Subtle nuances matter

It's not obvious what matters.

Whether we are just thinking, or doing fancy math, there's the stuff we leave in our model, and the stuff that we throw out, because it doesn't matter. Sometimes we think things don't matter because they have such a small effect that they are "negligible."

Sometimes we are wrong.

A classic example was the mistake that pouring toxins, like mercury, into the sea would dilute them to the point where they didn't matter. We forgot that nature has natural filters and amplifiers that recollected all those dilute molecules in one place, namely, the tissue of fish, so that the concentration was again dangerous or lethal to humans.

Or sometimes we forget some other factor. Nuclear scientists at Dugway Proving ground computed how much fallout would land on the ground and how much would wash away and "go away", and figured it was safe. After the sheep died and many people got cancer they found out, oopsie, that grass is remarkably good at harvesting water and holding onto it, so instead of the toxins washing away, they were recollected.

So, sometimes things that look like "small" effects do "go away", and sometimes they don't.

One conceptual problem we have is that we're not used to math where the answer depends on what time scale or geogrphic scale we're working in. So, yes, in the short run, "rock" is stronger than "water". In the long run, "rock" is demolished and destroyed by "water".

Or, in the short range, electromagnetic forces dominate gravity. A balloon, rubbed on the sleeve, will stick on the wall, not fall. For many purposes, gravity "goes away." But, if you look on longer time scales, it's the "strong" force of electromagnetism that "goes away", and the end state of the world is determined by that "weak" force of gravity, on a cosmological scale.

Or, if you look at an M.C. Escher painting of a staircase or waterfall, locally, there is nothing wrong, aside from a very slight noise or error -- but that error accumulates and on the larger scale, the total painting is absurd, even though locally any small part of it makes sense.

So we need to be careful about not "throwing out the baby with the bathwater."
It's not always obvious which is which.

Then there are other effects even more insidious or subtle. As the philosopher "Snoopy" observed one day, lying on top of his doghouse in the cartoon strip "Peanuts",

"Did you ever notice, that if you think about something at 2 am, and then again at noon the next day, you get two different answers?"

Or, another example I love, the story of two stone masons working on a church in the 1600's. One was doing very good work, and the other was doing work that needed to be redone often. The supervisor came to talk to each and asked them what they were doing. The one with poor outcomes replied "I'm building a wall." The one with great outcomes replied "I'm building a cathedral."

So, at least to human beings, it seems to matter a great deal whether the work they are doing makes sense in a larger context, whether it has "meaning" to them or not.

Is this true for people who write computer programs or "provide" health care services as well? Probably. How would we know for sure? And if it does matter, are we designing our systems in light of that effect, whatever it's called?

And is this just some "mental" or "psychological" effect, or is it an effect so "real" or fundamental that it would show up even if the agents building things were robots not people? Does this sort of thing matter to ants or bees or termites or bird swarms or swarms of viruses or bacteria?
Does it matter to the US Army?

Do real, tangible outcomes depend on "meaning"?

Certainly, from the model I described yesterday of nested contexts, the outer, distant contexts matter a great deal, although, again, the effects may take longer and longer as the context gets more distant. So, as many computer system designers and nation builders have discovered, "culture matters", and the survival of some change imposed from outside on a system depends, in the long run, on whether it fits with culture or not. If it fits, or can transform the culture to fit, it will remain. If it doesn't fit, the cultural equivalent of the body's immune system will identify it as "foreign tissue" and reject it. You can take that one to the bank.

Today's International Herald Tribune has an opinion piece on this subject at the scale of nation building, reflecting on Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's a brief snippet.

Do Not Neglect Culture
International Herald Tribune (on-line)
May 8, 2007
by Nassrine Azimi (Hiroshima, Japan)

The Rand Corporation recently published a study called "The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building." It covers the basics with clarity and objectivity, defining the roles of the military, the police and the judiciary; distinguishing humanitarian relief from economic stabilization and development, explaining the complexities of governance and democratization.

But the book has almost nothing about what is clearly the Achilles' heel of recent nation-building adventures: culture. No single chapter is devoted to it - nothing on the role of culture in countries being rebuilt and, just as importantly, nothing on the culture of the nation-builders themselves.

Though we are reminded that six of the seven cases of nation-building initiated in the last decade by the United States were in Islamic countries, we do not learn much of the lessons of this extraordinary experience.

How, for example, did it inform the dispatch of some 120,000 mostly Christian soldiers to Iraq - a Muslim country and one of the most ancient civilizations on earth?

Neither do we learn much about what kind of cultural preparations, if any, were undertaken in advance of embarking in Afghanistan, also an ancient and proud land, with subtle values and vulnerabilities not readily accessible to the Western mind.

The fault, however, may not lie as much with the Rand book as with nation-building operations themselves. In most, culture has been at best an afterthought and at worst a shallow and cynical exercise in public relations.

This was not always so. The U.S. occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952, so often cited as a model for Iraq, was quite different. American planners then appeared to have asked themselves some hard questions about dealing with a country they barely knew or understood, with which they had fought for almost four years, and which lay in ruins....

Perhaps this same effect is as evident in the many failed efforts across the country to install "Electronic Medical Record systems" where the system did not fit the culture or "the way we do things here", and the hope that the culture would "come to the system" was dashed by the fact that the system yielded to the culture.

This phenomenon is very well known and studied in public health, after a century or so of attempting to impose behavioral patterns on indiginous people who tended, as soon as the intervention team was gone, to keep the goodies and discard the behaviors that the strangers had imposed. The natives happily nodded "Yes!" while thinking to themselves "In your dreams!"

The lessons are that lasting change has to be rooted, and, in a mixed metaphor, rooted "deeper and deeper" upwards into the hierarchy of contexts that surround the point of intervention, or the unit of the hierarchy of life that is being tinkered with.

This effect is dimly and incorrectly perceived by many in McGregor's "Theory X" camp as "resistance to management", and as something that needs to be attacked, proponents of such resistance located and rooted out and fired, and overcome by brute force. In the short run, rock beats water. But, in the long run, water beats rock. If the intervention is "not me", the culture will ultimately find some way to reject it, or perhaps the culture will simply collapse under the conflict.

I think the prophet Yogi Berra once said "You can hear a lot by listening" , or words to that effect. It seems advisable that those messing with systems behavior at any scale should first investigate the system's "culture" before investing a lot in a particular change that seems, from the outside, to make sense. There are subtleties that are not obvious, "small things" that don't fit that turn out not to be so small after all, as the mercury or the fallout or the stone mason examples showed.

Whether a piece of the developmental puzzle "fits" or "is good" or "goes there" needs to be assessed at the cultural level, after all the "small things" have been given a chance to accumulate and add up again. This is a "complex adapative system" and the behavior at large scale is not reflected, in any obvious way, by the behavior at small scale.

The very fact that that's the problem is not widely understood.

There is no way that, for example, the CCHIT assessment of electronic medical record systems, at the individual user level, can possibly reveal whether this overall system will "fit" or "work" if "installed" at a particular site, in a particular "culture".

Collaboration-ware needs a completely different scale approach than classic IT software.
Again, that's not recognized as a problem to even fret about.

We are desperately short of good tools and accepted practices in this area. Maybe public health informatics can address that in the coming decade.

W.

Credits: Photo above is "The Hierarchy of Consciousness" by slark on flickr.