Frameworks for Purpose, Decision, Experience and More...

Warren Kinston I then started thinking a lot about value and purpose again, like decision making. Things that Elliot had not really turned his attention to, but which are obviously intrinsic to all everything that happens in life, in organization, society, a personal life.

Jimmy had done a little bit of work in it, but wasn't interested in taking it further. Before Rafe retired, I worked with him as best I could and then continued on that over the next, I don't know, 10-12 years.

And it was fascinating to articulate all the different entities that exist in this world of purpose and value. People think there's one or two, but there's so many of them. And what about a campaign or a crusade or a policy or a mission or a priority? There are just so many. And of course, you look in the literature and they're often the same word. There seem to be many words for the same thing or the same word being used for many things.

And by carefully studying, reflecting, talking, discussing, applying, one was able to articulate the different entities that existed. These entities are defined. You know, they exist by the function they perform in the world. You can find properties that they've got and you can see how they're like but different to other entities that are similar to them. And in this regard, we're talking about something that's not totally different to anything in the physical world.

So when you talk about oxygen, you can talk about how it's similar to nitrogen or hydrogen, how it's different to those things, how it's different to copper or how it's different to Xenon or this is basically the way the physical world is described. You describe it by the properties, you describe it by the relations.

The big addition in the psychosocial world is that the function that things in the psychosocial world have a function which is one of the words in the world, one of the entities in the world of purpose. And the central function is the key to the entity. And then entities there are entities which have related functions and some functions are more distant and so on. You can build up a taxonomy of entities.

It turned out that these entities had very particular forms. One of the things that really interested me was that the early things that I worked on was, first of all, inquiry. Different ways of inquiry. The interesting thing here was you got together a mathematician, a social scientist, an engineer and a sociologist, and you asked them to discuss how they knew or had confidence in the truth of their findings, whatever they were.

And of course, they were using completely different mentalities, completely different approaches. So it was possible to articulate the different inquiring approaches. A lot of this work had been done also by Churchman and Mitrov in the systems literature and certainly built on that. So in inquiry and in decision making, you had this phenomenon of a seven-level hierarchy.

And in the 6th level of that hierarchy, you had the mentalities, you had the approaches, the decision systems, the inquiring systems, as opposed to the process of action or the process of inquiry. However, in the seven levels of work, which by then I was convinced was what there was, there was no more, there was no less. Organizations could be smaller and not require the institutionalization of higher levels, but in principle they were there or could be there, but in the 6th level, there was not a seven-level system. So what did this mean? Why was this the case? Why was this particular hierarchy so incredibly powerful?

Why did the levels of work be something that you brought into organizations? And it was really the obvious first thing you had to do before you could actually do much else. Many of many consultants try to do things which really can only be done after you've actually implemented appropriate accountability structures and appropriate authority relationships and so on. That was a fascinating puzzle.

And I have to say that Elliot gave me the key there because he noted that the first four levels of work were about doing things with information progressively more complicated ways. And the top three levels of work, five, six, seven, were about doing things with concepts. And I therefore thought that could be the key. And it turns out that that was that then led to working on the different types of languages people can use when they communicate.

And slowly I worked in different areas. I worked on change and process. One of the puzzles that I was working on was in the psychoanalytic society, there were tremendous theoretical debates and divisions. Now, why was this so? Why should it be so? And it reminded me, of course, of the tremendous debates and divisions you have in terms of the inquiring systems. In other words, do we use hypothesis testing or empirical rational analysis or which sort of inquiring system when we're doing our health research?

I remember one very senior governmental scientist who was involved in funding, saying that when I hear for the word model, I reach for my gun. So the different mentalities and the different approaches tended to generate quite intense tribalism. They were really value systems.

And I found I worked at some point on the different forms of experience a person could have because it became clear to me that what happens is that people surrender to their own experiences. They really have no alternative. That's where we live in. We live in our experiences, and we can check, but we have to depend upon our sensations or our images or our intuitions. These are our experiences.

And I was fascinated about the way the work I was doing enabled people to operate counterintuitively, which is very difficult, of course, to do, and it involves opening the imagination. The mentalities I talked about before structure a lot of intuition. So you have to be able to deal with that anyway.

That led to being able to identify in the 6th level of experience identification systems what people do in order to be comfortable of the identity, what their identity is. So some people's identity is built around emotions and emotional being, whereas other people's identity is built around relations and other people's identity is built around social role people.

And the different identity systems or identity mentalities ended up generating different psychoanalytic approaches to them. And none of them were wrong, of course. They were all right, but they were coming at things and people, patients who fitted more in one type, they got their identity strengthening in one way preferred an analyst, obviously, who worked there, and often the work was to help them move into the next slightly more sophisticated way of existing as a human being.

All these things for a long time were reasonably separate but they fed back into each other, the forms fed into each other and meanwhile I was working very very hard on the book to try and get one thing. Most of these things were notes, some of them were papers in the systems literature, a lot were sort of from presentations and in 1995 I was able to complete the book working with values which covered a lot of what is the fundamentals of the entities in the world of purpose, value, obligation, ethical authorities, ethical obligation.

I stopped it when I realized that I could have written another several volumes because the thing elaborates, it has this quality of elaborating and having more applications and think I found out how the different various frameworks related to each other. I'd solved

 the problem about why there weren't hierarchies within level six and levels of work and turn my attention to reflecting on what I'd done. And I spent several years doing a little bit of consulting but mainly reflecting on these various frameworks, reflecting on all the knowledge that hadn't been accumulated of which there was of a vast, vast amount. But now you could give it labels, you could say where it was, but you didn't know what it was that you didn't know.

But that's a bit like with a periodic table there could be cells where you'd not had the element you sam.