Monthly Archives: September 2026

Strategic Insights Posts

Do Realities Exist?

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Uncertainty, Power, and the Construction of What We Call Reality

First, we usually assume that reality exists independently of us and that our task is to discover it.

However, what if every reality we believe we have discovered is itself only another representation?

Moreover, what if there is no final position outside all perspectives from which someone can say: this is reality as it truly is?

Therefore, the central question of this essay is not simply how reality is interpreted.

It is more fundamental:

Do realities exist at all?

Beyond the Idea of a Single Reality

Initially, many approaches assume that one reality exists, even if individuals perceive it differently.

However, this assumption itself may be questionable.

If every observer operates through language, concepts, values, interests, experience, institutions, and systems of interpretation, how could anyone reach a position completely outside those frameworks?

Consequently, what we call reality may always be mediated by representation.

Furthermore, if one representation is replaced by another, there is no guarantee that the new one is closer to a final truth.

It may simply be another representation.

Heisenberg as a Starting Point

For example, Werner Heisenberg provides an important intellectual starting point.

His uncertainty principle belongs to quantum physics and should not be mechanically transferred to society or organizations.

Nevertheless, it raises a broader philosophical problem: observation, measurement, and the framework used by the observer influence what can be known.

However, my argument goes further.

The issue is not merely that our knowledge of reality is incomplete.

The deeper question is whether a final reality can ever be reached at all.

Plato and the Problem of the Cave

Consider, for example, Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

The prisoner leaves the cave and discovers that what appeared to be reality was only a world of shadows.

Eventually, the prisoner reaches the outside world.

Plato presents this outside world as a higher level of reality.

But why should the process stop there?

What guarantees that the world outside the cave is the final reality?

Perhaps, another Plato could appear and reveal that this supposed reality is itself another cave.

Then, another observer could reveal another level.

And another.

And another.

Consequently, the movement toward a final reality may become an infinite regress.

Every supposed exit from representation may simply lead to another representation.

From Reality to Representations

Therefore, perhaps we should stop assuming that there is one social or organizational reality waiting to be discovered.

Instead, there may be competing representations.

Some disappear.

Some remain marginal.

Some gain legitimacy.

Some become institutionalized.

And some become so deeply accepted that people stop recognizing them as representations.

They begin to call them reality.

At that point, a new question becomes necessary:

Why did this representation become real while another did not?

This is where power becomes central.

Power and the Conditions of Reality

Importantly, power does not need to create every idea, movement, identity, or interpretation.

People can organize genuinely.

Groups can resist institutions.

Movements can emerge independently.

Opposition can be authentic.

Nevertheless, becoming socially effective is another matter.

For a representation to become publicly visible, legally recognized, culturally accepted, institutionally durable, or politically relevant, it must operate within a field of possibilities.

My proposition is that this field is never neutral.

Structures of power influence what can exist publicly, what can circulate, what can be institutionalized, and what can endure.

Permission Does Not Mean Creation

Here, an important distinction must be made.

To say that a representation is permitted does not mean that elites created it.

Nor does it mean that the people involved are secretly controlled by dominant groups.

Instead, the argument concerns the conditions under which something becomes socially operative.

A movement may originate outside dominant institutions.

It may oppose them.

It may create real conflict.

Yet, if it eventually becomes publicly recognized, legally protected, institutionally represented, culturally normalized, or politically durable, then the conditions that allowed this transformation must also be examined.

The question becomes:

Who controls, influences, opens, closes, or benefits from those conditions?

What Does It Mean to “Gain Space”?

For instance, political transitions are often described by saying that new actors “gained space.”

However, this expression already contains an assumption.

Who defined the space?

Who controlled its boundaries?

Who previously prevented access?

Who possessed the capacity to repress it?

Who stopped repressing it?

Therefore, what appears to be a simple conquest of space can also be interpreted as entry into a field that became historically possible.

This does not deny struggle.

It does not deny resistance.

It changes the question.

Instead of asking only:

How did the movement gain space?

we should also ask:

Under what conditions was that space allowed to exist?

Movements, Elites and Adaptation

Similarly, dominant structures can benefit from movements they did not create.

At first, they may resist them.

Later, they may tolerate them.

Eventually, they may absorb part of them.

Then, what was initially disruptive may become incorporated into a new institutional equilibrium.

Importantly, this process does not require conspiracy.

It requires adaptation.

Consequently, a dominant order may survive not by defeating every challenge, but by allowing, absorbing, redirecting, or institutionalizing selected challenges.

In that sense, power can preserve itself by changing.

Artificial Intelligence and the Prompt

Today, artificial intelligence provides a useful metaphor.

When we generate an image with AI, we begin with a prompt.

The prompt influences:

  • what appears;
  • what disappears;
  • what receives emphasis;
  • what perspective is adopted;
  • what style dominates;
  • and what range of outputs becomes possible.

Therefore, the prompt does more than describe an image.

It establishes the field within which the image can emerge.

Who Writes the Social Prompt?

Likewise, organizations and societies operate through prompts.

Consider two questions:

“How can we reduce labour costs?”

and:

“How can we create more value with our workforce?”

The organization may be exactly the same.

However, the two prompts generate different analytical realities.

Similarly:

“Why are employees resisting change?”

creates a different reality from:

“Why has the organization failed to create conditions in which this change can work?”

Therefore, the question itself already shapes the field of possible answers.

Power May Act Before the Answer

Consequently, one of the strongest forms of power may operate before anyone provides an answer.

Power may influence the question.

It may define the vocabulary.

It may establish the categories.

It may determine which variables are measured.

It may decide what is considered reasonable.

It may define what is dismissed as impossible.

In other words, power may write the prompt.

Those who answer afterward may believe they are freely interpreting reality while remaining inside a representational field that was already structured for them.

Reality in Organizations

In organizations, this problem appears constantly.

Managers receive:

  • dashboards;
  • financial reports;
  • forecasts;
  • market research;
  • employee surveys;
  • strategic plans;
  • consultant presentations;
  • performance indicators;
  • risk assessments.

However, these instruments do not simply present reality.

They select information.

They classify it.

They compress it.

They emphasize some elements and exclude others.

Consequently, a manager does not receive reality itself.

The manager receives a representation considered sufficiently legitimate to support action.

The Importance of Recursive Questioning

For this reason, two questions become especially important:

What does it mean?

What does it represent?

Then, the first answer should not automatically be accepted.

Instead, it becomes the object of another question.

What does that mean?

What does that represent?

Subsequently, the analysis may move through assumptions, values, interests, identities, incentives, structures, consequences, and mechanisms.

The purpose is not endless questioning.

Rather, the objective is to discover when an apparent reality is actually the product of an unexamined representation.

What Becomes Socially Real?

Therefore, the distinction between what exists and what becomes socially real is crucial.

A representation becomes socially powerful when it begins to organize behaviour.

It can influence institutions.

It can shape decisions.

It can define acceptable language.

It can determine what appears legitimate.

It can establish what people are expected to believe or reject.

At that point, representation begins to function as reality.

My Central Proposition

Ultimately, my argument can be summarized as follows:

There are no independent realities that simply emerge and then confront power. What becomes socially real is conditioned by what structures of power permit to exist, circulate, institutionalize, and endure.

This does not mean that power creates everything.

It does not mean that resistance is artificial.

It does not mean that individuals and groups have no agency.

Instead, it means that agency operates within fields of possibility, and those fields are themselves shaped by power.

There May Be No Final Cave

Finally, we return to Plato.

Perhaps the deepest problem in the Allegory of the Cave is the assumption that the journey eventually ends.

The prisoner leaves one cave and reaches reality.

But why should we believe that?

Perhaps, there is always another cave.

Another observer.

Another language.

Another framework.

Another institution.

Another system of power.

Another prompt.

Therefore, the central task of strategic thinking may not be to discover an ultimate reality.

It may be to identify which representation is currently being treated as reality, understand why it became dominant, examine which power structures allow it to operate, and search for the representations that remain excluded.

Final Question

Ultimately, perhaps the most important question is no longer:

“What is reality?”

It may be:

“Do realities exist at all?”

And, if what we call reality is always mediated by representation:

“Who has the power to make one representation function as reality?”

Affonso Henriques
PhD by ESADE Business School & Law – Barcelona – Spain

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Management Posts

Management Under Uncertainty: Who Defines Reality?

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Management under uncertainty. First, managers often behave as if reality were something objective, stable, and fully available for observation.

However, organizations rarely operate in such a simple world.

Instead, managers interpret incomplete information, competing narratives, conflicting interests, uncertain evidence, and changing environments before making decisions.

Therefore, management may be better understood not as the search for absolute certainty, but as the disciplined interpretation of uncertain realities.

The Limits of Certainty

Initially, the work of Werner Heisenberg offers an important intellectual warning.

In physics, the uncertainty relations show that certain properties, such as position and momentum, cannot simultaneously be specified with unlimited precision. Philosophers of physics continue to debate exactly what this means, including whether it concerns measurement, knowledge, physical indeterminacy, or the limits of classical concepts. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Therefore, it would be incorrect to say that Heisenberg demonstrated that “everything is uncertain” or that social reality is subjective.

Nevertheless, his work suggests a broader intellectual lesson: the way we observe, measure, and describe a phenomenon can affect what we are able to know about it.

Consequently, managers should be cautious whenever an organizational problem is presented as completely obvious.

Organizations Do Not Simply Discover Reality

Moreover, organizations do not only observe their environments.

Instead, they classify information, select indicators, establish categories, define priorities, create reports, choose terminology, and decide which facts deserve attention.

As a result, what an organization calls “reality” is partly shaped by its systems of interpretation.

A sales decline, for example, can be described as:

  • a market problem;
  • a pricing problem;
  • a leadership problem;
  • a positioning problem;
  • a customer-experience problem;
  • a productivity problem;
  • or a temporary fluctuation.

Importantly, the same event can generate very different organizational responses depending on how it is represented.

Power and the Construction of Organizational Reality

Furthermore, not everyone has the same ability to define which interpretation becomes dominant.

In organizations, senior executives, boards, consultants, analysts, regulators, major investors, technology platforms, and other influential actors often have greater power to define the language through which problems are understood.

However, this does not require assuming that a single elite secretly controls reality.

Rather, different groups possess unequal resources to frame problems, establish agendas, produce accepted knowledge, and influence which interpretations become legitimate.

Prompts as a Metaphor for Power

Today, artificial intelligence offers a useful metaphor.

For example, when we generate an image with AI, we begin with a prompt.

The prompt tells the system:

  • what should be emphasized;
  • what should be excluded;
  • what perspective should be used;
  • what style should dominate;
  • and what kind of result should appear.

Consequently, two different prompts can generate two very different representations of the same underlying subject.

Likewise, organizations constantly create their own forms of prompts.

A strategic question such as:

“How can we reduce costs?”

creates a different field of analysis from:

“How can we create more value?”

Similarly:

“Why are employees resisting change?”

is different from:

“What conditions are preventing this change from working?”

Therefore, the formulation of the question already influences the reality that managers will subsequently examine.

Who Writes the Prompt?

More importantly, managers should ask who is defining the initial question.

Sometimes, the board writes the prompt.

Sometimes, senior management does.

Sometimes, consultants, regulators, financial markets, technology systems, customers, or political institutions influence it.

Consequently, the first strategic task may not be answering the question.

It may be asking:

Who defined this question?

Why was it defined this way?

What assumptions does it contain?

What does it exclude?

Who benefits if this interpretation becomes dominant?

Elites, Institutions and Competing Realities

Furthermore, societies and organizations contain groups with different degrees of influence.

Therefore, powerful groups can often promote particular interpretations more effectively than less powerful groups.

For instance, those who control capital, institutions, information systems, professional expertise, communication channels, or formal authority may have greater ability to establish categories and define priorities.

However, power is rarely absolute.

Instead, competing actors continuously challenge existing interpretations, introduce new evidence, redefine problems, and construct alternative narratives.

Thus, organizational reality is often contested rather than fixed.

Management as Interpretive Responsibility

For this reason, management should involve more than accepting the dominant representation of a problem.

Instead, managers should actively test the assumptions behind that representation.

A responsible manager might ask:

What evidence supports this interpretation?

What evidence contradicts it?

What alternative explanation exists?

Which variables are missing?

Whose perspective is absent?

What would happen if we reformulated the original question?

As a result, management becomes partly an exercise in disciplined skepticism.

Strategic Decisions Without Absolute Certainty

Nevertheless, organizations cannot wait until uncertainty disappears.

Indeed, complete certainty is rarely available.

Therefore, decision-making requires action under incomplete knowledge.

The challenge is not to eliminate uncertainty.

The challenge is to distinguish:

  • what is known;
  • what is assumed;
  • what is interpreted;
  • what is uncertain;
  • and what remains unknown.

Consequently, better management depends on recognizing the limits of knowledge without becoming incapable of action.

A Recursive Approach to Meaning

In this context, two simple questions become particularly useful:

What does it mean?

What does it represent?

Then, each answer can be questioned again.

A falling performance indicator may represent declining sales.

But what does declining sales represent?

Perhaps weaker demand.

And what does weaker demand represent?

Perhaps changing customer preferences, stronger competition, poor positioning, reduced purchasing power, or another cause entirely.

Eventually, the analysis may reach evidence, assumptions, interests, values, mechanisms, or a point where no further conclusion is justified.

Therefore, the objective is not endless interpretation.

It is to avoid premature certainty.

The Manager as Reality Tester

Ultimately, managers do not simply receive reality.

They receive representations of reality.

Reports, dashboards, forecasts, presentations, consultant recommendations, market research, financial indicators, and strategic plans are all representations.

Therefore, one of the manager’s most important responsibilities is to test them.

Finally, management under uncertainty requires humility.

The question is not:

“What is the definitive truth?”

The more useful question may be:

“Given the evidence available, what interpretation is currently the most defensible, what alternatives remain plausible, and what decision can we responsibly make now?”

Final Thought

Ultimately, uncertainty is not a failure of management.

It is part of management.

Therefore, the quality of a decision depends not only on the information available, but also on the questions asked, the assumptions challenged, the interests recognized, and the alternative realities considered.

Perhaps the most dangerous managerial mistake is not uncertainty itself.

It is believing that one interpretation is reality simply because it has become dominant.

Affonso Henriques
PhD by ESADE Business School & Law – Barcelona – Spain