And for the last point, organizational metaphors, Gareth Morgan’s “Images of Organization” is of course the bible there. Even though it is metaphor analysis rather than visual, each of the metaphors he tackles is fundamentally a visual one.

Two recent interesting efforts are by Jessica Hagy who has successfully converted her long-running blog into a book, and the highly rated The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam, described as “a visual thinking consultant”. Both use handmade diagrams.

What metaphor we use for organizations is itself worth exploring: from sports teams to trees to even “fractal corporation” credited to an Indian company known for its aggressive growth with a string of mergers and demergers. Someone once made a mention of replacing the traditional pyramid with concentric circles to depict an organization structure where the lower-rung front-end staff are shown in the outermost circle, in daily contact with customers. It’s thought-provoking but needs to get more complicated to represent the reality of organization structures.

Your point about the dominant metaphor for the ‘net itself is an interesting one. I agree we started with ‘library’ but now we are borrowing all the ones that apply to organizations in general (brain, organism etc…).

And yes, I do hope to write a lot more about visual thinking. Not exactly a crowd pleaser as far as traffic goes, but then, if traffic had been the point, this blog would have had thrice as much by now There is a presentation/exposition aspect (the books of Edward Tufte for instance), but a deeper visual-thinking aspect as well.

1. I see your main point as unthinking oversimplification of the evolution process. One sub-point clearly made by you is that of wrongly identifying The Destination of the path (a segment of the path at a given point in time). This arises partly or wholly due to the sequential fallacy. This penchant of people to identify their topic of interest as the Promised Land can be seen in other areas. A recent example is Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind (disclaimer: this is surmised from reviews, I still haven’t read the definitely-seems-worth-reading book) that talks of our moving from the information age to the conceptual age. The giveaway of the predicted destination/culmination of a path is the sub-title: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future. Many spiritual groups similarly extrapolate facts from the past and the present ills to confidently state that the whole world is soon converging to their model/practice. Starfish is an especially brilliant choice by Quinn, with no central brain.

2. To me, this post neatly fits in and extends your earlier posts on triangles and grids, extending the theme of limitations and pitfalls of visual thinking, highlighting the importance of choosing the appropriate visual to explain and explore a theme. I do believe it fulfils my suggestion, but no, I am not saying your posts have sequentially evolved from 3-point triangles to 4-square quadrants to multi-branch trees!

3. One fascinating aspect to analyze is the way we have changed out thinking of what the Internet is. Initial concepts were a huge, accessible library and a global transport for email. Transactions (banking, shopping and B2B ecommerce) came next, and there was talk of the executable web being more important than the static web. Intelligence in the form of personalization using analytics, along with the Google era of search hinted at semantic web and other possibilities leading, among other things, to social networking. So now the web is all of the previous things and more. Luckily, it has always mostly remained self-regulated and self-organizing.

Similar to the sequential fallacy of evolution, the dominant metaphor we use to think of the Internet also enables or misleads in terms of what we do with it. This actually seems to be a candidate to analyze orthogonally with the evolution bit, in case you suffer from grid-quadrantitis (and if you accuse me of the affliction, I could easily blame your earlier post as the infecting agent ).

Thank you

I am in the Bay Area every couple of months or so. Should be able to bump into each other at some point.

Venkat

Ian Moore