On Staying Grounded

I’ve been getting irritated by the apparently pathological aversion to talking about real life cases on actKM. It’s annoying because the aversion allows demagogues to posture and make facile but grand-sounding declamations with no test of substance behind them, and to argue incessantly about the meanings of each others’ words.

In a post to the forum I referred to Jonathan Swift’s account of the flying island of Laputa (Gulliver’s third voyage), where the inhabitants were so obsessed by theory and so impractical that they relied for their supplies on the countries beneath them (whom they threatened with large rocks if they didn’t comply), and employed servants with leather balloons to gave them a whack over the head whenever their abstractions put them in imminent peril – as we see in this classic Arthur Rackham illustration.

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So I couldn’t resist this cartoon from Randall Munroe this morning:

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And yes, I know this is my fourth blog post today. And yes, I am procrastinating from something more serious. And yes, I am considering a line of leather balloon manufacture for knowledge management forums and conferences.

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