Several testable research hypotheses follow from the previous posts:
- Testable: Membership in a high-performance high-emotional coupling high-reliability learning team should be protective against depression.
- Testable: Such a membership in what I'll call a "hyper-resonant team" should also be protective against stress in general, and stress mediated health outcomes.
- Testable: Such membership should be protective against all bad psychosocially mediate outcomes that are triggered by a loss of social interaction and positive social coupling.
- Testable: Such membership should result not only in a team that collectively has very high learning capacity, but in members that also, individually measured, over time, demonstrate higher learning capacity than their "IQ" would predict.
- Testable: such a team result in greater social problem solving and load-carrying capacity than working as separate individuals, to the point where competing individuals would cry "foul" and "unfair!" if tested against the group effort.
- Testable: Such performance in hyper-resonance would be more due to capacity expansion than to problem division. That is, performance would be multiplied factorially, not just problems divided up among the team members who then work separately in parallel.
- Testable: Such a team would not only be protective, it would also be an exquisitely sensitive detector of a drift of a member towards depression or any other psychological state that reduced their input and ability to reflect ideas postively back to the team.
"Hyper-resonance" is a term used in celestial mechanics to refer to the entrainment of some body by a very low force that you wouldn't think would have any effect, but, over the long term, dominates the outcome. So, a planet that rotated exactly 3 times for every two revolutions around the sun would be "hyper-resonant". The fact that the moon keeps the same face towards the earth all the time is surprising - where's the coupling torque that changes the rotation speed?
A key concept in aperture synthesis coherence is "phase-lock", which only occurs in a "phase lock loop". This is a feedback phenomenon that keeps different systems that could operate independently synchronized, even though they don't have to be. They're "entrained" to each other. This is a critical phenomenon to understand when looking at the behavior or possible behaviors of tightly-coupled regulatory feedback systems.
So, in human cells, the DNA can be intentionally damaged in one cell and, if that cell is placed in a context of healthy cells, it can often continue to operate normally. In some way it "borrows" the health of its neighbors in a "field effect."
Is that just a property of cells? Probably not. It's probably a property of ANY coupled set of feedback-controlled regulatory circuits, regardless of scale. If so, we should see such a phenomenon among humans.
- Testable: There is way more power in "I get by with a little help from my friends" than there "should be."
If even some of the above hypotheses are true, this implies a totally new method parallel method of preventing the bad outcomes from stress and depression than "cognitive behavioral therapy" (CBT) and a lifetime of psychactive drugs.
What's good about this is that, once understood, it is highly scalable and probably something we can do for each other without needing a billiion psychiatrists to assist. Because these behaviors can result in massive increases in productivity and creative problem solving, corporations can be motivated to pay for this transformation in their own self interest. It's not something that comes at the expense of corporate success.
There are definitely downside of peer group interactions, as the history in the 60's of T-groups demonstrated. But the point is that there is an upside as well. LIke cars, which can run off the road, they can also get us where we need to go.
These hypotheses seem worth researching. There are people looking at the routes and health outcomes of positive psychology. One is the Positive Emotion and Pyschophysiology lab ( PEPLab at UNC )run by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. Productive power of such teams is documented at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan by Professor Kim Cameron in "Positive Organizational Scholarship", mentioned in other posts here.
We need something to lift us by out bootstraps into the 21st century. These initiatives don't take away from other good work, but provide a parallel and very interesting path to explore further with good, solid research.
technorati tags:hyperresonance, resonance, teams, organizations, groups, learning, hope, behavior, organizationalbehavior, teamwork, positivepsychology, psychology, positiveemotions, Fredrickson, UNC, psychphysiology, healtheffects, fieldeffects, cells
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On the way into the office I watched a swarm of about 200 birds flying around. They didn't seem to be going anywhere, just back and forth.
One thing that all the work on swarm behavior doesn't emphasize is that the flying gave me, not a bird admittedly, the sense that the birds were simply having fun.
In other words, going into a "Vulcan mind meld" or whatever it is with each other, and forming the swarm, and practicing moving it around as a unit, seemed to be a trip, a blast, a joyous thing to do on a nice sunny day.
The birds did not give, to this observer, the sense of "Oh, heck - not group flying again...."
We also have no idea what the individual cells of slime-mold "think" when then "decide" to all flow together and make a composite being so they can all migrate as if they were a single big body, before they "dissolve" again into tiny pieces that are ... more ... separate.
We don't really have good words for this. Maybe huge church events, or sports events, or clubbing is a sense of the joy of being part of a crowd.
Obviously, for people, sometimes abruptly text-messaging everyone and forming up as a swarm at some new location is some kind of fun as well, because humans do it from time to time, just for the heck of it, or something.
It seems something we do just because it can be done and because, in some very primal sense, it is compelling and "neat".
It's fun. It's satisfying.
So, there must be some kind of circuitry "down there" that dances to that drummer.
Interesting.
Maybe, the hope of seeing, even briefly, a momentary flash of complete team unification into a larger single thingie is part of the fascination of sports.
We can imaging saying "the whole game was worth it just to watch that play in the 2nd period..."
There is something that resonates when people "get it together", from sports to an orchestra. Somedays it's just parallel play, and sometimes, for a few moments, it is a delicious ecstatic hyper-resonant togetherness that makes the whole day worthwhile.
If someone could figure out how to make that happen on command, it would be worth LOT of money and be a great, non-polluting industry.
Maybe, in the same sense that our "thinking" tends to use our brain's visual circuitry so we can "visualize" things, our co-operation uses our body's sexual circuitry which has the capacity to have an experience where the bounds of one body are left behind and it is not clear whose arm or leg or body part anything is because two have, literally, in some very real boring mathematical sense, become "one", but a larger "one" than the original two "ones".
There may be some kind of deeper and profound meaning that would be helpful to understand in the idea of "two becoming one flesh", or even "e pluribus unum," the advice we get every day in the US on our coins and currency.
"Many becoming one" is important. We need to undertand how that happens, why it happens, and what exactly it means, if we're going to understand humans (which are, of course 10 to the 12th cells which have become "one" person, or host one spirit, or are a substrate upon which "one" emergent solition can exist, or something like that.)
This, not surprisingly, is probably mathematically the same problem we need to solve to figure out how to get world peace and get different nations to live together, or different relgions to live together as "one". IT's the core problem of nation-building.
It's the core problem, period.
One last thought, I hope, on this core problem thing.
The mathematics behind many becoming or operating as one seems to be a universal scale-invariant feature of great scientific, political, corporate, sociological, and theological interest. Everybody cares.
Trying to figure out how to get Iraq to act like "one country" is a problem the USA has sunk about a trillion dollars and a great many lives into.
Our problem, then, perhaps, is to figure out how to get a ten-thousandth of that budget allocated to research into the technology of unity instead of the technology of destruction.
We need, it seems, a "peacefare" capability to complement the "warfare" capability, to have a complete set of policy tools and levers.
Geneticists need to understand how many genes can somehow "act as one" in bringing about certain outcomes. It's everywhere.
It's a neat problem. What's even neater is that, if it is, in fact, scale-invariant, then each level of life operates under identical principles, so any fragment of insight we get from any level could, in theory, be combined with any fragment of insight from any other level, to form one single picture of what's behind all that.
There could be, or perhaps should be, an opportunity for cross-disciplinary sharing of patterns to see what the "elephant" looks like when all the pieces are assembled.
When these ideas are applied to workplaces, the name of the task is "integration" and all the big consulting and computing firms are rushing to join the game - such as Oracle and IBM.
Still, "integration" is more than a tinkertoy model of hubs of legacy systems "connected" by arms-length messages. That's a pile of legacy systems that will fight with each other over every update.
What is needed is a distributed operating system, with plug-and-play capability, that maintains "truth" across different systems. This requires that each system be willing to give up a little bit of control to other vendors, or that one system be "boss" of all the others.
The "boss" model breaks down rapidly under load and scaling, because it gets bottlenecked.
To paraphrase T.S. Eliot again, there is no point in "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good."
And, there is no point in dreaming of systems that will cause people to be good.
First, people need to address their social issues, and then they will be able to solve their seemingly insurmountable technical issues.
If people really want to work together, and cut each other a little slack, almost any system may be enough, if it has multiple pathways and end-runs. If people want a system to fail, it doesn't matter how good it is, it will fail. No system can support hostile users. They'll find its weakness and drive a spike through its heart.
The meaning of this for the National Health Infrastructure is that it really doesn't matter much if we "solve" interoperatiblity technical constraints, and don't also solve social constraints.
They're not "extra", and they're not something that can be done "later". They have to co-evolve with the system specs.
The "unity in diversity" problem is central to a national health record, or to homeland security, or to FEMA working next time, or to "solving" Iraq's national identity or the identify of the Mideast or Asia in general.
It's not "management", it's not "Business Analyst", it's not "Systems Analyst", it's something else. Some kind of sociotechnic architecture problem.
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