8 Comments on Fourteen ways to get things wrong …

Ben U on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 10:49 am


Matthew,

Firstly let me say how much I enjoy your musings on CT, even if I don’t always understand them!

I’m reading The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly on the relationship between the ‘West and Rest’ and the fatal flaw in what he calls ‘Big Push’ aid giving. The position of rich Western countries, which he is critiquing, is that the poverty problem is a ‘big chasm’ and that you ‘cant cross a chasm in two leaps’. Hence massive financial aid packages, things like ‘make poverty history’ etc. But actually, the things that make a difference are small scale projects that involve the knowledge and buy-in from local people.

I’m wondering if this is classic CT territory and an example of a sub-optimal solution? The hierarchy of Western governments and global financial institutions, egalitarianism of the people of those nations who are happy to send aid, go to concerts, wear bracelets, and the fatalism of acceptance when nothing changes anyway. What’s missing, as in Easterly’s critique, is the individualism of those in the developing countries. This is probably very crude so I share it with greater minds for some honing!

matthewtaylor on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 1:36 pm


Thanks for this Ben. The next and final two CT blogs (which I will post over the next few days) will I hope be the most interesting. I really hope Marco or Michael read your comment as they are both experts on the application of CT to development. I think their fear is that international instituions are simply incapable of being ‘clumsy’ and always revert to hierarchical solutions

Thanks for reading

Matthew Kalman on Fri, 23rd Jan 2009 3:14 pm


Hi Matthew,

When you talk about how truly enduring solutions must allow all the “active paradigms to be in play, tapping into the energy that each has to offer and managing the capacity of each to disrupt the solutions of the others” you sound ever more similar to Ken Wilber in his advice that sustainable solutions need to be ‘integral’ or Spiral Dynamics’ Don Beck talking about how solutions must tap into the energy of each existing thinking system (or value meme) – not just privilege one of them.

Geoff Mulgan even once urged a meeting of the Government’s future strategists to read Ken Wilber’s introduction to his integral approach, ‘A Theory of Everything – An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality’ (which uses Spiral Dynamics as a illustrative model, perhaps due to the simple colour scheme), and try to translate its ‘integral’ model into concrete Government policies.
I’m pretty sure no-one quite managed it…!

(Though Jake Chapman – author of ‘System Failure: Why Governments Must Learn to Think Differently’ is probably bringing some of this developmental/integral thinking into the ‘Top Management Programme’ at the National School of Government).

One suggestion I have for you is this: don’t you need to make space also for another paradigm – your own ‘clumsy’ solutions paradigm? (Giving you 5 paradigms in total).

Surely this ‘clumsy’ integrating paradigm is the one that you’re seeking to use – and represents a next step, beyond the current predominant, and unproductive, paradigms?

Look at what Mark Williams did this in his book about diversity issues called ‘The Ten Lenses – Your Guide to Living and Working in a Multicultural World’: verified by a Zogby poll, he found these 10 different lenses though which people view diversity issues: Assimilationist, Colourblind, Culturalcentrist, Elitist, Integrationist, Meritocratist, Multiculturalist, Seclusionist, Transcendent and Victim/caretaker.
Each such lens provides a framework, he says, but it is a “distorted and incomplete vision” (like your paradigms)– but a new perspective is emerging which liberates us, and takes us to the highest (and healthiest) expressions of each of these lenses.

He calls this the 11th Lens! I hope Barack Obama’s going to use an 11th lens
I would say this 11th lens is analogous with your ‘clumsy’ paradigm, Wilber’s integral stage, Spiral Dynamic’s Yellow values (which it also dubs ‘Second Tier’, as it is the first of the thinking systems that is really willing to value and include all the previous value systems, rather than just seek to subjugate or ignore them, etc).

The outcome of putting your 4 (now 5!) paradigms together with some of the other models I’ve mentioned might look something like this (in order of increasing complexity):

1. Fatalist/impulsive (Red)
2. Hierarchical/conventional (Blue)
3. Individualist/achiever (Orange)
4. Egalitarian/Sensitive (Green)
5. Integral/’clumsy’ (Yellow)

So these 5 stages are a (speculative) synthesis of the 5 paradigms, with models like Spiral Dynamics value systems, Maslow’s psychographic segmentation, Torbert’s ‘Leadership Development Framework’, Kohlberg’s moral development etc etc.

A pervasive ‘sub-optimal solution’ that Spiral Dynamics warns about is the way that Egalitarian/Sensitive (Green) tends to dissolve Hierarchical/conventional (Blue). This is perhaps illustrated in the Left’s attacks on traditional teaching methods, the patriarchal family and ‘oppressive’ authority everywhere.

Spiral Dynamics warns that if the Hierarchical/conventional (Blue) solutions are removed then Fatalist/impulsive (Red) will often never be able to make the needed steps up to Individualist/achiever (Orange) and eventually to the Egalitarian/Sensitive (Green) that progressives admire.

It’s as if Egalitarian/Sensitive (Green) climbs the ladder – to achieve a viewpoint that is in global terms quite rate and ‘elite’ – but then pulls the ladder up behind it, saying anything less than full-on postmodern/PC Egalitarian/Sensitive (Green) is just oppressive.

As a fan of the idea of the ‘Learning Organisation’, I’m also impressed by the insight developmental models give us into why they are so darned difficult to bring into being.

Prof Bill Torbert has found that only about 7 per cent of managers currently mature as far as his so-called ‘Strategist’ stage – let’s presume that that’s somewhere around “5. Integral/’clumsy’ (Yellow)”.

But this stage is, he claims: “the first at which a leader explicitly initiates double-loop, transformational learning.”

“Now we can understand why ‘learning leaders’ and ‘learning organisations’ are so rare.”

Do take a look at Torbert and Rooke’s article in Harvard Business Review called “Seven Transformations of Leadership” – it describes the strengths and weaknesses of seven paradigms/thinking systems, or whatever you want to call them (Torbert calls them ‘action logics’).

Here are three snippets from that article – so you can see if it will interest you:

“Strategists [ie Integral/’clumsy’/Yellow”?] deal with conflict more comfortably than do those with other action logics, and they’re better at handling people’s instinctive resistance to change. As a result, Strategists are highly effective change agents. We found confirmation of this in our recent study of ten CEOs in six different industries. All of their organizations had the stated objective of transforming themselves and had engaged consultants to help with the process. Each CEO filled out a Leadership Development Profile, which showed that five of them were Strategists and the other five fell into other action logics. The Strategists succeeded in generating one or more organizational transformations over a four-year period; their companies’ profitability, market share, and reputation all improved. By contrast, only two of the other five CEOs succeeded in transforming their organizations…”

“Such Achiever teams are often impatient at slowing down to reflect, are apt to dismiss questions about goals and assumptions as “endless philosophizing,” and typically respond with hostile humor to creative exercises, calling them “off-the-wall” diversions. These behaviors will ultimately limit an Achiever team’s success.”

“The situation is worse at large, mature companies where senior management teams operate as Experts. Here, vice presidents see themselves as chiefs and their “teams” as an information-reporting formality. Team life is bereft of shared problem-solving, decision-making, or strategy-formulating efforts. Senior teams limited by the Diplomat action logic are even less functional. They are characterized by strong status differences, undiscussable norms, and ritual “court” ceremonies that are carefully stage-managed.”

Hope some of this is helpful, or at least though-provoking…

I look forward to your next installment on cultural theory.

Cheers,

Matthew Kalman
http://www.integralstrategies.org/

matthewtaylor on Sat, 24th Jan 2009 11:50 am


Wow Matthew a lot to chew on here. Thank you. I did read Wlbur but as I said in a previous reply I find both the complexity and the evolutionary apects of the approach less than fully convincing. I advocate clumsy solutions but I think they will only hold for a while before imbalance reasserts itself. This is because the paradigms are always in conflict and indeed get ther energy in large part from their antagonism to each other. In my next blogs I am going to describe how managers should try to get the best out of the paradigms but this is a contnuous process of balancing – I’m not sure there can never be an enduring synthesis

Just two more posts left in my series: ‘cultural theory for dummies’ | Matthew Taylor's blog on Tue, 27th Jan 2009 10:21 am


[...] week I described fourteen types of sub-optimal solutions, each excluding one or more of CT’s four ways of seeing [...]

Fourcultures on Fri, 30th Jan 2009 2:33 pm


The paradigm that cultural theorists themselves most often exclude from the discussion is fatalism. They do this by claiming it is ‘passive’ (Michael Thompson), or ‘isolate’ (Mary Douglas), and by claiming fatalism opts out of policy debates, or is excluded by the others by definition. This betrays a real bias and a failure of imagination on the part of researchers. There is no reason to think that fatalism is any different from the other three paradigms in its capacity to organise actively and to actively seek to exclude other perspectives. Believing the world to be capricious, fatalists seek to make it more so in a thousand different ways. They seek to enact their worldview, to prove themselves right – just as the other paradigms do.
Two writers have shown how fatalism works at a policy level. Vernon Bogdanor claims fatalism is ‘not typically a strong bias in deliberate policy, but widespread, probably even ubiquitous in practice’ (2005:63,77). He uses the wonderfully evocative phrase, ‘random acts of senseless partnership’ – which anyone who has engaged with government will recognise immediately. Christopher Hood (1998) goes further, and shows with great insight how fatalism busily creates ‘contrived randomness’ which can ‘turn public organization into something less like a predictable slot-machine than a gaming machine, making it difficult to predict in detail where the chips will fall at any one time’ (Hood et al 1999:16). A parallel concept is that of ‘Keno capitalism’ (Dear and Flusty 1998), which deliberately organises urban space on a random basis, so that ‘capital touches down as if by chance’ in one place, ignoring neighbouring locations.
The prime example of a society dominated by a fatalist activism is Australia. I’m hardly the first to notice this. The Fatal Shore and The Lucky Country are two epithets that have stuck. Its modern foundation as an archipelago of repressive penal colonies, its history of near genocidal oppression of the indigenous population, together with its genuinely unpredictable climate (dominated by El Nino Southern Oscillation) make this a continent uniquely conditioned by and for fatalism. Australia has 1 gaming machine for every 99 people (contrasting with the UK at one per 236 people or the US at one per 426, according to the 2004 World Count of Gaming Machines). These produce significant revenue for the government, particularly in NSW, strongly impacting on policy. Policing is controlled by fatalism. A widespread Government advert says ‘More police: more chance of getting caught’. Every social event includes a raffle; even the recent Monet exhibition at the Gallery of NSW ends with online competition entry to win a trip to Giverny. These are all examples of contrived randomness hard at work every day.
To sum up: at least one country is in constant danger of suffering a monoculture of fatalism. Meanwhile, cultural theorists themselves conspire to create a limited culture that mistakenly regards fatalism as inactive, and therefore irrelevant.

How to be a Fatalist « Fourcultures on Fri, 30th Jan 2009 3:21 pm


[...] is an edited response to Matthew Taylor’s blog at the RSA [...]

News Room :: The strange shape of environmental politics on Sun, 15th Feb 2009 9:25 am


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