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Three laws of nonsense

I just had yum-cha to celebrate a cousin's birthday. The food was good, but much better were the discussions I had with my uncle, Noel Thompson. He has been working for many years in large organisations (such as BHP and James Hardie), and has been doing a lot of thinking about leadership, innovation and business processes.

He wrote down for me on a scrap of paper what he called the Three Laws of Nonsense, as follows:

1. The source of nonsense is that for every piece of nonsense there exists an irrelevant frame of reference in which the item is sensible.
2. The persistance of nonsense comes from rigorous arguments from inapplicable assumptions.
3. The diffusion of nonsense results from the fact that people are more specialist than problems.

These are pretty amazing rules, and I think they have a huge relevance in the field of knowledge management at the moment. Since he didn't invent the rules, I'll have to go off and do some hunting around for the original reference...

Posted by jamesr on August 10, 2003 03:55 PM
Categories: Knowledge management

Comments

Did you get anywhere with your hunt? I gave it a try but didn't find anything, so I'm curious if you were more successful.

Posted by: Armin on August 16, 2003 10:48 PM