OK! You have made it this far! The material below is for later, for now a quick and direct overview of the Wakefield Doctrine ( the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)…
All people are born with a potential to experience the world in three distinct and characteristic ways. Depending on which, we say that a person is a clark or a scott or a roger. When we say, ‘experience the world’ we don’t just mean things about you, we mean the way you see the world, the assumptions you make, how you feel about other people; all are in keeping with the description of your type. Not as difficult as it sounds. Try this: if you are a roger that means that you know that world is based on rules and that people who know these rules gather in relationships and groups sort of like a herd of animals do, common interests in common. (Stay with me, now) As a roger, to your very soul you know that the universe is quantifiable, knowable, organized. It is entirely natural for you to see the things in the world that demonstrate this quality of being quantifiable, so you tend to like things in an orderly, traditional arrangement. You are naturally attracted to work or study that reflect this, rogers tend to be engineers, accountants, judges, historians, members of the clergy. Anything that is based on natural organization, you will find a roger.
The same applies to clarks and scotts. What our personality type is goes way beyond likes and dislikes, aptitudes and interests. ‘Who’ we are as personality types is demonstrated in what we do for work, what our idea of recreation is, who are friends are and what we reject the most in our daily lives. All in reflection, in support of our personality types: clark, scott or roger.
Now one of the best things about this Doctrine thing is that you don’t have to take a test or a college course, you don’t have to pay someone money to test you and you don’t even have to know anything about psychology, in other words, none of the hoops and hurdles that most of the other personality typing systems require you to jump through before you can get any of the benfits. Here at the Doctrine, all you have to do: be able to step outside yourself, see beyond the most basic assumptions you make about life and reality. Do that and you can join us.
The other thing about the Wakefield Doctrine that we often hear is, “I read the description of the three personality types, sometimes I think I am a roger and other times it is clear I must be a scott. That must mean your theory does not work on me.” The reason this happens is that we are all born with the qualities of all three personality types, clarks and scotts and rogers. With this potential, at some point in early childhood we settle on one of three, we become predominately a scott or a roger or a clark. The other two qualities do not go away, we always have them within and sometimes we will act like one of the other two types. So don’t worry too much if it seems you are disproving the Doctrine, roger.
So that’s it. The Wakefield Doctrine. Step A.
Once upon a time, in a land not very far from Clark’s house… there were three atypical college friends who engaged in many of the atypical activities of their day. They went to school; they played guitars at ear-splitting volumes in dorm rooms, and sneered derisively at those who objected; one drank too, too much; one not at all, but subsisted on Oreos and Coke. One became a Baptist with a capital ” B”. They played in rock bands, worked all sorts of jobs, one got married way too soon. They all wrestled with the Issues Of Their Day, with varying degrees of resolve and/or success. And in spite of all the atypical ups and downs, they managed to form a very unique bond. And , to their surprise, the bond has lasted much longer than any one of them might have thought. Longer than some marriages, jobs, bands, or Baptist dogma. And after many hours of conversation about just about everything turned into years and decades of same, there came to be what was, and is now, referred to as … the Wakefield Doctrine.
Psychology and psychiatry texts make constant reference to type A/B/C personalities and their interactions. We are somewhat along those same lines. For us, those references have evolved into our Wakefield Doctrine, which we have found to be much more palatable. To err may be human, but to create a categorization system that explains all of human behavior in a somewhat cryptic nutshell is absolutely divine. And, we have noticed along the way, a heck of a lot of fun. In an “improvisational academia” sort of way, we gleefully invent terms as we go along to describe conditions and situations that may not have existed previously. And yet, our system also works perfectly well when taken perfectly and totally seriously.
The basic premise is that there are three fundamental personality types; and much can be known and discovered about oneself ( and any other aspect of life ) by learning to identify your own basic type; how to identify the types of others; and then consider all the ramifications of the interactions. In short…this explains everything, but only from a point of view that holds human dynamics as the prime component.
The Wakefield Doctrine is predicated upon the idea that everyone experiences the world/reality differently, from one of three overlapping but distinctive perspectives. It also proposes that our personalities are but a result of our perception, of our habitual responses to the world. The Wakefield Doctrine maintains that this characteristic perception of reality can be grouped into three distinct types, called for reasons stated elsewhere, clarks, scotts and rogers.
Born with the potential to view the world in one of these three ways, all people possess the characteristics of all (three) but soon (by age 7 or so) ‘become one of the three. Put another way: we also possess the potential to see the world as a clark or a scott or a roger. It is only the predominance of qualities from one (over the other two) that makes us what we are. No one is only clarklike or scottian or rogerian.
The value of the Wakefield Doctrine is that once you can see the world ‘through the eyes’ of another, behavior becomes understandable. If a scott sees the world as a predator (would) then all action is predicated on interacting with the world as a predator. This is distinctly different from a roger, who seeing the world as a social being, predicates action and reaction on the basis of a world in which the interactions of the herd is the dominant theme.
The above notwithstanding, following is the ‘eureka moment’ for the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers (the Wakefield Doctrine):
In the early 1980’s, Scott (the progenitor scott) worked at a music store in Pawtucket. He was the main salesman and also ran the repair department (of the store), this included not only repairing musical instruments and equipment that he sold, but any equipment that a might be in need of repair, including various types of tape recorders and other similar equipment.
One day I happened to stop by the store to visit scott while he worked. While there, a customer came into the store, went to the ‘repair department where scott and I were talking and presented to scott what was known as a ‘duel cassette recorder’ (This device had the capacity to record two cassette cartridges at once and was most often used to copy the contents of one cassette to another cassette, what we would call today, making a back up. Among the controls on this ‘dubbing recorder’ were two of all the normal tape recorder controls: volume, treble and bass. Where it was different from a single cassette recorder was that it had a Master Volume control dial, which, as the name implies controlled the overall sound output of the device.) The recorder that the customer placed on the counter appeared to be new and had no signs of damage or abuse. (As the customer approached the counter, I stepped back and Scott looked up and said, ‘What can we do for you’? The customer said to Scott, “this thing is brand new, it worked for a couple of days, then it stopped working entirely, I can’t figure out what is wrong”.
Scott looked at the recorder briefly, without saying a word and then reached under the counter and brought out some (black) electrical tape, and tearing off a 2 inch piece of tape, taped over the Master Volume control (after returning the dial to it’s highest setting). After completing this, scott slid the device back over towards the customer and simply said, “ There, its all right now”
The customer asked to plug in the recorder, took a cassette from his pocket, tried the recorder, ran it through it’s paces; seeing that the broken tape recorder that he brought into the store now worked like new thanked scott and walked out of the store without another word. A totally satisfied customer.
From my perspective the world shifted. For reasons not clear to this day, I not only saw what scott had seen (the nature of the equipment problem) but I saw that his solution implied a reality, a ‘context’ that was clearly different from the one that I assumed to be the same as everyone experienced.
From this point to the present day, I have been watching the behavior of others with the thought in mind, “What kind of world does that person live in?”
