Sharpening the axe

US President Abe Lincoln once said that if he had ten minutes to cut down a tree, he'd spend the first five "sharpening the axe."

Once upon a time, to cut down the "trees" of problems our society was running into, we had the "axe" of "smart people." This mostly seemed to work, and we developed huge systems of education to find "the right people" and make them smart.

As our society got more complex, and the problems grew larger and interconnected, those smart people were not smart enough to solve them, and we tried harder and harder.

What has happened, however, as this picture shows,

is that now the problems are so large and complex that even the smartest smart person cannot solve them, and it only gets worse from here on out into the future. We can't "wait this one out."

And, we have pretty well run out of ways to make smart people smarter. Already we ask them to go to school for 20 years or more, and even that doesn't seem to be working very well these days.

So, it's time to find a new "axe", something much more powerful than "smart people", and we have that -- it's called "smart teams".

Interestingly, the problems we face in making a smart team is just like the problem computer scientists had in making a "supercomputer" -- they finally figured out that it simply did not work to make a single, really, really, really smart computer --- what DID work was to figure out how to network together a cluster a half-million smaller computers so they acted in concert. That, actually, is what an "operating system" does. This took off the barriers, and suddenly it seems if we want more problem-solving power, we can add on more computers to the network.

So far, so good, but we haven't done the same thing with people. What concerns me is that we haven't even articulated this as a problem we should all be working on.

Teams of people can be smarter than the smartest individual person. We can, as the folk wisdom says, "get by with a little help from our friends."



The operative word is is "can". Sometimes, teams of people arrange themselves into "committees", a shape in which very little useful work actually ever gets done.

Sometimes people arrange themselves into hierarchical shapes, called "corporations" that sometimes get smart work done, but often only make larger versions of single-person mistakes.

Curiously, we know very little about what makes teams of people work well. And we know almost nothing about why the largest size team of people that seems able to function as a team is under 100 people.

We do know that if we want very high performance teams, producing very high quality work, the people cannot work "at arms length." They must take down the normal walls between each other, become vulnerable, become emotional, become intimate ( not in the sexual sense of the word, but in the "close" sense of the word.) and care about each other in a positive way. That seems to be required, and to help. Literature on some successful case studies is building up at last.

Our social problems are more likely "ten-thousand person size trees", while we are still working with 10-person "axes".

We don't know off-hand how to make a ten-thousand-person-size axe.

We do know, that for somethings like radio astronomy, we can "synthesize" a large telescope by getting a large number of small ones to "work together", as this photo shows.

Side note - for radio telescopes to work together as one, they can't just work separately and dump their results into a common basket -- they have to become aware of each other and synchronize their "phase" information as well, not just their "amplitude" information. Like lasers, there is a "synchronization" issue that has to be addressed for this idea to work.

This process is called "aperture synthesis" and it works in practice, as the photo above shows.

So, the problem is hard. So what? We didn't know how to get to the moon either, but when we needed to go there, or wanted to go there, we put in a lot of work and figured out how to do it.

We need to figure out how to make a ten-thousand-person size problem solving "axe". It's a problem worth solving, because we can then use the answer to that to solve most of our other social problems that no smart people know how to fix any more.


As the "Houston, we have a problem" graph above illustrates, this problem is not going to "go away" on its own, and it is not going to "solve itself." We will not solve this problem by making even smarter people and waiting for them to "solve it."

No, this problem needs to be solved by "regular" people, pooling notes on what has worked so far, historically, in making teams that work, and what hasn't worked, and then having a large scale discussion and head-scratching session about what might work, and just trying it until we find out how to get past this roadblock.

At least, that gives us a fixed target to work on, instead of an ever changing crisis of the day, and we can recruit the newspapers and top government officials to point at this and say "This is what we need to solve, everyone! If you have spare time, discuss this among yourselves and see what you can come up with!"

You know, we have millions of people on this planet that are (a) unemployed and (b) connected to the internet. Previous actions like the SETI project have tapped into their COMPUTERS unused power to solve large problems, like looking for intelligent life. What if we could tap into the human being's ability to work together, recognize patterns, and take some kinds of actions.

Even if this was only 1 percent efficient, we could make up for that easily by adding 100 times as many people into the web. One thing we do have is lots of underutilized people, many of whom would welcome something to do that felt useful. Another thing we have, or could have is high-speed internet access for those people.

And people don't all need to be in one place. People who need to "meet", or have complex "face-to-face" interactions, could potentially have those interactions in virtual reality worlds, such as Second Life or Forterra. The question is, what would nudge all that interaction from undirected Facebook-type chatter into powerful, laser-beam coherent focus that could pick up large problems , grapple with them, and solve them.

There is a crucial distinction I need to make here.

I'm not talking about the classic "divide and conquer"model

(which is what SETI uses, actually) where each of a million people is given one millionth of the work to do. That would constitute bringing the problem down to the level of the individual person.

What I'm talking about is the opposite -- bringing the collective grasp-size of the collection-of-people UP to the scale and scope of the problem. It has to be done that way, because "decomposing" the problem into parts loses crucial interaction terms and make any "solution" incorrect.

Otherwise, "Man must wait on street corner for long time before roast duck fly into mouth."

Wade

Notes:

In health care, the National Institutes of Medicine has realized that there is a problem that can be solved, which they term "microsystems" -- getting small teams of front-line care providers to work together extremely well.

In military circles, "Force transformation" is the buzz-word. Previous posts here on the US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100 have discussed realizations in the military about how effective teams have to be structured to operate in uncertain, rapidly changing worlds.

The ability of a group of people to have, effectively, computational power far beyond that expected is one of the findings in recent work in "social intelligence" and "the power of groups",
and "swarm intelligence."

Those findings give us hope that the "emotional components" of people are not flaws or bugs in rational machines, but are, in fact, the necessary connective tissue for reassembly of those fragments of living thinking protoplasm into a larger, self-aware, problem solving collection of protoplasm.

We don't want to remove human emotions from the workplace -- we want to turn them up full volume, and align them with the task at hand, because that's how people can synchronize with each other and act "in one spirit" or "as if one."

It is as if, by removing the walls and barriers between people, and getting rid of the Western concept of working "at arms length" in a "professional manner", we are moving from the energy released by fission to the much larger energy released by fusion -- in this case, the fusion of human beings, by the activity of working on a problem, into a persistent much stronger unified state, ready to be used again for just that purpose, and getting stronger with each use.

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Mathematical sidebar (advanced) -- in tensor calculus, any tensor of rank N can be decomposed (or constructed) into a larger number of tensors of rank N-1 working together. (As with relational database, there are simpler objects like tables and complex relationships that must be maintained as contstraints.) Carrying out that process iteratively guarantees us that any tensor of any rank can be completely represented by a sufficient number of tensors of rank one and a sufficient number of relationships and constraints. What that suggests to my eyes is that a wide range of complex mental activities can be "synthesized" out of a sufficiently large number of individuals of lower "rank" thinking, if (and only if) certain relationships are defined and maintained during the interaction.

In other words, there is very strong physical and mathematical basis for believing this "intelligence synthesis" process is theoretically feasible, for the class of problems that can be represented by tensor equations -- which Einstein believed spanned all physical problems. It is certainly a much larger class of problems than we can solve today.

Specifically, "Decomposition of a Tensor into a Sum of Vector Products): Theorem. In an n-dimensional space, any tensor of rank q > 1 can be written as the sum of n -to-the power (q-1) tensor products of vectors with q factors each." (From Introduction to General Relativity, by Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, McGraw-Hill, 1965, p25).


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further reading (not mathematical!)

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help(my thoughts)
Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper, MIT)
High-Reliability.org web site
Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety - Texas

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Nineteen case studies of health care organizations that dramatically improved their operations through the use of feedback-regulated small-team ("microsystems") operations are well documented in another post
here:


A great deal of accessible literature and some excellent videos are here:
Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, at the U of Michigan Ross School of Business

http://www.bus.umich.edu/positive/pos-research/pastpositivesessions.htm

http://www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/POS-Research/Readings-to-Get-Started.htm


Positive Deviance - (the new business model)

Consider this excerpt from the US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM 22-100)

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your
character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in
order.
1-7: The example you set is just as important as the words you
speak.
1-8: Purpose ... does not mean that as a leader you must explain every
decision to the satisfaction of your subordinates. It does mean that you must
earn their trust: they must know from experience that you care about them and
would not ask them to do something - particularly something dangerous - unless
there was a good reason...
1-10: Trust is a basic bond of leadership, and it
must be developed over time.
1-15: People who are trained this way will
accomplish the mission, even when no one is watching.
1-23: you demonstrate
your character through your behavior.
1-56: Effective leaders strive to
create an environment of trust and understanding that encourages their
subordinates to seize the initiative and act.
1-74: The ultimate end of war,
at least as America fights it, is to restore peace.
4-9: Be aware of barriers
to listening. Don't form your response while the other person is still
talking.
4-20: Critical Reasoning ... means looking at a problem from several
points of view instead of just being satisfied with the first answer that comes
to mind.
4-24: Ethical leaders do the right things for the right reasons all
the time, even when no one is watching.

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)
Houston - we have another problem (My thoughts on complexity and limits of one person's mind)