Findings
Findings include root causes behind the systemic housing crisis exposed through a 7-Level Analysis of Tenant and Landlord roles, 6 levels of systemic escalating harm, and 6 levels of Institutional Betrayal.
Findings
While the core finding on an experience level is the "Ask<-->Harm Loop", a deeper analysis reveals insights on the source of that viscous circle - insights that enable real positive change.
The following logical-level analyses are what we call "Audience Baseline Positions" and were discovered through the Audience Attunement stage of the Thaut Process of Strategic Thought Leadership. This process discovers unmet higher values and related mental models through linguistic pattern analysis of authentic online conversations about the topic at hand by the target audience.
In this context, the topic is rental housing and target audiences include tenants, managers, and investors. Sources include tenant discussion threads on Reddit, landlord/investor forums such as BiggerPockets, and property management community discussions. These are places where people speak their minds candidly rather than performing for an audience.
The 7 Levels of Learning and Influence (the "Pullamid") is a logical-levels framework for parsing audience thinking to discover where to apply empowerment to be most helpful.
Systems Thinker Gregory Bateson's concept of Logical Levels is based on "a set of members cannot be a member of its own set" and is thus at "a higher logical level".
As noted in this study designer's 7 Levels of Learning and Influence,:
Influence flows down logical levels but not up the same way.. It's like how a player on a football team isn't a team. And a team is not a league...it's a member of a class called a "league." ...If a team changes its practice routines, that will impact the players.
But if an individual player within a team changes their performance within their practice, it doesn't impact the team the same way. It can have some impact, but if a player can't meet the team's criteria, that individual will get replaced.
The team, being at a higher logical level, supersedes the player.
Robert Dilts built on Bateson's model with his Neuro-Logical Levels model, which consider logical levels of thinking and consciousness. The study designer's Pullamid (Pyramid of Pull) is an adapted version of Dilts' model optimized for use in Strategic Thought Leadership.
The Pullamid reveals where Mental Models fail to satisfy Values and thereby reveal Strategic Thought Leadership opportunities as leverage points for paradigm-level systemic change.
It can be helpful to understand that 3 of the top 4 levels are variations of belief systems:
- Identity is beliefs about who are are. Steve Andreas' work on self concept is relevant on this level.
- Values are beliefs about what is important - in terms of feeling states like confidence or abundance.
- Mental Models are beliefs about how the world works - when prevalent, these are called paradigms and this is where the highest leverage for systemic change is, per Donella Meadows "Place to Intervene in a System" discussed earlier.
Paradigm-level change pivots on the understanding that - per Korzybski's General Semantics:
The map is not the territory.
...which is a very helpful understanding. We don't respond to "the world" directly, we respond to our maps of the world. So all we have to do is help someone expand their "map" with a new (to them) and more helpful mental model, and we have changed the world - for that person.
This is the promise of Strategic Thought Leadership - the ability to do this at scale through STL Schema and bring about a paradigm shift.
Pullamid - 7 Levels of Learning and Influence
| Level | Name | What It Reveals |
|---|
| 1 | Core Purpose | The ultimate positive mission - one that transcends the individual self and has more to do with the whole. |
| 2 | Identity | Who they see themselves as in a context |
| 3 | Values | What is important on a feeling-state level. Higher values in this context are those that unify, such as "contribution", "joy", and "oneness". |
| 4 | Mental Models ⚡ | The maps of "how the world works", which can be expressed in "If->then=meaning" structure. |
| 5 | Skillset | Capabilities and knowledge. |
| 6 | Pull | Expressed demand in action, including learning pull (searching for information) and remedy pull (trying to fix what went wrong) as well as purchase pull (exchanging money for perceived values fulfillment) |
| 7 | Pullfillment | The actual, tangible experience of what they get in return for their pull. When it falls short of expectations, a Pullfillment Gap exists. |
Per the above table, we will be exploring several instances of Pullfillment Gaps that reveal unmet values connected to prevalent stale mental models that are ripe for improvement in landlords and tenants.
? Back to Where You Were | ? top
Tenant 7-Level Baseline Analysis
Tenant Primary Unmet Values: Agency, Dignity, Justice
Related Key Mental Models (If->Then=Meaning): "If I assert my rights, then I get suppressed, which means I am powerless."
Representative Source Conversations:- "Landlord bullying me; legal aid says 'you’re better off just leaving'"
- "Why do we take so much bullying from landlords?"
- "Everything about your relationship to a landlord showcases the power imbalance."