The Basis of Self-Reflection and Self-Governance Is a Developmental Plan (Premise 3)

No More Feedback — Chapter 11

This chapter is an excerpt from No More Feedback: Cultivate Consciousness at Work, the first in a series of books on toxic practices in the workplace. Read the introduction and previous chapter here on Medium, and find links to purchase the full book here.

To work as a self-correcting system, individually or as part of a team, a person must operate from a developmental plan that contains three lines of work, stemming from a hierarchy of values and influences. This means working on expressing one’s own uniqueness (first line) and learning about oneself and the joys and problems of working with others (second line), while all the time searching for opportunities to make a contribution to something greater than oneself (third line).

The only way a person can maintain their inner balance and optimize their ability to be self-governing is by creating and utilizing their own developmentally holistic plan and then continually self-reflecting to stay with the plan.

Cybernetics theory tells us that the isolation of what is perceived to be an unintegrated part in a system, as a way to stay within predefined parameters, will inevitably lead to runaway. In humans, this occurs most…