Coordination

Someone posted this on one of my online communities recently. Most people “get it” after watching a few of the transitions — and I think it’s a gorgeous illustration of a key principle in communication theory, called polysemy. I’ve posted about this a little bit before — the notion that we think words describe concrete “real” things, but in fact meaning is always understood in flash seconds by context, and no two people ever have the same understanding of the word, even when the meaning is closely enough agreed on. I might talk about my apple, for example, and you wouldn’t know if I was talking about fruit or my computer except from what I said before and after. And even if you knew I was talking about a crispy gala eating apple, the meaning you make of that apple is different from mine (I have sense-memory of fall, flavour bursts, doughnuts and apple cider from Colisanti’s as a kid that flicks against the word apple; your equivalent might be a mealy tasteless red delicious bruised in your Peter Pan lunchbox).

I wrote a post last week that I password protected because I was a little afraid that it exposed too much about the participants in my research. But one of the core elements was about how two people in an intimate relationship can live the same story and have two completely different experiences. The focus was a person with stroke and a spouse who were making very different meaning of their post-stroke life, both true. This kind of multiplicity just reminds me over and over that all of our lives are attempts to coordinate meaning, to arrive at enough shared coherence that we move forward without stumbling, keep stepping into something that makes enough sense for both/all of us that we don’t falter.

Sometimes our different apples are just fine, benign, or abut one another in a playful and generative way. And sometimes we dig our feet in about which apple is the one we’re talking about, our own versions of the apple so real that the notion of anyone else’s is an affront.

I was thinking about this vis a vis a couple of relationship tussles I had with people in the past week or so. One friend attached meaning to an incident a few months ago that was very different than mine; it wasn’t enough for her that I could say that I understood her perspective but disagreed with it — she needed me to agree. This really made me think hard about what we’re doing when we talk about “resolution,” and what’s required to coordinate. In the work I do in organizations and systems, we talk about how arguing over the meaning of something in the past, or diagnosing a problem, isn’t usually helpful — what needs to happen is to talk about what we want to create as we move forward.

In the other relational tug over perspective I had this week, that’s what we did. And in that, we found much more shared meaning than we ever had before, a much more powerful relationship. But with the other friend, we couldn’t resolve it, and decided that moving forward meant a much less close kind of connection. And in really trying to reflect on why this was, I suspect that there’s something there about sufficient appreciation of a different perspective even without the disagreement. In the situation where we found a path forward, I understood more fully the vulnerability and ache behind the disagreement — on both our parts. In the other, I was just impatient, couldn’t find my way to that appreciation. Maybe because I was less trusting that she could do the same for me.

Coordination is a complicated thing. Our traditional models are all about trying to get at “shared understanding” — as though there is an actual understanding to get at. But it’s so much more complex than that — and as I reflect on it, I see that in relationally disruptive events, the “misunderstanding” and how it unfolds becomes the platform from which we can try to fumble forward — or something where we recognize that our attempts to co-create will rarely feel truly coherent. And it’s a very tough thing to make that kind of conscious decision — partly, for me, because I believe (and want to believe) so deeply that the fluidity of meaning affords us so many possibilities for re-creating. Deciding that this re-creation is a dead end is very hard for me to swallow.