Meaning Guide

Putting meaning to work

It’s been a couple of months since I last posted, and over the summer a number of things have shifted for me personally and for the team at Visual Meaning.

Our vision as a company has always been the same:  To make the world a more meaningful place.  We do this by visualising complex ideas and systems so people can talk about them.

But recently we’ve started noticing that a lot of what we do has less to do with just picture-making and more to do with meaning-making in general.  For most of our clients, the pictures are great but the thing they really remember is the questions we ask, and the way we structure their answers and feed them back in a more meaningful way.

In principle, making meaning is a simple thing to do:  You figure out what people care about and represent it in a way that everyone understands.  But how do you do that in practice?

Kurt Lewin famously said that there’s “nothing so practical as a good theory”.  Well I’ve spent the last fifteen years doing the reverse – developing theory to explain good practice.  I’ve always had an outline understanding in my head of why what we do is a bit different – connecting with people’s experiences, matching mental models to perceptual schema and so on – but over the summer this has developed into a full-blown model that (it seems to me) just works.  And I think it has huge potential for practical application.

Meaning is a word that exists in many languages and draws together two everyday human experiences – the sense of “I get it” (the “meaning” in a dictionary) and the sense of “I care” (the “meaning” in a deep conversation).  Almost all the literature on meaning at work is purely about the latter sense – it’s just a synonym for “purpose” or “significance”.  But in my experience at least half the problem in most organisations is the former.  How can you care about your everyday work when you don’t really get what it’s for?  How can you feel passionate about your company’s strategy when it’s explained in a strange and abstract language that so many people are only pretending to be able to speak?  How can you find shared purpose with your team-mates when your manager can’t explain clearly what the team’s priorities are and why?

The model we’ve developed integrates both senses of meaning into a coherent whole.  It takes meaning out of the realm of the esoteric, and makes it a real, practical, learnable tool that can be used to make things happen.  Instead of talking about meaning at work, we’re going to be talking about putting meaning to work.

I’m really excited about this!

What this means in practice is that from now on the visual thinking side of this blog will become a subset of the overall subject matter.  And just to be clear, this isn’t because I don’t think visual thinking is important.  I run a visual thinking consultancy!  I still think visual language is the great unwrapped gift for mankind … half of our brain’s resources are spent on visual processing, so it’s crazy that this skill is so woefully under-developed and under-taught.

But it’s not the whole story.

And so, starting next month, this blog is going to be rebranded as www.meaning.guide.  And that’s what it’s going to be:  A user’s guide to meaning.  An exploration of how you can use meaning as an effective tool to build cohesion in your team, make working life more puposeful, communicate more effectively and draw people from different backgrounds together to get things done.  I hope you enjoy it.

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