How Do Systems Shape Your Sense of Self?

I’m publishing this newsletter series to discuss the nuances of the four timeless topics for people and organizations: conflict, change, transformation, and consciousness. Please subscribe to never miss an article.

A few years ago, I co-led a two-day workshop in England on making use of the TKI to help people broaden their sense of self (across all aspects of mind/body/spirit consciousness), in particular, by fully embodying all the systems and organizations that surrounded their life.

Conveniently, but not coincidentally, just one day before this workshop began, I had visited the British Museum. There, etched on one of the walls on the first floor, is a quote by the poet, William Blake. The writing on the museum wall proclaimed the essential challenge for humanity: “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s.” Blake wrote that powerful observation somewhere around 1800. It forewarns that if you think of yourself as separate from your systems and you assume that those systems are someone else’s responsibility, you’ll be at the mercy of all the systems created by others — whether those systems were created just last year…or thousands of years ago.

The basic premise is that roughly 80% of our beliefs, attitudes, and behavior are shaped by our surrounding systems (families, communities, organizations, and nations) and maybe only 20% is the remaining space for “free will” within those cultural systems. Some of the quality gurus, such as W. Edwards Deming, suggested that the ratio of system/process effects vs. “pure” individual choices is closer to 85–15. If you’re unconscious, cultural expectations, reward systems, and the habits, customs, and processes that surround you will unduly shape your behavior and determine your sense of self. Especially if you are unconscious, you’ll find yourself quite helpless and hopeless within that web of your surrounding systems.

Can you image the long-term impact on our planet and our species if everyone is implicitly saying that someone else is responsible for the system and that we have, by an overly narrow self-identity, implicitly chosen to enslave ourselves forevermore? What if nobody is taking care of the system? An alternative approach, of course, is to say, “I am those systems. I therefore have full responsibility to not only care for myself, but also to nurture, redesign, and transform my surrounding systems.” That perspective — consciously declaring that my systems are integral with who I am and what I must do — is perhaps the most profound declaration of ethical and adaptive selfhood!

To make a long two-day workshop short, I had the participants complete the TKI twice, with two different sets of instructions: (1) Think of an organization in which you felt that you were actively encouraged to express your true and complete self throughout the day. How did you respond when you found that your wishes differed from those of others? (2) Think of an organization in which you felt that you were discouraged and thus did not feel safe to express your true and complete self throughout the day. How did you respond….? For each set of instructions, people responded to the 30 A/B choices on the TKI.

Computing and graphing each person’s conflict mode scores from the two TKI results led to some startling insights. Not only did people see how the nature (and health) of their systems had a huge impact on how they responded to conflict (and whether, as a result, they got their most important needs met), but they also began to address the fundamental issues: Am I separate from my systems? Is my self defined only by me or also by my systems? Can I influence (and thus change) my surrounding systems so they are more supportive of my true AND complete self? Who is responsible for changing those surrounding systems to support consciousness, growth, evolution, and development? Do I have to choose between my self or my systems (on the distributive dimension of the TKI Conflict Model)? Or can I unify who I truly am by joining my previous sense of self and my new understanding of systems in an integrative (collaborative) manner? Bottom line: Which conflict modes will I use to resolve the inherent tensions between my systems and me? What are the short-term and long-term consequences of using those modes for my systems and me?

In this short article, I can’t do justice to all the discussions that unfolded during the two days from addressing these types of questions. But I can tell you that I plan to spend more time exploring the interface of person and system…and how the conflict modes (via the TKI) can help people expand their consciousness and infuse it into all their systems and organizations.

Kilmann Diagnostics offers a series of eleven recorded online courses and nine assessment tools on the four timeless topics: conflict management, change management, consciousness, and transformation. For more information about these online courses and how to earn your Certification in Conflict and Change Management with the Thomas-Kilmann Instrument (TKI), visit: https://kilmanndiagnostics.com . For the most up-to-date and comprehensive discussion of Dr. Kilmann’s theories and methods for achieving long-term organizational success, see his 2021 Legacy Book: Creating a Quantum Organization.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash