Plus two great new words to add to that lexicon. Both are creative conjugations of that ancient and innocent verb, to think, which can be morphed with modern technology into “thoughting” and “thunk”. I learnt both these words at a recent (and very good) seminar with Jack and Carol Weber at Darden.
“Thoughting” actually is a useful word; I believe it was coined by Jack and Carol. It is meant to describe the unsolicited thoughts that endlessly stream through every consciousness. This unsolicited stream is completely different from the disciplined, structured, methodical thinking needed to, say, prove a mathematical theorem. Or to professionally evaluate a business partner’s performance. Yet, this unsolicited stream often intrudes on formal, methodical thought, and sometimes subverts it.
Giving this formless stream of thought a distinct name, thoughting, to distinguish it from formal thought, thinking, is quite useful. A distinct name helps the mind switch out of the thoughting-mode into the thinking-mode as needed.
Maybe when Krishna told Arjuna to free his mind from the shackles of माया (maya) he was telling Arjuna to stop the thoughting and start thinking. माया is often translated as illusion. Maybe thoughting, the mindless chatter that clutters the consciousness, would be a better translation.
Maybe the meditative practice of emptying the mind is about stopping the thoughting. ध्यान (dhyana), the Sanskrit root of the word Zen, could be understood as freedom from thoughting. So the consciousness is released to prove the theorem, or evaluate the business partner. A mind that is full of thoughting will struggle to hit that little red ball hurtling towards the soft tissues at ninety miles per hour, with just a hint of reverse swing.
This famous story from Zen Flesh Zen Bones might be about thoughting:
Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1869-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen. Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor's cup full and then kept on pouring.
The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is overfull. No more will go in!"
"Like this cup", Nan-in said, "you are too full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen until you first empty your cup?"
Skilled thinking can't happen without knowledge, one has to know some math to solve the theorem. Thoughting, however, gets in the way of thinking.
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“Thunk” is not just an uncultured way of saying thought. It is typically used in the context of another management buzzword that includes the word thinking.
Let’s say you have a high-powered corporate mandate to do "customer thinking". This means building or modifying products and processes so they are easy for customers to use. Once this work has been done, the said product or process has been "customer thunk".
The same conjugation works for "possibility thinking", which means creative problem solving, understood as an attitude rather than as a technique. When this "possibility thinking" exercise has been completed, the business itself has been "possibility thunk".
What I love most about thunk are its poetic possibilities:
The CEO was in a funk
His stock options had turned to junk
So to the consultant he quietly slunk
His business processes were customer thunk
His annual bonus went up by a chunk
And he celebrated by styling his hair like a punk
Its surprisingly difficult to come up with positive words ending in unk. Sunk, bunk, dunk…. nothing uplifting or celebratory.
4 comments:
Not sure I like the liberties taken with the good old language..Sigh..perhaps we'll just have to get used to hearing these strange sounds.
On the first one (I refuse to use the terms you've used!), I refer to this all the time in my courses on structured thinking..The initial stream of ideas, issues, thoughts etc. is basically a dump, or a laundry list. There is no order or connection, and as far as the thinker is concerned they are all 'at the same level'. There is a world of difference between this dump and an ordered, hierarchical list, which is created once the person has thought through the relationships b/w those ideas.
However, the initial dump is useful as a start point. In some situations, we are easily able to proceed top-down, i.e. derive the variables / parts from the original complete issue...in certain others, we need the initial list of unorganised thoughts to get started - then we start seeing the logical groups and build backwards (bottom-up)
As you describe it, my challenging with 'thoughting' is that it is too broad a concept. You basically define it as NOT thinking, and it's rather hard to handle things defined only by what they aren't, especially when a term like thinking is already a pretty broad church.
To give an example, some of the best ideas I've ever had have come when I've been wrestling with a problem, then am doing something else, and an idea comes into my head. That model would absolutely be covered by your 'thoughting', and yet absent them I would not have done half the things I have done. And, given the neural plumbing in our heads, that this should happen is not a surprise.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is the clutter that most of us carry in our head that isn't helping with anything. 'I need to get milk', or 'I forgot to send a card to X', or 'I ache, but am I old enough to say it's age?'.
Bucketing that spectrum together as 'thoughting', just so you can define thinking as something else, and in the process clipping out elements that are really powerful like intuitive leaps leaves me cold. And, even if you know what you mean, these words that have rather specific meanings get garbled and even reversed when used in wider groups - in the same way I hear 'literally' to mean 'as good as it gets' - as in 'he was literally the best there will ever be'.
Sriram...totally agree that unstructured information in the stream of consciousness is useful raw material. I too find that trapping this information in a mind-dump makes it useable.
I also find that trapping this stream actually helps pause the "thoughting" and transition into more structured thought.
As an aside, one of my favourite ways trapping raw material in that stream of consciousness is a mind-map. Don't use this technique as much as I'd like to...
Greg... good clarification. “Thoughting”, if understood as not thinking, is too general to be useful. My take is that “thoughting” is most useful when used to describe the clutter in the conscious mind. Having a specific word to describe that clutter/ stream makes it easier to control.
The information processing that happens below the threshold of conscious feels like a totally different beast. This beast is more powerful and more fascinating. This is the part of the mind that was at work during a good night’s sleep, when a half understood idea become clear the next morning. This if that part of the mind that Kekule’s dream of whirling snakes or Coleridge’s Kubla Khan came from. I don’t think this is what “thoughting” is about.
I am an bit surprised that I don’t feel the need for words to describe processes which happen below the threshold of consciousness. Maybe that’s because I am not aware of these processes, I can’t label them, or use that label to control them.
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