The full article will appear in the fall of 2021 in a publication by Carl Auer Verlag on the topic of "Meaningful Organization - Pros & Cons".
In the past, there were the chants. And before that - long before that - already the dances. With voice, foot and beating heart we told each other the star run. The empty moon and the perfect one. And under the moving sky fire our life and death in the change of the seasons. This too was a dance and it was only right to stamp it too into the clay of this world, to breathe it and to give sound to breathing. This is how we created the world from ourselves. Gave it meaning. Gave it to each other. Sang ourselves into the fabric of life.
[Rabbit Hole 20] Something about dancing bees and the meaning of storytelling
I remember my grandfather and an incident that I have long tried to grasp in all its significance. By remembering, I tell. By telling, I create myself.
The incident occurred on a warm May day in 1977. Jimmy Carter was President of the United States at the time, the world was still peacefully dozing in the Cold War, and I was a curious six-year-old setting out to discover the adult world.
I remember. Of my grandfather rushing excitedly across the meadow in front of the farmhouse around noon. To the other end of the property, where it adjoined the old railroad shed of the local streetcar.
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[Rabbit Hole 21] A brief dwell on systemic honey pots.
When people ask me whether an organization should and may be meaningful - and I am indeed asked about this again and again in my work as an organizational consultant - I find it difficult to give a clear answer. I then think of my grandfather and his bees, on which he wanted to impose more than was familiar to their nature. Above all, he wanted them to dance to his own tune. I think that could only go wrong. In his hive - and if you'll allow me the metaphorical translation - in human organizations, too, of course.
Where people come together and organize themselves toward a common goal, the formation of meaning cannot be avoided at all. In a sense, it is inherent in the system. Organizations are always also meaning machines in which people plan, shape, and evaluate their relationships with other people in the context of expectation structures. They do this, of course, by communicating with each other. On the somewhat overrated rational factual level and even more on the relational and often unconscious meaning level. The latter is the home of experiences, emotions, values, unquestioned basic assumptions - e.g. prosperity is proportional to growth - and in general our heuristics in dealing with the phenomena of this world. Something else characterizes this level: the information is not structured logically, but narratively. Just like the complex micro and macro models for a successful life that are ultimately constituted out of them. We do not experience world directly, we narrate it to ourselves. And every narrative is a construction of meaning of the world.
In short: meaning is made. It does not simply exist, but is narratively constructed in interaction with other people. Therefore, it is not whether meaning is made that is interesting to me, but how. For example, how much co-design potential is granted to the participants in such meaning-making processes and how dynamically the meaning-making can update itself, because what makes sense today can be complete nonsense tomorrow.
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