Over the past couple of months, I have found out something out (thanks to some anonymous forum posters) about David Allen and most of the employees at The David Allen Company (if not the intent of GTD itself) that is kind of creepy. I have sat on this for weeks before blogging about it, however, it affected my performance and my implementation of GTD.
It is this: David Allen is a member of a somewhat fringe religion called The Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA, pronounced messiah!). If you really want to find them, you can follow the link from David’s comments on his now defunct blog. They believe that the guy that leads them, who goes only by the name John-Roger, is called the “Mystical Traveler”, and that he is in line with Jesus and Moses. Reading the stuff available on the web, it is evident that this is not a mainstream religion. I have even mentioned in previous postings that I have “drunk the ‘Kool-Aid’”, and it weirds me out a little.
I had originally started this post about a month ago, and had a long and at this point I had a long diatribe about how I found all this out, links to various forum postings and pieces of information, and other such stuff. I’ve thought about it for weeks, and my answer is as follows – stuff it. Who cares what David’s religion is? Who cares what he believes? He has given us a system that does as advertised – increases our productivity. I’ve decided to put it out of my head, use what I can, and dump the rest.
That said, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I did cancel my GTD Connect membership. I was a little worried about how the money would be used, sure, but at the end of the day I didn’t get $50USD value out of the thing. So I cancelled, and they were gracious about it and wished me well in my future GTD endeavours.
Getting Things Done is a great system for personal productivity, and irrespective of how David Allen got his experiences and developed the program, he has chosen to share it with the rest of us. Take what you need, leave what you don’t – and leave his personal choices out of it. Just get on with getting things accomplished.
I really encourage some discussion about this issue. It caught some peoples' attention at the Davidco Forums when it was first brought up. There is no denying that David is a member of MSIA, but what does that have to do with GTD? It bugged me for too long, so I'm going to move on and ignore it, while still using GTD. Your mileage may vary.
Technorati tags: gtd , gtd+cult , David+Allen , Weekly+Review
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15 comments:
Some very wise people over the past several centuries have belonged to various different religions. The same can be said of painters, musicians, authors, etc.
I've found myself in similar situations before. Do I listen to an artist's music if I find his social, religious, or political beliefs offensive? Do I read fiction by L. Ron Hubbard if I find Scientology "a bit off the mark"?
After much thought, I've decided the answer is generally "yes." I'm paying for a specific item or service. The portion of that money that goes directly to the creator is his personal money to do with as he pleases; that's how America works. I may not give to an organization as such, but I'd purchase specific items or services that I get use from.
GTD is, quite simply, a great system. It works really well. Personally, I'm going to continue to actively support it.
If I had the money, I'd probably continue with the paid subscription at DavidCo's website, *IF* I was getting something useful from it, and *IF* there was no reason to believe the organization itself was financially supporting this religion/cult (this is new information to me, so I've still got some personal research to do).
GTD isn't a cult. People have joked about it being a cult because people are very passionate about it, people are claiming it's changed their lives (actually, THEY'VE changed their own lives using this methodology, but close enough), and it's spreading fast. On the surface, it's close enough to being "cult-ish" that it's easy to joke about. Much like "Star Wars" when it was first released in 1977.
I understand your concern (and I'm insanely curious about it now), but I wouldn't worry about it. GTD either works or it doesn't. It stands on its own merits. And David Allen's advice, when it comes to productivity, it still sound.
I wouldn't take political advice from an actor, but I'll still watch their movies. I won't take financial advice from a musician, but I'll listen to their music. I won't take religious advice from David Allen, but I'll still buy his productivity books.
Erik,
I appreciate your comments, and I appreciate your insight. I think you have helped articulate what I was trying to say - however, I felt I had to give it some explaination.
I really feel that GTD is a good system - I saw great results with it. I have to figure some things out myself - when to do my weely review, etc., but it is a good system and once I have it all worked out, I know I will work well with it again.
I also agree with the idea of purchasing a specific product. However, I think that some of the stuff MSIA puts out may scare GTD users. It scared me for long enough, and I'm not even sure why. I had to resolve it in my own mind before I did anything with it.
Thanks again for the comment.
I wish you'd post the links you were originally going to include, now that you've made us all insanely curious. I'd like to know the ins and outs of it all myself.
I'm definitely not a fan of any religion (I'm an atheist), but I appreciate that Allen absolutely does not push his beliefs when he has his GTD cap on. Also, his contribution has helped me so much that I feel compelled to share it, regardless of his beliefs.
There was a very long thread about this on the GTD forums, plus another forum that went into it in quite some detail. Shouldn't be too hard to find...
I've long had the suspicion that David Allen was "into something" because of things like "mind like water" and just the way he says things sometimes. As others have said, no harm in that. Steven Covey is a practicing Mormon, but that didn't make his books any less relevant.
What I do have a bit of a problem with is the near cult status that GTD has achieved. It's really not all that revolutionary. And it's really pretty incomplete in that it doesn't really address goals and roles, among other things. There's actually not anything "new" in GTD. It just sort of pulls things together that others have said, and that many of us have always known.
Don't get me wrong, I think GTD is a great approach, but that's all it is... just a way to approach our work and activities.
Just came across this blog and found this post very interesting. I've always avoided organized religion and groups with the idea that they're just a crutch and that I should be able to get all my motivation and inspiration from within.
Well recently I took the Landmark Forum (another group often accused of being a cult!) and found that actually the sharing of ideas and philosophies with others is almost critical to happiness and effectiveness. I found myself resistant to the group aspects of it (there aren't many, but I'm REALLY sensitive), but as I have opened up to that stuff I find myself making better connections with others in business, personal life, etc. Not to mention MUCH more understanding of what people get from religions and being members of groups.
So without knowing anything about MSIA my thoughts are that if David gets something out of it, that's great. And it has nothing to do with GTD... it's up to the end user to judge whether they are getting something out of GTD or not.
PS Thanks for the mention of anagram in your links section!
Hi Nicholas,
I agree with your basic assessment - if it has nothing to do with GTD, who cares what David Allen does.
Having said that, I've refrained from calling him "David", The David, DA, etc., trying to stay away from the cultish references.
No problem on the link, BTW - I'm trying to get around to a review...
Hi, I remember reading this blog before.
I just read the new David Allen book called Making It All Work.
This new book seems to be doing what people having been talking about. Many times David Allen is promoting his GTD Coaching, and he even points to MSIA without identifying it. He does not list he is a MSIA Minister in his bio either.
On page 216 he has a quote from John-Roger, which is David Allen's "guru" as they call them. Yet Mr. Allen does not identify this in the book, and that is a conflict of interest. MSIA is a business, as well as a religion, have a look at the MSIA store selling countless products.
On page 245, there is a picture of a goal map that David Allen drew years ago. They printed it very small so you can see it, but only looking very closely. In this image, he has references to the Team Of Travellers, and to the Silent Ones. The Silent Ones are religious ideas from John-Roger, and J-R is the Traveller, which they believe means he is literally like Jesus Christ.
So why the heck is David Allen slipping that stuff into an alleged business book? To draw in the curious?
Of course the GTD coaches who are members of MSIA are going to suggest books by John-Roger, which are written as a way to introduce MSIA to people.
So in reality, GTD does serve as a platform for David Allen to "spread the word" as he calls it, and the word is MSIA and John-Roger.
Why else would he put that stuff in the book?
Its a subtle planting of seeds in the minds of the curious.
also, David Allen completely discounts all criticism that GTD is an unworkable system for many people.
He literally states in this book that he knows of no one who has not been able to make the GTD system work, if these people "get it".
That is not true. There are many blogs and comments from smart people who understand GTD, and who have dropped it. Even Robert Scoble has said he "gets it" but has not been able to make it work overtime. Countless people have said that, but David Allen literally does not have one word of that level of criticism of GTD in his book. Weird huh?
No chapter on GTD problems? Why, because GTD is a perfect system?
That being said, he does not provide any actual proof that GTD does what he says it does. He has had 10 years to get proper independent studies done of GTD, perhaps at some completely independent business universities, and he has not done so.
All he gives are anecdotes, like a self-help book, and anonymous references to "big companies" who use it.
The fact is that most people cannot make GTD work over time, even when they are intelligent people who totally "get it".
David Allen deny's there is anyone in that category!
So if GTD doesn't work, then its your fault?
No, GTD has serious problems, and most people drop it after a short while. That is clearly the reality of the situation.
David Allen quietly points to the Silent Ones and Mystical Traveller from MSIA in his new GTD book Making It All Work.
(by the way, that is the best way to refer to these types of things, in a very understated way).
Here is a link to an article from David Allen's guru John-Roger, about the Silent Ones. Its very bizarre stuff that leads in very troubling directions.
Its very unfortunate that people don't understand how these massive cult-like groups like MSIA and Scientology operate,and don't take the time to educate themselves about the dynamics, methods and structure.
http://www.ndh.org/template.php3?ID=732
QUOTE:
Are You Trying or Doing?
by John-Roger, founder of the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness (MSIA)
Just under the Sugmad of the Supreme Reality there is a band of Light, and in this band of Light are the Silent Ones. The Silent Ones cannot be named. It’s very hard to tell you about the line of masters that MSIA functions through, because we get to a point where we can no longer tell you. They must remain unnamed. But the Silent Ones carry on all work of all universes. They can come in any form at any time—as a rock, or a leaf, or a frog, or anything they desire in order to do the work that is set up by the Sugmad.
The Silent Ones will often appear as a great flowing energy, and then move so fast that you’ll think, “What was that? Was someone there?” It’s not like an entity from the other realms, where you see them and then they go. You don’t even really see or sense or know the Silent Ones, but you still do. They’ll just dip in and back out again, and can relate worlds of information to you within a second, just by touching into your auric frequency.
To become a Silent One is much higher than being a Mystical Traveler. The rigors and the training that they go through would make the Mystical Travelers look like Sunday school boys on their first day. Maybe that gives you an idea of what the Sugmad is.
(see article at link)
Business 2.0 Magazie did an article about how this came from Lifespring back 2007.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/07/01/100117066/index.htm?postversion=2007062109
How David Allen mastered getting things done
By Paul Keegan, Business 2.0 Magazine
...Allen was a 23-year-old grad student at UC Berkeley in 1968 when he met a psychic named Michael who said he owed Allen a karmic debt over a past-life transgression. Michael began teaching him karate and sharing Zen concepts such as "mind like water."...
Thus began a spiritual quest that eventually led him in 1971 to John-Roger, an L.A.-based mystic who later formed a church called the Movement of Spiritual Inner Awareness that has courted controversy and attracted such high-profile adherents as Arianna Huffington.
"I knew in the first 30 seconds that he didn't give a rat's ass if anybody believed him," Allen says. "He knew what he was talking about."
John-Roger started a personal-growth training program in 1978 called Insight Seminars.
Insight was based on a popular self-help seminar for young professionals called Lifespring, which employed potent psychological techniques to break down participants' entrenched thought patterns and replace them with ostensibly more positive states of mind. Although many graduates swore that Lifespring changed their lives for the better, the for-profit company was also slapped with dozens of lawsuits claiming psychological trauma and even wrongful death by suicide.
One of its trainers, Russell Bishop, upset by the harshness of the Lifespring program, approached John-Roger about creating a more benign version of the weeklong seminar.
"Insight started with the heart," Allen says. "We said, look, what people are really after is to love and be loved, and we just do it in weird and awkward ways. So let's try to find out how we're screwing that up and what you need to do to fix that."
Within a few years, Allen was ready to become an Insight trainer.
He wasn't the only one thinking this way. Lifespring and Werner Erhard's Est were already tweaking their seminars for corporate clients.
...At $595 a head, Allen will take in about $93,000 for today's event; he should gross $1.7 million from the 18 public seminars he's scheduled to lead this year.
...The Denver seminar, remarkably enough, is almost exactly the same as the first big corporate training session Allen ran nearly a quarter-century earlier. That breakthrough gig came about when an executive at Lockheed caught a glimpse of Allen leading an Insight seminar at a hotel and asked him to do an in-house version for his company. Allen figured that a lot of hugging and crying wouldn't go over well at a corporate gathering. So he developed a less personal seminar using a grab bag of ideas and techniques he'd picked up over the years.
...Yet Allen's book is notable for being nearly devoid of research citations, footnotes, and other source material. Most of its assertions begin with the phrase "In my experience ..." There is no research, for example, to back up one of the book's central claims -- that commitments made and abandoned are robbing our lives of energy and attention and that only when we close these "open loops" can we achieve a state of relaxed focus.
Anonymous,
Ok... so, what's your point? Does it change anything about how GTD as a system can increase your productivity?
Hi,
Does GTD increase productivity?
As stated in the Business 2.0 article, there is literally no empirical evidence that GTD increases productivity. NONE. Zero.
Productivity can be measured, and after years and 3 books, there are still no proper studies done.
It seems that GTD has an initial excitement, and then people fall off the wagon, like you have honestly discussed here.
Also, GTD is supposed to give "stress free productivity".
Does it?
Stress can be measured by psychological testing, why haven't any studies been done?
David Allen has stated that what creates stress are the aggreements we don't keep with ourselves. As many have said...says who? There is no proof for that either.
But in the new GTD book, Making It All Work, there is a quote from John-Roger, the Guru of MSIA, who says that broken aggreements are what create stress! So we know where that came from, John-Roger. And he got it from Lifespring, who used "aggreements" in the same way they did in EST, as a sales tool, a way to close the sale.
So GTD is not based on a solid foundation.
There is literally no proof it increases productivity, and it may increase stress.
Another problem, is GTD has a small army of bloggers, many of which appear to be engaged in selling/promoting GTD for profit, so they are not objective.
(many of those folks are MSIA followers, hate to harp on that, but its a fact).
The few objective blogs, where people are honest, seem to be constantly struggling, and then many of them quit and give up GTD, or just stop doing it.
But David Allen dismisses all of these people in his new book. Others have mentioned elsewhere that he comes off as arrogant.
So what if GTD is a mechanism, that creates more stress and confusion, which leads to more Coaching, and thus more dollars for their coaching company?
The bottom line is David Allen should have had GTD tested by independent sources at numerous universities by now. Why didn't he?
Is it because thefoundations of GTD to him are "revelations" from John-Roger and MSIA? That seems to be true.
Also, maybe they did have some tests done, and it showed all the problems with people not being able to keep it up? In that case, it becomes a burden, and a mess.
Remember, INSIGHT seminars, as proven in that article from Business 2.0, was literally a front for MSIA, and got into serious trouble. David Allen was an Insight trainer, but he doesn't mention that in his books. Why not? Why so vague?
But more seriously, in the recent book, when he dismisses all critics of GTD, that crosses the line. He said he doesn't know anyone who "gets GTD" that can't make it work.
That is simply not true. Why is he doing that? We know he knows many people who can't make GTD work, why did he dismiss them like that? (its due to his core belief system toliteraly ignores critical input). That is unscientific, and disrespectful, and people in the tech community won't accept that.
So we submit that the problems people are having with GTD, are due to GTD flawed assumptions and flawed processes.
But when it doesn't work, DAvidCo gets rewarded with more coaching business.
The only way to settle it, are for proper studies to be carried out by completely independent universities, before and after, to measure productivity and stress, and using a control group.
Its almost impossible to have a reasoned discussion with "followers" of GTD, as many of them respond like David Allen, by refusing to admit there are any problems with GTD. It is a type of cultish belief system to many of them.
This is why David Allen is not able to give specific examples of the "big companies" that use GTD, as they don't use it. A few may have tried a pilot study, but then canned it, as its totally unworkable. It falls apart in days, and leads to more confusion.
Feel free to research the subject, and we appreciate your honest inquiry.
But its true that GTD has serious problems with it, and is based on unsound assumptions, many of which come from John-Roger, and his many business seminars like Insight seminars.
So the roots of GTD are very important, as they explain the hidden assumptions within GTD.
Its up to David Allen to prove with scientific studies that GTD increases productivity and reduces stress. He has not done so at all.
He's done the exact opposite.
And his dismissal of those who understand GTD and its problems, will lead to GTD going nowhere.
This all seems to stem from his own closed belief systems, and lack of training in scientific methods of testing.
To him, GTD is a revelation.
That is why the most recent GTD book is just a rehash, with no improvements, and no evidence given for any of its claims.
Does GTD improve productivty?
Compared to what?
But it seems GTD does not improve productivity, and increases confusion and stress, and that's why most people drop it.
David Allen has posted an alleged "scientific" paper about GTD on his website, by Francis Heylighen & Clement Vidal
http://www.davidco.com/pdfs/Heylighen-Vidal-GTD-Science.pdf
There is no science in this paper,its not science. Its just a piece of speculative philosophy, that was written with a predetermined conclusion, to try and rationalize GTD.
It might be interesting to do a detailed search into the 2 authors to find their affiliations.
They state that testing GTD is difficult. That is false and deceptive.
Numerous cognitive and stress therapies have been tested hundreds of time,and there are protocols to do so. That is how they move forward.
Economists measure productivity everyday. Where are they?
This is the problem, these types of games they are playing.
What they have to do is come up with a GTD test and method, how about like the one they sell?
And then carry out the studies and measurements.
But DavidCo can't do this, it has to be done by completely objective people, working double-blind.
That is how science works.
You have to come up with a test that is falsifiable.
Its too bad that most of the public seems to have no clue about how any of this stuff works.
That "paper" he posted is an embarrasment. Worse, its deceptive and false, and appears to be commissioned to try and give some "proof" that GTD works.
There is no proof in that at all.
And their attempt to throw around a few technical sounding words is almost unbelievable.
Anonymous,
Either log in and comment with your name, or I'm considering you a troll and will delete your comments. I get your point - I think I made it clear in the post that people could go and find this out for themselves if it bothered them as much as it did me.
The system works from my perspective, and that's all I care about. I want to work in a way I'm comfortable with that lets me work a little smarter. I find that in the "Getting Things Done" system.
I'm over this - you should give it a try.
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