It may be that TPS was great for Japan in 1950, but that it's actually easier for the US to simply leapfrog that and move directly to the following stage.
So, yes, it may have taken Tibetan monks 30 years of hard labor to achieve certain states, but if we can get there in 5 minutes using a biofeedback device, lets do that.
This is important. At the rate global situations are evolving, from the economy to climate change to antibiotic-resistant organisms, we don't have 50 years to spend on this step. Like GM looking at a 6-week model conversion time, we also need to break the concept that "this is as fast as it could possibly be" and realize there is probably a 1-minute die-change model we are just not yet seeing because our disbelief is blinding us.
But, how do we search for it effectively?
A technique from physics can be helpful here. We may not know exactly what the object is we are seeking, but we may still be able to say some things about it , such as it is "smaller than a breadbox, whatever it is." Or maybe "It is red, whatever it is." This can help cut down the search space, as in the game "Twenty Questions." With enough such clues, we can often zero in on the right ballpark and from there complete the search by inspection of all the remaining choices.
Almost certainly, for example, no one person can comprehend the answer to this question, so we can be reasonably confident that a team-approach to searching would be at least helpful, if not indispensable. I'll assume for now that it takes a synthesized N-person brain to solve this problem, and we are to the solution as termites in a nest to concepts of air conditioning - we can do it collectively even though we couldn't describe it in words if we tried. There are lots of things like that, from catching a ball to knowing when to go at a 4-way stop sign intersection.
We need a team of people who have seen enough breakthroughs and factor-of-100 improvements that they believe these things can happen, even if they are totally not obvious at the start, and even if everyone else is stuck in "This is the best it's possible to do" mentality. We can overcome each other's residual disbelief and use the multiple-coals-burn-bright power to stay enthusiastic for this uphill search.
If we don't look for such solutions, it decreases the odds we'll find them. So, we should be looking, at least part time, unless that totally distracts us from our day jobs. At least some people should be actively working on this question at least some of the time.
I volunteer to "lead" the effort, ie, keep it going and shop it around and keep track on a wiki or something of what fragments of wisdom we've been able to assemble so far on the space-frame, kind of like reassembling fragments of an exploded aircraft, one at a time, until we can see what shape they are making and understand at last what has happened and is happening on Earth.
But the "team approach" is pretty well given. TPS is all about massively parallel algorithms with emergent solutions. We just need to figure out really easy steps at each level that, when deployed and acted on, result in the emergent solution behavior we want. That's one aspect let's lock down for now.
A second aspect I would suggest we start with as our "seed" is that we're looking for a recursive, symmetric solution if there is one. Life is a massively nested hierarchy of worlds of detail, each forming the context for even more detailed worlds, and each forming just one detail of much larger-scope worlds. The shape is basically a fractal, or at least that complex -- again, something very easy to write a generating function for, and astoundingly complex in outcome.
So rather than assuming that the primitive parts of the world are separate entities that can be considered and studied in isolation from each other, let's go to the other extreme and check out the space of things that are inseparably tangled into each other and form each other's content and context.
In other words, this is almost the exact complement to what Science has studied to date: those things that are easy to separate from context, bring into the lab, and study in isolation while changing variables one at a time.
We will focus instead on the parts of Life on Earth that doesn't have that property of separability - We want only the part that "goes away" when the live frog is dissected and the parts analyzed on the lab bench, looking for why it moves and acts the way it does.Very little search has been done there, and yet the essence of a "system" as opposed to a heap or list or collection of parts is that they work together as one, seamlessly. It would help if our language could handle such concepts easily and correctly, making it easy to do correct computations with such primitives, and hard or impossible to do wrong computations with them.
So, rather than search the end of the spectrum where self-energy dominates and interactions occasionally occur, I'd like to start at the other end where interactions dominate and self-energy terms are almost negligible. This is the kind of world that exists at the center of galaxies in Cosmology, for example -- hugely energetic worlds of almost unimaginable power.
Aside for the mathematically inclined: the reason there is so much power is that the equations are non-linear and involve "complex numbers", as opposed to real numbers. The inner product of two vectors in real space is limited to a maximum value of the product of each vector's magnitude, and generally smaller by a "cosine theta" term, where theta is the angle between them. But in general, in complex space, cosine is not bounded by plus or minus one and is part of a complex exponential that is unbounded. The inner product of any two things in the general case turns out to be unbounded and depends only on the relationship between the two things, not really on the size of either one alone. Here's an example.
This is the kind of synergy we are looking for and need to be able to see and capture and model and get to from here. It should be something we can represent in our working model, because if we can't, the model will not help us to find it and we'll miss exactly what we needed to find because our cynical approach to life has blinded us to looking the correct direction.
So, we have so far
1) Team approach
2) inseparable system components operating deep into synergy space
3) pieces "connected" by feedback loops and entrainment / phase-lock loops, not by rigid "connections." The actual arrangement of pieces in 3-D space is almost irrelevant. All that matters is that they are caught up in a dance they are all committed to deeply where each of them is responding in real time and almost uninhibitedly to each of the others.
So, isn't this trying to solve "world hunger"? Isn't this impossibly hard to do and we should pick an easier problem? Not really. That logic is deeply flawed and is one of the greatest dis-services to mankind ever foisted on us.
Here's why. If I try to model the behavior of one molecule, with quantum mechanics, I can do it. Modeling the behavior of 100 molecules is getting hard. 10,000 molecules require a supercomputer. The behavior of a million molecules is out of sight. But .... it comes back around back to easy. Because, say the molecule is "H2O" . Now look at a trillion molecules interacting, also called "water". Suddenly, whoa, strange loop, we are back to easy again.
Now a guy with his butt-crack showing can put in "plumbing" and make this "water" stuff come out our "faucet" thing into our "glass" thingie where we can "drink it." The complexity all vanished into itself, dissolved in place, leaving a rotated and different easy problem in its place. A team of Nobel prize winning scientists with a room of Cray supercomputers can't go there, but the dude with the pipe wrench can. This is the space we need to head for. Forget the Powerpoint and words and equations.
That's what I'm talking about with this interaction-end approach. The reason it seems hard is that we're still trying to use isolated-actor thinking and we need to let go of that and switch from "molecules" to "water" thinking, and then, all the complexity will fall away. This harder harder, off the board harder, and then suddenly easy again transition occurs multiple times as we increase scale - once each cycle in fact. So, yes we need to work where problems are "easy", but the domain of "easy" problems is comprised of multiple, independent, disconnected patches in scale space. We need to let go of the "easy- ground floor" world, enter the elevator or subway, skip the stuff in the middle, and re-emerge at the next "easy-floor 2" world and check out the view from there. Some whole new worlds of "cherry picking" will be ours for the taking.
This is getting way too long, so I'll add one more item and call this a day.
A fourth item to add to the list of things I would like to start with is called symmetry.
The best of all possible worlds would be if the key operations and processes we need to manage have the property that they are scale-invariant. By this I mean that, once we learn a way to look at them, the exact same approach works for whatever scale we are operating at.
So, first we should look for some kind of properties that are equally true of atoms, of water, of a whole planet, of galaxies, etc.
What kind of properties might those be? That's a pretty big range of stuff.
The properties I have in mind aren't the usual physical properties, but are more in the nature of "control" aspects. Regardless of the scale of life, or Life, or LIFE, there are some core feedback loops that are going to be there in any healthy adaptive living system of any scale.
For now, I only really care about living systems. Let's start with that assumption, and skip the dead stuff.
Healthy living systems, of any size, or scale, need to have at least two working feedback loops. I can think of no exceptions, but put this on the table for comment. This will be true of cells, of organs, or organisms, of people, of corporations, of governments, of religions, of movements, whatever it is that is alive or acts like it is alive or acts like it has a life of its own.
One loop is internal. The sensors of the "external world" have to be routed through some pathway to a goal-seeking unit and back to some kind of action-taking units (muscles) in a closed loop so that the living thing can sense the world and respond to it and tell that it has responded. In a corporation or army or nation, the head has to listen to the eyes and senses, and the muscles have to listen to the head, or we can just discard the solution as unstable and long-term unworkable and certainly sub-optimal and unhealthy in an obvious way. We lose no important solutions by discarding those that are so obviously broken and dysfunctional.
The second loop is external. In a tightly coupled world, everything that"I" do will have some kind of corresponding resulting action, on what those around me do. It is a phase-locked dance of a kind. A corporation that is healthy will have a tight coupling with suppliers and customers both. A human that is healthy will have tight coupling with many other people, but at least one other person minimum. In fact, there will also be couplings down the body and up to the larger social unit in a healthy individual.
The strongest correlation in public health, after "smoking causes cancer" is "social disconnection produces bad biomedical outcomes across the board." I will assert without going into detail right here that our whole concept of "an individual" is so deeply flawed that we should simply discard it for this discussion. In the tightly-coupled, feedback-loop dense, phase-locked world of synergy, there is really no such thing as "an individual" any more. Well, there is but there isn't but there is. There is an emergent whole living thing, and that is what we are crafting, and the zero-order terms of "individuals" pretty much drop out of the equations in the steady dynamic state. Outstanding performance is not a property of "outstanding individuals" any more, or even related to "individuals". Life is not describable as "events" so much as by stable dynamic feedback process loops that are self-aware, self-policing, and self-repairing, and mutually supporting.
So, where are we? We're looking for a model of successful corporate structure, which has to include as well all scales, so a model that also works for the embedded humans, as well as for the embedding nations and governments, all at the same time, in a healthy interaction, at a level of "health" that is several orders of magnitude more powerful than Business School even imagines.
We're looking for a model where healthy interaction, mutual support, and synergy dominate the landscape, as opposed to occasionally being spotted briefly somewhere.
We want to know how such a thing would behave, and if we can gain insight from studying that special case, whether we have a clue how to get there from here or not at this time.
So we want multiple people to review how a system, healthy across all scales, would behave and what this world would look like to the embedded humans, as well as to embedded CEO's as well as to embedded Kings over empires of such humans and corporation matrices. The solution should be fully symmetric, so healthy economies and healthy physiologies of the humans are synonymous, not competing trade-offs.
No one could "schedule" or "plan" the interactions, yet we know that the overlapping feedback loops have to be mutually reinforcing and the system has to be dynamically stable. It is likely that some small set of "easy" behaviors of each embedded human, when so multiplied recursively, could generate that overall system behavior.
Maybe more than one such set of generating behaviors exists. At this point, it would be comforting to find just one, any one solution that generates the desired emergent result. We can put that on the table, all stand in the circle, and look at it together until we go "aha!" and see what the magic is.
The solutions we seek need to be crafted and measured and managed in "feedback control phase space", not in the Newtonian separate actor and silo world we have used before to try to conceptualize and control complexity and outcomes. The primitive building blocks are stable, self-sustaining feedback loops, arranged in fractal hierarchies extending out of sight both above and below our level, made tractable by being recursive and symmetric in terms of generating functions.
The "figure" needs to become "ground", we need to stop seeing "parts" and start looking at the "whole" that is still there when the parts are ignored. We need to look at the white space between the boxes on the org chart, or even more so, at the nature of the piece of paper on which the org chart is written. It's as likely, more likely, that the problems we've had with productivity are due to the nature of the paper and concept that different parts are written on "different / disconnected" pieces of paper as to the shape of the org chart or which human we select to put into the "top" position on it.
We will not solve this by modeling ten trillion molecules. We need to let go of that, take the elevator up a few floors, change to "water" conceptualization and lenses in our glasses, and start again fresh from there.
Forget for a moment "what is" and consider "what if". What if every person and every corporation and every government were all interconnected and acting as one living thing? What if the actions were not fragmented or inconsistent or in conflict, but were coordinated and coherent and mutually reinforcing and supportive? What if actions were not forced to be a certain way, but just naturally followed from realizing how interconnected we all were, on every level?
Could that work? Sure. How could it not work in fact?!
The problem before us is not that there is no "final state" we can seek together .. the problem is the stuff in the middle, it's how to get there from here.
And the solution, like the elevator or subway, is that there is no "way", no "direction" that gets us there -- we need to sort of dissolve in place and refocus our energy into a different way of being, and we don't really need to let go of property lines or borders or wealth or values -- the ones that matter will survive that process just fine and the others didn't really matter after all.
It's not a question of "which individual" will be the "boss" or "king" or "on top" of the org-chart of the world, because there is no "top" any more and all of us are connected to all the wealth of the planet so strongly that none of it needs to shift from where it is by force. It will shift, but not because someone or some army forces it to. It will shift because it will simply be obvious to the "owner" that moving it here instead of there will improve things for everyone.
When I consider this solution, I immediately see a high-intensity broadcast jamming signal blocking the concept: a short-circuiting concept of "the Borg", and various other short-circuit images from "socialism" to "communism" to other isms. All those computations are wrong and I am not suggesting any of them. All of those still have a locus-of-control at a human individual level, where it will surely go wrong and be corrupted and destroy part of the world in a misguided effort to bolster another part. Those who protect hard-won wealth and values are wise to be wary of such "solutions" that destroy instead of preserving and growing wealth and prosperity and health at all levels simultaneously.
But any solution that tries to argue which level is most important has missed the boat, missed the message here. This is not about person A versus person B, or about nation A versus nation B, or corporation A versus corporation B, or silo A versus silo B.
This is about removing the "versus" part.
This is about replacing the "or" with "and".
This is about reuniting the macro and micro economies, and the macro health of the nation to micro health of individuals and families and communities, and to the hyper-macro health of the global biosphere and planet and climate.
That's the question, how to get to the final state when so much energy is currently being invested in trying to defend the status quo state against the perceived threats on all sides and fronts.
For that question we need to explore not what a "state" is, but what "transitions" between states tend to look like, and could possibly look like. Like GM's Freemont plant, almost nothing has to change between a terrible state and a fantastic state. We are in reality 99.95% of the way to where we need to be.
It's getting that last 0.05% now that's the focus of the next step. Everyone is terrified they will "lose" something and feels they are so close to the pit, so nearly underwater, that even small losses or increases in load appear life-threatening, probably with good cause.
So, classical transitions in X-Y space aren't the answer. Those are locked down with guards at every gate and sensors monitoring the slightest change.
It's transitions in feedback control phase space that are needed, to move a few "poles"of the equation around and produce dynamic stability, so that people can sense that "it's OK again" and realize the threat is decreasing, not increasing and be correct in that perception.
That's where the next steps need to happen. Everything else is noise or maintenance.
