Communication and control - the LAPD and Moslems

A hornet's nest was stirred up by a recent announcement by the Los Angeles Police Department that it was collecting data on Muslim communities.

"LAPD to build data on Muslim areas; Anti-terrorism unit wants to identify sites 'at risk' for extremism.", Los Angeles Times, Nov 9, 2007, also titled "LAPD defends Muslim mapping effort". Those aren't available for free, but a brief restatement is on the LAPD weblog at http://www.lapdblog.org/

What went wrong, and how could this work better next time? One hint is that the LA Times story had over 250 comments posted, and the LAPD weblog story had two.

The core problem, as I see it:
=============

I think it is almost impossible to communicate to someone, you can only communicate with them. Otherwise, you are really only talking at them -- most of it is bouncing off unheard.

This is like the teacher who said "I taught that material - the students just didn't learn it." That's not teaching, it's spouting. A DVD can spout. It takes a human being to teach.

When the FAA wants to read a flight clearance to a pilot, where it matters if the message is received, it waits until the pilot says "ready to copy." There's no point in running the faucet if the glass isn't under it.

What our K-12 or college systems seldom teach, however, is a fact that's obvious when you think about it, but overlooked all the time in planning:

People are not machines.

I've gone on at length in prior posts about what this means, but the most important take home message here today is this:

Human communication paths are not copper wires

that are either "attached" or "not" -- they are dynamic paths that you have to grow from both sides and continually nurture and weed. The are, in most senses of the word, living things.


And, like the way you talk with your wife, one harsh word or insult, even if unintended, can shut the whole thing down in an instant. To do this right requires heavy lifting over a long period of time. It doesn't just "happen." It's worth it, but it doesn't come easily.

It's as if you each have very low power walkie-talkies with invisible antennas, but your antenna is at right angles to hers, and essentially no signal gets through. You have to jockey around for a while on each end to get them more closely aligned before you can carry on a conversation.

You can't make up for this with volume. If the person is misunderstanding what you mean by a word, shouting doesn't improve the communication. What helps is noticing that their face registered a blank, or anger, when you used the word, which you didn't intend as your message, and stopping right there to ask what they just heard instead of what you meant.

Except that, you have to do that several hundred times, and they have to do it several hundred times, with both sides making a good faith effort to avoid jumping to conclusions, for it to work. There is no way to avoid this step. People are not machines. There is no magic wire, no Mr. Spock kind of Vulcan Mind-Meld that will let you communicate directly.

And, as my other posts go into at length, we live in silos in very different worlds, where words are attached to very different meanings, and it is misleading that we might all speak English, say. Then we think what I mean by a word is what you mean by it, and that's not true at all. Actually, it's amazing we manage to ever communicate at all with other people.

"What you heard is not what I meant" is the norm.

Anyway, at the end of this give and take dance of adjusting our internal antennas to get more aligned, there is, in fact a sweet spot at which a new thing takes over. In signal theory this is called "phase lock". Suddenly, briefly, you are 100% aligned. For a moment, the air is crystal clear, not filled with smoke and debris. But, people are not machines and this doesn't last very long, per event. But it can happen. Then you have to repair the channel again.

Sometimes you see this in sports teams that "get their act together", for a few seconds they play as if mind-reading, like a single person, totally synchronized and coordinated. There's a joy in watching this few seconds that makes the rest of the miserable weather worth while.

LAPD and Muslims
==============

Anyway, what triggered this post was the announcement (above) this week by the Los Angeles Police Department that they were going to start ... and I should stop there, because at the next word, communication already broke down.

The LAPD, after some false starts and use of the term "mapping Muslim communities" changed to the phrase "engaging". Too late! The community heard "mapping, followed implicitly by forcing to wear stars, surrounding with barbed wire, and shipping off to concentration camps, or worse. "

Again the basic rule of communication had shown its face:

What you say is not what they'll hear.

So, which side is "right"? I have no idea what is "really" going on, in terms of engagement between the LAPD and Muslim communities, aside from noting the obvious dysfunctional communication that set things back quite a bit.

Is the conclusion "Oh, I give up. There's no way to talk to her?" No. But there's no way to talk "TO" anyone, as I described above, unless you actually plan to take a lot of time listening as well, hearing surprising things that you weren't originally aware were issues.

In other terms, your antennas or mental models of each other have to both shift around somewhat and play this dance that we used to hear computer modems playing, alternating various beeps and squawks at each other, searching for a communication protocol that both sides understood before trying to start the actual conversation.

That step cannot be skipped, or your faucet is over here and their glass is over there, and there ain't any water making it across the gap.


The LA Fire Department
==============
By a remarkable coincidence, this month's issue of the magazine "Government Health IT" had a story about the LA Fire Department's use of Web 2.0 technology, including Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, to build communication paths with the public.

The LA Fire Department weblog is here.

The whole point of "Web 2" or "Web 2.0" is that the communication goes both ways. In "Web 1" systems, the company posts a "website" and the viewers, as on TV, well, "view it". It goes one way, period. Sometimes a letter to the editor might get a tiny bit of feedback loop going, but not really -- it's to little, and too late. Delay time matters, to humans. Remembering your wife's birthday ON her birthday is way better than remembering it the next day.

All of the "Web 2" tools are different, and not different inside the box -- they are different outside the box. They are used differently. They are social-networking tools that allow communications to go BOTH directions.

So, like a weblog, not only does the blog owner get to post an item, but everyone and his brother gets to post a response. That's one cycle. Then, people start posting responses to other people's comments, and it takes off. It is, in some sense, much less controllable.

The trade off that makes it valuable, despite this lessened sense of control, is that it lets the customers stop being "viewers" and start being "participants." It goes from the world of "selling" to resistant "customers" to actually hearing what people are saying and asking for and changing the product line to fit those actual needs. This is the key of the whole Toyota Way, known to Toyota as "customer pull", and Toyota could not operate without it.

Toyota knows how to LISTEN.

It turns out, it is not trivial to listen. It is not even easy to listen. Being in the room with the TV on is not listening, it's being near something spouting. TV trains us to be "subjected to" messages, which is like standing under a cold shower. People "tune out."

You want people to "tune in", you need to go interactive, where both sides talk, AND, both sides listen. AND, both sides adjust their frequency and antenna position slightly to improve the channel bandwidth, and go through that mutual learning cycle over and over again, each time getting a little better at hearing.

It's a loop, like the clothes line pictured above. It either goes both ways, or it doesn't go at all. If there's no loop, you're simply trying to "push with a rope."

If you want them to hear you, you have to spend a lot of energy listening to and hearing what they are really trying to tell you. The "density" is a property of the CHANNEL, not either side. If your listener seems "dense", it's because the whole communication LOOP isn't flowing adequately, full cycle.

Anyway, what's the LAFD doing?

Brian Humphrey and Ron Myers are described as having 80 different Web 2.0 efforts in the works, at the LA Fire Department's public information office.

I quote the Government Health IT article (Nov 2007, pages 42-43, Crisis Communications 2.0")

Humphrey and Myers see the new tools as opening more channels of communication between the department and the public. "Some might make the mistake of thinking these web 2.0 tools will allow us to get our message out louder and to more people," Humphrey said. "I think that is is wrong. What they enhance is the ability to listen."

He said some emergency agencies seek to control the public. "Instead, we want to empower them," he added. "And that lends itself to Web 2.0"

Well, I mostly agree. I am afraid that their phrasing could be heard as saying that it is not important to get OUT the message, and that it is not important to have public control and order."

In point of fact, as a friendly amendment, the reason for listening better is that you have to listen better IN ORDER TO get your communication channel built, IN ORDER TO be able to get your message not only broadcast and spouted, but actually heard and understood correctly.

The listening part is not just "for nice". The honest listening part is part of the requirement humans have to build a channel.

And, providing a spot for comments that are ignored is not "listening".

True story - once at Cornell the Building and Grounds department decided they were going to undertake some ill-advised project, which I think involved demolishing part of the beloved "Arts Quad" to put in something ugly. There was a huge outcry over the fact that this had not been discussed in public and there had been no chance for public input. As a result, the B&G department scheduled a huge public hearing. I went. They started off the meeting with, as near as I can recall, these words. "Thank you for coming tonight. We welcome your input. After the discussion, on your way out, please pick up your copy, from the boxes in the back,
of the booklets that describe the construction we will be doing next week. "

Communication only has value if it contains surprises. This is a basic law of signal theory. If the communication has no news in it, it's pretty useless. We already know that.

Which means, if you want to communicate, and build this loop, you need to accept the astounding fact that the party you're talking with knows something that you don't.

And the point of the conversation is to mutually surprise each other with facts that the other side didn't realize. This only works if both sides are willing to be surprised with information as good as, or better than, the information they had been working with and assumed was true.

The notion of "fairness" is very strong in human communication, unlike computers. People really resent being talked down to, and shut down the link. On the other hand, people sit up and take notice when their comments are heard and responded to, and come sit closer and start listening themselves. But it takes time. And humility. And listening. And hearing. And responding to what is heard by updating your mental model of what is going on.

The other point I have to disagree with, or tweak, in the statement above by the LAFD, is the implication that this communication process could lose "control".

As I've discussed before, no company or hospital or armed force is going to abandon the level of control they worked so hard to get, to be able to deliver their mission. BUT, they can, and must, adjust their internal mental model of what they thin they're doing, based on real information from the real world, not on some old, outdated concept of reality. Or, there's no point in "control" - you get that level of "control" by welding the steering wheel in place as the car drives off a cliff. You see that level of control in GM as they refuse to hear the message that people want cars with better mileage.

So, even the US Army, with a very strong hierarchy and a very strong need for control, has embraced the idea that they also need how to listen. (See the US Army Leadership Field Manual, FM22-100.)

The core "cybernetic" loop requires two things -- that the body respond to the brain's control commands, and that the brain stay current on what's going on in the body. Then it's a win-win.

Brains issuing controls based on how the world was last week or last year or "when I was in school" are like driving a car with the windshield blocked with a full-size photograph of the road taken last month.

Two kinds of authority
==================

As I've discussed elsewhere, the two meanings of "authority" have to be disentangled. Authority, in the sense of being able to issue lawful orders has to be retained, and enhanced.

Authority, in the sense of being right and being up to date an an authority on a subject, has to be obtained, and can only be obtained, by listening to real-time updates from the field, and being prepared to be surprised with what you hear.

The two together is a terrific combo. Control without actual paying attention is very short-lived, and expires at the next bend in the road one wasn't expecting or that wasn't on the Mapquest or Google Map of our planned route -- it is pointless.

The communication and response loops are key. One, vertically, has to let the guys at the top listen to, and actually hear, what they guys at the bottom are saying. One, horizontally, has to let everyone hear what the customers are actually saying. Then, you have a recipe for a very agile and adaptive powerhouse. Otherwise, you have a blind monster at large.

Wade

Related posts:

Unity in diversity and the two feedback loops (horizontal and vertical):

Nature of Feedback

(photo of man and woman , "Worn out" by by Avid Maxfan)

U.S. Army as a learning organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

If so, what? If not, why not?

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

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

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

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

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

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


I added emphasis to the excerpts below.


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being a robot - 101: The cybernetic loop

I realized that I was just assuming that everyone knew how robots think.
Or for that matter, how babies think when they have to grab something.

We usually think of actions as big chunks, such as "Catch the ball."

Robots have to operate on a much more detailed, step by step level, with everything spelled out for them. Nothing is certain, so everything is just a process of getting a little closer and seeing if anything broke yet. And repeat.

They do this by following a very simple loop, over and over again. Spot where the ball is. Push your hand towards it a little bit. Remember that your hand doesn't always end up where you were trying to push it. Figure out which way the ball is NOW from your hand. Push your hand that way one notch. Figure out again which way the ball is now. Push your hand. Etc.

In a diagram, it would look something like this:
Congratulations! If you understand that diagram, you are much closer to understanding how anything works. Actually, I think you're one huge step close to understanding how almost everything works.

There is a cycle of action, looking, planning, action, looking, planning, etc. Over and over.

The "planning" tends to be very short-range, uncomplicated planning - but what it lacks in complexity, it makes up for with speed and persistence and never getting bored.

So here's a very powerful fact about life. Not only does "a journey of 1000 leagues start with one step", but sometimes the ONLY way to plan that journey is one step at a time.

In fact, a series of small steps is a thousand times more capable than one big step, regardless how clever you are, and regardless how well "planned" that one step is. It took computer scientists almost 50 years to figure out that many small computers is actually much better than one large computer for getting work done. It took "artificial intelligence" workers about 30 years to figure out that many small, dumb rules added up to a better way to work than one huge, complicated rule - and it was easier to write and easier to fix too.

Why is this? Imagine that you are on one side of a small woods and you want to get to the other side.

It is very likely that there is no direction you can pick to walk in a straight line that won't bump into a tree.

But, if each step can be a slightly different direction, there are thousands of paths you can use to walk through the same forest without running into a tree.

What's the moral? It seems so "obvious" now, but it baffled scientists for 50 years -- a "curved" path is more flexible than a "straight" one. You can get places with a stupid little loop as guidance that no amount of clever planning can get you if you have to move in one step in one straight line.

This kind of cycle with many tiny steps and a very short pause to think between each step is called a "cybernetic loop". It looks deceptively simple, while it is amazingly powerful.

It can keep on working if the wind is blowing, without having to be reprogrammed. It can keep on working if the ball is rolling on a bumpy hillside. It can keep on working if your robot arm is rusty and doesn't always move as far as it used to when you push it, and sometimes it sticks entirely. This deceptive little loop is all the computer programming required, essentially.

Now, it will work a little better if the robot has some learning capacity and has done this kind of reaching thing before. The robot may learn that it should reach for where the ball will be, not where it is now.

You learned this so long ago you have forgotten that you learned it. Imagine a baseball game where the batter hits a high, fast ball and the guy in the field runs towards home base instead of towards where the ball looks like it will come down again, because that's "where the ball is now."
So, yes, taking the speed of the ball into account does help. But that's a minor change to the program. The same loop works, except the "planning" step is a little bit longer.

So, this is profound wisdom I'm giving you here. It took all of mankind 50 years to figure this out, and some haven't got the news yet. You get it for free, right here, right now.

So, let me run it by you one more time. Here's the same moral, or same story, in slightly different words:

A plan of action that involves a repeated cycle of very small steps, with some looking and thinking between steps, is much more flexible, and much more "powerful" than trying to "solve" any problem in huge step.

Furthermore, if the world is complicated, and tends to have hills and bumps and wind gusts and rusty arms, you can be guaranteed that no "single-step" plan will ever succeed. In that case, ONLY a multi-step approach will get you where you want to go. If your job involves "going through the woods" and around trees that you don't even know about yet, it is much easier to plan to go around trees than try to "collect data" on the location of every tree, put it into some huge list or database, print out a map, and find "a straight path" through the forest.

This doesn't say "don't bother planning." It does say, "don't waste your time trying to find a linear solution to a curved path." There are millions of curved paths that can work just fine, in cases, like the woods, where there is no straight path possible.

And, one more time through it, from the Institute of Medicine's perspective, as in dealing with small teams (called "microsystems"). If you are dealing with a "complex, adaptive system" (like a hospital), it is way more powerful to just rig up the team with eyes and a feedback loop than it is to try to have hospital management "plan" how to improve things. Ditto for "The Toyota Way", or the power of "continuous improvement" or what Demings taught, or a "plan do check act (PDCA) cycle".

Empowering your front-line employees by giving them "eyes" and a little room to maneuver on their own to get around "trees" is a very powerful strategy that works in practice.

It is based on the most powerful "algorithm" we know of today - the "cybernetic loop."

Oh, yes, one more tiny thing. Since this is such a powerful "algorithm" or "paradigm" or way of doing things, much of Nature and your body already knew about it and uses it.

Public Health is sort of vaguely discovering that the "action" step always needs to be followed with a "reflection" or "assessment" step, but hasn't yet sprung to the fact that it is reinventing the wheel, or more precisely, the cybernetic loop, yet one more time. It hasn't figured out that many smaller steps adds up to a more powerful path-generator than one large step.

And, sigh, enterprise budget processes don't reflect this wisdom. For years I fought with the fact that Universities tend to have "annual budget cycles", and enterprise computing is seen as coming in only two flavors: "maintenance" and "huge projects". Maintenance money can only be spent keeping things the same. Huge Project money ("capital budgets") can only be used to take, well, huge steps in a big straight line, and the big straight line, or "project plan" has to be computed up front and committed to before starting.

Well, duh, no wonder that doesn't work. That CANNOT BE MADE TO WORK. There are too many unknowns and unknowables, too many rusty arms, too many trees.

But every time it fails, the "solution" is to plan every LARGER steps next time, with a much BIGGER database that lists every single tree and bush and pothole. THEN, oh boy, you betcha we'll succeed.

Nope. That's a bad algorithm, a bad paradigm. The cybernetic loop model tells us the answer is way back at the other end: continuous, incremental, small improvement steps. Steps driven by local "feedback" that doesn't even involve upper management.

You can get to places you need to go with a million simultaneous tiny, sensible steps that people can understand that you cannot get to with one huge project, regardless how many billions you spend on "planning" it. Our whole accounting system, meant to help us spend money wisely, is causing us to spend it foolishly.

As the IOM report realizes - "We don't need a billion dollar project -- we need a billion, one-dollar projects." (paraphrased from "Crossing the Quality Chasm"). This isn't "sour grapes" or "some dumb idea" -- this is the most profound wisdom humanity has come up with yet.

It's kind of the Chinese approach. If every person picks up one piece of trash a day, it's way more successful than if every person sends $1000 per year into a central location where we build the Institute of Trash Pickup and study the trash-pickup problem and produce endless reports and finally some huge trash collection system that doesn't really work but is really expensive to maintain when they're not on strike (thank you, John Gall, for that insight.)

Ditto for installation of some kind of automated physician order entry system or other massive cultural change of the way things are done. It may seem "hard" to figure out what huge new system, in one step, will get us from point A to point B. Hmmm. Maybe that's because there aren't any "one-step" solutions to getting through the forest, and we need to reconsider our approach. Maybe a million tiny adjustments will solve two problems at once: the "What do we do?" problem, and the every popular "How do we implement it?" problem.

Ten thousand tiny search engines (people) each looking for one tiny step that is possible and totally understood that would help "a little bit" actually constitutes a "massively parallel supercomputer" that can outstrip almost any other way of "solving" BOTH of those problems simultaneously. That's really cool, because it turns out not to matter how great a solution is on paper or at some other site, if there's no way to get it implemented here without spilling the coffee and crashing the bus. That's the lesson Toyota learned. Forget central planning, which the Soviet Union demonstrated doesn't work. Empower the troops to use their eyes and brains and good judgement and make a million adjustments of 0.001 percent size.

It's an incredibly powerful algorithm. It doesn't require brilliant central planning officers. But it does require believing that the ground troops have enough brains to carry their coffee across the office without spilling it, even if they just waxed the floor. Turns out, according to Toyota, that's probably true.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. It would seem to make sense that, if this cybernetic doodad is so powerful, that it is in operation already in billions of places around us in society and biology. That would argue that it might be worthwhile to have cybernetic doodad detectors, and cybernetic doodad statistical tools available to use to spot and describe and tweak such thingies.

Most of the last 6 months postings to this weblog have tried to make that argument, in more complex ways, and maybe that's my problem.

The American Indians knew this - that the Great Spirit worked in circles, not lines. Taoism knows about circles and cycles. "Systems thinking" involves accepting that there are important places where feedback loops just might possibly be involved.

We're so close now. Bring it home, baby!

(Posted in memory of Don Herbert, "Mr. Wizard", who died last week, and taught millions of kids, including me, basic science-made-easy on his TV show.)

Causal Loop Diagrams, stories, and macrobes

One standard tool of Systems Dynamics is the Causal Loop Diagram. This tool is explained at great length in MIT Professor John Sterman's text "Business Dynamics", but a short explanation is given by Daniel Kim in "Guidelines for Drawing Causal Loop Diagrams."
(John Sterman had a paper in the March, 2006 issue of AJPH on "Learning From Evidence in a Complex World", so he's finally been given "judicial notice" by Public Health. Always a good start.)

Kim begins:

The old adage "if the only tool you have is a hammer, every-thing begins to look like a nail" can also apply to language. If our language is linear and static, we will tend to view and interact with our world as if it were linear and static. Taking a complex, dynamic, and circular world and linearizing it into a set of snapshots may make things seem simpler, but we may totally misread the very reality we were seeking to understand. ...

Articulating Reality
Causal loop diagrams provide a language for articulating our understanding of the dynamic, interconnected nature of our world. We can think of them as sentences which are constructed by linking together key variables and indicating the causal relationships between them. By stringing together several loops, we can create a coherent story about a particular problem or issue. [emphasis added]

I haven't been able to get away for a few weeks for intensive training in Vensim or Causal loop diagrams, but they are certainly referred to in the professional literature as being a strong basis around which to bring many different interest groups together and reach a better common undertanding than would be possible without even turning on the simulator.

Still, it appears to me, a relative newbie, that Causal Loop diagrams still suffer from the concept that feedback comes in only two flavors - "positive" and "negative", not the full multidimensional spectrum I described in recent posts for "self-aware, goal-seeking, feedback control loops." Thus, on web sites such as Pegasus Communications, we see the classic "two" kinds of loops, those labeled with an "R" for "REINFORCING" and those labeled with a "B" for "BALANCING" (or "negative" feedback reducing difference from some fixed goal state.) See also Mindtools' description of CLD's with somewhat clearer diagrams.

Here, I fear, the power of the ability to turn on the computer and have it crunch through ranges of estimated parameters short-circuits the process I would recommend -- namely, putting the CLD up on the wall, standing back a few paces, and looking amid all the N-factorial combinations of N "loops" for a few "self-aware, self-protective, self-repairing, goal-seeking, feedback-mediated control loops."

At the risk of hitting a lot of hot-buttons, let me say that these, in my mind, constitute a kind of proto-life, which is to say that they are active agents that "might as well be alive" because they satisfy the usual definitions of "life", which is to say that they:

• Consume energy
• are self-repairing
• adapt to their environments
• are self-aware
• seek something akin to homeostasis when disturbed
• resist being shut down or shut off
• are capable of learning and becoming smarter

BUT, because the entities I'm describing are creatures of the "control" domain, what flows in their equivalent of "veins" or "neurons" is control information and in particular real-time, real-world phase-lock signals. And, as I've emphasized, control information can easily jump from one medium to another, so it's tricky to track it down and "see" it the first time, although once you "see" it, like most visual patterns, you can keep on seeing it.

So, once again, I bring in the hand and water faucet picture, and the person-driving car picture, to illustrate the number of different stages that a single "control loop" can pass through and draw together into synchronous action.

Aside: The fact that the action is synchronized is all the difference in the world, as that is the difference between a laser-beam and incoherent light, where one cuts steel and the other is a little bright to look at. Most of our real-world measurements, unless we are into Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI), discard "phase" information and absolute time as "irrelevant." VLBI can work even if the telescopes in different countries are not connected physically, if a very accurate record is kept of each signal and the records synthetically reconnected in virtual space inside a computer. But it does require recording not just "amplitude" or "power" but also the phase component of the signal at each antenna -- information we normally discard.

The big Y-shaped array of "dishes" that Jodie Foster was using to listen to the stars with in the movie "Contact" was a VLBI, where the spacing between the dishes, which are on railroad tracks, could be altered to focus on different wavelengths of incoming signals.

Another example with some smaller feedback loops that compete for our attention is the "story telling feedback loop" picture I put up yesterday, again repeated below. Don't try to dig into the details. Just notice that there is a big loop that covers most of the diagram, surrounding the light blue bar -- and that is the main, persistent, "I am a person" kind of loop. Then there is also a smaller loop with a shorter lifetime managing incoming visual input at the lower right, and two competing permanent-fixture loops at the left -- One driven by higher levels reaching downward and trying to raise this person's goals; the other driven by the person's frustration limit and protection against overheating basically, which tries to lower the goals again until they are achievable.


It requires reflection, and explicitly asking the question, to realize which loops are self-aware and self-repairing if damaged.

Consciousness certainly keeps shutting down every night, but it recovers the next morning, usually. The visual system has many small loops that leap into action when triggered, then go back to sleep. If we lost them we'd be essentially blind in a sea of unfiltered noise.

Aside: I'm not sure about the loop I drew in the upper right, where the person's actions are echoed back to them, with various lagtimes, by different parts of the environment. Maybe that's just the classic, passive, "environment" that's envisioned by epidemiology -- with the same intelligence and adaptiveness as a canyon's walls. Or, maybe the world develops its own set of ruts and habits around reacting to you, as an irritant is surrounded by pearl inside an oyster, and those prove to be so useful that they are endowed with self-aware, self-sustaining, independent status to keep an eye on you and provide very fast feedback, as if you'd touched a stove, when you try to harm the world. That's a sort of meta-sociological question touching on guardian processes, for some other day.

Cutting to the chase: Hypothesis: Because self-aware, self-repairing agents survive noise and damage that will disrupt other, dumb, passive, accidental "loops", they will tend to end up dominating the landscape -- even if they don't reproduce or form support alliances. But, they will tend to form support alliances too.

Similar hypothesis I put forward a month or so ago: Because organizations tend to find and fix small-scale, non-complex problems, if we assume problems arise due to noise at every level in some equal amount, then the large-scale, "complex" ones will end up dominating the landscape, because those are the ones that keep getting put off and not addressed or fixed.

Synthesis of those two: In any long-lived multi-level complex adaptive system, large-scale, complex, active, self-aware, self-repairing control loops will end up dominating the landscape and being the primary shaping force.

And, sad corollary: Until we build scientific tools that can glance at a picture like M.C. Escher's Waterfall, and "see" at a glance "where" it is "broken", we will continue to be plagued by these large scale active agents.

We are, in fact,most likely swimming in a sea of semi-alive "macrobes" -- a concept probably as distressing as Pasteur's "germ theory" that had a sea of "microbes" swimming inside us. They would certainly be as "alive" and as annoying as viruses, and if they were not well, we would feel it, being, as it were, inside the "whale".

Of course, before going into anaphylactic shock at the idea of macrobes, I should point out that you already are familiar with some of them, as a big "yawn." Those would include persistent, self-aware, self-repairing, energy consuming, possibly self-extending macro-agents known as "families", "corporations", "cultures", "religions", and "nation-states." If the Gaia theory is correct, it would also include the Earth as a whole. If religions are even partly correct about some big issues, it continues at scales much larger than the Earth. However, the larger such an agent would be, the more slowly changing it would be, and at some point we could locally treat it as "fixed" or a "constant" for planning daily activities.

So, if sociologists, and even untrained civilians recognize that corporations and countries exist, what's the big deal here? What contribution to our collective wisdom am I suggesting this framework brings to the table?

Again, the most important point I'm making has three parts:

Hey everyone strugling with methodologies for feedback and multilevel systems in Public Health! Control System Engineering already solved that! Read the Literature!

and

Hey everyone in Control System Engineering! You have some potential new clients over here in Public Health!

Finally this one: Children! Stop fighting!

Public HealtH? stop picking on corporations -- the healthy ones hold your planet together right now. And the diseased ones need your insight and techniques to be healed -- once you master multi-level organism healing techniques. And, Hey, CEO's? :Please stop kicking Public Health in the shins -- they're trying to keep your workforce alive and healthy and productive, and besides they're closer than anyone to understanding The Toyota Way in terms of a health multilevel organism. Religion please stop picking on Science, and vice versa!

And, everyone, there's a big qualitative difference between a "distal factor" and the big toe on your other foot, so before you bite down .... oh, never mind. You'll find out soon enough!

By this model, there really only is one multi-level life form occupying this planet, and while it is the job of clinical medicine to heal people at the 1-body level, it is the larger distinct job of "Public Health" to deal with disharmony at any level -- between cells and cells, people and people, cultures and cultures, nations and nations, corporations vs. corporations, departments vs. departments, silo versus silo within hospitals, etc.

Because all that will persist is actually connected through all those loose-couplings (amplified by compounding feedback loops over long times), in a "control" or "regulatory system" sense, it's all only ONE body. We share parts of it, or levels of it. But it's hard to have your own foot have gangrene and not be affected by it, sooner or later.

The biggest problem right now is that the healers of society cannot easily see the feedback loop connections and evaluate the strength of each link and of phase-locked groups of links. That's the missing toolset. And that already exists, but indexed in a different literature where public health seldom treads. Now, with the new competency (2006) for MPH students from the ASPH, the focus on "systems thinking" will lead us there. The March 2006 AJPH is a start, but our work is cut out for us.

It puts a kind of different light and torque on things if we assume there is only one Body here, with many pieces and parts, that we're trying to heal and make right. It won't do to fix most of the body but leave a tooth or limb infected -- that'll turn around and bite "us".

If every level and pair of levels had different rules, this would be a huge problem, probably intractable. BUT, if every level and pair of levels has the SAME set of rules in "control space", then instead of many levels being harder to "solve", suddenly many levels becomes more hints and easier to fix. We have one equation and one unknown and 50 clues, not 50 equations with 50 unknowns and no clue.

That's WAY BETTER. Just align the fragmentary knowledge of the control structures of each level on a mental transparency, then put them on top of each other at the same scale and orientation, and look through the whole set, and all the clues will line up and reveal the full picture that applies at every level, even though we only have a little bit of it right now on each of those levels.

The prospect is compelling. It's a win-win-win solution, and we might just be able to get every field to give up 1% of its budget to work on this single problem that is relevant to working out more details in that field, for every field. It could be politically acceptable. It might fly.