Replying to LO27358 --
Dear At and all,
Thank you for your caring about my attempt to create something in the
aftermath of the immense provocation of 01-09-11. Meanwhile
strength-comparing has turned into the next round.
>Let us use your suggestion of taking a shortcut
>by looking for EOs among animals and then identify them among as an EO
>general to humankind too. Your suggestion imply a symmetry between going
>from animals to humans and going from humans to animals.
If there were a symmetry there would be no shortcut. I was thinking of the
emergence of humans also as a one-to-many-mapping of EO's and instead of
tracing back from the many to the one already present in animals realm I
have tried to identify the one and follow it's path of evolution -
especially the bifurcation point where destructive outcomes came into
reach. I have tried to articulate my grasp of this point so far as:
>>I wish to offer to the list strength-comparing
>>(competition) as such an EO (ESC?). Constructively,
>>the outcome of this EO could be the development
>>of learning couples like master-apprentice or
>>teacher-learner with the philosophical schools of
>>ancient Greece or the medieval guilds as examples.
>>Destructively we would think in terms of winners
>>and losers.
The organizing essence would be to find ones place and to fill it. The
concept of "place" will need to be checked with the 7Es in mind to trace
possible impairings. To allow only for two categories, winners and losers
is severe impaing of sureness due to the demarcation in it. Also to think
of strength-comparing as a comparison with a one dimensional scale,
attaching a value to ones strength so that it can be compared with others
strength is not much better:
>Winfried, my personal problem with "comparing-strength" has been my
>training as a physicist and chemist. I see it as a rather simple action
>involving two measurements with a standard. Furthermore, I actually
>dislike competition because of the stress on the win-lose facet.
So I could think of "place-filling" as another name - but this name has no
appeal at all for me, because it does not tell anything about the "how".
Also, liveness comes short, because "place" sounds static although a
complex place is meant to be a becoming place. As for the "how", you
write:
>I myself have also had thoughts on this "comparing-strengths" as an EO,
>but I thought intuitively of it as part of the ESC "game-playing".
I am wondering how much of game-playing is done to find and fill ones
place. I have to think of Games People Play by Eric Berne. Much of those
games is all but constructive. They seem to me closer to what I have in
mind with strength-comparing than your game-playing I suppose.
Now for competition: I think of it as an expression of the LRC (Law of
Requisite Complexity) and LSC (Law of Singularity of Complexity). These
two laws suggest to me that the "places" are structured hierarchically.
Entropic forces which lead to fluxes towards higher and higher peaks in
the free energy landscape are the essence of competition constructively.
Of course there are many ways to impair competition, so that we seldom
encounter constructive competition. Positively, I remember a professor of
physics of mine who once said that he feels lucky. Although he will
probably not find the unified theory of all four fundamental forces, he
may belong to those few who will recognize it, when it will be found one
day and may be, possibly some of his thinking helped to find it.
Now for being a physicist: Dialogue is a bosonic ESC, competition may be a
complementary fermionic ESC. I think of thoughts as collective, bosonic,
the exchange particles of my individuality so to say. The "container of
meaning" forms a kind of Bose-Einstein-condensat. On the other hand, our
strengths are individual, fermionic and each fermion has to fill one
unique place. And this place can be occupied by no other fermion. With
electrons as fermions, this is the basis of the structured "places" in the
periodic system of elements, the fundament of all chemistry.
>>I started to wonder how close I could come
>>with EOs which in themselves do not include
>>judgement but which in their use are often
>>hardly distinguished from judgemental thinking.
snip
>Wow, now you have also opened another can of worms! What all are involved
>with judgemental thinking?
What do you mean by "open a can of worms"? Is this the premature
suggestion for a one-to-many-mapping (one can, many worms)? Or is this the
suggestion of some kind of "many" without following up each of those many
with a rich picture as you do in your teaching? Premature as I am sitting
here and writing on these topics, I see judgemental thinking as an
expression of impaired deep categoricity. One judges according to
categories, which do not depict the complexity that should have been taken
into account to establish sureness. "Deep" means that this impairing can
be due to an impairing in any of the other six essentialities. For example
a set of predefined categories is impaired sureness due to impaired
openness. You have stressed this point more than once in the past for
questionaires, multiple choice tests, personality tests etc. Competing for
a predefined set of places is impaired competition due to missing
openness. Looking for the existing chairs in a company and competing for
those is definitely impaired competition.
>>situation-assessing
>>problem-solving
>>decision-making
>>future-anticipating
>
>Wow, now you have blown a storm into my mind! Are the other three not also
>part of problem-solving?
Only you can tell whether all four are part of your problem-solving. And I
think with a strom in your mind you will get more out of them than they were
meant to mean before. These four "organiziers" - in the sense used by Kepner
and Tregoe - are designed to manage action:
situation-assessing - what needs to be acted on?
problem-solving - is it heritage of the past?
decision-making - is it choosing a path now?
future-anticipation - is it avoiding problems in the future?
The tools provided for dealing with any of the four are highly analytical.
Yet with a gifted facilitator they can contribute their share in
organizational learning.
I love very much your example:
>Perhaps the most common seemingly "elementary organiser" among animals is
>"eating-food". This "eating-food" is also a very common among humans,
>except the billions who live in poverty and the millions among them who
>die each year of hunger. But does this commonality make "eating-food" an
>ESC?
You have walked the path that I suggested, didn't you? You arrived at the
conclusion that food-eating could be an ESC but only when it is cultivated
as such. Otherwise it is impaired. You immediately put your finger on the
point of bifurcation: Eating food is excluded from the spiritual
dimension.
>I think it would have been one should humans, despite the labels we could
>give them, would think more about "eating-food" among other humans when
>eating food self. I think we should not forget that human creativity is
>influenced by the back action of the entire human mind. Unfortunately,
>"eating-food" has become a plain physical activity among most humans
>without any connection to the mind and thus creativity.
Yet:
>However, the Banthu have developed and immense culture among eating food.
>For them it was indeed an ESC "food-eating".
The fact that an EO can act as an ESC for some humans, although it does
not so any more for others is exactly the point I am interested in - a
lost strength, lost ability to create and learn.
The worst impairing of food-eating (I will call it nutrition for short) is
starvation. With your contribution, nutrition and competition started to
play in my mind. Let us not make a dialectical dual of the dual nutrition
and competition. Like wholeness and sureness as essentialities, both ESCs
are needed. Admittedly, todays role which competition in one part of the
world has on terrible starvation on other parts of the world becomes more
and more clear. You found those words for it:
>This I want to say to fellow learners. If you really want to experience
>the destructive face of western civilisation and not merely boast of its
>constructive face, make "food-eating" an ESC in your life. Use the
>dialogue (another ESC) to find out what caused this starvation in your
>city or one close to you. You will soon wish that you belonged to another
>civilisation.
Many places were found, taken, occupied but not filled. Not filling a
place leads to starvation somewhere else. Constructively, we need to
choose a place not according to what we can get, but what we can give and
contribute to the whole according to our unique strengths. As examples I
have mentioned the relation of master and apprentice, both are places to
be filled. The same for guilds in mediecal society, but think also of the
organs in our body.
Sigh! I wrote (the can of worms):
>>I started to wonder how close I could come with EOs which in themselves do
>>not include judgement but which in their use are often hardly
>>distinguished from judgemental thinking.
I start to wonder whether I have not come too close, yet I hope I could
contribute to making clearer that there is also a constructive side to
competing, which is captured in the EO comparing-strength, although the
words alone may already tear one to the destructive side. Take care and
rope yourselves tightly to the constructive side. Hope you are not
starving physically and spiritually so that you can train by employing the
other ESCs first. Not saying that you are safe there, but what does safety
mean anyhow today?
Liebe Gruesse,
Winfried
--"Dressler, Winfried" <Winfried.Dressler@Voith.com>
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