Reflections 12th October

The Boundaries of Language

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

There are moments when the pace of change feels faster than our capacity to describe it.

Strategy accelerates, politics fragments, and perception tilts under the increasing weight of noise. Each domain, expanded and clouded by AI, invents its own language to keep up; words to contain uncertainty, frameworks to simulate control and yet these languages, once designed to clarify, now seem to multiply confusion.

Ever more desperate to be seen, the corporate CEO, the entrepreneur, the politician, the citizen, the scientist, the brand, each speaks fluently in their own idiom but struggles to make sense of or to understand the others. Each becomes fixated on their own truth and volume substitutes for dialogue.

We live in a new Tower of Babel, not of divine punishment, but of self-interested specialisation, wilful blindness and the resultant complexity.

However, the apparent chaos of this fragmentation carries opportunity. Wherever languages meet, something interesting happens. Meaning doesn’t dissolve; it evolves such that the boundaries between languages, of strategy, of country, of perception, are no longer barriers but active fields. They are the zones where new understanding begins to form.

The challenge for us is to learn to navigate them, rather than fence ourselves in to what we know.

The Languages We Speak

In a world of many specialisations, every system, every profession, every nation develops its own language. The language of strategy is shaped by power. It speaks in options, trade-offs, and playing to win. It values clarity, consequence, and compression; the shortest path between diagnosis and decision.

The language of geopolitics is older and more ritualised. It deals in signals, postures, alliances, and generational narratives. Words here carry a second life: what is said aloud matters less than what is implied. The diplomat listens for tone as much as content.

The language of perception is faster and more unstable. It lives in headlines, social feeds, and half-remembered memes. It thrives on metaphor, emotion, and repetition. Here, truth competes with virality, and simplicity beats precision nine times out of ten.

Once, these languages moved at roughly the same speed. Strategy could shape geopolitics; geopolitics could steer public perception. Now their clocks are out of sync. The strategist plans in quarters, the diplomat in decades, the crowd in seconds. Translation becomes impossible, and misunderstanding is inevitable.

Yet, as the philosopher Juri Lotman suggested, culture’s vitality lies not in its centres but in its edges. The semiosphere—the total field of meaning—renews itself at its boundaries where different systems of signification touch. Translation, however imperfect, is what keeps the whole alive.

The Art of Translation

Translation is a profoundly human act. It acknowledges difference without demanding assimilation. Paul Ricoeur, called it linguistic hospitality: the willingness to let another’s meaning dwell temporarily within our own language.

But hospitality always carries loss. No translation is ever perfect; something is always left behind. For every word in one tongue, there are many plausible equivalents in another, and no final arbiter to decide between them.

Think of the word “security”. In English, it implies safety and stability. In Russian, bezopasnost literally means the absence of danger, an altogether more defensive posture. In Mandarin, anquan carries undertones of order and harmony. Three words, one term, entirely different maps of the world.

The same applies in organisational life. The finance director’s “efficiency” may sound to the engineer like “risk”. The marketer’s “story” may sound to the scientist like “spin”. The result is friction disguised as consensus, a linguistic stalemate where each side believes it is speaking plainly.

As any of us who have worked in another culture for any length of time will recognise, true understanding begins only when we develop the humility to notice the mistranslation.

The Untranslatable

Every language holds certain words that resist translation. The Greeks had phronesis, practical wisdom, and the ability to act rightly in complex situations. The Portuguese have saudade, a bittersweet longing for something absent. The Japanese have amae, the pleasure of depending on another’s goodwill. And the Welsh have hiraeth, a word that doesn’t translate neatly into English. It describes a deep, homesick kind of longing, not just for a place, but for a time, a feeling, or even a state of being that may never have existed.

These words are not exotic curiosities. They mark territories of thought that our own language neglects.

In strategy, our untranslatables are often technical: resilience, agility, innovation. But these too are culturally loaded. What counts as resilience in one society may look like stubbornness in another. What feels agile to one firm may feel chaotic to another. The danger comes when we universalise our untranslatables, when we export them as global virtues, forgetting their local roots.

Recognising the untranslatable does not paralyse action; it deepens it. It reminds us that clarity is relative, and humility is a strength.

Power and Poetry

Between all these professional and political tongues runs another, quieter divide—the one between the language of power and the language of poetry, deployed so fluently by those like my friend Sue Heatherington, whose daily thoughts are part of my start to the day. This, from her post yesterday resonates :

---

Where do we draw the lines, the boundaries, that make us feel safe? 

And what if the world we are invited to be part of is so much bigger than this? 

I’m not sure there is an abstract answer to this…

Yet there are choices we make about the first steps, whether we are prepared to start moving. 

Because only responding with our whole being, not just our heads, will open the way. 

Go gently, you are in good company. 

And we need the you that only you can be… 

Pause. See differently. Re-story…

Those who understand the power of poetry sit in the spaces between language, evoking understanding that transcends clinical precision. We don’t use it enough. Power prefers the declarative: goals, metrics, outputs, targets. It seeks precision. Poetry prefers the suggestive: image, rhythm, ambiguity. It seeks resonance.

Power wants to decide; poetry wants to dwell.

Yet both are necessary. A strategy written without poetry becomes sterile; a poem written without some, often unconscious, strategic intent risks impotence. The two languages complete each other.

Camus understood this when he wrote that revolt must remain connected to beauty, or it turns cruel. Strategy, too, must stay in conversation with meaning, or it becomes a machine for empty motion.

In times of upheaval, when systems falter and institutions lose coherence, it is often the poetic register that keeps moral sense alive. The words that endure—justice, dignity, freedom, home—are not strategic. They are symbolic. They speak to something beneath calculation, which no amount of data can model.

The Boundary Workers

If boundaries are where meaning lives, then boundary workers are its stewards. They are people fluent in multiple codes: the scientist who can talk policy, the diplomat who can speak data, the strategist who can tell a story. They act as translators and as interpreters of silence, sensing where language has become performative and where words conceal more than they reveal.

Peter Galison, writing about the Manhattan Project, described trading zones as places where different scientific communities developed a shared language to collaborate. Physicists and engineers, each with their own jargon, found enough common syntax to build something that worked. The language was not elegant, but it was alive.

Our own century needs similar trading zones, between disciplines, sectors, and cultures. Spaces where we can forge working languages, provisional, temporary languages that allow cooperation without erasing difference.

These boundary workers are not born; they’re made. Made in spaces that protect the slow work of learning to listen across difference. Made in the crucible of sustained practice, where one learns to dwell comfortably in the productive tension between tongues. Their power lies not in mastery of one language but in the humility to listen across several.

The Drift of Words

Even the best translations eventually age. Words shift underfoot. What once united begins to divide. Derrida’s idea of différance, meaning produced through difference and deferral, explains this slippage. No word means precisely what it meant yesterday, because its neighbours have changed. Context erodes certainty.

“Sustainability”, once radical, becomes routine. “Disruption”, once heroic, turns toxic. Each word drifts, acquiring new shadows.

For strategists, leaders, and us, this is not merely academic. Policies framed in outdated language can bind organisations to dead metaphors, and us to the familiar language of a dying organisation. When we keep using the same words long after their meaning has shifted, we end up managing ghosts.

The remedy is linguistic awareness, a willingness to audit our vocabularies as carefully as our finances. To ask: what does this word mean now, to these people, in this context?

The Necessary Silence

There are times when language itself collapses. Moments of grief, awe, or moral horror expose its limits. We reach for words and find none. In those silences, something real begins.

Wittgenstein ended his Tractatus with the line: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” He meant this not as a withdrawal, but as an invitation. Silence is not absence. It is the soil from which new language can grow.

This silence is what the alchemists knew as nigredo, the necessary dissolution before new forms crystallise. It is the pause before re-storying the world in fresh terms.

In leadership and diplomacy alike, silence used well is an act of presence. It acknowledges that some realities cannot be reduced to briefing notes. Silence allows complexity to breathe, the essential pause before something new can emerge.

Machine Languages

The newest languages are not human at all. Machine learning systems, trained on our collective speech, now produce language at an industrial scale. These systems do not understand meaning; they replicate it statistically. Their language is fluent but hollow, a reflection of us, smoothed and accelerated.

These digital dialects add a new layer of complexity. We are now translating not just between cultures, but between species of cognition. The boundary between human and machine language will define the next decade: who sets the grammar of thought, and who becomes its audience.

To engage with these systems responsibly, we must treat them as mirrors, not oracles. They show us what we say most often, not what we mean most deeply. The task of meaning-making remains human. Slow, situated, and ethical.

The Tending of Boundaries

Boundaries, then, are not lines to defend but membranes to tend.

Healthy systems breathe through their semi-porous edges; closed ones suffocate. This applies to nations, organisations, and minds alike. The art of leadership in this century may lie less in command than in translation, creating enough shared understanding for cooperation, whilst protecting the diversity of languages that keep insight alive.

In practice, this means slowing down where everyone else speeds up. It means listening for the tone beneath the words. It means admitting that the map we use to navigate strategy, politics, or culture is only ever a draft, a permanently beta version of the territory.

There is no single global language waiting to be discovered. What we can cultivate instead is a literacy of boundaries: the ability to move between languages and dialects, to notice when meaning shifts, and to rebuild trust through translation.

If the twentieth century was the age of systems—machines, bureaucracies, standardisation—then the twenty-first may be the age of semantics. The next advantage will belong not to those who process the most data, but to those who understand the meanings behind it.

At the boundaries of language, we rediscover the limits of certainty and the necessity of imagination. To work there is to accept incompleteness: that no statement is final, no translation perfect, no word entirely ours. Yet it is in that humility that coherence re-emerges.

As the poet George Steiner wrote, “When we talk of meaning, we are talking about translation.” In that sense, the work of the future is the same as it has always been: to keep translating, listening, and speaking across the shifting sands of sense until something shared, however fragile, appears.

---

The Work Ahead

The question that remains isn’t whether you’re already working at these boundaries: you are, whether you name it or not. It’s whether you have a place to tend that work.

Language, once treated as soft power, is becoming hard infrastructure. It shapes markets, governs alliances, and defines identity. But more than that, it shapes what we can imagine ourselves becoming. When the languages we inherit no longer describe the work we need to do, we either find new words or settle for old categories that slowly calcify around us.

The Athanor is built for this: for those moments when translation becomes creation. When dwelling in the space between languages stops being disorienting and starts being generative. Not because we’ve mastered anything, but because we’ve learned to work in the uncertainty itself.

It’s a furnace, not a platform. Small connected groups, each no more than a handful of people, working with what the alchemists knew: that transformation requires patient heat, not sudden force. Provocations rather than prescriptions. Practices borrowed from various traditions. The steady attention of curation. And the understanding that what emerges belongs to each person, even as the fire that sustains it is shared.

The Athanor isn’t another space for analysis. Outside the Walls and New Artisans remain separate spaces for that, for pattern-seeking, for provocation, for thinking at the edges. The Athanor is where we take those patterns and test them, where we bring our untranslatable fragments and work with them in the company of others doing the same.

If you’ve felt fluent in your professional language but mute when trying to express what your work might become; if you’ve mastered the vocabulary of your field but lost the words for your calling; if you’re ready to dwell comfortably in the productive tension between what is and what wants to emerge, the boundaries are waiting.

So is the fire of the Athanor

---