I've been reading Katherine at Dating God's posts and woes around here statistics course.

As usual, her posts resound with the incisive descriptiveness and zest of her prose - even in the midst of angst.

But I hope she can keep at it, if not with this teacher, than with another.

Now, this is a jumping off point - and isn't related to Kate at all, but this leads me to a long-standing annoyance I have, that I'm going to post about here.

I would like to - here - emphasize STRONGLY, just how important, yet minimized statistics have been in the whole unfolding of the human potential movement, the weekend workshop movement, and the self-help movements.

The use of statistics in any type of change program is THE FACTOR that separates:

The men from the boys
The integral from the boomers
The serious from the unserious
Authentic change management from the NEW AGE movement.

It truly shocks me to no end, how, for various self-help programs, various practices, etc, the main mode of collecting feedback is the testimonial.

The testimonial?

The FREAKIN TESTIMONIAL??

Because you know, testimonials, these have a well-respected evidence gathering capability. Starting from the TOOTH FAIRY, I believe...

Look, statistics research, statistical methods - the use and promulgation of statistics as a field of study was pioneered one hundred years ago, and has been in general use for over 50 in universities.

Would it KILL any of the self-help movement gurus to incorporate a statistical methodology in their change management programs?

And I may be wrong - but I do not see any of the big boys and self-help gurus - be it David Deida, or Integral Institute, or Deepak Chopra, commiting to a published statistical methodology of collection, regarding their change management programs.

Actually, on the Deepak Chopra - considering he is an MD, and I am sure he had to go through a rigorous statistics study program, I might be missing the published methods.  But there sure are not easily accessible.

Now, there are exceptions that prove the rule, of course. 

Andrew Weil's stuff.  Some of Michael Murphy's research at Esalen.

And I have to say - and here I agree with some of the famous disparaging comments of Wilber regarding California Institute of Integral Studies (although I don't know if this still holds, so don't hold ME to it now...) -

Here is the bottom line -

It is simply inexcusable for any type of change management program to NOT have a published statistics, including methods of data collection and analytic methodology, for the change management program being advocated.

Simply inexcusable.   And fundamentally unserious.  Any time that you run into some self-help method that lacks this - while the methods and community may have tremendous value - there is an immature and lack of rigorousness to the change strategy. 

Integral Institute is still in its infancy, but I am hoping that this academic element of rigorous statistical analysis of the change managment program of ILP, is also being setup.

Now of course, as the super-bright Katherine demonstrates, statistics can be hard.  And unfortunately, there is a conflict in the type of people who are well suited to statistics, and the  type of people who are attracted to the spiritual and holistic.

Still, the job can be farmed out, if necessary, right?

End of rant...

UPDATE - Also - for anyone reading this who is connected to the Integral Institute (or maybe have their blogs read by people at II - cough cough cough) - can you pass this on?

Please?

And on understanding the causes of procrastination, rather than an action-based plan.

I'm not so sure.  I tend to view "understanding" as a whole-life psychological endeavor, that something like therapy is very useful for, to allow more freedom from childhood scripts, and mis-understandings held in the mind, and of course for simple allowing/healing.

That is very useful, but I think action-based plans - with of course right attitudes, which this approach strengthens - is more useful.