How Transformative Social Systems help to recreate meaning

Starting point and overview

The work on Transformative Social Systems (TSS) by Laureen Golden and Pascale Mompoint-Gaillard (Pascale & Laureen @ TSS) provides a powerful lens for understanding the need and pathways for accelerating human learning and development to navigate today’s increasing complexities.

In this paper, I want to suggest a context for the TSS as laid out by Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden and add to it — like encountering a beautiful mosaic and feeling compelled to add to it in the spirit of “Yes! And…!”

For disclosure, the convergence between their and my approach isn’t a coincidence — their thinking has influenced my thinking deeply and for years. Naming and describing TSS made it possible for me to recognize the ecosystem of practices that support holistic, multi-modal, and transformative learning and understanding.

In my approach, I will add two areas to their mosaic which are both part of a bigger body of work I’m exploring under the working title Wiser Organizations.

• Meaning as a side-product of transformative learning can serve as an incentive for building more resilience.
• Relevance and agency, supported by TSS and appropriate organizational structures, support an effective co-evolution of organizations and their ecosystem and reduce feelings of overwhelm.

Learn more about the Wiser Organizations work on the page: https://wiserorganizations.org. My bio is below this article.

The problem: complexity gap

Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden look at TSS in the context of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) and the complexity gap — the growing differential between the complexities around us and our capacity to deal with them.

This, of course, is not only an issue on a personal level but also for collective on all levels — teams, organizations, alliances, nations, and regions, as well as the planetary community.

In organizations, what this looks like is lots of overwhelm and confusion (often without being able to point to the source of confusion), disorientation, missed opportunity, reductionist focus on (questionable) metrics, flip-flopping between half-hearted self-organization and top-down directives in a haphazard attempt to gain ground under our feet.

The individuals don’t feel good either: there’s anxiety, disenfranchisement, and a loss of purpose or meaning.

At the same time, the planet is in trouble because of overshoot, mass extinction and climate changes. It’s easy to see that organizations and individuals are overwhelmed, and the planet is also overwhelmed.

What’s up with all that overwhelm? And what do TSS have to do with it? I will argue that TSS can be part of the solution to overwhelm and that the framing of John Vervaeke in Awakening From the Meaning Crisis can enlighten how and why.

TSS and Meaning — Vervaeke’s work

Learning creates more possibilities. The more different frames and modalities we can hold, the more likely it is that we can grasp new understandings and transform ourselves to become a person with new eyes to see (and a bigger heart to sense, a better toolset to get a grasp on needed actions). The more possibilities we have access to, the better we can respond. This is a fundamental skill for navigating complexity.

So far, so good. But there’s more! If we connect the work of the TSS with cognitive scientist John Vervaeke’s work, we can even reconnect to our sense of meaning and find better ways of dealing with our overwhelm.

In his work on the Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, Vervaeke analyzes the cognitive styles and practices to foster wisdom. Wisdom is different from amassing information because it needs to include transformation. Wisdom, he says, is the ability to learn and unlearn, become someone else and see outside of our frames and seeing with “new eyes.” By doing so with different angles and mechanisms, we can reduce the self-deceptions we habitually fall prey to. Wisdom, he says, means to continuously become less foolish.

Vervaeke proposes that it’s wisdom practices that support that journey. He mentions a host of practices like meditation, dialogue practices, shamanic practices, psychedelics and others. I propose that those wisdom practices in Vervaeke’s work are equivalent to TSS in Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden.

Both emphasize that

• Learning is non-linear. There’s not one set of practices that will guarantee this or that insight.
• Learning is transformational.
• Learning is multimodal (more-than-propositional, i.e. it can be thought and put into words like a statement)
• Learning is deeply relational.

While TSS emphasize collective practices, Vervaeke’s focus is more on individually based practices but the lines blur between the collectiveness of practices, and between individuals and collectives — and they are constituted by each other.

Vervaeke mentions that every cognitive style (and therefore every practice) comes with a certain bias. What is needed is a combination (synchronously or over time) to mitigate those effects. Maybe Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden make a similar observation when they say that there are constellations of TSS that relate to each other. It would be interesting to examine the biases of TSS more systematically and observe whether typical combinations build more robust “stacks” that counterbalance their individual biases.

The comparison between Vervaeke’s wisdom practices and TSS in Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden is not only affirming, Vervaeke also brings in two other elements that can positively contribute to the mission of Mompoint-Gaillard/Golden and improve the capacity of organizations to deal with the complexity gap: meaning and relevance.

Meaning

To Vervaeke, the path to wisdom is, at the same time, the path to meaning.¹

¹Meaningfulness is more than just purpose! Purpose is aspirational (and as such, further distant) while meaning is experienced in day-to-day interactions with colleagues, customers, performing and mastering tasks and “interacting” with ourselves. Meaning is what’s between us, penetrating our selves, our relationships and our actions. It’s not something that can be expressed in words because it is inherently non-propositional, multi-faceted and polycentric.

Vervaeke lays out that the same cognitive and psychological mechanisms that allow wisdom are also the mechanisms that create meaning.

He explores meaning as something that is not merely about achieving happiness or contentment but rather involves a deep sense of being connected in a valuable way to oneself, others, and the world. As such, meaning is deeply intertwined with the concept of wisdom and the notion of self-transcendence.

Meaning is not just out there waiting to be discovered, but it is created in our relationships, and in our learning. In my own words, meaning is in all the connections between us and the world around us. Vervaeke shows that most cognitive processes that contribute to finding things meaningful are not in propositional thinking but they are sub-propositional. Meaning is in comforting a child, jumping into a cold stream, in deep conversation, in a new insight, a new perspective. Words, on the other hand, may contribute to meaning but are also prone to deconstructing meaning. (A simple example is that we can feel someone’s love, but minds are really good at questioning whether they really meant it, deconstructing our sense of mattering.) So propositional thinking is a gamble — it can support meaning but also disintegrate it.

TSS can add to meaningfulness because they help us connect more deeply with ourselves and each other. They are often non-propositional or at least include non-propositional parts like sensing (like Theory U), connecting empathetically (like NVC), learning through relationships and feedback (many TSS), or tapping into our sense of aspiration.

This is worth considering for the proponents of TSS because it adds to the discussion and can serve as an incentive (a third attractor, in Schmachtenberger’s words) for transformative learning. If the same practices that help us be resilient, wise and resourceful are the ones that create meaning for the people involved, then there’s a positive reward loop to be uncovered that can support the learning path.

Just like a toddler or child seems to enjoy exactly the activities and games that she needs to make a developmental leap, meaning is the reward for the effort it takes to learn. Maybe meaningfulness is simply the adult version of a child's joy when practicing a new skill.

That means it might benefit proponents of TSS to center meaningfulness in how they talk about and design learning paths for those practices. A simple example is that sometimes practitioners of sociocracy tell me that the most striking benefit of rounds in meetings (the practice of speaking one by one until everyone has spoken once) is that meetings feel more connected and relationships more meaningful. People feel nourished. How can these TSS be taught so people experience that meaningfulness early on, and it might whet their appetite for more practice to bridge over some of the early bumps of learning a new skill?

Relevance

Wisdom is not just knowing a lot or having a lot of experience; someone can be very smart or experienced and yet not wise. It’s also not about being “good.” What “good” means changes depending on the context, for example we might need to prioritize honesty in one context, and kindness in another. So ironically, if we defined wisdom as being good, one would need be wise to know which one to prioritize, which means one would need to be wise to know how to be wise — a circular and unhelpful definition. So it’s not that virtues in an absolute form “make” us wise but that having more wisdom helps prioritize virtues effectively in a given situation. Wisdom is knowing what matters in what context.

To Vervaeke, all the processes that help us determine what’s relevant — cognitive processes along with sensation, feelings, intuition, values, frames help us have appropriate relationships with the world. If we can’t choose what’s relevant then all the information around us will paralyze us. Relevance Realization helps us select, align with our intentions, adapt, grow, and connect with others. It’s a helpful, adaptive, dynamic, and caring constraint.

He poses that the same mechanisms that create meaning help us know what’s relevant. This means that following this article, TSS help increase our capacity to know what’s relevant. And that’s a big deal if we consider that overwhelm is a lack of capacity to filter what’s relevant.

Here’s how Vervaeke puts it:

“Wisdom is an ecology of psychotechnologies and cognitive styles that dynamically (i.e. reciprocally) constrain and optimize each other such that there is an overall enhancement of relevance realization — relevance realization within inference, insight & intuition, internalization, understanding & gnosis, transformation, and aspiration.”

(John Vervaeke, Awakening From the Meaning Crisis)

Agency

Mastering different TSS now offers a collective “new eyes” and new modes. For example, if there’s an issue in the organization, groups in the organization can look at the issue “with a Theory U lens” or go about solving it sociocratically, or NVC-ly. With more options, the chances of grasping and transforming the issue increase. The more We (as a collective) understand Ourselves, the more effectively we can act because what we understand about ourselves and the world around us gives us a better handle on what’s relevant. Knowing what’s relevant makes us more capable of acting.

Relevance is highly dependent on the context. That means understanding what’s relevant requires familiarity with the context. For organizations, that means they need to be directly connected to their environment — whoever sits in an ivory tower or a marble board room will not understand the needs on the ground. That’s why TSS need to include patterns and practices that increase the connection between those serving and those served in organizations, like agile, Design Thinking or decentralized decision-making (like in sociocracy and Holacracy) where workers can make local decisions depending on immediate needs.

Taken even further, we need to ask ourselves what organizational structures are apt to support direct experience and flexibility for an organization to be shaped — to co-evolve — with its environment, like a fox with its habitat. Co-evolution requires a willingness to be changed, and acknowledges the power we have in shaping the world around us.

And that’s where all threads connect: if we fit into a context because we are intricately familiar and participants in a context, our work will feel meaningful, and we will have a good sense of what matters.

The absurdity of detached behavior of large corporations, the lack of sensitivity of what kinds of products and services matter in a world running in overshoot mode, the sense of utter meaninglessness and our overwhelm and lack of perceived agency — they might all be connected.

TSS are one building block to increase our capacity, build our resilience, manage our overwhelm, and re-create meaning between us.

Attunement

Our relevance realization mechanisms, as described by Vervaeke, happen on an individual basis. Relevance realization includes intuition, mental frames, and many other propositional and sub-propositional cognitive processes.

I am curious about how to transfer relevance realization to a collective level. In order to agree on what’s relevant, it helps to have shared experiences, mental models, intuition, intentions, and aspirations. How can we collectivize that?

I argue that a prerequisite of collective relevance realization is attunement — a way to “be on the same page” and have a shared reality, somewhat shared sense-making and share an outlook on the collective future, including each other’s emotional spaces and mental frames. For example, a TSS including a shared visioning exercise or ritualized sensing session might build that shared sense.

The more attuned we are, the less we have to make explicit, making it possible to retain the holistic, multi-modal and rich, context-connected quality of information (propositional and non-propositional) as a group or organization. Among the TSS, there are practices that lend themselves to holding complex information collectively without “flattening” it into propositional one-pagers, like rituals or constellation work, that let us grasp a lot of ineffable information quickly. In my work in Wiser Organizations, I am therefore most interested in those TSS that apply to that level and carry more information than propositional information. This is the current growing edge of my work as it connects to exploring TSS.

Call to action

Knowing what I know about what’s relevant in the context of overwhelm, disenfranchisement and the possible contribution of TSS to outbalance those negative effects, I want to encourage both leaders and practitioners of TSS to cohere and integrate the work of spreading and improving TSS.

These connections have to be both horizontal and vertical:

• Those working on different TSS are part of the same bigger movement. Instead of competing, we need to nourish and support practitioner interest in learning about adjacent other TSS.
• Those working on different levels (individual, organizational, systems) are part of the same bigger movement. Only a multi-point change effort will overcome the resistance in the system; all our work is needed and points into the same direction.

All TSS need to support more literacy and ease of learning of all TSS in the commons. All proponents of TSS need to work to make learning and cross-connection of TSS easier.

References

• Vervaeke, J. 2019. Awakening From the Meaning Crises (YouTube playlist): https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLND1JCRq8Vuh3f0P5qjrSdb5eC1ZfZwWJ
• Mompoint, P. & Golden, L., 2023. Introducing Transformative Social Systems. Medium pub. https://medium.com/@transformativesocialsystems/introducing-transformative-social-systems-tss-7ee5bdc6f274
• Schmachtenberger, D., 2022 (with Rebel Wisdom). In Search of the Third Attractor Part 1. https://consilienceproject.org/media/daniel-schmachtenberger-in-search-of-the-third-attractor-part-1/

Author bio

Ted is an advocate, trainer and consultant for self-governance. His main focus is sociocracy. After his PhD in linguistics and work in Academia, he co-founded the membership organization Sociocracy For All in 2016 which has grown to 250 members with several international and topic-focused departments and action teams. Ted spends his days consulting with mission-driven organizations, teaching and deeply immersed in the work as a member within Sociocracy For All. Ted identifies as a transgender man; he has 5 children between 10 and 20. A German citizen, he has lived in Massachusetts since 2010. He is (co)-author of three books on self-governance, Many Voices One Song (2018), Who Decides Who Decides (2021), and Collective Power (2023) and working on a book on the interface between governance and wisdom.

Reach me under info@wiserorganizations.org or ted@sociocracyforall.org