God’s Home Address
I begin this article with a bit of humor. In the Book of Revelations we are told that Satan’s number is 666. There are a variety of interpretations for this value. Most interpretations link this value to a letter-to-number translations system used in ancient days. I guess we could do the same today by taking the letters from someone’s name and converting them into binary representations in a computer. But, for the sake of this brief article, let us plot 666 on my graph. If we move upward six tick marks and then move to the right six tick marks and then move in the third dimension vertically by six tick marks we are at a point that hovers over chaos.
Now, continuing with the humor. What then is God’s number? Well in the ancient days the Hebrews associated certain numbers with certain meanings. For example, the proper response to God is three repetitions. Refer to the repetitions of Holy, Holy, Holy in the Book of Revelations. Six was already associated by the Hebrews with incompleteness. Twelve was the number of tribes and twelve was the number of the disciples. And seven is the number associated with God. Consider in the Book of Revelations that there are seven candle stands and seven stars. So let us continue this analogy using the number seven.
First, we move upward seven tick marks. Well that seems reasonable. God is a more powerful teacher than is Satan so God must be more powerful at creating dissonance than is Satan. It seems reasonable to move vertically in the third dimension by seven tick marks because God expends more effort trying to draw us to him than does Satan. The shepherd values the sheep more than does the wolf.
Notice that I skipped the left-to-right movement. The correct place to plot God’s location is found by moving seven tick marks to the left. Thus, if Satan’s number is 6,6,6, then God’s number is 7,-7,7. God’s home address is in the Kingdom. We find God when we are aligned.
What Is Your Home Address?
To find your own home address we need to go back to the version of this diagram that has all the words. Words, like people, are social creatures. Well they are not really creatures, but words have friends and relatives. Certain words overlap. Conflict and war, for example, are sometimes used interchangeable to either amplify the meaning of conflict or minimize the meaning of war. Other words have different vector orientations. On my graphs I plot dissonance vertically and love horizontally. I consider intolerance to be associated with the vertical dimension and believe we can be intolerant of a behavior without disliking the person. Hate is an expression of antagonism. Thus, intolerance and hatred are at a ninety degree misalignment from each other. You can increase intolerance without altering hate. Or you can increase love without adjusting your tolerance. For example, my love for a friend might grow over time and yet I might remain intolerant of certain habits.
Now, back to the question at hand. The key is to identify your place on the horizontal and vertical axis. Which state best describes your interactions with others regarding this specific community?
I might sense antagonism from one person on a team but not from others. The fact that I sense antagonism causes me to shift to the right. Note, the person who is generating that antagonism might be internal. We learn how to carry our own blaming and self-hate with us.
Now, it is possible that there are other environments where I do not feel antagonism. For example, it is not uncommon to have an antagonistic relationship at work and a loving environment at home. It is unfortunately also not uncommon to have a compassionate environment at work and a conflictual environment at home. Thus our place on this grid is situational. It depends on which environment we are in at the time. And it depends upon how broad a group of people we consider in our evaluation.
The vertical dimension is harder to assess because I am having a difficult time telling you what I mean by that dimension. Perhaps if I keep explaining it with different words one of these separate patterns will work for you. To me, dissonance is our ability to sense and respond to indications that there is a gap between what we have and what we expect. The unexpected causes dissonance. Humor causes dissonance because the punch line is unexpected. Teaching creates dissonance by presenting information that is valued but not yet assimilated.
Distractions are types of dissonance we use to block out information. The value in dissonance is that it conveys information. A song, for example, conveys a mood, sound pictures and it might convey words. The mood, sound pictures and words can convey information. Or, the music can be used to overwhelm our ability to discern and thus the music can become an anesthetizing agent.
The way to determine your location on the vertical scale is to assess the amount of valuable information you are processing. Since processing new information is hard work we tend to filter and block the information flow and tune out the dissonance. We can look at a homeless person and not see them. Or we can see them and block out our motivation to respond. Consider, for example, the story of the Good Samaritan. The best of the best of the Hebrew community chose to ignore the dissonance created by the plight of their fallen comrade. But a stranger who was hated by the Jews saw the situation, sensed the dissonance, processed the information and took action. Dissonance has value when it leads to action.
Where Do You Want To Go?
The optimal destination is alignment. Getting there, however, is not easy. Leaping from conflict to alignment seems difficult for us. Even moving from tranquil to transforming requires training and discipline. The broad pathway traditionally followed by teams of people is to move from tranquil to conflict to transforming and then strive for alignment. In team formation terminology those stages are called forming, storming, norming and performing.
While I have successfully used that explanation, I now wonder if it is accurate. I wonder if what actually happens is that we leave tranquil and find ourselves in conflict. Eventually we resolve the conflict sufficiently to return to tranquil where we regroup and try again to reach transforming. That, however, is just speculation. What has been documented is that teams start tranquil. Teams are frequently observed to be in conflict for a period of time and then when the next assessment is taken the team is in transforming. For the purpose of the following explanation I recommend that we think in terms of addressing one vector at a time and not assume that we are capable of simultaneously addressing two vectors of change.
Let us start this illustration by assuming we have reached the conflictual stage. Now we can move from conflict to chaos by increasing the dissonance. For example, we can hold open forums for discussion with the community. That will definitely increase the volume of information that we could process. But chaos is not a very desirable place to go.
We could try to dampen the antagonism while simultaneously amplifying the dissonance and aim to land in the transforming state. That, however, is risky. Unless we are unusually adept at this we can get a little off course and land in chaos rather than transforming.
So the best route to take from conflict is to go to tranquil. The fastest way to get to tranquility is to get deeper into prayer or meditation. We want to stay focused and yet dampen the antagonism while filtering the dissonance. When we sense the comfort of communing with God in prayer and meditation then the antagonism of the world vanishes. Whenever we find ourselves in conflict or chaos we should use a spiritual discipline like prayer to dissipate the conflict.
This might seem like a long way around the path, but the next logical step that we humans can take is to move to a transformed state. The leap from tranquility directly to alignment is hard for us. The pathway from conflict or from tranquility to transformation is through dissonance. I love that term. I had been searching for about a month to find just the right word and one evening our choir director said something about how much more we would need to listen when the cords were dissonant than when they were harmonious. I realized that dissonance was exactly the word that fit my understanding of the vertical dimension on this grid.
Dissonance is listening to the data and then discerning information. In order to go through a transformation we need to increase the dissonance until we can discern the truth. Then we need to transform ourselves. Notice that I did not say we need to transform others. Interventions designed to transform someone else typically start in conflict and end in chaos. The transformation that we are competent enough to manage is the transformation of our own self. The exceptions to this rule are teaching and therapy. And both teaching and therapy require that we carefully structure an environment that is low in antagonism and only sufficiently high in dissonance to allow the other person to transform their self.
The next move is from transformation to alignment. It is in alignment that we come closest to the Kingdom of God. To move from transformation to alignment requires superfluous overflowing abundant love. We need to start by loving ourselves. We need to love each and every person who supports us. We need to generously pour that love out on those around us. And then we need to love each and every person that is opposed to us. This was the technique used by Jesus, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. They loved their opponents. They created and amplified the dissonance while liberally dispensing love.
If your interpretation of your opponent allows you to sense antagonism then love is dissipated and you will be pulled back from alignment and may well land in chaos. Think of the times when civil rights marches began with love and ended with the non-violent demonstrators turning violent. If we return violence for violence while each side insists it is right we leap instantly back to chaos. We can only stay aligned when we bath ourselves and those around us with love.
Plotting Your Course
While several of the articles in this collection are designed to be self-sustaining, this article is dependent upon the set. Notice that I assumed you were already familiar with my grids and with the way I refer to movements through these states as a dance. Now I need to introduce another tool. This tool will be of value to us here but it is because I intend to then reuse this same tool later that I need to spend time on this introduction. Please have patience with me.
This tool begins with the continuous improvement cycle identified by Shewhart and Deming. The terminology used by Shewhart was Plan, Do, Check, Act and that label has stuck. Deming elaborated on the correct use of this tool and vainly tried to change the labels of the steps to Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA). In the remainder of this article I am going to use the Deming labels because they highlight the duration of time required to study and downplay the concept that checking is only a brief formality.
| In another work, tentatively titled Best Practices for Information Technology, I extended PDSA by noting that vision is a prerequisite to accurate planning. The diagram that I use for this enhanced model is show to the left. Allow me to illustrate.
In the 1960s John Kennedy created a vision that people would fly to the moon and return. Many plans were created, many spacecraft were assembled (do), many launches and experiments were conducted so that the processes and tools could be studied and then what worked was used to act on the vision in a manner that was repeatable. | 
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The correct technique for dancing the dance between the states is to set a vision for where you want to go. Then plan each step. Execute that step and study the results. If you successfully executed that one dance step then you plan the next step. Otherwise you take corrective actions, and then try again to plan, do, study and act. Along the way you may need to reassess your vision. Then you plan, do, study and act on the next step in the dance. In the mean time the world around you is changing so you need to continually study to see where you are. The key is to stay in continual contact with the dissonance that gives you the information to assess where you are.
Here, then, is the process. Assess where you are. Decide where you want to go. Communicate and coordinate with everyone involved. Collaboratively plan a course to transition yourself and influence the environment around you. Dance that dance while continually assessing the dissonance. Reassess and readjust as required because your dance partners around you are probably dancing a different dance.