Harry Talks – Simplifying Language

AML Talks. Think of TED Talks, ideas worth sharing and delivered in 18 minutes. It’s a simple, powerful thing. After a conversation over lunch about people’s interests, AML Talks was born.

Every 5-6 weeks an AMLer speaks on a subject they’re passionate about. It’s a great opportunity to share something that interests them, and for everyone else to learn a few new things. To make it even simpler, talks are timed to 15 minutes with 15 minutes for Q&A. That’s 30 minutes out of people’s lunchtime. Not long at all.

We’ve had a talk on the concrete appeal of communist architecture, so now over to our second AML Talks speaker, business exec Harry Henderson.

We take language for granted. Yet it’s one of the most important – if not the most important – developments in human history. In my talk, I wanted to explore how simplicity in language can come from even the most complex and unstructured origins. I made the agency my testing ground for an experiment that, much to the participants’ chagrin, appeared to come up with no results. However, I could soon see that simple structures emerged from the chaos. And if simplicity can come from complexity in language, why shouldn’t that apply to what we do at AML?