Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Thu, 1 Oct 1992 15:52:00 GMT
From:         Dag Forssell <0004742580@MCIMAIL.COM>
Subject:      Progress, Diagrams

[From Dag Forssell (921001-1)]

Progress report:
Presented the "second day" program with leadership applications of PCT
(Leadership, Vision/Mission statements, Teamwork, Performance reviews)
yesterday. It was well received. Christine have strong signals that we
will be invited back to teach other groups within the company.

Diagrams:

Martin: Thanks for direct post with comments on Red, Green and Blue cones
from your correspondence with Bill. Do I recall that you mentioned the
availability of your hypercard indexed files on PCT to Bill Silvert? some
months back. It occurs to me to ask you if you have submitted a set of
your files to Greg Williams for historical purposes. He will keep
anything confidential if you ask, but your correspondence with Bill will
not be lost to the world if your house burns down.

I look forward to a report on your Paris experience.

----------------------------------------------------------------
Greg, thanks for quick and encouraging reply also. As discussed this am
by phone, you posted direct so I would get it faster. I think your reply
belongs on the net for anyone to see, so here it is with your permission:
----------------------------------------------------------------
Date:     Mon Sep 28, 1992 10:03 am  PST
Subject:  Diagrams

From Greg Williams (920928 - direct)

Sorry I've been too busy to comment on your diagramming before now. I'll
be gone tonight and tommorrow, at home Wednesday on.

>Dag Forssell (920926)

>I'll be happy to mail good looking charts of the final result to those
>deserving souls who help out.

And for the CSG archives, too, I trust!

>As I labor on this, I get uncertain about the levels where I have placed
>the different happenings of passing a car. Have I stretched this too
>much?

My overall suggestion, considering your motivation for doing the
diagramming and the intended audience, is that you should not be worrying
too much about whether every detail is perfectly worked out and whether
there are any inconsistencies. I think your main point should be that
this is the level of analysis necessary for a detailed description of the
underlying phenomena involved in any behavioral scenario. Your
managerial/engineering audience will get the message that the required
analysis is anything but trivial, but that PCT is up (or is getting to
be up) to the task. Remember, this whole exercise isn't to convince
non-PCT psychologists that PCT is useful for understanding the genesis
of behavioral events, but has the primarily heuristic function of
relating the theory to "real life" events. At least that's the way I see
it. If I'm approximately correct in my assumptions, the demonstration of
how such an analysis would look is FAR more important than whether all
the details are exactly correct. Besides, how would you verify (ooops,
sorry -- falsify) the theoretical details at this stage of our knowledge
about actual peoples' CNSs?

>Bill Powers (920926.1900)

>An ambitious undertaking. It makes me nervous, because it takes the 11
>levels as Gospel about 20 years prematurely.

Maybe 100 years or even more, with respect to falsification
possibilities!

>Also, it doesn't (can't, really) capture the parallel nature of systems
>at these levels, and the branching networks that underly each system at
>each level.

Yet it gives the flavor of the depth of analysis required even WITHOUT
getting into the parallel business.

>I've never seriously tried to fill in all 11 levels like this.

But see "A Cybernetic Model for Research in Human Development," in LCS
[I].

>Dag Forssell (920927-1)

>My wording for the upper levels was hasty (and sloppy), pressing against
>time to post something for the sake of feedback. I had spent more time
>and felt more comfortable with the lower levels.

As I said above, I don't think that is a big problem.

>But this diagram can be supplemented by others (drawn to a smaller
>scale, (such as LCS I: page 278) designed to convey the parallel and
>branching nature of the model. I am working on that too.

Sounds good.

BP>>This sort of example isn't too difficult to construct at the lower
BP>>levels..

>I would like to do just this, then leave the upper reaches blank. My
>post yesterday will provide a start and a vehicle for communication on
>the net. The net result for now is simply to scale back my ambition.

How about the arm demo (new version almost ready) and/or the gatherings
demo as explicit examples of lower levels operating in real time? There,
you KNOW  how the levels are organized!

>For purposes of Vision/Mission statements, which are a leadership
>application of PCT, I will be the first to suggest that people use the
>general concept of layering, but use labels that make sense to
>themselves as they see fit.

>By the time a person has created a statement for a business, using some
>of this terminology, it will likely appear to have more layers than we
>talk about in the model.

Quite frankly -- I've told Bill, of course -- I have never bought into
Bill's  hierarchy AT ALL except as a (not very well fleshed-out)
existence proof for  AN instantiation of PCT details. At this stage, I
think PCT has a lot to learn from living organisms before pushing HPCT
as THE instantiation. Your leaders are providing data which shouldn't be
ignored by the theoreticians.

>Leaving the upper reaches of the model blank invites people to think
>this through and create layers of terminology that make sense to them.

Right on!     Best wishes,     Greg
----------------------------------------------------------------

>How about the arm demo (new version almost ready) and/or the gatherings
>demo as explicit examples of lower levels operating in real time?
>There, you KNOW  how the levels are organized!

Right now my mind feels blank. Time to go back to bed and get some more
sleep (after a very short night) before I start in earnest to complete
the workbook with diagrams for the third day. In a few days, I will study
these programs so I can show them off next Wednesday. In the meantime,
can you make any suggestions on the arm demo and crowd using my format?

Thanks for help!

Dag
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