The Strategy of the Dolphin

Strategy of the Dolphin: Scoring a Win in a Chaotic World ISBN 0-449-90529-2 is a 1988 business and self-development book written by Dudley Lynch and Dr. Paul L. Kordis. It has been translated into seven languages.
The result is a model of four major stages of human thinking and valuing skills and qualities. These four stages are compared to sharks, carps, "pseudo-enlightened carps" and dolphins to shed light on their distinct behaviors.
Carps
The carp user believes in scarcity. Such a belief produces highly authoritarian, traditional thinking. There is a tendency to be sacrificial, leaving occupants of these stages vulnerable to manipulation, particularly by users of the shark stage.
Users of the carp stage represent the extreme of right-brain, we-centered behavior. Rather than winning, they focus their efforts on not losing what they currently have.
Carp users fear confrontation, so their strategy in business or personal transactions is to give in or get out. Neither strategy, when used repeatedly, leads to positive outcomes. Both surrendering in a negotiation and abandoning a challenging situation lead to loss of equity in life or career.
In the dynamic between sharks and carps, carp users usually lose. Like sharks, they are locked into a single set of dilemma-resolving strategies, and when they fail, they are incapable of shifting to a different, more suitable strategy.
Sharks
The shark stage can range from raw, feral and extremely egocentric behavior to behavior that is much more flexible and adaptable to circumstances and surroundings.
Users of the shark stage represent extreme left-brain, I-centered behavior. They also believe
in scarcity. Their perception is that there must be winners and losers. To ensure that they won’t be the losers, sharks “move in for the kill,” striving to get as much as they can in every case, regardless of the cost.
In any personal or business transaction, the shark stage user will attempt to take over or, if necessary, trade off. They seek total control of circumstances and solutions. Their understanding of "winning" includes a need to be right 100 percent of the time and they may go to extremes to cover up their failures and vulnerabilities.
Because they are addicted to winning, their creativity in fashioning outcomes is often limited. When they fail, they may be unable to try anything different or learn from their mistakes. Their fear of failure and belief in scarcity dictates their actions and reactions.
Pseudo-Enlightened Carps (PECs)
The pseudo-enlightened carp stage has been the most controversial aspect of this book and model, probably because of the name. (The authors admit that it was a difficult naming choice.)
Their point in choosing the name seems to have been a desire to warn against prematurely assuming that you have achieved the level of thinking performance they describe as the dolphin level.
At the PEC level, thinking about what is possible is still absolutist. But instead of absolute scarcity, the PEC believes in absolute abundance.
This belief leaves PEC users vulnerable to unreasonable expectations, exploitation and predation by sharks, constant and never ending emotional healing and a tendency to surrender personal power by confining their dilemma-resolving activities in business or personal transactions to give in or trade off.
Dolphins
The introduction of the dolphin stage follows a brief discussion of the late John C. Lilly's observations of dolphins. Among other admirable behaviors, Lilly was drawn to the creativity that dolphins often display when not given expected rewards in training situations. Instead of continuing to do the same tricks, they may produce innovative behaviors in the expectation of improving their chances of being rewarded.
It is this adaptive learning behavior, as well as the creative pursuit of objectives, that set dolphins apart from sharks and carps in the model created by Lynch and Kordis.
The dolphin user may employ either shark or carp strategies for resolving dilemmas as well as their own unique strategies, depending on the situation. If one way is unsuccessful, dolphins respond with other possibilities. They learn from their mistakes and the mistakes of others. Dolphins see the possibility of both potential scarcity and potential abundance, through solutions that involve "breakthrough" win-win strategies that build new value.
The BrainMap
Lynch and Kordis connect the model of sharks, carps and dolphins to an earlier model of personality styles that Lynch had created in the late 1970s. Introducing the research into lobotomy patients, which showed the loss of ability to plan into the future or maintain a holistic view of the environment, Lynch builds a premise of forebrain and rear brain activity. As the right and left brain are roughly focused on "I" and "we" thinking, the rear brain is geared to survival and preservation and the forebrain is the site of both broad thinking and forward-looking planning.
Three other assessment instruments closely related to the BrainMap model are MindMaker6, which focuses on worldviews and values; The mCircle Instrument, which focuses on dilemma-resolving or conflict resolution choices; and the YoDolphin Worldview Survey, which identifies thinking and valuing behaviors.
Lynch is also the author of Your High-Performance Business Brain, published in 1984, which has been updated and substantially expanded into a new version, Your Dolphin High-Performance Business Brain. The entire model has also been revisited in a later work by Lynch called The Mother of All Minds: Leaping Free of an Outdated Human Nature. In addition, Lynch and Kordis wrote Code of the Monarch: An Insider's Guide to the Real Global Business Revolution, which, like the other books named in this paragraph, is an interpretation and expansion of the human developmental model of the late Dr. Clare W. Graves, an American psychologist who developed a double-helix model of human psychological maturation that connects levels of values and beliefs and thinking skills to corresponding levels of existential problems.
The BrainMap assessment instrument introduced front and rear brain considerations at the time when "whole brain" brain testing was commonly limited to studies and representations of the brain hemispheres only.
=="The Pool"==
In the book, Lynch and Kordis refer frequently to "The Pool", which is their name for the external world at large. All of their assessment and self-growth instruments relate to "The Pool". MindMaker6 is an adaptation of the Graves model into a seven-step description of human development. "The Pool" is also explored in terms of The BrainMap, which incorporates the ideas of brain function by right-left and front-back brain concepts, and in terms of The mCircle Instrument, which describes the kind of decision and conflict resolution strategies that carps, sharks, dolphins (and a fourth variety of thinking that Lynch and Kordis called the pseudo-enlightened carp in the book) typically use.
The more detailed stages of human development in "The Pool" are as follows:
*Worldview 1: Existence. Following Graves, Lynch and Kordis barely describe this level, saying it is seldom encountered in the adult world, except in the mentally ill or senile.
*Worldview 2: The Kinsperson, who lives for the good of the family, tribe, clan, or group to gain security.
*Worldview 3: The Loner, who lives for personal gratification and seeks personal mastery, as well as power and dominance over others.
*Worldview 4: The Loyalist, who lives within clearly defined rules and expectations to obtain stability and confirmation of existing beliefs.
*Worldview 5: The Achiever, who lives for return on personal investments and to gain advancement of wealth and status.
*Worldview 6: The Involver, who lives for helping and participatory situations to gain personal and group learning and growth.
*Worldview 7: The Choice-Seeker, who lives for high levels of freedom and personal choice, seeking stimulation and opportunities to enhance survival and quality of life for self and others.
Each worldview is a natural evolution from the previous one, as the previous worldview fails to meet some essential human needs. All represent a right or left-brain focus, evolving from basic sacrificial to expressive action on the world and back again as existential challenges change. An example of such a transition is the movement of an alcoholic (Loner) to Alcoholics Anonymous (Loyalist), because the Loner state offers no stability or building of sustaining life equity.
The MindMaker6 instrument rates activity at each of the seven stages or worldviews.
Business and personal uses of these models are explained in the latter half of Strategy of the Dolphin with topics ranging from personal development to group dynamics. The book became the foundation of an international publishing and management consulting practice that is based in Lynch's firm, Brain Technologies Corporation (BTC) of Gainesville, Florida. His assessment tools are marketed under the brand of Brain Me Up.

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