How does an Ambient Self in an Ambient Organisation find meaning in the Ambient Space that is being created?  We usually find meaning most powerfully in that which most strongly reflects our identity.

In many organisational spaces it can be difficult to discern authentic meaning from the constant background noise of unfocused activity.  This often results in an organisation that has no coherent identity, and usually generates politicised and antagonistic silos.

To find meaning in an organisation’s space, we have to look at how individual and organisational identity is projected into that space, and how it is reflected back.  In Dreamwork, we use tools like the Identifiers and Reflectors to detect and connect where people consciously or unconsciously find meaning.

The found meaning is expressed and shared as narrative fragments and in multimedia clips.  As people in the organisation begin to see and realise where they and their colleagues find individual meaning, they often become aware of a deeper shared collective meaning.

Why even bother trying to create meaningful space?  Surely the purpose of any organisation is to generate profit, rather than meaning?  When people realise there is no meaning in their work, they usually stop working, because it seems pointless.  The more meaning they find in their profession, the more value it will have for them, and the more value it will create for the organisation.

Meaning cannot be forced on them.  They cannot be forced to find meaning in what they do.  Like Frank Lloyd Wright ’s creation of meaningful space, their own Ambient Space has to emerge from the context of their own intentions and purpose.

In most organisations, individuals are often regarded as discrete units whose identity can be fully described by personality profiling tools like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and Insights.

These tools presume that there are only a few types of people and their complete identities are located within specific categories of theoretical pyschological structure.

However, in reality, we become aware of much of our identity and sense of self by the experience of projecting it into our personal space and having it reflected back to us from our environment.  Rather than being an easily quantifiable unit, we create our individual sense of self from the fragments of inner and outer experience.

In his 1999 paper, The Heterogeneously Distributed Self, Stanton Wortham described how contemporary understanding of human cognition had moved beyond merely viewing it as an internal psychological structure.  Rather than the self being located in the individual physical body, it is observed to emerge from various contextual structures such as linguistic, social and cultural activity.

Wortham goes on to describe the processes of distributed cognition where knowledge is distributed across members of a group, and situated cognition where knowledgeable action emerges from non-cognitive artefacts and structures as well the knowledge of others.  He then continues by applying these concepts as a way of describing the self.

However, this would suggest that some of the distributed self may continue to be present in a group context, even if the individual self were no longer present in the group.  It would also suggest that the situated self was still present in the artefact, even if the individual who had previously distributed their self  into the artefact was no longer associated with it.

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