About Us

We are a networked community of scholars and practitioners affiliated with the Institute for Social Innovation at Fielding Graduate University. The Project itself was developed in collaboration among Barnett and Kim Pearce, Pearce Associates and Public Dialogue Consortium; Don and Paige Marrs, Barrington Sky Consulting and Coaching; Ilene Wasserman, ICW Consulting Group; and Katrina Rogers, Director, Institute for Social Innovation. For information about this Project, contact Katrina Rogers.

For more information, follow the links below:




How this project developed:

Our story begins with a group of scholar-practitioners in Fielding Graduate University working with the theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM). We felt the tension between

  1. Our sense that these ideas and practices have great power in transforming patterns of communication and, in so doing, transforming lives and institutions;
  2. Our perception that our society desperately needs such transformative work;
  3. Our realization that Fielding is the leading doctoral-level center of research and practice using CMM; and
  4. Our awareness that there are hundreds of other groups around the world doing exciting work with similar ideas and objectives.

At the same time, the Institute for Social Innovation (ISI) was formed at Fielding with the purpose of supporting the creation of social capital by strengthening the capacity of individuals and organizations to address societal problems.

There was tremendous interest in developing a sustainable project and community that would:

  1. Promote the development of the theory and practice of transforming communication, with the realization that transformed patterns of communication enable individuals and organizations to address societal problems
  2. Promote the development of the theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning
  3. Provide a place for theorists and practitioners to share information, engage in conversation, and offer their services to interested clients.
  4. Nearly 100 members of the Fielding community participated in the first organizational meeting. The group that accepted the responsibility for channelling their energies and ideas into the Project include: Katrina Rogers, Barnett Pearce, Ilene Wasserman, Paige Marrs, Don Marrs, and Kim Pearce.


Why we think it is important

It’s obvious that we are living in turbulent, confusing times. In one way of telling the story, we are being pulled, simultaneously, in three directions. Call these vectors backward, forward and upward.

The “backward” vector refers to all of those attempts to find guidance for the future or meaning for the present in documents or habits of the heart from the past. For many, the inspirational poetry of the medieval Muslim poet Rumi reminds us of eternal verities; for others, the elevated language of the King James Version of the Bible provides the scaffold for faith and worship. But in addition, there are regressions to earlier and less desirable habits of the heart. Who would have thought that, in the United States of America, with its foundational commitments to “inalienable” human rights, we would be discussing whether or not the Chief Executive has the right to torture enemy combatants? Or that the Twenty-first century would begin with what many see as (yet another) religious war? These are instances of the pull “backward.”

The “forward” vector refers to all of those attempts to produce something “new.” It is the embodiment of the value of “progress” in which “new” is a synonym for “good.” Technology is one important driver of this vector. Each year, new products are introduced to make our lives better, faster, and easier…but next year, those same products are obsolete, replaced with newer products that make our lives even better, faster, and easier.

The “upward” vector has a different sense of “better” than does the “forward.” The difference is captured in the old joke about the pilot who announces that he has good news and bad news. The good news is that we have a tail wind and are making excellent speed. The bad news is that we are hopelessly lost and don’t know where we are going. The upward vector is not just interested in progress but in progress that is systemic and sustainable.

Here’s another way of understanding these three vectors. A homeless man is on the street, begging for food. The statistically most common way in which this situation is handled is for the more affluent persons passing by to avoid eye-contact and continue on their way. But what if they want to help?

Clearly, we want something in addition to “forward” movement. In this case, giving a hungry man modern technology without also giving him a sense of environmental awareness or locating him within a network of environmental protection regulations and guidelines is a recipe for disaster. Let’s call the development of environmental awareness and the discipline to act responsibility a step “upward.”

Transforming communication matters because the “forward” and “backward” pulls are very strong in contemporary society and it is vitally important that the “upward” pull is equivalently strong. The social technologies of transforming communication are an important part of the “upward” vector.

If you think that the patterns of communication that affect you are functioning quite well enough, then the TCP isn’t for you.

Yet. ☺

But if you find yourself having to make difficult choices, or locked into patterns of communication that don’t allow you to express your best self, or participating in patterns of communication that are dangerous or destructive, then you are like millions of people who have given conscious thought to ways of changing the communicative environment in which they live.

The TCP takes that a step further. In addition to developing social technologies for changing communication patterns, we want to transform them.

It’s easier to “show” what transformation means than to describe it.

Some changes just re-arrange things. For example:

We are not particularly interested in these kinds of changes. Instead, we are interested in:

The good news is that we are living in a time of unprecedented discovery and development. Although you won’t read much about this in the newspapers, thousands of people around the world have become creative artists of transformation and are applying their knowledge to help individuals, families, teams, organizations, cities and nations transform the patterns of communication in which they do their tasks. This is one of the most creative moments in human history. Never before have we known so much about how to transform communication processes. And never before have we known so well the consequences of those transformations. The most exciting discovery is that when we transform the patterns of communication in which we engage, those patterns of communication transform us, individually and collectively.

But what does “transformation” mean? Let’s say that you find yourself at what systems theorists call a “bifurcation point.” If you act “this” way, you set in motion a sequence of actions and responses that lead you into one form of life; but if you act “that” way, you set in motion a different set of actions and responses and, ultimately, a different form of life.

You may seek help in deciding how to act in such situations. You may take advantage of the examples set by successful people, reflect on traditional values, or engage in scenario building…and the result may be to change your actions so that you “win” this time, or manage to fire the trouble-maker, or increase your market-share.

Now let’s assume that you’ve encountered such situations several times and you get a sense of “been there, done that, got the t-shirt.” This time you have a larger perspective; instead of looking only at the action you may choose, you see yourself as performing the action and living in the consequence of it. You see that you become that which you do. This is a transforming insight. The “you” who perceives the world in this way isn’t the same as the “you” who looked only at your actions and their effects. In Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan’s terms, the universe has crashed through the perfectly functional epistemology that has “deluded” you into thinking that you “have grasped reality as it actually is” and transformed it into a “qualitatively more complex psychological, mental, and spiritual landscape.”

But you are not finished yet! You have a series of other experiences in which you realize that the situations in which you live and work are co-constructed with other people, who themselves are acting and living in the consequence of their actions. You can affect the situations in which you live by your choices, but you cannot control them. Perhaps it is a relief to discover that you deserve neither all the blame nor all the praise for them. They are contingent; constructed by the way your actions blend/build on/interface with the actions of other people. This is another transformation. Another epistemology has crashed, making room for the emergence of yet another, even more complex and satisfying.

But you are still not finished! Perhaps you use some sophisticated tools for describing and understanding co-constructed situations, and you begin to realize that other people are shaped by the same forces that shape you; and that the situations in which you are partly responsible for creating are themselves a powerful force in constructing you, your relationships, and the institutions in which you work and live. The distinctions between “I” and “it” begin to blur, replaced by a sense of reciprocal causality. This is yet another transformation that has implications for that which you consider good, beautiful and prudent.

Here’s just one example of what we are talking about. When you and the people around you have transformed the patterns of communication in which you are engaged, you find that your ethics have changed in a direction that we might call from an ethic of scarcity to an ethic of abundance. To simplify, an ethic of scarcity is based on the assumption that there’s not enough – food, water, respect, truth, love -- to go around and we have to get what we need by any means possible. This leads to very predictable and all too common patterns of communication. On the other hand, an ethic of abundance is based on the assumption that the things that are most important are renewable resources, and if we act appropriately, there will be more than enough for all of us. This ethic leads to equally predictable but less common patterns of communication that are better for all of us.

We’ve found that such transformations enable individuals to live richer and more satisfying lives. We’ve found that such transformations enable groups to accomplish more than they could before, with less stress and conflict. We’ve found that such transformations enable organizations to develop healthy climates in which to work and productive patterns of communication that foster creativity and community.

Although the term “social technology” is troublesome, we believe that they are knowable and learnable practices transforming communication. These practices enable us to intervene in dysfunctional patterns of communication, facilitate the development of preferred patterns of communication, and create the preconditions for preferred patterns of communication to occur in places where they otherwise would not. These ways of working are not mysterious. They include the arts of listening (in particular ways), asking questions (just the right question at just the right time and worded in just the right way), designing meetings, changing the type of language being used (for example, from “deficient” to “appreciative”), providing supports for naming and framing issues more productively, helping clients think of themselves and the situation they are in systemically. Most of the practitioners in the TCP use heuristics from the theory of the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) to help clients understand the patterns of communication in which they find themselves and to act wisely in them. We believe that if you get the pattern of communication “right,” then the best things will happen.



The ideas with which we work

The theory of the coordinated management of meaning (CMM) is the central (but not only) conceptual grounding of our work, and the work of the TCP includes the continued development of that theory.

CMM begins by taking what we call “the communication perspective.” Here is one way of describing that perspective.

Having directed our attention “at” communication, CMM suggests seeing communication “as” a two-sided process of making/managing meanings and coordinating actions.

Those working with these ideas have developed a variety of concepts and models that function as heuristics, helping us to understand and see opportunities for improving the patterns of communication in which we engage.

First articulated in 1976, CMM has continued to evolve. One way of describing its evolution is to see it as moving into a fourth phase.

For more information on CMM, see W. Barnett Pearce (2007) Making social worlds: A communication perspective. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, and the other documents in this Reading Room.