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

Controlled by the Blue Gozinta

For those who are following this discussion of feedback loops, we're most of the way through the basic description of the insides of such a loop.

I showed how a microphone and speaker, or getting a glass of water represented kinds of feedback loops, and made a distinction between dumb feedback loops and smart - goal seeking - feedback loops, also known as control loops. And we showed how control loops are everywhere in nature, made up of almost any substance - animal, mineral, vegetable, light, chemicals -- and they don't care because the principles work regardless. Control is to the loop as a song is to the instrument - you can play the "same" song on almost any instrument, or sing it, and the "sameness" is there.

So, I need to give a name to the four parts that I had in the upper left in this picture I drew yesterday:



The basic diagram that Professor Gene Franklin uses in the book "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" is similar to that block diagram, except for pulling the "GOAL" out and lumping the three other boxes "comparer", "model", and "decider" into a single blue box that is labelled "?" in his diagram of a car's cruise-control system for maintaining a constant speed.


So, the diagram is from that book, as quoted by me in slide 16 of my Capstone presentation on patient team management of diabetes control. I think you may need to click on the picture to make it zoom up large enough to read the words.



In any case, the only box on that diagram that is blue is the one that the feedback "goes into", so I'm calling it a "blue gozinta" as just a funny name that rhymes and that no one else is using.

Besides, the word "controller" rings all sorts of bells I didn't want to ring, echoing back to parents and school and bosses, etc.

Well I guess I failed in that already, as I gave the example of "negative feedback " of a student getting "graded" by a teacher for performance on an "exam", and receiving a failing grade of zero percent, which could be quite discouraging and dampen enthusiasm for the subject.

Franklin's picture has two other minor differences from mine. First, he adds "sensor noise" to the bottom "speedometer" box, to emphasize that this loop is all built around a perception of reality, not reality, and the thing that does the perceiving may not be perfectly accurate. That's a pretty good model of human beings or any other regulatory agent or agency.

As John Gall would say in his book Systemantics -- inside a "system" the perception IS the reality. The medical chart IS the patient.

That effect is so strong that the patient can be dying in the bed but caregivers are so busy looking at the monitors showing something else that they don't see the problem -- which is part of what went on in the tragic Josie King case, where an 18 month child slowly died of thirst in the middle of one of the best hospitals in the world. So, yes, we better remember on our diagram that what our senses tell us is going on may be very wrong. We'll come back to that in a big way when discussing how human vision and perception get distorted by all sorts of invisible and insidious pressures - especially in groups with very strong beliefs.

The other difference between Franklin's diagram and mine is on the upper right, where he adds an incoming arrow labelled "road grade". This means the slope of the road, and how hilly it is, not what we think of the road. His point is that the behavior of a car and the speed it ends up going after we have set our end and put the gas pedal where we think it should be actually ALSO depends on factors that are outside the car - such as whether it's going up a steep hill.

That will also be a universal pattern. The results of our actions are mixed into the impact of outside actions, which makes it hard to disentangle the two from just looking at the end result. The good news is that there are software programs that can disentangle those two for us.

Anyway, the whole point of this post is to get the "blue gozinta" identified.

This little blue box is the heart of the problem, because "feedback" is really just information, and is not intrinsically "positive" or "negative". In this diagram, the "feedback" is the speed of the car, as measured by the speedometer. That's just a number.

The number becomes "positive" or "negative", leading to "more gas!" or "more brake!" actions, only because the blue box, the controller, the blue-gozinta, compared that number to the desired speed, and saw that it was less than desired. Then the controller had to check a mental model and use some rule like "if we're going too slow, push on the pedal on the right!"
"If we're going too fast, push on the pedal on the left!'

As anyone who has ever taught someone else to drive knows, that turns out NOT to be the actual rule that drivers use to control the gas pedal. The behavior those rules and that simplistic model of the world result in is holding down the gas until the car shoots past the correct speed, then slamming on the brake until the car passes the desired speed slowing down, then overshooting and slamming on the gas until the car passes the right speed on the way up, then slamming on the brake, etc. The car jerks back and forth in an unstable and very unpleasant oscillation forever if that's the only rule in use.

However, we can probably all think of organizational policies or laws that have exactly that behavior, and are either too harsh or too lenient, or something, and keep on going back and forth and never manage to get the right setting.

It has been hard to recognize those problems and go

• Hey, I've seen that behavior before!
• That's a "control loop" behavior.
• The way to fix it is to change what goes on in the blue gozinta box.
• What part of the process / law / policy I have corresponds to that box?
• That's where the problem can be fixed.

It's really important to see that there is nothing wrong with the car. The gas pedal works fine, and does not need to be replaced. The brake pedal works fine. The speedometer (in this case) works fine. What is wrong is inside the blue box, and is subtle - it's the "mental model" or rule that is used to decide what action to take depending on what information is coming into the box from outside.

And, the realization is that a very simple rule, a dumb rule, doesn't accomplish what we want, but a slightly better rule will make the very same parts behave correctly together.

The better rule requires a little more brains inside the box. We have to track more than just how fast we are going and how fast we want to go -- we have to figure out how fast we are converging on the goal, and start letting up on the gas as we get near the target speed, before we even get there.

The controller needs to "plan ahead" or "look ahead" and react to something that hasn't happened yet.

This seems to fly in the face of science and logic. How can a dumb box react to something that hasn't happened yet? We can't afford the "glimpse the future!" add on module, at $53 trillion.

Ahh, but here's another wonderful property of feedback loops. What goes around comes around. We've been here before. Nothing is new under the sun. The past is a guide to the future.

Either putting out the garbage can causes the garbage trucks to come, or we can learn the routine well enough that we can predict when the trucks will come based on past experience. It turns out, in a loop, the past and future become very blurred together.

Being able to recall the past IS being able to predict the future, in a control loop.

We don't just go around a control loop once or twice -- we go around a control loop thousands or millions of times. So, if we have any rudimentary learning capacity at all, we can start to notice certain patterns keep happening. We can detect what always seems to be happening JUST BEFORE the bad thing happens, and use THAT as the trigger event to react to instead.

So, we have a second rule that gets added by experience -- "When you get near the target goal, start easing up on the pressure to change and start increasing the pressure to stay right there and keep on doing exactly what you're doing."

This basic ability to learn from experience is the simplest definition of "intelligence" we can come up with. Do you recall the joke about Sven and Ollie that Garrison Keeler told?

Sven comes by Ollie's house and sees that Ollie has both ears bandaged.
"What happened?" he asks.
"Well", Ollie replies, "I was ironing and the phone rang and I picked up the iron by mistake and held it to my ear!"
"Oh.... So, what happened to your other ear?"
" Ahh.... once I was hurt, I tried to call an ambulance. "

So, the moral of all this post is that the key to the behavior of a system being managed by a feedback control loop is the blue box, the "blue gozinta."

Very simple changes to that box can change a horrible experience into a pleasant ride.

The heart of "Control System Engineering" is figuring out what to put in that box.

For human beings, a second major problem is that little tiny addition of "sensor noise", and figuring out how to prevent, reduce, or account for distortions in perception that can cause the system to be responding to a perception, not a reality.

And, for both, there's another very subtle but very well understood problem, and that is "lag time." I didn't draw "lag time" on the picture but I will in the future.

If we're trying to drive based on the speedometer reading from 5 minutes ago, things will not go well for us. In fact, the more we try to "control" things, the worse they can get.

This is a huge problem. A perfectly stable system that is perfectly controllable becomes a nightmare and unstable and can fly out of control just by there being too much of a lag between collecting the sensor data and presenting the picture to the controller.

Or, in hospitals and business, it's popular now to have a "dashboard" that shows indicators for everything, often exactly in "speedometer" type displays.

The problem is, the data shown may be two months old. We are trying to drive the car using yesterday's speedometer reading at this time of day. When I state it that way, the problem is obvious. But, I can't find any references at all in the Hospital Organization and Management literature about the risks caused by lag times in dashboard-based "control".

At this point, even with just this much understanding of control loops, you, dear reader, should be starting to realize how may places around you these loops are being managed incorrectly.

We're spending a huge amount of effort trying to improve the brakes and gas pedals, when the actual problem is a lag time in the messages to upper management, or that sort of problem.

None of these problems need to be in our face. These are all "Sven and Ollie" problems that we can fix with what we know today.

But that will only work if we're really sure about how control loops work, and how they fail, and can make that case to the right people in the right way at the right time.

Take home message -

Even a very basic understanding of control loops can help us ask the right questions, and realize where the problems may be lurking instead of where they appear to be at first glance, so we don't waste our time barking up the wrong tree.

Especially in complex organizations, the generator of failure is usually not that labor failed or management failed, or that any one person did something "wrong." What is killing us now is that we have a huge collection of "system problems" that are due to things like "lag time" and "feedback". Every piece of the system is correct, but the way they behave when connected is broken. There is a "second level" of existence, above the pieces, in the "emergent" world. Things can break THERE. Most of the systems humans built are broken there, or at least seriously in need of an engine mechanic, because we didn't even realize there WAS a THERE.

Worse, "management" still thinks that discussion of "higher level" problems means that someone is pointing the finger at THEM, and that leads to bad responses.

The problems are subtle. We won't see them unless we spend a little time studying how control systems work, and how they fail. Then, the patterns will be much more obvious, and our efforts will be much more likely to be successful. And, then we can stop blaming innocent people for problems that aren't their fault.

It is, however, in my mind, the fault of the whole enterprise of Public Health if this kind of insight is not taken advantage of when designing regulatory interventions or in helping individuals try to "control" behavior. That, in my mind, would be a clear failure of due diligence.

Or - it would be, if these concepts had been published in the peer-reviewed literature that's the only thing they read and pay attention to.

Which says, it's my fault for not publishing this and your fault, dear reader, if you don't get after me to do so.

After all - I depend on feedback from my readers to control my behavior. So, what I do depends on what you do.

Wow, doesn't that sound familiar?

There is a way out of this mess

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspective: Spirituality in Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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


(Team crossing stream photo credit: Ollieda )

Photo credit: Amish barn raising by heyburn3.

Book: Building the Bridge by Robert Quinn

University of MIchigan Business School professor, Robert E. Quinn, the author of Deep Change, has written a new book Building The Bridge as You Walk On It - A guide for Leading Change.

The book shows how some very successful business organizations have converted theory into practice, using integrity and character to be the revitalizing firet hat makes it all work. In fact, Quinn argues, every one of the largest, most-successful companies seems to use this type of transformational leadership.

He has a web site for this book and other books at www.deepchange.com.

The University of Michigan Ross School of Business iTunes site
has a "seminars" section and a great talk by Robert Quinn can be
downloaded via iTunes fromt here titled "Building the Bridge from Good
to Great".

Professor Quinn presents the case that extraordinary organizations achieve extraordinary results, measured by the bottom line, by using a transformational change that comes about by first transforming the character of the organizations leadership.

Through stories, anecdotes, and exercises, he tries to make these concepts accessible, event though they fly in the face of traditional, highly-competitive theories of how to maximize wealth and productivity of a business organization by setting the managers at each other's throats in a competition to see "who is best."

The leadership style that is consistently found in the highest-performing organizations stresses character, integrity, humility, collaboration, and a leader who is oriented to care first about the organization and second about themself.

Quinn says (page 90):

[...The] fundamental state of leadership is ... the movement towards ever-increased levels of personal and collective integrity. Ever-increasing integrity is the source of life for individuals and groups.... It is the antithesis of slow death...

He goes on to discuss how continual application of this sort of "tough love" can create a collective movement in the organization to a much more empowered and creative state, and how that movement takes on a life of its own that can outlast the person who induced it, possibly even completing its work after the person has left.

He quotes Victor Frankl (1963):

What man needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the stiving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.

Teaching Resources and course Syllabi for various courses are available on-line for free as well.

Free access to previous research presentations in audio format, downloadable to iTunes or whatever you use, are also available.