Organizations* as places of meaning creation

In response to what Vervaeke calls the meaning crisis, organizations need to become a locus of meaning. Instead of bullshit jobs, they need to be places where meaning is created, nourished and fostered both for the individuals in the organization and for the collective as a whole. 
Following Vervaeke’s reasoning, meaning is not found but created.

*I’m open to the possibility that organizations as we think of them now are not appropriate for this form of organizing. 
We might have replace the term “organization” with another term, possibly “collective” – without any assumption of how that collective would be structured. For simplicity and easy access, I will continue to use the word organization for now.

How do we create meaning?

Let’s look at what meaning creation looks like for individuals? Vervaeke’s points out that meaning is not created on a propositional level. Quite the opposite even – conceptual/propositional thinking can remove us from meaning.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not against thinking. Thinking is great – but it’s just one tool in the tool box. Propositional thinking allows me to put thoughts into writing, and it allows for you to read and understand it.

Ironically, nothing I can write on this blog will create meaning for you. I can talk about meaning but I can’t create meaning. What creates meaning is a mix of participatory knowing (which requires participation), self-transformation, mindfulness practices and other practices.

Many years ago, I suffered from something I now recognize as meaninglessness. Everything felt unreal. I then took stock of all the things that are real. You can see what I wrote.

Real that’s when my sister cries  when she hears me sing my song
real that’s his hands on my back knowing, present, strong.
Intimacy, and skin to skin, feel weight on me when I want
real is the ocean’s power, standing at the water front.

truth that’s my hands on a keyboard when I write and play
real that’s when a friend of mine dares to go out of their way.

those things are real which means my mind can’t take them from me
I’m an addict of life and they are the fix for me,
they are comfort and they soothe
forever show me their own truth

real that is my daughter’s cheeks, nature’s beauty is my girl
she knows how to enjoy herself in a dance and twirl.
giving birth is eternal truth, and bleeding bright red blood
gardening and growing roots, hands covered in dark mud.

real is when you do not leave, real is all that stays in place
real is all that I can rely on, even if it is changing face
Real would be giving in, accepting unimportantness
how much pleasure there must be to dissolve in endlessness.

Meaning is in relationships, in our body, in our creations and aspirations. Meaning is in spiritual experiences, in nature, in art and awe. All the things that “my mind can’t take away from me.”

What Vervaeke emphases for meaning in individuals is our sense of relevance kicks in before we can even have a thought.

Let’s say I hug my son. He melts into my arms. The reason that feels meaningful is not because I have a thought like “oh, my son loves me.” The meaning created by a hug is immediate and even before a thought.

Meaning is not something that exists on its own; instead, it is embodied and lived, in our interactions, in our thoughts, in our body, in our feelings, in our caring, our participation, in who we are and in the stories we tell ourselves. It’s dynamic and never-fully formed.  

I don’t want to create a false binary here – we can also get meaning via propositional knowing. For example, we can understand our partner better after hearing (in words) of what’s going on for them. We can read scripture or philosophy.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that while propositional knowing might be useful for reasoning and (some) insight, it only covers a (small) part of what lets us evolve and individuals (and probably also as collectives). 

Meaningful organizations

The explicit in an organization is like the propositional. It’s what can be put into words. It’s what is in our policies and agreements. It’s in our mission and value statements. But no glossy purpose statement can bring back meaning if meaning is absent from the interactions and the embodiment in the day to day and the interpersonal. And no policy can undo misaligned behavior, just like an “I care about you” can’t undo body language or actions that embody indifference.

The implicit in an organization is often referred to as “culture.” Edgar Schein even calls it the unconscious – which is very close to the non-propositional and implicit. That means that meaning is in places with words but even more in places without words and that’s why culture eats all beautiful wordy strategies for breakfast.

Meaning is created when an organization participates in life, engages in self-transformation and absorbs information that goes beyond the propositional and planned. For an organization to participate in life, it needs to be interwoven with its surrounding in an interpenetrating manner. That’s possible, for example, when the “customer”-facing units of an organization are free to act and deeply understand and participate the world around it.

Here are a few examples:

• The intermeshing of consumers and producers into “prosumers” (Toffler 1980).
• Forms of self-management where those who do the work make decisions together.
• An organization understanding itself and being able to transform itself to adapt to its changing environment is an example of creating a better organization-world fit.
• Lastly, a lean startup will develop organically into the demand around it because it adapts quickly by real-life experience, not abstract strategy.

An extreme anti-example is a hierarchy where decisions are made in a way that’s detached from the work (and the workers).
Just like an individual losing their sense of meaning and finding “everything is pointless” and absurd, an organization will make absurd decisions when decision-making is detached from the needs around and within it.

In my exploration of wiser organizations, I want to understand better how meaning can be created on a collective and second-order level by integrating different forms of knowing on the collective level.