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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

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The 5Ps #2

PART 2 Process Just as careful consideration in selecting the appropriate people and place are critical factors in a successful MeshWORKS effort, the process that stakeholders use also requires thoughtful planning. From an SDi perspective, this means creating alignment and integration in the MeshWORK’s design. In alignment we gather pertinent stakeholders with diverse vMEMES to identify the root causes of the challenge and paint a comprehensive picture of what is happening in the environment. This helps us to understand what we will do with whom. This thoughtful analysis sets up for success during the integration phase where we put our strategic vision into action. W conduct pilot projects, learn and adapt, and scale accordingly all the while scanning the environment for patterns. In this phase, then, we focus on how we should support stakeholders to address their concerns. A MeshWORKS process should enable stakeholders to listen to and respect each other and to suspend judgement in order for everyone to voice new possibilities to the best of their abilities. This is not just an exercise in coming together to share information. The process evolves over time as stakeholders listen to each other and learn about each other’s concerns. This in turn… Read More

The 5Ps

SDi MeshWORKS: how Diverse Stakeholders transform Complex Challenges by Fred Krawchuk 16 July 2018 I am honoured to publish this ‘guest feature’ on the MeshWORKS concept by the remarkable Fred Krawchuk. A former colonel with US Army Special Forces, Fred has used the Gravesian approach as a key conflict management tool in several extremely difficult and highly dangerous situations – not least in undermining the insurgency in Iraq 2006-2007. This is discussed in part in The Sons of Iraq – a Step towards Stratified Democracy? (Fred’s somewhat controversial appearance at Don Beck’s workshops at the Integral Centre in Boulder, Colorado, in March 2009 and the challenge that presented to my own thinking is discussed in the Blog post Don Beck’s got Who at His Workshop This Weekend…?!?!?!). After his military career Fred consulted with the RAND Corporation. He also began teaching leadership, negotiation, and strategy at IESE Business School. He has led high-performing teams in over 30 different countries. Fred’s feature originally appeared in  Innovative Development: Emerging Worldviews and Systems Change (Integral Publishers, August 2015), edited by the late Tom Christensen. It is reproduced here with Fred’s permission. With the exception of some minor formatting changes, it is reproduced exactly as it appeared in… Read More

Citizen-Driven Community and Nation Building

by Bjarni Snæbjörn Jónsson 7 June 2018 I am honoured to publish this ‘guest feature’ on the MeshWORKS conecept by the remarkable Bjarni Snæbjörn Jónsson.  His main research interests lie in large systems development through public participation.  He was a founding member of The Anthill in Iceland which organized a cross-sectional National Assembly in 2009 involving abt. 1000 randomly sampled citizens which were physically joined for a day to formulate the Icelandic nation‘s future superordinate goals, following the financial crisis of 2008 which hit Iceland particularly hard. These goals were at the centre of the drive for constitutional reform which has dominated Icelandic politics since. Bjarni’s feature originally appeared in  Innovative Development: Emerging Worldviews and Systems Change (Integral Publishers, August 2015), edited by the late Tom Christensen. It is reproduced here with Bjarni’s express permission and encouragement. With the exception of some minor formatting changes and a several links added, it is reproduced exactly as it appeared in ‘Innovative Development’. To maintain the integrity of the piece as published, I have retained Bjarni’s use of the SDi terminology. However, for the purposes of this site, readers should effectively susbstitute ‘Gravesian’ for ‘SDi’. The truth is not to be found in books, not even good books. The truth… Read More

Citizen-Driven Community and Nation Building #2

PART 2 The social system and its citizens As governance of social systems such as nation states become more complex over time, the distance between the citizenry and the social structures built for their benefit tends to grow. This results in a sense of victimization in citizens and a loss of accountability in leaders, as an increasingly-centralized government fails to meet the expectations of the people it is intended to serve. Mike Jay (2010a) identified 6 factors in social change, each of which operates at a different speed:- Core – The basic social operating system Culture – The solution set; that is, response systems and vMEMES manifested in beliefs and behaviours (memes) Code – Algorithm developed through learning and evolving human consciousness Conditions – Iintensity of the situation or change Context – Perception of reality based on a frame of reference Content – The actual representation of reality as we perceive it As scientific and technological advances enable us to create new systems and realities at an ever faster pace, the development of content is exponentially faster than development of the other dimensions, as illustrated in the chart below (Jay, 2010b)… The discrepancy between content (an increasingly intricate social reality) and the… Read More

Tom Christensen : a Tribute

I’d barely been back in the UK 24 hours – following my participation in the wonderful Spiral Dynamics Summit on the Future in Dallas when I learned of the sudden and unexpected death of Tom Christensen on 23 April. To say I was shocked and saddened would be quite an understatement. To my knowledge, Tom didn’t have a serious/terminal illness and he was only 4-5 years older than me. I believe Tom’s last comments on Facebook were less than a couple of days before his passing was announced. I had been emailing with Tom and also exchanging views with him via the Spiral Dynamics integral elist and Facebook groups for several years. He was a staunch advocate of the Gravesian approach and was a well-known and well-respected contributor to a number of Integral forums. We first started emailing directly in January 2013. Looking back on those first posts, when he had just (sort-of) retired and was in a very what’s next mode, he was infused with a passion for Graves and was like a sponge absorbing and mapping anything to do with Graves and complementary theory and research. He was particularly interested in exploring consciousness and cognitive complexity in relationship to the Gravesian approach. He had already… Read More

Lives on the Spiral #2

PART 2 Work And Spiral Dynamics integral Prior to the Beck & Cowan workshops, career-wise I was very much driven by BLUE. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, given the household I grew up in, once I had gotten over the peak of my hippie rebellion, unconsciously perhaps my YELLOW taking in the consequences of all that GREEN-liberated RED indulgence – I settled easily into BLUE ways of thinking and ended up working as a consultant on quality standards like ISO 9000 and Investors in People. Unfortunately I very much approached this work, not from the angle of business improvement but from the perspective that what was required was rigid conformity to idealised models of business performance. My precision and attention to detail made me effective in getting organisations to meet their desired standard but I did little or nothing to improve business performance. One printing house in London threw out the project because I was tying them up in paperwork. That was typical of BLUE’s emphasis on form over function. That motivation was taken to the extremes of punishing the sinner when, during a procedural audit in a care home, I castigated a nurse for not signing the care plan in the right place.… Read More

Lives on the Spiral

Personal Reflections On The Influence Of SDi ‘Lives on the Spiral’ is one of 2 contributions commissioned from me by Tom Christensen for his compendium, Developmental Innovation: Emerging Worldviews and Individual Learning (Integral Publishers, August 2015). Originally the work was to be entitled ‘SDi Applied’ as Tom wanted to present chapters which reflected Don Beck’s ongoing development of Clare W Graves’ research. Accordingly, Tom wanted the primary term used to be SDi rather than Spiral Dynamics or the ‘Graves Model’. Although I readily acknowledge my debt to Don Beck (and Chris Cowan, for that matter), I have never operated under the SDi umbrella, preferring to use terms such as the Gravesian approach. To maintain the integrity of the piece as published, I have retained the SDi terminology. However, readers should know that effectively I mean ‘Gravesian’. Tom ended up with so many strong contributions – including from the likes of Said E Dawlabani, Elza Maalouf, Barbara N Brown and Fred Krawchuk – that he and Integral Publishers split the material into 2 volumes: the first on Systems Change and the second on Individual Learning. Both my contributions are in the second book. I’ve had an interest in Psychology since my first year at… Read More

The West and Russia: a Divergence of Values?

Published in Eugene Pustoshkin’s Eros & Kosmos e-zine, August 2014. Click here to read it in English on the Eros & Kosmos site. Click here to read Part 1 in Russian and here for Part 2. It’s difficult to write an article triggered by, but not about, an ongoing crisis that has no obvious outcome in any predictable timeframe. The Ukrainian army may be gaining ground but the United Nations’ concern about a growing humanitarian crisis may force them to slow down their assaults – perhaps helped by rockets fired at them allegedly from across the Russian border. The brutal fact is that West is not going to go to war over the low-level but brutal civil war in eastern Ukraine. The West is likely to continue to support Kiev diplomatically and with military supplies and intelligence and there will be reluctant incremental upgrades to the European Union sanctions on Russia (and retaliatory Russian sanctions on the West); but no American or European soldiers are going to die for Donetsk or Luhansk, even if there were to be an overt Russian military incursion. Russian militiamen causing trouble in the Baltic states could be a very different proposition, though. Treaty obligations would… Read More

Shades of Leadership

A Case Study in Leading for the Followers This case study was published in Russ Volckmann’s Integral Leadership Review e-zine – http://integralleadershipreview.com/ – March 2006. A version of the Hodgson Sealants story, with some different emphases, can be found in the Case Studies section of this site. A few years ago, I was invited to work with Hodgson Sealants Ltd, a Yorkshire-based family firm. They were a leading manufacturer of sealants and Europe’s single biggest supplier of putty. They were beginning to penetrate North Africa and other markets beyond the European continent. For the previous 30-plus years, the company had been run as the personal fiefdom of founder Peter Hodgson. His word was law and he could change the law, even on a day to day basis, as he saw fit. But the majority of his workforce, who had been with him, more or less since the company’s inception, were unwaveringly loyal. They loved him; and he looked after them in the manner of a beneficent feudal lord. The company had been a phenomenally successful for a smaller business and, at the time I became involved, had a turnover of over £10M and employed around 110 people. Things hadn’t changed much at Hodgsons over the years; but the world around them was changing – as Peter’s two… Read More

The SME Spiral

This article was published in the January 2005 edition of Quality World, the magazine of the Insitute of Quality Assurance (Brtain’s – and arguably the world’s! – foremost institution for the development and propagation of quality). It was written in response to expressions of frustration by consultants working with SMEs in the magazine’s August 2004 issue. A draft of the article was published on this web site for several months under the title ‘SMEs and ISO 9000’. The revised version above is identical to that published in Quality World – save for references to the models used. (In the IQA version, readers were directed to sidebars containing basic introductions to Adizes LifeCycle and Spiral Dynamics. Here, the links are to other pages containing information on the models.) My thanks to Quality World editor Nicky Farmer for her input in refining the article for commercial publication. Since the heady days of the DTI Enterprise Initiative in the late 1980s, survey after survey has failed to show any real improvement in the competitiveness of the SME end of British industry. Why is this? ISO 9000, Investors in People, business planning schemes, marketing projects, NVQs, Modern Apprenticeships, SMART innovation awards – the list is endless – have all failed to have the desired wide-scale impact their developers dreamed of.This is particulary… Read More