It's all in the wrist

Most of us aren't Einstein. People aren't born fluent in reasoning.

There are holes, gaps, blind-spots in our reasoning and perception. Magicians, con-artists, and some advertisers make good use of those to fool us.

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required.)

This makes it hard for us to make good decisions, especially social decisions.

Here is a made up example that illustrates a common problem that doesn't even have a name-- at least I don't know what it's called.

Suppose I walk into 10 rooms and shoot a person in each room, killing them. That would clearly be homicide.
Suppose instead I lock each of them in their room, seal all the doors and windows and cracks, and they die of suffocation. It's still homicide, but getting fuzzier and harder to see.
Now suppose instead of those methods, I release 1000 mosquitoes into each room, and let's say that 900 is sufficient to kill someone by each drinking one drop of their blood. The numbers may be off but you get the idea. At the end of the day, the poeple are all dead, due to my actions, and it is still homicide, but with a bioweaopon, I guess you'd call it.

Now suppose instead that I and 9 buddies each release 100 mosquitoes into each of 10 rooms, so the total is still 1000 per room. The people in the rooms still end up dying, but now no one person has released enough harm to any one person that it was fatal.

In this case, is anyone "guilty" of anything? Under American law, I suspect they are guilty only if someone can prove conspiracy.

Now suppose 10 people who don't know each other and never talk each release 100 mosquitos into each room for different reasons. All ten people in the rooms die.

Suddenly, now, no "crime" remains on the table. The "criminal action" has "gone away", and yet, the victims are all still dead at the end of the day.

Finally, suppose that 1000 mosquitoes are only enough to kill one in 10 people, if that one is unusually sensitive. Most people, 9 out of 10, can easily handle 1000 mosquito bites, say.

So, the 10 perpetrators each release 1000 mosquitos , 100 per room, and only 1 person, predictably, always dies, but we don't know in advance which one of the ten it will be. And let's say that happens every day for a year, so at the end of the year 365 people are dead.

Is anyone guilty of anything?

Here's the problem. On a collective scale, if you stand way back, there is a clear causal relationship between the mosquito release and the deaths. If you get up close, the relationship seems to go away - at least its now become so fuzzy that no jury would convict any individual mosquito-breeder for releasing a sub-lethal dose of 100 mosquitoes that demonstrably, in zero cases, by itself, would ever be fatal.

This becomes like the picture of, uh, Einstein (if you stand close) and Marilyn Monroe (if you stand far away) that I posted at the top and repost here:


If you back up 20 feed (7 meters) and look at that picture, it's the actress Marilyn Monroe.
If you sit at your computer, it's a picture of Alfred Einstein, the scientist.

Anyway, the problem described is an analogy to many of the problems Public Health has to deal with, and problems that large cities or nations have to deal with on a regular basis.

There is a hole, a gap, a blind-spot in our reasoning and perception, for this kind of distributed action that "goes away" when seen close up, but is clearly there when seen from "far away."

Or, in the case of the poor people who are stuck in urban ghettos, this kind of problem is very real when they are the ones dying, and the frustration is very real when they can't figure out how to make their case that the killing should stop.

Worse, it's not just the jury that won't convict anyone - it's that the perpetrators may individually each feel sincerely that they are not doing any significant harm and they can't figure out what the fuss is about. Sadly, the dim perception of a possible problem to a possible hypothetical victim has far less weight than the very clear perception of very clear profit from some enterprise such as selling cigarettes, or liquor, or guns, or predatory check-cashing, or predatory home-mortgages, etc.

In the suburbs, these don't add up to a lethal concentration, and the reported problems from the slums are interpreted as "something wrong with the people who chose to live there."

From the slums, the question is "Why do they keep doing this to us?"

Outrage, violence, or riots are ineffective at making the case. They generate a lot of attention, but then no one (from outside) can see what everyone (inside) is so excitedly pointing at.

On an international scale, I have to wonder how much of the violent resistance to the US and perception of the US as "the great Satan" is similar -- a protest over policies and actions that arrive diffusely but are experienced in concentrated form by the victims.

We need, as a planet, as humanity, better tools and better words for this sort of thing, so we can discuss it intelligently. This is one kind of "system effect" with profound implications and "unintended consequences" of the worst kind.

It is not unknowable. The problem is very clear, mathematically. It is easy to simulate it and show the effect, and, like the Einstein/Monroe picture, show how different it looks from each viewing location (inside and outside, in that case.)

After studying this, I think this effect is remarkably widespread, because it evades our perception. It causes management and labor to battle. It causes commerce and the poor to be in conflict. It causes the US and poor nations to be in conflict.

It seems like we should make a priority funding project to get researchers in such things to figure out how to make this visible, tangible, perceivable to everyone so we can resolve the abuse/oppression/exploitation cases that are accidental and inadvertent and unintentional.

Intentional abuse is a different story, but Systems Thinking shows that many problems are actually unintentional and completely unrealized and effectively impossible to view in the direct sense we normally see things. So, let's lower the conflict temperature by resolving the unintentional ones first, that we may all agree on if we all could simply see.

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
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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.