Clergy take on US Mortgage Mess

Martha Graybow, from Reuters, looks at what the US Clergy think about the mortgage mess in today's Washington Post. I agree wholeheartedly that there are "spiritual solutions to economic problems" but don't see them mentioned in that article.

One characteristic of spiritual solutions is that they tend to look at the bigger picture, in all three dimensions of space, time, and social scale. Like great health care, the solutions are proactive, preventing the car crash in the first place, not miraculously repairing the damage and deaths following it.

The solutions involve what seems to be a lost art these days - understanding the actual causes of outcomes, and the consequences of our own actions, and then, gasp, altering our behavior so we don't get into trouble next time.

The USA has made the news lately for the poor state of health here, and I'm not talking about insurance but simply the physical health of people. The upper quarter of white American males, for example, are less healthy than the bottom quarter of white males in England.

Why? Compare the strategies. England, with universal care, tries to prevent health problems and helps people eat well and stay fit and not do dumb things. The USA tries to have the most astoundingly heroic rescue and repair service so we can smoke, drink, and do dumb things, and then not have to face the consequences, sometimes. Of course, the culture of abandon of self-control is spread widely, and the access to repair-services is restricted, which makes for many sick poor people. What's less recognized is that even the rich end up worse. No doctor can make you better after a heart attack and transplant than you would have been if you'd stayed fit in the first place, either physically or psychologically.

With airplanes with those T-shaped tails, with the small wings ("elevators") up high on the tail, there is a design issue. If the plane descents at the wrong angle, turbulence ("stalling") from the body of the plane surrounds the tail, which loses the ability to change the angle of the plane. If you get into this condition, typically, the plane will descend into the ground before the airport. Not good.

Pilots have a question: "What do you do when you get into this condition?" and the answer is "Don't get into that condition."

And here is the difference between a novice learning lessons too late, and professionals. Professionals figure out what it takes so they don't end up in that condition, and what kind of training they need to do that, and build it into the training program so they can, in fact, "not do that." Social wisdom from other people's experience is built into everyone's training or retraining. That works, going forwards. It doesn't fix the past, of course.

So, when we look at an equivalent question to the mortgage mess, such as "What would it take to get young people not to drive too fast on icy roads?" the answer that comes to mind is "It would take a miracle."

Precisely.

It would take maturity, training, a social ethic of responsibility, a social ethic of competence, and an ability to overcome the impulse to rush and damn the consequences. All of these things are possible for people, and some people can do all of those.

The "miracle" isn't that the people wake up one day and are suddenly good drivers, but that they have the social support system that, over a long period of time, gives them the internal capacity to master skills, to survive the short-term costs of responsibility, to overcome temptation and the short-run impulses to cheat, etc.

What's "miraculous" is that this "bounce-shot" works, when you can't sink the pool ball in the pocket directly. If you try to do this activity on your own, you'll generally fail. It's hard, and it involves persistence and local costs for some distant future benefit, and you'll run out of steam regardless how well intentioned the start is.

This "steam" to keep on going is crucial. We aren't taught about this in school, sadly, despite the fact that everyone knows about it and I believe it would stand up to rigorous experimental designs and tests.

Where does this "steam" come from? What gives young people the ability to say "No!" to drugs or speeding or ill-advised sex, or the ability to stay in school, or the ability to say "No!" to a dangerous mortgage, or the ability to rise above ego and consult with others and avoid putting their foot in that mortgage bear-trap in the first place?

Some kind of larger scale, persistent social structure is needed to hold this learning and navigational advice, and some kind of practice and habit is required to develop the strength to "obey" or "submit" to that outside higher authority when the inside impulses all want to go the old way.

For pilots, professional organizations and ethics may be enough, although federal standards help somewhat. Great pilots are far above what standards require, because they use outside social support to keep themselves in line.

For most of us in daily life, we need some kind of equivalent. Organized religion has historically served this role, when it doesn't get lost in itself and lose its own way.

So, while the government's "abstinence only" method of birth control is demonstrably broken and ineffective, the reason is not that abstinence may be a good practice for teens (and others), but that it is simply not possible for fragmented individuals, on their own strength, to carry out that practice and survive temptation.

In between the chaos of everyone repeating every mistake over and over, and the rigidity of dead dogma controlling every aspect of everyone's lives is a sweet spot that can provide make good pilots or drivers of us all.

These kind of problems are not healed by prayer after the crash, but by organized activity long before the crash designed to prevent it from ever happening.

Like Mr. Rodney Dangerfield, prevention "don't get no respect." It works, it can work, it has worked, it will work - but it's an organized social activity, not something an individual does for or to themselves.

In the mix of making it happen are deeper spiritual issues of identity, motivation, purpose, awareness, externally-based stability and power, and "steam".

God, we all could use more "steam." We just wish it was free.

It's not free, but it is affordable. It's something we can do for each other that requires no huge government program and, in fact, would probably choke and die if the government tried to run it.

At this point, most people look, sigh, and turn sadly away saying "They'll never do that."

I'd like to see what would happen if the 3 hours a day of TV indoctrination encouraged social responsibility with eyes open, instead of discouraging it and encouraging blind yielding to whatever impulse the advertisers or politicians can create in us at that second.

I think the change would indeed justify the term "spiritual" sufficiently to use that word even in an academic sense. Actually, I think the reconnection to the larger "us" goes deeper, but even if it only went this deep, it would be worth investigating.

And I'm confident that, like discovering the planets, if we charted out all the known effects and watched behaviors, we'd see patterns of unexplained variation that would cause us to look even deeper for something else going on.

It's a fascinating question. Meanwhile, short term, there are solutions to our problems but we refuse to accept them, wanting, I don't know, something more glamorous or short-term.

Being able to say "yes" to saying "no" is enough of a miracle to pray for daily.

We're still trying to build some sort of moral-Rambo model, where we have internal strength that doesn't require external support -- a GPS that works without satellites. And, sure, there are inertial navigation units that weigh 200 pounds we could carry around with us, even though they drift over time. That's a stupid solution when there are satellites in place already, so the GPS in our phone can be so tiny we don't notice the weight.

Same with wisdom. Satellites and a receiver is a better model.

Is this hard to do? Well, yes and no. Is it hard to use structural and civil engineering principles and computer-assisted design to make graceful bridges that don't fall down? Yes, but it is doable and we'd be pretty stupid not to have some group of people that learn it and do it for us.

Is it harder to make social structures that don't fall down, don't become corrupt, give us daily strength to persist our lessons and still have dynamic ability to adjust to changing times? Probably not that much harder.

We've just never tackled the problem that way, because even pondering questions of what determines our behavior or allows corruption to creep in raises emotions and resistance.

Still, it seems an obvious way to go. We just need to keep on asking "Why" one more time, and saying, ok, how can we tackle this problem in social engineering even with resistance and opposition and those who prefer these subjects not be studied?

This is nothing new. T.S. Eliot, in Choruses from the Rock (1934) says

There are those who would build the Temple,
And those who prefer that the Temple should not be built.
In the days of Nehemiah the Prophet
There was no exception to the general rule.

and

In the vacant places
We will build with new bricks
There are hands and machines
and clay for new brick
and lime for new mortar
where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech.

and

If men do not build
How shall they live?

That's the "new bricks" metaphor this weblog site is named for. It's a good idea.

photo credit: I35W bridge collapse photo from Poppyseed Bandits

New life forms from Synthetic DNA - Washington Post

The Washington Post today deals with "Synthetic DNA on the brink of Creating New Life Forms." Talk about children playing with matches... Rick Weiss begins " It has been 50 years since scientists first created DNA in a test tube..." I'd add - it has also been 50 years since Jay Forrester's classic piece on "unintended consequences."

Here was my reply:

wade2 wrote:

Bio-error indeed. Maybe error-gance is the bigger threat, and very real. Our social approach to low-odds of very-high-risk accidents, as Carl Sagan pointed out re return of samples from Mars, is completely overwhelmed by our normal intuition. At Los Alamos, the first atomic bomb was tested when only a minority of the scientists on the project (something like 6 of 14) thought it would detonate the earth's crust and explode the entire planet. No one was sure, so they tested it. Hmm.

Good books like "Lethal Arrogance" by Dumas and "Normal Accidents" by Perrow detail hundreds of examples of our tendency to run it till it breaks, and then, only then, stop to think.
The tools to even begin to think about the way coupled feedback-loops get their job done, such as System Dynamics, have languished for 50 years. MIT's John Sterman, in "Business Dynamics - Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World" , details the lack of correct intuition, even for the MIT community, brighter than most. PhD's don't generally help, and most of us have less to work with.

So, at best we can model and simulate, which has been done at the Santa Fe Institute for the last few decades, with "artificial life" - virtual life and virtual DNA, genetic algorithms breeding and evolving, to see what happens. http://www.santafe.edu/ describes the work of many Nobel Prize winners.

In short (1) the little buggers are far smarter than we are and (2) parasitism evolves almost instantly in every case. The lesson of the movie Jurassic Park is a mild taste of the tenet "Life will find a way."

If the rest of our human affairs were measured and mature and stable, this would be a risky business. Having unstable tyrants convinced they must "master" this technology and use it to attack others, or defend from attack (exact same research), leads to the Russian model of stockpiling hundreds of tons of Anthrax or worse, in delusions that bio-warfare would be controllable or could be "won".

There are good odds the viruses and fungi and insects will win, not so good for humans.

Life is built with interactions with emergent properties on multiple levels, and we tend to think of "machines" at one level with only one function. But genes don't work like machines, they work like cooperative swarms.

Bio-warfare research has a "life of its own" that should already put us on alert that it is way easier to create things that "might as well be alive" than we think. Since we cannot stop it, we are committed to trying to get ahead of it and get the reins back, which means we should pour billions into understanding the world that the Santa Fe Institute has pioneered - massive interactions, how they go good, and how they go bad.

It becomes clear very quickly that, with complex systems, by the time you realize you "shouldn't have done that" it's too late. Experience is something that comes just after we need it.
For very high-stakes mistakes, that's too late. If we keep gambling with the whole planet on the table, sooner or later we'll lose one turn.

One is all it takes.

12/17/2007 6:07:22 AM
=========

Actually, all the research on high-reliability systems like nuclear power plant control rooms show that the maturity of the social system is what makes or breaks the technology-based system. Psychologically safe environments are needed for people to raise their hand, without fear of reprisal, and question what the heck is going on.

What we have instead is a whole culture used to using fear as a workplace and political context to "get things done", as described by Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson.

The Shuttle Columbia (picture at left) exploded because of an "o-ring" problem, that all the project engineers knew about, and had in fact gone in that day to tell the boss to tell the White House that it was too cold to launch safely. They all lost their nerve under workplace pressure to "deliver" so the Pres could talk to an orbiting teacher during the State of the Union address. She did, in fact, leave a message for us (picture at left) of what happens when we don't listen -- but, I guess we're still not learning that lesson.

Further reading

The classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony:
"The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems",
https://mail.jhsph.edu/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf

Quoting the abstract:

Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

Another quote from the Washington Post article is this:

"We're heading into an era where people will be writing DNA programs like the early days of computer programming, but who will own these programs?" asked Drew Endy, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

How true that is. I've been programming computers for over 40 years, and agree that the programs they write will be exactly like the "single-threaded" programs that mess up our airline reservations and everything else. In fact, a look inside some place like a hospital reveals the workings of the multiple legacy computer systems cobbled together in absence of any fundamental theory at all of how many interacting things should be structured in order to be reliable. Thirty years of research in computer science on "distributed operating systems" and how to build reliability in has had close to zero impact on the quick and dirty, cut-corners-now-and-we'll-debug-it-later model that vendors find locally profitable, but that always breaks down, producing, ta da!, more profitable rework. As a business model it's very popular; as a way of getting reliability, we all have seen the results. This is the culture we expect to "program" our genes? I'm not rushing to sign up.

The article quotes someone on the "unprecedented degree of control of creation" that the DNA technology gives us. Right. This is about the degree of "control" that a Labrador Retriever on your lap in the car at rush-hour has -- yes, it can turn the steering-wheel, but I wouldn't use the term "control" for what happens next. If you think our economy and business development and health care system are "under control", then maybe you would think genes could be "controlled" the same way - and they can, with about the same results.

Sadly, control requires maturity and depth of understanding, instead of simply strong muscles and a short attention span. I wish it were our strong suit as a nation, but see little evidence that it is, or even that it is valued or desired as a long-term goal.

We have instead young children playing with the cool gun they found in daddy's nightstand.

Oops.

======= Some after-thoughts:

Unlike the video games and computers this generation grew up with, life does not always have an "undo" button.

The core task of a civilization is to capture the wisdom we finally learn too late, and get it into a form that modifies the behavior of the next generation so those same lessons don't have to be learned all over again.

The hardest part of that task is that the next generation typically doesn't want to take advice from old people about situations the village elders seem way too concerned about - like, not going into debt over your head, you know, crazy stuff like that.

George Santayana said "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." I'd modify that slightly and add "Those who cannot learn from near-misses will someday not miss."

Each time we don't learn this, as a society, the costs go up. The biggest unknown in "the Drake Equation" about odds of there being other intelligent life in the galaxy that we could detect with radio is how long a civilization survives after it has gotten to the point where it has that much technology. The complete absence of any detectable signals from 100 trillion worlds "out there" suggests this is a pretty small number of years -- maybe under 200 years.

At the rate we're going, we're heading towards adding one more point to that data set.

Learning how to learn from our mistakes and our own past seems to be as important a problem as global warming, but actually more urgent, because time is running out a little faster on the 400,000 ways, besides global warming, that we can end human life on the planet.

Humans are remarkably inventive, and if every weapon and sharp object on the planet vanished, they'd find ways to attack each other with stones. Instead of tackling each symptom like global warming or genocide or terrorism, it would seem wiser to track further upstream and find the root-cause problem for why people are driven to fight, and fix that.

======================================

More further reading:

On High Reliablity organizations, which are sobering. They try really really hard to not have accidents, and still don't succeed from time to time:

http://www.highreliability.org/

I'm sure the US military tries very hard to keep nuclear weapons under control. Even that intense level of attention isn't enough to do the job 100% of the time, illustrating John Gall's law that "complex systems simply find complex ways of failing."

"Honey, I lost the nuclear weapons"

The US National Institutes of Medicine on how much the social relations of the front-line teams matter when your job is to get reliability in hospital care:

Crossing the Quality Chasm and other links

=========================
Photo credits :
Oops (car) by estherase
US Space Shuttle by Andrew Coulter Enright

Gentlemen first

Columnist Ruth Marcus, in today's Washington Post, discusses power politics these days in the Capital, and reactions to the female gender. It's rather revealing about beliefs about the nature of power and how to judge it. Here's an excerpt:

In case you missed it, the vice president [Cheney] made those comments in an interview with the Politico. "Most striking were his virtually taunting remarks of two men he described as friends from his own days in the House: Democratic Reps. John Dingell (Mich.) and John P. Murtha (Pa.)," wrote my former Post colleagues Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei and John F. Harris.

Cheney, they wrote, "scoffed at the idea of two men who spent years accruing power showing so much deference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the big spending and energy debates of the year." The House's senior Democrats "march to the tune of Nancy Pelosi to an extent I had not seen, frankly, with any previous speaker," Cheney said. "I'm trying to think how to say all of this in a gentlemanly fashion, but [in] the Congress I served in, that wouldn't have happened."

Asked if these men had lost their spines, he responded, "They are not carrying the big sticks I would have expected."

Gentlemanly, indeed. Once, Murthas and Dingells were Big Men on the Hill, swinging the Big Sticks of committee chairmen, Cheney is saying. Now they are, if not nancy boys, Nancy's Boys. Somehow, Newt Gingrich took on the committee chairs when he was speaker, and no one questioned their, um, equipment.

I guess there are people who believe the only kind of power that others understand is brute force and immediate, but I certainly don't believe that's the only kind of power that there is.

In many health and public health settings, persistent chronic pressure has more impact than acute events. Chronic slow low-key pressure can come in under the radar, in fact, of those scanning the skies for acute attacks.

Asian martial arts schools have been teaching for thousands of years the art of "fighting without fighting", as portrayed somewhat humorously by Bruce Li in "Enter the Dragon". The art of winning invisibly features prominently in "The Art of War" by Sun Tsu, written 2000 years ago, and still valid today.

I noted also today that, after several years of kicking the Chinese in the shins and demanding they hurry up and let the dollar fall, and make it fall faster, now that it's falling, the treasury secretary is asking China to increase investments in the US so the dollar won't fall so fast.

Long term thinking about consequences can be helpful sometimes.

There's no question that, in the short run, rock beats water -- but in the long run, water beats rock. In the short range, electromagnetic forces dominate and gravity seems to not exist, but in the long term, on larger scales, gravity dominates everything else. The last shall be first.

A small constant force, working persistently over a long time, can deliver far more power than a huge but very short force.

And, if you are talking about managing growth, not demolition, long-term shaping forces are at least as powerful as acute events.

The best strategies will be based, as I've said before, on taking all the different scales of space and time into account. The US is losing its position in the world primarily because it has been so busy with short-term events that it has neglected to have any consistent long-term strategy, aside from "have a big stick."

Well, we have the largest stick in the world, more nuclear weapons than anyone by far, the biggest and fastest army, and, frankly, so what? It doesn't seem to buy much. Meanwhile, the rest of the social infrastructure we neglected, including the education and health of our children, is crumbling and demanding an increasing amount of attention.

This is a really expensive and frightening way to rediscover what other wise people already knew.

There's an old feminist joke:

Question: How can we be sure that Santa Claus is a man?
Answer: He does something huge once a year and thinks he's a saint.

There's insight here. It's worth reflecting on that.

Of course, the USA is a relatively young country, still feeling its oats, and still convinced that its elders are total morons. It still has the sense it doesn't need to worry about all that stuff they did, because that's old fashioned and it has "Technology."

I'm hoping at some point it will grow up enough and be enough of a man to be able to say "Oops, I was wrong." That's another measure of strength, and that other thingie: "maturity."

The end of unity in the USA?

"It was the best of times It was the worst of times." Charles Dicken's description captures the rapidly shifting ground in the USA today regarding the "united" part of "United States". All biological species tend to fly apart, as do all flocks of birds or schools of fish. Species that survive need a strong force that continually pulls them back towards the center of mass of the group.

For humans, research has shown that you can generate a face that will be considered "beautiful" by finding the center of every feature across all races and combining them - giving a result like Catherine Zeta-Jones that seems familiar to everyone and yet a little exotic to all in a pleasant way.

Similarly, the behavior of a flying flock of birds can be generated in a computer with just a few simple rules, one of which is "Move towards the center of the flock", and another being "Don't run into the bird next to you." (If you have Java enabled, there is a cool animated interactive flock simulator that you can experiment with here.)

So it is startling to me to see a collapse of this principle in the central governing body of the US, the US Congress, or in the government of the states of Michigan and California. Congress is playing with fire and a current extension it granted itself on its homework until this Friday, Dec. 14th. (It was due October 1st, and I wrote earlier about the pending US Government shutdown here. )


The mood is described in a New York Times article today : Muscle Flexing in Senate: G.O.P. Defends Strategy, which I excerpt here:

WASHINGTON —...

[...it] was more than a little telling when Mr. McConnell laid down his mark in the current budget fight on Tuesday, informing the Capitol Hill press corps that he was ready to offer Democrats a deal ...the Republicans should get virtually everything they want.

Mr. McConnell and his fellow Republicans are playing such tight defense, blocking nearly every bill proposed by the slim Democratic majority that they are increasingly able to dictate what they want...

It also explains why so little is getting done in Congress right now.

But there are also risks. The latest New York Times/CBS News poll found that the stagnation in Congress has made an impression. Just 21 percent of Americans say they have a favorable view of Congress and 64 percent disapprove. And the two parties have been unyielding, calculating that voters will blame the other side.

“I am not seeing much common ground, meeting in the center,” said Senator Gordon H. Smith of Oregon, a Republican who is seeking a third term. “And if we don’t find that, the Senate will fail in its governing responsibilities.

“The thing that’s important to remember is that the Senate was structured to govern from the center, to find the common sense. There is little sense about this place right now.”

Democrats say the Republican stance, especially on spending, is reckless and aimed at shutting down the government.

By the calculation of Mr. McConnell and other Republicans, voters will reward them for stopping the Democrats from doing all sorts of things that the Republicans view as foolish.

Aides to the Republican leadership said they hoped to supplement that message with an agenda that they plan to lay out early next year and that they said would show clear differences with the Democrats.

In the meantime, Mr. McConnell and the Republicans, with Mr. Bush’s support, effectively have a stranglehold on the Senate. That has in turn created bitterness between Democrats in the Senate and House, where Democrats have a larger majority and more leverage.

Mr. Reid met Tuesday afternoon with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California as the Democrats continued to struggle to formulate an “omnibus” spending package that would bundle 11 appropriations bills and avoid a shutdown of government agencies.

So, it seems clear that the strategy of focusing on differences and amplifying them instead of seeking common ground has managed to stop operation of the Congress almost entirely. And it seems clear that the Republicans don't deny that, and are delighted with that result, figuring voters, or maybe corporate supporters, will be thankful and reward them for preventing any motion in the direction the elected Democratic majority wants to go now.

This also seems to be an unprecedented focus on winning everything possible today, regardless of whatever hard feelings or long term damage to working relationships it may cause the future.

It also seems to be an embodiment of the assumption that the way to get maximum long-term benefits is to keep on fighting intense battles for maximum short-term benefits. The belief being apparently that winning every battle will surely win the war.

The fallacy in that logic was a subject here recently. Only certain kinds of things have the property that short-term and long-term values are the same. The Japanese seem to be at one end of the spectrum, focusing on long-term gain, and the US seems to be at the other end, focusing on short-term gain.

Why is that?

One obvious reason may be a simple lack of education in the country that short-term and long-term results may go in opposite directions. This doesn't seem to explain how the US at one point 200 years ago "knew" that, and has increasingly been "forgetting" it.

It is not just the Congress, of course, that shares this misconception. Most US businesses seem to be in the grip of the myth of "EVA" - Economic Value Added, trying desperately to maximize short-term profits, and not understanding why that strategy isn't helping long-term prosperity.

But the article a few days ago by Stanley Fish in the New York Times, advocating a Machiavellian government, ready to cheat and lie at any time to gain its way, seems part and parcel of this approach. Again, there is an obsession with "pragmatism" that seems to me just a code-word for short-term victory and a lack of contemplation of the long-term impact of everyone following such a strategy.

But it goes both ways, and has a feedback loop, and closes in on itself and latches. If, in fact, you assume that the other side in any disagreement is bargaining in bad faith and has no intention of living up to its word or keep its promises, then why should you accept any promise of future benefit at the cost of an immediate loss?

The whole concept of "horse-trading" as it was called assumes that a man's word is good for something. It assumes that people care about their social reputation for honesty, because that is the currency needed to keep the system running. No lawyer will be around to enforce the back-room verbal deals that have to be made, so they must rely on the core value of honor, even among thieves.

So it may be that abandoning all pretense of caring about honest-dealing, as Mr. Fish advocates, and as many other apparently go along with, has the result of destroying the entire basis on which compromises necessary to keep the country from fracturing are based.

Certainly, a flock of birds simulated in a computer, if the instructions are changed to fly away from instead of towards the center, will immediately break apart.

What I think the Republican strategists are missing is that it will not split into two flocks, because there is momentum and a long term impact to deal with. If every person on the Republican side has come around to believing in and advocating emphasis on divisiveness and differences, yes, the flock will split into two -- and then the Republican portion will explode into a million separate pieces.

Because, at that point, why should any Republican trust any other Republican to deliver on promises that are made? Even "loyalty" is based on the concept that present suffering will be rewarded later. If that promise is worthless, why should anyone be loyal?

It's like the old joke of a man who asks a Boy Scout if he would trip an old lady for a million dollars, and the Scout considers and says "Yes." Then the man asks him if he would do it for one dollar, and the Scout replies "What do you take me for?"

And the man answers: "I already know what you are. I'm just trying to find your price."

I'm not on a personal vendetta here against Republicans, and I'm trying to be neutral but scientific. I simply can't see how a strategy of developing strong muscles and momentum pushing us apart instead of pulling us together and overcoming differences can possibly work.

By my calculations and logic if the Republicans "win" that battle, they lose the war.

Maybe I missed something. The hot-lines are open, and anonymous comments are welcome and won't be removed unless they involve personal attacks, inappropriate language, or advertising. I really am curious what the thinking is here of how this is going to play out.

Maybe the thinking is that cooperation is not required, only obedience; and obedience can be obtained by the swift and merciless execution of raw power, punishing those who disobey and break ranks of loyalty. This is "theory X" of corporate power, writ large.

And, there are two things wrong with that strategy.

One is that life is too complex these days to be understood from any one point of view, regardless how strongly enforced. More precisely, the stronger the single view is enforced and dissent suppressed, the more blind that leadership becomes to anything outside their limited experience. People may be brought into line, but Life will not. Global warming cannot be bullied into compliance. Gravity will continue to work. New infectious viruses will not care what you think. Life goes on. Domination of the whole world is simply not possible.

Similarly, the efforts to achieve "control" by continually simplifying the world until it becomes manageable is the myth that has brought many large corporations down. It won't simplify just because you wish it would, and you only end up with a simple model that has no connection to reality, producing results that refuse to stay in line. As any biologist knows, simplification of an ecosystem is the pathway to death. Diversity is power, when it comes to survival. Well, diversity with a continual distributed, voluntary restoring force towards the middle.

The second thing wrong with that strategy is that the most serious risk to stable control is not external, but internal.

No person, or group of people, has some sort of absolute reference frame. As soon as you break off input from outside, the internal world is free to start rotating and twisting, which will be entirely invisible from inside. The rubber sheet of the world stretches and shrinks, and the people embedded in that world stretch and shrink with it, unaware of these changes because it still looks "right" to them. But "right" has become disconnected to the larger world, and starts drifting, both overall, and then breaking apart into separate pools of "right" that differ with each other.

This may be quite visible to those outside that world, but will be invisible and denied to those inside its clutches.

I am not sure, but from the examples I can see I think that pathway leads to a collapse of morale, motivation, and to complete fatigue and depression as well. Certainly this is true, overall, to people who become fragmented from society. Fragmentation is followed very quickly with increasing isolation, depression, deterioration of health on all fronts, and perhaps violence against the world, which seems to be going wrong, or against oneself, possibly suicide.

It's the larger scale version of what our cells do in our body if they are removed from the body -- a process called "apoptosis" kicks in, and the cells commit suicide.

We seem to rely on some connection and alignment with the outside world, through all sorts of invisible pathways that we can only dimly sense, indirectly.

It makes sense. Life on Earth has evolved for billions of years, developing immune systems and the ability to police itself and restore health. If some part breaks off and starts growing on its own, which we'd call cancer, generally the body moves in and destroys it or by cutting it off from nutrition, kills it off. Life is way bigger than any one person, or group of people, and if they go head-to-head with Life, I think Life generally wins. It has about a billion years more practice and experience at this sort of thing.

Our bodies aren't built with a single Rambo-cell using super-human powers to command and direct all the other cells to do what they need to for the body to work. The idea is absurd. No cell could possibly understand, let alone keep track of all the required activities that need to go on for life to continue, let alone manage them centrally.

Past a certain size, either the body manages itself, or it dies. It cannot be "run" from some command post. It's not a question of raw power of the bullying type -- if the King cell had a super-death-ray that could kill any cell that disobeyed, it wouldn't help. It simply can't be run from the top.

That's not how very large aggregates of living things work. There are no successful examples based on the Rambo model. Those simply violate the underlying physics and math of Life. All attempts at centrally planned economies have failed, for the same underlying reason -- it can't be done.

There's just too much to plan, and the best a central authority can do is "prioritize" and work on a few "top things", and that requires building a mental context to get mental arms around a problem, and you can only do a few of those context shifts a day, if that. But reality has thousands of new "top things" that have to be dealt with each day, every day, or they will crash and burn and damage the overall system. Just picture trying to centrally manage how to feed 8 million New Yorkers every day, and what would happen if the Government, any government, tried to "manage" that process and "plan" it. Let alone a government that specialized in paralysis and stopping all planning operations dead in their tracks. So in a month or two we'll restart the food? That's not a plan. Now multiply that by a billion.

For that matter, imagine how much you'd get done if you had to spend your day regulating your own digestion and metabolism on a second by second basis.

That's the task. No one can "manage" that centrally. The more it's managed the worse it gets.

Oh, it does need management and structure, but the control system required is distributed and emergent, a system thing, not central and designed by mere humans.

And that requires all the parts to work together, above their diverse functions, in an overarching unity that recognizes a common bond and a common support system.

That's the model Life uses. It's the only model we know that works. I think we should pay more attention to understanding it and aligning our selves with it, or at least with the principles involved in developing healthy strength and a prospering, functioning body.

So, who's right? Well, everyone's partly right, as usual. A monolithic central planning government, trying to run everything will not work. An absence of any control structure will not work. We need to evolve the same kind of emergent yet distributed control that our bodies have, simultaneously globally aware, operating as with a single spirit, and still locally active, specializing in a billion local issues. We need both "freedom" and "law and order".

That is not, however, the end point of unfettered competition and "freedom" of every part to do its own thing on its own schedule. The parts still have to submit to the whole -- but the whole is not run by any single part. I think they had that idea 200 years ago when the US was formed.

And, curiously, if the shouting and screaming and pushing and name-calling would take a break, I think everyone actually agrees with the goal, just not how to get there.

Maybe it needs a better and more vivid simulation and animation to get more widely understood. There is no solution where one person, or one small group, or one religion, or culture, or political part, or corporation, or one nation-state "runs" everything and everyone.

This jockeying to be "in charge" and to be that "one" is based on a total misunderstanding of what is possible anymore in a small but fractally-complex world.

A different kind of overarching common spirit and unity is where we need to go. We are so close,with instant world-wide communication, and it is the best of times. But we are so much in apoplectic panic about loss of control and the risks of not being "number one" that it is the worst of times.

I agree that humans, or cells, or corporations, or nations left to their own devices and free-will will behave badly. I also believe that, as our human bodies discovered, it is still possible to constrain that free-will without killing it, if some level of submission to the whole is accepted.

It's not a loss - it's a gain. It's giving up a false hope of something we could never have for a real plan for getting something we could all use, and a world economy and political and military system that isn't as unstable and prone to collapse or self-destruction as this one.

I should state that my thinking here is guided by my own limited understanding of the teachings of the Baha'i Faith, and I recommend reading up on it directly for any readers who are not familiar with it. But, I am not the spokesman for the Baha'is, so I'll simply close with their own statement on the subject:

If the Baha'i experience can contribute in whatever measure to reinforcing hope in the unity of the human race, we are happy to offer it as a model for study.
From: The Promise of World Peace, a statement of the Baha'i Universal House of Justice, October, 1985.

Wade


Here's the Dicken's quote in context:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
English novelist (1812 - 1870)

Photo credit: "fighting fan" by K0P (on flickr)

With a little help from our friends

- "With a little help from our friends"

ScienceDaily (Nov. 1, 2007) - Spending just 10 minutes talking to another person can help improve your memory and your performance on tests, according to a University of Michigan study to be published in the February 2008 issue of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

"In our study, socializing was just as effective as more traditional kinds of mental exercise in boosting memory and intellectual performance," said Oscar Ybarra, a psychologist at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and a lead author of the study with ISR psychologist Eugene Burnstein and psychologist Piotr Winkielman from the University of California, San Diego

.

Quoted in the Healing Through Unity newsletter.

"Healing Through Unity" is published for the purpose of sharing thoughts, comments and experiences on how the teachings of the Baha'i Faith are being applied to physical and spiritual health. Other than the quoted Holy Writings, the material in this newsletter represents the thoughts and opinions of the writers and has no authority. None of the material published in this newsletter is intended to be a substitute for the advice of a physician.

You are free to copy articles, provided you indicate the source of the article. There are 6 issues per year. The newsletter is produced in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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You are free to copy articles, provided you indicate the source of the article. There are 6 issues per year. The newsletter is produced in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

My second response to Mr. Fish's dislike of principles

"... The permanence and stability achieved by any association, group or nation is a result of -- and dependent upon -- the soundness and worth of the principles upon which it bases the running of its affairs and the direction of its activities. The guiding principles of the Baha'is are: honesty, love, charity and trustworthiness; the setting of the common good above private interest; and the practice of godliness, virtue and moderation..."
(Universal House of Justice, from a letter dated 18 December 1982, quoted in the compilation, "Crisis and Victory," p. 45-46)

Sleeping with the Fish

Stanley Fish says we should get rid of honest leaders and replace them with ones who can "get the job done." I totally disagree. If it was just some guy on the bus saying that, I might ignore it - but Mr. Fish is an Opinion writer for the New York Times. He is speaking what many people are thinking, and even if my voice shakes, I must try to respond.

He speaks his mind in his column "Think Again" in his most current post "Integrity of Craft: The Leadership Question" (Dec 9, 2007).

And, to be fair, the ideas he proposes are mostly those of the famous historical contemporary of Christopher Colulmbus, an advisor to Western kings and author of "The Prince" , namely, Machiavelli. I link to the Wikipedia introduction because that article seems accessible and balanced and has good links to further reading. Quoting from it:

Machiavelli's best known work is The Prince, in which he describes the arts by which a Prince (a ruler) can retain control of his realm...

A careless reading of The Prince could easily lead one to believe that its central argument is "the ends justify the means" - ... that any evil action can be justified if it is done for a good purpose. This is a limited interpretation, however, because Machiavelli placed a number of restrictions on evil actions. Machiavelli does not dispense entirely with morality nor advocate wholesale selfishness or degeneracy. Instead he clearly lays out his definition of, for example, the criteria for acceptable cruel actions (it must be swift, effective, and short-lived). ...

While Machiavelli emphasized the need for morality, the sole motivation of the prince ought to be the use of good and evil solely as instrumental means rather than ends in themselves. A wise prince is one who properly exercises this proper balance. Pragmatism is a guiding thread through which Machiavelli bases his philosophy. The Prince should be read strictly as a guidebook on getting to and preserving power.... the ideal society is not the aim.

In fact, Machiavelli emphasizes the need for the exercise of brute power where necessary and rewards, patron-clientalism etc. to preserve the status quo. Machiavelli's assumption, that human nature is fundamentally flawed, is also reflected in the need for brute force to attain practical ends.

Reasoning from that, Fish concludes that:

Don’t blame [Katie] Couric for these softballs. They were devised, CBS News says, in response to prospective voters who are saying things like, “Our president has to be a person of integrity,” “morals, strong morals” and “character is everything.”

I beg to differ. Integrity — the quality of standing up for the same values in every situation no matter whom you’re speaking to — is probably not a qualification for navigating the treacherous and ever-shifting waters of domestic and international diplomacy. Morals strongly held may preclude the flexibility and compromise so essential to political negotiation. And if character were really everything, candidates would be judged by their relationships with family and friends (Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton might not fare too well if that were the measure) rather than by their ability first to recognize, and then to deal with, the many problems facing the nation....

“the question of who is the better man,” Hobbes says, “has no place in the condition of mere nature” — and everything to do with his political skills. ...

Is he good at the job? — does he have the aptitude? — is a more pertinent question than is he good?

So, although I disagree totally with Machiavelli, Hobbs, and Fish on this key point, I thank them for laying out the question so clearly.

I am always quick to point out in this weblog that things that look one way at one level look quite different at a different level, and we need to be careful and do a good search before we reach our conclusions. What looks "obvious" locally may not be obvious, or even correct, when viewed globally.

So, this is a fair question. Is it true that leadership does not require honesty and integrity?

Fish summarizes his argument (that I find captures the seductive Kool-Aid of this error):

Integrity — the quality of standing up for the same values in every situation no matter whom you’re speaking to — is probably not a qualification for navigating the treacherous and ever-shifting waters of domestic and international diplomacy. Morals strongly held may preclude the flexibility and compromise so essential to political negotiation. And if character were really everything, candidates would be judged by their relationships with family and friends (Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton might not fare too well if that were the measure) rather than by their ability first to recognize, and then to deal with, the many problems facing the nation.

So, what's wrong with that argument? Isn't Fish just being "practical" as opposed to some sort of idealistic "boy scout" approach?

Well, first, Machiavelli truly didn't care about improving the world. His work is indeed a guide to those who taste power, like the taste, and want more, regardless what the long-term consequences are of their reign of power.

And, to be fair, 500 years ago who was monarch and how they ruled did not have much impact on global warming or the fate of all mankind. Things were simpler. Mistakes were less important. At the end of a king's reign, the world was pretty much the same as it was at the start, and it was largely a question of who got to be king for that period.

So, yes, Machiavelli is probably right on the issue that, in the short run, people who abruptly cheat and lie and steal have an advantage over those who are honest or worse, who are gullible and made no provision that their leader was lying to them and simply out to consolidate his own power.

But, that is only part of the picture, and we need the rest to see what's happening. How does this strategy play out in the long run?

First, the expectations of a leader are a strong shaping force on everyone being led. This is the whole core of management's "Theory X" (people are bad) versus "Theory Y" (People are good). In fact, research shows, you get a self-fulfilling prophecy either way at least in the corporate world. If employees or coworkers or students are treated as if they are evil and stupid, they will justify your expectations - but, paradoxically, if they are treated as if they are good and competent, they will also justify your expectations.

That's what leadership is about, within the organization - setting a tone for how everyone else should behave. And research shows that it is a very powerful tone indeed, at least within the corporate world. We need to look at how strategies play out at different scales and try to sort out what is noise or accident of perspective, and what is the underlying reality. So, what happens in the corporate world is relevant to thinking about the nation-state world. In fact, as huge global corporations get to the size of small countries, or larger, the two worlds merge.

So, what corporate model do we like? Enron?

Well, again the question gets down to : Is it ok if the CEO is a crook, so long as they are very effective crooks and making money for us while they're getting rich themselves? Obviously some people think so, and have no difficulty investing in, say, Tobacco companies and other Merchants of Death, so long as there is short-term profit in it. After all, they may reason, "God is dead, Hell doesn't exist, it's OK to kill millions of people a year for profit as long as no blood actually gets on my hands, and besides, look, we're getting away with it, you idiots!"

I guess they do reason that way, in fact.

But this "getting away with it" part needs some further thought.

The merchants of sub-prime mortgages also thought they were "getting away with it" and, to some extent, they may in fact have ripped off several hundred billion dollars and stashed it safely offshore and left the mess were all in now for everyone else to clean up.

As I said above, the consequences of these actions are getting larger and larger. This isn't arguing over who rules some mud huts and peasant farmers in a 40 square mile kingdom anymore. This latest rip-off threatens to bring down the entire world economy, and the ripples and after-shocks are still reverberating, with daily news that "the worst is yet to come."

So, here's a news flash. Sometimes the consequences of our actions are delayed.

In fact, I was having a rant about that in the car yesterday with my wife as partially willing audience. It seemed to me (still does) that many policies, like say the Federal Reserve's management of interest rates, are based on what's visible today, not on what's been already set in motion that hasn't yet come home to roost.

Like gasoline prices. Suddenly, as it becomes clear Christmas shopping isn't going to be a joy to investors, the price of gasoline falls a quarter a gallon, despite tighter world supplies. Well, it's a little late for that. That should have been 4 months ago. This is like driving a car by not starting to slow down for a turn until you get even with the road you want to turn onto, and then hitting the brakes and turning the steering wheel -- you're going to overshoot and end up in the adjacent yard, at best.

Because some things take a while to have effect, we learn the hard way from experience that we need to have some "lead time". Things have delayed effects. We know that, sort of, even if we mostly keep forgetting it and learning it again the hard way. The time to work on that term-paper is 3 weeks before it's due, not the night before it's due. But that's "hard" to do, for humans, and mostly the lights are on all night, again, every term, every paper, as we repeat the same mistake over and over again.

On a national level, the US seems to have nurtured many foreign leaders with the mental model that crooks are ok if they're our crooks -- Sadaam Hussein, Noriega, Osama Bin Laden come to mind to name a few. Then after we've funded and supported them and they turn out to, well, be thieves and terrorists, we turn around and spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to undo that choice, and make another just as bad, based on this Machiavellian model of life.

Morality aside, it seems to be a very inefficient process that keeps breaking down. And it's a very expensive process, in dollars and lives, or entire cultures and civilizations.

But morality is largely the present reminder of lessons we learned once long ago, and will learn again in the future if we don't listen now. Morality is a way of trying to protect ourselves, not from the bad other people in the world, as Fish describes, but from ourselves and our tendency to take the easy road, the tempting short-term gain that we will regret in the morning.

So, back to the core question. Is it possible to be both honest and strong? Are we stuck forever having to pick between honest wimps and dishonest strong men for our leaders?

As I said, clues to the answer to this may be in the corporate sector, not the history books. Large corporations are larger than small countries now, with larger budgets and way more power.

So, forget the nation-state level for a moment and ask the same question about or corporations. Is our only choice for CEOs Rambo-style crooks with big whips, or honest wimps who won't be able to hold the center in place?

Here's the issue: This is another one of those scale-sensitive thingies that look different depending on how far back you stand. It's like the cornstarch vat that is a solid if you run fast and a liquid if you move slowly. We need to pull out tools that work when both ends are true.

In the short run, a person who suddenly cheats may have a huge advantage over one who doesn't. This much is obvious. And often they are not "caught", much to our frustration.

But, the devastation doesn't need anyone outside to catch it to work, because it is self-working. Once you pull out the safety pins, it starts picking up speed downhill on its own. Believing that cheating works, what will they do? Well, they'll do it again, of course. And again. And again. It will become a lifestyle, and they'll shift around their rationalizations to adjust to it.

And, like a cancer, it will start growing in size. First some small cheat. Then if that works, a larger one. If that works, a larger one, and so on.

In fact, this describes a pathway known in game theory as "The gambler's ruin." Abandoning internal self-control, the person will start cheating more and more, on more things, in more ways, each time shifting their attitude a little more to make this behavior seem more justified, always seeking new evidence to support their conclusion that "everyone does this", etc.

But, God aside, the rest of the world is not dumb. People see. People know. Things start to show more and more, to be more and more brazen and self-justifying. Things one thought had been successfully covered up come back to light. People who have been cheated, annoyingly, get upset and start comparing notes.

But, again, the destruction doesn't come from without. It comes from within.

Increasingly convinced that "everyone does it", the cheat will now start to expect that every person they meet is similarly motivated and trying to rip them off while keeping a smiling face. Life becomes increasingly filled with enemies everywhere, on all sides. No one can be trusted. Everyone is plotting your destruction.

And, God forbid you succeed at cheating and acquire a lot of wealth. The more wealth you squirrel away, the more it will attract people who want to take it away from you. You end up only associating with crooks-like-you, now being persuaded that "everyone does it."

In fact, almost every large-scale con man I can recall, when finally caught, says something like "Everyone does this. Why are you picking on me?" Their world, in fact becomes a living Hell, filled only with people out to destroy them.

I've discussed my "vertical loop" model of any cybernetic being. This is the fundamental requirement of being adaptive and surviving in a changing world.

This loop is broken by distrust and paranoia, believing that every person who disagrees with you is trying to "bring you down", labeling them "enemies" and dismissing their comments and advice as mere efforts to destroy you or make you look bad. The upwards pathway breaks down, and news of reality can no longer reach the top.

Now things start to pick up speed downward. Detached from reality, it still becomes clear that "things aren't working." Orders are given but the results aren't what were expected. Clearly, this is due to enemies within, as opposed to being mistaken about the situation. Enemies are purged, reducing dissent, increasing distance from reality.

Things start to spiral downward, out of control despite, or in fact precisely because of the misguided efforts to achieve control and reduce dissent. In the corporate world, this is about where the CEO takes the $100,000,000 in stock options and quits. Stupid company. Totally unmanageable. Filled with crooks and idiots. Good riddance.

So, back yet again to the core question. Is it possible to be both honest and strong? Are we stuck forever having to pick between honest wimps and dishonest strong men for our leaders?

The question comes down to this: define "strong."

Is "strong" being able to rip-off your friends and potential allies whether they aren't looking or are? Is that "strong"?

Or is "strong" being able to get past the temptation to take a short-term gain and the attached long-term loss, and instead select the short-term loss with the long-lasting, long-term gain?

I know MBA's in this country are into short-term gain and damn the consequences. I've seen them, I've got the degree, I've taught them. I used to run the Cornell Go club, where "Go" is a board game with white and black pieces, called "men" that form "armies" and try to take over the whole board. This game was required knowledge of all the Samurai warriors in Japan, long ago, as it requires learning the trade offs between short term material gain and long-term positional gain.

I could always beat MBA's who predictably always went for the short-term highly-visible material gain, (taking pieces) as opposed to the long-term positional advantage of getting some advance army in the right place that will matter later on -- when it will be too late to move there.

So, they'd win a piece, win a few pieces, win a piece, etc. as I put out bait and led them down the garden path. Then, as the game came to a close, they'd lose everything and be amazed. How did things change "so suddenly?" was their response. Well, nothing changed suddenly. They were making those trade offs, maximizing the present at the expense of the future, when, Oh my God, time passed. Suddenly, who could have predicted it, it turned into the future that they had been busy gutting in order to have a better life that was now in the past. They had done such a good job of undermining and selling out their own future that it was trivial to wipe them out, once it arrived.

In my mind, "strong" would mean understanding that some present pain and self-control is needed to reach a desired future state, and being able to discuss this honestly and bring about agreement by the crowd that this hard, up-hill trade-off is what we are all willing to do, and then doing it. Strong like Samurai Warriors, less concerned about instant gratification and more concerned about where this will all turn out.

Not "strong" like a warrior who can win every battle, and still manage to lose the war.

But, it is true that this kind of "strong" I advocate isn't entirely a property of a person - it's an emergent property of the whole system. Individuals are weak in all sorts of ways, and always will be. I've reflected on that before. You can't select a leader, put them in an isolated office, and walk away. It's more a leadership-facilitated-group-strength that is the goal, with the "leader" at the center of the group, strong enough to be humble and overcome the usual temptations and sources of blindness, the usual ways that power leads to corruption and corruption leads to global collapse.

This isn't a blind boy scout model, it's a fully-eyes open model knowing full well what humans are capable of, on both the upside and downside, and knowing full well and never forgetting for a minute that "I am weak but we are strong" -- that is, able to seek advice, able to hear advice, able to accept advice even if it is locally unpleasant.

It seems to me precisely that a person of integrity and honesty is the empty canvas on which such group power can be sketched and fleshed out and emerge, over time. Some one who sincerely believes this is about "us" not about "me", but isn't so silly as to think everyone shares that view.

There is no reason on earth that I can see
that "we" cannot always be made stronger than "me".

Any strategy that is based on activities that break bonds between people, instead of building them, seems like ultimately a losing strategy, when faced with some other opponent who has figured out how to build social bonds.

There is no way that any selfish guy we put in power will remain "our" selfish guy. By definition, we just selected someone who doesn't believe in "us". On some corporate or nation-state scale, we'll just replay the Saddam Hussein theme song over and over again -" put them into power, boost them up, hey what the hell they're turning on us, send in the army and try to undo what we just did, by, oh, I know, putting a different crook into power, boosting them up, hey what the hell, etc. etc etc."

Hello?

To quote the movie "Evolution" I think we have found that "Kakaw Kakaw" doesn't work.

Mr. Fish, I believe, is all wet.

And unable to see the water.

A few more "victories" like the last few, and we'll lose the entire game, like my MBA's.

I, personally, would prefer a leader, at any level, who was perfectly honest about what they wanted and delivered on that promise, and who could deliver because the honesty gave them a group emergent power of trust that wasn't possible to the proud-to-be-a-crook alternative. I'd prefer someone who was human, knew they were weak, and made up for it by drawing out and drawing on the power of the rest of us on a daily basis.

I'd prefer someone who could listen over someone who was so busy talking they couldn't hear me, or someone so proud of their perfection that they can't take advice.

No single person can lead any large organization any more - corporate or nation-state or cultural. They've become too big, too complex, too confusing, too interactive. We need leaders who know how to consult more than ones who think they have wisdom cornered, because whatever they know today, even if it's right, won't still be true tomorrow.

The whole beast has to be adaptive, and that means cybernetic, and that means a vertical loop, and that means honest listening at the top. I can't understand how any other model of governance could be stable over time in a rapidly changing world where humans are frail and subject to temptations, but the stakes are high and mistakes are increasingly costly.

I agree entirely with Fish that a leader has to be practical and pragmatic - I just disagree as to what reality they have to be practical regarding.

In the world I see, we desperately need to rebuild social bonds and overcome fragmentation. We need more transparency and honesty. We need to invest in long-term relationships, not gut them.

The power to lead is not invested in any man or woman -- it's invested in all of us working as one.

I don't know who those leaders will be, but I feel confident that they will not be guided by Machiavelli. If Machiavelli is the best we can do, we should just close the shop.

Building blocks - habits, routines, and standards

In the same vein as the recent posts, another fact about humans is that it helps to have regular patterns, habits, ruts that we're in. The same trade off applies, that sometimes the rut needs to change, but most of the time it doesn't and those times it is a big help to be in a good rut. Then, we call it a "groove."

Toyota's "lean process" design involves methodically establishing these ruts, and methods for changing to better ruts as time goes on.

The ruts are called "standardized work" and the methods involve becoming a little scientific experimeter, and learning from each day with eyes open what works and what doesn't given the current rut that we are abiding with and trying to follow as best we can.

Then, at the end of each day, having learned something new, we alter the rut a little bit, then lock it back down again.

This alternation of freedom and constraint is necessary. It doesn't seem to work to be "free" all the time, or to be "stuck in a rut" all the time.

So, when we are coming up with our budget or flight-plan or schedule for the day, we should be "free" to rearrange things and do mental experiments and try new things. Then, the best thing to do is to lock that down, end the "freedom" phase, and go into the "locked into that" phase and spend our energy trying to live within the constraints THAT WE JUST SET FOR OURSELVES.

We have two responsibilities here. We have to wear the hat of planner, and plan realistically and with compassion for what we are actually, realistically, going to be be able to do. Then, we have to wear the hat of a faithful servant, and spend some time trying to live within that plan.

As they say: "Plan the flight, fly the plan."

It's easier said than done.

Again, it helps to have a group support in order to "be all we can be". A public plan may have more power over us in the servant phase than a private plan.

Freedom from the "discipline" and "hardship" of following the budget or plan is one of those flashes in the pan that adults learn quickly is a bad thing.

What we end up longing for is the "freedom" to be able to follow our own damn plan despite our internal temptations to give in to some cop out. We need to be able to say "No!" to ourselves, whatever paradoxical reality is behind that.

And, that works best if we recruit our friends to help us do that, and make public commitments about our plan and what we're hoping to do, and why we think it may run into our weakness as human beings and need a little help in the middle there.

We are as strong, seen by the outside world after it is all over, as our ability to admit realistic weaknesses and recruit helpful friends to help us out in those spots.

This is a different kind of "strong" than we usually think of.

Curiously, it is precisely the kind of strong that works. It is the kind of strong in "Army strong", and the kind of paradox where "An army of one" or "Be all you can be" are slogans of a group that specializes in having ruts, drills, authority, and obedience that people sign up for on purpose in order to make their own "self" stronger - in context of this external supportive group.

We don't need the army to do that, we can set up our own groups.

What is a mistake in any book is to try to make it without a group.

Humans are not designed to be solo-performers. We are never at our best when alone, never as good as we could be in the right context, with the right people leaning on us with the full power of habit and expectations and counting on us to do the right thing exceptionally well.

When I read in recent studies that 20% of the USA's males have not even a single friend they can confide in, I am very concerned that something terrible is happening.

We're going the wrong way, if we're abandoning friendship in our quest for becoming perfect Rambo super-humans.

The inevitable result, sooner or later, is the mortgage fiasco all over again. There is no level of "bright" so great that it breaks the rule that "smart people can still do really stupid things."

Our "smartness" has to be in using every opportunity to invest our wisdom and best days outside our bodies, no inside. We need to invest it in the people around us, and also invest in listening to them, and also invest in the factors that will make that process work. It can work.

Toyota showed it can work in a corporate setting. We can be each other's context.

We can't make it as little islands, cut off from everyone around us.

No amount of high-tech goodies, or math and science education, or wealth makes us exempt from this basic principle of life.

Life will drive us to multi-cellular shapes, whether we want to or not. Period. Live with it.
Accept it. Face it. And figure out how to make it work.

There is one comforting fact you can be sure of -- absolutely everyone else has exactly the same problem.

We are all in the same boat on this one.

So, that's good. We can be a little more open and honest about it, and trade notes, and use break time to talk about strategies.

As in Gary Larson's cartoon, we cavemen can look at Oog, holding the raw meat in the fire on a stick instead of burning his hands like we are and say "Look what Oog do!"

This isn't rocket science. It just needs to be done.

Building blocks, research, and EVA

In the early 1990's a truly terrible thing happened - Fortune magazine published a cover story on a new technique called Economic Value Added - a trademarked term. In short, at least as utilized, this seemed to say that the way to value any investment, including a company, was how much money it made, net, last quarter. Investments with positive EVA should be kept, and those with negative EVA should be dropped.

A fast search in Google for that reference found this first hit from a random site by Casparija:

The current interest in the concept apparently results from a trademarked version of EVA(TM) which has been suggested and promoted by Stern Stewart & Co.. (See "The Real Key to Creating Wealth," *FORTUNE*, September 20, 1993 pp. 38-40, 45, 48, 50. See also "America's Best Wealth Creators," *FORTUNE* December 27, 1993, for a list of the 200 largest non-financial organizations which shows that more than half had NEGATIVE EVA(TM).)

That sounds about right and I haven't verified it. But I do recall I was working for Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research in Ann Arbor at the time, and the executives were getting all excited about this concept -- largely because the financial analysts were all excited by it.

This is also a modified version of what might be called "momentum investing", namely, invest in things that went up yesterday, regardless what they do, regardless why they went up. And as soon as they stop going up, ditch them.

I also recall that I went over to the administration building and tried to have a conversation that this strategy was absurd - that every single drug we had that was a blockbuster had been developed after a 12 year period of research where it lost money, and, if we had followed this strategy, we would never have had any of those drugs (like Lipitor). The argument fell on deaf ears. It seemed like such a nice concept, and was so much easier to understand than all that Net Present Value stuff.

So, sure enough, Warner Lambert quickly decided that drug research was a "loser" and sold Parke-Davis to Pfizer so they could concentrate on today's winners. Then investors put the pressure on all companies, and one after another the companies caved in and abandoned their long-term research programs. ATT demolished Bell Labs. Drug companies bailed on research. The Federal Government basically closed NASA and all the major federal research laboratories or told them to work only on things that made money this quarter.

Well, that was 14 years ago. Now, guess what. Nothing is coming out of the other end of those research pipelines. For some reason, scratch your head, everyone else also decided to bail on long-term investments, and did, and suddenly the old ones are running out and there is nothing new to replace it with.

Just amazing.

I read that the US is considering sending another manned mission to the moon. Last time Kennedy did this, in a crash program, it took 7 years from start to finish, and no one was sure we could do it. This time, knowing everything we know now, it is estimated that it will take 14-20 years to do the same thing. Or longer. (Or, I might add, forever.)

Ann Arbor also used to be the home to ERIM, which was very low profile but had what I think was the largest collection of signal processing and image processing people in the world under one roof. They did top secret stuff like designing the guidance systems for missiles and all sorts of "remote sensing" - learning how to read amazing details from satellite photos.. I tried to get them to help us at Parke Davis with an image processing problem we had, and met a few people.

It had taken 20 years to slowly collect those people into a self-sustaining critical mass. Then the government in infinite wisdom decided we didn't need this, and the company basically folded and disassembled, as NASA was doing, leaving a thin shell that was sold to someone else. I think they make money now designing systems to read license plates of passing cars or some such mundane task. Many or most of the good people left, and won't be coming back, and our schools don't seem to be making any more of them.

Maybe EVA was just a sign of the times, and the groundswell was already in motion of abandoning common sense and investment fundamentals, and going after what glittered most brightly in the sun. It seemed so clever. No more long weeks or months in the library or on-line trying to understand what a company did and what the industry did - now you could invest in 5 minutes without even knowing what line of business the company was in!

And, gosh-a-roo Mr. Peters, some companies were making 200% per year profit and those were the ones to leap on for sure.

The only problem there is that everyone wanted to do that, and there were very few companies doing that. Everyone wanted to bail out of solid, reliable, large companies that "just" made 5-10% per year, every year, solid as a rock. So those companies started to sink, to the extent they were held up by stock-market opinion. There mere fact that they employed 200,000 people and supported entire states was irrelevant - they were "losers".

So, the CEO's of those companies drank the same Kool-Aid, and started looking for glittering short-term winners that were almost all long-term losers, because that's what investors were rewarding. No one was looking forward. Everyone was steering by looking out the back window.

That got us where we are today. A dessert of has-been companies, with nothing new coming out the pipeline, wringing our hands about the "loss of innovation" in America, while all the exciting growth seems to be abroad.

This was a predictable outcome of that strategy.

Again, the core problem here has nothing to do with EVA - it has to do with the fact that, collectively, we have no capacity for long-term learning, or, for learning and then abiding by lessons that take a long-time to learn.

And that IS a problem.

Santayana, or someone, said that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Yep.

After a while, you have to hope that the lesson sinks in that short-term thinking is not a good guide to managing our lives. Simply going with what looks attractive on a personal, corporate, or national level will get us into deep trouble every time.

We need, on every level, a larger structure, slowly changing, that persists and accumulates wisdom, AND THAT WE LISTEN TO. Academia also served that role once, as has every major religion. But it doesn't do any good if the knowledge is all over there and the decisions are being made over here.

Science didn't like religion's way of being normative, of demanding compliance, and thought in an experiment for the last few centuries that it would be totally "neutral" and "value free" and wouldn't that be better? Well, I don't know. Was it?

Now scientists are shocked to discover that politicians, and most of the public, either don't know anything about science, or don't care, and regardless, don't want to limit their behavior to things that scientists tell them are important. And with no history of authority and obedience, they got what they built. An abstract world that may be "right" that has no connectivity to the decisions being made out here.

On top of that, many scientists (not all) also seem to want to destroy religion entirely, thinking that the problem is that there is too little objective knowledge, evidence-based reasoning.

The last few posts and this one present a different scenario -- where it doesn't matter how much evidence-based reasoning you have, if the users of that process only look in the very short range world around them at that instant for the evidence. Now we'll use "evidence" to be SURE we're chasing the latest flash in the pan that we're now scientifically CERTAIN is the brightest flash around.

Doh.

Science does no one any good unless is has some grip, some power, some hold on people's behavior. "Having" it has no benefit, by itself. And Science, as an institution, spent the last 300 years ripping out all the "authority" worship, and toning down all the papers until the strongest language that is acceptable reads like "This evidence may suggest that ..."

Whoopie. That'll move the crowd, you betcha.

Not.

A pure-knowledge strategy that doesn't involve submission to a higher authority can't carry the social load that real life puts on it.

Admittedly, the authorities can become rigid and dogmatic and lose all connection to the real world, just as science, paradoxically, has done.

Which gets us back to my "vertical loop" model of the core building block of any adaptive, surviving company, or person, or nation. There has to be order coming down met with obedience, and surprising news from the front going up, met with receptivity and updating the mental model and map. Then you have a cybernetic flow, and adaptation can take place, along with learning.

But some of the learning has to be lessons that take a long time to learn, maybe generations to learn, and that involves some special attention as to how that will work in practice. And, over the last 5,000 years, what has worked and what hasn't?

None of this depends on technology, or is changed because now there is more technology than there used to be. These are properties of any system of intelligent, context-sensitive beings, at any scale.

We just need to get clear what has worked, and what cannot possibly work, and then compare that to what we're doing, and see where we're trying to do something that's impossible, and stop doing that.

Red flags go up on the field when the word "just" appears, as it did in that last sentence.

This task isn't trivial, although it is quite straight-forward and common sense does help a lot and gives us good insight and intuition.

We cannot operate very long without a larger structure around us that persists our best wisdom and feeds it back to us in authoritative ways that we agree to abide by, provided the authorities, in turn, listen to us about what's working and what isn't and update their maps as needed.

Without that, any amount of science and logic and math will still be captive to the amazing capacity of humans, or executives, or governments to be caught up in local fads and chase "easy solutions" to hard problems, knowing full well that this is an exercise in denial and that, going down this pretty path, things will only be worse tomorrow.

We know we're all prone to that behavioral flaw.

Now we need to compensate for it using each other as a buffer.

If we insist on freedom from all interfering authority as a life-style, it won't work. It can't work.

If we abide authority and the authority has no learning curve, that won't work.

Somewhere in-between is the sweet spot.

Finding it is the task.

Admitting it will be required before we can discuss it.

Discussing it will be necessary to solve it.

We should start.

Building blocks - asking directions and drunk driving

Honestly, I'm working to reduce 12 pages to 2 on this important subject! In the past 2 posts I've reflected on how humans depend on context for sense-making and motivation, how we can be that "context" for each other, and why that leads naturally to religious or professional groups to help us "be all we can be".

Our friends can remember for us that we should get up and jog with them, or that we asked them to help us not drive when we're drunk. In an abstract sense, we can use our friends to sort of shift our perception over time, so that "the morning after" is more vivid and powerful "the night before. "Enforcement" is not required for social norms - the simple fact that we share a perception of what we "should" and what we "should not do" and what we "promised" or "resolved" to do is usually enough to get us past our "weak spots" and "bad days".

And, people are smart enough to realize, after they grow up, that they need this outside assist to not join the crowd of "smart people who do dumb things." The first step in humility is realizing that neither wealth nor brains or education will make "us" so good, in isolation, that we wouldn't do even better with a "little help from our friends."

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, people in the US seem to think that they are some sort of super-genetic creatures who are "above" the need for friends. There seems to be a norm that "leaning on others" is a bad thing, some sort of "mooching" or parasitic behavior or a sign of "weakness" that makes us unacceptable not only as leaders, but even as colleagues or friends. This conceit is really sad, and tremendously damaging to the society.

The latest example of this is the 2.5 million families that recently signed up for just terrible mortgages on new homes, and are waking up to the fact that they can't make the payments that they signed up for, past the initial low rate period.

Our jaws should drop to the floor in surprise at this - not because it's surprising that 2.5 million people are weak or uneducated or in trouble, but because 2.5 million people didn't ask for help when making that big a decision.

Now, of course, oh yes, after it's too late, suddenly the full impact of how bad a decision this sinks in. All the damage this has caused everyone, to our economy, our banking system, our corporate ability to raise money, our jobs, the probable recession and cuts in social services and fire and police protection and school teachers -- this was all totally unnecessary. There were plenty of other people who understood these facts, and no shortage of telephones or on-line sources or neighborhood wise people.

It is not the individual weakness and lack of experience that is startling - it is the fact that, as a society, we've lost the collective strength that would prevent that predictable weakness from turning into an actual problem. We aren't asking each other for help, and aren't giving it enough.

For reasons that again I cannot grasp, our entire education system seems to be based on the assumption that group strength is some kind of bad thing, and that we need to be "strong enough to not need help" so that we can "do our own work." This is an absurd goal. No person will ever be that "good". No CEO will ever be that smart. No King or President will ever be so wise they don't need advisors. Even Nobel Prize winners have weak spots and blind spots and bad days.

No one can possibly know everything or be strong all the time. Everyone has to sleep. Everyone has to inhale sometime. Everyone has short-term crises that use up all their internal coping energy and they need to fall back on their social bank account to bridge over until they can recover.

So why do we have a whole country that pretends we are "better than that?"

This concept or "mental model" makes us sitting ducks, easy prey for every con man, advertiser, or politico that comes along, as they surely will, and attempts to take advantage of us. It paralyzes us, just at the moment we should be reaching out for help.

It leaves males driving around for hours when it would take a minute to stop and "ask for directions." Some of those "drivers" are our department managers, CEO's, and governmental leaders, who are also trained that asking for directions is "bad."

While our consumer-based culture may not have created that tendency to be divided and conquered, it certainly doesn't hesitate to move in for the kill and take advantage of a whole population conditioned to be proud of the fact that they are behaving stupidly.

This makes the work of those of us in the quality and high-reliability field much harder. It becomes a major challenge, as all the books and academic papers describe, to simply get people to help each other and to ask for help. The guru of quality, W. Edwards Deming, was just furious with the whole Western civilization's concept of "school" and "education" and annoyed many people by saying so loudly.

As you may know, no one wanted to hear Deming in the US, so he went to Japan, which did want to hear him, and which built a whole culture of quality based on his ideas, which is what we're facing now in companies like Toyota, built around the core concept of employees helping each other out instead of competing with each other to be "perfect" individuals.

Our top schools' educational programs are build around books like "Leading with Questions" by Marquart, which charge $10,000 apiece to teach people that it's OK for an executive to not know how to do everything, and to ask everyone else how it should be done.

It's hard to count the number of other problems we see around us in society that are the result of this single error in our model of how life should work. On every side, we see bad decisions made worse by cover-ups or refusal to accept the fact that the bad idea isn't actually working.

It doesn't have to be this way. Nothing in human nature prevents us from making friends and relying on them to make it through the day and make it through our lives.

But recently, the full power of the media seems devoted to teaching the opposite lesson - that other people are enemies, that we need to be strong and being strong means we don't ever ask directions. I can understand why individual marketing departments think this is a great idea. What I can't understand is why we put up with it, and why we drink this Kool-Aid, and why our government doesn't realize the damage this is doing to our personal, corporate, and national ability to thrive and prosper.

In the short run, I suppose, it makes us "easy to govern", but in the long run it makes the society we build become "ungovernable" because nothing works any more. Even things that used to work don't work. Our aviation system becomes a nightmare. Our urban infrastructure of pipes and wires and roads is crumbling. Now, with the mortgage mess, our banks and staggering around and firing their CEO's, and housing is collapsing and jobs are going away.

That's not good. And it is 100% predictable, because this need for a larger group of friends to get us over the weak spots and temptation to take the short-cut happens on every level, not just to humans, but also to corporations and states and nations.

It's that role that religion has been trying to manage for the last 5000 years -- being a larger framework to hold the lessons that take a while to learn, and the lessons that require overcoming temptation to cheat or take the short cut, or to drive while drunk, or to head off to bed with that person that we will truly regret in the morning.

We are all weak, but that is no reason we cannot all be strong for each other. It's a timing thing. We are not all weak on the same day, or at the same moment, or in the same way so that the whole of us can be a buffer and get us each over whatever personal pot-hole we're falling into now, until a strong arm grabs us and steadies us and keeps us safe.

This is a role we absolutely must do for each other. We will never be able to get past this or grow beyond it. No amount of technology will make it go away. Every crowd of computers or robots or humans or companies or cells or Martians will face the same challenge. This is a universal truth.

And, we can "take it to the bank." Or, more likely, our bank account will certainly take a hit if we ignore this basic fact of life. If enough of us ignore it, the bank itself will fail. If even more of us ignore it, the entire banking system will fail. If even more of us ignore it, the whole country will fail.

Hello? This isn't rocket science. As the Beatle's song "I get by with a little help from my friends" shows, this is actually common sense and our shared experience.

But it is growing weak from official neglect. Which is to say, in a democracy, it's our own fault and we're doing this to ourselves.

We can continue to be proud and arrogant and think we don't need each other, but we'd be wrong. The Psalms of David in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible say "Pride goes before a fall." It was true 3000 years ago. It's still true.

It's a building block, a stable foundation we can plan on still being true tomorrow and 3000 years form now.

So, we tried something - living without that -- and it turns out not to work very well. In fact, it seems to be crashing around our heads right now.

If you trace back almost everything that's going wrong around you, sooner or later you will come across a point where this refusal to cooperate allowed the fatal flaw got into the building design, or allowed someone, somewhere to drive drunk, or sign up for a "super incredible unbelievably good mortgage deal" or some other nonsense.

We need to stop blaming individuals for being human, and look in the mirror, and stop congratulating ourselves for being super-human. We're not super-human, and that's never going to change, but it's also OK, because we can cope with it if we just help each other out.

To get there, we need a culture that supports that as a value and a social norm. We need to hear it every day on TV and in the movies and in our popular music.

The answer is right here, right in front of us. We don't need a $500 billion study commission to figure out that this is where a lot of stuff is going wrong.

I'm hearing from religions that the way we deal with each other is something that needs work. I'm hearing it increasingly from industry studies into corporate productivity and safety. I'm seeing it in simulations. But I'm not seeing it on television or hearing any of our politicians call this by name.

We don't hear that much from academic researchers, but, there's a problem -- these are people who are "experts" and who have built a whole universe where intellectual Rambo-ism is the norm -- at the opposite end of the spectrum from Deming. This crowd wants to pour new trillions of dollars into "education" where we will produce students better at "math and science" in order for our companies and country to be strong.

Won't work.

Can't work, unless we fix this other problem, this social problem first. Every gain we make in commercial innovation will be flushed away by larger scale drunk driving.

First, fix what's obviously and clearly wrong socially. Then, with a social system that actually works, address the other problems that are still there.

This doesn't require socialism or communism or overturning the profit motive or some total disruption of free markets or any change in the pecking order. It only requires that we work together more within that structure, and do the obvious things to help that happen, and see where that gets us.