Improvising Personal and Social Evolution with the Theory of Positive Disintegration (TPD) and the Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM)
The theory of positive disintegration (TPD) helps us understand factors influencing individual development and how to support personal evolution towards a personality ideal rooted in authenticity. The Coordinated Management of Meaning Theory (CMM) helps us understand how our social worlds are constructed in communication and how to support social evolution through the making of better social worlds. TPD and CMM are both rooted in decades of research and theory development and both have attracted committed communities of scholar-practitioners. We want to use our presentation to explore similarities and differences between the two in order to see how both the theories and the communities can strengthen each other. We are playing with the idea to use the metaphor of (organizational) improvisation to create relations between the theories and communities as one way to generate personal and social evolution.
Bio: Abbie VanMeter is the host of the Stories Lived. Stories Told. podcast. In partnership with the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution, she is involved in a number of projects that work to make the tools, language, and knowledge offered by the communication theory Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) more accessible. Abbie is passionate about sharing CMM with the world because she believes that when we are empowered in our communication, we can create better social worlds together.