Torpenhow Hill, a place in England, is famously a quadruple tautology: “Tor,” “pen,” and “how,” all mean “hill” in different languages, so “Torpenhow Hill” essentially translates to “Hill-hill-hill Hill.”

Each new group of settlers felt compelled to rename the place in their own tongue, and each of them drew inspiration from it looking like a hump. Cultures that passed through the region added their own word for “hill”: tor from Old English, pen from the Celtic, how from Norse, and finally hill from modern English.

So the next time you say “Torpenhow Hill,” you'll also think “Hill-hill-hill Hill,” and you're most welcome.

On its face, this whole thing is silly. But each extra "hill" made perfect sense to the people who added it. It didn't at all sound redundant to them because they didn't understand the previous words anyway. They kept the "heritage" and merely added another word that described the world in their own terms.

This is the Not-Invented-Here syndrome at large. Much like these different groups of settlers felt the need to put their own spin on the name Torpenhow Hill, organizations often feel the urge to rebuild or rebrand solutions that already exist, simply because they won't take the time to understand the prior thought process.

In problem solving, this tendency to “rename the hill” can be quite costly. Instead of building on existing solutions, teams waste time and resources reinventing the wheel, missing out on the benefits of external knowledge or collaboration. The challenge, then, is to recognize when we’re simply adding another........

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