When dynamics spiral out of control

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21st December 2008: Since posting this blog entry, I have received email from Don Beck, one of the original authors of the Spiral Dynamics approach, addressing some of the issues raised here and, in particular, providing some more information on his work on world issues. I have appended his main message at the end of the entry.

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21st December 2008: Anyone interested in the original work by Clare Graves, might also be interested in the site: www.clarewgraves.com. This site is managed by Chris Cowan, the other original author of the Spiral Dynamics model, but it does contain links to a variety of original resources, including audio clips, of Clare Graves himself.

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Spiral Dynamics (R) is grandiosely claimed to be an all-encompassing model to understand the universe. It has 8 pretty colours arranged in a lovely spiral, some words to describe each, is dismissed by academics, and has a cult-like following.

Maybe it's our search for meaning, but it amazes me sometimes how happily people project authority onto others. Without doubt one of the reasons I gave up being a 'management consultant' was that I had grown tired of individuals who had developed some kind of 'model' with nothing more than a simple acronym or a catchy diagram, and then peddled it as if it was going to win the next Nobel Prize for ingenuity.

Alright some models seem worthy of a little credit (the periodic table or that brilliant map of the London Underground come to mind) but most are merely a convenient way of categorising things or describing a sequence of events. Every now and then management media appear that have the latest of these convenient must haves (The One Minute Manager, Myers Briggs, Situational Leadership II, and SMART goals are all examples). There's usually three clues that they are little more than marketing hype for one consultant or another - a conveniently packaged way of trying to differentiate themselves:

The first is that effort has gone into visual design - as if nature would have based itself on a model that needed CAD skills.

Second is that they always have a fixed number of stages, levels, steps, or phases of which there are two schools of thought - either keep it few so people can hope to remember them, or make it many so people are impressed by the complexity.

Thirdly, stick on a TM, (R), or (C) as a little suffix.

I wonder how many Nobel Prize winning theories had "12 steps", were printed in colour with neatly overlapping pyramids or circles, and had a TM appended to their name? [ed: The answer is none.]

Forgive my cynicism. It isn't envy at their intellectual acuity. I am speaking with a modicum of authority here, and for once I can prove it, check out my books ... and you'll find a six step model for problem solving (PRIDEE) and the Rocket model of organisational change! (We even had printed stickers with that one on it.) Aaaargh!

Well, I'm afraid I have just sat through two days of a conference in which we were invited to absorb the delights of a 'biopsychosocial' system model known as "Spiral Dynamics (R)". Since its inception in 1996, Spiral Dynamics has catapulted into the world of management models, but what makes it different is that it doesn't just explain how to cut costs, motivate monkeys, or perk up performance, this one explains everything. In case you didn't quite catch that, the authors claim that this theory explains EVERYTHING, not just why you and I get out of bed in the morning, but why the sun rises and civilisations decline.

The hype has been such that well-intentioned proto-devotees have burned up their redundancy cheques to fly to Texas or California to study it and be licensed to use it on their own. The flood has been such that proponents pop up all over and they gladly share their new found model. But all is not entirely rosy with this particular one...

It neatly conforms to all my criteria for Nobel Prize winning status: it has a colourful pretty diagram, the acronym takes the form of the different colours (beige, purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow and turquoise) and that lovely little (R) mark. But how does it stack up to more critical inspection?

Criticisms of Spiral Dynamics

The general discipline of memetics and especially its branch, Spiral Dynamics, based on the research of psychologist Clare Graves, proposes that individual thought patterns have a consistency, they are a coherent system, and that individuals can move from one system to another, from one level of complexity to another. These systems or levels have been variously described as 'consciousness formations' and 'constellations of values'. It is these underlying value systems that make an individual 'tick', but Spiral Dynamics goes further, using these value constellations to explain the history of civilization in terms of societies moving from one 'average value constellation' to another.

This is not a criticism of memetics as such (ie the general idea that thoughts can spread like viruses, from one mind to another). We live in an era of peer-to-peer network-based knowledge transfer in which the viral perspective of memetics has value and leads to useful hypotheses. Nor is it a criticism of the work of Clare Graves, which has largely been interpreted in this way some time after his death in 1986.

Don Beck and Christopher Cowan collaborated on a book, entitled “Spiral Dynamics – mastering values, leadership and change”, which was published in 1996.

By 1999, Beck had begun to expand the model aligning his thinking with that of Ken Wilber (termed Integrative Psychology), and by 2002 the two of them had launched the SD-Integral movement. Beck’s website is at http://www.spiraldynamics.net/.

It is the application of the Spiral Dynamics school of memetics as propagated by Beck and Wilber (the so-called SD-Integral, or SDi model) that critics focus on. Their concerns are that the model's implications are political as well as developmental and that while the terminology of the theory is seemingly inclusive, the practical implications of the model can be seen as socially elitist and authoritarian. They say that it has rapidly evolved into a political neoconservative movement using the (pseudo-)scientific basis of memetics as a cover.

There is a large and growing body of criticism of Wilber and his theories. As a starting point you could try visiting http://www.integralworld.net/index.html .

Cowan, on the other hand, formed a working relationship with Natasha Todorovic. Their work is described on their website: http://www.spiraldynamics.org/ . Cowan has tried to distance himself from the work of Beck and Wilber and if you want to read his substantial and clearly angry rejection of it, check out this link: http://www.spiraldynamics.org/faq_integral.htm .

Clare Graves was at pains to say that his theory was not intended to imply that people cold be categorised into developmental boxes. He was also clear that we do not personally evolve from basic levels to higher ones. Cowan makes it clear that he follows the same viewpoint:

“While it is an expansive sequence in some respects, this is not a hierarchy of wisdom or decency or even intelligences, much less happiness and worth. Instead, it delineates a series of different ways of prioritizing and framing those things as solutions to one set of problems create new ones which require new thinking to resolve. First congruence then, if necessary or possible, growth. There is an increase in cognitive complexity as we move through the systems, but not in intelligence. Different intelligences are valued differently at different levels, just as different levels have their own sense of the spiritual, of the social, and of the essential.

To the extent that higher levels offer more degrees of freedom and consider a more expansive group of elements, they are 'better than' lower levels in the long run. However, the qualitative key to this point of view is appropriateness: using the brain which is there in ways that are constructively adaptive to the realities at hand with the openness to deal with the world to come.”

This is very different from the way in which many people present Spiral Dynamics and especially those influenced by the SDi approach.

The manipulation of lower tiers by the supposedly more evolved

In their work, Beck and Wilber emphasize that one of the characteristics of what they call "tier two" individuals, also called "Spiral Wizards", is their ability to make superior decisions for all parties concerned and to manufacture consent for their approaches at lower levels using resonant terms and ideas.

As well as outlining an underlying developmental theory, SDi gives explicit suggestions to these "Wizards" for both consensual and non-consensual management of "lower-tier" individuals.

One critic of SDi, Michel Bauwens, has argued that some conceptions of what it means to be "second tier" have come to resemble Nietzsche's idea of the Übermensch [1].

The emphasis SDi places on exercising power derived from greater developmental attainments has also been characterized as coming from a number of other past political theories emphasizing decision-making by a select elite, including Plato's idealization of the philosopher king.

Ostracism of critics

Within its own model, SDi is characterized as a "second tier" concept, which implicitly flatters those who support the theory and potentially invites self-confirming bias.

This is one of the defining characteristic of cults, and as the number of popular followers of Spiral Dynamics grew there have been people who have expressed concern that it is a mentally disturbing and socially alienating world view. Cowan has tried to put this in context, but largely does so by blaming people who use the model without understanding it properly.

Pseudo-science

Public criticisms of SDi have simply been dismissed by its advocates as expressions of lower-level memes, particularly the "mean green meme" [2]. This internal refutation of external critiques was one of philosopher Karl Popper's criteria for establishing that a system of belief is non-falsifiable and for distinguishing non-science from genuine scientific theory [3].

Some critics dispute the universality of deeper linear or emergent transitions as proposed in Spiral Dynamics, due to the high degree of variation they see among the surface expressions of human cultures over time. The claim that humans have changed systemically on psycho-social dimensions, such as self concept or the human propensity and reasons for self sacrifice, over the time period proposed in Spiral Dynamics, is not currently supported by mainstream anthropology, the social sciences, or evolutionary biology.

[1] Michel Bauwens, "A Critique of Wilber and Beck's SD-Integral", P/I: Pluralities/Integration, no. 61: March 23, 2005
[2] Natasha Todorovic, "Mean Green Meme: Fact or Fiction" http://www.spiraldynamics.org/documents/MGM_hyp.pdf
[3] Popper, Karl R. (1971). Open Society & Its Enemies. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-01972-X.

Best wishes

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Helping people achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org

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FROM DON BECK'S EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE:
"I teach at the Adizes Graduate School and use his [Clare Graves] Life Cycles model in our work along with Spiral Dynamics.

I played a major role in the transformation of South Africa out of apartheid (63 trips) and since Clare Graves was alive until l986, we worked together on a major multi-layered strategy to deal with the unique complexity that existed in the land South of the Limpopo River.

Much of my work, today, especially in Israel-Palestine and now with the Mexican Teacher's Union to design education for that entire troubled society, grew out of the "tear gas days" in South Africa. Since I had worked for several years in the National Football League (Dallas Cowboys and New Orleans Saints) I was able to aid the Springbok Rugby side in the l995 World Cup as a team psychologist, since Mr Mandela needed a nation-building euphoria.

You might check www.buildpalestine.org for a real world application of the Gravesian theory.

We are currently developing a major South American initiative (Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Guatemala, and even Venezuela) as well as growing interest in Russia, Ukraine etc.

My PhD work at the University of Oklahoma in the mid l960s was with Muzafer Sherif at the Institute for Group Relations where we were working with the auto-kinetic experiment and the Assimilation/Contrast Effect in Social Judgment, as a means of defusing major conflict in a bipolar context. We found this to be useful in the Netherlands, especially, in dealing with the threats of Jihad-inspired violence, resulting in a series of Dutch Summits om Fundamentalism. The third summit drew 900 Dutch leaders and has now resulted in a significant re-design of the Dutch government. I am quite aware of the problems all over Europe, especially in Germany and UK, with the integration of Islamic thought structures within the indigenous cultures.

We have also developed what are called Vital Signs Monitors, data mining, web crawlers, and other software packages designed to identify the underlying dynamics in a society. The Government of Singapore was the first to embrace the technology and Iceland is following. Their name is RAHS - Risk Analysis Horizon Scanning -- and it will become a major geopolitical piece to increase the quality of decision-making.

My Dutch colleagues and I have now formed the Hague Center for Global Governance, Innovation, and Emergence.

I broke any relationship with Cowan back in l999.

While I did some work with Wilber, that all began to wane six years ago because of his constant distortion of the Spiral Dynamics/Gravesian model.

Cowan put the TM and R on the concept which I bitterly opposed, wanting to keep the concept clean for academic applications, as you properly noted.

Graham, there is no "cult" of any type; colors were first used in South Africa as a short hand code to replace skin pigmentation; there aren't types of people; these complex adaptive intelligences spring from the interaction of humans with Life Conditions rather than a Calvinistic, pre-determined flow.

We are now doing major mind/brain research at the Brain Research Lab at the University of Cologne and have announced what we call "Large-Scale Psychology' as a new branch in academic psychology.

Far too many people make huge claims about "Second Tier" but it was Graves who identified, in his disciplined research, the major shift between the 6th and 7th Level priority patterns and that platform does contain more expansive codes and ways of dealing with world problems.

We just recommended to the US State Department that they fund a "cement factory" in Bethlehem because, based on the value-systems capacities, that would be a much better choice than a high tech factory that might disappear next year."

Quaker business practices prove to be more profitable

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Quaker business principles of fairness and trust are now being shown to be more profitable and less distressing.

I'm sitting in my room at the Quakers and Business Group Conference in Woodbrooke, Birmingham. Quakers have always had an interest in business. Back in the 1600s Quakers faced enormous persecution, and were effectively barred from holding public and professional positions and so many had no option but to turn to business as a way of making a living. They soon evolved some implicit standards for themselves on how to conduct their dealings and two of these were trust and fairness. In those days manufacturers didn't display 'recommended retail prices' and so a lot depended on the trader and how they assessed the gullability of their customer.

There are stories of Quaker traders in the US, to whom parents could send their children with cash to buy something, knowing that they would return having paid the same price as everyone else in the town. It was a reputation like this that led to the growth of the enormous Quaker businesses of the 1800s, including Fry's, Cadbury, Rowntree and so on.

At a corporate level, suppliers to these large manufacturers knew that they would be treated fairly, would receive a fair price paid in a timely fashion.

Fairness is a word that gets bandied around a lot these days. Most of us will have bought a product recently that carries a Fair Trade (FT) logo.

FT is a major political and social movement that advocates paying a fair price as well as insisting on social and environmental standards in the production of a wide variety of exported goods, mainly from developing countries and especially food produce such as coffee, cocoa, sugar, tea, bananas, honey, wine, and fresh fruit.

FT aims to work deliberately with marginalized producers and workers to help them become secure and economically self-sufficient. It is big business. In 2007, FT certified sales amounted to approximately €2.3 billion worldwide and it was estimated that over 7.5 million disadvantaged producers and their families benefitted from fair trade funded infrastructure, technical assistance and community developments.

There are critics of Fair Trade, who say that it fails, in the same way as other agricultural subsidies, when supply and demand become unbalanced. By setting a minimum price for producers in these countries, existing farmers are encouraged to produce more and new farmers come on stream. As supply grows, if the market doesn't keep apace, then non-FT producers can drop their prices and take substantial market share leaving the FT producers stranded.

This highlights the need for supplier and consumer to each have a sense of fairness in a deal and to trust the other.

Despite the evidence of these long-term success stories, other organisations have proved less keen to adopt the trust and fairness model.

For a long time, behavioural psychologists have known that most people prefer a sense of fairness to an approach that maximises profit at the expense of another. In countless experiments individuals and groups will move towards an agreement that gives both parties in a 'deal' an equitable share (often nearing a 50/50 split). Recent research into brain behaviour adds weight to this argument. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of brains when people are negotiating it has been shown that the same part of the brain associated with detecting bad smells (the anterior insula) is activated when someone is offered a bad deal! We literally SMELL a rat!

Despite this, economic theory says that the best arrangement is when one party has the upper hand and they can call the shots. Playing to this model, the holder of the upper hand (usually the manufacturer) offers only a small margin of profit to the supplier, who nontheless accepts as they are still just a little better off than they would be without a deal. For the economic theory approach to work the manufacturer needs to know (or deduce) the costs that the supplier has incurred. These days this information is usually easy to come by and so many markets have gone towards this extreme of low pricing. We frequently hear farmers complaining that they receive next to nothing for their milk, meat, or any other produce.

For the fairness approach to work, both parties need to trust one another to offer and demand a fair price. Once the manufacturer accepts that they will give this to the supplier, they in turn have to set a fair price for the consumer and so on.

This works all the way along a supply chain. Generally, the public will accept a price that they consider is fair even if it is slightly more than they might pay - they are prepared to accept a higher price for a fair trade.

Fairness in trade depends on a transparency of costs and profits. Modern technology, and the vast amounts of data available on markets, makes this a practical proposition.

Now this is all fine when we have a social conscience at play and are trying to support the most desperate economies, but until now it has been hard to justify in the main markets and for regular goods. However, some research published in the Management Science journal* last year shows that fairness pays.

Essentially, the authors were able to prove that when a manufacturer agrees a simple fair price with their supplier, because of the trust and transparency involved, they do not need to resort to complex contractual terms for pricing. Once the process begins to operate, ironically the overall profitability is actually higher and as both parties prefer to use this model so the amount of material traded in this way also increases. It becomes a classic win-win.

Now, of course, we shouldn't delude ourselves that fairness is easy to achieve. It is an ethic that is constantly attacked by the media and conventional business thinking. We live in a world where competition and beating others is seen as heroic. We glue ourselves to the TV when programmes like The Apprentice, Weak Link, Big Brother, I'm a Celebrity and so on are shown and we get pleasure from seeing people abused, manipulated and deceived.

Fairness needs to pervade an entire organisation's culture; otherwise it will not work, but allowed to do so, we can see that the results are better and we feel better too.

* Cui, Raju, and Zhang (2007) Fairness and Channel Coordination. Management Science, v53(8) pp 1303-1314.

Best wishes

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Helping people achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org

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Midlife crises, chasing God, and other existential issues

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True freedom to act is crucial to authentic leadership, and yet it depends on a personal clarity about our beliefs and values, and how we relate to those aspects of life that can never be known or seen.

In a previous blog (Minor Questions of Life: Leadership coaching and existential psychology), I posted quite a lengthy item about existentialism and why it is so important in the process of leadership development.

Of all the modern philosophical approaches, existentialists most clearly emphasize action, freedom, and decision as being fundamental to human behaviour. They look at where people find meaning and argue that we actually make decisions based on what has meaning to us rather than what is rational. This is a theme that I find myself returning to time-and-time again with my clients as we explore their ability to draw 'legitimately' on their intuition in their business decisions rather than the common tendency to fit post-decision rationalisations unconsciously. Only when they can distinguish between the two, and have a clear sense of their own beliefs can they hope to be the authentic leader that we now believe is so important.

As I said in my 'existential' post, to many existentialists, the most fundamental question to address is our personal relationship to, or understanding of, God and God’s role in society.

Some of you may know that rather than give out copies of Powerpoint slides after talks, I prefer to provide people with a clearer 'guide'. One of the talks in my portfolio is called; "Midlife: what crisis?" and you can find the guide based on it through my speaking page, or directly here.

In the talk (and guide), I make the point that one trigger to the midlife crisis is the death of a close friend or relative. This brush with death makes us aware of our own mortality, our limitations, and inability to control the world around us. It is a critical time to explore our beliefs and values as, done sensitively, we can emerge better focused and better able than we were before.

All this explanation is aimed at preparing the ground for a viewing recommendation. The internet is a wonderfully rich resource although you do sometimes have to sift through a lot of rubbish to find the true gems. Well I've found one for any of you who are interested in taking your exploration one step further. If you follow this link (http://www.teachers.tv/video/23961/dodownload/wmv/500k/A2446001.wmv), you'll find a roughly 60 minute long documentary, narrated by Dawn French, entitled "Chasing God". It isn't 'heavy', nor is it all theory. The imagery is very good, and the interviews with scientists, spiritual leaders, atheists and agnostics are excellent. Pull up a chair, pick up a cup of tea, and do some mind-expanding watching. It looks at these questions, and offers some very creative ways of addressing them.

PLUG: As ever, if there's anything in here that interests you, do remember that this is bread and butter to my leadership development work - you're welcome to get in touch and arrange a meeting!

Best wishes

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Helping people achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org

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What do our priorities say about us?

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Leaders who lack the ability to empathise with their team especially in what seem to them to be trivia or unnecessary, make choices and act in ways, that undermine their ability to lead when they need to.

We've all heard tales of fathers who were 'so busy at work' that they couldn't get home to attend the days at school that were special to their children. To the parent, it is easy to put an adult perspective on things:

They had to be there for an important meeting. If they hadn't their commitment would be questioned and their job threatened. And they need that job to pay for the home, the food, and the holidays, that provide the right quality of life for the children.

Of course, it doesn't seem the same to the child. To them the father is saying that his work is more important than them. Not showing up to sports day, to the school play, to prize day, and so on, are easy to see, but a father who prioritises his work in this way will be doing lots of other things that give the same message even if he doesn't mean it and doesn't realise that this is how it is being interpreted. Mothers are the same, of course, I've just illustrated the point by describing one parent.

Children compensate - they try countless strategies to get the attention they want. They develop ailments, they behave outrageously, they argue and fight. Others try to excel - they get exceptional grades in exams, they compete precosciously early in sports, they adopt bizarre or provocative dress styles and so on. Eventually, they give up trying to get that attention they so desperately wanted (and secretly still want) and instead throw themselves into other relationships - again, some precosciously early - the 13 or 14yr old girl who has rather too serious relationships with boys much older than her, the 15yr old boy who gets involved in gangs. The brighter ones go off to university, and have little to do with their parents after that, substituting the attention of a parent with that of peers.

And so I could go on, but this isn't a blog about parenting, or work-life balance. The problem is that employees do the same thing with their leaders - not the seeking of attention (though some do that too) but reading into their actions what their priorities really are and drawing conclusions as a consequence.

We were shocked in Oxfordshire this week. On Remembrance Day, the anniversary of the end of the First World War in which millions of young men were sacrificed, for a couple of minutes we show our respect for those young soldiers, most of whom did not choose to be there, nor expected to die in such appalling conditions. Small towns (noticeably not the larger ones and the cities) stop - shops shut, traffic stops, drivers stand by their cars, pedestrians pause, babies are shushed, school classes halt. While all this was going on some chap, in the glare of CCTV, picked up a charity collecting box and hid it under his coat and made his escape. Ironically, the citizens of Oxfordshire responded promptly and gave more than the thief could have stolen in extra, often anonymous, donations. His 'reason' was his need to feed his drug habit. Yes, what he did was disrespectful but his priority was elsewhere.

I have spoken to quite a few people in the last few days and they tell me similar stories - of managers who just carried on as if nothing was happening. Now, of course, people have a right to choose what they do, but those managers are looked upon as leaders. They are expected to set an example. And to command authority the rest of the time they need to match their behaviour to the expectations of their colleagues when they can - and showing respect on Remembrance Day is a simple opportunity.

One person told me of a manager who picked up a box that one of his team had put down while he stood for the two minutes, and carried on with the work. Another of a Chief Executive who came out of his office, saw the staff standing, and went back in muttering something rude in a forced whisper. Another spoke of his sales manager, whose mobile phone went off in the middle of the two minutes - he took the call and was heard to say "Yes, their all doing it here too!" which suggests something about his caller too. People notice these things - they don't say anything, they just notice, and know that your disrespect for the dead will translate into a disrespect for the living, and for them. Will they follow you for the extra mile? No.

I mentioned this to one of my colleagues and she rattled off a list of similar examples she has seen in recent weeks. A corporate responsbility manager published a report demanding that their employees cut down their carbon footprint, citing things they could do at home to 'make a difference', just before flying off to Bali on holiday. An HR Director who presented to a group of managers about the impending gloomy prospects for the business and the need to 'cull' only to head off in his chauffeur driven stretched BMW 7-series. A CEO whose staff were given a 3% pay rise last year, and yet whose company annual report published six months later showed that he had received a growth in income of over 35% in the same period.

Of course, each had an 'adult' explanation: It was her first 'real' holiday (ie foreign trip not paid for by the company) in a year. He had to get home to see his children whom he'd not seen for a week because he had been travelling all round the country telling managers about this forecast so that they all heard it 'from the top'. The 35% bonus related to the year before and included benefits negotiated when he was appointed.

We have all come across these paragons of sensitivity and I don't begrudge them their good fortune, I even understand the pressure and conflicting demands on their lives. But my old headmaster once told me; "Wilson, I want reasons not excuses." and as far as I can tell, those adult explanations are the latter.

If you expect people to put in that extra bit of effort in these recessionary times... If you expect people to respect you and your authority... If you expect people to follow you over the top... then you have to put in some effort yourself. Not when you need the favours, but NOW, you need to demonstrate that you understand their perspective, that you are prepared to accomodate them and their needs as well as meeting your own.

We're told that organisations and their managers generally lack 'emotional' and 'spiritual' intelligence. It doesn't take much to realise that this is as much the managers inability to empathize as anything else.

So next time, you find yourself juggling priorities and adopting an adult script, examine it carefully and double check the validity of the sentiments behind your decision and give some thought to how others, especially those you expect to lead later, are going to interpret your actions.

Best wishes

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Helping people achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org

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Say it with flowers. The emerging science of symbols and why it is important to business and leadership

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We depend on symbols to make sense of the world around us, to help us find our way around, to communicate with others. Look at your computer screen and it is littered with symbols. Despite this extraordinary reliance on them, we know very little about how the brain processes them.

The dictionary defines a symbol as something — such as an object, picture, written word, a sound, or a particular mark — that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible. Symbols indicate, serve as a sign for, or represent ideas, concepts, and other abstractions.

A simple example in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK, is the red octagon that conveys the instruction to "STOP" on a road.

Other symbols are used on maps to denote places of interest, such as crossed sabres to indicate a battlefield, and in mathematics (and shopping!) the numerals used to represent numbers.

Symbols can be physical objects too. For instance, a lover might send a bunch of flowers and provoke a quite dramatic response.

These are all examples of representational symbols, but there is also a wide range of abstract symbols in daily use, that provide ways of communicating powerful concepts.

For example, theologians have spent millenia discussing the symbolism of the Holy Trinity and in Holy Communion symbols of bread and wine are taken from a literal context (representing the bread and wine of the Last Supper to the abstract representing the body and blood of Christ.

In psychology, we might find our behaviour shaped by the way in which we give power to someone by association rather than directly. The power of the police, for example, has progressively declined throughout the last century as people were less prepared to project onto them a position of authority. A phenomenon that it took them a long time to recognise and that they still struggle to come to terms with. In a similar fashion, alongside this there has been the changing role of men in society and the male authority figure in families has changed substantially. How we interpret these shifts in society is largely about symbolism.

Religion and psychology have long been associated with the study of symbols, and it was over their interpretation and processing that the well known rift between Freud and Jung occured in the early 20th Century. Freud held that symbols were essentially an individual thing determined largely by environmental factors (such as early childhood experiences), whereas Jung believed them to exist across cultures and to somehow be innate. This was a subject that Jung pursued until his death, and his last published work was "Man and his symbols". (If you'd like to read a quick but informed summary of Jung's work, try "Jung - a very short introduction" by Anthony Stevens.)

One theory of the processing of symbols is that the brain treats them in the same way that it does language generally. (Of course, language itself is highly symbolic so this is not such an odd idea.) Now the latest research using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has confirmed this, with a number of consequences for knowledge management, business and leadership.

Kristian Tylén from the University of Southern Denmark in Odense and colleagues wanted to know which part of the brain was used to understand the meaning behind items placed in a symbolic manner*. They used fMRI to scan the brains of volunteers as they viewed pictures of everyday objects arranged to communicate meaning, such as flowers left on a doorstep, followed by the same objects in less meaningful settings, such as flowers growing in the wild.

The symbolic arrangements prompted more activity in regions associated with verbal communication, such as the left fusiform gyrus, used in reading, and the inferior frontal cortex, linked to semantic meaning.

Less conventional arrangements, like an art installation, also affected a "verbal" area - producing a pattern of brain activity previously associated with unusual verbal metaphors.

Previous research shows that the brain processes body language and facial expressions in a similar way to verbal communication. "It shows that language is more than just the processing of words - it pervades many of our activities," says Tylén.

Why is this significant to business and leadership?

In linguistics, symbolism is an important link in the interpretation of meaning, and meaning is a growing target for current generation of web-related knowledge management. Search engines used to be based on mathematical algorithms related to links between sites, distributions of types of words and so on. Increasingly research is into ways of detecting meaning in a webpage so that search results are increasingly relevant to the user. The ways in which the people you hired to maximise your web-presence achieved this last year are now out of date and semantic based ones are increasingly prevalent.

In psychology, semantic memory is memory for meaning, in other words, the aspect of memory that preserves only the gist, the general significance, of remembered experience, while episodic memory is memory for the ephemeral details, the individual features, or the unique particulars of experience. Word meaning is measured by the company they keep; the relationships among words themselves in a semantic network. Leadership generally requires an ability to grasp theory, vision, strategy, rather than handling detail, especially details 'on the edge'. If we want to understand how someone might be more effective as a leader, we need to understand this kind of processing and help them to develop skills of one kind rather than the other. If they were exclusively related to genetics, then there would be no point, but if they are associated with particular parts of the brain then we can devise exercises that strengthen this function, rather like training muscles, and so improve someone's leadership potential.

* Kristian Tyléna, Mikkel Wallentin and Andreas Roepstorf (2008) Say it with flowers! An fMRI study of object mediated communication. Brain and Language, July edition.

Best wishes

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Helping people achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org

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Conscientiousness is the secret to a long life

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Do the senior partners of accountancy practices really live longer than the rest of us? Evidence suggests that organised achievers live longest.

Business leaders who build successful companies, Olympic athletes and even some US presidents are all likely to live longer than the average person - because they are more conscientious.

Two scientists at the University of California at Riverside, performed what is known as a meta-analysis of twenty previously published studies, which altogether rated 8900 people for aspects of conscientiousness using a standard psychological assessment tool and also recorded the age at which each person died.

Applying rigourous statistical tests, Howard Friedman and Margaret Kern found that people who were less conscientious were 50 per cent more likely to die at any given age, on average, than those of the same age who scored highly.

This is a far greater impact than that due to socioeconomic status and intelligence, which are both also known to increase longevity.

The characteristics of conscientiousness that were most strongly correlated with longevity were those associated with achievement (persistent, industrious) and order (organized, disciplined).

Their findings are published in full in the journal Health Psychology (Ref DOI: 10.1037/0278-6133.27.5.505).

Best wishes

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Helping people achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org

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Leadership and resilience - a genetic heritage?

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The iron will that you need to bounce back and win in business, sport, or to pass exams even when the chips are down, may be partially inherited, but don't despair - read on...

There are countless stories of tenacious winners from the world of sport - such as cyclist Lance Armstrong, who recovered from testicular cancer and went on to win the Tour de France seven times - who are seemingly naturally tough. Similarly, business leaders like Gerald Ratner, whose famous gaffe ruined his jewellery business and yet subsequently launched, grew and sold a multi-million pound health club and now leads an online jewellery firm, clearly have something special. Such folks are always popular on the corporate speaking circuit regardless of how well they understand what has happened to them and how others can apply it to themselves - we just love a victim or 'loser', of whatever kind, who recovers and beats the 'system'. It is this quality that creates leaders - people who others will follow regardless of their present misfortunes.

As some of you know, I spend much of my time supporting people who seek to achieve things they never dreamt they could, and among them there's a smattering who have taken hard knocks along the way, so anything I can glean to help me understand the phenomenon of recovery is helpful. My eye was therefore drawn to a new study which suggests that this quality of resilience is inherited and that it may be difficult to boost people who are not naturally resilient!

Tony Vernon at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, led a questionnaire-based study of 219 pairs of twins which probed the genetic and environmental contributions [nature and nurture] of four traits associated with mental toughness: control over life, commitment, confidence and the ability to face new challenges.

The analysis, published in the journal, Personality and Individual Differences, found that 52 per cent in the variation of mental toughness was down to genetics. It also correlated strongly with extroversion. In contrast, being neurotic or anxious indicated a reduced likelihood of possessing mental toughness.

"It's about not letting setbacks destroy you," says Peter Clough at the University of Hull, UK, who designed the questionnaire. Clough agrees that mental toughness is mostly inherited, but says that natural worriers can deal with anxiety by learning to purge negative thoughts.

Sometimes it helps to read and re-read academic studies and look at them slightly sideways on. This is a case in point. What Vernon has demonstrated is that roughly half of our ability to be mentally resilient is attributable to our genetic make-up. The other half is down to our 'environment' which is partly due to the context in which we are at the current time, and partly due to the ways in which we have been brought up.

Now, I can't do much about the genetic component, but I am pleased to say that I can do quite a bit to help with the other two. So, if you find yourself suffering from the gloom around us at the moment, don't despair - give me a call!

Best wishes

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Helping people achieve things they never dreamt they could
t 07785 222380 | grahamwilson.org - inter-faith.net - thefutureofwork.org

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