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Keith E Rice's Integrated SocioPsychology Blog & Pages

Aligning, integrating and applying the behavioural sciences

Neurological Levels’

2007

SocioPsychologist! 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January: Accepted 2-term part-time post teaching A-Level Psychology and Key Stage 3/4 Religious Studies at Sherburn High School in North Yorkshire, covering a maternity leave. Commentary: Sherburn was a surprisingly tough school (but then its catchment area did include some wards high in the deprivation indices). The Key Stage 3/4 classes at times seemed almost as difficult as the last year at Vermuyden (though I doubt they really were!). The 6th Form, while containing some potentially-very capable students, generally lacked aspiration. Given the very mixed student population they had – with lots of disrupted PURPLE and strong but unhealthy RED – the school did very well to get the results it did. But really it needed stronger disciplinary systems than it had available at the time. The more successful teachers tended to be those whose RED was very strong – ie: they got their students to behave through sheer force of personality. My biggest regret… Read More

2004

The Beginnings of ‘Integrated SocioPsychology’ 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January: Facilitated a session in Grimsby on Learning & Change for Common Purpose South Humber as part of their ‘Profile’ programme. Commentary: The contact with Common Purpose South Humber was made via former Common Purpose in Hull director David Burnby who had been inspired through training with me in July 2001 to go freelance. David was much impressed with my training style and the Gravesian approach. In 2002 he had co-promoted the third delivery of An Introduction to Spiral Dynamics & Related Models of Neuro-Linguistic Programming and also sold an in-house version of the programme into Hull’s Preston Road New Deal for Communities project. January-April: Delivered Understanding MeshWORKS for North Lincolnshire Council Community Investment Team members who had not been on the first tranche of training in late 2002. Commentary: Jenny Gavin-Allen saw the need for as many members of her team as possible to be exposed to the Gravesian approach, related models… Read More

2003

Change Engineer, Psychology Teacher! 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020    2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January: Kicked off the New Year with a Cobus  planning summit. Led by Steve Beevers, of course, the session also featured Steve’s wife, Susan Rose , a trainer and consultant in her own right, and Lloyd Thomas, another leading light from 21st Century Group days. Commentary: After something of a mixed year for Cobus (with minmal involvement from me), this was an attempt to reinvigorate the company. For much of the previous year, Steve had been distracted from his consultancy work by getting a new business, Cyclerax, off the ground. In truth, little real activity came out of the planning session and the more lucrative Cyclerax largely dominated Beevers’ thinking over the next few years. January: Started working with the Consortium for Learning Board on Phase 2 of their Business Plan. January: Asked to do what I called ‘Personal Therapy’ with ‘Jasmine’, a heroin ‘addict’ wanting to quit the drug. Commentary: I wouldn’t pretend for a second… Read More

2002

Humber MeshWORKS… 1988-1996    1997   1998     1999     2000     2001    2002      2003     2004     2005     2006     2007     2008     2009     2010     2011     2012     2013     2014      2015     2016     2017     2018      2019     2020      2021-2023 21st Century Group     HemsMESH     Humber MeshWORKS     Humberside MESH Network January-February: Delivered Gravesian-centred staff training sessions for the Garths. February: Worked with Cathy Byrne on developing Spiral strategies to employ in her application to become headteacher of the new school being formed from the merger of the Danepark and Court Park primary schools in Hull. Commentary: A ‘graduate’ from the previous Summer’s SD-NLP open workshop programme, the remarkable story of Cathy’s management of the merger is told as a case study in The Parks in the Services pages. In some circles, there’s a lot of contention about the elitism so often associated with those who claim to think in 2nd Tier – especially TURQUOISE thinking. But I actually do think Cathy does think in TURQUOISE at times. Her fearlessness, her ability to see things clearly from multiple perspectives and to build towards the ‘Big Picture’ would fit with the little we know about this vMEME – and she’s often been way ahead… Read More

‘Jasmine’

Updated: January 2005 ‘Jasmine’ was a heroin addict. At 23 years old she had been taking the drug since shortly before her fifteenth birthday. Although her parents had separated when she was quite young, Jasmine came from what most people would consider a professional middle class family. Her mother, ‘Myra’, had remarried while Jasmine was still pre-teen and the stepfather, ‘Joe’, was generally accepting of his new wife’s daughter. Things changed little even when Myra and Joe had their own child, ‘Belinda’. When I was asked by Myra to try some therapy with Jasmine, the 3 of us mind-mapped the young woman’s life. While there might have been some questions around damage to her PURPLE need for attachments with the departure of her biological father and the loss of all contact with him, there was nothing obvious to indicate the kind of need heroin could fill. Joe had proved about as good a stepfather as Jasmine could have wished for. It seemed that Jasmine had simply experienced a powerful surge of RED self-expression in her early teens while hanging out with the ‘wrong crowd’ and had got drawn into first alcohol and marijuana and then heroin. Paradoxically she remained a high… Read More

The Trouble with Tribalism…

7 July 2016 …is that most Western politicians don’t get it. It’s seen as something relevant to Pre-Modern ‘primitive’ communities but not to Modern societies. And, when Western-style one person/one (secret) vote Democracy is offered to tribal communities as part of the Modernisation process, so many Western leaders seem genuinely perplexed at the relative lack of enthusiasm for it. The Americans in particular seemed baffled that attempts to embed Democracy in the wake of their invasions of the Noughties produced the markedly-corrupt government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan and the corrupt and overtly-sectarian government of Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq. A Do-It-Yourself attempt to introduce Democracy in Egypt produced a government (of the Islamic Brotherhood) so unacceptable to the urban middle classes and the army that a ‘sort-of coup’ was instigated, followed by rigged elections, to return the country to neo-military rule as before. Highly-controversial and bitterly-contested ‘democratic’ elections following Libya’s revolutionary civil war resulted in 2 – and arguably 3? – would-be governments claiming the right to rule with their various militia, often organised on sectarian or tribal lines, slugging it out in a patchy, second civil war. Anyone versed in the Gravesian approach could have told the Western planners and the internet-inspired urban ‘democrats’ of Egypt that their campaigns to introduce Western-style Democracy would hit trouble. (See:… Read More

The Thriving Organisation

Organisations Seen From The Second Tier Complexity Theory in the MeshWORK Approach to Businesses by Peter Fryer 4 February 2003 Author Peter Fryer was the Chief Executive of Humberside Training & Enterprise Council throughout its existence. He now works under the banner of ‘trojanmice’ and can be contacted via e-mail or you can call (+44) (0)1724 733303. How is your organisation faring in these rapidly changing times? Are you just surviving, are you surviving well, or are you thriving? Obviously surviving is crucial, but there is more to organisational life than that – a sort of Corporate BEIGE – much more. If we are thriving we are clearly doing well at all the things needed for survival but more importantly we are fulfilling our organisation’s true purpose. We are making the real difference that we intended when we set up the business and we are laying the foundations for our organisation’s existence for a long time. Thriving is not a state that is naturally reached by becoming better at surviving. No amount of continuous improvement (BLUE/ORANGE) will turn a surviving organisation into a thriving one. Thriving organisations have learnt to see themselves in a very different – 2nd Tier – way… Read More

vMEMES #4

PART 4 How complex is people’s thinking? The issue of just how far the bulk of any population ascend the Spiral/Hierarchy – experience the emergence of vMEMES in an ascending sequence – is a contentious one. In 1996 Beck & Cowan conjectured that the percentages of the world’s population dominated by a nodal vMEME in their thinking was:- BEIGE: 0.1% PURPLE: 10% RED: 20% BLUE: 40% ORANGE: 30% GREEN: 10% YELLOW: 1% TURQUOISE: 0.1% The percentages, of course, don’t add up to 100% and there is no breakdown of percentage to continents, cultures or societies. Cowan (Chris Cowan & Nastasha Todorovic, 2006b) has admitted that the figures were a (very!) rough interpretation/extrapolation of various data sets (including United Nations data) while Beck has never commented (for public consumption) on the estimates. Nonetheless, in general it supported the notion that the bulk of the population – the Western population, at least – were not significantly beyond a BLUE (Kohlberg) or BLUE/orange (Loevinger) way of thinking. Further support for this notion came from research using Kohlberg’s concepts. Using what effectively was a 9-stage model incorporating 3 sub-stages, Lawrence Walker, Brian De Vries & Shelley Trevethan (1987) found general agreement with Kohlberg. They interviewed 40 boys and 40 girls… Read More

Glossary N

Nos   A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z National Identity: a sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, as represented by distinctive traditions, culture and language. It may refer to the subjective feeling one shares with a group of people about a nation, regardless of one’s legal citizenship status. National identity is viewed in psychological terms as ‘an awareness of difference’, a ‘feeling and recognition of we and they’. However, Benedict Anderson (1981) depicts a nation as an imagined community,  a social construction imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group. Nationalism: Nativism: any orientation in Psychology or Philosophy that stresses the genetic, inherited influences on thought and behaviour over the acquired, experiential influences. Nature-Nurture Debate: the issue of how much of human behaviour is innate and how much is learned has occupied philosophers and scientists for centuries. However, more recent understanding of the brain’s ‘plasticity’ – the way it develops structurally in response to external stimuli – is beginning to render the ‘nature vs nurture debate’ obsolete. Negative Correlation: see Correlation. Negative Punishment: one of the… Read More

Glossary L

Nos   A    B    C    D    E    F    G    H    I    J    K    L    M    N    O    P-Q    R    S     T     U    V    W    X-Y-Z Latent Function: Late-Modern: Learned Helplessness: Learning Theory: see Behaviourism. Legitimate Authority: the recognised right of someone to give orders/instructions/commands to another and it to expected that person given the orders/etc will obey them. Legitimate authority is often symbolised by a uniform – eg: that of a police officer. Or it may be contextual – eg: a teacher may expect students to obey them on the school grounds but is unlikely to have that expecation away from the school. Levels of Adaptation: terminology I have developed to describe adaptation to changing circumstances:- Nominal Level – concerns alignment of the Identity to the Environment running right through the neurological levels Deeper Level – is to do with how vMEMES shape Values & Beliefs and influence Identity in relation to changes in the Life Conditions in the  Environment Levels of Data: there are different ways that variables can be measured and behavioural scientists typically group measurements into one of 4 scales:- Nominal data: a frequency count or tally chart of categorical items – eg: the number of… Read More