Use words with care and precision

In my experience with strategy and business development it is crucial to use wordings carefully, very carefully. Words are vehicles of notions. To – be able to – share the same notions is a major part of establishing an effective strategy or to executed a successful business development project.

When carelessly or casually used single words can lead to the failure of many a project for it will not create the same understanding and knowledge by the people involved, if only by random accident. I have written about this at RPD in Strategy is about understanding the terminology used and sharing (internalizing!) the same notions:

In my experience most people hardly ever try to get a grip on the words they read, hear and speak. In general people take their own meaning of a word, any word, totally for granted – however vague and broad their apprehension often is – and equally important assume that the other person is having precisely the same apprehension as they have.

A few days ago I bumped into an article of Horace Dediu via Daring Fireball: “Innoveracy: misunderstanding innovation”. He writes about the distinction between novelty, creation, invention and innovation. These are notions which are in a sense core to any strategy and business development endeavour.

Setting up a list of definitions is not sufficient on its own. I fully agree with Horrace:

The definition of innovation

[or any other term, RPD] is easy to find but it’s one thing to read the definition and another to understand its meaning.

In projects I often use a considerable part of my available brain time pondering on the meaning of words, what the essence is of the notions they represent, the boundaries they have and how they relate to other notions. Once I have mastered them I often have a clear view of the problems and the solutions at hand.

Horace creates an elegant distinction where he pinpoints crucial elements in a hierarchical order:

Novelty: Something new
Creation: Something new and valuable
Invention: Something new, having potential value through utility
Innovation: Something new and uniquely useful