Never prioritize!

I want to stir some thinking, so let me suggest that the activity known as "prioritizing" is a bad idea.

Now, Sun Tsu's ancient classic The Art of War recommends, if you find yourself on "bad ground", that you should get off it as soon as possible. Bad ground, would be, for example, having your army on a flood plain between two hills on top of which are two enemy armies -- in the monsoon season.

Bad ground for many entities today is finding oneself forced to decide between dying an immediate death (taking the bad impact all at once), or increasing the odds of dying every day from now on into the future (spreading the bad impact over the future.)

For example, on a national level, the Federal Reserve had a choice of keeping interest rates up, causing the stock market to crash and homeowners to go broke next month, or lowering rates, avoiding the instant death at the cost of a perpetual below-the-radar push on the Chinese and others to move their wealth out of the US and dollar-denominated assets. So, the Fed picked to lower rates a lot, and the dollar went in to accelerated falling and set new records against the Euro, the Canadian dollar, the Chinese Yuan, against gold and oil, etc. But, most voters either are out to lunch, or weigh getting through next month over leaking wealth out of their dollar-denominated retirement funds, so this got little first-page press.

And, that's because the voters themselves are on "bad ground", picking short-term survival against longer-term survival -- neither being a very good choice.

So, here's one of my own little rules of thumb:

If you're in a bad place, and every day it gets worse, you cannot achieve victory by waiting around for things to "get better."

Or, to parphrase an old Chinese proverb

"Man must wait long time on corner with mouth open for roast duck to fly in."

In the corporate world, one way things tend to go downhill relentlessly is when the problems have reached "system level" complexity, and the management team refuses to stop trying to solve them all by itself without help.

Unfortunately, in a culture of predators, admitting weakness is seen as an invitation to attract them all and become lunch, so the worse things get, the lower the odds management will admit publicly, or even to itself, that things are getting too complicated to handle.

So, one sign of that situation occurring is the familiar refrain "We need to prioritize." This usually signals that there are many more problems being raised than there is management bandwidth to solve.

Worse, many of those problems are system-level, and, being human and short-sighted, management then seeks to go for breathing room and the quick victory and the easy win, meaning it selects problems based on their ability to solve them quickly, not on the importance of the solution or the off-the-radar opportunity cost of going another week or month without a solution. (Surely, this is costing a lot somewhere, as the shutdown of the State of Michigan is demonstrating, as work has to stop and lay people off waiting for resolution.)

So, the system-level problems are selectively left for "later", which never comes, as they are root-cause problems and keep on generating new local events and symptoms which are viewed as if they are separate, independent new problems. It should come as no surprise that solving these "symptoms" doesn't cure the patient. In medicine, that would be termed "quackery."

But, management may argue in my virtual debate here, "We can't deal with everything at once!"

Well, hmm. Good point. The bummer is that life can, and does, hit you with everything at once. Deciding whether you want to keep on breathing, or keep your blood flowing is a lousy time to "Prioritize."

The key to the solution is the implicit hidden constraint in that phrase

"We can't deal with everything at once!"

Again, since the mountain will not come to you, you are going to have to go to the mountain. If the problems won't assist you by becoming smaller than your problem solving bandwidth, you are going to have only one choice -- increase your problem solving bandwidth.

And since the "you" (management team) is already working 16 hour days, that cannot mean put in more hours, or "work smarter" or "prioritize." Those only perpetuate the problem.

The root-cause problem is the arrogant implicit assumption that "only management is smart enough to solve these problems -- everyone else is an idiot. "

It is remarkable in a company with 100,000 employees, that 12 or fewer try to solve big problems, and are surprised they keep failing, despite prioritizing.

That is a very poor mental model. Maybe, some of those other human beings are more capable than management acts as if they are.

Maybe, collectively, those other human beings are way more capable than managment thinks they are.

The problem isn't that the employees are stupid - it's that management is unwilling to admit that the employees may be more than expenses.

If someone sees a flaw in this reasoning, please post a comment. It seems to me that, once the problems become system-level and larger than management's collective ability to solve, only one of three things can happen:

1. The whole thing crashes and burns, or
2. The external world lets up and gets a lot easier, or
3. Management finally yields some status and power to employees, even to, gasp, "labor."

If I were a majority stockholder in a company going downhill, in today's world, I wouldn't want option 1; Option 2 seems unlikely; and that leaves option 3.

Option 3 is what "Lean" and "Toyota Way" is about -- empowering workers, building stockholder wealth, at the expense of hegemony in status and power for the current management team the stockholders have in place to meet their needs.

Of course, this also means that if things are not going well for the company, the solution for the stockholders is not to replace the management team with a different small group of different people, which will only have the same problem, but will stir up enough dust and reorganization to delay dealing with it for longer. The ONLY solution is that the whole managment-hegemony model has to be discarded, and management retasked with bringing more of the company employees into the decision-making loop, working in parallel.

That also means that management probably is not worth $250, 000,000 apiece any more, although they can easily be worth $25,000,000 apiece if they accomplish spreading out the work of "managing" the company over the workforce and emerging sufficient collective brainpower and reality to accomplish that task.

The solution direction, in other words, is not "more Rambo" and "even more super supermen." The solution direction for the stockholders is "less Rambo, more distributed participatory problem-solving." It will only be more and more true as time goes on, the world shrinks, and everything becomes perversely connected to everything else. It will not become "simpler", ever again. Ever. No Johnny, not even in 100 years. Not in 1000 years. Not in a billion years, with computer assistance. (Not that the "quants" have shown themselves able to make a buck successfully in Hedge funds these days in the first place.)

We are being forced, inexorably, to figure out how to actually accomplish work "together."
Rats. Most managers had hoped it wouldn't come to that. When I had suggested in B-school that managers might "cooperate", the room of MBA's burst into laughter, assuming I was making a great joke. That event identifies the mental concept that is dragging us down -- that the job of corporate executives is to fight with each other to see who is "top" or who is "best." Obviously, if that is their task, giving another 500 people keys to the executive suite would make no sense at all.
The question is:

Is that their task? Or is the task of management to increase stockholder wealth by doing whatever it takes, even, gasp, distributing knowledge and voting-rights and power?

Counter-arguments, anyone? I'm open here. The comment field can be anonymous. Please post agreement or disagreement if you have a minute.

What's wrong with decision-making at the top?

Many companies try to make decisions "at the top" instead of delegating that authority lower down the ladder. In this sense they hope to remain "in control" of what is decided.

Here's the problem - bandwidth. Top management only has so much they can deal with in a given day. So, rather than trying to put in 185 hour days, management does two things.

First, it puts out visible signals that management is overwhelmed, and please stop bringing problems to our attention unless you already know the answer. That cuts out a lot of this flow of information about process defects and makes life look a lot better.

Then, management decides it "prioritize" - which often means that a small subset of the problems that have made it to their desks actually will be dealt with today, and the rest will have to wait to "some other day."

So, management attempts to retain "control" of the process by suppressing news about most things going wrong, and avoiding dealing with most problems at all, at least today.

True, some problems will be dealt with. The serious question is, what are the costs and what are the benefits of this approach. How high are the actual costs of all those problems that are not being dealt with, and the costs of everything downstream that has stopped in its tracks waiting for resolution of the identified problem? These "opportunity costs" are often very high and very real.

Theory Y, bottom-up management, distributed leadership, and lean manufacturing all push the responsibility for problem-solving out of the corporate suite. This does involve letting go of the "control" that is gained by making these decisions, but includes getting hold of the "control" that comes from some kind of solution to the problem being instituted, instead of no solution at all for another day.

In many cases, most of the problems can be resolved at lower levels than upper management -- the ship isn't as responsive to the helm, but on the other hand it has stopped taking on water and no longer feels like it is about to capsize, and that funny noise has stopped -- so, there IS a ship left that can be steered, somewhat.

I fret about the

FEMA national incident management plan

because it is largely a plan to change all the reporting responsibilities and send issues to the "top" for resolution. Bandwidth, I think, will be the issue. A single large issue can claim 100% of the top executives' attention, closeting them in secret somewhere, while the phones go unaswered on every other issue that is, as requested, carefully flowing up the chain of command. That simply is unworkable in a large-scale emergency which is, well, when it is needed the most.

We have this long-standing heritage in this country of success based on top-down management and it is hard to let go and "shift the paradigm" to empowered employees making most decisions. In Katrina, it was the US Coast Guard that was most effective at rescuing people, becuase they had authority already delegated to each ship captain to do whatever made sense in an emergency.

Interesting idea.

Role of IT - information technolgy - in next-gen companies

Judging from Toyota and "lean" processes, what is the appropriate role of information technology ("computers and networks") in the next-generation company?

If we assume that what we're building is, essentially, a massively-parallel connnectionist computing engine (consciousness) out of people and technology, we get the suggestion that the key roles are:
transparent communication at successively larger scales
coherence-building at successively larger scales, and
transparent interactions - ("phase-lock loops") across the components of the system.

Yes, computers will still be required for tracking the trillions of details needed to run a large company today, but that is, in Peter Senge's words "detail complexity." There's a huge amount of it, but it is, relatively, simplistic in nature aside from the amount of it. Enterprise computing knows how to do that, at least in theory.

What we are looking for in the next-gen company is the thing that ties it all together, that supports the feedback loops that maintain coherence and build integrity, the same way the circulating thoughts in the brain slowly emerge an "image" out of billions of "nerve impulses" from the retina.

This is "Technology-mediated collaboration" and more, so I'll call it "technology-mediated coherence." It is what allows "aperture synthesis" in large radio telescope arrays to act as if they are a single huge individual and the gaps "don't exist."

This is pretty much what the Institute of Medicine was recommending when it urged a focus on "microsystems" recently (see prior posts on "microsystems"). The point is that a small team (5-25 people) is capable of being "self-managing" if they can simply be given the power to do so by having access to information about what their own outcomes are. This information does not need to be packaged and interpreted at successively higher levels of management and then repackaged and distributed back to them a month later as "feedback." In fact, that doesn't help much. What really helps is speed. What helps is if they can see, today at 2 PM, how they have been doing collectively, up through, say noon. They can learn to make sense of the details, and don't need "management" to try to do that for them.

In fact, given the fractal density of reality, and the successive over-simplifications required to get data into a "management report", it is a certainty that we have something far worse than the game "telephone". What will come back down the line from upper management will bear little resemblance to what went up, breeding distrust and anger on both sides.

So the role of next-gen IT is to grab hold of the 'WEB 2" technology, that allows bidirectional websites to be both read and written by people, and that includes weblogs, wikis, and "social software" that encourages interaction and cooperation, including, gasp, "gossip."

This is the stuff that, in the right climate and context, can be converted into "social capital" and converging understanding by each employee as to what everyone else is doing and why.

Where there can be dashboards, they should best be very close, in both space and time, to the decision-making actors. Lag times are incredibly dangerous, and are the source of instability in feedback systems. (Imagine trying to drive a car with a high-resolution TV screen instead of a windshield, with a fantastically clear picture of what was outside the car 15 minutes ago. )

A relevant quote from Liker's "The Toyota Way" is this (page 94) where he is talking about the problems with large batches and the delays that go with such batches:

"...there are probably weeks of work in process between operations and it
can take weeks or even months from the time a defect is caused until the time it
is discovered. By then the trail of cause and effect is cold, making it nearly
impossible to track down and identify why the defect occurred.

The hugely complex computation of making sense of such data is what human brains and visual systems are built for, and tuned for, and that machines costing a billion dollars cannot replace yet. Just give people a VIEW into what is happening as a result of what they are doing, and they will, by a miracle of connectionist distributed neural-networks, figure out what's affecting what faster than a room full of analysts with supercomputers - in most cases.

That's the role that computation needs to look at - is close-to-real-time feedback in a highly visual form to the workers of the outcome of the work currently being done. (This is a step-up from Lean manufacturing visual signal system which is a signal to management that something is amiss.)

The "swarm" is capable, like any good sports team, of making sense of "the play" long before the pundits have had a chance to replay the video 8 times and "analyze" it. Yes, there is a role for longer-term, more distant view that adds value.

But what there is NOT is a way to replace real-time feedback and visibility with ANY kind of delayed information summary. All the bases must be covered, and long-term impacts and global impacts will not be instantly visible to local workers -- but they have to be able to see what their own hands are doing or they'll be operating blind. "Dashboards" with 1-month delays on them cannot cover that gap. Too much of the information is stale by the time it arrives. Both are needed. Local feedback for local news, and successively more digested, more global feedback for successively larger and more slowly varying views.

Thinking “Better than Toyota” and “Beyond lean”

It is interesting to consider what the nature will be of the generation of corporations beyond Toyota’s current “lean” model – the Toyota Production System.

Some might ask why that question should be asked, since most of the US is still playing catch-up with Toyota. One reason is that maybe the shape beyond “lean” is easier to get to than Lean. Lacking that, maybe it can give us some insight into what really matters.

I’ll approach this over multiple posts, but to get that ball rolling, there are two features that strike me as absolutely required regardless of local implementation.

A “vertical” feedback loop that brings together workers and management, and
A “horizontal” feedback loop that brings together the company and the customers.

The horizontal loop is reflected in the customer “pull” mantra of Toyota, and just plain common sense. If the company is out of touch with its own customers, it will have a hard time optimizing how much it satisfies them, and how much it learns from them. If this loop is missing, we have a company disconnected from external reality, unlikely to be “adapative” and makes poor use of external resources.

The vertical loop is reflected in much of the Toyota Way, bringing together labor and management, ensuring that the “eyes and boots on the ground” can be heard at “the top”, and vice versa. A breakdown in this loop is reflected in an unhealthy and dysfunctional organization, making poor use of its own internal resources.

Finally, there is a need for the company to be value-driven, long-term oriented even though most or all the people in the company are short-sighted and focused on local problems as perceived in local perspectives. In fact, the company has to succeed at every level, not just short term, and not just long –term. The easiest way I can imaging doing that is to have completely symmetric tools and thinking, so that long-term and middle-term and short-term issues are addressed in a way that hits every base for every decision. A breakdown in that coherence could expose the company to having short-term victories that interfere with long-term objectives, etc. If a solution can be found that is “win-win”, I’m thinking that’s probably the one to pick. (This can be argued, but it’s a good place to start.)

So, the coherences we seek are between management and labor, between the company’s interests and the customer’s interests, and between the short-term and the long-term interests of everyone. If those issues can be resolved at a reasonable cost, it would certanly remove many of the obstacles that cause companies to fail, and put it on a reasonable path for long-term vitality.

In fact, if a reasonably efficient company is converting external resources (cash) into external value (product or service) and in touch with its own people and the customers, just about the only remaining question is whether internal or external enemies could bring it down despite its otherwise strong operation.

One such hazard is that the company could still make flawed and short-sighted decisions. Generally I think this can be traced to top management that is failing to consult with its own staff and customers, but it could be that top management is just dense, or has an agenda different than the best interests of the company in mind.

Since companies in general do not “belong” to the CEO, but to the stockholders, they may not want the company to be stripped of value to pad the pocket of the current CEO – it’s their dollars that are leaking out. One way to address this internal corruption pitfall is to have very distributed decision making that cannot be thwarted by any small group of people, whether they are “at the top” or not. If the collective decisions can be at least as good as and as fast as those of solitary individuals (I say “if”) then this distributed model might be of interest. It’s a big “if” but one we’ll consider. Regardless, some function must be in place to prevent corruption at the top from developing and destroying the company. Often transparency will help there.

But, still, the CEO and the management team might simply be dense and not able to manage well. What will protect the company from that? Again, if (big if) we can find a solution involving distributed decision making that is demonstrably better and as fast as a single expert at the top, then we can make a design that is robust against individual components, even the CEO, failing.

Now, collective consciousness seems to work for Toyota, but according to Liker, Toyota has a reputation for being “conservative” and evolving slowly with a great emphasis on sustaining the past unless expliclitly addressed.

Aside from legal questions, the real question in “management by committee” (at its worst) is whether a team can “fly an airplane” or whether a team will simply defeat any coherent rapid action.

So, those are the two big research questions that determine this next-generation company design:
Can a team producce, reliably, better decisions than even a very good individual, and
Can a team produce such decisions as fast as a very good individual?

In other words, can we synthesize intelligence and sufficient speed to “pilot” the aircraft. And can that intelligence work with the CEO so the legal commitments the CEO signs remain aligned with the team?

Probably, this is going to require a CEO who is there for the good of the company and is willing to learn from the company about even better goals and objectives than the ones they arrived with. This is a hard type of leadership for the US to fathom. It requires combining assertiveness and submission in an unusual blend.

Still, if those problems could be addressed, a company run by a meta-person collective consciousness could, potentially, have all the advantages of “lean” and more on top of that.

Or, maybe, this concept is already carried within the true Lean concept held by Toyota. The question of how to manage distributed “command and control” is the pivotal one. So, maybe the next question to ask is if there’s any theoretical work or literature that supports the concept that this might even be possible.

And, again, I think immediately of my own body. Here I have ten trillion cells, or so, and there is no “boss cell” who the others “report to.” So, yes, in at least one working model of adpative learning systems, there is a solution to the emergent collective decision making –
and we’re it.

What would make that solution happen, instead of the downside alternative modes of collapsing – such as one very strong leader taking over, or the social culture becoming “the borg” and totally stifling innovation?

Good questions for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I recall that Marquardt's "Leading with Questions" approach separates the role of authority from the role of "know-it-all", and frees managers from having to "know everything" in order to remain managers. This is a hard transition to those raised that saying "I don't know" is a sign of weakness and will trigger the attack dogs being loosed. Still, these days, it is impossible to understand all the complexities of any large, complex, adaptive system -- so it is totally unrealistic to expect anyone, including a CEO, to grasp either the external world or the internal world. As with "lean" - when this transition is over, they will still have a job, but it will be a different job.

The same transition is already part of the FM22-100, U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual that I refer to repeatedly in this weblog. In short

Being IN authority does not require being AN authority.

That is just a crucial distinction if we are going to ever get CEO's and managers to be willing to listen to their staff, and free organizations from being hostage to mental models in their leader's brains that just aren't getting updated with fresh information.

Financial woes jeopardize LA Hositals

From the Los Angeles Times

Financial woes jeopardize area hospitals

Nearly two dozen are at risk. Losing even a few would mean greater strain on the region's healthcare network.

By Daniel Costello and Susannah Rosenblatt
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

September 23, 2007

excerpts:

Nearly two dozen private hospitals in Los Angeles and Orange counties, accounting for up to 15% of beds in the region, are in dire financial straits and in danger of bankruptcy or closure, according to hospital administrators, industry experts and state data.

The troublesome development follows the closure of community clinics and hospitals in recent years that has left the healthcare system seriously overburdened.

If even a few other hospitals close or reduce costly critical-care services, it could mean longer ambulance rides to hospitals, additional delays in emergency rooms and less access to care, especially for poor and uninsured people.

Among the hospitals in poor financial health, according to industry analysts, are Downey Regional Medical Center, Centinela Freeman Health System in Inglewood, Brotman Medical Center in Culver City, Century City Doctors Hospital and four Orange County hospitals owned by Santa Ana-based Integrated Healthcare Holdings Inc. including Chapman Medical Center in Orange and Western Medical Center in Santa Ana, one of three trauma centers in the county.

----
The financial woes result from a multitude of developments:

* An increasing load of uninsured and low-income patients has resulted from overcrowding and the shutdown of public facilities. The number of uninsured patients visiting private hospitals, particularly in poor areas, has increased by one-third in Los Angeles County since 2002. California's Medi-Cal program for the poor reimburses hospitals at one of the lowest rates in the country.

* The closure of Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital in Willowbrook last month left half a dozen nearby hospitals to absorb most of the 47,000 patients who used the public hospital's emergency room last year.

* Smaller community hospitals are drawing fewer patients as a few larger facilities attract a growing share of doctors and insured patients.

* As insurers have consolidated in recent years, they've squeezed many smaller facilities. Private insurance companies generally pay higher rates to larger hospitals with greater bargaining power.

* New, stricter state mandates on nursing ratios have raised labor costs, and a 2013 deadline to retrofit all hospitals to better withstand a major earthquake is estimated to be costing medical facilities $110 billion statewide.

Since 1996, more than 70 community hospitals have closed across the state, with a disproportionate share -- more than 50 -- in Southern California. Regionally, 14 emergency rooms have closed in the last five years, including 10 in Los Angeles County.

That's why experts say a new wave of closures would be so destabilizing.

"In many areas, you have had enormous consolidation, and there's very little breathing room left," said Kirby Bosley, director of California healthcare consulting for Watson Wyatt, a company that advises employers on health plans.

Many agree, however, that it's been years since so many hospitals have been in such dire financial straits at the same time.
In a few years' time, it's inevitable our community's already horrendous statistics of heart disease, cancer and diabetes will rise even more," she said.

The most immediate concern is how to best address the fallout from the closure of King-Harbor, which was shut down last month when the federal Medicare and Medicaid agency pulled half the hospital's funding after nearly four years of failed attempts to reform the troubled institution.

"Regardless of what everybody's trying to do, there's not enough money," said Carol Meyer, director of governmental affairs for the L.A. County Department of Health Services.

"We're talking about a system that is already in crisis," she said. "I think this is a tipping point for a couple of hospitals in the immediate area."

Honey, I lost the nuclear weapons - Bent Spear

According to the Washington Post, the US military lost track of 6 nuclear weapons for 36 hours while transporting them under very light security from North Dakota to Louisiana. My interest in this is again in the general problem of what it takes to produce a reliable system (of any type) that protects us against dangerous errors, and how such systems break down.

As with the classic "swiss cheese" model of protection, in this case there were multiple layers of simultaneous failures. And, as usual, the common thread was a strong belief in a mistaken mental model, that, once launched, managed to obscure contrary details against systems carefully designed for just such a purpose.

The question I have, as with my Comair 5191 analysis, is what we can learn from this, not which person to blame was last in the chain in what is certainly a "system-level" failure. The common point of failure here is most likely the power of a belief - in this case that the missles had dummy warheads- and the corresponding sense that surely the people before me did their jobs -- exactly as the copilot of Comair 5191, handed the controls while the plane as already picking up speed down the wrong runway, faced a serious problem in questioning the prior actions of a superior officer.

It is precisely the kind of accident that requires "mindfulness" of the type Karl Weick warned us about. (see my post with links to high-reliability organization literature.) It is why the Army has gone with a more open model of management than you would expect. (see FM22-100, the US Army Leadership Field Manual.) The Army is a "learning" organization, and they have learned, the hard way, than only a strong culture of safety is enough to overcome the forces that suppress eyes-open mindfulness required to see that something is wrong and question it. All of the command and control top-down discipline in the world cannot make eyes at the bottom work as well.


Missteps in the Bunkers
Sept 23, 2007
Washington Post
By Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, September 23, 2007; A01
excerpts: (emphasis added)

The airmen attached the gray missiles to the plane's wings, six on each side. After eyeballing the missiles on the right side, a flight officer signed a manifest that listed a dozen unarmed AGM-129 missiles. The officer did not notice that the six on the left contained nuclear warheads, each with the destructive power of up to 10 Hiroshima bombs.

That detail would escape notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.

Three weeks after word of the incident leaked to the public, new details obtained by The Washington Post point to security failures at multiple levels in North Dakota and Louisiana, according to interviews with current and former U.S. officials briefed on the initial results of an Air Force investigation of the incident.

The warheads were attached to the plane in Minot without special guard for more than 15 hours, and they remained on the plane in Louisiana for nearly nine hours more before being discovered. In total, the warheads slipped from the Air Force's nuclear safety net for more than a day without anyone's knowledge.

A simple error in a missile storage room led to missteps at every turn, as ground crews failed to notice the warheads, and as security teams and flight crew members failed to provide adequate oversight and check the cargo thoroughly. An elaborate nuclear safeguard system, nurtured during the Cold War and infused with rigorous accounting and command procedures, was utterly debased, the investigation's early results show.

The Air Force's account of what happened that day and the next was provided by multiple sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the government's investigation is continuing and classified.

Air Force rules required members of the jet's flight crew to examine all of the missiles and warheads before the plane took off. But in this instance, just one person examined only the six unarmed missiles and inexplicably skipped the armed missiles on the left, according to officials familiar with the probe.

"If they're not expecting a live warhead it may be a very casual thing -- there's no need to set up the security system and play the whole nuclear game," said Vest, the former Minot airman. "As for the air crew, they're bus drivers at this point, as far as they know."

What the Hell Happened Here?'

The news, when it did leak, provoked a reaction within the defense and national security communities that bordered on disbelief: How could so many safeguards, drilled into generations of nuclear weapons officers and crews, break down at once?

Military officers, nuclear weapons analysts and lawmakers have expressed concern that it was not just a fluke, but a symptom of deeper problems in the handling of nuclear weapons now that Cold War anxieties have abated.

When what were multiple layers of tight nuclear weapon control internal procedures break down, some bad guy may eventually come along and take advantage of them," said a former senior administration official who had responsibility for nuclear security.

A similar refrain has been voiced hundreds of times in blogs and chat rooms popular with former and current military members. On a Web site run by the Military Times, a former B-52 crew chief who did not give his name wrote: "What the hell happened here?"

A former Air Force senior master sergeant wrote separately that "mistakes were made at the lowest level of supervision and this snowballed into the one of the biggest mistakes in USAF history. I am still scratching my head wondering how this could [have] happened."

Actually, the right question isn't how this particular event happened. As James Reason noted, things will break. The more complex a system is, the more ways it can break.

The right question is, why would such events happen more than once? Why isn't there a learning curve at least as strong as the forgetting curve? How can people at a low level raise their hands hundreds of times on web-logs and not be seen or heard once at higher levels? Was this actual incident preceded by at least one "near-miss" that could have been attended to and learned from, that wasn't?

Lloyd Dumas' book "Lethal Arrogance - Human Fallibility and Dangerous Technologies" and Charles Perrow's classic "Normal Accidents - Living with High-Risk Technologies" have the same message: the social side of managing risk is where the problems must be stopped. As Perrow says, "systems complexity makes failures inevitable." As the cover of that book notes,

[Perrows] research undermines the promises that "better management" and "more operator training" can eliminate catastrophic accidents.

Dumas has a more extreme analysis, and concludes that as everything becomes more interdependent in unexpected ways, it will never be possible to stop all combination of events that could lead to certain accidents, and recommends an astounding thing for such cases - that society should voluntarily and pro-actively get rid of the technologies that cannot be fully controlled.

Reading Laurie Garrett's description of solitary 16 year old soldiers protecting the Soviet Union's abandoned bio-warfare facilities, you can see how unexpected events, such as collapse of a government, can remove all the safeguards we had been counting on in one step.

So, maybe, "We trust we won't have to use these...." isn't the world's safest strategy. That's a whole different debate.

For the technologies already in play, we need to bring our social systems up to the level of our technical systems, or we face a long list of risks that are certain in all but the date they will occur. Point-wise "control" systems depending on message-passing through formal channels need to be supplemented with diffuse cultural control cultures in order to be reliable and in order to be able to suddenly stop and say -- "Wait! Something doesn't fit right here!" and be heard.

This larger problem of people lower in the chain of command seeing things and not being heard, or not being willing to voice what they see, is the real problem behind many of these accidents. And after they occur, it's all to common to hear "I kept telling them that was going to happen one of these days, but no one would listen!"

The response from the person's superior officer or manager will predictably be "You never told me that!" or, more precisely "I never heard you say that!". What's subtle here is that the superior officer is correct and not falsifying information - they, literally, never did HEAR what their subordinate said, or was trying to say. Analysis of cockpit voice records of numerous accidents show clearly that the pilots, literally, did not hear what the copilot's were trying to tell them. Dr. Peter Pronovost's work in ICU's in hospitals in Michigan showed that it is actually surprisingly hard for a lower-status being (a nurse) to be heard, literally, by a higher-status being (a surgeon) and it takes a special step to make that work at all.

My whole post on "What I learned at Johns Hopkins last week" is about the co-dependenct suppression of dissent in classrooms and is a similar phenomenon.

People simply don't realize how powerful social suppression is between someone with authority and someone who is dependent on the first person for their survival or career. Once they realize they are hitting resistance, the subordinates back off and the superiors, literally, un-hear what was said and it vanishes from their long-term memory. Magicians use this technique all the time.

Even top Generals seem to collapse to Jello when trying to contradict the President, by some accounts. This is way harder than it "seems", which means our intuition is terrible and our mental model needs a lot of work and retuning. (That, of course, is what Systems Dynamics "flight simulators" are about.)

That's where we need to develop expertise, spend research dollars, and focus research attention. One more set of rules, or Standard Operating Procedures, or one more layer of the same kind of thing we have now will just fail the same way these ones failed here.

We were lucky this time.

As Michael Osterholm points out in hs book "Living Terrors - What America Needs to Know to Survie the Coming Bioterrorist Castastrophe",

You have to be lucky all the time - we have to be lucky just once.
Irish Republican Army

This needs more attention.

The Battle over Health Care - NY Times

One way we could all "save money" would be to stop putting oil into our cars. Of course, then we would have to deal with the "high cost" of replacing engines, the long waits at engine repair shops, etc. And we could have national programs to cut that cost down by 20% or so. So, we could save the $15/year we spend on oil, and replace it with $1,500 a year in engine replacement costs.

I am hoping that most people would see that the "money saving" scheme above is a terrible idea. What's remarkable is that, when we shift to health care for our bodies, everyone seems to be arguing about reducing the cost of engine replacement and what kind of insurance should pay for it. The idea of preventing the problem in the first place somehow got lost in the shuffle.

In a fascinating editorial today titled "The Battle over Health Care" the New York Times compares candidates platforms and seems something missing. The editors state:

WHAT’S MISSING

All of the plans, both Republican and Democratic, fail to provide a plausible solution to the problem that has driven health care reform to the fore as a political issue: the inexorably rising costs that drive up insurance rates and force employers to cut back on coverage or charge higher premiums. All of the plans acknowledge the need to restrain costs, but most of the remedies they offer are not likely to do much.

Electronic medical records to eliminate errors and increase efficiency, more preventive care to head off serious diseases, and better coordination of patients suffering multiple, chronic illnesses are all worthy proposals, but there is scant evidence they will reduce costs.

Well, I beg to differ. Adding oil costs way less than replacing engines. Preventing disease costs way less than "fixing" it. And yet, of every hundred dollars spent on "health care" in the US, less than $2 is spent on such prevention.

What it seems to me "is missing" is a serious discussion and investigation of exactly why and how we have, as a nation, become so blind to the obvious. And, why is this defect in our national perception resistant to any learning curve?

Since everything decays, including resistance to learning, something must actively be replenishing this social myth. Something like, say, today's NY Times editorial?

I don't want to spend today's column presenting evidence for the value of preventive care, except to note that your sense about oil in your car is correct. Maybe when I get done I'll add links to authoritative sources on preventive care. I've argued that before.

It is an astonishing fact that half of all increases in life expectancy in recorded history have occurred within this century and that most occurred in the first half of the century, before the introduction of modern drugs and vaccines. (Harvard University)

What I do want to do is look at the cultural and psychosocial factors that have created this blindness and that sustain it in the face of overwhelming contrary data.

Off hand, there are a number of contributing factors that spring to mind:

• Clinical health has far better marketing than public health
• Public Health is, effectively, clinically depressed
• Most players on the receiving end of the cash flow don't see the cash flow as a problem.
• Prevention is distant in space and time from the engine-failure event
• It's very hard to count events that would have happened but didn't
• It's very hard to "take credit" for successful preventive maintenance.
• Really good preventive maintenance staff tend to be fired, since "nothing ever breaks, so who needs them!"
• It's very hard for any politician to invest in efforts today that won't bear fruit until a decade from now, regardless how big the fruit is.

We can disentangle these factors somewhat more. Some of them are "perceptual" problems, where even good scientists lack good tools to see, let alone measure, what's called "distal causality" -- that is, causation far in time and space from events, or even harder, an absence of events.

THERE! DID YOU SEE THAT thing that just didn't happen! Just then!
LOOK! It didn't happen again!

Nope, we're not wired that way. Still, people can understand about putting oil in the car. What's different about health care?

A major factor here, generally not considered polite conversation, is a running battle well over a thousand years old between public health and the advocates of prevention on one side, and clinical health and the advocates of heroic acute repair on the other. Those receiving the money tend to argue that they are not biased by this cash flow, contrary to everything known about clinical trials and the insidious effects of bias on judgment. It certainly takes the punch out of arguing that the best "final state" to be desired, socially, would be the degrading of importance of hospitals and doctors or the elimination of both entirely to an era we'd all rather forget when people didn't know how to stay healthy.

I'm not saying that investing in public health would eliminate doctors, but it would certainly refocus them and you'd have to go well against human nature to expect them to be setting up as a national end-goal their own elimination as a respected and rewarded group. So, silence from the American Medical Association on this subject can hardly be viewed as an biased judgment call. And, to be fair, the AMA just elected a Dr. Ronald Davis, a preventive medicine specialist as president, so I suspect they know this change in focus is inevitable and are already reluctantly starting to prepare for it and shift focus to prevention and quality improvement and actually tracking "outcomes." At a recent talk at a Global Health Preparedness conference at the University of Michigan, Dr. Davis emphasized the links between public health and the AMA and his intent to build new bridges between the groups.

Amazingly, however, we don't hear the insurance industry advocating greater prevention efforts. I've inquired about this, and apparently they make money on transactions, not on keeping people healthy, so the corporate bias would be to want more transactions, if you get my drift. They aren't financially motivated to eliminate their source of revenue (broken engines.)

And public health mostly talks to itself, kicking the cat and muttering about how nobody loves them and there's just no point in talking, so have another drink and live with it. Their silence is actually probably due to a lack of funding for good media campaigns, as a result of the last 100 years being kicked across the schoolyard by the AMA and the insurance industry and other beneficiaries of the cash flow. I don't think "clinically depressed" is too strong a term for the state of the field. Most of the improvement in life-expectancy in the last century was due to public health (clean water, sanitary sewers, hand-washing regulations in restaurants, refrigeration, etc.) and occurred prior to the explosion of hospitals, following the Hill-Burton Act, in 1946, as well as prior to the explosion of use of antibiotics.

That, incidentally is a problem now, as antibiotics are increasingly reaching the end of their useful lifetimes, and the long-term result of their use has resulted in "super-bugs" like MRSA and VRE. Suddenly we see "infection control" moving back onto the radar screen, in hospitals and nationwide. We might, gasp, even expect to see a massive media campaign on the concept of washing hands after using the toilet, although if it happens it will most likely be paid for by public health, not the AMA, which still can't even persuade all their own doctors to wash their hands regularly.

Meanwhile, cholera is breaking out in Baghdad I see by the news, since the US blocked the flow of chlorine to public health facilities there, so water treatment with chlorine to kill cholera has stopped - something we just take so much for granted in the US we forget it is there.

So, there are issues with how humans perceive causation, compounded with power politics around a truly huge flow of cash - larger than the defense department, larger than oil. There is a huge invisible effect of bias blinding most doctors, who are generally good and caring people as individuals, to the true magnitude of this problem. (By the time they are done with med school, they're trapped in the system.) Trying to make a living as a "family doctor" in the US today is a losing proposition, totally underfunded as one of the front lines in prevention. So, the nations problems pale in light of the larger, more tangible, personal cash flow problems of just making a living in an insane system gone haywire and dysfunctional.

Public health academics mostly just talk to each other, although that's a common trait for academics in general. There is a dawning realization that no one in government or policy making positions is listening to them any more, and some movement to try to figure out how to have more clout -- hard, since most public health workers in the US are at or near minimum wage since the field is so misunderstood and devalued by the population, in a self-latching loop.
(No cash = no advertising = no cash, etc.)

Meanwhile, since no politician can educate the public against this tide of confusion, and they can't hope to benefit from getting credit now for investing in prevention of future things that won't happen in someone else's term in office, we can't expect much from them.

Still, I did expect more from the New York Times, than not realizing the value of prevention.
At least they could have said "There is scant attention given by us and other media to the overwhelming body of evidence that prevention would save well over half of our health care costs" and done a research piece on why that is.

Probably the last psychosocial fact I didn't mention is relevant there. Prevention would require that people "shape up" and let go of bad behaviors and adopt healthy behaviors - and that would seriously cut into both the profits of some big industries (tobacco, fast-food, alcohol, etc.) and ask people to take personal responsibility for their own "outcomes" instead of the philosophy of "party today and regret it tomorrow" that has become so prevalent.

Again, that could be fixed, but there are strong financial interests in not fixing that aspect of American culture. We still want "mature" to equate to "irresponsible." It may be fun, but other countries with less of that will be eating our lunch soon, and that won't be fun.

GM is blaming its woes on health care costs. According to Harvard's researchers, the largest single cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical bills. Changing who the middleman insurer is for this process will simply change the letterhead on which you get your bill for the engine repairs of yourself and your neighbors, but won't lower the bill.

Nothing will actually lower the bill until we "do less of that" and switch from a repair-mentality to a prevention-mentality. That would be worth about, literally, a trillion US dollars a year, but would require about a billion of that going to revitalize our champions in public health. ( You'd think this would be worth 1/200th of the $200 billion we do choose to spend on the War in Iraq next year in order to make us all "safer" and more secure from bodily harm. )

The fact that we, as a nation, can't do the math and see that trade-off is not helped by today's New York Times. I had hoped for more. I suppose we could dig one more layer further upstream and ask why the Times can't get its own research together anymore.

Meanwhile, looking in our own mirror, on a national scale dawn is coming, the party's over, and the guys with the bill are at the front door. I can't help but notice that neither the grand state of Michigan nor the US Congress has managed to get a budget together for the new fiscal year, that starts in a week. It's the first day of fall and summer is over. Nobody seems to want to face the music and look at the mess we've made for ourselves.

It will be more obvious when the Michigan government shuts down in a week, and the Federal government shuts down in mid-November (judging from prior times they've pulled this stunt.)
Still, it won't do much to improve our image internationally as the guardians of the world's "reserve currency." Or maybe, we've abandoned that role too.

But, here's one suggestion for the UAW - if you guys take on that $50 billion retiree health care obligation that GM is offering you, check out this idea of "prevention" and make friends with "public health." If we can't get the cost of health care in the USA under control, that trickle of patients heading out the door (with their money) to medical tourism sites abroad is going to turn into a flood, and there goes another trillion dollar a year industry outsourced to Asia. Then no Americans will have any money left to buy GM cars, because their medical costs will be hemorrhaging into pockets abroad.

It's like "fuel efficiency". This isn't a local issue any more. It's a global competitiveness issue. If we don't fix it, customers will stop coming entirely. Hospitals need to emulate Toyota and get "lean" about their costs in doing defect-repairs ("health care"), but the whole US needs to get "lean" and stop passing the defects downstream to hospitals and start fixing them upstream at the source, for the very same reason - the economics are killing us.

And, meanwhile, hospitals should consider a different long-term strategy than simply being superb at fixing the defects that are passed on to them by failures upstream in the nation's public health system, as that only institutionalizes the large-scale system structural problem and costs.

Hospitals need to transition increasingly to having positive value-adding roles, not just defect repair roles. They should consider being at the forefront of physical and mental and social fitness, and building our capacity to cope with life and build innovative and thriving industries, not just cleaning up the breakdowns and depression that come from failures in those areas. Then, their success is aligned with our success, and odds of long-term survival of all of us is improved.

Of course, if Hillary Clinton is reading this, remember that one rule of "lean" is that you have to guarantee the employees that, if the cooperate in making things run better, they won't lose their jobs. They may have different jobs, but they won't lose their jobs. Ditto for hospitals - if they participate in reducing their defect management role somewhat and support fitness enhancement programs instead, they need to be guaranteed no one will lose his or her job.

As always, the focus must be on the "customer". And as always, there is a hierarchy of customers, from individuals to families to teams to departments to companies to states to nations. If we do this right, it should be a win-win-win-... etc for everyone. Fit and healthy and innovative employees are what our companies need to thrive, and vice versa.

The job of public health should be to catalyze that win-win transition, and break the "us" versus "them" logjam, of "either" individual fitness "or" corporate fitness. Let's do the "and" solution instead!

Wade

Is it OK to ask for help?

Is it OK to ask for help? Reflecting on this question can give us some insight on why it's so hard in the US to adopt Toyota type "lean" operation models.

By "OK" I'm referring to the cultural norms and standards that we live by, the unwritten rules that we are supposed to know without asking. If we ask for help, will we will be punished by society?

All through the educational and socialization process in the US schools, at least Kindergarten to PhD, we are told "Do your own work." Consulting with others on homework is usually a "bad" thing. Consulting with others when it really matters, on "exams" is seriously punished. Tenure tends to depend on having done work that is clearly and recognizably "your own work" and discourages young faculty members from collaboration.

Then, one 25-30 years of such conditioning is completed, "workers" are released into the real world, where they discover that they are now supposed to collaborate and work together to get things done. The boss doesn't care if they check with each other, or use notes, or call a friend, or look things up on the internet -- the boss only cares that the work-product be completed on time. In fact, NOT escalating a problem to available experts who can help crack logjams is now punished and possibly cause for being fired. It's now bad to delay a process while trying to puzzle something out for yourself when someone nearby can just tell you the answer.


Whoa! What a disconnect!

The "workaround" used in the educational system these days is the dreaded "group work" project, generally hated by everyone from the teacher to the students. There always seems to be 3 or 4 students who are loafers and moochers and want a free ride, and one person who does all the work and gets little of the credit. It always slows down the work. No one sees the point of it, and I've had faculty apologize profusely for it but say they were told the have to do this.

That model makes it even LESS likely that anyone in business would want to participate in a "group" project or grant. Then, along comes the NIH and other funding agencies, always demanding multidisciplinary teams, or worse, interdisciplinary teams. ("multi" means they can just divide up the work and engage i parallel play and not talk much. "inter" means they actually have to collaborate on everything as they go.)

Again with the mixed messages!

And, on a larger scale, when work breaks up naturally into disciplines, departments, specialties, or "silos", the comfort level is again attacked by upper management that asks, on this scale, for TEAMS or DEPARTMENTS to "work together". It's "group project" squared!!

Somewhere along the line here the directives from above to "work together" seem somewhat like, to put it crudely, pissing upwind -- the result is unpleasant and shows no learning curve.

It's easier to deal with this issue if we understand the root causes of the conflicting message streams. It's also obvious, since "culture" eats "management initiatives" for lunch, that management initiatives for people to "work together" are, frankly, pissing upwind into the face of the very deep, very strong cultural message that "working together is BAD!!"

And, cultural messages don't come in the front door, throught our consciousness, as "rules". We just "pick them up" sideways somehow, through peripheral vision. We know, for example, that it is not permissiable to eat popcorn at a sermon in church, even though no one ever gave us a rule book that says that. These days it appears OK to bring a 3-course meal to the front row of a lecture, however, and eat it while the lecture goes on - quite a change from 30 years ago. Of course, college males no longer wear ties to class either.

So, it's less that we have a "Rule" that says "working together is bad" -- we just have a deeply trained conditioned reflex to turn away from it and avoid it, particularly when we need it the most (as in exams.) We "feel" that it is wrong, a violation of social norms, that we will be a "bad person" and rejected by society if we're "one of those people who keeps asking for help and mooching off others." It's a diffuse resistance and reluctance that may never be explicit.

And, it's the "wet blanket" that puts out the fires of initiative at collaboration.

So, how do we convert this culture into one where asking for help is OK, and giving help to someone who asks is OK, and our school system reflects that set of social norms? This seems to be important, if it is the primary obstacle to adoption of efficient "lean" approaches to our businesses that can make them globally competitive with other businesses in countries where it is OK, or even expected that people work together on things.

No, leeches who never want to carry their share of the work will still be "bad", but there's no problem if the rest of us swap and rearrange who carries what when, if it gets the job done faster and more easily.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of times a discussion will get up to the point where "culture" is mentioned, and that's almost a signal to give up and change the topic, instead of a signal to go get a cultural-change expert to come assist with that part of the work.

Maybe engineers and IT people and doctors don't realize that there are people who specialize in social engineering and know how to do it? I don't know. It's puzzling.

Certainly experts can be found in seeing the problem and measuring it in cultural anthropology, or in changing group behaviors or population behaviors among "behavioral education" practice experts in Schools of Public Health, or in media/marketing/crowd-manipulation experts with MBA's (on Madison Avenue) or Public Policy backgrounds ( in social marketing firms.) Of course, public health is oriented to helping people improve their lives, and the marketing people often with destroying their lives but paying to do it (tobacco, alcohol, "adult" entertainment and prostitution, harder drugs and hard-core pornography and white-slavery, etc.)

But many corporations have life improving products too - from cars that work to toasters that work, so they shouldn't be painted as "bad" with a broad brush that covers the obviously bad ones.

Still, it's ironic or something that the companies that are merchants of death seem to have mastered the art of population-behavior manipulation, and those that are trying to be merchants of life are still trying to figure out how to remove the shrink wrap from the package.

Nevertheless, there is a deep literature of social engineering for public health behavior change of populations, and doing work that doesn't collapse as soon as the intervention team departs or the grant runs out.

The best book but perhaps hardest to read, and the one used at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health is titled Health Program Planning - An Educational and Ecological Approach (4th ed), by Lawrence W. Green and Marshall W. Kreuter. The first edition was in 1961, and the 4th edition in 2005, so this includes 44 years of experience with the techniques and what has happened trying them on different cultures and problem sizes around the globe.

It's pretty solidly based in "what actually works" by now.

The problem (of course there's a catch) is that what actually works is basically systems thinking, (aka "ecological approach"), and for most of the last 44 years, there weren't even words for these concepts and people didn't believe in "ecology" or "systems". Now, finally, with 1 gigahertz laptops, we have enough power to start modeling what happens with complex interacting systems and the reasons behind what works in practice are becoming clear.

Still, since what works is very heavily based on feedback loops, and since feedback loops are forbidden in classical statistical analysis of causality, this "new" paradigm has been strongly discounted, disparaged, resisted, rejected, opposed, attacked, minimized, dumped-on, and otherwise culturally marked as close as we can (being primates) by being smeared with feces and considered "bad".

Besides, "systems" means we'd have to "work together". It brings to mind this logic:

I'm glad I don't like ice cream - because, if I liked it, I might eat it, and I hate it!

Well, at least the work is cut out for us and we know what to do, and need to apply cultural change engineering to the very concept of accepting social change engineering as something we should all learn, not just the tobacco and fast-foot companies.

And, to model the non-linear and "surprising" (but fully predictable) tendency of complex systems to show "unintended side-effects", tools such as Systems Dynamics need to be used, which, of course, is why I'm currently taking that class via distance education at WPI, the world's experts (along with MIT, where the faculty overlap.)

I think the combination of lean-thinking, ecological model cultural analysis tools from population behavior modification (otherwise disguised as the field called "public health"), discussion and model building tools from Systems Dynamics, I think that's a complete set of what's needed to make this fly.

Meanwhile, I got my first new US 1-dollar coin in change this morning. It's the first coin or bill in the US history (I think) to not have the two phrases "In God we trust" and "e pluribus unum" (from many, one) on either side. (It hides them on the EDGE of the coin.)

It's almost like the US is embarrassed about the idea of trying to take many people and make one nation, and wants to hide or bury the idea somewhere, like a dog scratching dirt over its droppings.

Such mixed messages we get. It's no wonder it's hard to get people to adopt "lean thinking" or "systems thinking" when our schools, employment compensation programs, and government itself reject the paradigm.

Still, our best and brightest thinkers from the last 4000 years or so have urged us to look at cooperative social interactions in a good light. Enlightened managers urge us to follow Toyota's astoundingly successful lead and change to "lean thinking" - which is basically ecological or systems thinking. The National Institutes of Health requires interdisciplinary teams on many new grants because, frankly, they get garbage otherwise. So, the paradigm refuses to die, even if the NIH-Office of Social Science Research gets abused, dumped on, and Norm Anderson pretty much left in disappointment (at least) and forced to try to get the good work done from outside instead of from inside.




Wade

Following up on down

Following my last post, there are two distinct types of moves that seem to lack names in English, but are quite common. One is a play or move that starts down, goes out of sight off the page, and shows up a few days later as up. The other is a move that starts off up, goes out of sight off the page, and shows up a while later as "down." (The state off the page is untested and unspecified.)

So, let's make a word "up-oad" for "UP, Off the page, Around the bend, finally revealing it self as Down" and a word "Down-oau" for Down, off the page, around the bend, ending up UP.

Then we can say that "using" a muscle a lot is "down-oau" - as it starts out down, and actually IS down, but a few days later when we look again it's actually now UP and stronger than before.

And, "winning a battle but losing the war" is the opposite, "up-oad". Looks good, looks up, we turn to something else, come back and discover the opposite."

These aren't just "unintended consequences", but are very reliable behaviors we can plan on for certain things, like muscle workouts.

In those new words, what I observed about MBA students strategy when playing Go when I taught at the B-School at Cornell is that they were always suckers for "up-oad" traps - things that looked yummy in terms of immediate gain, but that led to long-term awkward shape that ended up losing them the game. Of course, one reason Go was required of the Samuai soldiers was to train people to see that trap and avoid it.

American business, unlike long-term Asian business, seems to think that "investing" in "up-oad" moves will result in wealth, but only discover it results in less wealth, so, being obsessive, they see it is failing, can't comprehend why, and do even MORE of it, closing a downward spiral.

So, it would be good to do "eye training" for American executives in this concept, so they believe it exists and can learn to avoid the berries that look so good but have this taste.

Templeton, Toyota, and Dynamics

Well, today I'm ramping up to getting another day of Toyota Production System type "lean" training, and reading John Templeton's book "Worldwide Laws of Life - 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles", looking for overlaps. (At $11.95 a copy, a good deal!)

I'm also finally learning how muscles work (better late than never) and it's just fascinating.

I mean, this is really strange and not something we learned in physics in college - this "body building" mathematics. As a True Believer ("exponent"?) of hierarchically symmetric principles, of course, I assume that many of the same patterns that govern development of strong arms or abs govern the development of strong corporations or state or nation economie -- with some specific to each level as well.

But muscles. Wow. You make them get stronger by breaking them down and using them up. We can't even decide in our terminology whether this is "down" or "up" -- which instantly calls to mind non-transitive dice and Hofstadler's (Escher's) strange loops, and feedback mechanism.

Now, what is the template here, the reusable pattern? If I break my car down, it stays "down".
If I "work out" (Now a new direction!) I make space or gaps or folds or niches somehow that end up getting "filled in" with interest. Again signature linguistic clues to strange loops.

So, Templeton, one of the richest men on earth, really believes in a concept of "giving" which involves delayed but amplified "receiving" - and finds a spiritual basis for this in Christian scriptures. He says (page xx):

"Of course, an activity of this kind creates an activity in the lives of the givers into which more good can flow!"

So, he seems to be saying that "good" and "goods" (in a commercial sense) follow the same behavior patterns.

Still, I don't find a word in English for this loop, this pattern of behavior that muscles have where you have to use them up to make room for them to automagically refill or recharge.

I noted yesterday to my wife that it was good for rechargable batteries to let them run down, in fact, to go out of your way to run them down to just about zero and recharge them a few times, or they lose the ability to be charged up at all. Curious. Some even recommend that you do this as soon as you purchase them, and that, if you leave them in the recharger and "overcharge" them, they'll become useless and run out much, much faster than new batteries. They won't be able to "hold a charge", whatever that means (in general). (Now, we add the "let go" and "hold on" axis added.)

But, in my System Dynamics course we're studying how to model social processes using "stocks and flows" to capture the feedback structures.

I and a few other students are looking deeper, and asking what it is exactly in social systems, that "holds" any of these structures in place. In typical texts, like Franklin's "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" there are marvelously powerful equations and tools and software for designing great systems - but they all assume that the parts you build with don't simply fall part as soon as you connect them up.

In the real social world, that assumption is false, at least by default. Anything you build today will be much more likely to be gone tomorrow than still there when you wake up. So, if we want to draw on the power of Control System Engineering, we first have to figure out how to make, or model, parts that don't simply fall part like they're made of sand. This becomes a required precursor step.

And, parts don't "get made" in social systems, which have a truly funny sort of "clay" to sculpt things out of. Parts of any scale larger than trivial have to get "grown", like muscles, which gets me back to where I started.

I realized my vocabulary of words and concepts to describe how muscles "grow" by using them "up" is missing almost all they key words, which, as Whorf pointed out, makes it hard to think about, let alone discuss. Or , if words fail me, maybe a good picture or an animation or something.

How general is this phenomenon? Can we make employees "grow" by "using them up?" Can we make companies grow by "using them up?' Can we make nations grow by using them up?

Hmm. Well, start with employees. Any good employee actually wants to be "used" in a "good sense" (alert - two solutions!) not in a "bad sense". They want to be "exploited", again in the "good meaning" of that word, not the "bad meaning." (nuance alert!)

They want, in short, to be "used up ..[and recharged to a stronger state] " like MUSCLES, not "used up ... and discarded, like soap. In fact, it's HARD-to-impossible for an employee, or a member of a sports team, or a member of the Army, to "be all you can be" without an external social structure forcing [ nuanced word] you [nuanced noun] to "use yourself up" and "push yourself" and get through the pain / "the annoying feel of weakness leaving the body."

And, wow, are we not wired linearly for this multiday-process-loop. In the short run, rather than happily encouraging us to use them, our muscles complain bitterly about being disturbed from their slumber. Once "warmed up" or after a "great workout" they change their tune, and suddenly we get an "endorphine high" -- but that's way later than when we need it. So even this loop, maybe a month long, of getting the "pull" of the endorphine high to reach back around the feedback loop and inform the bitching-muscle part is nuanced and subtle and something no one ever explained to me before, let alone modeled for me or for a company or department or team growth process.

So, from the starting point, using up a muscle seems "hard" and "painful", and people who do it seem incomprehensible. I mean, they jog in the sleet in the middle of icy roads. Clearly insane.
Yet, "once you get into it" (nuance) the perspective changes and suddenly it becomes both possible and then enjoyable and rewarding.

But, I just don't have good pictures or words for the parts here. There's a ten-minute to 1 hour loop proess of warming up, a 2-5 day process of "recharging", and a 1-2 month process of learning that this is building you up not tearing you down that all have to fit hand-in-glove for this thing to fly at all.

It does fly, it can fly, and I'm finally figuring that out, much to the dismay of my downstairs neighbors who hear my weight-bench and think the ceiling is falling at 6 AM. The 6 AM part doesn't help.

So I can DO it, but I can't MODEL it yet so I can discuss it with someone else, let alone a very busy manager, and say "you need to do THIS" with your people, not "THAT", -- or better, build a "flight simulator" so they can interact and figure this out for themselves.

Boy, social literacy in this one alone would fix a lot of problems in how managers try to "develop" employees or teams and "fail.'

There's a lot of nuance, non-intuitive non-transitive loops, and multiple solution equations here that make this thing, relatively easy to do, very hard to explain in words.

Maybe, with Vensim modeling, I can simulate it comprehensibly and in a way it can be shared with others and discussed at a business meeting.

There are some other subtleties here, the motion equivalents of "a lap" - something that both is and isn't really there. (I mean, where does your lap "go" when you stand up?)

There are things that are like momentum or worse, angular momentum with its bicycle wheel or gyroscopic force that can be stabilizing or maddeningly sideways.

Somehow, though, back to Templeton, building "wealth" and social capital involves a lot of "giving and receiving" and the residual side effects of muscle-building as a result of that cycle, so that, if it is repeated a lot, it gets stronger and wealthier and "healthier" and more "alive."

This suggests that "wealth" is a flow-process, like a lap, not a static-noun, like "a rock" or "a gold bar." It suggests that building up wealth is like building up muscles, where you have to "give" to "receive."

That's just fascinating. I have to build one.

Well, off to learn about "lean manufacturing" and what makes some companies thrive and others become run-down, un-fit for business, and finally fall apart like sand in the wind.

This has so much to do with "life" and "health" and "wealth" and feedback processes! I think they all have to come as a bundle, at each level, and across levels, to work at all.
Batteries and muscles have to "recharge" from outside resources, and it's not through any "action" (at THAT EXACT TIME) that the battery "does" that it gets recharged. People have to "build muscles" or "heal" the "damage" [?] which happens when we sleep, not when we are "doing " something or when the doctor "does something." The best we can do is get out of the way of the natural process [ hah!] that actually does the healing out of sight, off-line, in secret, where it is so easy to be forgotten while being the key to the whole thing.

Ciao.

Wade

Coherence and my weblog

So, I'm considering dumping all my weblogs into some organizer like Brainstorm and rearranging them to cleaner subject areas.

The problem is, the areas are all connected. So, the best I can do is to build a pyramid of increasingly detailed descriptions from different viewpoints that work their way down to the same underlying structure.

Clearly, at least five viewpoints I need are : religion, business/commerce, and life-science, artificial life/advance computer science, and government, in addition to "clinical health" and the incredibly misunderstood concept of "public health". That's seven. Big job. Maybe enough to triangulate.

My core concept is that there are underlying themes that tie together all these disciplines that have grown apart and largely stopped talking to each other or reading each other's literature. The specialization and differentiating aspects of Life have gotten ahead of the reintegration aspects of Life, and we have a massive "silo" problem, socially.

And, worse than just distinct areas, the field actively repulse each other. I get flak from public health for even being willing to talk about corporations in a positive sense -- obviously, to some, business and corporations are "the enemy." Of course, that cuts both ways, and many corporations consider public health to be public enemy number one, always going on about global warming or 20% of the population that's easy plague fodder, or the damn environment or something, as if jobs don't matter too. As if health care will somehow "support itself" in the absence of employment. Ask Detroit how that's working out.

So, yes - corporations, government, and religion are all potentially corruptible -- but that's a social problem to be addressed, like landing a human on the moon, not a fatal flaw to be accepted as given. Any "body" with life force in it is potentially corruptible. So what? The goal of health and public health is to overcome that corrupting influence on the individual and population levels respectively. And, in my model, the population level has a "life of its own", so there is a real living entity, "the public", with its own high-level health, largely independent of the lives and health(s) of all the individuals within it. And, ditto, corporations have a "life of their own" that is largely independent of the people who make up the corporation, and which can go on despite turnover of the individuals. As, of course, does your body - which has a life of its own above and beyond that of the individual cells that make it up and come and go invisibly to you, in "healing" processes.

So, we cannot stop decay and thermodynamics from disassembly processes, but we can counter those with even stronger regeneration and rejuvenation and re-construction processes, and that's what "health" in the larger sense is about. The "events" of disease or accident are really only distractions - the core question is what the underlying structures and processes are that lead to healing which is strong enough to overcome the inevitable simultaneous decay.

One form of decay is parasitic invasion from outside by things at a smaller scale (microbes: viruses, bacteria, tapeworms, etc.) Another form is parasitism by "macrobes" -- namely, being eaten by each other, or by lions, or by other corporations, or governments, or religions, for lunch. We all fact this exact same problem, on every scale of LIFE, from cellular to governments and nation-states and global corporations and very rich people and religions.

It is one of the few universal truths that is "scale invariant" which is great, because everyone has a vested interest in solving this. (...or a greedy interest in solving it first.)

This gets to the question of immune systems. You can't "heal" something at any scale if you can't tell whether it is broken or not, and you can't tell whether some process "belongs" or not. These turn out to be very hard but crucial problems. Nothing will scatter energy faster than a loss of "identity" or "core values" or "integrity", and these are the stakes that lead to all out, back-to-the-wall win-or-die-trying battles for "survival" of "us", or "our way of life" or "what we believe in" or "what we stand for" or "what this company is about."

So, in many posts, I develop the idea of s-loops or "sloops" - which seem to me to caputre the basic building block of every form of life on every scale. I define this new term of mine, "s-loop" as a self-aware, self-protecting, goal-seeking feedback loop. It follows almost instantly from the lack of "constants" in the world, that an s-loop's first job is pretty much guaranteed to be surrounding itself with supportive subordinate s-loops. So, the concept of the founder of a company has to embody itself in supportive roles and relationships of new hires.

When that process isn't strong enough to hold the center, it becomes a"corrupt", or in a human body, "cancerous." The job of clinical health on a single-person level, and public health on a nation-scale level, is to prevent that corruption from getting out of hand in the first place, because once it is out of hand, it is, well, out of hand.

So, prevention upstream of where corruption occurs then follows as being the core strategy of both types of health preservation. Repair of cancer or disease or corruption may be very large business, but is a distracting set of events from the core processes that need to be made stronger to avoid failure in the first place.

And, even though academics with very limited bandwidth and years to apply it have broken LIFE into ever smaller specialty areas, we, as humans or corporations or cultures or religions or nation states must live in every one of them simultaneously. We therefore have a different problem than academics face. We can't pick which world to live in and focus on. This simultaneity is the dominant feature of our lives, and the complexity first to be removed in academic discourse "within" a "field." So, alas, that discourse becomes quickly irrelevant to our "system level" issues.

But, hey, we (at any scale of "we") also lack enough bandwidth to encompass the problems generated by hundreds of "us" at that same scale interacting, let alone larger scale interactions that are simply beyond our mental capacity to even see, let alone grasp. We can't win that way, ever. What can we do besides despair?

There may be an answer in the magic of "recursion." Recursive functions are wonderful things that act on themselves to produce themselves in an infinite loop. Fractals are recursive, and infinite complexity can be generated with a trivial rule, repeated recursively forever.

So, a single "recursive" simple object can be infinitely complex on multiple "levels" simultaneously, and still simple enough to write down the generating function on a 3x5 file-card. Perhaps, if we write our equations and do our math using recursive structures as the primitive elements, instead of "numbers" we will be able to say something useful, or develop a way to measure, model, and deal with the hierarchically fractal world we live in.

Ken Wilbur refers to such infinite fractal chains of scale-invariant symmetry as "halons" and has written about them, although in a somewhat hard to access way. For our part, let's assume that maybe we can summarize, simplify, and describe some key properties of the complex hierarchy of a body, or corporation, or nation or culture in such a hierarchical-but-trivial math.

Is there something we can say about that without exploding our brains? Actually, a lot has been written and studied about "small-world" models with exactly that fractal complexity, and why the internet, for example is one, and how such models are remarkably robust against damage from noise or faulty components.

Still, there is something about "life" that leans forward expectantly and desires or wants to move into the future. Life is, in some subtle but real sense, "pulled" forward by its own perception of a better road ahead. Life is driven by anticipation, occasionally fulfilled. That seems important, and not very obviously a feature of a set of recursive mathematical functions.

Well, the key thing here is that the levels of the hierarchy of life have to "work together" for the whole thing to succeed and be sustainable. A cell that takes on the human body will be located, marked for execution, and executed. A terrorist that takes on a culture will similarly be attacked. A rogue department chairman who tries to exploit the company for his own gain at its expense will be located and eliminated, or should be.

Can it work? Apparently - I don't have a sense that my body's cells are busily engaged in a battle to see who is the "top cell" and who gets to "own all the ATP" and "order the other cells around. There is no Rambo-neuron in the brain that all other neurons bow down to and serve -- there is only an emergent being, an sloop, that encompasses all the neurons, but is still above and beyond them with an independent life of its own.

How that "life of its own" comes about is the key question here, far beyond "life-sciences." Entrepreneurs are creating new large-scale life-forms every day, bereft of a general principle that encompasses both them and biological organisms. LIFE evolves simultaneously on every level at once, - genes, individuals, species, biospheres.

So, this blog is about how private health, corporate health, health of the earth's biosphere (Our environment), and national health can not only co-exist, but can become mutually compatible. It is not about "which one will win" because the definition of "win" requires that everyone on every level continue to exist, and the term "win", at least as used in the USA lately, seems to imply "winner takes all and the loser is eaten for lunch" an a cannibalism approach to corporate survival and even national survival.

The USA's official strategic policy declares the USA to be number one and asserts a right to persist and defend that by unilaterally attacking any other country that even dares to think about possibly someday being strong enough to challenge us if they wanted to, whether they do or not. The unspoken assumption is that life is defined by a "winner eaters the loser for lunch" approach and algorithm.

The problem with that concept, aside from polarizing and forcing every other single country on the planet to start trying to figure out how to get rid of the USA before they themselves are eaten by this predator, is that this concept is not consistent with the nature of the rest of Life. It is, alas, a self-fulfilling prophecy, that, once stated, is hard to retract and tends to generate exactly what it feared, thereby self-justifying itself - it is, in other words, an s-loop itself, a concept fighting to stay alive and build itself an army of supporting s-loops. It distorts perceptions, to eliminate contrary evidence and emphasize positive evidence. It wants to live.

But, in life, there is no "top neuron". There is no "top body cell". The only template and pattern we have for success in the long term isn't based on "winner kills off the loser" and isn't a zero-sum game at all. The local dry-cleaner doesn't depend for survival on killing off all other businesses in the area, including those who produce delivery vehicles or building materials or solvents or cash-registers.

So, there's the problem. We want and need higher-level s-loops to be strong enough to organize lower-level life forces productively, but not exploitively. The force must be strong enough locally to overcome decay and ensure survival, but not so strong that it simply becomes destructive decay on a whole higher social level.

The key thing to realize is that, on these levels, "individuals" is a very misleading concept. Corporations, cultures, religions, and natures can do something that human bodies cannot do, so we keep forgetting it -- they can "merge".

While lions and tigers and bears can "win" and "lose", or "eat" and "be eaten", the verb "merge" is not relevant. Yet, at a species level, say, wolves and deer get along just fine - the wolves eat the weakest deer, strengthening the deep species, and both species win. Already this is not familiar.

It seems to me really important to get the concept "merge" into active discourse. Without it, yes, maybe our only remaining choices are to "win" or to "lose", to "eat" or "be eaten." There is, however, a third choice, merging, which was pointed out to us by our bodies as a solution.

This is the kind of discussion that I think it will take to get past local ideas of winning and losing, of labor versus management, or individual health versus corporate health, or corporate health versus national health, or "this religion" versus "that religion." If we seek solutions that pit levels of the hierarchy of life against each other, it seems to me, the structure will surely collapse, or be far weaker than someone who figures out how to get all the levels aligned in a supportive and mutually reinforcing way. (recursively)

Such structures can suddenly be capable of great performance, and of importing great amounts of energy and "wealth", which then greatly increases the chances of local decay and instability and corruption of power by power itself.

But that equation has a solution, of a healthy body, and my sitting here with my ten trillion cells is evidence of it. That's the only stable, sustainable definition of "health", and it isn't something we can "insure" or cover for 2/3 of "people" or 1 percent of "nations" or 1 percent of corporations. Either we solve it all, for everyone at every level, simultaneously, or it will collapse along that axis.

That requires coming to grips with this concept of "merging" and all the stories, narratives, and anxiety we have about a similar-looking concept of "being eaten" or "being assimilated." There's where the work is required, to disentangle those two concepts. Life is not "the BORG."

Well, it's time to stop with all this analysis and "go to work." Sigh. Till tomorrow, if the markets don't crash today....

Oh, sidebar - "recursion is the one case where dealing with more of life at once doesn't cause the solution to explode, and in fact, improves resolution and simplifies the model. If we can get readings from every different level and combine them, we can figure out what's universal and what's local noise and artifacts, and boil the model down to a few core key elements. In that sense, more is less and, unlike the typical PhD thesis, we should be EXPANDING our horizon and being MORE inclusive when doing this analysis, not less. The goal isn't to describe infinite detail - but to distill all of it down to a very small, very simple set of equations that are capable of generating all that complex detail if applied to themselves recursively.

So, no, I don't feel bad at trying to encompass way more than a federal grant or thesis advisor would recommend for "a paper" or a "research study." The simplicity I am seeking for those who know the math, is Laplacian simplicity, not Newtonian simplicity. ' As a metaphor, I want the average temperature of the world, and adding more numbers doesn't make the answer any harder, it only makes it more accurate and reliable. The details all wash out and go away, so there's no loss in adding them. I'm not trying to "draw" or even "sketch" the fractal, which is infinite - only to nail down the fractal dimension and generating function, which fits on a 3x5 file card with white space left over. Or, adding more extreme data points doesn't make the line you get from linear-regression curve-fitting any more complicated - it only makes the line a better fit. (Obviously I feel defensive about this.)

Wade