A problem of fast the entire mankind?

In my opinion I see this point by very much people, almost by all the people around me.
A sort of looking for safety. When stuck in the same things…. always doing the same …. you are sure of the outcome!
One is creating some base of safety.
It may be good for the self-confidence, when allready knowing the outcome, you don’t have to bother about it. You also cannot blame yourself when it goes wrong.
A sort of safety-base for people.

Allthough I myself like it to do sometimes do things another way. It makes the world more interesting (in my opinion). You also have to accept it when sometimes it goes wrong.
But it also can make you more creative in doing things, and it can bring more fun in your life.

I think it is good people can fall back on old experiences, or on what you have learned. Otherwise one have to design the wheele everytime again and again.
But when you have the guts to do something in onother way, it can make your world much bigger, doesn’t it?

Another thing I was thinking of is the “Herd-instict” of mankind. People very much like it to do things the same way as the other people around them. So it is a big step having the guts doing something different. Is this Herd-instinct not also an explanation for the lack of flexiblility much people have?

This is what I was thinking. Please tell it when you have another point of view, or if you think I miss a point. I will like that
Greatings, Ivar

As a person who, by necessity, expends a considerable amount of energy to remain INSIDE the box – I have a unique view of the fishbowl…

To me, the NLP presupposition; Law Of Requisite Variety – is a social interaction heuristic or algorithm, or a rule of thumb, to plagiarize from Wikipedia : “Heuristic … is an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery. A heuristic method is used to rapidly come to a solution that is hoped to be close to the best possible answer, or ‘optimal solution’. A heuristic as a noun is a “rule of thumb”, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment or simply common sense. A heuristic is a general way of solving a problem. Heuristics as a noun is another name for heuristic methods.”

One example of a social heuristic we all experience is; “Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon that occurs in ambiguous social situations when people are unable to determine the appropriate mode of behavior. Making the assumption that surrounding people possess more knowledge about the situation, they will deem the behavior of others as appropriate or better informed. … formal analysis shows that it can cause people to converge too quickly upon a single choice, so that decisions of even large groups of individuals may reflect very little information (see information cascades).”

From a more cybernetic perspective, the Law Of Requisite Variety functions much like an attractor: “An attractor is a set to whiceh a dynamical system evolves after a long enough time. That is, points that get close enough to the attractor remain close even if slightly disturbed. Geometrically, an attractor can be a point, a curve, a manifold, or even a complicated set with a fractal structure known as a strange attractor. Describing the attractors of chaotic dynamical systems has been one of the achievements of chaos theory.” And more specifically a Limit cycle: “A limit cycle is a periodic orbit of the system that is isolated. Examples include the swings of a pendulum clock, the tuning circuit of a radio, and the heartbeat while resting. The ideal pendulum is not an example because its orbits are not isolated. In phase space of the ideal pendulum, near any point of a periodic orbit there is another point that belongs to a different periodic orbit.”

So, I think my SiGung said it most artfully: “Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

Bruce Lee, American Actor and martial arts expert. Born in San Francisco, California, USA 1940-1973)

Cheers

1) In my experience (and in my opinion) watching students and therapists work, lack of flexibility is a greater problem than lack of consistency. It’s not always the case, of course. One of my goals for this post was to get people thinking and leaning more to the flexible side.

2) Naturally, knowing when to be flexible as well as what to do differently (rather than random, flexible behavior) is key. It’s also too big of a subject for me to cover here and now.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us. I find them valuable.

For a start, without reading more deeply into it, the law sounds like a tautology – when the situation demands flexibility, you have to be flexible, except presumably when you need to be consistent and stick to your principles.

More fundamentally, the cybernetic principle seems to be all about control, whereas the kind of playful, exploratory learning displayed by a seven year old involves giving up a bit of control, and indeed in complex human situations like bringing up a child are characterised by a tension between being in control and letting things emerge.

My understanding of the law of requisite variety, based on half an hour reading Wikipedia, is that it’s a metaphor drawn from automated machinery and applied to wider biological and human situations, and that having requisite variety means that whatever the world throws at a machine or a person, the machine or person has to be able to respond in a matching but opposite way in order to stay on course – in a car, if you’re going a fraction too far to the right you have to be able to steer a little bit to the left, if you’re going too fast you have to hit the brakes, etc. A car without a working, responsive accelerator, brake, or steering wheel lacks the requisite variety to be able to get from A to B safely. But it’s a narrow definition of control to say that it’s being able to cancel out whatever change occurs – it applies to machines, but by itself it doesn’t seem to apply to complex human situations.

Even when the law of requisite variety brings some insight into human skills, it doesn’t seem to mean the same thing as thinking outside the box. Skilful drivers can be said to display more variety in their behaviour than less skilful drivers, but that doesn’t mean that they steer randomly between lanes and have a creative disregard for traffic laws, it means that they have appropriate and finely tuned responses to a wider range of situations that can occur on the road, so they’re able to stay in control when the weather turns bad, when the car ahead swerves unexpectedly, when their children are arguing in the back seat, when these things happen in combination, etc, etc.

Maybe driving is a bad analogy, because being playful, surprising, and provocative is almost always the wrong thing on the road, whereas it is appropriate if you’re trying to get yourself out of a rut, or if you’re seven years old.

But even to take an analogy from a more creative domain – all other things being equal in a film, the actor who has the widest emotional range will compel audience attention and drive the plot forward. Good acting is surprising, not because the emotion put across is extreme or random, but because it’s appropriate, precisely expressed, and not at all obvious or predictable when you’re not as finely tuned emotionally as the actor is.

As part of their preparation, the actor may have performed exercises where they were shouting and jumping up and down, giving up control and letting randomness, whimsy, and unconscious instincts take over. Those kinds of exercises are an injection of a kind of variety in order to expand the actor’s range and force them to discard cliched responses, but what you see on the screen is distilled down into a different kind of variety – it’s a variety of exquisite distinctions rather than a variety of chaos.