Reos — what’s in a name?
A worldview of eternal flux and change
I work with Reos Partners. When people ask what Reos means, the quick answer we usually give is that it derives from ancient Greek and means “flow”.
Several recent experiences have made me feel like sharing the full and deeper story and meaning. One experience was watching the movie Oppenheimer and reflecting around the implications of quantum physics for systems change. The second was listening to Indy Johar recently speaking about how our noun-based language limits us, and that many Native American languages are verb-based. And the third was recent conversations around decolonizing, which sometimes lead to a discomfort in our global team about having a name rooted in Greek and hence in Western civilization.
In 2006, we were a team of nine co-founders exploring a name for our new collective entity, which was yet to take shape. We explored many options, including words related to practical wisdom, archetypes, a new dawn, things coming into being, creative process, social change studios, etc. As we were exploring, Andrew Sullivan — a friend of one of the co-founders Jeff Barnum — shared some excerpts of Simon Blaxland-de Lange’s biography of Owen Barfield.
The excerpt describes Barfield’s interactions with the physicist David Bohm. It said:
“Krishnamurti’s ideas encouraged Bohm to think in terms of ‘wholeness’ both in nature and in society. He was deeply aware of the atomistic fragmentation evident in every realm of modern life, and made it his life’s task in some sense to develop the quantum physicists’ wish to transcend the mechanistic Newtonian picture of the universe in the distinctive (to him) direction of focusing on processes rather than separate objects. To this end, he developed the linguistic concept of the ‘rheomode’ (rheo is a Greek verb meaning ‘flow’), which is essentially an endeavour to introduce a more verb-based mode of language and hence, a mobile, living kind of thinking.”
David Bohm (like Indy Johar) argued that our noun-centric, object-oriented language was restricting our ability to fully perceive and understand the world. Our language was making us see a world of static objects rather than dynamic processes.
When Bohm met in 1992 with a group of native elders who were speakers of the Algonquian family of languages, he learned of their verb based languages and their world view of eternal flux and change. Their languages did not generate fixed categories. He was amazed to learn this because they were examples of the rheomode and their world view was in harmony with his understanding of quantum theory.
In “Civic-Indigenous 7.0” the Dark Matter Labs team states:
“Words, in Anishinaabemowin, are 80% verb-based. They speak of relations, conjugations and acting together. They insist on how we relate to each other and highlight possible aggregations of everything that is possible…. Inversely, a noun-based language, like English, generates categorizations and classifications. This tends to objectify reality, induce dualism and freeze what is possible. All these inert nouns end up creating a scaffolding for an over-complexification that erases life. Some might say, speaking English is like trying to hold water in your hands, an idle attempt at fixing meaning into something meant to elude, through means of flowing. What does it mean, then, to train ourselves to think of everything as a verb?”
Jeff pointed out to our team that the word ‘rheo’ is also the root of Heraclitus’ famous saying “panta rei” — everything is in flux. Mia Eisenstadt, who had recently returned to the UK from visiting a native Canadian community, expressed concern about choosing a word from Greek. As we were founding an organization with diversity and globality in its DNA from the outset, we should not really be centering European cultural heritage.
But the deeper meaning resonated with many of us. Based in South Africa at the time, I chimed in expressing that it offered a coherent story, sharing: “our work is about unblocking situations that are stuck, removing barriers from the stream, enabling human creativity and ingenuity to flow. It captures our identity in a way that balances the solid and the innovative. We unblock stuck situations, enabling things to unfold and come alive.”
Jeff responded (from San Francisco) saying “The only drawback I see is that “flow” is sort of passive. Active flow is different from passively letting things take you where they will — a common state of mind here in California. If we understand, and represent, our “flow” as occurring in a renewing river through the fire of transformation, well then, my concerns are moot.”
Next, our colleague Joe McCarron weighed in as a geologist sharing in conversation with Adam Kahane that “rheology” is the study of structural change in rocks. That nailed it.
You can say our name means flow. You can also say that in this name is captured a fundamental mindset shift that is at the heart of system transformation. We do not live in a fixed and finished world, but rather in a world which we are continuously engaged in co-creating.
