Alien Tech Alien Tropes

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

~ Arthur C Clarke

One of the reasons we chose the name “Familiar” for our software house (the first 100% Agile software house in Europe, BTW) was a homage to the above Arthur C Clarke quotation, and the connection with things magical. (Familiars, black cats, toads, witches, and so on).

The results we delivered to our clients were – mired as those clients were in traditional, failing approaches to software development – to them quite magical. And very alien.

And the idea that Alien Tech, although often inexplicable to us Homo sapiens, can confer amazing benefits has been a staple theme of science fiction books, films and TV for many decades (see: Stargate, Alien, Predator, Slan, Null-A, etc.)

It’s not much of a stretch to regard Organisational Psychotherapy as a kind of technology (see definition, below). And there’s no denying it’s an idea and a discipline alien to most organisations today. So, in my book, that makes Organisational Psychotherapy some kind of ALIEN TECH.

Organisational Psychotherapy is but one of many alien tropes which offer amazing benefits, yet from which most organisations recoil, due to the sheer alienness of such tropes (we could call this reaction “alienation”).

Put another way, the traditional tropes of conventional (Analytic-minded) business and management leave organisations floundering in a swamp of ineffectiveness, compared to the alien tropes of the less conventional Synergistic- (a.k.a. Teal) and Chaordic-minded organisations. Alien tropes are the sine qua non of highly effective organisations.

In my wider role of enterprise software development coach or tech business coach, one of my core value-adds is bringing alien tech and alien tropes to the attention of my clients, highlighting the benefits of these alien ideas, and helping my clients address and hopefully resolve their issues of alienation, such that they can begin to replace their conventional tropes with these alien tropes and reap the benefits.

By way of example, here’s a brief list of some alien tropes, “alien” that is to conventional management thinking:

• Flow
• Systems Thinking
• Theories
• Self-organisation
• Fellowship
• Cost of Focus
• Cost of Delay
• Play
• Slack
• Nonviolence
• Psychology
• Generalising specialists

See also my post entitled “Baggage”

Some Definitions

Alien

(adjective)

1. unlike one’s own; strange and not familiar; not belonging to one.
2. coming from another world; extraterrestrial.
3. differing in nature or character, typically to the point of incompatibility.

Technology

(noun)

1. the branch of knowledge that deals with the creation and use of technical means and their interrelation with life, society, and the environment, drawing upon such subjects as industrial arts, engineering, applied science, and pure science.
2. the application of this knowledge for practical ends.

Trope

(noun)

1. commonly recurring clichés in e.g. business literature. For example: Leadership; Utilisation; Management; etc..
2. involving an agreed-upon narrative, an archetypal reading of a story or situation according to the simplest and most widely-held beliefs, a kind of narrative stereotype.
3. a word or expression used in a figurative sense
4. devices and conventions that a speaker can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.

– Bob

Further Reading

Trope (Literature) ~ Wikipedia entry