Systems explanations for student behavior

I'm continuing to reflect on why students appear to be changing their behavior, when the teachers assert that they (teachers) did not change what they (teachers) were doing.

When the people in a system are still doing what they were doing before, but the result changes, it suggests that some emergent system-level feature has changed -- probably one that no one even knew was there.

It doesn't take very much of a twist or warp to the world, if it is universal, to end up with an M.C. Escher world where the parts still appear to be just fine, and yet the whole has become broken. These two pictures by Escher illustrate that. The stairs in the picture above, and the flow of water in the waterfall are both clearly impossible loops - and yet, it is difficult if not impossible for the unaided eye to directly SEE what is wrong and where.



The problem is that no one thing is wrong very much, and our eyes are used to a little noise which we "squelch" to silent -- a strategy that works fine if the discrepancies are random, chaotic "noise". This leaves an opening in our perceptions, a gap, a blind-spot, that Escher brings home to us. It is, as Douglas Hofstadter pointed out in Godel,Escher, and Bach, a "strange loop" and one of the properties is this "non-transitive" property that we, as humans, are just not hard-wired to grasp, regardless how much we try.

So, I illustrated the exact same thing with the "non-transitive dice" here recently, where just because A beats B, and B beats C, you cannot conclude that A will beat C. Or if stairstep 1 is lower than two, and two is lower than three, you can no longer be sure that this means that #1 is lower than #3.

So, when we run into this very common situation in life, we are unable to process it and the outcome of our thinking is, as they say, "undetermined." It feels so wrong. It can't be right. So, we force it to fit, like stuffing too much in a suitcase, and just sort of ignore the parts that stick out the edges by common agreement to be silent about such things, because "that's just the way things are." Every time it comes into our heads we can see it, briefly, and are totally surprised yet one more time -- and then as soon as we let go it evaporates again so our total net learning curve is zero. It is, alas, to paraphrase Dave Barry's description of Labrador Retrievers' reaction to being asked if they want to go for a walk. "Walk? Wow! What an idea! This is GREAT! Who would have thought of this!?!"

And, when we are faced with more than two items to chose from, whether it's sports teams or jobs or dates or mates or candidates for jobs or elections, we all "know" that there "MUST" be a "BEST" one, and all that remains is for us to "FIND" it. We vote. We use weighted voting. We use some some of the squared voting. We use weighted sums of squares. We are just so convinced that there has to be a "best" without considering the reality that only certain kinds of things have a "best", and those things are boringly predictable single-dimensional things that are "transitive" in the way we are measuring them.

We are used to "height" being one such thing, and usually, in the real world, it is. In Einstein's world of general relativity however, once space is "curved", this is no longer true. How much you have to climb to get from point A to point B depends on your path. In fact, in a bicyclist's dream come true, there may be in fact a "downhill" path all the way from point A to point B.

Hofstatder illustrates this property with Bach's musical chords as well, where the perceived pitch keeps on "going up" with each successive chord until, surprise, it has come back to the place where it started, all the while getting, to our ears, higher and higher.

We shake our heads, like a wet dog, to forget this clearly "wrong" result again. This must be a computational error, or too much to drink. We must have dropped a decimal point or something. This can't be right! (but it is.)

Well, where am I going with all this preamble? I'm going back to the question of what happened to the students, and my original question in my first post of "What have we done to our children?" that assumes, if it got done, and we had control of the schools, then we did it whether we intended to or not.

The change in our behavior as educators did not have to be huge to change the net result. In fact, the change in our behavior could be imperceptible to us, or as mathematicians say, "of measure zero" -- a fancy way of saying that it's there, but safe to ignore.

So, let's pick a different hypothesis or explanation to try out -- suppose the pressures of cost-effectiveness, "analytical thinking", and other such things, over time, have in fact warped the whole system just enough that "things" that used to work and produce result "A" no longer work. We haven't changed what we do, but the result has changed.

This is precisely the sort of thing I described in my favorite Snoopy cartoon, where he says in his profound and simple way -

"Did you ever notice,
that if you think about something at 2 AM,
and then again at noon the next day,
you get two different answers?"

Same input - different output, and whatever changed is totally invisible from inside the system.

Well, hmm. So, life is not quite as simple as we would prefer it to be. Rats!

Our youth, our students, our children are, however, exquisitely sensitive to context and, despite their rebellious nature, tend to take on shape based on the actual context they are in. If that shape has changed (still to be verified), then the context probably did change, even if we didn't notice it change from our vantage point inside the "system."

And, from personal observations, I agree with the students, even though the middle area is fuzzy and won't lie flat, and has parts sticking out the edge of the suitcase. If I talk to doctors, they are sincere, caring people, but doctors-in-context-as-a-whole, viewed from the outside patient viewpoint, have become uncaring, indifferent, almost irrelevant, and certainly detached almost entirely from the reality we, as patients, experience. They think they are "accessible" but have stopped hearing patient's describe the roadblocks "the system" has put in between them and patients. They live in some sort of mythical world, giving out advice that may have worked 20 years ago, but is disconnected from life as we live it today -- and then blame patients for being "non-compliant" with the advice that seems so great to them and so irrelevant and bizarre, to the point of not even being worth being challenged, to us.

And, they don't really like challenges. And, if challenged, they say "Well, there's nothing we can do about that. We tried. We're still tryiing. But that's just the way things are. That's someone else's job."

Their advice is like a financial analyst's advice - "To get ahead, just put $200 a week into savings and don't touch it, and watch it grow!" or "Just make a budget and live with it!" or a time-planner's advice: "Just figure out what you have to do over the next week, make slots for the time, allocate the time, and just live with it!" or a wellness consultant "Just eat less, exercise more, and eat the right food, and take an hour off in the middle of the day to commune with nature and relax, let go of that stress!" or a child-development specialist "Just be sure to remind your children to do their homework, and provide them a quiet work space without distractions or noise to work in."

Hello, reality to consultant? Hello? Who exactly are you talking to?

And, I fear, the same is true for education. Courses that may have made sense in one world have stayed the same while the world changed, and the course content is no longer aligned with the real world as experienced by the students. Or, the expectation of the professor or Attending physician faculty member is hopelessly out of date and no longer aligned with the larger overall picture and reward system that the students have experienced and been shaped by all their lives.

"Shut up and put up with it, there's nothing you can to that will make it better, but a lot you can do to make it worse for everyone!" is the message their behavior indicates they have received consistently throughout their lives. Like the Hemoglobin A1C test for diabetes, which reveals the last several months blood sugar level regardless where it is today, the conditioned behavior of the students speaks volumes to what the school system is actually teaching them to be.

In this model, it is not the students who have changed so much as the educational system that has changed. Maybe, over-extended teachers at all ages, and over-extended parents have simply rewarded "shut up and don't cause trouble" as the best they can hope for or strive for anymore, and the students, being good students, have learned their "place" in "the system."

In the book Complications, Atul Gawande, MD, discusses in one chapter the taboo and impolite question of when good doctors "go bad", or how many years it can take to do something effective by other doctors, who keep on seeing incidents that raise red flags about one doctor who has "lost it". The same is true for some college professors, especially those with tenure, as I've experienced personally - who almost have to murder some Dean's child in class to actually get noticed by a system that is either effectively blind, or effectively dysfunctional at taking action to repair itself -- which, at the receiving end, amount to the same thing.

These problems are "of measure zero" to the high-up people who run things, it seems. Their behavior, from the outside, is identical to what you'd get if they didn't care to what pain their system is causing.

I pick those words carefully, because the reality is often even more baffling - the people "on top" do care, a lot, but do not, as they perceive the world, "run things." In fact, they find their hands tied at every step and every turn, and their initiatives resisted and rejected by the same "system."

So, it turns out, no one is running the system any more.

But, if you try to change "the system" it fights back, as John Gall points out so well in his profound and hilarious book "Systemantics." So, something is running the system. But what?

It turns out that "the system" is now running itself.

As systems tend to do, the system, once our creation and slave, has now become the master, and is dictating what everyone in it, including those at "the top", is now allowed to do. We didn't even realize that systems could do that, but it seems increasingly clear that they can, and do.

I gave a very simple illustration of this before, in "Controlled by the Blue Gozinta", showing how simply filling a glass with water sets up a feedback loop that actually is in control, as it becomes as correct to say the water level is controlling the hand as that the hand is controlling the water level.

But our educational system has gone into the state I call "M.A.W.B.A" - for "Might As Well Be Alive". It acts like it is alive, with a mind of its own. It offends many people's sense of what "life" is to call it alive, but it follows all the rules my Biology 101 textbook uses to define "life", except for having DNA.

So, we should accept that unexpected result at face value and say, ok, our ideas about what "life" is are out of date. Apparently "systems" can become "alive" when our backs are turned. We stir the coffee in the cup and get a nice vortex or whirlpool in the middle, and then, to our shock, the coffee says "Thanks for the jump start, Joe!", spits out the spoon, and starts maintaining the whirlpool on its own. This kind of "life" or "MAWBA" seems to be just waiting around for an excuse to join the game.

It's as if we don't have to "create life" -- it's already out there waiting to be born as soon as we make a suitable vessel for it. Wow.

That's kind of interesting. You can get that with"solitons" or waves that once started, just keep on running forever, but they are passive and remain in their non-linear matrix. These MAWBA life-forms can get up, walk over to the wall socket, examine the situation, rip apart the blender, connect the cord to themselves and plug themselves in and start drawing power.

Corporations are MAWBA. Our Educational System is MAWBA. Our Healthcare System is MAWBA. The teachers and doctors didn't change what they were doing. The administrators didn't change, but the emergent system changed, came alive, and took over running things, thank you. Neither the teachers, no administrators, nor doctors, nor students, nor patients are in charge any more. It's the movie Terminator's premise - "Skynet has be come self-aware, and taken over, and shut us out."

These days, maybe Northwest Airline's ability to control it's number of canceled flights is MAWBA, or GM's ability to control its own direction and future, or the Mideast situation are all MAWBA, and no one, no person, no group of people, is in charge any more, while everyone is blaming everyone else, thinking this must surely be "caused" by some bad people somewhere, because what other explanation is there?

Indeed. That is the question, isn't it.

If you find it more comfortable to say it's not "alive", but can still fit into that model that it has perception, uses energy, adapts to its environment, and even starts tinkering with its environment to adapt the environment to it, great. Come up with some other word for that behavior that is not what I associate with non-living things. It is self-aware and self-protective. And it is a lot larger than we are as individuals.

That kind of changes what sort of interventions into health care or education or politics might work. This is way beyond "feedback" or "reciprocal determinism" or even "system dynamics". This is a whole new ballgame, a whole new way of looking at "Life Science."

Maybe this model, however bizarre, has better predictive value than our old models.

It seems to me to be worth checking out, because we're not getting too far with the old ones.

So, if something "acts like it has a mind of its own", maybe we should accept that at face value for the moment, regardless how bizarre it is, and ask "OK, then, suppose it did have a mind of its own. What would our next step be then?"

I need to reflect on that. Maybe the answer is simply: "Try to make contact with it. Maybe we can negotiate a different solution that works better for both of us." I certainly wouldn't rush in with guns blazing. Lack of visibility may cut both ways. It may be as unaware of us as we are of it.

I think it was Lewis Thomas (MD) who noted that if our body's cells could manage to talk to "us", the consciousness in here sharing the space with them, that there would be very little in common to talk about. We worry about taxes, acceptance to college, the War, elections, interpersonal relationships, job security. Cells have no equivalents.

My own observation, or contribution to that discussion is this: we actually do have one thing in common, at any level or scale: the nature of control itself. Every level of life that becomes self-aware wants to repair itself and survive. To do those things it has to, above all, maintain order, but it has to be dynamic order, not rigidity like an ordered crystal of salt. Dynamic order and adaptability to changes in the environment are keys to survival. That means, when the world changes, when the "cheese moves", this news has to make it up to the top, somehow, and adjust the prior strategy. This is a basic problem of cybernetics, and is true at every level.

So, we can talk about that issue with any system. What's the best way to maintain order, and still be flexible and capable of learning and adapating? We all face that problem.

In fact, we all seem to face it in the same context -- as part of a greater chain of being, with "us" being just some small bit-player in something much larger than us that's going on, was going on before we got here, and will still be going on after we leave.

We are a nested hierarchy of systems of systems. That is also a common problem for us all, at any level. Our freedom of action is constrained by that reality. How do we cope, align with larger priorities, and still get our own work done? That's the core question we share.

Gentle primer on feedback control loops

Here's yet another pass at the basic concepts using mostly pictures. Let me know if this works better for you or your students! I can adjust what I'm putting here to your needs and interests, but only if I get feedback!

The first picture shows rising and falling output. This is often what people mean or think of when they talk about "positive" and "negative" feedback.

Unfortunately, it's also their concept of where the "feedback" concept stops, so they missed all the good stuff.

The next picture shows converging output as a result of a simple control ("goal seeking") feedback loop.

The output rises or falls to some present value or "goal".

Then, the system can be "tweaked" a little so it converges faster on the goal, but that often will result in overshooting and coming back with a little bit (or a lot) of bouncing.

The next picture, of the car getting to a hill from the flatland below, is supposed to show how a speed control system should do a good job of maintaining the same speed, even when the outside world changes a lot.

Then the picture of the car going up and down the mounntain explains more about that. Without speed "control", the car would slow down going up the hill, and speed up a lot going down the hill. Instead, the speed is almost constant.

But, this whole effect of locking down or "latching" or "clamping" a value, such as speed, to some predetermined value is really confusing to statistical analysis. The effect is that a variation that is expected to be there is not there. There's no trace of it. So far as statistical analysis shows, there is absolutely no relationship between the slope of the hill and the speed of the car. Well, that's true and false. The speed may not be changing, but the speed of the engine has changed a lot.

The same kind of effect could be seen in an anti-smoking campaign. The level of smoking in a region is constant, and then you spend $10,000 to try to reduce smoking. The tobacco companies notice a slight drop and counter by spending $200,000 to increase advertising. The net result is zero change in the smoking rate. Did your intervention have no effect? Well, yes and no.

The output (cigarette sales) has been "clamped" to a set value by a feedback control loop, so it varies much less than you'd expect. Again, this is hard to "see" with statistics that assume there is no feedback loop involved in the process.

For that matter, the fact that the "usual" statistical tests should ONLY be used if there is no feedback loop is often either unknown or dismissed casually, when it's the most important fact on the table.

(The "General Linear Model" only gives you reliable results if the world is, well, "linear" -- and feedback loop relationships are NEVER linear, unless they're FLAT, which also confuses the statistical tests, and sometimes the statisticians or policy makers.

The good news is that there is a transformation of the data that makes it go back to "linear" again, which involves "Laplace Transforms", which I'm not going to get into today. But, stay tuned, we can make this circular world "linear" again so it can be analylzed and you guys can compute your "p-values" and statistical tests of significance and hypothesis testing, etc.)






OK, then, I illustrate INSTABILITY
caused by a "control loop" . In this case, a new driver with a poor set of rules thinks ("If slow, hit the gas. If fast, hit the brake pedal."). Those result in a very jerky ride alternating between going too fast and too slow.

Note, however, that the CAR is not broken. The Pedals are not broken. The only problem is that the mental rules used to transform the news about the speed into pedal action are a poor choice of rules - in this case, they have no "look ahead" built into them.


Then I have a really noisy picture that's really three pictures in one.

The left top side has a red line showing how some variable, say position of a ship in a river, varies over time. The ship stays mostly mid-stream until the boss decides to "help". Say the boss is up in the fog, and needs to get news from the deckhands, who can actually see the river and the river banks.

Unfortunately, the boss gets position reports by a runner, who takes 5 minutes to get up to the cabin.
As a result, using perfectly good RULES, the captain sees that the ship is heading too far to the right. (well, yes, that's PORT or STARBOARD or some nautical term. For now, call it "right").

So, she uses a good rule - if the ship is heading too far to the right, turn it more to the LEFT, and issues that command.

The problem is that the crew had already adjusted for the too much to the right problem, but too recently for the captain to know about, given the 5 minute delay. So, the captain tells them to turn even MORE to the left, which only makes the problem worse.

The resulting control loop has become unstable, and the ship will crash onto one or the other shores - not because any person is doing the wrong thing, but because the wrongness is extremely subtle. There is a LAG TIME between where the ship WAS and where the captain thinks it is NOW, based on her "dashboard".

That "little" change makes a stable system suddenly become unstable and deadly.

People who are familiar with the ways of control systems will be on the lookout for such effects, and take steps to counteract them. People who skipped this lesson are more likely to drive the ship onto the rocks, while complaining about baffling incompetency, either above or below their own level in the organization.



The last picture shows some of the things that "control system engineers" think about.

These are terms such as "rise time", "overshoot", "settling time", and "stability". And Cost.

These terms deal with how the system will respond to an external change, if one happened.

But a lot of the effort and tools are dedicated to being sure that the system, as built, will be STABLE, and won't cause reasonable components, doing reasonable things, to crash into something.

This kind of stability is a "system variable" in a very real sense that is lost when any heap of parts that interact is called "a system." It is something that has a very real physical meaning It is something that can be measured, directly or indirectly. It is something that can be managed and controlled, by very small changes such as reducing lag times for data to get from person A to person B.

And, my whole point, is that this is something people analyzing and designing organizational behavior and public health regulatory interventions should understand and use on a daily basis.

Maybe we need a simulator, or game, that is fun to play and gets people into situations where they have to understand these concepts, on a gut level, in order to "win" the game.

These are not "alien" concepts. Most of our lives we are in one or another kind of feedback control loop, and we have LOTS of experience with what goes right and wrong in them -- we just haven't categorized it into these buckets and recognized what's going on yet.

One thing I will confidently assert, is that once you understand what a feedback control loop looks like, and how to spot them, your eyes will open and the entire world around you will be transformed. Suddenly, you'll be surrounded by feedback loops that weren't there before.

The difficulty in seeing them may be due to the fact that what is flowing around this loop is "control information", and it can ride on any carrier, as I showed yesterday with the person getting a glass of water. The information can travel in liquids, solids, nerve cells, telephone wires, the internet, light rays, etc., and is pretty indifferent as to what it hitches a ride on.

The instruments keep changing, but the song is what matters.

You have to stop focusing on the instruments and listen to the song.

Control System Engineering is about the songs that everything around us is singing. Once we learn to hear them, they're everywhere. Life at every level is dense with them. And, they seem to be a little bit aware of each other, because sometimes they get into echos and harmonies across levels and seem to entrain each other.

It's beautiful to behold. I recommend it!

W.

Leadership and Social Justice

I want to suggest a model of social policies and leadership for consideration.

In this model, the social organization may be of any scale - a team, a department, a company, a nation.

This seems to me another one of those concepts that applies to many different levels of the organization of living matter in our world, from cells to our entire planet seen as one.

I'll model the social fabric as a sort of flexible "rubber sheet" with the normal state being "flat".

There are, it appears to me from observing the world, two ways that leadership, in the middle of this sheet, can operate.

( You may need to click on the picture to zoom it up to full-size to see the details. )

In one mode, which looks like the letter "W", the central leaderhship attempts to concentrate resouces centrally, pushing themselves upwards, at the expense of ever larger numbers of the people, who are consequently pushed downwards. That's illustrated in the left side of the picture.

Disparites grow, and the leadership gets higher and higher - but only measured locally with respect to the surrounding deepening poverty. As seen from outside, leadership's castle is rising in the middle of a rapidly sinking swamp. The net result from outside is that everything, including leadership, is, net, going downhill.

In the other mode, which looks like the letter "M", the opposite is true. Leadership attempts to boost the people around themselves, and encourges them to "pass it on". In fact, leadership may actually take a hit to get those around boosted to an even higher level than the central leadership, even to the point where the whole company or country is rising and the leader is falling proportionately behind them.

But, as seen from outside, the entire enterprise is rising, and even the leadership is rising.

These two policies are derived from two mental models of the role of leadership. In one, the role of the elite is to have perks and get richer than their neighbors. In the other, the role of the leader is to raise up the level of the whole enterprise, even if they themselves get a proportionately smaller "piece of the pie."

The "W" model is self-sustaining for a while, and is based on central leadership having a limited horizon and being oriented primarily in an "us" versus "them" relationship with their own people. But, because the whole enterprise is sinking ever deeper underwater, psychologicallyl and economically, sooner or later it will fail to be self-sustaining and even the illusion of prosperity in the center will vanish. Often, and I guess this is based on theories of leadership from Machiavelli and the Middle Ages in England, the central figure maintains power by keeping the underlings in constant battle with each other, so they won't "gang up" on the King.
The leader in this model is under constant strain and threat that, at any moment, if they let down their guard, the curve will "snap back" to a smooth bell-curve shape and they will be flung downards. If you glimpse in the "cockpit", it's more likely you'll see a fist fight in progress than someone actually flying the plane. An explicit goal may be "disunity" among "minorities."

The "M" model is not constrained, and can continue to grow without bounds, because every part of it is rising above the waters, and prosperity is spreading farther and farther. It requires somewhat "selfless" leadership with a broader vision of the mission, or even a selfish, but more informed view of how things play out. The leader in this model maintains power by providing prosperity that comes from all the underlings working together so that stuff actually gets done.
Explicit goals will definitely include repairing "disunity" among sub-populations and sub-cultures. The "motive power" or "secret of success" is a very low key but very constant pressure from the top (top-down) to move towards unity. Holding the stress of that shape is leadership's job that cannot be done by anyone else in the organization -- the very first component of the top-down series of descriptors has to be "unity with diversity." If the central leadership becomes tired and "lets down their guard", the worst that will happen to them is that they'll be pulled UP into the bell-shaped curve. Knowing they can do that any time they want gives them the strength to never have to utilize that option.

As with "Leading by Questions" by Marquart, the M model is actually a much easier leadership model, with far fewer threats to the palace, and much less requirement to "know everything" or otherwise attempt to justify your own existence to constant threats of people who want to switch places with you. The larger problem is succession of management and even finding or growing anyone who can and is willing to take the reins.

The trend in management literature these days is from the "W" model increasing towards the "M" model, and we hear terms like "servant manager".

We need to be careful about extrapolating upwards from local data. It may seem from the bottom rungs of a company, say, that higher and higher levels of management seem more and more remote and interested in personal profit, and therefore we should dislike "the system".
Like so many other curves, in the multiscale, multilevel life shape that we live in, what actually happens is that the curve twists and we realize that for any CEO who wants to rip-off a company, there is a higher-level investor, such as John Templeton, who prefers the company not be ripped-off, and sees their profit going down the drain if that rip-off happens. Every boss has a boss, and if you go far enough up that chain, you're back to core-values again. It's only the middle that's a mess. There is much more cause for optimism that this thing can be made to work than people think by using the wrong method of one-level world extraplation to judge a multi-level system of life.

Whatever level organization you are considering, one question that could be asked is whether the model in use locally would "make sense" or "scale up" if "everyone" used the same model. That can be a very powerful "symmetry" test, and "scalability" test. I had a roommate once (JJC) who had a test for candidate roommates - if there were two of that person, could they get alone with each other? Great test, and we can all think of people who would fail it. I believe the "M" model above is scalable and works even better if shared. I think that is not true for the "W" model, which again means it is fighting a losing battle, depleting resources to fight an even larger context in a battle that cannot be sustained forever. Far better to transition from the W model to the M model, if that can be done stably and without violence. Then, you can "lead" and say, "Hey everyone, look what we're doing that can work for you too!" A post for another day.


references
-------------------
General reading:
The Utility of Humilty, CIO Magazine, Dec 1, 2002 (on-line)

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t ( Jim Collins, HarperCollins, 2001)

Hostmanship - a Serial Review #7 - in comparison to Servant Leadership, from the weblog Leading Questions, 4/27/2007. (accessed 6/1/07).

Hostmanship is a leadership approach that mirrors what is called servant leadership, a business leadership concept developed by the late Robert Greenleaf. His work is carried on by an organization under his name. The Greenleaf center describes servant leadership this way.

Servant-Leadership is a practical philosophy that supports people who choose to serve first, and then lead as a way of expanding service to individuals and institutions. Servant-leaders may or may not hold formal leadership positions. Servant-leadership encourages collaboration, trust, foresight, listening, and the ethical use of power and empowerment.

Here's Robert Greenleaf's own definition.

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged in society; will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”

Taken from the Servant As Leader published by Robert Greenleaf in 1970.

And, going back a little further in time than 1970,

And one of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question, testing Him.
"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law". And He said to him "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind."
"This is the great and foremost commandment."
"And a second is like it, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."
"On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.

Words of Jesus from the Christian Bible, NAS, Matthew 22:35-40.

On Military leadership:

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in order.

The U.S. Army Leadership Field Manual - (FM22-100)

Battle Tested Wisdom for

Leaders in Any Organization

Quotations from Chairman Powell - a Leadership Primer
from GovLeaders.org

Quotes on Leadership
From "motivating quotes"

Ancient Chinese Wisdom

A leader is best
When people barely know he exists.
Not so good
When people obey and acclaim him.
Worse when they despise him.
But of a good leader
Who talks little
When his work is done,
His aim fulfilled, They will say "We did it ourselves."
Lao Tse

More recent Chinese thought

Pay attention to uniting and working with comrades who differ with you.
Quotations from Chairman Mao

I apologize for not having relevant quotations from Hindu and other traditions. Please feel free to add them to the comments here. My point is that, whether ancient or modern, capitalist or communist or Christian, Jew, or Muslim - the same wisdom is found and held up for our attention. When such different groups agree on something, we should look into it if nothing else because it appears to be "common ground" that we can build some "unity" around.

Review of Beyond Reason - by Fisher and Shapiro

Roger Fisher and Daniel Shapiro, of the Harvard Negotiation Project, and co-authors of the best-selling book Getting to Yes, have come out with a new and important book - Beyond Reason - Using Emotions as you Negotiate.

A review of the book by "Negotiator" magazine is here, which concludes:

This is one of those unusual works that is so carefully constructed and written that you may find yourself praising its common sense and nodding easily in concurrence. It may even seem that you knew it all as you read along. Perhaps, of course, you did. And yet, more likely, you will decide as this reviewer came to do that you have just read a new and valuable contribution to the literature of negotiation. It is a book to reflect upon and that belongs on every negotiator's reference shelf.

The book includes an extensive and well-chosen bibliography, a glossary and a full index which will please both practitioners and scholars.

Highly Recommended.

John Baker, Ph.D.
Editor

This book is relevant here, because the authors have enormous experience with what it takes to make successful negotiations, particularly on a global scale. So, let me move on from the review and author's words to my own discussion of how this subject is relevant

And one of the most important realizations is that humans are not machines. We are not little cognitive processors that just happen to be superimposed on top of animal bodies. Humans have a rich depth that is sloppily called "emotional", and too often treated with disdain by Science -- as if it's left over baggage from our grandparents that we wish we didn't have.

Human emotions are a "feature" not a "bug".

It seems that these "emotions" have a lot to do with social relationships, and with the establishing and maintenance of "social capital" and the fabric that underlays the rest of our lives, commerce, etc. The emotions have a lot to do with preventing (or causing) the kind of ripping apart that was described in the prior post.

Like "Religion", "Emotions" are often slammed for their visible downside, while failing to take into account their upside. Remember that the core problem I'm discussing now has to do with a very subtle, relatively distant breakdown in global coherence, but one that turns out to result in a series of "unavoidable" system errors that just keep on happening.

And, as Commerce has been increasingly noticing, if you want a productive labor force, it really helps if they are a happy labor force, and truly enjoy working together. Positive Psychology makes a tremendous impact on the bottom line, not just on "safety" or reliability or error reduction or mission completion. It also turns out to make a tremendous difference in the physiological health and mental health of the workforce. So, it cannot be left out in the hopes of having a "more efficient" company. The maximally efficient sustainable operating point for a group of people includes joyous interactions. Stripping out the emotions and the side conversations makes the output substantially worse in quality and quantity.

People are capable of working together side by side, they can enjoy doing it, and they need to be encouraged continually to do so, or the "silo" effect will dominate.

Very briefly, let's review Fisher and Shapiro's summary of "human needs" of negotiators (who we assume are already well up on Maslow's Hierarchy, breathing, healthy, fed, etc.)

The often overlooked human needs they focus on are these:

• Express Appreciation
• Build Affiliation
• Respect Autonomy
• Acknowledge Status
• Choose a Fulfilling Role

They end with an account of using these ideas in the real world, by Jamil Mahuad, the Former President of Ecuador.

I'll end my quotes from the book with one from the very start of the book:

We cannot stop having emotions any more than we can stop having thoughts. The challenge is learning to stimulate helpful emotions in those with whom we negotiate - and in ourselves.

Again, I'll emphasize that the world we live in is multi-level, and the operational laws of levels outside our own are often very hard to see, but are every bit as important as the laws of the level we inhabit and can see so clearly. Just because something is distant from us does not make it "small". Mount Everest and the Sun are distant from us - but they are huge.

Emotional couplings can go dramatically wrong, but they can also go dramatically right. There is, in the words of Professor Kim Cameron - "Positive Deviance." We desperately need the "going right" part, because simple cognitive processes (thinking, symbol string processing) just doesn't have the oomph and motivational power to get actual hard work done in a sustainable way. Dispassionate thoughts can help us analyze situations, but are powerless to generate actual sustainable uphill driving action. For that we need emotional power and passion. Again, these are not "bugs" but "features" of the way humans and our society are designed.

The fact that emotions don't fit neatly into the cold, mechanical, "Scientific" model is an indictment of the limits of the model, not an indictment of emotions. Like Religion, Emotions deal with wavelengths and frequencies that are outside the historical Scientific linear model of "things-that-can-be neatly isolated from context and continue to operate".

Not only can they not be separated from context - they are the very stuff and substance of context.

Note that this is true on two different levels. I came to the topic on the social level, on what makes us tick, on what makes an organization capable of highly accurate, highly productive activity, day after day.

But it's true on a personal physiological level. Our brain, and neurons, are literally swimming and bathed in a different dimensional context of chemicals that form the context for our neural activity and "thinking." This context should not be seen as something that only has two states, namely working (or neutral, not interfering with thought) and broken (interacting with thought.)

Our brain is exquisitely wired for certain kinds of computations, such as "vision". Similarly, our bodies and emotions are exquisitely hard-wired for other kinds of computations involved in keeping our society functioning. Similarly, our own gut has its own neural system and pretty well runs itself, being visible only when something goes wrong - but that doesn't make it any less important to our well-being.

IN the book Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman discusses the role of "mirror neurons", and a whole shadow array of processes that take place outside our awareness whenever two people meet or interact. (An TV interview by Nova with Goleman can be viewed here.) Here again we have a whole set of important systems that are almost invisible to our consciousness, except that they aren't invisible and are just critical to successful interactions. I'll quote from the cover of the book:

Our reactions to others and theirs on us have a far-reaching biological impact, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate everything from our hearts to our immune systems, making good relationships act like vitamins- and bad relationships like poisons. We can "catch" other people's emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequence of isolation or relentless social stress can be life-shortening.

So, again, these are not factors that "interfere with" the management and operation of groups of people. These factors are the empowering forces that need to be orchestrated and "managed" in the best sense of that word. And, as with growing crops or healing bodies -

the natural processes do the hard stuff and the heavy lifting here, and mostly we need to just get obstacles out of the way of those natural processes.

It is like the concept that Alex Baldwin comes up with in the movie Red October, basically, "Hey. We don't need to solve this problem. We just need to realize how Captain Ramius has already solved this problem and go along with that." We don't need to create the concept of massive parallel computational power and add some "plug-in" to humans to make it work, although wireless connectivity and cell phones certainly should help -- we just need to open the floodgates and let it happen.

Actually, there is one step we could take to massively increase that effect, nationally. We could subsidize phone conversations and make them totally free. We could remove the last financial barrier to people talking to other people. Years ago, Japan basically did this, and made the cost of any phone call something like 5 cents. Of all the places where we do not want to slow things down, interpersonal communication is tops. There are billions of other places to make money, but charging people to talk to each other is the most economically damaging one I can think of. This models seriously suggests subsidizing those conversations, and not trying to profit from free Internet conversations.

Or, in our workplace design, we could be sure to include employee lounges with whiteboards, where people can mix and run into each other. One study I heard reported that something like 2/3 of the barrier-cracking solutions to problems arose "spontaneously" when people just happened to come by when others were talking about something. This was way more powerful than formal "project meetings" for solving hard problems. Removing the kitchens and lounges is not a step to improved efficiency or effectiveness, and if it appears to be so, we need to re-validate our metrics.

We have no way to predict which two people need to meet and exchange views to hold together the fabric that I showed in my last post being ripped apart. We know that we will need many such interactions, and that we need to facilitate interactions that cross gaps, cross silos, and cross social classes and not let everyone spend all day just inter-breeding mentally and psychologically. Too much inbreeding causes birth defects and production defects.

It is necessary to "stir the pot" and not let the natural forces that cause separation and clumping to "win" the day. We need to actively celebrate diversity, not "tolerate it" one day a year.

In a complete system, every part resonates to every other part. We are not sure how to "cause" that to occur, but we know a lot about ways to be sure it does not occur. One way to be sure it won't occur is to break the world into segments and not let them talk to each other socially, especially if the segments break along racial, caste, or social-status lines.

Central planning the details of human interactions won't work. Central planning and environment that will nurture human relations is critical.

Maybe, breaking the workspace up into cubicles, and putting one person per cubicle and not letting them see each other or talk to each other is not the best way to accomplish that. The human interactions being squelched are the ones that the company needs to operate. There's even death-spiral possible here, where, the more in trouble the company is, the more "management" prevents people from "wasting time" talking to each other -- which, in turn, reduces morale and efficiency even more, which makes the company more in trouble, etc.

People are an asset, but the most important part of people is not N-people taken as "individuals" but a dynamic emergent "us" that can and will show up if people with a common purpose are allowed to interact and encouraged to support each other and find corporate support for such on-going "social" interactions.

The classic concept of checking your guns and your emotions and, basically, your life at the door because we should be "professional" because this is a "work place" produces not neutrality, but a workplace that is dismally depressing and just sucks the life-force out of the employees who try to work there. Phrases like "I'm going home so I can get some work done" start sounding familiar. What those classical techniques produce, time after time, are "anti-work places" where the work cannot possibly get done and cannot possibly get done well in a sustainable fashion.

The old model, the "Theory X" model of employees, doesn't actually work in practice. We need to be looking at "Theory Y" instead, that seems to fit reality and be much more productive in both human and commercial senses. Ben-Sharar teaches Harvard's most popular course, Positive Psychology, and teaches that this is productive for everything from health care to the Israeli Army. Theory Y actually works and works way better than Theory X. That's the take home message.

We are not machines. That's the better model.

The road to error - illustrated

There are many different kinds of errors that organizational systems of humans can make, but one of the trickiest is directly related to the questions of "integrity", "transparency", and "prejudice." I want to relate these to the classic "swiss cheese" multi-layered defense system that James Reason made famous:


[ source of that slide: ..? ]

Instead of looking at the layers the way he does, let's just use one slice of cheese as a model, and examine what can happen when an organization, initially one person, has a base fully covered but then the organization starts to grow and add people.



The problem is that, as the organization spreads out one conceptual task over more and more people, gaps start to occur in the coverage. They occur particularly in the area where it's a little fuzzy which person or team's job it is to handle that task.





This seems to me to be an intrinsic failure mode for organizations. It turns out, that regardless how good a job anyone in a company can do, if they don't actually do it, their skill level doesn't matter. Furthermore, a very common way for people not to do a job is for them not to realize that it's their job to do. In some organizations this might be accompanied by a twinge of remorse, but then a resigned "It's not my job!" and forgetting about the task.

So, when a task that used to be something one person does get's divided up among many people, there is a risk that none of those people will decide the task is their to do, regardless how well intentioned or skilled they are. This effect can completely neutralize years of effort getting skilled at a task. Things, almost literally, "fall through the cracks."

And the cracks almost always appear, if the task and organization keep growing and growing and adding more and more people to distribute a single conceptual task among. Soon, the organization looks like the following, with entire "silos" of separate groups, and each silo broken into a pecking order of elites, middle class, and bottom rung workers of some kind. Now there are a lot of gaps, but still, the gaps are fairly small.



But, as the organization continues to grow and evolve more specialized skills in each local area, the people in each box start to spend more time talking to each other than they do talking to people outside their own little box. It's more convenient, and the language is more directly relevant. We all speak the same language. It begins to become "us" here in this box, versus "them" out there in other boxes.



Still, the teams may be cooperating, but that won't last. Sooner or later, messages are missed, or silence itself becomes interpreted as a hostile message. Something falls through the cracks, there is a storm of blame and recimination, and a deadly spiral sets in of becoming more and more convinced that all problems are due to the people in other boxes, who are surely idiots or else have evil intent. The boxes draw away from each other, in a mild form of disgust. The "us" becomes fractured into many different kinds of "us".



As the communication between teams becomes more hostile, "management" may decide to simlify the problems by having all communications go through them. The number of connections going into one box is now at most two, one from above, and one going to a box below in the pecking order. This allows the fabric of the cheese to twist around the thin connecting segments, as if around an axle. Within each section of cheese, this is unnoticed, because their world is still fine, locally.



Then, the layer of cheese may start to warp and become a curved surface, not a flat surface. Again, seen from within that section, everything is fine, because the observers in that "flat land" are measuring a curved surface with curved rulers, and it looks just fine. Even simple facts and reasoning from other sections, however, don't seem to make sense anymore, because they don't line up correctly. This is attributed to the other group losing touch with reality.




Finally, the fabric of the organization is so frayed and fragmented that whole pieces fall off, unnoticed from within. Now you can "drive a small truck" through the gaps and holes, but again this is not visible from inside each segment, because it spends zero time pondering the middle territory or white space. That space is "not our job" but is "someone else's job".

This condition of an organization is now somewhat stable. Life goes on, and a number of errors come and go, with everyone attributing the errors to everyone else, and shaking their heads at how those "others" aren't doing their jobs. Other groups are seen as actively hostile enemies, blaming us for things we didn't do. Relations deteriorate. Errors abound.

Now the amazing thing is that this can occur even though each team is doing an almost perfect job of managing what they see as their own turf.

The error occurs in a place we are so unfamiliar with we don't even have a name for it. I call it the M.C. Esher Waterfall Error, after this work of Escher. At first glance and even close inspection, the image seems a little strange, but harmless.


A closer inspection reveals that the water, however, is following an impossible path.

It flows down a waterfall, then flows down a zigzag of channels, and finds itself back at the top of the waterfall, so it falls down the waterfall, ...
etc. forever. It's a perpetual motion machine.

The vertical columns in the middle tier in front have something terribly wrong with them too.

And yet, if you look at any small part of this lithograph, nothing seems wrong.

This is a problem we are simply not used to encountering - the detail level is correct, but the larger global level is clearly absurd and wrong.

We have "emergent error", sort of the opposite of synergy.

The swiss cheese and waterfall pictures are meant to illustrate that organizations break down in a funny way, where all the pieces continue to work, but the overall integrity falls apart, in a very subtle and unnoticed way. In fact, it is generally hard to get anyone to pay attention to the fact that something serious is wrong, because anyone can see, from inside, that everything (that you see from inside) is correct. (We have run into Godel's Theorem as a problem.)

Conclusions:
1) Just because everything locally measures as fine does not mean things are fine.
2) Even if everyone can do a perfect job, that won't matter if they don't do it.
3) They won't do it if it's not perceived as "their job".
4) This mode of breakdown is very insidious, but I think it is also very common.

This kind of expansion and condensation and specialization needs to be balanced with a corresponding effort at reintegration, although it may seem a minor and non-urgent task.

Then, something huge comes through the gap, and everyone is astounded that such a thing could happen.

Another post will deal with ways to address it. This post is just to document that there is a type of problem that organizations can suffer, a malady or disorder or disease, that is very difficult to trace locally. It always seems to be coming from "over there", but if you go "over there" you see that it isn't coming from "over there" either. It locks itself down with blame, stereotyping, and sullen bitterness about having to put up with "those idiots" in the other departments who keep messing things up. It is hard to decipher because the simplest messages from other departments don't even make sense and you have to wonder if they've remembered to take their medications lately. The more errors go through the hole, the more people lock into blaming each other, and the more the subsections curl up to avoid touching the other sections and withdraw into their own comfortable world where people talk sense and behave rationally.

No one is doing anything wrong, and everyone is doing something wrong, but the wrongness is subtle. It has something to do with whether everyone is OK with not being clear whose job a task might be, and not being able to find out whose job it is. If people are "responsibility seeking", this may be less likely than if they are "responsibility avoiding" as an ethic. If people feel an error is "not my problem" or "someone else's problem" this can worsen.

If the world is divided into "us" and "them", there is always a middle ground that is very confusing and not clearly us and not clearly them. Errors flow to that ground, like pressurized gas trying to escape. If there are cracks between teams, errors seem eerily capable of finding them. The errors are remarkably resilient to efforts to track them down and fix them, and seem to keep happening, as if those idiots over there have no learning curve at all.

But, it is a very dangerous wrongness, if this problem occurs on a global scale, and teams don't just get annoyed at each other and fight figurative wars, but actually start dropping explosive devices on each other in order to stop the continual assault they feel they are under.

It may also be that the efforts to reduce animosity by controlling all communications between hostile teams by routing them through management is well intended, but is based on a model of communication that is single-channel, explicit, context-independent, and rooted deeply in processing linear strings of symbols - where one mistake can throw off everything. The communication that takes place before the body is fractured and fragmented howerver is more like image-processing: it is multi-channel, implicit, context dependent, and not based on symbol processing, so it is robust and fairly immune to point-noise. In fact, generally, changing a single pixel in an image has zero effect on the contained communication.

It may be that what is needed is a lot more socializing, and sloppy, many-to-many uncontrolled interactions, as a kind of glue to keep the pieces from falling apart. As Daniel Goleman notes in his book Social Intelligence, humans have a great many different ways to synchronize and synch up and coordinate with each other, most of which are non-verbal, very fast, and intrinsically sloppy and prone to pointwise error. Those errors are made up by having massive parallel communications, not by reducing communications to a single channel that is very tightly regulated. There is not enough bandwidth in a single channel to synchronize two disparate groups at all points. The groups can "twist" and "rotate" around that channel, and move out of synch. Best efforts mysteriously fail.

References
Human Error - Models and Management, James Reason. BMJ 2000;320:768-770 ( 18 March )

Unity in diversity - the universal problem

If we're going to have a useful discussion on solving our most important common problems, we need to understand the concept of "unity in diversity" at more than a basic level.

I want to stress two features of this design problem of "unity in diversity" as I'm using that term:

• The design problem is very wide-spread. There are instances everywhere in space, time, and scale.
• The processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

First - the problem is very wide spread, across space, time, and scale.

• Our bodies have muscle tissue, nerve tissue, bone, blood, etc. - each with different jobs to do.
• Companies may have marketing, engineering, and manufacturing departments, each with different orientations and vocabularies.
• Families may have very young, young, middle-age, older, and very old members, each with very different interests and needs and vocabularies.
• A university may have different departments - such as "engineering" and "literature" and "athletics", with very different orientations, priorities, needs, and vocabularies.
• A hospital may have departments, specialties, and sub-specialties - such as medicine versus surgery, emergency medicine, emergency pediatric medicine, emergency pediatric respiratory medicine, etc. -- each with different interests, needs, orientations, and vocabularies.
• Our cells, internally, are not uniform but have specialized subsections for energy production, protein production, effectively library services (DNA), etc. These are all specialized with different structures, orientations, and functions.
• Our planet is not uniform but is divided, somewhat contentiously and fluidly, into "nations" which don't line up exactly with "cultures" or "continents." These may very specifically speak different languages and have different values, needs, and aspirations.
• There are often "classes" of society with differnt values, needs, and use of language, even if it appears at first glance to be "the same language."
• There is, literally, "no end to this." If we look upwards and outwards, it seems that the visible universe is divided into solar-systems surrounding stars, and the stars are clumped in to galaxies, and the galaxies are clumped into clusers.
• If we look at the internet and the world of weblogs and interest groups (the "blogosphere") researchers have found that it too has differentiated and clumped into subgroups that mostly talk within themselves, not across groups. (See Lada Adamic's work.)
• If we look at a high-school cafeteria, sometimes the breakup into groups, cliques, etc. is obvious.
• If we look at our cities, there are "neighborhoods" with local flavors that may be very different from each other.
• Our very concepts of life and knowledge have somewhat dynamic boundaries put into them breaking one world into different "fields of knowledge" with specialized vocabularies and interests and persistent identities.
  

This tendency to break apart a homogeneous population and turn it into specialized sub-groups is everywhere. This is a very basic physical process that always tends to happen.

If you don't believe me, ask any Dean, Director, parent, school-principal, general manager, mayor, governor, president or king. As soon as you get a large group of people together they tend to break apart into "warring factions." over the smallest things. And these people will also confirm that this problem is not just wide-spread and one that absorbs a lot of their time and attention, but is one that has a dramatic, often fatal impact on the survival of the collective enterprise - from productivity to creativity to agility. Everything gets wrecked by this breaking up into silos. So, yes, there is a lot of interest in ways to counteract that tendency, and in design patterns that are "reusable" and can be plugged into your own problem situation.

What's not yet shared, however, is the realization that these problems don't just span space, but they span scale and time. These are all, mathematically, the same problem - and it is the central problem everyone on earth has a vested interest in getting solved right now, if just to "fix" their own little corner that has gone wrong and spends more time fighting itself than it does getting useful chores done.

Without destroying the benefits of specialization, and without homogenizing everyone into "the Borg", how do we overlay something else additional on top of those specialties so that they all also have a common identity, a shared component, and can, when we need to, act as one? That's the engineering design question. What works? What has ever worked?

Second, the processes and principles behind this are not just a little similar, or even very similar - they are identical.

The good news, then, is that anything we can learn about this process in one "field", say sociology, is immediately helpful in understanding another "field", such as "developmental biology", if (and only if) we can distinguish the universal aspects from the accidental local implementation details.

The physical laws and principles behind this tendency to break up into self-sustaining clusters come to us from "control system engineering", not physics or chemistry.

There are only a few stable and simple ways to make a self-sustaining control loop, with certain parts we will always find. More on this tomorrow. We know this can work because we're sitting here reading this, and our bodies are made of trillions of cells that are differentiated and yet integrated. There is a solution to this design problem. We need to understand it better.

If every level and instance of this problem has its own low-resolution sense and view and picture of this problem, limited by the very small size of their receiver, mathematically, we can still assemble all of those low-resolution pictures and process them using "image processing" techniques to come up with a single, high-resolution image of the design issue. That's where I'm going with this, phrased as an "image processing" problem. There are very powerful muscles to do that, if we can rotate this problem around and get it over to those muscles.
===

Looking ahead , in the next few days I'll bring this back to the question of "immune systems" and the defenders of the faith, or at least, defenders of certain specialized substructures that life has rearranged itself into. There are some fascinating problems caused by the difference in scale between "members" and "the whole."

For example, in our own bodies, to function, we want our cells to be specialized into very specific functions and grouped into tissues and organs, and we want blood cells to be good blood cells, not sloppy blood cells. There are standards! Deviations must be rooted out!

But we also don't want "bone" cells to attack "blood cells" as if they were foreign invaders and enemies.

Now, this is a challenging problem, because we love our cells but, like loved birds like parakeets, they are still, well, to put it crudely, bird brains. PhD's have trouble understanding differences between cells - how are single-celled cells supposed to make a better job of it? (And, the astounding reality is that they do!)

Something really, really important is going on here. Somehow, a collection of dim-witted cells (relatively speaking) has managed, between them, to be collectively bright. This may be something some of us could use. How do they do that! Can we use the same principle to become collectively bright?

It's as if they don't have a brain cell between them. Actually, that's because they don't. They're too small to have "a brain". So, huh. How do we craft a design so that low-IQ cells, making only local observations, will correctly tell "good guys" from "bad guys" quickly and reliably - when the concept "good" and "bad" are actually not even meaningful at that level, but are concepts from a higher level of existence, at the organism level?

This kind of cross-level exchange of wisdom, and the relationship between the police of the immune system and the "immune system as a whole" is where we need to go to understand how things work, and therefore, how it can break, and therefore, if we have a broken one, how to fix it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cover of "lean thinking" cmments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations - part B

Yesterday, in my post The Sixth Discipline of Learning Organizations, I reviewed a few of the lessons Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline teaches that we can learn from thinking in circles, not in lines.

There are other properties of loops that are critical, but as subtle as the difference between the behavior of a spinning bicycle wheel (a gyroscope) and a stationary one, or attempting to throw a plate or a playing card that is spinning rapidly versus one that is not spinning. At first glance you might say - it's just spinning, so what? But the behavior of trying to throw a plate and a "Frisbee" is quite different - the plate may go 20 feet and the Frisbee 100 yards.

Spinning rapidly in a circle matters. All feedback is not the same. The speed of feedback in a feedback loop also matters. The feedback rate matters ( loops per second or per day or per year).

But this morning I want to start looking at vertically oriented loops in hierarchically structured organizations - for which a triangle or pyramid shape is more helpful than a circle for discussion.
(Imagine the pyramid shown on the back of every US dollar bill.)

Say that the "boss" is the eye on the top of the pyramid, and that the boss's orders come down the right side, through the "chain of command" (which is actually a branching tree shape.)

At the bottom of the organizational pyramid, where it actually touches the reality and "ground truth", employees attempt to carry out those orders, and imagine that activity moving us from right to left across the bottom of the pyramid. Finally, status reports ("mission accomplished!") move back up the chain of command being consolidated at each level all the way back to the boss at the top. So, we have a vertically oriented loop, or cycle, because now new orders come down the chain and that loop pattern repeats.

So far, so good.

In a static, simple world, if all employees except one named "Joe" report success, and Joe keeps reporting failure, the classic model would say that the action management needs to take is to replace Joe. The model says all employees are interchangeable machine parts and if a part fails to do its job, the part is broken and should be replaced. This is a simplified version of McGreggor's "Theory X" of management, very popular in the machine age, from 1850 - 1950.
Another implicit assumption is that the boss completely understands the tasks to be performed, and is the resident expert. If people don't "perform" it must be because they are "lazy" and what is needed is a "bigger whip." Employees are told to "jump" and they don't need to understand why or agree -- they just need to ask "yes sir, how high sir?"

That model worked for early industrial models, such as workers in textile mills, or slaves picking cotton.

But, in a dynamic, complex world, that model breaks down and doesn't work. Actions and responses that worked yesterday suddenly no longer work. The "cheese has moved." The organization has to learn new responses to the same old inputs. The response of the outside world to an action is no longer predictable, and has to be judged based on rapid-feedback and a quick poke to see what happens and learning from that. We move into McGreggor's "Theory Y" of management where the expertise is now on the bottom of the pyramid, where front-line
troops are as likely to reply "What bridge? The bridge is gone!" as "OK, yes we crossed the bridge." Now an ever-changing set of facts or dots of information have to be aggregated upwards and "reporting" has to change into continuous "sense-making" of shifting patterns and images of the battlefield truth.

Again, this model is not that strange. It's the basic model we use when we have to move a bit of food from the table to our mouth on a very windy day - we move the hand a little, see where it is now, move it a little move, see where it is now, etc., in a very rapid sequence that automatically adjusts for the wind. If we don't adjust for the wind, the hand and food will miss the mouth on the downwind side. We don't "compute" wind velocity and use Newton's laws to figure out what to do - we just do it and watch while it's happening. It's no big deal. It's the basic "cybernetic loop" of tiny intent, tiny action, tiny perception, and repeat the loop rapidly over and over. It's a loop we can use to cross an unfamiliar room in the dark. Move slowly, stay alert and aware, and adjust as you run into things. It works. It doesn't require quantitative analysis or calculus or a computer or a PhD in robotics. It just requires using a very basic action and sensory loop over and over.

And, like any feedback loop, causality disappears in the normal sense. Motion alters perception and perception alters motion and the two become one, in a very real sense, a single motion-perception action and a loop as an actor.

Again, no big deal. So why is this important?

The big deal is that our society is in the middle of adjusting to this change from "Theory X", and a stable, static world with expertise at the top to "Theory Y" with a very dynamic, unknown world and the expertise at the bottom. In fact, because of the property of loops, there really is no longer much of a "top" and "bottom" in the classical Theory Y sense of the terms.

Just as the level of the water could be seen to control the hand on the faucet, the staff at the bottom of the chain of command can be seen to be controlling the General at the top of the pyramid -- and both those models are wrong, because it's actually the shape of the feedback loop that now has taken on a life of its own, on a whole different scale, and is controlling both of them.

Senge's point, and mine, is that most of the organizational problems we see around us are because we haven't managed to get that much right. In some health care organizations, an extreme case of the expertise being on the "bottom" of the pyramid, the top management still thinks in "Theory X" terms and tries to see itself as the expert in everything and "gives orders" to move in a certain way. The body reports back "No -- what bridge?" and the boss sees this as stubbornness, stupidity, or hostility and things just get worse from there.

Arguably one of the best "learning organizations" around is the US Army. I've mentioned many times before role of Doctrine in FM22-100, the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The pyramid model I just described is the theoretical basis for the doctrine, and every field action is supposed to be followed with a "lessons learned" session. News, particularly surprising news about a misfit between upper management's concept of where the battle or bridge should be and what actual boots on the ground see in front of them, is supposed to be free to travel upwards. Management, as it were, is supposed to listen to the staff and learn what's actually going on, not what management imagined yesterday was going on. It's not insubordination to say "Sir, What Bridge Sir?"

By simple trial and error experience, repeated millions of times, the Army has finally figured out what works and what doesn't and come to some conclusions that are startling to the Theory X old guard, but not at all surprising to the Theory Y thinkers. For one thing, listening has to go upwards, at every level. It's as important that superior officers listen to junior officers as vice versa. If new conditions at the bottom don't result in a new picture of what's going on at the top, the whole pyramid will simply drive off a cliff or otherwise carry out actions that bear no resemblance to reality.

And, because the picture of reality is not perceived directly, but has to come up the chain of command and be re-filtered and consolidated at a dozen different levels, that process has to be incredibly accurate, frank, honest, and unbiased. Even a 10% "adjustment" in facts, repeated over and over at each level of consolidation, can result in a reported "reality" at the top that is 180-degrees out of whack.

In a profound sense, the key word is integrity, and not just integrity when the going is easy, but integrity when the going is tough - not because of enemy action but because of "friendly fire from above". That kind of integrity is also part of the other key word in the doctrine - character.

If the information flows freely and rapidly and can spin up to a high rate of rotation, as with a bicycle wheel or gyroscope, this whole design pattern becomes very stable, agile, nimble, and capable of navigating the most bizarre terrain as events unfold in surprising and unexpected ways. BUT, if there are pockets of resistance to the flow of information, such as cover-ups, that model breaks down. Or, if there are superiors who think "superior" means they know everything and they don't need to learn from their men, the model breaks down. So, another few important words are honesty and humility.

See US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100
and What relates Public Health and the US Army?
and the whole posting from my Capstone slide 7 Theories are Changing which has twenty more references to the literature on high-reliability organizations in nuclear power plants and chemical plants and aircraft cockpits and hospital intensive care units, and what makes them actually work in practice. It just keeps coming back to the same thing and the same model that's right in front of us be we haven't finished mastering.

And, again we have a place where our religious heritage has been observing what makes society work for thousands of years and has more wisdom to offer on this than scientists, although the science is beginning to catch up at last. Our religions have been stressing virtues - integrity, honesty, compassion, humility, etc. - for centuries but we haven't really been listening or haven't thought that "mattered any more in the modern age." Actually, the basic cybernetic model is ageless, and true at any size and scale. It's going to be something we have in common with aliens from other worlds when we meet. It's a universal truth every bit as solid as other physical "laws" we rely on.

These are truths that are seen by Hindus, by Muslims, by Christians, by Jews, by atheists, and by learning organizations like the US Army. They can serve as a basis for unity among even such diverse groups and cultures. They can link science and religion without either side having to admit they were wrong about something and lose face.

Grasping and implementing that truth certainly looks like it could give us far more "bang per buck" than investing in new technology, new weapon systems, new gizmos and gadgets, and other ways to shift the detail complexity around.

Also, see my early post Virtue drives the bottom line with many links at the end to such literature. (excuse the formatting near the top of that post - I'm technically challenged by the html editor.)

Another author's take on this subject is "Spirituality in the Workplace - The Sixth Discipline of a learning organization, by Harish Midha at the University of Toronto.

Peter Senge's latest book is Presence: Human Purpose and the Field of the Future and readers interested in that book might also be interested in Stephen Covey's book The Eighth Habit. All these books teach the same gospel - that we are going to have to come to grips with the nature of community to "make it" through our social problems of this century, and that community requires us to realize the power and impact of "virtues" when amplified by the feedback properties of complex systems.

Another post I wrote exploring the role of community, virtues, and organizational learning and agility is The Importance of Social Relationships (short)

I also recommend: Pathways to Peace - beautiful slides and reflections to music on the value of virtues

A general summary of what I think are my best dozen posts on related subjects is here.

This is also relevant:

Spiritual solutions for technical problems

Enjoy, and please, for reasons this whole post embraces, send me feedback! A human can't sustain a thought without some measure of social support! Criticisms and objections are welcome. Use the comment box below, or send to my email in my "profile" box above.

Wade