The Anatomy of Meaning
- RIZOM
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
How Humans Make Sense, individually and collectively
Meaning is the movement through which experience becomes aware of itself and finds a form that can be shared. How does meaning actually take shape inside individuals and organisations? Far from slogans or purpose statements, it lives in the subtle alignment of what we feel, what we notice, and how we articulate it.
This insight explores the anatomy of that curve and how RIZOM works with metaphor to make it visible, traceable and shareable - the foundation on which genuine attunement and better decisions emerge.
The Motion
Every organisation talks about “meaning”. Few can point to where it actually lives.
Most assume meaning is a message, a slogan, a purpose statement pinned to the wall. But inside a human being, meaning is never a thing. It is a movement: a slow turning of experience into understanding and congruence.
At RIZOM, we see this movement everywhere. When leaders speak, when teams react, when people try to name the feeling they are in, what they call “meaning” is really a curve: the way their inner state bends towards the world and the world bends back.
Meaning appears where three movements align:
Continuity: It is the lived flow of experience, to say the weight of the day, the unseen background of pressures and hopes.
Consciousness: It is a moment of noticing, a form of awareness, a pause in the drift such as when “I can feel something here” or “This is not how I expected it to feel”.
Coherence: It is the story one gives it, that is, the articulation through which the experience is made shareable with oneself and with others.
When these three touch, even briefly, meaning comes into focus:
A leader suddenly understands why the room feels heavy.
A team realises why enthusiasm has thinned.
An individual recognises the shape of their own unease.
Meaning is the curve where experience, awareness and articulation meet.
The Metaphoric Key
This is why RIZOM does not start with scores, because scores flatten experience and thus remove the curve. Instead, we work through metaphor as per the Basho-Loop™.
Ask someone “How was your day?” and you get a polite and generally insipid response.
Ask “If today were a weather pattern, what would it be?” and you get some true insights. “A patch of fog”, “A shaft of light”,” A storm stuck on the horizon” all speak to me and provide nuance.
Indeed, metaphor keeps the shape of what is felt. It lets people bring the curve of their inner life into language without having to justify it.
Across thousands of interactions a simple pattern repeats:
Metaphor opens from Mood
Awareness deepens from Motif
Coherence forms in the Archetype
Meaning returns though Identity
This is the “equation” behind RIZOM, though we never show it as an equation. We treat it as a living cycle that can be invited, supported and learned.
How Attunement Is Built
Attunement is what happens when this cycle no longer lives only inside individuals, but starts to exist between people. It is the moment a team, a cohort, a leadership group begins to feel itself as a shared field. What we call the symbolic field.
RIZOM helps organisations build this in three simple moves.
1. Ask differently: invite inner weather
We begin with micro-prompts that ask for lived texture.
“If this week were a landscape, what would it look like?”
“Right now, are you more forest, shoreline or motorway?”
“If this project had a season, which would it be today?”
People respond in their own words, with honesty. This is how continuity enters the conversation, by giving each individual's inner experience a voice.
2. Listen structurally: trace patterns in the metaphors
Next, RIZOM listens to these metaphors as a field.
We look for recurring images and movements across the aggregated metaphors.
Are we seeing more tunnels or more open skies?
Are people describing stillness, pressure, fragmentation, renewal?
Is the language of the leadership group in tune with everyone else, or drifting away?
We keep the integrity of anyone’s words, then map the motifs that emerge across them. This is where consciousness scales. What individuals sense vaguely, the organisation begins to see clearly.
3. Reflect back: show the curve
Finally, we give this field back in a form that invites dialogue, as a mirror.
Here is a simple example:
a visual “album” of the metaphors shared that week
a small cluster of archetypes that describe the current posture of the group
a short narrative that says, in effect “Here is how your own words are leaning. Here is the curve you are tracing together.”
Leaders can then respond in kind. They can acknowledge, adjust, open space, or change course in a way that respects the felt field. This is how coherence becomes collective, through recognition.
To understand how the RIZOM Dashboard sustains the structure after metaphor has opened the door, turn to this companion insight on Reading the Symbolic Field.
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