An Extended Description of the Natural Systems Approach, Method, and Philosohpy

Natural Systems is an approach that seeks to find solutions to problems across a spectrum of individuals; couples; families; neighborhoods; public schools; mental health; juvenile justice correctional institutions; public policies; large and small organizations, and many other types of organizations and agencies. At the same time, it takes into consideration perspectives on past and future time. Natural systems uses current scientific knowledge in the fields of sociology; mental health research and treatment modalities; psychology divisions such as social and evolutionary psychology; management; economics; systems theory; linguistics and psycholinguistics; neurology and neuropsychology; biology; demographics; anthropology and cultural comparisons; history; futurist studies; and whatever else may be relevant to the problem under consideration. Natural Systems is not averse to using results of our technological genius. One of the main reasons why it is called ‘Natural’ is that it attempts to study and solve problems by integrating factors across spectrums, by levels, and from the most global external structures and systems through the most micro internal, psychological structures and processes. In other words, it is a holistic, multidimensional approach.

Before human societies and their organizations and people were taxonomized, organized, measured, regulated, compartmentalized, systematized, computerized, segregated, commoditized, certified, officialized, and ending finally with social organizations becoming ossified en extremis, we humans related to each other in a face-to-face, intuitive, holistic way. We cannot go back to those earlier pre-industrial, halcyon days and should not do so. Instead, the way forward is to master the art of thinking and relating to all of these sudden developments in a multi-level; multi-dimensional; integrated; objective and subjective; and personal manner, or in what some might call a neo-holistic manner. In doing this, we can begin to recapture the personal and communal aspects or values that have been lost in this mad rush into modernization. We must recapture the humanness of being humans and overcome our transformation of each other into things and of our lives into the frenzied pursuit of and immersion in possessions and status rivalries. Resisting the magnetic draw toward the immediacy, receptivity, and thoughtlessness of our myopic, narcissistic, vicarious, now oriented, easy-button, insensitive, depersonalized culture just in order to learn to think in a methodical, holistic, natural systems way is a difficult challenge that we must not fail to meet. Natural Systems is that direly needed, neo-holistic way of thinking and relating.

Natural Systems does not set fixed parameters or variables. Furthermore, its concern is not with conducting replicable and observable scientific experiments or arriving at general theories or laws with respect to any of the fields listed above nor does it seek universal truths. It is oriented toward practical solutions to critical issues in our society. As such, it does not restrict itself just to the canons of science. ‘Natural Systems’ typically speculates about what is not immediately ‘observable’ (but not supernatural) and it heuristically applies conclusions from these speculations to a unified approach to understanding and restructuring organizations and assisting in the growth and development of individuals, simultaneously. If these speculations and tentative solutions are found to work according your criteria of amelioration, when solving practical problems, then your current goal has been reached. In the process, and as a by-product, Natural Systems may make conjectures or hypotheses that could be subjected to scientific study by anyone. However, that is not its primary purpose.

Natural Systems was referred to and discussed above as an ‘approach’ and as a ‘method’. It also could be called a philosophy. As a philosophy, it is a set of basic principles or concepts about the nature of social institutions and human beings. Natural Systems examines the underlying basic concepts of causality and freedom in human affairs. It also questions what people tend to take as reality when viewing and relating to social institutions without reference to their history or potential for change. As a method, it encourages taking different perspectives. Perspectivism is a principal part of ‘Natural Systems”. It also encourages using what could be called a ‘continuously self-correcting model’. That is to say, all solutions, even those that already have been implemented, should be subjected to constant questioning and revision. Organizational structures that already have been put in place or treatment modalities that have been adopted should be considered tentative and subject to review and revision. Nothing currently in place should be considered ‘ossified’. This is makes Natural Systems a highly flexible system.

In addition, this method or approach is always meant to encourage users to look to levels of structures and systems that ascend and descend from broad to narrow. The content you fill in when revising the levels of structures can be subject to your desire to change perspectives. This flexibility applies to internal structures and processes as well. As one traverses and alters the content of the levels of the top and bottom pyramids, it is also important to ferret out the unidirectional and mutual influences between these levels. Perspectivism, therefore, is an essential part of the Natural Systems philosophy as well as its method. While people do not incorporate this approach, method, and philosophy as a kneejerk reaction to social issues, not doing so is considered unnatural in that human social problems are not ‘of the moment’ and do not exist in isolation from the welter of interconnectedness of our world.

II. The Duplex Pyramid Model

The duplex pyramid symbol is used to represent or iconically illustrate what I call The “Duplex Pyramids Model” which is central to Natural Systems.

Logo
Figure 1. The Basic Natural Systems Model

In the center of Figure 1 above, there are two pyramids, one on top of the other. The top pyramid is inverted. The top pyramid is represented in Figure 2 below as a stratification of levels of external structures and systems. It moves top down in levels from the most to the least global or most to least encompassing. Conversely, the ascending levels from Dyadic Interaction to Global Encompassing Environments are, spatially and temporally, increasingly unobservable to the naked eye and require knowledge and imagination to construct what one cannot see. For example, if you were discussing or studying global warming you might want to imagine the geological history of the globe as far back as possible; the whole earth with its continents and bodies of water and their currents; clouds and the ozone layer; large masses of ice and glaciers; all sorts of measures of temperature variations; the currents of winds; variations in rainfall; the impact on animal, vegetable, and marine species; the publications of the worldwide cohort of scientists studying global warming and pollution of the earth; the worldwide cohort of politicians and the many NOGs advocating action to halt these phenomena; and the like. The more you know about geology, geography, meteorology, and related subjects, the more accurately you can use your imagination to construct what you cannot immediately see. The more complete and accurate your imagination, the more effectual your plan of action will be.

At the tips, where the pyramids meet, are the most immediately observable but the least encompassing constructs. The top pyramid’s bottom tip and the bottom pyramid’s tip join and represent the present interaction between two people, or dyadic interaction. You can observe, in front of you, two people interacting. If you are trying to establish each party’s patterns of interaction across time, you have either to follow them and keep records for a long time or rely on your memory of your past observations of them. These observations will typically involve their interactive behavior with a succession of partners. From the tip of the bottom pyramid, it moves successively down levels to the least immediately observable and the most enduring and pervasive yet least directly influential.

To gain insight into the bottom pyramid’s levels of internal processes, you increasingly may have to rely on the research and inferences of many experts from the social sciences. You can supplement information about was going on inside persons over time with instances in which people periodically confide through self-reports and other scientific instruments or from what they can provide from introspection. These are notoriously unreliable. Determining how these internal processes vary over time becomes increasingly difficult the deeper you go into the levels of a personality. Attempting to correlate these internal processes with levels of external structures, therefore, should be even more difficult. It is easy to see why such challenges are seldom undertaken.

In reference to keeping track of one’s own behavior across time in dyadic interactions, one can use a technique called journalizing or keeping a personal journal. Using this technique, a person can try to keep track of their internal processes in relation to the way they vary with respect to different organizations and meetings attended; settings within them; roles; situations that emerge; and interactions with ever-changing dyad partners. The deeper the level within the person, the more likely this method is to be pure fabrication. There are specific procedures to use with journalizing to help minimize such things as embellishment or defensiveness. If this procedure is faithfully used over time, noting dates and external factors as you record the details of your internal processes, then you may gain much more semi-objective, subjective knowledge about oneself than by just relying on memory. You probably, and rightly so, suspect that this approach will not bear valuable information. Even recording your own ‘observable’ behavior is likely to be unreliable.

III. The Top [Inverted] Pyramid: External Structures and Systems

The analytical value of the top pyramid and its levels can perhaps most easily be described by using another illustration. Take, for example, a teacher and student being observed during their interaction during class. Their respective formal roles are usually known but their informal roles must be inferred. The classroom, or place where teaching is ongoing, is observable. Its furnishings and equipment are observable and rarely need explanation. Its designation as a setting for teaching and learning must be inferred but rarely is mistaken. However, one must infer the kind or quality of relationship they have. Situations can develop between persons, such as students, in the classroom. These situations can be observed but the nature of the situation must be inferred and categorized. The assumptions about the exact nature of the situation can be illusive. Why different types of situations arise in different classrooms or between different teachers and their students can be very difficult to determine. The dyadic interaction between a teacher and a student is directly observable, yet its significance can be illusive.

When one is in a classroom, one typically assumes that it is encompassed within a school. You may meet the superintendent, but you must gather a large amount of information in order to draw conclusions about the way the school is organized and administrated. That is to say, the nature of the school’s structure and its vertical system or hierarchical structure may require extensive analysis. A Table of Organization, and even job descriptions, may only roughly approximate the actual state of affairs. There can be a huge gap between job descriptions and job performance. Assumptions based on the written descriptions are often quite mistaken. Furthermore, the particular school may be assumed, and usually erroneously so, to be a part of a school district that determines the policies and procedures of each of its schools. School Boards are assumed to have control over what happens in classrooms, hallways, and school grounds. In most schools, nothing could be further from the truth. If they have any influence at all, it is likely to be negative. Gaining insight into the nature of the formal and informal relationships between the school districts, school boards, school employees, students, city and county governments, State Boards of Education, the state and even the national government requires gathering a considerable amount of knowledge of both formal statues, records, oral reports, and first hand information. It sometimes takes years to assess the effects of different levels of structure on one another.

On the broadest, most encompassing level, understanding how the school can be the way it is in contemporary society requires extensive study of political, social, cultural, and historical documents. Inferences about the efficacy of contemporary schools and school systems would require comparative studies across many types of school districts; possibly studies of the school systems of foreign nations; comparisons across periods of history; and analyzing such information from the perspective of the current goals and values of the society the school serves. This also usually should involve making future projections about ever changing future societal trends, goals, values, and needs.

Figure 2, The Top Pyramid: External Structures and Systems

Top Pyramid 2

Consider a few examples of the effects of levels and the insights that can be gathered from comparative analysis between sectors of the same level.

In light of the description above, therefore, the structures and systems included for study at each level of the top pyramid can never be considered perfect, static, or permanently fixed. The occupants assigned to each level of the top pyramid, such as ideological groups, agencies, or institutions, are a matter of perspective and judgment. The perspectives one adopts and judgments one makes should be presumed to change and become more refined as one proceeds in trying the find the best possible solution or plan for the problem or issue under consideration. In addition, each level is to be analyzed in terms of its relationships to the occupants of the other levels and in terms of their mutual impact. As one progresses, therefore, insights are likely to suggest that the occupants, factors, and information gained from these analyses should change as the designated entities being studied change. In addition, a person’s understanding of entities included in their configuration within and across levels should change as well. At any stage of analysis or implementation of a plan, measurements that are relevant to chosen mission statements, goals, and objectives can and should be used. Their results, such as performance indicators, ratios, and the like, should be evaluated as to how well they approximate the entity’s mission, goals, and objectives. On the other hand, no one should confuse such measurements with bona fide scientific research or even applied or action research. They meant to solve problems and not to arrive at scientific laws, ideal models, or universal truths. If the performance indicators turn out to be what you want, that is fine. However, these should not result in automatic generalizations to be extended to other similar entities.

The content of the top Pyramid is referred to as ‘external structures and systems’. Systems are different from structures and are even more difficult to grasp. A system exists within a structure. A system consists of interrelated or integrated parts such that should any one part change, it affects changes in the other parts and the elimination of one part dislocates, distorts, reduces the functions, or even renders the other parts inoperable. This sometimes can occur to such an extent that the whole system fails and the structure collapses and has to be replaced with completely new systems or in the case of a corporation, for example, it simply goes bankrupt. Structures have many systems that are simultaneously interdependent and yet function independently. Systems can be viewed as representing the dynamics of structures. Structures of organizations entail systems. There are a number of systems and they are all inextricably interdependent. However, they must be analyzed as though they were separate. Using this method makes it possible for one to examine how external structures influence external systems and vice versa. When systematically taking this approach, a next and vital step can be taken which is to analyze how these factors influence components of the internal structures and processes to be addressed below. The same is true for the intentionality processes to be discussed in a subsequent section.

Each descending level of the external structures consists of smaller units of analysis. For example, below the Encompassing Environment is the institution, organization, or community. Below that level, we have particular Settings within, for instance, the institution. There is a fine art to the analysis and design of Settings. Settings can involve such things as seating arrangements but many other factors as well. Given a Setting and its designated activity, there usually will be both formal and informal roles. Informal roles can be unconsciously assigned by the group or they can develop as result of members situational identities. Given your goal for an activity to take place in a Setting, the seating arrangement, for example, can facilitate or ruin the chances for reaching your goal. The composition and configuration of a setting and its formal and informal roles can elicit or prevent the emergence of a wide variety of situations and dyadic interactions, some of them desirable and some undesirable. To be able to use Natural Systems effectively you must be willing and able to go through the arduous steps outlined in its method of analysis. in spite of the amount of effort, the results can be enormously positive.

IV. SYSTEMS WITHIN STRUCTURES

Once one has selected one of the uppermost levels for analysis, its structure is likely to include organizations, agencies, institutions, and such and these will generally have broad purposes or missions that are identifiable. Next, it is usually possible to determine what and organization, for example, it purpose or purposes are and subsumed under broad purposes are its goals that are supposed to achieve each purpose. With high-level structures there are usually broad purposes that encompass all are most of that levels’ subcomponents such as, for example, agencies. At this point, the analyst may want to examine the purposes of each subcomponent, or agency, to see whether they are consistent with their encompassing structure. Purposes of subcomponents may complement or facilitate one another but are rarely islands unto themselves. Purposes and goals are often ethically complex and result in complex debates over their nature and their consistency or inconsistency with one another. Structures having many systems present a similar challenge. The analyst may find, in the course of studying, for example, an agency, that its systems compete or subvert each other. Systems may also have ethical implications and these may be inconsistent with broad purposes of the agency or with one another. For example, the communication system of an agency may entail ethical implications that conflict with other systems. For example, distribution policies within the agency may conflict with the ethical requirements of the agency’s social systems, particularly where distribution within an agency could be inconsistent with distribution of information to its external social relations. Corporations, for example, may have stated purposes that imply concern for the welfare of the community or broader society within which it exists and upon investigation, one finds the information detrimental to the community is being withheld. In this case, the ethics of the communication system conflicts with or undermines the ethics related to the social system.

Figure 3. Systems within Levels of External Structures

Each Level of Structures Has Its Own Set of Systems

Structures can have many systems within them and the analyst has to demarcate the systems to be included in the analysis and likewise demarcate what is to be included in each system. The following are brief examples of some typical systems an analysis of an organization, neighborhood, governmental department, nation, etc. will discover or uncover.

Delineating the Major Systems

There is usually a Vertical System. Vertical systems are found within most organizations. A notable example is the way Quakers are organized. A vertical system may be referred to as its management system or its hierarchy of authority and responsibility. It can be meant to be used in a broader sense. For example, the informally stratified levels of socio-economic status can have a strong top-down influence, particularly in a community. Management involves something more than Figure 3. How Systems Are Configured within Each Level of External Structure

its hierarchy or its authority as represented by its table of organization. The organization’s purpose may be the products it is designed to produce or the services it is designed to offer. The management, therefore, would include not just a hierarchy but also the responsibility for formulating the organization’s mission. A broader description of a vertical system might include, in addition to its hierarchy of authority (responsibility for and accountability to), its complexity, span, and size.

Horizontal Systems

Financial Systems are the ways, or allocation policies, in which parts of a structure are supplied or fed the resources or materials needed for parts to exist and function.

One common system within organizations is the Communication system. A Communication System will typically consist of messages, their means of transmission, and the routing paths for information. It typically keeps parts of a structure or its other systems aware of each other’s goings on.

Social Systems are the ways people relate and interact with one another both within the structure and between the structure and its external world, community, or social context.

Performance Systems are the specifications for how parts will function or work. Plus personnel evaluation.

Longitudinal-Historical Systems help both to perpetuate of the concept of what the structure is and to facilitate transitions in that concept, help to acculturate incoming members to the structure, and help preserve the structure’s identity and understanding of the structure as a whole, or its Gestalt.

Training Systems prepare members to perform functions of current parts and newly developing parts.

Measurement Systems assess and determine whether parts and functioning properly. A brief description of how these systems operate and how they can be optimally designed follows.

Managing these systems within structures to facilitate maximum human potential is a high-level art. While it is nothing like an algorithm, it is a special kind of method that requires proceeding systematically in a somewhat algorithm like manner and yet doing so with extreme flexibility. Each of the systems must be examined independently but still in relation to each other. As one proceeds, it is necessary to set each system in the context of aspects of specific levels of structure, particularly the levels of organizational structures. Since this approach is a highly complex process, it will help if the analysts create a form or forms to proceed through steps of relating different systems to each other within and between each structural level being examined.

A. VERTICAL SYSTEMS

A vertical system has a head, for example the top administrator in a corporation called a CEO. The CEO’s style and effectiveness will be a direct function of the configuration of the horizontal, financial, communication, internal and external social, performance, training, measurement, longitudinal-historical, and other systems. A deeper understanding of a vertical system might also include a definition or description of its management philosophy. Our top Pyramid is inverted. If one were depicting the table of organization of an organization, the narrow peak would be at the top and line staff would be the widest level and at the bottom. The narrow peak is occupied by one person and yet this person represents the broadest degree of influence. The more numerous line staff would have the smallest degree of influence and be represented by wide, bottom level of the pyramid. Contrary to the ordinary, in the duplex pyramids model, the head is represented by the top and has the widest level since it signifies its extensive degree of influence. Furthermore, contrariwise, the narrow peak of this pyramid is on the bottom, representing the line staff, which possesses the smallest degree of influence.

Since you might instantly recall instances that were exceptions to this generality, you should also grasp the significance of analyzing Vertical Systems and trying to gain a more insightful perspective on the way those varieties function.

Management typically decides and oversees departments and their functions. However, Natural Systems finds it important to give special attention to departments and their layout factors and refer to them as a separate system that we refer to as the Horizontal System. This can include the architectural blueprint of a structure of an organization and the spatial arrangements of departments. How departments and functions are arranged with respect to one another can be somewhat haphazard; can be influenced by their place in the chain of command; their size; their relation to clients; place in the flow of production or delivery of service; the perceived value of their personnel; financial considerations; the dictates of layout upon occupancy; tradition; or some idiosyncratic need of a manager or top management. If one were to introduce the concept of Horizontal Systems and draw into consideration for a more methodical analysis the other Systems, then a completely differently design for the spatial arrangement of departments and functions might emerge.

In turn, the configuration of systems will exert a powerful influence on the personalities within the organization. By personalities is meant the person’s internal structures and processes and their processes of intentionality as well as how these are expressed in behavior. Rarely does anyone step back and methodically analyze the personality and behavior of organization members, business employees, or subjects of governmental regime or its institutions in terms of how the total configuration of systems is shaping their personality and behavior. Persons are usually regarded as the authors or initiators of their behavior, independent of the configuration of the structure of the organization and its systems. Personalities are typically regarded as something inherent in the person operating independent of the forces of structures and systems. My personal observations over my entire career have led me to the opposite conclusion. Now, when I see self-defeating, ineffective, or aberrant behavior or behavior that is having a negative affect on others of the organization, I immediately begin to look to the structure and systems of the organization. When learn that a corporate executive has engaged negative behavior such as white-collar crime, policies harmful to the environment or communities, or socially disapproved behavior, I look to the nature of the systems within which this person operates. The combined effects of the legal status of the corporation, the nature of free enterprise and capitalism, and obligations to stockholders to maximize profit and minimize cost, all lead to a field force that pressures executives to engage in such negative behaviors. Counterproductive features of the structure and systems of the organization itself and those same categories of features within which it is imbedded, therefore, become the primary suspects as causal factors. Furthermore, by imagining alternative ways of configuring the organization, it becomes even more apparent that behavior is a function of structure. Consequently, alternative structures can be imagined and hypotheses about how they might alter personalities come to mind. It has usually been the case that when the organization is restructured according to one of these hypotheses, the aberrant behavior is replaced with positive, productive behavior. The system that pressures toward maximizing profit and minimizing cost is primarily aspects of the Performance system. In addition, the Financial, Communication, and Measurement systems contribute largely to these pressures. Altering these systems in strategic ways can make pressures become positive and consequently the executive’s behavior becomes positive. Outsiders viewing the executives’ positive behavior are likely to attribute it to their positive personality.

Vertical Systems and management was included in the list of systems in Figure 3 above. It was noted that the directives of top management are shaped or influenced by a philosophy. Often top and lower levels of management have never articulated their philosophy. Their philosophy is implicit. Among the many implicit traits of a management philosophy is its degree of sensitivity to the structure of the organization and the effects of designs of structure on the organization as a whole, including and particularly the members of the organization. As mentioned above, the top inverted pyramid, which is broadest at the top, represents the top management. In this case, the broad top level suggests that the top officials usually have the broadest or most pervasive influence over the entire organization. However, the top level also may serve to filter the communication and influence of the rest of society outside of the organization. It simultaneously may serve to filter how of the organization is reflected to the broader society and how the organization interprets society’s reactions to it. Internally, the way the total organization is structured and functions will influence the executive’s attitude and philosophy. The executive, in turn, will suffuse this resultant attitude and philosophy to executive cohorts, political figures, leaders of community organizations, and the media. Some executives have an acute and intuitive understanding of how artfully and constructively to design organizational structures to elicit the optimal potential of members while at the same time engendering a deep loyalty to and fondness for the organization and its leaders. Similarly, these executives with this kind philosophy will reflect to the broader society a positive view of the organization and its members. Whether or not this image simply is spin can be determined by the effects on society. If it is genuine, the public will relate positively to the organization and members. If it is spin, eventually society can become soured on the organization. Such results could even reach up to the highest level of government and have an impact on what kind of legislation is enacted which in turn will affect the organization and its members. In other words, the Vertical philosophy influences the Training System, and consequently these influence and are influenced by the Performance and Financial Systems, while these are codified in the Measurement System, and simultaneously irradiates through Communication System and the Historical-Societal System.

A style of involving, listening to, and taking members seriously is an aspect of participatory management. These same principles operate in intimate, interdependent relationships. If the couple agrees to listen, respect, and have a mutually facilitating style, they will tend to negotiate fairly on decisions. Each will also feel successful when the other is successful. Having organization members collaborate with their leaders to set goals and objectives for their organization, departments, and themselves has the powerful effect of instilling a sense of ownership for their own roles and tasks as well as for the whole organization. If a management that emulates a good intimate relationship has individuals and departments negotiate interlocking objectives, they too will each feel successful when the other is successful. Rivalries and jealousies will disappear and mutual facilitation, cooperation, and respect will ensue. Having a structure where management uses this type of objective-setting melded with a participatory management orientation coupled with finesse for designing positive structures and an artful use of and design of its various systems will turn out to be a magical combination. This will also elicit the respect and loyalty of the broader society. It should be obvious by now how intimately vertical and communication systems are related.

Another common style is called ‘Management By Objectives’ (MBO). While ‘Participatory Management’ (PM) can be a part of MBO, it is not essential to it. When PM is not used with MBO, staff or members are not likely to get a sense of what other departments are working toward and how they all fit together with goals to reach the organization’s Mission. When this is the case, it is difficult for individuals to get a sense of identification with the whole organization or to have the feeling of being all on the same team. Separateness is also likely to induce rivalries between departments.

Natural Systems adds its own style called Structuralism.

Vertical Systems can be characterized in terms of levels of maturity. If the tone of the vertical system or management hierarchy can be set by the behavior of the top administrator, then his or her behavior can shape, in their own image, the behaviors of successive lower levels of administration.

For example, a top administrator who is hedonistic, deceptive, manipulative, and bends policies and rules capriciously to court favor and evade disfavor, then managers up and down the chain of command are likely to begin behaving or managing in a similar manner.

If a top administrator tends to use force and disregards conflicting information and recommendations of subordinates, subordinates will tend to do the same. Such an organization can become brutal in its methods of enforcement and punishment for disagreements and non-compliance and even for reports of the failure of their boss’s orders. Everyone becomes ruthless and deceptive in this type of management atmosphere.

If a top administrator is rigid in demanding adherence to rules and policies and standards for procedures, and will not tolerate deviations for the multitude of daily situations that require non-standard innovations and individual initiative that involve variations or exceptions to the ‘rule’, then the organization will become cumbersome, awkward, inefficient, and ineffective. If this occurs in a human services institution, like and prison, school, welfare program, or the like, then the people who are harmed the most are the clientele or residents.

If a top administrator

B. HORIZONTAL SYSTEMS

Horizontal Systems are utterly different from Communication and Vertical Systems. Horizontal refers to the way organizations or communities are laid out. Where are they geographically? Where are they with respect to other organizations or communities whether similar or different in nature? Where are they with respect to parent or subsidiaries of an organization? Within a metropolitan area, in what part of the area are they situated? What are the characteristics of the locale within which they are situated? These demographic features may be important for establishing needed relationships with other organizations in the area. However, with respect to the organization itself, the layout of offices or departments may be crucial to the optimal functioning of the other systems.

Typically, the horizontal characteristics of an organization are overlooked, even during a startup of a new organization or a branch. If it is a human services organization, the effects of the relationships between members or staff are not considered. The effects of the layout on a client population are seldom considered. Typically, factors that are considered are things like convenience for staff or manageability of client groups. Yet, ironically, the layout could be having a deleterious effect on the clients or residents. Using convenience as a criterion may in fact have such a negative effect on clientele that it actually sabotages the effectiveness of the staff with the clientele, thus resulting in interpersonal problems, high recidivism, lack of compliance, and the like. Such results can hugely absorb staff time and resources as well. The combined effects of costliness, inefficiency, and ineffectiveness may wind up being blamed on the nature of the clientele. Taking this view of the problems means that a search for alternative causes or experiments with alternative horizontal arrangements is not considered. Oddly, often even minor changes in layout results in such dramatic reduction in certain kinds of problems that effectiveness and efficiency increase and cost goes down. Doubtful as it may seem at first glance, a defective horizontal structure can impede the mission of the institution, which is to facilitate growth in maturity.

One important way the Horizontal Systems can impede success with its mission is by placing departments or functions that have interlocking objectives in locations that make it difficult for them to communicate. If departments are adjoined in a chain of processes, or if they are closely interdependent, the more visible contact with one another, the more success they will have in facilitating one another’s interlocking objectives. Also, the more immediate, transparent, and effective communication is between those with interlocking objectives, the more likely they are to facilitate each other’s objectives. Consider the opposite case. Imagine departments that are crucially interdependent but set their objectives in a manner that is detached from one another. Each is evaluated in terms of the degree to which they attain their objectives and rewarded accordingly. They are not likely to consider the adequacy of performance of each other and may even take pride in excelling over those with whom they should be helping. Invidious rivalries can occur and sabotage the overall success of the organization. Without anyone be aware of it, the cause of underperformance or failure is likely to be an inauspicious horizontal (spatial) relationship between such departments. They would be likely to receive negative evaluations that would generate resentment and deliberate, covert mischief and damage to the organization. It may seem odd that merely restructuring horizontal relationships could result in a change from substandard performance to superior performance. People in these departments who had been thought to be problem staff, even thought to have emotional problems, would suddenly be regarded and healthy, highly motivated, successful staff. Furthermore, the cause of the change would be the optimal placement of departments with interlocking objectives.

C. FINANCIAL SYSTEMS

Zero Based Budgeting, cost benefit analysis, resource allocation versus annual revisions of traditional, stagnant, annual revisions. and Family budgeting

D. COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS

Consider the top management of an organization and examine the communication systems at that level. What information is gathered for potential communication? From where or whom does it come in to departments? After deciding what should be disseminated and the style or form to be used, to whom will it be communicated? There is also a question of when it should be communicated. In what manner will it be communicated? When speeches to gathering of staff are given, interjecting jokes will increase receptivity and memory of the message. When delivering official speeches to larger audiences, well-honed elocutionary humor will cause the audience to identify with the speaker, enhance the authority of the speaker, and increase the appeal of the message.. What role does the location or placement of messages play? For example, some information is best presented through postings at high traffic points. Some should be routed to parties who are selected based on relevance. In other words, sending memos to everyone or to those for whom the message is not relevant will cause recipients to neglect or devalue all messages. Some should be presented through videos to organization wide gatherings. Using this approach without priming the audience for the content the video with discussion of its essential points will cause most to miss the main points. Without following the video with discussion of main points and their use on the job, the main points will have a very short shelf life. If the content of the message is intended to be implemented in the workplace, then it should be delivered in the workplace. Training delivered away from the work site is unlikely to transfer to the work sight. This is true even if delivery includes practice exercises. Learning tends to be situation specific. That being the case, delivery should include examples taken from the work site and participants should have the opportunity to ask questions about what they feel may be exceptions. The group should be encouraged to explore the rationale for the procedure being presented. They should also be encouraged to report back instances in which the procedure was ineffective.

If the information is to be disseminated down the chain of command, to selected departments, with the stipulation of exclusivity, or with the stipulation for dissemination by department heads in small personal groups in which there is an opportunity for discussion and feedback, there should be a way to ensure that the feedback is taken seriously. Through all of this, there is also a subtle, informal mode of communication going on. Those who are recipients or participants will inevitably make it known to outsiders that something was going on from which they were excluded. The nonverbal communication of each group could be such as to create friction, jealousy, rivalry, resentment, deprecation, superiority, and the like. These modes of communication, therefore, can promote or destroy a healthy sense of unity and cooperation. It can even lead to deliberate underperformance or sabotage. While the focus has been on dissemination down the chain, the way communication is structured for information going up the chain is equally important.

Language of commands

E. SOCIAL SYSTEMS

As noted above, a change in layout can have surprisingly beneficial effects. In this vein, one can examine Social Systems in relation to Horizontal Systems, but also in relation to Vertical and Communication Systems. If one wants to institute interlocking objectives to improve interdepartmental relations and cooperation, considering where departments are laid out with respect to each other. Suppose interlocking objectives are not working. One might first blame the involved staff. Once again, odd at it may seem, the quality of the social relationships between people in the respective departments may be making it impossible for them to get know each other well and to communicate transparently so as to work out an effective meshing of procedures and functions. As everyone who has worked in an organization knows, there is always an informal social network. Staff has their official jobs and formal roles but they also have informal roles and relationships that are not easily detected by their managers or people in other departments. The official Communication System usually does not consider the informal social network. What was mentioned above about the management philosophy and the patterns of the Communication System having the potential to engender all kinds of negative feelings and conflicting relationships can now be understood in terms of these informal social roles and informal social networks or cliques. Failure to acknowledge the power of the informal Social System can lead to disastrous failure of otherwise extremely good programs and organizational goals. Another factor that is seldom considered because it is nearly impossible to detect when conducting work within the organization is the fact that there are also powerful informal relations with people outside of the organization such as family, friends, or other organizations within the surrounding community with which staff may be affiliated. These relations and groups may hold strong opinions and attitudes about how an organization like a human services institution should act and treat its clientele. These informal, external social reference groups may make it impossible for staff to adopt the philosophy and methods of treating clientele that the management is trying to promote. On the other hand, if all of these networks and forces within the broader Social System are examined and directly addressed, they could turn about and be powerful forces facilitating the success of the organization. In other words, just as with using structural design, participatory management, and management by objectives with the extra-institution Social System can just as equally result in a sense of ownership, mutual respect, mutual facilitation, as an organization-community-integrated-whole. Examining each of these four Systems, pairing each in relation to the others, and each in relation to both the functioning of the staff and effectiveness with the clientele will yield startling insights and astoundingly effective innovations for the successful accomplishment of the mission of the organization.

F. PERFORMANCE SYSTEMS measures for interlocking objectives public schools perf ms

G. LONGITUDINAL-HISTORICAL SYSTEMS

History lodges itself uniquely within each person. Their memory’s historical record contributes to each person’s stance toward what is immediate whether that be their reaction in a present situation or forming an opinion in a discussion, to name just a few instances of the way it contributes. A person’s historical record may consist of their own personal experiences such as insults or victories. It may consist primarily of recollections of events in the lives of others, such as friends or family. It may consist of changes of fortune occurring over time to oneself; one’s business, institution, or organization; one’s state or nation; or one’s religion, and so on. One’s historical record may be of discreet occurrences or it could be that some people look for patterns and trends and try to gain perspectives and analyze and make inferences or judgments about the course of their remembered history of observed events. Others may read history books or other written historical documents and form their perspectives or draw their inferences about the nature and course of history from these. Finally, some may have formulated histories that are combinations of all of these. The significance of this description is that people develop a sense of how things within their range of awareness and concern are likely to be like in the near to distant future. If you are a child, you may be concerned only with the expectation that your friend will visit you tomorrow. If you are a head of state, you may be concerned with your country’s economic data or with an upcoming conference with some other nation with respect to a peace agreement. If you are a teacher, you may be concerned with how the curricula you are to teach next year may change or what your students may be like when summer is over. Each person’s historical content and its range and configuration, perspectives on and stance toward that content, and concerns for and stance toward expectations will be unique, idiosyncratic. Furthermore, for many people, what is in their historical record may be below the level of consciousness and may have never been conceptually thought about, verbalized, or shaped in any way.

A leader can become aware of these idiosyncrasies and deliberately engineer what their follower’s are aware of and educate them with respect to factors in their organization that must or are going to change. The destabilizing effect of impending change can automatically invoke anxieties and questions about all manner of things they ordinarily never would focus on. The leader can bring into focus all of the systems and structures of the organization and using them can create, in the minds of the followers, a Gestalt of the organization. With a leader who listens well to the complaints, questions, and objections of the followers, these can be directed, in a systematic way, to each of the various systems and structures. The leader can magnify the flaws in systems and interactions between systems and thereby generate a quest for positive ways to restructure them. A contrast can be set up between the Gestalt of the organization as it has been and is and how that Gestalt can look if a positive restructuring were accomplished.

H. TRAINING SYSTEMS

I. MEASUREMENT SYSTEMS

V. SYSTEMS AT GLOBAL LEVELS INFLUENCE THE BEHAVIOR OF INTERACTIONS WITHIN SYSTEMS AT SUCESSIVE LOWER LEVELS OF STRUCTURE

Heretofore, the focus has been on the structures and systems in organizations such as agencies and institutions. Influence descends upon all of these organizations from the structures and systems at the global level. The focus here is mainly on American organizations and institutions. We could not get a complete understanding of how descending levels of structures exert their influence without first directing attention to global structures in the sense of the international community. The US exerts influence on many other nations and they influence the US. For example, we ship the materials and assembly instructions for toys to China and they export the toys to us. Since cost cutting is one of the ways corporations compete with one another, the cheap labor in China reduces cost. They export the toys to the US and our retail stores sell the toys at much reduced prices. Of course, this means drastic reductions in the US workforce and leaves many American families destitute. China and the US are separated by both the Pacific Ocean and the language barrier. Communication in the media would surface immediately if an investigative reporter discovered a US corporation was using what amounts to slave labor. The distance and language barrier factors result in negligible to no coverage of the US corporations’ deplorable exploitation of cheap Chinese labor. Besides impoverishing American families and brutalizing Chinese laborers, the eventual appearance of reports on these appalling conditions in the media of both countries results in concomitant complaints of both countries toward each other. International relationships turn sour and both sides begin covert and complex sabotage of each other. If conditions and relations such as this continue over years and decades, history solidifies negative perceptions of each other and even paranoid reactions to each other. This state of affairs causes mutually constructive treaties and contracts to be bogged down in a morass of international ill will. The way out of this morass is for the international community to engage in long term efforts toward restructuring relations and re-educating their peoples. As this is taking place, all parties must gradually work together to create transparent and frequent verifiable measurements of progress toward these objectives. At the same time, they must make strong, good faith efforts to keep their peoples well informed concerning these reports on their mutual progress.

While this perspective is important and there is still much to be said on this topic, a narrower topic can shed light easily and straightforwardly on the reciprocal relations between more local levels of structures. To illustrate, consider the configuration of settings within most institutions. A market economy, that is to say the combination of free enterprise and capitalism, affects home life and emotional states and behavior of family members. Kathy Griffin’s corporation had stockholders pressuring for a profit. She saw the cost cutting advantage of cheap child labor in Asia. Investigative reporters dramatized the Kathy Griffin case and this resulted in some degree of boycotting her products. I suspect that her bad publicity may have had something to do with her being ousted from her place on the Regis and Kathy Show. It also was a catalyst in bringing exploitation of labor in foreign nations to the forefront. Other similar stories surfaced and together fueled the resentment of American workers toward the massive outsourcing of their jobs to foreign nations. Earlier, Ross Perot, in 1996, was a vocal opponent of NAFTA as a harbinger of massive outsourcing. As the media was silent on the issue and both Bush Sr. and Clinton favored NAFTA, in due course, outsourcing has become the norm. Currently legislative bills concerning outsourcing, immigration, education and training for immigrants, retraining of laid off citizens, worker compensation, health care for the uninsured, free trade agreements, sham reports by Stock Market experts, tax bills, that even sponsors know are doomed to fail. The American public is painfully aware of its negative consequences. The current hoopla over Mexican immigrant workers makes it clear that there is vast under-the-table agreement on the part of corporate giants, American farmers, other small businesses, and politicians to promote both insourcing and outsourcing while giving lip service and bogus legislation to the contrary. These top-level structures integrate vertical, horizontal, financial, communication, social, performance, longitudinal-historical, training, and measurement systems to keep insourcing and outsourcing going full steam ahead while neutralizing the strong opposition of the majority of middle class Americans.

WORSHIP-DEVOTION TO TRADITION VERSUS CHANGE- GLOBALIZATION AND PEACE VERSUS JOB LOSS FROM OUTSOURCING -----RULES CONVENTIONS MORALITY ETHICS ADAPTATION TO UNIQUE SITUATIONS POLITICIANS AND DOUBLE SPEAK OPPORTUNISM AND FREE ENTERPRISE global environment driven by market economy means the world is the rats and free enterprise is the pied piper. What if-s or playing with perspectives interconnection of worldwide media and corporate interests. Elections and corporations gov leaders and corp ally and hire riot police to control those shafted by corp opportunism and exploitation Global imperialism global fundamentalism and fundamentalist imperialism and transformation religion of religious zealots into protagonists of Thomas Hobbs PAGEREF _Ref189535323 \h 21 control and oppression http://www.iep.utm.edu/h/hobmoral.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes Lllllllllllllllllllllllllll l

A. HISTORICAL ORIGINS OF AMERICA’S ADVERSARIAL CULTURE AND ITS PERVASIVE INFLUENCE ON OUR INSTITUTIONS AND ULTIMATELY ON DYADIC INTERACTIONS

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

Before entering into an analysis of America’s cultural attributes such as, for example, those that are adversarial, authoritarian, exploitative, and violent, it is necessary to provide a brief description of our national beginnings. The question surfaces as to how that early American culture set customs that predetermined contemporary ill-fated trends in the systems of our culture. For example, England and all of Europe had been war prone for centuries. Small groups were constantly fighting for dominance and fighting to appropriate their neighbors’ land and possessions. Primeval governmental structures meted out cruel punishment for whatever they thought were transgressions without having the least semblance of what we would call a justice system. Torture and cruel punishments were exacted even upon those who did not profess the correct religious doctrines.

Following the discovery of America, many English and Europeans began to immigrate to the primitive new land. Except for Indians who had a different language and who were perceived as outsiders, America could be considered an unpopulated and ungoverned land. It was devoid of governmental and religious rulers and traditions other than those they had brought with them, mostly in their memories, from their former nations. At first, they were ruled from afar by the British and they remained so for a very long time. Governing at such distance meant that control was extremely loose. The British sent Viceroys who tried to maintain their tenuous grip on the settlers and early colonies so as to collect taxes and maintain exports of gold and other coveted new world goods. More than just a few of the settlers in these British colonies were quite well educated. They built homes, small townships, developed farms and other rudimentary trades and soon some of them became landed gentry. These landed gentry eventually grew resentful of exploitation by the British and their Viceroys. The Viceroys or territorial governors emulated the arbitrariness of their King’s wishes. The Viceroys reigned supreme and uncurtailed over their American subjects. However, the colonists, particularly the landed gentry, longed to create from scratch a new form of government that would be free of all of the despised characteristics of the governments from which they had hoped to escape. They soon grew desperately wont to throw off that demeaning English yoke and devise their own version of an ideal state. Nevertheless, having been raised in those brutal and unjust countries, those very same cultural attributes inevitably and unconsciously continued in the fabric of their minds and infused their new culture. In spite of themselves, those attributes tinged their perceptions of each other and of the Native Americans. Colonists, therefore, were perpetually ready to punish or fight when threats from the Indians arose and when the way the British treated them became insufferable.

As the settlers moved further inland and encroached on Indian Territory, their initial good relations began to sour. The settlers had muskets by the late 1600s. The Indians had their silent bows and arrows and spears. When close up disputes arose, the musket won. However, the Indians were masters of the forest. They could make surprise attacks on settlers and silently shoot their arrows from afar. When settlers were killed, they got revenge or inflicted punishment on Indians by organizing and assaulting them with their more accurate and deadly muskets. Muskets evolved into rifles that are more sophisticated. In a couple of centuries, the encroaching settlers and the Indians became enemies. Renegade white gunrunners sold rifles to the Indians but the Americans had formed a military. Small troops of Americans became disciplined fighters and the long history of wars between the Westward moving Americans and the Native Americans.

The point of this brief history is that the Americans came with a cultural history of fighting and wars. They knew of no other way to settle conflicts in this primitive, lawless new land. There were exceptions. Some settlers learned to speak Indian languages and taught them English. They learned the Indian culture. These few were able to relate to Indians in a more civilized, peaceful manner. They were far outnumbered by the pugilistic majority. The landed gentry tended to live near the more populous, coastal regions. They led the way in emulating the civilized institutions of their ancestors of their motherlands. Nevertheless, the propensity to settle conflicts with war remained as the only available alternative, just like their Westward moving brethren. When the unjust and exploitative rule of the British became to overbearing and when the colonists became more populous and well organized, the scales tipped in favor of violent rebellion. The new world aristocrats wrote their 1776 “Declaration of Independence” and then gathered their people and fought and won the “War of Independence”.

After this victory, the most prominent aristocrats gathered and began exchanging ideas for a new nation and a Constitution emerged the nature of which was cast as a contrast to the evils of the governments from which their ancestors had fled. Institutions such as those involving commerce, religion, education, law and justice, and the like replicated the old world in a rudimentary way. However, with British rule cast off, they had the opportunity to create a new government remold those old world replicas into new institutions that were set free from the negative traditions of the old world. These aristocrats were knowledgeable with respect to philosophies of government that had been set forth by Loch and Rousseau. These philosophers portrayed a democracy. There would be no king. If the people were to be the ruler, how could this kind of government be structured? Being aristocrats and landed gentry, it took no great leap to formulate a representative government. In other words, they, or people like themselves, should act as representatives of ‘their’ people. The American population or society was already well stratified socially, economically, and educationally. A true democracy in which all of the people would meet and decide on such critical issues and taxes, war, trade, laws, distribution of land and income, and the like was completely untenable and was probably dismissed out of hand, if indeed such an alternative was ever presented.

The stage was now set for the emancipated new nation to be governed by a handful of aristocratic large landowners who were strategically located along the northeastern seaboard. These men could meet periodically to make laws that would protect their property rights, pass laws to regulate commerce in their favor and keep the populace under control, collect taxes and control budgets. They would select judges to administer courts with an adversarial justice system. They would institute courts that would have trials in which aristocratic defense and prosecution attorneys would argue cases against the accused before a jury of their peers. A jury of one’s peers meant the relatively uneducated plebeians. The jury would decide on guilt or innocence and select from among the punishment alternatives presented by judge. In other words, the structure was a rigid judicial system designed to maintain the supremacy of the elite and particularly to protect their property. Did it occur to this group of elite rulers that adversarial trials would work to the benefit of the well-to-do? The populace was unlikely to see through this system. Being poorly educated and not trained in the arts of questioning and debating opposing erudite assertions and separated through the elitist social stratification, they would be mystified and awed by their language and complex rules of their justice system. The populace easily would be cowed into compliance with this refined and highly educated group or rulers who, quite misleadingly, claimed to be putting the government in their hands. The elites could authenticate this new system by, at one-and-the-same-time, citing that it was an extension of a long history stretching back to old England and yet a system that turned that ruthlessly arbitrary autocratic system on its head by turning the power over the people.

Juries as a modern day farce.

Aristocracy and education: so how is the level of maturity affected by this stratification into elites and the populace? The elites have mastered the art of using power, they have created the rules and so are masters of them, they have mastered the requirement of loyalty to their social strata, they have learned how to interact with one another on the basis of sophisiticated ethical principles, they have learned how to assess unique situations and adapt their principles accordingly but with adherence to the essence of the principles, they have learned highly complex skills of governing their personal life with it ethical and familial challenges, they have mastered a complex set of manners and sophisticated relationship skills in dealing with the intimate relationships, they have mastered the art of dealing with all of the varieties of personalities within the populace, they have gained a broad view of the nation as a whole and have envisioned an immediate and distant future for the nation’s domestic concerns but for the relations between America and other nations in the world with whom they have ongoing treaties, agreements, and trade, and, finally, they have risen to a high level of intellectual or philosophical understanding of the nature of their new government and its many divisions. In contrast, what has the populace gained in terms of maturity, education, and life skills? See model of intentional processes. See role systems. See life topology. See structure and systems.

Constitution and Landed Gentry

Aristocracy and Education

Slavery and Economics

Origin and Consequences of the Stock Market

Religious Sectarianism and Sectarian Rivalries

‘Conquest’ of Territories and Mentality Westward migration American Expansionist

Religion and Slavery

1807: The British Parliament abolished the slave trade in the British West Indies.

Economics and Civil War

Late 19th century and rise of populist education

Industrial revolutions, mobility, white slavery

Degrading Populist education and the factory model producing workers as commodities

The Rise And Dominating Role Of The Corporation As An Unbridled, Amoral, Socially Omnivorous Force

Role of the Stock Holders in Corporate destructive modus operandi

Modern Transformation of recreation into a conscienceless, power oriented, commercial enterprise

2nd half of the twentieth century and The rise of national paranoia,

the military-industrial complex,

the consecration of conquest or international domination as a patriotic-religious obligation

National Goals such

continual increase in jobs,

expansion of markets,

maintaining high GNP

Globalization http://communication.ucsd.edu/people/f_hallin_homogenization.htm

B. DYNAMICS OF SOME PROMINENT, UBIQUITIOUS, POLARIZED, CULTURAL ATTRIBUTES IN OUR NATION

Definition of man is – Kierkegaard says man is constituted by his relations. Christianity says man is born with original sin. Lock says man is a tabula rasa. Hobbs says man is essentially selfish and must be controlled by forceful government. Heidegger says the definition of man is essentially “Care”. I say man is a tabula rasa who becomes constituted by his relations and his relations are determined by the structures and systems of his culture. Systems embody attributes that are partly a function of the influence of successive levels of structure and partly a sub-function of the type of segment of the nation.

Profit Vs Exploitation
Free and Irresponsible Vs Censured and Inhibited

Success Vs Integrity
Rivalry Vs Collaboration
Separatism Vs Universalism
Outcome Vs Process
Law Vs Love
Authority Vs Democracy
Coercion Vs Care
Control Vs Guidance
Rule Vs Judgment
Punishment Vs Correction
Superstition Vs Science
Conformity Vs Individuality
Discrimination Vs Acceptance
Ostracism Vs Understanding
Individualism Vs Community
Regimentation Vs Maturation
Care Taking Vs Empowering

C. HOW POLARIZED, CULTURAL ATTRIBUTES FUNCTION WITHIN AND ACROSS SYSTEMS IN DIFFERENT SEGMENTS OF OUR NATION

1. Tripartite Republic Style Government and Elections and Appointments: Party Politics Presidential and Congressional debates:

Prevent McCain-Romney type catfights. Shape questions to evoke informative responses. Adversarial formats evoke spiels, opinion contrasts, accusations, and defenses. They do not reveal how well prospective leaders can work together with peers and staff to solve complex problems. This format works against everyone honestly expressing bold and risky suggestions, honestly revealing all of their reservations about tentatively accepted proposals, trying to work toward a consensus, and evoking these same tendencies in others. That is what great top executives must be able to do best.

2. Article One of the Constitution’s Bills Of Rights, Freedom of Speech:

a) The US Media as a Major Factor in the Nation’s Culture:

b) US Media in Relation to the World Media as a Major Factor in the Nation’s Culture:

3. The Private, Business, Sector of the Nation’s Culture:

The Corporation. Personalities of CEOs are shaped by the structures and systems of the corporate world. Their personalities are not inherent in them and then are expressed in their socially irresponsible behaviors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation

The defining legal rights and obligations of the corporation are: (i) the ability to sue and be sued; (ii) the ability to hold assets in its own name; (iii) the ability to hire agents; (iv) the ability to sign contracts; and (v) the ability to make by-laws, which govern its internal affairs.[1] Other legal rights and obligations may be assigned to the corporation by governments or courts. These are often controversial.[2]

The modern business corporation has at least three other legal characteristics: (i) transferable shares (shareholders can change without affecting its status as a legal entity), (ii) perpetual succession capacity (its possible continued existence despite shareholders' death or withdrawal), (iii) and limited liability (including, but not limited to: the shareholders' limited responsibility for corporate debt, insulation from judgments against the corporation, shareholders' amnesty from criminal actions of the corporation, and, in some jurisdictions, limited liability for corporate officers and directors from criminal acts by the corporation).[3]

a) Capitalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism

Friedman's view was also shared by Friedrich Hayek and John Maynard Keynes, both of whom believed that capitalism is vital for freedom to survive and thrive. Some problems claimed to be associated with capitalism include: unfair and inefficient distribution of wealth and power; a tendency toward market monopoly or oligopoly (and government by oligarchy); imperialism, various forms of economic exploitation; and phenomena such as social alienation, inequality, unemployment, and economic instability. Critics have maintained that there is an inherent tendency towards oligolopolistic structures when laissez-faire is combined with capitalist private property. This concept of political economy concerning the relationship between economic and political power among and within states includes critics of capitalism who allege the system is responsible for not only economic exploitation, but imperialist, colonialist and counter-revolutionary wars, repressions of workers and trade unionists, genocides, massacres and so on. There are environmentalists who claim that capitalism requires continual economic growth, and will inevitably deplete the finite natural resources of the earth, and other resources utilized broadly. Those environmentalists, such as Murray Bookchin, have argued that capitalist production passes on environmental costs to all of society, and is unable to consider its impact upon ecosystems and the biosphere at large. Some labor historians and other scholars, such as Immanuel Wallerstein and Marcel van der Linden, have also argued that unfree labor — the use of a labor force comprised of slaves, indentured servants, criminal convicts, political prisoners and/or other coerced persons — is compatible with capitalist relations.[56] This argument, pointing out the acceptability to capitalism of unfree labor, was originally put forward by Tom Brass. [57] Hernando de Soto is a contemporary economist who has argued that an important characteristic of capitalism is the functioning state protection of property rights in a formal property system where ownership and transactions are clearly recorded.[58] However, in the 20th century, according to some authors, capitalism also accompanied a variety of political formations quite distinct from liberal democracies, including fascist regimes, monarchies, and single-party states,[13] Capitalism has been defined by some as a philosophy just as Communism has by communists. It is described by them as a philosophy of personal attainment and achievement. It stresses the accumulation of wealth or Capital by individuals. Wealth, in Capitalist terminology, is defined as anything that an individual can personally attain. A good example of wealth in Capitalist terminology that is not usually considered wealth by others is spiritual fulfillment. Capitalists claim that, as it can be attained by an individual human and can be given to others or kept by the individual, it is wealth. Capitalists regard this attainment of wealth as the main driving force behind humanity. Capitalists claim that this driving force continues to push humanity forward. Capitalists regard advancement as one of the ultimate goals of humanity as a whole. Arguably, as individuals advance themselves, they advance the rest of society with them.

b) Corporation Stocks and The Stock Market

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_Market The expression 'stock market' refers to the system that enables the trading of company stocks (collective shares), other securities, and derivatives. Bonds are still traditionally traded in an informal, over-the-counter market known as the bond market. Commodities are traded in commodities markets, and derivatives are traded in a variety of markets (but, like bonds, mostly 'over-the-counter').

Actual trades are based on an auction market paradigm where a potential buyer bids a specific price for a stock and a potential seller asks a specific price for the stock.

The purpose of a stock exchange is to facilitate the exchange of securities between buyers and sellers, thus providing a marketplace (virtual or real). The exchanges provide real-time trading information on the listed securities, facilitating price discovery.

in the 11th century Muslim and Jewish merchants had already set up every form of trade association and had knowledge of many methods of credit and payment

There are now stock markets in virtually every developed and most developing economies

The stock market is one of the most important sources for companies to raise money. This allows businesses to go public, or raise additional capital for expansion.

History has shown that the price of shares and other assets is an important part of the dynamics of economic activity, and can influence or be an indicator of social mood.

The smooth functioning of all these activities facilitates economic growth in that lower costs and enterprise risks promote the production of goods and services as well as employment. In this way the financial system contributes to increased prosperity.

saving has moved away from traditional (government insured) bank deposits to more risky securities of one sort or another.

pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, insurance investment of premiums

investors find it increasingly difficult to profit. Stock prices skyrocket with little reason, then plummet just as quickly, and people who have turned to investing for their children's education and their own retirement become frightened. Sometimes there appears to be no rhyme or reason to the market, only folly.

research has shown that psychological factors may result in exaggerated stock price movements.

The stock market, as any other business, is quite unforgiving of amateurs.

Over the short-term, stocks and other securities can be battered or buoyed by any number of fast market-changing events, making the stock market difficult to predict.

Preferred stock may carry superior voting rights to common stock or may not carry any voting rights at all. Preferred stock may carry a dividend that is paid out prior to any dividends to common stock holders. Preferred stock may have a convertibility feature into common stock. Preferred stockholders will be paid out in assets before common stockholders and after debt holders in bankruptcy. Terms of the preferred stock are stated in a "Certificate of Designation".

There are income tax advantages generally available to corporations that invest in preferred stocks in the United States that are not available to individuals.

Companies listed at the stock market are expected to strive to enhance shareholder value.

Shareholders are granted special privileges depending on the class of stock, including the right to vote (usually one vote per share owned) on matters such as elections to the board of directors, the right to share in distributions of the company's income, the right to purchase new shares issued by the company, and the right to a company's assets during a liquidation of the company.

Although directors and officers of a company are bound by fiduciary duties to act in the best interest of the shareholders, the shareholders themselves normally do not have such duties towards each other.

Although ownership of 51% of shares does result in 51% ownership of a company, it does not give the shareholder the right to use a company's building, equipment, materials, or other property. This is because the company is considered a legal person, thus it owns all its assets itself. This is important in areas such as insurance, which must be in the name of the company and not the main shareholder.

Owning shares does not mean responsibility for liabilities. If a company goes broke and has to default on loans, the shareholders are not liable in any way.

c) The influence of Free Market Economy in the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market_economy A market economy is an economic system in which the production and distribution of goods and services take place through the mechanism of free markets guided by a free price system.^[1]^[2] In a market economy, businesses and consumers decide of their own volition what they will purchase and produce. In theory this means that the producer gets to decide what to produce, how much to produce, what to charge customers for those goods, what to pay employees, etc., and not the government. These decisions in a market economy are influenced by the pressures of competition, supply, and demand. This is often contrasted with a planned economy, in which a central government decides what will be produced and in what quantities.^[3]

Capitalism generally refers to an economic system in which the means of production are all or mostly privately owned and operated for profit, and in which investments, distribution, income, production and pricing of goods and services are determined through the operation of a market economy. It is usually considered to involve the right of individuals and groups of individuals acting as "legal persons" or corporations to trade capital goods, labor, land and money (see finance and credit). Capitalism has been dominant in the Western world since the end of feudalism, but some feel that the term "mixed economies" more precisely describes most contemporary economies, due to their containing both private-owned and state-owned enterprises, combining elements of capitalism and socialism, or mixing the characteristics of market economies and planned economies.

The key difference between market economies and planned economies lies not with the degree of government influence but whether that influence is used to coercively preclude private decision.

4. US Annual Budget, Taxation, Wealth Distribution

5. Labor and Labor Union Restrictions

6. Immigration Law and Influence on the Economy

7. The Structure of the Educational Sector of the Nation’s Culture:

8. The Jurisprudence Sector of the Nation’s Culture:

9. Consumption, Marketing, Advertising

10. Globalization, Multi-National Corporations

11. Population, Economic Expansion, Foreign Exploitation: US and Other Nations

12. Military Industrial Complex

13. War, Media, Recruitment

14. World Religions and US Religion and Article ??? of the Constitution’s Bills Of Rights, Freedom of Religion

15. Sexuality Control

16. Global Warming

17. Energy and Alternative Resources

18. Food and Drug Production and Regulation

19. Health and Mental Health

D. INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURES AND THEIR GESTALT OR ATMOSPHERE AND DEGREES OF RIGIDITY VERSUS LENIENCY

Being the top administrator differs from subordinates is that they have far fewer structured constraints, in other words the top position has more freedom which permits more of their own personality, that is their private person versus their conforming, public personality. Top administrators can skew things in the organization in the direction of their values and traits. Two critical vulnerabilities from the top: 1) their character plus their type and level of maturity sets the tone and shapes the behavior of the rest of the organization; 2) their decisions and behavior is insulated from scrutiny by the lower echelon thus making it possible for them to misuse their power and authority with impunity. Whether organization is a corporation, human services, education, the justice system, the military, non-government business associations, or a charity organization, for example, you may assume that the type will determine, largely, all other aspects of the organization. Given the type of organization, two parameters have the greatest influence over the Gestalt of the organization. Their management philosophy, which is a reflection of their personality, can impose degrees of rigidity or permissiveness on the structure of the organization. It can also impose their level of maturity, with its accompanying set of values, on members of the organization. This one parameter of management can result in a wide range of negative patterns of behavior in the rest of the staff. The second parameter is the purpose of mission of the organization. For example, the military generally has the most controlled and rigid structure. Its mission is to defend against enemies. There is very little room for individual choices and relationships controlled by strict rules. A private, for profit, recreational organization is likely to have a loose, permissive structure. A prison tends to have a highly rigid structure for the staff but the relationships among inmates tend to be laissez faire. A corporation that sells products such as a pharmaceutical distributing company uses sales representatives. These representatives must rely, for the most part, on their own initiative and must develop their own style of conducting their job. Their have rules that they must adhere to but there is little supervision. The major control factor is their sales quota that is set by their sales manager.

High, Medium, and Low degrees of structure each tend to have their own type of effects or tend to result in their own type of behavior with the two extremes being more likely to result in dysfunctional behavior. People in high structure organizations tend to feel oppressed and become passive aggressive. They cannot afford to be overtly rebellious and harbor frustration and resentment. These suppressed angry feelings will surface explosively when there is too much seemingly unreasonable and harsh control and oppression. This is seen by authorities as dysfunctional behavior. This dysfunctional behavior is almost universally blamed on individual person’s psychopathology. On the other hand, people in low structure organizations tend to let their private desires readily surface. To authorities, they may seem to be immature, impulsive, and irresponsible. As with very high structure, their dysfunctional behavior is almost universally blamed on individual person’s psychopathology. These conjectures seem to hold regardless of the nature of the agency, organization, or institution. A top administrator who recognizes the relationship between organizational structure and behavior rather than simply blaming personnel problems or poor performance on individual personalities is in the best position to find ways to correct or shape the structure and thereby avoid dysfunctional behaviors.

However, what is a dysfunction? It is whatever a self-appointment authority or expert says it is!

VI. THE BOTTOM PYRAMID AND ITS INTERNAL STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES

The focus so far has been on uppermost levels of structure and systems. The systems upon which one may focus are likely to change just as the occupants of levels within an overall external structure. Thus, both structures and systems are likely to change as one makes progress with a plan, succeeds, fails, and gains increased insight into the problematical subject, the analysis of the problem, and its proposed solutions. The analyst can move up and down levels and compare between levels or across organizations within a level as well as examine the relations between systems within an organization. At a lower level, for example, the analyst could focus on a neighborhood or a family, institutions or the professions that serve them, or the legal system that controls them, just to cite a few. Take, in a generic sense, the family, for instance, as a focus of analysis. Upon analysis, one is likely to find that each family exemplifies a unique instantiation of each of the kinds of systems mentioned above. The analyst could expand the focus to include the extended family. The focus could also include the family’s relations to organizations or facilities present in its community or neighborhood. One example of this would be the educational institutions serving the family’s children. On the other hand, a corporation that employs people from surrounding communities may have an interest in these same educational institutions. The broader legal system may have subcomponents within these same surrounding communities. A question for the analyst might be whether and how these various organizations facilitate each other’s purposes and goals or undermine each other. Each organization or structure may have its own set of systems but these may be found to be operating as islands unto themselves and as such have come to have purposes or systems that undermine each other or are even ethically, radically inconsistent with one another without having the slightest awareness of this state of affairs. This myopia of awareness may be preventing the people in these organizations from detecting that they are having profound effects on the internal structures and processes of the people for whom they exist. The next major question is what these internal structures and processes are, what the effects the external structures and systems are having upon them, and specifically which aspects of external structures are having an impact and what kind of impact they are having on which or each of the internal structures and processes. Therefore, the focus will now turn to the bottom pyramid and the levels of internal structures and processes represented within it.

VII. INTERNAL STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES FROM THE OBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVE

The bottom pyramid of the “Duplex Pyramid Model”, illustrated in Figure 3 below, represents a stratification of levels of internal structures and processes. As stated earlier, Dyadic Interaction, which is in the center where the two pyramids meet, is an observable factor. It shares the tip of each pyramid, thus suggesting that it can be viewed as external or internal. Informal roles manifest semi-external, semi-structured behavior concerning which outside observers must be highly astute if patterns are to be detected and codified. Furthermore, Informal Roles can change rapidly. In a sense, however, for those inside a group with Informal Roles, the occupants and the other members of the group must, or usually, have a subtle, intuitive grasp along with a loosely shared consensus concerning who has been assigned or who is enacting each Informal Role. Members must also have a shared sense of the ephemeral role expectations. Consequently, Informal Roles actually do fit as a part of the bottom pyramid as semi-observable and transient. Yet they are setting and situation dependent, therefore sharing features both of the upper-most level of the bottom pyramid and bottom-most level of the top pyramid.

The levels of the bottom pyramid are stratified in terms of a movement in a latter-like downward fashion. They descend from the most observable, the most immediately active in influencing the ongoing dyadic interaction, and the most readily altered for the shortest length of time. Their logical descent is down to the bottom where the least observable, the most resistant to change, and most indirectly influential in the ongoing dyadic interaction reside. They move, therefore, from Informal Roles down to Self-concept whose counterpart is Situational Identity in the top pyramid. Self-concept is unobservable and simultaneously is influenced by and influences Situational Identities.

Bottom Pyramid

Figure 4. The Bottom Pyramid: Internal Structures and Processes

The greatest direction of influence is from the top down. Oddly, the next lower level on the latter is behavior, both physical and verbal. This is odd because we can observe both. [P & V
behavior –bit and spur-and maximally unstructured settings] However, both are constantly changing with the flow of Dyadic Interaction, which, in turn, is primarily, directly influenced by settings and
situations. Additionally, verbal and physical behavior requires honed skills in interpretation. The meaning of a single behavior is open to countless possible interpretations. They are, nevertheless, the main interface between what is inside the head and interactants or external observers. Informal Roles, Self-concepts, and verbal-physical behavior are all semi-observable, highly transient, and primarily influenced by, yet weakly influencing, external structures. Moving further down, there is cognition. Cognition, or thinking, is less reflexive, more difficult to do, is more indirectly influential, less immediately active in influencing the ongoing dyadic interaction, and more resistant to change. Settings and Situations rarely cause significant and lasting change in what we think or especially how we think.

Now the critical question is how external structures and systems can be changed in order to make enduring, positive changes in the internal structures and processes. Emotions and

The Intentionality Processes across the center from the point of contact between the pyramids in Figure 1., “The Basic Natural Systems Model” above, and in the model in Figure 5., “Component Processes of Intentionality and Their Sequential Paths,” below, represent an organizing principle for the Duplex Pyramids. At this point, a radical departure from traditional psychology is made. In the early twentieth century, Robert Titchener, a structuralist, designed experiments to study mental phenomena through introspection. He was superseded by the functionalist school of thought, which disavowed introspection as an unreliable experimental technique. This was a valid criticism but unfortunately, from that time forward, introspection, or speculation about the unobservable, inner processes of the mind, has been excluded from experimental psychology. Speculation about motivations, feelings, traits, and mysterious constructs like drives, and the unconscious has been an essential part of psychotherapeutic modalities. Initially, these were studied more indirectly using public, objective observations. Eventually and even more strictly adhering to the necessity for observation, there were scientific studies of constructs such as memory, cognition, perception, language developmental processes, and language performance processes. These constructs became, in effect, separate sub-disciplines of psychology. Intentionality, on the other hand, has been a proscribed area of study. It has been as if these accepted disciplines of study have been conceived as being able to operate independently and as separate, solitary disciplines, as it were.

There has been a somewhat loose chronological progression in what became the major focus of the scientific study of humans.

For example, Sociology began to study informal roles.

John B. Watson, from 1924, began to study observable behavior. The Gestalt perception theorists (Wundt, Wertheimer, Kohler, e.g.) appeared during this period but became prominent in the late 1930s and 40s. The scientific and objective study of emotion gradually evolved from the early experiments of Walter Cannon (1929), Magna Arnold (1960), Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer (1962), Paul Ekman (1972), and many others. B. F. Skinner (beginning circa1950) made Behaviorism the dominant psychology of the fifties and sixties. While the Gestalt theorists had been studying perception, they also assumed that they were studying cognition in the sense of the way the mind dynamically organized perception. Cognition, however, was not assumed capable of being studied in an objective, scientific manner, in and of itself, until the 1980s.

VIII. INTERNAL STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES FROM THE SUBJECTIVE PERSPECTIVE

Figure 3., depicting “Systems within Levels of External Structures”, can be looked at from vastly different perspectives. The constructs in Figure 3 can be studied objectively and scientifically as an outside observer looking for patterns that can be recorded and subjected to scientific experiments that demonstrate what external factors cause changes in those patterns. On the other hand, those same constructs can be viewed from a perspective of someone who is trying to understand what is going on inside a person. That is to say, one can to understand what it is like for one person to be interacting with another. One can try to understand why or what the motivation was for a person to assume an informal role and what is like to that person to be performing that informal role. One can try to understand how a person regards themselves, what their self-concept is, regardless of what others think of them or what identity others have ascribed to them. One can try to imagine what physical, behavioral, acts signify to a person. One can try to understand the meaning or intent of what a person is saying. One can try to discern whether acts and words seem inconsistent and if so why the person is doing this and even how it may feel to the person as they do this. An objective study could examine physical and speech acts; however, this is quite different from the subjective attempt to regard this same phenomenon as though they were that other person. At this juncture, the objective and subjective perspectives are usually seen as incompatible and in radical conflict. Protagonists of each perspective usually see the other as unreliable, inadequate, and invalid. The construct cognition is highly subject to the objections of these rival perspectives.

Psychotherapy

Personality psychology and psychotherapy, especially Carl Rogers, began to study self-concept in what he deemed and objective and scientific manner in the 1950s. Rogers became a dominant force in psychology beginning in the 1950s primarily through his Client Centered Counseling, which was decidedly subjective. The theoretical approaches of Rogers and Skinner were polar opposites with Rogers using self-report instruments and Skinner using laboratory mazes to study rat behavior as well as somewhat similar contrivances to study human behavior. Robert Gagne (from the late sixties to the late eighties) and others initiated the study of Cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics that was in part based on Noam Chomsky’s “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”. With these developments, the study of the inside of the head, the mind, or mental processes began.

IX. HOW EXTERNAL STRUCTURES AND SYSTEMS INTEROPERATE WITH INTERNAL STRUCTURES AND PROCESSES

X. HOW THE PROCESSES OF INTERNAL STRUCTURES INTEROPERATE

The Bottom Pyramid has structures and processes. Note that here processes take the place of systems in the Top Pyramid

A common misconception has to do with the cult of personality

XI. INTENTIONALITY PROCESSES: THE INTEGRATOR OF THE DUPLEX PYRAMIDS

In contrast to the way the top levels of the bottom Pyramid’s structures and processes can be viewed, Intentionality Processes cannot be observed. Neither can they be regarded from an objective perspective. Furthermore, inferring their existence and determining their nature is extremely difficult. Consequently, even regarding them from subjective perspectives can only be done indirectly. However, by creating abstract descriptions and hypothetical constructs and designing experiments to test assumptions and hypotheses about the way they are likely to function can lead to useful information. Introspection has been conclusively shown to be highly unreliable. However, when introspection has been honed to clear abstractions and formulated as hypothetical constructs that can be tested indirectly and when these tests yield results that are supportive, we have a tentative foundation that supports a reliable, objectively arrived at subjective perspective. One primary assumption was that these intentionality processes operate sequentially, as represented in the model. Once the hypothetical constructs have tentatively been shown to be experimentally validated, it is possible to suggest that they have some pragmatic value. I spent many years trying to develop a comprehensive set of abstract constructs embodied in the Model of Intentionality that eventually were tentatively validated by indirect tests. I have used these abstractions in applied settings and they have proven to have pragmatic value.

This comprehensive set of abstractions was used to develop a model of intentionality processes. This model supposes that these constructs are functionally separate processes that can be demarcated and that they flow, subtly and extremely rapidly, in a roughly linear direction. Each delineated process affects the next succeeding process. Each delineated process, nevertheless, seems also to be somewhat independently affected by specific critical aspects of External Structures and Systems. If these assumptions are true, then it should be possible to design aspects of Structures and Systems so that these aspects or clusters of aspects should positively shape a specific intentionality process. Of course, other or all intentionality processes could be shaped to some extent as well. Again, the inference in reference to an applied setting is that when structures are designed to shape one or more intentional processes, a predictable change in related physical or verbal behavior should be observed.

[When a person exhibits behavior that is destructive or counterproductive to themselves or others, the assumption usually is that the source of the problem is intrapsychic or genetic. Turning this assumption upside down, this new approach assumes that the destructive behavior is rather a product of a defective structure. If you were a strict behaviorist, you would address a specific behavior to be changed and use direct reinforcement strategies to change the behavior. This approach has been shown to be ineffective in naturalistic environments. If you were a psychotherapist, you would be more likely to assume that the problem was intrapsychic and should be addressed using counseling or some psychotherapeutic modality. However, Natural Systems assumes that it is more natural to approach such a problem as though both its origin and treatment should simultaneously involve both external structural factors and internal or intrapsychic factors. If you look carefully, you can find a likely source of the behavioral problem in the external structure. On the other hand, if you look carefully you can find a likely source inside the person, as for instance some disordered personality trait. However, what if both approaches are simultaneously correct and incorrect? That is to say, on the one hand, external structures have been inaccurately inferred, vaguely described, and imprecisely addressed or altered. On the other hand, in some instances intrapsychic factors such as traits have been hazily, inexactly, and narrowly inferred or, in other instances, an over generalized, over inclusive, psychiatric diagnostic label has been applied and ascribed as the cause and a treatment based on that prescribed. In general, our social institutions typically have resorted to the use of some form of punishment or incarceration with antisocial or criminal behavior or to the use of a psychotherapeutic modality, with or without psychotropic medication, for one hour a week as treatment for non-criminal self-destructive behaviors or feeling and mood disorders.]

The Natural Systems alternative is to restructure or redesign the external structural sources to correct the problem. If at first you do not succeed, you can continue to redesign structures until the problem is eliminated. However, in and of itself, this is a negative or neutral goal and strategy. Natural Systems assumes that this will have limited success from a long-term perspective. Mere elimination of a problem behavior does not necessarily entail engendering a higher degree of internal functioning and skills that may be transferred to subsequent problem or novel situations. An enhancement of coping skills and maturity in both intentionality processes and behavior patterns is a more productive goal. The key therefore is to redesign structures that elicit a higher level of functioning in such a way that this is maintained in a wider variety of subsequent structures or wide variety of similar old and new environments and situations.

A. EXPLICATING THE COMPONENT PROCESSES OF THE MODEL OF INTENTIONALITY

Figure 5. Component Processes of Intentionality and Their Sequential Paths

At this point, the important issue concerns what these intentionality processes are that are to be subjected to shaping by redesigning structures. A brief account of them will be presented here.

1. MEMORY AND STORAGE PROCESSES

First of all, there is memory or storage of experiences. This storage consists of what we have experienced of the outside world and along with our reactions to it. These two elements, memory of experiences and reactions, build up in storage over time. Memory and reactions can also be referred to as, respectively, schemata and schemes. We develop increasingly sophisticated ways of understanding the outside world and of reacting to it. At first, Intentionality processes are primitive and simple. Eventually they become elaborate and complex. We initially learn to focus on what we sense, that is to say what we see, hear, smell, taste, touch, and feel as pain or pleasure. At the same time we focus on how to look including where, when, and the like and we do this with all of our senses. We also focus on how to move. An example is a newborn infant learning to turn its head in the direction of a sound. At first, these acts are carried out without thought, automatically. Settings such as those in most institutions, neighborhoods, families and the like can be redesigned to facilitate people’s learning to focus and store selective information consciously and deliberately. This can be done informally by persons with natural coaching skills or formally by having specific procedures to invoke at teachable moments. It is important to choose, as coach, a non-judgmental person, to whom the learner will listen and believe in and whose respect is important to them. Such coaching can direct the learner’s attention to important aspects of the task and patiently allow them to try while approving effort and suggesting small, practical ways to improve performance and share in the learner’s delight with whatever measure of success they achieve. It is also important to remind the learner to create a way to remember the behaviors that led to success to be prepared to use the task related learned schemata and schemes in the future and to point out new situations in which they can transfer their successful training. This leaves the learner with an overall pleasant and rewarding experience of accomplishment and confidence and enthusiasm to face future challenges. As a by-product, the learner may also be incorporating the way to be a good coach or teacher himself or herself someday.

2. PARAMETERS OF AWARENESS AND LEARNING TO MANAGE YOUR MIND

Most tasks vary in the kinds of mental skills required. Some tasks simply require learning a mnemonic or routine to remind them of something in the future like someone’s birthday or an appointment time. These are easy for busy, preoccupied young people to let slip by them or to just forget the details. Some tasks require memorization that also may require repetition. Some tasks require using imagination to construct something or attention to detail and exact sequences in following instructions. Some require pausing and listening carefully to be sure that they get the correct message. Some require using empathy to understand another’s plight. Some may require remembering an incident or pattern and then being able to compare with something similar in the future, assess, and evaluate the differences. Some may require detecting errors in fact or logic. Some may require the ability to clearly explain or persuade. Some may require long, unwavering attention, observation, exact and repetitive execution. Some may require using imagination to grasp and understand what may be going on with numerous people far away. Some may require being able to take a large number of parts of a machine or experiment and mentally reorganize those parts in various configurations until a superior, workable configuration is found. Some may require acquiring a long series of muscular movements coordinated in such a way to complete a near perfect execution of a performance.

Often people face many of the different types of mental tasks listed above and switch rapidly from one to another. For example, a person may have to sit patiently and listen and try to be able to recall what someone else is saying and immediately afterwards have to engage in well timed coordinated interaction with other in a fast moving adult sport or game or the spontaneous, impromptu play with a group excited, enthusiastic children. Immediately after that, they may have to be quietly concentrating and critically analyzing a difficult scientific paper.

A person’s mind is always changing the way it is configured. In the adult mind facing such a wide variety of mental tasks, they must employ the skills of mind management. What one is aware of, with respect to the way one’s mind is functioning, is usually the external task. On a more sophisticated level, a person may become aware of how their inner awareness is functioning. Once they are aware of this, it is possible for them to train themselves or to be trained manage the configuration of their inner awareness and to manage their mind so that it is tailored to the most efficacious configuration of inner awareness for the particular immediate task. I have isolated eleven of what I call the parameters of awareness that can become managed for optimal, task specific performance. These eleven are:

1) Awareness of Mental Assessment Levels

In this context, mental assessment levels will be referred to as Levels of Awareness.

2) Awareness of The Focus

Focus of Awareness refers to the ability either effectively to maintain focus on one aspect or topic of the task or to shift focus between aspects or topics without losing one’s place in either or with respect to goal of a single aspect or topic of the goal of the project as a whole. Keeping track of the appropriate focus and applying task specific mental skills as the focus changing while being able to return or readjust to a former or subsequent focus while rapidly switching between them can be difficult. It will usually require considerable effort to leave one focus and shift to another especially with different mental skills required in each case.

3) Awareness of The Direction of Focus

Which means to be aware of where one is going or where one’s mind is going or of the goal of one’s mental activity. This may have to be held close to the forefront of awareness or maintained but not in immediate awareness. Direction is also concerned with temporality. Some tasks require directing one’s focus on the distant or recent past or future while working in the present or relating past or future to present. These require managing the direction of focus of awareness

4) Awareness of Organization

Organization of Awareness means whether your awareness is dealing with a mass of disorganized information or tightly organized or something in between or whether you must mentally develop or create a highly organized project or rather something spontaneous and chaotic assaults of the senses or something in between. These require distinctly different ways of configuring your inner awareness.

5) Awareness of Complexity

Which refers to a continuum from sophisticated abstract symbols that are intricately related as in higher mathematics or physics to simple concrete objects or images. When dealing with tasks along this continuum, a person must gear their mind to their level of complexity. In archaeology, the archaeologist may have to examine countless small objects while at the same time hold in mind an historical or temporal reference map within which to place discoveries and then arrange the objects consistent with the reference map. The physicist may have to construct mathematical equations designed to test the quantification of mere traces or indicators of hypothesized objects or processes that are never seen with the naked eye. On the other hand, playwrights or dramatists may have to manage in their imaginations intricate relations between characters and events that unfold in plots that at the same time cause the view to feel as though the imaginary dramatic actions are actually reality unfolding in real time. They must do this in such a way that nothing seems contrived or implausible. Simplicity, on the other hand, for example with a carpenter, may require hitting nails with a hammer, swiftly and accurately, while keeping thinking or distracting thoughts out of this mind. In another vein, a defense lawyer trying a case may have to conceive statements that lead to a hoped for response in his prosecutorial opponent, anticipate the response and plan another statement that leads the prosecutor to incorrect assumptions and responses based on them and finally conceive of a plan to suddenly reverse the course of the argument causing the prosecutor to be surprised and caught off guard with respect to the defense lawyer’s true intentions and find himself trapped into revealing evidence, or lack thereof, that virtually acquits the accused. This is highly complex, stage-wise thinking in which the lawyer must hold his entire plot in the back of his mind, tweaking responses to conform to his strategy as he goes along leading the prosecutor to the slaughter. A lawyer such as this must rigorously and repeatedly train himself to master this highly crafty art of mind management.

6) Awareness of Intensity

which means that there is continuum which at one extreme is the mental calmness of the virtually empty mind of a person awaiting a response from someone while patiently remaining totally receptive and non-judgmental. At the opposite extreme might be a method actor’s believable enactment, as though it were real life, of an extreme crisis or other type of dramatic event. Another pair of extremes in intensity would be a warrior in ferocious hand-to-hand combat versus a Monk in meditation.

7) Awareness of Integrity or Integration

Integrity, or Integration, relates to how the various parts of the Content of awareness fit together. Integrity in this case does not refer to ethics. Considering all of the other parameters of awareness, many are vulnerable to disintegration. For example, when switching between Levels it is possible bring into the immediate Level in Focus something from a higher or lower Level or from a Level in a External Structure or Internal Structure that is not truly relevant. It is also easy, when the Content is Concrete, to inject something Abstract that is not germane and mislead when presented in writing or orally. The reverse is also true in that entering something Concrete to support an Abstraction that is not truly relevant would destroy the Integrity of the immediate Focus of Content of Awareness. In addition, it is possible draw into Focus some authority’s writings about reality that misrepresents reality and therefore there would be a Dis-Integration with actual reality or factuality. These are easy mistakes to make unless one is very careful to rigorously check and analyze to see if there are such discrepancies in the Integrity of the Focus and Content of Awareness. When the Focus is on something that has Complex and tight Organization, ferreting out instances of Dis-Integrity can be difficult and time consuming. However, if the Goal of a course of thinking is eventual written or oral presentation, being meticulous about this is not only responsible but also vital. Unfortunately, such mistakes are often made in adversarial debates and articles as deliberate debate tactics in order to mislead and win an argument or case.

8) Awareness of Boundary, as a Parameter of Awareness,

Relates to how closely one stays on a well-defined or narrow topic or target. Whether one is engaged in abstract thinking or using one’s imagination, awareness typically has to search out new information or invent new concepts. While ranging around sources of information it is common to come across ideas or reports that capture one’s attention. This can often cause one to pursue them as intriguing or entertaining even though there is no possible relevance to one’s goal. Getting lost in such distractions will usually mean that it is difficult to reinstate the prior state of awareness. On the other hand, it is sometimes important to range about in a wide circle in hope of finding novel facts, ideas, concepts, images, and the like. In this case, it is important to be able to open up the boundaries of awareness and let it be permeable. Sometimes the idea or image you are looking for is already in your mind but you cannot call it up. In such cases you can lay back in your chair or lie down someplace with the determination that you are going to wait patiently for the idea or image to surface. Occasionally, while doing this, ideas or images will flit, like butterflies, around the periphery of your mind. If you allow them into awareness, one or more of them will turn out to be just what you are looking for. After collecting many promising items, it will be necessary to sort them out and select those that are relevant and discard the others. Next, one must go through the arduous task of trying to seeing how they fit into the topical goal. This means that one has to repeatedly reinstate the major focus of awareness and assess each new item in terms of whether it fits in an integral way and where and how it fits. If the focus of awareness is for construction of an essay, for example, then using this approach will often require making repeated reviews of both the place where the item is situated in the document and repeated reviews of how integral the item is within the context of the entire essay. As you can readily see, when reviewing the item where it is situated means narrowing the Boundaries of Awareness and reviewing the item in the context of the entire document means vastly expanding the Boundaries. Managing boundaries as one of the Parameters of Awareness requires a high level of skill and much practice.

9) Awareness of Perseverance

refers to being able to keep one topic in focus until work on it is sufficient, at least for the moment, and it is more profitable to move on to the next content topic. This typically means resisting distractions or not giving in to mental exhaustion, frustration, or boredom. This is akin to the sports concept of pushing through the pain. Sometimes a respite or change of topic may be necessary when productivity really becomes bogged down. On the other hand, perseverance in ‘pushing through the pain’ often eventually will result in a major success or ‘Eureka!’ experience. Yet, there are occasions when the opposite is true. As many researchers and writers have reported, they have stopped work, closed out the focus of awareness, and then engaged in something entirely different such as recreation or even sleep. During their ‘escape’, they suddenly have that wonderful ‘Eureka!’ experience. Actually, this reminds me of the ‘Zeigarnik Effect’ (Bluma Zeigarnik 1927) in which children who were interrupted before completing a task had better recall than those completing the task. There is a similar concept in Gestalt psychotherapy called “unfinished business’ in which incomplete tasks keep dogging us until they are complete. Many people have reported that insights related to incomplete tasks come to them even during sleep. Finally, Elizabeth Zeigarnik a German psychologist found that memories only let go of tasks when they are complete. While the purported success of both dogged perseverance and giving up and switching to recreation or sleep seem inconsistent, in fact both may be true. Managing your mind using these two opposite approaches needs to be done judiciously. Learning when and on what kinds of tasks they each work best can yield valuable results.

It may seem odd, however, I know of reports where a person decided on the escape method, not for a few hours or a day or so but for a long time, like even months or even a year or more. Of course, when taking this approach one has to determine to set firmly, in the back of your mind, what you want your unconscious mind to work on or come up with. Usually, in such cases, these people do not know specifically what they are looking for. It is like a hazy criterion for fulfillment where you feel or sense in a very vague way what you are looking for yet you know you can only know it when it occurs or arrives. Therefore, if you feel stymied in trying to come up with something of which you are only vaguely aware and find that you are having a long period without productivity, it may be best to surrender, use the escape technique, and patiently wait while an unconscious incubation period does its work. I, personally, have seen this work highly successfully for a couple of dissertation writers. Backing off for a while for incubation, therefore, should not be taken as a lack of ability, laziness, or procrastination.

10) Awareness of Taking Perspectives

is the king of the parameters. This is the most highly sophisticated of all Parameters especially with respect to the art of managing of the Parameters of Awareness or mind management. It involves the integrated use of all of the other parameters.

We differentiate our world. First, what is immediate and sensed, then what is seen then what is communicated,

Outside foods, utensils, one’s body parts, skin, voice, blankets, soft toys, hard toys, cloths, eating and toilet conventions, plants, insects, little animals, other’s toys, rain thunder and lightening, furniture, rooms, cars, other’s ideas beliefs

Inside, playmates, genders, my your, older bigger younger smaller, them, my house your house, my pain your pain, my desire my preference, your desire your preference, our body’s capacities and abilities, our ability to affect others, parents’ approval disapproval, roles of parents and those routinely present, rules, consequences, permissible and taboo behaviors and words, time of day yesterday tomorrow, special days, clock time calendars, the policeman the fireman the postman the garbage man, roles, conditions, privileged poor, judgments opinions of others, our judgment and our approval, our roles peer’s roles our conformity compliance their conformity compliance, games and performance evaluation, sports rules team roles team performance evaluation winning and losing, behavior toward winner and loser,

Institutions: my church others’ churches, our school others’ schools, rankings of churches schools, stores, conventions place specific acceptable and unacceptable behavior, territorial limits and restrictions, school rules and roles grades and grade levels and grade specific behaviors, lessons grading and acceptability, comparison and rivalry related to school performance, social in and out groups, friends and enemies, my SES standing others’ standing, bases for differentiating,

Trips to my and others’ parts of town, my town other town, my race other race, my country others’ countries, good people alien people evil people, people I am not as good as, people to whom to be deferential and obedient, people in occupations

Learning to take the perspectives of others, other gender intimate partner spouse, perspectives of children, other race, other country, other conventions religion, life country and culture history perspectives. Always asking what if might be like to be them to be in their life conditions, to have experienced what they experienced. Interest in understanding why others are the way they are their personalities in terms of their motivation and in terms of external causal factors. Try imaging what it would have been like for early humans, say for example 4 million years ago. Would you have language? Where would you live? What would you eat? How would they get food? Would there be families? What would happen if you got ill? What would you wear? How about tools? How would children be cared for? Who would teach, what would children be taught, how would they be taught? What would play be like? Would there be child to adolescence developmental stages? What would reproduction and sex be like? How about personal hygiene? If they did have language, would they have belief systems? What might the belief systems be like? Etc. Now imagine four million years into the future. Take each of the questions for four million years ago and answer them for four million years in the future. How might your imagings of the past alter the way you think about your culture, institutions, life style, and so on. How might your imagings of the future alter the way you think about your culture, institutions, life style, and what alternative possibilities could you dream up? If you dream up one change, what other structures and systems might be implicated? How would the changes affect personalities, behaviors, values, beliefs, preferences, relationships, and other such internal processes?

Learning to understand different fields of knowledge and what it might be like to have to do what they do and think the way they have to think. Learning to understand how society works and what and why institutions do what they do. The dynamics of interactions among institutions. Learning to evaluate cultural conventions, institutional conventions, roles within institutions. Understanding their histories, how they came to be the way they are. Evaluating in terms of institutions’ histories. Learning to understand the evolution of institutions, subcultures, nations, and what factors are pivotal in inducing change and shaping the direction of countries.

Ultimately learning to examine structures and systems and how they interact among components on the same level and interact across levels. Finally learning to examine how external structures and systems effect changes in structures and processes within individuals. If these concepts are understood well, then it is possible to understand how the individual can effect changes in each of the levels of external structures and systems. Referring back to a discussion at the beginning that delineated levels of structures and types of systems, one can begin to work on how to change systems and interactions between systems to change the behaviors of whole populations and even the cognitive processes of individuals within a culture.

Taking the perspectives of people cited above.

Beetles songs art poetry jokes cartoons ads fiction science fiction plays movies futurist essays

Perspective exercises: on oneself; on others; from high above; from within the populace using a scale to position oneself and others; taking the point of view of the opposition(s); from inside the life conditions of another; from the point of view of agencies and agents; taking the point of view of each of two parties; someone or you or some population from the point of view of other cultures; imagining the implausible, improbable, unconventional, illegal; within the experience of someone undergoing an unusual experience; imagine your are the beach by the ocean and you have been there for hundreds of years and you could remember everything that occurred there, what is like 700 years ago, 100 years ago, 50 years ago. Imagine you were a very old crab or dolphin, imagine you were a very old insect, imagine you were a river and could remember when you were pure and unpolluted; imagine you were a pupil in a small school house 150 years ago and you kept being the same pupil decade after decade but the school kept changing with the times;

Considering the caveat that whatever imagining or thinking one is doing while perspective-taking may not represent reality and may need to be tested in some manner. Taking the perspective of someone in another culture may demand learning about its nation’s history and its cultural history.

Try imagining something that is not present in some agency or institution, particularly with respect to some aspect of its structure or its systems. Try imagining something that is currently present in some agency or institution and then imagining what would happen if it were removed, or removed and replaced with something else. For example, try imagining unusual alternatives for the justice system; health system; education system; election procedures; constitution; or economic system, and so on for countless systems within structures in our culture. Try imagining that US took an entirely different approach to foreign nations and foreign policy. Taking a hypothetical perspective typically means using the technique of ‘If’ and ‘What if’. For example, when in a particular situation, try imagining what if you were someone else or imagining you were several other types of people, and then try imagining what the reactions or consequences would be. Try imagining that you had won the Lottery and then checking to see what actually happened to various different types of people who actually did win to put a check on unrealistic imaginings.

Taking complex perspectives:

With the preceding discussion on perspective taking as it was applied to segments of the social universe, or compartmentalized topics, we now need to go back to the beginning and include, in overarching perspectives, the Levels External of Structures and Systems integrated with Levels Internal of Structures and Processes in one holistic, comprehensive perspective. Still, we are constrained by our limited mental capacities to parts of that social universe. We may want to consider public schools, for example, and in so doing, we must segment aspects such as the constituents of successive levels of structures. Inevitably, we have to slice up the world. Managed Parameters, particularly Focus, can only entertain one thing at a time. One can rapidly shift focus. Nevertheless, ‘Managed Focus’ has boundaries and therefore it is directed to one part at a time. However, that does not mean that we ignore the necessity to bring together, for the sake of analysis, a consideration of the way the parts of the whole integrate. If we attempt to sketch a final comprehensive perspective, an effective way to do this is to use the Duplex Model as a guide. Consider, for example, the public school system. Ultimately, public schools are part of larger wholes and consist of parts. These must all be taken together in consideration and the Duplex Model serves as a template to assist in doing this. Justice systems, welfare systems, community organizations, and so forth, for example, all have mutual impacts. They can be viewed separately or taken together as an encompassing system.

PERSPECTIVES ON chains of behavior and repetition compulsion and vicious cycles and cycles of generational alternating patterns and habits as short term patterns situationally induced repetitive patterns extended repeated longitudinal sequences and cycles of history role of systems in perpetuation and repetition conspiracies and hidden or undeclared agendas with powerful influence academic freedom and the un-freedom of academic conventions using analogies and - dangers in false analogies and comparisons - metaphors allegories similes graphic language statistical tables and trend analysis illustrations and misleading demonstrations and demonstrable truth

You listen to a musical like West Side Story and you think ‘How beautiful! How touching!’ and you fail to see the cruel elitist philosophy and view of the world it is presenting. This is true of so many musicals, songs, movies, and the like. Think of how many glorify war and capture young men’s minds and fantasy with visions to heroism and machismo-ism. References for songs that represent America’s bellicose culture:

States of Incorporation, especially Heuristic Incorporation and Heuristic Disincorporation effect perspective taking and can be learned and used in a disciplined manner for more intelligent perspective taking.

Levels Direction Organization Complexity Intensity Integrity Boundary Perseverance

11) Awareness of Content, which means

12) Awareness of Configuring the Parameters of Awareness in Your Head

3. ASSIMILATION and Accommodation

Learning cultural Schemata and Schemes for Social Settings and Activities

Learning from experience and personal and social consequences and learning to alter behavior

4. MENTAL ASSESSMENT LEVELS

Mental Assessment Levels, of course, are related to Perspective taking mentioned above. In this case, one could say that ‘Mental Assessment Levels’, like views from an ascending and descending Eiffel Tower elevator, is a more straight line, vertically linear concept and ‘Perspectives’ is a more adaptable, mobile, imagistic, and mentally elastic concept. On the other hand, we develop awareness of levels of our world as we grow and expand our territorial boundaries and deepen our sensitivity to and understanding of the nature of our fellow humans. Gradually we relate more complexly to what becomes a more complex world. Step-by-step, ascending in knowledge, we initially learn, and then eventually expand, all the while storing these experiences. We learn to use our imagination and relate to what is not immediately present. It takes a child a while to learn that there may be something under a box. It takes a while to learn that what is out of sight is still there and may be of interest. It takes a while for a child to experience excitement and a bit of dread when playing cops and robbers or hide and seek as they are about to look or go around a corner. We also come to anticipate more and more of what people will do next. The infant or child behaves accordingly and acts as though it knows what is coming next. Eventually our storage makes it possible to imagine the rooms of our house, our yard, and our neighborhood. While still quite young, we extend the process of imagining to a general idea of what the layout of our town is like and finally learn how to navigate it without getting lost. As we are doing all of this, we are also storing information about not only what the people in our world are like but also what they are expecting of us and how they are defining us. At some point, we, metaphorically speaking, take the Eiffel Tower elevator down into the depths inside our fellow human beings. We learn a language of feelings. We learn that we are supposed to make adaptations when someone is telling us what they feel. We learn the language of feelings and use this to express to others what we are feeling. Eventually we may learn to dialogue with ourselves about how we feel. We eventually begin to look inward and examine memories of sensory and emotional information about what we are like, what we did, and how we felt. Next we even learn to compare these memories with what we learn about what others are like, do, and feel. In other words, we learn a language of traits.

At this point in the development and use of our memory or facility with storage or information storing, we can say that the developing person has acquired an inchoate, stratified conception both of their own and of others’ inner and outer worlds. When we are grown up, we may even use words like worldview, self-concept, and identity. As adults, we have differentiated the world into levels of external structures and levels of internal structures. We can move between focusing on these levels with ease. We can use information about any one of the different levels as causal explanations for what actually occurred in another level. Likewise, we make predictions, based on knowledge of one level, about what will likely occur in another level. In some sense, we have developed an understanding of systems. We begin to infer that events in one part of a system will have effects on another part of a system. One much discussed system today is the Ecosystem. Most people do this kind of inferring automatically but in a rudimentary way. Some, however, can do this consciously and methodically as a part of their scientific discipline or profession. In the Natural Systems’ Intentionality Model, these different kinds of knowledge are referred to as Mental Assessment Levels. In the Natural Systems’ Duplex Pyramids, these are divided into Levels of External Structures and Systems and Levels of Internal Structures and Processes.

People can be taught to use this concept of Mental Levels of Assessment. For example, when presented with a problem,

5. PLEASURE-PAIN AND INDIVIDUATION

As these early processes are developing, they are accompanied first with degrees of sensations of pain and pleasure sensations but with sophistication there comes conceptual pain and pleasure as in ‘this is an unpleasant situation, he or she is uncomfortable to be with, or I feel guilty about the kind of person I have become’. This process is called individuation because pleasure-pain and psychological comfort-discomfort begin the process of individuation. These experiences are the basis for perceptual interpretations of world incidents and events and establishing behavioral reactions and patterns. As the socio-psychological person develops, pleasure-pain and psychological comfort-discomfort becomes increasingly, cognitively complex. The more cognitively complex process of individuation becomes layered and sorted or parceled into states that can actually transform original sensations and experiences into distortions and polar opposites. This is where the intentional process called states of incorporation comes into play.

6. INCORPORATION

Incorporation involves channeling experience and information into States of Incorporation, parceling (sending as though they were a piece of mail) them and transforming them back and forth from one State into another.

Oddly, the social pleasure-pain dimension interacts with the pure sensations of pain and pleasure. When told a certain thing is something we should enjoy, we may come think we enjoy it even if the original sensation was painful or nauseating. We also learn to do the reverse. Some things our sensations tell us are painful or unpleasant can be transformed through social pressure into something we think, or actually seem to even experience, is fun, pleasant, or desirable. However, early on we learn that we can pretend that something is hedonically its opposite to avoid disapproval or gain approval. In other words, we learn to distort our real experience for the sake of familial, peer, or cultural conformity. These distortions in experience will inevitably distort how we behave. These components of these processes will be called States of Incorporation. Pleasure and pain of all sorts are initially either incorporated or disincorporated. Pretense will be called pseudo-incorporation and pseudo-disincorporation. Many things, experiences, ideas, and the like, when not accompanied with overwhelming pressure to conform, and when we are not initially sure how to react, we will call the heuristic-incorporation and heuristic-disincorporation.

7. ENVISIONING

1) Implicit Other Effects

2) Environmental Conditions

3) Level Perspectives

4) Time Perspectives

5) Strategies and Macro Cognitive Operations
Lie manipulate deceive coerce blackmail supplicate beg negotiate preempt cooperate compete deprecate

8. CRITERIA for FULFILLMENT

1) Foreshadowing

2) Deciding

3) Goal Setting

When we are confronted with the possibility of acting, for example to touch or not, agree or not, decide whether to go one place versus another, or imagine and choose a life career or life mate, we are envisioning what to do next. Our states of incorporation will have a profound influence over this envisioning process. We may have to take one path and then we conjure up how we want things to turn out when having arrived at the end of the path. On the other hand, given the freedom to do so, we may imagine something we want to do, or make, or to create something entirely new. Typically, we cannot not imagine the final product perfectly or with finality but we a at least a vague idea and sense that we will know when and if we have reached the goal. We may want someone to go on a date with us and we also want them to genuinely want to and we also want the whole experience to turn out positively. If we carry the plan to completion with the result that we wanted, we can say we have fulfilled our criterion and will feel satisfaction. However, let us say you are a musician and you have a sense of a sound never heard before. You try and try and cannot create just the right sound. Finally, one day you play something you created and as you listen you feel something like ecstasy as you announce, “That is it! Eureka!” You have met your criterion for fulfillment even though you did not know exactly what it would be like until you got there. People are constantly envisioning and envisioning always contains those elements called criteria for fulfillment. These criteria for fulfillment within the environing process guide the subsequent behavior toward the goal.

9. ADVENTURING

1) Timing and Adventuring

2) Bodily Experiences as By-Products

3) Temporal Experiences as By-Products

4) Emotions as By-Products

10. Disengaging

1) Mirroring

2) Comparing with Foreshadowing

11. Dialectical Reasoning

1) Re-Envisioning Aspects

2) Macro and Micro Cognitive Operators

a) Macro Cognitive Operators

i. Searching

ii. Analyzing

iii. Taking Perspectives

iv. Transposing

v. Suspending

vi. Dimension Scaling

vii. Meta Computing

viii. Abstracting

ix. Symbolic Modeling

x. Concretizing

xi. Scenario Alternating

xii. Revision Synthesizing

xiii. Integrating

b) Micro Cognitive Operators

viii. Disassembling

3) Revising Criteria for Fulfillment

4) Revising Goals

12. Re-Engaging Adventuring

1) Completing Successfully, Failing, Exiting before Completion

2) Storing Experience in Memory as Schemata and Schemes

13. Repetition of Cycle from Beginning to End

1) Re-Entering Mental Levels of Assessment

2) Re-Entering Individuation

3) Re-Entering States of Incorporation and Transformations

4) Re-Entering Envisioning

5) Re-Entering Adventuring

14. MASTERING AND PRACTICING

15. TRANSCENDENCE AND REORGANIZATION

B. MUTUAL MODIFICATIONS BETWEEN EXTERNAL STRUCTURES, INTERNAL STRUCTURES, AND INTENTIONALITY PROCESSES

Logo stuff

Figure 6. Intentionality Processes as the Integrator and Modifier
of External Structures and Systems and Internal Structures and Processes

XII. THE ROLE OF TEMPORAL PERSPECTIVES IN THE MODIFICATION AND INTEGRATION APPROACHES

Finally, time is included in the Natural Systems Approach and a unifying concept. That is to
say, the inclusion of time with the Duplex Pyramids and the Intentionality Processes makes Natural Systems a representation of the complete human experience. Psychology, for example, up to this point, has become increasingly fragmented over the last century. Experiments have become focused on increasingly smaller units of human experience and in the process; it has become increasingly difficult to make it relevant to human, real life problems.

Logo stuff 3

Figure 7. Temporal Perspectives

Therefore, to complete this approach to the integrated, ’natural’ - ‘system’, Time is included and is represented simply by the bi-directional arrow above. Now, with the inclusion of all of the components of the Natural Systems into a single, methodical, approach, a death knell has rung for the traditionalist, monolithic, barricaded, fragmented, and increasingly irrelevant systems of the various human related academic science disciplines. Conceptions of time and temporal perspectives must be included in studies to determine causal explanations, predictions, proposal feasibility studies, restructuring projects and the like. For example, studies that focus on the nature of genders are ill advised to consider the nature of a gender in terms of traits ascertained within contemporary settings, cultures, and the like. CAVEAT ABOUT THIS.

XIII. THE PURPOSE OF NATURAL SYSTEMS IS TO LEAD THE WAY TO REFORMING MENTAL, CORRECTIONAL, AND EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS TOWARD FACILITATING PERSONAL GROWTH AND MATURITY

Natural Systems was first developed to restructure organizations and social systems (in the broadest sense) so that they facilitate the individual person’s growth of coping skills, maturity and its many facets, serenity, a prosocial orientation to life, and constructive creativity. After observing the effectiveness of the Natural Systems Approach with persons in institutions, the next step was to apply its constructs to relationships with individuals and small groups in non-institution and non-organization settings. Again, the purpose was to facilitate the individual person’s growth of coping skills, maturity, and its many facets, serenity, a prosocial orientation to life, and constructive creativity. It was assumed that the components of this purpose would also result in a sense of personal fulfillment and meaningfulness. It was assumed that, in the case of organizations, aspects of external structures could be designed to interact with selected intentionality processes in a way that would facilitate these growth purposes. It was assumed, also, that there were individual intentionality processes that would be responsive to aspects of external structures. Further, it was assumed that with the optimal external structure or the optimal way a relationship was structured these individual intentionality processes would become integrated. As they did so, they would move toward mastery of a high degree of maturity. Ultimately, these intentionality processes would dynamically organize themselves and transcend themselves, and begin reaching toward persistence of their gains and on to an even higher level of maturity.

A. LEVELS OF MATURITY OF ORGANIZATIONS

Organizations such as governments at the rank of nation, state, agency, and institution and other organizations, without or without ranks, such as sports, social, fraternal, religious, commercial, etc., all can be described in terms of the level of maturity or combinations of levels of maturity.

Levels of maturity for organizations can go from primitive level one through the sophisticated level six of maturity that is based on principles.
The Following Lists the Progression through Successive Levels of Maturity

Level 1: Pleasure-Pain: Guided by immediate or anticipated Experience of Pleasure-pain
Level 2: Power: Acts are Oriented to the Power of those in charge or those with the most force, strength, or leverage in bargaining
Level 3: Rules: Oriented to Rules laid down by authorities with the understanding that the rules should be absolute
Level 4: Loyalty: Actions are influenced by Loyalty to Peers
Level 5: Principles: Actions are guided by conventional Principles of living
Level 6: Individual Situations: Uses assessment of individual Situations as basis for actions. Level 6 entails a basis of Level 5 and so on down to Level 1. The progression up from each preceding level requires that the preceding level, levels, be transformed. The preceding levels continue to be implicitly understood and they, particularly Principles, are likely to continue to influence Level 6 behavior, but they do not conflict with its broader, more flexible perspective. It is a common misunderstanding, among opponents of Situational Ethics, or Situationism, is really a form of relativism. They claim that it has abandoned Principled Ethics and operates without a moral compass. This clearly is not the case.
Level 7: Uses broader and deeper perspectives that encompass a universalistic standard to evaluate choices for action, while at the same time taking into consideration the uniqueness of each situation. At Level 7, maturity can be divided into categories such as Maturity in Intimate Relations; Personal Maturity; Interpersonal Maturity; Societal Maturity; and Intellectual Maturity.

Inept dealing with inherent tensions generated when the level of maturity of an organization interacts with a differing level of maturity of individual persons is a common source of conflict and negative consequences, particularly when the individuals are subject to the jurisdiction of the organization. Consider an organization whose level of maturity could be assessed as what I will succinctly designate as the Rule Oriented Level 3. The Rule Oriented Level 3 of Maturity is typical of all of the agencies and institutions of the justice system. The policies and procedures of such an organization could be legislated as ‘law’ or could be non-legislated but still have the force and rigidity of law. Assume that the administrative personnel of such an organization are in harmony with this characterization of Rule-Oriented level 3 of maturity. Now imagine that a.) An incident of infraction of rules has occurred or b.) An infraction is proposed or about to occur. In the case of an incident of infraction of rules where there is punishment for the infraction, the harm done by the punishment could exceed the harm done by the infraction. The argument for enforcing this punishment would usually be that to not do so would have the effect of undermining legitimacy of the ‘rule of law’ which could be construed as possibly leading to anarchy. If the intent of the law was to prevent harm, then, in this case, the law has failed with respect to its intent. Upholding the law, in effect, could result in condoning an extraordinary amount of harm where punishment for infractions was having negative consequences far in excess of the harm done by the infractions. The argument for ‘upholding’ is usually that if an exception for one case is made, regardless of how meritorious, then this would require exceptions for all similar cases, or, god forbid, a change in the law. Excepting the alternative of changing the law, trying such cases under current law would entail substituting personal judgment for the impersonal and ‘impartial’ rule of law. Of course, one could argue that administering ‘the law’ by persons entails non-adherence to the impersonal and ‘impartial’ rule of law. In fact, this is an almost universal observation about the administration of justice. If this is the case, then the astuteness of a judge, or, I would prefer to say, the level of maturity of the judge of administrator becomes the critical issue.

Other types of organizations that are rule based include educational institutions, most competitive sports, many religious organizations such a Muslims, Mormons, and Catholics, business social groups like Rotarians, and highly formal, secretive, and ritualistic organizations like the Masons. Legislatures are rigidly ruled based with respect to their formal procedures but also have a covert code of loyalty that can be quite unprincipled.

The maturity level characterized by a belief in and use of power, Level 2, is common to commercial organizations. In this case, we would be equating money with power. The goal of commercial organizations is to make a profit. The principle, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” is a dictum that cannot apply to these organizations. They must focus on profiting from dealing with customers without regard to the negative effects this may have on customers. In the case of some businesses, members may relate to each other based on principles but the mode of relating to outsiders, like customers, is power. The stock market is like this. Their commercial transactions among themselves are based on a strict, complex set of rules, Level 3, that embody principles but their relation to customers is power based, Level 2, and is basically undeclared, predatory, and amoral.

The level of maturity characterized by a belief in loyalty, Level 4, is common to loosely structured groups like the IRA or the Mafia. Level 4 Loyalty, groups usually depend on their survival of and entailed or integrated Level 3 Rules. These groups are usually a blend of loyalty, Level 4, and power, Level 2. The military is a rule-based, Level 3, organization whose relations to outsiders, who are considered the enemy, are based on power, Level 2, and subgroups within the military, for example the Marines, have a strong ethos of loyalty, Level 4, to each other and to their country.

The maturity level characterized by a belief in and application of principles, Level 5, is common to many charitable organizations and many non-formalized social groups. Some formal groups are based on rules but the rules tend to be general and interactions are more likely to be based on trust, negotiation on decisions, a loose and non-explicit assumption of reciprocity.

The maturity level characterized by situationism, Level 6, is common to organizations whose members are professionals and whose goals are altruistic, such as ‘Doctors Without Borders’ and the Quaker religious organization.

Most organizations, including those mentioned above, tend to be a blend of different levels of maturity but with one level being predominant.

The category of intellectual maturity at the level of situationism, especially with regard to inferring cause and effect when invoking supernatural intervention or religious dictums as causes versus invoking scientific knowledge or scientific method of discovery as the means of discovering or inferring cause and effect relations. Legislators and the Terry Schaivo case (http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-9515748.html).

B. ORGANIZATIONS ASSESSED AS HAVING LEVEL SEVEN MATURITY CAN STILL HAVE UNEVENNESS WITHIN THEIR CONFIGURATION CATEGORIES OF MATURITY

One serious problem of organizations that have a pervasive influence over a large population is their level of intellectual maturity. For example, the major television stations have widespread influence over the populace of the nation. Consider the case of a celebrity who has gotten into some kind of serious trouble, for example the commission of a felony or a career threatening addiction. Some prominent commentators could cast a negative spotlight on their personality, attributing the problem to flaws of character or some variety of psychiatric illness. Other commentators could focus on structural forces as the cause of the problem. By focusing on intrapsychic causes and recommending modes of treatment, the generative structural causes are neglected. If the generative structural causes are widespread practices of persons and agencies in their social environment, problematic behaviors will recur with the treatment has been completed. Other celebrities subject to these aggravating structural causes will remain at risk. Systems within the structure of a society plagued with aggravating structural causes such as these will resist change because each the systems within the overarching structure are interdependent and mutually sustaining and reinforcing. Top television administrators who have reached a high level of maturity, particularly in the category of intellectual maturity, can work to educate their program producers so that they have an understanding of such issues as personal versus structural causation in the lives of troubled celebrities. In turn, when producers educate their commentators on this topic, commentators may begin to educate their audiences as well. If this were to occur, then it could promote movements to change the businesses, agencies, professions, and the like to restructure the nature of their own organizations. This would mean that they would modify previously aggravating structures that have been generating the personal problems of those maltreated celebrities.

Consider universities with different general levels of maturity. The general level of maturity may be contingent upon the nature of the university’s vertical system, its chief administrator setting the tone for its many departments with their own vertical system being interlocked with the top administrator. Even highly intelligent, highly educated, and highly mature persons like university faculty are unlikely to be able to evaluate themselves as having a ‘maturity’ deficiency or problem. It is almost universal among humans that they lack the ability or tendency to reflect upon their own personalities with an objectivity that could suggest or mandate the need for corrective change. Natural Systems is designed to overcome the problem by supplying the conditions in which members or participants will progress naturally toward higher levels of maturity.

An organization that has reached Level 7 of Maturity should exhibit a design or configuration of external structures and systems that is optimally facilitating the mission of increasing the level of maturity of all of its residents or clients. A person who is assessing such and institution will be able to discern how the external structures and systems are addressing the residents’ internal structures and processes. On a deeper level, the assessor should be able to infer that these external and internal factors are the cause of residents’ remarkable progress in maturation. The even deeper inference is that exhibited, observed, mature behavior stems from intrapsychic changes in each of the processes of intentionality. Measurement Systems, or Performance Indicators for both the institution as a whole and its individual residents, should show extraordinary increases, since they measure critical objectives of the mission and goals of the institution as well as the institution’s goals for the residents and goals the residents have for themselves.

Contrast these measurement criteria with that used by psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. For these mental health professions, the principle criterion for success with patients is a reduction in the pathological symptoms of patients’ underlying mental illness. They generally treat one patient at a time. If efficiency is an objective, then Natural Systems, which successfully treats (increases their maturity) all members of whole populations simultaneously, then mental health treatments are far less efficient. For Natural Systems, not only is there a concomitant reduction in pathological symptoms but there is a significant increase in their level of maturity. A tenet of Natural Systems is that as the structure of the environment changes so as to provide the conditions for growth in maturity, symptoms of mental illness are automatically shed or eliminated.