Minessence eZine

eZine #49 - The Entropy Paradox

2011-11-09T20:03:00.001+10:00

Nobel Prize physicist Erwin Schrödinger wrote a book in 1944 with the title What is Life? It has been described as one of the most influential books in the history of science. Its object was to investigate the extent to which life could be accounted for in terms of physics and chemistry, despite our 'obvious inability' to define life. He had tow themes--'order from disorder' and 'order from order'. Order from disorder emphasised that life fed on negative entropy, which is a way of saying that whereas the universe as a whole is becoming less ordered (positive entropy) life creates greater order (negative entropy). This is not an exception to the rule of the universe for the rule simply states that, whereas the universe as a whole is running down, there are enclaves where the opposite may happen and one such enclave is human organisms. There is nothing mysterious about this. Living organisms get their energy to do this from the sun. The sun's energy is trapped by plants. Animal get their energy from feeding on plants...
Schrödinger's second principle 'order from order' was about how information was passed from generation to generation by genes. he predicted the general nature of the gene more than a decade before the structure of DNA was understood. [Birch 1999, p. 4]

Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that requires a particular direction for time, sometimes called an arrow of time. As one goes "forward" in time, the second law of thermodynamics says, the entropy of an isolated system will increase. Hence, from one perspective, entropy measurement is a way of distinguishing the past from the future. However in thermodynamic systems that are not closed, entropy can decrease with time: many systems, including living systems, reduce local entropy at the expense of an environmental increase, resulting in a net increase in entropy. Examples of such systems and phenomena include the formation of certain crystals, the workings of a refrigerator and living organisms. [source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(arrow_of_time)]

Since entropy is the measure of disorder, we can easily create a relative measure of it for any group of people for “equal priority = no priority = chaos = high entropy”, conversely "strong & clear priorities = strong focus = well-defined values-system (strange-attractor) = understandable order = low entropy". This means all we have to to measure the relative entropy of groups, is to undertake an analysis of their value priorities. High group priorities and only a few values will be low entropy and a well focused group. Low group priorities and a large number of shared priorities means high entropy and a low focused group.

The diagram below shows the life-cycle of an organisation or group of people:

Figure 1. Group/Organisational Lifecycle

At foundation and boom, entropy is low because shared values are few and priorities are high—strong norms which guide behaviour will emerge
In the period of decline, entropy becomes higher and higher because shared values become many and their collective priorities are low—a state of anomie exists when norms break down-- many people are doing their own thing—the organisation/group is becoming chaotic
The group/organisation's only chance of surviving and again becoming successful is to rebuild a robust values-system (strange-attractor)--when this is in place the entropy will again be low.

Keeping track of group/organisation's entropy is a way of keeping track of the group/organisation's health. When entropy starts to rise, alarm bells should be ringing.

The Entropy Paradox

While it's important for an organisation's entropy to be low. For individuals, growth depends on them following a regular entropy cycle as depicted in Figure 2. The top of the diagram represents a person working from their primary brain-preference modes. Here they are most competent and dependable. However, if they never engage the other parts of their brain their development will be stunted. It is important that everyone in the organisation is given the freedom and encouragement to undertake fun activities matching their least brain preference on a regular basis 9at least two hours per week). This will unlock their creativity, and lead to holistic brain development--i.e. their brain becomes more complex, and though they are cycling through low to high entropy, in the long run their brain entropy will be decreasing. Hence the paradox, people need to feed off periods of chaotic fun activities (high entropy) in order to be more creative, more sophisticated (low entropy) individuals.

Figure 2. Entropy Cycle

in summary, people have to be given their space, time & freedom in organisations so they can have fun in their creative mode—the saying, "All work and no play makes Jack/Jill a dull boy/girl” turns out to be a key principle behind personal development. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his video, http://www.minessence.net/presentations/Happiness.aspx, gives a few good examples of people who have this freedom. The Australian movie The Dish also gives a good example of an organisation which is maximally effective and successful because its people are continually moving through the entropy cycle.

Entropy should not be a static measurement, rather the conditions should be set so that people can cycle through it. A good measure which shows if an organisation is “ripe” for enabling this cycle to exist in an organisation is the leisure/pleasure score in the diagram below:

Figure 3. The Cultural Field Map

An organisation with a low or zero leisure/pleasure score and a high control/order score would be a low entropy (i.e. orderly and boring) organisation. On the other hand, an organisation with a moderately high leisure/pleasure score and a low control/order score would be an even lower-entropy organisation yet be a fun creative place to work, provided it has a clearly defined values/vision/mission statement based on its people own values, and, encourages teams with a diversity of brain-preference to engage in regular creative mode activities. It has a lower-entropy than the highly controlled no-fun organisation because it is more complex/sophisticated in its operation--you could say, it's more alive! The Chaordic Model (Figure 4), in conjunction with the values alignment model of Figure 5, are designed to create such an organisation.

Figure 4. The Chaordic Model of Organisational Development

Figure 5. Organisational Alignment Model

To create a low-entropy high performing organisation, each person and each group in the organisation must give attention to:

Concretization. Concretizing their top 10 priority values (using techniques such as: asking VAK questions about each value, concept mapping, and/or Repertory Grid). "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate." - Carl Jung
Purpose. Having regard any published organisational values, formulate personal and group values, vision and mission statements. Make statements which are uplifting and motivating. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." - Proverbs 29:18
Will. Each person reflects on their foundation and vision values, and brain-preference. Vision values motivate so, "Will this organisation enable you to be passionate about and motivated by your vision values?" Foundation values can demotivate if they are not satisfied so, "Do you have strategies and skills in place that turn these values into a solid foundation rather than an achilles heel?" "In this organisation/group, are you able to focus mainly on tasks which match your work-mode brain-preferences and priority values?"
"How do your top 10 values compare to your group/organisation's top 10 values?" "What common ground do you see?" "If your values are markedly different to the group/organisation's values, can you see a way you could happily live your own values whilst at the same contributing to the group/organisation's values?" "How does the group energy management profile compare with your personal profile?"
Capability. "Do all in our group have the skills, resources and abilities to live our values in our workplace?" SQ = Spiritual Intelligence, EQ = Emotional Intelligence and IQ = intelectual intelligence, "Do we have the knowledge to develop these intelligences within our group?" The group skills profile indicates the skills needs of each group based on the values they all have. "What are the implications of this profile for our group?"

The above program works, and it works very well, because it creates low entropy organisation--i.e. an organisation with a strong values-system (strange attractor) sourced in its people's actual values--self-organisation does the rest.

eZine #48 - Have you discussed your principles lately?

2011-10-19T09:29:00.001+10:00

I am frequently asked, "What are the differences between values, ethics, morals and principles?" My short answer to the question is usually, "Values motivate, morals and ethics constrain." In other words values describe what is important in a person's life, while ethics and morals prescribe what is or is not considered appropriate behaviour in living one's life. Principles inform our choice of morals and ethics (our desired behavioural constraints).

"Generally speaking, value refers to the relative worth of a quality or object. Value is what makes something desirable or undesirable" (Shockley-Zalabak 1999, p. 425). Through applying our personal values (usually unconsciously) as benchmarks, we continually make subjective judgments about a whole manner of things:

...we are more likely to make choices that support our value systems than choices that will not. Let us say that financial security is a strong value for an individual. When faced with a choice of jobs, chances are the individual will carefully examine each organisation for potential financial and job security. The job applicant who values financial security may well take a lower salary offer with a well established company over a higher-paying offer from a new, high risk venture. Another job seeker with different values, possibly adventure and excitement, might choose the newer company simply for the potential risk and uncertain future.Values, therefore, become part of complex attitude sets that influence our behaviour and the behaviour of all those with whom we interact. What we value guides not only our personal choices but also our perceptions of the worth of others. We are more likely, for example, to evaluate highly someone who holds the same hard-work value we do than someone who finds work distasteful, with personal gratification a more important value. We may also call the person lazy and worthless, a negative value label. (Shockley-Zalabak 1999, pp. 425-42)

What then of ethics? Ethics are the standards by which behaviours are evaluated for their morality - their rightness or wrongness. Imagine a person who has a strong value of achievement and success. Knowing only that this value is important to them gives us a general expectation of their behaviour, i.e. we would expect them to be goal oriented, gaining the skills necessary to get what they want, etc. However, we cannot know whether they will lie or cheat to get what they want or "do an honest day's work each day". The latter dimension is a matter of ethics and morality. Take another example, a person has a high priority value or research/knowledge/insight. They have have a career in medical research. In fact, knowing their value priority we would expect them to have a career in some form of research, however, we do not know from their value priority how they are likely to undergo their research. Will the person conduct experiments on animals, or would they abhor such approaches? Again, the latter is a matter of ethical stance and morality. Johannesen (cited Shockley-Zalabak 1999, p. 437) gives further examples which help distinguish between values and ethics:

Concepts such as material success, individualism, efficiency, thrift, freedom, courage, hard work, prudence, competition, patriotism, compromise, and punctuality all are value standards that have varying degrees of potency in contemporary American culture. But we probably would not view them primarily as ethical standards of right and wrong. Ethical judgments focus more precisely on degrees of rightness and wrongness in human behaviour. In condemning someone for being inefficient, conformist, extravagant, lazy, or late, we probably would not also claim they are unethical. However, standards such as honesty, truthfulness, fairness, and humaneness usually are used in making ethical judgments of rightness and wrongness in human behaviour

To summarise then, "values are our measures of importance, where as ethics represent our judgments about right and wrong" (Shockley-Zalabak 1999, p. 438). The close relationship between importance and right and wrong is a powerful influence on our behaviour and how we evaluate the behaviour of others.

Now let's move to another level. How does one go about choosing what ethics are right?

The Principle Centric Approach to Behavioural Choices

In this Millennium, perhaps more than ever before, We need to reformulate a set of principles to guide us. There are two main benefits of taking a principle centric approach to guide all human action: (1) knowing a set of principles concerning 'the nature of things' enables us to make informed choices and judgments as we would know, with a high degree of certainty, the likely outcomes of our actions, (2) knowing even a few principles helps us avoid information overload. On the latter point, Birch (1999, p. 44) says:

One way in which drowning in information is overcome is by the discovery of principles and theories that tie up a lot of information previously untied. Prior to Charles Darwin biology was a mass of unrelated facts about nature. Darwin tied them together in a mere three principles of evolution: random genetic variation, struggle for existence and natural selection. So we do not need to teach every detail that was taught to nineteenth century students. A mere sample is necessary to illustrate the universal principles.

Before you raise your voice in protest, "What do scientific principles have to do with informing what constitutes ethical and moral human behaviour?" Stop for a moment and ponder the what has been institutionalised into Western society all in the name of extolling the virtue of progress through unencumbered evolution - i.e. guided by the principles made evident by Charles Darwin we push for free trade; level playing fields, argue that cloning interferes with natural selection, push for de-regulation so that competition prevails and only the fit organisations should survive, etc., etc.

But what if we've got Darwin wrong? What if the principles instead were: survival of those who cooperate for the greater good, selection guided by a moral sense, etc. We would have a completely different society from that which we have today. Internalising the principles we believe describe 'the nature of things' is perhaps the single most powerful factor which shapes society. Thus, it is vital that we maintain a continual dialogue around principles to ensure those we internalise and institutionalise are up-to-date and are our current best shot at the truth. We must work hard to expose those who willingly spread misinformation for their own personal gain--our future depends on it.

We are entitled to our own opinions. We are not entitled to our own facts.

References
Birch, C. 1999, Biology and the Riddle of Life, University of New South Wales press, Sydney.

Loye, D. 2001, 'Rethinking Darwin: A Vision for the 21st Century', Journal of Futures Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 121-136.

Shockley-Zalabak, P. 1999, Fundamentals of Organisational Communication: Knowledge, Sensitivity, Skills, Values, Longman: New York.

eZine #47 - Culture Matters Most

2011-09-22T09:46:00.003+10:00

Values are the Wellspring of Organizational Culture

Benjamin Tonna, a sociologist from Rome, while working with Brian Hall first posited the idea of taking an inventory of the values in documents. When the idea was applied to significant documents in real organisations the results were astounding. It was claimed that 80% of the organizational issues could be identified from the results of this analysis.

When one reflects on this it makes sense for values are the well-spring of organisational culture—see below:

Figure 1. Values are the wellspring of organizational culture

Research from London's school of economics has identified that a company’s culture is eight times more influential on performance variance than a company's strategy or business plan, yet while over 90% of all organisations have a business plan or strategy, less than 5% have a plan for developing their organizational culture.

Where do an organization’s values come from?

Initially the organization’s values are the values of its founders. The organizational life-cycle (Figure 2) illustrates the evolution of an organization’s values and the three scenarios for its destiny.

Organizational Life-cycle:

In the beginning the values are the values of the founders.
If society values what the organization does as a result if it living the founders’ values then it will become successful and norms will emerge around the founding values in relation to “how-things-are-done-around-here”. It will be a highly cohesive organization.
The organization’s success could go on for years, however, often complacency sets in.
During the complacency phase one of two things may happen: (a) the organization loses touch with the values of its founders and strays to some other path which its clients don’t value, or (b) the values of society change and the organization ignores this, continuing to believe that what made it successful in the past will always make it successful.
After complacency, if no attention is given to the organization’s values, comes decline.
There are now only three possible destinies for the organization: (i) it ceases to exist, (ii) it continues to barely exist with none of its former glory, or (iii) it gives attention to the values of its founders, its people, its clients and society, and re-invents itself around new values.

Figure 2. The Organizational Life-cycle

Undertaking a values scan of the organization’s key documents is essential to gaining an understanding of the values of the organization. Two sets of documents matter, those prepared by the founders, and current strategic/operational documents (including internal newsletters, website ‘about us’ pages and the like). Comparing the values in the two sets of documents shows where the organization has come from and where it is heading.

Click the links below for a couple of examples of what can be done by scanning for value-laden words in documents, or even transcripts of people's speeches:

eZine #46 - Don't Do Don'ts--Do Do Dos

2011-02-15T13:34:00.002+10:00

The truth will set us free. If we just tell people the facts, since people are basically rational beings, they’ll all reach the right conclusions.
But we know from cognitive science that people do not think like that. People think in frames…To be accepted, the truth must fit people’s frames. If the facts do not fit the frame, the frame stays and the facts bounce off. Why?
Neuroscience tells us that each of the concepts we have – the long-term concepts that structure how we think – is instantiated in the synapses of of our brains. Concepts are not something that can be changed just by someone telling us a fact. We may be presented with facts, but for us to make sense of them, they have to fit what is already in the synapses of the brain. Otherwise facts go in and then they go right back out. They are not heard, or they are not accepted as facts, or they mystify us. Why would anyone have said that? Then we label the fact as irrational, crazy, or stupid. -Lakoff ¹

If you are planning to run a values development program, using say the Minessence Values Framework (MVF) , to change peoples’ values, you are going to have to wrestle with brains which, by their very nature, have a vested interest in not allowing the beliefs, which structure thinking, to be challenged.

In this modern world, we hear daily of people who die for their beliefs – we call them terrorists or martyrs – which label you choose, for the same person, depends on your own beliefs.

Rather than engage in a futile attempt to change people’s values to those someone else believes to be important, go with the flow and make your values program about how people can more effectively live the values they already have.

"It doesn't matter what values you have, what matters is how you live them." -Paul Chippendale²

In formulating your values program, frames of meaning should be a very important consideration in designing its delivery.

Do do dos - Don’t do don’ts

Frames of meaning are networks of related concepts which enable us to make sense of the world. The term originates in the field of cognitive science. A neat concept mapping tool, CmapTools³, has been developed to help map people’s frames of meaning (from now on I’ll just call "frames of meaning", frames). Below is the concept map of the frame I have in my mind of the concept of frames:

The interesting aspect of frames is that, to negate a frame is to evoke the frame. Thus, when we say don’t smoke, don’t drink and drive, don’t whatever, we are actually evoking the frame associated with the meaning of the 'whatever" which follows the word "don’t" and we are therefore putting the whatever 's frame foremost in their mind. So, saying, "don’t smoke" to a person actually evokes the frame associated with smoking in their head--just like switching on a set of Christmas tree lights and most lights are in the shape of an attractive aspect of smoking! Knowing this, I was not surprised when my son, who had never smoked, was given a homework diary by his high school which said, "don’t smoke," with a clever cartoon, on every second page. The message was clear--and, by the end of that school year, he and most of the class were smokers.

By telling people don’t do this, don’t do that, etc. we are actually evoking the frame in their head associated with the very thing we don’t want them to do – bad strategy! So in values development programs, focus instead on desired outcomes. Focus on where to go rather than on avoiding negative aspects of the past and present. Help people make positive statements about what they want. For example, if a person wants to lose weight, a positive meaningful objective for the person could be, "By September this year I will be fit and healthy and will be wearing size 10 clothes."

A whole new therapy has emerged based on this understanding of how the brain works. It’s called ACT–Acceptance and Commitment Therapy⁴. The main thrust of ACT is to accept that life is tough, then, rather than focussing on what we don’t want or don’t like, identify our priority values and commit to living them. ACT shifts people’s thoughts from undesirable frames to desirable frames. Not surprisingly, ACT is having outstanding success in all facets of people’s lives.

The Minessence Group have developed a non-therapeutic approach to ACT called ACCL–Acceptance, Commitment and Conscious Living⁵ which has application in people’s everyday lives.

Endnotes

Lakoff, G. 2006, Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know your values and frame the debate, Scribe Short Books, Melbourne, p. 17.
Chippendale, P. http://minessence-principles.blogspot.com/2010/09/it-doesnt-matter-what-values-we-have.html
CmapTools is available as a free download from http://cmap.ihmc.us/ - it was developed by the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (ihmc)
Hayes, S. 2005, Get out of your mind & into your life, New Harbinger Publications
Minessence Group, ACCL – Acceptance, Commitment and Conscious Living

eZine #45 - The Top Priority Values in Each of the Eight Clusters of Values

2010-12-24T11:04:00.000+10:00

The Minessence Values Framework (MVF) comprises 128 values, eight values clusters, seven generic worldviews--each value has attributes such as goal/means, energy giving/draining/neutral--each value has a temporal dimension past/present/future [this dimension is dependent on worldview], and much more.

The Minessence Group have been identifying people's values via the AVI (A Values Inventory) since 1988. Listed below are the Top 6 values, in each of the eight clusters of values, of all people who have taken the AVI since its inception. The values are listed from highest to lowest priority.

Self-Preservation

Physical Function
Food/Warmth/Shelter | Safety/Survival
Self-Preservation | Wonder/Awe/Fate
Self-Interest/Control

Security

Affection | Wonder/Nature
Security
Sensory Pleasure
Financial Security
Property/Control

Belonging

Family/Belonging
Rights/Respect
Self Worth
Care/Nurture
Hospitality/Courtesy
Peer Support

Organization

Self-Competence/Confidence
Loyalty
Achievement
Productivity
Management
Rationality | Duty | Responsibility | Workmanship/Quality

Self Actualization

Sharing/Listening/Trust | Integration/Wholeness
Self-Actualization
Decision/Initiation
Independence
Adaptability/Flexibility

Emerging Order

Being Self
Human Dignity
Limitation/Celebration | Presence/Being | Simplicity/Play
Creativity | Intimacy

Wisdom

Synergy
Interdependence
Collaborative Individualist
Wisdom
Oneness
Transformative Communication

Global Transformation

Minessence
Human Rights
Deep Ecology
Convivial Technology | Just Global Distribution | Global Macroeconomics | Global Equality

eZine #44 - By the time you are old enough to vote, your brain will have decided for whom you should vote!

2010-11-01T11:40:00.004+10:00

From when we are born our interaction with the world around us stimulates our brain. We quickly begin to develop preferences for some forms of stimulation over others. By late adolescence these preferences are virtually "set in concrete" and we have developed a preference for one of four ways of relating to the world around us: things-abstract, concrete-things, concrete-people, or people-abstract. Below, each of these four ways of dialoguing with reality are briefly described.

Things-Abstract [Technical Architect]

These are people who have a preference for using their hands to "tinker" with or to create things and to use their intellect to develop models or plans. They rely mostly on discovering things about the world through thinking about it and intellectually analysing it. They prefer to gather information visually. They are the "accidental leaders" because they will often create a technology which everyone else wants. People such as Bill Gates and the inventor of Facebook are examples. People with this brain-preference are not particularly interested in politics, they are the "corporatists" and would be quite comfortable living a totally privatized world.

Things-Concrete [Quality Producer/Crafts Person]

These are "hands on" people who like certainty and like activities/organisations to be well structured. They prefer things to be down-to-earth rather than abstract and intangible. People with this preference may be athletes, mechanics, surgeons, gardeners, accountants, farmers, etc. They will prefer a political party which gives them certainty and a sense of security. They will also prefer a party which is conservative in its policies rather than one which comes up with innovative new (never-tried-before) policy.

Concrete-People [People Servants]

As with the Quality Producers, People Servants like structure. However, their preference is for spending time with and talking to people, rather than relating to the world of non-human things. They will choose careers as school teachers, actors, ethicists, priests/nuns, public servants, value consultants, etc. They will also prefer a party which is somewhat conservative in its policies, however, they will put people ahead of balancing the budget. So, if their party spends too much money on welfare (i.e. caring for those who can't care for them selves), their party will probably be voted out of office and a party supported by the Quality Producers will be voted back in on the promise of spending cuts to bring the budget back into surplus.

People-Abstract [Social Architects]

The Social Architects, like the People Servants, prefer the world of people to the world of non-human things. Social Architects are comfortable functioning in a world of uncertainty--in fact it's their preference--too much of the "same old, same old" and they get bored. Social Architects like to create models to understand how people behave, they like designing new social systems. They are the "greens", social-ecologists, social-activists, social scientists, social policy planners, etc. in our society.

Brain-Preference Map

The diagram below plots all four of these preferences for relating to the world:

You might ask why only adjacent preferences are described. Why not People-Things or Concrete-Abstract? Research by Walter Lowen and others has found many aspects of the brain are dichotomous. Thus we cannot consciously be using the part of our brain which deals with the abstract at the same time as the part which deals with the concrete. Similarly, we cannot be consciously using the part of our brain that we need to relate to people at the same time as we are concentrating on performing a delicate task with our hands (if you have a surgeon with bad bedside manner operating on you, be very pleased!!).

Because people's brain-preference shapes a person's worldview and therefore determines some of their values (we've found 40 of the 128 values are correlated with brain-preference), a person's priority values can be used to identify their brain-preference. The chart below is my brain-preference map as identified from my priority values--click on the image to see the full size Brain-Preference Map as a PDF document.

Click here to take an inventory of your values so you can have your own brain-preference map.

eZine #43 - Only Things Which Have Irreversible Consequences Have Meaning

2010-10-15T09:09:00.003+10:00

I recently saw an analysis someone had carried out on the most and least popular words in Tweets on Twitter. Looking at the list of words I was immediately struck by the fact that many of the words were just that, words. These words did not represent values (words which have attached emotional significance), they were just words. The distinction between information and data is: information = data + meaning. So the survey provided lots of data but little information.
Why is it that some words convey little or no meaning and others are highly charged with meaning?
Baroness Susan Greenfield says, "only things which have irreversible consequences have any meaning." When you think about this, it makes sense. If you do something, and you or someone else don't like it and you can completely reverse it (both the action and the consequences) so nothing at all has changed, then it has no significance in your or their life--i.e. it was a meaningless event. On the other hand, if you do something and it has significant consequences which can't be undone, the outcome has the potential to challenge yours and other's beliefs about the very nature of reality. However, it takes a lot before we'll change our beliefs. Just telling someone about the potential consequences of their actions is certainly not enough to trigger change:

        Many among us believe that learning is a simple transaction that occurs when someone with knowledge...communicates that knowledge to a receptive individual. The learner assimilates it and is thus able to modify his or her interactions with the world to accommodate this learning. Oh that it were so simple!
        Learning, in the final analysis is about changing minds. What we have learned about the world has been gained through a considerable investment. We are unlikely to modify these beliefs easily because we have a vested interest in them. We see the world through the paradigm filters that have been painstakingly built on the platform of our earlier experiences of the world.
        Thus, to begin with, we are unlikely to accept those new bits of information that we receive that are at odds with our current paradigms. If we have a construct that, to us, adequately explains our experience of the world, then we are unlikely to countenance a new construct that is at odds with our present rationalisation.. Hence, a major block to learning is merely getting the new information past our own individual paradigm filters. This is a difficult lesson for the rationalists to learn; they believe, rather naively, that the power of logic will prevail. When a person has invested time, and more importantly, emotional energy, in making sense of their personal reality, logic is not particularly persuasive! The intellect serves the purposes of the will in defence of current paradigms: "you cannot accept that which you cannot afford to know". It is only when the existing paradigms no longer allow us to deal effectively with the anomalies and inconsistencies in our lives that we surrender them up to a new and more effective paradigm.
        Learning is essentially about developing meaning structures that enable us to make sense of our world. It's about having maps which plot and explain our experiences...[Thus] real learning seems to occur only through experience. Knowledge derived from rational thought or through the observed or related experiences of others is not accepted into our domain of learning until we have tested it against our own experience. If it helps us make sense of our experience it becomes part of our embedded meaning structure. From such experiences we may abstract more general laws and theories which we continue to test against our experience. [Scott & Harker, 1998, pp. 91-92]

The worldview we create and maintain through this process has an associated set of values. These values are the filter which ensure we only pay attention to that which is important to us--that which matches our values.

Social networks such as Twitter and Facebook cannot escape these filters. Via Facebook and Twitter people will connect to others with the same values as their own. They are fabulous at connecting people with similar worldviews, but they can have little direct impact on changing worldviews.
Do you know which values are determining who reads your web posts, your Tweets, or anything else you are wanting to communicate to the world? These values can be made explicit, for example, at the request of RSA we recently analysed two items they have on the web. Read what we found: http://bit.ly/9WiMDQ.

References
Greenfield, S. 2010, (Video) The Future of the Brain, http://bit.ly/cCQI2N
Scott, T. & Harker, P. 1998, Humanity at Work, Phil Harker & Associates, Luscombe, Queensland.

eZine #42 - Empathy: The Preeminent Value

2010-09-09T10:12:00.009+10:00

For years I've been arguing, "It doesn't matter what values we have, what matters is how we live them." So what's this about a preeminent value?

All statements make sense in the context in which they are made. So, when talking about the worth of people, the statement, "It doesn't matter what values we have, what matters is how we live them," makes sense because how we live our values has more to do with morals, ethics, and the like--i.e. beliefs about how people should behave.

In the context of building a better society, empathy matters. The following RSA Animate from TED explains:

How then is empathy unfolding in society? We've been tracking the value priorities of people since 1988. The chart below plots the priority placed on empathy and rights/respect, relative to the other 126 values, over this time interval.

From 1988 until 2000 the priority people were placing on empathy relative to other values was increasing. The global world-view shift which occurred after September 11 seems to have resulted in a decrease in the importance of this value. This is possibly due to people choosing to associate more with people similar to themselves and to have less interest in building bridges with people different from themselves.

The reason I've plotted rights/respect on the same chart is because when this value is given a high priority by people it is indicative that people feel they are not been treated very well by others. As you would expect then, when empathy is higher rights/respect is lower—i.e. when people place a priority on empathy people around them are happier with how they are treated.

What do you think?

eZine #41 - G-SEEs & World-View Shifts

2010-08-09T16:53:00.003+10:00

Last month the Minessence eZine focused on the on how the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) impacted on the world-view of key players responsible for the global economic system. This month, the eZine looks at how the GFC has impacted on Australians. Looking at the two charts below, you would perhaps say the GFC has had little impact on us.

Figure 1 -- Changes the priority of values in the Self Preservation, Security, Family and Organizational clusters

Figure 2 -- Changes in the priority of values in The Self Actualization, Emerging Order, Wisdom and Global Transformation clusters

Both Figures 1 & 2 show the dramatic change in collective world-views, and hence value priorities, which occurred after September 11, 2001. The value priority shifts set in motion by that global significant emotive event (G-SEE) continue despite the GFC which clearly has not been a G-SEE of the same magnitude as September 11. Perhaps the world-view shift brought about by September 11 placed us in a better space to deal with the impact of the GFC?

There seems to be one dimension where the GFC has impacted. Figure 1 hows that after September 11 we placed almost as much priority on family and friends as on our work. Since the start of the GFC in 2008, we are reducing our priority on family/friends and once again turning to the demands of the organization.

What are your thoughts?

eZine #40 - The GFC & World-Views

2010-07-19T12:00:00.001+10:00

Previous eZines have highlighted the fact that whenever a significant emotive event occurs affecting almost everyone in society, a collective world-view transformation takes place. When a collective world-view changes:

people's value priorities change,
people make different decisions because they now have different priorities,
people then do different things, and
society embarks on a fundamental transformation--a new culture has its beginnings.

The two most recent significant emotive events with global impact have been September 11 and the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The world-view/values shifts as a result of September 11 and how our society changed, were the topic of eZines 34 & 35. The graphs in eZines 34 & 35 will be updated next month to include the GFC. In this eZine the CFC is used as an example to describe how the world-view of just one person can impact on a collective world-view.
Alan Greenspan in his role as Chairman of the US Government's Federal Reserve shaped the Global Economy for over 19 years. He was our world's economics guru. Anyone who had anything to do with economics or the Market hung on his every utterance. That's what makes the following admission¹ of the failure of his own world-view so astonishing:

WAXMAN:² "The question I have for you is, you had an ideology, you had a belief that free, competitive—and this is your statement—'I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free, competitive markets are by far the unrivalled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation, none meaningfully worked.' That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others. And now our whole economy is paying the price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?"

GREENSPAN: "Well, remember, though, what an ideology is. It’s a conceptual framework with [sic] the way people deal with reality. Everyone has one. You have to. To exist, you need an ideology. The question is, whether it is accurate or not. What I am saying to you is, yes, I found the flaw, I don’t know how significant or permanent it is, but I have been very distressed by that fact."

WAXMAN: "You found a flaw?"

GREENSPAN: "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works, so to speak."

WAXMAN: "In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working."

GREENSPAN: "Precisely. That is precisely the reason I was shocked, because I had been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

Dr Gunther Weil has developed a model³ which directly relates people's monetary decisions to key values associated with their world-view:

World View Philanthropic Values & Motive
Alien/Threatened Survival & Security
Family/Social Family tradition, care/nurture, status/image
Organizational/Transactional Financial metrics & accountability, productivity, efficiency
Self-Actualization/Service Self-discovery, empathy, altruism, service
Collaborative Social justice, innovation, collaboration
Symbiotic Society transformation, prophetic vision, wisdom & spirituality
Global Transformation Global transformational, human rights, global ecology, macroeconomics

If you know which of the seven generic world-views are closest to a person's world-view it will come as no surprise as to how they choose to spend their money.
If you know the world-view of the people responsible for setting economic policy, you will know what type of economic system they will put in place.
Your world-view comprises a set of assumptions about "how the world works". If your model of the world no longer seems to be working, you can either move to a state of denial about the assumptions on which it is based, or you can as Alan Greenspan did, recognize that the assumptions on which it is based are flawed, and build a new world-view. Your very survival may depend on it:⁴

How valid are the assumptions underpinning your current world-view?

Notes

From a transcript of a hearing before a US Congress House Committee hearing in 2008 reported by Raj Patel in The Value of Nothing, pp. 5-6.
Henry Arnold Waxman (born September 12, 1939) is an American politician. He has represented California's 30th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1975. Waxman, a Democrat, is considered to be one of the most influential liberal members of Congress. His district includes much of the western part of the city of Los Angeles, as well as West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. Before his election to Congress, he served six years in the California State Assembly. With the Democrats' victory in the 2006 midterm elections, Waxman became chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the principal investigative committee of the House. Source: Wikipedia.
Source: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2010/06/18/how-to-raise-fu.html
Drawing by Ted Key in Keyes, K. 1975, p. 115.

References

Keyes, K. 1975, Taming Your Mind, Living Love Publications, Coos Bay, Oregon
Patel, R. 2010, The Value of Nothing: How to reshape market society & redefine democracy, Black Inc, Melbourne

eZine #39 - How does your organization rate?

2010-02-13T07:34:00.003+10:00

For two years now we've been running a survey asking people to choose between four statements. Almost 1000 people have responded:

10.1% chose, "I get little from being part of my organization and my work is not valued."
11.9% chose, "I get little from being part of my organization yet my work is highly valued."
12.8% chose, "I get a lot from being part of my organization but my work is under valued."
68.2% chose, "I get a lot from being part of my organization and my work is highly valued."

The diagram above depicts the the responses graphically. The results are encouraging as the majority, almost 70%, of people say their work is meaningful and they are highly valued for what they do.

If you ran this survey in your workplace, how would it measure up?

How long is it since you took an inventory of your values? Have you had a lot of changes in your life?

Do you want to see what values are important in your life now? Click here.

eZine #38 - Genesis Effect Revisited

2010-01-20T10:15:00.003+10:00

In 1988 I read Brian-Hall's book, The Genesis Effect, in 24 hours--I was excited by what I read. 22 years later--I'm more convinced than ever of the power of the genesis effect.

So what is the genesis effect? It has two dimensions: (1) we try to create the world around us to match our view of how the world should be, (2) we are most most motivated to undertake activities which match our values.

Creation
We each have a view of what the world around us is all about. Our personal world-view is shaped by our beliefs, our life experience, our knowledge about 'the nature of things', etc:

The values we hold are the byproduct of our personal world-view. We attempt to create a desired world around us through makings decisions about what to do. Since the choices/decisions we make are based on our values, and since our values are a byproduct of our world-view, it follows that our personal world-view (inner-reality) determines the world (outer reality) we create for ourselves.

This has important implications for change be it personal, corporate, or societal and leads to the first principle of the genesis effect, i.e. to change our outer-reality, we must firstly change our inner-reality (world-view).
Motivation
We are only motivated to do things which match our values. This is the main cause of procrastination, i.e. we are reluctant to do things that are important to someone else (match their values) but do not match our own values and are therefore not important to us.

So, if we define productivity as a measure of how much we get done with a given resource, the second principle of the genesis effect becomes: there is a direct relationship between productivity and the extent to which people can live their own values--i.e. when people can perform tasks which match their values they will be more productive than when they are 'forced' do things which match someone else's values.

What have the Minessence Group learnt about values-based programs over the past 22 years? In summary, the following set of principles, starting with the two above, have emerged:

People make decisions based on their identity. To change the outer-reality, the inner-reality (world-view) must firstly change;
To increase people's productivity, one must ensure they can engage in tasks which match their values;
What matters is not WHAT values a person has, rather, what matters is HOW they live their values;
Rather than attempt to change a person's values, it's more effective to 'harness' the values people already have;
Transformative leadership is a team effort. It requires constructive dialogue between the Transactional leaders (the implementers) and the Visionary leaders (the dreamers);
People's brain-preference influences whether they more motivated by being a Visionary or Transactional leader;
Systems (organizations, the economy, cultures... ) have values independent of the people in them. The values of systems are those of the people who created them. As people's values change, it's important to re-work systems to be based on people's current values;
Civilization is best served through facilitating people to maximize their well-being (Why? Because the path of happiness is identical to the path of progress--see 9 & 10);
Happiness ensues when we take on ever more challenge, with commensurate skills development, whilst living our own values;; and
Progress = increased simplicity through increased complexity. The arrow of progress is in the direction of increased internal complexity, provided the increased complexity is for the purpose of making things simpler.

Should you wish to discuss any or all of these principles in depth, please visit our blog site.

eZine #37 - Values Re-Discovered by Business

2009-09-30T13:00:00.003+10:00

In this issue:

Values Re-Discovered by Business

I had a chuckle when Gunther Weil sent me the article by Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter titled, "The Strategic Value of Values: A New Guidance System". I was left wondering how values had suddenly become a New Guidance System. After all, values have been guiding human behaviour since humans came into existence. Initial reaction aside, her article makes some excellent and very valid points:

Any company can say they have values, but the values need to be embedded in business practice to make them credible.
Genuine values-based-organizations [VBOs] go beyond lists of values posted on walls and websites by using their codified set of values and principles as a strategic guidance system. They gain business advantages from actions they take based on the societal responsibility these statements imply.
Companies of with new or renewed values and principles which they have consciously embedded in all their business processes, not only speak to high standards of conduct but also stretch those enterprises beyond their own formal boundaries to include their extended family of customers, suppliers, distributors, business partners, financial stakeholders, and the rest of society.
VBOs gain both a moral compass and an entire guidance system.

Kanter says, many people are focused on the global economic crisis, yet there's also a global crisis of business. In her new book, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good, Kanter argues that the model of capitalism which worked so well to raise the fortunes of millions of people last century appears to have hit a wall, "In its place must arise a new model of the company, one that serves society as well as rewarding shareholders and employees."

Saul in, The Collapse of Globalism and the Re-invention of the World, predicted in 2005 that the current economic crisis was coming and was an inevitable consequence of the current economic system's disconnect between trade growth and growth in wealth. He points out that, while there's been a spectacular growth in trade over the past decade, there has been only modest growth in wealth, and for many, wealth has declined. Saul asks, "Is it possible that an over-obsession with trade -- with the movement of goods and parts of goods -- distracts us from the creation wealth? Is it possible that trade taken out of a sensible economic and social equilibrium actually depresses wealth creation?
"Is it possible that a sizable portion of our growth in trade relates not to a revival of capitalism, but to a decline into consumerism? Note how many of of the leading modern economic historians equate consumerism not with wealth creation and social growth, but with inflation and the decline of citizenship. Why? Because there is a constant surplus of goods that relate neither to structural investment nor to a concept of economic value, let alone to societal value. This in turn makes makes nonsense of the ideas of competition, comparative advantage and supply and demand.
"Measuring success by gross domestic product is a dubious approach to life. But if you do, you discover that GDP growth per head over the last three decades has been quite modest -- less than half that of the pre-Globalization quarter century. It has been particularly subdued in Western democracies, disastrous in both Latin America and Africa, and remarkable in large parts of Asia.
"Trade -- with or without capital markets -- is meant to serve the economy. It is not a purpose. It is a service. If it does not serve, it may become a counter productive distraction. It may even become an unusual form of inflation, one that we are not used to identifying, let alone measuring. And so we act as if something is happening that is not happening."
"Klaus Schwab, the founder of the annual CEO gathering at Davos in Switzerland and a predictable echo of what the mainstream is thinking, now warns of 'fragility' and of Globalization leading to 'the first really synchronized world recession and the risks of economic implosion.' These days Alfred Eckes is quoting Keynes in the 1930s: 'The age of economic internationalism was not particularly successful in avoiding war.' Eckes's interpretation of Keynes is that 'free trade, combined with capital mobility, was more likely to provoke war than to keep peace.'
"Meanwhile, a growing number of highly respected figures speaking outside of the Western democracies are turning their backs on theoretically scientific interpretations of global success such as trade statistics and cumulative GDPs. What they see are real people whose actual standard of living apparently must drop in order for them to appear to rise in Western-style statistics. How can that be? For example, these people may have been living a life beyond such measurements -- perhaps rural lives. They are therefore technically existing on zero income. Then they move to a desperate urban slum where dirty water, sewage and alienation are the norm. But in such a place, even a dollar's worth of income can be measured. And so Western measurement systems say they have taken a step forward and upward."

Marylyn Waring, in her film, Who's Counting? made similar observations. She gives an example where the system of Western economics counts as more valuable the work of an American military officer who earns $40,000 per year just to stand ready to push a button to launch a missile to destroy an attacking missile (which may never happen), than the work of a housewife to stays home to raise children--her work is not counted in the economic system so has no value.

It's time we constructed a society where what we do matters more that what we earn. Where growth in wealth is synonymous with growth in the number of people reporting an increase in wellbeing.

References

Kanter, R. 2009, SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good, Crown Business, New York.

Saul, J. R. 2005, The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, Penguin Books, Australia.

Waring, M. 1995, Who's Counting? Marilyn Waring on Sex, Lies and Global Economics, National Film Board of Canada. http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/collection/film/?id=32736

Coming Events

Karynne Courts of ValuesConnection is running one of her renowned Visionary Leadership Programs (VLP) soon for Club Managers Australia (CMA), as always public are welcome.
Karynne is also running an AVI Accreditation workshop later this year.

For more details on both events, please visit: http://www.minessence.net/courses/events_schedule.aspx

What's New

So many organizations now depend on the AVI and it's support site MissionControl being available 24/7, that we've set up mirror websites in the UK.
More articles have been added to our articles page and some broken links have been repaired: http://www.minessence.net/articles/Articles.aspx
Value Mentors in conjunction the Minessence Group, have developed our first PDF format multi-page group report. Also, we are currently re-working the PC based values alignment report so it can be web-based.

eZine #36 - Do Values Make a Difference?

2009-07-16T11:07:00.001+10:00

The Co-operative Values Conference Manchester, UK, July 2009 by Jackie Le Fevre

Over 100 people from all over the world gathered in an uncharacteristically hot Manchester this July to address the question Do Values Make a Difference? The values in question were those of the co-operative movement and, perhaps unsurprisingly, the conclusion reached by conference was “yes values do make a difference”.

In his opening keynote address Professor Ian MacPherson of the University of British Columbia in Canada gave an overview of the values of co-operation. In essence his view was given—the core values that do now and always have lain at the heart of co-operatives:

self-help, self responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, solidarity, honesty, openness, social responsibility and caring for others

These 10 represented the distillation of 50 separate values that had been surfaced through an enquiry conducted in 1995 by the International Co-operative Alliance.

Conference seemed to feel that the uniqueness of co-operatives has been significantly eroded in the recent past. Not-for-profit organisations have become more entrepreneurial, private sector companies have become more socially responsible, local government has diversified into trading and new forms of organisations such as social enterprises and community interest companies have arrived on the scene.

So what does make co-operatives different?

Essentially Professor MacPherson says it is their values. He sees the span of values from individualism – self-help and self responsibility – right the way across to communitarianism – social responsibility and caring for others – as being the uniqueness of the co-operative movement.

Traditionally co-ops emerged as a class or societal response to the “ravages” visited upon groups of people by more powerful actors. Conference mused upon the notion that co-operatives might rise up as “the answer” in a new “economic age” across the world in the coming months and years – I guess we shall just have to wait and see what happens.

For anyone interested in more information about the co-operative movement around the world there are some interesting short reports published by the Co-operative College, you can find them at http://www.co-op.ac.uk/aroundtheworld.htm

Dougal Thompson, Values AT Work, says...

I’m mid way through a great book in Donna Leons’ Commissario Brunetti series, set in Venice. In the story, two people talk about a govt project to collate building information from different bureaux to a central source. apparently for the purpose of effectively storing and speedily searching for plans and permits of building and renovation work being undertaken in the city.

However, according to someone, ‘in the know,’ the whole plan is a ‘smoke screen’ conceived by people within building departments, who were aware of the increasing volume of illegal permits issued, and bribes taken, for building and restoration work carried out. They also recognised the damage that would be caused should details come to light. So, if all the paper work for permits and building plans had to be ‘un-filed’ then moved (physically) between many departments from around the city, then re-filed, in a central location, it would be easy to have particular papers, the important (in this case incriminating) ones, to become conveniently ‘lost’ along the way.

What’s this got to do with values? Well, just before I read about this in the book, I got an email from Paul asking if anyone had any contributions for this eZine As I was reading about the ‘moving of papers across the city’ a thought came to me about the similarities of the confusion that can create ‘lost’ paper and the confusion that we can create to ‘lose’ our values.

It can be easy to keep moving from one ‘thing’ (project, task, chore, job, partner, adventure…) to another, getting caught in the ‘buzz’ of the moment. And, along the way, lose connection with what is really meaningful to us. Now could be the perfect moment for you to take a 5 minute VB, (that’s values break not Victoria Bitter, for those of you in Australia) step out of the ‘buzz,’ and reconnect with what is truly meaningful and motivating to you.

eZine #35 - Meaningful Work

2009-03-19T12:25:00.003+10:00

After the last eZine was published, Dougal from Values AT Work, commented:

"I'd love to see the self actualization cluster in this chart as I think that would give an interesting picture as to any relationship between immersing themselves in work and wanting work that is meaningful to them.
"Also my reading of the graph is that 2001 - 2004 organization dropped, began increasing 2004 and spiked 2007/8 (it would be interesting to consider what was happening that might have caused this) dropping significantly 2008 onwards to about the same 'high' as 1990.
"What did 'go through the roof' were security and self preservation from 2001 to 2004 then plummeted to their current levels, the lowest since the data starts in 1990. This dynamic is another reason I'd like to see the trend for the self actualization cluster."

So here's the graph of the remaining four clusters:

Figure 1 - Value Cluster Priority Changes—January 1990 to December 2008

As Figure 1 shows, from 2004 onward, the priority people placed on Self-Actualization values also went 'through the roof' compared to any time since the data started in 1990. This seems to reinforce Dougal's expectation that people are not just seeking to immerse themselves in any form work as a way of dealing with the new world-view, rather people are seeking meaningful work.

This makes sense as an effective strategy:

Because work is so universal, yet so varied, it makes a tremendous difference to one's overall contentment whether what one does for a living is enjoyable or not. Thomas Carlyle was not far wrong when he wrote, "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness." Sigmund Freud amplified somewhat on this simple advice. When asked for his recipe for happiness, he gave a very short but sensible answer: "Work and love." It is true that if one finds flow in work, and in relations with other people, one is well on the way toward improving quality of life as a whole. [Csikszentmihalyi, 1998, p. 144]

Unfortunately great civilizations have never really cared whether or not the masses have work which is enjoyable and fulfilling:

For much of history, the great majority of people who lived at the periphery of "civilized" societies had to give up any hope of enjoying life in order to make the dreams of the few who had found a way of exploiting them come true. The achievements that set civilized nations apart from the more primitive—such as the Pyramids, the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, and the temples, palaces, and dams of antiquity—were usually built with the energy of slaves forced to realize their rulers' ambitions. Not surprisingly, work acquired a rather poor reputation. [Csikszentmihalyi, p. 144]

The latest research from neuroeconomics indicates that, when people feel they are been treated unfairly, they would rather go without [Kendall, p. 312]. Going without in the difficult economic times we face today may not be an option for many. Some organizations may seek to exploit this fact—it would be misguided because the bottom line is: people are more motivated and more productive when they are able to engage in work which gives meaning to their life.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1998, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, Random House.

Kendall, P. 2003, 'Economy of the Mind', in PLoS Biology, Vol. 1, Issue 3, pp. 312-315 http://biology.plosjournals.org/

eZine #34 - World-View Shift Revisited

2009-03-13T12:05:00.004+10:00

In the August 2007 eZine I wrote:

"As you can see in the chart, after September 11, 2001 people placed significantly higher priority on Self-Preservation and Security than anytime in the ten years before the event. A shift in people's world-view to one of fear and uncertainty would explain the increased priority on Self-Preservation and Security. Interestingly, in 2006, people's Self-Preservation and Security priorities returned to their pre-September 11 levels suggesting people are no longer 'buying' the politically driven world-view of fear.

"A permanent world-view change seems to have occurred as a result of September 11. The priority people are currently placing on Family/Belonging values is significantly higher than anytime before September 11. This suggests people are turning to family, and relationships with others, to give them the security and certainty in life which September 11 temporarily took away from them. "

Figure 1 is the same chart as the one I was referring to above, but with two year's more data. As you can see little has changed since I first reported the world-view shift which has occurred as a result of September 11, 2001.

Figure 1 - Value Cluster Priority Changes—January 1990 to December 2008

There are eight clusters of values: Self-Preservation, Security, Family/Belonging, Organization, Self-Actualisation, Service, Emerging Order, Wisdom, and Global Transformation. In the 2007 eZine, I only plotted the first three of these clusters. This time, for interest, I've added the Organizational cluster. The fact that the priority people place on Organizational values also rose after September 11, 2001 seems to indicate that, not only did people turn to relationships to deal with the "scary new world" in which they now found themselves, but they also immersed themselves, more than ever before, in their work.

This later point will have implications for how these people could react if they lose their job as part of the current global economic crisis.

I'd be interested in your comments.

eZine #33 - Redefining the 128 Value Descriptors

2008-04-09T20:37:00.000+10:00

Paul Chippendale, Karynne Courts, Jackie Le Fevre, Rona Lynn Fitzpatrick, Michael Henderson, Shar Henderson, Dougal Thompson, Gunther Weil

Over the past 30 years, the 125 Value Descriptors, as originally defined by Brian Hall's team have been re-defined several times to keep them relevant to the language and culture of the time. The original descriptors were defined and tested primarily in a religious/theological context. Subsequent re-workings of the descriptors have addressed the need to use language more relevant to society in general. In addition, language changes with use over time and what is considered "transitory" or "simplistic" is often, as in the case of beauty, in the eyes of the beholder (check out The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way).

The team who have co-written this eZine are currently engaged in the latest Value Descriptor redefinition project, with a target completion date of 1 June 2008.

As part of this project, we've had a significant amount of dialogue in order to clarify our intent. This dialogue included consideration of the impact of descriptor changes on the AVI. It is our understanding that the purpose of the AVI is as a tool to indicate where people's priorities lie, and, that additional conversation about the meaning of the descriptors is where the true value lies - this emphasizes the importance of follow up.

Another outcome of this dialogue was the considered need to use descriptors rather than definitions and to simplify some of the descriptors. The impact of this will be to expand the possible interpretations also broaden their application. We believe it is important to emphasize that it really does not matter what the author or consultant believes the values to mean, rather how does the client find this value relevant in their life. For example with the value, Being Liked: being liked by others covers everyone including peers. Someone who believes it is important to be liked will still choose this value despite leaving out the narrow interpretation of "experiencing friendly feelings by your peers". The question that may come up about someone who chooses this value is, "How does this value affect my decision choices?" The vagueness allows someone to consider if their need to be liked affects all or only some of their relationships and in what way. We believe it to be a mistake to consider that "depth of meaning" comes from the actual words used to describe a value, rather than from the conversation that occurs in sharing the meaning. The latter is more inclusive of the person participating in the values discovery process.

In summary, we believe that arriving at shorter, clearer descriptors, will ultimately give individuals more room to explicate how that value, and what it means to them, is lived or not lived in their own lives.

The Academic View: LANGUAGE AND CONVENTION

We were also interested in what academic experts in language have to say about language and its imbedded meaning. The extract below from Understanding Arguments: An Introduction to Informal Logic (Fongelin. R. & Sinnott-Armstrong. W. 2005, Thompson, Wadsworth, pp. 4-5) gives a good overview of the academic position:

As everyone who has bothered to think about it knows, language is conventional. There seems to be no reason why we, as English speakers, use the word "dog" to refer to a dog rather than to a cat, a tree, or anything else. It seems that any word might have been used to stand for anything. Beyond this, there seems to be no reason why we put words together the way we do. In English, we put adjectives before the nouns they modify. We thus speak of a "green salad". In French, adjectives usually follow the noun, and so instead of saying "verte salade", the French say "salade verte". The conventions of our own language are so much with us that it strikes us as odd when we discover that other languages have different conventions. A French diplomat once praised his own language because, as he said, it followed the natural order of thought. This strikes English speakers as silly, but in seeing why it is silly, we see that the word order in our own language is conventional as well.
     Although it is important to realize that our language is conventional, it is also important not to misunderstand this fact and draw false conclusions from it. From the idea that language is conventional, it is easy to conclude that language is totally arbitrary. If language is totally arbitrary, then it might seem that it really does not matter which words we use or how we put them together. It takes only a little thought to see that this view, however daring it might seem, misrepresents the role of conventions in language. If we wish to communicate with others, we must follow the system of conventions that others use. Communication can only take place from within a shared system of conventions. Conventions do not destroy meaning by making it arbitrary; conventions bring meaning into existence.
     A misunderstanding of the conventional nature of language can lead to pointless disputes. Sometimes, in the middle of a discussion, someone will declare that "the whole thing is just a matter of definition" or "what you say is true by your definition, false by mine." There are times when definitions are important and the truth of what is said turns on them, but usually this is not the case. Suppose someone has fallen off a cliff and is heading toward certain death on the rocks below. Of course, it is a matter of convention that we use the word "death" to describe the result of the sudden, sharp stop at the end of the fall. We might have used some other word-perhaps "birth"-instead. But it certainly will not help a person who is falling to his certain death to shout out, "By 'birth' I mean death." It will not help even if everyone agrees to use these words in this new way. If we all decided to adopt this "birth" instead of "He is falling from the cliff to his certain death." But speaking in this way will not change the facts. It will not save him from perishing. It will not make those who care for him feel better.
     The upshot of this simple example is that the truth of what we say is rarely just a matter of definition. Whether what we have said is true or not will depend, for the most part, on how things stand in the world. For example, if Germans wish to say that snow is black, they will use the words, "Der Schnee ist schwartz." Other Germans will understand these words, but unless snow is different in Germany than everywhere else, they will also think that what is being said is false. In general, then, though the meaning of what we say is dependent on convention, the truth of what we say is not.
     In the last sentence we used the qualifying phrase, "in general". To say that a claim holds in general indicates that there may be exceptions. This qualification is needed because sometimes the truth of what we say is simply a matter of definition. Take a simple example: The claim that a triangle has three sides is true by definition, because a triangle is defined as "a closed figure having three sides". Again, if someone says that sin is wrong, he or she has said something that is true by definition, for a sin is defined as, among other things, "something that is wrong".
     In sum, people are able to communicate with each other because they share certain linguistic conventions. These conventions could have been different, and in this sense they are arbitrary. But it does not follow from this that the truth of what we say is always just a matter of convention. Sometimes things are true just as a matter of convention; however, in general, the truth of what we say is settled not by definition but by looking at the facts.

Value Definitions or Descriptors -- Which Should We Use?

When we started this exercise we were intent on providing revised definitions for some of the values. After observing the flow of our dialogue we came to the conclusion that we would be better using descriptors for the values.

What's the difference? WordNet to the rescue:

definition -- a concise explanation of the meaning of a word or phrase or symbol
descriptor -- the phonological or orthographic sound or appearance of a word that can be used to describe or identify something

The following saying sums up the problem with definitions, "The Tao expressed is not the Tao." In other words, by the very nature of trying to write a definition for value we are constraining the value to less than it is or can be.

So, taking the lead from the definition of a descriptor, our objective is to provide sufficient information about each value so that a person can easily identify it -- i.e. distinguish one value from other values.

An alternate definition of descriptor, from WordNet, is: "a piece of stored information that is used to identify an item in an information storage and retrieval system". Thus a value descriptor is a piece of information that is used to identify a particular value.

So our values re-definition project is not about providing precise definitions for each value, rather, it's about providing a sufficiently detailed descriptor for each value such that people have no difficulty distinguishing one value from another.

Criteria for evaluating the efficacy of value descriptors

Here we define a set of criteria for evaluating the efficacy (capacity or power to produce a desired effect) of the value descriptors.

Firstly, to create efficaciousness value descriptors we should:

Identify values which have like roles and work with the identified set of values. (For example, control/order/discipline, law/duty, law/guide, accountability/ethics, etc. all have an ordering role within their respective world-view -- each world-view has different beliefs about how the ordering should be effected, therefore, each world-view has a different value giving expression to the beliefs.) In working with the new descriptors for a set of values, we must ensure the role for each value within its world-view is maintained, and each descriptor clearly distinguishes each value in the set from the others.
Keep the value label and its descriptor simple using more common-usage words.
Use word senses which are the most common interpretation of the word.
Ensure the descriptor of a value makes it simple to distinguish it from other values, particularly from other values which have labels of like-senses such as, for example: Cooperation/Complementarity, Collaboration/Subsidiarity, and Interdependence.
Not use other value labels within the descriptor.
Not provide examples of how the value may be lived -- this narrows the descriptor and could bias its meaning.
Ensure it facilitates the process of people working through the VAK questions to identify how they are living the value in their life.

Thus the criteria for evaluating the efficacy of a value descriptor becomes:

Is it simple?
Is it constructed from common-usage words?
Does it use words such that their most common meaning-sense is the sense intended?
Does it faithfully describe its role in the world-view to which it belongs as a focus value - i.e. is it congruent with the beliefs of its world-view?
Is it sufficiently different from other descriptors of values whose labels have like-senses?
Is it free of other value labels?
Is it free of examples of how to live the value?
Is it easily used with the VAK questions?

In IT jargon, a descriptor which meets a set of desired criteria, is be said to be well formed.

Where we are at?

We have currently completed 25 of the 128 values. You can view some of the discussion and activity in relation to this project at: http://definingvalues.blogspot.com/ -- apart from the blog, much of the project dialogue has transpired over Skype. This latter dialogue has not been recorded, however, at the completion of the project, we will make available a white-paper which will document, for each value, its original definition through to its latest descriptor.

eZine #32 - Setting Values-Based New Year Resolutions

2008-01-03T20:40:00.000+10:00

This year, we are celebrating 20 years of working full-time in the values field and with the AVI (A Values Inventory). To mark this occasion we are offering you a chance to explore your values via the AVI and to set Values-Based New Year Resolutions (Meaningful Objectives) for 2008.

A special AVI Report has been developed specifically to help set Meaningful Objectives based on your responses to the AVI. It is available until 20 January 2008 at the introductory price of $AUD 15.00.

To take advantage of this offer, follow the instructions at www.minessence.net.

Accredited AVI Consultants are welcome to take advantage of this offer too - at no cost - just use your usual AVI link, then go to the Individual-Reports page of your MissionControl and use the SMO code to print your Setting Meaningful Objectives AVI.

Below is an extract from the introductory page of the new Setting Meaningful Objectives AVI:

When I’ve observed clients who are extremely productive, I’ve found that simply completing a list of actions isn’t enough for them. What’s important is that their actions are linked and driven by their Meaningful Objectives. These clients rarely do anything that doesn’t relate to one of their objectives.

Meaningful Objectives are your North Star, your guiding light, and your reference point for success or failure. Without meaning, objectives become dry and nothing more than text on a to-do list that you might (or might not) look at every now and again…

You’d be amazed at how many people I’ve coached, at every organizational level, who don’t have Meaningful Objectives. Even if they do, their objectives are often unclear. Identifying objectives that are meaningful, and clarifying them so that they are specific, is a crucial step in helping you manage your life. As Lily Tomlin once said, 'I’ve always wanted to be somebody. I guess I should’ve been more specific!' [Sally McGhee]

Before you can set Meaningful Objectives, you must know, with crystal clarity, what your priority values are. The AVI process is designed to facilitate your achievement of this clarity.

Unlike competencies, which can be classified as skills, knowledge and attitudes (i.e. the ability to perform activities effectively within an occupation or function to the standard required in employment), values are our lifestyle priorities. They express our wants, desires and preferences. For most people, they are their unconscious motivators.

A key characteristic of successful people is that their values are conscious motivators - i.e. successful people know what their values are.

Researchers over the past 30 years have identified 128 values. They form the building blocks of human nature and relationships. These 128 values cover all that could potentially be important to people, for example:

Play and Recreation
Knowledge, Discovery, and Insight
Adaptability and Flexibility
Human Rights
Environmental Responsibility
Achievement and Success

Your priority values are fall into in three categories, Vision, Focus, and Foundation:

Vision values are your motivators. [The internal dialogue you have between the world-view associated with your Vision values, and the world-view associated with your Foundation values, creates the reality you experience.]
Focus values are the values you would normally want to put most of your conscious energy into.
Foundation values demand attention. [Make sure you have strategies in place to enable you to live your foundation values without the need for devoting much conscious energy to them.]

By definition, only objectives, directly related to living your values, can be Meaningful Objectives. You will only follow through and actualize your New Year Resolutions if they are based on your own values.

eZine #31 - Chaordic Organisational Design

2007-11-09T20:45:00.000+10:00

Introduction

In a recent workshop I made the comment that the most creative space for a team to work is near the edge of chaos. I also commented that this creative space can only be sustained when team members have a clearly defined and understood shared purpose based on their shared values. In this eZine I overview an approach which enables teams to operate in this highly creative space - order within apparent chaos - the chaordic space.

A Chaordic Design Process

The Chaordic Design Process described here has been adapted from the model used in the transformation of VISA from an organisation of a few hundred members twenty years ago, to its current form which is a highly decentralised, collaborative organisation linking together 20,000 financial institutions, 14 million merchants, and 600 million consumers in 220 countries (Clanon 1999, p. 150).

The Seven Components of the Chaordic Design Process

Values & Beliefs. All people in the organisation need to be consciously aware of their priority values and why these values are important in their life. To facilitate this process, each person takes an inventory of their values, via, for example, the AVI (A Values Inventory). Use of an instrument like the AVI, with its standardized values' definitions, enables the building of a shared language of values within the organisation. It is important to note that people have the values they have and we can only work with them, i.e. go with the flow, we cannot make people take on values that are of no importance to them.

The objective of any approach to personal or systemic change is to change peoples' values. It is known from neuroscience and complexity theory, that world-views must be altered in order to change people's values Thus the change program has to somehow change people's world-views. To be successful, the program is going to have to wrestle with the very nature of the brain itself, which has a vested interest in preventing the beliefs, which structure it's thinking, to be challenged.

The values-system of any organisation is its strange attractor¹ which gives order to what would otherwise be chaos. The values system can only operate as an attractor to create order when members of the organisation are conscious of their priority values, know why the values are important, and have a common language of values.

Values and beliefs clarification is the most important component of the chaordic design process.
Purpose. Define with absolute clarity, common understanding, and deep conviction, the organisation's collective purpose. This can be accomplished via a series of workshops using CMapTools, repertory grids, appreciative inquiry, etc., to "tease out" the shared meaning lying behind their values.

This component is the key to motivating people in the workplace - people are highly motivated at work only when their work makes their life meaningful.
Principles. Define a body of principles against which all structure, decisions, and conduct will be judged i.e. the fundamental shared understandings about the 'nature of things' which will guide people in the organisation. As with purpose, these principles can be made explicit through an exploration of the underlying shared values and beliefs of participants in the chaordic design process.

Because we live in a society we cannot live our values anyway we want. This component of the chaordic design process ensures shared norms, as to "how things are done around here", emerge.
Concept Organisation. Create a concept organisation which is congruent with the expressed values, beliefs, purpose and principles.
Structure. Operationalise the purpose, principles, and concept organisation by developing a charter, constitution, code-of-ethics, bylaws, etc. in which all three aspects are embedded as a fundamental web-of-meaning for governance.
People. Identify and draw together the people and institutions necessary to achieve the purpose in accordance with the values, beliefs, principles and the defined structure.
Practice. Identify and engage in the practices required to realise the purpose - i.e. define organisational strategy and implement all systems, processes and activities necessary to create the organisation ensuring all are congruent with the values, beliefs, purpose, principles and structure.

Concluding Comments

Values alignment, so crucial to an organisation's success, cannot be dictated - though I've seen many try!

Through the chaordic design process, values alignment occurs as a natural consequence of the interaction of the component processes - i.e. values alignment becomes an emergent property.²

The chaordic design process looks simple, and, up to a point it is. To be successful, people must put real effort (as against token effort) into exploring their values and to building the common language of values in their organisation. I'm tempted to say "no pain, no gain", however, it does not have to involve pain, exploring one's values can be a fun, energising exercise - so I'll re-word it, "no values exploration effort, no gain."

Footnotes

A magnet, or an individual value, are both point attractors. Place a metal ball near a magnet and you know how it will be attracted to it. Likewise, if a person could have only one priority value in their life, say achievement, you know all their behaviour will be directed towards this one value. In the real world, point attractors can form a system of many point attractors. A system of many point attractors is known as a strange attractor because it attracts in strange ways. A system of individual magnets, each of different strengths, will still attract a metal ball towards it, however, there's no way of predicting the path it will follow. Also, in the real world, people have many values, all with different priorities. This their values' system, their personal strange attractor. Only through understanding their values' system are you able to understand their behaviour. Predicting their behaviour from moment to moment is not possible, however, through understanding their values' system, you will be able to predict the general pattern of their behaviours.
An emergent property is something you cannot predict from knowledge of the individual components, it's only when the components are combined in a certain way that the property manifests itself. For example, when hydrogen and oxygen are combined in a particular way as to form water (H₂O), the emergent property, "wetness", manifests itself.

References & Suggested Reading

Clanon, J. 1999, 'Organizational transformation from the inside out: reinventing the MIT Center for Organizational Learning', The Learning Organization, Vol 6, No. 4, pp. 147-162.

Chippendale, P. 2005, 'Management by Values', in Carlopio, J., Andrewartha, G. & Armstrong, H. 2005, Developing Manager Skills: A comprehensive guide for leaders, Pearson Education, Australia. pp. 119-123

Colins, C. & Chippendale, P. 2002, New Wisdom II: Values-based development, Acorn Publications, Brisbane.

Fritz, R. 1999, The Path of Least Resistance for Managers: Designing organisations to succeed, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

Labovitz, G. & Rosansky, V. 1997, The Power of Alignment: How great companies stay centred and accomplish extraordinary things, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York.

Limerick, D. & Cunnington, B. 1993, Managing the New Organisation, Business & Professional Publishing, Chatswood.

Kelly, S. & Allison, M. A. 1999, The Complexity Advantage: How the science of complexity can help achieve peak performance, McGraw-Hill, New York.

Parry, K. 1999, Transformational Leadership: Developing an Enterprising Management Culture, Business & Professional Publishing, Warriewood.

Wheatley, M. 1992, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

eZine #30 - Worldview Shift Follows September 11, 2001

2007-08-10T20:52:00.002+10:00

Analysis of the shifts in priorities, of people in the Australasian workforce, in relation to the Self-Preservation, Security and Family/Belonging value clusters, see below, shows an interesting change since September 11.

As you can see in the chart, after September 11 people placed significantly higher priority on Self-Preservation and Security than anytime in the ten years before the event. A shift in people's world-view to one of fear and uncertainty would explain the increased priority on Self-Preservation and Security. Interestingly, in 2006, people's Self-Preservation and Security priorities returned to their pre-September 11 levels suggesting people are no longer "buying" the politically driven world-view of fear.

A permanent world-view change seems to have occurred as a result of September 11. The priority people are currently placing on Family/Belonging values is significantly higher than anytime before September 11. This suggests people are turning to family, and relationships with others, to give them the security and certainty in life which September 11 temporarily took away from them.

This is just a my interpretation, what do you think?

Regards, Paul Chippendale, Co-ordinator, Minessence Group

On a completely different tack...

The first stage of the Minessence Learning Centre opened this year. The concept is to locate the Centre in a bush setting, using buildings such as "barns" and cottages, so as to be consistent with the pioneering values which are central to Minessence Group activities. Below are a couple of photos from the event.

The "Barn" - Lower floor is workshop space - Upper floor is office space

Inside the "Barn" - the Workers: from left to right Paul Chippendale (planning, carpentry & painting), John Tangney from Atlanta USA (painting), Josh Nye (floor tiling), Susan Chippendale (floor tiling), Jason Chippendale (floor tiling and property clearing), Jeremy Rasmussen (property clearing)

eZine #29 - The Language of Values

2006-11-26T08:27:00.000+10:00

In New Wisdom and New Wisdom II, I quoted from Ignatieff, in The Needs of Strangers (1984), who argued that, with the demise of the language of religion, we no longer have a language appropriate to the expression of our needs and, without an adequate language of needs, the needs themselves will die, and along with this goes the very essence of our humanness.

In order to ensure a language of needs prevails, and exists independently of any religion, a key thrust of the Minessence Group, and its associates, since 1988 has been development of a language of values. Using the same techniques as the original values-research team some 40 years ago, we continually monitor people language looking for emotionally charged statements, searching for the emergence of new values. In this way three new values have been added since 1988. So the list of 125 values has now expanded to 128.

Why is it important to have a standardised list of values? Without the chance of choosing from a list of all currently known values, there often are things which are passionately important to us, yet we are unable to give them full expression. This is because we do not have the language to define them and to share them with others.

The value Minessence, the one we have adopted as the name of our organisation, is a great example. The values-research team found a value which was very important to some people, however, it did not have a name. It was important to many people to work with complex ideas and/or technologies and to simplify their understanding and use for the benefit of others. A name for this value was thus created: min from miniature - i.e. to make smaller, less complex; and essence - simplifying a concept so its essence is clear. So combining the concepts of miniaturization and essence, we have minessence.

Since the identification of this value, many people have discovered how important it is in their life and they can now share this passion with others. This is but one example from the set of 128 values. There are many other stories like this.

Values Lie Behind All Our Choices

Now that values-programs have become mainstream in our society, watch out for people conducting programs where they have limited your choice of values. When they limit your choice of values, they are imposing their own bias on you!

Many of people's values are unconsciously important to them. It is only when people are given the fullest set of values possible and are able to choose between value-laden statements based on them, that their values emerge to the level of conscious awareness. Then magic begins!

Regards, Paul Chippendale - Minessence Group Coordinator

eZine #28 - Objects of the Minessence Foundation

2006-05-29T08:21:00.000+10:00

We are in the process of transforming the Minessence Group into the Minessence Foundation. Below are the proposed Objects (a legal term we have to use!) of the Minessence Foundation. If you would like to be a member, please contact us.

Object 1

To facilitate the creation of a society where people can live meaningful fulfilling lives.

Object 2

To instigate and co-ordinate leading-edge projects aimed at facilitating personal, organisational and community development.

Object 3

To be a learning organisation and to operate learning centres accessible to all.

Object 4

To develop relationships, for the purpose of finding innovative solutions to long-standing social justice and equity issues, through conducting future creation conferences, employing open-space technology, through public consultation, and the like.

Object 5

The Foundation will function in a way that is sustainable financially so that its important work can be performed efficiently and effectively for as long as it takes.

Object 6

Key functions of the Foundation will be:

The accreditation of Value Consultants,
The Certification of Values-Based Organisations (VBOs),
The provision of financial grants to people or organisations to enable them to engage in values-based activities that would enhance the capacity of the Foundation to achieve its Objects,
To provide awareness and education on the benefits, to individuals, organisations, and society, of values-based processes, and
To influence Government policy in respect of matters that affect the nature and form of society in which we live.

Object 7

All these Objects are to be met through values-based processes.

eZine #27 - Looking to the future - Connecting with the past

2006-05-15T08:17:00.001+10:00

The Minessence Group's website is undergoing another transformation. The Survey has been reactivated. The Minessence Group's Values, Vision & Missionare now on a separate page. The article ACCL (Acceptance, Commitment, & Conscious Living) has been updated and added to the site.

You may also have noticed, that since I was at Waiheke Island for the launch of Michael Henderson, Dougal Thompson, an Shar Henderson's excellent new book, Leading through Values, the Minessence Group's website has broadened its focus from values to ACCL. This is because, at our planning meetings on the Island, it became clear ACCL better encapsulated our philosophy.

Looking to the future

The Minessence Group's website will become more and more a collaborative effort of all Minessence Group members. That is to say, members will be able to log on to MissionControl (the support site for AVI Accredited consultants) and add their own content to the publicly assessable website: http://www.minessence.net/. Already accredited consultants can alter their contact details, add upcoming events, and change the look of their AVI (A Values Inventory) site - all with no intervention required by anyone else. Blog, photo album and forums will all be added so members can share their own values stories. In short, the desire is to enhance the Minessence Group's sense of community.
The most sophisticated reports produced, after a person completes the AVI online, are still produced by downloading the responses to a PC and then processing them. This is gradually changing, with the intention that, eventually, all reports will be produced by software at the website.
The people who provided our online shop (http://shop.minessence.net/) have ceased trading, so I am in the process of producing a replacement online shop, developing it from scratch with VB.NET and SQL. We have been in existence since 1988. Since that time, I've had the inconvenience of re-doing our website from scratch when One.Tel /One.Net ceased trading, re-doing the credit-card processing facility when our ISP ceased supporting the third party software, etc. In the long run, I'm finding it far more productive to develop my own software for our web.

The immediate past

We proudly supported the Youth Enterprise Trust's recent event: An Afternoon At Woodstock. Below are some photos from the event:

To the right is the veranda where the concert was staged. In the
mid-background is the tent from which a sumptuous lunch was served.

The choir

YET Staff Competing in a Woodchop Competition

Coming Events

Please check our events page for upcoming events conducted, or sponsored, by Minessence Group Members.

eZine #26 - No Pain - No Gain

2006-02-17T08:15:00.000+10:00

Thanks to Yaro Starak for alerting me to an exciting article titled, "Happiness Isn't Normal" (Time, February 13, 2006 / No. 6, pp. 50-55) by John Cloud. In the article, Cloud describes a new therapy, used by third wave psychologists¹, which is having amazing results. The new therapy is called ACT - Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), ACT's predecessor, asked people to identify negative thoughts, challenge them, and work to habitualize new behaviours to live out the new thought patterns. ACT on the other hand, asks people to accept that negative thoughts and feelings are normal and suggests that to dwell on them, even through CBT processes, only serves to magnify their impact. ACT asks people to diffuse the power of negative thoughts:

Instead of saying "I'm depressed," ...[ACT] proposes saying "I'm having the thought that I'm depressed." Hayes [a major proponent of ACT] isn't saying people don't really feel pain..., but he believes we turn pain into suffering when we try to push it away. ACT therapists use metaphors to explain acceptance: Is it easier to drag a heavy weight on a chain behind you or to pick it up and and walk with it held close? (Cloud 2006. p. 52)

The commitment part of acceptance and commitment therapy is about identifying your values and then living them. In his book, Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life, Hayes suggests a simple exercise to see how well you have committed to your values:

...give yourself a score of 1 to 10 each week for 16 weeks to show how closely your everyday actions [are aligned] with your values. If you really enjoy skiing with friends but end up watching TV alone every weekend, you get a 1. (Cloud 2006, p. 53)

Cloud (2006, p. 53) summarises an impressive body of research that shows ACT is producing remarkable results:

In the January edition of the journal of Behavior Research and Therapy, Hayes and four co-authors summarize 13 trials that compared ACT's effectiveness to that of other treatments after as long as a year. In 12 of the 13, ACT outperformed the other approaches. In two of the studies, depressed patients were randomly assigned to either cognitive therapy or ACT. After two months, the ACT patients scored an average of 59% lower on a depression scale. ... In a 2002 study, Hayes and a student looked at 70 hospitalized psychotics receiving the standard medication and counseling. Half were randomly assigned to four 45-min. ACT sessions; the other half formed the control. Four months later, the ACT patients hade to be re-hospitalized 50% less often. They actually admitted to more hallucinations than those in standard care, but ACT had reduced the believability of their hallucinations, which were now viewed more dispassionately. Hayes likes to say ACT effectively turned "I'm the Queen of Sheba" into "I'm having the thought that I'm the Queen of Sheba." The psychotics still heard voices; they just didn't act on them as much. They learned to hold their thoughts more lightly, increasing their psychological flexibility.
ACT has also shown promise in treating addiction. In one study, drug addicts reported less drug use with ACT than with a 12-step program. And ACT worked better than a nicotine patch for 67 smokers trying to quit. ACT encourages addicts to accept the urge to do drugs and the pain that will come when they stop -- and then to work on figuring out what life means beyond getting high...

Cloud quotes other examples of ACT's amazing results too, however, I'll leave you to read his article for those.

Some Minessence eZine readers may have by now recognised the incredible parallel between the Minessence Group's values model and that of acceptance and commitment therapy. If you are not yet one of the thousands who have taken an inventory of your values via the AVI, I suggest you contact one of the accredited consultants listed at: http://www.minessence.net/aboutus/consultants.aspx, and, make sure you also get a copy of Michael Henderson's award winning book, Finding True North to help you work through committing to living the values you identified through the AVI process.

A final word, don't let the word therapy put you off. Just as William Glasser uses reality therapy with people who don't need therapy per se, but want to make changes in their life (in the later case he talks of reality management and uses the same processes as reality therapy), so too you can look at Finding True North as using ACT style techniques to enhance your everyday living.

Footnotes

First-wave therapy: behavioural therapy (devised in part by B.F. Skinner). Second-wave therapy: cognitive therapy (based on the work of Beck and Ellis). Third-wave therapy: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

References

Cloud, J. 2006 'Happiness Isn't Normal' in Time, February 13, 2006 / No. 6

Henderson, M. 2003, Finding True North: Discover your values, enrich your life, Harper Business, Auckland

eZine #25 - Trust - New Findings from Neuroeconomics

2005-12-13T08:00:00.000+10:00

Introduction

Last eZine I emphasised the importance of basing human development/intervention programs on principles that have been established through sound research (traditional academic or experiential) which has credible evidence to support it. This eZine, I give an example of deriving guiding principles from research, and then using the principles to guide behaviour/action and policy making.

Before launching into the example, let's recap how principles relate to behavioural choices.

Figure 1 - The Relationship Between
Values, Ethics & Principles

With reference to Figure 1. If we know what a person's priority values are, we will know in a broad sense what behaviours will be important to them. However, we cannot know specifically how they will behave in any specific situation. For example, if a person's highest priority value is research/knowledge/insight it would probably come as no surprise if you found the person in a laboratory somewhere doing medical research. However, you cannot know from their values alone whether or not they are likely to carry out harmful experiment with animals. This is where codes of behaviour (ethics, morals, laws, norms, etc.) come in. If we know the code of ethics guiding this medical researcher, we will know how he/she is supposed to behave in terms of conducting the research.

There are many ways in which we can live out any particular value. We live in a society, therefore, we cannot live our values any way we want. That's why ethics, morals, etc. exist. - as Mackie (1977) says, "Even thieves have values, but they don't behave ethically." Johannesen (cited Shockley-Zalabak 1999, p. 437) gives further examples to help distinguish between values and ethics:

Concepts such as material success, individualism, efficiency, thrift, freedom, courage, hard work, prudence, competition, patriotism, compromise, and punctuality all are value standards that have varying degrees of potency in contemporary American culture. But we probably would not view them primarily as ethical standards of right and wrong. Ethical judgments focus more precisely on degrees of rightness and wrongness in human behaviour. In condemning someone for being inefficient, conformist, extravagant, lazy, or late, we probably would not also claim they are unethical. However, standards such as honesty, truthfulness, fairness, and humaneness usually are used in making ethical judgments of rightness and wrongness in human behaviour.

Clearly our values influence what we determine as ethical; "however, values are our measures of importance, whereas ethics represent our judgments about right and wrong" (Shockley-Zalabak 1999, p. 438). An easy way to remember the difference between values and ethics is to memorise the phrase: Values motivate, ethics constrain. The close relationship between importance and right and wrong is a powerful influence on our behaviour and how we evaluate the behaviour of others.

We've covered values and ethics, now where do principles fit in?

Principle is defined in Nuttall's Concise Standard Dictionary of the English Language as, "n. the source or origin of anything;...a general truth or law comprehending many subordinate ones;...tenet or doctrine; a settled law or rule of action;... v.t. to impress with any tenet; to establish firmly in the mind". Ideally, we formulate our codes of behaviour (the constraints on how we live our values) from sound principles - i.e. from our best knowledge and understanding of the "way things work". Based on an understanding of the principles that underpin an action, we know with a reasonable certainty what the outcome and consequence of the action will be.

There are two main benefits of taking a principle centric approach to guide human action: (1) knowing a set of principles concerning "the nature of things" enables us to make informed choices and judgments, as we know the likely outcomes of our actions, (2) knowing even a few principles helps us avoid information overload. On the latter point, Birch (1999, p. 44) says:

One way in which drowning in information is overcome is by the discovery of principles and theories that tie up a lot of information previously untied. Prior to Charles Darwin, biology was a mass of unrelated facts about nature. Darwin tied them together in a mere three principles of evolution: random genetic variation, struggle for existence, and natural selection. So we do not need to teach every detail that was taught to nineteenth century students.

Let's now look at a more specific example of how principles can guide how we live our values - and perhaps a value we may choose to place more priority on once we have a clearer understanding of its role in human interaction. The value chosen for this example is trust.

Trust Defined¹

One dictionary tells us that trust, derived from the German word Trost, meaning "comfort", implies instinctive, unquestioning belief in and reliance upon something. It is very much like love, and its presence or absence can make a powerful difference in our lives. As trust ebbs, we are less open with each other, less interdependent, less interbeing - not into each other in deep and meaningful ways; we look for strategies in dealing with each other; we seek help from others; or we look for protection in rules, norms, contracts, and the law. My defences are raised by my fear that I do not or cannot trust you. The ebbing of trust and the growth of fear are the beginning of alienation, loneliness, and hostility. In a very real sense, we can say that trust level is the thermometer of individual and group health. With it, we function naturally and directly. Without it, we need constraints, supports, leaders, managers, teachers, interveners, and we surrender ourselves and our lives to them for guidance, management, and manipulation.

Understanding Trust

Until the late 1990s we had to rely on the experientially gained knowledge/wisdom of people such as the late Jack Gibb (1914 -1995) to guide us in effectively living the value trust. Now, new advances in neuroscience are discovering what is really going on when we trust people. Neuroeconomist, Paul Zak, has found that the hormone oxytocin influences trustworthiness. When we sense someone trusts us, the level of oxytocin in our body rises:

Oxytocin rises when someone trusts you, and facilitates trustworthiness. This finding shows that we trust others because it "seems" the right thing to do, activating social attachment mechanisms (Zak 1993, p. 23).

Oxytocin is the hormone associated with the physiologic attachment mechanism that has evolved in mammals to ensure they care for their offspring. Oxytocin is released during orgasm, breast-feeding and childbirth:

For humans who are not breast feeding or giving birth, every time oxytocin spikes, besides when a stranger shows they trust you, is when you have sex. So at some level it's sexual reproduction that has enabled the growth of oxytocin - there's a bonding mechanism that's important in monogamous species which humans mainly are. (Zak in Horstman 2005)

The findings of neuroeconomists are causing other economists to rethink theories that have been based on the assumption that people act in pure self-interest. We now know that our brains are wired to guide us towards both socially and individually beneficial behaviour and that this motivation to cooperate happens on an unconscious level (Zak in Horstman 2005):

So somehow, this little simple brain chemical [oxytocin], is not only telling us what's good for society, be cooperative, trust other people, allowing us to live in big cities, it also tells you what's good for you as an individual.

Through oxytocin being released when other people's actions unconsciously lead us to feel we can trust them, trust levels in a community become culturally determined. This is graphically illustrated in Figure 2 which shows the percentage of affirmative responses, by country, to the question "Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted?"

This question seeks to capture "generalized trust", which is whether two randomly selected individuals can trust each other. The surveys were done in person in 1996 using the native language, and the questions correspond to impressions of the respondents' own countries. Strikingly, the data vary by an order of magnitude: while only 3% of those surveyed in Brazil and 5% in Peru say their compatriots are trustworthy, 65% of Norwegians and 60% of Swedes believe this to be so. The United States comes in at 36%, down from 50% in 1990; the U.K. has been holding steady at 44% for the past decade. (Zak 1993, p. 19)

Figure 2 - Trust Level by Country
(Source: Zak, P. 1993, Trust, Capco Institute Journal of Financial Transformation, p.18 - used with permission)

Why should we be concerned about trust at the cultural level? Well it turns out that our that wealth is correlated to trust levels and there is a simple explanation for this. When trust levels are high, financial transaction costs are low and efficient - there's no need for elaborate contracts to protect the parties involved - "a simple handshake will suffice". Whereas, in low trust contexts, elaborate, inefficient means are necessary to protect parties, therefore, transaction costs are high (Zak, P. 1993, pp. 19-20):

Our analysis shows that a 15% increase in the proportion of people in a country who think others are trustworthy raises income per person by 1% per year for every year thereafter. For example, if trust in the U.S. increased from 36% to 51%, the average income for every man, woman, and child would rise by about U.S.$400 per year thereafter due to the additional business investment and job creation. You can see that the impact of trust on living standards is quantitatively large: U.S.$400 per year corresponds to an additional U.S.$30,000 in lifetime income.
Our analysis also shows that if trust is sufficiently low (below 30% for the average country in [Figure 2]), then the investment rate will be so low that income will stagnate or even decline. Economists call this a "poverty trap", and we show that the primary reason for a poverty trap is ineffective legal structures that result in low levels of generalized trust, and therefore little investment. Further, the threshold level of trust necessary for positive economic growth is increasing in per capita income; that is, the poorer a country currently is, the more trust is required to generate sufficient investment to raise living standards. This makes the low-trust poverty trap difficult to escape from. These predictions of the model are strongly supported in the data, and illustrate the spectacular effect of trust on growth.

If personal income rises 1% for every 15% increase in the proportion of people in the country who think others are trustworthy, the reverse must be true - a 15% reduction in trust suggests a 1% reduction in personal income - i.e. trust reduction equates to standard-of-living reduction. This raises some interesting government policy questions in respect of the so called "war on terror". If a government promulgates policy that encourages people to distrust strangers, the country's trust level, and hence its people's standard of living, must decrease!

The late Jack Gibb believed, "Trust begets trust; fear escalates fear." We now have scientific evidence to support this belief and elevate it to a principle underpinning the trust process. In the next two paragraphs I have adapted/paraphrased some of Gibb's views on trust which, I believe, are as relevant today as when he wrote them in 1970.

Trust is a Catalytic Process¹

Is the world dangerous? Can people be trusted? Should we try to maintain our childlike trust and help our children to do so? Or should we develop caution, be "appropriately" wary, be realistically prepared for danger?

I remember an experience in an elevator in Washington, D.C. Feeling good, I said "Hi!" to a girl, about five, who was wearing a swimming suit and carrying a towel on her way to the hotel swimming pool. She was so haughty and chilling that a friendly elevator operator, the only other person present, said to me: "I'm sure her mother has told her not to speak to strangers." I understood that too, and appreciated the man's concern and empathy. But I couldn't help feeling that multitudes of tiny experiences like this escalate into the loneliness, alienation, and unconnectedness of modern life, and I felt sad that the learning of distrust should start so early in life. (Gibb 1970, p. 17)

Dangers do exist. Children and adults are ignored, rebuffed, punished, kidnapped, or raped. Just three weeks ago [1970] the papers reported the discovery in Los Angeles of the murdered bodies of two little girls, and as I write, the Hillside Strangler remains at large in Los Angeles. Some city streets are dangerous, especially at night. Teachers and students do get beaten up in the schoolroom. Offices and factories are filled with dangerous, life-draining tension. We may be cheated by a dishonest car repair shop, or even by a bank. Watergate did happen. Hitler and his minions did murder millions of Jewish people. How do we prepare ourselves, or our children or students, to live wholly and fulfillingly in such a world in which they confront so many dangerous possibilities? Do we take our children to school or hire guards to take them? Put extra locks on our doors? Increase the number of policemen? Make tougher laws? Tighten the security at the airports? Increase the number of crimes that get the death penalty? How much to trust and distrust, and how to handle our fears and distrusts are dilemmas that face consumers, voters, managers, parents, teachers - all of us.

Trust begets trust; fear escalates fear. Trust catalyses all other processes, is contagious, softens our perceptions, breeds trust in others, makes us less dangerous, and is self-fulfilling. Fear and distrust over-perceive the danger, trigger defensive behaviour in others, escalate the tension, and are self-fulfilling - that is, fear creates the danger.

I have a friend, Pat, who at seventeen hitchhiked alone through Africa for about a year. Listening to her tell of her experiences, and fantasying dangers for a beautiful young woman hitchhiking in Africa in the early sixties, we asked if she were ever molested, cheated, robbed, or raped. She said that things like that just don't happen to her. She is trusting, gives out non-defensive signals, and creates her own environment.

Trust and fear are keys to understanding persons and social systems. They are primary and catalytic factors in all human living.

When trust is high, relative to fear, people and people systems function well. When fear is high, relative to trust, they break down.

Trust enhances the flow of mind-body-spirit processes. Energy is created and mobilized. All the creative processes of the person or the system are heightened. Feeling and thinking are both more focused and energized. People act in more direct and effective ways. Consciousness is awakened. When trust is high enough, persons and social systems transcend apparent limits - discovering new and awesome abilities of which they were previously unaware.

When fear levels are high, relative to trust, individual and social processes are impaired. The life forces are mobilized defensively, rather than creatively. Consciousness is restricted. Perceptivity is reduced. Perspectives are narrowed. Feelings and emotions become disruptive and disabling. Thinking, problem solving, and action become unfocused, displaced, or dysfunctional. The processes of the mind-body become segmented and discordant. When fear levels are high enough individuals and the social systems become immobilized, psychotic, or destructive

Trust is an integrating and wholizing force. It is a property of the whole mind-body-spirit. Trust brings integrity.

Fear constrains and blocks. Fearing, I become congested, inhibited, and restricted. I retard all of my processes: my feeling, my imagination, my play and sense of adventure and fun, my courage, my vision, the flow of energy in my mind-body, my intuition, my awareness - all of my processes. An optometrist told me once that he could tell from seeing persons in the waiting room whether or not they would be able to relax enough to wear contact lenses. The people who tried to control their bodies while sitting in the chair and who tried to control their children while waiting would be too "frightened" to wear such lenses. Golfers use the same expression: the person doesn't have courage enough to make the putt!

Trust is a releasing process. It frees my creativity, allows me to focus my energy on creating and discovering rather than on defending. It releases my courage. It is my courage. It opens my processes, so that I can play, feel, enjoy, get angry, experience my pain, be who I am. The full life is a spontaneous, unconstrained, flowing, trusting life. Some holistic studies of cancer are relevant here. Researchers discovered that people who could free themselves to image their cells as actively and flowingly resisting toxic substances were able to retard the carcinogenic processes. I have discovered a similar phenomenon after about an hour of jogging. When I get into my flow, all of my processes are heightened: my energy and breathing, creativity and imagery, awareness of sights and sounds and smells, courage. I become available to me and to others.
Trust gives me my freedom and my fear takes it away. Freedom comes from my own flow. It is not given to me or taken away from me by others. I create my own mind-body trust, which is my freedom. I create my own fears and my own bondage, which is my fear. Freedom is not out there. It is in me.

Trust provides an environment that nourishes personal growth, holistic health, spirituality, and the discovery of the soul. Trust level is a diagnostic cue to the understanding of individuals and groups: to the creation of a fulfilling home environment, an effective classroom, a healing therapy session, a redemptive ministry, a productive workplace, or a nurturing neighbourhood.

Trust level is a key to the understanding of the larger system. As a consultant or as a manager I have an option to focus my "theory" on one or more among many "realities": energy systems, power relationships, role formation, interfaces among sub-units, barriers to productivity, profitability. The possibilities are endless, and there are theories for each. I prefer to start by looking at the trust level. Everything else fans out from there. Social systems can present a bewildering array of symptoms. Recently, a company presented me with massive data gathered from surveys, observations, complaints, interviews, and impressions. One of the most perplexing items for them was the fact that the workers, in a company-wide election, had turned down an obviously beneficent stock-purchase plan. This had previously been available only to members of management, but was now to be open to all employees of the corporation on a voluntary basis. We planned new data collection around trust-theory hypotheses. The employees who were interviewed gave many different responses, but they centred on this theme: "If it looks like those guys are giving you something for nothing, watch out! There'll be a ringer in the small print someplace!" A latent and not-easily-visible state of general distrust and fear had been produced by fear-induced management role-taking, covert strategy, persuasion techniques, and efforts to control. Management practices were unintentionally escalating fears and distrusts, which were retarding productivity and creativity.

Trust is the Process of Discovering¹

To trust with fullness means that I discover and create my own life. The trusting life is an inter-flowing and interweaving of the processes of discovery and creation. These processes have four primary and highly-interrelated elements:

Discovering and creating who I am, tuning into my own uniqueness, being aware of my own essence, trusting me - discovering my True North.
Discovering and creating ways of opening and revealing myself to myself and to others, disclosing my essence, discovering yours, communing with you - sharing my True North and understanding yours.
Discovering and creating my own paths, flows, and rhythms, creating my emerging and organic nature, and becoming, actualizing, or realizing this nature - following my True North.
Discovering and creating with you our interbeing, the ways we can live together in an inter-depending community, in freedom and intimacy - co-creating our world.

The Underpinning Principles of Trust

To summarise then, some guiding principles in relation to trust are:

We become more trustworthy when we sense others trust us - in Gibb's words, "trust begets trust".
The standard of living in a country is directly related to the degree to which people in the country trust each other.
Men become aggressive if they perceive they are not being trusted.
(I have not covered the research in relation to this one here. I just thought I'd throw it in anyway! To read about current research into distrust and sex differences, see: The Neuroeconomics of Distrust: Sex Differences in Behavior and Physiology By PAUL J. ZAK, KARLA BORJA, WILLIAM T. MATZNER, AND ROBERT KURZBAN at http://www.pauljzak.com/pdf/Zak%20et%20al%20AER%20Published%202005.pdf. )

Concluding Comments

In this eZine I introduced a model to illustrate the dynamic relationship between values, ethics/morals, principles and behaviour. The value trust was then taken as an example to illustrate this dynamic relationship - specifically, how guiding principles can be developed to inform choices we make on how we live the value trust.

Understanding and internalising the principles that comprise "the nature of things" is perhaps the single most powerful determining factor in the shaping of the society in which we live. For civilisation to advance, it is vital that we maintain a continual dialogue around principles so those we internalise and institutionalise are up-to-date and are our current best shot at truth.

References

Birch, C. 1999, Biology and the Riddle of Life, University of New South Wales press, Sydney.

Gibb, B.,1970, Trust: A New View of Personal and Organizational Development , Tutors Press, Los Angeles. (Reprinted in 1991 as: Trust: A New Vision of Human Relationships for Business, Education, Family, and Personal Living. Trust is now available for reading on the web at: http://www.geocities.com/toritrust/trust.htm).

Horstman, M. 2005, Catalyst: Trust - ABC TV Science, ABC Online, http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/s1481749.htm

Mackie, J. 1977, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Shockley-Zalabak, P. 1999, Fundamentals of Organisational Communication: Knowledge, Sensitivity, Skills, Values, Longman: New York.

Zak, P. 1993, Trust, Capco Institute Journal of Financial Transformation, Vol. 7, pp. 13-21, accessed 25 November 2006 at: http://www.minessence.net/articles/CAPCOTrust.pdf

Footnote:

This section adapted/paraphrased from Gibb, 1970, Chapter 1.

eZine #24 - SHAM (Self-Help & Actualization Movement)

2005-10-12T07:58:00.000+10:00

I'm currently reading the book SHAM (Self-Help & Actualization Movement) by Steve Salerno. Steve's view is that many so called "gurus" of the self-help movement are making "us" helpless. As I read Steve's book, I can't help being reminded of another book I read in the early 1980s, If You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him (Sheldon Kopp 1973). Both authors have a similar message:

"The most important life-skills each of us must learn, no one else can teach us. Once we accept this disappointment, we will be able to stop depending on the 'guru' who turns out to be just another struggling human being."

Of course, we do need experts. As a Software Engineer, I value the wisdom of more learned Software Engineers than myself. I have just finished devouring, over the past few months, the contents of 20+ books on ASP.NET programming - the average page length of each book is 600 and the average cost of each book was $100. I have my software gurus, Michael Kay for profound insights into XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformation), Dan Fox for his guidance in developing distributed applications using Visual Basic.Net and his excellent guidance on ADO.NET development. No idea what some of these terms mean? Well that probably means you are not a Software Engineer, however, my point is, if you desire to become a expert in any field, you will have to rely on the wisdom of current and past experts in the field to help you along the way.

Whereas, the point Steve is making in SHAM and the point Sheldon is making in You Meet Buddha on the Road, Kill Him is that many in our society are becoming over-reliant on self styled "gurus" such as Dr. Phil and Tony Robbins. For some inexplicable reason, we are blindly following these pseudo-gurus and not using our common sense to reject the absurd - why is this so? Would you have walked out on Robbins' seminar if you'd been there the day he said, "The energy frequency of Kentucky Fried is 3 megahertz" (cited Salerno 2005, p. 13)? Apparently he made this statement as he was stressing the importance of us being aware of the "energy frequency" of the foods we eat. Rubbish! I totally agree with Steve, there are too many self-styled "gurus" pretending to understand the latest scientific discoveries and making financial gain out of preaching how the new discovery (the implications of which they seem to have been the first to understand) will change our life:

...the customary formula calls for taking a modicum of legitimate research and "piggybacking" onto it -- that is, extending it and misapplying its conclusions in a way that's just plausible enough to [get away with it!]. (Dale Beyerstein, a Philosophy Professor who has written extensively on the destructive consequences of those who engage in pseudoscience - refer: Salerno 2005, p. 11.)

Steve Salerno gives a wakeup call to us all to use our common sense, recognise false prophets, pseudo-gurus for what they are, and take charge of our own destiny. As Birch (1999, p. 14), citing a Chinese proverb says, "People in the West are always getting ready to live", isn't it time we stopped been sheep, stopped trying yet-another-unproven recipe from a self-proclaimed guru and start, not perpetually getting ready to live, but actually living!

So how do you tell people, who are proffering real wisdom (which, as such, is obviously worth heeding), from pseudo-gurus with their life (i.e. our life)-wasting babble? I offer the following criteria:

There is evidence that the advocated process works. "The results of a 1995 study conducted by Harvard Medical School indicated that alcoholics have a better chance of quitting drinking if they don't attend AA than if they do (Salerno 2005, p. 13)" If you were an alcoholic and no longer wanted to be one, and knew this fact about the efficacy of AA, would you go to AA or seek some other therapy? So, before blindly following some guru, look for evidence that their advocated process does actually work.
They are appropriately credentialed. Ask to see their qualifications. Ask for evidence of their successes - If people have to keep going back for help then their advocated process is obviously not working.
They have a real capacity to improve our situation. I love Steve Salerno's example for this criterion (In my mind, it exemplifies the importance to us of real experts):

At meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous and other support groups, the leader's sole credential may consist of his being in recovery from whatever the specific addiction is. Society, again, seems to think this makes good sense. I would ask two questions: isn't it possible that fellow sufferers are a bit too close to the problem to lead effectively and impartially? And if your problem was, say, that the electrical fixtures in your house were acting funky, would you really want a workshop taught by some other homeowner who couldn't get his lights to work right (and who, by his own admission, still had the problem)? Or would you want a trained electrician? (Salerno 2005, p. 15)
Do they really have the skills and knowledge themselves to help, or are they still looking for solutions to the same problems as we are?

They encourage us to figure out where we want to go, and they encourage us to expend effort to get there. As every gym attendee knows, "no pain no gain" - a maxim which, as it turns out, if we do not wish to stagnate or regress, applies in all-of-life's journeys. Simply attending a seminar (even if it costs a small fortune), reading a book (without practising over and over its advocated proven techniques) or listening to a "guru's" tapes (sorry CDs) as we drive to work, will get us nowhere - except perhaps a bit less financially endowed each time we invest in a new recipe to which we merely listen.
They encourage us to understand principles and choose our actions accordingly. The pseudo-guru will have a "one-recipe-fits-all" approach to life. True gurus among us do not offer one-recipe-fits-all type approaches to living, rather they help us figure out who we are as individuals, and encourage us to gain the wisdom to take responsibility for our own destiny. The operative words are they help and encourage us rather than tell us and dictate to us - thus, if you hear the pied piper on the road - ignore him/her and go your own way! True gurus make suggestions and ask us questions. They do not pretend to have the truth, but share with us their current 'best shot" at explaining the "way-things-work/are", encouraging us to contribute to the ongoing process of unfolding a collective understanding of the "nature-of-things".

What do you think? I'd like to hear you comments after you've read Steve Salerno's book, SHAM.

References

Birch, C. 1999, Biology and the Riddle of Life, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Kopp, S. 1972, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him: The Pilgrimage of Psychotherapy Patients, Bantam Books, Toronto.

Salerno, Steve 2005, SHAM (Self-Help & Actualization Movement): How the gurus of the self-help movement make us helpless, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London.

In Brief

Congratulations to Rona

Rona Fitzpatrick, B.FA., University of Manitoba, 1974, CERT. ED., University of Manitoba, 1975, has successfully completed her Master of Arts in Conflict Analysis and Management at Royal Roads University, Canada. Her Masters Thesis title was Exploring Values Alignment as a Strategy for Enhancing Collaboration in a Government Agency. Rona used the AVI in an action research project in order to develop and write her thesis. Rona will be awarded her Masters Degree this month.

WebSite Development

The development work to transform our main website and the AVI Consultants' support website over to database driven websites in the dot.net framework is almost complete. This eZine has been sent out using new the group mailout software which we developed. It now is much easier for people to subscribe/unsubscribe from our eZine. The AVI Questionnaire is also much more user friendly - even of a person is logged off, for any reason, they can now log back on and none of their responses will have been lost and, if you log back in to the AVI years after you first completed it, you can see which responses you chose last time you completed it.

eZine #23 - Personal Mastery - Developing culturally and epoch specific ways to make life richer, more enjoyable and more meaningful.

2005-07-24T07:54:00.000+10:00

"The simple truth—that the control of consciousness determines the quality of life—has been known for a long time; in fact, for as long as human records exist." [Csikszentmihalyi]

A friend recently sent me a copy of a brochure about a two day intensive using meditation to create a centred state of awareness with all the usual promises of how one's life would benefit from the experience. The brochure prompted my recollection the following passage from Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow (pp. 21-22):

..if it is true that people have known for thousands of years what it takes to become free and in control of one's life, why haven't we made more progress in this direction? Why are we as helpless, or more so, than our ancestors were in facing the chaos that interferes with happiness? There are at least two good explanations for this failure. In the first place, the kind of knowledge - or wisdom - one needs for emancipating consciousness is not cumulative. It cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorised and the routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as mature political judgments or refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. Control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires the commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who keep practicing what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is applied to modify our own habits and desires.
Second, the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes [emphasis added]. The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time - and might still be the best, if we lived in those times and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary California [or Sydney, or Brisbane, or wherever you live] those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that are specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and the seeker is back where he started.
Control over consciousness cannot be institutionalized. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be. Routinization, unfortunately, tends to take place very rapidly. Freud was still alive when his quest for liberating the ego from its oppressors was turned into a staid ideology and a rigidly regulated profession. Marx was even less fortunate: his attempts to free consciousness from the tyranny of economic exploitation were soon turned into a system of repression that would have boggled the poor founder's mind. And as Dostoevsky, among many others observed, if Christ had returned to preach his message of liberation in the Middle Ages, he would have been crucified again and again by the leaders of that very church whose worldly power was built on his name.
In each new epoch - perhaps every generation, or every few years, the conditions in which we live change that rapidly - it becomes necessary to rethink and reformulate what it takes to establish autonomy of consciousness.

...Given the recurring need to return to this central question of how to achieve mastery over one's life, what does the present state of knowledge say about it? How can it help a person learn to rid himself of anxieties and fears and thus become free of the controls of society, whose rewards he can take or leave? As suggested before, the way is through control over consciousness, which in turn leads to control over the quality of experience. Any small gain in this direction will make life more rich, more enjoyable, more meaningful.

Csikszentmihalyi's statement which I highlighted in the above passage: "the knowledge of how to control consciousness must be reformulated every time the cultural context changes", sets us a challenge. As Csikszentmihalyi points out, we cannot just adopt methods from bygone ages and different cultural contexts and expect them to work as they did then and there - we must create techniques that are relevant to our own cultural context, our own place on the timeline of human evolution, and relevant to ourselves personally.
In taking up this challenge, members of the Minessence Group have developed some meta techniques which we believe are relevant to our culture, our epoch, and which enable people to create, for themselves, their own unique strategy. For example:

The values @ work people have developed the True North process. You can read more about that in Michael Henderson's award winning book, Finding True North.
You can take an inventory of your values through contacting one of our many AVI Consultants listed at our website. By facilitating the exploration of your values and brain-preference, they can help you create your own unique strategy to make your life more rich, more meaningful and more enjoyable.
Peter Wallman and Rachael Flower have developed a passion mapping technique. Refer to their book, The Wisdom of Passion: Mapping your Way to vitality and success or you can contact Peter via our AVI Consultants' listing.
John Loty is working with Appreciative Inquiry techniques.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1992, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, Random House.

Henderson, M. 2003, Finding True North: Discover your values, enrich your life, Harper Business, Auckland.

eZine #22 - Concept Mapping as a Method of Conscientizing Meaning from Values

2005-04-06T07:49:00.001+10:00

I have always used Mind Maps to analyse and understand patterns. This all changed when John Loty sent me an article on concept mapping, a technique originally developed by software engineers, to capture knowledge from human experts, for the purpose of using the captured knowledge in the software of their expert computer systems. Concept mapping is now used by people in all walks of life who wish to explore concepts and build common understanding - it enables real dialogue at the concept level.
So what is concept mapping? It is a technique whereby the component parts of a concept, and the relationships between them, can be represented diagrammatically. For example, the basic form of the values model we use can be mapped as:

Fritz stresses the importance of identifying our dynamic urge (A similar concept to what we call finding your True North):

Our dynamic urge is wired into us. We don't choose to have it, we just have it. We can't get rid of it either, although sometimes we may drive it underground in ourselves. We cannot add to it, take away from it, or fake it.
The dynamic urge is a genuine phenomenon of the human spirit in which people, no matter what the circumstances, continue to want to create something that matters to them.

Fritz goes on to highlight how organisations, like people, have a form of dynamic urge. This force exists in the purpose of the organisation. It is found in the hope people have for the organisation. It can't be manufactured by adopting certain behaviours. It cannot be declared into existence. You can't fake it, even if you are a good faker at other things. You can't fake that you have it when you don't have it. When it is thwarted, it doesn't go away; it smoulders as an undercurrent of frustration that builds over time. When an organisation is filled with people who have strong dynamic urges and it, by itself, has a strong dynamic urge, then magic happens.

Your True North/Dynamic Urge can be found through unfolding meaning and purpose via a comprehensive values analysis process. It is for this reason Fritz says:

I am a big believer in people being true to their aspirations and values. I am a big believer in the organization being true to itself as well.

Comprehensive values analysis involves taking an inventory of your values and analysing the patterns in the elicited values - the process is greatly simplified and increased in efficacy, through using the elicited values to guide the creation of a concept map of the beliefs that give the values their systemic structure.

****************

Concept mapping software can downloaded for free from: http://cmap.ihmc.us/download/

References

Cañas, A., Hill, G., Carff, R., Suri, N., Lott, J., Eskridge, T., Gómez, G., Arroyo, M., Carvajal, R. "CmapTools: A Knowledge Modeling and Sharing Environment", In: Concept Maps: Theory, Methodology, Technology, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Concept Mapping, A.J. Cañas, J.D. Novak, and F.M. González, Editors. 2004, Universidad Pública de Navarra: Pamplona, Spain. p. 125-133, http://cmc.ihmc.us/papers/cmc2004-283.pdf

Fritz, R. 1999, The Path of Least Resistance For Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco.

Henderson, M. 2003, Finding True North: Discover your values, enrich your life, Harper Business, Auckland.

eZine #21 - But in the Real World!

2005-02-10T07:30:00.000+10:00

How many times has the phrase, "But, in the real world..." been thrown back at you by someone? It was no doubt designed to stop you in your tracks so they could avoid confronting a serious, big picture, issue. Similarly, you may have been confronted by people who consider values soft, "We deal with 'the real world' around here and don't have time for soft stuff like values!"

The irony is that people coming from this space are actually the ones who are avoiding dealing with the real world. Bart Kosko, in Fuzzy Thinking: The new science of fuzzy logic, points out that people who see the world in black and white terms - guilty/not-guilty, right/wrong, etc. (bivalent logic), are dealing only with special case extremes of the real world. Between the extremes of black and white lies an infinite world of other possibilities - the real world.

The black and white, binary world of true or false, guilty or not guilty, only exists in the abstract conceptual world of mathematics and it only exists there because we have arbitrarily defined it that way through a person-made set of constructs on which maths is based: e.g. 1 + 1 = 2 because we have defined it that way. In the real world, 1 + 1 is always more or less than two (no two real world items are ever absolutely identical - additionally, when real world items are combined, properties can emerge that could not have even been predicted through a knowledge of the properties of the individual components. It is often only in hindsight (from experience), that one can say what may happen when entities are combined.

Defining terms and constructs may work to our advantage in the abstract world of mathematics, however, in the real world we face what Whitehead (cited Birch 1999) calls The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary: Reducing our understanding of the world to sets of definitions lacks the power of delicate accuracy of expression. As Charles Birch explains (1999, p. 10):

I remember, to my chagrin, asking Sir Karl Popper what was his definition of mind. He replied, in no uncertain terms, that it was no way to start a serious discussion by defining terms. Once you do that you give the impression that you know the answer before you have started. On another occasion Popper said that when people ask him to define a word that he has used, he usually instead proposes a different word. When we ask the question, what is life? we soon realise that a simple definition will get us nowhere. What the question can do is to initiate a discussion of a complex issue that may bring us to a greater understanding of the question than we had when we began the discussion. Blaise Pascal said, 'Le dieu defini est le dieu fini'. How can you define something that is infinite in finite terms?
The fallacy of the perfect dictionary divides philosophy, said Whitehead, into two schools; the critical school and the speculative school. The critical school confines itself to verbal analysis within the limits of the dictionary. The speculative school enlarges the dictionary by exploring meanings and seeking further insights. It is willing to have an attitude of adventure in the face of mystery and ignorance. The divergence between the two is, suggests Whitehead, the quarrel between safety and adventure.

'The black-and-white world of science...[is] unreasonable, as when a zealous prosecutor or judge applies the letter and not the spirit of the law and you end up in jail if you spit on the sidewalk or deduct a nonbusiness dinner on your tax forms or mail-order the wrong magazine. Language, especially the math language of science creates artificial boundaries between black and white. Reason or common sense smooths them out. Reason works with greys.' (Kosko 1994, p. 15) We need a grey language to describe and understand a grey world. The language of values is such a language.

Stuck in a rut?

Until we learn the language of values, we are likely to be guided unconsciously by our values. A former colleague and close fiend of mine, Rosie Bergin, described living one's values unconsciously by likening the life journey to a maze. If we keep going down the same path in a maze, we will never get through, continually coming to the same dead end. To find one's way through a maze, we have to back-track and try different paths until we finally arrive at our desired destination. If we keep making choices from values that we hold unconsciously, we will never find our way through life's maze, as Birch (1999, p. 27), quoting Singer, explains:

Achievements of the past can block, rather than foster, the development of a new, more desirable intangible sort of good. There is a word which describes this state. It is 'addiction'. Peter Singer has written a book on why people make the choices of lifestyle they do. He points out that most of the choices we make in our everyday lives are restricted ones, in that they are made from within a given framework or set of values. The rich man knows how to be rich and that is the framework of his choices in the future. He knows, or thinks he knows what is of value to him and he continues to choose in that direction, even when it brings a sense of emptiness. He chooses the soft option.

Breaking free!

When we learn the language of values and use it consciously to explore any restraining beliefs we may hold, the process can be a powerful myth breaker. 'Myth busting' through values exploration challenges us to break away from a world of delusion and false belief and asks us to confront the real reality - or as a line in the movie Sister Kenny goes, "It's what we know that ain't so that matters."
As an example of using values for 'myth busting' take a person who places a very high priority on money. Chances are they have made this their priority because they believe it will bring them happiness. However, there is absolutely no evidence in the real world that money brings happiness:

A study was made in the USA comparing people with two sorts of beliefs. One group believed that happiness lay in the pursuit of external goals of wealth, fame and physical attractiveness. The other believed that happiness lay in the pursuit of intrinsic goals of personal relationships and contributing to the community. Which group were happiest? Answer: those with intrinsic goals. Furthermore, extrinsic-oriented individuals had shorter, more conflictual and competitive relationships that made a negative impact on the life of others. In short, the pursuit of goals for money and fame led to a lower quality of life than the goals of relatedness and community feeling. (Eckersley cited Birch 1999, p. 27)

On the topic of happiness, Csikszentmihalyi (1988, p. 1) observes that, 'While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal—health, beauty, money, or power—is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy'.
So if happiness is the penultimate goal, and money is not the path to happiness, what is? Csikszentmihalyi (1988) found a simple answer:

It requires consciously following our values (not those of others that's been a slave or puppet),
It requires challenging ourselves to live our values more fully,
It requires gaining more skills in living our values so we can keep 'upping' the challenge. (Too much challenge and you will get anxious or frustrated - the solution: get more relevant skills. Not enough challenge and you will get bored - the solution: find more challenge in living your values.)

One more point: the path to happiness requires effort! The black-and-white world of artificial 'rational' logic is the easy path. In life, whenever we trade the expressive power and accuracy of fuzziness for black-and-white logic, we over simplify and thus avoid the effort required to deal with real reality.

[Actions have costs:] Bivalence or rounding off trades accuracy for simplicity. When you round off, you pay in truth and accuracy and honesty for what you gain in simplicity and precision and conformity. Denial does not eliminate the costs. A little rounding off, like a little debt, never hurt anyone. But even a little rounding off, like a little bit of pregnancy, can lead to surprises. If you round off too much, you pay the penalty of bivalent self-contradiction and land in paradox...[Paradox reminds] us that walking through math differs from walking through the universe. (Kosko 1994, pp. 91 & 97)

Don't get me wrong. I'm not knocking the wealthy and I'm not implying there's something wrong with having money. What I am saying is, that setting a goal to have lots of money is pointless because money is itself not a value. Rather, money is an information system by which people in our society indicate to others, through its exchange, how much they value what people are doing.
Not even making an organisational goal of maximising return on investment to shareholders makes any sense:

Shareholders' return on investment has never been a big turn-on for anyone, unless you're one of the major shareholders.
The great organizations know that there's more to life than shareholder return, even while they manage that part of their business. Great organizations are not just organizations that spout a bunch of platitudes every morning before the workday begins. They walk more than their talk, and they are able to be true to themselves. They also tend to make a lot of money. Isn't that wonderful? Greatness is a commercially viable proposition that pays of handsomely.
What kind of organization would you rather work for? One in which you could express what is highest in your spirit, or one that doesn't care for you personally but just needs someone like you to do a job so it can make more shareholder profit? Where would you work? Not too many people would choose the latter organization. What does that tell us about ourselves? That we would rather be a member of a company that stands for values, that reaches for its future, that cares about its people than one that doesn't. (Fritz 1999, p. 208)

One goal in life that does makes sense is to find our true purpose. Michael Henderson (2003) calls this our True North. Fritz calls this our dynamic urge:

Our dynamic urge is wired into us. We don't choose to have it, we just have it. We can't get rid of it either, although sometimes we may drive it underground in ourselves. We cannot add to it, take away from it, or fake it.
The dynamic urge is a genuine phenomenon of the human spirit in which people, no matter what the circumstances, continue to want to create something that matters to them.
...Organizations, like people, have a form of dynamic urge. This force exists in the purpose of the organization. It is found in the hope people have for the organization. It can't be manufactured by adopting certain behaviors. It cannot be declared into existence. You can't fake it, even if you are a good faker at other things. You can't fake that you have it when you don't have it. When it is thwarted, it doesn't go away; it smoulders as an undercurrent of frustration that builds over time.
Many people have very strong dynamic urges that they are not able to express in organizations that they work for, and this is sad, because they both lose. The person loses time that would be better spent on being involved with something that mattered to him or her. The organization loses because a person with a strong dynamic urge wants to join in any way possible to help create the organization.
When the organization is filled with people who have strong dynamic urges and it, by itself, has a strong dynamic urge, then magic can happen. We still need to set up the right structure so that the path of least resistance advances us toward our goals, but the juice is there, ready to be turned on.
I am a big believer in people being true to their aspirations and values. I am a big believer in the organization being true to itself as well. (Fritz 1999, pp. 186-187)

In the real world, values are not 'soft'. The soft option is to avoid exploring personal and organisational values, to avoid harnessing the true potential of individuals, and to avoid putting in the effort required to create a great organisation. The hard, yet worth it many times over, option is to unfold meaning and purpose for individuals and organisations through values - no pain no gain as they say! The very reason for existence of the Minessence Group is to make this process as accessible to people and organisations as possible. To do this, a range of values' technologies and resources have been developed. The very latest of these technologies for individuals is the True North PAK: people can go online and take an inventory of their values and the book, Finding True North, is provided as a support resource.
For organisations, a similar technology to the True North PAK has been developed. Apart from enabling people within an organisation to find their True North, it facilitates the process of organisations identifying their own true values and purpose.

But in the real world? Avoiding the exploration of values is soft. Unfolding meaning and purpose through values is hard work, but well worth it - just ask someone in any great organisation!

References

Birch, C. 1999, Biology and the Riddle of Life, University of New South Wales, Sydney.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1992, Flow: The Psychology of happiness, Random House.

Fritz, R. 1999, The Path of Least Resistance For Managers: Designing Organizations to Succeed, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco.

Henderson, M. 2003, Finding True North: Discover your values, enrich your life, Harper Business, Auckland.

Kosko, B. 1994, Fuzzy Thinking: The New Science of Fuzzy Logic, Harper Collins, London.

Rowe, D. 1997, The Real Meaning of Money, Harper Collins, London.

eZine #20 - Memes & Social Evolution - Fact or Fiction?

2004-05-20T07:27:00.000+10:00

...if the twentieth century proved anything, it was that the certainty of utilitarian reason could as easily be the ally of evil as of good. In fact, it raised the question of what linear progress actually meant.
The reasonable position after our experience would be that the human race does not progress. We may slowly evolve in scientific terms. But in terms of our own qualities we don't change.
We all know that we know more. And our technical progress has been revolutionary. But what we do with this knowledge and machinery remains as open a question as it always has been. "Ignorance made you happy," the Chorus said to Oedipus. "The truth has made you blind."
You could argue that this inability to progress is the human disease. We may design the most noble of laws yet twenty or fifty years later discover that they are being used accomplish the opposite. Social theories which rid us of state violence -- the death penalty, for example -- reverse themselves effortlessly and bring it back. (Saul 2001, p. 253)

Over the past few decades there has been a shift in thought concerning the evolution of human culture. Just as Dawkins in the Selfish Gene suggested that the evolution of living entities was really the result of the evolution of genes, so too there has been a ground swell of people focusing on the evolution of ideas (memes) separate from humans. “Memes are ideas, tunes, inventions, retorts, ways of doing business, ways of asking for help, and ways of saying hello (Palumbi 2001, p. 243).”

Dawkins suggested that memes, composed of memory and imagination, were the basic replicating units through which human culture evolved. However, there is basic flaw to this approach. Memes simply do not fit the model of classic Darwinian evolution. For starters, an idea, if not passed on, may die with the person who had the idea. A prime example was Fermat’s last theorem. In 1637 Fermat pencilled a note in the margin of a page saying he had solved a particular mathematical theorem, however, he did not give the complete solution because, as he said, “there is not enough space in the margin to write it.” It was not until 1993 that Andrew Wiles solved the mathematical problem and announced the answer. Ideas clearly are not passed on from one generation to another in a linear fashion as are genes.

With ideas, replication and transference are identical processes. That is, ideas can be cloned (no change in an idea passed from person to person) or modified (another person may add their own slant to an idea or may simply not understand it properly and pass on some distortion of the original). The life and evolution of an idea then, has nothing to do with the survival of the fittest.

Values, too, have a profound impact on the transference of ideas. When people are acting unconsciously, their values will filter what they give attention to -- they will not even notice someone else’s idea that has no relation to what they value -- let alone pass it on. On the other hand, if people are operating consciously, they will make a conscious choice, based on their values, as to whether or not and how to pass on a particular idea (whether to pass it on at all, whether to pass it on in its raw form, or whether to embellish it in some way).

Lastly, the most significant difference between the classic Darwinian evolution of genes and the conscious evolution of ideas is that with the former, it is merely about the survival of what works in order to keep the species alive, whereas with the latter, there is a values judgement made in respect of the idea as to whether or not it should survive.

The impact of conscious selection at the stage of idea mutation and transmission blurs the distinction among the three elements of Darwin's engine and suggests a very different way of looking at ideas than Dawkins's notion of evolving memes. Picked over as carefully as meatballs at a cheap buffet, ideas are sorted by the finicky process of conscious selection. They are created, used, and discarded by active minds seeking their own advancement or their own comfort. What other element of our lives do we consciously improve for better function and pick carefully among to fill our cultural shopping carts? We can also consider ideas as tools.
As tools, ideas may be practical or not. They may have general or specific uses. Others may scorn them or adopt them with gusto. Sometimes they seem to have a life and independence of their own, like the wooden handle of an axe that becomes polished through use to fit the hands that wield it. But in the final analysis they remain tools, ways of manipulating the world or understanding it. They do not evolve like genes because like tools, they cannot really replicate themselves-- they can be made only on demand by brains, and only by this agency can they spread through to other brains. This does not say they always benefit us-- akin to the way many of us have tool boxes stuffed full of things not currently doing us any good-- and it does not claim that they can never do damage-- like an unchaperoned gun. But the function and rapid change of ideas does not require their independent evolution... (Palumbi 2001, p. 252)

It is worth repeating the point I made last eZine: that there is no automatic link between evolution and progress. Classic Darwinian evolution does not inevitably lead to progress since the only value judgment involved is about survival. On the other hand, conscious evolution can lead to progress when, and only when, value judgments are made in relation what should or should not survive in terms of creating a desirable society for us all.

At the start of this article I quoted Saul who believes that, to date, society itself has not progressed. In fact, given some of the events of the past few weeks related to the war in Iraq, one would wonder if perhaps society is regressing! The other point Saul made was, "We may design the most noble of laws yet twenty or fifty years later discover that they are being used accomplish the opposite. Social theories which rid us of state violence-- the death penalty, for example-- reverse themselves effortlessly and bring it back."

The former Lord Mayor of Brisbane, Jim Soorley, expresses a similar view:

Former Prime Minister [of Australia] Paul Keating has his fans and those who hate him. But even those who hate him have to admit he had a way with words and concepts.
Nothing has changed. This week, at the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the first national Labor government in the world, Keating talked about the huge effect war has on politics. When a nation is involved in war, he said, it's easy for government to roll back progressive policies, and resort to wrapping the country in the flag of others.
In World War I we wrapped ourselves in the British flag -- this time it's the Stars and Stripes.
He's right. The war in Iraq is terrible and ongoing, and there is a sense that our whole development as a nation, our international role and identity, and our domestic progress have been put on hold while we line up with George Bush.
I don't know about you, but I'm tired of facing backwards. (Soorley 2004, The Sunday Mail, p.21)

If we choose to face forward and look towards a more advanced society than we have today, what would we see?

The main characteristic of this society would be that it creates a context in which the quality of human experience of all of its members is continually improved. Currently, our society uses the promise that, if you do its bidding, then the quality of experience will be improved. However, this is only a myth and, in reality, is a means of social control with the result being, "We are always getting to live, but never living" (Ralph Waldo Emerson, cited Csikszentmihalyi 1992, p. 16). When people begin to realise that they have been duped and that progress is not inevitable, then most often, they quickly lose courage and determination at the first signs of adversity:

When they realise that what they had believed in is not entirely true, they abandon faith in everything else they have learned. Deprived of the customary supports that cultural values had given them, they flounder in a morass of anxiety and apathy.
Such symptoms of disillusionment are not hard to observe around us now. The most obvious ones relate to the pervasive listlessness that affects so many lives. Genuinely happy individuals are few and far between...
The roots of this discontent are internal, and each person must untangle them personally, with his or her own power. The [cultural] shields that have worked in the past -- the order that religion, patriotism, ethnic traditions, and habits instilled by social classes used to provide -- are no longer effective for increasing numbers of people who feel exposed to the harsh winds of chaos.
The lack of inner order manifests itself in the subjective condition that some call ontological anxiety, or existential dread. Basically it is a fear of being, a feeling that there is no meaning to life and that existence is not worth going on with. Nothing seems to make sense. ...There no longer seems any point to the historical strivings of humankind. We are just forgotten specks drifting in the void. With each passing year, the chaos of the physical universe becomes magnified in the minds of the multitude. (Csikszentmihalyi 1992, pp. 11-12)

The key principle that gives us a way out of this malaise has been known for as long as human records exist, that is, control of consciousness determines quality of life. Whether one studies the teachings of Aristotle, the advice of the oracle in ancient Delphi, follows the principles developed by the Stoic philosophers in classical antiquity, or follows the disciplines of Yoga, Zen or Buddhism, the intended result is identical (Csikszentmihalyi 1992, p. 20):

...to free life from the threat of chaos, on the one hand, and from the rigid conditioning of biological urges on the other, and hence to become independent of the social controls that exploit both.

If this principle for living has been known for so long, why hasn't society progressed? Csikszentmihalyi (1992, p. 21-22) has identified two plausible explanations for this failure:

The type of knowledge or wisdom that is required to control the focus of attention of our conscious mind is not cumulative. That is to say:

...it cannot be condensed into a formula; it cannot be memorised and then routinely applied. Like other complex forms of expertise, such as mature political judgment or refined aesthetic sense, it must be earned through trial-and-error experience by each individual, generation after generation. control over consciousness is not simply a cognitive skill. At least as much as intelligence, it requires commitment of emotions and will. It is not enough to know how to do it; one must do it, consistently, in the same way as athletes or musicians who must keep practising what they know in theory. And this is never easy. Progress is relatively fast in fields that apply knowledge to the material world, such as physics or genetics. But it is painfully slow when knowledge is to be applied to modify our own habits and desires.

The knowledge about how to control consciousness must be reformulated for each culture and between generations, in fact, each time the cultural context changes:

The wisdom of the mystics, of the Sufi, of the great yogis, or of the Zen masters might have been excellent in their own time -- and might still be the best, if we lived in those and in those cultures. But when transplanted to contemporary [Western cultures] those systems lose quite a bit of their original power. They contain elements that were specific to their original contexts, and when these accidental components are not distinguished from what is essential, the path to freedom gets overgrown by brambles of meaningless mumbo jumbo. Ritual form wins over substance, and the seeker is back where he started.
Control over consciousness cannot be institutionalised. As soon as it becomes part of a set of social rules and norms, it ceases to be effective in the way it was originally intended to be. Routinization, unfortunately, tends to take place very rapidly. Freud was still alive when his quest for liberating the ego from its oppressors was turned into a solid ideology and a rigidly regulated profession. Marx was even less fortunate: his attempts to free consciousness from the tyranny of economic exploitation were soon turned into a system of repression that would have boggled the poor founder's mind. And as Dostoevsky among many others observed, if Christ had returned to preach his message of liberation in the Middle Ages, he would have been crucified again and again by the leaders of every church whose worldly power was built on his name.

I believe there is a third impediment to society's progress. It is in society's interest to control its members. This control is accomplished through a process known as socialisation. What society is going to include, within its educational programmes, courses which teach us to control our consciousness, when the known outcome is the development of individuals who have the strength to resist society's socialisation strategies?

The Bottom Line

It's up to each of us to develop skills, in controlling our own consciousness, which lead to quality of life experience -- no one else can do it for us. Additionally, we have a responsibility to pass this message on to others.

Memes (if they exist at all) can play no part in society's progress because, the more each of us is in control of or consciousness, the more we will be immune to memes. Memes (if they existed) would be the tool used by society to control its unconscious members.

No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought (J. S. Mill).

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1992, Flow: The Psychology of happiness, Random House.

Palumbi, S. 2001, The Evolution Explosion: How humans cause rapid evolutionary change, W. W. Norton & Company, New York.

Saul, J. 2002, On Equilibrium, Penguin Books, Australia.

eZine #19 - MBV - Management By Values

2004-02-15T07:24:00.000+10:00

Whereas values were once considered by managers as 'too soft' to be included in any serious approach to management, they have now become a central part of mainstream management. Figure 1 below illustrates this shift of focus.

FIGURE 1 - Shift in Management Focus

This shift in management focus has been brought about through society's increased demands on managers in respect of professional responsibility, quality and customer focus. The world has also become a much more uncertain and complex place. Managers can no longer avoid dealing with complexity. Instead there has become an urgent need for managers to confront complexity head on with new skills acquired through an understanding of complexity theory, chaos theory, systems theory, etc. It is now understood that the arrow of progress and growth of any entity (person, organisation, society), is NOT bigger, richer, taller, faster, etc. rather, the arrow of progress and growth IS increased internal complexity with a commensurate simplification of interface between entities - if internal complexity and interface simplicity are not increasing, then the 'management alarm bells' should be ringing!

As Figure 1 shows, in the 1920s it was sufficient to manage by instruction (MBI) as change was not rapid and the way things were done in the past worked well enough to pass on to others. By the 1960s, change was accelerating to the point where more flexibility of action was required by managers. The introduction of management by objectives (MBO) enabled managers to agree on direction and to choose their own strategy. In 1986, Prigogine put forward the notion that an analysis of the value systems of complex living entities was the key to understanding their behaviour. Years of research since has confirmed that value systems are indeed the key to understanding the behaviour of individuals, organisations and society, leading, today to the emergence of management by values (MBV).

In simple non-living human-made linear entities such as machines, bridges, buildings, etc. their motion (behaviour) can be understood through forces and simple attractors such as gravity. One can, through using a few mathematical equations, predict with a fair degree of accuracy, the behaviour of these entities in a whole range of possible environments. Not so with complex living entities. However, in this later case, a strange attractor, in lieu of a simple attractor, can be used to understand the general form of behaviour - to predict with a high level of certainty what the entity will do at any moment is simply impossible.

For individuals, groups, organisations and society, value systems are the strange attractor that determines the general form of their behaviour. One way of using this strange attractor to analyse the likely general form of human behaviour is to separate the value system into three dimensions: control values, ethical values, and developmental values.

Control values are necessary to maintain and bring together various organisational sub-systems. They include values relating to efficiency, discipline, and performance standards. These values guide such activities as planning, quality assurance and accounting.

The way people behave in a group setting is guided be the Ethical values the group's members share. Ethical values emerge from beliefs held about how people should conduct themselves in public, at work and in relationships. They are associated with social values such as honesty, congruence, respect, and loyalty. A person's ethical values will influence how they behave when living their personal Control and Developmental values.

Developmental values are essential to create new opportunities for action. They are values related to trust, creativity, freedom and having fun in the workplace. Examples of developmental values are creativity/ideation, life/self-actualisation, self-assertion/directedness, and adaptability/flexibility.

Paul Chippendale's research identifies a significant world-view shift of the Australian and New Zealand workforce between 1988 and 2003. This shift is illustrated, in Table 1, using the strange attractor (value system) in operation in 1988, 1998 and 2003.

Table 1
Strange Attractors (Value Systems) of the Australian & New Zealand Workforce

1988

1998

2003

Control Values (52)

Management (62)
Productivity (60)
Responsibility (58)
Efficiency/
Planning (47)
Administration/
Control (46)
Criteria/Rationality (45)
Achievement (44)

Control Values (25)

Productivity (32)
Membership/
Institution (31)
Management (25)
Responsibility (22)
Duty/Obligation (22)
Achievement (21)
Efficiency/
Planning (20)

Control Values (43)

Territory/Security (52)
Management (44)
Achievement (43)
Duty/Obligation (43)
Responsibility (41)
Dexterity/
Coordination (40)
Administration/
Control (40)

Ethical Values (47)

Rights/Respect (54)
Collaboration/
Subsidiarity (52)
Family/Belonging (50)
Intimacy (48)
Friendship/
Belonging (46)
Loyalty/Fidelity (41)
Mutual Responsibility/
Accountability (40)

Ethical Values (37)

Family/Belonging (39)
Synergy (39)
Generosity/
Service (38)
Loyalty/Fidelity (38)
Personal Authority/
Honesty (36)
Intimacy (34)
Self Worth (32)

Ethical Values (61)

Human Dignity (68)
Family/belonging (65)
Loyalty/Fidelity (63)
Self Worth (63)
Intimacy (61)
Congruence (55)
Rights/Respect (53)

Developmental Values (49)

Decision/Initiation (56)
Self Competence/ Confidence (54)
Sharing/Listening/
Trust (57)
Being Self (50)
Limitation/
Celebration (47)
Adaptability/
Flexibility (44)
Life/Self
Actualisation (41)

Developmental Values (42)

Self Competence/ Confidence (50)
Relaxation (47)
Being Self (44)
Decision/
Initiation (39)
Life/Self
Actualisation (39)
Creativity/Ideation (38)
Sharing/Listening/
Trust (38)

Developmental Values (61)

Self Competence/ Confidence (70)
Sharing/Listening/
Trust (67)
Life/Self
Actualisation (61)
Expressiveness/
Freedom/Joy (59)
Health/Healing/
Harmony (58)
Construction/
New Order (55)
Contemplation/
Asceticism (54)

Notes:

Definitions of all the values can be found at http://www.minessence.net/pdfs/values_definitions.pdf
The numbers in brackets, after the value labels in this table, give a relative indication of the amount of collective mental energy being placed on the particular values dimension (control, ethics or development) or on a particular value - the higher the number the greater the mental energy being applied.

Interpreting the World-View Shift

The 1988 value system of people in the workforce indicates that people at that time viewed the ‘world of work’ in a rather traditional light:

Effective management was most important
You get things done through delegation
Productivity, making decisions and acting on them, taking responsibility for actions, treating each other with respect, and having the competence and confidence to undertake one’s allocated role - were all key components.

The 1998 value system indicates that the majority of people in the workplace no longer view the world of work this way - there has been a paradigm shift. The amount of energy devoted to control values is approximately half that of 1988, indicating people feel more able to engage in "whatever they want" and "however they want". The energy devoted to ethical values has also dropped significantly since 1988. This reinforces the conclusion that the trend over the decade from 1988 to 1998 was increasingly for people to feel they could, within reason, behave more or less as they choose towards each other. There is little change in the priority placed on developmental values over this decade, however, the overall score on control, ethics and development has dropped substantially. this drop in overall score indicates a trend towards people being less clear as to what they want in life and how to get there (the Generation X?).

The events of September 11, 2001 and subsequent terrorist events, have had a profound impact on people's world-view. This is reflected in the strange attractor for 2003. Until September 11, Australians and New Zealander's placed little to no priority was placed on Territory/Security as a value. After September 11, as Table 1 illustrates, it became the most prominent value in the control dimension.

Today, people are no longer as free to do what and as they please (the score on control values is not quite as high as in 1988, however, it is significantly higher than 1998). Ethical values have become even more important that they were in 1988, indicating a very real concern in Australia and New Zealand for how we treat each other. The fact that human dignity has become the most important value in the ethical values dimension indicates that we now have a priority concern for how humanity in general are treating each other. The higher score on developmental values suggests that people are now devoting much more energy to creatively build a new future for themselves - they are not prepared to sit back and let the future unfold around them. More than ever, people want to be part of creating their own future.

Implications for Managers

Values are people’s motivators. For most people they are unconscious motivators. However, in highly successful organisations, each person in the organisation is aware of their personal values and how they relate to the organisation's value system - in the successful organisation values are conscious motivators. Today, effective managers tap into people’s values as a way of motivating them.

Managers who are still operating from the belief that people still hold the same values they held in 1988 or even prior to September 11, however, will not be effective in motivating their people. The world is in a state of flux and worldviews can change overnight. To function effectively in this turbulent world, today's managers must be able to identify the strange attractor (value system) of their organisation. They must be able to communicate to all in the organisation the key role that values play in organisational success, and they must be able to match their organisational structure and processes to the emergent value system. It is the era of MBV.

References:

Dolan, S. L., Garcia, S., Diegoli, S. & Auerbach, 2003, Organisational Values as "Attractors of Chaos: An Emerging Cultural Change to Manage Organisational Complexity,http://www.minessence.net/articles/articles.aspx#satt

Prigogine, I. 1986, 'Science, Civilisation and Democracy: Values, Systems, Structures and Affinities', Futures

eZine #18 - Value-Neutral Education in Australian Schools

2004-01-01T07:08:00.000+10:00

I wrote the article below in response to John Howard's (the Prime Minister of Australia) criticism that Australian Public Schools are too politically correct and are value-neutral. He says that is why more and more parents are sending their children to private schools.

The very notion of any school being value-neutral is nonsense. It is impossible for people to live life without some form of expression of their values.

Values are like the settings on a plane’s autopilot. Changing the settings (values) changes the course the plane takes. When all is well, the autopilot is left to guide the plane in a particular direction, however, when weather conditions change for the worse, it is necessary to override the settings (values) to steer a different course. For example, if a pilot observes that there is a severe storm ahead, the passengers would not be very happy with the pilot if she didn’t change the values (settings) of the autopilot to steer around the storm.

So it is with peoples' values. Peoples' values are like the settings on our personal autopilot, our values steer us on a particular course through life - changing our values changes the path we take. If we say, there is only one set of values that should guide all children - i.e. the traditional values taught by private schools - as John Howard, Peter Costello and others seem to suggest, then our children could run the risk of heading down a path that may not be appropriate for their wellbeing or that of society.

The key skills that schools ought to be teaching children are:

how to identify the range of value choices that are available,
how to determine what values are important to them as individuals,
how to explore why these values are important,
how to change their values if they believe a change will create a better life for them and others, and
how to explore the consequences of living their values to the full, given that their values shape those of society.

The last point is very important, as Stephen Covey says in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, "even thieves have values, it’s how we live our values that matters."

It seems appropriate to finish with one more quote:

Teaching values, recently a political theme, can’t be done. So, while the candidate for office declares, "We need to teach our kids family values!" the fact is that our children form their own values. Most often, they have very good values. What they need to learn is how to use their true values as a basis for making decisions. Let’s adjust our political candidate’s talking point to say, "We need to teach our kids how to organize their lives around their own values!" While this doesn’t sound as good on the stump, and our candidate may lose the election by a landslide, at least our politician was honest. (Robert Fritz)

Or as I like to say myself, "Being forced to live someone else's values is tantamount to slavery!"

Let me know what your views are on this topic, Paul Chippendale.

eZine #15 - Dialectic-Synthetic Logic - A Logic of Transformation

2002-10-05T07:06:00.000+10:00

Whether we choose to love or hate science we cannot escape the reality that it has a profound impact on the way we think and act - that is, it shapes our world-view. The beginning of last century saw the emergence of the school of scientific management, however, this was based on a 400 year old mechanistic view of the cosmos. As we move into the new Millennium, a new form of scientific management is emerging, however, now it is informed by such fields as neuroscience (the 1990s was the decade of the brain - using MRI and similar technologies, we began to understand the workings of the brain as never before), quantum theory, complex systems theory, chaos theory, and so on.

Margaret Wheatley was one of the first to describe key aspects of the new scientific management. Two passages from her book, Leadership and the New Science, had a particular impact one me so I share them here with you in anticipation you may find them equally powerful:

We social scientists are trying hard to be conscientious, using the methodologies and thought patterns of seventeenth century science, while the scientists, travelling away from us at the speed of light, are moving into a universe that suggests entirely new ways of understanding. Just when social scientists seem to have gotten the science down and can construct strings of variables in impressive formulae, the scientists have left, plunging ahead into the vast "porridge of being" that describes a new reality. (Wheatley 1994, p. 141)
Wouldn't we all welcome more laughter in the halls of management? I would be excited to encounter people delighted by surprises instead of the ones I now meet who are scared to death of them. Were we to become truly good scientists of our craft, we would seek out surprises, relishing the unpredictable when it finally decided to reveal itself to us. Surprise is the only route to discovery, the only path we can take if we're to search out the important principles that can govern our work. The dance of this universe extends to all the relationships we have. Knowing the steps ahead of time is not important; being willing to engage with the music and move freely onto the dance floor is what's key.
One of the guiding principles of scientific inquiry is that at all levels, nature seems to resemble itself. For me, the parsimony of nature's laws is further argument why we need to take science seriously. If nature uses certain principles to create her infinite diversity, it's highly probable that those principles apply to human organizations. There is no reason to think we'd be the exception. Nature's predisposition toward self-similarity can be extremely useful. It can even help us evaluate current management practices, providing a guide through the fads and ideas that plague us, directing our attention to those things that have merit at a deeper level. I feel better able to distinguish real nourishment from fast-food guru advice because of my awareness of the directions science is taking. (Wheatley, 1994, pp. 142-143)

I've found Wheatley's notion that the principle - at all levels, the universe seems to replicate itself - can be used to guide one's scientific inquiry, particularly insightful. For example, the basic pattern of dialectic-synthetic logic seems to permeate all levels of our values model which gives us a high degree of confidence we are on the right track.

The pattern of dialectic-synthetic logic between world-views is represented as:

That is to say, for the conscious human being, there is always a dialogue taking place between our past and our future ( Greenfield 2000). From this dialogue is synthesised our current world-view.

At a higher level, the dialectic-synthetic relationship between those in society who hold a tacit view of reality and those who do not is represented as:

A dialogue is always in progress between those who insist the world is different from the prevailing world-view of society, and those who accept, without question, that their view of the world is actuality. At some point, a critical mass of people see a new world-view and a new tacit world-view emerges and everyone in society behaves differently. And so the cycle continues.

At a lower level, there exists a dialectic-synthetic relationship between goal values and means values which impacts on the nature or qualities of other values we hold (Colins & Chippendale 1995). Thus if our highest priority goal value is family and our highest priority means value is control, then, if our next highest priority goal value is play, our mental dialogue around our highest priority goal and means value will result in an entirely different type of play than if our highest priority means value was care/nurture:

Let me know if you can find any other dialectic-synthetic relationships in our values model.

References

Colins, C. & Chippendale, P. 1995, New Wisdom II: Values-based development, Acorn Publications, Brisbane.

Greenfield, S. 2000, The Private Life of the Brain, Penguin Books, England.

Wheatley, M. 1992, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco.

Take an Inventory of Your Values

If you want to explore your Brain Preference Map or obtain a map of your value priorities, then take an inventory of your values at: www.minessence.net/AValuesInventory/AboutTheAVI.aspx

eZine #14 - Values-Based Model of Public Consultation

2002-09-14T07:01:00.000+10:00

The Value Consultant

What do Value Consultants do? I'll get to that soon. Firstly, why 'value consultant' and not 'values consultant'? When one refers to a person as a values consultant it places an emphasis on the consulting being around values themselves as though they are 'things' - in other words it objectifies values. On the other hand, when one refers to a person as a value consultant, it places emphasis, not on values, but rather on the process of valuing, or attributing value to things. It is my belief that the latter is a more powerful and useful aspect of values exploration. In the next section, below, I look at one model of public participation from the repertoire of the value consultant.

Values-Based Model of Public Consultation

A key feature of the model is that three sources of knowledge are recognised as being of equal worth and are specifically included in the process:

knowledge based on common sense and personal experience,
knowledge based on technical expertise, and
knowledge derived from social interests and advocacy.

The model is applied when some new social policy, or decision that will affect the community or people in an organisation, has to be made. Ideally, a representative group are drawn from the public, or the organisation, at random (citizens) - they are the main source of the common sense and personal experience knowledge. Relevant special interest and advocacy groups are involved to the extent that they suggest experts who should provide input to the process, otherwise they are observers, rather than participants, in the final decision making process. Experts make presentations, run workshops, etc. - using appropriate methods to educate all participants in the issues involved. Sponsor groups (those funding, on in other ways resourcing the process) are present, and have input to the process, though only in the first two steps - in the last step they remain observers.

The whole process is facilitated by one or more value consultants whose role is:

Step 1 - elicit the priority values of all participants and establish the shared priority values of all (i.e. identify the common ground). The AVI is a powerful tool for facilitating this process.
Step 2 - identify the values that are addressed by each possible option and provide participants with this information, explicitly showing how the values links were made.
Step 3 - the public representatives (citizens) evaluate the identified options based the value priorities established in step 1. A recommendation is made to the sponsoring body.

The best way to become familiar with this process is to experience it. Contact your nearest value consultant if you want to participate.

This is a great process for building social capital in the community.

eZine #13 - There's Nothing new under the Sun! Except Perhaps a Better Understanding of Why-it's-so!

2002-04-14T06:59:00.000+10:00

[Editor's note: In Minessence eZine #3 I talked about the importance of creating a state of negative entropy in consciousness to the creation of happiness in our lives. After reading the work of De Botton and Birch and finding a similar convergence of thought, I believed it was time to touch base on this topic again.]

As far back as 306 BC, Epicurus had formulated a recipe for happiness. All we needed were:

Friends
Freedom, and
to Live a Thoughtful (Reflective) Life (De Botton 2001, pp. 56-58).

Epicurus believed that money would not make us happy. If we were not happy before we had money (material wealth) we would not be any more happy (less unhappy) when we had money. Happiness was related to how we lived, not what we owned. See the diagrams below (De Botton 2001, pp. 61-62):

In the 1990s Csikszentmihalyi, after researching what made 100,000+ people happy, came to the conclusion that happiness was the ultimate goal of all humans:

While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal - health, beauty, money, or power - is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy (Csikszentmihalyi 1998, p. 1).

Interestingly he found people were still struggling under the same delusion as in Epicurus's day, 'that material wealth is the path to happiness'.

What Csikszentmihalyi also discovered was that happiness could be created through reducing the disorder in our consciousness, or in Csikszentmihalyi words, 'reducing our psychic entropy' (1998 Csikszentmihalyi, p. 36). [Note: entropy is a measure of disorder and chaos. As entropy is reduced, order is created and chaos reduced. The state of high order is also referred to as a state of negative entropy.]

Interestingly, in 1944 Schrodinger (cited Birch 1999, p. 3) believed that the distinguishing feature between living and non-living things was that life fed off negative entropy, 'whereas the universe as a whole is becoming less ordered (positive entropy), life creates greater order (negative entropy).

It seems that negative entropy is not just a characteristic of life but also, creating that state in our mind, is essential for our happiness.

Lowen and Miike (1982), in developing a systems science model of the brain, gave us the first clue as to how this state was theoretically achieved. In 1995, Colins and Chippendale developed a technique for mapping the brain's preferences, based on a person's values. Using this Brain-Preference Map people would, theoretically, be able to create 'entropy flow' in their brain. Low and behold it worked! The results were just as Lowen and Miike's theory predicted.

Ever since, people who have taken an inventory of their values, and who have then had their Brain-Preference Map produced, have been stunned with the positive impact on their lives.

References

Birch, C. 1999, Biology and the Riddle of Life, UNSW Press, Sydney.

Colins, C. & Chippendale, P. 1995, New Wisdom II: Values-Based Development, ACORN Publications, Brisbane.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1998, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, Rider, London.

De Botton, A. 2001, The Consolations of Philosophy, Penguin, Australia.

Lowen, W. & Miike, L. 1982, Dichotomies of the Mind: A Systems Science Model of the Mind and Personality, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

eZine #12 - Linking IQ, EQ & SQ to the Performance Model

2002-01-28T06:56:00.000+10:00

What's New?

I recently put together a brief article summarizing the difference between IQ (Intelligence Quotient), EQ (Emotional Intelligence) and SQ (Spiritual Intelligence). In writing the article I realised there was an obvious correlation between capability (competency) - developed mainly through IQ, will (motivation) - developed mainly through EQ, and Focus (meaning) - developed mainly through SQ.
The AVI Questionnaire is now online. The standard range of AVI Reports are still available - the results of the online AVI Questionnaire are automatically available for us to process

eZine #11 - On Values, Ethics, Morals & Principles

2001-11-12T06:49:00.001+10:00

Last issue Gisella looked at different theories that underpin approaches to values and ethics. At Minessence, a question we are frequently asked is, "What are the differences between values, ethics, morals and principles?"

My short answer to the question is usually, "Values motivate, morals and ethics constrain." In other words values describe what is important in a person's life, while ethics and morals prescribe what is or is not considered appropriate behaviour in living one's life. Principles inform our choice of values, morals and ethics.

...we are more likely to make choices that support our value systems than choices that will not. Let us say that financial security is a strong value for an individual. When faced with a choice of jobs, chances are the individual will carefully examine each organisation for potential financial and job security. The job applicant who values financial security may well take a lower salary offer with a well established company over a higher-paying offer from a new, high risk venture. Another job seeker with different values, possibly adventure and excitement, might choose the newer company simply for the potential risk and uncertain future.
Values, therefore, become part of complex attitude sets that influence our behaviour and the behaviour of all those with whom we interact. What we value guides not only our personal choices but also our perceptions of the worth of others. We are more likely, for example, to evaluate highly someone who holds the same hard-work value we do than someone who finds work distasteful, with personal gratification a more important value. We may also call the person lazy and worthless, a negative value label. (Shockley-Zalabak 1999, pp. 425-426)

What then of ethics? Ethics are the standards by which behaviours are evaluated for their morality - their rightness or wrongness. Imagine a person who has a strong value of achievement and success. Knowing only that this value is important to them gives us a general expectation of their behaviour, i.e. we would expect them to be goal oriented, gaining the skills necessary to get what they want, etc. However, we cannot know whether they will cheat to get what they want or "do an honest day's work each day". The latter dimension is a matter of ethics and morality. Take another example, a person has a high priority value or research/knowledge/insight. They have have a career in medical research. In fact, knowing their value priority we would expect them to have a career in some form of research, however, we do not know from their value priority how they are likely to undergo their research. Will the person conduct experiments on animals, or would they abhor such approaches? Again, the latter is a mater of ethical stance and molality. Johannesen (cited Shockley-Zalabak 1999, p. 437) gives further examples which help distinguish between values and ethics:

Concepts such as material success, individualism, efficiency, thrift, freedom, courage, hard work, prudence, competition, patriotism, compromise, and punctuality all are value standards that have varying degrees of potency in contemporary American culture. But we probably would not view them primarily as ethical standards of right and wrong. Ethical judgments focus more precisely on degrees of rightness and wrongness in human behaviour. In condemning someone for being inefficient, conformist, extravagant, lazy, or late, we probably would not also claim they are unethical. However, standards such as honesty, truthfulness, fairness, and humaneness usually are used in making ethical judgments of rightness and wrongness in human behaviour.

Clearly our values influence what we will determine as ethical; "however, values are our measures of importance, where as ethics represent our judgments about right and wrong" (Shockley-Zalabak 1999, p. 438). This close relationship between importance and right and wrong is a powerful influence on our behaviour and how we evaluate the behaviour of others.

Now let's move to another level. How does one go about choosing what ethics are right? Last eZine Gisella looked at several theoretical approaches each of which gave a different way of tackling the answer to this question. In this eZine I describe the approach I believe most relevant to the new Millennium.

The Principle Centric Approach to Behavioural Choices

'Principle' is defined in Nuttall's Concise Standard Dictionary of the English Language as, "n. the source or origin of anything;...a general truth or law comprehending many subordinate ones;...tenet or doctrine; a settled law or rule of action;... v.t. to impress with any tenet; to establish firmly in the mind".

In this Millennium, perhaps more than ever before, I firmly believe that we need to reformulate a set of principles to guide us. There are two main benefits of taking a principle centric approach to guide all human action: (1) knowing a set of principles concerning 'the nature of things' enables us to make informed choices and judgments as we would know, with a high degree of certainty, the likely outcomes of our actions, (2) knowing even a few principles helps us avoid information overload. On the latter point, Birch (1999, p. 44) says:

One way in which drowning in information is overcome is by the discovery of principles and theories that tie up a lot of information previously untied. Prior to Charles Darwin biology was a mass of unrelated facts about nature. Darwin tied them together in a mere three principles of evolution: random genetic variation, struggle for existence and natural selection. So we do not need to teach every detail that was taught to nineteenth century students. A mere sample is necessary to illustrate the universal principles.

But what if we've got Darwin wrong? What if the principles instead were: survival of those who cooperate for the greater good, selection guided by a moral sense, etc. We would have a completely different society from that which we have today. Understanding and internalising the principles that comprise 'the nature of things' is perhaps the single most powerful determining factor in the shaping of the society in which we live. It is vital that we maintain a continual dialogue around principles so those we internalise and institutionalise are up-to-date and are our current best shot at the truth.

Some readers may be surprised to discover that Darwin believed in the evolution of a moral sense which provided both the core drive and structure for mind (Loye 2001, pp. 127-128):

Go the next step then, and we see that beyond ourselves he is writing of the moral impact of the evolving mind of humanity as a whole upon the shaping of ourselves, and upon all else that constitutes the human world.
Alas, that this should be so difficult for us to see this! But having for so long lost the language or the social encouragement to know ourselves and the meaning of life this way, it is asking for mind to step out into the unknown. But we must try for the future hangs on the effort.

Defining the Good and the Bad

The following extract from the work of David Loye (2001, pp. 128-130) is used to illustrate the use of a principle centric approach to the formulation of a morality to guide us into the 21st Century:

"An increasingly critical problem that Darwin can help us with is defining what good is not. It is clear, for example, that it is not the use of "morality" by rightist and authoritarian religious and political interests as a club with which to try to beat - and even in the extreme kill - all who might in any way disagree with them.

"Large buildings, even hundreds of people, are being blown up; people trying to check a potentially disastrous population explosion globally and save rape victims are being machine gunned; being poor is being relabelled evil; our right to bear assault rifles is being defended as a holy cause; whole villages are being slaughtered down to the last woman and child; and, via the booming persuasion of the media in all its forms, political character assignation and actual assignation is becoming an advanced art - all in the name of Jesus, Allah, or some other supposedly unquestioned source of "moral" law.

"This is moralism, not morality. And how may the difference be defined? If we examine closely what the Darwin in his own time and we in ours find appalling, we see that moralism can be defined as a false, fake, or hypocritical self-promotional 'morality.' generally designed to put down, intimidate, or terrorise rather than be helpful to others. But what then is morality?

"...Darwin's central concept of the moral sense is what today we would call moral sensitivity. As he makes evident in the warm wonder and all the ins and outs of his tales of goodness at work in the so-called animal world, but also more abstractly at our level, this is the ability to emphasise, to feel sympathy for, to care for, to resonate to, to want to nurture, or heal, or help - in short, to be morally sensitive to others. But what his exploration makes clear is that he is writing about considerably more than moral sensitivity.

"If we are morally sensitive to another we may resonate to their needs or plight with mind and heart - or cognition and affection. This, however, doesn't necessarily mean we are going to get up out of our easy chair with book or watching television to do anything to help them. This depends on courage and all the other components of what we call the will, or in psychological terms, conation.

"Throughout Darwin's explanation of how the moral sense developed and operates both in animals and humans, we can see that what holds everything together - advancing the individuals over its lifetime and the species over aeons - is the more active involvement in the fate of one another. It is the drive of moral agency.

"An agent acts on behalf of another. Moral agency is then the force of action on behalf of moral sensitivity and of another. A moral agent is then the person who acts in such a way.

"This is why Darwin's is actually a theory of moral agency rather than of the moral sense, which carries only the more passive meaning that the old philosophical term conveys.

"And what is moral intelligence? Out of the grand sweep of the second and third levels for his theory of the moral agent, the evolutionary picture Darwin provides is of the drive of moral sensitivity. Through inspiration and education, this drive is given the edge of of moral agency. Then comes what builds true wisdom for our species. Out of the thrust of moral agency comes learning experience that builds within us the core to higher mind of moral intelligence.

"And what of morality? It is the codes, the programming, the human software of whatever evolutionarily prevails at any point or place in time. It is the huge inbuilt user's manual that provides the guidelines for human-to-human and human-to-prehuman behaviour.

"It is everything that, based on the experience of the past, we have collectively agreed to be ruled by. It is the norms, the rules, the customs, the laws, the commandments whereby out of the power of caring, the power of reflection, the power of language, and the power of habit, we establish social expectancies for moral sensitivity, moral intelligence, and moral agency.

"Ethics is then all the sub-booklets in mind, the sub-routines or more finely-tuned differentiations, of how these codes are to be applied in specific situations.

"The 'moral sense' for Darwin and more broadly considered is all this. But still it is more. Yearning for comfort and reassurance, sensing a transcendent reality and source of meaning, for the sake of a word that might bring this concept to earth, for thousands of years most of us have called this 'more' God, or earlier and again increasingly in our time Goddess.

"For many of us - including at least four of the greatest Asian spiritual visionaries, Gautama, Lao Tsu, Confucius, and Mencius, as well as Darwin historically - this has posed difficulties. However, this may be, more important than what now or in the future this Greater Force may be called, it is something that is more felt than named, and seems to me undeniable - and here, too, groping in this direction can be detected in Darwin.

"Out of something that is timeless and larger than ourselves, embracing the future as well as the present and the past, there works within us something else that additional to our experience of the past also seems to speak to us in the shaping of all moral codes. It is simply there. Out of the evolution of the cosmic mystery that is both within ourselves and that surrounds us, unknowable by that part of our self we think is our mind, yet at times most surely felt within all our being, there seems to be this voice that quietly but persistently urges everything emergent on this earth, including ourselves, to be the best that is in us.

"The old theory encourages us to just sit back and enjoy the medium. For supposedly the message is settled. Having been scientifically worked out and certified by people much smarter than we are, who are we to question what we have been and will again and again be told? Oh, sure the message may not be what we want to hear, but the old theory affirms that this is the grim reality we must each - as best we can - adapt to.

"The new theory tells us that the message is open-ended and eternal, stretching out of the dim past into the mists of the future for our species. It tells us we have a voice in the shaping of the message - but that this message needs a great deal more nurturance, and understanding, and the assignment of much more of the power of the media to its spreading. Above all, it tells us we are not just what we more or less dutifully adapt to. Much more importantly, we are what we refuse to adapt to."

Concluding Comments

Whether we are prepared to accept it or not, science has had a profound impact on our world-view and our understanding of 'the nature of things'. Many of the principles from science we unconsciously use to inform our morality and structure our society today are in desperate need of revision. Our blind acceptance of the old interpretation of Darwin, with its emphasis on competition and survival of the fittest is leading us into troubled waters. Likewise the materialistic model of Newton is still powerfully influencing us today - with its emphasis on forces and objects.

If our morality and the way we structure society today were to be informed by the principles of today's science, what a different world we would live in. That society would be based on: cooperative relationships rather than competition; a concept of evolution which includes moral agency rather than blind adaptation to the environment through random selection; emphasis on the subjective ahead of the objective; fields and energy would be structured to enable flow in desired directions rather than a focus on objects to be manipulated through the application of force. What a wonderful world it would be.

References

Birch, C. 1999, Biology and the Riddle of Life, University of New South Wales press, Sydney.

Loye, D. 2001, 'Rethinking Darwin: A Vision for the 21st Century', Journal of Futures Studies, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 121-136.

Shockley-Zalabak, P. 1999, Fundamentals of Organisational Communication: Knowledge, Sensitivity, Skills, Values, Longman: New York.

eZine #10 - Theories of Values & Ethics by Gisella Danesi

2001-09-11T06:45:00.000+10:00

In reviewing the various theories of values and ethics, it became clear that the world-view and beliefs one holds, have a direct bearing on the theory to which one subscribes. In turn, the theory to which one aligns oneself has a significant impact on the course of action one is likely to take when facing an ethical issue or dilemma. For example, Keating (1987, p. 299-300) takes the view that:

Only a person is capable of love, but any of the lower forms of animal life can experience pleasure as merely a sense reaction. A person is much more than a body, and any form of sexual activity which is impersonal, which uses the body alone for pleasure, violates the integrity of the person and thereby reduces him to the level of an irrational an irresponsible animal…Sexual immorality, more than any other causative factor, historically speaking, is the root cause of the demise of all great nations and all great peoples…[That is why obscenity] laws have existed historically in recognition of the need to protect the public morality…

If one were to hold the same worldview and beliefs as Keating, then one would no doubt also be supportive of the principle of legal moralism {an approach whereby one advocates that laws should be enacted to "control" the moral behaviour of people in society – a hybrid of deontological theory (Freeman 2000, p. 73) and natural law ethics (Freeman 2000, pp. 76-87)}.

Brief Review of Theoretical Orientations to Ethics

Freeman (2000, pp. 29-144) outlines several different approaches to ethics, each informed by a different theoretical model, which in turn, is given credence by the existence of a sufficient number of supporters who hold similar worldviews/beliefs. In this section a brief review is made of different theoretical orientations to ethics with a view to developing an ethics framework (methodology) for addressing the case study.

Ethical Relativism (Freeman 2000, pp. 38-48). Moral relativism takes the stand that there are no absolute standards of morality – different standards exist for different cultures and societies. However, within a particular society, one should live according to its moral codes whilst respecting and tolerating the moral codes of other societies. An extreme view of ethical moralism even suggests that moral standards are a matter of personal preference and, ‘one should respect and tolerate the individual moral standards of all people (Freeman 2000, p. 27). It is difficult to imagine how an orderly society could exist if everyone held this extreme view. However, ethical relativism does have a potential positive side as well as possible negative consequences:

On the positive side, relativism encourages mutual respect and acceptance of differences, and may reduce tensions. respect should also not be confused with agreement. If one truly believes that moral opinions of others are as valid as one’s own, then one should have better tolerance for behaviours one disapproves. On the negative side, however, relativism can encourage avoidance and cowardice. "Well, let’s agree to disagree and avoid the issue – after all, it’s all relative." (Freeman 2000, p.48)

Consequentialism (Freeman 2000, pp. 49-65). As the name implies, the focus is on the results of actions rather than the intention. ‘The right thing to do…is whatever will maximize the good’ (Freeman 2000, p. 63). The positive side of consequentialism is that one knows what is right or wrong. The negative side is that there is little guidance for how to achieve the right or wrong outcome in specific cases. (Freeman 2000, p. 63)

Deontology (Freeman 2000, pp. 66-75). ‘The word deontological comes from the Greek root deon, meaning duty. In deontological theory, an action is justified by showing that it is right, not by showing that the consequences of the act are good.’ (Freeman 2000, p. 73) This approach focuses on the intention of the action, or the duty to act in a certain way, rather than on the consequences of the action. Unlike, relativism, this orientation comes from the belief that there is a universal set of principles that ought to be obeyed by all. These principles can be determined through rational thought. (Freeman 2000, p. 73)

Natural Law (Freeman 2000, pp. 76-87). The natural order of things has been determined for us by God. We can know the principles of this natural order through recognising our natural inclinations (i.e. by following our conscience). We can make moral judgments by means of the ‘interpretations and choice [which we can make] through utilization of our knowledge of intuitive natural law that God provides’ (Freeman 2000, p. 85). Like the deontological approach to ethics, the focus here is more on the intention of the act rather than on the outcome (Freeman 2000, p. 87):

…what is good or bad about an action is not merely the outcome, but what one intends as the consequence of the action. Being no slave to reason, whether an act is voluntary or involuntary is a critical factor in determining culpability, as are desire, intent and knowledge.

Virtue (Freeman 2000, pp. 88-97). The virtuous approach to ethics seeks to identify the ‘right action’ through a person asking, "What action will make me a better person both now and in the future?" (Freeman 2000, p. 89). Virtue ethics provides a useful bridge between principles and values (Freeman 2000, p. 98):

There are certain principles that provide good reasons for value judgements. Likewise, certain virtues can provide guidance in the application of principles to specific situations. Prudence also plays an important role in virtue ethics. The prudent individual knows the means or principles that guide one to certain good ends; this individual also knows how much particular ends are to be valued.

Whereas, ethics based on natural law has traditionally sourced the natural law (principles) from God, modern virtue ethics sources its principles in scientific study of human and social behaviour. In particular, evolutionary biology and neuro-science, are providing a fruitful source of principles (Ridley 1996; Freeman 1999):

…Utopia is impossible, because society is an uneasy compromise between individuals with conflicting ambitions, rather than something designed directly by natural selection itself.
None the less, the new ‘gene-tilitarian’ understanding of human instincts that [my book, The Origins of Virtue,] has explored leads to a few simple precepts for avoiding mistakes. Human beings have some instincts that foster the greater good and others that foster self-interest and anti-social behaviour. We must design a society that encourages the former and discourages the latter. (Ridley, 1996, p. 260)

Human Developmental Theories (Freeman 2000, pp. 100-113). Theories of human moral/ethical development hold that people develop an ever more complex understanding of the world around them, and the people in it, through a process of self-discovery. A key part of this developmental process is the resolving of conflicts within oneself and the resolving of conflicts with others (Freeman 2000, p. 100). Various models of ethical and moral development exist:

…all of which involve cognitive development and social experiences. Each model views development as a tiered or staged progression, with each stage possessing its own unique logical approach to problem solving. Each stage represents an increasingly adequate conception of fairness and justice. Interaction between the society and the individual leads to the establishment of values, beliefs, and attitudes that influence choice and behaviour. (Freeman 2000, p. 111)

Developmental models are more useful in understanding why people do what they do, rather than in guiding ethical decision making. They are, however, useful in the information gathering process in terms of defining the context in which the issue or dilemma is seated. They also give guidance when questions arise as to how much responsibility for ethical behaviour should be borne by the institution and how much by the individual (Freeman 2000, p. 113).

Feminist Ethics (Freeman 2000, pp. 114-126). In A Different Voice, Carol Gilligan (cited Freeman 2000, p. 124) exposed the fact that men and women think very differently about ethics and the related process of moral decision making: ‘Men think in terms of justice, women in terms of care’ (Freeman 2000, p. 124). The focus on caring as a moral imperative is the essence of feminist ethics. The world does not depend on us obeying its rules; however, the people we encounter do depend on us meeting with them from a caring space (Freeman 2000, p. 125).

Casuistry (Freeman 2000, pp. 127-141). This approach recognises that ethical dilemmas are seldom simple and often present conflicts involving moral obligations and duties:

The casuistic approach is a case-driven approach that seeks out the principles unique to each case, given the individual circumstances. The analysis of moral issues is guided by reasoning based on paradigms and analogies…Ethical principles originate within the concrete details of the case itself and are ferreted out throughout the method of paradigm case comparisons and analogy, which is the casuistic method. (Freeman 2000, p. 138)

The casuistic method involves five steps (Freeman 2000, p. 140):

Identification of the principles that apply to the ethical dilemma or issue.
Identification of a course of action.
Identification of other similar ethical dilemmas or issues that contain similar principles.
A comparison is made with the other similar cases.
Similar cases are sought in which the guiding principles justify the option in question.

This approach is similar to the legal system of most Western societies whereby the parties involved know what outcome they desire and what is likely to be achievable. The legal experts then seek to justify the chosen approach based on precedents set from similar previous cases.

Metaphysical Ethics. Metaphysics is defined as the, ‘Theoretical philosophy of being and knowing; philosophy of mind’ (Concise Oxford Dictionary, New Edition). Concerned with a decline in morals, and believing this to be due to people deserting religions in droves, some are advocating, that to counter the decline of society, ‘We need a theology which can continue without God’ (Murdoch1992, p. 511). To address this concern, they are turning to metaphysics. In fact Sprigge (1990, p. 247) sees it as almost untenable that people should not consider metaphysics when addressing ethical issues:

…there is something very odd in the dissociation of ethics from metaphysics. The difficulty in answering such questions as ‘How is it best that we, or how ought we, to act in the world?’, lies as much in deciding what we really are, what action really is, and what the world really is as in deciding what ought and best are. Even those last problems have a metaphysical dimension, but the first simply are metaphysical problems.

Conclusion

Clearly the approach one takes to values and ethics is steered by our beliefs and world-view. However, in today's society, very little attention is given to exploring the underlying reasons for the decisions made by people in power that affect our everyday lifestyle. They make these decisions based on their own (usually unquestioned) values and beliefs. The result is that competition is encouraged in lieu of cooperation. Economic efficiency is encouraged in lieu of increased employment, and so on.

We will only have the capacity to build a society which provides us all with a meaningful life-style when we are prepared to put a significant effort into defining and living the values that are central to the creation of such a society. The defining of these values must start with an exploration of the source of our values, i.e. our beliefs and our world-view.

References

Blanchard, K. & Peale, N. 1988, The Power of Ethical Management (You Don’t Have to Cheat to Win), Heinemann Kingswood, London.
Freeman, S. 2000, Ethics: An introduction to philosophy & practice, Wadsworth – Thompson Learning, Australia.
Guidelines for Facilitating Solutions to Ethical Dilemmas in Professional Practice, http://www.engr.washington.edu/~uw-epp/Pepl/Ethics/ethics5.html, accessed 6 July, 2001.
Longstaff, S. 1994, ‘Why Codes Fail: And some thoughts on how to make them work’ in Ethics in the Public Sector, ed. N. Preston, Federation Press, Sydney.
Murdoch, I. 1992, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Ghatto & Windus, London.
Nolan, J. 2001, ‘Teachers banned for misconduct’, in The Courier Mail, June 14, p. 9.
Ridley, M. 1996, The Origins of Virtue, Viking, London.
Sprigge, T. 1990, The Rational Foundations of Ethics, Routledge, London.
Tarvydas, V. 1998, ‘Ethical Decision-Making Processes’ in Ethical and Professional Issues in Counselling, eds. R. Cottone & V. Tarvydas, Prentice-Hall, New York, pp. 144-155.
Woodside, M. & McClam, T. 1998, An Introduction to Human Services, 3^rd edn, Brooks/Cole Publishing Company, Melbourne.
ValNet 2001, Values Survey of the Australian Workforce 1988-2000, http://www.minessence.net/valnet/, accessed 1 June, 2001.

eZine #9 - Values Education and Making Life Worth Living

2001-08-28T06:42:00.000+10:00

Values Education and Making Life Worth Living

by Ole Varming

[Editor's note: Unfortunately, we've received quite a few eMails recently telling us of people close to them who have committed suicide and wondering how the values material can be used to help stem this epidemic (I'm in the same situation myself, having had a 17 year old cousin commit suicide not so long ago). As a response I thought the following article may be of interest and assistance to you all.]

Camus (1942) begins his novel Le Mythe de Sisyphe with the following lines: "There is only one philosophical problem: Suicide. To decide if life is worth living or not is to answer the basic questions of philosophy". This quotation easily comes to mind when one considers the background for the many suicides, attempts to suicide and thoughts of suicide which have occurred in many Western countries during the last few decades. This tendency is strange and surprising because we have believed that the Welfare State would give everybody a better life. Of course we should be proud of what has been built up during this period: more and more people have been able to satisfy more and more needs. Have material values been given a high priority at the expense of spiritual values? Is this the reason why the suicide frequency has gone up? Has society - despite material wealth - grown more inhuman to live in? Why do not the majority of people in Danish and other societies consider suicide as a temptation or possibility? Or in other words: Which values give the majority of people in Denmark the spirit to live? Which values give an elementary experience of what gives meaning to their life and what role does values education have in this?

Background

In 1993 a short article was published in about twenty Danish newspapers (Varming 1995). The article told about the rising number of suicides, suicide attempts and suicide thoughts, and ended with the question: What makes life worth living for you? Readers were asked to write short essays answering this question. The idea was to throw light on which reflections and experiences based on values and philosophy protect a large number of people from suicide thoughts. Or, in order to connect to the quotation from Camus: How are the basic questions in philosophy answered in the modern life? An analysis of the reader's essays is reported later in this paper.

The research literature has shed little light on this topic - probably because there was no reason to pose this question. The meaning of life was more or less instilled into children during their upbringing. Everybody who grew up in the "old" society became part of, by direct or indirect influence, the same values, which all could be derived from the same concepts: God, King and Country. A solid common basic set of values was the result of open and hidden influences in home and school.

Today, life is more or less handed over to each of us to create our own meaning: we do not have a common basis of values. In other words, it is handed over to each of us to find out what is important in our life and what the good life is, because there are many different ways to understand and explain life. Modern humans' lives become personal projects, where each person through constant choices creates his or her life. This is true for both children and grown-ups. We must acknowledge that the common basis of values has crumbled away and that everybody experiences ethical confusion. This confusion is partly due to the Church no longer being an authority in questions of ethics and values* and to different sciences taking over the role of the authority. There is no longer only one authority for meaning, but many authorities, each of which gives good explanations about how life is organised and could be understood. In modem life we have to live with this secularizing and pluralism, and we have to understand that in the future we have to survive with continuing values confusion. Neither secularization nor pluralism need in itself to be problems, but they can develop to relativism where everything seems to be unimportant.

This modem situation is especially difficult for young people who have problems in finding an identity. In earlier generations identity was developed in a local environment making common cause with family and local society. Today young people have to create their own identity. This demands (1) personal and social competence (2) self confidence (3) breath of outlook, (4) ability to look at life as a whole (5) skills of communicating demands/wishes in a socially acceptable way, and (6) full self control so as not to offend the group. As most adults know, it is not easy to attain these criteria of maturity. However, it is the development of these criteria that are needed to cope with secularization nor pluralism, and to escape relativism.

A Study of Spirits

A few days after the publication of the newspaper article, the first essays arrived. After about two weeks 240 essays had been received. I will now share some main results of an analysis of the responses. Of the 240 answers 88% were written by women and 12% by men. The main age range of respondents was 50-80 years, about 20% between 20 and 50 years, a few above the age of 80, and a substantial number of 12-15 year-olds. Responses from middle-aged people were lacking and so the data are not representative. However, it was important that so many elderly people had responded, because it was regarded as an advantage to have many people answering the question on the basis of many years of experience.

What were the main themes in the essay? A large majority concentrated on solidarity - the importance of others in our lives. The answers mentioned the importance of partners, children, friends, parents and family, where code words were "trust", "helpfulness", “sympathy" and "contact". Most answers expressed solidarity in one form or another, and indicated that meaning to life is given by:

Breaking the tendency to regard yourself as the centre of everything and go beyond selfishness: for instance, to take care of other people, animals and nature;
Feeling of being close to other people, especially the family and close friends - that is, to love and be loved;
Together with other people building up a community of values: for instance in associations and clubs; and
As an ethical ideal, cultivating those parts of the human personality, which makes it natural to take care of other people and to show unselfishness. For example, taking care of ill members of the family such as sick children, and senile parents.

These types of answers characterised by solidarity could also be labeled under the concept of transcendency formulated by Frankl (1970). His understanding of being human means to go beyond yourself in searching after life's meaning and to establish a meeting with another human being, and that human beings are able to take part in creative activities which do not have ourselves as a centre, but have a broader meaning as a purpose.

The concept of self transcendency could also be used as a headline over the large number of answers coming in as a second choice: nature. Many essay writers gave very beautiful descriptions of what nature means to them. In third place came a Christian attitude to life and a fourth priority was given to good health including healthy eating habits. After these five priorities came good leisure activities, engagement in life, curiosity, humour and capacity to make decisions about your own life.

It is amazing that only three people mentioned work as important. This is interesting, especially that since childhood everybody is told of the importance of being able to manage a job, to make a career, to become wealthy and take care of a family. Three people who mentioned work did not attach importance to work itself, but to the possibility it gives them to meet other people. Seemingly, work does not count, when people consider what makes life worth living. Although it was expected that schooling would be important to living a good life, school is not mentioned at all.

The following example is cited to show the general tendency in the 240 essays. The essay is written by a twenty-one year-old woman and as with the other essays it is written in order to answer the question: What makes life worth living? "That I feel at home in two places - with my parents and childhood - and youth friends in my native town and also with my boyfriend and new friends in Copenhagen. I regard this as two bases. That I have somebody who takes care of me and that thereby I myself have somebody to take care of. That I am loved and valued by those I love. That I feel that life is a school, where I can influence my learning. That I try to be open and positive to all impressions and experiences I get every day and that I think of what I can learn from all that. That I tell myself that every second is a gift, which has to be enjoyed in the best possible way. That sometimes I succeed in enjoying the present moment instead of looking forward and wondering how something should possibly be better. That sometimes I think of what I am happy at and feel lucky with my life."

Consequently, when many people are asked what makes their life worth living they think of other people, especially family and friends. In Denmark at least most schools - intentionally or non-intentionally - prepare students for the future with values belonging to the labour market - not with values belonging to grown-up people: family life, leisure-time activities and the political life.

Conclusions

We ought to ask ourselves, and one another, about how relevant it is to stress training for work in a situation where people attach minimum importance to work and maximum importance to getting on well with people. The topic is seen in perspective when illuminated by results from the research of Adler-Karlsson (1983). He found that the total working hours is much shorter than most of us can imagine. Work plays a much lesser part in our life than we generally imagine. He found that work only accounts for 12.5% of people's total waking state. Consequently, he concludes, "work is a very small part of life. If you prepare yourself for filling life, the only life you've got, with a worthwhile content you have to direct your attention much more towards your leisure time than towards your working life."

Perhaps we have to re-evaluate the extent of training for work that goes on in schools. Even serious politicians doubt that it is possible to totally reduce unemployment. Some people will be without work. Perhaps we need to question the school's main task in a modern society. Perhaps we should consider the main purpose of education as helping students to find answers to the question: What do 1 want to do with my life?

In a Danish understanding of values education there are two central concepts: spirits and life ability. "Spirits" implies an elementary experience of life's meaningfulness and "life ability" implies a content of leisure ability, family ability and political ability, with a definite meaning wish and ability to take responsibility for your own life. Logstrup (1985) coined the phrase "life understanding" which is important in this connection. Life understanding gives priority to children's experiences of identity building and self-esteem. In this way children are assisted to create meaning by giving confidence and feelings of belonging to a comprehensive life and a social network. Without each other we are nothing. Therefore values education primarily is an ethical subject, if ethics is defined as follows: A vision about the good life together with and for other people.

Ole Varming is a consultant educational psychologist with the private firm Paedagogisk Udyikling & Fomyelse (PUF): GL TORV 11, DK 4880 NYSTED, Denmark.
* In the Danish literature it is common to distinguish between morals, ethics and values. Morals are standards/norms for identifying right and wrong. Ethics is the theory about what is right and wrong. Value indicates a firm conviction that a particular behaviour or kind of life is personally or socially preferred for other kinds of behaviour or kinds of life. For more detail on this see Rokeach (1973).

References

Adler-Karlsson, G. (1983) Skolan - parkeringsplatsf6r on6diga eller vdgen till det inre reviret? Bakjbrlaget flrisma, Arldy.

Camus, A. (1942) Le Mythe de Sisyphe. Paris.

Franki, V. E. (1970) Psykologi og eksistens. Gyldendal, Kobenhavn.

Logstrup, K. E. (1985) 'Skolens formal'. In: Lauridsen, L and Varming, 0 (Eds) Skolens formal - debat om skolens opgave. Danmarks Lxrerhojskole, Copenhagen.

Rokeach, M. (1973) The nature of human values. Free Press, New York.

Varming, 0. (1995) Selvvoerd og selvvoedsudvikling. Kroghs Foriag A/S, Vejle.

eZine #8 - Using the AVI to create a code of ethics

2001-07-01T06:39:00.000+10:00

Last eZine, we looked at the importance of creating a code of ethics in the right way and the importance to organisations of having a code. In this eZine, we look more specifically at just what a code of ethics looks like and re-visit the steps to put one in place.

Firstly, Longstaff (1994, pp. 241-242) makes a clear distinction between codes of ethics and codes of behaviour:

A code of ethics expresses fundamental principles that provide guidance in cases where no specific rule is in place or where matters are genuinely unclear. A well-drafted code of conduct will be consistent with the primary code of ethics, however, it will provide more specific guidance.

As an example, a code of ethics might include statements such as (Longstaff 1994, p. 241):

Our actions should be based on a recognition of the essential dignity of each and every person.
We should have concern for the well-being of the community and the environment.
We should provide a challenging and safe work-place in which people can flourish.

On the other hand, codes of conduct usually have discrete headings and specific instructions (Longstaff 1994, p. 242):

Gifts & Benefits - Employees must:
not demand or accept any unauthorised gifts, rewards or benefits because of the employee's status.
disclose to their manager any gift, reward or benefit offered or suggested to them in connection with their duties.
Conflicts of Interest - Employees must:
ensure that there is no actual or apparent conflict conflict between their personal interests and the performance of their duties.
identify, and fully disclose in writing to their manager, possible conflicts of personal or financial interests.

Even the language used in the two types of code is different. Codes of ethics are expressed in terms of "ought" or "should", whereas codes of behaviour use "must".

A properly drafted codes of ethics expresses the values and principles the organisation wishes to "display to the world" through the behaviour of its stakeholders. It is a core statement of its identity. It provides general guidance in cases where a code of conduct is silent, ambiguous or unclear. As we saw in eZine #7 , a code of ethics is a more significant document than a code of behaviour.

Below are the steps to put a code of ethics, as a "living document", in place in your organisation:

Undertake a Values Audit

Use the AVI to take an inventory of your organisation's values. A Group AVI Report is produced from the AVI questionnaires completed by a selected random sample of stakeholders. This report is used to guide the answering of the questions: What do people in your organisation...
think to be most its important values?
believe to be the ideal level of presence of each of these values?
believe to be the actual level of presence of each of these values?
This step identifies any "values gap" that exists in your organisation. It also provides a base-line against which progress, to close the gap, can me measured.

Involve Everyone

Everyone, directly or indirectly, should be involved in suggesting the means to close the gap. One way your organisation can go about identifying strategies to close the gap is to use a future search conference. Involving people in this way helps build the level of trust and loyalty necessary for any cultural development or change that may be identified as necessary. By choosing to encourage your people to participate in defining your organisation's ethos it sends a message to them that they are regarded as being more than a mere means for securing your organisation's ends - they are co-creators of the organisation.

Aim for a Short Development Cycle

All the good work of Steps 1 and 2 will be wasted unless reports and follow-up action take place in a timely manner. Such tardiness can lead to a serious erosion of morale. People become cynical and easily develop the perception that the entire exercise was nothing more than a "gesture" by management. From a practical point of view, the faster the turn-around, the greater the likelihood that positive reinforcement ensues.

Build in a Process of Review

Use the AVI, at regular intervals, on a selected random sample of your organisation's stakeholders to gauge if a values shift is occurring. If at any time, a significant values shift is found, then start again at Step 1.
As part of this regular review process, ask people their perception of how their organisation is living in accordance with its values.
Encourage people to look at their own values and reflect on how their life can be made more meaningful through living their personal values in such a way that they are "in tune" with the organisation's values - see eZine #6, it is through this process that people are able to maintain themselves at Position 4:

The four step process described above, should be viewed as an investment. In today's competitive global market place, organisations can no longer afford to sacrifice the additional effectiveness that flows from values-based processes for the sake of achieving false efficiencies. As Michelle Collins highlights (The Sunday Mail Jan 21, 2001, p. 92) in an article titled, Ethics of profit: honour before greed, values-based organisations consistently prove to be more successful than other organisations. Michelle cites Cochlear Limited, maker of the bionic ear, as a typical example of an ethical success story:

[Cochlear Limited] is your classic case of a growth company that has made good and used state-of-the-art technology to improve the lives of deaf people...Last year, Cochlear's shares went from a low of $8.50 to a high of $21.10.

Cochlear Limited, under the guidance of Heather Lesley-Swan, have, for some years, undergone an extensive values programme using the AVI as its foundation.

References

Colins, C. & Chippendale, P. 1995, New Wisdom II: Values-Based Development, Acorn Publications, Brisbane.

Longstaff, S. 1994, 'Why codes fail: And some thoughts on how to make them work' in Ethics for the Public Sector, ed. N. Preston, Federation Press, Sydney.

Scott, T. & Harker, P. 1999, Humanity at Work , Phil Harker & Associates, Queensland

eZine #7 - More on creating a workplace that is "in tune" with its people's values

2001-06-12T06:36:00.000+10:00

...although most people are attracted to fields of certainty, it is an unavoidable aspect of the human condition that we inhabit an ethical landscape that is inherently imprecise. A decision to adopt an effective approach to the development of codes [of ethics & behaviour] will require managers to recognise and accept that they are engaging in a task that requires them to "explore" rather than control the cultures they inhabit and share. So why surrender a capacity to control in favour of a far less predictable process?

The answer to this question may be as old as history itself. Eons have passed since legislators embarked upon the task of devising tools to curb the impulses of human beings. The scribes have used gallons of ink in drafting black-letter law. When alienated from its provisions, people experience the law as a yoke to be cast off as soon as it is safe to do so. That is why codes will fail unless situated in a culture where the individual is respected as the ultimate source of value.
[Longstaff 1994, p. 246]

Codes of Ethics and Codes of Conduct - Some Observations

It might seem commonsense to involve all affected parties when drafting codes of ethics and behaviour - everyone knows organisational change is only effective when key stakeholders are involved in the process. So why is the participative process so often neglected in favour of an elite few drafting the code for their organisation? Longstaff (1994, p. 240) believes the answer lies in a false belief in the efficiency and effectiveness of the unilateral approach:

...when it comes to addressing the "problem of ethics", most companies look for a cheap "off-the-shelf solution. What is more, those who seek such a solution do so in the face of compelling evidence that solutions of this type may be superficially efficient - but almost totally ineffective.

There is a fairly obvious reason why off-the-shelf codes or codes dictated by an elite don't work. The reason has to do with the level of trust needed in an organisation if the codes are to be effective. To put it bluntly, the level of trust in the organisation needs to be sufficient to ensure people are prepared to believe claims by management and others that rules are designed to prevent a serious mischief or to promote a worthwhile good. In a similar vein, the range and quality of relationships that underpin the organisation's culture need to be such that a sufficient degree of loyalty is felt to be owed to the enterprise and its defined ends.

There is another erroneous belief related to "quick fix" solutions that will lead to them being ineffective:

At first glance, the error might seem quite trivial. However, there is considerable significance to be found in the fact that so many organisations set out to develop a code of ethics and, instead, produce a code of conduct (or some sort of hybrid). The significance of this goes beyond the issue of mis-description. rather, the confusion is evidence of the phenomena... in which the broader issue of ethics is set aside in favour of the "hard science" of specifying types of behaviour that, in defined situations, are to be prescribed or post scribed. (Longstaff 1994, p. 241)

Specifying codes of behaviour in lieu of a code of ethics is a futile exercise for three reasons: (1) one cannot possibly cover/foretell all possible behaviours that may need to be defined, (2) it is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain agreement with all people within the organisation at this level of detail, (3) codes at this level of detail are virtually un-enforceable.

Despite (or some may say because of) its "fuzzy" form, a code of ethics is the better vehicle for ensuring long-term commitment to important values. This is because a code of ethics demands something more than mere compliance. Instead, it calls forth an exercise in understanding that is linked to a requirement that people exercise judgment and accept personal responsibility for the decisions they make.

A code of ethics should be a document that expresses an organisation's underlying values. It is therefore essential that the document rings true for those to whom it applies. And this means that codes of ethics need to be devised in consultation with the people most directly affected by its application. In other words, everyone who's going to have to live with the statement should get a chance to put in his or her two cents worth.

Codes of ethics are not "magic bullets" that solve an organisation's problems. And the fact that an organisation has a written code will not guarantee that its personnel are especially ethical. But good managers will realise that, if approached with the proper degree of care and sophistication, the very process of developing these codes can have a profoundly positive effect on the culture of an enterprise.

Steps to Create the Code

Map the Base-line - i.e. Undertake a Values Audit

Very few organisations take the trouble to assess the culture that they seek to reinforce or change. Anecdotal evidence or a kind of "group memory" may provide a prolific source of assumptions that are seldom or never tested. At the very least, this opens one to the risk that the ideals of an elite come to form the basis for developing an approach to the organisation's ethos. In the same vein, it is possible that a "mythical" culture can emerge from the minds of idealistic enthusiasts. It is possible to avoid such pitfalls by the relatively simple expedient of conducting a "values audit".
In its simplest form, a values audit will seek to establish three things:
What do people in the organisation...
think to be most important values? [We at the Minessence Group have developed a values inventory (AVI) to facilitate the asking and answering of this all important question.]
believe to be the ideal level of presence of each of these values?
believe to be the actual level of presence of each of these values?
This step identifies any "values gap" that exists in the organisation. It also provides a base-line against which progress to close the gap can me measured.

Involve Everyone

Everyone, directly or indirectly, should be involved in suggesting the means to close the gap. One way we suggest organisations can go about identifying strategies to close the gap is to use a future search conference. Involving everyone in this way helps build the level of trust and loyalty necessary for any cultural development or change that may be identified as necessary. By an organisation choosing to encourage all of its people to participate in defining its ethos it sends a message to personnel that they are regarded as being more than a mere means for securing the organisation's ends - they are co-creators of their own enterprise.

Aim for a Short Development Cycle

Involving everyone in the initial stages of identifying any values gap in the organisation and in identifying ways to close it is commendable. However, all the good work will be wasted unless timely reports and follow-up action take place in a timely manner. Such tardiness can lead to a serious erosion of morale. People become cynical and easily develop the perception that the entire exercise was nothing more than a "gesture" by management. From a practical point of view, the faster the turn-around, the greater the likelihood that positive reinforcement ensues.

Build in a Process of Review

Codes that come to be seen to be stale or "set in stone" will lose their effect. Building a process of regular review will keep the codes relevant. The AVI (mentioned earlier in this eZine) is a very useful tool to facilitate this review process. It can be used on a selected random sample of the organisation from time to time to gauge if any values shift is occurring. If at any time, a significant values shift is found, then it may well be time to start again at Step 1 with a new values audit.
It is also important, as part of this regular review process, to ask people their perception of how their organisation is living in accordance with its codes.
Another key ongoing process should be to encourage people to look at their own values and reflect on how their life can be made more meaningful through living their personal values in such a way that they are "in tune" with the organisation's values. [See the last eZine - it is through this process that people are able to maintain themselves at position 4.]

Afterword

Three further points are worth making in regard to the above process:

There is no need for managers to surrender responsibility

Many managers object to any orientation where they feel that they are abrogating the management of their organisation to their employees and therefore would "shy away" from such an approach outlined above. In this regard Longstaff (1994, p. 245) suggests:
[It is not meant to suggest that in the process outlined above] that managers ought to surrender their prerogative to manage. An important part of the process will be to define and articulate the various spheres of responsibility. It is perfectly reasonable to specify that while they are genuinely interested in consulting their colleagues they will, in the end, have to accept responsibility for making the final decisions.
Having said this, there may be separate reasons for managers to extend the decision-making process so that it involves their colleagues. Such a decision might be part of a process of evolution away from the technical paradigm of management towards the less precise art of leadership.

There is a need for authenticity rather than homogeneity

Many people believe that there is just one type of culture that can be described legitimately as possessing sound ethical characteristics. The prevalence of this false belief is no doubt what lies behind the motivation to go for "quick-fix" generic code products that can be bought "off the shelf". There is also perhaps some comfort in adopting positions that are similar to the "norm".
Over the years we have found huge diversity in the values of people in different organisations. To try to force the values of someone else on another is a form of oppression/aggression. Instead, the key feature to be sought (and the main one that builds trust, loyalty and commitment and leads to high levels of motivation, creativity and productivity), is an authentic expression of what people hold as important and right.
However, one caveat, it is the Minessence Team's belief that at the meta-level, there are some universal principles that can and should be part of all organisational design processes. One such principle is described by Ridley (1996, p. 260):
...Utopia is impossible, because society is an uneasy comprise between individuals with conflicting ambitions, rather than something designed directly by natural selection itself.
None the less, the new 'gene-tilitarian' understanding of human instincts that [The Origins of Virtue] has explored leads to a few simple precepts for avoiding mistakes. Human beings have some instincts that foster the greater good and others that foster self-interest and anti social behaviour. We must design a society that encourages the former and discourages the latter. [emphasis added]

The process should be viewed as an investment

In today's competitive global market place, organisations can no longer afford to sacrifice the additional effectiveness that flows from this process for the sake of achieving false efficiencies.

References

Colins, C. & Chippendale, P. 1995, New Wisdom II: Values-Based Development, Acorn Publications, Brisbane.

Longstaff, S. 1994, 'Why codes fail: And some thoughts on how to make them work' in Ethics for the Public Sector, ed. N. Preston, Federation Press, Sydney.

Ridley, M. 1996, The Origins of Virtue, Viking, London.

Scott, T. & Harker, P. 1999, Humanity at Work, Phil Harker & Associates, Queensland

eZine #6 - Does going to work make your life meaningful?

2001-05-16T06:26:00.000+10:00

Does work make your life meaningful?

"Say not that I have found the the truth, rather say that I have found a truth that makes life meaningful for us."

Values motivate, ethics constrain. Because we live in a society, we are not free to live our values any way we want. Obviously society must have some say in how we live our values. It is through dialogue with each other, around our values, that we can, hopefully, come to some agreement as to how we can or should live our values.

Before we begin this dialogue, we must firstly know what values are important to us and to those with whom we regularly come in contact. In an organisational context, the following model is a useful framework to guide this journey of values discovery (click on thumbnail to view, use browser's back button to return to the eZine - PDF versions are provided so you can print out the diagrams):

[PDF Version]

Let's walk through this model step by step. For a start, each of us has values that lie behind the choices we make, the goals we set for ourselves, and the life-style to which we aspire (click thumbnail to enlarge):

[PDF Version]

In the above diagram, people in the organisation, have their own goals, desired life-style, etc. They all have a reasonable idea as to how far along the track to attaining those aspirations they are. For the purposes of the diagram, a person at position 3-4 is said to have attained more of what they aspire to than a person at position 1-2.

Now let's look at the organisation:

[PDF Version]

Each organisation has its own values (quite often different from the values shared by many people in the organisation). As depicted in the above diagram, the organisation's values lie behind the organisation's decisions about its desired culture, targets, vision, etc. We can depict the extent to which an organisation is performing in meeting its targets, goals, etc. with arrows on the diagram: As the organisation lifts its performance from position 1-3 to position 2-4 it has moved closer to achieving its targets, etc. (i.e. it's performance level has increased).

When we overlay the last two diagrams, we get the model we started with:

Now the numbers 1, 2, 3 & 4 take on a new significance...

POSITION ONE:

This person is performing at an unsatisfactory low level in the eyes of their organisation and they have attained little in terms of their own aspirations. They are likely to be sacked or leave of their own accord.

POSITION TWO:

This person is performing well in the eyes of the organisation but is personally gaining little from the experience. They will perform well only in the short term, and are likely to be highly stressed and dissatisfied, and will probably leave or worse still, become unwell.

POSITION THREE:

A person in this position is attaining all they want in life through the organisation. The organisation on the other hand does not consider they are contributing enough. This person may require feedback, coaching developing, training or even repositioning. However, there is another possibility. The person may be on the right track, yet the organisation doesn't see it! In other words, the person may be "ahead of their time" and worth listening to.

POSITION FOUR:

This in the ideal situation. When there is a match between an individual’s key values and those of the organisation, this individual is perceived to be be contributing and is also personally attaining their desires, wants and preferences. This is the condition in which optimum fulfilment is achievable, and in most cases results in high productivity and profitability.

What position are you? 1, 2, 3 or 4?

We've set up a min-poll so you can compare yourself with others (by the way, it's a totally anonymous survey).

How do you get to Position 4? How do you create an organisation where as most people are at Position 4?

We'll answer these questions in the next Minessence eZine. If you don't want to wait, download the AVI LifeStyle Planner. It is designed to facilitate the process.

eZine #5 - Energy Field Maps - A new way to explore values

2001-04-21T06:23:00.000+10:00

"Although we know a great deal about the way fields affect the world as we perceive it, the truth is no one really knows what a field is. The closest we ca come to describing what they are is to say that they are spatial structures in the fabric of space itself." (Talbot cited Wheatley 1994, p. 46)

The R&D Division of the Minessence Group has developed an Energy Field Map as a new way to explore a person, organisation or culture's values. To provide a context to the development of this Map a few relevant notes & quotes are listed below...

Newton’s world of cause and effect required great effort (described in the language of forces) to make things happen. However, since the emergence of the quantum world-view, we instead see that it is possible to make things happen through manipulating non-material structures, i.e. fields - the basic fabric of the universe.

One way of describing how fields work is to consider fish in an ocean. As the water moves in synchronism with the swell, the fish all appear to move together from side to side or up and down as though connected by some invisible connector Of course, in this case, we know that it is the water of the ocean. Fields in space behave the same way. We cannot see them and they (unlike the water of the ocean) have no material substance, however, they link all material objects in space. "Physical reality is not only material. Fields are considered real, but they are not material" (Wheatley 1994 p. 40).

In 'field language', the laws of motion are rules for flows in the 'cosmic ocean'. Field-based rules for transformation tell us what reactions occur among the components in the cosmic ocean and the convergence of fields brings energy into form.

The Newtonian Science Organization	The Quantum Science Organization
"An organisation is a collection of choices looking for problems; issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired; solutions looking for issues to which there might be an answer; and decision makers looking for work" (Cohen, March & Olsen cited Wheatley 1994, p. 54)	Organisational order is generated through fields. These fields are conceptual controls – it is the ideas of a business that are controlling, not some manager with authority One of the most powerful fields is the shared meaning or the unconscious common ground within an organization.

"In the field view of organizations, clarity about values or vision is important, but it’s only half the task. Creating the field through the dissemination of those ideas is essential. The field must reach all corners of the organisation, involve everyone, and be available everywhere...we need to imagine ourselves as broadcasters, tall radio beacons of information, pulsating out messages everywhere...we must fill all the spaces with the messages we care about. If we do that, fields develop – and with them, their wondrous capacity to bring energy into form. (Wheatley 1994, pp. 55-56)

References

Wheatley, M 1994, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about organization from an orderly universe, Berrett-Koehler, San Francisco.

Tosey, P. & Smith, P. 1999, ‘Assessing the learning organization: part 2 – exploring practical assessment processes’, The Learning Organization: An International Journal, Vol 6, No 3, pp.107-115

eZine #4 - Top Ten Values - Australian Workforce 2000

2001-03-27T06:20:00.000+10:00

The top ten values of the Australian Workforce in 2000 were:

Relaxation,
Self Competence/Confidence,
Being Self,
Synergy,
Life/Self Actualisation,
Decision/Initiation,
Generosity/Service,
Creativity/Ideation,
Family/Belonging, and
Independence.

Click here to obtain a PDF Version of the Values Map of The Australian Workforce - 2000

Note: If you take up our special offer (Top Right of this page), we will also send you definitions of all the 125 values from which people were asked to choose their personal priorities.

eZine #3 - Entropy & the Link to Happiness, Success & Creativity

2001-03-01T20:34:00.000+10:00

While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every goal --- health, beauty, money, or power --- is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy (Csikszentmihalyi 1998, p. 1).

In his book, "Flow: The Psychology of Happiness", Csikszentmihalyi reports his findings, based on years of methodological research, into what makes people happy. The essence of his research is summarized thus:

Contrary to what we usually believe...the best moments of our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times --- although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen.

The key words/statements in the above quote are "voluntary" and "something we make happen", but I'll come back to their importance later. Firstly, "Entropy" is mentioned in the title of this article, not an everyday term, so let's define it:

ENTROPY: A measure of disorder of a system, used in thermodynamics. Thus a solid has less entropy than a liquid because the constituent particles are in a more ordered state (The Macmillan Encyclopaedia).

The concept of entropy was originally developed as part of the field of thermodynamics. However, today the concept is used by mechanical engineers, biologists, neuro-scientists, social scientists, and the like. In fact anyone developing a model for understanding the behaviour of a dynamic system.

As already stated, the concept of entropy emerged from the study of thermodynamics, to be precise, it is a key concept of the Second Law of Thermodynamics - now, because of the realization of its universal application, it is frequently referred to as the Entropy Law. In 1980 Rifkin said somewhat prophetically:

...the Entropy Law will preside as the ruling paradigm over the next period of history. Albert Einstein said that it is the premier law of all science; Sir Arthur Eddington referred to it as the supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe. (Rifkin & Howard 1985, p. 16)

It is now becoming clear that an understanding of the flow of entropy in our brain is a key component in understanding human behaviour and why we feel the way we do when we do.

Csikszentmihalyi has found that the reducing the entropy in one's brain (i.e. creating more ordered thinking patterns) is a key component to creating the feeling of happiness.
Both Csikszentmihalyi and Lowen have found that there are defined meta-processes that apply universally to all humans as to how to go about reducing the entropy in our brain.
Lowen describes how the process of reducing entropy in the brain is an essential component of creativity. However, the specific process for an individual to follow depends on an understanding of their personal brain-preference profile. [click here for a case example of this creative process for one particular brain-preference profile]
Lowen has developed an entropy flow diagram which he describes as a key link between knowing a person's brain-preference profile and understanding its implications for their behaviour.
We have developed a process of using the AVI (A Values Inventory) to determine a person's brain-preference profile. From this profile were are then able to guide people through the entropy flow diagram to gain an understanding of the appropriate strategy for them to engender the feeling of happiness in their life more often and to unlock their creativity.

The Entropy Law as applied to an understanding of the link between the workings of the human brain and human behaviour goes much wider than just helping people tap into their creative juices and feel happy more often. It has profound implications for how we approach our relationships with others, organise our families and work, and our society and our politics.

References

Csikszentmihalyi, M. 1998, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness, Rider, London.

Freeman, W. 1999, How Brains Make Up Their Mind, Phoenix, London.

Lowen, W. & Miike, L. 1982, Dichotomies of the Mind: A systems Science Model of the Mind and Personality, John Wiley & Sons, New York.

Rifkin, J. & Howard, T. 1985, Entropy a New World View, Paladin, London.

eZine #2 - Assimilation

2001-01-28T20:27:00.000+10:00

Among some updates forwarded to me from Robert Fritz's website by Sharon McGann, was this snippet of information:

Robert Fritz's latest book, The Path of Least Resistance for Managers (Berrett-Koehler) is currently on Amazon.com¹s best seller list for Canadians. It¹s number 7 (Harry Potter is number 6).

Congratulations Robert!

I believe Fritz has made a major contribution to helping people discover new ways of operating in the post-mechanistic paradigm in which we now find ourselves. It is said, that to function effectively in a new paradigm one must totally embody the new paradigm: its principles, its language, its behaviours. It is not easy at first, but as more people fully embrace the new paradigm, the old world-view no-longer seems to embody commonsense.

A key concept Fritz talks about in one of his earlier books, The Path of Least Resistance: Learning to become the creative force in your own life, is assimilation. I've found his ideas around the concept of assimilation very useful, not only in my own life, but also in helping others transform the perceived obstacle course ahead of them into a path of least resistance to their vision.

>Assimilation is an important stage of growth and development because it is the period during which we incorporate intricate physical and mental skills in such a way that they become a natural part of ourselves. Without assimilation there is no real learning (only learning about things):

Assimilation is a step beyond mere learning, for in assimilation you incorporate the learning into yourself.

Yet assimilation is poorly understood.

Fritz says one reason the assimilation stage is so little understood is that during this stage, progress in growth and development remains invisible for a time. For long periods it might look as though nothing significant is happening or is being learned. For example, if you have ever learnt a musical instrument, you will recall that your music teacher (at least this is the way mine operated) had the annoying habit of giving you pieces to learn each week and then go on to more complex pieces before you ever mastered any of them. The interesting thing, is that after a few weeks, if you return to the simpler pieces that you had never mastered, you find that you can play them with ease and well - what has happened?

This highlights a key principle of assimilation:

One powerful way to assimilate your present step is to move on to your next step - even if you feel inadequately prepared for it.

People who do not understand this principle, and who are coming from a reactive rather than a creative orientation, are likely to give up any new venture as they perceive no progress is being made and decide, "this is obviously not for me" - whether it be a fitness programme, learning a musical instrument, a new language, our running a business under the new GST regime!

The above principle pertains to taking a new path, going where we have not gone before. The same dedication that should be applied in persisting with a new path, should not necessarily be translated into trying to keep going with an old path that's had it's time. A recurring pattern in the universe is the cycle of birth, life and death. There's no point trying to hold onto something that's "had it's day". This is only postponing the inevitable, wasting energy and making the final end more painful/stressful. This lack of awareness of cycles most frequently occurs in relationships with others. We try to hold onto a relationship that is no longer working. Humans are notorious for trying to engineer the natural cycle of birth, life and death out of our experience (through plastic surgery, HRT, and other technologies) yet it is only postponing the inevitable. Fritz cites Robert Frost's poem Reluctance to illustrate this point:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

One final important key principle of assimilation:

What you embody tends to be created.

Embodiment is distinct from behaviour. To embody love is not the same as behaving in a loving style. As Fritz explains:

Those who "fight for peace" do not embody peace, but rather embody fighting. Those who worry about their health do not embody health, but rather fear. Those who lust for power and affluence embody neither.

Embodiment is not simply adopting the right behaviours or finding a new response. What you embody speaks louder than your behaviour, to the same degree that your actions speak louder than words.

You assimilate what you embody. As you internalise what you embody, inner development occurs that is consistent with what you embody. All aspects of your consciousness realign themselves in accordance with what you embody.

Media Watch

The Australian Jan 23, 2001
(Spotted by Bronwyn Buck)
From Sir John Browne Chief executive of BP Amoco (he has built the business from a market value of 20 billion UK pounds to 129 billion UK pounds in 5 years). He is talking about being comfortable with being different.

The more you grow up the more you understand that nobody really conforms and everyone has something slightly different to offer.

When you think about it in a corporation context, it's the only effective way to run a corporation of this scale. Everybody is here on merit and they're all different. They have different inner value systems, they speak differently and present themselves differently. It reflects real life.

The Sunday Mail Jan 21, 2001, p. 92
In an article titled, Ethics of profit: honour before greed, says new breed, by Michelle Collins

A growing number of investors is looking to make a difference as well as a dollar. Shareholders are increasingly basing their decision on where to invest their hard-earned cash not just on a company's bottom line but on its stand on a range of non-financial issues, from its green credentials to how many women sit on the board. This trend is called ethical investment.

Recent estimates put between $150 million and $300 million - of more than $500 billion in funds under management - in ethical investment. However, this is just a drop in the ocean compared to the trend which is already established in the USA and Canada.

Sara Harman, stockbroker and senior financial planner with Hartley Poynton, says although the trend is still in its infancy in Australia, it will grow substantially in the next five years.

So what constitutes an ethical or socially responsible investment (SRI)? At its broadest definition, says Sara, socially responsible or ethical investment means investing in companies where you feel comfortable with their policies, and that means what constitutes a socially responsible investment will vary from person to person.

Sara Harman is one of a new, and growing, breed of financial planners who work out 'who's naughty and who's nice" based on their own set of values. Hartman cites Cochlear Limited, maker of the bionic ear, as an ethical success story:

Obviously, when Cochlear started, the risk was high and the company did not pay a dividend...

This is your classic case of a growth company that has made good and used state-of-the-art technology to improve the lives of deaf people and it was previously run by a woman [Catherine Livingstone - now appointed to the board of directors of Telstra].

Last year, Cochlear went from a low of $8.50 to a high of $21.10.

[Readers of the Minessence E-zine might interested to note that Cochlear Limited, under the guidance of Heather Lesley-Swan, have, for some years, been undergoing an extensive values programme using the AVI at its foundation]

eZine #1 - A Word or Two on Trust

2001-01-11T20:18:00.002+10:00

Trust is an essential component of the culture in any values-based organisation. So what is trust?

Trust is built through making commitments that are both objectively understood, reasonable in the light of experience, and grounded in personal values.

"In the office, we tend to forget that each commitment we make is a personal promise to a colleague. Commitments require self-awareness and personal responsibility. This means we focus on both sides of the commitment: First we don't coerce others into commitments they find unrealistic; and, second, we don't say 'yes' and mean 'maybe' or 'no'.

"Probably one of the most important - and most difficult - changes for many will be the ability and commitment to say 'no' when that is what they mean. In many companies today, 'yes' means all manner of things. If people can and do say 'no' in the the appropriate circumstances, when they do agree, this agreement initiates a dependable cycle. [Then deeply] committed teams can count on the intention of constituent members when making agreements." [Kelly & Allison 1999, p. 72]

"We urge everyone to take a look in the mirror: to evaluate personal attitudes toward, habits surrounding, and regard for commitments. As with changing any habit, the first step is to notice what you actually do." [Kelly & Allison 1999, p. 74]

In this context, performance and capability are key concepts through which trust can be understood.

'Performance' is the history of actual results achieved by an individual or group following a committed course of action. After the individual, or group, have committed to a course of action, what were the measured results? How did they actually perform?

'Capability' is a predictor of expected outcomes for a person or group - i.e. knowing one's capabilities, based on past performance in similar situations, one will naturally make an assessment of the likely outcomes. Only when people measure their performance can they understand their capability . Understanding our capability is a key ingredient in making improvements to it.

The bottom line is, that in an environment created by an organisational culture based on trust, synergy and collaborative energy are high.

[Reference: Kelly, S. & Allison, M. 1999, "The Complexity Advantage: How the science of complexity can help your business achieve peak performance", McGraw Hill, new York.]

World View	Philanthropic Values & Motive
Alien/Threatened	Survival & Security
Family/Social	Family tradition, care/nurture, status/image
Organizational/Transactional	Financial metrics & accountability, productivity, efficiency
Self-Actualization/Service	Self-discovery, empathy, altruism, service
Collaborative	Social justice, innovation, collaboration
Symbiotic	Society transformation, prophetic vision, wisdom & spirituality
Global Transformation	Global transformational, human rights, global ecology, macroeconomics