Science, religion, and business - three ways of seeing life

Science, religion, and business may capture three different ways of knowing about life. They seem to correspond to the "near field", "far field", and "intermediate field" properties of a radiating antenna.

What does that mean and how is it helpful?

This isn't a math lesson but one example may be useful, so here it is:

When physicists or engineers analyze electromagnetic waves radiating from an antenna, something unfamiliar appears: there are three different worlds, that tell different stories. The worlds appear initially to be in total conflict with each other, yet they can't be.

Very near the antenna, much closer than one wavelength of the signal, the radiated power appears to follow one law - it may clearly fall off as (1/r) where r is the radial distance away.
The measurements and math are quite clear and easy to do. The answer is clear.

Very far from the antenna, many wavelengths away, the radiated power clearly can be measured to fall off as (1/(r*r*r)) or 1 over r-cubed. The measurements and math are easy to do. The answer is clear. (but different from the one above).

And, in between, the equations are a mess, measurements are much harder to make sense of, and a third world applies, possibly the field varies as the inverse square of the distance.

What's the point? The point is that all three observers and measurements are "right", from their point of view.

These really do seem to have a lot of resemblance to the ways of knowing the world that are described by science, business, and religion respectively. Science tends to be very accurate and short-range, specializing is studying phenomena that can be studied "in isolation" - the core of the "scientific method". Religion tends to be very far-range, specializing in dealing with the biggest picture one can get - everything, with all the parts connected together, over all space and time.

And business tends to occupy the very messy place in the middle, often despised by both sides.
From science's viewpoint, business thinking is too messy and imprecise. It is "unclean." It deals with too much at once.

From religion's viewpoint, business is too down-to-earth and pragmatic and short-sighted. It is unclean. It deals with too little. Like "science" it is viewed as neglecting the very important human and non-quantitative factors that are critical.

So, this is the world into which "system thinking" and "system dynamics" really comes to play, trying to cross the gap from the "science" world where things can be studied separately, into the business world, where it seems everything happens at once and nothing can be known with certainty. It is a world where action is more important than study, where feedback from motion has more wisdom in it than any amount of analysis from a static point of view.

It is a world perhaps like the one birds occupy, where static vision may not be very good, but high-speed motion vision is astoundingly good, and they can fly through a tree of twigs at 40 miles per hour without hitting something. It's a different way of seeing.

And, one of the unspoken and perhaps unrealized terrors of systems thinking is that, by legitimizing the concept of looking "upwards", some legitimacy spills over into the concept of "religious studies" of the world - the perceived arch-enemy of science.

Like a rock-climber on a cliff face, the question is how to include a little more within one's grasp, without holding so little now that one slides off the cliff to one's death below. What's always worked before is the commandment and teaching to narrow one's view an focus, to cut down scope, to consider less. As one moves towards the intermediate field, the complexity rises as does opportunity for error.

This model does raise the new idea that the complexity doesn't rise forever - in fact, the complexity goes up, but then goes back down again, and, at a high enough level, the complexity gets back down to a manageable level. In physics, this happens in thermodynamics, when you stop looking at molecules and start looking at "a gas". The area inbetween is a mess. Single molecules are relatively easy to study, as are large-scale gases.

So, one issue for systems dynamics is how much more to include in the boundaries. It may be that "more is less", and that adding some additional factors make the model harder, but adding more and refactoring to a larger scale may make that complexity, legitimately, go away again.

There is a way out of this mess

Executive summary - there is a way out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It involves using renewable spiritual power instead of oil or technlogy to power our commerce. There is substantial hard-nosed evidence that this works, economically. It should be investigated further, cause, frankly, we're dying out here.

Reflecting on "lean" process, yesterday I focused on some aspects of "pull" and how envisioning a future that benefited and inspired other people, or pulling on brotherly love in the immediate present, could lift the spirits and support whatever other secular task was being done at the time -- including producing goods and services that generated profit for a corporation or nation.

I want to extend those ideas into the question of global social and economic development, and see what in there could possibly offer relief to the economic burdens so many people are now suffering, even in rich countries such as the USA.

Along those lines, I am very explicitly stating a normative belief that corporate leaders should be looking into ways in which intangible "spiritual" changes in their workplace could substantially improve their "bottom line" financially. This is consistent with McGreggor's "Theory Y" and the idea that human beings actually like to use their muscles, both physical and mental, to accomplish useful and helpful work and do not need to be whipped or terrorized into doing so if they can simply be given the means to see how their work benefits others that they care about.

This post is a continuation of the general theme I've been following, which is my understanding of a model that is consistent with science, business, and the Baha'i approach to globalization, development, peace, unity, and "spiritual solutions to economic problems."

I also found a nice thread this morning that's relevant,

Perspective: Spirituality in Development

[Editor's note: The following is adapted from a paper, entitled "Valuing Spirituality in Development: Initial Considerations Regarding the Creation of Spiritually Based Indicators for Development," presented by the Bahá'í Faith at the World Faiths and Development Dialogue on 18-19 February 1998 in London.

Development, in the Bahá'í view, is an organic process in which "the spiritual is expressed and carried out in the material." Meaningful development requires balancing the seemingly antithetical processes of individual progress and social advancement, of globalization and decentralization, and of promoting universal standards and fostering cultural diversity. In our increasingly interdependent world, development efforts must be animated by universal values and guided by a vision of world community.

Local and national communities that prosper in such a future will do so because they acknowledge the spiritual dimension of human nature and make the moral, emotional, physical and intellectual development of the individual a central priority.

The secret, of course, is that the "gasoline" in this engine is not in the "seeing the end customer" type of "pull", but is in the profound power buried in that misused word "care." This fact seems to me self-evident with a little reflection -- it won't have any motivational power to "see" how a task will help someone else unless you care about helping that someone else. If you are indifferent to their fate, then it makes no difference to you whether you're helping or hurting them.

But, wait -- isn't this simply "exploiting" the worker's vulnerable primitive spiritual beliefs in order to make a buck? Even if it works, which it seems to, is this activity morally acceptable?

I don't believe that God or spiritual principles only exist in the twilight or dark. I think they are perfectly capable of standing on their own in the bright sunlight - and, in fact, that may be one of their signature characteristics. They can withstand scrutiny. Like the power of gravity, they work whether you believe in them or not, and whether you realize what is going on or not. These are not phantoms that vanish when the tribe's belief in them weakens.

The laws of physics and chemistry are fine with your "exploiting" them to build a gasoline powered engine and using it to power your truck. There is some human pleasure, in fact, in doing that engineering task extremely efficiently, with as little noise and waste as possible. A powered up jet turbine engine is a wonder to behold.

Similarly, I believe that the laws of spiritual development are fine with your "exploiting" them to build a powerful and profitable corporation. Just don't be stupid about it.

The key here is that, as I've pointed out numerous times in discussing feedback loops, the whole nature of causality becomes a sort of resonance state, either/or relationships become "and" relationships, and before/after relationships become phase-locked dance relationships. As Peter Senge points out in "The Fifth Discipline", it is as correct to say that the water level in the glass controls the hand on the faucet, as to say that the hand on the faucet controls the water level in the glass. In reality, the mind and vision of the person you left out of that picture entirely is what is controlling both simultaneously and equivalently.

So, while it is true that the corporation can be a turbine engine, "exploiting" spiritual power and turning it into hard cash, it is simultaneously true that optimizing this process will reshape the nature of the corporation at the same time in a way pleasing to God. It's not clear, in other words, who is being exploited and reshaped by the constant structure in place that makes this all possible. More correctly, it is clear who is being reshaped, and it is BOTH the workers and the corporation, and, indirectly, management, and indirectly again, the whole culture that builds in reliance on these spiritually-fueled corporations. God is totally neutral about the fact that the process generates cash and employment -- those are human-level variables.

The fact that a permanent developmental piece is thereby generated that takes on a life of its own in converting social needs into socially-useful solutions is fine with God and is in a very real way a multi-level process of building the material body of God on earth.

Of course, to work well, the process can't be totally hijacked in a stupid and selfish fashion by "management", killing the goose to get one golden egg. Not only do profits have to be shared with workers, but control of the production process, and ultimately, control of the goals of the corporation need to be shared with the workers, who are the experts in this new vision. Again, this is not an either/or conflict, because the constant goal of both the workers and management is to do a great job of finding social needs and meeting them efficiently and effectively, and in so doing generate sustaining cash flow to workers, management, owners, and a whole raft of neighbors who also benefit.

The more the owners can push, nudge, and help the Chief Executive Officers of the owned companies to do a good job and finding and meeting social needs efficiently, the more financial rewards they will reap so they can continue to do this. Again, if they are stupid and kill the goose to get one quarter's golden egg, this won't work. Again, it turns out that a good understanding of the principles here means that BOTH owners and management have ultimately the same goal, as do the workers - which is to make this process sustainable and effective for the long run, which is consistent with society's goals and values.

At every level, the thing that can cause this to be noisy and inefficient is an attempt to break up the development of stable, sustainable, long-term growth in order to maximize some local month's or quarter's cash flow. That is simply harmful to everyone's long-term interests, regardless how attractive it looks locally.

And, unlike the world's supplies of oil or nuclear power, tapping into the grid of spiritual power and converting it to developmental progress and cash flow is not only non-polluting, it's the opposite - it's health and benefit generating -- or it can be, if not applied stupidly and short-sightedly. As the investor John Templeton has sought to demonstrate, development of wealth and prosperity is not something that has to be inconsistent with spiritual development and family values. What is immoral and inefficient and ultimately self-destructive is the failure to understand the process fully, resulting in stupid short-sighted efforts to push the engine over the red-line, or attempts to hijack the process so that management or owners get all the profits and workers get none, or so that the corporation gets all the benefits and the customers get screwed. That kind of stupidity will self-destruct rapidly.

There can be, and is, a multi-level, win-win-win solution here, once you allow for the compounding effects of feedback loops, keep a very broad horizon, and think in terms of the multi-level "holons" that Ken Wilber is fond of - that is, entire hierarchies of live that span multiple levels of scale. But, also, the process won't work if participants insist on trying to rip off customers, or eat the seed corn and remove strength from the system. A properly tuned system will be agile and will grow at whatever rate conditions allow and it's stupid to try to drive it faster than that because of some concept that only, say, a 37% return on investment per quarter is "acceptable."

The only people who are desperate for cash in the short run are those who have done a bad job of managing what they have and are now trying to cover that up with theft of God's resources somewhere else, "robbing Peter to pay Paul." Very large scale investors realize quickly that they will happily settle for any non-zero rate of return in real wealth if it can be made self-running and sustainable. And, once they realize that and stop over-driving the engine, in fact they get their original goal because the whole system can now stabilize and stop burning up all the energy fighting with itself, with two different pistons firing at the same time in conflicting directions trying to rip apart the camshaft or engine block.

There is, in short, a "spiritual" solution to our economic problems, and by "our" I mean the full multi-level hierarchy of "us" from individuals to corporations to nations. It's a "win-win-win" solution, and the rich can stay rich and get richer while so does everyone else -- provided we attend to spiritual principles through-out at all levels.

It's also a non-zero sum game, a tap root into an infinite supply of spiritual energy of caring for each other's welfare, which goes up when the population goes up. If we could all realize the principle involved, and stop trying to out small sections of the engine for personal short-term gain, we would have so much output that everyone would have way more than they do now in the long-term.

One thing would be lost, and that is something we need to let go of - the intentional, conscious effort of some people to be better than, richer than their neighbors. We have to let go of the totally destructive mentality that "It is not enough that I win, everyone else must lose!" We have to let go of a proportional disparity of wealth as a goal of the system. It's a stupid goal, and left over from the days of massive unidirectional exploitation, where there was a sense that if the "peasants" ever got strong, they'd revolt and kill the elite. The flames are fanned by those who believe that marketing the idea of "being better than everyone else" will cause more products to be bought, and ultimately more prosperity and wealth to occur.

Our planet is finite, however, and we're getting near the limit. There is no way 6 billion people can burn resources at the same rate the citizens of the USA do without killing the planet, literally. The solution is not to stop everyone else from getting rich - it is to redefine "rich" so that it doesn't involve insane striving to get "better than" each other.

The economic power of honest compassion and caring is much stronger as a business model than the false solution of trying to run the world on greed and competition. Nothing in God's plan or the world is in the way of everyone being healthy and wealthy and safe from terrorist attacks, except our own stupid efforts to sub-optimize the engine we have here at our disposal.

I wish someone at the Santa Fe Institute, or some other think tank, could simulate this process and demonstrate convincingly, in secular terms that our national and international financial leaders could understand, that it could, in fact, work that way.

If every person on the planet had food, clothing, shelter, health care, and honest compassion from their neighbors, I think the wind would go right out of the sails of violent extremism. It's like looking at the tremendous drop in interpersonal violence as you drive the mile and cross the river from Detroit to Windsor, almost certainly due to the fact that Canada has a social safety net and the US does not.

Somehow, we are trying to power the USA workforce with terror, fear of death, fear of loss, fear that their "enemies" might get "stronger than them", fear of being unemployed -- on the implicit myth that nothing else is strong enough to get people motivated to power the wheels of commerce and wealth. That's a stupid, misguided, out-dated concept. 50 years of studies with "Theory Y", well documented by the USA's Ross School of Management, show consistently that caring, compassion, and sharing are, in fact, the basis for a much more powerful engine of profit, agility, sustainability, creativity, innovation, stability, etc.

Some very solid case-studies are available on the links from "Positive Deviance - Kim Cameron"
and the book "Making the Impossible Possible" is a must see. (The video of the book is here, if you have a high-speed link. (Nov 6, 2006) It's an hour but just spell-binding if you've ever tried to get a hostile, reluctant department to do an impossible task.

If you are experiencing difficulty viewing the video, please turn off your pop-up blocker and verify that you are using version 9 or greater of Windows Media Player.

) Many other videos on "Positive Organizational Scholarship" are there. Professor Cameron designed an approach for dealing with the cleanup of the nuclear waste mess at Rocky Flats, Colorado around what I'm terming "spiritual" principles. An effort viewed as "impossible", hopelessly locked into a management /labor dispute, estimated to take 70 years and cost $100 billion, was accomplished in 2 years using such principles.

The reason we have such social conflict and rising unemployment is that we're trying to make a defunct, broken model work when there is a better one available. It doesn't involve people giving up any of their wealth to get there, only their myths.



And, it is not some idealistic dreamer's fantasy that this can work , but well-documented studies by a well-respected School of Management. At this point, the problem seems to be one of inertia and persuading the older generation to let go of "solutions" that turn out not to scale up to global size, regardless how well they worked from 1900 to 1950.

This post "Virtue Drives the Bottom Line" has links to the serious management literature.

There's a lingering fear that this will lead to communism, or socialism, or some other ism that will force the wealthy to become poor, and lead to the workforce becoming lazy and stopping productive labor, and cause corporations to stop seeking efficient distribution of resources to meet social needs. I don't think that's the case, but some rigorous economic modeling of the ideas would really help make the case.

Repeating the summary - there is a way out of this mess we've gotten ourselves into. It involves using renewable spiritual power instead of oil to power our commerce. There is substantial hard-nosed evidence that this works, economically. It should be investigated further, cause, frankly, we're dying out here.


(Team crossing stream photo credit: Ollieda )

Photo credit: Amish barn raising by heyburn3.

Public Health, business, jobs, and profit

All of my theoretical models lead to the same conclusion - the field of "public health" cannot really do their job well until the needs and interests and realities of multi-human meta-organisms are included as well.

In English, that means that we ARE what we are PART OF, which is increasingly clear in public health studies of the impact of social connectivity on physical and mental health.

But it also means that the internal life of corporations, cultures, and nations, as well as the entity called "the public", are all very real systems that behave as if they were separate biological goal-seeking, energy-consuming, adaptive, reactive, self-protective organisms.

It also means that it just doesn't make any sense to evaluate the impact of different interventions in the health of people without, at the same time, evaluating the impact on jobs, employment, and the health of corporations and business and the business community.

The physical health of people in a community or nation is very directly influenced by the "health" of the community or national economy. If the economy or businesses crash, it will show up "under the skin" very rapidly.

The failure of many in public health to have a wholistic approach that includes BOTH people AND corporations reduces the credibility of public health. If there is one lesson "systems thinking" teaches, it is that the word "OR" is vastly over-used. We shouldn't be thinking that EITHER we can serve people OR the public - we need to lead the way in serving BOTH. And, similarly, we need to get corporations realizing that they can't survive if the workforce they draw on, and customer base they need in this country collapse. We need each other. We are each other, in some very real ways, and our respective "health" depends on each other in a feedback loop, either for better or worse.

Similarly, it makes no sense to me that "Republicans" should be fighting for the interests of "business" and "Democrats" for the interests of the "people" - because there is only one, multi-leveled complex life-form on this planet, which includes "cells", "people", "corporations", "cultures", and "nations."

We are all in the same lifeboat. At this point if the people all die off, so do the corporations. If the corporations all died off, so would almost all the people. Get over it.

If we're upset that corporate or national planners don't include "human factors" in their planning, we shoudn't also assume it's because they refuse to -- it is, in my experience, more that they are clueless as to how to do that.

If public health wants to change that equation and interaction, great, pick up that heavy burden and figure out how to include humans in the equations and not make them indescribably difficult to solve. If corporations can get better bottom-line performance by doing better planning including more of reality in the plans, they'll do it, but someone has to show them how that would work and make a convincing case that it does work.

That gets down to that messy problem of "profit." As the Ross School of Business here in Michigan says "Non-profit is a tax strategy, not a business strategy."

Or, as one sister from Trinity Health Care's catholic leadership put it, "No margin, no mission."

Health is intimately tied to growth and life which are intimately tied to "wealth."
That component sub-systems decay and die is a given; what's up for grabs is whether there's a balancing source of regeneration and growth, which requires that actions result, ultimately, in absorbing more energy than is spent in getting there.

In other words, in the larger accounting scheme of life, public health interventions have to "pay off" or they will simply "die off." This is a schitzohrenia that both clinical health and public health seem to have - the idea that making money is intrinsically bad or a dirty concept.

Yes, obsession with short-range, stupid strategies to make money at the expense of life, health, and stability are indeed stupid. On the other hand, there is no such thing as a long-range strategy of losing money each year.

The most important distinction is that wealth, and health, are not zero sum, and are based heavily on interactions across levels of the MAWBA beastie.

Health can, in fact, be created out of thin air.
Wealth can, in fact, be created out of thin air.
BOTH of these, health and wealth, cross-support each other.
Being "rich" and "dead" is not a winning strategy.
Some balance is required.

Public health has an opportunity to teach the principles of SUSTAINABLE GROWTH, which means sustainable rates of return on investment. Business owners hate that venture capital firms and stockholders expect them to operate to maximize profit this quarter, at over 27% a year annual rate, but to keep operating in the long run.
Those are incompatible goals. With the exception of discovering gold or the equivalent, healthy businesses probably grow at 10% or less, maybe as low as 2% per year. If public health would show CEO's how to keep stockholders from jumping ship if the companies invested more internally in people and showed such "small" profits, the CEO's would love public health. Everyone knows this is an absurd demand that's killing off healthy, stable business as "not up to par."

These problems cause each other. People are stressed out because the businesses they work for are stressed out. Businesses are stressed out because they don't know how to tap the healthy creative power of people at a sustainable rate. They are different views of the very same, multi-level, MAWBA problem.

If 30% of the humans died or were seriously put out of commission for 2 months by something like avian flu, at least 30% of the corporations would crash and burn as well, because they are riding very close to the line on being as short-staffed as they can be right now. The crash would cascade, as suppliers of key components failed. The interests of public health and "big business" align when it comes to stopping global pandemics.

This fact is maybe less visible because of the invisiblity of the details of the roles of people on "the bottom" in keeping corporations operating. My guess is, after the last round of layoffs, that more than half the large corporations in the US are vulnerable to crashing and burning if 30% of their Information Technology staff were to abruptly be incapacitated on the same day. All meta-life involves a constant battle between natural collapse and regenerative efforts, which may "look like" nothing is going on and all is "well." Remove those people who are holding everything together, and it will suddenly become apparent that maybe they were doing something after all.

Other areas of "infrastructure" are similar. We have huge reliance on armies of people doing low-visibility or invisible jobs, without which the wheels of commerce would cease turning in a cross-cascade, house-of-cards type collapse.

It is a mistake to think that pulling out the "safety net" has "worked." It hasn't been tested on a full-scale pandemic yet. The effect of having almost 50 million people in the US without health coverage will have the same effect as having a basement filled with gasoline-soaked rags would have on a small house fire. These are things you really do NOT want to give a running start on you.
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(This was originally published 11/21/06 on my weblog "might as well be alive" at http://mawba.blogspot.com)

Multilevel Architectures - Bane or Boom?

Marsden Bloise once described life as having a "curiously laminated quality."

Life on earth does have levels, and they have important mathematical consequences.

In fact, the multi-level model is one we find reasonably familiar and can live with. We structure our corporations and government to have layers and levels, with people one "one level" reporting to people on "a higher level."

Not only are there levels, there are gaps between the layers. It is almost like a quantum mechanical model, where there are legal levels and forbidden zones.

In the world of large-scale enterprise computing, there are officially levels (see the OSI model), where there is a hardware level, a messaging level, an application level, etc. The goal of each level is to function so well that it essentially becomes a perfectly flat, stable platform or metric on which the higher levels can be built. A perfect level "goes away" and "falls out" of the equations.

So, in the best world, when nothing is going wrong, an application such as Microsoft Word can say "save this file!" and, behold, it happens. The application doesn't need to concern itself about the details of what brand disk-drive is in the computer, or how may empty slots of what size are there, or how to chain them together and break up the document into chunks that size for storage and retrieval later.

Or, in business, workers and "the boss" or the next level of management up have a functioning gap between them. The boss doesn't really want to know the details of how something happens, and only wants a simplified, almost cartoon-level sketch, and mostly cares, yes or no, did that happen. The employees see all the details and prefer the boss not "micromanage". The employees have little idea what the boss does all day - so long as reasonable work tasks come down the pike in reasonable order, it's good. The boss has little idea of the complexity of many tasks, or the pains that have to be taken to accomplish them.

On the upside, this makes "management" even possible, because otherwise the world would rapidly become way too complex for anyone to ever comprehend, and the largest business would probably be something like 200 people.

And, if perfectly managed, lower level computer "infrastructure", like plumbing or electrical wiring, should be completely invisible. The thousand upgrades a day, putting in new hardware, swapping out old networks, installing new security patches, upgrading the database or operating system, should all be done "seamlessly" and at most result in a slight slowing down of normal response time.

One downside of this is that it is very easy for the upper levels to mistake the perception with reality. The classic problem in preventive maintenance is that, if perfectly done, all problems are seen coming in advance, headed off, and so "nothing ever breaks" -- and consequently upper management, at the next budget crunch, decides they can lay off the maintenance department because, who needs them, nothing ever breaks! So, they do, and only later discover what it was that the department did.

A second downside is that upper management is shielded from details by multiple layers of oversimplified sketches to the extent that they mistakenly believe that the tasks people at the front, or on the bottom, are actually easy to do, or even trivial. Consequently, it follows that the people doing them are really only one step above morons, and also that failure to do the tasks must be due to not only incompetence, but bad attitudes, because anyone can see the work is trivial.

Thus we have what I call "wicked-II" (wicked two) problems - where the tasks may be enormously difficult, but from above or outside they appear to be simple or trivial.

The immediate consequence of those misperceptions then are that management may decide, in its infinite wisdom, to undertake some new task, or "put in" a new computer system that, from their very limited depth model, should be "easy." First, they seriously lowball the associated work and costs. Then, they interpret reports of trouble from below as being obviously due to incompetence, laziness, or, worse enemy action that demands instant retaliation and disciplining or firing the idiots who resist. Management says "I don't want to hear about problems! Don't tell me you can't do that!" That directive appears to be successful, as complaints drop to zero, until the whole project finally crashes on the rocks the employees were trying to warn management about when they got fired. Management blames the employees for failing to do what they were told to do. And everyone loses.

This model of operation appears to be the norm, and enormously easy to slip into, even if management is trying hard not to. It is what "safety cultures" and "high reliability organizations" have to try to overcome in order to work.

So, we also expect to find, throughout history, a vague awareness of this type of problem and hard-won advice on some benchmarks to avoid falling into that same pitfall in the future - advice typically ignored as old wives tales, so the future generations end up rediscovering the world of hard knocks.

In some ways, this is like the brain-body dichotomy, where our conscious selves are able to think deep thoughts, like what movie to go to, and be generally unaware of all the hard work going on in the body below synthsizing enzymes, digesting food, managing pathogen invasions, etc. It is all too easy, not seeing those details, to take "the body" for granted and neglect or abuse it. And, as with management, complaints can be suppressed and we can continue on deep into fatigue and exhaustion because of higher goals, until some physiological system that was trying to warn us finally collapses. (Recall the old rule of thumb - the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail. Those who forget it as the wind picks up rediscover it after their mast snaps or the boat overturns.)

Similarly, "upper" levels of society are reminded in all religious literature to "remember the poor" and take care of the powerless "below" them. This advice is often neglected for short run gain and long-run disaster.

Similarly, "upper" structures, such as corporations, can easily forget that their existence depends on the lower level existence of a healthy workforce and community, and a stable ecology and climate. Again, industry can take actions for short term gain that undermine the workforce health or environmental stability, with long term catastrophic results. It's very easy to do, and very easy to suppress complaints.

Similarly, "upper" levels of the military, or civilian government, can suppress dissent and ride roughshod over the key needs and observations of their own staff, often without realizing they are doing it. The result is being surrounded by "yes men", being cut off from reality into a fantasy shell, and making terrible mistakes that end up being catastrophic.

The problems listed above are all the "same" problem mathematically. Interlevel communication and the tradeoff between "invisibility / detail hiding" and constant needs that have to be met remains an open problem.

(note: I originally posted this Nov 21, 2006 on my weblog mawba.blogspot.com,
where mawba = "M.ight A.s W.ell B.e A.live", and it got this comment:
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Frank said...

Wade:
A truly great analysis. Are you aware of Macintosh, Moffat, Atkinson's works on resilience and networks? They are going to the High Reliability Organizations conference in Deauville next may (http://www.hro2007.org/index.html ). I find Atkinson book in particular quite congruent with your analyses. There is a link on that page where you can download it: http://www.hro2007.org/speakers.html
Frank H. Wilson

5:42 AM

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The Sixth Discipline for Learning Organizations

There are some things common to the diverse fields of medicine, public health, business, religion, science, and the military.

• They all tackle problems which result in "success" or "failure" in a changing world.
• Failure can cost property, lives, or even entire nations and cultures.
  
• "Success" depends on how well they can detect failure and adapt to it.
• They all have bright people, but really operate more at the organizational level
  
• Adaptation depends on how good the organization is at seeing and learning.

So, a book like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is very important to us all, and impacts us on many fronts.

Senge points out an extremely pivotal insight: there are two different kinds of complexity, and most of what we do is focused on the wrong one.

He describes "detail complexity", which is the type we are familiar with, where there are thousands or even millions of details to be kept track of and managed. That one we're pretty good at, with the help of computers.

But then he goes on (on page 71 of the 2006 revision):

But there is a second type of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where the cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity...

When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in a different part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce non-obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.

He adds

"The real leverage in most management situations lie in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity."

This understanding comes from "system thinking" and that, in turn "starts with understanding a simple concept called feedback."

Of course, to say feedback is "simple" is misleading. The impact of feedback is wildly subtle, counter-intuitive, perplexing, and paradoxical to most of us. Some simply refuse to accept the concept at all because it overturns so many cherished notions of how the world works and how things "should" be.

Senge goes on, echoing many others and American Indian culture, "Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines."

The point is that when people or things form a causal loop, where each thing influences the next one down the chain, and the chain is closed, then all our notions of "causality" are thrown out the window. Every actor in that loop is both the cause and the prisoner of the effects of the entire loop. In many ways, the shape of the loop becomes the dominant "cause" of what unfolds, far more so than the people caught up within it.

Senge describes a person filling a glass of water. As seen by a person, their hand is controlling the level of water in the glass, and adjusting it as the glass fills. A perfectly valid alternative description is that the level of the water in the glass is controlling the hand, causing the hand to close the faucet as the level reaches the right place.

Both descriptions are partially correct. The hand affects the water level, and the water level, in turn affects the hand. There is a feedback loop in place. Both are "causes" and both are "effects," and "which came first" is an irrelevant question.

It is the intrinsic property of complex systems to be dense with such feedback loops between the people inside them, making everyone a cause and everyone a trapped recipient of effects.

This means bad news and good news.

The bad news is that, if the output of "the system" is wrong, then the blame should be shared among everyone in the system, not just the last person to touch something that failed.

The good news is that every person in the system therefore also has the opportunity to change the flows and impact the system's output. In conflict situations, either party has the ability to increase the tension or decrease the tension.

In fact, in most conflict situations, the whole reason for the conflict in the first place is that there are feedback loops that are reflecting each sides actions into later behaviors by the other side, which are misinterpreted as new "actions", not "reactions."

Thus, in 2006, when Hezbollah forces in Syria reacted to Israel's capture of many of their own, they captured two Israeli soldiers in return. However, Israel saw this not as a reaction, but as a new "unprovoked action", which therefore demanded a new massive "reaction" and counter strike - a 34 day assault by Israel. The counter strike, in turn, was perceived by Hezbollah as a new "unprovoked attack", and the cycle simply continues to feed itself.

This is a classic no-win situation, where each side downplays the value of lives of the other side, and feels that the loss of one of their own should be responded to by killing two of the "others",
in order to "get even" and also "be even." By that flawed match, the conflict spirals out of control because there will never be an "even" situation.

On a smaller scale, within organizations, the same phenomenon occurs - but generally without actual explosives and death. The vast majority of conflicts can actually be traced back to people, or teams, or departments, or divisions, or managers blaming others for behavior that is simply the downstream result of their own earlier behavior, reflected and sometimes amplified through the structure of "the system" of feedback loops and lags. Similarly, management and labor can get into the same endless loop of conflict over "getting even" for behaviors that are the result of their own, forgotten, earlier actions.

In a bizarre sort of hallucinogenic dance, at all levels from personal to national, we are fighting demons that are simply the delayed reflections of our own earlier behavior, which we fail to recognize and blame instead on the "others" being "bad."

Senge mentioned the problem with dynamic complexity over space and over time, but he missed the third dimension, namely, over scale, or location in the hierarchy of life. Actions or interventions may look very different, ranging from great to wretched, as we rotate the lenses in our microscope stage and view different time-horizons, different space-horizons, and different perspectives from the bottom of the organization to the top.

Worse, actors in one place who perceive, at their location, time, and scale that their own actions are "good" may be completely baffled by hostile responses coming from actors at other locations, times, or level who are only responding to the "terrible" thing being done to them by that obviously uncaring and bad person somewhere else. And, of course, this would mean that those people responding with hostility must be "bad people" and need to be fired, neutralized, or killed, depending on the context of the conflict.

Dennis Severance describes the same kind of error being made by a mythical management in the book Making I/T Work. That management tries to impose an an enterprise-wide computer system, runs into "hostility", tries to "deal with" the "opponents" by firing them, and then is blind-sided when the computer system, "out of the blue, with no notice", fails to operate as intended, and they can't grasp why no one ever warned them of problems. The fact that those who raised these issues at the start were fired for their "hostility" is completely lost. This is a very common problem across industries.

These problems are not, as they might seem, problems of perception, but are actually problems of the intrinsic properties of systems. The people in these systems are all well-intended, doing "good jobs" locally, and yet, like M.C. Escher's pictures, taken together form an impossible loop that simply can't operate.

The variables that depend on the horizon of space, time, or scale are the keys here, and are as surprising as seeing an object that is red close up turn to look green when you back up several steps. This seems "impossible". Actually, New Scientist published a marvelous picture a month ago that, if viewed close up, was Albert Einstein, but if you backed up across the room, changed into Marilyn Monroe.

( Hybrid images: Now you see them…

• 31 March 2007
• NewScientist.com
• Gregory T. Huang )
  

These system effects are much more prevalent than people realize, and are the things that are "to blame" for most of the conflict and corporate dysfunction and national conflict around us.

It is clear to me, and I'd say to Peter Senge, that these effects need to be somehow made visible and accessible to everyone, at every level, from every country, so that we can get enough comprehension for people to see that, in Walt Kelly's Pogo's words, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Of course, many scientists, working a small scales, would have a hard time accepting wisdom from theologians, working at large scales, who see different pictures in the same world. Biomedical researchers, used to looking down the microscope for the cause of problems, are not prone to look out the window instead, and even less to consider that their own scientific culture could be implicated in producing the conditions that produced the cancer that they are now working to "cure".

Still, the logic of Senge's arguments is sound. "All" that is required is for people to stop blaming others for all the pain and recognize that the others are just as good people and are just as trapped in the pain, and, in any case, as with Jimmy Buffet in Margaritaville, they might realize that, yes, maybe, they themselves might be partly to blame.

If this looks remarkably like the basic golden rule of most religions ("Do unto others what you would have them do unto you") that's because it is. Other really annoying commandments like "Forgive us our sins as we forgive others" also come readily to mind.

Like the "Marilyn Einstein" photo, reality is multi-scaled, and the scientists have the fine-detail or high-frequency detail right, and the religions may be wrong on details but have the long-wavelength, larger picture right.

All of this should be something that can be animated, simulated, and taught in K-12 school, as well as in continuing education. And it should be.

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