Updating Survival Strategies with Bateson’s Levels of Learning

1. Updating Survival Strategies with Bateson’s Levels of Learning Robert Dilts

2. Survival Strategies Basic Mammalian Survival Strategies include: Fight (attack) Flight (escape) Freeze (paralysis) It is important to periodically review, enrich and update our survival strategies, expanding our options to include new possibilities such as centering, acceptance, commitment and fluidity.

3. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what people mean by “God,” but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology. —Gregory Bateson (Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 1972) Gregory Bateson

4. Bateson’s Levels of Learning Learning 0 – no change. Repetitive behaviors in which the individual, group or organization is stuck in a rut or trapped “inside the box”—e.g., habits, resistance, inertia. Learning I – gradual, incremental change. Making corrections and adaptations through behavioral flexibility and stretching, but still “within the box”— e.g., establishing and refining new procedures and capabilities. Learning II – rapid, discontinuous change. Instantaneous shift of a response to an entirely different category or class of behavior. A switch from one type of “box” to another—e.g., change in values or beliefs.

5. Bateson’s Levels of Learning Learning III – evolutionary change. Significant alterations which stretch beyond the boundaries of the current identity of the individual, group or organization. Not only are they outside the “box,” they are outside of the “building”—e.g., transition of role or identity. Learning IV – revolutionary change. Awakening to something completely new, unique and transformative. The individual, group or organization is out of the box, out of the building and in a new world—e.g., completely new responses or perceptions that open the door to previously unknown and uncharted possibilities.