Second Life for executive education

I've come to believe that a key catalyst in the revitalization of American industry is getting middle and upper management to start using relatively new models such as the Toyota Way, Theory Y, and other techniques of empowering employees and distributing the workload further down the organizational hierarchy.

The US National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine has similarly recommended empowering "microsystems" or front-line teams as the intervention that has proven successful in raising quality and lowering costs in hospitals.

And, where these techniques have caught on and worked, they have worked very well. The problem is, that's not very many places. There are far more failures than successes at this sort of cultural transformation of existing industries.

There are several big problems that I see.

One problem is that this change involves collaboration, and that's not something that single people can do. Even the IOM recognized that changing the behavior of a single doctor, in an unchanged culture, was up-hill to the point of impossible. The common wisdom in Public Health's field of behavioral modification also holds that any change has to be multi-level, and address higher levels of context and the individual, not just the individual. But, like one person with a phone, one is not a very helpful number. You need a larger critical mass before this behavior change can become self-sustaining and pay off.

So, it's hard to get started. There is no "good place" to start for those who want to.

The second big problem is that it is paramount that command and control not be lost during this transitional hand-off from central control to distributed control. That's huge, and generally not mentioned in these how-to books. We know how centralized control works, and we can find examples of distributed control working, but there are very few published examples of getting from one to the other successfully. The trajectories all seem to go through a disruptive middle ground where it is unclear who is responsible for what, with the expected results. In hospitals or the Army or aircraft cockpits or nuclear power control centers, disrupted control can result in a large loss of life.

So, a revised golf swing might be far better than then one you have now, but it is almost certain that transitioning from one to the other will involve a period that is worse than either. If a company is barely above water as it is, a period of worse performance may not only test faith in a process, it may simply not be survivable. If you can't get from here to there, it hardly matters how good "there" is.

A third problem is that the CEO or top executive staff might not like the idea of sharing power, losing the limelight, and losing the justification for being paid 100 or 1000 times what front-line workers are paid, regardless how beneficial this is to stockholders. It's hard to expect them to have an unbiased, altruistic interest in the good of the company at their own expense.

And, the fourth and biggest problem mentioned is "culture," or the self-sustaining, self-regulating norms for "how things are done here." Again, any single individual going up against culture, even the CEO, risks being brought back "into line" with the culture. As I've modeled this before, the culture is effectively a living thing with its own survival paramount, and one that has been rewarded for keeping things "in line" with the status quo.

Culture is far stronger than simple passive mass or inertia, which change when pushed on, even if annoyingly slowly. Culture, when pushed on, is as likely to retaliate and break your arm as it is to change direction.

Where are we?

OK, aside from the fact that the culture and the management team will conspire to fight back or comply maliciously, that there's no place to start, no visible route that works, and damn few role models, this is a great idea.

You can immediately understand why, say, brand new hospitals in Dubai or Bankok have a huge competitive advantage is starting with a blank slate, no legacy IT systems to stay compatible with, no legacy culture to fight back, a lot of space, and cheaper labor with fewer regulations. As Harvard Medical International pointed out in the Keynote address to the latest HIMSS virtual conference, they can also hand-pick administrators and clinical staff from day one that agree to a transparent, quality-oriented culture.

So, one way around all these obstacles is to forget dealing with them and just start over somewhere else. That's one model.

That doesn't do much for John and Mary Smith, or the local community here in the US though. Is abandoning the US and walking away the only model?

This is the point at which I suggest we look at using the best technology we have on this problem. It is, however, a social problem. So it requires social technology.

What's "social technology?"

There are many new tools that have only come to fruition in the last few years that are available to aid collaboration and employee empowerment. Many of them fall under the "Web 2" category, meaning they are on-line tools where the users are all active participants and content suppliers, not just passive consumers of content. An example is the op-ed columns of the New York Times, where a few paragraphs of opinion results in several hundred replies and replies to replies within a few hours, adding a lot of depth and richness to the conversation.

Some tools are more complete suites of collaboration software, with video and audio and shared-white-boards and files, which vendors are rushing into right now. Examples of more developed packages are on the website of the University of Michigan's School of Information under the mouthful "Technology Mediated Collaboration". I've taken their graduate class in that, SI689, and checked it out, and the short of it is that there is great potential but it's harder than it looks to get this working -- for the reasons I describe above.

Another reason it's hard is that most IT programmers still think in terms of single-users and "human interfaces" between man and machine, and don't think through the fact that it's really man-machine-man interface, in fact it's a many-people-to-many-people interface or a social product they are implementing the technical part of. As a result the designs tend to be inflexible and miserable, accompanied by the designers whining that the software works fine but the problem is "bad users" or a "bad culture." This is like designing an interstate highway with right angle turns in it, and complaining that bad users keep driving off the road -- the road is fine, so long as no one actually tries to use it.

Again, unless you deal with how the culture and command and control systems are all going to be migrated from point A to point B and not have serious issues in the middle, you haven't solved the right problem. This is not something "IT-people" even recognize, let alone own, in general. In their minds, this is just "implementation" which is like taking out the old PC and putting in a new one - what's the problem?

Still, these are not the most powerful social technologies out there. The most powerful one we have, in my mind, has a very low profile and looks at first glance like an innocent game. An example is the "Second Life Grid" by Linden Labs.

"Second Life" is a 3-D, multi-player virtual world in which people can wander around, build things, interact with others, run businesses, farm, fly, explore fantasies, whatever.

"Second Life Grid" is Linden Lab's name for their offering that world-construction site to anyone who wants to build or script an experience for whatever reason they want it. They have a corporate and educational branch as well.

Harvard, Stanford, New York University, Texas State University, and others have started using this tool. (A 16 page list of them is here.)

So, you might say, big deal. Aside from inane things like flying and walking through walls, how does this help get my management staff and culture through the transitional problems we discussed above? Why not just put people in a room and teach them the old fashioned way?

There are several huge advantages of training in a virtual on-line world. One is that it avoids the need for physical travel to some site, with all the costs and hassles that involves these days.

A second is that the virtual world is open 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. This means it's open from home to an executive who suddenly realizes they have 8-9 pm available because something got canceled. Everyone doesn't have to be in the same place at the same time.

The third advantage, but possibly most important one, is that Second Life can be anonymous. No one knows who you really are in real life.

This is huge. Everyone has some ego, but top executives or government officials or doctors have huge egos, to the point where they are totally resistant to any experience where they might look awkward or stupid or confused in public. And they tend to hang around with a small group of similarly minded people in a culture that supports or demands that personality.

So what we need, and what Second Life (or some equivalent) provides, is the ability to put on a different body, hang with a different group of people, and try out different ways of behaving without anyone knowing it's you.

This is huge. Most top executives can't even walk into a room without the whole nature of the conversation changing to fit their old personality and role. They have no idea what goes on when they aren't changing the rules just by being there, "observing." They are so used to dominating a situation that all they see anymore is a reflection of themselves in the survivors around them, and get no useful feedback about changes they should make in themselves and the way they behave. No one is honest with them.

With a different personality, all that changes. You could come to a virtual meeting of white males as a black woman, say, and suddenly understand first hand what it's like to be invisible in public with your opinion totally ignored or punished. Or, flip side, they could learn how to behave so that they aren't so over-bearing that lower-ranking people in their vicinity are not terrorized or intimidated into silence. They can practice that sweet-spot between authority and being perceived as being open to criticism.

Just getting doctors to behave in a way that let nurses raise a question, once, dramatically improved the tragic error rate in hospitals in the study Dr. Peter Pronovost did. Doctors had little idea how much they were intimidating the staff into silence, possibly based on some incident of flying off the handle 3 years ago that is still reverberating around the culture.

Or, you could join a group that is actually collaborating to get something done, instead of everyone trying to "win" every meeting and make everyone else look bad, and feel what it feels like to collaborate - an experience many MBA's have apparently never had.

The truth is, one day in Business School, as an MBA student, we covered a case in Personnel class and I suggested, naively, that the managers could consider collaborating to solve it. After a few second silence, the class burst into hysterical laughter. The concept is simply not even on the table for people trained in that way.

They literally cannot imagine managers cooperating.

That's a problem. And it's a problem that some hours in a virtual-life simulator could potentially fix.

No commercial pilot steps into a cockpit today who hasn't practiced various collaboration scenarios over and over and over in the simulator first. It matters, and it works.

Professor Bryan Sextan at Johns Hopkins found that 74% of commercial aircraft accidents occur on the first day new teams of people are in the cockpit together for the first time.

Hmm. First, it shows the power of collaboration, and teamwork, in flying something as complex as a plane, which is way simpler than flying a business. Second, it makes me ask why those people aren't required to practice collaborating with each other in a simulator before they try it out for the first time on the plane I'm on.

And, third, it raises the question of why we think management teams, or Boards of Trustees, can possibly collaborate well, honestly, and frankly if they've only practiced doing it wrong and never practiced doing it right.

Issues of time, cost, availability, and ego can all be dealt with by virtual-life simulators. I suggest we apply that technology to management teams as a way of passing on the fire, and having anyone, anywhere in the world able to role play to help mentor new anonymous mangers over their psychological barriers to this new way of acting.

There are literally hundreds of "content providers" looking for business at setting up new virtual worlds in Second Life, which is the only one I've looked at so far. I have no financial connection to Linden Labs -- I just think this is a very cool product that is worth investigating and supporting.



I just can't think of any other way to address the training gap for executives that doesn't take 20 years internship at Toyota, and we don't have 20 years to figure this out regardless. Interactions with others can only be learned by interaction with others, not by watching power-point presentations, or videos, or reading about it. This training goes into a different part of the brain than normal school-work anyway. The experience is required to change deeply-based beliefs. Even Toyota says that training for the Toyota Way requires actions first that change beliefs, not vice-versa.

Here's a way to generate, moderate, and improve those actions. It's a massive multi-person "game" setup at Linden Labs, so there would be no problem adding 10,000 people in a week to the system a their end.

I think we need to apply "Lean" to lean instruction. GM couldn't grasp that model change-overs could take less than 6 weeks until Toyota did them in 6 hours. Learning to control your alpha-rhythm in your brain takes 20 years on a mountain in Tibet, or 5 minutes with a clinical biofeedback monitor. Sometimes, technology can help.

Just because Toyota took 20 years to learn something doesn't mean, say, that all Michigan businesses couldn't learn it in 20 weeks of sponsored time in Second Life, or some such tool. That's the kind of breakthrough technology that scales up that we need to grab and run with.

Wade

exec ed photo by by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha
Teamwork (crossing stream) by ___________
pool by by prettywar-stl

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
• 
  
• 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

Never prioritize!

I want to stir some thinking, so let me suggest that the activity known as "prioritizing" is a bad idea.

Now, Sun Tsu's ancient classic The Art of War recommends, if you find yourself on "bad ground", that you should get off it as soon as possible. Bad ground, would be, for example, having your army on a flood plain between two hills on top of which are two enemy armies -- in the monsoon season.

Bad ground for many entities today is finding oneself forced to decide between dying an immediate death (taking the bad impact all at once), or increasing the odds of dying every day from now on into the future (spreading the bad impact over the future.)

For example, on a national level, the Federal Reserve had a choice of keeping interest rates up, causing the stock market to crash and homeowners to go broke next month, or lowering rates, avoiding the instant death at the cost of a perpetual below-the-radar push on the Chinese and others to move their wealth out of the US and dollar-denominated assets. So, the Fed picked to lower rates a lot, and the dollar went in to accelerated falling and set new records against the Euro, the Canadian dollar, the Chinese Yuan, against gold and oil, etc. But, most voters either are out to lunch, or weigh getting through next month over leaking wealth out of their dollar-denominated retirement funds, so this got little first-page press.

And, that's because the voters themselves are on "bad ground", picking short-term survival against longer-term survival -- neither being a very good choice.

So, here's one of my own little rules of thumb:

If you're in a bad place, and every day it gets worse, you cannot achieve victory by waiting around for things to "get better."

Or, to parphrase an old Chinese proverb

"Man must wait long time on corner with mouth open for roast duck to fly in."

In the corporate world, one way things tend to go downhill relentlessly is when the problems have reached "system level" complexity, and the management team refuses to stop trying to solve them all by itself without help.

Unfortunately, in a culture of predators, admitting weakness is seen as an invitation to attract them all and become lunch, so the worse things get, the lower the odds management will admit publicly, or even to itself, that things are getting too complicated to handle.

So, one sign of that situation occurring is the familiar refrain "We need to prioritize." This usually signals that there are many more problems being raised than there is management bandwidth to solve.

Worse, many of those problems are system-level, and, being human and short-sighted, management then seeks to go for breathing room and the quick victory and the easy win, meaning it selects problems based on their ability to solve them quickly, not on the importance of the solution or the off-the-radar opportunity cost of going another week or month without a solution. (Surely, this is costing a lot somewhere, as the shutdown of the State of Michigan is demonstrating, as work has to stop and lay people off waiting for resolution.)

So, the system-level problems are selectively left for "later", which never comes, as they are root-cause problems and keep on generating new local events and symptoms which are viewed as if they are separate, independent new problems. It should come as no surprise that solving these "symptoms" doesn't cure the patient. In medicine, that would be termed "quackery."

But, management may argue in my virtual debate here, "We can't deal with everything at once!"

Well, hmm. Good point. The bummer is that life can, and does, hit you with everything at once. Deciding whether you want to keep on breathing, or keep your blood flowing is a lousy time to "Prioritize."

The key to the solution is the implicit hidden constraint in that phrase

"We can't deal with everything at once!"

Again, since the mountain will not come to you, you are going to have to go to the mountain. If the problems won't assist you by becoming smaller than your problem solving bandwidth, you are going to have only one choice -- increase your problem solving bandwidth.

And since the "you" (management team) is already working 16 hour days, that cannot mean put in more hours, or "work smarter" or "prioritize." Those only perpetuate the problem.

The root-cause problem is the arrogant implicit assumption that "only management is smart enough to solve these problems -- everyone else is an idiot. "

It is remarkable in a company with 100,000 employees, that 12 or fewer try to solve big problems, and are surprised they keep failing, despite prioritizing.

That is a very poor mental model. Maybe, some of those other human beings are more capable than management acts as if they are.

Maybe, collectively, those other human beings are way more capable than managment thinks they are.

The problem isn't that the employees are stupid - it's that management is unwilling to admit that the employees may be more than expenses.

If someone sees a flaw in this reasoning, please post a comment. It seems to me that, once the problems become system-level and larger than management's collective ability to solve, only one of three things can happen:

1. The whole thing crashes and burns, or
2. The external world lets up and gets a lot easier, or
3. Management finally yields some status and power to employees, even to, gasp, "labor."

If I were a majority stockholder in a company going downhill, in today's world, I wouldn't want option 1; Option 2 seems unlikely; and that leaves option 3.

Option 3 is what "Lean" and "Toyota Way" is about -- empowering workers, building stockholder wealth, at the expense of hegemony in status and power for the current management team the stockholders have in place to meet their needs.

Of course, this also means that if things are not going well for the company, the solution for the stockholders is not to replace the management team with a different small group of different people, which will only have the same problem, but will stir up enough dust and reorganization to delay dealing with it for longer. The ONLY solution is that the whole managment-hegemony model has to be discarded, and management retasked with bringing more of the company employees into the decision-making loop, working in parallel.

That also means that management probably is not worth $250, 000,000 apiece any more, although they can easily be worth $25,000,000 apiece if they accomplish spreading out the work of "managing" the company over the workforce and emerging sufficient collective brainpower and reality to accomplish that task.

The solution direction, in other words, is not "more Rambo" and "even more super supermen." The solution direction for the stockholders is "less Rambo, more distributed participatory problem-solving." It will only be more and more true as time goes on, the world shrinks, and everything becomes perversely connected to everything else. It will not become "simpler", ever again. Ever. No Johnny, not even in 100 years. Not in 1000 years. Not in a billion years, with computer assistance. (Not that the "quants" have shown themselves able to make a buck successfully in Hedge funds these days in the first place.)

We are being forced, inexorably, to figure out how to actually accomplish work "together."
Rats. Most managers had hoped it wouldn't come to that. When I had suggested in B-school that managers might "cooperate", the room of MBA's burst into laughter, assuming I was making a great joke. That event identifies the mental concept that is dragging us down -- that the job of corporate executives is to fight with each other to see who is "top" or who is "best." Obviously, if that is their task, giving another 500 people keys to the executive suite would make no sense at all.
The question is:

Is that their task? Or is the task of management to increase stockholder wealth by doing whatever it takes, even, gasp, distributing knowledge and voting-rights and power?

Counter-arguments, anyone? I'm open here. The comment field can be anonymous. Please post agreement or disagreement if you have a minute.

Is it OK to ask for help?

Is it OK to ask for help? Reflecting on this question can give us some insight on why it's so hard in the US to adopt Toyota type "lean" operation models.

By "OK" I'm referring to the cultural norms and standards that we live by, the unwritten rules that we are supposed to know without asking. If we ask for help, will we will be punished by society?

All through the educational and socialization process in the US schools, at least Kindergarten to PhD, we are told "Do your own work." Consulting with others on homework is usually a "bad" thing. Consulting with others when it really matters, on "exams" is seriously punished. Tenure tends to depend on having done work that is clearly and recognizably "your own work" and discourages young faculty members from collaboration.

Then, one 25-30 years of such conditioning is completed, "workers" are released into the real world, where they discover that they are now supposed to collaborate and work together to get things done. The boss doesn't care if they check with each other, or use notes, or call a friend, or look things up on the internet -- the boss only cares that the work-product be completed on time. In fact, NOT escalating a problem to available experts who can help crack logjams is now punished and possibly cause for being fired. It's now bad to delay a process while trying to puzzle something out for yourself when someone nearby can just tell you the answer.


Whoa! What a disconnect!

The "workaround" used in the educational system these days is the dreaded "group work" project, generally hated by everyone from the teacher to the students. There always seems to be 3 or 4 students who are loafers and moochers and want a free ride, and one person who does all the work and gets little of the credit. It always slows down the work. No one sees the point of it, and I've had faculty apologize profusely for it but say they were told the have to do this.

That model makes it even LESS likely that anyone in business would want to participate in a "group" project or grant. Then, along comes the NIH and other funding agencies, always demanding multidisciplinary teams, or worse, interdisciplinary teams. ("multi" means they can just divide up the work and engage i parallel play and not talk much. "inter" means they actually have to collaborate on everything as they go.)

Again with the mixed messages!

And, on a larger scale, when work breaks up naturally into disciplines, departments, specialties, or "silos", the comfort level is again attacked by upper management that asks, on this scale, for TEAMS or DEPARTMENTS to "work together". It's "group project" squared!!

Somewhere along the line here the directives from above to "work together" seem somewhat like, to put it crudely, pissing upwind -- the result is unpleasant and shows no learning curve.

It's easier to deal with this issue if we understand the root causes of the conflicting message streams. It's also obvious, since "culture" eats "management initiatives" for lunch, that management initiatives for people to "work together" are, frankly, pissing upwind into the face of the very deep, very strong cultural message that "working together is BAD!!"

And, cultural messages don't come in the front door, throught our consciousness, as "rules". We just "pick them up" sideways somehow, through peripheral vision. We know, for example, that it is not permissiable to eat popcorn at a sermon in church, even though no one ever gave us a rule book that says that. These days it appears OK to bring a 3-course meal to the front row of a lecture, however, and eat it while the lecture goes on - quite a change from 30 years ago. Of course, college males no longer wear ties to class either.

So, it's less that we have a "Rule" that says "working together is bad" -- we just have a deeply trained conditioned reflex to turn away from it and avoid it, particularly when we need it the most (as in exams.) We "feel" that it is wrong, a violation of social norms, that we will be a "bad person" and rejected by society if we're "one of those people who keeps asking for help and mooching off others." It's a diffuse resistance and reluctance that may never be explicit.

And, it's the "wet blanket" that puts out the fires of initiative at collaboration.

So, how do we convert this culture into one where asking for help is OK, and giving help to someone who asks is OK, and our school system reflects that set of social norms? This seems to be important, if it is the primary obstacle to adoption of efficient "lean" approaches to our businesses that can make them globally competitive with other businesses in countries where it is OK, or even expected that people work together on things.

No, leeches who never want to carry their share of the work will still be "bad", but there's no problem if the rest of us swap and rearrange who carries what when, if it gets the job done faster and more easily.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of times a discussion will get up to the point where "culture" is mentioned, and that's almost a signal to give up and change the topic, instead of a signal to go get a cultural-change expert to come assist with that part of the work.

Maybe engineers and IT people and doctors don't realize that there are people who specialize in social engineering and know how to do it? I don't know. It's puzzling.

Certainly experts can be found in seeing the problem and measuring it in cultural anthropology, or in changing group behaviors or population behaviors among "behavioral education" practice experts in Schools of Public Health, or in media/marketing/crowd-manipulation experts with MBA's (on Madison Avenue) or Public Policy backgrounds ( in social marketing firms.) Of course, public health is oriented to helping people improve their lives, and the marketing people often with destroying their lives but paying to do it (tobacco, alcohol, "adult" entertainment and prostitution, harder drugs and hard-core pornography and white-slavery, etc.)

But many corporations have life improving products too - from cars that work to toasters that work, so they shouldn't be painted as "bad" with a broad brush that covers the obviously bad ones.

Still, it's ironic or something that the companies that are merchants of death seem to have mastered the art of population-behavior manipulation, and those that are trying to be merchants of life are still trying to figure out how to remove the shrink wrap from the package.

Nevertheless, there is a deep literature of social engineering for public health behavior change of populations, and doing work that doesn't collapse as soon as the intervention team departs or the grant runs out.

The best book but perhaps hardest to read, and the one used at Johns Hopkins School of Public Health is titled Health Program Planning - An Educational and Ecological Approach (4th ed), by Lawrence W. Green and Marshall W. Kreuter. The first edition was in 1961, and the 4th edition in 2005, so this includes 44 years of experience with the techniques and what has happened trying them on different cultures and problem sizes around the globe.

It's pretty solidly based in "what actually works" by now.

The problem (of course there's a catch) is that what actually works is basically systems thinking, (aka "ecological approach"), and for most of the last 44 years, there weren't even words for these concepts and people didn't believe in "ecology" or "systems". Now, finally, with 1 gigahertz laptops, we have enough power to start modeling what happens with complex interacting systems and the reasons behind what works in practice are becoming clear.

Still, since what works is very heavily based on feedback loops, and since feedback loops are forbidden in classical statistical analysis of causality, this "new" paradigm has been strongly discounted, disparaged, resisted, rejected, opposed, attacked, minimized, dumped-on, and otherwise culturally marked as close as we can (being primates) by being smeared with feces and considered "bad".

Besides, "systems" means we'd have to "work together". It brings to mind this logic:

I'm glad I don't like ice cream - because, if I liked it, I might eat it, and I hate it!

Well, at least the work is cut out for us and we know what to do, and need to apply cultural change engineering to the very concept of accepting social change engineering as something we should all learn, not just the tobacco and fast-foot companies.

And, to model the non-linear and "surprising" (but fully predictable) tendency of complex systems to show "unintended side-effects", tools such as Systems Dynamics need to be used, which, of course, is why I'm currently taking that class via distance education at WPI, the world's experts (along with MIT, where the faculty overlap.)

I think the combination of lean-thinking, ecological model cultural analysis tools from population behavior modification (otherwise disguised as the field called "public health"), discussion and model building tools from Systems Dynamics, I think that's a complete set of what's needed to make this fly.

Meanwhile, I got my first new US 1-dollar coin in change this morning. It's the first coin or bill in the US history (I think) to not have the two phrases "In God we trust" and "e pluribus unum" (from many, one) on either side. (It hides them on the EDGE of the coin.)

It's almost like the US is embarrassed about the idea of trying to take many people and make one nation, and wants to hide or bury the idea somewhere, like a dog scratching dirt over its droppings.

Such mixed messages we get. It's no wonder it's hard to get people to adopt "lean thinking" or "systems thinking" when our schools, employment compensation programs, and government itself reject the paradigm.

Still, our best and brightest thinkers from the last 4000 years or so have urged us to look at cooperative social interactions in a good light. Enlightened managers urge us to follow Toyota's astoundingly successful lead and change to "lean thinking" - which is basically ecological or systems thinking. The National Institutes of Health requires interdisciplinary teams on many new grants because, frankly, they get garbage otherwise. So, the paradigm refuses to die, even if the NIH-Office of Social Science Research gets abused, dumped on, and Norm Anderson pretty much left in disappointment (at least) and forced to try to get the good work done from outside instead of from inside.




Wade

So what? part A of why SLOOPS matter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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


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

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

Wade

The Toyota Way - viewed as feedback control

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

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

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

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



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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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