The Applied Socionics School
Socionics can and should become a fact of culture. It has the potential to transform virtually all aspects of human life. Self-identity, tolerance, and constructive communications are all direct consequences of learning Socionics. However, this transition won’t come easily. To make Socionics a part of daily life, it has to be promoted and advocated, have educational materials developed, and have provide practical examples of its efficacy both in enterprise and in the personal life. That's what we do on daily basis.
Credo
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Elena Udalova, |
I'm confident that the basic concepts of Socionics are simple enough to be understood — even in elementary school.
However, despite this simplicity, Socionics has tremendous potential for influencing all of our social interactions, whether this is by improving mutual understanding or by raising the level of humanism in society. These are not just words; we have demonstrated these effects with every group that has been taught Socionics.
Since modern society is built on information, problems caused by communication and mutual understanding have a profound effect. Socionics is the best known way of addressing these issues.
What is Socionics and What it Brings to One's Life
In the modern era, the ability to efficiently acquire new information is key to determining one's success. But what do we know about information processing? And how does one feel about that enormous informational flow? These are some of the areas that Socionics aims to address, by studying ways a human being perceives, processes and produces information. However, each of us handles information quite differently; information which is of great importance to one person might be of little interest to another. Why is it that our minds react to information flow so selectively?
Socionics is based on observations of a Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. He discovered the fundamental laws of human information processing and perception, and published these in his revolutionary book "Psychological Types" in 1921. Then, in the late 1970s, a Lithuanian teacher named Aušra Augustinavičiūtė used analytical modeling to apply Antoni Kępiński’s theory of information metabolism to Jung's works. That's how Socionics begun.
According to Socionics, how we perceive information can be grouped into one of 16 types, with each having different interests and levels of expertise. Knowing the differences between each type is therefore important when one is going to communicate, since the recipient will likely fit a different type. For example, when creating a document, one must take into account the recipient's capabilities in formal logic, and whether this message will be met with interest or aversion. Taking such traits into account must become natural.
Since each type is an integral part of one's psyche, identifying one’s own type can help with a wide range of potential interactions. These might include finding the most suitable profession, meeting the most supportive and encouraging partner, and improving relations with coworkers, amongst many other possibilities.
Difficulties of Self-Identification
Unfortunately, not every adult is aware of their capabilities. This requires both finding one's hidden treasures and, even harder, admitting one's weaknesses. Sometimes a lifetime isn’t even enough! This is especially true when one was taught to overcome oneself—to prove to the world that one can do anything.
Ideally one should align their life and profession with their innate capabilities. Only then can one's decisions will be adequate, creative and responsible. However, once socially acceptable solutions lay beyond the expertise of one's core talents, tasks may become problematic, and require one to go against their natural mode of processing information. In such cases one is forced to rely on their weakest traits, and is left unable to develop their strengths.
Socionics helps one to understand and admit the peculiarities of their information perception type. This helps safeguard against one's weaknesses and improves self-esteem—all by focusing on one's natural talents.
Dualization
In Socionics, someone is said to become "dualized" when they become aware of their type and are able to use this to their advantage. A dualized person is therefore able to admit their weaknesses and accept help from their partner, while also not feeling insecure or inferior as a result. At the same time, this person is also ready to help their partner by using their own strengths, while also refraining from criticism about partner's shortcomings in those areas.
Dualization therefore causes one to sincerely admire and be grateful for those possessing complementary talents—thereby improving one's relations with everyone around them. Besides, knowing when to defer or pursue certain ambitions helps to avoid common sources of conflict and misunderstanding. Although it can be difficult to accept that there are areas where one needs to follow their partner as if they were blind, this can also make one feel taken care of, protected and important.
Communications
Socionics denotes many type regularities in how we process information, but perhaps the most important is the principle of mutual understanding, which makes it possible to draw conclusions about the division of labor within the society. Some people simply have a better innate understanding of certain types of information than others. This natural diversity across our population is not only an oddity of evolution, but also a sometimes cruel necessity.
Each of our evolutionary advantage is our ability to uniquely and creatively process information, and when taken collectively, this enables our society to process a broad and comprehensive range of information. However, as demonstrated by Jung, each of us is unfortunately incapable of obtaining of effectively processing all types of information on our own. That's why evolution led to the specialization. Therefore, in order to most efficiently use this specialization for the public good, it’s necessary to have a well-developed communication between each specialty.
Our informational system can therefore be thought of as an evolutionary organ designed for communication. If one is unable to reach an understanding, it means that this organ is being used so ineffectively that it can no longer perform its primary function: connecting us to the rest of society. That's why understanding the differences in how we perceive information is such a fundamental way of improving human relations. Observations have shown that rapid progress can be achieved when self-understanding, mutual understanding and tolerance prevail, whereas their absence leads to stagnation and disorder.
At one time or another, everyone has experienced fast and pleasant communications in addition to groundless antipathy to strangers. That's how informational interactions manifest themselves. Socionics has been studying those manifestations for over 40 years, and can now describe and predict them successfully.
Staff Recruitment
During the hiring process, an HR Manager usually assesses qualifications, education, and intelligence, amongst other similar characteristics. However, these often say little about some of the more important characteristics. Such as, is this candidate really interested in their potential job duties? What relations will this person have with their colleagues, managers, and potential clients? Does this person want to climb and make a career out of the position, or just remain idle? Is this person capable of solving some of the creative objectives required by the position?
While it might at first seem impossible to answer questions such as these ahead of time, with Socionics this can becomes possible. Socionics is able to provide clear criteria for the best candidate, both in terms of satisfying their employer and in terms of enhancing the employee’s own personal development. Identifying inappropriate fields for a particular candidate, due to their limited ability to perceive those types of information, can help that candidate avoid working in areas that are likely to find overly labor-intensive and stressful. Such inappropriate files can lower self-esteem and spoil that employee’s relations with people around them.
Finding the best application for a candidate within an organization is the field where Socionics excels, since this takes into account both one's area of expertise and one's potential to form symbiotic relations with colleagues.
Simple Yet Powerful
Despite their power, the fundamental concepts of Socionics are simple and quantifiable. There are just 8 functions of information metabolism, they’re combined into one model (called 'model A', and there are few supplemental traits— all easy enough to learn in a single course of 50 hours. Afterwards, a whole new world of understanding is opened. Easier than the multiplication table, yet arguably even more necessary, this field of science can and should be an early part of everyone’s education.
