" . . . that there is no reason why Value Analysis and Value Engineering concepts cannot be applied to everything one does in an organization." 

But in order for me to discuss these problems with you, I must take a few moments to acquaint you with a new way of thinking about the how and why of man’s behavior.

Beginning a decade or so before the birth of Value Analysis was a questioning of the existing explanations of why man behaves as he does and of how he behaves. This questioning continued through the forties and fifties. Now, in the mid-sixties, we, in my profession, are in the midst of a change as revolutionary to the field of psychology as Value Analysis has been to the field of cost control. Two of these changes are particularly pertinent to your problem.

The first change in psychological thought is that we are discarding the concept of man as a pain avoiding, pleasure-seeking creature. We no longer accept that the reason why man behaves is to free himself from tension, to find a life without stress. A tentative statement of what we now believe is – that man seeks to build up tension because its subsequent release provides him what he desires. What man wants out of life is to expend the energies that arise within him as a result of the problems of being alive, because it is expending energy that gives meaning to his life. But to comprehend this new formulation of why man behaves, it is necessary to know that sometimes man becomes so confused in respect to what he thinks he wants, existence without tension, that he goes overboard. When he goes overboard, he does such things as try to maintain the status quo, resist changes, and the like. Man falls into this errant way of living particularly when he is operating at lower Levels of Human Existence, a phrase referring to a conception of how man behaves which is the second change in psychological thinking, which we need to examine before we look more deeply into your fourth and fifth generation problems.

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