The Power of Nuance
David Epstein’s book, Range, highlights how a broad set of experiences helps us drive innovation. Knowledge in different domains enables us to make analogies to describe new and unexplored territory. Epstein doesn’t specifically call out vocabulary, but I believe an extensive repository of words helps us build the analogies necessary to explain the yet unknown. The more extensive our language and our experience, the better we will be at explaining the concepts that underly a new innovation.
Broad experience and a deep vocabulary empower us to specify meaning at a high level of granularity. Specificity in meaning isn’t a cute, nice to have flourish for creative writing. It is a hard business skill. The difference in tone, feeling, and wording can dramatically change how the same “data” is received.
You could argue that ChatGPT can do that for you, and learning the many nuances of language is a waste of time. There is some truth to this for written communication. But it doesn’t help for a dynamic group brainstorming session that happens in real-time. You are thinking and creating in parallel. I have found that small adjustments in how you say something can help spark an insight that helps a group get to a better outcome. Even if AI gets better at helping us adjust our language in real-time, it is a dangerous decision to fully outsource our ability to create and think critically.
Exposing yourself to a wide array of books, speakers, podcasts, people, and even songs (“sanctimoniously performing soliloquies”. Need I say more?) will help give you the language and style you need to craft the perfect meaning to solve a business problem.
