Biolosgical evolution has given us words and the physiology to speak, hear and understand them. Biology always has limitations so we rely on our technology if we want to go faster, further or higher than biology allows. Our articulated legs, though very versatile, limited how fast and far we could go. When we applied technology, we didn’t emulate our legs with mechanical legs, we took a step back and used the wheel and smooth surfaces to allow us to go much faster and further than mechanical legs ever could.

We now have the technology in our pocket smartphone to share more words further and quicker and hopefully get more meaning from those words to solve our social problems. The result however is that we are drowning in words but have no better understanding of what those words mean. This is because we use the technology to emulate words but the real limitation is in the words themselves, like the limitations of articulating mechanical legs. We need to step back and focus on the objective of words which is to share meaning and insight.

To achieve this we can take a page out of the engineers handbook. They have long replaced words with a visual blueprint language using the computer as a medium. Our mind does not work in words, they are a very recent addition to a mind that has evolved over millions of years. Our mind deals with what I will call Conceptual Objects. These are mostly subconscious, might be visual and are how we deal with a very complex words in our mind. We need to uncover what these conceptual objects are, find a way to represent them in our smartphones and give us tools to create, manipulate and share them.

This BPS language might be the route to harnessing our technology to give us that boost in effective collaboration that we so desperately need. Emulating words only drowns us in more ineffective words and sometimes even works at cross purposes with collaboration