Crucial Benefit: Group Communication

Groups depend on Individuals

Our mind is an instrument for thriving on life, and taxonomy-based knowledge is directly relevant to being personally effective. However, big achievements require groups. So a major focus of inquiry has been about how to enhance the effectiveness of organizations through strengthening and enlightening the individuals involved.

Each of us has our preferred perspectives, biases, agendas and blind-spots. In organizations or any large project, and of course in politics and government, minor misunderstandings and egotistical difficulties can interact and multiply alarmingly. Consulting to sort out such messes led to discovery of the natural frameworks that were eventually unified within THEE.

While it is likely that the biggest benefits will show up in better handling of complex situations or projects, the beauty of the taxonomic frameworks is that anyone can benefit. All that is required is that you focus on your own responsibility, exercise your freedom, and make the effort to be aware of yourself and your situation.

In doing this, it is crucial that you know what you are talking about.

Know What You are Talking About

The first and most basic use of the Taxonomy is to be sure we know what we mean when we say something. We also want others to properly understand what we are saying and we want to understand them—but such things are much harder.

In other words, groups need a common language for reference for their members if they seek to do anything substantial as a group.

Scientific and engineering disciplines take such a language for granted. By contrast, clarity and precision in social life are often viewed as impossible, even unnecessary or unhelpful. Legal precision is valued but perceived as overwhelming and unbearable in everyday life.

Without denying the need for tact and diplomacy as well as simplicity, a negative attitude to clear communications is foolish when striving to achieve social goals.

Ideas (thoughts) are fundamental personal tools—but ideas are only useful if they refer to something specific and do so consistently, coherently, and invariably. The formal names used for taxonomic categories tie down essential ideas and allow sharing and mutual comprehension. We can use a formal name effectively in a group only if we are all willing to share knowledge of its function, properties and relationships—in effect, its taxonomic properties.

Although categorization is natural, we do not usually think of «category names» as tools. However, we should realize that such names are indeed the «power-tools» of personal and social life.

Scientific research uses concepts. If we reverse the discrimination process, and define a term by what it refers to, then that name (i.e. term) functions as a concept. On this basis, researchers can pursue investigations of taxonomic properties and relationships. The problem in much social science is that concepts are inherited, invented or intuited and lack a close connection to objective realities. Not being unequivocal names for things, everyone then argues about what the concept "really" means.