We need serious R&D on how to improve meetings!

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's 2020 Annual Letter titled Why We Swing for the Fences is posted, and I wanted to respond at greater length than their comments section would allow, so here it is.  A subtitle might be: We need serious R&D on how to improve meetings!

Executive Summary

I present a case that, while funding initiatives into high-profile problems is a good idea,  in addition serious funding should be considered for the cross-cutting unsolved problem of making great decisions come out of small group meetings.  In my own opinion, easily half, if not more than 90% of the funds going into business and public initiatives is wasted by the present dismal state of group decision making,  especially where the rubber meets the road, at the front of local decision groups.  The $100 million sent this week to combat the corona-virus pandemic, for example, is really trying to fix a problem caused by a poor decision of a Chinese censor group to suppress the observations of a doctor who spotted the problem early when it could have been fixed for probably under $1,000.  Business meetings I have been in seemed to be so preoccupied with 51% of the room battling 49% of the room that only 2% of the mental bandwidth was left to use for actual thinking, with the expected result of no decision made.  The universe of problems mankind faces, and their solutions,  do not fit well through the tiny keyhole of this sort of "meetings".  There must be a better way. Technology of super-computing, cockpit-management, and very high performance teams which have been observed in practice suggests there is.  Few problems would have more leverage, per dollar spent, of improving mankind's chances of survival than this one.

Introduction

First let me say how much I appreciate and applaud their past efforts in the often contested areas of global public health and public education.   I spent 50 years in academia myself and recently went back to school to get a Masters in Public Health from Johns Hopkins,  because, to put it bluntly, if we're all dead then solutions to the other problems don't really matter, do they?

Sadly, many people mistakenly believe that "Public Health" is a term that simply means free health care for poor people, or something like that, instead of grasping that it is really about the Health of the Public,  the global concern for all of us on the planet and the things that make us unhealthy ( or dead ) which includes diseases and disorders, physical and mental, but it also includes responses to the "agents of death" such as tobacco,  weaponry of all scales from handguns to tactical nuclear weapons,  and, yes, the change in the climate, again hotly disputed as to cause, but hardly disputed as to the devastating impact it is already having on world populations,  starting with poor people.

Weather after all has profound effects far from the source.  It was a drought in India that raised the price of tea which caused England to raise the tax on colonists which led to the American Revolution. Everything is connected.

And now we have a new global pandemic at the gates,   the novel corona virus ( aka Covid-19 ),  ringing echoes of previous pandemics,  from SARS to MERS to HIV to the Spanish Flu of 1918.  I see the Gates Foundation has already chipped in $100 million just this last week.   See Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Dedicates Additional Funding to the Novel Coronavirus Response

And if you look at the map of the corona-virus cases and deaths, updated daily on the World Health Organization's website,   you see not a single case in Africa so far.    There is deep speculation that this is not due to there being no spread of the virus into Africa and its densely crowded poverty-stricken large cities,   but that the public health capacity there to test for and diagnose the virus has been lacking.    

 Their neglected and impoverished health care system and poverty are very likely to soon become "our" problem in the USA -- if not on this pandemic, then perhaps on the next one.   This problem is "silent" and ignorable here in the USA until suddenly it won't be, but that time will be far past the time we should have acted.   Again, thank you Gates Foundation for stepping up to the plate.

[ post-comment: I learned today (24-Feb-2020) from the WHO briefing that much of Africa actually has quite good syndromic surveillance on diseases like Polio, Hemorrhagic fever,  Cholera, Lhasa Fever, and Yellow Fever, but their system for tracking pulmonary diseases still needs work ]

Also Melinda said in the letter, "But we’ve also developed a major sense of urgency around two other issues. For Bill, it’s addressing climate change. For me, it’s gender equality."

The issues around adapting to climate change,  and/or combating it, depending on which of two polarized camps you are in,  has spread not only to the rest of the world, but has also become a major psychological concern of Generation Z - our young people today.   The Washington Post magazine had a piece this week " The Environmental Burden of Generation Z / Kids are terrified, anxious and depressed about climate change. Whose fault is that? "  ( apologies  -that site might require a subscription to see. )

I am a member of the Baby Boomer generation myself, who grew up in constant fear of global thermonuclear war breaking out,  which it almost did in 1962 in the "Cuban missile crisis" when only the decision of one Russian submarine captain to go against policy and not fire his missiles stood between us and Armageddon.     The very real fears these children have of climate change,  that they will never live long enough to have their own children, will certainly mark them forever, even if we resolved the problem itself tomorrow.

So kudos to Bill for addressing climate change in the coming decades.  

I am an absolute believer in the need for gender equality and the religion I belong to, the Baha'i Faith, has been working tirelessly on this front for over a century.  ( See The Advancement of Women )    The newsletter didn't mention the studies which have shown, by the way,  that the profitability of companies, the bottom line, seems to be proportional to the number of women on their Board.      See for example "Huge study finds that companies with more women leaders are more profitable"  and a quote from that piece: 

 The evidence on women in the C-suite is robust: no matter how we torture the data we get the same result: women in the C-suite are associated with higher profitability,” Marcus Noland, director of studies at the Peterson Institute, told Quartz in an email.

Re-framing "the problem"

So while every one of these issues,  from global health to climate change to education to women's roles is important,

I want to suggest that the global situation we are in today is akin to a sinking boat with 200 holes in the bottom, and we are arguing over the priorities of which four holes to address first.  

There is always a natural inclination, when overwhelmed, to "prioritize".  What's wrong with that?

The problem with that approach is that it only works out for situations where we only have a handful off key issues,  and if those are addressed the others can be mopped up later.     With the complexity of the globe today, and the accelerating progress of change  we a simply making new problems for ourselves faster than we can solve them.

The problem, in other words, is that prioritizing doesn't work in that situation. 

The boat will still sink, from the other 196 holes, while we are prioritizing those four holes.   I'm not saying these are not big holes -- I'm just saying that there are now so many holes that even if we fix those four,  we're nowhere near done.  We will still sink.   We need in addition to those initiatives, something that addresses all of the holes at once.

What might that be?

I raised that question and a tentative answer in this weblog in 2006 and 2007 in a post titled "Houston, we have another problem" and illustrated it with a simple graph with profound implications:

The graph is simply a visualization of two curves -one showing the wisdom or intelligence required to solve today's problems on a generic "wisdom scale" , which is heading exponentially upwards at an ever faster rate,  and the other curve showing the peak IQ or wisdom of the smartest person on earth, which I was generous and put at an IQ of 250.

The problem illustrated is that sometime before the year 2000 these curves have crossed and will never meet again.   The problems are already beyond what the smartest human can get her head around, and growing rapidly even worse, as everything is tangled up into everything else, and every time we humans try to solve one problem we seem to create two more, and in fact the solution to our first problem becomes the new problem.    This sort of thing happens regularly with "complex adaptive systems", and the wonderful thinker Lewis Thomas put it so well in Lives of a Cell

When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century. You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obligated to understand... the whole system.. Intervening is a way of causing trouble.

Are we doomed then?  Is there no hope?

Actually, there is not only hope, there is a clear path to a solution on the table in front of us.

A single root-cause problem that would address all the other problems at once is figuring out how to dramatically improve working together in small groups.

 It turns out that our computer scientists ran into a similar problem last century.  They kept trying to make larger and larger computers  ( remember "mainframes" ? )  to solve problems, but were running into all sorts of technical issues, when someone finally realized that they did not need a single cpu ("central processing unit") large enough to do everything with almost infinite speed -- what they needed instead was a community of small, cheap, easy-to-build computers which worked together to solve problems.

That solution worked.  Today's so called "supercomputers" are actually villages of tens of thousands of small computers that have learned to work together on common problems.

It's  good solution. It's a good pattern. It works.

Humanity's problem has been that trying to put together many people to make a sort of larger entity, a meta-smart-person,  has to date, until recently, been sadly lacking.

We've tried "committees" but those have a rather dismal track-record, and making one larger than, say, a dozen people,  seems to only worsen the problem.

In other words, we haven't solve the problem that I can tease out as follows:   

How do we consciously design a decision making architecture that has the property that if you need it to be wiser or smarter, you can just add more people.

We can do that sort of thing now with "The Cloud" --  we can synthesize however much computing power you need on a problem,  and just keep adding more physical computers under the covers.  It works.  Again, we have a physically real model, a design pattern, that actually works in practice to draw from.

On committees and meetings, endless meetings

Part of the problem of committees,  and of almost every organization imaginable today, is the primitive design of what are called "meetings"  -- an interaction supposedly designed to produce light but that typically produces only lost time, boredom, or outrage.    More heat than light.

This "meeting" idea was designed several thousand years ago, and to be honest, aside from the addition of better lighting and power-point slides,  hasn't really improved much since then.  Real time visualization and interaction tools like Tableau help some, as do "mind-mapping" tools for debriefing crowds to try to tease out underlying mental models from fragments of knowledge.

But our experience with meetings and committees and our expectations are best captured by the cartoonist Scott Adams in his series Dilbert -- namely, rampant dysfunction.

That needs to change. That's where we need to focus some serious energy.  Of all the places in the world with a huge leverage, a huge potential payoff,  making "meetings" even 10% more effective would have an absolutely enormous downstream effect.     Making them 250% more effective might solve our problems overall.   Meetings are on the critical path to essentially everything we do.

We need better decisions,  and we need innovation, desperately.  Both of these things can potentially arise from small groups working together.

And times have changed since when we grew up.   The "cheese has moved."  Our expectations are way out of date.

A vast amount has been learned in the past 20 years about how decisions get made in mission-critical environments,  such as airplane cockpits or surgical operating rooms, and dramatic improvements in performance have resulted, with dramatic reductions in what were unimaginably ( if not real ) stupid errors, like cutting off the wrong limb.

As a side note, a result that showed up in my Artificial Intelligence courses, was that many if not most business failures were due to bad decisions - and more particularly they were caused not by a failure to be a genius and solve astounding problems, but by a failure at the bottom end, a failure so basic, so stupid, that you just shake your head at, or maybe say "I could have told them that!!!" or maybe even "I did tell them that, in fact, but they didn't listen."

Recent financial collapses come to mind.  Climate change, pandemics,  water supplies,  social unrest and riots and change of governments face us daily -- as do the products of insanely bad decisions somewhere upstream in the ether.  Our children blame us for the problems by the way.  This is no longer simply a standing joke or something we see in a Scott Adams Dilbert cartoon and laugh at and then simply forget.  That time is past.

Some of these issues are things that Artificial Intelligence might solve because so called "Rules-Based Expert Systems"  are not necessarily great at the top end, though some are  but they work quite well at the dumb end of the spectrum.

[ aside: One could imagine, say, replacing a fixed written policy document, or emergency-response handbook with a set of rules which in good times produces exactly the same handbook of situations and responses, but in times of crisis or war, when the core assumptions turn out to be false, as they always do when the first shot is fired,   could have the assumption set tweaked, the crank turned, and a new set of guidelines for response generated.    That could work in many circumstances and has the advantage that it can explain how it came to a conclusion, so a human can look at it and accept or over-ride it, unlike the output of, say, a neural net.  The nice thing is the computer does not get tired after 72 hours of solid crisis, unlike humans.   And pandemics last well over 72 hours. ]

Still, those are just specific instances of decision-making that can be improved somewhat.

I'm talking about making a factor of ten improvement in the actual productivity of "meetings." 

What scale change are we looking at?  What's a possible "future state"?

I'm reminded of the time I lived in Ann Arbor, near Detroit, and General Motors was trying to figure out how to get the transition time between models on the assembly line down from 6 weeks to maybe 5.7 weeks.     Someone was sent to see how Toyota did it, and discovered that Toyota did their assembly line model changeover in something like 4 days.

That's what we need for "meetings" -- not at 5% improvement around the edges, but a thousand percent improvement,  using the new understandings we have about how people think, and new computer-assisted technology,  and God knows what else we have to bring to the problem.

We need to start by re-conceptualizing what a "meeting" is supposed to accomplish, on the one hand, and then looking at what tools are available today that were not even a decade ago, and do some brainstorming, innovating, and experiments.      I recently saw a demonstration of Adobe Connect and I'm impressed with even that much improvement in ability to connect in real-time, share voice and data and applications, get real-time feedback about who has fallen asleep and stopped participating allowing for reactive facilitation, etc.   Much more functionality could fit in that framework with their plug-in architecture.  Dig here, people!!   And no I have no connection to Adobe.  I just think they did a really nice job with this product and it's a potential framework for two huge new "use-cases" to add a new functionality "app" plug-in to monitor how well a consensus is being formed, who is backing off from it and who is moving towards it, who just got mortally offended,  etc.

• professional global meetings on pandemic outbreak response  , and
• local community multi-stakeholder public meetings about local pandemic response.

[ Note - after the above was written I did check the Gartner Group's "Magic Quadrant" analysis of the best on-line-meeting support tools.  The 2019 ratings are here:
https://www.uctoday.com/collaboration/exploring-gartners-magic-quadrant-for-meeting-solutions-2019/
The best product ratings there are for Cisco and Zoom.

I am not shilling for a particular product. Any product that is actually swung into wide use would make me very happy!
]



Meanwhile -- what's the "present state"?

In general,  we have not only contentious small meetings, but meetings where multiple stake-holders, or the public are involved,   where action decisions are called for on something,  and people can't even agree on terms and definitions, or mental frameworks or value systems to use, or on the credibility of the data, or the legitimacy of the rules they might use to process that data into conclusions and an action decision and plan.

This seems in the last decade in fact to be getting decidedly worse.  Outrage is the norm and civility, not one's weapons, are checked at the door.     Not too suprrisingly even less gets resolved, and what does get resolved does so in such a way, such as a 50.1% majority overruling a 49.9% minority, that permanent damage is done to human relations and odds of everyone agreeing on anything ever again have gone downhill as an unintended but persistent side-effect of the "meeting".

Properly conceived,  what we need to optimize, or at least improve significantly, is an entire string of meetings, not just one meeting-event.

It's an extreme position, but the Baha'is consider the impact of a meeting on group unity to be more important than the ostensible product of the meeting, such as a decision on something,  to the point that a wrong decision that improves unity is urged instead of a contentious meeting which produces a right decision;   the logic is that wrong decisions can be quickly detected and fixed, whereas hard feelings become permanent feuds and prevent any more decisions of any kind to ever be made -- far more damaging than one wrong decision.      In support of that position,  many CEO's operate from information they know perfectly well is imperfect, and take probing steps while braced to quickly undo that if it turns out to be wrong, which allows them to continue to operate in territory with weak data where academic analysis paralysis would result and where "no action" or "no decision" is, in fact, an action and a decision in its own right.

Meeting over the web, or via social media,  does not appear to have solved this problem, but in many cases seems to have only worsened it.

On Tackling Big Problems

One attack approach to large problems is to try to "divide and conquer" or at least break one large problem to be solved into multiple smaller ones, and then reassemble the results into an effective larger result, solving the big problem.

One attempt to break problems apart is the classic hierarchical tree of management, with one all powerful decision maker at the top, and a branching network of smaller and smaller units reporting upwards and taking orders downward.

That model has largely broken down today, because it assumes that there is one human being that can get their head around a problem, the expert,  and that sensor data flowing upwards is properly summarized and distilled at each level, and that orders down wards are properly interpreted and executed at each level going down.    None of these assumptions proves true in practice.  Problems are so complex and fractal-shaped that the expertise has to be be out in the field, at the end of the branches, and even then may not be up to actually understanding the local circumstances in which operations are taking place.

Regardless, it is clear that local circumstances are really important, and widely different, and mostly or totally invisible at the top, or made invisible by successive operations called "summarizing" that removes all the salient details and leaves only a residue that fits on one power-point slide,  repeated at each level of management.   Thus, very large organizations are quite well known to have top management that appears to be living in a different world than the people at the bottom or on the front.

As a result, even for a very large company or military, say, decentralizing a great deal of the decision making to the front, to where the actual circumstances are clear and known to the decision makers, is becoming more common.    Decreeing a one-size-fits-all policy based on the world seen from the top doesn't seem to work well for that situation.

So, again, we are down to how to make those decisions well, matters.  How do small groups of people get together,  using "meetings" or something else,  to combine views, frameworks, perspectives, values,  sensor data,  hunches, smarts,  spreadsheets, visualization tools, etc. to emerge from the room with a "good action decision" in hand?

Interestingly the Baha'i Faith,  with a strong interest in Social and Economic Development, has urged for over 100 years as a major central pillar the idea of "consultation" -- the role of very local decision makers getting their heads together and addressing local problems in such a way that not only are the problems solved, but everyone comes out of the room feeling closer to and more friends with everyone else as a side effect.    Despite the "common wisdom" that this is not possible, it is in fact quite possible. it's possible in high-tech countries, and it's possible in dirt-floor villages.

In some ways all that is needed, aside from some guidance and training,  is figuring out how to counter-balance and overcome the deeply paralyzing belief that this task is hopeless. 

 That's the sort of task that a funded study could evaluate,  determine what is valid and portable and reproducible,  and craft basically a marketing effort around, seeking an intervention to change a cultural belief. A lot is known about that now.  Best practices that work in reality can be collected and rebroadcast.  Training can be created.

Virtual reality may help - as well as emotional channels 

Personally, I'm of the belief that a lot can be done by holding meetings in virtual reality -- just the flat-screen desktop version, not anything that requires expensive googles and high-end workstations. Many of our meetings today involve people distributed around the planet,  or even around the city or the campus, so being on-line is not a barrier. Cheap commodity laptops are adequate for this purpose.

Many meetings already use technology such as Skype or Discord or GoToMeeting or many other products to actually have video conferencing, globally, for essentially zero incremental cost.  Video conferences are somewhat improved over audio-only conferences if the bandwidth is there, because much of the critical interaction between human beings in any meeting is not captured in the text-only transcript -- the volume, tone, pauses, timing, intonation, all form part of one channel of communication that it turns out is simply crucial to humans reaching an agreement with each other.

Similarly video conferencing in large, with one screen showing the whole room, is pretty unsatisfactory for communication of critical honest signals of body language ( described by Alex Pentland) , facial expression, and micro-expressions and micro-interactions that occur when people are face-to-face and can, literally, see each other's faces and detect microscopic changes in everything from posture to the size of one's iris in response to a statement or question or even a "pregnant pause".

Timing matters.  A question answered by "Yes"is not the same answer as the same question followed by a 30 second pause, and then a hesitant "Yes", even though they show up the same on a meeting transcript.    I recall a description of a psychiatrist meeting with a patient where a researcher was given consent to record and transcribe the meeting.  The researcher showed the transcript to the doctor who looked at it in shock and replied something like "You missed everything!  All you did was write down the words! "

The importance of picking up on and consciously emitting emotional content has shown up in the evolution of  "emojis"  or emoticons,   designed to send information to the part of the recipient's brain and body that text-only does not reach, thereby improving the conversation even of "text chat".

Humans are remarkably good,  hardwired as it were,  at picking up any sort of pathway or signal which reveals the honest emotions and what is going on inside the head of the other person in a conversation.   We're built for it.   It can be enhanced -- for example, wearing a large hat would amplify tiny moves of one's head.  

These signals can be consciously sent by people willing to at least try to reach a decision together. I was in a training session,  a so-called "T-group",  during the Vietnam protest days,  that lasted 96 hours and had about 20 people on the floor of a large room discussing issues.   We had an expensive trainer from the Esalen Institute in California as I recall,   who was our emotional disk-jockey and managed the intense emotions unleashed in the room to prevent them from zeroing in on and psychologically damaging any participant.     He also had us all agree to do a few simple things to make it obvious to everyone where we were on the topic and what the person speaking was saying. As they talked, if we were interested we moved closer to the speaker in the center of the room; if we were not interested, we backed away.  If we were totally disinterested, we lay down. .  If we agreed with what was being said, we faced forwards,  as we were ambiguous we faced sideways, if we disagreed we turned our back on the speaker.

The effect was dramatic, and amazingly different from business meetings where people are playing their cards close to their chest,  poker-faced,  if they are paying attention at all.

I call attention to the fact that rather than suppress emotions,  emotions were encouraged and brought to the front.  ( but under a safety-measure of a central facilitator ).

Emotions were seen as a feature not a bug.

Virtual words oriented heavily to social interaction, such as Linden Labs Second Life,  are popular and have quite advanced levels of high-resolution graphics for avatars to represent people, including all types of body language and facial expressions now.       The advantage of meeting in a virtual world would include the fact that the room design can be as nice as possible, from a mountain top to a Buddhist temple,  making use of ambient background sound engineering and lighting to set a mood, or feng shui if you prefer, that is conducive to making friends and making serious and good decisions.   We had one meeting room in a place I used to work that always seemed to generate hostility and bad decisions - and we did our best to not have to be scheduled there.  It matters.

The fact that the room also served double duty as a storage place for dead furniture and boxes of xerox paper did not improve the mood.  No living thing in the room, no plants, did not help.  Sadly, I've seen public health facilities where the environment reflected the minimum funding level, and it just about held in hallway with a desk made up of an unused door stacked atop boxes of some kind of forms or records. These things have a very real effect on the tone of the meeting which has a very real effect on the outcome, and the human side-effects of the meeting.

Making a spectacular meeting space in Virtual Reality costs a few dollars, if that.  It's doable.

In addition,   I took Professor Gary Olson's course "Computer Supported Cooperative Work" when he was at the University of Michigan back in 2006 or so.    One of the great research papers we read in that class was titled  "Global Tele-Immersion: Better than Being There" ( I think I pulled the right cite) and had the novel hypothesis that

computer-mediated conversation should not aim at being "as good as" face-to-face meeting -- it should aim to be much better.  

I may trigger a firestorm with this next comment, and it's risky, but it needs saying. I believe that women may in fact be hard-wired to be better at establishing non-verbal rapport with another human being, because they have evolved to do that with infants and children.
Because women are more adept at this emotional channel, and, anecdotally,  often discussing issues among each other "in order to decide what they think",  instead of a classic ( stereotyped?) male pattern of wanting to figure out what they say before they say anything.   What I've observed i my life supports this sex-linked difference, although I'm not sure if it's gender-linked as well.    Women, famously, are said to be much more willing to ask directions when lost than are men.

I speculate that one reason women have trouble breaking into an otherwise all-male leadership gang is that (a) they won't approach things the same way as the men will and (b) the behavior of "one woman", in a way,  is sort of impossible or at least uncomfortable, because it actually takes two or more women to actually wake up the recursive interactive conversation style and channel.  Therefore there is no way that trying out women,  one by one, in the Board Room,  would ever reveal what power three of them say, would have.   You can't extrapolate from one.  It's a system group effect.  The whole feedback path is structurally different.

The role of diversity in meeting member composition

I am always surprised at the number of people who seem to confuse diverse thinking, and people from diverse cultures and viewpoints,  possibly of different races or sexes or socio-economic status,  with legally mandated requirements and giving important slots and limited chairs to, you know, "those people."

I don't want to go into that here, but I think the literature and example from Radio Astronomy is exquisitely relevant.      Astronomers want to get a good picture of the sky, and for this they need two things -- a lot of surface area of the "dish" or "array" they use to collect the weak signals,   and, often overlooked by non-astronomers,   a large diameter of the "dish".     Usually these two things come bundled together, but someone figured out that they can be separated.    The resolution of a combined radio-telescope,  that is the ability to separate two objects that are close together in the sky and realize there are two things there, not just one larger fuzzy thing,  is simply proportional to the diameter of the dish, or, more precisely the resolution along any specific direction is proportional to the distance apart of the two most remote chunks of the telescope along that axis.

So,  you don't need all the middle of the telescope.  You only need parts that are far apart, in order to get good resolution, and to see what's really out there.   I've oversimplified, but you get the idea.

New Mexico's Very Large Array, pictured below, is an example of a single "radio telescope" entity composed of separate pieces that can be widely separated in space.  This is the one featured in the movie "Contact".

In reality the largest such "synthetic aperture"  radio-telescope in use today is roughly the diameter of the planet Earth.   Parts are located all over the globe, from Sweden to Chile, giving a very long "baseline" and therefore very great "resolution of details" and disambiguation of nearly similar sources in the sky.

The math is exactly the same for people,  people.  If you want to get good resolution of the fine structure of a problem,  you need to get individuals with as wide a difference of viewpoints as possible,  and then carefully and correctly "synthesize" them.

Note importantly that the signals are not added, or averaged -- which might result in garbage or zero result because one signal might be going up while another is going down, and the net result is zero.  And the "conflict" between different signals is not resolved by letting the stronger signal "win".

What is required, when the signals are recorded and then brought to one physical location to be processed,  is that the exact "phase" of the signals be recorded,  the exact timing, and not just the amplitude.     This makes all the difference in the world.   Dedicated supercomputers then process the signals to resolve a unified coherent high-resolution picture of the sky.

There is both diversity and unity, but not uniformity, in the mix.

I keep looking for such physical design patterns that work that can be ported over to the question of how human beings can be put together to achieve such an "aperture synthesis".  It's interesting to me that details of timing are as important as "the signal" in the same way that hearing the exact timing of a human conversation is filled with honest signals about what's really going on behind the words.


Summary

Without taking away from current funding priorities,  I am suggesting that finding ways to make human-human interactions at meetings dramatically more productive could be a funded research aim.

Every other initiative, from dealing with debriefing public opinion and wisdom, to innovation, to adapting to climate change,  would benefit from any results from such an initiative.   It is in my mind a "friendly amendment".     I also believe that figuring out how to add more women to the conversation, successfully, without squelching their diversity,  would immediately emerge as a necessary component and change the whole torque of why and how that could and should be done, advancing that cause.

There seems to me to be every reason to believe that a dramatic leap forward in productive meeting technology should be possible, if we can simply overcome our bad experiences with committees and classic meetings and dreaded "group work" in school,   and focus some serious attention on it.

picture credits - the pictures of the pole barn and the radio telescope were found on the web many years ago and aren't mine but I can't locate the originals.  The graph for "Houston, we have another problem" is my own art work.  Image from FOMC meeting in Washington, D.C., Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia ( public domain );  Huntington town meeting (CC-by-SA);   image from Tropentag 2018 meeting on how to solve wicked problems.  Fossil Creek Public Meeting ( public domain)