11 Comments on Sixth time lucky?

James Horn on Wed, 12th Sep 2012 5:37 pm


Hope it goes well, Matthew! Don’t be afraid to take risks…

Matthew Mezey on Thu, 13th Sep 2012 1:30 pm


Hi Matthew,

I really enjoyed the lecture yesterday (and journal article).

In fact, I’ve written (not in work time!) a response to it that is so long that I don’t dare paste it in here.

It’s titled: “The Olympics offered us a glimpse of the integral wisdom of ‘Clumsy’ leadership – but how can we turn it from a 1% rarity into a commonplace inspiration?”

You can read it here: http://bit.ly/clumsyleadership

To give you an idea what I talk about, here are the headings:

- How much ‘Clumsy’ leadership is there currently in society?
- Does varying psychological capacity put a cap on the spread of the ‘Clumsy’ leadership that we would like to see?
- Our situation is not hopeless: the capacity for ‘clumsy’ leadership can be successfully increased (but will it take the 16 years it took Jonathan Haidt?)
- How to increase the capacity for Clumsy leadership?
- If we help leaders to change – will they then just leave our organisations…?
- Next steps? Some potential roles for Matthew Taylor’s RSA:
*Launch a research project to uncover how commonplace the Self-transforming/Clumsy mind actually is
*Undertake a literature review/metanalysis of all interventions which have fostered positive adult growth (towards ‘Clumsiness’)
*Produce a template to help active citizens create ‘Clumsy’ solutions
*Start testing out the collaborative/organisational approaches – such as ‘Future Search’ – that Cultural Theory has assessed as being most ‘Clumsy’
*Begin to assess government policy proposals to see whether they are integrative and ‘clumsy’, or not.
*A booklet featuring the key proponents of the different models of plural rationalities outlining how their approach has successfully dealt with – or could deal with – a particular ‘wicked’ issue.
*Support ‘Clumsy’ leaders, help them to stay – and grow – inside their organisations
*From Alpha Course… to Genesis Course – spreading transformation across the UK and beyond
*Develop, recruit and support post-conventional leaders
- The thorny issues of hierarchy, directionality et al.
- Parallels between Spiral Dynamics and Cultural Theory? – A quick linguistic experiment

Wow, this gets pretty long with just the cross-headings!

Do take a look at at the full analysis: http://bit.ly/clumsyleadership

Even though I’d not told anyone my analysis was there, Mike Munro Turner FRSA has added a very insightful comment… (Thanks Mike!).

Matthew

–

Matthew Kalman Mezey
(Online Community Manager)

http://www.thersa.org
A live dashboard webpage showing RSA online activity is here: http://bit.ly/onlineRSA
twitter.com/MatthewMezey
twitter.com/thersaorg
rsafellowship.com (online community)
Is there an ‘RSA Connector’ for your country yet?: http://bit.ly/RSAconnectors

Ian Christie on Fri, 14th Sep 2012 1:11 pm


Thanks to Matthew for this very helpful comment and longer piece.

Prof. Perri 6 of Queen Mary University, London, is putting together a conference next year on empirical tests and practical applications of cultural theory. There’ll be a lot of contributions from the University of Bremen, where sociologists and psychologists have enthusiastically taken up the challenge of testing CT.

Matthew Mezey on Fri, 14th Sep 2012 4:46 pm


Re Cultural Theory…

I have the blurb about that great Cultural Theory conference next year somewhere or other – it did look *really* interesting. (Is there a URL for the conference?).

I think Matthew plans to join the fun.

Michael Thompson – a leading figure in Cultural Theory, and author of ‘Organising and Disorganising’ just got in touch with me.

He wished he’d been there at Mathew’s lecture, but overlooked the RSA newsletter where it was announced. He’s appreciative of the boost it gives Cultural Theory/plural rationalities.

He thinks some kind of “Are You A Clumsy Fellow?” publication might be a way forward.

He also pointed out that bridge-building between Robert Kegan’s model of cognitive complexity/’Ways of knowing’ and Cultural Theory is tough as Kegan is psychology-focused whilst Cultural Theory is an institutional theory. (Spiral Dynamics is a bit more inbetween the two, I think…?).

But the paper I link to by Marco Verweij and Steve Ney might help this bridging, Michael suggests.

There’s also a new PhD by Eero Olli which begins to get to grips with “some unfinished business” within Culural Theory “at the micro-level” (ie ‘the individual/psycho-physiological entity’).

My personal thoughts on Matthew Taylor’s lecture, and his article in the new ‘RSA Journal’, are here: http://bit.ly/clumsyleadership (warning: it’s long!).

Matthew M

PS I still think that ‘Clumsy’ is very closely related indeed to concepts like ‘Integral’, ‘Second Tier’ and the ‘Yellow value-meme’. Worth looking at the empirical research done around them – there are some great assessment tools out there, and some less good ones…

–

Matthew Kalman Mezey
(RSA Online Community Manager)

http://www.thersa.org
A live dashboard webpage showing RSA online activity is here: http://bit.ly/onlineRSA
twitter.com/MatthewMezey
twitter.com/thersaorg
rsafellowship.com (online community)
Is there an ‘RSA Connector’ for your country yet?: http://bit.ly/RSAconnectors

John Dowdle FRSA on Mon, 17th Sep 2012 3:25 pm


I listened to your annual address and recall that you advanced 4 categories of response to climate change. There is one additional category which goes beyond fatalism in welcoming adverse climate change. I am referring to religiously motivated individuals who welcome it because – they believe – it will usher in a new era in which some messianic figure will emerge to save the world with supernatural powers and – in due course – usher in a new era in which all the “good” people are saved and all the “bad ” people receive their just deserts in the form of eternal damnation in a place called “hell”.
Many of these people are linked with the Christian Zionist movement.
Ordinarily, these people could be dismissed as just a fringe element. However, there are clear indications that members of the previous Bush administration were significant supporters of this hypothesis, which is why they opposed any form of internationally binding climate change agreement. There are also other influential individuals in other parts of the world who share a similar belief.
Do we know where Mitt Romney and the people around him stand on this issue?

Rebecca hanson on Sun, 23rd Sep 2012 11:54 am


Thanks for this Matthew. There were two points I wanted to pick up on.

Firstly you note the decline of the congregational event.
I contribute to many discussion forums and blog communities and I think these are wonderful congregational events.

Face-to-face congregational events often put the individual in situations where they feel obliged to conform. For me online mass discussions and the communities which form in specific locations and interact with each other many times on many topics are much freer. People say things because they feel they have something to add and they keep posting until they and other interested people understand what it is they are trying to say. In face-to-face congregational events people feel much more obliged to say things or do things because social convention requires them to do so. Time plays an important part in creating those social pressures – you are expected to respond at a certain time in a certain range of ways. Time pressures are released in mass online discussion. You can participate as and when you feel you have something to say. I could say a lot more. I’ll try and write a post on my cyberrhetoric blog when I get time:
http://cyberrhetoricbyrebeccahanson.blogspot.co.uk/

I’m interested in writing a ’21st Century Enlightenment’ booklet on the capacity of mass online discussion. It’s very different to the networking things which have already been written.

My second comment relates to the three forces you repeatedly refer to. I think you need to reexamine your understanding of the forces relating to the self. You have a quite a fixed view of these as being selfish forces and I think you need to look at the way in which these forces are different for different people. David Hawkins has done some excellent work on the essences of the ‘spiritual journey’ of the self, analysing cross-cultural experiences and the elements of learning which seem to be communal to different religions. He has developed a ‘scale of consciousness’ which is one of the most useful tools I’ve found for thinking about this.

This ‘scale of consciousness’ describes a structure for thinking about how some people are so wrapped in their own egos that they can barely tell what truth is at all (and tend to be very selfish) while others are more functional but still have a a strong propensity to judge situations according to their prior conceptions rather than according to what is actually in front of them. People in this mindset would be likely to experience the kind of mixture of selfish, social and hierarchical forces you describe.

But beyond that Hawkins describes a state where people are much more aware of their own limitations of objectivity and are more able to correctly describe aspects of their experience which contradict either established science or the experiences of others. The further people move in this direction the less they tend to bother about their selfish needs and I think they are more resilient to hierarchical pressures. They seem to have forces of the self which are deeply in tune with others and the wider world and which had an unexpected level of power. I don’t think they’re really social forces as you know then. I feel like most of my friends have at least one foot in this world. Whilst higher level study challenge you to push yourself in this direction in my experience the most powerful transformative forces is losing everything you thought mattered and discovering yourself again.

John Dowdle FRSA on Sun, 23rd Sep 2012 4:27 pm


In response to Rebecca Hanson, I think you can adopt social policy which will achieve greater social cohesion among all members of a society. If people have secure lives with regard to employment, a stable home and relationships, as well as the availability of a wide social welfare system, then they can afford to be altruistic and empathetic towards others in their society.
The numbers of real sociopaths is arguably low and they will always exhibit parasitic and selfish behaviour but the fact that they are few in number makes it possible for the majority in any society to lead lives which can be mutually enriched, supportive and fulfilling.
As far as the online community is concerned, I do agree that it makes it far easier to stay in touch with a far greater circle of acquaintances but I also think it would need some sort of research to assess just how deeply the relationships are that are built up in this way.
Breadth and depth are two different dimensions, after all.

Rebecca hanson on Sun, 23rd Sep 2012 4:47 pm


Thanks for your thoughts John,

To your views on the social policy which builds social cohesion I would add, that I subscribe to the political philosophy of devolving power to the lowest level but organising where it is clearly appropriate to do so while retaining as much openness and transparency as possible. I feel this is a good system of state for supporting social cohesion.

Beyond that I’m interested in looking at how networks can be created to support voluntarism – for example how primary schools can be hubs which link volunteers who want to support families under stress (and might for example go round for an hour once a week to support a child with their homework) with suitable families. I’m also interested in whether we can create system like linkedin but for the peer-to-peer recording and accreditation of voluntarism.

I think you do not yet have experience of the kind of online communities I am describing if you are only using social networks to stay in touch with wider circles of acquaintances. But I know you must have at least some experience beyond that because you’re here, in this discussion, chatting to me and having (probably?) a discussion which you could not have had had the medium of this open discussion below Matthew’s blog not existed. Many of my friendships these days developed in forums. When I meet people in real life who I’ve first got to know in forums it’s just like we’ve always been friends only often we know each other much better than people who’ve met through more traditional routes.

If you’re interested in a more challenging analysis of the dynamics involved you might be tempted by a discussion like this:
http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Do-online-discussion-forums-produce-3847644.S.105213866?qid=360a875d-3ed9-4d29-82a2-b86372da535b&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_3847644

Matthew Mezey on Sun, 23rd Sep 2012 9:23 pm


Hi Rebecca,

You’ve taken the discussion in a very interesting direction – which has been particularly on my mind for the last couple of days.

This post – which RSA Fellowship Council member Roxanne Persaud shared with me on Twitter – is what began to make me really wonder about this topic: ‘On the Psychosocial Determinants of Community of Practice Success’ – http://mloxton.wordpress.com/2012/08/30/on-the-psychosocial-determinants-of-cop-success/ (I made a comment, but it apparently never got as far as the moderator).

The point I made to the post’s author Matthew Loxton is that the ‘Psychosocial constructs’ he is so far considering look largely ‘horizontal’ and non-developmental. In other words, he’s not so far looking at the developmental, ‘vertical’, maturational, complexification-orientated, constructs. (Eg Robert Kegan’s ‘Ways of Knowing’ or Piaget, Kohblberg, Maslow et al. And perhaps David Hawkins, who I’ve not read or understood yet.).

And there are reasons to believe that it is these maturational/developmental differences could be a key factor in the success of knowledge-sharing networks, even in the creation of friendships.

For instance, here’s a snippet from a blog I wrote some years back:

* * *
Your information sharing approach depends on your leadership maturity

Paralleling Torbert’s research, Harvard’s Prof Robert Kegan found that the few open leaders – with ‘Self-transforming’ minds – also have a very different approach to sharing information than other leaders do. They alone are alert to the limitations of their current frame, or mental filter, and open to the ‘golden chaff’ – the unasked-for, the anomalies – that could offer the crucial insight needed to take their organisation to the next level, but that most leaders ignore, Kegan and Lahey wrote in Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 2009).

These leaders keep their doors open to colleagues, and invite ‘off-mission’ communications that colleagues believe could be important – realising that “their behaviour can have a big effect, upstream, on whether people decide to approach the door.”

Uniquely, they find ways to let colleagues know that such feedback will be welcomed.

Other leaders, at previous stages, will only seek information that advances their own agenda – for instance – rather than challenges it.

And 360-degree feedback research has found that this high leadership maturity correlates with a leader’s effectiveness – including in such areas as “creating a compelling vision and managing performance.”

[Full post is here: http://bit.ly/bJraEV ]

* * *

It seems also that milestones in psychological maturation play a key role in where friendships are created.

I only just realised that I’d seen an amazing finding mentioned in an interview in ‘Integral Leadership Review’ a year or two back – about how people tend to form friendships with others at almost the same developmental stage as themselves:

* * * Extract from interview with developmental researcher Harry Lasker * * *

“In Curacao [capital of Dutch Antilles] I was able to measure ego development in large numbers of people across different socio-economic levels. Thus I could construct the psychological demographics of that society. …

When we ran training groups in Curacao we eventually reached almost the entire adult population. One of the things we found was that if you brought strangers together in a group and you asked them months later who they liked most in the group, mutual selections were invariably between people within a half stage of each other. Ego stage is not just a psychological variable; it’s a social variable. It defines a type of “mindedness” in which birds of a feather literally flock together. You can graph and predict the flocking.”

‘Fresh Perspective: Development and the Entrepreneur as Leader: An Interview with Harry M. Lasker’ (in Integral Leadership Review)
http://integralleadershipreview.com/5496-fresh-perspective-development-and-the-entrepreneur-as-leader-an-interview-with-harry-m-lasker

* * *

A helpful German developmental coach – in the ‘Adult Development’ e-group – kindly sent me some hard-to-obtain but fascinating research in this area. He even scanned in a relevant bit of Harry Lasker’s PhD for me. (You’re right about the wonders of online communities!).

I just received one of those pieces of research now, and can see that it contains potentially fascinating insights, such as that “Girls at high ego development levels also had unique roles as liaisons between cliques, while having fewer reciprocated friendships in dyads. … the experience of participating in successively more complex network structures may stimulate girls’ ego development. For example, the
challenge of managing diverse and perhaps conflicting friendships as a liaison between cliques may stimulate the transition from the middle to the upper levels of ego development.”)

As you might have spotted, I suspect that Cultural Theory’s non-developmental ‘plural rationalities’ – egalitarianism, hierarchy, individualism – might best be understood if looked at in longitudinal and developmental terms. Interestingly, when research was – for the first time – done on Jonathan Haidt’s non-developmental multiple moral matrices, it was found that they mostly tended to fall fairly well into Kohlberg’s moral development model.

I’ll certainly be thinking further about how involvement in online networks might relate to psychological maturation, whether ‘Clumsy’ leaders (with ‘Self-transforming minds’) create stronger mutual learning networks etc etc.

Matthew Mezey
(RSA Online Community Manager)

Rebecca hanson on Mon, 24th Sep 2012 11:12 am


Matthew M,

In education we also use the concept of whether people are in fixed or growth mindsets which I think helps. This concept is based on the work of Carol Dweck which is widely respected. It fits neatly with the neuropsychological analysis found in books like The Success Zone http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Success-Zone-ebook/dp/B003L77P5W/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1348485052&sr=8-1 which describes two modes of functioning of the brain, one of which could easily be a grown mindset and the other a fixed mindset.

When forums function well people who are used to the dynamics of them seem to rapidly relax into a growth mindset.

Dave Gorman on Tue, 9th Oct 2012 9:44 pm


Hi Matthew,

Just a quick belated note to say that I found the lecture (as usual) to be packed with ideas and dense argument- really good stuff that I’ll be passing to my CEO to take a look at and mull over…

The good thing about being a Head of Strategy is passing good ideas on…

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