Myth 1: Operational closure makes organisational intervention impossible.

Environmental changes—including those brought about by a consulting intervention—can alter the material substrate on which organisational activity depends, as well as occasion changes in organisational responses and decision premises. Luhmann’s core distinction is that operational closure does not mean causal isolation: it means that these changes do not transfer a ready-made meaning or organisational response into the system.

An external intervention may offer instructions or recommendations, but these do not determine how the organisation responds. It offers occasions for irritation, which the organisation takes up according to its own history, programmes, and decision premises.

A practitioner who takes Luhmann seriously gives up the assumption that an intended change can simply be transferred into the organisation. They attend instead to how their contributions become taken up, rejected, or transformed in organisational communication. They offer alternative distinctions, design spaces for irritation, and work with recursive decisions and undecided premises when appropriate.

Myth 2: Treating social systems as communication makes bodies and consciousness irrelevant.

Luhmann never argued that communication floats free of bodies and minds. Placing human beings in the environment of social systems is a deliberately counterintuitive move. But it does not mean that people are absent or unimportant. It distinguishes what constitutes a social system from the conditions that make its operations possible.

This distinction is theoretical, and other theories draw their boundaries differently. But alternatives also need to account for the distinctions they make and what those distinctions leave out. Claiming a holistic perspective does not, by itself, resolve that problem.

Luhmann explicitly names what he calls psychic systems (systems of consciousness) and organic systems (living bodies) as a necessary substrate. Communication depends on embodied consciousness without consisting of conscious experiences. Luhmann discusses the relation between consciousness and communication through interpenetration and structural coupling, with language playing a central role in their coupling. These relations make influence possible without allowing one system simply to specify the other’s operations.

Myth 3: Identifying the actor explains the social event.

For Luhmann, actions are socially constituted through attribution: a communicative process is identified as an action belonging to a particular actor. This applies both when attributing a decision to an actor (“John approved the budget”) and when categorising an observable physical movement (“John kicked the can”). In the latter, the observable movement alone does not settle whether the kick was playful, aggressive, or accidental; different observers may attribute different meanings to it. In both cases, the attribution simplifies reality, but allows the flow of communication to continue. These attributions don’t necessarily reproduce John’s own understanding of what he was doing, and their social consequences do not depend on his agreeing with them.

What appears in organisational communication as a discrete deed by an identifiable actor can depend on a much wider sequence of communications, expectations, and prior decisions. Attribution locates responsibility and agency in an identifiable actor, simplifying a communicative process whose production cannot be explained by that actor alone. Such attributions help organise further communication, including questions of responsibility and accountability.

Why does this all matter?

On one hand, trying to influence an organisation solely by changing “individual mindsets” overlooks how organisational communication takes up, rejects, or transforms what individuals propose and do. Changing individual mindsets does not, by itself, explain organisational change. The question is how those changes become consequential for the organisation’s recurring decisions and decision premises.

On the other hand, focusing exclusively on the local, immediate emergence of bodies in relation risks overlooking what becomes of those encounters organisationally. A powerful encounter is not yet evidence of organisational change. The further question is whether (and how) it becomes consequential for subsequent decisions, expectations, or decision premises, including informal ones.

Second-order observation adds another question: through which distinctions does the organisation observe and evaluate the encounter? What makes it count as useful, irrelevant, successful, or disruptive? Examining those distinctions can make the organisation’s criteria of relevance available for reflection, rather than taking them for granted.

This perspective changes what practitioners attend to and what they can reasonably claim about their interventions. Whether a particular intervention is useful remains a practical and empirical question.

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

Part 3 of a series on narrative inquiry, organisational culture, and conversations for change.

In the previous articles, we explored how organisational culture operates through undecidable decision premises—historical distinctions that cannot simply be changed by decree—and how narrative inquiry offers situational indicators that allow us to observe how people observe.

Yet having narrative patterns, catalytic questions, or a collection of vivid lived experiences in hand is not the complete intervention, but only the threshold.

The temptation at this stage is to believe that because patterns have been identified, action will naturally follow: “Now that we see what is going on, we can fix it.” But the ongoing process of organising does not automatically reconfigure itself just because a hidden dynamic has surfaced. In fact, pointing it out often triggers the system’s immune response, making “sitting on the threshold” one of the practitioner’s most important invitations.

When the system encounters itself

The central idea is not to persuade an organisation to rush from pattern to action. It is to host a conversation around a theme that may touch on its undecidable decision premises, and to create enough of a holding environment for the inquiry to continue.

This does not mean making the conversation comfortable, securing agreement, or treating every discomfort as a sign that something has gone wrong. It means creating conditions in which people can remain in contact with a difficult theme long enough to think and speak about it, rather than immediately dismissing it, personalising it, turning it into blame, or closing it down.

Recognition, disagreement, hesitation, discomfort, and defensiveness can all become part of the work. The question is not whether participants welcome a hypothesis or interpretation. It is whether the group can stay with the theme, connect it to experience, offer counterexamples, challenge its framing, and continue in inquiry.

In social systems theory, an organization reproduces itself through continuity and predictability. When an inquiry touches upon undecidable decision premises, it threatens the very shortcuts the system relies on to operate without existential paralysis. Discomfort is not evidence that the intervention has gone astray; it is, more likely, evidence of the contrary: that the inquiry has actually arrived at something consequential.

The difference between a productive and counterproductive conversation is not shown by the patterns alone. It becomes apparent in the responses given when the organisation encounters the themes raised from the data.

Those responses—or the lack of response—matter. In practice, we may encounter humour, silence, defensiveness, relief, anger, or a quick change of subject. We should not treat a response simply as confirmation or dismissal. They may challenge our hypothesis as much as deepen it. But they can also show what is at stake in bringing a theme into communication.

Power, presence, and containment

We also need to ask whose responses we are able to hear. Silence is not one thing, and neither is agreement. The consequences of speaking differ by role, tenure, status, employment relationship, identity, and proximity to authority. A hosted conversation is deeply embedded in this dynamic. The work includes reflecting on who can participate, who is absent, who can safely disagree, and whose interpretation is likely to become consequential.

Hosting space in this context means helping contain what becomes difficult in the conversation: the anxiety, ambiguity, conflict, and uncertainty that arise when established premises become available for reflection. There are other forces acting on containment in any group, but it is usually the host who takes up the explicit role of paying attention to it, bringing it forward when needed.

This notion of a holding environment—drawn from psychodynamic traditions—establishes a temporary space where we hold the collective boundaries of time, focus, and curiosity firmly enough that the group can tolerate anxiety in the face of unanswerable questions.

Every intervention by the host is contingent and relational. A rush to resolve tension may simply be the host’s own anxiety at play; offering a tidy framework might provide a temporary scaffold, but it can also become a subtle control mechanism. In the work of change, the host’s primary task is to tune in to what is showing up in the room and offer their contribution to sustain the tension needed for new distinctions to be explored.

Thematizing the conversation itself

As we’ve mentioned, the sensibility for what themes or tensions can or should be explored is never exclusively in the hands of the host or change agent. It can become one of the themes of the conversation itself: What can we talk about here? How can we talk about it? And what happens when we do?

As Jesper Tække writes in his Luhmannian analysis of organisational culture:(1)

“Reflexively, thematization itself can be thematized.”

We can discuss a theme, but we can also discuss how that theme is being introduced and what meanings we are giving it. We can ask not only what “accountability” means, for example, but what happens in our conversations when someone invokes accountability.

It is often the role of the change agent to lead or influence the creation of such reflexive spaces: spaces where an organisation can communicate about its own communication.

Tække describes reflexivity as vital for the development of semantics—the ongoing negotiation of shared meanings—and for working with decision premises. At the same time, culture can constrain whether reflexive communication is possible at all.

That tension is familiar in practice. We are attempting to create a space for reflection using the very premises that may limit reflection. You are always inside the room, speaking with words that carry sedimented organizational meanings, subject to the same anxieties about status and belonging. Stepping into reflexivity means acknowledging this circularity rather than pretending we have escaped it.

Beyond the room: Returning to lived experience

When we sit with a group and narrative data, we may have more situational indicators at hand. That does not mean there will be less anxiety, less defensiveness, or less risk for those participating in the inquiry.

As Tække cautions:

“Challenging cultural values, articulating contradictions, or even defining the values themselves risks alienation and reputational harm.”

Having indicators that support novel conversations is an affordance. It is not enough on its own.

A hosted conversation is not yet a changed organisational pattern. Its significance depends on what happens afterwards: whether a distinction is taken up again, whether a different action becomes possible, and how that action is received in subsequent communication.

Consider how an act as simple as asking for help can mean completely different things across an organisation: in one team, asking early is treated as responsible collaboration; in another, it is judged as incompetence or personal weakness. If a hosted conversation brings that implicit tension into view, it makes a new distinction available for people to use in subsequent everyday situations. Someone might dare to ask earlier, respond with less irritation to a colleague’s request, or question an unwritten rule about what competence requires. Whether that becomes a different way of organising depends on what follows—not only on what was said in the room.

The work is to return to lived experience: to create spaces, invitations, and opportunities for reflection that can hold the tension between stability and unpredictability, inquiry and anxiety.

For me, this is what reading Tække alongside narrative practice brings into focus. It protects us from two equal and opposite illusions: the managerial illusion that culture is a set of dials you can adjust by executive mandate, and the diagnostic illusion that uncovering data is sufficient to change how people relate to one another.

We are not deciding what the culture should be and then installing it. We are listening to how people make organisation, making some of those patterns available for reflection, and hosting conversations in which different meanings and actions may become possible.

We have answers to questions that we’ve never asked ourselves.

Sometimes the work is to make room for the question again.

Reference

(1) Tække, Jesper. “Luhmann and Organization Culture: A Systems Theoretical Analytical Strategy.” Paper presented at the EURAM 2025 Annual Conference, University of Florence, Florence, Italy, June 22–25, 2025.

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

Part 2 of a series on narrative inquiry, organisational culture, and conversations for change.

In the previous article, I explored how organisational culture can be understood through what Niklas Luhmann called undecidable decision premises: premises that guide choices without being available for direct decree. They are the answers one receives without ever being presented with the originating questions.

Why does culture matter? Not to turn it into an abstract entity or a fuzzy property, but to recognise the sedimented choices and unwritten premises that directly shape how people act and decide each day. Even if we cannot map culture exhaustively or reify it into a simple object, there are specific patterns we can notice and influence.

If we cannot simply decide culture into existence, and if these premises cannot be found on a policy document or corporate values poster, how do we begin to notice them?

The conventional response in organisations is to deploy a diagnostic: an engagement survey, a Likert-scale culture assessment, or a round of structured executive interviews. Yet these instruments frequently stumble over a fundamental paradox: culture is invisible to direct interrogation.

Ask people directly, “What is our culture?”, and you will usually receive either the formal corporate values repeated back to you, or safe platitudes about teamwork and collaboration. When you press someone to explain why they take certain assumptions for granted, or why they act one way rather than another, the question itself can feel absurd, impolite, or threatening.

Rather than treating culture as a set of shared values to be measured with a questionnaire, Jesper Tække proposes an analytical strategy focused on semantics—an approach designed to listen to how meaning actually circulates, reproduces, and constrains communication in the everyday life of an organisation.

Semantics as a reservoir of meaning

In his paper “Luhmann and Organization Culture – A Systems Theoretical Analytical Strategy,” Tække offers a helpful language for the condition this work responds to.(1)

He defines semantics as:

“the meaning that words, sentences, and actions hold for organizational members”

He proposes that those meanings can be analysed to infer undecidable decision premises. Drawing on Luhmann, Tække describes culture as a reservoir of themes: meanings available from the past that can be brought into present communication, shaping which contributions are understandable, credible, and appropriate.

In ordinary conversation, we often dismiss debates by saying, “That’s just semantics.” But in a systems-theoretical sense, semantics is not superficial wordplay; it is the infrastructure of understanding.

Semantics determines whether an utterance makes sense to colleagues, whether it is taken seriously, or whether it is immediately discarded as noise. Condensed terms like agile, accountable, professional, risk, or urgent rarely carry dictionary definitions in an office. They are saturated with local, sedimented history. They act as shortcuts that pre-structure what kind of action is permitted to follow.

This reservoir is not an abstract cloud floating above the organisation. It is carried forward in how people communicate about their day-to-day work: what they justify, what they explain away, how they describe a success, and where they place blame when something falters.
The connection I am making is practical. If organisational culture is carried forward in the meanings through which people interpret experience, relate to one another, and make decisions, one way to surface aspects of that culture is by listening to both those experiences and the meanings attached to them in lived accounts.

Questions grounded in situational indicators

The challenge is that any invitation to communicate about taken-for-granted premises is itself contained and constrained by them. To talk openly about something foundational may already feel like a violation. It can be like asking for a reason for something “obvious,” where the act of asking is perceived as shameful, inappropriate, or not permitted.

Tække, drawing on Luhmann, describes how inquiry into established habits and assumptions can easily be counteracted as provocation, taken as disloyalty, or laughed off as a joke. He writes:

“Questions about culture must be specific and grounded in situational indicators.”

This is the methodological hinge. Rather than asking people what they believe about culture (which invites abstract theories, defensive postures, and rehearsed opinions), we can ask them to recount specific, lived episodes.

An opinion (“Leadership never listens to frontline staff”) invites disagreement, defensive counter-examples, or ideological debate. But a narrative account (“Last month, when the rollout stalled in regional depots, we submitted three incident reports, and the review meeting was cancelled before we reached the agenda”) provides a concrete situation. It describes what happened, what was communicated, and how choices were coordinated.

Rather than beginning with an abstract question about “our culture,” collecting concrete, situated accounts brings us back to lived experiences:

• How a specific decision happened.
• How someone interpreted an unexpected event.
• Where responsibility was placed when a deadline was missed.
• What was considered appropriate or out of line.
• What happened the last time someone acted differently.

These accounts give us situational indicators. They make available the distinctions through which people describe organisational life: relevant or irrelevant, successful or problematic, responsible or irresponsible, initiative or overstepping.

Working with culture, in this sense, is connected to observing and working with evidence. Not evidence that proves we have definitively uncovered “the culture,” but evidence that grounds the questions we bring into conversation.

Observing how people observe (Second-order observation)

Accounts of lived experiences do not offer a complete explanation of organisational culture, and organisational patterns cannot be reduced to stories or semantics alone. They are one way an organisation can listen to how decisions, constraints, and possibilities are encountered in practice.

In that sense, listening to people’s experiences functions as second-order observation: observing how people observe. We are not merely asking what happened (first-order observation). We are asking:

• How did what happened become meaningful to those involved?
• What distinctions did they draw?
• What possibilities did those distinctions open or close?

In systems theory, drawing a distinction is the primary cognitive and communicative act: to distinguish something is to draw a boundary, highlighting one side while leaving the other in the unmarked space. When someone recounts an event using the distinction “diligent execution versus reckless experimentation,” they are organising reality in a way that makes certain actions sensible and others blameworthy.

Another person describing the exact same event using the distinction “proactive problem-solving versus bureaucratic stalling” constructs an entirely different communicative landscape. Second-order observation does not referee which description is objectively true; it observes the distinctions themselves and what they make possible.

The narratives are evidence of how experiences are described and interpreted. The premises we infer from their patterns remain working hypotheses.

They may also point to structural conditions that need attention. A recurring story of people avoiding escalation, for example, may suggest an informal premise about competence or loyalty. It may also bring into view a workload problem, unclear decision rights, a history of punitive management, inadequate staffing, or a workflow that leaves no time for collaboration.

The narrative does not settle the explanation. It tells us where the organisation may need to look more carefully.

Crucially, second-order observation reminds us that the practitioner is not standing outside the system. When we gather, select, cluster, and frame narrative material, we are also drawing distinctions — being mindful if they are ours to draw. We are not neutral mirrors reflecting an objective reality; our own observations are part of the communicative web and must remain open to scrutiny and challenge.

Working with tensions, not unified cultures

There may not be one premise to discover. Different roles, teams, histories, and positions sustain competing meanings, and the contradictions between them are often more informative than any apparent consensus.

Imagine a collection of stories about asking for help: in some accounts, asking early is described as responsible, collaborative, and risk-aware. In other accounts, asking for help is treated as evidence that someone cannot do their job or is offloading duties onto others.

We can bring that tension into view without needing to decide which account represents the “real” culture.

Instead, the inquiry becomes situational:

• When does asking become responsible, and when does it become exposing?
• What changes with the person, the role, the situation, or who is listening?
• What have people learned from the responses they received in the past?

The work is not to settle the meaning in advance, but to let the organisation examine how these competing meanings are organising everyday choices.

Where formal decisions and stated premises do not adequately explain recurring patterns, we have a place to inquire. Informal meanings and undecidable decision premises are likely at work.

Here lies a critical distinction between traditional consulting research that culminates in a report and an ongoing inquiry. An analytical report cannot change undecidable decision premises; at best, it becomes another formal artifact that the system routes around.
Narrative accounts and accompanying patterns are not the conclusion of an intervention. They are merely the raw material for collective reflection. This is clearly expressed in Participatory Narrative Inquiry (PNI),(2) where Cynthia Kurtz speaks not of definitive findings, but of a catalysis report: an artifact designed to catalyse sensemaking rather than deliver settled verdicts.

From observing patterns to hosting conversations

Having patterns at hand, and working with the hypotheses they suggest, can support conversations about future action and the affordances and constraints shaping it.

And when I say “can support,” that is deliberate. Naming a pattern does not mean the organisation can or will use it. Tække warns that culture remains largely implicit in organisational communication, and that attempts to articulate or integrate it explicitly into management can be counterproductive.

The movement from gathering narrative indicators to actually sitting with them in a room is where the core of the work lies. It is not only the narrative patterns, hypotheses, and suggested premises that matter, but the act of observing and making sense of them in conversation.

How do we bring these situational indicators back into the room without provoking the very defensive routines they describe? How do we contribute to an environment where an organisation can examine its own communicative habits without collapsing into blame, cynicism, or polite avoidance?

In the final article of this series, I turn to the craft of hosting reflexive spaces: what it means to hold the inquiry open and contain the anxiety that inevitably surfaces when established premises are brought into the light.

References

(1) Tække, Jesper. “Luhmann and Organization Culture: A Systems Theoretical Analytical Strategy.” Paper presented at the EURAM 2025 Annual Conference, University of Florence, Florence, Italy, June 22–25, 2025.

(2) Kurtz, Cynthia F. Working with Stories: In Your Community and Your Organization. 3rd ed. Kurtz-Fernhout Publishing, 2014. (See also workingwithstories.org).

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

We have answers to questions that we’ve never asked ourselves.
We have answers to questions that we’ve never asked ourselves.

Every time I share that sentence, I say it twice because it is not trivial.

I learned it from Julio Olalla in his work with the Ontology of Language. We operate—individually and collectively—taking a lot for granted, having learned and absorbed a great deal without making the distinction or the choice ourselves.

We operate from a place shaped by both the decisions and choices we have made and those passed down to us. For some of them, we might have had the space and opportunity to reflect on their origins. But others remain transparent to us: we look through them rather than at them. They are answers we received and incorporated without being presented with the originating question.

And because our previous choices influence what we see as possible now, these transparent premises can become the unnoticed backbone of a lot of what we do. When we inquire into why we operate the way we do, we will often reach one of them.

In coaching—the context Olalla is coming from—exploring the judgements and distinctions through which we act can open possibilities for changing our actions and how we interact with the world.

For many, it might seem simplistic to imagine that reinterpreting something can itself be part of change. But imagine someone who has been deciding their whole life from a premise—not a fact, but an interpretation—that was passed down and absorbed without their noticing.

I once worked with a client whose first workplace implicitly treated asking for help as a sign of inefficiency. Eager to prove themselves, they learned not to ask.

Several years later, now in a senior position, that connection between asking for help and being inefficient had not left them. It continued to shape how they organised their work, relationships, and choices—even in a role that could not be held by trying to hold everything tightly and grind through it alone.

This is not to say that reinterpretation alone is the whole of change. It is to recognise that reinterpretation can be part of action. And it requires more than a checklist or framework; it requires context and conversation.

Individual to Collective Premises

For groups and organisations, we can create spaces to inquire into the collective premises shaping how decisions happen in the practical day to day, as people relate to one another and make organisation.

The connection is in the historical choices and distinctions that continue to guide our actions: with Olalla, we are looking at the individual; here, we turn to the collective, to how those premises are carried forward in organisational communication and decision-making.

This does not mean that an organisation is an individual at a larger scale. It means that both perspectives direct attention to historically formed distinctions that shape what becomes available as meaningful action. In one case, we are concerned with a person’s way of observing and acting. In the other, we are concerned with organisational communication: how decisions connect to other decisions, how some contributions become recognisable and others do not, and how practical ways of working become customary.

Some organisational premises are explicitly decided: policies, procedures, roles, reporting lines, budgets, performance measures, or a CEO’s directive. These can be communicated as decisions. People may disagree with them, work around them, or interpret them in unexpected ways, but there is usually a recognisable moment in which the organisation decided them.

Other premises live in more informal communication, in the unsaid ways of “how people do things around here.”

They show up in what people learn to do in practice:

• What counts as a real problem and what is dismissed as noise.
• Who is expected to decide and who is expected to wait.
• When asking for help is responsible and when it signals incompetence.
• Which risks are worth escalating and which should be managed quietly.
• What people can question openly and what is treated as obvious.
• Whether a deviation is recognised as initiative, disruption, or disloyalty.

We often perceive these patterns very well. In fact, we can become highly skilled at navigating them. We quickly learn to use the workarounds as much as the directives.

The question is not simply whether people know how things work. It is whether what people know how to navigate can become something the organisation can communicate about.

What We Can’t Decide or Declare Directly

I came across Jesper Tække’s article, “Luhmann and Organization Culture – A Systems Theoretical Analytical Strategy,” while thinking about this question. (1)

The article develops an analytical strategy based on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of organisational culture. Luhmann looks at organisations as systems that reproduce themselves through decision communication. Decisions establish conditions for subsequent decisions, allowing an organisation to continue organising over time.

Within that account, Tække describes organisational culture through Luhmann’s concept of undecidable decision premises: premises shaped under the influence of organisational decisions but not traceable to a specific decision. As Tække puts it:

“These premises are used because they have always been used.” (1)

Luhmann contrasts these with premises an organisation can formally decide—such as policies, procedures, roles, or directives. Undecidable decision premises still guide decisions, but they are not themselves available for direct decision.

Formal decisions always operate against a backdrop they cannot fully specify. Every time an organization decides what to do, it relies on a vast, quiet reservoir of assumptions about how things are done.

This helps explain why we cannot decide on organisational culture in the same way we can decide on a strategy or a reporting structure. A formal decision can change what is required. It cannot, by itself, determine what will be treated as appropriate, credible, responsible, risky, or worth doing in everyday organisational life.

An organisation can decide that cross-functional collaboration is a priority. It can create a collaboration policy, a new meeting structure, a shared platform, and a performance measure. None of that guarantees that people will experience asking another department for help as legitimate.

They may still understand such a request as intruding on another team’s territory, exposing a lack of competence, creating extra work without recognition, or bypassing an expected hierarchy. Or they may see it as exactly what responsible work requires. The formal decision and the practical meaning of collaboration do not necessarily align.

The same is true in more ordinary moments. A manager can say, “Raise risks early.” Yet someone who has seen colleagues blamed for raising a problem too soon may learn that the safer course is to wait, soften the message, solve it alone, or hope the problem goes away. The directive remains in place. But another premise may be organising what people actually do with it.

Undecidable Premises are not a Barrier or a Problem

It can be tempting to frame taken-for-granted premises as a problem to expose and overcome. Sometimes the work is presented that way: a revealing coaching conversation, a diagnostic intervention, or a framework that will finally uncover the truth.

For a change agent, consultant, or facilitator, that is a siren’s call. It promises a position outside the system, from which culture can be revealed, explained, and repaired. It is worth proceeding more carefully.

Organisations need taken-for-granted premises in order to coordinate action at all. They cannot reconsider every possible interpretation, responsibility, relationship, and action every time someone makes a decision. Much of organisational life depends on people being able to act with a sense of what is relevant, expected, legitimate, and possible.

There are many layers of such premises, and we depend on them heavily. The aim is not to reveal or eliminate all taken-for-granted premises. The question is whether particular premises, under current conditions, are enabling worthwhile coordination while also narrowing what the organisation can notice, discuss, and do.

A premise that once helped a team operate effectively may become limiting when the work changes. A distinction that helped protect quality may later make adaptation difficult. An expectation that helped people manage risk may become a reason not to raise concerns. A familiar way of dividing responsibility may make sense until it prevents people from responding to a problem that crosses those boundaries.

Tække emphasises that culture cannot simply be introduced or changed through decision in the way other organisational elements can. Questions that challenge established habits and assumptions can be met as provocation, humour, or a failure to understand how things work. (1)

That is not necessarily because people are irrational, resistant to change, or unaware of what is happening. It may be because a question touches something that has been doing important work without being openly available for discussion.

What initially appears as a practical question about process can quickly become a question about competence, loyalty, authority, identity, or belonging.

A Question Before Method

This brings me back to the sentence I learned from Olalla.

We have answers to questions that we have never asked ourselves.

In organisational life, some of those answers are carried forward through what people do, what they expect, what they avoid, and what they treat as obvious. They are present in formal decisions, but not exhausted by them. They are also present in the gaps between what an organisation says and what becomes possible in practice.

If organisational culture cannot simply be changed by deciding, the work is not to declare a new culture and expect it to take hold.

The work may begin more modestly: by making room to notice the questions that have disappeared behind the answers.

If some of the premises guiding organisational life cannot be found in a policy, a values statement, or a strategy document, where might we begin to notice them?

One place is in the accounts people give of ordinary decisions, conflicts, workarounds, and experience. In the next article, I explore what narrative listening can make available for that inquiry.

Reference

(1) Tække, Jesper. “Luhmann and Organization Culture: A Systems Theoretical Analytical Strategy.” Paper presented at the EURAM 2025 Annual Conference, University of Florence, Florence, Italy, June 22–25, 2025.

Sources
https://pure.au.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/430217389/1352_Paper_0327100359.pdf

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

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.

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

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?

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

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.

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

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.

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

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.

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti

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.

Original content from Augusto Cuginotti