Constructing Meaning

I try to spend a few hours at the library every 3-4 months to skim several periodicals I'm interested in. Since I've let my Harvard Business Review subscription lapse, it's on the list.

A couple of HBR articles I ran across last week in my latest skimming prompted this post (these articles are from over a year ago, since I've been fairly busy the past 18-24 months).

The first is from May 2007 ("Inner Work Life", Amabile & Kramer). The authors divide the "inner life" into Perceptions, Emotions, and Motivation. Most of my interest has been in the arena of perceptions. This article reminded me that I probably tend to underappreciate the centrality of emotions and motivation. I suppose I'm no different from most folks in that I assume most people are more like me than they really are. Those differences may be more difficult to understand and bridge when the differences are grounded mostly in emotions and/or motivation...perhaps because emotions and motivation tend to be deeply entwined with key personal narratives and the mystical/mythical terrain of innate personality structure.

I suppose that I need to be more aware of the potential danger and difficulty of treading on emotive/motivational issues. We've all seen managers and organizations that were amazingly tone-deaf on some issue. However, this landscape also offers tremendous opportunity (i.e., the intense devotion of some Apple users). See the article for an in-depth discussion.

The second article is "Promise-Based Management" (Sull & Spinosa) from April 2007. It has a box entitled "A Primer on Speech Act Theory" which discusses how speech and actions are related. My initial reaction was to recall Weick's "how can I know what I mean until I see what I say?"...a question that calls attention to the degree to which we talk/act ourselves into meaning. This topic has a way of generating lots of heat w/ little light, so I'll limit myself to a few comments:

• We probably expect (and often demand) more agreement than is required for coherent decisions and action. Since this blog is not about philosophy/religion, I'll just note in passing that we seem to have an innate need for this that often results in unnecessary conflict...though separating this from some folk's apparent love of conflict may be difficult... :-)
• The descriptive-active spectrum of statements is mentioned. I'm not sure what to make of this. While descriptive statements may be purely aesthetic, even they seem to often have strong undercurrents of action. I guess I'm wondering if even the purest of descriptive statements aren't usually grounded in some sort of telos...ok, enough philosophy.
• Over the past few centuries there's been a whipsawing between the philosophical poles of "it's all objective & knowable" and "it's all subjective and unknowable" that continues to reverberate. Most people tend to act (whether they admit it) as if certain things are objective, knowable, and true. However, most of us probably spend more time arguing about "what's real" than is really needed (again, see the first bullet).

In a late modern (or postmodern) age, we perhaps underappreciate the power of words to create action. This article helps remind us of that linkage.