U.S. Army as a learning organization

I've praised the U.S. Army as a model "learning organization" that has evolved a way to ask "hard questions" and internally debate extremely contentious issues, and to learn from its "mistakes" and improve next time.

Please note that I am very carefully trying to avoid stating any position regarding what decisions got made, in the interest of focusing on the underlying process of decision-making and mental-model adaptation itself. How did that work? Did it work well? How could it be tweaked so it would work better, not just for one specific instance, but in the general case, from now on?

In short, what can we learn from this experience that will be a permanent step upwards in how we make important decisions collectively, as a country, with both free-speech and a command structure to balance. What can we learn that we can apply to any organization's leadership?

The "unity" above the "diversity" of these two almost-opposing interests is the theme. Where is the sweet spot that we can rise-above the conflict and satisfy both interests without compromising either?

That's the serious question all sides should agree is worth asking.

Then, when we're done looking at the smaller problem we need to spin to a different lens and look at the larger question of how the American people and Congress worked in terms of utilizing information, interests, and politics to make the decisions involved. Did that work? Are people happy, looking back? Can that be improved? Can we learn something?

If so, what? If not, why not?

Is something interfering with our ability to learn from the past and adapt to the future? If so, what is it? What can we do about it? As with "the Toyota Way", we need to do what we were discouraged from doing in grade school, and keep on asking "Why?" at least 5 times trying to dig back to "root-causes" and go far enough to find the upstream things that can, in fact, be changed.

The lesson we should have learned from looking at Toyota's spectacular performance, and the "Making the Impossible Possible" video, is that mostly what is in the way tends to be simply cynicism and the incorrect belief that "nothing can be done" and "We have to live with that." Toyota's lesson in "lean processing" is "No you don't. In fact you must not put up with it. Stop and fix it!"

It often turns out that the cynicism is both unjustified and unsupportable. Change can happen, over time, a little bit at a time, with persistent efforts by everyone. Toyota has proved that.

Maybe, there are better ways and better models for us consulting with each other to make hard decisions about emotionally charged issues.

So, today's NY Times has a relevant article that hits many of those points, particularly the dynamic tension between keeping the command and control structure (and the US Constitution) in place, but also keeping the flow of surprising news going upward, so that we're not trying to violate the basic law of cybernetics and operate with the eyes disconnected from the hand.

For those at my talk Friday, here's the relevant image:


I added emphasis to the excerpts below.


At an Army School for Officers, Blunt Talk about Iraq
New York Times
October 14, 2007
by Elisabeth Bumiller

FORT LEAVENWORTH, Kan. — Here at the intellectual center of the United States Army, two elite officers were deep in debate at lunch on a recent day over who bore more responsibility for mistakes in Iraq — the former defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, or the generals who acquiesced to him.

No, Major Montague shot back, it was more complicated: the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the top commanders were part of the decision to send in a small invasion force and not enough troops for the occupation. Only Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff who was sidelined after he told Congress that it would take several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, spoke up in public.

“You didn’t hear any of them at the time, other than General Shinseki, screaming, saying that this was untenable,” Major Montague said.

... Here at the base on the bluffs above the Missouri River,... rising young officers are on a different journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq.

Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: ...

But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

On one level, second-guessing is institutionalized at Leavenworth, home to the Combined Arms Center, a research center that includes the Command and General Staff College for midcareer officers, the School of Advanced Military Studies for the most elite and the Center for Army Lessons Learned, which collects and disseminates battlefield data.

...The goal at Leavenworth is to adapt the Army to the changing battlefield without repeating the mistakes of the past.

Much of the debate at Leavenworth has centered on a scathing article, “A Failure in Generalship,” written last May for Armed Forces Journal by Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, an Iraq veteran and deputy commander of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment who holds a master’s degree in political science from the University of Chicago. “If the general remains silent while the statesman commits a nation to war with insufficient means, he shares culpability for the results,” Colonel Yingling wrote.

The article has been required class reading at Leavenworth, where young officers debate whether Colonel Yingling was right to question senior commanders ...

Discussions nonetheless focused on where young officers might draw a “red line,” the point at which they would defy a command from the civilians — the president and the defense secretary — who lead the military.

“We have an obligation that if our civilian leaders give us an order, unless it is illegal, immoral or unethical, then we’re supposed to execute it, and to not do so would be considered insubordinate,” said Major Timothy Jacobsen, another student. “How do you define what is truly illegal, immoral or unethical? At what point do you cross that threshold where this is no longer right, I need to raise my hand or resign or go to the media?”

But Colonel Fontenot, who commanded a battalion in the Persian Gulf war and a brigade in Bosnia and has since retired, said he questioned whether Americans really wanted a four-star general to stand up publicly and say no to the president of a nation where civilians control the armed forces.

For the sake of argument, a question was posed: If enough four-star generals had done that, would it have stopped the war?

“Yeah, we’d call it a coup d’etat,” Colonel Fontenot said. “Do you want to have a coup d’etat? You kind of have to decide what you want. Do you like the Constitution, or are you so upset about the Iraq war that you’re willing to dismiss the Constitution in just this one instance and hopefully things will be O.K.? I don’t think so.”

Some of the young officers were unimpressed by retired officers who spoke up against Mr. Rumsfeld in April 2006. The retired generals had little to lose, they argued, and their words would have mattered more had they been on active duty. “Why didn’t you do that while you were still in uniform?” Maj. James Hardaway, 36, asked.

Yet, Major Hardaway said, General Shinseki had shown there was a great cost, at least under Mr. Rumsfeld. “Evidence shows that when you do do that in uniform, bad things can happen,” he said. “So, it’s sort of a dichotomy of, should I do the right thing, even if I get punished?”

One question that silenced many of the officers was a simple one: Should the war have been fought?

“That’s a big, open question,” General Caldwell said after a long pause.

Remembering our soldiers

Countries still send their youth to fight and die, or come home injured and changed, for causes too often "long ago forgotten."

In the US, memory seems to be very short, and even the returning soldiers from last year are themselves forgotten in corners of Walter Reed, or in our homeless shelters or in cardboard boxes on the streets.

While violence and war seem to be the last resort of those incapable of any higher form of civilization, those who go are often motivated by their understanding of what will protect and serve the rest of us, and deserve our respect. That applies as well to "enemy" soldiers and injured civilians as to our own.

This is one of the most obvious "multi-level" activities of mankind, where "the Nation" is off fighting one kind of war on one level, and armies are fighting a different war on a different level, and individuals and small teams are fighting a third kind of war on a different level.

And, the "causes" of war, or intervention points to stop wars and achieve "just and enduring peace" are similarly clouded by all the factors this weblog discusses, from feedback processes to distant causality and the aggregate impact of many "small things" that we don't realize add up to a dominant force.

I'm reading a book titled "Social Injustice and Public Health", (Oxford, 2006) by Barry Levy and Victor Sidel, which is the textbook for a course I'm taking later this summer. The editors, Levy and Sidel, previously edited two other books "War and Public Health" and "Terrorism and Public Health." Their main thesis is that social injustice underlies these problems -- war, terrorism, and public health -- and that those visible downstream outcomes cannot be resolved until the underlying problem of social justice is solved.

This is similar to the central thesis of the book Peace - More than an End to War, published by the Baha'i Publishing Trust in 1986. Quoting from the forward of that book,

The Baha'i approach to the achievement of peace calls for fundamental changes in all aspects of behavior - individual, interpersonal, corporate, and international - based upon the belief that human beings have an innate capacity for harmony and cooperation,which, unfortunately, has been suppressed by religious fanaticism and the spread of divisive ideologies.

The Baha'i teachings prescribe education for world citizenship, the fostering of effective communication, and the eradication of prejudice. The advocate social reconstruction and administration based on the principle of the oneness of mankind. Each of these behavioral changes supports the others...

While there are many misguided and less noble motivations for warfare, one of the most consistent one, on all sides of any such conflict, is the belief that sacrifice and even death are worth it in the struggle to make a world safe for our children to grow up free of terror, discrimination, disease, and oppression. I suspect no nation has ever gone to war without believing that they are champions of this effort and that they are fighting some version of evil personified. Dehumanization and demonization of "the enemy" is always rampant.

Yet, 50 years later, these people like us that we had perceived as demons are often our friends and allies, and now we've shifted to perceiving other groups as demons.

Surely, our linear minds think, there is someone out there to blame for what is going wrong, and it surely couldn't be ourselves.

One of the most important lessons of "systems thinking" is explained well using a class role-playing simulation of a massive instability in the production and distribution of the alcoholic beverage beer, in MIT Professor Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline. Orders fluctuate wildly until companies start failing, but there is, it turns out, no one to blame. The system is to blame. The overall structure of the interactions is to blame, and, literally, every person in the system is behaving rationally and sensibly and no one intends the whole thing to go so wrong.

I can't think of anything more important for people who want to "stop war" or "end violence" to understand than that lesson. Often, no one is to blame, and everyone is to blame, for sustaining a structure that results, inevitably, inexorably, in us demonizing each other, and killing each other, instead of watching our children play soccer together.

The problem is that warfare has always been an inefficient and ineffective method of accomplishing the goal that everyone on all sides wants, ultimately, of a peaceful world with stable, thriving communities, economic prosperity, physical health, and an opportunity to move closer to nature and our particular view of God without being demonized ourselves for doing so.

We all want what our bodies and spirits are designed for and optimized for - social connectivity to each other. We want to belong, and to belong to something larger, and belong to something larger that has noble purpose and that may demand something of us but that sustains our best self in return. When that connectivity breaks down, as all the social epidemiology literature shows, when we become fragmented and disconnected, it is inevitably followed with depression, deteriorating personal physical health on many fronts, sometimes violence, and often death. We were never designed to try to face life alone, and it doesn't work well. Even the cells in our bodies, if removed from our bodies, commit suicide ("apoptosis"), apparently seeing no reason to go on.

This seems to be a deep, profound, and multi-level need, the need to belong, to reassemble all the loose parts and form a fabric, a community, a society, a culture.

One problem is that on different scales, individuals, groups, cultures, and sometimes entire nations and peoples are perceived as "not us" by other people, and efforts are made to marginalize, detach, suppress, or kill them outright - singly, in groups, or in massive genocidal wars. Needless to say, the attitude becomes mutual and self-reinforcing.

From the model I've been painting in the weblog, we may be able to view this in the framework of "regulatory feedback control systems" trying to do what they always do - namely, figure out where their own parts are, reassemble the parts, figure out what parts don't belong, get rid of those parts, and re-stabilize the whole thing in some kind of sustainable shape -- homeostasis in the case of humans, allostasis in the case of other beings or other levels of life, "system stability" in terms of large, complex computing systems and ecologies.

Now, that process is unstoppable and comes with the territory. You can't have Life without that process on every level, from sub-cellular components such as mitochondria to nations. There is nothing wrong with that design. It's a great design. It got us from a sea of hydrogen to the complex muli-leveled beings we are and the world we've built around ourselves and the natural world we've inherited, even if we seem bent on destroying as rapidly as possible.

What is killing us, and resulting in pain and violence at all levels, is not that process, but disorders of that process.

It is quite like our relationship with microscopic organisms known as bacteria. There are millions or billions of different kinds of bacteria, and for the vast majority of them we get along fine. In fact, there are some we literally could not live without, populating our intestines. Even some of the "diseases" that "we" get turn our to be the unintended side-effect of the bacteria themselves getting a disease from the much smaller viruses. We are not, or should not be, at war with bacteria. Coexistence dominates, and there are only a few places where it breaks down, and even those are malfunctions on the pathogen's end. It makes no sense for a pathogen to kill its host, and then have to go find another.

It is, on that scale, a poor business model.

Similarly, the cells of our bodies are not our enemies as humans. Occasionally, one goes crazy and starts ignoring the larger body and grows itself unboundedly, and we call that "cancer", but for the most part the health of our cells and the health of our bodies are fully compatible and, in fact, more than compatible, they are mutually supportive. It's the ultimate win-win solution.

It is, in my mind, a very similar process that we're fighting on a whole different scale with our economies and religions and armies.

Religions have disorders at the entire entity level because they can't resolve clearly what part of themselves is "them" and what part is "other", and we end up with "autoimmune disorders" where one part of the religious body turns on another part of the religious body and tries to destroy it. Sects develop and intersect warfare results. The body religious rips itself apart, to no one's benefit.

Immune systems are great, except when they go wrong. But it is not the concept of an immune system that should be discarded - it is the disorder of the immune system that needs to be repaired. You cannot make a living, sustainable anything without an immune system.

So, our attention then is turned, inevitably, onto how our social immune system makes the subtle but absolutely critical distinction between "me" and "not me", or "us" and "not us". Which thing out there should be preserve and healed, and which thing out there should be attacked and destroyed? This turns out to be a very hard question.

But, it turns out to be a very hard multi-level question, a scale-invariant question, a problem that is instanced on every single level of every living thing that ever was or will be.

In that is our hope, because, even though no one level tells us enough to "find the answer", the fact that all levels have this problem means we can pool data, trade notes, combine our insights from every level into a single master picture and then, I believe, we will be able to simply look at see what to do. It should be obvious, once we get the right viewpoint. It should be unambiguous, because it should be beautiful, simple, elegant, and have "white space" all around it. We should "resonate" with it, because it will be the answer our own body, our own psyche, our own family, our own community needs as well.

So, if we just accept the working hypothesis that "life" exists at every level, and then extend everything we know across levels, it should turn out we already know the answer. The "life sciences" should inform the "social sciences", and vice versa, because we all face the problem of supporting a multi-level mutually compatible immune system and the associated "identity" that the immune system is pledged to defend, at the price of death if necessary.

The expression of this identity at the social and national level can be perceived as "prejudice", when it attempts to divide one part of the human body from another and turns one part of our Body on another in the form of warfare or discrimination or suppression or exploitation.

Put most simply, that can't be good. It is an auto-immune disorder. It turns us on ourselves.

If our health is actually dependent on the health of the people around us and our connectivity to that, which it is, then it seems to follow that we want more of that, not less of it.

As Fisher and Shapiro note in their book Getting to Yes, after analyzing how to stop the Soviet Union and the USA from annihilating each other in a global thermonuclear war, there is a level upstream from the details of "position" where we can look at "interests" and realize that both sides, regardless how much they may hate each other at this moment, actually are made up of humans and actually have common interests - and if we can meet those human interests in some new way, the old "positions" that led to conflict can be released without struggle. The intractable simply dissolves.

This is the sort of thing that Kim Cameron experienced at the Rocky Flats nuclear waste-dump in the work I described yesterday - Making the Impossible Possible. It can work. It has worked. It does work. It will work.

We have a much larger problem than resolving the "Mideast crisis" facing us. The development of nuclear power is widely advertised as "the threat", but it is nothing compared to the threat of biological weapons, which almost any country can already develop. Unlike nukes, that at least mostly stay where they're used, aside from toxic plumes of fallout that will kill everything for the next 50,000 years -- the biological weapons can literally take on a "mind of their own" and decide that they will turn around and destroy their creators, then go on to destroy the rest of human life on the planet. That is not cool.

And, no missile defense shield or "Star Wars" project can stop such an onslaught, once it begins.
Such a thing can be launched, stupidly, by almost any two countries that decide the only way one of them can exist is to destroy the other.

The largest threat to the Homeland Security of the USA, in that light, has nothing to do with nukes or an "axis of evil", but has everything to do with any two countries or cultures or sects of a religion that get it into their heads that they should attack each other with bioweapons, which then spiral out of control around the globe.

There is only one defense for that threat to our lives and our children's lives and the entire future of the human race - and that is to tackle the disease and disorder of our collective immune system that keeps causing "some of us" to abruptly perceive "others of us" as mortal enemies that must be attacked to keep the whole body healthy and operational and to restore "homeostasis" on a larger scale.

As I say, I think we know a lot about regulatory control feedback systems, and we have an unimaginably huge computing capacity on the planet that is mostly used for video games and unused 2/3 of every day while we work or sleep. We have a global communications system with wearable camera-phones and wireless internet. Never before in history has any civilization had such powerful tools to use to tackle any social threat.

The threat is that our collective immune system, on a planetary scale, has not yet been stabilized and keeps mis-identifying parts of our own Body as "enemies" who must die.

It's an issue of who "we" are, at the core, and finding common ground with every other human on the planet -- which shouldn't be too hard in the space age, because we're all standing on the same little ball floating in a very hostile very large space out there.

Through the matter of how our individual and population healths are intertwined on a physiological and psychological and spiritual level, there is no "them" that is not, ultimately,
also "us." "Love thy neighbor as thyself" is redundant, because our neighbor turns out to be another side of ourself.

I recall the day our infant daughter Kelly saw something interesting waving in front of her face and reached out and bit down on it, as infants tend to do. The something was her own large toe.
It took about 2 seconds for this realization to work its way through the system and the shock and horror and pain to "click" and get her to stop biting her own self. Once the issue was "realized" there wasn't a problem in getting her to "disengage."

On a planetary scale we are not just "one people" but also one "meta-organism" with a life on its own level that is higher than our own, and that we share. We have a society and civilization and we have values and "epigenetic" information that was hard won that we want to pass on to our children's children.

It's time to tackle the job of healing that meta-organism's immune system, which will be reflected in the removal of "prejudice" of all types and the partitioning of the world into little subsections that think each other is some kind of enemy agent.

It's not that we shouldn't be fighting a war against bad things and evil, but that the bad thing we need to fight has to be "prejudice" and narrow-minded, short-sighted, selfishness that threatens to kill us all downstream of its own bloody in-fighting.

I think the framework I've laid out, mostly built on Baha'i and Public Health's best teachings, may be a way to approach that problem with new eyes, new tools, and new hope.

If so, maybe all the wars everyone has fought will be finally "worth it" and we can stop the rest of the wars forever, and actually heal this disorder instead of just living with it and dying from it.

Some people have found it strange that I spend a lot of time on a "public health" weblog talking about military leadership and US Army Doctrine. I don't see these as incompatible, and I want to address that question. The US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM22-100) seems to me a marvelous work, even if it now superseded by FM6-22. The description of the doctrine is of a fighting force with tremendous focus on integrity, character, humility, strength, and being a learning organization that learns from every mistake and is agile and not hung up on outdated concepts or models of the battlefield, but can quickly process new information and develop a new model of what's going on. What is not to like there? If there are problems they are from failure to live up to that standard, not from the standard.

Here's a few excerpts from that manual:

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.

Such a group is not "the enemy." These aren't the words of people with an objective of hatred and destruction. These aren't the techniques of evil.

The people aren't the problem. The army is not the problem. Individual decisions are not the problem. The problem traces back, up stream, to our collective human immune system. Like Peter Senge's example, even when everyone does the right thing with the right intentions, this sucker breaks down. OK, fine, we've identified the issue, and some tools.

We owe it to everyone who fought to get us this far, preserving the values they understood our future depends on, to complete the job, repair the planet, and restore a vital peace that finally works correctly and doesn't keep veering the car off the road into the trees.

And we owe it to our veterans not to leave them homeless and abandoned. The weapons may have changed, but in a larger sense, we still need to "complete the mission" and protect our future. It's not "their war" and it's already "over here."

It is immoral and twisted to send our children to fight and die to protect some set of values that we are all not involved in protecting through our own daily lives. If these values are not a big deal, then bring the army home. If they are a big deal, why aren't the rest of us working on all the other fronts possible to resolve the conflict and all future conflicts?

"Memorial Day" 2007

The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations - part B

Yesterday, in my post The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations, I reviewed a few of the lessons Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline teaches that we can learn from thinking in circles, not in lines.

There are other properties of loops that are critical, but as subtle as the difference between the behavior of a spinning bicycle wheel (a gyroscope) and a stationary one, or attempting to throw a plate or a playing card that is spinning rapidly versus one that is not spinning. At first glance you might say - it's just spinning, so what? But the behavior of trying to throw a plate and a "Frisbee" is quite different - the plate may go 20 feet and the Frisbee 100 yards.

Spinning rapidly in a circle matters. All feedback is not the same. The speed of feedback in a feedback loop also matters. The feedback rate matters ( loops per second or per day or per year).

But this morning I want to start looking at vertically oriented loops in hierarchically structured organizations - for which a triangle or pyramid shape is more helpful than a circle for discussion.
(Imagine the pyramid shown on the back of every US dollar bill.)

Say that the "boss" is the eye on the top of the pyramid, and that the boss's orders come down the right side, through the "chain of command" (which is actually a branching tree shape.)

At the bottom of the organizational pyramid, where it actually touches the reality and "ground truth", employees attempt to carry out those orders, and imagine that activity moving us from right to left across the bottom of the pyramid. Finally, status reports ("mission accomplished!") move back up the chain of command being consolidated at each level all the way back to the boss at the top. So, we have a vertically oriented loop, or cycle, because now new orders come down the chain and that loop pattern repeats.

So far, so good.

In a static, simple world, if all employees except one named "Joe" report success, and Joe keeps reporting failure, the classic model would say that the action management needs to take is to replace Joe. The model says all employees are interchangeable machine parts and if a part fails to do its job, the part is broken and should be replaced. This is a simplified version of McGreggor's "Theory X" of management, very popular in the machine age, from 1850 - 1950.
Another implicit assumption is that the boss completely understands the tasks to be performed, and is the resident expert. If people don't "perform" it must be because they are "lazy" and what is needed is a "bigger whip." Employees are told to "jump" and they don't need to understand why or agree -- they just need to ask "yes sir, how high sir?"

That model worked for early industrial models, such as workers in textile mills, or slaves picking cotton.

But, in a dynamic, complex world, that model breaks down and doesn't work. Actions and responses that worked yesterday suddenly no longer work. The "cheese has moved." The organization has to learn new responses to the same old inputs. The response of the outside world to an action is no longer predictable, and has to be judged based on rapid-feedback and a quick poke to see what happens and learning from that. We move into McGreggor's "Theory Y" of management where the expertise is now on the bottom of the pyramid, where front-line
troops are as likely to reply "What bridge? The bridge is gone!" as "OK, yes we crossed the bridge." Now an ever-changing set of facts or dots of information have to be aggregated upwards and "reporting" has to change into continuous "sense-making" of shifting patterns and images of the battlefield truth.

Again, this model is not that strange. It's the basic model we use when we have to move a bit of food from the table to our mouth on a very windy day - we move the hand a little, see where it is now, move it a little move, see where it is now, etc., in a very rapid sequence that automatically adjusts for the wind. If we don't adjust for the wind, the hand and food will miss the mouth on the downwind side. We don't "compute" wind velocity and use Newton's laws to figure out what to do - we just do it and watch while it's happening. It's no big deal. It's the basic "cybernetic loop" of tiny intent, tiny action, tiny perception, and repeat the loop rapidly over and over. It's a loop we can use to cross an unfamiliar room in the dark. Move slowly, stay alert and aware, and adjust as you run into things. It works. It doesn't require quantitative analysis or calculus or a computer or a PhD in robotics. It just requires using a very basic action and sensory loop over and over.

And, like any feedback loop, causality disappears in the normal sense. Motion alters perception and perception alters motion and the two become one, in a very real sense, a single motion-perception action and a loop as an actor.

Again, no big deal. So why is this important?

The big deal is that our society is in the middle of adjusting to this change from "Theory X", and a stable, static world with expertise at the top to "Theory Y" with a very dynamic, unknown world and the expertise at the bottom. In fact, because of the property of loops, there really is no longer much of a "top" and "bottom" in the classical Theory Y sense of the terms.

Just as the level of the water could be seen to control the hand on the faucet, the staff at the bottom of the chain of command can be seen to be controlling the General at the top of the pyramid -- and both those models are wrong, because it's actually the shape of the feedback loop that now has taken on a life of its own, on a whole different scale, and is controlling both of them.

Senge's point, and mine, is that most of the organizational problems we see around us are because we haven't managed to get that much right. In some health care organizations, an extreme case of the expertise being on the "bottom" of the pyramid, the top management still thinks in "Theory X" terms and tries to see itself as the expert in everything and "gives orders" to move in a certain way. The body reports back "No -- what bridge?" and the boss sees this as stubbornness, stupidity, or hostility and things just get worse from there.

Arguably one of the best "learning organizations" around is the US Army. I've mentioned many times before role of Doctrine in FM22-100, the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The pyramid model I just described is the theoretical basis for the doctrine, and every field action is supposed to be followed with a "lessons learned" session. News, particularly surprising news about a misfit between upper management's concept of where the battle or bridge should be and what actual boots on the ground see in front of them, is supposed to be free to travel upwards. Management, as it were, is supposed to listen to the staff and learn what's actually going on, not what management imagined yesterday was going on. It's not insubordination to say "Sir, What Bridge Sir?"

By simple trial and error experience, repeated millions of times, the Army has finally figured out what works and what doesn't and come to some conclusions that are startling to the Theory X old guard, but not at all surprising to the Theory Y thinkers. For one thing, listening has to go upwards, at every level. It's as important that superior officers listen to junior officers as vice versa. If new conditions at the bottom don't result in a new picture of what's going on at the top, the whole pyramid will simply drive off a cliff or otherwise carry out actions that bear no resemblance to reality.

And, because the picture of reality is not perceived directly, but has to come up the chain of command and be re-filtered and consolidated at a dozen different levels, that process has to be incredibly accurate, frank, honest, and unbiased. Even a 10% "adjustment" in facts, repeated over and over at each level of consolidation, can result in a reported "reality" at the top that is 180-degrees out of whack.

In a profound sense, the key word is integrity, and not just integrity when the going is easy, but integrity when the going is tough - not because of enemy action but because of "friendly fire from above". That kind of integrity is also part of the other key word in the doctrine - character.

If the information flows freely and rapidly and can spin up to a high rate of rotation, as with a bicycle wheel or gyroscope, this whole design pattern becomes very stable, agile, nimble, and capable of navigating the most bizarre terrain as events unfold in surprising and unexpected ways. BUT, if there are pockets of resistance to the flow of information, such as cover-ups, that model breaks down. Or, if there are superiors who think "superior" means they know everything and they don't need to learn from their men, the model breaks down. So, another few important words are honesty and humility.

See US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100
and What relates Public Health and the US Army?
and the whole posting from my Capstone slide 7 Theories are Changing which has twenty more references to the literature on high-reliability organizations in nuclear power plants and chemical plants and aircraft cockpits and hospital intensive care units, and what makes them actually work in practice. It just keeps coming back to the same thing and the same model that's right in front of us be we haven't finished mastering.

And, again we have a place where our religious heritage has been observing what makes society work for thousands of years and has more wisdom to offer on this than scientists, although the science is beginning to catch up at last. Our religions have been stressing virtues - integrity, honesty, compassion, humility, etc. - for centuries but we haven't really been listening or haven't thought that "mattered any more in the modern age." Actually, the basic cybernetic model is ageless, and true at any size and scale. It's going to be something we have in common with aliens from other worlds when we meet. It's a universal truth every bit as solid as other physical "laws" we rely on.

These are truths that are seen by Hindus, by Muslims, by Christians, by Jews, by atheists, and by learning organizations like the US Army. They can serve as a basis for unity among even such diverse groups and cultures. They can link science and religion without either side having to admit they were wrong about something and lose face.

Grasping and implementing that truth certainly looks like it could give us far more "bang per buck" than investing in new technology, new weapon systems, new gizmos and gadgets, and other ways to shift the detail complexity around.

Also, see my early post Virtue drives the bottom line with many links at the end to such literature. (excuse the formatting near the top of that post - I'm technically challenged by the html editor.)

Another author's take on this subject is "Spirituality in the Workplace - The Sixth Discipline of a learning organization, by Harish Midha at the University of Toronto.

Peter Senge's latest book is Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future and readers interested in that book might also be interested in Stephen Covey's book The Eighth Habit. All these books teach the same gospel - that we are going to have to come to grips with the nature of community to "make it" through our social problems of this century, and that community requires us to realize the power and impact of "virtues" when amplified by the feedback properties of complex systems.

Another post I wrote exploring the role of community, virtues, and organizational learning and agility is The Importance of Social Relationships (short)

I also recommend: Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues

A general summary of what I think are my best dozen posts on related subjects is here.

This is also relevant:

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

Enjoy, and please, for reasons this whole post embraces, send me feedback! A human can't sustain a thought without some measure of social support! Criticisms and objections are welcome. Use the comment box below, or send to my email in my "profile" box above.

Wade

Subtle nuances matter

It's not obvious what matters.

Whether we are just thinking, or doing fancy math, there's the stuff we leave in our model, and the stuff that we throw out, because it doesn't matter. Sometimes we think things don't matter because they have such a small effect that they are "negligible."

Sometimes we are wrong.

A classic example was the mistake that pouring toxins, like mercury, into the sea would dilute them to the point where they didn't matter. We forgot that nature has natural filters and amplifiers that recollected all those dilute molecules in one place, namely, the tissue of fish, so that the concentration was again dangerous or lethal to humans.

Or sometimes we forget some other factor. Nuclear scientists at Dugway Proving ground computed how much fallout would land on the ground and how much would wash away and "go away", and figured it was safe. After the sheep died and many people got cancer they found out, oopsie, that grass is remarkably good at harvesting water and holding onto it, so instead of the toxins washing away, they were recollected.

So, sometimes things that look like "small" effects do "go away", and sometimes they don't.

One conceptual problem we have is that we're not used to math where the answer depends on what time scale or geogrphic scale we're working in. So, yes, in the short run, "rock" is stronger than "water". In the long run, "rock" is demolished and destroyed by "water".

Or, in the short range, electromagnetic forces dominate gravity. A balloon, rubbed on the sleeve, will stick on the wall, not fall. For many purposes, gravity "goes away." But, if you look on longer time scales, it's the "strong" force of electromagnetism that "goes away", and the end state of the world is determined by that "weak" force of gravity, on a cosmological scale.

Or, if you look at an M.C. Escher painting of a staircase or waterfall, locally, there is nothing wrong, aside from a very slight noise or error -- but that error accumulates and on the larger scale, the total painting is absurd, even though locally any small part of it makes sense.

So we need to be careful about not "throwing out the baby with the bathwater."
It's not always obvious which is which.

Then there are other effects even more insidious or subtle. As the philosopher "Snoopy" observed one day, lying on top of his doghouse in the cartoon strip "Peanuts",

"Did you ever notice, that if you think about something at 2 am, and then again at noon the next day, you get two different answers?"

Or, another example I love, the story of two stone masons working on a church in the 1600's. One was doing very good work, and the other was doing work that needed to be redone often. The supervisor came to talk to each and asked them what they were doing. The one with poor outcomes replied "I'm building a wall." The one with great outcomes replied "I'm building a cathedral."

So, at least to human beings, it seems to matter a great deal whether the work they are doing makes sense in a larger context, whether it has "meaning" to them or not.

Is this true for people who write computer programs or "provide" health care services as well? Probably. How would we know for sure? And if it does matter, are we designing our systems in light of that effect, whatever it's called?

And is this just some "mental" or "psychological" effect, or is it an effect so "real" or fundamental that it would show up even if the agents building things were robots not people? Does this sort of thing matter to ants or bees or termites or bird swarms or swarms of viruses or bacteria?
Does it matter to the US Army?

Do real, tangible outcomes depend on "meaning"?

Certainly, from the model I described yesterday of nested contexts, the outer, distant contexts matter a great deal, although, again, the effects may take longer and longer as the context gets more distant. So, as many computer system designers and nation builders have discovered, "culture matters", and the survival of some change imposed from outside on a system depends, in the long run, on whether it fits with culture or not. If it fits, or can transform the culture to fit, it will remain. If it doesn't fit, the cultural equivalent of the body's immune system will identify it as "foreign tissue" and reject it. You can take that one to the bank.

Today's International Herald Tribune has an opinion piece on this subject at the scale of nation building, reflecting on Iraq and Afghanistan. Here's a brief snippet.

Do Not Neglect Culture
International Herald Tribune (on-line)
May 8, 2007
by Nassrine Azimi (Hiroshima, Japan)

The Rand Corporation recently published a study called "The Beginner's Guide to Nation-Building." It covers the basics with clarity and objectivity, defining the roles of the military, the police and the judiciary; distinguishing humanitarian relief from economic stabilization and development, explaining the complexities of governance and democratization.

But the book has almost nothing about what is clearly the Achilles' heel of recent nation-building adventures: culture. No single chapter is devoted to it - nothing on the role of culture in countries being rebuilt and, just as importantly, nothing on the culture of the nation-builders themselves.

Though we are reminded that six of the seven cases of nation-building initiated in the last decade by the United States were in Islamic countries, we do not learn much of the lessons of this extraordinary experience.

How, for example, did it inform the dispatch of some 120,000 mostly Christian soldiers to Iraq - a Muslim country and one of the most ancient civilizations on earth?

Neither do we learn much about what kind of cultural preparations, if any, were undertaken in advance of embarking in Afghanistan, also an ancient and proud land, with subtle values and vulnerabilities not readily accessible to the Western mind.

The fault, however, may not lie as much with the Rand book as with nation-building operations themselves. In most, culture has been at best an afterthought and at worst a shallow and cynical exercise in public relations.

This was not always so. The U.S. occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952, so often cited as a model for Iraq, was quite different. American planners then appeared to have asked themselves some hard questions about dealing with a country they barely knew or understood, with which they had fought for almost four years, and which lay in ruins....

Perhaps this same effect is as evident in the many failed efforts across the country to install "Electronic Medical Record systems" where the system did not fit the culture or "the way we do things here", and the hope that the culture would "come to the system" was dashed by the fact that the system yielded to the culture.

This phenomenon is very well known and studied in public health, after a century or so of attempting to impose behavioral patterns on indiginous people who tended, as soon as the intervention team was gone, to keep the goodies and discard the behaviors that the strangers had imposed. The natives happily nodded "Yes!" while thinking to themselves "In your dreams!"

The lessons are that lasting change has to be rooted, and, in a mixed metaphor, rooted "deeper and deeper" upwards into the hierarchy of contexts that surround the point of intervention, or the unit of the hierarchy of life that is being tinkered with.

This effect is dimly and incorrectly perceived by many in McGregor's "Theory X" camp as "resistance to management", and as something that needs to be attacked, proponents of such resistance located and rooted out and fired, and overcome by brute force. In the short run, rock beats water. But, in the long run, water beats rock. If the intervention is "not me", the culture will ultimately find some way to reject it, or perhaps the culture will simply collapse under the conflict.

I think the prophet Yogi Berra once said "You can hear a lot by listening" , or words to that effect. It seems advisable that those messing with systems behavior at any scale should first investigate the system's "culture" before investing a lot in a particular change that seems, from the outside, to make sense. There are subtleties that are not obvious, "small things" that don't fit that turn out not to be so small after all, as the mercury or the fallout or the stone mason examples showed.

Whether a piece of the developmental puzzle "fits" or "is good" or "goes there" needs to be assessed at the cultural level, after all the "small things" have been given a chance to accumulate and add up again. This is a "complex adapative system" and the behavior at large scale is not reflected, in any obvious way, by the behavior at small scale.

The very fact that that's the problem is not widely understood.

There is no way that, for example, the CCHIT assessment of electronic medical record systems, at the individual user level, can possibly reveal whether this overall system will "fit" or "work" if "installed" at a particular site, in a particular "culture".

Collaboration-ware needs a completely different scale approach than classic IT software.
Again, that's not recognized as a problem to even fret about.

We are desperately short of good tools and accepted practices in this area. Maybe public health informatics can address that in the coming decade.

W.

Credits: Photo above is "The Hierarchy of Consciousness" by slark on flickr.