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Grammar of the Sociological Problem
Copyright © 2022 — Robert D. Jones, InclusiveWorks LLC — All Rights Reserved
Prologue
In 2016 I was consulting for a global pharma company in Cambridge, MA, working in an area of endeavor that was quite familiar to me, but not my main area of consulting. In helping the Global Diversity Officer work through organizational challenges of his assignment related to an internal functional merger, the typical problems surfaced. I designed some atypical approaches to them.
Over the decades of doing similar work, one recurring theme had been difficulties with meanings in the language of change. In this particular case, there was a managerial need to fit proposed solution descriptions into language that CEOs understood, but that didn’t necessarily flange up with the final deliverable or the way the root problem was to be addressed.
By that, I mean the specific nature of the linguistic disconnect was what I often perceived as an inability (or unwillingness) to both name and aim at root cause of social dysfunction, which was most often seen as well beyond the scope of the contract, but not entirely beyond the reach of the client organization(s). That was especially true for those in the F-500s I had served, with which there was almost always the capacity for…
