Podcast transcript

Episode 1: Context

Hi, my name is Ted and I welcome you to the series “Organizations that Make Sense.” This is a series about a new way of seeing, one that holds organizations as life itself. And I invite you to come with me to see organizations in a new, more beautiful way. A way that starts from a worldview of relatedness, of interconnectedness, where we’re not separate from each other or from what people call nature, where organizations get to be participants in life, not just vehicles to serve us. Not as entities we design and control, but as living, breathing participants in the vast web of existence. This is a series for everybody who has the same intuition that I have. There must be a better way of doing this.

And this is not some naive pipe dream. Our view of organizations has to be connected to reality. In fact, more connected to reality than you might think. I’d argue that most organizations don’t live in the real world, but in a distorted world, an abstracted world, a disembodied world where a tree is worth more when it’s cut than when it’s alive, and where we love our plans more than reality.

So I want to flip the script and talk about the real world because in the real world, everything is interconnected and that is not a woo-woo thought. We know it is scientifically so. And the more deeply we look, the more our simplistic narratives based on separation, simple causality and reductionism fall flat.

This is “Organizations that Make Sense.” Let’s begin.

Opening

More and more people are saying, and I agree, that we need a new way of seeing, of asking questions, of holding, relating and making sense. Maybe we do need a way to see. Maybe our eyes are longing to see differently and the world longs for us to participate differently, and maybe just maybe a new path will open invisible to us now because to step on the path we would need to change.

Organizations are a big part of our lives. Many of us spend lots of time in organizations at work, as volunteers, where our kids are, where we live.

How we approach organizations has given me this growing pit in my stomach for a while, as if there’s something we need to figure out, as if it’s something where we need to find the right voting algorithm, the perfect governance system, the perfect IT tool. Something about this very approach seemed awfully familiar because it’s all around us. It’s the way modernity treats basically every problem. Figure things out, build it, divide and conquer, the modernity code of progress, control, separation, individualism. It’s the water we swim in. It’s the air we breathe.

And this is going to be a little uncomfortable for my colleagues because I think even the world of self-management in big parts are still deeply committed to this modernity code. So I’m trying out what happens if we start from the premise that we’re all interconnected and that organizations cannot be controlled, not directly through hierarchy, and not indirectly through governance codes.

How would organizations run if that were the case? How would we get anything done? How would we make decisions? Would we make decisions? And how would we relate to the world around us?

For me, this is a spiritual journey. It’s about putting some space between what my mind tells me of how things work, and listening more to what I sense, tuning into the vast universe around me.

It does not have to be a spiritual journey for you. And the argument I’m making doesn’t rest on that at all. But if you fall in love with organizations in new ways, I hope that’s okay too because I think our celebration of life belongs where living creatures are and there sure are a lot of people in organizations and there sure are a lot of creatures affected by organizations.

Life has a place in organizations, and organizations can be a place to experience and live that celebration or even reverence of life. Okay.

Now, just a few words about me. Well, I’ve spent 10 years deeply immersed in sociocracy, co-founded Sociocracy for All, a nonprofit supporting peer-based, consent-based governance. And I’ve worked with dozens of organizations, supporting them and redesigning their organizational processes and governance.

I’ve lived in an intentional community for over a decade. I’m a linguist. I worked on how we encode facts and morals in syntax and semantics. I’ve been living in Germany and in the US and I’m a very proud parent of five children.

In my work, I’ve often worked with organizations that were just a little outside of mainstream, those who push the boundaries beyond business as usual and beyond the frames of typical success markers that we’ve been told are the only ways to get taken seriously.

While sometimes I was longing for, you know, a little bit more straightforwardness and more mainstream, you know, just to have it easy, it is after all on the edges where innovation is. In 2023, I finished a book I was working on at the time, “Collective Power,” and for the whole time writing, it felt like a final report.

I just didn’t know what it was ending. I knew I had to write this final report, but I had no idea what would come next. There was just this gut feeling that under all the stuff I’m writing, there’s a whole universe to discover. And boy, was that true.

And just so you know, as it’s true for many transformation stories, at the end you come back to realizing that everything you’ve done is actually still useful.

Like that book “Collective Power” is still useful. But I had changed and I saw it with different eyes.

What I’m talking about here is not the truth, and it can’t be. It’s my perspective, my way of making sense. It connects to a lot of great thinkers and feelers and doers.

In fact, it connects to everything else other people have done. In an interconnected world, how could it be any other way? But I want to tell you my version mostly because I’m so excited to hear what comes up in you in response.

You might know the story of the elephant, where there are blind people trying to make sense of what it is that they’re touching.

One feels the trunk and thinks it’s a hose. One feels the side and thinks the elephant is a wall, and so on. They all come to different conclusions of what this thing might be. And the story is often taken as a way to show that we can all never see the same thing. We look from a perspective and that shapes what we see and that’s somehow the end of it.

And someone who I will mention quite a bit in this series, John Vervaeke, his take on the story was to point out that there is a second part of the story that somehow we never tell. Because of course these people could talk to each other. It is true that we all have different perspectives and none of us has access to absolute truth.

But that doesn’t mean we’re doomed. We do not need to stay stuck in that separation story of, well, oh well, we all see different things. We can bring our stories together. We still don’t have access to absolute truth, but we do see more together.

In the same way I’m talking about organizations and all the things I’ve learned, I’m touching organizations from my point of view, and it’s completely clear to me that there are other points of view. Imagine the people in the elephant story excitedly sharing what they see. Let’s imagine that’s me and you, and I hope I get to hear how what I’m saying resonates and how I might need to stretch to see what you see or maybe what I would need to let go of to see more clearly. Okay.

Con-text

We will start from the assumption that everything is interconnected and see how far we get. Is there a moment when interconnectedness becomes paradoxical? Yes. And that’s where it gets interesting. But for now, what I have in mind is not just that all the people are interconnected, it’s more like a multimedia tapestry.

The relationships are between all kinds of actors, people, full embodied people, and if you’re familiar with internal family systems, throw parts in there as well. They definitely show up in organizations.

And then there are the items we interact with. Your uncomfortable office chair, your computer, the charger, the machines you use, the software, and how Zoom slows down whenever I open my browser. Does it affect my work when my office chair hurts my back? Yes. So then my office chair’s relation to my back is part of the mixed media tapestry. And of course, the more-than-human world, the air, the water, the tides, the sun, the trees. Would your organization run if there was no oxygen? No. Then you’re interconnected, even interpenetrating with oxygen because the oxygen is in you and you’re the oxygen.

Add all of that to the tapestry in your imagination.

Whenever a client has a British accent, they always remind me a bit of my extended family growing up, and I have a little bit of a complicated relationship with that. So that history is now in the room, at least for me. Does it maybe affect how I show up even just a tiny, tiny little bit? Probably. So then my family history is now in the room and everybody else’s as well.

And that includes the stories shaped by gender, race, class, origin, language, culture, my affect, my history. All of that is baked into my behaviors, into how I show up. So of course that makes all of that part of the organization.

Each organization also has its own lingo and phrases, each pointing to and connecting with deeper ideas and beliefs. How they use language is part of the organization. And each word became part of the language we’re speaking or not speaking at some point throughout the centuries or millennia.

So our language alone has sediments of thousands of years of history. Thousands of years of history are like sediments in our language alone.

And of course there’s the history of what the organization has experienced together. The dad jokes that the woman in it makes. The way we’re proud of how we overcame the budget crisis two years ago. The way most of us believe that if we only focus on storytelling, then it would keep us true to ourselves.

Or how the new strategist always has new ideas about expanding into new project ideas and the discomfort some of us express with that when she’s not in the room. This is commonly referred to as culture, but I want to include also the bodies and the objects in it. If you have a systems background, none of this part is new to you, and yet I want you to imagine it as if you could touch it.

Imagine the tapestry. Its vastness and interconnectedness. And then I ask, what is an organization? If everything is interconnected, a set of individuals? No, it’s so much more. Is it a machinery of processes optimized for purpose? No, it’s so much more, and most of this cannot be written down. Most of this you can only understand when you’re in it as a participant.

You can feel it in your own body, but as you feel it more, it also changes you. You change it. It’s embodied, relational, dynamic, perspectival, participatory, and it never stops changing. That’s the context.

Imagine

Why do I call it context? Because context comes from weaving together what is woven together into each other. Honestly, before I looked it up, I thought it came from text as in language, right? As if that was the only way of weaving things together. Weaving is older than written language. So weaving together, it is. If you imagine this context, like you could travel into it with a microscopic magical submarine, you’d see the rubber bands that connect everything, the concepts, the people, the feelings, the sounds, the smells, the objects.

You’d see the rubber bands that connect everything, the concepts, the people, the feelings, the sounds, the smells, the objects, the ideas, the memories, the longings, each with their own patterning, but connected. And then you’d realize that it’s not a dead tapestry, but deeply alive. It moves. It flows. It forms new connections, and it lets others wither.

This is way too complex to design them on a piece of paper. Okay.

And then again, we’re co-creators of this context, engaging and weaving in the tapestry, engaging and weaving the tapestry of organizations consciously and unconsciously. We get woven into each other. For example, if you watch your colleague make tea in the exact same way each day, and you chat with that colleague every morning bitching about her divorce drama while you make your coffee, you are weaving your habits and your patterns together with hers.

If she’s out sick one day, you’d feel her absence during coffee break and maybe wonder how the story continued. There’s a good chance you will change your behavior so that you’re there for coffee break and you don’t accept any other meetings during that time.

If you learn about a new concept, you’re weaving that concept into the existing concepts. Without the other meanings and ideas, the new concept wouldn’t mean anything. Your idea only lands if it relates, if there’s resonance, maybe, even.

As we drink coffee or tea together, share ideas, and spend time in proximity, the threads between us connect and our tapestry holds more related information. As we and the ideas and the language and the items and our bodies and our emotions and our memories, all of them keep bumping into each other.

There are also a million threads that lead outside of the organization, of course. In fact, this whole organization will be shaped by how it is set into the world, how it relates with the world, and the inside and outside imprint themselves into the patterns. If your organization, for example, is hyper-focused on a certain market, everything will arrange itself around that market—the concepts you use, the people you hire, the products you produce. The tissue of the organization holds some responsiveness. Say I’m in an organization set on making money, and I say, “Hey, we could host a free networking day” or whatever. It would probably get ignored as if I never said it, or the immune system might fight it, or it could be turned into a PR event because that’s the resonant patterns it would loop into.

You know about culture eating strategy for breakfast. The tissue, the threads, the fibers, they are alive and they orient what’s possible and what isn’t. If the whole river flows from east to west, maybe there’s no point in suggesting that we swim from west to east.

And none of that is good or bad. It just is. Of course there’s a shadow to everything, but there’s also beauty in this congruence of the context. The organization shapes its tissues and structures and flows to fit its environment towards what’s needed, both inside and outside.

So now we’re holding this vast living tapestry, but here’s where it gets tricky.

How we choose

Because now we’re a little stuck. If there are countless threads all over, then where does the organization begin and end? And even more basic, how do we even know what to focus on? Where do we put our attention? What if we want those threads and fibers to point in a particular direction? When I first realized that, I was a little stumped, because once you’ve let go of the idea of control and instead acknowledge the complexity and vastness of that organizational tapestry, and its infinite connections inside and outside, it’s overwhelming.

How do we even know what to do next? How do we not get completely paralyzed in every moment for every choice? But organizations aren’t special. Humans are always needing to discern, every moment. Like you are paying attention to what I’m saying right now. I am recording this right now.

There are a thousand things I could be doing right now as I’m sure is true for you, yet we’re both here, so we seem to have a way to choose.

But how? You might not even see the problem here because the answer might seem obvious to you because the common narrative is simple. As an individual, you consider all your options, pick the best one for you. And as an organization, you have your overall purpose of the organization, and then you consider your options, choose the best one for that purpose.

That’s the rational way of going about things. Well, let’s have a look at whether this is true.

Rationality, causality and strategy

You see, the problem with this rational way of seeing things is that there are just too many options to consider. If you considered all your options for any given choice, you’d take forever to decide. Quite literally.

So a rational way of picking the best option is probably not what we do, neither as individuals nor as organizations. Let’s just stick with a simple script. The basic idea of an organization, the way they tell us, is that there’s a something we’re selling or offering, that’s our aim, mission, service, purpose, whatever.

Then we create the structures and processes to deliver that. Define the strategy to add some focus, and that’s it. We define the rule set to consider it, plug in the problem and the facts give us a way of deciding. This sort of works if you have a very narrow and computable goal, like maximum benefits for shareholders as the highest goal.

But even then, you run into trade-offs, for example. You’ll have to ask yourself how much resources to spend to make your people comfortable enough so they will continue working. Trade-offs make the whole thing less computable, because it’s hard to know just how miserable people have to get before they refuse to work.

Organizations that want to prioritize their mission over making money now have an even harder time. In all possible trade-offs, they need to balance mission work and people care and staying financially viable. The approach of just look at all the facts and choose the best one completely falls flat, and that doesn’t even consider the things we don’t know or can’t know, like how markets will change in the future.

But people try to soldier on. They have a strategy session and they have purpose coaching. They define a hierarchy of missions, decentralized decision making strategy, this and values that. Let’s say our organizational mission is to teach compassionate communication, and we already work with teachers and administrators.

We want to go into a new market and we’re discussing what market to go for. So some of us say we should work with activists because they want it, or dentist offices because they need it. Definitely. Others say we should work with business leaders because they can pay for it.

Okay. Now, if we define a strategy, it only reduces the pain, but it doesn’t solve the issue at its core. We just had two people going to paternity leave and one retired. We simply do not have the energy to expand. So is this a moment to ignore our strategy? Is this a moment to prioritize the strategy over my team’s capacity and wellbeing?

Is this a moment to put more resources into people care or less? How do we choose? How do we choose?

If your mind is spinning right now, that’s exactly my point. Everybody’s heads are spinning. And I’d argue that’s because we think we have to use our minds. But our minds cannot hold the implications of all the actions.

I think the truth is we’re at our wits end.

Values

Of course, we could define values, and values can be defined for several reasons, but I want to focus on their usefulness as guidelines for decision making. So the idea, just like with strategy, is that we can use values to narrow down our possible choices. For example, in our imaginary compassionate communication organization, our value might be affordability.

So naturally, our strategic expansion should be into activism because they’re so often underfunded. But of course, it’s not that easy because given affordability, our school districts already have had a hard time paying for our services, so given our value of affordability, we could argue that we should work with business leaders because the money we make there could help us make services affordable for schools.

Do you see what I mean? Values are rarely specific enough to be helpful because they leave so much room for interpretation, and if we apply them to make them specific, they’re controversial. It’s not uncommon for organizations to argue about what values look like in practice. I mean, I’ve heard people yell at each other to be respectful or kind.

So values don’t solve the fundamental problem that we still need to discern and choose what we take into consideration, what we pay attention to, what counts as this, and what counts as that. We cannot define our way out of contextual discernment.

But it gets even worse because why should we choose this or that value in the first place? Does that mean we don’t care about the other values? If you pick inclusiveness, what about the moments where it’s good to do something alone so it gets done? Values emerge in response to context, and we get into deep trouble if we treat them as absolute.

I like how nonviolent communication holds it. There, we all have values or needs and in a specific context, some of those needs bubble to the surface.

For example, I might be in contact with my unmet need for beauty while I’m walking through a city made of concrete. [I] might be in contact with how my need for beauty is met in a moment when I’m looking at a painting or a gorgeous tree.

The subtitle of the book by Marshall Rosenberg, about nonviolent communication, is “A Language of Life.” And I think that’s beautiful because in life, all values matter. All of them are aspects of life. Life will always ask us to make contextual choices and choices come with trade-offs.

We always discern to pick and choose between trade-offs, and if we don’t, we get rigid, righteous, and purist. And maybe that’s my biggest criticism of values in organizations. We always discern to pick and choose between trade-offs, and if we don’t, we get rigid, righteous, and purist. And maybe that’s my biggest criticism of values in organizations.

They give us false certainty, and we think that if we plug values into the big computation machine of our organizations, then the results must be good. The implementation on the ground is somehow just a nuisance, never as perfect as our plans and values and strategy papers.

Haven’t you heard about the path to hell, paved with good intentions?

If people tell me that values do help them making decisions, I often wonder how much confirmation bias is at play here.

For example, it’s really easy for me to imagine that our fictional organization sharing compassionate communication, decides to expand into one area, tells itself that they made that choice because of the value of affordability, when they could have argued the same for any other choice as well. It’s a nice story to tell ourselves that we chose business leaders because of our value of affordability, but it’s not exactly rational.

It’s what Iain McGilchrist would call a confabulation. And that points to power and epistemic violence. If we gloss over the fact that someone discerns, if we present things as a system where it’s computable objectively, which one is the strategy-aligned path, then maybe even unconsciously, somebody discerned that. We are not observers in an objective game.

We’re choosing, always choosing. So there was discernment at play and it was somebody’s discernment. Rationality and all the guidelines and values can be an elaborate scheme of cover-up, of whose line of thinking can we follow? Which factors we factor in, how we weigh things against each other, and that’s how defining values and purposes and strategies and missions may be a part of the same power and control fantasies that run our modern world.

Not only do we want to make money, we also want to be the good ones, the value-aligned ones and so on. We want to control the outcomes and ensure that every interaction is safe and comfortable to everybody. Sometimes I feel like those mission-driven organizations are like modernistic control paradigms on steroids.

So can we step back for a moment and ask, is trying to control the outcomes more and more, is that really the only idea we have? What happened to flowing with life? What happened to understanding that we’re nothing but specks in the universe?

What happened to trusting that the way knows the way? Can we shift our attention from what we want to do, what we want to be seen as, towards participating in what wants to flow? Okay.

Episode 2: Relevance

Welcome back to “Organizations that Make Sense.” I’m Ted. We started by seeing organizations as living tapestries, interconnected webs of people, objects, history, air, everything woven together into context, and then we hit a wall because if everything is interconnected with countless threads going everywhere, how do we ever choose what to do?

How do we not get paralyzed? We looked at the usual answers. Be rational, define your strategy, follow your values, but none of it holds up. There are still too many options to consider rationally. Strategies don’t tell us when to override them. And values conflict with each other depending on context.

So no matter how we turn it, we keep coming back to the same question. How do we actually discern? How do we sift through all the options and know what matters? That’s what we are. That’s where we’re going. Now let’s talk about relevance realization.

No matter what we do, no matter how we try to control the outcomes by defining rules and guidelines, it always just goes back to discernment. But how do we discern? How do we sift through all the countless options and factors, possibilities, and priorities? We already know that choices are always made in a context.

We discern all the time. In fact, there’s no moment when we don’t discern. Just opening our eyes, we discern how we pay attention to the world around us. The self-organizing process that guides how we make sense of the world is called relevance realization in cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s work. Relevance realization is our way of selectively noticing things, filtering things, and prioritizing information that is meaningful in a given context. It’s like our navigation system. Mostly it focuses down the number of choices to what’s meaningful or useful in a context. We have to ignore huge amounts of data coming at us all the time.

If you’re overwhelmed, you are not actively choosing and you’ll lose your agency in the world. So how does this actually work? Well, it gets a lot tricky because it becomes circular. We can only know what’s relevant if we know what’s relevant. It’s an ongoing loop. What is relevant in one moment shapes how I see the next moment.

The relevance realization is how we find our path when everything is unknown, and our own capacity of getting information also needs to be constantly reframed, so our own preconceptions don’t steer us in the wrong direction for too long.

That’s why relevance realization has to be recursive. The very way we see changes as we change in our environment. Changes relevance emerges from that ongoing interaction between that and me. It can’t be fixed because if it’s fixed, that’s where it will break eventually.

And now it goes back to rationality. Sometimes people tell me they want to make decisions without getting confused by feelings or desires, but we saw that rationality, just choosing with our minds, leads to overload.

John Vervaeke says that our non-propositional knowing, the things that you can state in words, are a way to structure the context. For example, if you don’t want anything, nothing will be useful to you. Without caring about anything, without having a goal, we cannot choose. A hammer is not intrinsically relevant. Relevance is a relationship and it gets structured by the context, but the full context and my relationships to it. That’s why choosing is inherently relational—my relations to everything in the whole multimedia tapestry.

We need intuition and sudden insights, caring, thinking, feeling, wanting, sensing. We need our gut instinct and our heart for relevance realization to operate effectively. If we ever just run on rational, one-dimensional thinking, we miss things outside of that, and we don’t have a way to distinguish which of these propositions matter.

That’s why relevance realization, in fact, needs to be able to change its own processes recursively. If you notice that things break or you’re making too many mistakes because you’re going too fast, you need to notice that and slow down your processes.

If you notice that your noticing processes don’t work well, you need to adjust how you notice how you notice. I quoted earlier that the way knows the way, and maybe that sounded a bit too poetic and wishy-washy to you, but do you see how it’s not wrong?

The way knows the way because there cannot be a prescribed path. Any preset path is going to fail someday. Just like the Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. All we have is the current moment, the way we perceive it through our relevance realization filter.

So relevance realization is higher than anything. Or as John Vervaeke says, it’s primordial. And now you might think, well, great, but you can’t run an organization like that. There has to be ground to stand on and we need goals and we need to know what we’re doing. But we will see later that we have lots of ground to orient ourselves, more than we knew, if we just slightly change our view on what ground looks like.

For now, let’s look at what relevance realization looks like in organizations.

I was once the external facilitator for a board that had a hard time with its process, and although I’d consider myself a weathered facilitator, I struggled with that group and it’s really hard to describe why. I can only give you a sliver of that sense of chronic confusion I’ve felt there because this group would constantly go off track, but people would disagree on what off track looked like.

They completely disagreed on what was even worth talking about, where a topic began and ended. In addition, they were constantly getting caught up in meta-discussions on how we decide and who decides and who gets to be included in what decision. As a facilitator, I never knew who was on track and who wasn’t.

And for most of those meetings, at least half of my brain was constantly trying to put my finger on why on earth I felt so discombobulated. With my words now, I realize that what this group didn’t have was functional relevance realization. It was like a collective brain that just couldn’t figure out what to focus on.

Whenever one part held on, whenever one part held onto something for a while, it slipped away for the others. It was energetically draining for them and for me. In an organization, whatever we do, we have two things running at once: relevance realization on the individual level and on the collective level.

Each person uses relevance realization to make sense of what they perceive, and we have collective processes that steer how we collectively pay attention. For example, this board would argue for quite some time what topics to talk about in that very meeting.

So what do we know about collective relevance realization? Learning from Vervaeke, there are three pieces I want to focus on. We cannot assume computability because relevance realization is self-organizing and non-algorithmic.

We already know that. Okay. We need to factor in non-propositional ways of knowing, procedural, perspectival, and participatory forms of knowing—all the things that you cannot say in words. And we need a recursive system so we can adjust our own system. That last one is a thought you might recognize from Peter Senge’s work or triple-loop learning.

We need not only to question our own choices and actions and whether what we’re doing matters, but also question our very processes of asking these questions. In other words, we need to be able to reorganize our structures and processes when we notice that they lead us away from the path. But what kinds of non-propositional aspects are there in collective cognition?

The board I’m talking about, for example, lacked simple procedural knowing—the basic setup of how to have a meeting, how to track the topics for the agenda, and talking turns. Those are simple options of how to weave individual minds together into collective cognition.

Knowing about these methods doesn’t do a thing. It’s not something you can know or talk your way into. We need to get into a rhythm of doing them, of working. It’s like our fibers need to align through repetition. Recurring practice becomes like a hairbrush to brush those fibers and those threads into a configuration that lends itself to working together.

Goals are a great ordering function because they focus our attention. Maybe you’re familiar with “Reinventing Organizations,” but for many, the whole point of self-managed organizations is that we organize around a shared purpose. The shared purpose is acted on in a self-organizing manner, just like relevance realization is self-organizing.

While there are moments where goals, aims, or purposes make sense, if we hold them in an interconnectedness logic, which we will look at later, there are several moments where this way of thinking can easily fall into the same trap of monocausality that I talked about earlier with values. And I’m spending some time on this topic because it is so common in the field.

Okay, so people tell me the organization is defined by purpose. We think that we introduce one purpose and then all other decisions flow from there.

Let’s look at an example and see how it holds. Let’s say we have an organization that has, as its purpose, to improve health outcomes in Springfield. Great.

First, it is not true that we do all the things that fall into the purpose statement.
There are things we don’t do. For example, it’s a known fact that being in nature improves health outcomes. So I assume this organization also builds parks, or at least organizes rides for people to go into parks or engages in reforesting activities. If not, then where do they draw the line?
It’s also not true that they only do things that fall into the purpose statement, and I’m not even talking about secondary activities like HR or finance. Of course, they contribute to the purpose indirectly.
But how do you weigh, for example, people care and mission care? Based on what? And are you seriously telling me that if you put effort into people’s wellbeing, then you only do that so the purpose gets fulfilled? Honestly, I find that weird. And I’m not making this up by the way. I was in a room when a founder told his HR team that the organization had to prioritize its mission over its people.
And this was not in a moment of financial distress. It was as a general principle. And I remember HR looked at him with big eyes and their faces had a big “does not compute” written all over. Third, organizations sometimes override their purposes. I know plenty of healthcare organizations that put candy at the checkout to stay financially viable.
I’ve taken clients for the money that I had a hard time getting behind to protect the overall mix of the organization’s sustainability. We cut corners all the time. Don’t tell me you don’t. We work with Amazon to ship out books to Australia and Canada. We need to choose when that is okay, and when a line is crossed.
But how do we choose? Of course, there are gradual differences here, but it certainly isn’t as easy as we need to align each choice with your overall purpose. So even purpose, which seemed like such a smooth, easy, and compelling idea, always brings us back to discernment, and that means relevance realization.

There is a reason Vervaeke calls it primordial. You cannot get out of relevance realization and relevance realization will always trump any purpose you define. Just like a contextual choice, it’s just an attempt to meet a need. All of the needs that make the fabric of life—purpose is just one aspect of the world we’re in.

Only in a separated universe can there be such a thing as a monolithic purpose. In reality, the purpose is interconnected with everything around it. As we will see later, it’s fine to pick something you do for a while, but it will always, always be secondary to how life flows.

Because if you look at the grand scheme of things, even the most beautiful purpose might have hidden indirect trade-offs.

For example, might a healthcare organization contribute to professionalization of healthcare instead of keeping care in the family? Or take me, in my day job. I am part of an organization that makes sociocracy accessible, and often that means making it affordable. But I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wondered whether making it affordable might actually undermine the overall access to sociocracy, because now the people who want to become trainers are easily underbid, and that means it’s harder for them to have an income with sociocracy, so it will spread less.

The same is true for accessibility. If we make it very accessible, there’s a good chance now people have an easier time only reading bits and pieces here and they may misunderstand it, misapply it, and give it a bad reputation. So I can’t quite tell what purpose is good in the grand scheme of things.

And maybe once you listen to this whole series, you will see how I wonder if maybe unknowingly I contributed to a narrative of control in a very indirect but very palpable way. I thought I was doing a good thing, but did I? And sometimes when I listen to my inner monologue about wanting to do a good thing, I’m instantly worried exactly because of that point of good intentions and the path to hell.

So tell me, if we don’t know what it looks like to be a good person, how do we know what it looks like to be a good organization? So back to purpose. Sure, if your purpose is useful to focus on what matters to you as a group, do it, define it. Goals, as I said, are a great way to focus our attention, but that is only true if your purpose is not just a shadow statement on the website.

Something you take out of your drawer when you need to tip the scale on a decision and want to add more consideration into your discernment. Because if that is the case, then I wonder, isn’t that a little late? Wouldn’t we expect that the highest purpose has already imprinted itself into the many threads of the organization and every fiber structured your attention and your caring and longing all along?

Hasn’t the purpose already shaped every step and your organization? Honestly, honestly, I wonder why do we even need to say it then? Does painting the purpose into words help you get clarity, or might that be your ego, individual or collective, speaking? Is your purpose something you are willing to question when you need, when you notice you need to change?

Or do you hold it in absolute truth? In a computable, controllable world where we think it’s one reason that shapes everything when really it’s all the reasons that contribute to the whole shebang reality.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-purpose.

I’m just wanting to be honest about discernment.

Episode 3: Boundaries

Welcome back to “Organizations that Make Sense.” I’m Ted. We’ve been exploring organizations as living tapestries, webs of relationships, history, air, objects all woven together, and we’ve run into a problem: if everything is connected, how do we ever choose what to do?

We saw that rationality cannot save us. There are too many options to compute. Values and strategies cannot either. They just add more parameters to an unsolvable equation. That’s where relevance realization came in, this self-organizing process that helps us navigate by noticing what’s meaningful in the moment.

We saw that organizations have collective ways of knowing they can’t be written down—the procedural, the perspectival, or the participatory. But now we need to ask: if organizations are these vast, interconnected tapestries, where does an organization end and begin? How do we even draw a boundary?

When I was a little kid, we spent time at the beach in UK and Kent. Imagine white cliffs, sandy beach, and freezing water—at least if you’re not born in Britain. And at the beach, they’d carve off a kayaking place from the ocean. They built a wall that was maybe knee-high for an adult, and when the tide came in, it would fill that pool with water, and when the tide went out, the water inside of the pool would be trapped and the little kids could kayak in there.

I was one of those kids. The tapestry of organizations is just like that. We are in the big world, the ocean. And organizations are temporary small basins that we carve off for a while.

I don’t know what you had in mind when we talked about the context. Was the context limited to inside of the organization or did you imagine the big open space of everything? Both ring true to me. Okay.

It is clear that the context doesn’t end where we draw the line of what the organization is. Lots of threads go to the outside of the organization.

For example, in my language, you hear my accent, which leads us to Germany and that’s outside of the organization.

It is obvious that there are threads reaching from the outside into the inside, just like the ocean sweeps into the little kayaking basin, and seagulls fly back and forth from the beach to the kayaking place, and crabs go about their lives without taking any notice of the wall.

An organization in this image works exactly like the kayaking place. Just like they build a wall into the ocean, we define an organization into the tapestry. Inside of the membranes, the threads now connect more. For example, you know your colleague better because you spend more time together. You start adopting the special lingo, you acquire the concepts and see the connections between them. Your body learns the movement patterns of that organization, and with that, the organization’s patterns imprint themselves into your body, in your thinking, in what you pay attention to. It’s impossible to separate you from the organization because you co-evolve and interpenetrate.

And that means at the same time that organizations aren’t built from scratch. In fact, they aren’t built at all. It’s more that we recombine and connect and weave things that already exist. You start with relationships, ideas, infrastructure, education, capital, knowhow, your body, your memories, your caring, the air and water, the internet, love of coffee, the rhythm of your day and week, the way injustice feels in your body, memories you’d rather forget, the weather and climate, the national holiday schedule in the country where you live. Sometimes people talk about designing an organization or growing an organization, and of course we say things like these all the time, and yet it is a little like saying, “Oh, I grew pumpkins in my garden this year.” Okay.

The truth is, of course, that we don’t really grow pumpkins. We don’t have the power to do that. All we can do is contribute to conditions that make it more likely that a pumpkin may grow. The same is true for organizations. We can’t make them because organizations aren’t something you make. You steward them.

You hold a piece of the world in your care and nurture and grow the connections inside of it.

That makes an organization a denser piece of relatedness that integrates into working together. We then recognize the organization as a collective. It gets a name, maybe a logo, an address. However it begins, like the wall at the beach, we define a boundary and we say, “This is the organization.” And that’s how by creating an inside and outside, by assuming there’s a membrane, we can start to build our own conditions that serve our aliveness.

We can then build the structures to digest resources. For example, we can take funder money and use it to fuel projects, take supplies, and turn them into products. We, as a collective body, are able to do things in a coordinated way.

To interact with resources, there are two approaches. You can immerse yourself into the food, like slime molds for example. They don’t ingest, they grow into their food. It’s more like a network. The other option is to put the food inside of you, and that requires there to be an inside and an outside. So what makes that boundary? How do we know where to draw the line?

What is that wall even made out of?

We already know that it’s not defined by purpose because purpose and activities aren’t a clean fit. And besides, if that were the case, somebody would automatically become a member if they started working on the same purpose. Try and be a stranger and walk into an organization and start working at a desk and see what they say.

If they tried to send you away, tell them you’re working on the same purpose and see how that goes. So it’s not purpose. So then what is it? I’ve given this a fair bit of thought, and I’ve come to the conclusion that this boundary is in fact arbitrary. Almost any reasonable reason, almost any reason will do.

Sometimes it’s blood relationships, sometimes it’s purpose. Sometimes it’s that we live in the same village. And after all, autopoiesis doesn’t need a reason. Life doesn’t operate on reasons.

This whole obsession with narratives and purposes seems to go with that modernistic assumption that you have to earn your place in the world by serving a purpose. But do organizations have to earn a place in the world in the first place?

In this view, it’s life force manifesting itself through us.

A bold self-assertion of “I exist.”

And then we stay alive if we can keep those conditions up and make our inside and our environment livable for ourselves. A cell might keep up a certain pH. A mammal might keep up a certain body temperature. An organization might keep up a certain pay rate, workload, or appeal to new talent. It’s not one thing.

It’s all the things, whatever it takes. Without the concept of a self, an organization would fall apart. The threads would disintegrate, processes wouldn’t hold up anymore. Resources would leak out. People would simply stop going there.

The concept of itself doesn’t require consciousness. All I’m saying is that our organizations work like our immune system. A cell in our immune system doesn’t fight just everything that doesn’t look like itself, but everything that doesn’t look like the bigger we. That means it needs to know the difference between I and we. If it weren’t true that each of our immune cells fights for the bigger we, then the bigger we would cease to exist. So it’s not crazy to say that we only exist as a collective because we believe that we exist.

I am not the only one to say that a static I is not as static as we think it is, but it is a very useful illusion to believe that.

So let’s play with that for a moment. Let’s assume that we can predict an organization into being, and because it eventually maintains its boundaries, it continues to exist. And for that to happen, it doesn’t really matter what the defining factor is. The main thing is that we start defending it.

It is a common story, which I’m sure you’ve experienced as well: is say, a retreat ends and everybody really fell in love with each other. Typically, people want to defend this new collective that just got birthed by organizing messenger groups and reunions and so on.

They start defending the group’s boundaries and sheer existence and want to keep it from fading away. I can’t detect any other definition, but just groupness here.

Having a self that can act as one is really important. And here’s how I learned that when I was a teenager, and this time it’s not a kayaking but a canoe story. When I was like 15, I went on a canoeing trip. We had eight people in a canoe. One day we were on a river and there was an island in the middle of the river.

You could either go left or go right. So we were just kind of paddling and I remember the camp counselor calling out from the other, and I remember the camp counselor calling from the other boat screaming, “There is an island, don’t hit the island.” We all saw the island, but somehow we still couldn’t decide which way to go.

Some people were screaming to the left and others were screaming to the right and you know what happened? We literally hit the island. We all had to get out and get unstuck again, and that one left a deep impression on me because I was so embarrassed. It seemed to be illogical that this would happen, and I couldn’t figure out why this would happen because it was not about deciding which way was better. Neither one was better or worse. The main point was that we had no way of acting as one. It was just about deciding. We were acting as a bunch of individuals, not as a group.

So groupness also means having the agency to stay on a path together. That self somehow needs to be able to act as one. And with that, we are now, again, in a funny situation. We both assume that the organization is interconnected and almost indistinguishable from its outside and there is no real boundary. And we need to assume that there is a wall and that the organization needs to be one thing separate from its environment. Both are true.

And that leads to legitimacy questions, and I know more about these than I’d like to because organizations with legitimacy issues seem to come and haunt me. I’ve had several clients in my career that knew they wanted to improve their collective agency, but didn’t know how to decide how they would decide.

I know it sounds… I know it sounds like a problem where one could just decide, but what happens in real life is much closer to what happened with the canoe on the island because in order to form that self, our mind seems to need reasons. Okay.

I don’t fully understand why we do, but we do. We want to know why the boundaries here and not there, and who gets to decide that. Humans need good reasons, convincing reasons. So we tell ourselves stories like origin stories about when the founder passed down the power to us or the board. I call it legitimacy theater.

It’s theater because it’s not real, but it looks very convincing and we all want to believe it is true while we’re watching it. If we don’t believe it, if we remember that it’s just theater, it kind of loses its magic. It’s an elaborate game, like all the systems we build around it.

Bylaws, registered organizations and governance agreements, UN constitutions and statutes. It’s all part of the same theater. It is theater because it tells a story, but it’s only telling a story. No words will give an organization the legitimacy to exist. Just like words cannot give permission to a tree to grow.

There’s a particular kind of thing we say sometimes, and it’s like the pattern of, “I hereby name you Tom,” or “We hereby found this organization.” They’re called performative or declarative speech acts, and when they were introduced into the linguistics discourse, it was in an article that was called “How to Do Things With Words,” and it is kind of fascinating and really cute that you can declare something to be true, like “I hereby call you husband and wife.”

But if we say that it’s words that do it, we completely overlook that it’s not the words that do it, at least not alone. The words cannot declare somebody husband and wife. It’s the whole context that does it. I can only call somebody husband and wife when I’ve been given the legitimacy to do so. It’s a social convention game that we play with each other. And that only works if we take it seriously. Okay.

If you think about it as theater, it makes much more sense why founding or legitimizing rituals are so much more powerful than words for legitimacy. Like a founding ceremony, swearing in, the ritual of signing documents together. Those create legitimacy through participatory knowing, not propositional knowing.

You don’t have to be convinced by the argument. You just have to be there. The magic wasn’t in what was said, but in the shared experience, the collective body and enacting the organization into being.

The fact that we boldly asserted ourselves and exist. And maybe this is just left brain wanting a story that it can tell to itself to reduce its anxiety because things just coming into existence seems scary.

So it’s not crazy to say that the life force manifesting itself through the context and organizing itself in is what makes an organization.

But here’s a funny thing, and it’s… I always have to bite my tongue a little when I talk to clients because if we are too aware of how legitimacy is just a game we play, then it doesn’t work.

If we don’t believe that the organization is the organization in a legitimate way, then everybody’s credibility in showing up on behalf of the organization fades.

In fact, that can be what organizational death looks like when the parts stop believing in the shared story and the threads and the fabric orient themselves in new ways and are composting the organization. The individual counterpart may be that if you’re too aware that you’re just stardust, you might stop getting off the couch.

So having a self, as illusional as it is, keeps us alive. If I asked you, is this molecule inside of your body, is that yours? That’s a nonsensical question. In an interconnected world, ownership doesn’t make sense.

Only stewardship does. We steward the molecules in our body. The kayaking place still belongs to the ocean, not to us. We just all borrow from the world for a while.

Yeah, so maybe we’ve been so busy defining what an organization should be and how they should function and how we can own them collectively, and how every individual can have a voice in them, who should have a say, what purpose they should serve, that we forgot to look what they actually want. What is actually happening right in front of our eyes?

Life force manifesting itself, integrating what is into new combinations, new functions, ways to play inside of the big, vast ocean. Okay.

Bounded spaces are useful because they allow us to do things. Organizations have agency because they define their boundaries, and there are a lot of kinds of bounded spaces like containers. If you have a conflict resolution practice, for example, you can define the rules for that process, like who speaks first and how long and what kind of prompts they need to speak to.

And that creates a container that allows us to be better agents in the big world, like when we resolve our conflict and then go back to life outside of the conflict resolution process.

What counts as a container or a bounded space? Well, everything we use to navigate, everything we use to reduce the world to something we can manage, like any category, any framework, any policy, any decision-making method and governance systems. They all form bounded spaces that make it easier for us to operate and that give us a way forward without arguing about everything each time, like how to decide and who decides and how to do it and so on.

Strategies are tools, categories themselves are tools, and we need them. If we can’t categorize food, we cannot find it.

If we don’t distinguish roads from sidewalks or dangerous animals from less dangerous animals, we might not make it. Categories are as necessary for living as having a body with an intact membrane. So we as living beings, just like organizations, as living entities, live in this tension field. We need boundaries.

Without them, we dissolve. If we wanted to be in full contact with the world, we would have to jump into the ocean and disappear in it.

Boundaries separate us from the whole, they limit what we can sense, and know whenever we build a brick wall at the beach, we create an inside and an outside. We stop fully participating with everything beyond the wall. Closedness is a part of life, but so is openness.

Life is neither one or the other. It’s the skillful integration of both, the dance between the bounded and the boundless.

Each tool also comes with a shadow side, of course. How that shadow plays out depends on the context. For example, having a boss who tells you what to do typically comes with a big shadow. But in the canoe, we would’ve benefited from someone telling us to pass the island on the left or the right.

A charismatic founder can be a blessing or a curse. Our purpose comes with light and with shadow. Our own way of thinking is a blessing and a curse. This is not a game you can win or a mechanism you can outsmart.

The more you strive to be that good person, the one who can game the game and overcome trade-offs, the more you might get wrapped in it. You can combine things into more stable configurations, maybe even in a way that balances the advantages and disadvantages into a more anti-fragile or less fragile combination.

Sometimes people dismiss any bounded spaces like frameworks, defined processes or workflows, but having no bounded spaces, not having proper governance is the organizational version of disembodiment.

After all, tools, frameworks, categories, kayaking pools, cell membranes, bodies aren’t only separators. Without a body, I can’t feel. I’m trapped inside this finite body, but it is also what makes me experience through this body. I first read this in Andreas Weber’s work, but it is endlessly fascinating to me.

Our skin that is our separator from the world is at the same time our connector with the world. It transcends the dichotomy of connector and separator. Okay.

If the goal is participation with the world, co-evolution, then of course we need interfaces and practices to stay in contact with it. Imagine you have a map that is 100% accurate. It’s one-to-one scale. The rocks are not symbols on paper, but real rocks. The trees aren’t dark green shading on the map, but real trees. That’s a map you cannot carry around. A map that is as big and as detailed as the territory.

A map that is as big and detailed as the territory isn’t a useful tool anymore. We talk about the map is not the territory, but a map is useful to navigate the territory. It is a way to give us access. Some territories you shouldn’t even enter without a map. So don’t dismiss maps.

All the processes and knowings that are connected to relevance realization are at the same time separation from reality and our connection with it.

And that makes sense if you remember that we can survive better if we are in better contact with reality. If we don’t know what’s going on in the world, we can’t effectively act in it.

To be good actors in the world, we need to dynamically integrate the logic of boundedness and structuredness with the open and vast to stay in good coupling with reality. That might mean to get rid of categorizations and frames once they’ve lost their usefulness.

With our bounded spaces, tools, practices, containers, frameworks, paradigms, we are like snakes that outgrow their skin. We outgrow our skin and must shed it to keep growing, but we always need a new skin. Okay.

The goal then is to use tools, but never forget that they are tools, while at the same time using them with an earnestness as if they were real. To play the game fully.

In our world of organizations, maybe we already have all the tools. Maybe we can stop looking for the perfect system. Maybe it’s in fact us looking for the perfect system that’s part of the issue. It’s our relationship to the tools that trips us up. ‘Cause some people fall in love with the tool, whatever it may be. They forget that a tool can’t be the one answer. And some people want to get rid of all the tools and dismiss all the frameworks and categories. They have a hard time taking tools seriously.

They lack that earnestness. They want to cut corners, but that’s disembodiment. But how do we know which one is which? So here we are again, back to relevance realization, which raises the question, how can we improve how we discern? Can we get better at the dance between boundedness and boundless? And that’s what we will explore next, what I call context stewardship.

Episode 4: Stewardship

Welcome back to “Organizations that Make Sense.” I’m Ted. We’ve been on quite a journey together. We started by seeing organizations as living tapestries, everything woven together into context. And then we ran into the overwhelm problem.

If everything is connected, how do we choose what to do? And we saw that the usual answers don’t quite work. Rationality can’t compute all the options. Values and strategies just add more parameters. So we turned to relevance realization, the self-organizing process of sensing what matters in the moment.

And then we asked: where does one organization begin and end? And we discovered that organizations are both. They’re interconnected with everything and they need boundaries to exist. They’re both useful illusions and dense webs of relationships at the same time. We looked at how we use tools, bounded spaces, categories, practices to navigate and how they’re both separators and connectors.

We need them and they can trap us.

So here we are with this question: How do we improve how we discern? Can we get better at this? Can we get better at this dance between the bounded and the boundless? That’s what we’re exploring now. I call it context stewardship.

Remember when I talked about how people’s choices operate with a recursive, self-organizing mechanism of relevance realization. Instead of there being a set path, we inch forward by anticipating and figuring out what’s relevant and then we act accordingly and find ourselves in a new moment doing the same thing.

There is no solid ground to stand on, and instead we have to trust the process, the navigation process. Yet, while we can’t access any solid ground of absolute truth, we can improve the navigation process. That would be improving our relevance realization itself. How do we do that?

What John Vervaeke says about individual relevance realization is that we can improve it by engaging in practices. For example, for individuals that might be mindfulness or meditation, reading philosophy, going for hikes among trees, listening to podcasts. You are already doing a lot of that.

Those practices, in my words, create interfaces with reality, and they open possibilities for learning in ways that are non-algorithmic and unplannable. For example, they say it’s helpful to go for a walk when you’re stuck in a math problem or to take a shower, but that doesn’t mean it always works.

Yet the more practices we have, the more likely it is that between all of them, we grow more skills and insights and get a better handle on more situations, acquiring practices that bump us closer into reality and a variety of aspects of reality. The more we participate in the world, the better we can make choices because we have fuller information on what’s going on.

And of course, tools matter for that because once we think that we have to find the right tools or the best process or the best people, then we miss the show. Our minds are in an ideal future instead of our hearts being in the present. Participation doesn’t require perfection or optimization. It requires presence and practice, but it does not give guarantees.

If we want to improve the decision making in our organizations, defining and categorizing is one direction, but the other is to change the conditions so people are more closely connected to the context. That’s the indirect way. That means I need to have better information about what’s going on in the organization, and that doesn’t just mean what we say about it.

We need to get into the manure, the ineffable, not the polished abstractions, and that means holding the non-propositional reality a little closer. The participatory, the procedural, the perspectival. Because whenever we make preventable mistakes or we’re somehow off track, then there was typically something in the context that we could have seen, noticed or sensed.

But often it’s our rational minds pushing back against our good intuition.

Of course, it can also go the other way when our intuition is off and we should have listened to our rational selves. I’m not trying to play rational against intuition here because of course all processes have bias. My whole simple point is that more context makes it more likely we’ll make a good decision. I’ve heard Nora Bateson say, “If you can’t figure something out, add more context.” Adding more context is how we can make life easier for ourselves. By having more context, we have more to work with in our relevance realization.

Here’s an image that helped me understand that. Let’s imagine you have a perfect pencil, beautifully sharpened, perfectly symmetrical, perfectly sharp, and you have a smooth surface, perfectly even. You put the pencil perfectly straight onto the piece of paper. Which way will it fall?

This is a philosophical problem because it seems impossible that it won’t fall, but then you have an unsolvable problem on your hands because you can’t determine why it would fall this way and not that way. But we have to see that the problem here is not in the pencil, but in the way we think about it, because it assumes perfection and perfection doesn’t exist in the real world.

So in reality, this pencil will have some asymmetrical property, will have some asymmetrical part either on the pencil or on the surface, or likely both. In reality, this is not a problem. The pencil will fall, but in our minds, we’ve navigated ourselves into an unsolvable situation.

Now instead of getting all caught up in hypothetical discussions, could we assume non-perfection? Could we factor in the little asymmetries and imperfections of a system to make decisions instead of operating on the assumption that some ideal world knows better than the pencil, which way it will fall?

The fact that we even think about it just shows how we assume that the ideal world is somehow more real than reality. And that’s true in organizations as well. Instead of looking up into abstract things like what abstract value will guide our decision making better, look down, look deeper into the issue, zoom in, let go of perfection, and go deeper into the messy reality.

Once you zoom in, things may get easier to decide. There might not be absolute ground to stand on, but our embeddedness in the context actually creates something to hold onto and orient us in all the directions. It’s not ground to stand on, but more like a web all around us. We just don’t see it if we only look for propositional truths.

Let’s look at some stories. And I’m going to use examples from my living community.

A few years back, my community was stuck in what seemed like an unsolvable issue. We wanted kids to wear helmets on scooters, but any rule we made about it seemed to fall flat. We couldn’t decide whether the rule also applied to adults or just kids, and if so, what age?

And we had a really hard time defining what kinds of vehicles would count. Bikes, sure. How about scooters? Yes. How about tricycles? An 8-year-old going downhill on a tricycle with a foot on the seat is a very different situation from an 18-month-old learning to climb onto the tricycle seat. Any policies we tried to make felt like attempts to define which way the pencil would fall.

So one day we’d had it and we changed our approach. We took a deep breath and got rid of the rule and called for a big get-together. We had a process where kids and adults could hear each other and their concerns about safety, but more importantly, what we were able to do was to listen to each other’s perspectives.

The kids didn’t want anybody hurt either. They also didn’t want to be yelled at, though. And you wouldn’t believe how many kids rightfully criticized adults for zooming down the hill without helmets and really being dangerous about it. Hearing each other already changed our shared reality. We understood what it’s like to be an adult that wants to zoom down the hill after work, wind in their hair, and we understood what it’s like to be the elderly neighbor worried about the kid that decides to use their bike as a gymnastics device because that person’s memories of somebody else getting hurt maybe is still very much in their reality. All of that is perspectival knowing. The more we share people’s stories, the more information we have about all the parameters in the shared context. Even if it’s not something that can be written down, it informs what is going on and what is real between us.

Would it be easy to just make a policy and enforce it? Yes, but only if our goal is to never get sued and to be sure we can say, “Told you so” when something happens. I’m not convinced that fewer kids get hurt when there’s a policy. And isn’t that what ultimately matters?

Um.

We also tried to get a policy right about how many outdoor cats should be allowed in the community. Some people hate cats. Others love cats because when I have a cat, it might kill the birds in front of your house or poop into your kid’s sandbox. The care we express for the different viewpoints is hard to put into a cut-and-dry policy.

So we made a policy, but we also added an element of participatory knowing. If you wanted to get an outdoor cat, you needed to have a conversation with your immediate neighbors. Not to ask for permission, but to put your nose into the deeper context of interrelatedness of our choices, to see how you are a participant in a bigger web of relationships.

Procedural knowing helps us well in this community. There are meals twice a week in this community with about 50 people attending. Some people cook and some people do dishes, typically in a team of three. When the community started 30 years ago, it took three people four hours to do the cleanup.

Now we’re typically done within a good one and a half hours. What has changed? Well, a hundred little things. The kitchen setup, the way people bring their dishes to the dishwashing station, the way the team divides up the tasks. The whole collective body knows how to do dishes efficiently.

And new people learn by working alongside the long-term members. It’s not anything that’s written down. That’s what I mean when I say I want to bump people closer into reality. Not the abstract, but the radical contextual. All of this knowing is not something in an onboarding handbook.

Those three examples show how perspectival, participatory, and procedural knowing work.

When the whole tapestry is oriented towards something well and with ease—the dishwashing station, the detergent, the teams, the jobs, the layout of the kitchen, the timing, remembering to preheat the sanitizer before sitting down to eat, feedback to those team members who chat more than they clean, and music for those teams that want it—enough fibers in the tapestry have grown around the dishwashing so that now there is flow. Working with the tapestries is like working with gravity.

And that’s why “does it scale” is such a trigger phrase for me.

Sure, the principle of connecting with context scales, but context is already everywhere, so there’s nothing to scale. We just have to work with what’s already there and not take a solution pretending that we are working in empty space. And if we scale our way to access it, we missed the point because we abstracted away from our context.

To me, the question of “does it scale” just smells like modernistic logic through and through. The context itself is the soil on which our actions rest. Healthy soil with tunnels and roots and mycelium, water, nutrients—they give us access to deeper reality. Depleted soil can’t guide or hold us. The problem is the more we get lost in abstract meta-discussions and bounce around looking for the perfect tool, the more the soil loses structure. Soon declarations are going to be our only options because there’s nothing left to feel.

So how can we feel more? Here are three concrete examples from my practice. In many volunteer organizations, people can join teams because they’re interested in that team, but that often leads to issues. That board I mentioned earlier, the one where relevance realization was acutely off, they had assembled people with the biggest opinions, but little shared experience with what was happening on the ground. No wonder they couldn’t align. They lacked embeddedness in the lived context, and they were constantly bouncing around. Working shoulder to shoulder in the muck is a great unifier and alignment factor. So we better design for participatory knowing over opinions.

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There are a few simple tweaks that one can make to get a team to talk less and experience more or to feel more. One of my favorite practices comes from consent decision making, where we play with terms. If somebody has an objection, we don’t just say no to the proposal, and that’s the end of it.

Okay. Instead of not doing anything at all, we agree on a timeframe of how long we’re willing to try something out just so that it’s safe enough to not create harm and long enough to experience something. So now, instead of talking, we’re letting reality decide. We’re looking at what actually happens.

So instead of talking about the context, we go deeper into it by doing something.

Another example is how we can connect to teams. There’s a practice in sociocracy called linking, where when you have two related groups, two people go back and forth and participate fully in both groups. They can, for example, give reports based on lived experience as whole human beings. It’s like a warm link because they bring the other team’s whole context along with them.

They are steeped in it and they embody it, and we don’t have to read any documents or start guessing to understand what’s happening somewhere else.

And that’s how there are just a hundred little things that we can do to maybe take the emphasis off the written and the spoken word, to take the emphasis off the written word and the data and the metrics, but instead add more participatory, procedural and perspectival knowing to the system.

While there’s no monocausal link between if you do this, then this and that will happen, overall, we create a system where more information is held and that way we can improve our relevance realization indirectly. Okay.

Stewardship means to tend to the soil instead of trying to control for outcomes. We trust the tissue, the people, and the relationships to surface whatever is needed. Because if something is off, if something is not tended to or if there’s a tension, it will likely show in the tapestry and we can sense it, especially if we are well versed in practices.

We don’t play for safety or pretend that there’s absolute truth. Instead, we use the tapestry among us to guide us. That requires several pieces to play together. We already know we need protective boundaries. Our boundaries need to protect the context on the inside.

Otherwise we cannot shape it to support our very own life functions. There is no context without a membrane, just like there’s no weaving without a loom or frame.

And then there’s the tissue, like I talked about, the tissue that formed around the dishwashing. The tissue holds wisdom, and we need to let its fibers grow. Let procedural muscle memory grow. Let participation create bonding by proximity. It takes time. If we change too many parameters too often, the threads don’t have time to grow around the new structure.

So give it time. Don’t reinvent things all the time. Trust that over time patterns will shape and people will form their patterns in alignment with the other patterns. Sometimes the context is out of balance because a certain perspective isn’t present enough. Then we can gently steer with awareness. Awareness practices help shift the focus indirectly.

For example, if we all learn to recognize and pay attention to a certain aspect, let’s say gender distribution in talking turns, we might gently reshape the patterns around that, or we regularly talk about something that we all care about, like more focus on ending meetings on time. Now, each attractor in the system might make tiny choices that add up over time and shape the patterns toward that goal.

This way of changing the context is elegant because you don’t have to know how it will weave itself into the context.

An example of that was the listening session on the helmets and scooters. We had no way of controlling what would come from it. We just had the hope that more awareness on helmets and safety would do something somehow. Yet, this way of doing things can create disappointment.

You know that if you’ve been to a weekend workshop once, got all lit up and found yourself unable to integrate what you’ve learned into the patterns of your daily threads. So this way of making change only works if the new state of threads is attainable from where we are now.

The last point is proactive patterning. We can also more actively reshape the tapestry. For example, doing rounds or holding meetings in the same way each time. These practices, habits, repeated care, they all form patterns. They require commitment and repetition. If you wanted to make the water in a bucket swirl, you wouldn’t just hit it once. You’d stir it again and again in the same direction. A committed practice works just like habit stacking, where you always put your gym clothes out for the next morning before you go to sleep. You don’t hope for awareness or willpower, but you simply make that action easy to do. You make it the obvious choice.

An example of that is about talking to neighbors when you get an outdoor cat. It is not for permission or decision making. It’s for strengthening our commitment to weaving our context closer together. It is less likely that we’ll have more cats, even though everybody still has choice. Those forms of context stewardship all share one feature.

They work without rules. They work through strengthening the context and our connection to it so that rules aren’t needed. Decision making is different. It’s more like coming in like a surgeon and cutting what has grown and then rewiring it. While necessary less than we think. It’s not bad, it’s just one of the tools in our toolkit.

Decisions. De-cisions. Did you know that the word decision comes from “cut off”? When I first remembered that, I asked myself, wait, what are we cutting? What are we cutting? I think we cut the possible actions. For example, if we say from now on, no one can wear jeans to work, and then we define what actions…

For example, we might say from now on, no one can wear jeans to work. We make abstractions of what is and shouldn’t and could done, and we cut some of those from our consideration. We just don’t do that thing anymore. Wearing jeans to work is not one of the possible actions on the table.

Of course, those actions are only cut off in the imagination. They still stay in the living tapestry as options. In reality, I’m completely able to wear jeans to work despite company policy.

But our brains are used to forming these imaginary sets. We form imaginary sets of entities like cats or cows. And when we say these are cats and those aren’t cats. But our brains are used to forming these imaginary sets. Like when we form imaginary sets like cats or cows, we say these are cats, and those aren’t cats. We don’t have to know all the cats or cows to form a set like that. In imaginary space, we can cut without even ever entering a meadow. And cutting then is a hard separation, a hard cut, like a Venn diagram.This is this, and that is not this.

Hierarchy thrives on separation logic like that because separation is necessary for control. In a system based on separation logic, we need to have these cut separations because in order to play a right and wrong game, we need to know what is right and what is wrong, and who is right and who is wrong.

Even self-management or less hierarchical methods can overuse this separation logic. I want to have a look at that on the examples of role descriptions and consent.

Role descriptions

First, imagine an organization with its whole interconnected tapestry. Now, let’s say we notice that our onboarding of new people isn’t so great. For example, we constantly forget to give them their keycard, and sometimes it takes weeks till somebody remembers to invite them onto Slack.

Now, our first idea might be to write up an onboarding manual, but we soon realize that that’s not going to cover it all. So we decide to have a warmer welcome by defining the role of an onboarding person. This person is now in charge of making sure onboarding works well.

We want to make it really clear what is included in onboarding. So we write the role description with a list of activities. Now we can say, “Look, these activities are within your role for you to do,” like making a company email address for the person or handing over the keycard or inviting them to Slack.

Maybe it also includes some less clearly defined activities like showing them where the bathrooms are. And maybe it also has some activities that are more on the periphery, like showing them where the bathrooms are. In separation mode, we now think, okay, great, we’re done. It’s all defined and that’s it.

It’s clear who is responsible. Now, is there also a reading where we don’t make that cut between onboarding activities and non-onboarding activities? Can we read this also in interconnectedness mode? And I think we can, if we get the gestalt of the role description and imagine that it points to a part of the tapestry that has a higher density of onboarding activities. We can now say this is more what you do.

We don’t draw a hard line, but we can still point and say that these are significant onboarding activities, and then we would expect that the person would do more of those things. Now if we have an activity that might not fully be in the center of that, we might have a situation where other people are also picking up the slack.

For example, I might remember to show that person where the bathrooms are. I might invite that person over to lunch. It is not so clearly separated because we’re all invested in onboarding going well. In separation mode, I’m not only cutting the activities off its context, I’m also assuming that accountability and responsibility as something that can be cut. In separation logic, if someone else is in charge, I am not in charge. And now we’ve created an imaginary world where not only are activities chunkable, but responsibility too. In interconnectedness logic, that’s complete nonsense. Responsibility is held in a web that you are a part of.

Maybe even as a term, responsibility makes little sense in interconnectedness logic because it sounds like something you can have. It’s like something discrete. Interconnectedness and our relatedness automatically covers responsibility somehow because if we are connected and I’m a feeling being, and you are in pain, then of course I’m present with that.

Maybe I just have a hard time relating to what responsibility is supposed to mean in interconnectedness logic. It seems to be just part of the package because we are connected.

Role descriptions aren’t futile. They’re useful tools that create clarity here and there, but they can also trap us. We might think that because somebody else is in charge, we don’t have to worry and we don’t have to pay attention at all. That would be self-management inheriting the modernistic paradigm of separation in an unexamined way.

So, sure, let’s use the tools, but interconnectedness logic needs to come first, and we need to be aware that whenever we use tools, those are just tools in a limited way. Just like the wall at the beach, creating a kayaking pond.

Consent

Consent is a decision-making method often used in self-management. It’s the idea that we accept a proposal and therefore make a decision if nobody on the team objects. So technically we don’t all have to agree to consent. We just need nobody to say no. But what’s more relevant here is the context in which that happens because we can use consent in separation mode if we assume that right and wrong can be computed.

So we come up with the rule, and the rule is we define our aim as a group, and if the proposal violates that aim, we say no to the proposal. And if it doesn’t, we say yes. That’s great, but it makes an important assumption and that is that the aim of the group is a discrete set of things with a clean way of saying what’s in and what’s out.

And we’ve already seen that that cannot be done. And the same is true for the proposal. It is also something that can’t be defined into “this is in, and this is out” because there are so many different ways of reading a proposal and interpreting it and playing it out in real life. And again, tools aren’t bad as long as we remember that they are only tools.

So if we define everything and it works out well in most cases, great. And yet, never forget you’re only playing because real life is always bigger than you think.

Here’s an example of that. Imagine a cell phone factory with one aim: produce cell phones. Let’s say I object to a proposal because it pollutes the river, and you tell me, “Well, nothing in our documents says we can’t. We’re producing cell phones and not polluting the river is not mentioned in our aim.” That’s how externalities happen. The more rule-bound we are, the more reductionist we become. Now, of course we try to fix it with more rules.

We might add “don’t pollute the river” to our aim. And then we notice air pollution. So now we have to write another policy. And then there’s people’s health, so we have to write more and so on. You remember what we said about futile ways to keep adding more and more rules?

If we tried to spell everything out, we’d be too slow, too bureaucratic, and we’d always be behind. So let’s look at how to use consent in interconnectedness mode. Similar to the role description, we could use the proposal as a gestalt. We don’t pretend that it can be pinned down or even assume that it points to a definable set. We can go with the intention and our common sense around the proposal. We make sure we have a good grip on the situation, both the proposal and the context, and then we compare the tapestry as it is now.

Does it seem like the proposal as a shared commitment would change the tapestry in a desirable way? Are there any possible negative impacts or reasons why this planned course of action would be rendered impossible? Notice how we’re not comparing a clean, discrete set of the proposal with a discrete set of the aim.

Instead, we sense into the proposal and into the whole tapestry, not just the aim. We are guided not only by what is rational and can be spelled out, but we use all of our sensors. So we don’t want to use consent just in a rule-bound way because it would always leave something out. Instead, we want to use consent as an attunement and alignment check, where we stop together and ask ourselves, “Do we have a sense of the context?

And do we think the new pattern will weave well into the existing patterns? Will it flow with what we’re already doing? Would it not create negative side effects somewhere else in the system?”

Policy and operations

There’s another distinction that I find very useful, and it’s the distinction between policy and operational decisions.

It’s basically a mental aid. We assume that there are some decisions that are working on the system and some that are working in the system. The policy decisions are pattern-setting, and we make them by consent. The operational decisions flow from the decisions that we’ve already made.

For example, we can now define handoffs between two people, and once defined, the activities between the two can flow. They could have flowed just based on habit or emergence, but we helped the process along a little by defining it. If we do that well because we work with what’s there, then this is incredibly helpful.

I teach this model because it’s useful. But it falls short when we get into less obvious examples because the flow of the river can also change in a million little actions. So this distinction between pattern-setting and pattern-following decisions, that’s not really true. There is no hard separation here.

Each and every action changes the tapestry. So in order to apply the system well, we would need to be good at saying what kind of pattern change is relevant. To say it with Gregory Bateson, does this difference make a difference? So here it is about relevance realization yet again. That’s why all those tools, like roles, consent, policy, operations, work well when people have a good handle on the context—and they don’t so much if they don’t.

The word clarity comes up for me here. Many people believe that you can only get clarity if you make things explicit in language, but is that true? Words leave so much room for interpretation. Maybe contextual knowledge is actually more reliable. If we put things into words that fall into participatory, perspectival, or procedural knowledge, we have to use a lot of words. Does it mean those things are more complicated, more wishy-washy, or are words maybe just not the right tool?

Imagine you had to write a handbook on how to be a good friend. If you don’t have the procedural and participatory knowing, it would take a few thousand pages and even then you wouldn’t be done. But if you do know how to be a good friend, you can be a good friend without ever having been taught.

Language is a very limiting way to think about clarity. Someone who reads the room or knows how to do things in their sleep, somebody who has been there, somebody who has experienced something and knows what it’s like, they will have a different kind of clarity, never reached by words.

And once we can free ourselves from the assumption that everything has to be done through words and rules, maybe we can see the wisdom in creating clarity based on non-propositional knowing, on being there, on knowing how to do things, on doing things in the same way, and supporting our knowledge of the context and our deep connection to it.

So maybe you might think the best way of operating would be if we didn’t even need to make decisions to create clarity, because we’d be so well in touch and attuned we’d already know without being told. Now, of course, watch out. That is an idealistic state, which we will never reach because we will always run into our limitations. Even if we have access to all of our ways of knowing, it will never be full reality. So we will always be missing something.

So I’m not saying that making things explicit is bad or useless. It’s just very tedious, and we need both. We will have to discern better what is a decision that needs to be made where we make a clear cut and now it’s clear. And what patterns are better changed through participatory, procedural and perspectival knowing?

We observe and sense into what is. How is our soil? How is our tapestry doing? Where are the knots, the tensions? Where are the changes in the flow that would make things easier? Where can we give access to information, propositional or non-propositional, that would unblock flow?

I invite you to try this out. How about every time you feel that impulse of wanting to make things clear by writing them down or make things clear by making a decision, ask yourself, is this a moment where a decision makes sense? Or is there any way we could re-pattern the context so that the desired choice would be the most obvious choice?

Could we let go of that idea that language is somehow more real than what is happening on the ground?

Episode 5: Meaning

Welcome to “Organizations that Make Sense.” I’m Ted. We’re in the middle of a deep journey of finding the modernistic code of separation inside of the very logic of how our organizations work. We want to move to an interconnected way that only holds separation for limited purposes as a tool and stays aware of how separation really is an illusion.

We shifted our attention to the tapestry between us and how we can steward it both for its health and its attunement by forming protective bounded spaces, giving it time to grow connections, engaging in practices that bring us awareness to shape the organization indirectly and by active re-patterning, either through repeated action and habits or by making decisions.

What we’re still missing is a way to get out of the maze. Context stewardship only tells us how to shape ourselves to create livable conditions where people can act in flow, but it doesn’t tell you where to go.

If relevance realization doesn’t give us solid ground, but only lets us inch forward, then how do we know where to go? The good news is that like before, we already have everything we need. We just need to see it with new eyes.

If we were in perfect alignment with the universe at all times, we would not need governance or decision making. Imagine we could live that way, perfect readers of the universe and each other. But that is not so. There will certainly always be tensions in our tapestry. Imagine an organization where everybody comes late to meetings and it creates a tension between meetings and other work where people have to be on time, like meetings with customers. Because of this pattern, meetings start late and end on time and are squeezed and we don’t devote enough time to our topics. People get stressed and a little pissed off.

So now there are lots of threads oriented around that late meeting start and some threads that are in tension with that. Now, something’s gotta give. The system needs to shift, but how do we change that? And what would be the difference between a decision and other ways to steward the context in a non-invasive manner?

Ways to steward the context

Let’s look at changes first that aren’t decisions, but other ways of context stewardship. One is protective boundaries. That’s an approach where we simply carve off a space where the new patterns could form. For example, when a subset of that group meets separately, it might be able to change the patterns internally to that small group, albeit not in the large group.

That might be useful if the tension may be persistent, particularly in one team. Have them form their own patterns.

Trusting the tissue means to just accept that meetings might begin late, and that the tissue around it will respond and make it somehow all fit together in a way. If every meeting is 15 minutes late and everyone knows it and plans accordingly, there isn’t really a problem.

The other is awareness attractors. We could have conversations about the value of being on time and hope that sparks the desire for change.

The last option, proactive patterning, would mean to just change your behaviors and see how everybody arranges their behaviors around it. For example, the facilitator could just start the meeting on time and hope that other threads, people’s behavior, will align with that.

I think all of these are valid and they happen in organizations all the time, of course. But now by contrast, what would a decision look like here and why would that be useful? Well, some changes only make sense if we all make them like a leap of faith. Coming late to meetings is a good example because if two people want to break the pattern and show up on time, then meetings still can’t effectively begin until everybody is there.

So the two people have no incentive to break the pattern alone because of the interdependence of all the threads. You will recognize that as the tragedy of the commons. This is where pattern breaks come in. If we made a decision that from now on meetings started on time, that’s a pattern break.

It’s useful because it snaps everybody out of their current patterns and everybody at once. So re-patterning can actually happen.

Let’s say we make the rule from now on, people have to be on time for meetings. We’ve now made a cut between being on time and being late, but any cut is reductionist and we can feel that instantly when making such a rule, because I’m sure people would find all the holes in the rule. They would ask things like, what if somebody’s late because of an important other meeting? How many minutes is too late? What if I’m just late for 30 seconds? What if my car breaks down? Or what if my kid is sick? What happens if you’re late? Is there punishment? How many times do I have to be late to be punished?

Since decisions operate less in the tapestry directly, but more in the abstract virtual possibility space, we can pretend that things are easy and cut and dry when really they aren’t. So while the rule is helpful because it helps us shift the pattern in a bigger, more coordinated way, it comes at a cost. The cost is that now we’ve introduced a whole other element of separation between good and bad, violation and following the rules.

And the reductionism of that cut has a hard time concealing just how futile it is to define a clean cut. Knowing that everything is interconnected and that rules can never give justice to that, we’ve now in a way, made a fool of ourselves.

If the words or the spirit of the rule are very much aligned with how people want to see the patterns changing, then that doesn’t really stand out to us as much because the words are not so far away from the reality in the tapestry, so there’s congruence.

But in general, there are two ways to hold this. One is to ignore the interconnectedness and become a strict rule follower by the letter. The other is to see policies as a promise, not a rule. It is an awareness attractor now. Like, I hear the rule, I see the policy, and I let it inspire me to change my actions, yet not in an absolute way.

Sure I can commit to coming to meetings on time if it’s clear that I might override that if I need to go pee before the meeting. Honestly, that’s how I see rules most of the time.

But that doesn’t mean we can get out of relevance realization because if I see policies as merely aspirational, I need to decide each time whether this is the moment when I’m going to choose to follow it, and whether this is maybe one where I won’t.

And here’s where the dichotomy between a rule and an awareness attractor, so between a cut and context stewardship that is non-invasive, isn’t actually so clear.

We typically know when a rule is a hard rule and when it’s a soft rule. Coming late to a meeting once isn’t as bad as embezzling 10,000 euros from the company bank account. Both might violate company policy. Both are on the wrong side of the Venn diagram. You broke the rules, but of course we understand that it’s gradual and that [UNCERTAIN: original has “And that”] changes very much in context.

Some rules are medium important under some circumstances, and then become very important in others. If our team or organization is under threat, if somebody cuts corners too often and our coherence is fading and it’s about our survival, then following rules might become more important. It’s like the membrane is fluid until there’s a threat, and then the membrane needs to become a little less permeable. A porous boundary then might become a wall, turning a softer distinction into a hard Venn diagram. Which patterns are threatening under what circumstances is, of course, a relevance question again, and I’m sure we’re all aware of situations where somebody in power all of a sudden decided that a rule actually applied.

In those examples, we can see that discernment, relevance realization is always happening and that it can blend with power.

While I was thinking about this, I was wondering whether there would ever be a tension in the tapestry that would run so deep that you could not actually undo it. And while I was thinking about that, I saw a tree, and it had grown perfectly around the fence wire so perfectly that the wire was going directly through the middle of the trunk.

And I realized that in this case, to get the wire out, you would have to kill the tree. And in that moment I understood why the cycle of death and composting is such a smart strategy in this evolutionary process. Every structure reaches a point where its fibers are organized in a way that it doesn’t allow for what’s needed next.

The tree can’t unlearn the wire, it can’t reinvent itself to that degree. An organization might not be able to shed the patterns that made it what it is. Sometimes the only way forward is to fall apart completely and that the fibers return to the soil and see what grows anew.

But not all transformation is full death.

Again, I’m resting on John Vervaeke’s work who helped me understand what transformative change even is. It’s been a buzzword for a long time. People calling for transformative change and I always took it as, yeah, I get it, deep change. But transformative change is actually something more interesting.

Take one of my daughter. My 20-year-old daughter thinks I’m boring because I don’t go out late on Saturdays. I’d rather feel fresh in the morning and do what I do. When she says, “Ugh, I hope I’ll never get old,” she’s making a mistake. She thinks that she’ll still care about the same things when she’s my age, but 45-year-old her will care about different things than 20-year-old.

Not only will her situation change, but she will change.

And that puts a limit on consent. Consent works beautifully for linear transitions, but in transformation, fully informed consent is hardly possible. My kid can’t really consent to growing up. She doesn’t know what it’s like to be a grown adult.

And I know we would all like to live in a world where there’s full informed consent and we never need to do anything we don’t consciously choose, where we have a say on all matters that affect us, but if we expected life to only throw us things that we can consent to, we would never grow.

So the child doesn’t consent to growing up.

Does the caterpillar consent to turning into mush?

Does the mountain consent to being shaped by wind and water? How does the tree feel about the wire?

Sometimes what exists needs to be broken to make place for the new, and that’s how the coupling between us and the context is a higher principle even than consent. Okay.

Organizations change as well, inner factor is outer factors like disruptions. We might have to change the very fabric of how we make sense. I see that with a lot of clients since I help them change their governance system.

The patterning of how they relate, makes sense and decide. It’s like open heart surgery just for organizations. And mostly that works well, but some change processes are harder than others. Sometimes people say that they would like to introduce consent by consent, for example, but the problem is the new practices will shape and change who you are and how you even see. You will shed old ways of thinking and interacting.

The people and the organizations will be someone something else after. Can we choose that? It’s complicated, and in a culture that wants to control every outcome, it makes sense that there’s some discomfort with this part of how things flow.

One of the ways in which we want to make sure we have control is by seeking democratically governed spaces. I work daily with people who want to make changes in their organizations and say, “Hey, we want to give people a voice. We want people with autonomy.” And in the context we are in, that makes 100% sense.

I’m going to take a big risk here, and I want you to remember that I say this while working tirelessly for more inclusive organizations as my day job. But we need to ask ourselves one thing very honestly: Why do we want organizations to be inclusive? Because often inclusiveness is held up as an absolute value, but I do not believe in absolute values.

I believe that all values matter and are part of life, and they all depend on context. So if we have an inclusive organization where all or at least more voices are heard, what does that give us? Why would we want that? Well, of course there’s the individual dimension. People want to feel agency in their world. They want to be heard and taken seriously. Yes, I absolutely want that too.

Let’s look at it from the organizational dimension though. Why would the organization want to have inclusivity? Well, it actually wants that too, because having more voices, that’s like having eyes all around and ears in every direction.

It’s like turning on super sensing, being super tuned into what is going on in reality. Not in absolute terms, of course, because there’s no direct access to reality, but a solid, well-informed collective relevance realization. If we are systematically shutting out voices, then we miss a whole piece of reality, and that means we now have lost information.

So less imbalance in our systems leads to a better handle on reality for all of us. That’s what inclusiveness can give us. And, and that’s the risky sentence: that is only true if that is contextually meaningful. Inclusiveness, if taken as an absolute value, can lead to disjointed situations where we do not see the context because we’re so committed to being or looking inclusive, or so committed to hearing everybody that we lose our coherence.

I want to steward a context that can hold as much rich information as possible, including all the voices, perspectives, experiences, but only as long as we have enough agency and coherence to process those voices. Because if we can’t digest the information, then what’s the point? That would be hearing voices just for the sake of hearing them, and that’s like holding power just for the sake of holding power.

And holding power just for the sake of holding power is the hallmark sign of modernity and separation. Power in general is such a tricky topic. One could say that the idea of power itself assumes separation. People think of power as something you can have and hold, like a thing you can hold in your hand like a scepter.

But power entirely depends on context. If the context doesn’t enable your form of power, your power crumbles. That shows you never really had the power, but the context, the relationships enabled your power. Power likes to present itself as absolute because that story supports that reductionist narrative, but it isn’t.

Context determines legitimacy and context enables power. If the system topples, all of a sudden those who had power don’t have power anymore. Seeing power as separate from context is dangerous. We’ll never change the power game if we keep thinking about power in separation logic. Power doesn’t exist without context, without responsibility, without interdependence.

So if we want to change how power is enacted, it’s not changing who’s on top, but overcoming the very paradigm that power is something that can be separated, held, or owned, or maybe even shared as if it were a piece of cake.

If we start from interconnectedness, maybe a better word is agency. Agency is what we experience when the context is stewarded in a way so that we can flow with life and co-create the parameters of our participation. We can’t consent to everything, but we continue to stay in contact, shaping the world and being shaped by it. Tending to the tapestry that connects us is a way to overcome versions of power that inadvertently will turn toxic.

I bet there’s a voice in you that says, “Okay, Ted. Cute. I like this whole thing of tending to the tapestry and decentering power, but it is also true that you’re telling me that I can’t consent to everything, and that’s scary. First, you took away solid ground to stand on, took away our values, and now you are also saying that we have to give up control on matters that affect us.

Are you serious?” Well, yes, but I do think we get something in return. And I’d argue that it’s the most valuable, precious thing that you can get: meaning.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me a long time ago. I thought that meaning was something that we had to find, that somehow we’d venture into the world and find it like in a treasure hunt. But then I found out from people like Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke that meaningful experiences emerge in the non-propositional, in feelings, relationship, the relationship with vastness, in awe, in the divine, in life and death, in showing up and being present, in new viewpoints, mastery of skills, transformative experiences, and flow, in how knowing changes us, how it bumps us deeper into the world. I wonder why I never noticed that. Now it’s so obvious to me. I guess I just absorbed that modern narrative that whatever we’re looking for is not here, that we’re still working towards something, that somewhere around the next corner, there will be heaven on earth.

But it’s true that those experiences that I hope I will flash back to at the end of my life aren’t the success markers, but the tiny things. In my case, probably mostly moments with my kids, beautiful sights, moments of intense learning.

And why would that be? Well, the idea here is that meaning is the biochemical reward for touching reality. Okay.

Think about it. We need to be separate enough to live, but connected enough to survive. And non-propositional knowledge bumps us into that reality that isn’t rehashed, isn’t narrativized. Maybe we’re drawn to poignant moments because understanding what’s actually happening increases our chances of survival.

Okay.

Propositional knowledge, unless it gives you deeper insight and changes you, often remains self-referential. It doesn’t lead anywhere. We stay in that world of thought, circling like an anxious loop. If you want to find out what a word means, you might look it up in the dictionary, so then it points to other words which point to other words. Everything that arbitrary can only point to other things.

We saw that legitimacy is arbitrary too. Who decided that you can decide who can decide who decides? It never ends because it’s not tethered to reality in the same way non-propositional knowing is. The propositional world has nothing to hold onto, but it makes up for it with grandiose narratives.

I remember a recent retreat. People had a wonderful time for days. At the end there were speeches. “This group is so special because,” or “No group is like this because,” and I kept thinking, why are we finding propositional justifications and reasons to prove that this group is special? Of course it is. Every group is unique, but a group doesn’t have to be special on some absolute scale for us to love each other. We bonded, we had a fantastic time. That’s it. No retroactive justification needed.

I do not want to be the best parent in the world. I want to be my kid’s parent. I don’t want them to be the best kids in the world. I want to be in relationship with them. They’re not a project to complete, not a prize to win, not an expectation to fulfill. We are together, we are in each other’s lives, and in that mutual participation and co-evolution, that’s where meaning is.

The more we touch full reality, the bigger the reward of meaning.

Now, what does that mean for organizations? Can we look at the relationship between an organization and its environment and instead of finding meaning, create meaning in a thousand little, preferably non-propositional ways? A colleague of mine, Emily, expressed this in the most beautiful way.

I used to work at an organization that makes sense. We answered the question “what do you do?” by saying we met everyone who walked through the door where they were. That meant we didn’t fully know what we were doing each day until someone came in with a need. I don’t think I ever heard someone use the word strategy in that organization.

Of course the needs of people coming through the door followed trends so we tended to do a lot of the same stuff day-to-day: when the organization formed 40+ years ago, unemployed people were having a hard time getting jobs they applied for because they couldn’t afford a telephone, so the organization set up an answering machine and took messages and folks could come in and collect their messages. When people needed computers to answer emails, we started refurbishing computers. As time went on, people increasingly needed food, and community, and dental work, so they opened a cafe and soup kitchen and free dental clinic. Then things got worse and people needed housing, and hospice care, and safe consumption sites, and someone to bear witness to the suffering of the toxic drug supply crisis. So the organization bought buildings and turned them into housing with wrap around support services. The organization was way ahead of any other org in meeting these needs, because they started addressing the needs the minute they emerged in the community.

The people who anchored the different community tools projects (rough analog to a circle leader) were selected because they held the most context – in other words, they had the widest and deepest reaching relational ties to the particular reality cluster the project was working in. Those anchors I worked with didn’t really lead, they weren’t out front guiding or showing the way, they really were anchoring our team down into the context so we wouldn’t wander away from it. They stayed rooted in the context and the team would flow out and back to them (we sometimes compared this to a beehive).

The anchor’s legitimacy came from their relationships with the people we worked with, rather than them having some experience in a similar field or because they were equipped with certain skills. We didn’t have to believe in a story that they were the best possible anchor or the most educated person, it was just undeniable that that person a) had the capacity to hold the context for us and b) had the most durable links to the context. So we naturally gathered around them to discuss what happened each day. We’d go out and meet people where they were and then come back to our anchor and say “here’s what we’re seeing, feeling, noticing from out there” and the anchor would say something like “alright, that probably connects to xyz from two years ago, and this probably has something to do with so and so, and I wonder if that situation might have a downstream effect on this and that,” and contextualize our experience, make it mean something to us, so we could go back out and try to create the conditions for a more harmonious, engaged, easeful reality to emerge.

The resonance of working this way was undeniable for me.

Man, I can feel that call towards wanting to be in an organization like Emily’s. Do you feel it too? To do something that’s real for other people? Maybe our obsession with purpose is actually a symptom, a symptom of our separation from meaning. It tracks with all the other synthetic replacements in our lives, like AI girlfriends.

Emily’s organization shifts in an ongoing evolution around what the community needs. Now, you might say that already happens. Nonprofits and businesses pop up in response to needs, right?

But you will agree that profit and philanthropy distort the scene quite significantly. Businesses do not form around real needs. They form around business opportunities. The profit landscape shapes what emerges, not the context of our real world.

We don’t serve people, we serve target audiences. We don’t fund those nonprofits with the deepest, most meaningful connection to community. We fund those with the most polished impact statements.

Each and every time I fill out a grant application, I want to scream because it feels like we’re doing all these things, but then I have to describe them in terms that just seem to suck the meaning right out of them. While they would give us money not for what is actually needed, but for what sounds good to somebody who’s entirely uninvolved. I typically last only about an hour or so on grant applications because then it feels like my soul has entirely left my body, and I need to do something more real to make up for it.

So imagine an economy that organizes around real needs and orients itself to meeting them. That’s what it would take to get meaning back.

Meaning

So what does that mean? It means that there is not one purpose statement that can reflect all the million ways in which we interact with the wider context. Meaning isn’t declared or found. It is lived. There’s a story that Gandhi was asked for his message and he said, “My life is my message.” And that’s exactly what I mean.

And it means we don’t even need to know where to go. Sure, a North star, a vision is a neat tool, but the actual navigating might happen around meaning. Meaning is like the scent trail that leads to better co-evolution. I’m not sure this is a full theory of change, and I’m not sure we should have theories of change in this moment of deep shifts and at the end of a paradigm.

Meaning is more like a thread to follow, a lifeline out of our paradigm, because people have changed before. Paradigms have changed before. Meaning might be that built-in longing to find the gateway out of the illusion. Meaning has led people throughout time.

And if we followed meaning as the attractor, billions of small shifts might lead us out. We trust programming in our bones older than modernity.

And I think we can navigate by red flags and by green flags. Navigating by red flags means that since the tapestry is interconnected, any dissonance and tension can be felt anywhere in the system. We just need to tune in and we already know what misalignment feels like in our body. We know what cognitive dissonance feels like.

We know that distinct confusion when a group has no way of moving forward. We know the cynicism spreading in our body when we know we can’t carry out the grandiose strategy we just put on paper when people make a strategy because they were told that’s how you do it, when what we say is not what we do, and what we do is not what we say, when we’re disconnected from the tapestry, from reality.

If you were an individual, we’d say you’re delusional, not in touch with reality. When it’s an organization, we feel it as disillusion. And we all know that feeling when everybody in the room seems slightly disjointed, when we don’t really listen and talk past each other.

When people don’t seem to be fully present, when people seem to follow an ideal or preconception in their head instead of the reality between us. That’s when we’re disconnected from each other. It’s lack of attunement, like organizational dissociation.

We feel that dissonance when our agency seems to flow right out of us because we don’t tend to our containers. When we’re overwhelmed because we didn’t use the tools to reign in all the threads thrown at us. That’s lack of self-care. Because you know what?

Your mind, heart, gut, body knew it all along.

But don’t walk away and say, “Ted said to follow our intuition,” then you dumbed it down into an action plan again. That’s not what I’m saying. You need your entire process of relevance realization, the whole. And then you might say, “Oh, I knew it.” It’s about wholeness. And I say, “No, it isn’t.” It sometimes it’s wise to ignore the whole and assert yourself.

There is nothing to figure out. Relevance realization is primordial and it’s an ongoing process. Make it your home.

A home is not just a house. It’s where we participate. It’s where we weave ourselves into the fabric. Emily’s organization clearly made itself a home in the community, just like a baby born into a home. It didn’t come out of nowhere. There was lived experience carrying relationships, memories, and likely a deep sense of “people here need and deserve support.”

And from there, relationships and memories and concepts and practical skills got added, woven into a deeply rich soil, structuring itself to help better, to fit better into the environment and co-evolve with it.

I don’t know about you, but for me, Emily’s story has become a reference point for green flags, something to aspire to, like an awareness attractor.

Sometimes if there’s an emergency, we get that spike in our sense of meaning.

For example, if your neighbor’s house is on fire, now everything becomes obvious. Get everybody into safety. Put out the fire. No five-year plan needed, no value statement, no policy. The goal emerges from that very rich context. How can we organize ourselves in a way so more people get more of a felt experience of the immediate needs that we can meet? The more porous, decentralized, and responsive we are, the more easily we can do that. And of course, decentralization needs to be balanced with cohesion, just like openness with closedness.

If obviousness maybe is the gold standard for us, that gives us a sense of how to begin: responsive organizations where those with lived experience and real relationships have a part. Because no organization is an island.

Okay. Just like the context inside of the membrane shapes what happens inside, the organization itself lives in a context, and that context isn’t all balanced. The wider context will have imbalances and tensions, and the organization will be shaped by that.

The thinner the context, the harder it is to stay connected. If things go too fast, if there’s too much to consider, we become superficial. If I don’t know you, I operate on stereotypes. Limitations are a given. That’s why an abundance mindset isn’t the opposite of scarcity. We need measured discernment, not naive abundance, and for measured discernment, we need as much context as possible.

Resonance

If you play the violin, you know that a violin doesn’t have frets. But then how do you know where your finger needs to be? Well, one of the ways is to memorize where your finger needs to be, but that’s not all that people who play the violin do.

They also constantly adjust with feedback. You play and you listen. Does this sound right? And there’s one really good way to know, and it’s by paying attention to what the other strings are doing, the ones you’re not playing. So if you play a perfect G, the other strings on the violin will resonate and it really feels like the whole instrument is singing back at you. You can’t miss it really. If you’ve never heard it, I recommend asking somebody to show it to you.

And now imagine all the threads again, inside of our organization, all the relationships, all the forms of knowing, all the memories, all the muscle memory that lives in our bodies. And now imagine that for a sweet moment everything seems to align and it almost is like all these threads form one humongous string.

And now you could imagine that in one of those perfect moments, the organization plays its big string and the world sings back. That is resonance and it’s likely the most pleasurable form of feedback. Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist, talks a lot about resonance in a social context. It’s meaningful relationship when one sings back, a connection, a relatedness. The string has to be tuned to a related note, and the more related it is, the more it sings back. That’s kinship. And it’s not my voice, but their voice coming back. It requires an agent on the other side.

My violin teacher said that if you don’t play an instrument often enough, its fibers lose the orientation and it doesn’t sound as rich anymore. I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s clear that the way the fibers are oriented is essential to the instrument. It’s not just a block of wood. Just like an organization is not a block of people. The fibers are oriented towards holding a shape and the flexibility to sing.

Now Rosa is assuming that resonance might be the driver behind everything that we do. And here I wonder, are we maybe misunderstanding what we want? When people say they want to have a voice in an organization, that they want to be heard, is it maybe that they want to have a resonant relationship with the world?

If people say, “I want to be in an organization that has purpose,” are we maybe actually saying, “I want my collective to be in meaningful relationship with the world”? So maybe this is meaningful connectedness and kinship in its purest form, resonance, and that’s what we’re all chasing.

That puts us into a tough spot. Rosa points out that resonance is not something you can control. You can’t force it to happen or reliably repeat it. If you listen to a favorite song tomorrow, maybe you won’t get the chills that time.

It’s something that deeply depends on the real fibers in the real context, like the short-lived ultimate peak state of coherence, where for a split moment, all the context melts together into one.

So where does that leave us? We can’t control resonance. We can’t guarantee meaning. We can’t compute our way to the good life, and that’s what makes it so precious.

The more we try to control the outcome, the less likely we are to experience it.

With that, maybe what we’ve been looking for has been here all along, all the ingredients we already have, the practices, the tools, the context of the organizational methods.

We have a gut instinct for cognitive dissonance. We carry our longing for meaning and our thirst for resonance. Maybe we don’t need to reinvent anything. It’s already there. There’s nothing to fix, nothing to scale, nothing to replicate.

It’s just that we need to change to see it.

And that’s why this series doesn’t end with a grand five-point plan. I assume you saw that coming. How do you tend to a relationship? There’s not just one way. There are countless ways. Any rule I’d make would fail in some other context.

Your tool is the answer and it’s what gets in the way. You need to use it like you mean it, and you need to be ready to throw out the tool and try something else. Relevance realization needs all of you and all of us.

And once you see it, the next day, everything is different and everything is still the same. You write a report, you talk to the colleague, you fix the machine. But now we do it while being a part of a web of meaning. We don’t just prepare a report. We tend to the soil.

We don’t just talk to the colleague or fix the machine. We reinforce and weave threads. These are ways to bump ourselves closer to reality for the sake of participating in a celebration of life.

And tomorrow we will weave again.

I know I’m by far not alone by advocating for a kinship paradigm, and I love hearing and reading everybody else who seems to be on a similar journey. What I’ve tried to do here is to break down what it all means into a realm I understand inside out: organizations. The same can be done and has been done for other sectors.

I wrote a long list of references on my website, wiserorganizations.org.

Just like the story of the elephant in the beginning, we might not fully know what the paradigm is that we’re longing for. It’s a huge shift across all areas of our lives, but we can each report from our particular points of view and connect and share our experiences.

So this was mine. And that’s why now I badly want to hear from other people and see what else might connect that I have no idea about. What could this all look like for you? I’m offering study groups so that we can hear from each other, not just you and me, but also you and me and other people, and figure out what else comes up for you. Read more on wiserorganizations.org.

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