Research & Publications

This foundational paper establishes Organizational Meaning Science as an interdisciplinary research discipline examining how meaning functions as a systemic force within individuals, teams, and organizations.

The paper argues for the necessity of Meaning Science in an era marked by complexity, rapid change, and widespread meaning instability. It introduces meaning as a structural phenomenon, outlines core architectural components including the Meaning Loop, and positions Meaning Science as a necessary complement to existing leadership and organizational disciplines.

Rather than treating meaning as an abstract concept or aspirational outcome, the paper investigates how meaning is constructed, disrupted, interpreted, and stabilized over time—providing both theoretical rigor and practical application for researchers and practitioners.

Leadership research has traditionally focused on behavior, style, and intent, while treating meaning as either implicit or synonymous with sensemaking. This paper introduces Meaning Leadership as a distinct leadership capacity concerned with how meaning forms, stabilizes, and fractures within organizational systems over time.

The paper argues that leadership outcomes are mediated not by action alone, but by how leadership signals are interpreted through individual lenses and resolved at the system level. Meaning Leadership is defined as the capacity to sense interpretive divergence, maintain signal coherence, and repair meaning before trust fractures.

The work distinguishes shared meaning from uniform interpretation, demonstrating that trust depends on interpretive compatibility rather than consensus. It introduces interpretive divergence as a measurable construct and proposes a framework for detecting meaning strain across teams, departments, and organizations.

This paper explores system design principles for organizational meaning work, including meaning safety, interpretive pacing, and meaning repair as structural interventions rather than cultural aspirations.

The work establishes explicit ethical boundaries governing observation, measurement, and intervention in meaning dynamics. It argues that meaning stability cannot be achieved through control or optimization, but rather through designing conditions that protect the system's capacity to interpret freely.

Design implications include staged communication, dedicated interpretive forums, temporal buffers following disruptions, and role-sensitive pacing mechanisms. The paper maps interventions to phases within the Meaning Loop, demonstrating how organizations can act earlier with less force and greater effectiveness.

This paper applies the Meaning Science framework to leadership analysis, examining how different leadership approaches shape interpretive dynamics and meaning formation within organizational systems.

Rather than evaluating leadership styles as inherently effective or ineffective, the work analyzes how leadership signals are interpreted, how authority amplifies or dampens meaning, and how leadership transitions create meaning disruption requiring intentional repair.

The analysis provides interpretive frameworks for understanding leadership impact beyond behavior and intent, focusing on how leaders create conditions for meaning safety, manage interpretive pacing, and steward meaning through periods of change and complexity.