Active strength through emergent synthesis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coherent unity is a winning strategy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's a new day.

Wade

How long does it take to change a culture?

We have ways out that we don't see.

Our whole world is like the scene near the start of the movie Labyrinth where our heroine and a worm are walking down a seemingly endless pathway around the castle, and she finally blurts out "There's no door!" and the worm corrects her and says "Yes, they're everywhere! There's one right there. You're just not seeing them." Then her vision "clicks into place" and she finds the door, no problem.

As they say, "Some things you have to believe to see."

There is hope.

This is the consistent message that various religions of the world have tried to embody, that commerce in the form of "The Toyota Way" or "Making the Impossible Possible" teaches, and that, at last, science is starting to catch up and understand and accept as legitimate, as it gets enough computer power to model the feedback loops involved.

While we tend to think of "culture" as being a huge, almost unchangeable rock or "supertanker we're trying to turn", in point of fact it can change overnight.

Did you ever have this happen to you? There's a person you knew a long time and had pretty fixed view of, and then you find out something you never knew about them or about their life or past, and it changes everything in an instant? Suddenly you realize you'd been misinterpreting them all that time, just to see things "in a new light"?

This, dear friends, is the kind of "new light" that we need to understand the workings of, and get a lot more of.

We tend to rush on by and not pause to realize, "Whoa. That's exactly what I need."

In fact, we need to start manufacturing "new light" bulbs and lay out a power grid for making them shine, or maybe even a wireless broadcast power system would be better -- the cellphone model not land-line model.

Please slow down your reading and "reflect" on this for a moment. I'm not talking about magic or mysticism or "Kum-bay-ya by the fire" here - I'm just talking about exactly the same kind of sudden realization that all of us have had and can relate to.

We could call it a "magic moment", but it is only amazing in impact. We usually spend zero seconds reflecting on exactly how a complete transformation of our thinking can occur in 1 second. It is kind of surprising, isn't it?

What is called "one-time learning" is the same way. We tend to think of learning as something that is hard, requires buying expensive textbooks, going to class, studying for hours or weeks, taking exams, and maybe we get and maybe we don't. But take a 4 year old child somewhere where they get a cookie, and see if they remember that fact the next time they are in that neighborhood. Of course they do. Effortless, one-time learning. No study required. No memorization of facts. It just goes in and stays.

I've heard "true art" described as a way of making a person experience something that has the effect that they never see the world the same way again after that.

Actually, this is pretty much the meaning of the word "repent" in the Christian Bible, to re-think something in a dramatic new way, to re-conceptualize it, to re-frame it, to "turn and be saved." It's not magic or I don't know what, it's just an "Oh, my God!" moment of realization of something that was always there that you were blipping.

And as soon as perception changes, behavior follows along and changes. The "impossible" becomes "possible." Everything is somehow different, in a new light.

If you dig under the covers in "The Toyota Way", it is clear that the end point, the goal of all the fancy tools and techniques, is actually just to get to a new way of seeing things and seeing each other. They use the term "philosophy" and say the whole way is based on it. To me, that word smacks of years of academic study and Ph.D's and makes the concept seem almost impossible.

So, I'm going to apply the Toyota Way to itself, to thinking about the whole process of transforming ourselves to the Toyota Way, and ask "Why do we imagine it should take years or decades of struggle to accomplish?"

I don't think it does.

I think we could do it in an afternoon, if we drill down and figure out what it is that we're not seeing that we need to see, and how to make that a vivid one-time-learning, flash of realization experience - with every camera flash in the whole company going off at the same second.

Flash. Realization. Exact "same" world, and yet, suddenly, in an instant, entirely different.

I mean, Toyota looked at US auto companies struggling to convert assembly lines from one model to another in 6 weeks, and asked "Why can't we do that in 6 minutes?" and realized they could, and now they do. The barrier was all in their heads. Some things you have to believe to see.

Now that we have a whole new technology of incredibly realistic, life-size 3-D simulation virtual worlds, you'd think we should be able to script whatever interactive experience we want someone to have, and do the whole thing in under an hour, tops.

This requires challenging the "common wisdom" that the Toyota Way involves some kind of magic learning that cannot be described and only can be pointed to indirectly that takes years and years of labor to grasp.

Well, that's what some high priests of yoga said about certain physiological control they had learned to do, and it did take them decades, thank you, to do it the old way, but we can do it in 5 minutes with biofeedback now. It's 2007, not 207.

I recall Tony Robbins mentions in one of his self-help books that someone asks him how long it takes to change a deeply embedded belief or behavior, and he responds "How long do you want it to take? We can change that this afternoon."


We don't really have the luxury of taking another generation to turn around the economy of Southeast Michigan. We need something we can do in "months" not "decades". A lot of people need help. A lot of businesses need help. The edge is way too close for comfort.

If we can just focus on how "new light" works, it becomes possible.


Wade

(Image of a self-assembling tower crane adding a new section to its own top as it grows is from "How Science Works"; "Friends forever" image is by the author.)

Role of IT - information technolgy - in next-gen companies

Judging from Toyota and "lean" processes, what is the appropriate role of information technology ("computers and networks") in the next-generation company?

If we assume that what we're building is, essentially, a massively-parallel connnectionist computing engine (consciousness) out of people and technology, we get the suggestion that the key roles are:
transparent communication at successively larger scales
coherence-building at successively larger scales, and
transparent interactions - ("phase-lock loops") across the components of the system.

Yes, computers will still be required for tracking the trillions of details needed to run a large company today, but that is, in Peter Senge's words "detail complexity." There's a huge amount of it, but it is, relatively, simplistic in nature aside from the amount of it. Enterprise computing knows how to do that, at least in theory.

What we are looking for in the next-gen company is the thing that ties it all together, that supports the feedback loops that maintain coherence and build integrity, the same way the circulating thoughts in the brain slowly emerge an "image" out of billions of "nerve impulses" from the retina.

This is "Technology-mediated collaboration" and more, so I'll call it "technology-mediated coherence." It is what allows "aperture synthesis" in large radio telescope arrays to act as if they are a single huge individual and the gaps "don't exist."

This is pretty much what the Institute of Medicine was recommending when it urged a focus on "microsystems" recently (see prior posts on "microsystems"). The point is that a small team (5-25 people) is capable of being "self-managing" if they can simply be given the power to do so by having access to information about what their own outcomes are. This information does not need to be packaged and interpreted at successively higher levels of management and then repackaged and distributed back to them a month later as "feedback." In fact, that doesn't help much. What really helps is speed. What helps is if they can see, today at 2 PM, how they have been doing collectively, up through, say noon. They can learn to make sense of the details, and don't need "management" to try to do that for them.

In fact, given the fractal density of reality, and the successive over-simplifications required to get data into a "management report", it is a certainty that we have something far worse than the game "telephone". What will come back down the line from upper management will bear little resemblance to what went up, breeding distrust and anger on both sides.

So the role of next-gen IT is to grab hold of the 'WEB 2" technology, that allows bidirectional websites to be both read and written by people, and that includes weblogs, wikis, and "social software" that encourages interaction and cooperation, including, gasp, "gossip."

This is the stuff that, in the right climate and context, can be converted into "social capital" and converging understanding by each employee as to what everyone else is doing and why.

Where there can be dashboards, they should best be very close, in both space and time, to the decision-making actors. Lag times are incredibly dangerous, and are the source of instability in feedback systems. (Imagine trying to drive a car with a high-resolution TV screen instead of a windshield, with a fantastically clear picture of what was outside the car 15 minutes ago. )

A relevant quote from Liker's "The Toyota Way" is this (page 94) where he is talking about the problems with large batches and the delays that go with such batches:

"...there are probably weeks of work in process between operations and it
can take weeks or even months from the time a defect is caused until the time it
is discovered. By then the trail of cause and effect is cold, making it nearly
impossible to track down and identify why the defect occurred.

The hugely complex computation of making sense of such data is what human brains and visual systems are built for, and tuned for, and that machines costing a billion dollars cannot replace yet. Just give people a VIEW into what is happening as a result of what they are doing, and they will, by a miracle of connectionist distributed neural-networks, figure out what's affecting what faster than a room full of analysts with supercomputers - in most cases.

That's the role that computation needs to look at - is close-to-real-time feedback in a highly visual form to the workers of the outcome of the work currently being done. (This is a step-up from Lean manufacturing visual signal system which is a signal to management that something is amiss.)

The "swarm" is capable, like any good sports team, of making sense of "the play" long before the pundits have had a chance to replay the video 8 times and "analyze" it. Yes, there is a role for longer-term, more distant view that adds value.

But what there is NOT is a way to replace real-time feedback and visibility with ANY kind of delayed information summary. All the bases must be covered, and long-term impacts and global impacts will not be instantly visible to local workers -- but they have to be able to see what their own hands are doing or they'll be operating blind. "Dashboards" with 1-month delays on them cannot cover that gap. Too much of the information is stale by the time it arrives. Both are needed. Local feedback for local news, and successively more digested, more global feedback for successively larger and more slowly varying views.

Thinking “Better than Toyota” and “Beyond lean”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good questions for tomorrow.

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

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

Being IN authority does not require being AN authority.

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

When and how should we question authority?

New York Times piece today relevant to thinking about Toyota's Production System,
as well as topics of mindfulness, high-reliability, and how to teach and reach new MPH students that I discussed a few weeks ago in "What I learned at Johns Hopkins last week" where I bemoaned the fact that the students "just sat there, unresponsive."

The Times article, by Norimitsu Inishi
Japan Learns Dreaded Task of Jury Duty
NY Times July 16, 2007

Japan is preparing to adopt a jury-style system in its courts in 2009, the most significant change in its criminal justice system since the postwar American occupation. But for it to work, the Japanese must first overcome some deep-rooted cultural obstacles: a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with one another and to question authority.

Well, that certainly sounds like the class I was in. What insights can we gain from this cross-cultural view?

They preferred directing questions to the judges. They never engaged one another in discussion. Their opinions had to be extracted by the judges and were often hedged by the Japanese language’s rich ambiguity. When a silence stretched out and a judge prepared to call upon a juror, the room tensed up as if the jurors were students who had not done the reading.

Well, in my case it's likely that, literally, the students had not, in fact, done the reading and were in no rush to call attention to themselves and get a follow up question back to them that would reveal that fact. And they were reluctant to ask a question that all by itself would show they hadn't done the reading.

One more snippet is worth quoting:

Hoping for some response, the judge waited 14 seconds, then said, “What does everybody think?”

Nine seconds passed. “Doesn’t anyone have any opinions?”

After six more seconds, one woman questioned whether repentance should lead to a reduced sentence....

After it was all over, only a single juror said he wanted to serve on a real trial. The others said even the mock trial had left them stressed and overwhelmed.

So, I for one will be watching with great interest to see how this evolves.

One point I have to note regards our country's history efforts to try to implement abroad things that work for us at home. Sometimes we seem, like a teenager, with our 230 years experience, to be confidently giving advice to 5000 year-old civilizations -- maybe akin to a 2.3 year old trying to advise his 50 year old parents on how to run the household.

Maybe things are as they are for a good reason. Maybe, messing with a cultural system we don't even pretend to understand and casually plannint to replace one part of their system with one that "works for us" will have, shall we say, "unintended consequences."

As I said there, the classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony:
"The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems",
http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf

Quoting the abstract:

Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations. Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

I am deeply concerned about not just this context-blind approach to trying to walk in and transform existing cultures, that as far as I can tell we are not very good at, but at extensions of this mental model to deciding we are going to start tinkering with DNA.

My daughter recalled a conversation she saw quoted with China's former Chairman Mao meeting with the head of France around 1980 or so, and being asked what he thought of the French Revolution. Mao's response was "It's too soon to tell."

I can't help but note that W. Edwards Deming came up with key quality improvement ideas decades ago in the USA, which was totally uninterested in them, so he went to Japan, where he was welcomed as a hero and passed along ideas adopted by Toyota that have directly led to Toyota's impressive performance. So, maybe Japanese culture had some positive aspect to it that we should be careful not to damage when adding our new "jury duty" feature.

The systems literature shows that it is generally impossible to change just one part of a complex living system without impacting all the other parts. Living things are not machines, with sub-assemblies we can just remove and replace with the latest version. This has the feeling of someone removing the propeller from a small private plane and installing a jet turbine in 98% of the cabin space, since "jets are better than props." Hmm. Not always.

Maybe a better example that I recall actually happening was the period when the US was complaining about Japanese "barriers to entry" of US car sales in Japan, back in the mid 1970's.
GM was offering a car that had the steering wheel on the left side (Japanese, like British, drive on the left side of the road and have steering wheels on the right side of the vehicle.). Also, the cars were too large to fit down most alleys and many streets in Tokyo, too large to park anywhere, and guzzled gas that was running at ten times the US price. And the car interiors were scaled for 6 foot Texans, not 5' Japanese. And, the car had no place to put a bicycle in it for the rest of the commute once a parking place was found. The US attributed low sales to wrongful Japanese barriers to free trade. The reality was that most Japanese couldn't use that car if you gave it to them for free. The basics of marketing once upon a time, when I went to Business School, were "know your customer" and "Be driven by what the customer values, not what you think they should value." In "lean manufacturing" this would be called "pull" or "value chain".

But, then, we were too busy assuming things and talking to shut up and listen.

We were violating Japanese traditions from nemawashi (walking around and gaining consensus before taking action) to the "lean" concept of genchi genbutsu (going down to the floor to see for ourselves before making pronouncements from afar of what is wrong.)

As even Wikipedia realizes:

Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物) means "go and see for yourself" and it is an integral part of the Toyota Production System. It refers to the fact that any information about a process will be simplified and abstracted from its context when reported. This has often been one of the key reasons why solutions designed away from the process seem inappropriate.

So, I'm not sure this particular government policy has a learning curve and won't explode in our face when we turn it on. Maybe this has been deeply considered. Maybe not.

If the objective is to damage Japan's culture and gain a competitive edge, or at least remove their edge over us, then I suppose random tinkering might be a good idea. If the objective is the much harder task of improving the functioning of a 5000 year old civilization, it might be good to be mindful of any indications that our mental model doesn't match their reality, so we should stop what we're doing and address that and update our model with more current information. That's the key to high-reliability performance, and avoiding nasty surprises. The article gives no indication that the policy implementation is contingent on it actually working in practice when implemented.

In the classic PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act), there is that "C" step, "check" that what we did had the desired effect, not an unexpected contrary effect, in case we missed some crucial fact.

That's not a bad model.


W.

Bees, infection, lean, and emergent immune systems

"What's good for the hive is good for the bees." That's one of the posters near the cafe at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore. I recall it's described as an "African saying."

I've gone on at great length looking for the right way to describe and convey the difference between multi-level organization and, well, "heaps."

There seems to be an extremely strong bias in the US against anything that has to do with higher organizational levels of humans - unless it's man-made, centrally-planned, top-down business organizations. Anything "bottom up" has a cultural repellent overtone of collectivism or labor-movements or community-organizers ( read "troublemakers") or socialism or communism or Star Trek's ultimate bogeyman - "The Borg."

It's puzzling. It's as if there's a conviction on the one hand that the country has passed through its entire need for "social and economic development" and is trying to forget that awkward, teenager stage when things didn't work out well, now that ... um ... we have everything perfectly under control?

That's pretty much a "theory X" model, where all the expertise is concentrated at the top, and the only thing everyone below that level is good for is blind obedient labor or paying taxes. And maybe that did work in the middle ages or for running plantations or companies where the labor was just an extension of the company's founder.

But, that model also ran out of steam a few decades ago, as more companies started being "knowledge based" with "knowledge workers," all of which meant that the center of mass of the expertise was moving from the executive wing to the shop floor. In hospitals, for example, there was a traumatic transition, that's still happening, where the main administrator of the hospital would now be a professional administrator, who was not even a medical doctor. The expertise in medical matters was shifting out to the floor, and the expertise in central administration was becoming, gasp, "administration" -- which previously had been sort of a dirty "four-letter word", the kind of thing that only worn out doctors would do when they couldn't keep up with "real work."

All this is morphing slowly, and with loud shrieks and moans and strenuous objections, towards "theory Y" where the laborers are assumed to be highly competent experts and in touch with reality on the floor or "ground truth" or "in country" or whatever the context is. Central "management's" role became less to "direct" or "manage" the operation than to "orchestrate" it. There' s no way the new "conductors" could even begin to grasp how to operate one of the "instruments" out there in the orchestra, let alone be the fount of all wisdom on every one of the sub-sub-sub-specialties and stay current on every relevant journal and attend every important conference.

So, it's a new "paradigm." The "chain of command" doesn't go away, but the nature of the command is distinguished very carefully from "information flow".

Now, if you look at this through the high-magnification lens, it doesn't look very different from the old model. (see picture below).


To see the difference, you need to rotate the microscope lenses around to a lower-power, broader field-of-view lens, and you can see what's changed, or what has to change, to make this new model work as advertised.

The big changes are that:

• News about the outside world comes in at the bottom (the front, the ground troops), and loops up to the top, where it has an effect, altering the new, revised orders that come back down the chain. That loop is travelled many times, but is still relatively slow.
• There is a very fast local loop, where feedback about performance comes right into the low level team, which responds to it on the spot, with no involvement of management. This is akin to your hand retracting from a hot stove without having to check in with the brain first. Or equivalent to the Coast Guard in Katrina, where they were pre-authorized to make decisions on their own without bothering headquarters.
• In Theory X, the news comes in the top, which has limited bandwidth or a small 1-person pipe, then only some of it goes down and some is lost at each level, depending on upper managers to recognize what lower employees care about. Finally a dribble of news makes it to the front. The troops report what they see and differences with what the orders seem to imply, but at each level going back up the chain, half of that is deleted by managers who think they know what the boss actually cares about. By the time the internal news gets up to the boss, 3 months later,
• it's unrecognizable.
• TheoryX is very hard to steer with. The Boss is effectively blind to what's going on inside, the troops are essentially blind to what the boss sees outside, and the whole thing feels like "pushing" on a rope.
• Theory Y is very easy to steer with. Most of the heavy lifting is done at each level with fast feedback that never has to go up to the brain and back down to the hand. Because the loop upwards is fast and phase-locked, news at the front actually makes it up to the top, which can change the mental model and the marching orders. The troops effectively control the boss, the same way the water-level controls the hand when filling a glass of water.
• Carrying on the "rope" analogy, it's like PULLING on a rope that goes out to a pulley and comes back to a pulley and goes in a big loop. You can accomplish "pushing" your clothes out to dry by "pulling" on the rope. The LOOP does the magic. You need the loop.

Well, I came in to talk about bees and emergent immune systems, and I've headed off in what seems a different direction, so now let's stop, turn around, and look a the "bee problem" from the top of this mountain we just climbed.

What's the problem? As the Los Angeles Times put it this morning,
Suddenly, the bees are simply vanishing.

by Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II
June 10, 2007

The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.

Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.

"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."

Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.

So far, they are stumped.

The problem seems to be both a parasite (that can be killed by irradiating the hive), and a simultaneous breakdown in the bee's immune systems. The article states:

Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.

"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.

The article goes on looking at parasites, but I want to hit the brakes here, get off the highway, and go up the side road of looking at the question of suppression of immune systems. This is pure speculation, but possibly important speculation.

What catches my attention here is that there is a natural, multi-level beastie here - and that is that honeybees don't exist as individuals, they exist as parts-of-a-hive. Increasingly research is showing that humans have lot of the same tendencies, but for bees this is extreme. If you remove a honeybee from its hive, I suspect it will simply die - as will a human cell if you remove it from a human body. (That's why it's so hard to cultivate human "cell-lines".)

The latest literature on humans shows that it's not just that a person's immune system reflects the "health" of their own body, but it also reflects whether the person has become isolated and fragmented from society. One of the most painful things for a person, that is sort of surprising in the "rational actor" model, is that the imprisonment in "solitary confinement" is extremely draining, even to prisoners. The need for daily interaction with other humans is tangible.

Chimps, if removed from their herd, have been shown to sacrifice a chance for food for a chance to open a window and see what the other chimps are doing. This is a deep, biological need, not confined to one species, or, as the human cell example shows, not confined to a single "level" of organizational hierarchy.

The point is this. If you forget what your eyes see, and look at what the mathematics show, human beings, or bees, or cells, are not the shape your eye sees. They have parts of their physiological control and regulatory systems that extend out into their larger social structure. Those are important parts, and if those parts are not well, or damaged, the damage is quickly manifested in the local physiology of the individual as well.

For tax or legal purposes, or buying a train ticket, we are separate "individuals". For purposes of computing how regulatory processes operate, and how they fail, we are not nearly so "separate". Because our eyes don't show us these invisible (but very real) connections, we tend to discount them, or ignore them. We do so at our peril.

These tendrils of our "meta-bodies" are like having our blood diverted from our bodies in tubes in a dialysis unit, run out to some other place, processed and cleaned up, and returned to our bodies through some other tube. We can say that is not "me", but in the sense that a breakdown in that system can directly cause you to be sick or die, it really is "you".

Apparently, cells, chimps, bees, humans, whatever, develop many such external loops in their interactions with each other. These can be so great that it is common to hear a person say that when a loved one abandons them or dies, "it is as if a part of me died."

Alternatively, it's been shown that cells with even damaged DNA's can be supported by a "field effect" from neighboring healthy cells, and not become cancerous. [ I'll track down the reference.] Notice that the "life sciences" spend a huge amount of effort on "signal transduction" and ways signals are communicated between cells, or between genes with "genetic circuits", but there's little use of a model that this low-level communication, if it persists, really has to be part of a high-level closed feedback control loops with a mind of its own, and the key thing to do is to find that loop. As I showed a few days ago, tracing out the loop is a challenge, because control information leaps happily from medium to medium, now in neurons, now in voice, now in electromagnetic waves, now in liquid flow, etc. The point is if you know there MUST be a closed loop, so that the cells can PULL on the ROPE (discussed above), then you are encouraged to find the rest of the pieces.

And, then, of course, if you're a drug company, you have a whole new set of intervention points at the meta-loop level.

In extreme cases, when the culture and society collapses, the impact can be dramatic. I suspect that collapse of cultural integrity is part of what is going on in the huge rise in suicide rates among native Americans right now. The history of the Pima Indians, in the USA, shows a dramatic collapse of physical and social health, going from a tribe with almost no diabetes and one with a reputation for being extremely cordial in 1800, to one with something like 80% diabetes rates and a high rate of suicide and interpersonal violence. Many factors are put forward to explain this, but I'm biased to looking at multi-level models for this kind of effect.

So, if something is killing off the honeybees, and the something is enabled by an apparent collapse of the individuals "immune systems", then other people will start looking at what's wrong with "this bee" (the "clinical medicine" model), and I'd prefer to start the investigation at the other end and ask "Is something wrong with the hive?"

In other words, what's "broken" for each bee may not be "inside the box" of that bee's "body", but may be out in the external part of the control-system-body that is connected into and through the "hive." In the analogy, the "dialysis machine" is broken, or the tubes running to it are clogged or kinked, or something like that.

I think this can be a very powerful model, to think that there are TWO life-forms involved that may need medical attention. One is a lot of individual cells, or bees, or people. The other is a much larger scale emergent thingie, that we'd call "our body", or "the hive" or "society" respectively.

To date, we've considered emergent thingies as if they would evaporate if you took away the tiny things that make up the big thingie.

But I've presented many cases where the emergent thingie suddenly transitions, becomes self aware, and takes on "a life of its own" and even acts as if it has "a mind of its own."

For humans, the emergent thingie is very familiar - it's "us". Cells may have formed the substrate in which our spirit was formed (or placed, if you prefer that model), but now that spirit has definitely taken on a life and identity and mind of its own that is only remotely related to the lives of the cells that once made it up, but now are subordinate to it.

We see the same pattern in many other places. Mental images in human or machine vision start by being made up of many small patches of data or patterns, but once they combine into an overall "vision" or "percept", that thingie takes on a life of its own and even if we remove the source data it persists. In fact, even if the data now refute it, it can continue to persist, and defend itself, and change what we look at in order to sustain itself. Wow.

So, I think it is safe to say that everyone recognizes that bees have a very strong social component to their daily activity and identity. And, like corporations that continue to exist long after the founders have died or left, "hives" tend to persist even if individual bees die off.

But, OK, say the hive is a living thing that has a "meta-body" and has something that is appropriately called "health" that is a mostly-independent factor from the health of the individuals within it. I say "mostly" because it's only in the short term that they may appear to be separate -- in the long term, they are tightly coupled because feedback loops have compounded the "weak interactions" and "loose coupling" into dominant factors.

So, if the bees are dying, it may be because the hive-scale-thingie is dying first. As with any feedback loop, causal "directions" become a meaningless concept. The hive and the individuals rise or fall as one, in a upward or downward spiral feedback loop pattern.

But, it still can make sense for humans to talk about "psychological problems" or "immune system problems" that are defined at the large-scale, meta-body level and may not even make sense at the individual cell level.

The point is, things can "break" or "be wrong" at that large scale.

That's why I keep on flashing that M.C. Esher picture of the waterfall -- everything is healthy locally, but it's broken globally. The two are completely distinct, in the short run. (but coupled in the long run in any living thing.)

Is this what's going on with the bees? I have no idea. But I am pretty certain that very few people who aren't systems analysts would even start with that approach and look there for signs of something wrong at that level. So, it would be "baffling."

This is exactly what many social and corporate organizational problems are. At a local level, we see the equivalent of "bees dying" or "employees burning out" or "employees quitting" and we are baffled as to what's wrong with them. Sometimes, the problem isn't at that level. Sometimes it's a structural problem, a "systems" problem. Those are hard to see to begin with, and impossible to see if you don't look for them on purpose and methodically.

A great deal of management literature these days, including The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker, describe problems and solutions at the meta-level, without ever springing, in my mind, to the overall pattern they are pointing to. This is an emergent-organism that has a meta-body. It acts like its alive, and it can have disorders and dysfunctions and "health" and often needs "medical attention" at its own scale. (But save us from most "consultants"!)

If you look at all the emphasis on "vision" or "spirit" or "direction" or "identity" in the management literature, you can simplify it all to an effort to create a self-aware, self-sustaining, emergent beastie at the meta-level -- a beastie that will then turn around and form a nurturing context and reshape and empower the people that just gave it life.

So, it's one thing if you push up emergent life, and when you let go it falls down again. That's one case. In this other case, it's more like a radio antenna or something -- you push up emergent life and push so hard or well that the life breaks loose and is radiated out and takes on an existence of its own outside the antenna. Then, you can shut down the transmitter or dismantle the antenna, and the radiated wave just keeps on propagating outward.

Except in this case, it's more like a ring-vortex wave that just sits in place, like a little donut-shaped "halo" above us. It doesn't shoot off a the speed of light, but instead turns around and comes back and embraces the parts that just created it.

I think this is what we're trying to do with corporate management these days, effectively.
I think that's what "lean" and "six-sigma" and "Toyota Production System" are about. They're about creating a culture that is vital, and self-sustaining and that reaches around people and becomes the sea they swim in and draw life from, while they complete the cycle and return the favor.

That requires a lot of complete loops to work, and they have to be vertically oriented. We need to have the vertical donut model, not the open-ended "tree" model of management to bring all the pieces into "phase-lock" and allow a laser-beam output, not incoherent light.

And, when it breaks, we need "doctors" of the corporate spirit to bring it into alignment with a pattern that works again.

But it's not "the Borg" and it's not scary and it's not homogenization and it's not domination and it's not an abandonment of a social hierarchy -- but it is a different use of those pathways, a transforming use, that uses vertical close-paths to make the top the bottom and bring vertical unity to the compound-level beast. Then, it works. Then, it's great!

Note: All closed paths are "loops", so any causal loop diagram will have lots of "loops".

Most of those loops aren't dominant. What will be dominant will be the FEEDBACK CONTROL LOOPS. These will be self-aware, self-repairing, persistent, goal-seeking loops. THOSE are the key players over any long period of time in living systems. Those are where things break, or never got formed in the first place. And those are the intervention points for a sustainable intervention.

The Toyota Way - viewed as feedback control

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

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

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

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



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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cover of "lean thinking" cmments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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