There is no meaning in anything. There is only meaning in relations between - or in relating to - other things. And maybe we can use this for planning.
Yesterday I read in a book on semiotics how "meaning" is possible. The summary: meaning resides in the realtion of one mental concept to other mental concepts.
What really left me stunning was the following notion: "A thought by itself - which is basically just a feeling - has no intellectual content or value by itself". Now, read the middle part again: "A thought is basically just a feeling"! ?????? Now stop reading and try to literally observe the thought you have in mind. Not the flow of thoughts but the one single thought you have in your brain at a given moment. Now! ..................................................
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Right, there is none! There is a feeling of "thinking" but no thought. I love all that Zen stuff I have to admit. First of all because it's true and real. But let's leave that aside.
Back to semiotics: What the semiotician was saying (and it was Peirce himself by the way) is that meaning is between the thoughts. That what you think in a given moment is meaningful through the thoughts preceding it and following it. Now this sounds somewhat reasonable. Really seeing it happen in your mind is stunning!
If you didn't have this effect in your mind, try again because it's by far more interesting than my writing about it and all what follows below.
How can we use this insight in planning? Just two quick guesses how this might help. Don't know, really, but maybe it makes sense...
a) A slight change of perspective in research? We tend to ask people about "things" and the meaning of "things" to them. We also tend to attribute the meining to things when we interpret what people tell us. Now, if that's not where meaning resides we should refocus - or rather unfocus. Let's try and not ask people about "things" but about relations between "things". A simple technique could be contrasting things with other things or situations with situations etc.
When listening to what people say we could listen less to why and how people perceive or do something but how what they perceive or do becomes meaningful through relations to other concepts or actions. For instance, when someone tells us how nice it is to come home and be welcomed by the dog, maybe now "home - dog" is the relation to explore, less the "nice feeling". I guess normally we would go for the feeling side of that revelation.
b) A simple thinking technique to use for ourselves? When we get stuck, start relating to something. Because being stuck is the nature of a thought (which is not there as you might have experienced in the "Thought Experiment" above). Meaning will arise when we relate things to other things, findings to other findings, etc. We could do this quite without obvious logic behind it. For instance, "How could I relate the fact that this gadget is too big for a mobile device to the fact that its launch will be in September?" ... "Would any other month have been different or better for us?" It's really stupid, I know. But it might tell us something about possible meaning of "big". Maybe not... You should never let anyone know that this is the way you work, though.
I will think about it a bit more and try to come up with better ideas. It's very crude so far.
