Roots, Leaves, and the Language We Debate

Earlier this year, I attended the 2026 CEO Meeting of the Council of Engineering and Scientific Society Executives (CESSE) in Baltimore. CESSE is to me what INFORMS is to many of you – a professional home, a place to compare notes with peers, and a reminder that the challenges we face are rarely as unique as they feel in the moment. 

During one session, my peer Vicki Deal-Williams, Chief Executive Officer at the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), showed a slide titled, “The Tree of Our Values” (Source: Megan-Brette Hamilton and Vicki Deal-Williams). It used a simple image of a tree to explain how ASHA thinks about its identity over time, and it stayed with me for long after the meeting ended. 

The roots and trunk, Vicki explained, represent ASHA’s foundational values: respect, inclusion, equity, responsiveness. Those values have grown steadily since the organization’s founding nearly a century ago. The leaves represent something different: the language used to describe those values. Over time, the words have changed. What was once called “minority concerns” within ASHA have now become “cultural and linguistic diversity.” The leaves shift with the seasons. But the tree remains rooted in the same soil. 

That metaphor captured something I have been thinking about for a while, both in our field and in the organizations that serve it. It is identity. (Fun fact: much of my work in grad school was related to identity development.)

The Leaves We Disagree About 

Spend more than a few minutes in the OR/MS community and you will hear a familiar conversation about the identity of the field. Is operations research being eclipsed by data science? Is analytics simply a new label for work our community has been doing for decades? What about AI? Decision science? Why doesn’t the phrase “operations research” resonate with students entering careers today? 
And what about management science and operations management? 

These are reasonable questions. Language matters. The terminology we use influences how others perceive our work, who discovers it, and who chooses to enter the field. 

But Vicki’s tree helped me see something more clearly. Much of what we debate is about leaves, including:

• Operations research
• Management science
• Artificial intelligence
• Analytics
• Data science
• Decision science
• Industrial engineering
• And more

These leaves are vital, visible, and worth tending– but they are not roots. The roots run deeper: a commitment to rigorous thinking about complex systems, the use of mathematical models to improve decision-making, and the belief that analytical insight can help organizations and societies function better. These roots have not changed. They were not invented by a tech startup a decade ago. They have been growing in the same intellectual soil for generations – the soil that was tilled by ORSA and TIMS before INFORMS was born. 

The leaves will always evolve. They respond to shifts in technology, culture, and the broader language of engineering, science, and business. That is not a sign of instability. It is how healthy fields adapt.

Choosing Roots, Not Labels 

When the INFORMS Board developed our current strategic plan, we made a deliberate choice that reflects this distinction. Rather than trying to resolve the long-running debate over the perfect label for our field, the Board focused on the roots. Our vision speaks about better decision-making for a just, prosperous, and sustainable world. Our mission centers on advancing the science and technology of decision-making – smarter decision-making for a better world, as our tagline succinctly states. Settling on one perfect phrase to describe our fields of interest is a fool’s errand. The language will keep evolving. Our purpose holds steady and strong.

A Deep Root 

I see the same dynamic inside professional societies such as INFORMS, and I think it is worth speaking about directly. INFORMS has navigated real tension in recent years around language related to how we create an organization where everyone can succeed and feel welcome. Our underlying belief is not new: our profession benefits when people from different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences are able to contribute fully. That belief has long been part of our institutional fabric. That is a deep root.

But the language surrounding it continues to evolve. Different generations and different audiences respond to different terminology. Words that feel natural in one moment can feel contested or mismatched in another. Much of the work of leadership involves navigating exactly that terrain and, of course, the temptation, in those moments, is to treat every contested phrase as if it were foundational. When that happens, organizations risk defending particular words rather than the values those words were meant to express. 

The opposite temptation exists too. Some people assume that if the language changes, the values behind it must have changed as well. Both responses miss the point. 

The real challenge, and the real skill, is distinguishing roots from leaves.

Learning to Tell the Difference 

I have found that distinction is rarely obvious in real time. It emerges through conversation, experience, and sometimes uncomfortable debate. But asking the question directly can clarify the stakes: Is this foundational to who we are? Or is it simply the language we are using at this moment to describe us?

Over time I have noticed something. People who resist change tend to treat everything as a root. People who welcome change enthusiastically tend to treat everything as a leaf. Neither is entirely right. Healthy fields and healthy organizations learn to tell the difference. And this capacity, I've come to believe, is one of the genuine skills of leadership. It is rarely taught explicitly. One develops it through experience, mistakes, and the occasional uncomfortable conversation (yes, I’ve had a few) where you realize mid-sentence that you have been defending a leaf as if it were a root. 

Vicki was not presenting a grand theory of organizational behavior. She was offering her community a practical way to understand that evolving language does not mean abandoning core values. The most useful leadership tools are often the simplest ones, and they can create a remarkably strong tree.

Our Work Is Paramount

The leaves will continue to change with the seasons. New terms will emerge. Old ones will fade. That process is unavoidable and often healthy. What matters most is that the roots remain strong.
For those of us in the OR/MS community, whether we lead organizations, departments, research groups, or project teams, the metaphor offers a useful question when debates arise: 
Are we arguing about roots, or leaves? 

Because if we are arguing about leaves, we might spend less energy defending the language and more energy advancing the work. And the work, after all, is what helps people make better decisions.