Underneath the Labels…Billions of Stories…
Words can be powerful or ineffectual. They can be strung together in unlimited combinations. They can stand alone and become loaded with meaning. What we say and how we say it is open to interpretation.
Living between worlds, we’re also living between words.
All the more reason to be mindful of our words and their effect — their potency, inadequacy and limitations.
The mind is a terrible thing to waste. ~ Frederick D. Patterson
The mind and so much more is going to waste…
…literally, psychologically, ecologically, societally and metaphorically…
So much untapped humanness capability and creativity…and so much that is extracted, exploited, used up and discarded…
Does the perception of mindset set us up to set our minds, when we potentially have way more fluidity and capacity to learn and develop, individually and collectively — widening and deepening pathways for co-intelligence?
What will engender a deeper understanding of the underlying mental models we carry around?
“Mental models are deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. Very often, we are not consciously aware of our mental models or the effects they have on our behavior” ~ Peter Senge
Imagine a world where we no longer believe or behave as if minds are rigidly set.
How might that create more enabling naturally adaptive conditions for shift?
In an effort to communicate, we name things. Naming provides a sort of shorthand…a way to classify, put things in buckets and draw lines around them.
The language or terms we use send signals. Those signals can produce the intended effect. They can draw attention to subjects and issues that warrant reflection, behaviour change, adaptation and action.
They can also be intentionally provocative.
Sometimes that is a very necessary and good thing.
A jolt or wake-up call that interrupts the lull of unawareness, disconnectedness or apathy, and points the flashlight, can disrupt, disturb and/or inspire us toward conscious choices about changes we might make in our lives, our work and/or our personal behaviour….necessary changes that reflect needs beyond our own immediate lives and fields of vision.
This naming and the labels we attach can also be misunderstood, misinterpreted or misconstrued. They can produce unintended effects.
Sometimes people attach meaning to the labels that conflate the issues. Kinda like combining and throwing related and tangential stuff into a big heap. When this happens communication can become more convoluted — making it even more difficult to disentangle overlapping issues and the assumptions being made.
Provocation can produce defensiveness, inflaming or shutting down communication. It can lead people to double down:
🔹 Inadvertently entrenching the very patterns they/we aim to shift
🔹 Holding onto control, resisting change and/or ever-more tightly clinging to the status quo
The labels can evoke a strong limbic reaction of fear, anger, frustration, disdain…They can exacerbate polarizing battle lines.
The labels can perpetuate limited left-brain leaning binary thinking, cognitive biases, and dysfunctional spirals of blame and distrust. The irony…often this cyclical pattern is no one person’s fault.
We are all messy humans, affected by messyhumanness… admittedly another shorthand term to embrace our paradoxically perfectly imperfect existential humanness — our human nature. All of us are works-in-progress. By accepting this, can we communicate and navigate with more humility?
Our need to be right, our sense of what is right and what is wrong, our right-ness and righteousness — are easily absorbed human patterns that so often precipitate and perpetuate difficulties and dilemmas. This is a recurring hydra-headed theme explored in these 3 articles:
🔹 Being right is [almost] never enough
🔹 Being ‘Roughly Right’ is ‘Always’ and is ‘Never’… ‘Good Enough’
There comes a point of diminishing returns. Whatever satisfaction is gained in the blaming game, assigning fault is besides the point in a zero sum game where we all ultimately lose.
Many of the models, policies, strategies and metrics that seemingly made institutions, organizations and careers successful in the past — will not carry us forward into a viable future — fit-for-humanity and a living planet.
The modern Industrial Age that seemingly achieved so much, is littering our world and lives with liabilities — literally and figuratively.
The risks and the stakes are multiplying across all domains of society, as we face increasingly degenerative, destabilizing complex and overlapping meta-poly-perma crises.
Sense making has become more difficult, and more important than ever.
Language is a clumsy tool…we often don’t mean the same things even as we use the same words.
We use words differently. We string them together in different ways to convey different perspectives and ideas.
Sometimes the thoughts on which our words are based are well-formed and crystal clear.
Sometimes we’re not entirely clear in our own minds and our words just tumble out. Saying things can help our ideas gain more shape…become clearer.
What we say and the way we say it can also confuse and obfuscate…failing to land or make a point…
Communication is dynamic. It’s an inside-out and an outside-in job…
We often have different conversations at the same time, talking over one another’s words and not even realizing that we are not truly engaging — listening, hearing and talking in ways that can build deeper understanding and lead to thoughtful positive action and learning.
And yet language is a vitally important way to communicate, to converse, to open up conversations…to work things through…to build (a threshold) of trust.
Many important systemic issues have acquired labels that can trigger people…emotionally and/or cognitively…consciously or unconsciously…depending on the context — current and historical — world views, lived experience, declared or hidden agendas/motivations, (ad)vantage points and the way people are or aren’t engaged etc, etc…
There are many underlying issues that often lead to yet more labels or words that become loaded, misconstrued or misused. Terms are often thrown around superficially. Those that gain popularity can be used to gain market advantage. This, in turn, gives rise to virtue signalling, and every shade of ____washing, distorting reality and further eroding of trust…
Words matter, and the contexts within which we use them matter a whole lot. What we mean or intend and how we can use language as bridges for understanding — matters.
Often we (habitually) hang in with familiar terms, even when they’ve outlived meaningful value or purpose…because they’re still the words commonly used. New terms and acronyms introduced and tossed around without deepening understanding can easily create new barriers or become the latest objectified shiny replacements. Sometimes new lingo or jargon fails to take root beyond limited thought leadership, communities of practice, academic or research circles.
Here are some labels listed randomly that regularly draw attention in the news, social media, conversations in communities and at work, in articles, research papers, online events and webinars:
🔹 Meta crises / poly crises / perma crises
🔹 Degrowth
🔹 Post growth
🔹 Green growth
🔹 Green energy
🔹 Economic growth
🔹 Regenerative economics
🔹 GDP
🔹 Capitalism
🔹 Post capitalism
🔹 Conscious capitalism
🔹 Socialism
🔹 Climate change and climate emergency
🔹 Impact
🔹 Eco anxiety
🔹 Climate doomerism
🔹 Global South/Global Majority and Global North
🔹 Neoliberalism
🔹 Conservatism
🔹 Colonialism
🔹 Decolonization
🔹 Woke
🔹 DEI
🔹 ESG
🔹 SDGs
🔹 Sustainability
🔹 Regeneration/Regenerative
🔹 IDGs
🔹 Civilization/societal collapse
🔹 Conspiracy theories
🔹 LGBTQ+
🔹 Neurodiversity
🔹 Disabled
So…what do we do?
🔹 Use more care when we define and label things?
🔹 Seek multiple sources to better understand the underlying issues from varying perspectives?
🔹 Try to be more aware of our flawed sense making cul-de-sacs — cognitive biases — since we all have them?
🔹 Set aside some of our labels or use them less?
🔹 Observe our own attachment to labels?
🔹 Become more mindful of the superficial use of terms that aren’t fully understood?
🔹 Observe our own reaction to labels?
🔹 Ask more open-ended questions that invite authentic inquiry and exploration?
🔹 Look for ways to open up real dialogue before we assume, judge and conclude?
As an example, often fuelling dysfunctional ping pong debate, we drilled down further on the degrowth label which touches on so many overlapping and underlying contentious and conflated issues and dilemmas. The driving economic model and the implications and interpretations of growth, green growth, post growth and abundance etc. are explored in this article, Holding the Tension of Less is More. Ideological, philosophical and political views and positions about capitalism, socialism and democracy easily become intertwined — making it increasingly difficult to navigate wisely and well.
We are social beings. We are all influenced and affected to some degree by the issues and perspectives that surround us and the algorithms that track and feed us. We also have spheres of influence that, to some degree, can affect the way others in our lives see things.
We can reframe and experiment with many terms as we shape, support and live into life-affirming shifts.
Sometimes we can redeem certain terms. Going back to their origins can help. Sometimes new words can help us break with dysfunctional patterns.
We can enrich the framing or reframing of the terms we use and choose — deepening understanding — inviting generative dialogue and shaping healthy re-patterning.
The ways we are influenced by others — matter. The ways we influence others — matter.
Our interdependence with one another and our living planet is vitally relevant on multiple levels:
🔹 Family, friends and co-workers
🔹 Local community or neighbourhood
🔹 Organizations and affiliations
🔹 Bioregionally
🔹 Globally
At a very basic individual human level everyone has a story — a storyline, many stories, old stories, evolving stories, untold stories and unfolding new stories.
Our stories can keep us stuck. Our stories can move us forward.
They shape our lives, define who we are and influence:
🔹 How we move through the world
🔹 What we see or filter
🔹 How we perceive people
🔹 How we interpret events in our lives, communities and around the world
🔹 Our primary concerns…the things we most care about
To truly understand the person and the lived experience that underlie the spoken or unspoken words — inviting, reaching and accessing the human stories — enable any and all of us to make (more) sense of our world and learn how to co-exist, co-operate, collaborate and navigate more wisely.
When we get underneath the labels, the clumsy words, the limitations of language — we can uncover more truths.
We don’t have to agree on everything.
This is not to avoid conflicts. Avoiding conflicts temporarily masks or defers problems. Trouble has a way of festering under the veneer of politeness. It often builds up, magnifies, manifests and resurfaces as even bigger issues at some point.
Healthy conflict takes us beneath the surface of labels.
We can see through a wider lens, taking care not to slip into auto-default knee-jerk assumptions and judgements.
It can deepen our understanding.
We can honour and celebrate our diversity.
Maybe then:
🔹 We begin to see more choices and ways to navigate through difficult dilemmas.
🔹 We can reframe and transcend some of our rigid politics that box us and others into intractable double binds.
🔹 We can discover our common ground.
🔹 The consequences of intolerance, divisiveness, dysfunctional polarization and othering become increasingly intolerable and are not tolerated.
🔹 We can work through our natural interdependence guided by a moral compass with responsibility and accountability — the foundational requirements for greater trust between and among us.
🔹 We can learn how to co-create viable alternative pathways that better address and serve our differing and mutual needs and interests.
Maybe…
Deep down, we all want and need to be heard, to feel like we matter, to have (more) agency and choice in our lives. We may be fond of certain labels. We may readily use them. They help us organize, source more information and sense-make. They might help us find thought leaders and like-minded allies…affinity groups or tribes with whom we align and bond.
There is a looming shadow side… The more we seek like-minded perspectives that reinforce what we already think and know…the greater risk posed by our biases and blind spots.
We don’t know what we don’t know. We may be unaware of all that is knowable and relevant. We also don’t know what might become knowable in the course of more open inquiry and how others’ knowledge and lived experience might open up pathways and produce breakthrough ‘aha’ moments. Faced with the reality of an uncertain non-ergodic world — we cannot afford the (unintended, real or perceived) arrogance of all-knowing airtight expert positions.
When the labels we use lead us to label people, for whatever reason, we also box ourselves in to narrower versions of who we are, who we might become and what we might more effectively accomplish. In essence, labelling can disable us from being our best selves — a disservice to us all. Labelling can unwittingly unleash monsters — human and systemic patterns — that keep us stuck.
As we engage more deeply, we can reawaken to our interconnectedness and interdependence. We (might) realize how much better life and work can become, when we let go of the things that matter less. When we embrace what matters most…what it means to be human in the fullest sense — everyone can potentially be uplifted.
Maybe…
When we widen our horizons and seek diverse viewpoints beyond our usual circles, we can learn and gain relevant insights. We can listen, pause and reflect…
Those insights may or may not change our perspectives. In any case, we are potentially better equipped to communicate more effectively, to feel and convey real empathy and possibly deeper compassion — which doesn’t equate with agreement. We might discern sound strategies on how we can (begin to) work together, (begin to) build trust, and make conscious choices on whether and how to invest (more) time and energy etc.
While we’re okay embracing some terms, we often resist labels defined by others and foisted upon us — even when those words and labels are well-intended or contain relevant information that warrant our attention and action, and especially when they directly affect us in ways that don’t feel right or fair. Those labels and the hard lines they represent can affect people in many ways that marginalize, minimize or overlook vitally important aspects.
🔹 What becomes possible when we excavate beneath some of the labels and let go of the rigidity suggested by mindset?
🔹 What new possibilities are uncovered when we become unshackled and more aware of underlying mental models — perceptions, beliefs and assumptions — that often unconsciously influence how we see things, the associations we make and how we behave?
As we engage in generative dialogue, excavating beneath the labels, we can gain deeper awareness and understanding, enhancing our mutual capacity for adaptability, learning and (co-)creative flow.
Underneath the labels are billions of stories that can bring us closer to our humanness, the experiences that make us who we are, simultaneously revealing our uniqueness while connecting us to one another.
When we set the labels aside and let the richness of the underlying stories and factors touch us, we might co-discover how to relate as co-invested citizens — planetary denizens — releasing an abundant flow of creative capacity and spirit that humanity so desperately needs.
Underneath the labels are billions of stories that got humanity to this point and billions more that can (maybe…potentially) help us individually and collectively gain (trans)contextual insights and shape a more life-affirming trajectory. Underneath the labels, life flows…
When we excavate beneath the labels and words, we can better appreciate our interconnectedness in ways that are more whole and wholesome. Engaging more deeply, we can see and understand more fully — bringing and inviting more of our whole selves and co-intelligence — life perspectives, wider nestedness and contexts — into the frame. We can learn, apply and adapt a pattern language that enables us to navigate with intentionality — more consciously and wisely within and across any of our (nested) life and work contexts. There are many ways to develop, nurture and integrate this kind of generative engagement into our ongoing efforts — (re)constituting wise commonsing into the fabric of society.
This is all the more important with AI nipping at our heels, further constricting our full potential if we aren’t being mindful about our evolution as humans — the ways we learn, make decisions, engage and much more. This article explores those implications, dangers and choices: A Wary Eye on AI and Why.
An overarching crisis of meaning — a consequence of disconnectedness from the essence of life — seems to feed the hole in the collective soul of society. So many are still trying (and competing) to plug this gaping hole with more brands, labels and stuff that insidiously continue to feed the mechanized cycles and gears.
Many of our labels, words and metaphors ring hollow…and so we endeavour to find new labels and words, new (re)combinations, new metaphors and symbols that might reach out wider and deeper — (re)igniting the imagination of our spirit and souls.
Underneath and beyond the labels, drawing from lived experience and ongoing learning…many are determined to find…restore…co-discover pathways that might help birth…nurture…uncover…recover…discover — wholeness — what’s natural…inclusive…diverse…sacred…adaptive...living…ever-present...
Living between worlds, we’re also living between words.
WOR(L)DS.
Our words captivate. Too often they also ensnare. We need our words to build bridges, invite ways of seeing with fresh eyes, and tap into our capacity for love-of-life and the livingness that matters above all else — where meaning resides.
*This article was updated April 2024, reflecting additional perspectives, links and ongoing action research, as we continue to observe, listen, assimilate, curate and adapt — a learning journey for us all.
Unstitution was birthed as a collective creative commons and nested ecosystem. We (co-)catalyze, support, convene and curate a wide range of context-based, place-sourced and themed initiatives where people from across sectors, disciplines, cultures, generations and walks-of-life work together on mission critical issues. From readiness through to regenerative progress — moving beyond polarization — is how we roll. The links embedded throughout our articles are a warm invitation to go a bit deeper, at any time. For more insights reflecting our ongoing journey, our suite of Unstitution articles are published on Medium. They portray a small sample of the ways we are adapting and contributing among ever-expanding commons-based communities and initiatives inspired and fuelled by citizens — perhaps better described as denizens — anywhere in the world — living into the principles and spirit that govern our collaborative work.
You can follow Unstitution and engage with us on LinkedIn. Many of our posts and perspectives also pop up under hashtags #messyhumanness and #wisdomwithteeth.
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