Relationship is Meaning
"Music is the space between the notes". Debussy
Introduction
Given my deep engagement with imagination and liminal space, working with AI might seem incongruous. In my coaching practice, I sit with individuals or groups in a session, where a story told in the right shape can change what they feel and know. In a new endeavor, I have used AI to explore and build a system that indexes passages of text by meaning based on relationships. Last Thursday, I set the two ways of working side by side for two hours in a collegial workshop kindly sponsored by the Schumacher Institute, which is what prompted this article.
They both have roots in meaning as a function of relationship.
The Same Principle in Three Fields
The same principle engages me from three directions, each independent of the others:
Firstly, in trance work, a suggestion only does something when its shape matches the situation it describes. The clearest case is glove anaesthesia: a suggestion of numbness that stops cleanly at the wrist, along a line no nerve actually follows. The nerves of the hand and forearm are arranged nothing like a glove. What the body takes up is the shape of the idea, overriding its own anatomy. The correspondence does the work, not the content of the story.
Secondly, Alfred Korzybski put it starkly: structure is the only content of knowledge. A map shares no substance with the ground — only arrangement. It is useful because the relationships between the marks on it mirror the relationships between things in the world. You may have had the moment, with a paper map in an unfamiliar city, when the streets on the page suddenly swing into line with the streets under your feet. That click is the relationships matching.
And thirdly, in systems thinking the same thing turns up as a rule of thumb. Donella Meadows found that changing the elements of a system does little, while changing the relationships between them can change everything. Fritjof Capra went further: a part, he said, is not a thing but a pattern in a web of relationships; the web is the unit, not the part. Picture a flock of starlings turning at dusk. No bird leads, and each is only tracking the handful nearest it. Ten thousand separate wingbeats power the turn, but that they turn together, as one shape, rather than scattering, is entirely in the relationships between them.
The Application in Groups
This translates to a group of people. A team can hold all the same facts and still be stuck, not because they disagree about the facts, but because the facts haven’t yet been arranged into a structure the group holds in common. The work is not getting agreement on content; it is finding that shared arrangement of the already shared elements.
A piano illustrates this nicely. Put the pedal down, strike one string, and every other string is free to vibrate as well, through the bridge and the soundboard and the air between them. What decides which strings vibrate is sympathetic resonance, and that has an arithmetic relationship: a string will sound when the note struck is a whole-number multiple of its own frequency, the octave above it, and a fifth above that again. And so strings that are not the same pitch as the single string that was struck will move – and move each other – readily if they are in that mathematical relationship. Shift the frequency of the struck string even slightly and all of those strings will sit there silent. The relationship has to be exact.
Which is an interesting way to look at what a group needs. Each person’s reading has to stand in clear relation to a structure all of them can reach; it does not have to be the same reading, which is neither achievable nor much use. Vague overlap will not do it. What travels between people is not the words; it is the relation the words stand in.
In Coaching Sessions
In a coaching session, what helps my clients change what they feel and know is the correspondence between the shape of a suggestion and the shape of a situation. In the software I’ve created, it is the correspondence between a user’s question and the passages in their uploaded document store that stand in the right relation to their query. Different material, same principle: meaning is in how things stand in relation to one another.
Take this seriously, and it changes how you listen. I stopped waiting for the decisive fact or the perfect phrase, and started listening for the shape that holds a set of things together. A story lands when its shape fits. A group finds its feet when it finds the arrangement it can share. An argument that would not resolve turns out to have been about the meaning of structure all along.
The melody is not in the notes but in the intervals between them. The meaning is in the relationship.
An Invitation
After Thursday, I wrote the whole thing up at length: the thinking behind the build, the mechanism, and the sources. If you’d like a copy, reply to me at mike@liminalcoaching.com, and I’ll send it.
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These are exquisite, light-carrying insights that resonate deeply with me Mike, thank you. As a part-time music teacher, I am always aware of my responsibility to help my students perceive the opportunities of what fine artists would call "negative space": the power in rests, articulated rhythms, unresolved chord progressions and imperfect cadences. Reading this reminded me to he more aware of such silent alchemy as it shows up in my daily life, too.