Know Thyself?

When I was working in Central Europe in the early 1990s I used to buy multiple copies of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) by Stephen Covey in the local language - Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian – since it was about the only book of its sort I knew and respected which had already been translated into these languages and therefore useful as a means of finding some common ground. The principles are - 

- be proactive (don't blame others; take responsibility)
- begin with the end in mind; 
- put first things first; 
- think win/win; 
- seek first to understand - then to be understood; 
- synergise; and, finally 
- "sharpen the saw" - ie keep mentally and physically fit.

I was well aware that, as an American self-help book, it would strike most of my audiences (who had just emerged from communism) as hopelessly optimistic if not naïve - but still felt that some of its messages – eg the one about important change coming from within ourselves rather than thro' manipulation of others – were sufficiently powerful to have a chance of sticking with at least a few people. How naïve I was in those days! Some 20 years on I’ve been looking at the book again - and have to say that it still makes for an important and worthwhile read 

As the new millennium dawned, I started to use a book on “Behaviour in organisations” in my project work – it was indeed only through the Belbin team role test and strategic thinking exercises that I began to understand that we all look at (and think about) the world in different ways. 
Postmodernity tended to pass me by – although I was aware of Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisation (1986) and Baumon’s Post Modernity and its discontents (1997)….

Of course, as we get older, we do tend to go beyond systems and look to the personal. As I tried, a couple of decades ago, to repair the huge deficiencies in my understanding of the personal world, I  noted the different ways our behaviour was classified viz -

• age
• gender
• culture
• psychological type
• socio-economic position
• politico religious values

How different writers try to explain our behaviour -

Defining Variable	Authors	Classification system	The crude message	The deeper message
1. Age	W. Bridges Gail Sheehy Ronnie Lessem	7 stages Ditto 4 stages	Young and old inhabit different planets	Each stage of life brings its own crisis – which we should see as a learning opportunity
2. Gender	John Gray	binary! – represented by Venus and Mars planets	Men and women are from different planets	time and effort needed to understand and show respect for others
3. Culture	Lessem F Trompenaars Huntingdon	4 - Points of compass ??	Societies will never understand one another	People from different countries value things differently from us.
4. Psychological Type	Jung Belbin	Introvert - extrovert 9 team roles	We have internal dispositions to behave in very different ways.	The world works because each of us can potentially complement the other. We should not try to mould people in our image
5. Socio-economic position	A Maslow C Handy?	Hierarchy of need (5 levels) 4 organ types	Those with basic needs are selfish and aggressive	Do not expect those poorer and richer than us to see the world the way we do
6. Values	A. Etzioni McGregor R Ingelhart	Three Theory X and theory Y World values	Some of us are kinder than others	What we think will work in society depends on the assumptions we make about people
7. Organisational metaphor	Gareth Morgan (Images of Organisation)	9 (unconscious) ways we all think about organisations – like a physical body; brain; prison;	Nothing is real! Everything is in our minds!	What we think will work in an organisation depends on the images we have in our mind