[From Bill Powers (940401.0730 MST]
Dag Forssell (940332.1300) (time warp) --
RE: HOW IS THIS DIFFERENT?
I liked your original version, and I liked Ed's revision, and I like
your combined product. Better and better.
I would like to see the emphasis on "the organization's goals"
reduced even further:
An organization consists of people who have goals. The problem is
not just to get some of those people (employees and managers) to
work together toward the goals of some abstract entity ("the
organization"), but to get _all_ the people in an organization, from
the CEO and VPs and stockholders and financial advisors and
department managers and floor supervisors and production workers and
loading dock laborers, to adjust their personal understandings and
goals so they are compatible with the understandings and goals of
others, and with continued viability of the enterprise. This is not
a problem of how the people on top can get the people below them to
do what they are supposed to do. It is a problem of how, given the
facts of human nature, an organized effort requiring many different
specialties and levels of functioning can be maintained at all. PCT
does not offer just a new scientific view of human nature; it
suggests how we can explore new ways of understanding traditional
social organizations like businesses and other institutions.
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Chuck Tucker (940401) --
How about writing to Alfie Kohn and inviting him to check out PCT?
Your project for replicating PCT experiments is of the utmost
importance, both for validating the experiments and for giving
people the opportunity to discover for themselves what PCT means and
how well it works. A million bytes a month of CSG-L can't substitute
for 10 minutes of watching a computer plot a model of tracking
behavior right over the plot of the subject's actual hand movements.
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Bob Clark (940331.1105) --
Yet people seem to be quite varied in their ability to record
and playback their experiences. I think many of the
differences between people is an accidental result of specific
incidents.
This is an important concept that applies to more than memory. The
scientific approach to behavior has always assumed that when you
deal with a human being or a Sprague-Dawley rat, you are dealing
with a standardized piece of machinery, so that one individual is
interchangeable with another of the same species. The superficial
similarities of members of a species, however, hide enormous
differences, some genetic but many resulting from the unique
interactions of each individual with the environment and other
organisms, starting at or even before birth. These differences are
physical and geometrical and well as functional.
Even in mapping the brain, neuroanatomists have found that the neat
functional layouts published in books show gross variations over
individuals. This makes, for example, the elaborate stereotactic
techniques used for brain surgery somewhat ridiculous, because there
is no guarantee that a specific brain function will be carried out
in exactly the same place, or occupy the same volumetric extent, in
every individual. The brain initially becomes organized through
neurotaxis as well as through Hebbian changes in "synaptic
strength." The very wiring differs widely from one individual to
another. And different brains learn to do very different things;
some learn to pole vault, some learn to compose symphonies; what one
person learns would not necessarily help another person to do what
that other person had learned. To be a doctor you must develop a
great skill at memorizing; to be a composer of original music, you
must NOT develop a great skill at memorizing.
Science has treated organisms on an assembly-line basis. Perhaps one
of the appeals of PCT is that it looks for regularities in
organization that do not require every person to be the same.
Experimenting with PCT shows that all people control, but that they
control different things with different styles of control and with
different understandings of what they are controlling and why. There
are generalizations in PCT, but they are at a different level from
those traditionally studied in human behavior. PCT is basically a
science of individual behavior.
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Best to all,
Bill P.