In this article I’m looking at the notion of organizational purposes in light of cybernetic constructivism. The ideas here are inspired by giants like Stafford Beer, Spencer Brown, Ralph Stacey, Werner Ulrich, Russell Ackoff, and Erik Hollnagel.

The corporate world seems to be obsessed with organizational purpose. Mission statements adorn lobby walls. Consultants make fortunes helping executives discover their organization’s deeper calling, their “why.”

From a cybernetic constructivist perspective, this entire enterprise rests on a philosophical error. This is the notion that organizations have purposes. Organizations don’t have purposes. People do.

Organizations are certainly created with specific objectives and goals in mind. For example, a company can be formed to develop software, or a charity established to alleviate poverty. But the idea that these entities themselves possess purposes is what philosophers call reification, treating an abstraction as if it were a concrete thing.

Organizations have goals and objectives set by their founders or governing bodies. But purposes, the deeper sense of meaning and direction that drives behavior, belong to individuals. This distinction is crucial for understanding emergence in an organizational setting.

This isn’t semantic nitpicking. It’s a fundamental reframe that helps us rethink how we understand organizational behavior and human experience within systems.

The reification trap and POSIWID

When we say something like “our company’s purpose is to make the world more sustainable,” we commit reification. We treat an abstraction as if it were a concrete thing. Organizations are viewed wrongly as entities with intentions, values, and purposes of their own.

What organizations actually have are stated goals and objectives, declarations about what they aim to achieve. But when we strip away this corporate fiction, what remains is people: people with their own purposes, their own sense-making processes, and their own constructed meanings about what matters and why.

Stafford Beer’s insight that “the purpose of a system is what it does” (POSIWID) helps us cut through the fog of stated intentions and mission statements. But when we think about what we’ve been saying so far, we can see that the idea of POSIWID itself could be a reification trap. In criticizing the reification of organizational purpose using POSIWID, we risk reifying “the system” itself as something that “does” things.

A way to ease out of this apparent trap is to use Wittgenstein’s Ladder. POSIWID serves as a cognitive aid helping us climb to better understanding, which we then discard.

What we actually observe are patterns of human behavior and interaction. When we say “the system produces data harvesting behaviors,” we mean “we observe people engaging in data harvesting activities within particular structural contexts.” When we say “the system undermines individual viability,” we mean “we observe interactions between people that result in reduced individual flourishing.”

The value of POSIWID lies not in discovering what systems “really want” but in training our attention on emergent patterns of human behavior rather than declared organizational intentions. Once this shift in attention is accomplished, we can discard the system-as-actor metaphor and focus on the actual phenomenon: people with purposes interacting within conditions that constrain and enable certain patterns of behavior.

Applied to organizations, this refined principle becomes this: If we want to understand what’s actually happening, we should observe the patterns of behavior and interaction that emerge from people’s purposes within particular conditions, not focus on declared organizational goals.

Patterns of purpose interaction

From a cybernetic constructivist perspective, what we observe are patterns emerging from the interactions of individual purposes within structured contexts. When a software engineer’s purpose to solve elegant problems intersects with a marketer’s purpose to help people discover useful tools, and both operate within structures that reward customer satisfaction, we observe certain patterns of behavior and outcomes.

These patterns are dynamic, not fixed. As people’s individual purposes evolve, as new people join the system, and as external conditions shift, the observable patterns shift, too. The patterns become a living expression of ongoing purpose interactions rather than a static implementation of declared intentions.

But here’s the crucial insight from cybernetics: The observer is part of the system being observed. When we observe patterns of organizational behavior, we’re not neutral external scientists. We are participants whose purposes and perspectives shape what we see. This creates recursive loops that traditional management thinking often ignores.

A manager who observes that “people aren’t motivated” and implements new programs isn’t a neutral observer. They’re a participant whose own purposes drive their observation and choice of interventions. These interventions then become part of the conditions within which other people’s purposes interact, potentially changing the very patterns the manager was trying to understand.

The refined POSIWID insight helps us see that if we want to change observable patterns, we need to understand and work with the actual purposes of the actual people involved, not impose new mission statements or organizational goals from above.

From alignment to resonance

Traditional thinking seeks alignment, getting everyone pointed in the same direction toward the same stated organizational goals. But our refined understanding shows us that there’s no collective entity that can choose a unified direction. In reality, there are only individuals with purposes engaging in ongoing interactions.

Some of these interactions create resonance, patterns where individual purposes amplify and support each other in ways that produce coherent behavioral patterns. Others create tension or conflict. The software engineer’s elegant problem-solving and the marketer’s user advocacy can resonate productively, creating emergent value. But this coherent behavior isn’t orchestrated by some collective consciousness. It emerges from how these specific people with these specific purposes interact within particular conditions.

What we observe are the behavioral patterns emerging from these ongoing purpose-interactions, not something chosen by “the organization.” Even when there are formal decision-making processes, you still have individual people making individual choices about whether to participate, how to contribute, and what to support.

Understanding recursive viability

When we talk about recursive systems, we mean something different from linear processes. In recursive systems, each loop is independently viable. Each person constructs their own purposes, observes their own interactions, and maintains their own capacity to adapt and respond. They’re not merely components serving the larger system. They’re complete systems in themselves.

People observe the patterns of interaction, including their own participation in those patterns. This observation changes how they construct their purposes, which changes their interactions, which changes the patterns, which changes what they observe. Each person completes this cycle independently while also participating in the larger patterns.

The viability of observable patterns emerges from the viability of individual participants, rather than being imposed upon. When individual people can maintain their own purposefulness and adaptive responses, the larger patterns that emerge tend to be more resilient and creative.

Instead of asking, “How do we get people to serve the organization’s purpose?” we ask, “How do we create conditions where each person’s independent viability contributes to emerging patterns that enhance collective viability?”

Collective viability isn’t itself an entity or fixed goal. It’s an emergent, dynamic pattern arising from the interactions of individual viable systems. It shifts as individual purposes evolve, as new people join the system, and as conditions change.

Quality of life and practical implications

Quality of life isn’t something organizations provide to employees like a benefit package. It’s something individuals construct through their lived experience of pursuing their purposes within particular conditions. But quality of life is both an input and output of the system. When people experience high quality of life, they bring different energy and capability to their interactions.

This reframe has practical implications. If we want to change observable patterns of behavior, we need to understand and work with the actual purposes of the actual people involved. What do people actually care about? How do their purposes complement or conflict? What conditions support the expression of these purposes?

Sustainable change happens through shifts in the interaction of purposes, not through compliance with new directives. People adapt their behavior when conditions change in ways that better enable them to pursue what they already care about, or when they develop new purposes through their lived experience of interaction with others.

Final words

Let go of the fiction that your organization has a purpose. Instead, get curious about the actual purposes of the actual people involved and observe the patterns of behavior that emerge through POSIWID analysis. What do they care about? How do their purposes interact? What behavioral patterns emerge from these interactions?

Then, experiment with conditions. What structures and processes support the kinds of interactions that produce the behavioral patterns you want to see more of? Pay attention to emergence while remaining aware of your position as observer. Use POSIWID as your reality check. If the observable patterns don’t match the stated intentions, look to the interaction of individual purposes within current conditions for explanation.

This shift from organizational purposes to human purposes isn’t merely theoretical. It’s practical. When we stop pretending that abstractions have agency and start working with the actual agency of actual people, we discover possibilities for organizing that honor both individual viability and collective capability.

In the next article, we’ll explore what this means for leadership as condition creation, boundary critique, and the challenge of supporting diverse purposes within structured contexts.

I’ll finish with a quote from Ralph Stacey:

“There is no possibility of standing outside human interaction to design a program for it since we are all participants in that interaction.”

Stay curious and always keep on learning.

Published Sept. 14, 2025, in Harish Jose’s blog.