The Original Change Management Toolbook

Dnn, Dnn, Dnn… Another One Swept in the Spiral of War

Although there's little published research to substantiate this, it can be hypothesized that Beck & Cowan's containers can be mapped to the experiences of a predisposed individual throughout the duration of an extended modern civil war. For the purpose of this analysis, we'll demonstrate the reasoning through a young male, who is residing in Kin Spirits at the time when unrest escalates to a level where it is first described as "civil war". While this will be typified by a fictitious individual, Fadi, the chosen Lebanese war scenario is documented historical fact.

Bordered by Israel and Syria, Lebanon is a country on the east shore of the Mediterranean Sea that is almost the size of Connecticut State. It was among the first democratic republics in the Middle East, and it has above average economic freedom in the region. Following independence from French mandatehood in 1943, Lebanon's tourism industry witnessed considerable growth to become a popular upmarket leisure destination through the 1960's, until the interplay of external interventions and underlying internal fidelities became the root cause for a 16-year conflict. As the war developed, so did Fadi. Aside from the irreversible damage it wreaked on his scholarly growth, it paradoxically thrust him into constructive opportunities for significant personal growth. Consider this:

Individual ^vMeme War Stage Age Dynamic

Kin Spirits Antebellum 0-14 -

1
Survival Sense

Express Self Phase 1

1975-1977 14-16 Means of escape blocked. Intense trauma and fresh food shortages resulted in a hard-forced acceptance of the new reality. Fadi's humanity hardened as he saw that good Samaritans who ventured out to help the injured in the streets were themselves rewarded with death. Instinctively, he drew on his primal beige capacities in order to keep functioning. He expressed indifference to even his brother being caught in the crossfire, provided he was able to obtain rations for his parents. Fadi sharpened his urban warfare survival tactics and faculties, such as sandbagging his family's apartment balcony and proactively seeking refuge in safer, inner stairways upon the "cold silence" (a sort of ESP described by many preceding a forthcoming airborne bombardment).

2
Kin Spirits

Sacrifice Self Phase 2

1977-1982 16-21 Increasingly adapted to life in a war setting, the rebalanced, but isolated Fadi sought camaraderie and protection from the psychological and physical havoc that the hostility was inflicting on his community. The return to his pre-war purple values led him to connect with the sectarian group closest to home, wherein basic needs, a sense of security, and powerful group bonds were guaranteed. Fadi was fascinated by the frequent chants of phrases - ones that prophetically fit the circumstances - from a holy book, inside the group's congregation. He was lured regularly to it by the mysterious way that cigarette smoke danced out of his elder cousin's nostrils, who sometimes lingered outside its doorway to exchange stories with others. Every time they were there, Fadi found meaning in their mesmerizing tales of martyrdom and divinely intervened combat miracles.

3
Power Gods

Express Self Climax

1982-1983 21-23 Meaning is fulfilled by action. Overcoming his fears and those of his family, Fadi exercised the ideology he represented by declaring himself as one of its soldiers so he can take up weapons. Arguments and multiple loyalties proliferated even within his very unit. Emboldened, he hit the rooftops alone in an effort to assert his supremacy over all factions. Meaning became the last thing on his mind - it was all about the feeling; life was for the smell of bullet casings and the adrenaline of battle. Driven by a heroic need for triumph, he was filled with energy and a proud, masculine agency he had never before experienced.

4
Truth Force

Sacrifice Self Dénoue-
ment

1984-1989 23-28 Partial ceasefires prompted disciplinary action that brought "Rambo-wannabe" fighters like Fadi in check. Only now did Fadi begin to discover the purpose and deeper principles behind the group cause he submitted to. The prolonged nature of the war and lack of total victory from previous clashes meant that Fadi had to expand his organizational perspective. Having lost close friends, he came to recognize that physical means had its limits in advancing his group's agenda … and that an alternative expression of its merit was via patriotic self-control, subject to the authority of its now legendary leader. Peer pressure reverberated through his now enlarged group network, and he felt responsible to the younger ones in the community who saw him as a role model. He lectured to them in order to spread the righteousness of his group's perspective, and to ensure that the other perspectives were seen as morally unjust and unacceptable. Fadi also married his childhood friend during this period.

5
Strive Drive

Express Self Post Bellum

1989-1991 28-30 Since the war was declared officially over, and being regarded somewhat as the "rooster" of his neighborhood, Fadi saw an occasion to gain from his status like so many others before him had been doing. He embraced practices that are deemed corrupt, such as having been paid to allow burial of imported nuclear waste barrels on land his unit controlled and distributing stolen luxury cars. Yet he also leveraged his power for legitimate business, such as the sale of portable electricity generators. Substantial earnings from many of these non-group-sanctioned activities went not to group funds, but to the foreign accounts of some of its seniors, who incentivized Fadi through gifts that he and his wife used lavishly to make up for years of lost youth. Fadi's having been branded "nouveau riche" by degree-educated, repatriated Lebanese only bolstered his self-esteem.

6
Human Bond

Sacrifice Self Peace

1991-2005 30-44 Fadi's first travel outside Lebanon was a glimpse that "people are people wherever you go" and that it is very possible for diverse societies to live together harmoniously. After returning, he slowly grew increasingly disillusioned with the lasting impairment that the war had made on people's quality of life and aspirations, with mass unemployment and brain drain to boot. Enduring the general devastation of infrastructure, and the epiphany that this environment could not sustain his lifestyle and his children's future indefinitely, led Fadi to halt his money-for-waste profiteering. He felt drawn to the more cooperative and compromising tendencies of the new unity power-sharing government, compared to the martial law (if not anarchy) of the previous decade, and thus began volunteering as a negotiator between political parties. Against his firmly ingrained sectarian affinities and activities that continued to define who he was, he began the process of reconciliation and forgiveness. He did not oppose initiatives for de-sectification of the national army and invested in municipal reconstruction, which had an interfaith worship-place layout plan.

The assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in 2005, the IDF-Hezbollah war in 2006, and a spate of other murders rekindled the conducive factors for a second civil war, which is inhibiting Fadi from responding to Flex Flow stimuli. Rather, he is once again attuning to his Survival Sense, and therefore, his psyche is busied with more foundational ^vMemes.

Whole-systems change agents, business continuity advisors, immigration policymakers, emerging-region staffing planners, conflict mediators, and other readers alike must remember that the more realistic the individual case, the less applicable it is as a holistic, sequential example to comprehend SD theory. One scenario cannot encompass the entirety of the field. In other words, the complexity of human encounters means that various value cocktails --from all over the spectrum of SD stages- would have radiated upon Fadi within each war stage. These would both invoke existing abilities as well as provoke new ones. Furthermore, there are healthy and unhealthy expressions of each vMeme, not all of which were elaborated on or considered in our example. Fadi did not necessarily get any "smarter" nor more "moralized" (or demoralized) through the war, but simply, he became more versatile.

Comparisons can indeed be made to other wars like the 2003-to-date one in Iraq or the Thirty-Year War of Germany. Whereas other conflicts like the Chinese or American civil wars may have been too short or bipolar to spiral their soldiers through these development stages, the applicable wartime quote of "some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them" does suggest an aura of Gravesian biopsychosocial systems if it's the same person in all three cases.

With that said, greatness - at least in terms of meme dexterity - is not always an overnight thing. Many people spend a lifetime never reaching orange or green, let alone tier 2. Some SD practitioners have deduced that a stage transition takes a decade or longer, which raises questions about just how many individuals who partook in the Lebanese civil war actually underwent the unusually rapid cognitive expansion that the fictitious Fadi did, even if they did experience the same course of events.

Scientific, quantitative SD research has been primarily based on Western populations in more idyllic settings. It is possible that a protracted war in today's culturally intertwined world, fought by multiple, equally-equipped convictions in one dense urban habitat, would catalyze stage transitions for exceptionally adaptable individuals. Without a doubt, the wartime Fadi transcended from Kin Spirits to gain new Power Gods capacities, all the while including his Survival Sense capacities. But did he really uplevel to Truth Force and onwards to spiral wizardry? Or was he just upleveling to temporary states (not lasting stages), unwittingly craving the first break to shift back to his latter Power Gods center of gravity? The answer lies in what Fadi will do next, when a car bomb goes off in his very own neighborhood.

Habib El-As'aad is an operations specialist at the Middle East and Africa offices of a multinational corporation in Dubai, UAE, and is a pro-bono node in the Change Facilitation Associates Network. E-mail him your comments at:habib@change-facilitation.orgDavid Butlein is a clinical psychologist and sustainable business consultant in the California Bay Area. He can be contacted at habib@change-facilitation.org

Individual ^vMeme	War Stage	Age	Dynamic
Kin Spirits	Antebellum	0-14	-
1 Survival Sense Express Self	Phase 1 1975-1977	14-16	Means of escape blocked. Intense trauma and fresh food shortages resulted in a hard-forced acceptance of the new reality. Fadi's humanity hardened as he saw that good Samaritans who ventured out to help the injured in the streets were themselves rewarded with death. Instinctively, he drew on his primal beige capacities in order to keep functioning. He expressed indifference to even his brother being caught in the crossfire, provided he was able to obtain rations for his parents. Fadi sharpened his urban warfare survival tactics and faculties, such as sandbagging his family's apartment balcony and proactively seeking refuge in safer, inner stairways upon the "cold silence" (a sort of ESP described by many preceding a forthcoming airborne bombardment).
2 Kin Spirits Sacrifice Self	Phase 2 1977-1982	16-21	Increasingly adapted to life in a war setting, the rebalanced, but isolated Fadi sought camaraderie and protection from the psychological and physical havoc that the hostility was inflicting on his community. The return to his pre-war purple values led him to connect with the sectarian group closest to home, wherein basic needs, a sense of security, and powerful group bonds were guaranteed. Fadi was fascinated by the frequent chants of phrases - ones that prophetically fit the circumstances - from a holy book, inside the group's congregation. He was lured regularly to it by the mysterious way that cigarette smoke danced out of his elder cousin's nostrils, who sometimes lingered outside its doorway to exchange stories with others. Every time they were there, Fadi found meaning in their mesmerizing tales of martyrdom and divinely intervened combat miracles.
3 Power Gods Express Self	Climax 1982-1983	21-23	Meaning is fulfilled by action. Overcoming his fears and those of his family, Fadi exercised the ideology he represented by declaring himself as one of its soldiers so he can take up weapons. Arguments and multiple loyalties proliferated even within his very unit. Emboldened, he hit the rooftops alone in an effort to assert his supremacy over all factions. Meaning became the last thing on his mind - it was all about the feeling; life was for the smell of bullet casings and the adrenaline of battle. Driven by a heroic need for triumph, he was filled with energy and a proud, masculine agency he had never before experienced.
4 Truth Force Sacrifice Self	Dénoue- ment 1984-1989	23-28	Partial ceasefires prompted disciplinary action that brought "Rambo-wannabe" fighters like Fadi in check. Only now did Fadi begin to discover the purpose and deeper principles behind the group cause he submitted to. The prolonged nature of the war and lack of total victory from previous clashes meant that Fadi had to expand his organizational perspective. Having lost close friends, he came to recognize that physical means had its limits in advancing his group's agenda … and that an alternative expression of its merit was via patriotic self-control, subject to the authority of its now legendary leader. Peer pressure reverberated through his now enlarged group network, and he felt responsible to the younger ones in the community who saw him as a role model. He lectured to them in order to spread the righteousness of his group's perspective, and to ensure that the other perspectives were seen as morally unjust and unacceptable. Fadi also married his childhood friend during this period.
5 Strive Drive Express Self	Post Bellum 1989-1991	28-30	Since the war was declared officially over, and being regarded somewhat as the "rooster" of his neighborhood, Fadi saw an occasion to gain from his status like so many others before him had been doing. He embraced practices that are deemed corrupt, such as having been paid to allow burial of imported nuclear waste barrels on land his unit controlled and distributing stolen luxury cars. Yet he also leveraged his power for legitimate business, such as the sale of portable electricity generators. Substantial earnings from many of these non-group-sanctioned activities went not to group funds, but to the foreign accounts of some of its seniors, who incentivized Fadi through gifts that he and his wife used lavishly to make up for years of lost youth. Fadi's having been branded "nouveau riche" by degree-educated, repatriated Lebanese only bolstered his self-esteem.
6 Human Bond Sacrifice Self	Peace 1991-2005	30-44	Fadi's first travel outside Lebanon was a glimpse that "people are people wherever you go" and that it is very possible for diverse societies to live together harmoniously. After returning, he slowly grew increasingly disillusioned with the lasting impairment that the war had made on people's quality of life and aspirations, with mass unemployment and brain drain to boot. Enduring the general devastation of infrastructure, and the epiphany that this environment could not sustain his lifestyle and his children's future indefinitely, led Fadi to halt his money-for-waste profiteering. He felt drawn to the more cooperative and compromising tendencies of the new unity power-sharing government, compared to the martial law (if not anarchy) of the previous decade, and thus began volunteering as a negotiator between political parties. Against his firmly ingrained sectarian affinities and activities that continued to define who he was, he began the process of reconciliation and forgiveness. He did not oppose initiatives for de-sectification of the national army and invested in municipal reconstruction, which had an interfaith worship-place layout plan.
The assassination of Prime Minister Hariri in 2005, the IDF-Hezbollah war in 2006, and a spate of other murders rekindled the conducive factors for a second civil war, which is inhibiting Fadi from responding to Flex Flow stimuli. Rather, he is once again attuning to his Survival Sense, and therefore, his psyche is busied with more foundational ^vMemes.