FAQ
(Frequently Asked Questions)

What is this assessment tool about?
As its name indicates, the Yo!Dolphin!™ Worldview Survey identifies what scholars call your Weltanschauung—the overall perspective (or window) from which you see and interpret the world. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language (Fourth Edition) also defines worldview as “A collection of beliefs about life and the universe held by an individual or a group.”

Who are the Yo!Dolphin! assessment tool’s creators?
For brief biographical sketches for Dudley Lynch and Dr. Paul L. Kordis, go here.

What is the best worldview to have?
Each of the five worldviews described and measured by the Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey works best in a certain set of circumstances. The quickest test of whether your current worldview is “best” for you at this time is to ask yourself, “Is the overall way I think consistently getting me the results I want and need now?” Although worldviews are developmental—that is, they emerge in sequence as a person’s development advances—they can repeat themselves in redesigned fashion. Typically, when a worldview renews itself and resurfaces, it is emerging from a greatly enhanced “time, space and complexity domain.” That is, it emerges from a more tightly ordered, wider-ranging and more complicated “external world” context of human interactions and human and technological capabilities. If the external world begins to deteriorate or if there has been significant personal trauma, individuals, groups and entire cultures and societies can also regress, and old worldviews can reemerge.

What causes us to change our worldview?
Sometimes a shift in worldview is a do-it-yourself (autocatalytic) job. You see a worldview that you like better or want more, and you work diligently and successfully to have it. One of the features of the Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey interpretation is to offer each user an introduction to how they might “narrate” their worldview from the next level up. We anticipate that imaging and reflecting on the nature of a new worldview will help some Yo!Dolphin! users begin to convert our fiction into their fact. However, most changes in worldview to this point in history have been caused by environmentally imposed demands. If the person has not become entrenched or solidified in their current worldview, this change is typically not very traumatic. If a person’s worldview has become solidified (typically because it closely resembles the most prevalent worldview in the person’s family and culture), then it usually takes one or more significant emotional events for someone to shift to another worldview. Out of personal and/or societal train wrecks can rise the Phoenix of a new Weltanschauung. There’s no guarantee, though, that the pain will bring the gain. All the mathematics, physics, philosophy, biology, psychology and "fluidities of the soul" attending the dynamics of any kind of change involving humans seem to attend the dynamics of worldview development.

Why have the creators of the Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey chosen to make this product available now?
There are trends and events occurring in our world that are culminating in a very important choice for humanity. We wish to identify and support the worldviews that will help us make the right choice.

What is the Deep See-Change Dolphin and how is it different from the Dolphin mindset that you have written about previously?
First, the Deep See-Change Dolphin is a Dolphin who has seen the impending danger of the path on which humanity is traveling and has also seen that everyone will be affected by the outcome of our next few choices of great significance and that there is no avenue of escape if the wrong choices are made. Second, the Deep See-Change Dolphin has the wherewithal to work with others of his or her own kind to powerfully and positively alter the path that humanity is treading.

Do the developers of the Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey consider themselves Deep See-Change Dolphins?
We are chroniclers of worldview development and of the new Deep See-Change Dolphin perspective. We have intuited and observed the emergence of the Deep See-Change Dolphin value set and the need to prod and nurture other Dolphins towards this view of operating within the world. But we also understand that the crises facing humanity cannot be addressed individually, but rather must be faced through a coalition of Deep See-Change Dolphins who are connected, focused, committed and capable of doing what needs to be done. It is our goal to facilitate this process, whether or not we personally have achieved Deep See-Change Dolphin perspective or capability.

Will you publish your findings and inform us of your activities?
In a word, yes. This is the purpose of this Web site. We intend to provide a resource for finding Deep See-Change Dolphins, bringing them together, facilitating their activities and reporting the outcome. We also intend to provide other assessment instruments, training and support materials to better inform people of the importance of different worldviews and their impact. We also wish to provide information regarding the changes going on in the world and how they are impacting our worldviews, and conversely, how our worldviews are impacting the world.

Why are you the best people to do this?
Well, we may not be, but we have spent decades studying the evolution of values and worldviews, documenting them, corroborating them with other researchers and publishing our findings. Our data is based on the best efforts of the most preeminent minds available and the convergent validity of our findings is readily evident. But in addition to this, we simply do not see enough effort behind addressing the larger picture. Many people and organizations are making valiant efforts towards addressing specific issues. But only a few are pressing forward to address the entire gestalt. We intend to add to the force behind tackling the situation in its entirety because we feel that this is the best place to expend our energy and will have the most salient impact. This does not mean, however, that we intend to tilt at windmills. Rather, we wish to work together to find the most effective and elegant perturbations needed to cause systemic change.

Which scholars and researchers have been most helpful to you in developing your ideas for the Yo!Dolphin! tool and the Deep See-Change Dolphin worldview?
Many great minds have influenced our work, some still living, some already graduated. However, our research borrows from many fields of inquiry and from many people who have been researching and writing about various aspects of the larger picture. Because of this, we first began to see an emerging gestalt from the puzzle pieces that were presenting themselves in such rapid succession. Many authors would agree on one piece, others on another, and a very few, as were we, were putting the pieces together into a larger picture. Those few who come immediately to mind are Jarod Diamond, David Korten and Chalmers Johnson. Others who may also be piecing together the big picture but who are writing in a more focused way about individual issues are people such as Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Farmer, who both write brilliantly about the need to eliminate poverty; Barbara Ehrenrich and Juliet Schor, who are clear thought leaders in the areas of debt, overconsumption, overspending and how difficult it is to get along in today’s economy; Kevin Phillips, Chris Hedges and Karen Armstrong, who have been shining a painful light on the influence of radical religion on contemporary life; Robert Kennedy Jr. and E.O. Wilson, who are convincing and captivating authors on the decline of earth’s environment; Helen Caldicott, who writes persuasively and heartrendingly on the dangers of nuclear proliferation, and so on. But first, last and always, there was the seminal thought and research of the late Clare W. Graves, a psychologist at Union College, whose analysis was on our minds when first we developed the idea of a Carp-Shark-Dolphin Worldview way of modeling the way people’s beliefs take form and sort themselves out. Clare Graves has inspired many others; we’ve absorbed his works, their works and have added our own, the latest of which is the Yo!Dolphin! Worldview Survey.

Are you sure you have anything new to say? After all, the whole “postmodern revolution” in thinking— a lot of the so-called New Age gurus, the Woodstock generation, the Green Party, Green Peace, the Earth Liberation Army, the radical liberals, and that’s not to mention Gandhi, Martin Luther King or Ralph Nader—has made claims, expressed concerns and touted solutions that sound a lot like yours.
Well, we like Dr. King and Gandhi and can positively identify with many of the ideas voiced by “postmodern” thinkers, at least as far as they go. And if anyone in the groups you mentioned who is still living would like to step up and suggest how to fix this rapidly deteriorating situation, nothing would delight us more. We’d be happy to concede, then, that maybe what needs to be said has already been said. But until folks who hold to the views of the people you’ve mentioned do step up and make fundamental contributions to staunching and reversing the decline, we’re not inclined to worry about how fresh or how dated our messages may be. Our concern continues to be to stir the pot and warn of the drift away from what works and what’s workable.

Aren’t you just the latest round of philosophical Luddites—the kind of pessimists that critics like Virginia Postel warns us about in her book, The Enemies of the Future?
We embrace the philosophy of what works. Postrel, much like Ayn Rand, embraces individual freedom and a faith in creativity and market forces. We like creativity, freedom and market forces. They’re great! Everyone ought to try them sometime! However, Postrel does not support trying to predict or control the future in any way, and we do plan to control the future by changing the suicidal course we are on. The future isn’t magical or totally unknowable, especially where negative consequences to current trends are concerned. If you stick your finger in a light socket you can probably wager with winning accuracy on what will happen next. We aren’t talking about rocket science here. We’re talking about trends that are unsustainable, period. So let’s use all of the creativity and technological innovation and market mobilization we can to move forward to a very bright future rather than to march blindly and in lockstep towards the 13th century.

Do you really expect your worldview assessment to be used in the corporation with people being labeled with names like Carp and Shark?
The current influence of the Carp and Shark Worldviews, including the manipulation and abuse of these systems, lies very close to the root of our major problems. But this is not to absolve any of our major systems or their offshoots of responsibility. In fact, the systems by which we operate often place people in a quandary and force them to behave in ways that they would normally reject. Our goal is to give people the opportunity to employ the best of their current worldview, change it if they see fit and, most importantly, to change our systems of operation so as to facilitate functional and long-lasting quality of life. The labels of Carp and Shark are descriptive for sure, but as a result of our first “dolphin” book, Strategy of the Dolphin®: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World, we have convincing evidence that people in all kinds of organizations (including the corporate world) find the terms and the concepts very useful because they tellingly described all-too-real qualities and behaviors with all-too-real real consequences. Moreover, isn’t it better to discover what both your strengths and weaknesses are so that you can improve?

Isn’t it a bit opportunistic to talk about the next great worldview involving, among other things, a return to the spiritual? Or, actually, aren’t you really way late in the “spirituality game”? Every New Age bookstore is jammed with this kind of stuff and has been ever since folks like Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson and The Aquarian Conspiracy crowd.
The spirituality we talk about is very, very practical and based on bedrock philosophy and commonly held ethics. In fact, not pooping where you eat is a really good one. We haven’t seen that particular one in a new age book so far. But if the ethics fit, then we should wear them. Why should our ethics be new? They’ve been honed over the eons. We should finally have them right by now. The question is, are we going to live by them? Besides, worldviews reemerge at much greater levels of space, time and complexity processing. These ideas will come around time and again, but the application will be different. We are now living in different times.

How do you tell, without having to attend a seminar that you lead, the difference between a First Dolphin, a Prime Dolphin and a Deep See-Change Dolphin?
You can read the material we provide or you can spend many, many years studying human development—which we recommend if you have the time. The seminal works of Dr. Clare W. Graves are a good place to start. Lovinger, Kohlberg, Maslow and many others provide convergent validity for our views.

There’s been a lot of criticism directed toward trying to build change movements and change processes around metaphors. Yet the two of you keep doing it. Why?
For us, it works. When it stops working we won’t do it anymore.

What do you like best about using the ocean’s dolphin the way you do metaphorically? And why is the dolphin such a universally powerful metaphor?
We don’t know why it’s so powerful; simply that it is. People around the world appear to view the dolphin in a very similar fashion and to intuit its use as a universal metaphor. One more rational explanation may be that the cetaceans have really large brains. But they seem to think quite differently than humans.

The very way that you score your questionnaire suggests that people don’t operate exclusively from a single worldview. Rather, we all tend to use a “different ‘views for different you’s” approach. How do we manage to pull this off?
Humans are smart, flexible and complex. We have a lot more going for us than we give ourselves credit for. Even more importantly, when one advances to a more complex worldview, the worldviews that came before are still available in many circumstances.

On a scale of 1 to 10, how serious do you view the growing worldwide crises that you believe are fueling the emergence of the Deep See-Change Dolphin Worldview? What is your greatest single fear or concern regarding this?
Over the top: An 11+. Our greatest single fear is that we will change reactively rather than proactively. In this instance, timing is everything.

You are suggesting that a major redistribution of wealth and power is going to be required if humanity and forms of life are to be saved. But isn’t this what every revolutionist ends up contending? What is new about the Deep See-Change Dolphin point of view on power issues?
Actually, we are not suggesting a major redistribution of wealth and power but rather that the distribution of wealth and power needs to be what people think that it should be and normally believe that it is. In fact, what we do suggest is that we practice what we preach. That is, we should behave according to the principles and laws and agreements that we profess and at least pretend to support. The foundation of democracy and the principles of both religious and secular advanced societies are based on a set of common human ethics that have been worked out over the millennia. These ethics apply to individual, social, organizational, economic, political and spiritual behavior. Most of us say that we agree with them and think that they are important, but most of us don’t really live by them. Therein lies the problem. In addition, we have done a lousy job of distributing and embedding our memes and our phemes—our knowledge and wisdom. Every new generation must be taught all over again and make the same mistakes. This is very inefficient. Not only do we need to better support our common ethics, we need a better transfer system.

Wouldn't a scholar like Jared Diamond, who puts major weight on the technological and environmental differences between people, find the emphasis you put on worldviews as an explanation for why people and societies do what they do a bit naive and simplistic?
In the past, most worldviews evolved in concert with their environment. That is, a significant change in one’s external environment often causes a significant change in one’s internal worldview which, in turn, often causes a change in the external environment. This back-and-forth play between the human mind and the world in which we live has likely been going on for the whole of human history. However, recently the more advanced worldviews have acquired the ability to be autocatalytic. That is, a change in the brain (or mind) can cause a change in the brain (or mind), and so on. This does not mean that these systems are always autocatalytic or that they cannot be perturbed into changing due to environmental influences. Diamond is quite correct in asserting that the resources available in certain environments could account for the advance of some cultures over others and therefore does not require the superiority of any one group to explain their success. Our observations do not contradict these assertions. Rather, they compliment them and illustrate the interplay between one’s worldview and one’s environment.

What's the difference between Joseph Campbell's work and yours, his approach and your approach?
Every time someone advances in their worldview they must undergo a Hero’s Journey of sorts. So this transition happens time and again as people change their worldviews, and there is no ceiling on worldview development. Therefore, we find that the Hero's Journey is a good metaphor for the transition between worldviews, as are, for example, the stages of grief identified by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, for the transition between value systems. The more adept at making the Hero’s Journey one becomes, the more flexible and able one is to make a worldview transition when it is called for. (Ross’s stages of grief apply to situations where the environment imposes the change upon the worldview. In autocatalytic [self-initiated change] situations, different emotions apply.)

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