An Animating Insight: What Everything Is Made Of
The Hidden Architecture of Every Venture, Organization, and Relationship
This is one of the core insight that animates my work—as a coach, as a strategist, as a human attempting to orient and navigate in this time between worlds.
"Fernando Flores encountered Austin's work through conversations with Austin's student John Searle, one of Flores' thesis advisors. Flores recognized that performative verbs comprise the heart of every action and everything that matters in all of our worlds. Up to that moment, Austin and Searle's work had been understood as 'Speech Act Theory' - a subject of great interest to a tiny population of academics studying the analytical philosophy of language in a half a dozen graduate schools of philosophy in the world. To Flores, their thinking showed itself as something of enormous import for our modern world.
"Here is my summary of what he grasped:
"We invent all of our ventures and enterprises with declarations. We make offers which, when accepted, become our promises to customers, investors, employees, and friends, family, and others. Everything that is new begins with assessments we make about insufficiencies, messes, opportunities and obsolescences. Our enterprises are created as networks of requests, offers, and promises. Everything else that happens starts with requests and offers. We make sense of ourselves and our worlds through assessments and assertions. Money lives in the middle of all this as a collection of commitments, often in hidden and secret ways."
(From the very excellent Mobilize! Dancing Between Worlds, by the very excellent Chauncey Bell)
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