When Borges referred to a certain Dr. Franz Kuhn and his mention of a peculiar and distant Chinese encyclopedia — the “Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge” — he was demonstrating the power of speculative world building to rearrange perception and challenge our assumptions about order, classification, and meaning.

Let me explain, at risk of further obscuring my point by saying that I returned to this reference but not directly. Rather as it was written by Michel Foucault in the preface to what is, in my mind, his most readable and impactful book, “The Order of Things.”

In the preface to the book Foucault admits to being “shattered with laughter” when he first read this Borges passage and, it seems, this is what inspired him sufficiently to pen the book itself.

You could be easily forgiven for either missing this passage (in the preface, which is not always read when one is reading a book) or, just as much so, never having read “The Order of Things”. So, here’s the passage that Borges attributes to this obscure and entirely speculative Chinese encyclopedia:

“..[t]hese ambiguities, redundancies, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia called the Heavenly Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. In its distant pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”

That “shattering” evokes this sense of a breaking or a fracturing of a whole. The kind of unexpected interruption in one’s sense of things that is so profound that one cannot help but laugh.

What brought me to all of this (and thank you for reading to here) was upon the occasion of my trying to find a conclusion to a short commissioned book for a client who requested a reflection on what I had mentioned in passing: “Organizational Imagination” and how to build that capacity within a company.

I wanted to find a way to talk about the value of speculation and speculative prototyping as a means to push at the walls of the box — the one we’ve been told for eons to “think outside of..”

(I’ll note that this is ultimately nearly impossible to do as no matter how far outside you get from the box, the culture/epistemology of the org is baked into those trying to get out their thinking outside of that box. Which is why these practices that are fully internalized never get outside the box. You need a hoolie or sledge in the form of someone whose DNA isn’t already baked from the organizational culture.)

The underlying thesis of this commissioned book is to make a compelling argument for why a speculative prototyping capability is a critical part of any meaningful innovation and product development capability. The book is meant to be a practical guide for how to build that capability within an organization, but I wanted to find a way to talk about the value of that work in a way that was more evocative than just describing the process and the outcomes.

That shattering laughter? It matters to this point. It is not the laughter of dismissal — it is the laughter that comes when the categories one had relied upon fail all at once. When the ‘order of things’ one had been born into and one has inherited, and was and always has been as natural as butter on toast and as common as the sense we say we all share commonly — when that suddenly reveals itself to be only one order among others and perhaps not even a particularly durable one..it’s kinda funny to realize that the way we have been taught to classify and understand the world is just one of many ways to do so, and that it can be so easily disrupted by a different set of assumptions about how things are ordered and classified.

That is the part I keep wondering into when working with clients to integrate an Organizational Imagination capability.

Companies and institutions run on categories. They sort the world into markets, users, products, risks, forecasts, and strategic priorities. Those systems are useful until they become blinding. They keep the present intelligible, but they can also make an emerging possibility look awkward, unserious, or something to be riduclued, which is the opposite of what you want to do when you’re trying to make sense of what’s going on in some new emerging terrain.

See, what Borges is doing here is fabricating a taxonomy so alien, so orthogonal to the way we coordinate and categorize things that one’s sense-making apparatus — that weird vascularized piece of meat in our skulls — is forced to notice its own furniture. One suddenly becomes aware that order is made, not given. Categories are historical, contingent, local and what seems to belong together may only have been, at one point, taught to belong together sufficiently that it went from weird to unconsciously normal, ordinary, everyday knowledge. That curious “commone sense.”

This has a lot to do, at least for me, with speculative prototyping.

I have been trying, in one place or another, and in one register or another or another, to make the case that speculative prototypes matter because they do something more than illustrate a possibility or report on a trend. In the idiom we are working in right here, they disturb the taxonomies by which an organization knows what counts as serious, fundable, strategic, real, probable, worthwhile. They introduce into the room an object, a fragment from a field of possibilities, a demo, a scene from an adjacent space or near future, and by doing so they put a useful kind of pressure on the categories already in circulation. The effect of this is sometimes subtle, sometimes comic, sometimes disorienting. (I tend towards the comic, perhaps for the same reason Borges does.) But that subtlety is precisely the point. The artifact does not fit, and in not fitting, it reveals that we are only seeing very partially the possibilities and, conversely, we recognize the limited frame around which we peer into the world.

The team doing the work is unhindered by this frame because they are told to see outside of it. This is their function, and their immense value.

There is some pleasure in the abstraction of this philosophical argument for this function in a commercial context. But it is tangled up with a much more immediate concern, which is that I am trying to make this work legible as a role, a function, a job to be done and as necessary as any other vital function. I am trying to describe why an organization might need someone whose practice sits somewhere between prototyping and proposing, or that is able to fit an emerging trend inside of an artifact.

A fabricated thing can produce a real epistemic effect — the “shattering” reframes a product thesis or shift market categories. A false encyclopedia can rearrange perception. In a similar way, a speculative prototype, if it is any good and done with expertise and experience, can do something similar inside an organization. It can make the familiar order flicker a bit — perhaps just a glitch — that reveals something not noticed before. It can make another ‘order of things’ now suddenly appear for the chance to wonder about.