What about GM?

Toyota has a track record of taking over totally dysfunctional GM plants and making them functional by just changing management, with same unions, same facilities, same labor, same equipment. See history of NUMMI in Fremont, CA, going from GM's worst plant to the best in one year.

references:

Becoming Lean , Jeffrey Liker, page 62-63
http://books.google.com...

Stop Rising Healthcare Costs Using Toyota Lean Production Methods

By Robert Chalice (page 53)

http://books.google.com...

There may be no reason to lose the jobs, plants, or contracts.

Actually, what changed was not just management, but the whole underlying philosophy on which the plant was managed, which is the crucial change.

Chalice cites these factors as the new "five core values: teamwork, equity, involvement, mutual trust and respect, and safety."

In short, workers were treated as first class partners in the plant, not as some kind of "asset" to be "managed" and "controlled." They were listened to. They were respected.

Yes, that does make all the difference, in automobiles, as Liker points out, or in hospitals, as Chalice points out, supported by the Keystone study of John's Hopkins Dr. Peter Pronovost in Michigan, showing that when nurses were actually listened to by doctors, patients were significantly better off and had better outcomes.

Gasp. I took Dr. Pronovost's class in Patient Safety last year, and, yes, it really is that "simple." Culture drives safety and productivity. Culture drives the bottom line, not technology.

If you want things to work, you have to learn about human beings, and culture, and work within the constraints that puts on you. Humans are not machines and work way better than machines if allowed to (McGreggor's Theory Y), or way worse than machines if forced to (Theory X).

It's the job of the stockholders and stakeholders to realize that, and put management in place that will support the work force instead of trying to exploit it.

Period.

Japanese social networking in the news

Today's Washington Post has an article "Japan's Bloggers: Humble Giants of the Web".

Here's a few highlights:

Although English speakers outnumber Japanese speakers by more than 5-1, slightly more blog postings are written in Japanese than in English, according to Technorati, the Internet search engine that monitors the blogosphere.

By some estimates, as much as 40 percent of Japanese blogging is done on mobile phones...

Blogging in Japan, though, is a far tamer beast than in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world. Japan's conformist culture has embraced a technology that Americans often use for abrasive self-promotion and refashioned it as a soothingly nonconfrontational medium for getting along.

Bloggers here shy away from politics and barbed language. They rarely trumpet their expertise. While Americans blog to stand out, the Japanese do it to fit in, blogging about small stuff: cats and flowers, bicycles and breakfast, gadgets and TV stars....

"Behavior is more important than technology," said Joichi Ito, a board member at Technorati and an expert on how people around the world use the Internet. "In Japan, it is not socially acceptable to pursue fame."

Technorati found that of all recorded blog postings in the fourth quarter of last year, 37 percent were written in Japanese, 36 percent in English and 8 percent in Chinese

Isn't it interesting how a country that generates a company like Toyota, that's running circles around GM and Ford, puts more emphasis on social harmony than on "competition"?

It appears that maximum competition, at the individual level, does not result in maximum "competitiveness" at the corporate level.

Unity and adaptation - continued

Picking up from yesterday's post, can we be sure of anything about the nature of any solution to the fractal organization problem? Let's try tackling this first in the static case, then in the dynamic case, then in the dynamic, time and space short with noise case.

This is a general solution to the co-evolving properties of Life - ever becoming more specialized in order to deal with life, and yet always having to communicate fast enough and be agile and able to move as one when external changes or dangers require it.

The specialization part is relatively easy and automatic, the re-integration part is where we all get stuck.

First, consider our physical bodies. We start with, effectively, the "stem cells" that are in the news lately, that can become anything. Then those specialize and specialize more and specialize more. Why doesn't our body fragment into a zillion pieces that refuse to talk to each other , like our societies are tending to do? I note in passing that even a slight tendency to fragment results in what we call a loss of overall system functioning, or "ill health" and requires reintegration, or "wholistic" recovery and reconnection.

Why is this such a big deal. It's such a big deal because of the wonderful property of relationships, a boon and a curse at the same time. Between any two things is a third thing, a relationship. I've posted on this before. At one end of the mathematical spectrum, the two things, like billiard balls, dominate and the relationship, occasion interactions, seem sort of tacked on. Some businesses and people have relationships about that level - occasional ships passing in the night, exchanging messages, then back to the cubicle for "parallel play" kind of work, as if no one else was there.

Usually, this is a very low-powered arrangement, because of the fact that each of the "objects" or "actors", the billiard balls, has a small and finite amount of energy and complexity. Not so for the relationship. Relationships, like the "angle" between two vectors in complex space, for the mathematically inclined, are unbounded. They can be arbitrarily complicated and hold arbitrarily large amounts of energy.

Mostly, we are continually surprised by this fact. We occasionally see a group of people rise above the billiard ball state to one where the interactional energy is storing a lot of energy, in "teamwork". And, as with sports teams like (sigh) the Michigan Wolverines, this dynamic "synergy" is a quicksilvery kind of thing that comes and goes and depends on "coaching" or something subtle. Subtle, yes, but powerful? Yes! The skill or thingie that can take a bunch of ragtag individuals and make them into "a team" is very highly praised, and very rare.

Going back to physics models, this interaction energy can be hundreds of times more powerful than the "self-energy", even for dumb things like atoms or large billiard balls like black holes. In fact, in the limit of that end of the continuum or spectrum, the interaction is everything and the self effectively vanishes. It's the mirror image of billiard balls as the stable thing and "interactions" as the occasional interruption -- it's a world where the interactions and relationships are the stable thing and the "objects" are occasional interruptions. (As if the Spirit occasionally takes an embodied form briefly, then it's over.)

That is the world that scientists believe exists in the super high energy worlds near the center of every galaxy, the disk shaped collection of ten trillion stars like the milky way.

What's the rule here? The design says that objects, or "self", is a very limited concept, but that relationships and interactions are where "The action" is, long term.

So, there is a fairly well developed mathematical machinery for understanding this kind of interaction, where the relationship or context itself becomes as important, then more important than the things having the relationship. For dumb atoms, the spectacular result is galactic centers of almost unimaginably high energies. At a planetary scale and larger, this is the field called "General Relativity" that Einstein studied.

But, we're humans, not atoms. We are, whatever it means, "alive". Our molecules and cells are dominated by this interaction energy field called "life", and when we "die" that goes away, and we are left with the heap of atoms, almost an afterthought, that was at the base of that interactional field. At that point, yes, we are "just a heap of molecules of water, carbon, oxygen, etc."

But when we are alive, we are something more. We live and breathe and operate in that space that soars far above the constraints of mere atoms. Our cells themselves are alive, already, so we are built up of relationships among living relationships, not relationships among molecules. And each of those relationships has a "life of its own", but we also have a potentially much larger "life together".

Coherence doesn't go from zero to one - it goes from zero to infinity. That's important to realize.

We're not facing the possibility of a 10% impact of "synergy" on top of our own small lives, we're facing a possible 100% or 1000% or more impact. Two people by themselves may be almost inert, or tending to "go out" as solitary coals from a fire do; but put together and interacting, may be huge. This is the key to sports team "teamwork". This is the key to why human relationships of just two people "in love" can be so amazingly powerful.

And, this is the key to The Toyota Way - at the core, it is a process for the organization members to stumble slowly, almost blindly, up the evolutionary scale in almost real time, discovering the huge power inherent in "working together". No manager can direct this result, no human can describe it well, but, together, collectively, over time, we can just keep on experimenting with a million tiny improvements and way-find our way up that invisible mountain to greatness.

But, Toyota took 50 years. We need to understand this well enough that we can make it all happen in 5 years, or 5 months. Is it possible that that is possible?

We can learn to control our brain-waves, our alpha rhythm, or the beating of our heart. Yoga masters can retreat into the mountains, shut out distractions, and master this in a few small decades. Or, we can connect to a biofeedback monitor and master it in ten minutes. As Tony Robbins, the performance improvement guru said when asked how long something takes, "How long do you want it to take?"

Now, there is something else about people that can be forgotten - something very surprising. We don't replicate by budding. We don't grow take one of our existing arms, say, and break it off like a salamander's tail or half an earthworm, and have both halves grow back into full people. We do something much more complicated -- we start over again at a single cell between each generation.

Why? That's a huge amount of work. There must be a huge reason.

One reason is genetic mixing and cross-over, yes. But the world is multi-valued, and just because we find one reason doesn't mean we found them all.

And, here's another puzzle. How can it be that each new generation's infants are so powerfully strong and dynamic and adaptive, when they are born to parents who are getting old and set in their ways and having parts already start to break? That's strange, isn't it? Where does this "new life" or "new youth and vitality" come from? (And can I buy some more of it?) It can't be packed inside the DNA, because by now we've unfolded that sucker a million times or more, many times per generation, and it would have run out.

No, the new youth and vitality and life comes from this "synergy" part -- the dynamic relationship among the parts that has to be rebuilt from the ground up every generation, and, astoundingly, is.

Well, maybe these two things are related - the pushing the entire thing through a keyhole the size of one cell, and the sudden burst of new vitality and energy that seems to come as a miracle from nowhere.

I think they are related. What our bodies have at that stage are millions, then billions of cells that very recently were all a single cell, and still remember, in some real way, that total unity of being. It's hard to get more unified than being one cell.

Then, as the parts specialize and specialize more, not hands and arms and legs and eyes, they start migrating into these secondary and tertiary silos, with a common heritage but no longer working on exactly the same problem, locally. We "get old" and set in our ways.

Well, good news, boys and girls. Toyota has proven that at least one organization can be "revitalized" or "vitalized" from the ground up. It doesn't have to just "go downhill."

We only need one case to prove it can happen and we have that case.

What are the secrets of the solution? Well, as I just discussed, "unity" is a big deal. The cells of our body have to be in constant awareness of their inherent similarity, of the fact that they all came down the same tree, from the same start, even though they chose different pathways to turn into from the stem-cell stage. For people to pull-off an organizational miracle of revitalization, they too probably have to get back in touch with the core "unity" that makes all humans "equal" in where we started in life - as single cells -- an further back than that.

That is one unity that surpasses all diversity, and we need to treasure every possible source of unity, because those are what hold together the chalice into which we want life to pour our new life and new youth. For Toyota, this involved a tremendous flattening of the organizational pyramid or hierarchy, and acceptance of the astounding idea that management and labor are the same kind of people. All kinds of prejudice and stereotypes about other groups being inherently and irrevocably "different" have to be let go of, and removed, for this to take off and soar without holding the brakes on.

"We are one" has to be made real in every way that we have control over, to open the door the the ways we don't have direct control over.

Then, our vitality can become unbounded again, we can regenerate lost parts, and we can rise up to arbitrarily high performance and ability to cope with and adapt to the world's challenges.

Well, in theory. Starting with, say, any large organization such as a tertiary medical center that has already differentiated into different branches and specialties and sub-specialities and sub-sub-specialties, each of which is internally convinced it is "superior" to all the others -- how does that work in practice? And doctors don't want to think of themselves as "the same as" a secretary or janitor, the think of themselves as "better than" such people. Then what?

Then we have what we have today. We get institutional level fragmentation, arthritis, inability to adapt, inability to cope, dysfunction on increasingly larger scales, and, if left unchecked, the inevitable and inexorable end point of all that fragmentation -- institutional old age and finally institutional death.

But that is not the end point of life, just the end point of a life style in which the power is all leaking out through barriers to change and stereotypes of expectations and prejudices of history or power that are holding onto constraints that need to be discarded.

What to do is not something that a few managers, or an outside consulting firm can come in and go, oh yes, change these reporting relationships and replace these people and you'll be fine. The change that's required is organic. Every part of the being of the beast has participate in being aware of the presence of the other parts, and accepting them as "equal", and letting the obvious ways of improving things happen, even if that changes long-standing cherished boundaries that used to help us make sense of life and keep it under control.

The boundaries that used to be the solution to control necessary for life to thrive and be prosperous have become the problems.

Our human organizations are held in place by norms and expectations, that can change in a heartbeat, but tend not to. Our expectations are prisoners to our beliefs and our prejudices based on what happened in the past. We are in a world recreated every day anew based on those prejudices and self-fulfilling expectations. It can change in a day, if we let go of our pre-conceived notions (prejudices) that are holding it back.

So, in theory this is possible. In a different scale of life we see this happen all the time. On corporate scales we have seen it happen at least once. In sports teams, we see it happen often enough to pay a lot of money to watch games for those few seconds of ecstasy when the team "gets it together" for a few moments of "momentum" and changes everything. All bets are off when that player takes the field.

But this still seems like luck or magic, some kind of art that happens rarely, but sadly will not happen to us. We say the incantations, arrange the magical items, but the rain doesn't fall. Why not? What are we doing wrong?

How can we make the more like building a bridge or skyscraper so it doesn't tend to fall down as soon as we're done?

We have trillions of examples, across all scales of life from viruses to nations, where this phenomenon has shown glimpses of itself. Again, we need to pool notes and reveal the phantom shape that keeps playing out around us.

That's what learning is about, on a social level - finding out what actually works with our eyes open, trading notes, realizing what might work just one tenth of one percent better and trying it to see if it does, over and over again.

And knowing we need to let go of the old shapes and old solutions that are the new problems. But not in a revolutionary way, which is chaotic and risky, but in an evolutionary way, stable and methodical and systematic. All changes have to be tiny, small enough that we can hit the "Undo" button if they don't work, or the "commit and accept" button if they do, times a zillion, persisted over time. That's all it takes. That, and time will do the trick.

Well, and enough belief in the process to be willing to devote the time and energy to overcoming despair and trying it. We keep looking for single-step solutions that have a huge impact, which is at the wrong end of the spectrum.

As the Institute of Medicine noted in Crossing the Quality Chasm -- we don't need a billion dollar solution -- we need a billion one-dollar solutions.

That's what the Toyota Way, or continuous improvement, or learning organizations are all about. Very small changes, so "control" is never lost, repeated over and over. We are not good at comprehending the power of a compounded change. We think it should "look" big.

It doesn't, not with our usual eyes. Amazingly small things can have an amazingly large impact, and we have been not looking for solutions of that nature.

If we rotate by half a degree a day, which is almost nothing, we will turn by 180 degrees, a complete U-turn, in a year. That's the sweet spot that combines unbroken control with unbounded upwards evolution and learning -- persistent motion, just above zero, in some direction or with some coherent generating process.

It's exactly the opposite of the end where contractors or vendors can charge big bucks, because the individual changes are so tiny, as well as completely unpredictable in advance. We can define the process, but not say much about the path, except that it will surprise us. And big budget programs want pathways spelled out in advance, and big changes to happen that are visible.

Big outcomes come from the other end as well, and only from it once the world becomes so entangled -- a billion $1 changes, not a $billion change, remember.

So, now the question has been rotated around yet again to what process, or ethic, or belief, or mechanism will hold together such a collective effort over a long time, with such "little" visible or tangible result in the short run?

Again, quoting Tony Robbins, "We over-estimate what we can do in a year; we underestimate what we can do in a decade."

And here we reach the point where science has to look to religion or culture for clues as to what gets people to pick a direction and stick with it over a long period of time, even with little immediate tangible outcome? "Faith" comes to mind, faith in a process, not blind faith, but faith based on the experience of other parts of the world that has been comprehended and understood. Eyes open faith based on evidence of what actually works in practice.

And, since this is a bootstrap feedback loop we're trying to get rolling, a tornado we're hoping to induce, the faith in the unity of mankind requires seeing the unity, which requires pooling notes across diversity, which we tend not to do since we already concluded it's not there. Those pre-judgments of despair have to be let go, suspended for a while, based on solid theory and maybe advanced computer simulations or something that can make vivid animations showing that this can and does work.

Our bodies work which requires this miracle to be possible in practice. Galactic centers work. This isn't magic, but it is math beyond our usual training and experience. We're used to the cold, dark rock, the billiard-ball end of the universe, even though our textbooks tell us that 99% of the universe is at the opposite end, in the "plasma" state of matter, or state of being, at the blinding light end of the spectrum.

We just need to resolve to move towards the light, a little bit more every day, with every person expected to pitch in and help a little, and no one expected to have "a plan" other than the Toyota type process of continual exploration and mutual assistance.

The Light is there, and we need to move, because the old ways just aren't working any more, but we can move slowly and methodically, without disruption or ripping or tearing the fabric of society, if we all move a tiny bit forward each day.

That's the Way.

No one can tell you what change you need to make at the levels you live in. Something can change, but no one really knows which way is up, given how much things interact and have surprising results. So we need to move very slowly so that news from the outlying districts has time to make it into town.

And, at least have of our tiny exploratory moves will be in the "wrong" direction, that is, we will be surprised that the result is the opposite of what we expected. That's cool. That's how it should be. We tried something, we learned something. That's success not failure. Tomorrow, reverse direction and take two steps. We end up way ahead of where we'd be if we just stood here dithering, or analyzing. We're in motion and found the right direction with a simple experiment.

Just like the eye guy does, switching lenses in and out. "Better HERE.... or HERE?" That's all we need to do, but everyone needs to do it, every day, for a long time.

And that's what the problem has now rotated into. What does it take to get everyone to participate in doing something that takes a long time and has very little positive feedback, although some, as it is unfolding?

If we crack that problem, we can get learning organizations that adapt, and if we get those, we can solve most of the rest of our problems.

And, as with any bootstrap feedback process, it won't start overnight. It will start small, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, pick up speed and steam at the same time. It will develop momentum and start to snowball once it gets rolling.

All the standard financial analysis garbage like Extended Value Added ("EVA") misdirect us to ignore solutions that don't solve the problem this quarter in one huge step. "Prioritize" or "let the government do it" are pushed as solution paths.

This is at the other end. Everyone does a little, not someone does a lot. Initially we see close to nothing, although it better be positive or we should reverse it, but the change picks up speed as it starts to make a noticeable dent in things.

To try it, we have to see it, or have trust -- and cynicism is pretty large these days, judging from the polls, so seeing is better. This is where science can help, by making some vivid animations of how this process can work that are persuasive to some critical mass of people to give it a try, eyes open, and see what happens.

No one's apple cart should be over-turned, since it only changes 0.1% of things at a time, slowly, and reversibly. It's safe. But it gets us out of here.

And, the amazing thing about constant-force processes, is that they pick up speed. As with rocket ships or jet aircraft, the power is proportional to the velocity. Runways for some of our most powerful jets are still two miles long, because at initial slow speeds they are lumbering beasts that make a lot of noise and don't seem to be getting up much speed. We need to hold that setting and wait a little -- and check that speed again.

Once it's actually airborne, it picks up speed faster and faster and we can pull the nose up and break the sound barrier in a vertical climb out. But we have to make it past that really, really slow starting of the roll-out.

That's what we need to figure out how to bring about.

A billion one-dollar solutions. It will work. It's how we got this far, and why your body is able to function and sit there reading this. But what will give us the persistence to try, that's the question to look at.

Survival of the selfless

"The consequences of regarding evolution as a multilevel process, with higher-level selection often overriding lower-level selection, are profound." This under-statement is in the latest issue of New Scientist, in a must-read piece titled "Survival of the selfless", by sociobiologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson. (New Scientist , 3 Nov 2007).

Indeed. Since I've been presenting the case for multi-level co-evolution in my weblogs for the last 2 years, I am ecstatic to see some big names in the field take the same position.

This furor is about whether it is "genes" that evolve, or "individuals" or groups of individuals such as tribes or species. Views were and are still held by many otherwise rational scientists with religious fervor in the worst sense, and arouse equal vehemence when challenged, akin to that between creationists and evolution-supporters.

This matters because higher level groups may have a whole different "fitness" measure than individuals, and while individuals or genes might evolve faster by being "selfish", the whole society of individuals might evolve faster if everyone was cooperative and altruistic. This battle continues to rage today, and is a core issue in whether "competition" and "free markets" are a good idea or not. So it is tangled with social ramifications, just like all science ultimately is.

This is also a core question in whether a "Theory X" company, driven by internal competition between managers, can ultimately be out-performed by a "Theory Y" company, like Toyota, driven by massive internal cooperation. A lot of egos are at risk of being bruised. A lot of justification for public policy is at risk of being overturned. It's a big deal.

Well, which is it? Do individuals evolve by being better at beating each other, or do groups of individuals dominate by being better at collaboration?

Peeking ahead, of course, I usually argue that "or" is a bad concept, once feedback is involved, and the right solution to look at usually involves "and" and "all of the above, simultaneously, interacting." But, "all of the above, interacting with feedback" was way beyond anyone's ability to compute or analyze, and not an attractive model for most researchers or grant writers.

Well, back to this article. In the face of enormous opposition, and tacking a consensus in the field that group-level evolution is a dead concept, they really settle for the weak claim that "we cannot rule out group-level selection."

Hmm. What's this all about? The concept is fascinating, and the sociology of science is equally fascinating here. The Wilsons ask "Why was group selection rejected so decisively [ in the 1960's ] ?" What a great question in how Science works!

Now, I should note that I'm one of the casualties of what seems a similar disastrous and mistaken turn of a field, namely Artificial Intelligence ("AI"). I got hooked by a course at
Cornell in 1965, taught by Professor Frank Rosenblatt, titled "Learning and Self Reproducing Machines".He and his lab had developed a "perceptron", a maze of switches and wires that connected up to a 20x20 grid of 400 photocells, on which letters of the alphabet were projected.

The perceptron, a model of human vision and learning, was slowly learning to tell the letters apart and identify them. At the time, this was astounding, and many scientists confidently argued that this could never be done. Later, of course, Kurzweil and others carried this technology forward and made OCR text-scanners that are now about 99.5% accurate or better and can read license-plates at an angle from a speeding car. But, in 1965, telling "A" from "B" was a big deal, especially if the "A" wasn't always exactly straight up and down, or in the same place on the grid.

The perceptron's insides were a network of wires and "nodes", a model of our brain's neurons, where the total strength of signal coming into each node was added up, multiplied by some factor, and either triggered or didn't trigger an outgoing signal to the next layer. The system learned by changing these multiplicative factors, searching for some set of them that would ultimately trigger the highest level "A" node when an A was projected on its primitive retina, and trigger at "B" when a B was projected, etc.

Then, the field was devastated by a very authoritative and persuasive paper, ultimately retracted, by highly regarded MIT professor Marvin Minsky that this approach "could never work." Funding dried up, and researchers moved on to other projects. Labs closed.

It took over a decade until somone finally figured out that Minsky had simply proven that a two-level neural net had irrecoverable gaps in its logic, and was not "complete". What he failed to look at, or see, was that these gaps went away when you got to three-levels or more.

Wikipedia has this quote:

Its proof that perceptrons can not solve even some simple problems such as XOR caused the virtual disappearance of artificial neural networks from academic research during the 1970s, until researchers could prove that more complex networks are capable of solving these and all functions.
(source: Hassoun, Mohamad H., Fundamentals of Artificial Neural Networks, The MIT Press, 1995. pp. 35-56.)

Oopsie.

Anyway, it appears to this observer that a similar phenomenon has occurred in socio-biology. Some very persuasive people published papers "debunking" multi-level evolution, well before there was enough computer power to actually simulate it and see what happened. ( In 1978, the mainframe computer I was programming had 4,000 bytes of memory to work with. Not 4 Gig, or 4 Meg, but 4 thousand. Any cell phone today has more than that.)

The social climate at the time made this debunking seem a better idea. World Communism was the mortal enemy of all that was good and holy, threatening "our way or life", justifying huge military expenditures, and anything that suggested communal good or community was more important than individuals was instantly suspect and risked being dragged before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee, where the proponent had to renounce their views or be thrown out of their jobs or locked up as being "unAmerican." Everyone was building bomb-shelters for protection against that day's terror threat.

In addition, religions had held for thousands of years that there was really nothing of importance between man and God, and man was God's noblest creation, so the idea that something larger than humans but smaller than God mattered was suspect dogma. (These days, the evolution of the earth and global warming is in fact dominated by such a larger life-form, "corporations", which have more or less hijacked the role individuals used to play in influencing governmental decisions and policies. But that observation lives in world "A", and discussions of evolution live in world "B", and the two don't talk to each other or trade notes.)

Then, of course, some people didn't like the idea of evolution in any form, and rejected it and most of biology and science based on that view.

So, for many reasons, some good, some not so good, the idea of group evolution as a dominant or even important force was denounced, rejected with emotion, and painted as an example of wrong thinking to be avoided at all costs.

Now, by what the Wilson's say, the whole question is being raised again, this time in a climate with much more powerful computers, where cooperation and collaboration in corporations are not always dirty words, and where the old theories, frankly, didn't explain why there was just so much altruism and goodness in people.

As I say, I'm delighted.

Also, finally, as I've posted on before, finally "feedback" and dynamics are starting to be considered in models, and finally multi-level causality keeps on increasingly showing up in how individuals behave, to the point where the National Institutes of Health and the Institute of Medicine talk about the necessity of using multi-level models to understand social interactions and how the things we see around us, like poverty, are held in place by many subtle but very powerful forces at different levels.

Fascinatingly, this gets us back to what Charles Darwin himself said in The Descent of Man, published in 1871, and the lead sentence in the Wilson's article:

Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe ... an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.

The Wilsons say that group evolution, versus individual evolution, doesn't yet explain the observed rise in altruism, although they can computer a visible imact.

Immodestly, I'll suggest that they need, like Minsky, to look at three levels, not two, to see the effect start to dominate.

In fact, all around us, we see corporations trying to survive and be more fit than competition, by pouring resources into internal cooperation and collaboration. So while individuals may continue to follow "greedy algorithms" and seek their own advancement, the corporation is making the playing field non-level and rewarding collaboration as the method of getting ahead personally. In that sense, Corporate policy is serving one role of religion - seeing the larger picture, thinking globally, and then trying to shift the local context so that relatively less visionary individuals, acting locally, will do the right thing if they just follow the rules.

This "think globally, act locally" function is the key role that "unity" has to handle, and it works best if people stop fighting the behaviors and yield and embrace the behaviors instead.

People have to let go of their own ego, "die to themselves" as it were, only to be "reborn" where their ego now includes the other people in the larger village or familiy or corporation they now have committed to belong to. In some sense, they now are just selfish at a whole larger level, as now those villages or corporations or religions or nations start competing, and the whole cycle begins again at a higher level, as they too have to learn that collaboration beats competition hands down in the long run, even if it doesn't seem obvious locally.

This phase transition is one we should be looking for and supporting. It's built so deeply into the fabric of space and time and control loops that it is inevitable and always working in the background, at ever higher levels, simultaneously. At least, that's how I see it.

Of course, that would imply that it won't be long before earth discovers we're just one inhabited planet of millions such planets, and we have to deal with the whole unity/diversity and competition / collaboration thing all over again at an even larger scale and scope.

Which is a model that some people don't like, so this can get emotional again. Still, I think we need to get used to the idea that we are not on top of God's creation, just below Gods ourselves, but maybe quite a few levels lower than that. Earth is not in the center of our galaxy, nor in the center of the universe.

It's a very scary concept to some people, if the world is seen as a place where competition and dog-eat-dog dominates. That belief leads to an imperative to dominate the world, before someone else dominates you. On the other hand, if the world is a place where cooperation and collaboration dominate, then it is a far less scary place, and we should "get with the program."

Already our corporations, internally, are undergoing this transformation. Kicking and screaming, often, but they cannot deny that the Toyota model outshines the GM model.

We need to speed the transition on the level of nations and religions as well, and find that sweet spot where cooperation and collaboration work so much better than competition for dominance and attempts at mutual destruction.

All of those struggles are tied up in this question of the way nature, life, and/or God operate here and what the design principles are that we can rely on to work. The cells in our bodies don't triumph in "beating" each other, but in collaborating with each other. It's a good model, and it's been field tested, and it works.

We should stop fighting it and use it.

Wade


The New Scientist article says of itself:

This is an edited, abridged version of a review in the December issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology. Further reading: D. S. Wilson's book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's theory can change the way we think about our lives describes multilevel selection theory for a broad audience. D.O. Wilson and B. Holldobler's forthcoming book The Superorganism analyzes how insect colonies can be seen as products of colony-level selection.

Active strength through emergent synthesis

My recent post on "active strength" really isn't complete without a mention of what astronomers are doing now to boost their ability to see farther into space and detect even larger structures.

As the picture shows, many radio telescopes (the satellite dish-shaped things) are often used simultaneously to get a better view.

But, something almost magic is going on here that you can't see from the picture. If you simply collected and added up the signals from each dish, and you had, say 100 dishes, you'd end up with a picture with the same crummy resolution one dish has, but 100 times as bright. So, you could see dim objects you couldn't see before, but you absolutely cannot see any more fine structure than you could before. The picture is, effectively, still blurry. You have, effectively, a pinhole camera where the pinhole is the size of the dish.

A law known as Bracewell's Law says that it doesn't matter how many images you take and add up, you can't get better resolution with many images than you can get with one image. (There's an exception, of course, for "hyper-resolution" that I'll talk about sometime.)

To get a less blurry picture, you need to resolve details. However, Bracewell's law prevents you from resolving details finer than the ratio of the wavelength you are using to the diameter of the dish.

But, there's another sort of exception. If you spread out some dishes as in the picture, and you do the right thing mathematically, you can get as good resolution as if you had a dish with a diameter equal to the distance between the farthest separated dishes. So, with one dish in Arizona, and another in England, the effective diameter is 8,000 kilometers or so.

The process is called "aperture synthesis", and I had a more technical prior post on it here.

The points relevant to active strength and social constructs where people work as one are these:

• If we work together we can see way better than if we work separately
• 
  
• All of us have a larger "diameter" than the largest single one of us, hands down.
• 
  
• The more distance there is between our dishes, the better we can resolve ambiguity in what we're looking at. (Effectively, "diversity" helps, and the more axes and larger distance we can get, the better.)

Working together doesn't mean just working separately and pooling our data. It means, in some very specific sense, "working as one". The difference is the difference between incoherent light (normal light) and a powerful laser beam (coherent light). We humans need to be "coherent" and that's a very special meaning of the concept "united" or "unity."

If we can pull it off, our power goes up from some number "N" which is the number of us, to something like N-squared, a much larger number. And here's the astounding thing - no single molecule in a laser is doing any more work than it did when the light was incoherent -- all that changed is that the radiation is synchronized and coherent. The power results simply from changing the timing of what we do, not from doing something harder.

A small change in synchronization or timing can make an orchestra sound terrible, and a small change can make it sound fantastic. Same instruments, same sounds, just a slight change in how the parts relate to the whole.

Or, for a sports team, it helps to have great individual players, but it helps more to have teamwork that "clicks" so everyone suddenly starts acting as one completely coherent player spread out over many people. That's the few seconds of a 3 hour game that makes the three hours worth while to watch. It's why some coaches don't want "great individuals" but want "great team players." An activated, coherent team will always be more powerful than the "best individual" on it or on the opposing team.

Coherent unity is a winning strategy.

This is basically the magic behind The Toyota Way. By stabilizing what everyone does so it's known by others, visible, and fully predictable, and by forcing everyone to be aware of what everyone else is doing, that last 1 percent can be crossed and everyone can suddenly see with hyper-resolution eyes and think with an aperture-synthesis brain the size of the whole workforce. It only works if individuals are willing to let the team be larger than their own egos, which can be a problem in some cultures.

So, we should set our sights on more than just "working together", and aim for the much more powerful goal of "working as one." This is part of why "unity in diversity" is such a powerful concept, way more so than you'd think.

Mathematically, this is much more powerful than the "invisible hand of Adam Smith" trying to select the "best individual" so that individual can lead the pack or find the way the rest of us can try to emulate. Competition and "survival of the fittest" "rugged individual" strategies result in fragmentation and getting stronger individuals, yes, clearly, but at the cost of weaker teams.

Unfortunately, we're at a point in social evolution where the team matters more than the individual now.

So, we end up with some very fine companies being thwarted by a state government, say, that cannot get its act together and manage the state, or by a county government that cannot get its act together and manage the county.

There is a backlash by some very bright individuals and their families at social obstacles everyone else presents to their brightness being "all it can be." The reality is that unharnessed individuals going off on their own for their own benefit is not the kind of creativity we are most in need of right now. That's not where it's breaking.

I discuss this in my post "Houston, we have another problem!" and showed this diagram. The basic message is this. It doesn't matter how smart we can make one person. One person is like "one dish" in radio telescopes. Take any person and make them a million times smarter, and the complexity of social problems that 6 billion people can produce, in real time, is still vastly larger than that person will ever comprehend. There is only one "algorithm" that keeps up with "everyone" with their N-factorial interactions, and that is "everyone" in a coherent effort to work together.

Compared to the size of the problem, even a person with an IQ of a million is effectively an ant trying to comprehend quantum mechanics. This startling idea really hasn't sunk in yet. This will never "go back" to the way it was, the old days, where one person could "know it all" and "rule the world." We have an educational system trying to produce individual smart people and what we need is an educational system that produces collectively smart teams. The curves have crossed forever:

So, the Arecibo radio telescoe, with a 1000-foot diameter dish, is not being funded because the days of huge single "RAMBO" type solutions are over, replaced by networks of individuals where the network is the key to the power. No single "dish" will ever compete again.

IBM stopped trying to make super "CPU's" years ago, and their new "supercomputer", as everyone's, is really a network of 860,000 smaller cpu's, and the key to it (what a surprise!) is how well the smaller cpu's can figure out for themselves what to do and how to do it, without being programmed or controlled by some "master cpu". The "operating system" is the key.

This isn't theory. This is practice. We have a school system designed to develop leaders for 19th century industry, in a 21st century world. We don't need a 20% fix or even a 50% improvement in "productivity" or "teaching skills" or "scores on the GRE."

What we need is a complete transformation of the whole point and purpose of education. Now that no one can know everything, what few things is it just critical that we all know? I think "how to work together" is in that short list.

The paradox is this. Great individuals aren't of value unless they can work together as one in teams. That requires solving how anyone can work together in teams. Once we solve that, we don't need "supermen" individuals any more, because a network made up of just a lot of regular people cooperating will end up being more powerful.

The power is in the network, not in the individuals in the network. Or, more precisely, the power emerges through the network, but is way more powerful than the network.

But, this is not a "team" like that used by ants or bees or termite communities. Those are built from individuals who are entirely inflexible, and the whole structure is rigid to the point of being brittle. If the world changes outside the range of motion of the hive to adapt, the hive will die. Applied to humans, that's the tyranny model.

Humans are, we hope, a much higher-level creature than ants. What we need to strive for is a higher-order community more like Air-Traffic Control, where we have enough imposed and accepted order that we don't run into or damage each other, but beyond that we have flexibility to adapt locally to whatever is going on. Instead of "rigid strength" we seek "active strength".

That picture describes, once again, something that looks like "unity in diversity", with "independent investigation of the truth". It seeks harmony but not homogeneity, unity but not uniformity. The overall structure is not rigid, but can learn and adapt and change as the environment changes or the problem we are all addressing changes.

So, if we collectively decided that we wanted to get some roots down on other planets around other stars, we might take on one shape that is superbly good for solving interstellar travel. But we would be "transformers" as a society, and could flexibly change our overall shape to meet the needs. The flexibility is crucial, because the creativity of such a structure will be enormous, so we will polish off problems that have been here for millenia, before lunch, and then move on from there. Like an airplane picking up speed, we'd need to start tucking in our wings as we get to the speed of sound, and being air-tight as we got above the atmosphere and switchted to rocket power, etc.

No rigid hierarchy or structure would work for that, but neither would the chaos of anarchy -- we need an adaptive, flexible core network that helps us hold on to a certain shape at a certain time, and then, when it is the right time, to let go of that shape again and move on to something else.

As societies, we've managed to get the "hold on to this shape" part down, but we're not very good yet at "now let go of that and move on." The only "let go" we're generally familiar with is disruptive and revolutionary, or anarchy. Like the ants, we've build some corporate and social structures that were fantastically good solutions to problems we had 200 years ago. Or, like Southeast Michigan, we've build a social structure that worked fine 50 years ago.

Our problem now is that it's not 50 years ago, it's not 200 years ago, it's now. This is a new world, and "the cheese has moved." We don't have very much experience figuring out which parts of our culture are crucial to hang on to , and which parts are in the way and we need to let go of. And, that is made complex because the value of things needs to be assessed over hundreds of years, not over 3 months, or we'll miss the point of some structure and "throw out the baby with the bathwater."

That's where we are today. Disruptive external pressures are demanding that we adapt and transform the way we live and our social structures to new realities, and we have very little personal experience with that magnitude of change, let alone that rate of change. In China, cities like Shanghai have experienced 1000 years of growth in one generation and are a little dizzy from the altitude change and need time to adjust. This is totally new. Change has never come this fast. In 1500, kings could take weeks or years deciding what do to; now the world changes in 12 minutes.

So we are doing what physics does all the time, "searching for invariants of the motion". Amid all the apparent chaos, what are the few things that need to say the same? What can we release our death-grip on, and what should we hold on to even tighter? Where have we mistaken "positions" for "interests" and gotten stuck on some local maximum and missed the big picture?

That's where we need "active strength", and enough trust to let go a little bit and see if things get better or worse, and prepare to be surprised.

For Islam and Christianity and Judaism, the challenge today is to disentangle what is degeneration from what is regeneration, to block the first and embrace the second. These are decisions we need all of us to grapple with, not just a few of us.

As a recent post discussed, evangelical Christianity is struggling with this right now. In the Mideast, everyone is struggling with this right now - modernism versus tradition, chaos versus order, new versus old, what to hang on to and fight to the death to defend, and what it's OK to let go of now, finally, since that storm is over and now the wind is from a different direction and the challenges are different.

As with any active structure or building, the parts may need to shift "positions" in order to keep on doing a good job of the interests of keeping the building upright as the winds shift direction and velocity. It's the same task, the same goal, but new ways of accomplishing it.

It's the task of technology not to replace humans and cultures in this sense-making, but to enable them to do it faster and better, dropping less on the way. Even technology is falling into its own wake, with the support of advanced bookkeeping yielding to support of social collaboration and redefining entirely the purpose and values of "I.T." We've moved from "data processing" to "word processing" to "image processing" and are getting beyond "content processing" into the realm of "context processing". We're getting beyond information and into living and dynamic social wisdom. We're getting beyond what someone said to why they said it and who they are, anyway, and how come they never call anymore?

It's a new day.

Wade