In this second excerpt from Lea Redmond’s thesis, she reveals how the curious workings of presuppositional frameworks create these associative barriers. Their effect is illustrated with the story of the rice-boats from David Abram’s book, The Spell of the Sensuous. This example shows one way that presuppositions can be revealed and questioned. (See previous excerpt Mistakes and Possibilities).

A “strange incongruity” is a phenomenon that catches us off guard

I recently connected with Lea Redmond, the insightful writer/artist and founder of Leafcutter Designs. We share a common interest in David Abram's book, The Spell of the Sensuous. Abram succeeds in connecting the patterns of organic energy with speech, the alphabet, written language and scientific explanations. He weaves this incredible string into a rich path that includes anthropology, ecology, philosophy, mysticism and science. It is not a simple journey, but an enlightened one. The depth of his research and breadth of his references gives this book a magnitude of uncommon proportion.

"Our understandings rest upon our presuppositions which filter how we see the world," says Redmond. Abram's book begins with his surprising experience of an Indonesian ritual. Leaves are folded into little boats, filled with rice, and given to the "house spirits," (which end up being ants).  In Lea's thesis, she takes a close look at Abram's experience by considering the relationship between presuppositions and insights - mistakes and possibilities."

With her permission, I am including an excerpt from her thesis:

There is not a “right” and a “wrong” way to see because there are no neutral interpretive categories. This is because interpretation involves the projection of a certain range of possibilities that will cut off other possibilities.

Putting humans into space required broad design thinking – an ability to grok the entire issue and integrate diverse resources and processes into a single effective system. Success required far more than constructing a rocket. It involved innovation throughout the entire supply chain, ground support system, life support system, global tracking system, training system, public relations system and many others.

Ray Anderson, CEO of Interface, Inc. and self-described radical industrialist, views global warming as a crisis of even greater proportion. But he sees it as an opportunity more than a crisis.

The McKinsey Quarterly recently published an interview with Richard Rumelt, professor at the Anderson School of Management, UCLA. His refreshingly blunt observations included:

Most corporate strategic plans have little to do with strategy. They are simple three-year or five-year rolling resource budgets and some sort of market share projection. Calling this strategic planning creates false expectations that the exercise will somehow produce a coherent strategy.

What top management really seeks, he elaborated, is substantially higher performance. There are two ways to achieve that. Invent your way to success, or exploit change in your environment.

Either requires strategic thinking.