On the sharing of

meaning
For some, the web is the defining
metaphor or image of our times. For
others it may be that first picture of our
earth taken from a spaceship – an image
that is everywhere recognisable and
recognised in the First World and yet
which would have been without meaning
50 years ago. (Interestingly, it’s also one
that seems to distance us alarmingly, as
observers, from our own planet. It
reminds me of the Cartesian I/Eye/Mind
looking down loftily on the detached and
rather meaningless It/Body. It reminds
me of the female form held by the male
gaze. A sort of softgaiaporn.)

At Triarchy, the defining image is very

often the rhizome. (Here, on the left, is
Antony Gormley’s Rhizome III.) Why?

Let’s start with Deleuze and Guattari: “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it
is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is
filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance.”1

There. We’re moving away from the tree, from the vertical order, from
hierarchy. (Our very first book2 was an assault on the hegemony of hierarchy
and an insistent demand that we look more widely and consider more
‘heterarchical’ alternatives.) And we’re moving towards complexity and
interconnectedness. “Unlike a structure, which is defined by a set of points
and positions, the rhizome is made only of lines.”3 So it has enormous
flexibility. It also has more of the quality of a pattern about it than the quality
of a structure. It’s a bit fractal in its possibilities.

Patterns seem like good models for the sort of flexible, interrelated,
adaptable, responsive organisation or institution that the world needs now to
replace the organisations and institutions that have failed it politically,
environmentally, economically and socially.

“A pattern comes about when things which have some degrees of freedom
are related to each other such that for a while their behaviour is co-ordinated:
drops of moisture in a cloud, living organisms in an eco-system, couples in a
dance, children in a family, citizens in a nation, and so on. Life is lived
amongst many such patterns which relate one life to others and to their
surroundings. “4

1
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,
2004, Continuum
2
Gerard Fairtlough, The Three Ways of Getting Things Done, 2007, Triarchy Press
3
Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit.
4
Bill Sharpe, Economies of life: patterns of health and wealth, 2010, Triarchy Press
Here we touch on families and other sociosystems – living patterns of people
that make up and shape our world. And it seems to us that huge demands are
made of these sociosystems, whilst little in the way of real resources are fed
back into them. Perhaps we’re in danger of depleting our sociosystems in
much the same way as we are depleting our fields and soil and seas and
failing to replenish them?

What does that depletion of families and other sociosystems mean in

practice? Well, to continue the environmental metaphor, it’s as if we expect to
carry on ‘using’ them and expect them to carry on working without our doing
anything. Take the family. The family is the embodiment of the notion of
ancestors. The young learn from the old and the old from the young. The
young keep challenging and the old keep reminding. It’s an exquisite balance.

Don Michael talks about learning from the old:

“Even given time and candid acknowledgements, it will be long before most
humans experience the generative circumstances – the disasters,
accomplishments and consequences – and learn from them that which might
moderate behaviour into the compassionate ways needed to live humanely,
according to a systems ethic… in an increasingly complex world. [So that] we
might interpret our experiences in such ways as to engender values and a
psychology that sustains a society of explorers-learners.”5

Of course, he isn’t talking about families. He’s saying it takes a long time for
any individual to acquire the experience that will enable her to be wise. And a
remedy for that, surely, is to draw on the experience and wisdom of others
who have gone before or gone elsewhere. It’s how we propagate knowledge
and wisdom. And we need to do it in all our communities: in families and
schools and villages and streets and cities and organisations and social
networks and countries…

And yet, though we develop more and more remarkable communication

technologies, they often serve to prevent us communicating. The teenager
may be able to remain in almost constant contact with his friend in another
city via the computer and mobile phone, yet the always tenuous
communication that he used to have with his grandmother will be made much
harder by his absorption in a computer screen and hers in a television screen.
And so the wisdom of generations is spilt and runs away between the flag
stones we hardly walk on any more.

Writing of Virginia Woolf, Sarah Bakewell says that she "…had a beautiful
vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how 'minds are threaded
together – how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides…
it is this common mind that binds the whole world together and all the world
is mind'."6

5
Don Michael , In Search of the Missing Elephant, 2010, Triarchy Press
6
Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at
an Answer, 2010, Chatto & Windus
We might contest the idea
that all the world is mind,
but it’s hard to argue about
the connectedness. Let’s
take another example. In
“Of string bags and birds’
nests”, anthropologist Tim
Ingold compares the
observations of puzzled
scientists as they record the
behaviour of weaverbirds
making their nests and the
behaviour of the Telefol
people when weaving string
bags. The birds, it appears
to the scientists, have to use
something that they can
only describe as
‘judgement’. As to the
human bag weavers, Ingold concludes that their weaving skills are neither
innate nor acquired. They are “grown”, incorporated into the human organism
through practice and training in an environment. In short the nature vs
nurture, genes vs culture debate falls away. Weaving becomes an ecological
skill that emerges through practice and repetition in a specific environment.
In this case, all the world is not so much mind as action. We are what we
weave.

So where is this leading? What might we do to facilitate communication

between generations, between and within organisations, across cultural
divides? How might we extend the knowledge management principles that
business has pursued for two decades into ‘wisdom management’?

Chap has a suggestion: “Art is the currency of experience, putting our unique
individual experiences into motion amongst us as shared meaning.”7 The
starting point on the path to sharing wisdom is to share meaning. Sharing
meaning leads to shared understanding and thence to empathy. And empathy
is the corner stone of love. Coming more from empathy and love than from
power, we learn how not to eat our young and kill our fellows. We learn how to
nurture and nourish and how to put away our weapons and our
sociopathologies and psychopathologies.

Otto Scharmer, a student and now colleague of Peter Senge, proposes the
practice of Theory U8 in learning to share wisdom and share meaning. Theory
U’s first two steps are as follows:

1. CO-INITIATING: Build Common Intent - stop and listen to others and to

what life calls you to do.
2. CO-SENSING: Observe, Observe, Observe - go to the places of most
potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open.

Finally, Don Michael proposes the age-old practice of story-telling to facilitate

the sharing of meaning:

7
Bill Sharpe, op. cit.
8
C. Otto Scharmer, Theory U: Leading from the Future as it Emerges, 2007
“All worthy stories are first and foremost occasions, mirrors and contexts for
learning about self by drawing one both inwards and outwards, by expanding
one's sense of the plausible. By learning about self one learns about others,
for one always sees others through oneself. Thoughts about the future, by
the very expansion of context they provide, offer their audience a larger
mirror for viewing themselves, a larger mirror, then for viewing the world and
their part in it...”9

There he tells us that we learn from others’ stories but that we also learn from
our own. And on that basis – the idea that telling a story helps us to
understand and apply our own wisdom and helps us to share it with others –
Triarchy developed On Q. Part game, part ice-breaker, part conversation-
provoker, part story-extractor, it was designed as a rich way of sharing
meaning at work, at home, between friends or with total strangers.

You can find out more about On Q here.

Oh, and rhizomes? Well, they’re a reminder that we’re not sharing meaning
and experience up and down a family tree or an organisational chart but
across, between, among, via foldings and multiplicities and complexities, so
that we soon lose any sense of who’s teaching and who’s learning. And talking
of foldings, the fold is the metaphor chosen by Jay Ogilvy10 to represent a
better way of thinking around problems to recognise their implicit complexity
and uncertainties.

Michelle Smith
June 2011

9
Don Michael, “Forecasting: The myth of control” in Strategy & Leadership, 1986, Vol. 14,3
10
James Ogilvy, Facing the Fold, 2010, Triarchy Press