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.

The post Observant-Dependant Social World first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

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”.

The post Intention and Concern – Why Re-Interpret Stories and Not Change Mindsets first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

The use of mental models and our ability to see them

Some studies tie this to mental models, shields between reality and our perception of reality. A metaphor could be the lenses of our spectacles, from which all the visual information of the world comes before it reaches our eyes – when using a coloured lens, we see the world not as it is but influenced by characteristics given by our lenses too.

Lenses are not bad in themselves, but when we’re not aware of them, they might lead us to assume a world that could lead us to make ill-informed decisions. For example, if we’re trying to solve a problem and our mental model is too simplistic, we might fail to see other possible solutions.

We all have different lenses shaped by our individual experiences, beliefs, and values. And these lenses can change over time – as we learn new things and have new experiences, our mental models evolve too.

From this perspective, the solution given to our inability to see the world as it is can quickly become a matter of realising we all operate from mental models and that we can deliberately change them if we want to.

According to this view, we can learn about different perspectives and ways of looking at the world and constantly challenge our beliefs and assumptions. Only then can we start to see reality more clearly; only then might we catch a glimpse of the world as it is.

See Case Study: Reality Bias: The Mother of All Cognitive Biases

Depth of Perception: The world is more than we can see

So I’d argue we can stretch our perception by relating to the world and others who see the world differently.

And also argue that our “mental model” expansion is the actualisation of our internal conversations from the perturbations by external stimuli. One stimulus could be the world responding in a way that does not confirm our predictions, and another could be the consideration of other narratives brought by other “mental models”.

But would that be enough if we could stretch our perception to the fullest and catch a glimpse of the world as it is? 

Perhaps it could be our first step towards enlightenment, but still seeing the world as it means one person seeing it, a particular person at a specific point in time. And because the world is more than what we can see, perhaps more than what we can ever distinguish, it would be a more prosperous point o view, but not the whole picture.

“Everything Said is Said by Someone” – Maturana & Valela, 1987

There’s an infinite amount of perspectives and, therefore, the so-called “mental models” out there, and no matter how many different ones we learn about, there will always be more. The world is complex and constantly changing, and our mental models are only a simplified representation of it. Perhaps all our perceptions are an aggregate of partial pictures of the world. This representation can be good enough for practical purposes, but it might as well not be. The fact is that it is all we have.

So, even if we could see the world as it is, we would still only see a small part of it. And that’s why reality bias is something we need to accept as part of being human. It’s not something we can eliminate, but perhaps it is something we can become aware of and temper over time.

See Everything Said is Said by Someone

Accepting We Are Always Biased

We tend to see the world in black and white. This is called dichotomous thinking, a form of simplification that allows us to make quick decisions without having to weigh all the options. But, unfortunately, this kind of thinking also causes us to miss out on a lot of nuance and complexity.

Dichotomous thinking is a form of cognitive bias, which is defined as “a systematic error in thinking that leads to inaccurate judgments”. We all have cognitive biases that impact how we see the world and make decisions.

There are many different types of cognitive biases, but some of the most common are:

1. Confirmation bias is when we only pay attention to information that confirms our beliefs.
2. Perceptual bias is when we fail to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight.
3. Anchoring bias is when we give too much importance to the first piece of information we receive on a topic.
4. Framing bias is when we interpret information in a way that suits our interests or agenda.

These biases are often unconscious, so we’re unaware we’re doing it. But they can have a significant impact on the way we see reality.

For example, let’s say you’re trying to decide whether or not to vote for a particular candidate in an election. You might only pay attention to information that confirms your beliefs about the candidate and ignore anything that contradicts it. This is confirmation bias in action.

Or let’s say you’re trying to decide whether or not to buy a new car. The salesperson tells you the car’s base price but doesn’t mention the additional fees and taxes. So you anchor your decision on that initial price and don’t consider the actual cost of the car. This is anchoring bias in action.

Cognitive biases can lead us to make bad decisions and prevent us from exploring different aspects of reality. If we’re only ever exposed to information that confirms our beliefs, we’ll never learn anything new. We’ll never challenge our assumptions or question our worldview. Instead, we’ll be trapped in our little bubble, and the world will seem much more straightforward than it is.

All these tendencies and biases prevent us from exploring a complete aspect of reality and considering more possibilities further away from the status quo. The results are more of the same and tend to generate a perception of a “one size fits all” approach, even when the context is different, and other explanations might be more appropriate.

Conclusion

Reality bias is a cognitive bias that refers to humans’ tendency to simplify events to reduce anxiety and allow for decision-making and action. This tendency causes individuals to fail to perceive unexpected stimuli or only see things that support their chosen explanation. The result is a perception of a “one size fits all” approach, even when the context is different and other reasons might be more appropriate.

Reality bias can have dangerous consequences if it prevents individuals from exploring a complete aspect of reality and considering more possibilities. This can lead to missed opportunities and a lack of understanding of our world.

What do you think about the reality bias? Do you think it has impacted your life and everyday decisions in any way? Share your thoughts!

The post Reality Bias: How Our Tendency to Simplify Causes Us to Miss Out first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

What is critical data for organizational development?

Organizational development is a science-based process to enhance the organization’s capacity to adapt and improve strategies.

The organizational development process has become increasingly important in modern times. The current world has uneasy volatility and uncertainty, complexness, and ambiguity. This VUCA world requires heightened agility through organizational structures, and organizational development enables that purpose.

This complex world also needs other data that bring more relevant information to the table.

Many OD practitioners and human resources professionals disregard this type of data when researching or implementing their programs. Many OD interventions focus on leadership development or talent management without proper analysis of the aspects critical to the organization.

How can we understand the organization, people practices, and internal conflicts? How do you identify people’s knowledge, innovation possibilities, values, and new strategies?

I say we’ve better listen to understand, but not listening processes led by the OD practitioner or in the form of a context-less database or other sources or tools like traditional climate surveys.

We’d better listen to organizations: teams, employees, and management. But then two questions come to mind:

1. What kind of different data are we talking about?
2. What possible strategy or method could be used to do that?

But what data do we need to develop organizations in this VUCA, complex times?

When dealing with complex systems in organizational systems, we want data that tell us how we see, feel, and experience the world around us. So, beyond looking at things, we look at how we, as people, look at things.

A branch of social sciences tells us we should not only look at the world as it is but also at how people interpret the world around them. We will see why that makes sense and an example based on our current history.

In the same way, we should collect data about the world and its metadata: how people perceive the data in front of them.

On Complexity, Do not Rely on Reality

The world’s reality might be a significant constraint, but it is not enough to clarify what is going on. The reason is that we don’t see the world as it is but see it as we are. And although I believe the world eventually catches up with our illusions, this does not bring clarity but chaos. Even so, this eventual clarity does not come within a workable timeline, and it might be too late to change.

A good example is climate change. How much more data do we need? At some level, we don’t need any more complicated data; all have been proven and sufficiently peer-reviewed. And yet we still need to understand how people understand, feel and judge climate change and its repercussions.

This type of data, which I’ll call “complex data,” gives us a hint of how people deal (or not) with the issue. We need this information to create new collective understandings, declarations, and possibilities of action. We must bring new ways of seeing the world to the table and hope we will choose better and in time.

So our ability to understand reality is not enough. To change the world, we need to know how people understand the world. So we need another set of data for complex systems: “complex data.”

What is the process of data collection for this type of data?

We can get complex data by listening to people and understanding their perspectives. We can also look at how we, as people, look at things. By doing this, we can create new collective understandings, declarations, and possibilities of action.

Listening Differently as Organisational Development Process

Listening is not just hearing what someone has to say but also working to understand their perspective and add the other’s narrative and judgment of things into our landscape.

The problem is that we are hardwired to judge. It’s part of our limbic system, responsible for the “fight or flight” response. So our brain is constantly trying to protect us from danger, and it does this by judging everything it encounters.

So, when trying to listen to someone else, our brain automatically puts what they’re saying into a coherent package, going as far as categorizing it as good or bad, right or wrong, etc.

And this is where things start to go astray.

When we judge, we immediately stop adding other perspectives. That helps us choose and create an action plan but limits our ability to understand what the other or the system is trying to say to us.

No trained consultant or revered reporter is immune to it. All we need is enough time to create a coherent picture of what is being presented to cement our options.

But what do we do if we want to get complex data and we just can’t put aside our judging behaviour?

The Power of Understanding: Data Processing in a Different Way

Once we understand people’s perspectives, we can see how our views might be limited and the problems we identified be misconstructed.

But the problem is that we can’t understand other people’s perspectives on organizational systems, at least not at the level of scale we need.

The increasing emphasis on communication that tells us to be open to new ideas and willing to see things from another person’s perspective or working hard to change one’s mindset will not do the trick.

The power of understanding is that individuals, consultancies, and work groups should realize that we cannot wholly understand a complex system. Even with all the data in the world, we still don’t know how people see that data.

So we will accept we cannot gather data from others and judge ourselves through our lens. What we will do, instead, is to ask people to evaluate the data and facts themselves.

We will collect “complex data” on how people understand things around them. Beyond the perceived fact, we will ask and collect the lens that was used to judge that fact.

Imagine a data set that told us what people see, their beliefs, their confidence in those beliefs, and perhaps even which premises are in place.

By bringing these two levels together – the world and our collective lenses about the world – we can offer back to the collective the patterns that emerge and get the conversation going from a much richer set of data.

A richer set of data because rather than a constraint perspectives from a small few, it contains an expanded one by everybody involved.

What are your thoughts? Let me know!

The post Another Set of Data for Complex Systems: Why Knowing Reality is Not Enough first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

Many of us have been taught that being emotional is like being out of control. And since control and predictability are vital to reducing anxiety, expressing emotion is silently forbidden everywhere, especially in the workplace.

We all know emotions can be uncomfortable and may surprise us, so it’s natural to want to push them away and work hard not to manifest them. However, everything we do carries an emotion, and not being aware of your emotional state is like flying blind. As for displaying them, as long as you are aware, they can help us move forward.

emotion (n.)

1570s, “a (social) moving, stirring, agitation,” from French émotion (16c.), from Old French emouvoir “stir up” (12c.), from Latin emovere “move out, remove, agitate,” from assimilated form of ex “out” (see ex-) + movere “to move” (from PIE root *meue- “to push away”).

Our emotional state defines what actions are possible for us

When we’re feeling frustrated, for example, we may not be able to think as clearly or come up with as many creative solutions as when we’re feeling inspired.

Think about the moments you felt angry – what actions/thoughts does this emotion invite? What can’t you do if you are operating from it? How about joy? Fear? Enthusiasm? Recall times in your life when you experienced those emotions intensely; you will see that what is readily available to you is very different depending on the emotion you are experiencing.

While making a presentation at work, if you feel frustrated or enthusiastic can turn out to be two very different presentations. Likewise, holding a baby in your arms, feeling sad, or expressing tenderness are two separate emotional states that allow for different relationships.

How to learn about your emotional state?

The first step is to get in touch with what you’re feeling. Emotions can be perceived and usually arise in your body as physical sensations, so pay attention to the clues your body is giving you.

Are your muscles tense? Is your heart rate accelerated? Butterflies in the stomach? These are just some physical indicators that can clue you into what emotion you’re feeling. The more you pay attention, the easier it will be to know from what emotional state you are operating.

Then, once you’ve identified the emotion, ask yourself what actions are available to you from this emotional state. If they do not allow you to operate well for a task, you might choose to postpone or adapt that critical presentation or care for the baby, for example.

Becoming emotionally aware

The first step to being more emotionally aware is learning to pay attention to your feelings. Emotional intelligence starts with self-awareness: the ability to notice and identify your emotions as they’re happening. Some people have that connection more available than others, but everybody can master it.

Your body and emotions are instruments for you to perceive the world. It is common for you to experience one emotion before understanding what is triggering it. When you identify the emotion you carry, you can better understand what is going on.

Don’t apologise for bringing emotion to the room

Emotions are natural, and we all experience them. Being aware of and understanding your emotions (and the emotions of others) is a valuable skill in any setting, whether personal or professional.

In my experience, many people apologise for allowing their emotions to surface. But they shouldn’t. Emotions are not something to be ashamed of – they are a part of who we are and can provide valuable information about what’s going on around us and how we’re affected by it.

So the next time you find yourself in a situation where emotions run high, take a deep breath and step back. See if you can identify what information has been given to you and what’s the best way to act on them.

When emotions are out of place

There are, of course, times when emotions need to be managed because they’re out of place or inappropriate for the situation. Not because we are emotional, because we always are emotional, but because we are reacting rather than acting from that emotion.

For example, suppose you’re in a meeting, and you suddenly feel angry about something that happened earlier in the day. In that case, it’s probably not helpful (or professional) to lash out at the person sitting next to you.

In this case, it would be more effective to take some deep breaths and try to calm down before re-entering the meeting.

If you’re unsure if you can trust yourself to manage your emotions in a particular situation, it might be best to remove yourself from that situation until you feel more level-headed.

Be your whole self, embrace emotions

In conclusion, it is vital that we allow ourselves to experience emotions fully and not try to bottle them down. Emotions are a part of who we are; they provide valuable information and can guide our actions if we let them.

So next time you’re feeling an emotion knocking at the door, take a moment to identify it, and then ask yourself what actions are available to you from that emotional state.

And don’t apologise for bringing your whole self – emotions and all – into the room. Instead, embrace them, use them, and be the best version of yourself that you can be.

Thanks for reading!

The post Mastering Emotions in the Workplace: How to Pay Attention to What You’re Feeling and Make Moves Based on That first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

There is something special about language. It has the ability to create things out of nothing. By using words, we can communicate with each other and make things happen that we would not be able to do alone. As a result, we can build relationships, create memories, and achieve our goals. I want to invite you to explore the magic of language and how we use it to make things happen!

But first, a confession: I also take this wonder for granted. The way we can communicate is a miracle that we often take for granted because it is an integral part of our lives. It runs transparently in the background. But if you think about it, language is one of the most powerful tools we have as human beings. It allows us to connect, share our thoughts and feelings, and make things together.

I’ve just landed in NYC, and a story came to mind that illustrates this.

I was in a gathering with a group of friends, and the speaker was sharing a story about two people who were left on two different sides of New York City and, even without communicating, were able to find themselves after some hours. Was it coincidence or divine intervention? The power of intention or just the fact that everybody walks towards the same regions in New York anyways?

I was amazed at how compelling that story was for the audience. Really? The Secret? Mind over body? Positivity until either you change your mindset or the world bows to your will?

Despite your beliefs, I would like to propose there is a lot in the mundane and ordinary that, if we dig deep, is where the real magic comes from, without the need of any abracadabra.

Imagine the same story of two people in different parts of New York, but now they text each other and say: “let’s meet at Broadway and 49th at 4 pm today”. Not much here on the surface, but if we look closely, we might see the power of this communication – two people have committed their future with each other, and from all they could do at 4 pm today, if they keep their promise, they have defined a moment in their lives.

If this does not seem grand when two people are meeting, think about a multinational with 500+ employees on four different continents or what it takes to prepare a city for the Olympics. Yet, it is all done the same way, communicating through language, and it’s pretty extraordinary.

Not that you shouldn’t believe in magic, who am I to say that (I believe in 🎅), but consider there is something magical about our simple communication exchanges. We can do things together that change us, our relationships, and the world.

And if you haven’t been selected to Hogwarts to learn the first kind of magic, you certainly have been introduced to the power of language and communication. And more, you can train to use it better too.

Check my ebook that talks about it. It’s free: https://augustocuginotti.com/gathering-to-commit/

Did you like this blog post? I would love to hear your thoughts!

The post The Magic of Language: How We Use Words to Make Things Happen first appeared on Augusto Cuginotti.

The decision-makers biggest mistake is not understanding the decision-making process they should use in a specific situation. Every decision has different characteristics, and, as a result, other approaches are more appropriate.

Here are some things the decision-maker should take into account when deciding the best decision-making process to use:

Once you’ve considered these factors, you can choose the decision-making process best suited to your specific challenge.

While some of those things are obvious, like a highly urgent decision that may not involve many people, others are a bit more subtle. So let’s take a look at participation: how to include people in decision-making processes.

Participation: How many people need to be involved in the decision-making process?

The decision-maker should take into account how much participation is needed from others. In some cases, it may be best to decide on your own, while in others, it may be necessary to involve others in the decision-making process.

A case for more participation

In a world that is always running to the urgent, most decision making that should involve others do not. As a result, the decision is weak, generates lots of biased or is narrow, especially when facing complex problems or decisions that are highly impactful for some or many.

On complex matters, the decision-maker should always involve others in the decision-making process, even if it takes more time. One cannot wait until the issue is urgent but to envision a future solution that the collective can create with sufficient time.

The best way to ensure that you involve the right people in the decision-making process is to talk about it. Talk to some stakeholders, including those impacted by the decision, and get their input on what they think is the best course of action.

Highly strategic decisions benefit from diverse perspectives, especially where the options are unclear and the environment turbulent. Remember – no small group can grasp a complex problem because there are not enough points of view in the room.

A case for more responsibility

Sometimes bringing others to the table is a way to avoid taking responsibility for the decision. A leadership position requires taking some risks, and not always you will be able to have everybody on board: you will choose with the best information, judgement and risk assessment you have at the time and deal with the consequences. That’s part of the job.

I am used to seeing clients who should have been deciding on their own but consider participation as a way to engage others. Don’t do this, at least not for engagement only. People are engaged when they participate, but they are also engaged when they see a clear direction. It depends.

Instead, for decisions that are yours to make, share the decision and, if appropriate, what made you get to it. Then go back to your pool of challenges and find the topics that require participation, even if the final decision is not up to the whole group to make, and invite others appropriately.

Tailor Your Participation

When it comes to decision making, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. One should tailor the decision-making process one uses to the specific challenge at hand. The amount of participation required and the factors to be considered will vary depending on the situation.

Check some resources that present different decision-making formats and explore the level of participation that each one has.

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Why is Building Trust Important?

Trust is a social construct that provides a measure of security, a way we can cope with the natural anxiety we carry about not knowing what is about to come, what is going to happen.

As individuals, it means relying on the other, believing no risk comes from that association. For society, it is the fabric that allows us to take some things for granted, i.e., don’t check everything all the time.

So, let’s say you trust someone in a particular context, you rely on them to be your partner in action: if you trust someone with a secret or some money, you judge the other person as trustworthy. The same with institutions or society in general – you might or might not trust that media outlet, the police or your local political representative.

When we trust, we expect that the other party will not behave in a way that breaks that trust or tries to take advantage of it. If it is broken, it can lead to a sense of betrayal and loss. Trust has been a significant predictor for success in long-term relationships with others in both our personal and professional lives.

Having people’s trust will make them more confident in your work, which means there will be less reputation damage when you make a mistake. Furthermore, when you trust someone, you are more willing to experiment too. This will be key when we explore the impact of trust in our organisations.

What are the Definitions of Trust

Trust is the bedrock of all human interactions and is imperative to a functioning society. For human beings socially, trust is our most valuable resource, but there is no common understanding of what trust is.

Trust according to the Ontology of Language

Trust is a psychological state defined by one person “willing to take a risk together with someone or something”. It is a judgement we make, a declaration about the other, not necessarily entirely rational, defining if that person or institution is worth the risk of us engaging with them and acting accordingly.

There are 3 domains of trust according to the Ontology of Language:

1. Sincerity: our judgement if our private internal conversations are aligned to our public discourse;
2. Competence: our judgement of the other’s competence in a specific domain or task;
3. Trustworthiness: our judgement over time if the other keep their promises.

Emotional aspects of trust are just as important, if not more important, than cognitive aspects, so it is common to feel that we trust or not even without interacting with someone – it can be a projection or just a “bad feeling about this”.

Emotional and cognitive aspects of trust are integral components of this element in human relations, and if they are misaligned, we can put it in check.

Trust according to Brené Brown

Brené Brown is a renowned American researcher and professor, famous for her theory on social connection to vulnerability. According to Brown, trust is the core of the human relationship, and without it, we cannot be fully alive and fully human. We need trust in our lives to open up and be seen and fully experience life.

Trust between two people is established when we allow the other person to see our true selves, vulnerabilities, and imperfections. She uses Charles Feldman’s definition where trust is “choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of someone else.”

To explore all aspects of trust, she coined the acronym: BRAVING. (A love from acronyms, go figure). You can find more all over the web.

In our personal lives, trust tends to be developed over time through a series of interactions with someone else – a person we know, respect, and believe in. As we spend more time together and establish a relationship, we will see that person’s good qualities over time and gradually develop trust in them.

The role of building trust in our society

Let’s also look at a social system view on trust. Imagine all the interactions we are exposed to in this world. Processing all the information around us would overload both our brains but also societal communications. I mean, it is already overloaded, right? I argue it is because our trust levels are low, but we will come back to that.

Trust allows us to move forward without double-checking everything; imagine having to check credentials of your doctor, your mechanic, and your bank every time you interact with them. Instead, you just trust them. Trust helps us assume risk relationships that otherwise would take us energy and time to access and judge in all the aspects we had previously discussed.

We need to rely on trust to cope with the world’s increasing complexity.

Trust according to Niklas Luhmann

“The great civilising processes of transition towards trust in the system give mankind a stable attitude towards what is contingent in the complex world.”

Niklas Luhmann

According to Luhmann, trust is needed in our society so we can cope with complexity. In the past, our society would simplify things through religion and cosmology, so trust in the way we use it today was not needed. There was no need to individualise trust in a world of faith and ‘god-willingness’ as our decisions were divinely guided.

Trust became an issue from the moment there were identifiable personal risks in our decisions, and they could be related to our association with individuals or institutions. We then started to judge if an association was a risk and if we were willing to take it.

So trust in societal terms has to do with expectations and predictability. Because the future contains many more possibilities than what could happen in the present, uncertainty is constant. Trust acts as a constraint to the possible futures that can come to be, reducing uncertainty.

So, for Luhmann, beyond interpersonal trust that we have explored on above definitions, there is a need for systemic trust, i.e. trust in the various social systems of society. Modern society has increasingly differentiated, impersonal processes and/or mechanisms such as the law, educational degrees, or medical procedures. Those are evolutionary achievements to reduce its increasing complexity.

Looking from this perspective and the times we are living in right now, it is understandable the feeling of being overwhelmed and the polarisation happening in the world. Both walk hand in hand to the discredit of our institutions and the increasing complex challenges in our world. As an example, being more globalised (as in refugees and COVID disparities) and more aware of its impact on the environment (climate change).

Building Trust in the Organisation

Successful long term organisations are built on trust. Employees and collaborators need to feel like they can be themselves at work and be supported by their colleagues.

Building trust in the workplace has always been a challenge, but it seems especially hard to achieve these days. Many are under more significant pressure than ever before, and it’s becoming more difficult for them to maintain a balance between work and their personal lives.

Organisations are desperately looking for ways of increasing people’s well-being while maintaining productivity and competitiveness. The result of this imbalance has brought up the risk of people leaving and burnout. It’s not enough for organisations leaders just to say “trust me” or promote mindfulness sessions. They need to show that the others’ interests are accounted for and can be trusted more than ever.

As a subsystem of society, organisations that build internal trust will be more able to respond to environmental changes. It is a matter of attention and energy: if you have to check and control your internal bureaucracy and communications, you won’t have enough to respond appropriately to the constant changes coming from society – think the market, but also D&I, well-being, COVID.

How to build internal trust in your Organisation

We will work in the future to explore the role of informal communications to build internal trust in your organisation.

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