An Introduction To The Coordinated Management Of Meaning Communication Theory

Hello friend, welcome to Stories Live Stories Told. I'm Abby and I'm so glad that you're joining me today for our very first episode. Today's episode is what I am calling a mini-sode. So to give you a little direction for the podcast, we're going to alternate between these mini-sodes which will just be me and longer conversation episodes with guests. Following the conversation episodes, I'll be asking my guests about their own stories and hopefully modeling what intentional meaningful conversation looks like. And my vision for these mini-sodes then is to allow us to do a deep dive into the theory and really the application of coordinated management of meaning. I will say that if you haven't listened to the trailer for this podcast yet, I'm going to suggest that you stop right here and do that. That is where I give a better introduction to my purpose and mission for this podcast, so you can get better acquainted with that. Great, so now that you've listened to the trailer, let's begin. Today is all about us getting better acquainted with coordinated management of meaning or CMM. There's a lot of nuance to this theory that's important for me to elaborate on. So as far as communication theories go, CMM takes an interpretive approach to communication rather than an objective one. So what this means is that CMM functions under the assumption of pluralistic truths, or the idea that there's not one objective, capital T truth waiting to be found, but rather, everyone experiences their own little T truths that we make. And all of these little T truths can coexist with each other. So what this translates to in the theory then is that everyone's stories can be told and heard in the same space. Two people might experience the same event and have different stories about it, but these different stories don't cancel each other out and one doesn't invalidate the other. There's no search for figuring out which story is right or wrong. That language just doesn't exist in CMM. Now this view that everyone lives out their own little T truths that can coexist is a little idealistic. Because what CMM also notes is that our stories do not exist in a bubble and they're not all equal in the eyes of society. When we tell our stories, we're bringing them into a culture and a context that's much bigger and the culture that we bring our stories to can influence which stories are told and allowed to be told in which ones are heard or ignored. So it's storytelling on this intimate personal level, but also in a larger cultural sense. So it's the combination of your day to day storytelling. Like maybe you tell a friend something that happened at work or with your family, but it's also the idea that when you zoom out on all the little stories we tell throughout the course of our day and our life that we're ultimately telling a much larger story or narrative about our lives. As I mentioned, CMM was founded by Barnett Pierce and Vernon Cronin in the 1970s. In the trailer, I said that the central idea of CMM is that persons in conversation co-construct their own social realities. But there's a little more to it. The full understanding of CMM is that persons in conversation co-construct their own social realities and are simultaneously shaped by the worlds they create. So a CMM is effectively doing is looking at the process of communication from the lens of a participant instead of taking on the perspective of a neutral observer. CMM recognizes that we are all engaged in a constant cycle of creating and then being influenced by what we create. The language CMM uses is that communication is a constitutive force, meaning that it shapes our ideas, relationships and environment. This basically acknowledges the process of communication itself as a real factor in our lives. So it goes beyond just paying attention to the content or what is communicated and instead starts looking at how we are communicating and seeing the power there. So to break down this core concept, even if we're not always having conversations with people in the most basic sense of the word, we are a hall always persons in conversation. The same way I made the distinction between your day-to-day stories that you tell and your life stories that you're telling. This gets at the overarching idea of being constantly in conversation with one another. We live in community, so we are always collaborating and communicating, which is then what makes it so we are not isolated but co-constructing because we are all partners in the creation of our social worlds and then participants in the social worlds we created and are still creating. Ideally, through the course of this podcast, we can build our understanding of what it looks like to be a person in conversation, co-creating our own social reality, and better understand the responsibility that we have to ourselves and to others to create something that works for everybody. Something more just and equitable. Within CMM then, we can further break down this concept into four central claims that make up CMM. So the first claim states, "Our communication creates our social worlds." CMM believes that the communication going on between persons in conversation is the primary social process, the primary function of our social worlds. Again, it's less about the content of a conversation and more about the conversation itself. I definitely experienced this in the sense that I've had really meaningful conversations with people that are deep and personal, but these conversations aren't only meaningful to me because of what we shared, but just the fact that we shared it all, the fact that I was able to share and be vulnerable because I felt safe to do so, and that the other person would trust me enough to be vulnerable to. And it's messy, and we don't always get it right. I've also had conversations where I didn't feel safe to be vulnerable, and that impacts me as well. So the first claim of CMM states that our communication creates our social worlds. The second claim says, "The stories we tell differ from the stories we live." Which is where the name for this podcast comes from, right? Because our lives are really a back and forth of living stories and telling those stories and living more stories than telling those, and there's attention there. Because our stories we tell are always going to differ from the stories we live. And that's really where we can break down the name of the theory. When we're living our stories, we have to coordinate with others because we're in the middle of our stories and meeting them in the middle of theirs. So there has to be collaboration in the creation of the social world that you're now a part of. Then the meaning part of coordinated management of meaning comes in because we are meaning-making creatures. A lot of communication theories rely on this foundation that as humans, that's what distinguishes us from other animals is that we look to create meaning in our world and in our lives. So when we tell our stories, that is our way of making meaning out of the things we experience. And in turn, we're also then managing that meaning in how we present our stories. Like I could tell you a story of a conflict with a friend where I'm the victim and they treated me wrong and I might leave out parts where I was the antagonist of the story because I want to manage the story about myself that people know. I want them to think positively of me or whatever the motivation is. So claim to says the stories we tell differ from the stories we live. And that's not a neatly a bad thing that we do this. The point of this claim is not to call us out or tell us we're doing something wrong, but just to help us recognize how we relate to our stories. Which then brings us to claim three, which says we get what we make. One piece is now the president of the CMM Institute and one way that she has explained it is that if you have destructive patterns in your interactions, then that's the kind of relationship or social world that you've created, a destructive, maybe defensive, negative one. But if you come to interactions with genuine curiosity and love and an open mind, then you're creating a way different social world. Before he passed away, Barnett Pierce wrote an article and in it he says there are three questions we need to be asking ourselves. How did that get made? What are we making right now? And what can we do to make better social worlds? So this hits the past, present, and future of CMM, of looking back on what we created in our interactions and conversations previously and are we still showing up the same way or how do we show up better in the future? Piers also talked about bifurcation points. So these kind of make or break moments that will influence the course of the conversation or of the relationship from then on out. So it was really his belief that having the knowledge and language provided by CMM would equip us to make the best choice when we come to these bifurcation points. So that ultimately we could get something better because we were actively thinking about what we were making. So claim three. We get what we make. And lastly, claim four. Get the pattern right, create a better social world. I said earlier that I wanted us to pay attention now to what it means to be a person in conversation and what it means to have the responsibility of creating our social world. That puts a lot of control and in some ways pressure on us. So this claim is the idea of responsibility that comes with this theory and it points out that the idea of creating better social worlds is subjective. That what what constitutes a better social world is going to look different in different circumstances. But in every social world, Kim and Barnett hear say it's about mindfulness. Mindfulness of your story and other people's stories and how they interact. It's the paying attention. Like if you're in a conversation with someone recognizing the weight or power of your actions to create real change. So claim four is get the pattern right create better social worlds. And that's what we're going to try to do. This really is just an introduction to CMM. But I think it's helpful as we continue on our journey of learning and applying the principles of CMM. So there's so much more to explore about CMM and we'll get there. But for now, this has been Stories Live Stories Told. Thank you so much for joining me. I'll be back next week with our very first conversation episode.