Affordances Beyond the Physical

I was walking in a park in Japan with a dear friend and we arrived at a nice structure on the edge of a lake. Inside the structure there was a bench—or so I thought. But when I declared my intention to sit on it, I was told that it was a table. Apparently, the object affords both, just not to the same person.

“Conventional affordances are possibilities for action, the engagement with which depends on agents’ skillfully leveraging explicit or implicit expectations, norms, conventions, and cooperative social practices. Engagement with these affordances requires that agents have the ability to correctly infer (implicitly or explicitly) the culturally specific sets of expectations in which they are immersed—expectations about how to interpret other agents, and the symbolically and linguistically mediated social world. Thus, a red light affords stopping not merely because red lights correlate with stopping behavior, but also because of shared (in this case, mostly explicit) norms, conventions, and rules.” (1)

Let’s say we are in a room in an organisation with people looking at a budgeting spreadsheet on a big screen. First, we must acknowledge that the physical landscape of a room, spreadsheet, etc., is already part of a landscape of affordances, more or less consciously perceived by individuals.

If we didactically zoom in on the spreadsheet, what it affords goes beyond the structural tool and how it’s been designed; it also reverts to the expectations of the people sitting in the room. In an organisation, besides overall societal norms, there are also created practices to deal with the organisation’s complexity that are structural in social terms: modes of organising, heuristics of decisions, etc.

Here is where Luhmann’s functional differentiation can support the work. When an organisation grows in complexity, we create separations (subsystems) to cope with its operations. Looking at that screen, we might have people from HR, Finance, and Compliance, for example.

Not only will different people see and interpret a budgeting spreadsheet differently, but those functions will also receive and respond with their own type of communications. Here are some everyday interpretations of what is on that screen:

• To Finance, it affords structural control, fiscal visibility, and predictability.
• To HR, it affords constraint, and the reduction of human potential to expense lines.
• To Compliance, it affords risk mitigation and accountability.

We can look at a spreadsheet as a tool that affords all of the above, but like my experience with a bench in Japan, affordances are filtered by the possibilities of action we can see. That’s why mapping abstract affordances of tools and objects is far from enough—they are also deeply contextual. Such mapping has to include the interpretations of multiple people and, in the case of our organizational operations, the interpretations of its different functions.

But wait! Sometimes the work is to break out the silos of those subsystems and re-interpret from another, common perspective, right? That is possible, but the fact is that we created those functions and separations for a reason. By separating, we can better cope with a complex organisation through reduction. At the same time—another Luhmannian contribution—we increase complexity by such reduction. There is no free lunch. A forced ‘alignment’ is simply a discourse change with no affordance change: a common pitfall which we will address later.

This is a practical use of Luhmann’s functional differentiation—a way to listen to the interpretations of the organisation’s own separate functions. When you step into an organisation that claims they have a communication problem, do not create a communication workshop or teach them the Enneagram. Instead, look at what their own distinctions afford by listening to how they interpret events and make decisions, specially when those are not contained within their self containers. In our example, when HR needs to make interpretations and decisions that can’t be implemented only internally, how are those interpreted by others? How do decisions irritate other functions?

New Materialism’s Challenges to Discourse

From what I’ve learned from new materialist intentions, it makes complete sense that changing the discourse (communication) without paying attention to material affordances is an old trap. People are verbally invited one way, but what is physically present does not afford what is declared.

I remember a client project in a Pharma company where the regional leaders were invited to test their field representatives for a period of probation and let them go if they did not seem to fit. That was a clear directive that made sense, but reality was less obvious. With a high demand from clients and a strict quota to deliver, regional leaders would rather have any field representative than none at all. The strict monthly quota simply did not afford the luxury of testing.

The monthly quota and the budgeting spreadsheet are both material apparatuses. Following Barad, they are not neutral, passive tools but participating agents performing ‘agential cuts’—dictating what is made visible and what is hidden, which actions are naturally invited, and which ones are hindered.
This allows for an important de-personalisation of the challenges in both cases. It is not about psychological traits or functional attitudes (“the leader is like this ”, “ HR is like that ”), but rather a response to what has been afforded by the entanglement of material and discourse.

Here there is more to learn. It takes me immediately to Weisbord’s ‘structure invites behaviour’ and Fritz’s ‘the path of least resistance’, but of course the background is different and worth digging into.

My initial response—sort of Luhmann’s revenge on new materialism—is that agential cuts are selections that include the material as an agent but, as we discussed, cannot be separated from the socio-cultural entangled cuts inherent to social systems. Because the agentic in this case does not mean intentional, it also presupposes using languaging to generate new ‘cuts’ in our organisational context.

Complex Matters Turn to the Linguistic Act

One assumption of discourse is that it is used only to describe and select, but discourse is as generative as materially changing settings, templates, tools, or room layouts. In fact, in complex social situations, languaging is central. A declaration of war is an impactful change in geopolitics—much more than building more tanks and planes. It instantly reconfigures the boundaries of what is possible.

Despite that, it is a fair challenge that we can’t change affordances by pure re-interpretation, which is a common critique misdirected at radical constructivism. Luhmann and others do not claim the world is all about communication; that is just a common strawman. But if we bring New Materialism into it, we can see that this loop runs both ways. The material world constantly irritates and limits our social systems, forcing us to respond. But our social system of communications also turns around and ‘irritates’(2) the material world. Our linguistic acts—our agreements, quotas, and decisions—are not floating ideas; they are forces that ultimately lead us to rewrite the software, change the templates, and physically reconstruct the tools left behind.

We will then agree that material change is crucial. But how does material change come about in complex organisations? Will a 90-minute convening in a room with different people magically re-configure the budgeting spreadsheet into a tool that allows for something else?

Or is it more likely that, understanding affordances and what can potentially change, those 90 minutes will afford the coordination of actions needed for such change?

So communicating here shows up twice. First, we need to communicate our diverse interpretations of what a tool affords and map the potential alternatives, adjacent possibles, and so on. Secondly, to change the material, we likely won’t start a hackathon on the spot. Instead, we use language to coordinate the actions needed for both material and discourse change.

Discourse as generative action precedes new material change precisely because the issue at hand is complex. Of course, the material world was already present, already providing the landscape of affordances that allowed us to gather and speak in the first place. But in the intentional timeline of a change process, the linguistic act comes first. It requires a coordination of actions—or, as Maturana would put it, the coordination of the coordination of actions—to deliberately decide how we will reshape that material landscape.

Discourse isn’t a cheap lecture or a vague change of mindsets; it is the highly sophisticated, messy, political work of using language to negotiate a future reality.

When we are in the room, change is the linguistic commitment—the offers, requests, and promises that are made. Over time it cannot be confined strictly to the linguistic act, and in rare cases it might not rely on it, but that’s another very practical use of Luhmann’s ideas: we can look at communications as the primary elements of social change.

Communications as shared rituals and stories, communications of interpretations of the past, making sense of the present, and projecting the future. Communication in general—language, linguistic acts, and stories in particular—is deeply entangled in our social realm, and as such can beautifully support the frame of the work for change.

(1) Ramstead MJ, Veissière SP, Kirmayer LJ. Cultural Affordances: Scaffolding Local Worlds Through Shared Intentionality and Regimes of Attention. Front Psychol. 2016 Jul 26;7:1090. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01090. PMID: 27507953; PMCID: PMC4960915.

(2) A strict systems theorist might argue that communication can never directly irritate matter because they don’t speak the same ‘language’. But taking New Materialism’s invitation to see the entanglement, we can interpret structural coupling as the mechanism that allows communication to leverage human beings as physical bridges to the material world. When our collective communications reach a decision, that discourse acts as a physical force—traveling through human bodies and clicking fingers to irritate and reshape the software, the quotas, and the tools we live by.

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Real change in organisations starts with listening to multiple voices, not just the sponsor’s story. Participatory Narrative Inquiry made it possible to arrive at a client engagement with richer context, something integral to running a Culture Sprint. I am sharing a simple, open source, self-hostable platform for small engagements you can use in your work as a consultant, facilitator, or internal change agent.

The Journey

The work of hosting participatory spaces was about listening to the different voices in the room. But the contract and mandate always came through a sponsor or leader who would tell their story and reason for the intervention. As many of us practitioners know, their accounts were rarely the full picture. We would find out slowly, or sometimes rather abruptly, that there were many more layers in that onion.

In one client engagement, it took no more than a couple of voices in the opening circle to realise the job was, in fact, to sell the leader’s story to the team. It was not necessarily the leader’s deception, but rather a lack of listening and contracting on our part.

The structure of many consulting engagements rarely allowed for a return visit. Our participatory intervention ended up performative and shallow. Even when everyone seemed satisfied, it felt more like a twisted version of a motivational keynote than a meaningful conversation. Being a facilitator and host like that was not enough for real change to happen.

The work with change and culture started with a search for multiple conversations that could generate possibilities. Hosting space expanded to negotiating a mandate and process that could support the creation of spaces, experiments, and commitments to open new possibilities.

For a change project with one client, we created a group with different stakeholders who joined us consultants in conducting interviews, experiencing the client’s journey, and taking this back to the organisation by hosting the conversation themselves.

When I came across Participatory Narrative Inquiry almost a decade ago, I started experimenting with collecting narratives before engaging with the client. Some clients would approach me for an intervention and I’d suggest collecting experiences beforehand.

It was not easy. Adding PNI to the process was already a negotiation for listening to multiple voices, and it was often met with resistance. To be honest, clients who said yes were almost always the ones who already knew my work and trusted me at some level.

One global organisation used PNI to listen to their members before regional gatherings took place. What used to be a team building event became a space for conversations on topics that were always present but never discussed.

Then came the pandemic and the remote and hybrid work that followed. People in organisations who already had little time to stop and reflect ended up with even less. Online hosting showed surprisingly good results, but it was not the same as having people in the room for conversations like that.

That’s when Culture Sprint was born. It brought together the power of collecting diverse accounts beforehand using PNI and the condensed in-person conversations to explore them in the here-and-now.

With one multinational client, we used Culture Sprint to understand how people worked and what invitations, including the unspoken ones, were present. We used PNI and spent a week at the client’s headquarters.

The Platform

I started partnering with others and running PNI projects using Narrafirma, which remains the best open source software for learning the process, alongside the books and some guided practice. I also explored SenseMaker and Sprockler, both with strong features and good presentation.

Over time, some tools had more features than I needed for smaller engagements. Sometimes it was easier to collect through a different method and import. Other times I wanted to try something new and found it hard to navigate existing platforms. So I started building my own, a simple collection tool inspired by PNI but not claiming to replicate it completely. I shared with colleagues running Culture Sprints and some of you may have explored the Culture Sprint Platform last year.

Several people wanted to use the platform outside the Culture Sprint context. That conversation pushed me to separate them and open it up to the field. After extensive testing and security reviews, here it is.

You can now self-host your own platform on your server. It was built for simple engagements, so it does not have many of the features other tools offers, but it is a solid structure for the work. If you are on the technical side and want to use and improve it, you are most welcome. I would also be grateful if anyone wants to write better documentation on how to self-host.

What would you add or change to make it work for your practice?

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The social draws on observant-dependent conditions

When in social interaction, we have constraints and affordances that do not depend on human observation, and although they can only become social through observation, it is safe to assume they are not there because of it. For such constraints, we can count on certain stability and coherence over time.

The challenge is that there is much more in social interaction than that.

In every situation, encounter, or event, there are constraints and affordances that are observant-dependent, i.e., they are a result of past interpretations and meaning-making, they are a result of sustaining agreements and challenged decisions.

They are past social constructions, some more stable than others. Unlike physical or biological constraints, it is not safe to assume their stability or coherence in the present. Instead, each local situation carries the possibility of re-interpretation, of both maintaining and shifting patterns held until now.

When we look at organisations, most of what is already unfolding in the here-and-now has to do with previous agreements, decisions and selections, constraints that are not physical or biological counterfactuals. A lot of what we can afford to do today is tied with interpretations, decisions, choices we made in the past.

That’s why observing those interpretations and decisions is a way to witness what is the current system/organisation. This does not negate the presence of pre-conceptions, but shows that they are distributed and show up in patterns of how decisions are made and what is valued when they happen.

The question is about distribution and power, of polyphony: many voices carrying their own stake with no merge to a single one. The encounter is one of pre-conceptions living alongside each other in the here-and-now, not someone stepping in with a borrowed teleological pre-conception from there-and-then.

What is already there when we start interacting is not one static picture we can form or a map we can read. It is more like joining a conversation mid-way, without being able to trace what happened before you arrived. Kenneth Burke captured this precisely: Imagine that you enter a parlor…

“begins with the assumption that human thought is basically both social and public – that its natural habitat is the house yard, the marketplace, and the town square. Thinking consists not of ‘happenings in the head’ but of a traffic in what have have been called, by G. H. Mead and others, significant symbols – anything, in fact, that is disengaged from its mere actuality and used to impose meaning upon experience. From the point of view of any particular individual, such symbols are largely given. He finds them already current in the community when he is born, and than remain, with some additions, subtractions, and partial alterations he may or may not have a hand in, in circulation after he dies. While he lives he uses them, or some of them, sometimes deliberately and with care, most often spontaneously and with ease, but always with the same end in view: to put a construction upon the events through which he lives, to orient himself within ‘the ongoing course of experienced things’, to adopt a vidid phrase of John Dewey’s.”
Clifford Geertz, in The Interpretation of Cultures

As a practitioner, if arriving with a pre-defined map or direction from other contexts is unhelpful, so is the idea that one can map the field of potentiality in a system. Both moves presuppose a separation that does not exist: a practitioner standing apart from the system, looking at it from outside, able to read what is latent or possible. One imports a framework from there-and-then. The other claims to map those affordances as if they existed independently of the interpretations already at play. They do not. Mapping the substrate is the same move as importing a framework: both place the practitioner outside a system they are already part of.

Here, again, it is about distribution, participation, polyphony. The practitioner is one voice among many, carrying a specific role and mandate, both negotiated and evolving in relationship. The work of change has two dimensions. One is scaffolding: creating conditions, structures, and moments that make encounter possible. The other is re-interpretation: the shift in meaning that can happen when pre-conceptions meet and are not left undisturbed. Neither comes from the practitioner’s analysis or design. Both emerge from the process of ongoing relationship.

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Owen

As many other participatory methods, Open Space has to be placed not only on the socio historical of its founder, but on what was the status quo of the time. The idea was that people gathering together wanted to explore topics but were constrained by the format of fixed presentations, usually decided by third parties and in advance. What if participants themselves could bring forth the topics relevant to them in the moment? For that, a new structure was needed, one that invited another behaviour and opened other possibilities of conversation.

Open Space and other participatory methods invited and served that purpose, and recognising their root assumptions, offered a then radical way of organising. What I learned about their law and principles were less about ontology and more about giving permission to something different.

I was always puzzled by “The Law of Two Feet” (now called “The Law of Mobility”), which I paraphrase: if you think you are not contributing or learning from this group, feel free to move around, no questions asked. I was discussing this back in 2009 with a colleague from Greece. Why do we need a law to tell us we are free to move around? Our reflection at the time went back to the status quo – apparently we needed a reminder precisely because of being trained to stay put no matter what.

The principle “whatever happens is the only thing that could have” could also be seen that way. In a world where the status quo is bound to teleological encounters and output/performance anxiety, this was an invitation to let go. It ties to the idea of sustaining more divergent conversations, ones that are still rare in organisational life to this day.

The new structure does not automatically redistribute power, although in some cases it might, and as a practitioner you might have encountered high resistance when it’s the case. Such structure can also be used as a one-off experience of connection and creativity, but not a challenge to the system in which it’s embedded. In other cases, at a certain level, it might challenge such systems, not as the trigger, but as an element. Like all participation, it can be manipulated and bounded, but that does not undo its advantages. As we know from the state of our democracies, it is still valid to have them, although they might not solve manipulation or changes in power.

Expanding the influence from the founder’s history to the context of organising at the time does not weaken the influence of the former. It also does not take away the complexity of power relations or the danger of metaphysical sublimation, both explored well by the study.

The work goes back to the impossibility of stepping outside of it. Whether wanting to exert control or allow to ‘emerge’, there are a number of actants that influence what is possible. The consultant is only one of them, participating in a theatre to create a containment for participation truly believing it enables self-organisation, when in fact it might just be sublimating overall anxiety about loss of control into a methodology that looks participatory.

We practitioners know this, because if we stick around, we notice that a scape valve cannot hold anxiety for long, and the conversation tends to go underground, become cynicism or find another outlet to show up.

Shaw

I had the chance to say this some times and repeat – if you are an Open Space (or the Art of Hosting) practitioner, Patricia’s “Changing Conversations in Organisations” is a must read. It challenges the position and the role of the host or consultant exactly on the stance: there is no design change, in fact, no design organisation, so design a participatory process comes into scrutiny.

It also challenges the “innocent circle”, something the participatory process community has been struggling for some time. In another community meeting of participatory participants talking about race, it was obvious that sitting people in a circle did not mean giving them ‘equal voice’.

The sincere step to change a controlling and concentrated structure to more participatory and distributed one is confronted to the nature of conversations. Conversations result of the process of relating that happens without any previous thought design, form, or structure. More, it happens in the process of relating in the local here-and-now and flows with embedded patterns of power, history, etc.

Both the piece and the book explore this stance and critique well. The piece also mentions the writing style using reflective narratives that very much aligns with the proposed stance – a style that can be seen in other publications from the same tradition and coherently invite for practice and further reflection rather than an abstract summative.

For the participatory practitioner, read both. The confrontations are key for a stance where a selection of a theme or a question is unwarranted, regardless if given by a third party or the participants themselves. It is not to say that there is no place where alternative structures can be at service, but it provides nuance and deeper context to a practice that was born to allow alternatives to the still dominant command-and-control. The host and consultant can then show up as one role in relationship, a negotiated role immersed in power relations like everybody else, but not as process designer.

For the work of change, a structure pre-selection might backfire – it presupposes someone who understands and designs in advance, a critical imposition only surpassed by arriving with your favourite framework. In this work it is better to enter the room to witness and join how things unfold in the present, in the here-and-now re-creation of organising together. More like swimming with the tides rather than being a lifeguard, a weather man, or worst, god Poseidon.

Beyond the confrontation

Structures of participation might make sense in some contexts and generate spaces and conversations that allow for new explorations and possibilities. But the work of change does not happen by either content or structure design. Shaw’s stance, staying with the here-and-now and immersed in the local, acknowledges the role of a consultant as one within many, participating in the unfolding re-creation of organising together. Yet, I would not go the unbounded assumption behind Shaw’s relationship:

1. There is no cuddling corner in this work. No stepping outside, no whole-systems view, and whether controlled by people, defined by structure, or emerging from the divine, there is no external lookout or importing of natural phenomena as ontology.
2. There is no making sense without distinction, separation, a form of closure or containment. Even the local re-enactment of relations presuppose previous selections, some conscious, some unconscious. Making sense of change is to recreate containment despite a certain level of anxiety or the recognition of paradoxes.

If (1) contradicts the idea of designing for emergence and creating an innocent structure, (2) contradicts the idea that we can operate unbounded, somewhat rationally deciding to take risk.

In Shaw’s narrative, for example, her presence (history, projected expertise) in her engagement is the operating container, one without which intervention and future reflection on experience would be impossible. Staying with the conflict is not un-containing it, quite the opposite, it is the textbook of active containment.

In both practices, there is neither guarantee nor tendency that one will allow raggedy exchange rather than performative ones. There is absolutely no evidence of predisposition, being of openness or closeness of any sort, that per se induces “real or unsafe work” to happen. For all we know, raggedy is too risky on all interactions, and definitely avoided in organisational life.

There is also the complexity of consultancy (another great book within Shaw’s tradition): transformative teleology is a hard sell. Although perpetual construction is generally accepted as a given, it does not provide the anxiety reduction effect of a 2×2 matrix or of a ‘proven process’. The middle ground between abstraction and surrender might be exactly what someone like Shaw would take – create experiences with others, reflect and share them, and build the relationships needed to allow the stance she holds. There is no consultancy without commission, and a consultant needs to negotiate the power to make power part of the conversation. It’s not the consultant’s choice, but part of the relationship with other parties (sponsor, other stakeholders, etc).

The piece ends exploring form, in-between, the liminal, both in western and eastern traditions. There is a lot there that is above my pay grade, but I connected to the ‘technology of the will’. From what I’ve got, there is no escape or ‘surviving intact’ in being in this world, there is no cuddling corner to rest, no ultimate stance. If emptiness is form, form is emptiness – so the container is borrowed, it arises and it passes.

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I landed in an engineering school but found myself drawn to people and intrigued by social relations. The university was the technical reference of the country, mirroring the advances of the world. But when I looked back 100 years, I noticed a striking difference: in human relations, things seemed to not have moved as fast and in more subtle ways. That realisation led me to dialogue, initially David Bohm and his peers, because I new I could trust physics. :)

Following this path, I ended up involved with a diverse group of people working with organisations. They introduced me to Deming, Churchman, Checkland, and the authors hyped at the time: Senge, Wheatley, Wenger, Maturana. I remember like it was yesterday working with “creating spaces and opportunities for shared learning.” Given that many people were from the business world, that brought me into the world of organisation. With this group I also learned some structures that invited shared learning: appreciative inquiry, world café, open space.

I was at a workshop on facilitating dialogue in Canada (2000, 2001) and there was a parallel group working on something called the Art of Hosting. I was intrigued, asked around, and joined that workshop the following year. I learned the chaordic path and don’t even remember what else, but I found a community. Many teachers, no single guru. At the time I was really following Tina Turner’s advice: we don’t need another hero.

In a distributed fashion, the AoH community developed insights for hosting learning spaces and dialogue. The highlight is the community more than the content, so have a coffee with someone. But if you only have Google for now, search for the fourfold practice, the breaths of design, the stepping stones. Practitioners also arrived with their own histories and kept practicing and exploring, so there are many intersections with other practices in the field. The last time I was at a community gathering, I co-hosted an Open Space session with a colleague. We explored what we had learned and found powerful from my systems psychodynamics background and her process work practice.

Forward to 2006. I was doing this work and experiencing the world of “human dynamics” in action without much reflection behind it. Things seemed to unfold in groups in strange ways. Conflict would be swallowed or amplified. Some people, including me, were scapegoated or raised as saviours. I wanted to understand what was happening and started a journey into group dynamics, where I learned about Bion, Klein, and most importantly, what it means to work in the “here-and-now” instead of the “there-and-then.” My first teacher’s dream was to attend Tavistock’s Leicester Conference. When I had the chance in 2012, I was there. I think you should go too. [1] [2]

The experience of group relations brought power relations and the social into focus, as well as emergence and unfinalizability. From Bohm and Buber, I became interested in the work of Bakhtin [3], went to read Dostoyevsky’s polyphonic novels, and found a reflection of what it means to recognise liminal spaces and refrain from synthesising other people’s voices to sustain a multi-voiced world. Search for dialogism, heteroglossia, chronotope, and carnivalesque.

There was a lot of reading during this period, while I was also teaching science at Summerhill School. Another author who crossed my path was Luhmann. He contributed to my post-humanist search by offering a theory that was not anthropocentric and used communication as its core, without relying on living systems or ecological metaphors. Insights from him helped me drop “human development” and pay attention to conversational spaces. His view of organisations as the ongoing regeneration of decisions is a fantastic invitation. You don’t have to accept the whole theory. But if you can open up to the possibility that “only communications communicate,” there is a whole world out there. [4] [5] [6]

It must have been around 2014 when a colleague suggested “Ontología del Lenguaje” by Echeverría. Drawing on insights from Maturana and Flores, the ontology of language presented a post-metaphysical view of people as social through language and communication. It proposed that we constitute the social world linguistically and don’t use language merely to describe it, but also to create it. (Hold your horses, not in the mind-to-matter sense.) [7] [8]

Paying attention to language and conversations looked like the work. That led me in two directions. One was a book called “Changing Conversations in Organisations” by Shaw, which seemed to be exactly where I was heading. Shaw used what I would learn much later were complex responsive processes to deconstruct the role of the consultant, facilitator, and host. Go and read that book.

The other direction was story and narrative [9] [10] [11] [12]. I came across work on networks and communities, frameworks for decision making [13] [14], and became interested in Geertz’s thick description, Snowden’s disintermediation, Bateson’s warm data. At that time, Chris Corrigan was bringing some of this work into the AoH community, and “data precedes the framework” made a lot of sense.

Because my work had been on participatory processes, I was immediately drawn to Kurtz’s Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI). Her “Working with Stories” is the magnum opus of the field and the place to start. PNI is a practical and non-reductionist way to listen to people’s stories and to the patterns emerging from them. I recently wrote a thesis using PNI. Download here

If this whole journey pointed toward experience and the here-and-now, it was PNI that made the work of Culture Sprint possible. By listening to people’s experiences in advance, it became possible to open conversations by inviting people to make sense of what is, using their own accounts and interpretations. That unlocked a condensed process for collective reinterpretation and sensemaking in the here-and-now, and for communicating and deciding on possibilities forward.

Reflection

Reading this text feels unfair in many ways. Talking about influences, there is a lot more that should be here and, most importantly, the citations are short on the depth of the people named. As you will see from the short reflections linked in the text, they are not essays. I hope they give proper credit where it is due. On top of that, some are decades old, so not only poorly written but hopefully with content that is a bit dated.

More than those shortcomings, I think the biggest one is precisely about experience. I had the chance to learn directly from some of these people (sadly not Tina Turner), but what is not in the text are the communities and colleagues where this was developed in the very local and here-and-now that I praise. Their names are not here, but practicing with them is what makes this more than theory and influence. It makes for lived experience. My collection of experiences might be unique and I could feel somewhat alone in it, but that might be exactly the richness of being together.

If you felt like listening to Tina, here it is.

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1. There is no uncontained view of the world. Everything said is said by someone*. There is text, context, and the distinctions that were made in selecting those.
2. The present in social relations only shows up in the local process of relating in the here-and-now.

Taken together, these two premises set up a practical question: how should one work when both distinction and relation are unavoidable?

On the inevitability of making distinctions

Making distinctions does not mean we can clearly separate parts and wholes, different domains, or even binaries such as local/global and outside-in/inside-out. They are all used to allow us to communicate and make sense of things. Regardless of the choice, it is the fact that we are choosing what matters here.

To acknowledge that an intervention in the world requires a type of distinction (a separation that is fundamentally created) is a recognition of that tenet. Every use of distinction involves choice, and that choice is permeated by social, historical, and political rather than naturalistic or being observer-independent.

As I explored here, being observant-dependent does not mean relativism. Sometimes people within a specific context agree on distinctions, and those agreements—though made up—can function as the source of truth in that context. We make agreements about institutions, money, laws, and costumes, as well as about how to behave in groups and organisations. Those agreements are created, re-created, and challenged in daily interactions, and they constrain and enable our actions much like biology and the natural world do.

So distinctions are always in play, which raises the questions: who makes them, how aware are we of them, and how are they sustained?
It also brings up the question of how much those distinctions and the decisions based on them can be defined by power, structure, etc, and how much of that dynamic in itself is a conscious selection.

In our role as facilitators, consultants, or hosts, we can pay attention to the distinctions we and others are making, and invite others to do the same. We cannot be aware of all of them, let alone all the time. Rather than ranking selections a priori, the work is to recognise the selections in play and engage them critically.

We can examine the language of choice and how it mirrors those distinctions. We can inquire into the past and present decisions behind them, conscious or unconscious, coherent or not, and what direction they may be pointing in.

Our role is one among many, and we practice both in relationship and over time. We enter a process already in motion, usually with a task at hand, but immersed in the complex relational process like everybody else. We can carry tools and experiences, but the work is to subordinate them to the experience of relating and the contracted task, not the other way around.

One powerful critique on intervention lies with the practitioner who arrives creating their own boundaries, either bringing a structure or their assumptions. On one hand, we recognise this is unavoidable, whether consciously or unconsciously. But on the other hand, the work is to inquire into how this is happening and how it serves the process we are engaged in. For that, we can work with others, through supervision, and in reflective and reflexive spaces.

On systems, frameworks, and relating in the here-and-now

All systems, frameworks, theoretical paradoxes are taken as selections and therefore created by someone within their own context. It can be a framework created by a management consultancy, our institutions (the law, education, etc), or a colonialist narrative passed down generations. They do not all hold the same declarative power, of course, but as declarations, it is not enough to set them up, we have to critically re-evaluate them: remember the text but also the context and who has been declaring it, and then check its validity, scope, usefulness.

Our declarations and actions in turn constrain and enable later decisions and possibilities. This entangled dance contributes to a process of relating with the world that is predictably unpredictable*.

If we accept the inevitability of distinctions and selection, we are coping with irreducible complexity by accepting that we depend on a picture to operate, and every picture comes with borders. So we can talk about an imagined unbounded world, but only from within boundaries. It’s bounded unboundedness.

It’s then pointless to be against systems, frameworks, or any other bounded view or selection, provided we acknowledge their inherent limitations.

We make use of predictions knowing the social world is unpredictable, and talk about ‘global’ knowing we cannot fully see or claim to completely understand it.

That said, the most important part of our work is not juggling pre-bounded selections. Importing abstract concepts or asking people to fit their experiences into a pre-defined grid it’s a great way to contain anxiety and may even generate novel explorations, but what we experience together, the re-emergence of relating as relation happens, is what paints the picture of the collective and it is the closest to ‘what is’ that we can get.

This is not because the local and here-and-now is better than the global and there-and-then. But the present in social relations only shows up in the local process of relating in the here-and-now. Everything else is past and future. Claiming this local relation is a fractal of the global is intuitive, even likely, but unnecessary. In the social realm we can expect, but cannot know what will unfold in the present and how that might impact beyond the local.

Taken together, we recognise the centrality of the process of relating without the need to assume any global outcome. We also acknowledge the inevitability of selection, so we need not pretend otherwise while reflecting on its choices and effects.

Reflecting

The inevitability of distinction, and the need for some level of abstraction in communication, means we act based on premises and argue from assumptions we rarely name. Our argument here, which resists privileging frameworks over lived experience, is itself an example of that: grounded in experience, it is still articulated as a conceptual frame.

In the same way, we do not want to trivialise “global” understanding, even as we rely on concepts that point to non-local phenomena such as colonial narratives. The point is not to reject abstraction, but to remain attentive to how it is made, by whom, and to what ends.

*“Everything said is said by someone” was said by Humberto Maturana.
*“Predictably unpredictable” is Ralph Stacey’s.
*The picture is a landscape by Gong Xian.

The post On Distinctions and the Here-and-Now first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana, working with Francisco Varela, offered a compelling perspective on how language functions in human systems. Rather than viewing language as simply a tool for describing an objective world, Maturana proposed that language plays a crucial role in shaping how we perceive and organize our shared experiences.

His theory of autopoiesis—the idea that living systems are self-producing and self-maintaining suggests that organizations, like biological systems, create and maintain themselves through ongoing interactions and conversations. While language doesn’t create physical reality, it does fundamentally influence how we construct meaning, coordinate actions, and build the social realities within which organizations operate.

Language as Coordination in Human Systems

Maturana introduced the concept of “languaging”, the ongoing process through which humans coordinate their behaviors and create consensual domains of meaning. In organizational contexts, we use language to establish shared understandings, define roles, and coordinate complex activities. This isn’t about words magically creating reality, but rather about how our linguistic practices shape what becomes possible within human systems.

When teams develop specialized vocabularies, create new frameworks for understanding problems, or establish cultural norms through repeated conversations, they’re participating in what Maturana called “structural coupling”, the process by which systems mutually influence each other through interaction. These linguistic patterns, combined with emotions and non-verbal communication, create the operational domains within which organizational culture emerges and evolves.

The Practical Impact: How Conversation Patterns Shape Organizational Culture

Language as Organizational Infrastructure

In Maturana’s framework, language functions as essential infrastructure for organizational life. The distinctions we make through language – distinctions between success and failure, innovation and tradition, collaboration and competition – create the conceptual landscape within which organizational decisions and actions unfold. This doesn’t mean language determines everything; instead, it provides the medium through which we negotiate meaning and coordinate action.

Consider how different departments often develop their linguistic patterns and frameworks: marketing speaks of “brand equity” and “customer journey,” while engineering discusses “technical debt” and “system architecture.” These aren’t just different vocabularies, they represent different ways of organizing attention, defining problems, and evaluating solutions. Maturana’s work helps us understand that these linguistic differences can create real challenges for cross-functional collaboration, not because of mere miscommunication, but because different linguistic domains can lead to fundamentally different ways of perceiving organizational challenges.

The Influence of Conversational Patterns

While conversations don’t dramatically rewire our brains like sometimes it’s claimed, Maturana’s concept of structural coupling does suggest that repeated patterns of interaction influence how we perceive and respond to our environment. In organizations, the stories we tell, the metaphors we use, and the conversations we regularly engage in contribute to shaping collective perception and behavior. When leadership consistently frames challenges as “opportunities for growth,” this linguistic pattern can influence—though not determine—how teams approach difficulties.

Similarly, organizations dominated by deficit-based language (“what’s broken,” “who’s to blame,” “why we can’t”) may find it harder to recognize possibilities and resources. This isn’t magical thinking; it’s recognizing that our linguistic practices influence, without fully determining, what we notice and how we respond. The key insight is that by becoming more conscious of our conversational patterns, organizations can deliberately cultivate linguistic practices that support desired cultural outcomes.

Beyond Description: Language as a Tool for Organizational Development

The Observer and the Observed

One of Maturana’s key contributions was highlighting the role of the observer in any system. He argued that we cannot separate ourselves from the systems we observe—our observations and descriptions influence what we see and how we interact with it. In organizational contexts, this means that how we talk about our culture, challenges, and opportunities isn’t neutral description but active participation in shaping organizational reality.

When consultants or leaders assess organizational culture, their frameworks and language don’t just describe what exists, they influence what becomes salient and what remains invisible. This doesn’t mean reality is whatever we say it is, but rather that our linguistic distinctions play an essential role in organizing collective attention and action. Understanding this can help organizations be more intentional about the assessment tools, frameworks, and conversational practices they employ.

Emotions and Language in Organizational Life

Maturana also emphasized the interconnection between emotions (or “emotioning”) and languaging. Our emotional states influence the domains in which our conversations unfold, and our conversations in turn influence collective emotional climates. In organizations, this manifests in how different emotional-linguistic combinations create different possibilities for action. A team operating in fear uses language differently than one operating in curiosity, so the questions asked, the risks considered, and the solutions imagined all shift with the emotional-linguistic domain.

This isn’t about positive thinking or ignoring real challenges; it’s about recognizing that the emotional tenor of our conversations influences, though doesn’t determine, what becomes possible. Organizations can benefit from paying attention to both the content and emotional quality of their communications, understanding that both dimensions shape the cultural environment.

Applying Maturana’s Insights: Practical Implications for Culture Change

There are numerous claims of using theory, especially borrowing from the ‘hard’ sciences, to work with organizations and other social systems. Those usually transpose scientific knowledge without ever reflecting on what has been assumed and its limitations. Always be sceptical of such claims.

How this Theory Helps

Instead of making claims about organizational realities, we are working with the reflective question: in what way those insights can help us navigate our complex social world, more specifically, in the organizational and cultural sphere? We are particularly interested in insights that can offer an alternative to the current managerial narratives.

Maturana’s work, particularly his concepts of autopoiesis and structural coupling, offers valuable insights that challenge how we can approach organizational development without simplistic self-help claims about language creating reality.

From his work, we can explore organizations as a system continuously producing and maintaining themselves through the interactions of their members. Language is a crucial medium through which this self-production occurs, but it works alongside other factors, many of them also mediated by language! Understanding organizations as self-producing systems helps explain why culture change is often difficult: the system tends to reproduce existing patterns unless there’s sustained effort to shift the underlying conversational and relational dynamics.

Conscious Participation in Organizational Evolution

Perhaps the most practical insight from Maturana’s work is that we are always already participating in the creation and maintenance of organizational culture through our daily interactions. This participation happens whether we’re conscious of it or not. By becoming more aware of how our linguistic practices contribute to organizational patterns, we can make more intentional choices about the conversations we engage in and promote. This isn’t about controlling reality through words, but about recognizing that language is one crucial lever for influencing organizational culture.

Culture Sprint: A Conversational Process

The Culture Sprint process is a structured approach to examining and potentially shifting the linguistic and conversational patterns that sustain current organizational realities while opening space for new possibilities to emerge.

This perspective encourages us to view organizational culture not as a fixed entity to be managed, but as an ongoing accomplishment sustained through countless daily interactions. By understanding the role of language in this process—without overstating its power—we can become more skillful participants in the continuous evolution of our organizational cultures.

Learn more about the work we are doing and run your Culture Sprint.

The post How Language Shapes Organizational Reality: Insights from Maturana’s Theory first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

On a first-order observation of human intervention, we transform materials from nature into things like rudimentary knives, chairs and aeroplanes. Each of them is made to perform a function that does not necessarily result from what we had previously intended. If you look around, many of those human-made creations have acquired value because we took unordered pieces and put them together in a particular way.

On a second-order observation, we also create the expectation of order in some of our invented processes or collective agreements. In the UK, everybody drives on the left, which comes from an agreement that is based not only on driving on a specific side of the road but also on the expectation that everybody else will. Order is created by the expectation of how the general peer will behave.

We will look at those two ways of observing the world, first and second-order, to explore our agency in creating order.

First-order observations and order

If you look at human first-order intervention in the world, given that no natural laws are defied, we can assemble materials in some order and do it well so we can use them, just for the time until nature un-orders them again. This was the norm for all things: entropy will make disorder out of order.

At some point in science, we learned that some structures worked differently and that order could naturally come out of chaos and not just the other way around. The possibility of “self-organisation” broke new ground in the natural sciences.

For the social sciences, those new grounds created an opportunity for an analogy update: from a mechanistic and industrialist way of looking at social systems to a more biological, emergent and self-organised one.

Although beneficial for making sense of human systems’ perceived increased complexity, the assumption that those particular complex structures behave like natural systems is exactly that—an assumption.

It is appealing to relate human organisations to systems that emerge and maintain themselves through self-organisation, at least much more than organisations as machines.

What we can’t do is say societal and organisational structures are far-from-equilibrium systems, dissipative structures, etc. The central reason is that human systems are not first-order observation systems; we don’t observe them as humans observe convection cells or oscillating chemical reactions [1].

That does not invalidate the process of making sense of human systems by analogy – it only invalidates the claims that forget to mention the scientific transposition and call human organisation self-organising systems or complex adaptive systems. It is a tremendous simplification to transpose a first-order observation of nature to society and organisations.

The science of human biology and the brain

What we can observe about our own biology is a first-order observation. Advancements in neuroscience have also highlighted the limits of human perception and attention, such as cognitive biases and cognitive load.

Those studies sometimes confirmed what was empirically observed in the past. Inattention blindness, like in the experiment of doctors not seeing a monkey on an X-ray and many others [2], is a constant theme on the factory floor during scientific management.

However, given that those findings impact how we perceive the world around us and place us in our rightful place as biological beings, they are all first-order observations.

So, when we talk about human systems, we can distinguish our biological selves, which we observe first-order, from our social selves, which are always the result of second-order observation.

Note that this does not disembody our social beings. A distinction is not a separation. Our social relations and everyday interactions are embodied and relate to our cognition as much as our body, emotions, etc.

The point here is that we can’t be without our biology, but how we observe it is different from how we observe the social aspects of our existence.

Second-order observation and order

In social systems like societies and organisations, we create order by making declarations and agreements that are accepted and expected by the general peer.

This created order is not like ordering the natural world as in the first-order manipulation of wood to make a chair, for example. In the same way, we can’t unthinkingly transpose the way we order nature (or that nature orders itself) into human systems.

For the creation and constant re-creation of society and organisation, we create order by declaring a difference that lives in the realm of language. Those differences, like choices, determine how we coordinate our actions (and sometimes how we coordinate the coordination of actions!).

To use our example, the decision to drive on the left is not an individual one, nor is the decision to collaborate on a supposedly common project. This collective decision, when made and accepted, generates not only action but also the expectation of action from the other.

We create order when we set up a time for dinner with family tonight. The expectation that people will fulfil the previously coordinated action makes it orderly. The expectation that others will uphold the agreement to drive on the left makes sane driving in the UK possible.

Unlike natural constraints, agreements can be broken at any time, which makes family dinners and transit in the UK as complex as any other human activity.

If you decide to drive on the right, you can. You might be in big trouble, and there will be a sanction for non-compliance. Or sometimes you must: if you see a police officer indicating you should drive on the other side of the road – even if you don’t know the reason – you still would because we had agreed that their authority trumps road convention.

Bérnard cells (convection cells that form stable emergent patterns) can self-organise, but they do not agree on what to expect from one another and, most importantly, they can’t choose otherwise.

So, even if we transform the world by creating order, when we talk about human systems and, therefore, a second-order observation of that creation, this order does not make the world ordered.

Even sustaining such order in a social system is complex.

Some Things to Read

[1] The Self Organisation of Intentional Action – https://www.jstor.org/stable/23955624

[2] Inattentional blindness in medicine – https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-024-00537-x

The post Can We Create Order in the World? first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Ontology: a particular theory about the nature of being or the kinds of things that have existence.

Epistemology: the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge, especially with reference to its limits and validity.

I will distinguish between context-dependant or context-free things on one side (connecting to how we know something, epistemology) and on the other between observant-dependant and observant-free (relating to the way things are, ontology).

As a premise, I’ll claim that human beings are interpretative beings, meaning we interpret the world around us, devise individual and collective meanings, and communicate these meanings with others.

As such, how we experience the world is interpretative, which does not mean it’s all relative and there is no objective reality. It only means that we interpret objective reality all the time.

Let’s think of the sky at night, for example. Although we are bound to our biology in the way we can perceive the sky (we can only see what is available to us, in this case, the viewable spectrum of light), the existence of a starry sky is not dependent on a human observer.

A way to guarantee the sky and the stars are there is to look at them, but it is safe to say they do not depend on us checking; they are independent of the human eye. We can call this ‘external’ reality, and they are observant-free.

Even when observing external reality and receiving the same impulses in our cornea, human beings remain interpretative.

Imagine four different people looking at the sky and the stars in the same position and at the same time: one is a poet, the other a scientist, the third, more specifically, an astronomer, and finally, the fourth is an astrologist. They look at the same sky but see the same thing?

If you ask them to describe it, each individual will describe it differently. When an astronomer shows you the sky, you can locate Venus in a place where there was just another shiny dot before.

So, even though we claim there is an objective reality when human beings are not around, we also argue that we interpret it to give meaning and bring it to our social communications. Everything that has to do with us as social beings is ontologically observant-dependant.

Everything that is said is said by someone and carries some interpretation. No exception.

Now that we talked about things that are observant-free and observant-dependant, let’s move to the realm of epistemology.

Saying that we are interpretative beings does not mean everything is subjective. Pick up a banknote from your wallet (if we still have those at hand) – a banknote is a piece of paper representing a promise of payment. If that banknote reads $1, that’s how much it represents. If someone else gives you another note identical to your own, you will now have $2.

That is not a subjective thing. You now have two banknotes of $1 and a sum representing a promise of payment that equals $2. That is true regardless of your interpretation of that being a lot of money or just a little, for example, and the amount and promise are independent of whoever is holding it. We can say how much money you have in your hands or the bank and how it adds up with your salary and diminishes with your bills are objective and context-free.

Even though this representation is independent of whom is the person holding it, it is not independent of human beings or society. It is context-free but still observant-dependent. It is society, people, who assign meaning and confer value to the banknotes, which otherwise would be a piece of paper with a drawing. It is also an institution, a central bank, that guarantees the promise that the representation dictates. If there is no observer, the banknotes do not mean anything.

Finally, we can talk about things that are context-dependent. Building on the example above, the judgment of having little or a lot of money when I get my $2 depends on who judges. Even if we agree our money doubled, my daughter might consider it much more money in her hands, whereas I might not be so excited.

There is more to explore on all those. Still, the great confusion, and what I’d like to leave here with, is that matters related to our world representation are always ontologically observant-dependant. As a unit of measure, a meter is invented and has value because we assign value to it. And that does not mean it is up to dispute that I’m 1,8 meters high: with a measuring tape anywhere in the world, that is a fact.

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I’ll compare two ways of looking at human action and relate them to two words: intention and concern. But first, let’s look at both their meaning in the dictionary:

Intention: something that you want and plan to do.

Concern: something that involves or affects you or is important to you.

The word “concern” can also mean “to cause worry to someone”, but we are using it in the previous sense: something that involves or affects you, something that invites acting in the world.

Intention as an Action before Action

From the Newtonian perspective of cause-effect to Freudian’s unconscious drives, it is commonplace to consider there is an intention behind an action.

For people who look at the world with these eyes, every action results from an event before it. It is like we have a little human (our conscience?) behind the wheel, in this case, within our minds, that acts deciding the action we’ll perform.

The problem with imagining there is the act of choosing before acting is that we are forced to explore the first “act of choosing” itself. What is the intention of setting up another intention to finally act in the world? What makes/influences us to choose how we choose how to act?

If there is an action before the action, it makes sense there is an action before that too. And before that, and before that.

We can create another entity, the unconscious mind, to outsource “how to act” to unconscious drives we are unaware of.

But we can also scrap the idea that there is a decision – that happens in our minds – before we act. I want to sustain that there is no action before action. Agreeing with Nietzsche on this, the deed is everything:

“. . . there is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

The Deed is Everything

We are acting on the premise that human beings just act, and then we create stories that allow the act to appear coherent for us and others, i.e., we tell a story to explain it.

Of course, the story we tell might be different and compete with other accounts, so the meaning of an action is interpretative. And different interpretations do not mean relativism: some interpretations are well-founded while others are not.

The interpretation we offer for a given action takes into account three things:

1. Our concerns – what is affecting or influencing us that we are called to address, but it is not only centred on us.
2. Socio-historical explanations. Past explanations constrain and enable the possibilities of action. We use them to create coherence and reduce complexity, making things “make sense” over time.
3. Personal intention. Here lies our understanding of intent – an intention is a planned explanation for future acts. It is a powerful human ability, but the more complex the action, the more likely we’ll need to adapt that interpretation after the event occurs.

Re-Interpretative Stories vs Changing Mindsets

From this distinction, we look at interpretative stories people make regarding their actions rather than exploring what drives them to act the way they do.

Change is to look at interpretations, invite for re-interpretation, and not enforce a different inner drive in people.

Are you tired of change management that tries to fit people into abstract ideas?

Get in touch to explore how we can work towards change without “changing people”.

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