I’ve always been interested in what makes some people able to take the decision to “walk on water” and just get on with trying to make something happen while most are looking for a set of rules to follow. I set up the Free Spirits Club in Ecademy to discuss these issues.
Some people believe that we are hardwired to seek conformity and rules – the simpler the set the better. It’s true that if you study the way the brain works you tend to come to the conclusion that it’s a machine to take 2 and 2 and produce 5. It’s driven to produce patterns from insufficient data and these become persistent, rigid and infective. Much religious dogma seems to fall into this category.
However there does seem to be a countervailing tendency for individuals to recognise that they are trapped and to strike out on their own. Sometimes blindly, sometimes calculatedly, sometimes in a conscious attempt to achieve a balance of self expression but not at the expense of the group. Level 7 – the yellow zone in spiral dynamics. Dudley Lynch’s book Mother of all minds is an account of his own journey.
What interests me is what can be done to facilitate and sustain the independence from group-think that’s needed to make real progress. Or is this just a meta set of rules because the only truly independent thinkers get sectioned?
This seems like a discussion worth having as it touches on many of the recurring themes of small business. How do we build a sustainable business (which usually doesn’t involve following someone else’s simple formula), How do we stay true to ourselves, How do we steer our course between gross materialism on the one hand and utter wishful thinking on the other.
My own view is that we need to learn how to be disobedient for the common good.
I realised when I was 10 that if you played the game according to the rules you were going to lose. It’s a casino, the deck is stacked against you. Big industry and government regulation are always making life harder for the independent. But somehow we all survive in growing numbers. It’s a key competency to understand which things you can ignore and which things you can’t.
A successful operation needs just enough structure . What we’re told to do is generally over-engineered and will result in slow death – euro-necrosis
So – how do we keep the vital spark alive?
Over to you guys.
Alan
If everyone broke the rules the world would be rather like driving in Istanbul, or Paris ~ part exhilaration, part innovation and mainly frustration as we all bumped into each other.
The idea isn’t to break rules because they exist but rather to evaluate every situation on its merits.
This is surprisingly difficult since our conditioning is so strong that most of us are programmed to attempt to fit each new encounter into a system of existing prejudices.
This of course is useful in many contexts since one could spend a long time standing-up if every time one found a chair one had to work out its function.
But businesses aren’t chairs, although customers may have predictable behaviours for the reasons described.
Disobedience, in my view, is as much a habit as conformity. In short an automatic reaction to something.
The ability to evaluate every encounter on its merits may also be developed as a habit, and I suggest it’s of far more use than ‘blind disobedience’
Stephen
P. S. Alan, we’re waiting here for your next visit :~)
[...] hours ago Is Disobedience a Core Competency? http://drbollocks.wordpress.com/2009/05/… I think [...]
Thanks, Alan!
I know that you are a serious student of the spiral values theory and model of the late Dr. Clare W. Graves. And ’d submit that the key ideas in your post above dovetail closely with perhaps the most powerful mindset that he sought to describe.
I’ve actually written or co-authored five books on his model and called the mindset I hear reflected in your remarks by various names.
One of those books was a best-seller in France and Germany (in those languages but not in English) and was called “Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World.” In that book my co-author and I called the mindset I believe you probably personally use the “dolphin” mindset because, in part, it is the only one in the model (and in the ocean) that can kill a shark. (The other two mindsets that my co-author, Dr. Paul Kordis, and I described were the carp and the pseudo-enlightened carp (go figure!).
The folks who are most like to object to the views in your post are, in my experience, primary users of the pseudo-enlightened carp mindset. This whole matter, this whole planet, this whole issue of people’s nature and whether and how they can “grow” a different nature looks altogether different from a dolphin’s mindset (doesn’t it!!).
To that end, I would like to again mention my latest book, The Mother of All Minds: Leaping Free of an Outdated Human Nature. My works on the Graves theory have been cited by some (such as the reader quoted below) as among the most readable, consistent and insightful popular introductions to Dr. Graves’ theory and model.
Here is that reader’s comments about The Mother of All Minds:
The Mother of All Minds is a fascinating, intricate and brilliant work, yet as readable as a good novel. It is both philosophically challenging and at the same time practically useful to people who are serious about wanting to grow and adapt to the new world we live in. I found it as impactful as a punch in the face but not without a sense of humour. Dudley Lynch may well be doing for Clare Grave’s theory what Daniel Goleman did for Emotional Intelligence.–Noel Odou, Author of Magnificently Insignificant (Brolga, 2009), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
More on The Mother of All Minds here: http://www.brainmeup.com/moam.htm
We also have a number of powerful personal assessment tools used by some of the world’s best life and executive coaches based on the Graves theory, in particular, MindMaker6, and our online tool, Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey. More info here:
http://www.brainmeup.com
If anyone ever has any questions about our approach to all things Gravesean, don’t hesitate to drop me an e-mail.
Best wishes,
Dudley Lynch
President
Brain Technologies Corp. and Brain Me Up!
Gainesville, Florida