I was interested to note the different stances of the 'narrators' of the
different interpretations of the 'SHUCKING PERALS' metaphors as quoted by
Lon and Kent.
The first seems a very 'closed thinking' approach ("Most oysters have no
value."; "All oysters look alike"; "You can't open the whole bushel").
The second a more open one ("True. On the other hand though, there is no
way to extract pearls other than shucking"; "seeded oyster beds (LO
group?) do significantly improve the odds of finding a pearl"; "Sadly all
the technology in the world has not increased the human attention span")
I'm intrigued as to whether Kent's reaction to the original metaphor was
to the metaphor itself, or to the stance of its narrator. The stance Kent
takes in his 'BLIND PIG' metaphor is different. It is more creative (fake
it, if you can) but also honest (don't be afraid to admit ignorance) and
realistic (what smells bad is likely to taste bad), etc.
My question is: how can we make the PEARL metaphor work?
Some other creative ways of looking at PEARL SHUCKING that have occured to
me are:
Don't shuck for pearls - buy them (being the entrepreneur who doesn't
shuck for pearls, but pays a good price for what he wants = being the
time-efficient, creatively-switched on employee who trades his
attentiveness, time and creativity for pearls of information that he
wants/needs, but will not tolerate dud offerings).
Find a way to create pearls out of the mother-of-pearl in the oyster shell
(adopt an experimental approach for a while, to extract at least one
learning point from every email message, changing the whole thing into a
creative exercise)
Get others to do the shucking for you (get an email sifter - delegate non
privately marked email to a secretary to deal with)
Can anyone add to this list, or provide any further insights as to why
they think the original 'OYSTER' metaphor didn't work for Kent?
Leon
Leon Conrad
The Conrad Voice Consultancy
website: http://www.actual.co.uk/conrad
--Leon Conrad <100755.1675@CompuServe.COM>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>