Woah, stumbled across this as I Googled "languaging" Mostly just skimmed it. I'm looking forward to sitting down with it soon.
Languaging Sin.. the Compellingness Of
- posted by Jor @ 4:59 PM -

 
I found the source for the paper Todd Hunter was reading on Leadership.

Center for Creative Leadership Making Common Sense: Leadership As Meaning-Making in a Community of Practice
- posted by Jor @ 11:37 PM -

 

I want to make sure that I give credit to my teacher Toby Hecht (and his teacher Fernando Flores) for the philosophical and pragmatic thinking which he's taught me. The distinctions of Meaning, Relevance, and Leadership are from him. He's been teaching it as fundamental education for business professionals, but the same understanding of human cognition has helped me to think about the fundamental design of the human relationships around me, whether its family, community, church, friendships, business, or play.

For instance, Todd Hunter has been reflecting on leadership, servant leadership and following Jesus' example of serving others. I appreciate him for bringing those up for me to reflect on as well. In the discourse I've been studying, leadership is an offer of help made to people. This offer of help produces for those people an opportunity to produce a desired future situation, avoid an anticipated threat, or fulfill an obligation. In order to accept the offer of leadership, the followers must accept the leaders assessments and fulfill his requests. The "authority" of this kind of leader is not positional, its transactional. Jesus says, "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men". He expects His followers to accept his assessments: "Blessed are the poor..." etc., and fulfill his requests, "This command I give to you: love one another." etc. He promises a future satisfactory situation: "If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed." etc.

Then leadership is an offer, not a position. It depends on the leader's ability to produce the future situation--if the followers follow. It will only show up as valuable to the followers if they believe the leader can produce the situation (with their cooperation), and if the followers value the future situation offered. "Today you will be with me in paradise." Sounds like a powerful leadership offer to me.

So who is the greatest servant? Isn't it the one who performs the greatest service? The one who helps you get into the best situations? Is this merely a humility contest? From a pragmatic view, I could care less how much someone abases themselves. It strikes me as phony, and irrelevant. Can this guy take me where I want to go? Somewhere I want to get that I can't get on my own? That's a powerful service to me. I think it was C.S. Lewis who said that humility is the ability to have the same appreciation for a beautiful painting whether or not you painted it. Leaders need to be aware of the offers God has enabled them to make, and how their offers are listened to. Leadership is not a 'thing' which you are, or are not. It's an assessment made by people who either accept or decline your leadership offers. As you fulfill on those offers and produce the situations you promise, people will trust you, and be more willing to accept further leadership offers.

People are looking for help. They are looking for narratives for their future. They are helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. An offer of a powerful narrative is a valuable offer. It's leadership. I think that is a powerful narrative for servant leadership.

In business, this model of leadership depends on the leaders competence to produce the future situation. I'm still working on how this relates to domains where we are called to rely on God's power, not our own. When Paul writes to Timothy, he gives very practical guidance. It's not all mantles and mysteries. And yet we are told to that without God, we can do nothing. I could use help on this.
- posted by Jor @ 10:05 PM -

 
I’ve been reading more post-modern blogs (I think). The questions that keep coming up for me are: Does modernity have to be wrong for postmodernism to be right? And isn’t that kind of dualism a modern notion? I keep stumbling on postmodern rants against modernism. There’s still a lot of modern people who will be born again in modern churches, or as a result of these modern churches’ actions (even their programs!).


I’m interested in meaning and relevance. These only exist against a background of concerns. They will only exist in someones language. Maybe it’s mine, maybe it’s yours, maybe it’s God’s. But if there isn’t language, then it doesn’t exist for humans. Maybe it’s not spoken language, maybe it’s some internal language, maybe it’s body language.


I use the word “Meaning” as the intersection of practices and concerns. There are meaningless practices: blowing out a candle on our birthday cakes, the tooth fairy, eating turkey at Thanksgiving, telling children that Santa brings them presents. These are meaningless when no one knows for the sake of what we are doing them. We don’t know what concern, if not taken care of by this practice will produce a breakdown in our future which we want to avoid. And adding a relevant narrative (or story) is all it takes to produce meaning: blowing out the candle to represent dying to self, comforting a small child with the interpretation that losing a tooth will be rewarded instead of leaving him with the scary story that his face is falling out, using Santa to lay the groundwork for the story of a father-like figure who loves us and will produce a good future for us and who significantly works through people in our lives.


I use the word “Relevance” as an assessment of relationship to some future situation I am committed to producing. Unless it has something to do with my future, it is irrelevant to me. Knowing that my car’s brakes will work is relevant to me, knowing what composite material they are made of is not, because it doesn’t allow me to take any effective action, unless I happen to be mechanically competent enough to make use of this information.


And for Jon and Dave, who are interested in the distinction that they’ve heard me use: “languaging”, I’ll give it to you from the source. Languaging is: “Linguistic coordination of linguistic coordinations, a domain of descriptions of descriptions.” Yea, I know, it sounds like gibberish. But bear with me. This is from the book by Maturana and Varela, “The Tree of Knowledge” it is a biological study of human cognition. My understanding of this is that languaging is different than communication because fundamentally communication is evident when you can observe some coordinated action between the communicators. All sorts of animals communicate. Humans (and the One in who’s image we are made) can talk about how we are talking about something. We produce distinctions for each other (just as I am now producing the distinction “languaging” for you, gentle reader). Humans can talk about what is “modern” and what is “post-modern”, and why the distinction is meaningful.


The real juice here is that languaging is how humans produce existence for themselves and each other. It is obvious that humans do not perceive truth directly, that is, we almost always have some mediating sense which perturbs our nervous system (touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing). Then we make an interpretation, and that interpretation is always made in language (sharp, sweet, red, fragrant, melodius). This language is learned from the recurrent contact we have with the culture we grow up in. Babies do not grow up in WASP families spontaneously speaking Hebrew. We learn our language (and all that that controls) from our culture. There’s an amazing amount of power for designing meaningful practices if you can learn this. I highly recommend the book to anyone with the commitment and open-mindedness to study it. One tidbit to lure the dubious: the author is laying the groundwork for a definition of “love” based on human biology. And you won’t get it unless you read the book from the beginning. (Of course everyone just told themselves they could. And of course, you’re right. You’re special. Didn’t Barney say so?)


My point is that all of this is learned behavior, learned from the culture you are born into. You didn’t pick it. And the lesson for me is that people who grew up in a modern culture are exploring post-modernism. As such, we always have assessments of whether something is modern or not. And we always are assessing whether a current modern practice or narrative is still relevant in our current situation and the future we want to live in, or if we can invent a better one.


In inventing new practices, the knowledge of languaging opens up a power of designing our languaging, improving our skill with it, in order to produce more powerful communications, that is, more powerful coordinations of action, more powerful communities, more powerful relationships, to produce the future that we say is important to us. And ultimately to cooperate in producing the future God says is important. "Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."


+++God help us to better understand one another, to better love one another.+++

- posted by Jor @ 12:24 AM -