To the moderator: I’m sorry. That should be “found,” not “Find” in the first line of my comment. Sorry!!!

Sometimes being able to name the beast defangs it. Often in consulting work we’ll surface a problem or situation that creates tension, but which arises from the histories of the people in the room. If we can name the beast, it enables us to tame it.

When the beast rears its head the next time, people say, “Oh yes, that’s …” So has it been since Moses figured he could get control of God by learning God’s name.

“..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laboureres were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow…he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.”

Lewis wrote this more than 50 years ago, about the protagonist–a sociologist–of his novel That Hideous Strength. I’m afraid the same thing could be written today about too many businesspeople.

Closely related: the reification of concepts, that is, the inability to distinguish a conceptual model from reality. For instance, you know the old BCG four-box chart (everything is either a star, a cow, a dog, or a question mark)?? There are people for whom the (assumed) position of a business on that chart is much more real than the realities of the business itself.