Thinking “Better than Toyota” and “Beyond lean”

It is interesting to consider what the nature will be of the generation of corporations beyond Toyota’s current “lean” model – the Toyota Production System.

Some might ask why that question should be asked, since most of the US is still playing catch-up with Toyota. One reason is that maybe the shape beyond “lean” is easier to get to than Lean. Lacking that, maybe it can give us some insight into what really matters.

I’ll approach this over multiple posts, but to get that ball rolling, there are two features that strike me as absolutely required regardless of local implementation.

A “vertical” feedback loop that brings together workers and management, and
A “horizontal” feedback loop that brings together the company and the customers.

The horizontal loop is reflected in the customer “pull” mantra of Toyota, and just plain common sense. If the company is out of touch with its own customers, it will have a hard time optimizing how much it satisfies them, and how much it learns from them. If this loop is missing, we have a company disconnected from external reality, unlikely to be “adapative” and makes poor use of external resources.

The vertical loop is reflected in much of the Toyota Way, bringing together labor and management, ensuring that the “eyes and boots on the ground” can be heard at “the top”, and vice versa. A breakdown in this loop is reflected in an unhealthy and dysfunctional organization, making poor use of its own internal resources.

Finally, there is a need for the company to be value-driven, long-term oriented even though most or all the people in the company are short-sighted and focused on local problems as perceived in local perspectives. In fact, the company has to succeed at every level, not just short term, and not just long –term. The easiest way I can imaging doing that is to have completely symmetric tools and thinking, so that long-term and middle-term and short-term issues are addressed in a way that hits every base for every decision. A breakdown in that coherence could expose the company to having short-term victories that interfere with long-term objectives, etc. If a solution can be found that is “win-win”, I’m thinking that’s probably the one to pick. (This can be argued, but it’s a good place to start.)

So, the coherences we seek are between management and labor, between the company’s interests and the customer’s interests, and between the short-term and the long-term interests of everyone. If those issues can be resolved at a reasonable cost, it would certanly remove many of the obstacles that cause companies to fail, and put it on a reasonable path for long-term vitality.

In fact, if a reasonably efficient company is converting external resources (cash) into external value (product or service) and in touch with its own people and the customers, just about the only remaining question is whether internal or external enemies could bring it down despite its otherwise strong operation.

One such hazard is that the company could still make flawed and short-sighted decisions. Generally I think this can be traced to top management that is failing to consult with its own staff and customers, but it could be that top management is just dense, or has an agenda different than the best interests of the company in mind.

Since companies in general do not “belong” to the CEO, but to the stockholders, they may not want the company to be stripped of value to pad the pocket of the current CEO – it’s their dollars that are leaking out. One way to address this internal corruption pitfall is to have very distributed decision making that cannot be thwarted by any small group of people, whether they are “at the top” or not. If the collective decisions can be at least as good as and as fast as those of solitary individuals (I say “if”) then this distributed model might be of interest. It’s a big “if” but one we’ll consider. Regardless, some function must be in place to prevent corruption at the top from developing and destroying the company. Often transparency will help there.

But, still, the CEO and the management team might simply be dense and not able to manage well. What will protect the company from that? Again, if (big if) we can find a solution involving distributed decision making that is demonstrably better and as fast as a single expert at the top, then we can make a design that is robust against individual components, even the CEO, failing.

Now, collective consciousness seems to work for Toyota, but according to Liker, Toyota has a reputation for being “conservative” and evolving slowly with a great emphasis on sustaining the past unless expliclitly addressed.

Aside from legal questions, the real question in “management by committee” (at its worst) is whether a team can “fly an airplane” or whether a team will simply defeat any coherent rapid action.

So, those are the two big research questions that determine this next-generation company design:
Can a team producce, reliably, better decisions than even a very good individual, and
Can a team produce such decisions as fast as a very good individual?

In other words, can we synthesize intelligence and sufficient speed to “pilot” the aircraft. And can that intelligence work with the CEO so the legal commitments the CEO signs remain aligned with the team?

Probably, this is going to require a CEO who is there for the good of the company and is willing to learn from the company about even better goals and objectives than the ones they arrived with. This is a hard type of leadership for the US to fathom. It requires combining assertiveness and submission in an unusual blend.

Still, if those problems could be addressed, a company run by a meta-person collective consciousness could, potentially, have all the advantages of “lean” and more on top of that.

Or, maybe, this concept is already carried within the true Lean concept held by Toyota. The question of how to manage distributed “command and control” is the pivotal one. So, maybe the next question to ask is if there’s any theoretical work or literature that supports the concept that this might even be possible.

And, again, I think immediately of my own body. Here I have ten trillion cells, or so, and there is no “boss cell” who the others “report to.” So, yes, in at least one working model of adpative learning systems, there is a solution to the emergent collective decision making –
and we’re it.

What would make that solution happen, instead of the downside alternative modes of collapsing – such as one very strong leader taking over, or the social culture becoming “the borg” and totally stifling innovation?

Good questions for tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I recall that Marquardt's "Leading with Questions" approach separates the role of authority from the role of "know-it-all", and frees managers from having to "know everything" in order to remain managers. This is a hard transition to those raised that saying "I don't know" is a sign of weakness and will trigger the attack dogs being loosed. Still, these days, it is impossible to understand all the complexities of any large, complex, adaptive system -- so it is totally unrealistic to expect anyone, including a CEO, to grasp either the external world or the internal world. As with "lean" - when this transition is over, they will still have a job, but it will be a different job.

The same transition is already part of the FM22-100, U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual that I refer to repeatedly in this weblog. In short

Being IN authority does not require being AN authority.

That is just a crucial distinction if we are going to ever get CEO's and managers to be willing to listen to their staff, and free organizations from being hostage to mental models in their leader's brains that just aren't getting updated with fresh information.

Even more on "What's the point of Religion"

(above - picture of the road home, from this site. )

(third part of a series of posts) - I'm trying to reduce 8000 words to 250 here and still get to my answer to the New Scientist's question of "What's the point of Religion?" Maybe the shortest answer is simply in terms of bandwidth and signal theory. There are concepts that are larger than any individual human brain and don't fit in linear symbol string text, so what does the evolving planet use (a) to perceive those and (b) to store and persist those?

Again, I'm trying to explain a model for religion with terms that scientists would recognize.

So far I've mentioned concepts that Science has inherited without adequate scrutiny that need to be re-examined. One of these is the idea that humans are magically special and different from other natural phenomena, so that "social science" is somehow different from "the natural sciences".

Another idea left over from history is the idea that mankind is God's greatest creation, beyond which there has been and never will be any life in this universe that is greater. The term "God" has been removed from that thought by Science, but the rest persists -- in direct violation of the Cosmological Principle that asserts that here and now isn't special, and which, like Occhams razor, is one way to generate hypothesized models to test first.

So, let's break that constraint, which has no basis in either theory or fact. Let's start by assuming that Evolution is occurring on many levels simultaneously, whether that's easy for humans to grasp or to model or not. Further, let's assume that some of what's evolving is superior to human beings -- that humans are not evolution's endpoint, by a long, long way. We are not the top, and not the end-point. That's the Cosmological Principle. We are not at the middle of the universe - same principle.

OK, but then follow that logic, oh Scientists, and take it where it goes.

I'll assert without proof that there are important things that individual human brains are too small to grasp, period. The burden of proof is on the contrary assumption that the world is so simple that bright individual humans, in less than 100 years time, can even learn the terminology, let alone understand the concepts.

And, similarly, I'll assert that there are things that take 500 years of continuous observation to detect that, again, no individual human is going to ever "see".

If these were radio signals we wanted to pick up, with very low wavelengths and long time-constants (compared to human biological clocks, but not to the time scale of the Earth), we would go, OK, and build a receiver/detector that was very large and would remain in place for 500 years. No big deal, if our society was one that undertook such projects.

Generally, society is more short-term focused, as are individuals, so Evolution has instead created meta-beings, persisting structures that last hundreds or thousands of years, to do such sensing and observing and remembering and learning and storing of that kind of information that humans can not and will never personally grasp.

That's the kind of thing that "organized religion" may be good for. We have very few very-long-term structures on Earth, composed of humans, that could serve to pick up the long-wavelength information about this universe we might need to know. Nations are one other contender, but they are too fluid and come and go too quickly, and are focused on short-term issues. Large Global Corporations are perhaps a great long-term solution going forward, but we don't have globe-spanning corporations that go backwards a thousand years -- except these "organized religions".

It is a frustration of many that religion "changes so slowly" -- but, from a pure signal theory point of view, it takes precisely something that only changes slowly to detect and pick up the long-wavelength signals.

Are such signals there? Following Drake's Other Law, yes, surely they are.
Will we discover new, previously unsuspected phenomena if we look at those wavelengths over time? Again, by Drakes Other Law, yes, surely we will. (These "laws", like Occham's Razor, aren't proven, just helpful guidelines for where to dig first.)

Are there other similar phenomena we can use to do a sanity check that our thinking here is not totally off-base? Yes, read any book on large-scale phenomena and how large scale things are not simply larger versions of small-scale things. One example I recall was the amazement people who didn't know Drake's Law had when they built the first Supertankers and one day one of them, on a perfectly calm day with a flat sea, started moving and ripped apart its dock.

This is the first time people realized that the ocean waves "came that size". Waves with wavelengths of half a mile were treated by small ships as just "swells" or not even noticed at all. It took a ship that long to be rocked by a wave that long. In hindsight, we should have fully expected it, by the Cosmological Principle. There is no reason signals and waves around us should abruptly cut-off at the scale of human beings and only exist to one side of that point.

Throughout history, organized religions were the storehouse of "wisdom" - which was largely definable as simply long-wavelength knowledge -- something that it took 100 years to pick up and finally see for sure was there, because it sure wasn't visible or obvious locally to individuals. Then this long-term "wisdom" stuff had to be distilled into local operating rules, so that it was effectively possible for dumb, short-range humans to benefit from smart, long-range understanding. Organized, large-scale, thousands of humans over hundreds of years "religion" served, and still does serve, as that signal detector and transformer for us.

Well, maybe not for "us". Maybe, for Earth. Individual humans weren't very interested in having their short-term impulses controlled by long-term social wisdom a thousand years ago, and still aren't interested in that, not seeing the point, and not grasping how that works.

Today, our society rejects anything over 30 years old as being "irrelevant." Hmmm. We seem to be regressing, or asserting, implicitly, that there are no long-wavelength lessons we should be "learning from history". That is an unsupportable, and invalid Scientific hypothesis - that everything that matters to us is "news".

Surely yes news matters. So does "olds". All wavelengths matter, until proven otherwise.

Right now Earth is busily evolving social structures the size of Microsoft and Haliburton and GE and other globe-spanning corporations. We weren't asked permission for those, and those may be less "human creations" and more "natural evolution's creations." They are way larger than individuals, act like legal "persons", have civil and constitutional "rights", take actions, absorb energy, and are made up of DNA in complex arrangements and hierarchical structures. By all our textbook definitions, corporations are "alive."

The only reason we don't like to think of them as "alive" is the threat to our myth that humans are God's///blind-evolution's greatest creation. Well, not any more, apparently, by Science's own rules and laws and logic.

And, in point of fact, many humans have noted that, in the USA at least, an unspoken coup has taken place and Congress has a new mandate now, to make a nation "of corporations, by corporations, for corporations". The only "economy" that matters now and is reported in the press and Wall Street JOurnal is the corporate economy, than separated from human-level economy a few decades ago, and now are at odds. Good news for one is generally viewed as bad news for the other, although there is some "leakage" between the two.

But, as humans, we've already "lost" the planet, before we even knew there was a fight for control of it going on. A new species has arisen, Corporations, and it has taken over, and we, being fragmented and tiny-thinkers, either didn't see it, or can't see it if we try.

Still, Corporations should treasure Organized Long-Term Old Religions, because there is no other repository of long-term wisdom they can turn to for advice about what LIFE is like at that SCALE of organized activity. Or, like most teenagers, corporations can simply "Not see" what those old fogies around them are so bent out of shape about, and go off to rediscover the lessons of life the hard way, and wrap the family car around a tree as they find out that "oh, ice is slippery!"

Meanwhile, Scientists, you can go back to sleep, because this is happening without your assistance or brilliant assistance, and is already beyond your ability to model simplified versions of, let alone grasp. LIFE will evolve despite you.

It's magnificent to behold unfolding. Probably the same thing is happening on ten trillion other planets simultaneously, evolving and unfolding into a LIFE form shape so far beyond our ability to grasp we don't even have words to describe it.

We're still back here arguing about whether it is "genes" or "species" evolve, and not looking out the window or reading the paper where the answer is apparent. Right now, "corporations" are evolving and spreading and taking over the Earth's evolving re-structuring process.

It's a little uncomfortable where corporate life forms run unexpectedly into existing religious life-forms, as in the Mideast. Some clashes will occur, but there is no need for "survival of the fittest" -- because at the corporate level, "merger into a larger ONE" is also an option that battling tigers never had.

Already, new pathways to evolution are open, like that. The past is a poor guide to the future, in that regard. Darwin didn't even speculate on what shape evolution would take once corporation sized living entities had the ability to clone and merge and have tele-presence.

The good news, for religion, is that as corporations get to live longer, they will "grow up", as do humans, and begin to realize that some of that stuff their parents was spouting actually matters and applies to them: Things, dammit, have consequences. Who knew? Why didn't someone tell me!!??

So, global warming and the collapsing biosphere should be a wake-up call. Corporations can see, or could see, on scales humans never will, so they should start to grasp this, maybe faster than people can.

Well, if they can utilize their internal resources. If a corporation behaves like a huge exoskeleton for a few dudes at the top, it will be stuck and limited by human cognition. If it can accept "Theory Y" and open itself up to internal flow, it can get way past that binding constraint and evolve to something much smarter than the smartest human.

We better see if we can't catalyze that process. We can't "beat" corporations anymore, they already are here to stay. They don't have intrinsic "morality" at that scale, yet -- ie, they are too new to have absorbed long-term (> 1000 year) lessons about what works and what doesn't.

We need as scientists and religious folks to accelerate that learning curve for corporate-scale entities somehow, because we're in the back seat of the family car the kids are about to wrap around some tree.

If someone has a great idea how to do that, let me know. I just trace all the wiring back and point to where the problem is.

Still, it's interesting. If you dig into it, the Toyota Production System and "lean" approach actually does spend a great deal of time removing the internal barriers inside a corporate structure to the flow of information, so that the "aperture synthesis" can take effect, making the whole organization a learning machine with a capacity far greater than "management".

That model seems to be extremely successful. So, maybe there's hope.



( a self-assembling tower crane from howstuffworks.com )

My public health buddies sometimes seem to want to disown me for being willing to hop into bed with corporations, instead of viewing them as the scourge of the earth and something to be fought off and destroyed in a noble losing battle.

I flip it around and say our job in public health (this weblog) is to figure out how to help corporate life forms SUCCEED beyond their wildest dreams, and learn to SEE better -- because they'll SEE the things we're trying to tell them on their own then. And that seems to be the only way to reach them, is through simulation models or real-life experiences that let them find this out for themselves.

I prefer simulators for learning about consequences and limits and to avoid plane crashes over practicing extreme maneuvers with a real plane. We need better long-term, long-wavelength LIFE simulators for corporations to learn from -- multiplayer games on a corporate level that, like the WHOPPER in the movie "War Games", will finally realize -- hmm, curious game, the only way to win "GLOBAL WAR" is not to play the game.

Corporations aren't Darwinian lower life forms that can only "win" or "lose" -- they can actually "merge". That's our way out of this mess. It's not a zero-sum game anymore.

And, corporations do not have to be "the BORG", life-sucking stultifying wretched places to suffer and "work". In fact, a corporation that squeezes individuality out of people is self-defeating, as it reduces the complexity of its own internal ecosystem, and makes itself dumb along some new axis, some new base you could have been covering for it.

So, "bright" corporations exult in "unity in diversity". It's a great model. It's the only good working model. It's not "Am I me OR am I a corporation employee?" In the optimal solution, you're BOTH simultaneously but not in the degenerate solution, in the multiplicative solution.
Each of those identities makes the OTHER identity richer and more satisfying.

That kind of corporation, one can imagine, will have way more success at "innovation" and have way higher morale than one without that feature.

The problem corporate CEO's struggle with is how to maintain "control" in an open-system and prevent it from simply descending into chaos once they stop "running things with a firm hand" from above. Like "angular momentum", the "forces" that emerge to take "control" in an open system are invisible and not at all intuitive to the human animal.

We've seen examples and know that it can work and does work, though. The trick is how to convert a dumb, dull, life-sucking corporate exo-body into a fit, thriving, exciting life-energy supplying exo-body. That's a win-win for the economy, for the workers, for the stockholders, and for everyone except a few top "officers" of the company who become less important in the greater scheme of things and can be expected to fight back against losing or not getting their $250,000,000 perks for their "leadership".

Again, here, the concept of "emergent leadership" needs to be fleshed out, so that even the employees know what it is they are asking for. It's not a question of changing WHO gets to sit in the "top seat" and "run the company." -- in open control, no ONE person runs the company. EVERYONE collectively, in a single unified emergent entity, runs the company.

That is NOT the same as everyone having a "vote" in corporate decisions. The difference is subtle but crucial. The difference is a herd of people versus a TEAM. Again, this is an area humans have little intuition on, and have a hard time seeing, except perhaps when they see a sports team or band "get it together" for a few moments and the experience is astoundingly rewarding -- we resonate to that frequency. We are hard-wired to LOVE that frequency and that experience. Employees who have ever been in a work situation where it "clicks" into a true TEAM never want to work anywhere else again.

But, most CEO's, even if they wanted to, don't know how to navigate from "HERE" to "THERE", so it does little good for stockholders to demand that they do so. The mental models we were taught in school don't even include the "THERE" I'm talking about.

So, let me whirl it by one more time on this way too long post. It's not the employees who run the company in this model, and it's not the CEO, and it's not labor, and it's not management, and it's not some sort of vote sharing between them. NO ONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is in charge. And EVERYONE ON AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL is not in charge (chaos or Communism).
Nothing on an individual level is in charge. The "in charge" part is no longer located ANYWHERE on the "individual" level plane. The "in charge" part has moved up the hierarchy of being to the EMERGENT plane above the "individual level" that we crudely and vaguely try to tag with the word "team" or "synergy" or "emergent" without really grasping well.

The CORPORATION becomes a living being in its own right, above and beyond the living-ness of the individuals within it, and the CORPORATE-level BEING runs the company. That's the model. If you can't grab hold of and work with "emergence", this model makes no sense at all and keeps mis-resolving itself into chaos or communism or the Borg.

This century, for the first time in the history of the Earth, we finally have the computer power we need to model "emergence". This is just crucial. This is "where it is at". This is our escape route from the mess we've made of this planet and the forces we've already set into motion that are coming back to haunt us.

This isn't "kum bay yah" touchy feely stuff. You watch a great sports team (like Michigan CAN too be, someday!) and it's no "accident" when they win. They "have it together."

That's what we need to aspire to, as families, communities, corporations, nations, and the planet - to "have our act together", to get to that overarching UNITY that embraces and loves DIVERSITY instead of suffocating it, because it spins out into a higher dimension where that unity becomes possible.

We know this can work. Our human bodies are living proof that ten trillion cells can form one "body" and each have a life better than what they had before.

99.9 percent of us WIN in that strategy, and the few people at the top might think they've lost millions of dollars (or billions, or trillions), but money ain't much good if the planet implodes, guys. You can't spend it anywhere if everyone else is dead.

The total value of stored wealth goes to ZERO if everyone else dies, regardless what number of dollars or gold bars it is made up of. Wealth is, at its core, access to future social resources and if there isn't a future society, that adds up to zero.

The way to maximize wealth from here, or rich people, is to maximize the future society that you now own a piece of. Think long-term. You can't even spend a trillion dollars short term anyway. "Emergent unity above diversity" is the only key that's been shown to work here.

We don't NEED TO take each other's stuff, because the pie CAN stop shrinking and start growing again, through emergent Life.

Mathematically, this is a relationship thing. The "inner product" of two vectors a and b is written and computed as magnitude of a times magnitude of B times the "cosine" of the angle between them (their relationship to each other.).

For "real" angles, the cosine function varies between zero and one, so the best you can ever end up with that product equaling is when the two are perfectly aligned, and you get a value of a times b.

For other angles, mistakenly called "imaginary" and related to that strange thing the square root of minus one, cosine is not bounded, and can grow without limit. Any two things, with the right relationship, if you move into that dimension, can have a product larger than any number you'd like it to be. And a company formed of people oriented like that can have a value larger than any number you'd like it to be. It's all about getting relationships off the "real plane" and to having a component in this other dimension, which is very real as well, but a little harder to point to from here, except by example. It's emergent. It's synergism.

It's simply a "complex exponential", as is any simple growth curve. That's pretty solid ground. It's a pure feedback equation where growth is proportional to size already, with the "complex" additional part adding the zing. That's what we need more of. More zing. The curve is a pretty helix-shape, which is kind of interesting - and, like a "screw", by twisting it THIS way, it moves THAT way at right angles to the way you are twisting it. That's important, because we don't have other tools to make the work piece move in that other dimension.

And, you can crank it out like you can a bridge, through solid engineering, once you get the right math understood correctly. We finally have the computer power to solve those equations. There is hope.

Wade

math reference links:

The beautiful exponential spiral - see the bottom left graph in the section


4-D projections halfway down the page and also pictures of the complex "sine" curve showing that it does head off to infinity and is no longer trapped between zero and one.




complex exponential dynamics (fractals)

Complex exponential map (not instantly helpful but animated and pretty).

Complex exponential - Nice interactive live graphics from MIT's open-courseware

Self-assembling tower crane:

http://science.howstuffworks.com/tower-crane4.htm

So what? part A of why SLOOPS matter

I get tired of writing "Self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, regulatory feedback-mediated control loops" so I'm going to use S-Loops or "SLOOPS" (all caps) to name those in this post.

Again, I need to meet the burden of showing why all this effort is worth it. Where's the payoff? Where's "the beef?" If this doesn't give at least a 10-times improvement over older techniques or frameworks, it's not worth considering, after looking at "transition costs".

OK. So, let me begin showing why this actually helps. Some theory to start, then some fully worked synthetic examples, then some real data. How's that?

First, recapping, I've said that we need to put on lenses that let us spot proto-life, or S-Loops in the sea of interactions going on around us, within us, and that we're within. Those are where I believe "the action" will be for reasons I went into already. Some are the obvious, named parts of "the Ecological Model" -- cells, tissues, organs like the pancreas, body systems like the endocrine system, families, work-groups, departments, corporations, cultures, religions, nation-states.

Then I suggested that maybe this set of what Marsden Bloise called "curiously laminated" levels of life on Earth isn't really many different living things, but only "one" living thing, in the same sense that our circulatory system or immune system is "one" thing, despite having many parts that are, in the short run, not even connected to each other. White and red blood cells appear at first glance to all be off doing their own things. The "ties that bind" are subtle, and not always some kind of physical binding like glue or cement. The "parts" are not always in a fixed or plastic relationship to each other, like our bodies, and can have "gaps" between them (as do blood cells, or the pancreas and various endocrine control centers in the brain.). They are still, in a critically real sense, "one." They act as "one".

But, this is a funny sort of "one". We're used to billiard-ball models, or rocks. We're taught that "one" plus "one" gives you "two". This kind of "one" has a different math, forget calculus, we've already left the building at "addition". We have "one plus one equals ONE" -- where ONE is larger than "one." But it doesn't stop there, because "ONE plus ONE equals ONE."
and "ONE plus ONE equals ONE." So many cells act as "one" body. And many bodies act as "one" corporation. And many "corporations" act as "one" nation-state. -- but each "one" also includes all the previous, "lower" level "ones" too. So corporations are made of people, but people are STILL made of cells. Corporations are big complex organizations of DNA, in fact.
So is the USA. It has the identity of DNA, and the identity of many immune systems and endocrine systems, and the identity of many "people" and the identity of many "subcultures" AND it has an independent identity too, on top of all of that. It seems infinitely branching, almost fractal. (actually, I think it is symmetric across levels, so it actually IS fractal.)

These identities are context-dependent, scale-dependent variables so we have to be careful what kind of math we do with them, and not just "addition."

In the SHORT RUN, with our SHORT RUN lens on, the levels appear to be "obviously" independent and unconnected, although, sure, they "impact" each other a little. Just like blood stream cells impact each other a little as each does its own thing. But that tells us NOTHING about what we see when we rotate the microscope stage to the LONG RUN, large field-of-view lens -- where suddenly all these "different" things are all connected after all and all coordinated and synchronized at a high level, which is almost (but not entirely) invisible at the lower level.

I gave the example of water molecules -- in the short run, molecular interactions are complex and require advanced quantum mechanics and only supercomputers can predict the behavior of a few hundred molecules at one time.

It's the height of arrogance and folly to try to hope to predict one thousand or ten thousand --- using those tools and that base-point and looking upwards.

But, if you keep on going, you get to the scale of household and city plumbing. Suddenly, people who never graduated from high-school are putting in pipes and faucets and getting "water" to do their bidding, and filling glasses with "water" whenever they need a drink. No big deal.

What was impossibly hard from below, becomes incredibly obvious and easy from above. Same molecules. Same you. Different lens.

So, whether things are "many" or "one" is a slippery concept that may be scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent. Whether interactions are "weak" and "loosely-coupled" or "deterministic" is also a scale-dependent and time-horizon dependent type of variable. We can't use our billiard-ball addition, subtraction, and reasoning on such objects -- they have a different system of math. It's very real and very solid, but it's different than we're used to, so our intuition is just terrible regarding it. Our hunches and impressions tend to be wrong most of the time.

So, bring this back down to Earth and focus, Wade.

OK, yeah, here's the thread. It is an important thing to decide how many semi-living things human beings are "one" with already, right now. If we put the boundary in the wrong place, we will get bad predictions on our "what if " thinking.

In my mind, the proper subject of "Public Health" is not the public misperception of "health care for poor people", or "hygene and sanitation", and is not to maximize the sum of the health status of every person, although both of those are virtuous goals. The proper subject is to take care of the health of the living and semi-living entities that are larger than people, including corporations and cultures and nations, going all the way up to Gaia or "all of us."

The "public" in "public health", in my mind, is ONE living thing, ONE highly complex, fractally organized set of DNA in a fantastically complex dance. Viewed through one lens, it is one planet. Viewed through another, it is separate "countries." Viewed through another, it is 6 billion "people". Viewed by a virus, it is some huge number of cells, waiting to be infected.

It's a system, and not a heap, although both have "oneness." The heap, however, just sits there, and a living system, or S-Loop, is self-aware, self-repairing, goal-seeking, and allostatic. In the heap case, our interventions are on a passive lump of clay. In the complex adapative system case, our interventions are on a living Body that has its own equivalent of an immune system and tissue rejection is a very real possibility. Or the patient could be upset by the injection and punch us in the stomach and stomp out and come back with its friends and burn down the clinic.
It is not a lump of clay. It has huge stored energy and active agents within it. And it has a self-identity, and a goal, and will attempt to keep itself aligned with its current concept of its healthy state.

So, much of this is not news. Public Health knows that you can't just walk into a culture and impose some solution and expect it to "take" and expect that you can walk out again and not have your solution thrown out the window after you. Almost every foundation that funds public health interventions in Africa or elsewhere has already learned that lesson the hard way.

One place where this is news is corporate management theory, and the large interest right now in trying to understand why Toyota, coming from behind with about zero to start with, could walk slowly up to and past General Motors and keep on going. Despite the unseemly screeching about "unfair trade practices" and "unfair cheap labor" and "unfair currency valuation", there is a realization that they're doing something right that corporate America better wake up and figure out and emulate while they still exist.

After reading 20 books on "lean manufacturing" and "The Toyota Production Process" and "Lean Six-Sigma", and attending a weeks training and exercises, I come away with this -- Toyota understands the multi-level living model, and aligns itself with that, and GM still thinks the parts of the Body operate best if they are at war with each other.

Economically, especially if you live in Southeastern Michigan near Detroit as I do, this is one very big deal. This is the dominant thing happening on the economic landscape right now, and it has, surprise!, a huge impact on employment, education, health care, and the health of the states, cities, neighborhoods, families, small businesses, ancillary services, and physical health of the people who live there.

I have trouble imagining how that could NOT be a proper subject for "public health" to attend to, but some don't share that view.

People are not well because their companies are not well. Their companies are not well because they are pursuing a bankrupt, dysfunctional model of human behavior that ran out of steam in the late 1960's, after McGreggor's Theory Y was published -- but the news hasn't hit many corporate boardrooms yet. Why? Because the companies have banded together to maintain a set of stories and myths about why things are the way they are, in which CEO's are "good guys" with "white hats" and labor, environmentalists, unions, lawyers and terrorists are the "bad guys" with black hats. It's a very powerful story, capable of distorting perceptions and selective attention to discount and ignore incredibly strong evidence that the myth doesn't hold water any more.

Well, I have to go. Let me put in a bookmark here. The bad news, from the point of view of activist "people", is that the level of corporations and managmeent a few levels above them seems to be so short sighted that all hope is lost.

My message is don't despair. It's like the water molecules. I'm sure there are idiots and crooks wearing CEO hats, but there are many good people wearing them as well. And, if you get high enough, as with the water and plumbing example, the ultimate investors, the huge funds, the John Templeton's of the world, are not evil people and are not in a frenzy about making 37% return on their money this week before the dude comes with the tire iron to break their kneecap for the loan they took out and failed to repay. The huge investors would be ecstatic to find ANY place to put a trillion dollars that would even RETAIN its value from year to year, or, wow, maybe even grow 1% in absolute real value. China's bankers are sitting on that kind of money and have that very same problem.

So, while the CEO's seem "high up" and out of reach from below, from far above CEO's are hired guns and "a dime a dozen." They can all be replaced, if there is a better way to make money in a sustainable fashion, with less fuss and anxiety and fewer disrupted golf afternoons. Probably entire nation-states can be replaced if they're in the way by the Club of Rome type crowd, or "organized crime" bosses.

Everyone one of them has the same issues, the same problems, the same S-Loop issues to worry about. Every cell, every tissue, every organ, every body system, every person, every company CEO, every Governor or President has the same set of questions they face daily. These are the ones we need to get better at. FIRST, there are the 7 basic steps of the core S-Loop, that I've gone over before.

Yesterday's picture - above. My Capstone picture below.



Second, there is not ONE loop doing this activity, but millions of them, or at least very many, horizontally at each level of the hierarchy of life. Third, there is a whole fractal tree shape of higher and lower level "ones" doing exactly the same activity in their world, at their level, at the same time, interacting vertically. All that gemisch looks only loosely coupled, but I think a deeper investigation will show that, like the body's immune system or circulatory system, the distal parts are really tightly connected after all, in at least a few important ways.

So, we have one huge, fractal tree shaped collection of DNA, all trying to figure out which way is up and how to survive until tomorrow and make it through today. Everyone is working on the same set of 7 questions, over and over.

where to intervene? John Kenneth Galbraith would call them "mental models", but for public health or psychology these days they are "stories" or "narratives" (or myths) that we tell ourselves, tell each other, and make self-sustaining by passing them back and forth so they don't die out. The ones that link up to make an S-Loop will persist and end up dominating.

So, the intevention points are the boxes in yellow then. These are non-tangible "stories" and changing them will change all the very real, very physical parts of the S-Loop located at the right side of the diagram. The IOM had it perfectly -- use "feedback" to inform and reshape the group, and it will become self-working and self-managing and self-righting without any more "guidance" from management. My addition is, use S-Loop feedback, not just "feedback", and your efforts will be 1000 times more self-persisting and have way less "tissue rejection".

Besides, there's a resonant notch there, so it tends to "click into place" or "snap to grid" if you get close to it. It has a familiar heft and ring. We know this place, because it is us.


As T.S. Eliot, in the Four Quartets , said

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Wade

The Toyota Way - viewed as feedback control

Here I look at Jeffrey Liker's view of The Toyota Way, and twist it around to show that a hierarchical, nested control-loop model fits the data, which I will later show provides some insight that's not otherwise evident.

The first conclusion is the same theme I've been trying to work on - that personal health, social population health, and corporate health are not mortal enemies. They are, in fact, joined at the hip. The "loose coupling" is magnified by feedback loop compounding so much that there really is only one "mathematical" entity here on this planet, and it includes people, corporations, nations, and computer systems, as well as the supporting plant and animal life. We need to plan around that reality, or our plans will just keep on failing.

I plan to show that the Toyota Way is strong precisely because it meets that challenge and aligns the multiple levels and threads.

So, I start with Liker's diagram 1.1 from his book "The Toyota Way", above.



Then I invert it, because the rest of my model views this from the other side, and I see "causality" and "resting on" going downwards, not upwards.

That gives three axes - small to large, many to few, rapid to slow.
But, I want to swap people and processes in this diagram, because processes and problems are more related than that diagram shows.

And, it's not really problems, despite breaking the words-that-start-with-P rule, that I don't think is a natural constraint. STEPS make up Processes. I want to start with the way a HEALTHY organism looks and functions, not one with something that's broken. LATER we can deal with how "errors" at every scale, horizontal and vertical, high and low, can be detected, compared to the "me" and "not me" decision that "immune systems" make, and responded to gracefully at all levels simultaneously. (pulling the cord is just one way to do this.)


And, people make up Society. (This is consistent with Liker, and Philosophy, long-term-thinking, and social goals all sort of merge.)
So that looks somewhat better.
x
But the transitions between levels aren't symmetric. I like symmetric. I love symmetric, actually, and think Nature loves symmetric, because it's so much easier to learn and compute.
Symmetric across levels (scale-invariant) is a very popular design pattern on this planet, and it tends to work and be the easiest possible way to stack things.


so, we'll pull "people" out, for just a moment, and try "business" in that slot. Yes, that works much more smoothly up the chain. The transitions are all "composes" / "composed of" relationships now.
Then, I want to put people back in, but everywhere.


OK, Each step of this ladder or hierarchy now is something that has a local identity and local self-sustaining (homeostatic / allostatic) control loops in place. In the ball rolling on surface analogy, these each have locally defined "notches" or "grooves" where they try to keep the ball, and where it will roll "naturally" , given the dent in the terrain that the local control system has created.

But, this actually has "N-factorial" control loops. Not only does each level, taken one at a time, have a control system, but each pair of levels, (taken 2 at a time), has a control system to maintain their relationship:
x
If those control systems break, we call things "out of line" or "broken" or "Not working smoothly". We want steps to make up processes stably, and processes to work together to make up business entities, and business entities to work together (!) to form stable societies. (all of which requires people and affects people at every step - some other detailed loops I'm leaving out.)

Skipping the N=3 control loops, and N=4, etc, (departments, divisions, groups), we can get to the far end of that list, and look at the single loop that holds everything together, taken N at a time. This is the loop driven by "Pull" downward, which changes substrate and becomes "cars", which changes to "met needs" which changes to "social support and cash inflow" and return business and helpful regulatory climates and laws, which sustains both business and social and personal needs, and so is stable. We have found a "loop invariant" that works for people, teams, business units, business, societies, a nation, and a planet scale.

We can look for a moment at HOW this loop feedback is carried, and ponder the "visual" cards and "cords" used at Toyota. The key to any of it is "transparency". It should be obvious to anyone, inside or outside the unit, walking by, how they are doing. Not only are things not hidden, they are "worn on the sleeve." The internal health of the "cell" is reflected directly in what proteins are displayed proudly on its external surface for all passers by to see.


Now, if we look at the "people" aspect of this thingie, this multilevel living entity, we see that the people thread is actually multilevel too. We can see from DNA, making up cells, making up body systems,making up bodies, making up families and teams, making up communities and departments, making up businesses and societies and what public health calls "populations".
That thread has to be whole, and healthy, or this whole deal falls apart on that.

If the people are all sick, they are poor workers, poor consumers, and won't support the social structure continuing whatever it is that's wrong. If you destroy the ecosystem that supports the people, that's not a very stable long-term business model either.

Employees are people. They don't suddenly appear at 8 AM and disappear at 5 PM every day.
They have lives. If the lives don't "work", there goes your customer base and your workforce and your management team, all at once.

Finally, there are control systems at the non-DNA side of this double helix vine that grows up and around the core hierarchical trellice. That's the computer or IT side, including robots.
This has a similar ladder, from actuators to "arms" to process control systems to business control systems and customer relaiton systems to social control systems and regulatory legal systems. Again, for this to be adaptive and responsive and agile, it has to be healthy top to bottom, and all similarly chained up with a hierarchy of internal controls that reshape it, so that each of the individual components can have its own perceptions, self-control model, and action set that it can do -- and, if you add all these up, they are not only compatible, but the whole thing produces a product (cars), meets social needs, develops the people, develops the teams, develops the organization, and develops the society.
x

This last slide is an illustration that "you can't beat city hall". The long-range, large-scale "dent" in the world that higher parts or contexts create will compete and win over small-range, local "dents" that local control systems create.

If you add up the slopes, you end up with the bottom diagram, where the local dent is now tipped and "won't hold water" anymore. Nothing that happens locally can overcome that problem.

If the higher context is aligned with society and good things, this misalignment is a good thing, and will put pressure on the local structure to move its goal over to where everyone else is.

If the higher context is misaligned and the local context is good, well, that's bad news. Again, sooner or later the larger context (society) will win out, but locally the misdirected efforts will appear to be winning, even though they are continually defeating local efforts to align with the global good. Nothing can survive, long term, if the contexts above and below and around it are pulling it some other way, because, if we move up a scale, it now is the "local" entity and Society is the "global" entity. Things will just keep breaking. That is not a "solution" to the problem that will be stable, grow, thrive, and be a good investment.

Moral - Either we solve EVERYTHING or we solved nothing.
Toyota tackled everything.
Trying to pick up some part of that scheme and apply it just to manufacturing, while ignoring the rest of the "Toyota Way philosophy" won't actually ever work, according to that model.

Toyota, Lean Thinking, Pull, and the role of Religion

Toyota is the envy of much of the world, particularly the area near the "Big-three" auto manufacturers in Detroit, Michigan, USA.

Two very popular studies of Toyota's "secret" is the book Lean Thinking, by James Womack and Daniel Jones, and The Machine that Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
by the same authors. The Lean Institute says:

In this landmark study of the automobile industry, Jim Womack, Dan Jones, and Daniel Roos explain lean production to the world for the first time, and discuss its profound implications for society. It is based on the largest and most thorough study ever undertaken in any industry: the MIT five-million-dollar, five-year, fourteen-country International Motor Vehicle Program’s study of the worldwide auto industry.

Philip Caldwell, Chairman and CEO, Ford Motor Company (1980-1985) had this to say about "Machine"

Truly remarkable.... The most comprehensive, instructive, mind-stretching and provacative analysis of any major industry I have ever known. Why pay others huge consulting fees? Just read this book.

The cover of "lean thinking" cmments:

Instead of constantly reinventing business models, lean thinkers go back to basics by asking what the customer really perceives as value.

It goes on to talk about terms such as value stream, flow, cycle, perfection, and pull.

It is the concept "pull" that I want to focus on in this post.

Womack says this (Chapter 4, page 67 of the 2003 revised edition)

Pull in simplest terms mans that no one upstream should produce a good or service until the customer downstream asks for it, but actually following this rule in practice is a bit more complicated. The best way to understand the logic and challenge of pull thinking is to start with a real customer expressing a demand for a product and to work backwards through all the steps required to bring the desired product to the customer.

Now, the authors have way more industrial experience than I do, with a mere MBA and most of an MPH, and a single "lean workshop" under my belt -- but I have my model to bring to bear on this question and raise some new ways to view pull. So I will be undaunted and proceed to offer some suggestions and reinterpretations of the same data for the reader's consideration.

First, in light of a multi-level approach to everything, we should realize that "customer" is not only plural in a horizontal sense (many drivers of vehicles), but in a vertical sense (the dealers, the supply chain, the auto industry, society, etc.)

Second, in light of feedback's description of everything in terms of closed process loops, not open-ended chains, we should complete the loop from the customer back to the company and look at how many times that loop will be travelled. (This is the "multiplier" of any "small" improvement we can make in the loop process.)

Third, in light of the multiple-scale, multiple-lens approach, we should move back ten paces and zoom the lens down so we see far more of the picture in space and time, and realize that customers often are repeat customers, or even lifetime customers. In that sense, not only does the satisfaction of this car matter, but it matters many times over in terms of the next cars this person, and their friends and family will buy the rest of their lives, and their children, etc.

Also, as we view Toyota over time, we have to note that the Toyota miracle, and the Honda miracle, started small, at about zero, competing with a firmly entrenched US Auto industry. The approach used by Toyota was slow, patient, long-term focus combined with a focus on the needs of everyday people, poor people, people the workers could relate to, in a country demolished by World War II.

And, in context, we should realize that "product engineer" in Japan has the same cachet and social status as "aerospace engineer" or "rocket scientist" in the USA.

So, the context here is that the workers respected and cared about the customers, and the customers cared about and respected the workers.

Now, finally, we can look at "pull", not as a production scheduling technique with optimal mathematical qualities, but as a human caring mechanism that had the potential to shape, or drive the Toyota engine -- with money being second. The "work" had a role, in the minds of the workers, of connecting them to the customers, which was a desired state.

This is where the light of religion, we can speculate that two more effects come to play. One is illustrated by the motto of Boy's Town in the US:

He ain't heavy father, he's my brother!

The second is a story I've told before, probably made up but it touches a truth:

In the middle ages, a quality control specialist came to work on a production problem in a church being built. Some stonemasons were doing work that was not high quality and needed to be redone, and others were doing excellent work consistently. The specialist asked one of the poorer workers what he was doing, and the reply came "I'm building this wall." Then he asked one of the best workers what he was doing, and the reply came "I'm building a cathedral!"

What these stories suggest is that there is a driving force, and a shaping force, that dramatically alters the functioning of people - and it is related, surprise, to purpose and meaning of "the same" action. The quality and sustainability of a worker's efforts depends on what it is they believe they are doing, and what larger picture it fits into.

If this effect has a significant effect, it probably means that "the customer" isn't actually viewed as "a customer" by the worker, but is viewed instead as "a person." "If I do my job well, and everyone does their jobs well, then old Mr. Lee will be able to afford a car and visit his children and his ancestor's graveside!"

This kind of bouyancy can make heavy objects lighter, and "impossible tasks" suddenly possible. I'll relate this later to much research on the impact of such "psychology" on worker output, innovation, creativity, willingness to change or share, etc. It is more like lifting "heavy" objects in the water than in the air -- they have the same mass but much less weight. Being filled with this kind of "spirit" really does make a difference in hard-nose measured output.

Interesting. And kind of what religion has been urging us to do for centuries.

This view, or focus, or framework shifts what aspects of the "lean" technique are most important, and which aspects are just artifacts. It changes how the process looks and how it should be managed.

So, it should be evaluated to see if it holds up to a formal study.

I recall also one last item of interest. When the head of Toyota was first approached by Americans who wanted to learn about their production techniques, there was great concern by some that Toyota would lose its edge. He thought about this and finally said, basically "Let them come. The Americans will never be able to do this. They don't have the necessary spirit in dealing with each other."

We recall that W. Edwards Deming of Quality Control also had no luck getting his message heard by Americans, and finally went, by invitation, to Japan and gave all of Japan a 20 year lead on the US on such techniques. They weren't "secret" but they were "not hearable" by American management.

This factor needs to be considered as well, and the source of "resistance" to such ideas identified and rooted out, if this technique is to bloom and thrive here.