Discovering and creating are twin, interflowing processes of social change. Change is universal and continuous. Persons, groups, and societies change most rapidly through the evolution of Environmental Quality levels when trust is high, for trust allows us to join each other in creating a better world.
We can apply the same theory to overall cultural change that we use in trying to understand all other human process, that trust level is the key leverage variable in world change. Enduring change in the social order is in direct relation to that social order's upward movement on the Environmental Quality scale, as progressively higher levels of trust are achieved by its individuals and its organizations. Trust level results from significant changes in the four basic TORI discovering processes. These propositions are as central to political, economic, and social change as they are to changes in the family, the business, and the school.
From the perspective of the EQ analysis, the world is in more of a fluid state than ever before. In the United States and in certainly the majority of industrial nations, most institutions can be classified as benevolent, advisory, participative, or emergent environments, EQ levels III through VI. There remain vestigial elements of EQ I and II in some families, schools, prisons, and athletic programs, and to a certain extent in all of our institutions. But we also have many images through our reading or our experiences of individuals and groups reaching EQ levels VII through X. Most of us, in our daily lives, live in relationships at levels III through VI.
A number of analysts have pointed out that the dominant themes of our day are fear, distrust, and defense in various guises. We have in recent history passed through times when the dominant themes of EQ levels I and II—punishment, retribution, power, control, obedience, and rebellion—were the key themes of institutions in which and with which we lived.
But new consciousness levels bring higher levels of trust, lessening our need for defense and increasing our dissatisfaction with a world of power, punishment, and coercion. Nurturing, participative sharing, communication in depth, and shared search for freedom occur more frequently. These are the marks of EQ levels III through VI.
To some extent, defenses and distrust have gone underground: They are now often disguised and less easily recognized for what they are. Fear and distrust, tyranny, coercion, oppressive scheming, and enslavement appear reincarnate in the form of four modern and deadly sins: role-taking, covert strategy, persuasion, and leadership.
The sickness of our day is embodied in these four "defending" processes and their many variants. Does this sound harsh? Let me explain.
Role-taking or depersonalization is endemic to our culture. The hot/cold, hating-love, redemptively-unique person is lost in "assuming appropriate roles". When I am a "parent" dealing with a "child", I am no longer a person being with another person. Even though I happen to be a superintendent, I needn't be a superintendent. A teacher playing the role of teacher cannot be an effective teacher. The sadness of Watergate is epitomized in the process through which the person Richard Nixon once was finally disappeared into the role of the "imperial presidency". And the "lesson" of Watergate is not that one wicked man led us into this calamity, but that we have created a culture in which we are depersonalizing each other, joining in an alienating process in which roles are relating to roles relating in turn to still other roles. Nixon is a symbol of the age, a flowering of our theme, an object lesson, a warning signal that screams: "Let's look at what we are doing to each other!" It was no accident that we elected this kind of person to represent us to the world.
Role-taking is a potent and seductive process. In some informative experiments at Stanford a few years ago, the students taking the roles of guards became so hostile and punishing to the students taking the roles of prisoners that a role-taking experiment studying prison behavior had to be discontinued prematurely. Role prescription that we give ourselves and that others give us tend to lock us into depersonalizing behavior. A patient classified as a paranoidal schizophrenic in a mental hospital will tend to act out what the patient thinks such people do, and hospital personnel get into the same perceptual patterns. The sickness is reinforced by the role perceptions.
The stabilization, stereotyping, and preservation of roles are major targets of the women's movement. Seeing oneself and being seen in the role of female starts early in life. According to a Georgetown study, female children under two years of age were administered 50 per cent more over-the-counter drugs than male children. The study found that this role-taking and role-giving persisted into adulthood: women took more over-the-counter drugs than men, even when sickness rates were similar.
Covert strategy is the identifying mark of a closed life. The fearing and distrusting person thinks strategically in an effort to respond to a variety of fears: fears of revealing feelings and opinions that might cause disquiet or retaliation; or fears that unplanned, unstrategized, and impulsive actions might not "win friends and influence people". The more fearful we are, the more we feel it is necessary to devise a strategy to "deal with" the other person. The more we are into a role, the more likely we are to come up with a strategy, a device, a technique, a gimmick, a plan, or a management tool. And the more we do this the more we induce distrust.
Some roles are noted for the use of strategy and resultant distrust: psychologist, lawyer, salesperson, advertiser, public relations expert. Whenever I've asked people to tell me what it means to "use psychology", their answers indicate that it means to "trick people" or to manipulate them. Two recent studies of the legal profession indicate that the more experience people have with lawyers, the more they come to distrust the law. The reporter of one of the studies recommended that, as a result of this finding, the legal profession ought to hire public relations experts to create a better "image of the law"!
The creation of distrust is in direct ratio to the rise of strategy. Again, the Watergate phenomena are relevant. It was characteristic of Nixon and his co-conspirators to engage in what seemed like interminable secret-strategy sessions. It is diagnostically significant in looking at our contemporary culture that a frequent statement of the lesson of Watergate was: They should have destroyed the tapes. Or that it was poor strategy to have made them in the first place. The more penetrating lesson is that covert strategizing is a sickness that characterizes our culture. It is a sickness that retards cultural and social growth to newer levels of fulfillment.
Persuasion is the attempt to manage other people's motivations and is a hidden sickness of cultures in the EQ III, IV, and V ranges. Advertising, public relations, performance appraisal, merit pay, and other institutionalized forms of motivation management are so woven into our culture that they are a way of life—integrated into our values like motherhood, patriotism, and competition. Most institutions hire public-relations people, advertisers, propagandists, and lobbyists to try to change people's motivations: to get them to want new things, to want to go to our church, to buy our cigarettes, to want to join the army, to want the bra we sell, to want to vote for our candidate, or to want to believe what we want them to believe. These professionals engage in a constant battle of subtle distortion, seductive massaging of the truth, selective laundering of the data, expert manipulation of symbols, incessant bombardment of the senses, and the use of a wide variety of media messages directed toward the manipulation of our motivations.
Persuasion is the antithesis of inquiry. Our legal system, for instance, is historically rooted in the "adversary" system, which pits the parties against each other in the attempt to persuade the jury of the merits of opposing sides, in contrast to an objective and dispassionate inquiry into the "truth" of the matter. This process of prosecution and defense is in direct contrast to one of discovering. It is easy for this adversary mode to get into politics, the church, medicine, education, and other institutions. Forensic medicine is a growing field. Doctoral students "defend their theses". Hard sell ministers market the gospel message. The President feels he has to "sell" the idea that there is an energy shortage.
This constant and pervading climate of persuasion results in a generalized resistance to the assault of such messages, a cynicism about the motivations of people who are assumed to be distorting their messages in some way to influence, manipulate, or control us. It is assumed that ministers, teachers, counselors, lawyers, psychologists, store clerks, and used car salesmen all have hidden motives, and that it is necessary to respond to what everyone says with suspicion and distrust. This neurotic buy-sell culture feeds the growing cynicism and paranoia of our day. It is an unhealthy atmosphere in which fulfilling relations are difficult to achieve and sustain.
Leadership is the fourth process embedded in our defensive culture that masquerades as a positive attribute of persons, organizations, and societies. Leadership is defined in most of the textbooks as the process of getting other people to do what you want them to do: the management of the actions of other people. Leadership in an elite group and reliance by underlings that the elite will perform the vital functions of the society are the key, defining marks of the EQ levels I through V. The transcendence of leadership and the building of processes that do not depend upon leadership are doorways to higher states of being, to greater fulfillment, and to higher levels of productivity and spirituality. A critical step in the growth of the person is the movement away from dependence upon the leadership of another person. The key to the future lies in increasing the number of instances of emergent leaderless groups in education, business, therapy, and all phases of life. The key to changing environmental quality is the growing trust in ourselves as individuals, and also as groups and communities.
I remember a white manager in the presence of a black manager characterizing the black "march on Washington" as "surprisingly" orderly and responsible, i.e., "the blacks must have had good leadership". The black person expressed indignation; his inference correctly interpreted the white person's derogation of black people's ability to act responsibly on their own. One of the most resistant forces against growth is the assumption that we need "leadership" to motivate, protect, encourage, nurture, and organize us. We give away our own dignity and worth when we make this assumption and allow "leaders" to influence, dominate, control, and take power over us.
These four camouflaged defending processes are so easily rationalized, appear to be so innocent and even righteous, and are so interwoven in the culture of the home, the church, the school, and even the mental hygiene clinic, that it is difficult to recognize these as the toxic diseases that they are and to see the effects these processes have on the erosion of trust level.
The processes and methodologies that people use to achieve social change are, not surprisingly, appropriate to their EQ level. The problem often is that the methods are more appropriate to the level we have passed through, or are now passing through, than to the level we are moving into. As a result the methods and processes tend to be forces that act to preserve outmoded forms, attitudes, and environmental qualities. Change efforts can be far more effective if they are appropriate to the world we are trying to create rather than to the world we are trying to grow out of.
Punishment is widely used through the law enforcement and the penal systems, with little effect other than increasing the problems that it is designed to solve. Typical is the finding regarding the Delaware whipping law, an unbelievably primitive provision which prescribed public whipping for a number of serious crimes. Several studies analyzing incidence of punishable crimes during periods when this law was in effect and when it was rescinded indicate that the punishment did not diminish incidence of crimes the whipping was intended to deter.
Even more serious are the ancillary effects which punishment visits upon everyone involved in the process. A study of black and white children at a summer camp sponsored by a social-change organization found clear evidence that dislike of the other race was higher among children who came from homes where punishment was commonly used. The contrary was found in the attitudes of children who came from homes where punishment was little used.
The effectiveness of legal action is a function both of power and of trust. At primitive stages there is so little trust that a life under law is unattainable. As trust grows and social needs are clarified, laws evolve as a codification of mutual trust. Presumably, with advances into higher EQ levels laws will not be necessary. In our current society, the application of law depends upon the use of power—the power of the majority, the courts, the police, and the punitive system.
Movements for "woman power", "black power", and "brown power" are responses to the Level-II nature of our culture and of the Level-II philosophy of the power-seekers. "Personal power", "encounter group", "fight training", and "assertiveness training" approaches often use militant or quasi-militaristic terminology and concepts and tend to lock participants and the social system into lower EQ levels. All of these may be necessary as safety-valves to release the aggressions that accumulate in a power- and control-centered culture. They are barriers to the movement of the culture toward significant levels of new trust and new environmental quality.
Strategy is a Level-II, III, and IV process. But many efforts to achieve the states that characterize Levels VI, VII, VIII, and IX are also basically strategic in nature, relying upon devious or hidden techniques for their effectiveness. When the methodology is appropriate to Levels II and III and the aim is to reach states that characterize higher environmental levels, the results are predictably very mixed. The closed and devious strategies of est, Ringer's Winning Through Intimidation, and other such techniques are inappropriate to their stated aims and will have no enduring effect on growth toward higher trust levels.
When one examines the handbooks of some social-change activists, what is most striking is the low-trust techniques that are employed. They are often elitist ("We know what the people need"), devious and strategic, esoteric, distrusting ("People need to be trained" by our staff in order for them to achieve their ends" power-oriented ("You need to develop a strategy that gets first to those in power" ), depersonalized, ends-oriented rather than people-oriented. They are appropriate to the defensive EQ levels, but not to growth.
I am defining effective social change as movement on the Environmental Quality scale. Processes that cause significant and enduring change in EQ level result from forces that are intrinsic to the culture at that level.
It is much easier to see the limitations of the change-induction methods that are level-fixated and ineffective than it is to discover what an effective change method might be. My experience is necessarily limited to the EQ levels of institutions in which I have participated, but my vision is not. Let me try to spell out what TORI theory indicates would be major criteria for and characteristics of an effective change effort.
1. The effort must provide a new perspective and vision for the culture.
For me, the greatest significance of the EQ analysis in Chapter III is the perspective that it creates. When I see a long-range extrapolation of current events in my life, I am able to see my life differently and to make choices in the light of this broad perspective. Seen in the vision of a longer time-line, the alternatives of my life are more clear. I know what I want. I know where I'm at and where I want to go. Conversely, when I fear I see the immediate choice only in the moment, I am torn by many ambiguous alternatives. Though I believe in living fully in the moment, I also believe in rhythms and flows in my life, often living fully in the moment and "flowing into choices", as it were. At other times, I live fully in my reflections and speculations, in a sense living in eternity, or at least in what is my experience of eternity, timelessness, and perspective. I enjoy each of these experiences. For me it is important to see my life experiences in the perspective of a long time-line.
I believe that it is important for the culture to move in harmony with its basic rhythm. Unless it is so, the culture is dissonant and cannot perceive itself in its times of fullness or see itself in its moments of perspective. TORI theory provides one frame of vision, one way of integrating these diverse elements in the continuing rhythm of life. I find that in discussing societal change with groups, this extrapolative frame of reference—the EQ analysis—provides a basis for impressive agreement among people about the societal changes they would like to see.
For example, most people dislike participating in the selling and advertising process, either as a seller or a buyer. I have yet to hear a person who had other than negative reactions to movies or news on television being interrupted frequently with advertisements. Haven't you heard, as I have, people talking about advertising and selling in this way? - "I hate it, but I suppose someone has to do it if we are going to keep the free enterprise system going."—"I hate to have a salesperson call on the phone or come to the door, but I put up with it because I guess they have to make a living."—or "People must like to see advertisements on TV, or we wouldn't have so many of them". I have yet to hear anyone, taking a long view of the process, who felt that buying and selling was a positive process in and of itself. Punishment, covert strategy, persuasion, and leadership are seen by many persons as necessary evils when they are looked at in the context of immediate social conditions. When looked at in the context of a larger world view or of a long-range perspective on human growth, these processes should and, someday will, be left behind us.
The process, the form, and the substance/content of trust level theory are all congruent in providing one perspective on social change. The deeper the trust, the wider the perspective of the viewer/theorist who is looking at social change. To be effective, a social-change effort must be embedded in a long-range perspective of some kind. Most social change programs never achieve their goals because of lack of an adequate theoretical base, fears brought on by a sense of emergency, pressures from the establishment, short-range financing, and other similar factors which limit vision, lead to opportunism, and produce limited results.
2. The effort must be discovery-oriented.
Life is a process of continual discovery. An effective social-change effort is an attempt to discover something, not an attempt to prove or to demonstrate something. It is research in the best sense. The change process itself is the research—the quest. One lesson of the Hawthorne studies is that when people are engaged in what they perceive as a discovering process, they are more productive, creative, and fulfilled. It is the discovering, per se, that makes it productive.
A simplistic model of doing social-change research is to compare two methods: one that is thought to be less effective, usually the conventional or present way of doing it, and one that it is believed may be more effective. If the "experiment" is well-planned and well controlled, and the alternative methods are well-defined, the difference in measurement of the results can be attributed to differences in the two methods. There are, fortunately, better ways than this of doing research.
The focus of an effective change effort is upon discovering a way of producing pollution-free automobiles, of planning a balanced urban environment, of creating a more redemptive social milieu for retired people, of setting up a school that stimulates learning, or of creating a happier organization.
Again, it is necessary to stress that the quality of the process of discovering is more important than the product of the social-change effort. The process must be humane. The people participating are paramount, for enduring and effective societal change does not come out of a dehumanizing process. As far as we as TORI theorists are concerned, this people-process is the product: What results at the end of the change process—a better car, neighborhood, or school—is only a by-product of change in people. The process is, in a real sense, the product.
The president of one of my client organizations once asked me to help him sell the employees of the company on the advantages of a beautiful new building that the company had planned and built for the corporate headquarters. I told him that his process of social change was creating the change problems that he was experiencing and that he was involving me at an unfortunate point in the change process. The building itself was an incredibly effective building, with open space, multiple-option forms and furniture, and it incorporated the best ideas that skilled architects were able to provide.
I told my client thatn an effective change process is person-centered, open, self-determining, and interdependent. His change process met none of these four TORI criteria. The persons who wer going to use the space had not entered into the planning - the planners planned around the roles that would be performed and provided, in an inventive way, to be sure, for the roles. The space was open, but the procerss of planning was closed and strategic; the planning had been a fairly secretive and private process, with small group experts making the decisions. The persons who were going to use the space were scarcely consulted. A centralized filing system and a centralized typing pool were created, based upon well-established systems-design principles and work-management processes. Principles of function interdependence were considered in depth. Principles of interdependence of people-in-the-work-situation were largely ignored.
The intentions of the president and his executive team were to create an EQ III-IV management system. The employees experienced it as an EQ II system. The process had a built-in persuasion stage - it required "selling". And the selling let to resistance - several years, in fact of multi-level resistance to the new building. This incredibly costly resistance was not to the change, per se, nor to the new working plans, nor to the well-designed building, but to how the change was made. There had been too little communication before and during the planning and designing of the building, and too little involvement in the process. Instead, the selling process was communicated after the change was complete. The process is the message in either case.
Had the total change effort been genuinely directed from the beginning toward discovery - toward discovering how to create space that would be efficient and would lead to more effective corporate activities - it would have more nearly met the significant criteria of effective change. And, incidentally, it would have been dramatically less costly in time and money.
A good test: If the change or the change effort requires persuasion, something’s wrong! Sound process produces effective change.
3. The process of the change-effort must be appropriate to the hoped-for EQ level.
This principle applies to whatever change is under consideration, from changing a production method to changing the basic nature of the social system.
The Russian revolution, in using EQ I and II processes to accomplish what were to be EQ V social conditions, created at least a half-century of resistance. The American free-enterprise system, in using EQ II and III processes to accomplish what it perceives as EQ IV and V ends, continually creates incongruities and encounters resistance. The scientific community often uses EQ III and IV processes to accomplish EQ V ends. Aware that research shows the importance of participative (EQ V) modes of living, science-based programs often use experts to decide on the data to be gathered and the methods of collecting and interpreting the data, and only then solicit involvement in getting programs activated.
Some growth centers use EQ III, IV, and V methods in the attempt to create EQ VIII and IX states of being. The resulting states are often temporary, partial, and unrelated to the everyday life of the participants. Such centers often operate under EQ II, III, IV, V management systems, trying to coordinate activities directed toward providing experiences appropriate to EQ VI-X aims.
Until some churches can discover methods that rise higher than EQ III in managing the worship system, they are likely to be unsuccessful in creating the spirituality that they hope for. The spiritual episodes that are created on a Sunday morning are not likely to spill over into the everyday lives of the participants.
Since the process is the message, what is learned from an educational effort or a change-induction effort is also the process. The challenge to the modern school is to develop something other than an EQ level III-IV environment to communicate ideals, values, and content in the EQ V-X range. Substantive or content learning in a school is not likely to rise above the EQ-management level. Promising new developments in some churches and schools are being managed by teachers and administrators who are in EQ V through VII levels.
It should be no surprise that psychoanalytic training programs have had little impact on the behavior of the participants in organizational settings relative to effort expended. This is due largely, in my view, to their being managed in an EQ level II-III style. At the same time, they are attempting to impart a message that is appropriate to an EQ VIII level, in which the unconscious lives of the participants are to be integrated into the social and institutional relationships of everyday life. Neo-Freudians are happily developing educational and therapeutic styles more appropriate to the aims of their programs. As a result, they are having commensurately more significant effects on their patients.
4. The effort is most effective if it includes a significant pilot study at an early stage.
No matter how brilliant ideas and theories may be, they require implementation in the heat and complexity of the "real" world of practical affairs. Many plans can go askew between the drawing board and the schoolroom or factory floor. The idea or theory may be misunderstood. Some actions will be fortuitous; other actions may have unforeseen effects. The intent and perceptions of those carrying out the change plan may be very different from those of the persons who did the planning. New and underperceived factors may enter into the situation that outweigh the predicted effects of the idea- or theory-based plan.
Useful information can be provided by a series of pilot studies on the effects of plans for change. Such pilot studies may be pre-planned and well-defined efforts especially designed to test out an idea or a theory in a business, a school, a neighborhood, or a nation; or they may be natural events that serve the purpose of the theorist.
For instance., the League of Nations was, in a sense, a pilot run for the United Nations, which may be in turn a pilot run for a more effective attempt yet to be made in the future. Our present political, economic, and societal theories are not yet adequate to form the basis for a truly functional world order. Social experimentation on such a grand scale is very difficult to perform. The application of Trust-Level theory to international and global living will be the topic of a later book in this series. Fear level among nations is so high, relative to international trust, that we need more differentiated theory and more adequate social tests of theory to determine how in practice trust levels may be significantly changed on a global basis. I believe that we are on the right track and have one possible theory base.
Douglas McGregor's Theory Y may be viewed as a powerful, trust focused, general theory of social change. As is the case with all theory, its wide applicability requires testing in the hot and complex reality of diverse organizational settings.
Such testing is difficult but necessary. While McGregor was president of Antioch College, he made a number of courageous innovations that, in one sense, constituted a test of Theory Y. Many complexities in the situation made the results ambiguous and difficult to interpret conclusively. Later a large corporation financed a major multi-million dollar test in a large geographical sector of the company, but the executive board of the company placed a powerful Theory-X executive in charge of the Theory-Y operation in order to "guarantee its success"!
After many such discouragement’s, Doug, Peter Drucker, and I consulted with a corporation that was interested in experimenting with Theory Y on a large scale. Doug and I spent about nine months interviewing key company people in depth at all levels, nationwide, on key questions. We were trying to set up a pilot plant or relatively autonomous operation that could be a pilot run for the usefulness of Theory Y. We tried several mini-tests of the theory, but the total climate was such that we were never able to implement more than a partial test of McGregor's major theories. We believe that our efforts were effective, but they were necessarily inconclusive. Good pilot tests of even powerful theories are hard to come by.
In the sense in which I am using the term here, historical innovative social experiments can be seen as informal pilot studies in the continuous process of building an adequate theory of organizational design. In a broad sense, what the world needs is an adequate "theory" of how we can live together, work together, and be together in more fulfilling ways, at progressively higher levels of environmental quality, however, this may be defined.
Think of the wide range of "pilot studies"—good and evil—that provide data for us in our search for discovering better ways to live together: alternative schools, the utopian communities, legal assistance groups, drug information centers, birth control clinics, nudist colonies, ashrams, sexual freedom clubs, the women's liberation movement, the Alberta social credit plan, the Mormon's United Order, the kibbutz, Prohibition, polygamy and bundling, prisons and concentration camps, Teapot Dome and Watergate, no-fault divorce laws, the bombing of Hiroshima, consumer co-ops, and a legion of mini-tests of "theories" of social living.
Consideration of this wide diversity of experience leads me to the next criterion of effective social action.
5. The effort is most effective if it nurtures diversity and emergence.
God or the cosmic process apparently designed some undeterminable number of social-discovery experiments, one of which is happening on the planet earth. The experiment is apparently leaderless, unstructured, emergent, blind 1from the participant standpoint), and apparently has high diversity on several dimensions. From the standpoint of the participants in the pilot study, the purpose, experimental design, hypotheses being tested, and hoped-for-outcomes are all indeterminable. From the participant's viewpoint, what we see produced is both massive fear and massive trust. The fear produced is certainly awesome and pervasive. But this high-emergence pilot study also makes possible the experience of awesome trust. Presumably, without the experience of fear and perceived risk, we would have no experience of trust.
Perhaps one solution to the collective dilemma is that this massive fear (massive from the participant's viewpoint; perhaps minuscule from the cosmic viewpoint of the experimenter) makes possible the discovery/ creation of an even more awesome and transcendent trust state. As one participant in the experiment, my guess is that the I-X EQ scale discussed here contains only one tiny end of a cosmic scale in which my levels I through IX are minute gradations on range I of another scale. Perhaps my EQ level X contains a presently unperceived richness and range of trust experiences Ibeings—or some state different in quality from what we call experience or being) on a presently unimaginable scale, which is most certainly not likely to be linear or linear-like.
It may be that transcendent trust (at levels we cannot now experience or even conceptualize) is the significant outcome of this earth experiment. Perhaps the only way such transcendent trust can be acquired is through discovery and emergence in diversity.
To move from this fanciful and cosmic level of speculation to more immediate perspective, I believe that diversity and emergence are enhancing conditions for all social change. We need the range of experiences, models, pilot studies, and data provided by the rich diversity of life as we know it. In fact, we need more diversity, more richness, and less control of the range of experience and models. At this point, people try anything that they have the energy, imagination, courage, and resources to try. Can it be argued that we needed the Ku Klux Klan, the concentration camps, Watergate, and the Vietnamese war to show us convincingly what fear can do to us and our social models? As we learn to trust the human processes of diversity and emergence, we will move toward more and more trusting models of social living. I firmly believe this. We are now in a state of rapid transition, moving into escalating states of fear and trust, and we are probably going at the pace we can handle.
Greater diversity, particularly on the high-trust side, of social models, innovative ideas, and pilot studies can take us to the frontiers of social change: provision of adequate health care for all, conservation of our people and their natural environment, learning ways of living together cooperatively, liberation of all minorities, discovering humanistic and holistic ways of producing goods and services, and ultimately, achievement of transcendence and ecstasy.
The application of this principle of diversity to everyday life means that change in the schoolroom, factory, church, and clinic is best accomplished when we range widely in the tests, methods, and theories we use and when we encourage variation and innovation. In consulting with school, church, business, and government systems, I have been impressed by the occasional innovation, but dismayed even more by the standardization, lack of imagination, discouragement of innovation, routine continuance of methods and procedures that have been found time and again to be ineffective and inhuman, and the lack of an atmosphere of spontaneity and emergence.
In a free society, in an emergent workplace, in a free school, optimal diversity of social-change efforts is functional. Alternative models succeed or fail in practice—in the classroom, clinic, or home—not on the drawing board, in the theorist's mind, or in the administrator's office. It is difficult and perhaps impossible in practice to derive adequate change models directly from pure theory. At the present stage of our theory, the process of developing new models of society, work, or living seems to require some give and take, some trial and error.
6. All change is implemented by persons and probably starts with a change in the person.
Every person is significant in the change process. Each person who gets in touch with a deep level of trust can say something like the following: "I create my own environment and can change it in any way I wish. I am limited only by my fear, and need not be limited by that. I can change my immediate environment on the job, in my home, in my classroom, in my friendships, in my recreation, in all of my life relationships. I can join with others to change the organizations I belong to and the world around me. I do not need to try to change other people at all, but can accomplish the changes I wish in my environment by making changes in myself. Usually I change myself by letting me go free, allowing myself to be who I am and to discover and create what I want. The more free I allow myself to be, the more I become what I aspire to be.
"I can choose to live and be in my immediate world around me, or I can choose to live and be in larger and larger areas of the world. I can have as much effect upon the larger world, upon societal processes, as I wish to have.
"As I increase in my vision and courage, my choices become simpler and easier because they are clear cut:
"(1) I can choose to be personal or to be in role in as much of my life as I wish.
"(2) I can choose to live an open and direct life, or to live my life in strategy, behind a facade, and by manipulation.
"(3) I can choose to do what I want or I can live my life as I think that I ought.
"(4) I can try to be with others in all of my living relationships with persons-and with nature; or I can attempt to dominate and control others, or submit to them."
To me, this series of statements defines a way of life that can change any person and that can ultimately change all aspects of our world.
As part of my attempt to understand trust and fear, I have been interested in historical figures who, through their trust and through the processes that I call TORI theory, have contributed significantly to changing the world by moving it in the direction of higher trust levels and have also lived rich personal lives.
Whom would I choose to illustrate this point for me? Wouldn't you agree that Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr., qualify? Each of these lived what I would call a TORI life. Each of them had a profound and positive effect upon the world. Each had a deep sense of being which each showed openly to others. Each had an intensely self-created mission that integrated his or her life around what each deeply wanted to do. Each worked with the world, sharing the life process in an interdependent way. It would be difficult to categorize any of them by role. None pursued a covert strategy. None tried to coerce or dominate.
For me, the significant point is that each of these persons had a sense of personhood. Each makes it easy for me to feel that my relationship to each of them is a personal one. The gentle simplicity of Jesus is a living image of trust and openness. The widespread response to the life-being of Jesus seems to be a testament to the inner core of trust in each of us that resonates to His being. It is impossible for me to stand in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln at the Memorial in Washington without having an intense experience of trust. I have been there many times and have noticed others, particularly children, who seem to respond as I do. The life of every working man and woman is different today because of the intense personhood of Eugene Debs, and the vision, trust, and authenticity of his life. Visiting Hull House in 1937, two years after the death of Jane Addams, I had a similar feeling of the intensity of her presence and being. Gandhi lived his belief in and trust of the simple process of being and his creed of non-intrusion and non-violence. Martin Luther King taking that final courageous walk on the balcony, immediately after being warned by his friends of danger, testified to the transcending nature of his trust.
When persons relate to each other in a state of high defense at lower EQ levels, self-caring may be an exclusive or excessive concern for one's own well-being without regard for others. It may even have a narcissistic quality. But with growth, reduction of defensiveness, and movement into higher EQ levels, self-caring seems to co-exist with and even intensify one's love for others. At these levels, love of self and love of others seem to come from the same store of well-being. The people I have mentioned above seem to illustrate this coexistence in trusting people of self-caring and of altruistic feelings and motivations. It may be that in order to be fully whole, a person must integrate these needs to be uniquely one's self and to be fully altruistic. Neither self-caring nor altruism need exist at the expense of the other. They are thus not alternatives but mutually supportive processes.
The mixture of self-caring and other-nurturing probably differs with every person, but all growing persons have humanitarian and altruistic motivations. These may be submerged into partially conscious or unconscious levels by traumatizing fear and defense, but they are retrieved by experiences that restore trust.
This means that, to be effective, experimental community and organizational ventures must offer the opportunity for members to discover activities that are personally enriching in an immediate way, as well as activities that have holistic, altruistic, and societal significance meaningful to the persons involved. Hopefully both self-caring and societal motivations can be rewarded by the same activities, communal and organizational activities that integrate these aspects of each person.
The defensive change-agent, consultant, manager, parent, or minister looks first to change the people or the situation that is threatening. The trusting parent, consultant, manager, or minister looks first to himself or herself, knowing that enduring change or growth in environmental quality starts with self-caring.
7. The effective change effort is grounded in some way in an increasing trust level.
The effective change effort is personal, open, self-determining, and interdependent. That is, the processes are expressive of trust and induce trust. Effective change (growth) is movement along the environmental-quality scale.
When efforts to produce change meet increased resistance, they do so because they have a process that is defense-arousing. Resistance is not to the change itself. Change is exciting, fulfilling, enriching, and indigenous to all life. It is the toxic process used by some "change agents" that is frightening and that reduces trust. Any process that is depersonalizing, closed and covertly strategic, persuasive, manipulative, and controlling will produce fear, resistance, defense, and their variants. The commonness of such methods of creating change is the factor with is responsible for the myth that change is resisted.
Trust is the key to societal change. Trust is the inherent capacity of the individual and the institution to be whatever they are to become. The growth process in all forms of energy and being is an inner-outer process—it proceeds from within the being, from the center, moving outward toward interdependence. The outer-inner, intrusive, coercive, manipulative, and attack process is a violation of the nature of being. The external agent can be a force which intrudes upon and violates these intrinsic processes or one that nurtures them.
This principle is true with children in a nursery, with students in a school, with teams in a league, with divisions in a company, with states in a federation, and with nations in a world. Effective change is trust formation. The parent gets along with the child when the parent trusts the child. It is that simple. The manager gets along with the worker when the manager trusts the worker. We will get along with the Soviet Union when we trust the Soviet Union. There seems to be no other solution to the continuing dilemmas that confront our cosmic pilot study.