(2023-09-30) Fox The Perils Of Declaring A Purpose

FoxWizard: The perils of declaring a “purpose”. The Perils of a Neatly-Defined Purpose...When words get in the way of meaning.

Is it perilous to have a Pithy Purpose? I daresay, sometimes, yes.If we’re not careful—or, ironically, if we’re too careful—the noble yearning and the burning aspiration that comes from A Clear Sense of Purpose can be rendered inept in our attempts to neatly define it.

does the neat conclusiveness of a Pithy Purpose actually shut down the very thing that connects us to a sense of purpose—the curiosity to ask questions and pursue meaning?

Don’t let words get in the way of meaning

I know: this is coming from the one who has conjured The ‘Choose One Word’ Ritual of Becoming—which is all about finding an apt word to serve as a nebulous semiotic beacon to help hold you true to your own unfurling.

I do believe there’s a both/and to this. Have a placeholder purpose statement that broadly covers what you’re about, sure. Even better—gather clusters of stories in response and relation to the proposed purpose statement from the people actually doing the work

even if you ‘land’ on a neat piece of propaganda—keep the real conversation about purpose alive. That is: messy, developing, complex, adaptive, fluid and ever in flux

But, wait—Simon Sinek says that your purpose—‘your Why'—is ‘something objective’.
This reeks of fixed meaning—an eternalist ploy.

The antidote,“ David Chapman writes, “is curiosity. Wonder what things mean

Purpose is how we orient towards contribution and relevance-realisation. It’s a nebulous meta-narrative that allows for our activities to ‘make sense’. Purpose works best when we feel as though we are contributing to something larger than ourselves.

Ideally we have a constellation of visions, rather than a singular vision. This constellation looks like a cluster of potential stories—glimmers of worlds that may be.

Missions are narrow in focus, linear in path, binary in outcomes (success/failure) and easily measurable throughout. They’re finite games and thus: the opposite to a quest.

Are values valuable?
Kinda? Again; values are emergent properties of complex systems that guide the standards of how we interrelate. Yet they are still situational/contextual

the best values are polarising. They’re a distinct stance adopted that’s meant to spark debate

Why do I make such a dance of these topics?

To name something is to rob it of its power.

And we so love to hallucinate knowingness.

Most of us cannot grasp the true name of phenomena that we observe. And so we flatten the vast complexity into words that reduce the subject into something we believe to be knowable.

“It’s the articulation of tacit understanding where things go wrong,” writes complexity sage Dave Snowden. “Tyranny of the explicit.”

All of this alludes to why I so love oral lore—knowledge is kept alive through this process

“The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking,” writes Martin Shaw. “It always was.” Purpose—like myth and lore—has an emergent quality to it.

lore will emerge. “Lore is the story insiders tell themselves to manage their own psyches”, Venkatesh Rao writes. So too, our sense of purpose serves in a similar way.