Co-Creating Social Worlds in Relationship with Others

ARC25 SIGHTLINES | Anthology of Reflexive Contributors

Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) originated as a theory of communication developed by Barnett Pearce and Vernon Cronen in the late 1970s as an alternative to the commonly accepted “transmission model” of communication (Pearce & Pearce, 2000). Since then, CMM has evolved into an important perspective and practice that foregrounds relationality as central to meaning-making, is increasingly applicable in everyday life, and remains rooted in a strong theoretical foundation.

Pearce (2004) explains that persons-in-conversation are both creating and being shaped by the social worlds they inhabit (p. 36), that is, seeing persons-in-conversation not as individuals exchanging information, but as participants co-constructing their shared realities (Jensen & Penman, 2018). To simplify, CMM posits that communication is a two-sided process involving the back-and-forth activity of coordinating our actions and making and managing meaning; persons co-construct social and environmental worlds through stories (told and untold), actions, and patterns of relating. While many systems perpetuate patterns that make individuals feel as though they are powerless, passive observers, CMM invites all of us to consider ourselves as curious, active participants capable of creating arcs of impact, which begin in our smallest social worlds and ripple exponentially and endlessly outward through our largest social worlds and systems.

I am not exaggerating when I say that my relationships, life, and perspectives have undergone a huge transformation due to the way I have been able to integrate CMM into my communication. Where I previously had an (admittedly maladaptive) lens coloured by perfectionism, control, and anxiety, I now have a lens coloured by improvisation, curiosity, relationality, and creativity. As I have continued to dig deeper into CMM, both personally and professionally, I have come to understand that most communication misses the fact that what we experience can be attributed to a lack of a communication perspective. I firmly believe that if more people had the language, tools, and skills to better articulate and participate in communicative meaning-making processes, then our world would change. It is impossible to overstate the importance of taking a communication perspective in every moment of our lives. Every moment is a critical moment, a bifurcation point that offers us the opportunity to ask ourselves three questions: How did that get made? What are we making? What can we do to make better social worlds? And act accordingly. At the most (seemingly) basic level, CMM’s communication perspective asks us to look at communication rather than through it (Pearce, 2007). However, this often proves to be easier said than done because most of us are simply unaware of the components that constitute the practice (and ideally, one day, the embodiment) of a communication perspective.

Understandably, many of us, if not all of us, have grown to take communication for granted. The most prominent understanding of communication remains rooted in simple transmission—the conveyance of information or ideas from one person to another, without regard for the intricate dynamics of meaning-making between persons in conversation. And in the worst cases, we have learned to disregard communication altogether—to look through it, believing it to be too abstract and intangible ever to be comprehensible. However, practitioners of CMM know that the processes of communication—the stories we tell, the patterns we participate in, the meaning we make, and the social worlds we create—are both nameable and shapeable.

The CMM Institute, where I serve as Executive Director, is a global community of scholar-practitioners committed to the practice of CMM as an emerging process. We continue to seek opportunities to be “CMMish,” expanding our understanding through our exploration. The flexibility of CMM allows it to be used hand-in-hand with other perspectives and frameworks. CMM can enrich a systems thinking and design approach by offering a lens that enables practitioners to not only look at but also to talk about and affect the dynamic processes of communication that are at play within systems. The practice of CMM is naturally reflexive- enabling us to look back with the purpose of ultimately “looking forward,” using the language of “better social worlds” as a measure of our greatest imagination for what we might construct.

Notably, while CMM champions every person’s ability to co-create their social worlds in relationship with others, we also recognise that there is much that falls outside of what we can control, especially when we are acting at the systems level. In CMMish terms, this unknown—as we call it, “mystery”—is defined by Pearce (1989) as “the recognition that the human condition is more than any of the particular stories that make it coherent or any of the particular patterns of coordination that construct the events and objects of the social order” (p. 175). Mystery is not something to be diminished or erased; rather, it is something to work with. We allow social worlds to emerge in our communicating, with great respect for what can be made when we relinquish control of the outcome and instead focus our energy on the quality of the process, the quality of our relating, and the quality of our design. This perspective prompts an important dialogue for designers on how to better design for emergence—seeing the two not as opposed opposites, but as interrelated aspects of one whole.

While there is a strong component of mystery and emergence present in our ways of relating, the ways that our communication shapes our social worlds are not entirely unknowable. Designers are adept at considering the elements involved in their respective fields—whether that involves the design of items, physical spaces, performances, processes, economies, or organisations—and all of this design can be enriched by greater communication design. As I noted above, our communication shapes our social worlds, and our social worlds, in turn, shape our communication. Therefore, we must design social worlds that enable healthy, compassionate, mindful, and generative communication to thrive within our systems.

I attended my first RSD conference in 2024—it was my first introduction to systems thinking and design—and it got me hooked! I immediately became curious about what could be created at the intersection of a communication perspective and a systems perspective. Plus, I’m convinced that there is great value in designers exploring the question of how we would go about designing better social worlds in terms of our communication, relationships, and the larger systems of which we are a part. In many ways, we already say the same things while using slightly different language. And now, with the bifocal lens of communication and systems, as I ask how we might create better social worlds, I’m also asking how we might design better social worlds. As we seek to more mindfully coordinate between individuals and systems in increasingly complex social worlds, we require CMM’s equally complex frameworks for understanding and engaging patterns, contexts, and stories.

CMM Resources

CMM Institute Resource Hub https://cmminstitute.substack.com/

CMM-related Publications https://cmminstitute.substack.com/s/publications

What is CMM https://cmminstitute.substack.com/p/what-is-coordinated-management-of