I opened a bit of a can of meta-worms debating the similiar patterns within science and religion early. This conversation, as conversations do, morphed a bit, and a friend of mine Kriek Jooste had this to say:

"Having been recently through a situation where someone I thought better of
actually perceived someone of the Hindu belief as being exotically wise with
depth, I keep on wondering if people grown up indoctrinated in the Hindu
faith would also find evangelical Christians exotic when they explain their
beliefs to them in detail for the first time.

I think we have a similar thing with Chinese medicine, Buddhism, Italian
food and tree bark eating rituals of South American tribes. Perhaps one day
the hippies of the future will copy cultural habits of exotic past cultures,
and re-enact the NG Kerk, beer drinking, braai and watching people play
rugby, while the progressive Asians are busy copying our Western habits
already. For us going to a sushi bar or getting into Buddhism is a bit like
for the Chinese to go to bars where they drink beer and watch a cover band
play alternative guitar music."

To which I say "Abso-bloody-lutely", we seem to have a romance for the things we do not know. Part of this is based on what romance is which is the idealisation of things. By seeing the same patterns and behaviours on a day to day basis we have no mystery to them, we understand them, and the mundane sits there, instead of finding the beauty in a some thing we've seen a million times.

My personal quest for the week is to find beauty, in that which I already know. Find the mystery and ideal in something that I've previously taken for granted.

Of late I've been training rather hard, for those of you that know me know that I've been involved in mixed martial arts for going on 8 years, which is where a large part of my sports psychology background comes from. The cross-integration between sports psychology and the psychology of the real world is interesting, simply because the structure is so amazingly similar. You really get to know a person once you've spent 5 minutes beating at each other with leather gloves (please note I do not suggest this technique when trying to get to know someone on a date).

Over the years I've noticed a distinct trend in how people become better fighters, and unsurprisingly the trend follows through to business, relationships and of course life. We know we have comfort zones, these zones act as our default behaviours, our routines and how we generally function on a day to day level. On either side of this zone we have upper and lower bounds, where extra stress is the upper bound, and less stress than the ordinary is the lower bound. In life we have the option to utilise either at any given stage, however there are awarenesses which are important. By pushing ourselves too hard, we move ourselves past a state of learning into a mental state of anxiousness and without enough stress we become lethargic and lazy. The perfect point of learning and growth is with just enough pressure that there is discomfort, but discomfort that you can deal with. Soon this zone becomes the default zone, and the natural state.

The most growth I see is when people understand that their growth, their success, is their own responsibility.

I've been falling asleep to screaming the last couple of nights, after tearing myself away from an addiction. The incredibly beautiful Little Big Planet has taken over my household, and the world shakes because of it. This is not a review of the game (for reviews look at IGN, Gamespot, or 1Up) this is a review of something that I've noticed whilst playing, that translates beautifully to "The Real World[TM]".

In LBP the levels require working together to reach a common goal, your standard teamwork type structure. There's an incredibly interesting spanner that gets thrown into it however due to two reasons 1) by having a winner at the end of each level, your standard title for any finite game, and 2) different personalities are driven by different sub-goals in the level (e.g. collecting stickers). Assuming 4 players are madly thumbing their keypads, the structure of what happens is this:

The level starts, 4 sock puppets come thrashing onto the beautifully structured level screen and almost at once chaos ensues. One player is in the background collecting stickers, another thinking that they are an invincible ninja is using up all the shared lives by attacking box-robots, whilst yet another is proactively running forward trying to get to the end of the level. The fourth is doing nothing but shaking their head in dismay whilst they are trying to work out how the levels tricky bits work and strategise around them.

Back in TRW (The Real World[TM] - Again) there is a couch of players hurling abuse at each other, because of the fact that they need each other to succeed, yet because of their various sub-games within the game are making each others lives increasingly difficult.

The solution that my family has finally reached is this: Be aware of that the sticker collector will want to collect everything, so point the stickers out to them. Create open communication about what is going to happen, before you act. Solve problems together. Let the guy who wants to win for the title win (Don't let him know though). Be patient with both the level, and your teammates, and of course...The obvious one: Align your sub-goals to the greater goal, and work together.

I have a particularly challenging friend, someone that just doesn't let me get away with the murder the rest of the world seems to, who often asks "What was the last book you read that changed your life?" For a long time I found the question kind of glib, on the basis that all books change your perceptions, all books add value, all books are...Well books are books. Of course, I was wrong. Referring back to my post on outcomes there is a reality that reading with intention, and alignment to life and purpose offers far more insight not only into the matter, but also across dimensions to which the book may be relavent. Over the past 2 months I've been reading at an incredible rate, as much as I've always been known to sit in a corner and get on with it, I've noticed other things happening: Massive intellectual growth, ability to question the subject matter, and strangely coleriate non-fiction with non-fiction and tie back the theory into practice.

It is due to all of this that I will, as I find a little spare time (between moving, working and of course reading), be adding a "Books" section to the blog. So keep an eye out for life changing subject matter.

Over the past couple of weeks I've noticed several changes in
behaviour and happiness. Part of the behavioural change has been due to the fact that I'm borrowing someone elses mac. These are some of the things I attribute to my new found freedom:

- I spend less time at the computer because it's not mine
- Due to my newsfeeds not coming in, I havn't been reading RSS.
- Due to a web based browser, and a resource intensive machine I tend
to only read emails of either massive relevance or of exceptionally
high priority weighting.
- My to do's are not really getting done, (part of this is an excuse,
part of it is linked to not being around my to do list)
- I've been using paper and pen in meetings with wonderful effect,
and taking notes.
- I'm more likely to spend time reading books that I've set out to
read with intention, than randomly click around the internet until
something interests me.
- Any work I do on the computer is done with intention, and once
completed I step away.

It's difficult to attribute which factors are making me feel so good,
especially given that I'm not really drinking, have been drinking
lots of water and am back at training too. So I don't want to create a
false idol from the above processes which I'm blaming on the mac,
however I have found them incredibly useful.

Sports psychology and martial arts have taught me more about myself than most books I've read. The greatest beauty of the above are how transferable they are across context, the flow of boxing is essentually a form of meditation, or in neuro-semantic terms "Genius State". The single largest component I've noticed has now been brought to light in Peter Senge's "The 5th Discipline"...Personal Mastery.

Although I've subscribed to the term self-efficacy in the past, there is something almost romantic about personal mastery. A discipline of a life focused on learning and growth, with the acceptance that we will never meet our full potential, because as we grow so does our potential. The term mastery itself conjures up images of aged monks practicing the arts of meditation in my mind.

Practitioners, according to Senge display some of the following attribute:

* They have defined and concretised vision
* The see their current reality as an ally to reach that vision
* They are committed to seeing reality accurately and truthfully
* They are extremely curios and inquisitive
* The work with the forces of change, as opposed to resisting them
* They feel the connection with others and life itself

Feedback is an interesting thing, I've only recently become aware of just how useful feedback systems are, not only in business or management, but rather from a personal perspective in creating the appropriate change in any form of behaviour. In fact that is, almost by definition, what feedback does.

A feedback loop is created by taking some proportion of a systems output, and feeding it back into the input. This then appends the input and will change the throughput and as such the outputof the system. This sounds all well and good from a process perspective, but what does it actually mean? To massively simplify it means that if you are aware of your actions, your actions change.

I've always been a believer in Socratese's method; question everything. However over the last few days, I've realised why his society decided that he was a menace, and poisoning him was the best way forward for their evolution. Questioning everything has the potential to cause infinite belief loops.

Wikipedia defines memetics as: Memetics is a neo-Darwinian approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Ok, so that's well and good, in theory we co-exist with biological and idea viruses (and of course digital virii). The effects of meme's are probably far more substantial than that of your biological virus, granted it's unlikely to kill you, however, a meme, unless utterly dismissed will affect you for the rest of your life.

Our belief systems (in conjunction with our value systems) underly our decision making criteria, and as such will dictate our response to situations. In a previous post I showed this process:

Systems Structure -> Pattern of Behaviour -> Events

So let's take a look at what the Systems Structure of human behaviour looks like. identified a structure which he called Neurological levels, which looks something like this:

- Purpose (Spirit etc)
- Identity
- Values & Beliefs
- Skills & Capabilities
- Behaviour
- Environment

Bateson was one of the origional systemic thinkers, and that view echo's through to the above model. As we see above, beliefs sit up fairly high in the structure. Now this is where things get tricky.

The above, of course, is just a meme. The idea of meme's is just a meme. The above is a recursive system, for understanding itself. Having said that, I personally like the above system, I have found it useful, not only in describing the behavioural universe that I've seen, in business, or even individuals, but also affecting behavioural change. I also enjoy the view that everything should be questioned, this post should be questioned, this blog...I should be questioned.

Maybe.

I'm currently reading "Uncommon Widom" by Fritjog Capra, and it really is a remarkable read. Capra's identity is split between a physicist and mystic as he tries to create a user guide for the universe we live in, both from within and without.

In the introductory passages of the book Capra talks, with love and passion, of the 60's hippie movement, and the expanded consciousness of the time, while I was reading this a thought dropped into my head: We are now 30 years on from Woodstock, the late teen hippies with tales of changing the world, views of freedom, peace and political intrigue, are now entering their 50's. Where are they now? What have they done?

As I reflect on this,removing as much as possible the effects of technology, many things become immediately evident:

1) Democratic blue belts on the coasts of the USA now exist in dominance, I suspect through these individuals.
2) Through the 80's a massive "Green" movement was born, as was Feminism. Both of these movements have maintained massive roll-on effect.
3) Mixed spiritual views are now mostly tolerated world-wide, with many Westerners pulling influences from the East. (This point deserves it's own post)
4) Society is far more prepared to question the authority that we have put into power, there has been a massive shift in how democracy works over the last 30 years.

As much as the world isn't perfect, and we're still trying hard to love our neighbors as we love ourselves, there has been massive culture progress to a more enlightened space.

I'm currently under commission to put together a 360 profile which has been custom built, in order to measure the alignment to values in an organization.

For those that don't know how a 360 degree profile works, it's quite simple: Your manager, sub-ordinates and peers are all fill out a questionnaire, the questions are rated on a scale, and the outputs from this are then mapped so that there is a 360 degree view of how your behaviours are perceived.

A good friend of mine Masedi Molosiwa asked what my insights where on the process. Initially I responded that it was all about appropriate information chunk size.

Values are an abstraction of importance ("What are my criteria?", "Why is this important"), through which some very interesting games in our universe get played. It's values all the way up. How values get played out in organizations is incredibly interesting, and outside the scope of this post. Values will dictate that certain patterns of behviour get lived out. As with any system, the following structure holds true:

Systems Structure -> Pattern of Behaviour -> Events

The above structure gives us an inkling on how to measure the acting out of values.

1) [Events] What sensory specific actions will be displayed in order to ascertain that those values are being played out (What will I see, what will I hear?).
2) [Patterns of Behaviour] What events do I group together to show a pattern of behavior which describe the values

The output of the above will bring out questions, or patterns to rate in the 360. Difficulties I picked up in this process are:

1) Values mean different things to different people, and what some people may classify as one thing, may get displayed by others differently.
2) The shift from System Structure to Event needs a parity check, only by moving in and out of state (something I'll try and blog about soon), does one get a feel for which actions attach to values.
3) This is a personal disclaimer - You cannot force values through an organisation any more than you can force a belief through a family system. The measure and importance of a value system in an organisation needs to be carefully chunked all the way up to "Do we work together towards a common purpose."

Human systems are complicated things, and while checking an odometer of a car will let you know how fast you're going, it may not let you know if you are any closer to your destination. 360's are exceptionally powerful tools, and when used in isolation they will feedback only what the have been created to measure.