Lately I've been spending a lot of time reading books on how to make groups of people better able to do the work that "meetings" are supposed to help with.
People, as individuals, have a lot of problems when viewed as "problem solving" units or agents. We have terrible and selective memory, flawed perceptions, are easily biased and swayed in ways that are invisible to us, etc. Sometimes, using the power of collective intelligence and social wisdom, we can come together and actually have a dialog and collaborate and consult, and overcome those flaws, at least partly, and make better decisions together than any of us could have made as separate individuals.
Still, when we assemble all that into larger units, such as corporations and mega-corporations and governments, the process seems to break down and revert to being dominated by the ego and psychological flaws of individuals all over again. Sadly, this time the individuals are armed with not rolling pins and sticks, but armies and nuclear weapons so the costs of these character flaws become much higher.
What to do? Humanity has experimented with all kinds of mix and match ways to organize ourselves, with assemblies and parliaments and elected "representatives" and houses and senates and committees and subcommittees -- but the results we were hoping for -- a central honest competent decision-making process -- remains elusive. On a business sense, we seem able to put together close to a million people to make a company, like General Motors, that is surprised by the fact that people seek more efficient cars when the price of gasoline goes up. We have, in fact, made a collection that appears to be dumber than the average Joe on the street.
We've even tried "group work" and "collaboration", which sometimes works better than "competition", but still has yet to demonstrate the robust power of a true solution.
I just noticed, however, that one thing we have always been doing is using individuals as the building blocks.
So, maybe we should consider using dyads (pairs, couples) as the building blocks instead, and see what we can make in the way of larger complex structures composed of pairs-of-people-working-as-one.
Of course, we are biased against this by being taught in school that 1 + 1 = 2. We come to believe this, and it colors all our thinking.
In reality, however, we also have the option of this math:
1 + 1 = 1
In other words, a small one plus a small one can add up to a larger ONE. Some couples can make this work, generally assisted by a combination of "love" and a great deal of relationship-sustaining plain hard work and sacrifice.
I've discussed in prior posts the idea of "pair programming" and the power of working on a computing task as a pair with one computer and two people, intimately consulting on each step. This is known to be very effective. It's also a lot more fun than working in isolation, and it overcomes the terrible trade-off our business structures force us to make -- between being social and "working".
Why should the two be mutually exclusive? This is so strange.
Maybe, the concept needs to be extended to all our business structures, and every slot for a "person" should be a candidate for being filled with a person-dyad instead, a pair of people.
Actually, our legal system recently made it clear that corporations are legally "persons" and have First Amendment Rights, etc. So, certainly a pair of people could legally incorporate and become a meta-person then, and hold one job between them.
Imagine if we allowed this to occur, and could consider for our elected official persons, not just "individuals" but also "dyads". Typically, suppose, that rather than choosing between a male and a female President, say, we could elect a married couple as our meta-person to fill that slot.
This is a fascinating thing to consider. Suppose we restrict the playing field to those couples that have been married for, say, 10 years or more. Hey, we restrict it to people who have been alive for 35 years or more. so same deal here -- we're just looking for a meta-person, a PERSON, who has been alive at least 10 years.
By so doing, we will actually be selecting for a demonstrated ability of each of these individual people to overcome their own egos and work with at least ONE other human being over a period of time, where every step has consequences they are going to have to face.
Maybe, that would be a good trait to select for in our elected leadership. And, it might allow our leaders to have the option of being in two places at once,when needed. More on this later.
We seem as a society to have somewhat abandoned the idea that two people, with a male and female viewpoint, would come together for the purpose (or accepted side-effect) of managing a household and family.
I don't think that was such a bad idea. The fact that the rest of our social and religious structures and culture undermined that construct didn't make it a bad idea, just one that has been increasingly difficult to accomplish.
Still, if we selected for leadership couples who have managed to pull that off and accomplish it, wouldn't they, as a pair, have the type of insights and attitudes that we actually always wanted our leadership (in loco parentis) to have?
In any case, it would be one way to cope with the fact that we have more people than jobs these days -- start filling one job-slot with a pair of people, a legally-incorporated meta-person, instead of with a single person. Especially if the pairs are mixed genders, both male and female viewpoints can be reflected in their work.
Yes, it would be a challenge. It would suggest some rather dramatic changes in our entire educational K-12 and college programs, to be oriented around training dyads instead of training individuals on the one hand and "teams" on the other.
Still, since nothing else we've tried has been very successful, I put this on the table for consideration.
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