“But This is important.”

On the problem of discerning what’s relevant to talk about

Do you know that feeling when you look at your to-do list, and you cannot decide which one to do first? A or B? 

And sometimes (not always), I sit there for a while and just shrug and pick option C. I do something completely irrelevant because I just can’t get myself to choose. 

And now that’s only me. Decision fatigue and analysis paralysis also affect our groups. 

Let’s look at a team trying to plan an agenda. It’s Tuesday morning and our group of coordinators has come together for the biweekly meeting. They have a common issue which is determining: What is relevant to talk about? 

Agenda planning is an innocent-looking priority-setting mechanism in our organizations. Different models solve the problem in different ways, often with significant downsides. For example, a hierarchical system just gives the power to decide the agenda to one person. Others pool agenda items in the meeting which is often less intentional and can follow the tyranny of the urgent over the important. In sociocracy, agendas are pieced together and then consented – but it still relies on people’s good judgment on what’s relevant. 

Each person in the room will have a different opinion. One person wants to talk about our GDPR compliance, another person wants to talk about the tension in Department B. Yet another wants to review the budget, and the fourth wants to do scenario planning. 

Now what?  

Deciding together what’s relevant

The question of relevance is fundamental. It guides where our attention is, where our resources go, and where we spend time. 

If we can’t determine what’s relevant, then we’re stuck. We get overwhelmed by all the requests for our attention, and we’re paralyzed. 

Some symptoms of that in meetings are: 

• What we do doesn’t match what we say. For example, we have a strategic plan, but we don’t follow it. Or we change it repeatedly because our discernment of relevance changes or never was reflected in the strategic plan. 
• We talk about “emergence” to cover up the fact that we have no idea what is actually relevant to us, and we shy away from making a choice.
• We argue about where to put our energy. 
• We spend hours and hours “creating clarity” by writing value statements, strategies, theories of change, and missions, but we have no idea how those would translate into actual actions. 
• Everything just feels a little arbitrary and empty. Our organizational life is detached from the fact that there’s a climate crisis and heat records and several wars. Aren’t we losing the big picture? 

Relevance is only partially answered by strategy and purpose

If we have too many options, we get overwhelmed. So we need to reduce our options – ideally leaving only the good and desirable options. 

For example, an organizational purpose reduces the number of “allowed” choices because it clarifies what kinds of actions are desired. We’re a company that “improves people’s lives as the world’s best transportation” – those actions that support other things are now out. Reducing options is useful because it focuses and aligns us. 

Eventually, our purpose, aims, and strategies will have whittled down as much as we can. If we define more, we micromanage and that would be inflexible and suffocating. 

Quite often, the clarity from purpose and strategies and values still doesn’t answer the question of whether to talk about topic A or B or C. So there must be something else that helps us answer that question of what’s relevant today. Let’s call that the “relevance discernment gap.”

Before we look at the relevance discernment gap, let’s first understand how Relevance Realization works in individuals. 

How relevance really works

Relevance Realization (RR) is a term and key concept I’m taking from John Vervaeke (Awakening from the meaning crisis). It is the dynamic cognitive machinery that helps us decide what is relevant from an infinite (“combinatorially explosive”) set of possibilities.

All day long, every moment, in an emergent game of options and judgment calls, a constant back and forth between different levels:

• Contextual Information – we take in lots of information “at a glance”
• Aspiration and needs – we care about things
• Prior knowledge and experience – our muscle memory, our useful and unuseful frames and mindsets
• Cognitive and emotional states – Stressed? It will change what choices we make.
• Social and cultural norms
• Biological, neurological, and cognitive mechanisms determine how we think
• Adaptive processes – we learn as we go

Relevance Realization works quite well most of the time. We know that because without it, our species would have gone extinct many millennia ago. 

The strength of the non-propositional

As you can see on the list, “aspiration” is one of the factors in Relevance Realization. That’s our mission, purpose and/or strategy, and those do help us determine what’s relevant. But they are only one factor. We can’t pretend we’re only making decisions regarding relevance based on purpose and strategy because (1) it’s not true and (2) it wouldn’t be sufficient because we’d leave out other relevant information. 

The two main points to take from Vervaeke’s work for our topic here are: 

• Relevance Realization is a complex and dynamic process that takes in a wide variety of information, not only propositional thinking.
  You heard about the research that says we move our hands before we consciously make a decision? Like that. Our body, our unconscious mind, they all work together to make choices. Our conscious mind is just one sliver of that. We should stop pretending that we make strategic decisions based on strategy. It’s just as flawed as saying individuals make decisions based on their conscious thinking. 
• Making decisions based on conscious thinking wouldn’t even be desirable because we’d be paralyzed by all the options. Relevance Realization is not about thinking through all our options. That’s impossible. In fact, RR is a mechanism to avoid having to think through all our options. It short-cuts the process and helps (pre)determine what to focus on. 

Intuition – a placeholder for all the ineffable ways of knowing – is nothing woo-woo. It’s also not irrational in the sense that it’s counter-rational. It’s just not propositional and conscious – and that’s exactly the strength it brings to the table.

Collective intuition

Let’s go back to groups and what I called the “relevance discernment gap” – the gap between our strategy and our day-to-day prioritization.  

We’re ready for the main idea of this article: I seek to somehow scale our Relevance Realization into the organizational domain. 

In other words, we need to develop more effective “collective intuition.”

So what is the counterpart of “intuition” in an organization? A big bucket would be to say “organizational culture”, and that’s probably right. We know that culture eats strategy for breakfast and that’s because strategy leaves out so much. 

individual	collective
Conscious thought	Strategy and all explicit institutional documents
Prior experience	Workflows and established practices/norms
Aspiration	Collective purpose
Contextual Information	?
Cognitive and emotional states	?
Biological, neurological, and cognitive mechanisms	?
?	Culture

This table suggests that this is a finite list but that’s nonsense. It’s not. But that’s true for organizational culture as well. It’s exactly the things you can’t spell out. 

The question is, how can integrate and make use of all or more of the different forms of information maybe even without knowing what they are? 

Connecting it all

Let’s go back to the example in the beginning: agenda planning. 

The situation for agenda planning is incredibly complex: the world is complex, our organization is complex, individual relevance realization is complex, and we’re trying to do it together for better (multi-perspectival) outcomes. That’s a lot. 

And we can’t work our way there in a propositional way. We can never talk or write enough to have the same (same enough) intuition. 

It’s not only about agenda planning. While agenda planning is about our attention economy, there’s also resource allocation and information management (and I’m sure more). They all are results of but also factors in determining relevance. For example, we determine what’s relevant and then fund it, and in order to determine whether it’s relevant, we need to fund it. Information helps us determine what’s relevant, and we need to know what’s relevant to know what information to generate or share. 

No wonder people in organizations are going insane right now. Our approaches have reached their limits. And we feel it. 

Now what? 

I don’t have a brilliant solution. I’m more in the camp of “the answer to all of the problems is all of the solutions” (Daniel Schmachtenberger). 

We need to redesign how we allow relevance realization to happen. Here are some ways in which we may have leverage:

• Some practices help us process multimodal information faster. We need to improve the quality, literacy and fluency of those practices. One example here are systemic constellations that help us grasp a lot of ineffable information quite quickly.
  • So what are the propositional and non-propositional practices to reach more attunement and process (non propositional) information faster? 
  • How can we increase fluency so more people can use them more often and more effectively? 
• What are the structures and processes that can help us combine and integrate practices to create more possibilities? In other words, how can we build “organizations” (or their next reincarnation) so the different forms of knowing gel into more coherent attunement?
  • Collectivization. We need to collectify our individual intuitions. For example, it’s clear that lived experience is key to being tuned into relevance. What structures help us have shared lived experience while preserving different (incl. outsider) perspectives? 
  • Integration: What structures and processes as well as maybe practices can increase the integration between different forms of knowing, so more possibilities are created based on what’s already there? 

Interested in the same questions? Learn how to be a co-thinker.