Model-induced blindness, FEMA, and Systemantics

[ Published in my other weblog 8/31/06. Still relevant today ]

It's a year since Katrina made it obvious that people watching CNN knew more about what was going on top government officials.

We have to ask how that is even possible. It defies our intuition, although not our experience, which is interesting.

While the "blame-game" remains in high-gear, Systems Thinking leads us to discount the obvious "bad people" and look for deeper root-causes in the social structure. FEMA Director Brown has been replaced, but the systems problems are harder to see and may still be there.

How would we know?

Some systems features come with the territory, such as problems getting coherent action across 6 or more layers of a hierarchical structure. Each layer has its own intrinsic variables and a world view that is quite distinct from that of the layers above or below. The result is that communication across levels that appears easy is actually quite hard, although the miscommunications may be hard to detect locally. The same words play into different mental models of the world, and convey different meanings.

This is not a problem that is fixed by simply getting everyone radios with compatible frequencies. A discussion in depth of this problem can be found on the weblog Fifteen Charlie.

Or, on the health care front, this type of problem is not resolved by everyone agreeing to use messages all formatted to the same governmental standard, such as HL7, so they are "interoperable." The telephone was already "compatible" in that manner, but it didn't help New Orleans. To change the outcomes, we need to realize that there are no "technical problems", only socio-technical problems, and the "socio-" part cannot be a last-minute add-on optional feature.

So, from President Bush's point of view, policies were followed, money was launched, their work is done. "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job..." Six to ten levels away, where the money or benefits or even rescue from rooftops was not underway, these actions looked feeble and inept, disconnected from reality. And today, a year later, much of New Orleans still remains as it was a year ago, although many of the fund have now been fully expended.

John Gall, a University of Michigan emeritus physician, in his marvelous book Systemantics (1986) , captures the essence, as he calls it of "How systems really work and how they fail." An introduction to this book can be found here on wikipedia, and some of the key rules revealed, such as "A system is no better than its sensory organs" and "To those within a system, outside reality tends to pale and disappear." He goes on to describe the inversion of "input" and "output" and gives this example:

"A Giant program to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled "you and the War against Cancer" have been distributed. Those publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input. "

His book is a real gem, an easy read, and worth re-reading at least once a month.

Meanwhile, New Orleans remains a visible and tragic reminder of what an open-loop, top-down control model produces in practice. Without sensory feedback making the return journey from the eye to the brain, the hand is as likely to end up in the flame as on the handle of the frying pan. I'd says this "cybernetics 101" property of a control loop is what Steven Covey in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People calls a principle, a law of nature, that you can like or dislike, but you can't get around.

Unfortunately for all of us, it is precisely when high-stress disasters occur that these upwards communication channels close up entirely, as New Orleans discovered. Almost every factor there is conspires to close the lines:

* Top brass, fearing blame, close ranks

* Top brass, under stress, fall back on previously successful behaviors of ignoring small stuff and focusing on the top one or two priority issues. In a huge, multilevel organization, this means every problem from level 3 down is totally ignored.

* The most important information, that which challenges preconceived notions and the assumptions of the plan in hand, is what is ignored the most at the top. They are trying to focus on working the plan, not questioning the plan. Efforts to challenge facts are viewed as enemy action, not as helpful feedback from sensory organs. In worst cases, the messengers are killed to resolve the conflict between inputs and mental model.

I'm working on a white-paper on the issue of how upwards channels shut down during disasters and how that could influence disaster preparedness competencies. Contact me if you're interested in reviewing it.

And, voila. A president who is unaware of what every CNN viewer knows. Auto companies that can't understand how anyone could have foreseen rising gasoline prices, or competition from China.

These are very strong systems forces, that can totally overwhelm huge numbers of very bright and well intentioned people. These are the types of problems we need to be able to recognize and solve, or they will simply keep on occuring.

How frequent are such problems? Well, if problems occur randomly at all levels, and if humans typically only ever see and fix the non-systems problems, then there will be an ever growing sludge of unattended system problems. The percentage of all problems that are systems problems will keep on growing. A good guess, perhaps somewhat waggish, is that, if such problems have never been addressed, then they almost certainly dominate current behavior of the organization in question. The longer the organization has been functioning, and the larger it is, the larger the percentage of problems will be unrealized and unresolved systems problems. The US government is probably almost a limit point, and probably over 99% of it is dominated by such problems, as the others have all been fixed.

The fact that we don't recognize these as problems is what Systems Thinking attempts to address. Our "systems problem" detectors are broken is what it is.

Take the analogy to the detection of pulsars, intensely bright flashing objects in the radio frequency spectrum, virtual strobe lights in the night sky to a radio telescope, outshined only by the sun and the galactic center. These were missed entirely for years, because "everyone knew" that there were no important signals at high-frequencies, that this was just noise, and the noise was filtered out before doing any analysis of the sensory input.

It took a female graduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, one not caught up in the shared myth, to challenge that assumption, remove the filter, and just look at what was there with open eyes.

Systems problems are similar. They are everywhere around us, but we use statistics all based on Sir R. A. Fisher's work and the General Linear Model, or even multilevel models that are still linear, (as Dr. Ana Diez-Roux at the University of Michigan points out in the Annual Reviews of Public Health, 2000, Volume 21, pages 171-192.), and that assume, at their core, that there is no feedback. The key assumption, generally unspoken, and often unrealized, is that there is a causal end of "independent variables", some set of paths, and a terminal end of "dependent variables." Feedback or reciprocal causality is often noted in passing, but, lacking a recognized way to cope with it, most public health papers then try to proceed without it. Or, since the feedback is "small", it is considered insignificant - a mistake similar to looking at a beaker of air and denying the possibility of the existence of "hurricanes", which rely critically on such tiny effects, almost infinitely compounded, to exist and grow.

So, without meteorological feedback effects, Katrina would never have existed in the first place.
It invalidates the model if the output feeds back into the input, with feedback, which, of course, almost every social system we care about does: love, war, communication, relationships, terrorism ("He hit me back first!"), the economy, the stock market, the housing market, etc.

So, we don't see such "distal causality", not because it's not there, but because we've short-circuited it out of the equations before we even turn on the computer.

I'd suggest it's time for someone to remove that filter, analyze how to do statistics on feedback-dominated regulatory control loops, and let us see what's really out there. Odds are, as with the night sky, we will be very surprised by the answer.

========

In his new book "The Eighth Habit - From Effectiveness to Greatness", Steven Covey separates out and focuses on problems, including organizational blindness, that result from attempting to use the old paradigm, the industrial machine model, instead of the new paradigm - the Knowledge Worker model.

In the old model, workers are treated like machines - replaceable, better without an independent mind or spirit, needing firm management or a good whip hand to keep them from goofing off. In particular, only those in positions of authority should take initiative and decide what should be done. The model creates a self-fulfilling world.

The alternative he presents is the empowered knowledge worker, who has initiative, a "voice", heart, spirit, and an active role including taking personal responsibility for seeing that the job gets done, and done well. This expectation also creates a self-fulfilling world that latches, but in a far more productive state, and one that requires far less day to day management of "bad employees".

Why are so many flights delayed?

Although my flight made it home from Baltimore, my flight there was canceled, and on the way back the two flights on adjacent gates to mine were canceled.

Northwest Airlines, with a hub in Detroit, seems to have led the pack, with 14% of its flights canceled two weeks ago, stranding over 100,000 passengers.

An article in this morning's paper confirms that it's getting worse. It also notes something I realize I should have seen myself, since it's one of those scale-dependent thingies: the delays counted by airplane are nothing compared with the delays experienced by passengers. The airline calls it a 1-hour delay, but it causes a missed connection and an overnight stay, or even longer, waiting to get re-booked, because all the other flights are already full too, and you're not the only one who got bumped.

Here's some numbers from the Times:

Ugly Airline Math: Planes late, fliers even later
New York Times
Jeff Bailey and Nate Schwebber
July 5, 2007

As anyone who has flown recently can probably tell you, delays are getting worse this year. The on-time performance of airlines has reached an all-time low, but even the official numbers do not begin to capture the severity of the problem.

That is because these statistics track how late airplanes are, not how late passengers are. The longest delays — those resulting from missed connections and canceled flights — involve sitting around for hours or even days in airports and hotels and do not officially get counted.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ... determined that as planes become more crowded — and jets have never been as jammed as they are today — the delays grow much longer because it becomes harder to find a seat on a later flight.

But with domestic flights running 85 to 90 percent full, meaning that virtually all planes on desirable routes are full, Cynthia Barnhart, an M.I.T. professor who studies transportation systems, has a pretty good idea of what the new research will show when it is completed this fall: “There will be severe increases in delays,” she said.

Over all, this could be a dreadful summer to fly. In the first five months of 2007, more than a quarter of all flights within the United States arrived at least 15 minutes late. And more of those flights were delayed for long stretches, an average of 39 percent longer than a year earlier.

Moreover, in addition to crowded flights, the usual disruptive summer thunderstorms and an overtaxed air traffic control system, travelers could encounter some very grumpy airline employees; after taking big pay cuts and watching airline executives reap some big bonuses, many workers are fed up.

If a flight taxies out, sits for hours, and then taxies back in and is canceled, the delay is not recorded. Likewise, flights diverted to cities other than their destination are not figured into delay statistics.

About 30 percent to 35 percent of Continental’s passengers make connections between flights

A spokeswoman, .. added that many delays are caused by weather and thus do not reflect the airline’s performance.

...That is a typical level of missed connections, but Continental’s flights that day were 89.6 percent full, so finding seats on later flights for some passengers was difficult.

Continental also has a new system that sends e-mail messages — and, beginning next month, text messages to cellphones — informing connecting passengers on late flights how they have been re-booked.

It also is moving ticket kiosks inside the security area so passengers can print new boarding passes without going out to the main ticketing area or having to wait in line for a gate agent to help them.

The system, however, re-books people on the next available flight with a confirmed open seat and that is not always as soon as people might expect. Some are told their new departure is in three days.

“That causes them to go berserk,” said David Grizzle, a senior vice president at Continental. Often, on standby, people get out sooner, he said.

I also noticed that Northwest Airlines had attempted to solve this problem by institutionalizing the response. They now had entire special carts to make it easier for large numbers of passengers to attempt to make new bookings faster.

From the point of view of "lean" practices, and the Toyota Production Model, this represents one of the worst wastes possible - trying to become more efficient at doing work that shouldn't even be done in the first place. The risk is that the "workaround" will partly work, and then dig in for the long haul and become part of the new "normal" process, replicated 500 times in other places. New vendors will spring up to build even "more convenient" re-booking carts, and to lobby for sustaining this practice.



What might be done instead?

The first thing is to identify what the problem is. The problem is not thunderstorms or a feud between the traffic controllers and the FAA, although those contribute. The problem here is one of those pesky physical laws that I've been writing about, and what "the Yarn Harlot" pointed out as man's persistent desire to make "ten less than nine" and the delusion that maybe it just hasn't been rotated the right way yet and somehow this will "fit."

The law in question is called "Little's Law", and it looks innocent enough. It says that for any system the "cycle time" to process one unit (or passenger) goes up towards infinity as the system becomes full, and goes up much faster if there is more variability in the processing time for any individual step.

I can't easily find an authoritative textbook online, but here's the key info from a wafer fabrication newsletter "fabtime". (The same law applies to semiconductors as to passengers.
WIP = Work in process)

The relationship between cycle time and WIP was first documented in 1961 by J. D. C. Little. Little’s Law states that at a given throughput level, the ratio of WIP to cycle time equals throughput, as shown in the formulas below:

Throughput = WIP / Cycle Time

In other words, for a factory with constant throughput, WIP and cycle time are proportional. Keep in mind that Little’s Law doesn’t say that WIP and cycle time are independent of start rate. Little’s Law just says if you have two of these three numbers, you should be able to solve for the remaining one. The tricky part is that cycle time and WIP are really functions of the start rate.

Oh, and that tricky part is the devil in the details. What this really says is that as you try to jam more and more stuff through the same process, as it fills up the process starts to run into conflict and congestion costs, and the actual throughput starts declining rapidly, while "work in process" (passengers waiting for a flight) climbs towards the sky.

Fabtime's tutorial, shows a graph of the result, that shows that effect.

What this shows is that not only does the "cycle time" expected for a unit in this system (a passenger) to be processed (get home) go up, it goes up rapidly to multiples of the time it would take on an uncrowded system. So, for a very consistent, low variability process, the blue line,
trying to operate at about 90% full capacity will cause the process time to be six times the time it would take at 10% full. If the process has more variability (thunderstorms), this knee can be reached much sooner - at 65% capacity.

This is as true for service work and management work as for producing widgets or silicon wafers. Past a certain point, trying to shove more work through the system only slows down everything. So, the right thing to do is to find the sweet spot where the most work actually gets done, and resist the temptation to now try to fill every open space with more work. For wafer fabrication, this is about 85% "full". In other words, at the maximum throughput, 15% of the system will be empty, just "sitting there". This drives management crazy.

What typically happens is that people don't believe this result, even if they know it. (The delusion factor is strong, and surely 10 can be made less than 9.) None of the outside stakeholders, or visiting brass from the parent company understand this law, and a piece of idle equipment is surely a mistake and needs to be doing work! Or so it seems.

So, now, our friend, the feedback loop, comes into play. Once this knee in the curve is passed, and output starts to slow down due to congestion, the typical response of management is to go ballistic and push harder, trying to jam even more work through the system. This slows the system down more, which leads to management pushing even harder and starting even more work in process.

Then psychosocial factors come into play. Management becomes convinced that the employees must be goofing off, and become irate. "Surely that is true, because the total throughput is going down!" they think. Meanwhile, the swamped employees, seeing more in their in-boxes than ever and becoming exhausted trying to deal with all the internal delays at getting the simplest thing done, also become testy and hostile.

Meetings are held to discuss why so little is getting done, which takes more time, further slowing down the process. Labor strikes. Management retaliates, further cutting production and sales and revenue, which makes stockholders even more desperate to make up the losses with even more bookings. We end up with a positive feedback loop that rises until something breaks.
That's where it appears to be today.



If you click on that diagram, you can zoom it up to a readable size.

(That diagram is most of a Causal Loop Diagram, as developed by Systems Dynamics folks like Worcester Polytechnic Institute, or MIT Professor John Sterman (author of the tome Business Dynamics), drawn with Ventana Software's Vensim software that could put in numbers and actually run the simulation to see how this unfolds. This sort of reasoning is described by Peter Senge in his book The Fifth Discipline, where he uses an example of a beer production and distribution system to show how things can fall apart even when everyone is doing a good job, as they see it, because of "system factors" and "feedback loops". People interested in that would be interested in the whole Systems Dynamics Society. )

This occurs in a great many companies today. Unfamiliarity with Little's Law loads the gun, psychosocial factors cock the hammer, and every new thunderstorm or glitch pulls the trigger as everyone involved - stockholders, management, labor, and passengers, blame each other for the problem -- which is really a "system problem" not a "bad person" problem.

When this kind of thing happens to any health care delivery system, such as a hospital, it becomes a public health problem. When this kind of thing damages nerves and business effectiveness which leads to more pressure which damages nerves and leads to obesity and heart attacks and layoffs and no health insurance, it becomes a public health problem.

This is the kind of "systems thinking" competency I'm hoping the new ASPH Core MPH Competencies will lead to, so people can see this effect and head it off at the pass.

The biggest single controllable step here is to lower the blame factor, and realize we're all in this together. Myths and delusions and a norm that management's job is to crack a whip and push harder and harder come into play in a bad way when it is the system that is slowing down, not the employees. (Take it up with God, I guess, if you don't like Little's Law.)

Going around and around this loop is one of the major factors winding us all too tight these days, both humans and corporations. Maybe understanding what we've run up against can help defuse it and lead us back to a saner world for everyone.

At least, that's what Public Health hopes, in my view.

Wade

Reflections on Human evolution

Nicholas Wade's piece in this weeks Science Times is titled "Humans Have Spread Globally, and Evolved Locally." (NYTimes.com, 6/26/07).

He begins:

Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.

People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where natural selection has recently remolded the human clay, researchers have found, as people in the various continents adapted to new diseases, climates, diets and, perhaps, behavioral demands.

Before looking at that, we need to pause to reflect. There seem to be few topics that set off so many trip-wires and third-rail emotions as the question of evolution.

This is not surprising to me, and fits my model. I had described before what I saw as four levels of disagreement that any self-aware, self-protective, self-healing feedback loop, or "s-loop", has to deal with. These are disagreements about

• Data
• Mental model or frame used to make sense of data
• Goal of all activity (often externally provided)
• Identity (which of this stuff is "me" and which is "other"?)

The levels are successively less questioned and more strongly and emotionally defended if the survival of that level as it is currently constituted is challenged. We talked a lot about "high-reliability" systems and the realization that often the problems were not due to data being wrong, but due to the whole mental model of what is going on that the data feed being wrong. -- and how emotional people, especially superiors, can instantly be if their framework is questioned.

That much (two levels) is generally recognized. (cite - paper from MIT). Even the US Army Leadership Doctrine allows and encourages raising facts that challenge the mental model being used at headquarters, as startling as that seems, because they have realized that too many losses were occurring due to wrong mental models of the situation on the ground. But that concept has not gone gently into the night, and is widely misunderstood and resisted.

Similarly, The Toyota Way or "lean manufacturing" is designed to mercilessly force errors to be surfaced, despite human reluctance and resistance at all levels to discuss "dirty laundry" or "defects" or "errors" or "waste", from employees on the front lines to top management. Face-saving cover-up is the norm in many if not most industries, and is what Toyota has realized is the single thing that damages long-term corporate survival and prosperity the most.

Challenges to what I call the third level, or goals, are even less well tolerated by the existing order and administrative hierarchy or power elite or whatever you call it when people do it, versus machines. The system or s-loops "goal" is pretty tightly protected and defended and not changed lightly. Employees in theory Y enlightened companies can challenge the mental model, but not question the goal of the corporate entity. Military personnel can challenge the mental model, but not the goal of the military. This is becoming "sacred" turf, or, with people, tightly held turf. Again, we have an order of magnitude, or factor of ten times as much emotion raised about challenges on this level as on the second level of frameworks.

Finally, what I call the fourth level of any s-loop is "identity". Goals spring from identity, which is the hierarchical glue that plugs this s-loop into the next larger or higher s-loop that it is part of and belongs to, in several different meanings of the word "belongs to." Any s-loop will be part, at any time, of some larger s-loop. This membership defines who "we" are and what "we" stand for and defend as sacred, and defines our goals locally. It defines what is "us" and what is "not us" so we know what to defend and what to resist or, in some cases, attack.

Challenging identity is another factor of ten more emotional, and harder to do. People tend to fix and lock-down their identity, their goals, and their world-views and defend them to the death, regardless how arbitrarily and unconsciously they were inherited or selected in the first place.

And the question of "evolution" hits at that fourth level, for many people, whether religious or scientific, in equally emotional ways and triggers responses with "religious zeal" among people who define themselves as part of the "science" body and among those who define themselves as part of some "religious" body. Now we're talking "sacred", and "heresy" -- at the "burn the witch!" or "kill the heretic!" level.

Well, I find myself loving both camps, as if I had a parent who was Science and another who was Religion, who are currently "separated" and not living together, and who fight a lot lately, calling each other ugly names and throwing things. It's not pretty.

Still, it seems to me that human life on Earth is at a risky place, where we have the technology to kill ourselves off many different ways, but not the wisdom to manage that technology wisely. And, of all the issues that affect the health of the public, that seems to be central to me, and almost a core issue of what "Public Health" needs to address.

Most of those battles between groups fit into my model of "s-loops" just trying to survive, in a massively-parallel, multi-level soup. Some battles are over boring material resources, such as water, but more and more battles are being fought over the four levels of being - over differences in data, mental frameworks or paradigms, goals, and, most of all, identity.

Who are we, and what are we doing here and why? Those turn out to be questions that are ripping us apart and holding us together, and generating much of the fighting. So we cannot avoid looking at them if we're going to bring this baby through the white water and into peaceful waters beyond.

That said, I can get back to Nicholas Wade's article that triggered this reflection, namely, findings from geneticists that our DNA is continuing to evolve even today. So what? Why is this newsworthy? Is there something we can learn from this that we didn't realize before?

I think so.

First, we can see evidence that evolution represents a closed feedback process these days, perhaps more rapidly than ever before so far as human beings are concerned. Our DNA, at least our children's DNA, appears to be somewhat plastic and responsive, in very short order, to changes in the local environment. That's what Nicholas Wade says. But, we also know that much of the local environment these days is the "built environment", the context that we humans, based on our existing DNA, have constructed for each other to live in or with.

In fact, for most people, the built environment now dominates everything else. We spend far more time being "pressured" by school, jobs, corporations, laws, taxes, pollution, careers, social norms, terrorist threats, and loud stereo's than we do coping with "nature" per se. And these are all things we have built for ourselves.

We are living in our own wake, with good aspects and bad aspects. We inherit culture and high-speed Internet, but we also live in our own sewage. We live in our planet's climate, but we are now large enough to affect that climate.

The point is, it's a closed loop. Most people would agree with that. There is feedback. Again, most people would agree, leaving out those who deny that evolution has or is occurring because that violates their mental model and identity. On this point I'm going with the science, because it's overwhelming and I need conclusions that yield action plans, and because I don't believe at all that evolution in any way discounts God. If anything, it's a more impressive universe and more awe-inspiring if it's not just static, but dynamic.

Having now offended half the religious readers, let me give equal time to offending the scientists.
First, I agree with Stephen Jay Gould that evolution is multi-level, with each having an independent contribution. There are vertical feedback loops, so the "either/or" question becomes a meaningless distinction. Yes, we have genes evolving. Yes we have species evolving. Yes each has pressures at its own level that are mostly independent in the short run.

But, here I'll turn a corner and say that the evolution is of s-loops, not of DNA. And that suddenly means that "corporations" and "nations" and "religions" and "cultures" are just one more kind of life of this planet, that needs to be in the complete ecological picture.

In fact, lately, the evolution of humans seems to have taken quite a turn and is dominated by the evolution of corporations, with their typical nested-hierarchy shapes, being both DNA and more than DNA, being both many people, and more than many people.

Corporations are a new species on the evolutionary stage, and they are becoming the dominant world-reshaping species. This is a rather important observation if we're trying to make sense of what's going on and where it's headed and, if it's broken, where to fix it.

So, we don't just have species co-evolving in a tight feedback loop with DNA and genes -- that's an incomplete model. We have species co-evolving with genes co-evolving with corporations co-evolving with cultures co-evolving with religions, with each one of those providing part of the context for the next step in evolution of each other part. Each part of that equation provides part of the "evolutionary pressure" on each other part. And the parts are all connected if we stand back far enough, so that each part is providing evolutionary pressure ultimately on itself.
In parallel. Simultaneously. Irrevocably interlocked bidirectionally.

This is not a situation that can be understood without using "feedback loops", to put it mildly.

But, the big question is still to come. Are these just "feedback paths", yawn, or are some of these actually s-loops -- self-aware, self-repairing, self-defending, self-extending goal-seeking control feedback loops?

Because, the behavior is extremely different - as different as a hot, muggy, sultry summer afternoon, and one with a tornado. Same air, same moisture, same laws of physics and condensation, but one is a closed feedback loop that feeds and holds itself together, and one is not. I'm not saying that a tornado is "alive", but I am saying that a tornado is "MAWBA",
or "Might As Well Be Alive" in terms of some predictions about future behaviors that are otherwise startling and catch us off-guard.

So, I've made a model of the world that includes what we see in the microscope and what we see in the newspaper at the same time. It's a model of nested s-loops, fighting more or less blindly to survive and sustain their four-levels of being. It's a model where s-loops can merge and join forces, instead of just "winning or losing", and where a handful or a trillion s-loops can pool their identity and form a larger, multi-cellular "being" with an independent, higher-level s-loop, consciousness, awareness, self-protectiveness, etc. (for example, us.)

Again, none of this says one word either way about the existence of God or the "true nature" of what a human being is. It focuses on vertically symmetric, scale-invariant primitive building blocks of s-loops, regardless what material or non-material substrate those operate within or across. That's something that supercomputers can model relatively easily -- the kind of thing that artificial life researchers do on a daily basis, except with a different "payload" or "generating kernel" or "seed" to the process of evolution.

The one really critical new thing here is the idea that dumb feedback pathways can undergo a phase-transition and become self-sustaining, self-defending, self-aware, terra-forming active agents on their own accord, existing semi-independently of the smaller agents that make them up.

This is the observed phenomenon where, effectively, after the pixels have formed a coherent image (whatever that means), the image realizes it exists and "takes on a life of its own" and pulls up the scaffolding used to create it and now starts telling the pixels what to do in order to keep itself alive. ( or if you prefer, to keep itself sustained, or s-loopy, or soliton-izing, or some persisting verb.)

Assuming this is a scale-independent control-loop process, we don't need our microscopes to understand it. We can look out the window. We can watch people form a company, a corporation, that takes on a meta-independent life of its own, and the company can then become self-sustaining, self-repairing, have an identity and a goal and a vision, and can in fact turn on and fire the founding partners because it doesn't need them anymore. It has been born, or radiated or emitted or generated or somehow launched.

This phase-transition should be something that can be mathematically simulated, but I don't know anyone who has done that yet. (Nobel prize waiting for someone!)

If we're looking for how to stabilize or improve relationships between people, or management and labor, or government and citizens, or corporations and "competitors", or between "nation states" or between "religions", it all can be illuminated by understanding what these relatively s-loops can do in the way of "merger" that preserves core values while generating an even higher substrate or vessel in which "life of its own" can be placed by God, or emerge, or whatever it is that happens there.

Something happens there. Something important that we don't fully click to yet.

I think its the key to resolving world chaos and should be looked at more fully. IF we can solve that one, we can catalyze the process and complete the birth process for a planet-sized life-form that's trying to emerge here, held back by our own concepts of life and our role in it.

Let me be clear about one thing. This is not a "reductionist" effort to say that all life on earth is "just" a bunch of atoms or s-loops. I'm at the opposite end. But I'm the first to say that if our bodies have a substrate of atoms, then we should know something about what laws and rules constrain what you can do with atoms, because "we" have to live with gravity and physical injury due to momentum and energy and other physical stuff. Similarly, if we, human spirits, live in or on or above or attached somehow to a substrate that is, above atoms, composed of s-loops, then we would we wise to understand what physical laws constrain those as well, and understand how they can be injured, and how to repair them when they break.

That's not saying that humans are "just" atoms or humans are "just" s-loops. My whole premise is that something miraculous happens in the upward emergent phase transitions that we haven't even begun to grasp yet. Stay tuned.

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