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CYBEK	PROBING the NEW MENTALITY Copyright © Dr William Theaux 1999 <Access to French Version>

You say that PLAN is an ancient, traditional method?

Yes - an early technique of Group Management was described by Cicero in Rome, who attributed the model to Simonides several centuries earlier in in Greece. In its original version, this technique was not yet plural. Only one participant is extracted and there is no Circulating Absence (click on the picture and read the original text). It is only much later, during the Renaissance, that Giordano Bruno transmitted it again as an Art of Memory that included a rotation structure. It was the beginning of the Plural. 

Interesting enough, the specialist historian - Frances. A. Yates - understood that Bruno was describing a primitive model of Cybernetics. But let's begin with the animated illustration of Simonides' principle. In Greece, at that time, a group was called a banquet. What we don't see in the picture - because the legend keeps it is the dark - is the entity that Simonides is supposed to meet outside. But we know that it is a twin being: Castor and Pollux.

It is unusual to promote an antique model, since Modern structures seems appropriate to modern times.

Precisely! It is remarkable and meaningful that PLAN originates from modern Sciences. It has been first set by the end of the 20th century on the basis of Sociology, Psychology, Information Theory etc... It was several year later when it was discovered that it was also an ancient technique. I am myself Psychiatrist and Neurologist and I was looking for a technique that would address the change in the Social dynamics resulting from new technologies, and how it aims toward ecological laws. PLAN results from formula of Cybernetics applied to the collective human resource. Finding its anteriority was a confirmation of its coherence within civilization.

So what is the update that PLAN brings to our present times?

In the past, social systems were concentrating on an Ideal. The situation  has changed with an interactive media as Information Technology. The collective Ideal has begun to be relative and to invest each individual and situation. The mass has become plural and the Ideal mobile. Everyone has become ideal in a democratic way, and the environment has become an ecosystem.

People experience the condition of a new consciousness in which the Ideal has become plural. This is expressed by a circuit which is represented by a Circulating Absence (also called the Distributed Extraction of PLAN ).

It looks like a self-management organization, with the manager outside of the group.

It is not a self-management more than the usual group situation. The manager, who can be part of the group, or leave the group alone, remains entirely in its function. The person who functions as an analyst in the appending room is like a pivot. Any designated member of the group, even the manager or a person from outside can fulfill this function. Actually, PLAN runs as an automatic process that is added, but does not alter the integrity of the group. It adds a degree of auto-management which operates in the background while the group remains active without structural change.

Why taking the risk of introducing an automatism besides the fact that it could challenge the traditional leadership?

Don't confuse the cure with the risk. Actually an automatism has already been set and constantly increases in influence upon our modern society; it is imposed by computers, Information Technology, Cybernetics, Expert System and soon Artificial intelligence. The traditional leadership function has already being largely disrupted, and it now operates in the semblance. There is a need for restoring the human place. PLAN, as an automatism is simply to complement and to balance of what the Hi-Tech imposes. PLAN restores and regulates the natural social order for it rebuilt something that compares with a memory. And it is unique in doing so - no other contemporary method equals its depth in the re-identification of people's role.

If PLAN compensates for new technologies, where can they be seen in its model ?

It would need to go deeper in the knowledge of Sociology and Psychoanalysis, in order to see  how the formula of Cybernetics and Collective Psychology relocate the non-human instrument of intelligence where it belongs. However one can imagine how the factor of absence that circulates in the group during PLAN takes place for the more abstract absence which is introduced with the technology and its absence of life within. There is a version of PLAN that is even more typical in assuming the IT; in providing distant support by telephone, PLAN administrates the presence of network and telecommunication. Such communication between a lay analyst and an expert is not only obviously convenient, it makes the weight of the new technology visible.

Is is possible to deliver PLAN to virtual groups ?

Theoretically yes. We are looking forward to applying sessions this way. It will show again how PLAN is a dynamics that operates per se - i.e. an automatism within a social situation. By its private sessions/extractions however, it indicates how the human participants is nevertheless necessary. PLAN helps the individual to maintain their personal identity. In a virtual group, everybody seems physically absent for everybody, but the group nevertheless is an entity - and from this entity Short Personal Sessions © and Circulating Absences © can be instituted and operated. The 'mechanism' that is added within the virtual group, is a pure sociological phenomenon; meanwhile psychology is preserved.

So what are the benefits, eventually, that one can expect from PLAN ?

A high degree of usability - it is convenient, economical in its distant support version. It restores also the names, places, roles, function in the new mentality groups - as it was initially describe in the founding legend and as psychoanalysis and modern human sciences also describe.
The Short Personal Sessions © help the individual psychology, and the Circulating Absences © helps the group progressing dynamically.

There are also general and even industrial effects - for the work of the group dealing with an exterior structures its process toward a productivity more aware of its environment. At the subtle level of the social environment as well as the clear level of physical goal the group that undergoes PLAN opens itself to a general behavior which becomes aware of its ecology. There again, no other method equals PLAN for enhancing the new mentality with structures of the new environmental horizon.