Veering toward first-order effectsthree days beforeHave you ever driven a car that pulls to one side? It’s…The story of belonging

The tension between Agency and Belonging2020Within the Four Needs framework, the need for Belonging is best described…Tension between Purpose and Safety2020Now that I described the tension between agency and belonging, I’d like…The story of a threat2021Continuing my exploration of narratives that catalyze coherence, I would be remiss…The Four Needs Framework2020The stories we tell ourselves shape how we see the world around…Next in my adventure across the coherence narrative realm is the story of belonging. It sort of maps into one of the fundamental needs from the Four Needs Framework, but plays a subtly different role here.

Of Love and Fear2019I am struck by the line I see between two kinds of…The story of belonging is also something that is easy to spot as a felt experience. Someone wise suggested that humans are wired for connection, and the web of these connections is what creates the gravitational pull in the story of belonging. There’s something about being together with others, being part of the group, next to those who consider you kin, being loved, included, and understood.

The story of an opportunity2021While geeking out on this idea of coherence and possible mechanisms that…When I try to examine stories of belonging, I notice something interesting. They usually contain the words “we,” “community,” “together,” “teamwork,” “alignment,” “unity,” and so on, but structurally, it’s almost always not a standalone story. Instead, the story of belonging acts as a powerful catalyst, laced into the story of a threat or the story of an opportunity. Just milling around together is one thing, but something magical happens when the “we are” is combined with “under attack” or “the future”: the capacity for coherence shoots up like a rocket. No matter what kind of compounding loop we might face, it seems that doing it as a tightly knit group feels natural and right to us humans.

The System of Self2019The need for Integration, to be part of a larger whole, in…To add to the weirdness, the loss of belonging is a common story of a threat — and finding it a common story of an opportunity. In our interconnected world, this kind of ouroboros is in itself an abundant source of compounding loops. It’s one reason why teams tend to form boundaries and organizations grow silos. It is also the undercurrent behind the craving to gain more likes or followers and many similar societal dynamics.

Polarity of intention, structure, and capacity2022I keep coming back to the post from last year, where I…Triggered, intentional, and spontaneous coherence2021I’ve been chatting about organizational coherence with a few folks, and this…Developer surfacefour days afterI mentioned this concept before, and I feel like it’s worth expanding…The story of agencylinks here, 2021Another kind of story that I’ve encountered in my exploration of coherence…Considering the story of belonging as means to improve organizational coherence, a couple of thoughts come to mind. First, the stories of belonging are quite inert by themselves. The need to combine with compounding-loop stories to get traction. Second, we live and tell multiple stories of belonging simultaneously. Navigating all these stories is tricky, and growing new stories of belonging (“we are a team!”) is a careful, finicky process that often bumps against all the participants’ stories, taking patience and time to develop. Maybe this is why we use the word “culture” to describe a mature organization’s story of belonging?