Sunday, August 19, 2007

The glory and the dream of groups

This year, I think, humanity passes a milestone - more than half of the population of the Earth now lives in cities, as opposed to the countryside.

Put another way - we are now much more likely to find ourselves, like it or not, surrounded by other people. We are carrying out more and more of our daily activities and thinking in the context of fairly dense groups of people.

So, we are going to be experiencing the powerful and invisible influence of groups on our own thinking and behavior. It would be good to understand the first thing about it then.

It seems that group activity pushes us one way or the other, but in general is not neutral. Some of our best moments are in sports teams, or musical teams, in cockpit crews or operating room teams. Even being in a group called an "audience" experiencing a concert or football game together is a strong experience many people pay a great deal of money for regularly.

Some of our worst moments are in "group-think" and "stampeded herd" and "teenage gang" rampages. Some of the worst decisions come out of "committees."

What makes the difference between a group experience being great, and lifting up our outcomes, and a group experience being a disaster? How do we get all of the good stuff and none of the bad stuff?

Maybe the difference emerges from what the intentions are of the people forming the group. If they have a common shared goal that they are working together to reach, the group-effect can be very powerful and uplifting, producing results far better than any individual could.

If the members of the group are there to take advantage of each other in a negative way, to try to rip each other off and win at each other's expense, then the group-effect appears to end up producing the worst destruction of our ability to think and operate.

In other words, it appears that the collective sum of everyone else's intentions towards us has a dramatic effect on our own ability to think straight and act well.

IF they wish well for us, it helps us do well. If they wish the worst for us, it forces us to do poorly. This effect appears to operate through some non-cognitive route, below our radar, and doesn't appear to be blocked or deflected by education, IQ, wealth, or effort on our part.

This enhances, or distorts and damages, our reasoning and sense of what is "obvious" in powerful ways.

Maybe, that's why so many corporate boardrooms, filled with back-stabbing "colleagues", end up being effectively blind and dumb and making terrible decisions that affect our jobs, our careers, environmental pollution, criminal activity. Maybe that's why "government intelligence' is often termed an oxymoron - something that just doesn't happen.

But, it's critical to see that it's not the "group", per se, that is causing this effect. The group and the many feedback loops that are travelled hundreds of times in "meetings" or "business", is really just a structural amplifier for the core attitude or intent of the individuals.

What we get is a clean, straight-forward function of what we bring. If we all bring a desire to help each other mutually succeed, we get that effect. If we all bring a desire to help cause each other to mutually fail, we get that effect.

The description of people fighting desperately to "get" a mortgage quickly so that other people won't sounds like a mutual intent to succeed at other people's expense. The result seems to be ending up in really rotten mortgages that we were somehow "blind to" in "all the rush."

It's not the rush so much as the impact our love, or hatred, has on each other. We can build each other up, or tear each other down - the effect is very real, the outcomes dramatic on our corporate, governmental, national, and personal "bottom lines" and our economic and physical health.

So, either the world is filled with enemies, and we're pretty well doomed to being forced to be blind and stupid, or the world is filled with friends, and we find ourselves surprisingly brilliant and capable.

It's our own choice what we make of that effect.

The implication of that model is that the cut-throat competitive ethic may appear to get us what we want in the short run, but that is an illusion and distortion of reality, and actually brings long term disaster upon us all.

The ultimate irony is that this "non-linear" effect changes the size of the pie, of the prize at the end of the day, and is a "self-fulfilling prophecy."

This is the same effect seen in "theory X" management of organizations and "theory Y" management of organizations, where you get what you expect to get. If the boss expects employees to be lazy, good for nothing bums and treats them that way, that's what he gets. If the boos expects employees to be helpful, caring, collaborators in success, that's what he gets. That effect is well documented by academic research.

If we treat other people as resources, collectively, not only does our thinking improve, but everyone's thinking improves, and we find solutions to economic problems that were in our way, and the pie gets larger. We have successful hunts, or crops, or business outcomes and there is food and profit to go around. It turns out there was nothing to be fighting about, because there's more than enough to go around and no one leaves hungry.

If we treat other people like dirt to be exploited and discarded, everyone's thinking and actions deteriorate, and there ends up being very little pie left. It turns out that there was everything to be fighting about, because most of us will starve or die.

Our own expectations create the economic outcomes we experience.

There are, as the Baha'i Faith points out, "spiritual solutions to economic problems."

That's good to know. We need more of that. And soon.

The difficulty right now seems to be in the transition. We have many "theory-X" companies going down the tubes, and many "theory-X" health care systems self-destructing. We also have some "theory-Y" companies wildly succeeding and thriving, and pockets of health care systems, "microsystems", small-teams, that are succeeding at making this group effect work, producing far better patient outcomes, job satisfaction, and cost-effectiveness than we could have imagined getting before.

But, to those deep in the theory-X mindset, this transition looks like lunacy, some kind of magic or madness. There's clearly not enough to go around, the thinking says, so how on earth could "sharing" result in my ending up with more? That reasoning is clearly broken, they think, and I'd be better off ripping off what I can while I still can -- getting my benefit, or mortgage quickly and beating everyone else to the punch. Then, oh yeah baby, then I'll be on top of the world.

No, then you'll be on top of the garbage heap.

If we could just make computer games or some way to get people to experience this very non-linear and counter-intuitive result of positive group activity, we'd be home free, with the "same" number of people and the "same" physical resources as before, we could suddenly do so much more that what failed before would work.

This isn't dreamy kum-bay-ya thinking, it's very rigorous science and laws of interactions of swarms of actors in complex dynamic systems.

We just need to get better at this faster, and help more people realize that it not only can happen, but it is already happening around us today.

Even there, we have interaction effects, those who glory in doom and cynicism and claim this will never work, so we should give it up before we start. If they "win" we all lose.

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