We all find ourselves immersed in a phenomenal soup of information, symbols, narratives and languages of varying diversity, sophistication and complexity. Addressing active intelligence to problem-solving, be those problems of interpreting the motivations or intent of other people or disentangling issues of non-trivial organisational complexity, requires the cultivation of personal methods for the rapid extraction of relevant information from all available empirical evidence. As it is generally a time-saving strategy, the adoption of relatively simple predefined frameworks and methodologies provides precisely this kind of temporal compression and an associated possibility for procedural acceleration. This favours the acquisition and use of the generalised concepts, idioms, tropes and normative methods of our time and place, a shortcut not without both overt and covert costs.