[Bruce Nevin 2018-02-05_11:57:13 ET]
I have noticed in some groups and organizations in which I have participated a conflict that members felt between desiring the group to grow and a variety of perceived or anticipated (=imagined) undesirable consequences of growth or unintended side effects of growth. You may have noticed this too. Applying the Test to identify the variables and values generating the conflict is a matter of circumspect field observation. As is applying the Test to oneself.
Phil Runkel was a social psychologist interested in groups and organizations and how individuals may thrive in them. He had quite a good understanding of perceptual control theory, beginning in 1985 with his letter to Bill on July 23 of that year. He was clever, smart, and wise. (Those are three independent variables). The following, relevant to the above concerns, is from his letter to Bill on 22 January 1987.
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By the way, in Richards’s letters to you on pages 4 and 5, he seems to be taking the tack academicians often do about “open exchanges of views” and so on; namely, that if researchers get together and yak at one another, something good will happen. They like phrases, too, like people “being exposed” to one another’s ideas. I take more the view that you do in your letter to him of 28 March 86 (p. 4).
It’s a problem. If you don’t listen to other people, sooner or later you are going to miss a good idea. Sooner or later you will miss the benefit you would get from a person willing to criticise your own ideas. But how many bores do you have to sit through to find the very few people who will give you those benefits? Maybe there is no help for it. Whom can I trust to screen out the bores? Maybe they will screen out as a nincompoop the very person who would bring me those benefits.
The best solution I know is to keep conventions small. The CSG is now at about optimum size. If it gets bigger, you will have to sit through more bores. And the opportunities for intimate conversations where people can strive to understand one another by probing questions and by efforts to paraphrase what the other person is saying will diminish. The growing mass of strangers will encourage formality. And so on.
But if you try to cope with size by dividing the membership into specialties, then you narrow the vision of everybody and lower creativity. There are better ways of keeping size small.