Conscious Performance (2 of 3): how to read an organisation

Second of three parts. Part one defined the term. This one covers the method of reading, the four bodies of knowledge behind it, and the four levels where performance creates or destroys value. Part three covers the evidence and the context.

Every decision runs on signs

A report, a figure, a silence in a meeting, a gesture during a performance review: none of it arrives already interpreted. Someone reads it, and that reading happens whether or not they are aware of reading.

Semiotics, the general science of signs, offers a distinction here with real practical value. It has a long lineage: the Stoics already distinguished three elements in a sign, Ferdinand de Saussure coined the terms signifier and signified in the early twentieth century, and Mauricio Beuchot takes up and develops that tradition in the work on semiotics that we use.

The idea is simpler than it sounds. Every word works on three layers at once. Take one that turns up daily in the email of any project: done.

• The word itself. What is written or said, those four letters. This is the signifier.

• What the word is meant to convey. For the person writing it, finished and reviewed; for the person reading it, finished and still to be reviewed. This is the signified.

• The concrete thing it points to. This deliverable, in this state, on this date. This is the denotation, and it is where you find out whether the two were talking about the same thing.

The three layers usually line up, which is why nobody notices them. Trouble starts when they do not line up and nobody notices that either.

That is the practical value. Most of the alignment conflicts we encounter are not conflicts of will but conflicts in that third layer: two functions use the same word (quality, urgent, customer, collaboration) while understanding different things and pointing at different realities. Nobody is lying and nobody is resisting; nobody made the act of interpretation explicit. A committee can argue for three months about priorities when what is missing is an agreement on what counts as a priority.

The diagnostic grid

From this follows the grid we use to read an organisation. The division into syntax, semantics and pragmatics was set out by Charles W. Morris in 1938, in Foundations of the Theory of Signs, and it is the basis Beuchot works from. We apply it to organisational terrain.

• Organisational syntax. How signs relate to one another: structure, processes, governance, systems, the architecture of indicators. What is connected to what.

• Organisational semantics. How those signs relate to what they actually designate: whether the indicator measures what it claims to measure, whether a stated value names a real behaviour, whether the written strategy refers to the business that exists.

• Organisational pragmatics. How signs relate to their users: how specific people interpret them, with their culture and their personality, and what they do as a result.

An organisation can have impeccable syntax, with certified processes and well-built dashboards, and still suffer from broken semantics. It can also have sound semantics and failed pragmatics, when the message is true but nobody reads it as it was sent. Working all three at once, in proportion, is what we call conscious performance.

The method for interpreting in that middle ground, between the single rule and relativism, is the analogical hermeneutics of Dr Mauricio Beuchot Puente. His analogical realism, in dialogue with Hans-Georg Gadamer and with new philosophical realism, holds that there is a reality that resists our interpretations and that, therefore, some readings are better than others. That thesis is what makes measurement possible: if every interpretation were worth the same, there would be nothing to evaluate.

The four foundations

The framework rests on four verifiable bodies of knowledge. Each answers a different question about your business, and none is sufficient on its own.

Foundation	Sources	Question it answers
Philosophical	Analogical hermeneutics of Mauricio Beuchot; the Aristotelian and Thomistic tradition; the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer.	What interpreting well means, and how to tell whether one reading is better than another.
Cultural	Cultural analysis drawing on the original work of Geert Hofstede on cultural dimensions, whose legacy and rights belong to Geert Hofstede BV, and on Edgar Schein's model of organisational culture, applied together.	Why the same practice means different things in a factory in Mexico and a factory in Germany.
Personality	Personality science of Robert Hogan; the HPI, HDS and MVPI inventories from Hogan Assessments, together with its judgement and decision-making assessment (Hogan Judgment) and its emotional intelligence assessment (Hogan EQ).	Why the same policy produces opposite effects in two equally capable executives.
Ethical	Immanuel Kant; Romano Guardini; Adela Cortina; Joseph de Finance.	Where the line falls between what can be done and what ought to be done.

The four work together. Without the philosophical foundation there is no criterion of interpretation; without the cultural one, what is local gets treated as universal; without the personality one, different people are treated as interchangeable; without the ethical one, the possible gets confused with the right.

It is worth stating what is ours and what is not, because it is a fair question. Hogan's instruments and Hofstede's model are third-party assets, openly available in the market, and we cite them as such. What is ours is the protocol for integrating them, the semiotic diagnostic grid and the design of the dialogue processes, developed at the Applied Research Institute TCPS SIA.

The four levels where performance creates or destroys value

Most neighbouring approaches work at a single level, almost always the individual one. Conscious Performance works at four, and names them so they can be measured.

Level	What is at stake	What we observe
Person	Discernment and decisions, motives and values, and the human cost of what is achieved.	Profile of motives and derailment risks, quality of judgement under pressure, signs of wear.
Team	Difficult conversations, shared decisions and operating trust.	What gets said and what gets withheld, how disagreement is settled, whether commitments hold.
Organization	Strategy, structure, processes and culture that make performance possible.	Coherence between what is stated and what is practiced, architecture of indicators, cultural patterns.
Social environment	Effects on suppliers, communities and shared resources, and intercultural bridges for collaboration.	Where the pressure the organization does not absorb ends up, and what trust is won or lost beyond its boundaries.

The relationship between levels is one of containment, not addition. Here is a concrete example of value being destroyed across all four.

A company introduces a quarterly bonus on signed sales volume (organisation level). The most driven salespeople chase it successfully (person level). Six months on, operations is sitting on committed orders it cannot fill, and the two functions stop speaking except by email (team level). To hold the pace, the company pushes the pressure down to its local suppliers with lead times they can only meet through excessive overtime, and trust across the regional chain erodes for years (social environment level). The indicator that was designed went up; value went down, and part of the cost was paid by people who were not on the payroll.

Now the reverse. When the same bonus is redesigned around orders delivered rather than orders signed, individual ambition pushes collaboration instead of eroding it, and the supplier stops being the system's relief valve. The people did not change. What changed was the reading made by whoever designed the incentive.

That is why every engagement we run states which level it acts on and what effects it expects at the other three. One note of honesty about the fourth level: it is the hardest to measure, because its effects are delayed and most organisations do not instrument anything beyond their own boundary. We observe it qualitatively and we say so, rather than presenting it with a precision we do not have.

The origin: a misalignment nobody was naming

All of this has a concrete origin, and it was not a marketing idea.

Conscious Performance GmbH was founded in 2014 on a diagnosis repeated across twenty-four years of corporate work in multinational companies: there is a persistent misalignment between an organisation's strategic goals and the needs, aspirations and life plans of the people who work in it.

That misalignment produces a dynamic tension. No internal communication campaign corrects it, because it does not come from anyone's bad faith. It comes from two systems running on different time horizons and different definitions of success, rarely made explicit in the same room or in the same language. At bottom it is the same semantic problem described above, played out across a person's career.

The cost falls mainly on the people who want to get ahead, make a difference and be recognised for their contribution. In other words, on your best people.

Our answer was to build robust processes of dialogue, joint problem-solving and functional collaboration, capable of carrying difficult conversations without breaking the working relationship. From that follows a principle that defines our practice: well-handled conflict is a source of learning, not a system failure. An organisation that eliminates conflict also eliminates the information conflict carries.

Handled with method, that tension becomes productive in both directions. The organisation gets value creation and profitable growth; government, academic and social institutions get efficiency and responsibility in the use of resources to generate the greatest possible good. The person gets integral growth, across every dimension of life. The first without the second is extraction; the second without the first is good intention without means.

That is part two

We have said how we read, what we rest on and which levels we work at. What remains is the question every board asks, and rightly: what has this produced in twelve years, with numbers and with limits stated. And where all of it sits in the context now arriving. Part three takes that up.

Sources

• Beuchot, M. (1997). Tratado de hermenéutica analógica. UNAM.

• Beuchot, M. (2004). La semiótica. Teorías del signo y el lenguaje en la historia. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

• Beuchot, M. (2004). Hermenéutica, analogía y símbolo. Herder.

• Morris, C. W. (1938). Foundations of the Theory of Signs. University of Chicago Press.

• Saussure, F. de (1916). Course in General Linguistics.

• Gadamer, H. G. (1960). Truth and Method.

• Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture's Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Sage. The legacy and rights to this work belong to Geert Hofstede BV.

• Hofstede, G., Hofstede, G. J., and Minkov, M. (2010). Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. McGraw-Hill.

• Schein, E. H. (2017). Organizational Culture and Leadership. Jossey-Bass.

• Hogan, R. (2007). Personality and the Fate of Organizations. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

• Hogan Assessments. Technical documentation for the HPI, HDS and MVPI inventories and for the Hogan Judgment and Hogan EQ assessments.

• Cortina, A. (2024). ¿Ética o ideología de la inteligencia artificial? El eclipse de la razón comunicativa en una sociedad tecnologizada. Paidós.

• Guardini, R. (1999). Ética. Lecciones en la Universidad de Múnich. Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos.

Rights notice

This text, the concept of Conscious Performance and the Effectiveness with Human Meaning framework are the intellectual property of Conscious Performance GmbH and of their author, Miguel Ángel Gurrola Rodríguez. Quotation is permitted under the right of citation, with full attribution to the author, the firm and the original URL. Reproduction, translation, adaptation or commercial use, whether complete or partial, requires prior written consent. Rights for text and data mining are expressly reserved pursuant to § 44b (3) UrhG.