First, as humans we tend to think first about the human beings within a system, and tend to ignore the system as a living entity. This is a mistake.
In fact, for a while, for the insight it provides, we should deal with the growing sludge of unexamined problems at the OTHER end of the spectrum. We should ignore the humans, and think first and for that matter only about the SYSTEM and its needs, desires, and behaviors.
In particular, regardless of country, shape, composition, animal, vegetable, mineral, language or anything else, all living things, and all things that behave as if they were alive, MUST CARRY OUT THE BASIC CYBERNETIC LOOP. This is as true of alien civilizations, martians, or any thing else.
This means any living (or meta-living) thing has to
* Have some sense it has made of the world around it, internalized
* Have some sensors to get new information about the world around it
* Have some sensors to get information about its own conditions and depleted resource needs
* Have a process to take action, based in some intelligent way on matching its own possible behaviors to the immediate external environment with an eye to acquiring the needed resources.
If the thing is going to "make it" for any period of time, it will need as well
* a "learning curve" -- a method for determining which efforts "worked" and which efforts "failed"
* A way to feed that news back so as to change internal stuff so that more energy and time is put into successful efforts than the unsuccessful ones
That's pretty much it. Any living thing MUST carry out those activities. There are no exceptions. Anything that does NOT carry those out is not actually "alive". Anything that DOES carry those out MIGHT AS WELL BE CONSIDERED ALIVE, for purposes of planning interventions. (Regardless of your own scientific or religious constraints about what constitutes "life")
This, we are looking within life for how this Basic Cybernetic Adaptive loop has been implemented, and, in general, if there is a disruption of this loop, there will be worse outcomes. Or, conversely, if outcomes are not as good as expected, it would make good sense to look first to this loop and see if some part of it has broken down.
A corporation or government that stopped listening to staff or customers or stakeholders would be an example of a breakdown of this loop. That kind of thing tends to be fatal, in the long run. The thing that was formerly "alive" becomes "dead", sometimes in exciting ways.
So, then, looking at the converse side -- if a hospital, or military unit, or banking system, or economy, or entire religious culture, or an entire country BREAKS the core cybernetic loop, it has essentially become dead, aside from the dieseling on and the falling over and decomposing part.
No "wrath of God" is required. This is just basic control system engineering.
And, if a hospital or banking system or government is not functioning well, the FIRST Thing to look at is the basic cybernetic loop, and see what part is mis-firing.
It is, then, not only a kind of structural "health" we should be focusing on, it is the irreducible universal principles of LIFE. If a system is not performing well and is at risk of dying, it is because this core level of LIFE is not functioning well. What we need to do, at the heart of it, is ADD MORE LIFE.
This suggestion triggers intense emotional and religious response, fires multiple hot-buttons and triggers third-rail reactions. Still, I don't see how to avoid it.
We are, as humans, in the context of organizations, capable of building NEW LIFE. We do it every day. We do it all around us. We see all around us an environment actually dominated by the new life forms (corporations, governments, religions) that we were involved in setting into motion, but which then took advantage of some property of the universe that allowed them to "TAKE ON A LIFE OF THEIR OWN".
We do this creating children all the time. Why this is a big deal is surprising.
Still I think this is, this must be, the single most important first sub-system of any living or almost living thing that needs to be looked at when you are tuning up the engine for better performance.
Ask yourself -- how is the universal cybernetic loop embodied in this organization? Identify the parts. Identify the loops and sub-loops. Identify the flow. Identify the places where the flow is blocked. Unblock those parts or add new parts to bypass the blockages.
Voila. How can it NOT work?
But remember -- ignore the people. To a good first approximation, the people in a large system are pretty much irrelevant. The structure and functioning of the system has moved beyond the point where any particular person matters that much, in the BIG PICTURE. The system no longer depends on people, any more than your brain depends on a particular neuron to accomplish something -- your brain will have multiple ways to acccomplish anything and everything.
Formal "organizational structure" and "reporting lines" are probably mostly a myth,and at best advisory. Once a system becomes alive, those functions become holographic, and no longer take place along the lines they once did. Human distinctions, such as between "management" and "labor" evaporate or dissolve.
What you can be sure of is that this meta-being, the composite entity, having recently been born, is struggling with the problem of recreating "one-ness" on a whole larger scale. The parts are not yet all fully integrated and holographically synchronized and reflecting each other -- that's bad, and the system, to survive, needs to address that issue and get on with the urgent task of consolidation and reintegration at a whole new level of being alive.
It is not only possible, it is likely, that "management" in any such organization will transition from being "the solution" to being "the problem." Once the organization has developed a sense of itself, it WANTS to have holographic control of everything, and total self awareness -- which is exactly what management wants to prevent so that management can keep "control" in its own hands.
We are surrounded by systems we "created" but which we need to get clear are now running out of our control, busy recreating themselves at a whole new level of existence. Meta-life.
The picture is not the pixels. The picture has risen above the pixels, taken charge of the electronic circuitry, and is busy altering the pixels to keep itself alive as an image. We are past the point where the picture can be changed by "changing the pixels." -- they'll just be changed back again, and we will just pull back a bloody stump for thanks for our efforts.
What is the biggest threat to humans is all of these half-formed, nascent living meta-beings that are not yet in touch with themselves, which are careening about like drunks desperate for their next drink. The tighter "management" or "government officials" try to take "control" of this living system, the more the system will thrash violently trying to shake them off and be free at least to be itself, without mere humans trying to "run things".
In the US we're way past the point where "government" is either "of the people" or "by the people" , not even rich people. Those days are gone. We're into de-facto government by "the corporations" for "the corporations".
It's crazy to fight that trend. All life on earth has this tendency that appears unstoppable to grow in complexity and scale, and transition from single-celled operation to multi-celled operation to massively parallel synthetic life at the next higher level of complexity and scale.
We, as humans, are stuck in the middle of all of this. Our ego's like to think it's maybe Obama versus Putin, but each of those "players" is so deeply enmeshed in "a system" that they are no longer free agents or acting like solo human beings. They have been entrained by, effectively, the BORG (to use Star Trek's favorite enemy image.)
Except there is no reason this has to be a bad thing. Everyone actually tends to like and prefer to be "part of something larger and nobler" than mere solo humans. It's built in. If we try to decouple ourselves from it and become solo operators, we tend to die. Period. The best predictor of bad medical outcomes is realizing a person has become disconnected from society. It gets under the skin very quickly. Our bodies NEED to be PART of something that is alive that is LARGER THAN LIFE, larger than us, anyway.
The sticking point is, Dr. Frankenstein and mommies aside, we haven't conceptualized our task here as "creation of new life on a higher level". Many people would feel even raising that concept is some type of religious heresy or offense to God.
My own view on that is expressed pretty well by the poet T.S. Eliot. in "Choruses from 'The Rock'"
"The LORD who created must wish us to create
And employ our creation again in His service
Which is already His service in creating."
This is a message of hope, of recursive creation and recreation, which is, in the end, what we're after for our economy and our society, isn't it?
This is a "natural" or "God directed" process, it doesn't matter which you prefer, because the results are identical.
Eliot says
The soul of Man must quicken to creation.
Out of the formless stone, when the artist united himself with stone,
Spring always new forms of life...
These are profound and fundamental issues -- issues on which commerce, religion, and science can and should all seek common ground. These are issues that, if we all look through the lens of our own background and ponder, we can realize we can agree upon as being important core values.
If commerce and management are reconceptualized to become an effort to create (or allow God to create through our lives) a new and higher more beautiful construct of Life, a coherent composite BODY of which we're parts -- it will alter in very substantial ways the entire torque of what goes on in commerce, and alter the results.
These are some pretty strong leaps of perception here, but I think it is a basis for a serious and sober analysis of what has gone wrong to date, what has gone right, and why, and what we might do to get more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff to come out of that pipeline.
This framework shifts the dialog from whether this person or that person is right or wrong, or slept with his ferret, or whatever slime passes for discourse these days. (I've turned it off and tuned it out.)
We are God's creation, and our task is to keep on recreating ourselves and our corporations and our culture. Or, for atheists, our task is to keep on recreating ourselves and our corporations and our culture. Either way, we come out in the same place, with the same action conclusions.
I guess if your religion denies that evolution can or does occur, and believes all that is around us is fixed forever, these ideas may be threatening. I personally just see life as FIXED (ie, constant, invariant) on a whole different level. LIFE, to me, has the fixed property that it is constantly evolving (or being evolved, or being directed) into ever more beautiful and large scale and more complex life forms.
Again, I guess if your religion or science tells you that man is the highest creation in the universe, and always will be, these ideas are alien. If you believe in God, you already believe man is not as "high" as life can go.
The more we can get commerce, multiple religions, and multiple sciences to all agree on something, like a core direction of the vector of LIFE, the more we can put aside our differences and gasp in awe and wonder of the engine we find ourselves inside, part of.
And the more we can use the common architectural guidelines and design principles, like the core cybernetic loop, as an invariant and reliable foundation on which to base all the rest of our human endeavors, to increase their odds of success, and to decrease the odds that what the people over THERE are building will ultimately be in conflict with what the people over HERE are building.
We're all in this together, dudes.
There is one constant of Creation -- and it is .... creation.
Not creation once, in a frozen sculpture for all time, but continuously recursive re-creation of life.
Life is that which recreates itself, and so on. We should celebrate it. We should understand it.
We should think deeply about where that "goes", over time.
We should discuss with each other what that "says" about our place in it all.
- Our religions all tell us to focus on "higher life", in so many words. Some are far more explicit, talking about us being "members" in the "Body of Christ" or similar terms.
- Our science is obsessed with creating life from scratch, but can't figure out how.
- Our businessmen and women are busy creating higher life, but haven't realized that's what they're doing while they think they're doing something else.
A massive interdisciplinary effort to pool all our notes and everything we know about "higher life" and "composite life" and "emergent life", and figure out what that tells us about ways to make our economies "come back to life" and our businesses "come back to life" will help our own personal careers "come back to life."
We don't have a large pool of concepts we can all come together around. This seems to be the only one I've seen so far, in fact. Maybe we should use it as a tool to defuse hostilities.
There are so many ways hostilities could explode and employ technology in unprecendented waves of killing.There are so few ways we can recover common ground and draw attention away from our differences, and put them into perspectives.
We have the SAME GOALS. We are made of the SAME DNA. We differ on how to get there, but, in the BIG PICTURE, that is not really very important.
What is important, socially, is to SHARE a BIG PICTURE about something, ANYTHING.
Without that common ground to fall back on, we will be perpetually vulnerable to demagogues trying to blow small differences all out of proportion. It is really crucial to all conflict resolution on all levels that we get a common, explicit, shared framework of BIG things we agree on, as the context in which all discussion of our remaining differences can take place. They will all turn out to be small details, that, in the larger mission and picture, we will be finally able to let go of or be flexible on, if in so doing we can go for the final goal.
T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
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