"Organisations grow because some individuals give interpretations as gifts." The sentence may seem unusual. We are accustomed to thinking that organisations grow thanks to capital, technology, processes or skills. All important elements. Yet none of them is sufficient to explain why some organisations develop an extraordinary ability to understand their environment while others, despite having similar resources, remain trapped in outdated readings of reality. The difference often lies in the production and circulation of meaning.
An organisation is a system that continually produces interpretations of the world. It interprets customers, competitors, technologies, opportunities, threats and even itself. Without this interpretative activity, no coordination is possible. People do not act upon objective reality. They act upon reality as they understand it and have interpreted it.
From this perspective, the true engine of organisational growth is interpretation. Information is abundant. Useful interpretations are rare.
Whenever someone observes a phenomenon and manages to formulate a convincing reading of it, they generate a collective resource. Whenever a technician explains a hidden cause of a problem, a salesperson identifies an emerging need, a manager connects seemingly unrelated events or a researcher proposes a new interpretative key, something happens that goes beyond the mere transfer of knowledge: a way of seeing is given as a gift.
These acts have a particular characteristic. Those who perform them often receive no immediate and proportionate benefit. The individual invests time, cognitive energy and attention in producing something that others will use. Often, even the memory of who first offered a particular interpretation is lost. Especially when it is particularly apt: whoever received the interpretation will probably make it their own. In good faith.
Most organisations exist thanks to millions of these small acts of spontaneous, disinterested cognitive generosity. Carefully written documents. Procedures explained to a colleague. Meetings in which someone shares an insight that is still incomplete. Informal conversations by a coffee machine. Internal articles. Manuals. Mentoring sessions. All settings in which generous people give intelligence to the organisation. All elements that produce the invisible wealth that makes the organisation more intelligent than the sum of the people who comprise it.
Why should people perform these acts? Why should they give interpretations as gifts rather than keep them to themselves?
Part of the answer lies in a very ancient cognitive structure that contemporary psychology is beginning to understand better. Many human beings seem to possess some form of trust in moral causality. Not necessarily in the religious sense of the term. More simply, they tend to believe that there is a relationship between the way they behave and the kind of world they will live in.
In Eastern tradition, this intuition takes the name and form of karma. In Western psychology, it often appears as belief in a just world. In both cases, the same fundamental idea emerges: actions produce consequences that transcend the immediate.
And indeed, those who help contribute to creating an environment in which help becomes more likely. Those who cooperate contribute to creating an environment in which cooperation becomes more readily available. Those who share knowledge contribute to creating an environment in which knowledge circulates. And karma comes to pass, becomes self-fulfilling.
Of course, these relationships are not guaranteed. Reality is full of exceptions. Generous people can be exploited. Competent individuals can be ignored. And unfortunately, even collaborative organisations can fail. Yet on a large scale and over the long term, there is an emergent dynamic that makes these beliefs less irrational than they might seem.
People do not merely react to the world. They help to construct it. They enact it. If a sufficiently large community believes that sharing has value, that community will tend to generate more sharing. If enough people consider cooperation important, cooperation will progressively become a structural feature of the environment. In this sense, karma can be reinterpreted not as a metaphysical law but as an emergent property of social systems.
The consequences of actions do not necessarily derive from a transcendent force. They may derive from the transformation of the relational system within which those actions take place. Every act slightly alters the structure of the social world. This mechanism is particularly evident in organisations.
When someone shares a useful interpretation, they are increasing the collective capacity to give meaning to future events. An insight today can become a procedure tomorrow. A procedure can become an organisational capability. A capability can become a competitive advantage. A competitive advantage can turn into a new corporate identity. The final effect is vastly greater than the initial act.
Yet it all began with someone who decided to explain to others what they had understood. Because it seemed the right thing to do. From this perspective, sensemaking and cognitive giving become aspects of the same phenomenon. Making sense means producing interpretations that allow others to find their bearings in complexity. Giving interpretations as gifts means making these structures available to the collective.
Intelligent organisations are those in which there are people willing to turn their own individual understanding into a shared resource. And this allows us to see many contemporary transformations in a different light. If organisational knowledge depends on the continual production of cognitive gifts, then the main problem is not merely to accumulate information. It is to keep alive the desire to share interpretations. Any technology that facilitates this sharing can strengthen collective intelligence. Consequently, any technology that replaces it risks weakening it instead.
Organisations survive because they continue to produce meaning, and they produce meaning because some people invest energy in understanding and generosity in sharing what they understand. And perhaps, ultimately, karma for organisations comes to pass when this generosity is imitated and gives back through the intentions of individuals rather than through moral causality.