Sources of Active Strength

Science is just beginning to get some insight into a phenomenon called "active strength", where the strength of a system of parts isn't "in" the parts, or "in" the way they are connected, but "in" the way they dynamically change pressure on each other in response to some external stress. A thin Wikipedia article on Active Structures with one links is here.

This concept is subtle, but is as important to understand as the concepts of "dynamic stability" and "dynamic control", which also seem to our intuition that they shouldn't work, but do, and, in fact, they work superbly. You need to understand these concepts to really get the difference between rigor and rigidity. We want structures we build to be rigorous and not fall down, but that turns out to mean they have to be somewhat flexible, and cannot be rigid. (There are no Oak trees in hurricane country, only palm trees that bend with the wind.)

There are whole institutes that study "Active Materials", such as the "Active Materials Lab" at UCLA. What becomes really fascinating is when active materials are ocmbined to make active structures. See, for example the "Active Structures Lab" in Brussels.

One example of an active structure is your bones. I worked at the Biomechanics Lab of the VA Hospital in Cleveland at Wade Park, helping design artificial hip joints, long ago. Researcher had assumed that bone was, you know, dead stuff like steel, so they had measured how strong it was, which was mostly what I did with my lathe and Instron machine. Then, they designed artificial joints based on that data. The joints mostly either bent or broke. Oops.

It turns out that bone is an active material, and is piezo-electric. When it is under stress, the body sends electrical signals to the bone that cause it to shift shape slightly, but enough to make it much stronger for that instant stress. This trick lets the body have it both ways -- light bones, so we can move, but really strong exactly when and where strength is needed.

It's as if the door to weakness is guarded by some sort of "pong" paddle that simply moves back and forth to block incoming hockey pucks, without requiring that the door be "solid" or even there most of the time. If you go look for a "door", you won't find it. It's like your "lap" -- only there sometimes. It's like a bridge that is mostly empty space except for a little bit just under your car that is extra strong and moves along like a shadow under you.

We don't know how many other places this design pattern is used in nature, but I suspect it is quite a few, because it is very efficient and economical. You get both strength and lightness.

Tall buildings and some other buildings are now being built with active strength concepts and they actually change shape and pressure to deal with high winds coming from one side or the other. Really tall buildings now have a huge weight at the top, that can glide in any direction, that is driven by hydraulic pistons and counteracts vibrations and sway in the wind.

So there are books like "Vibration Control of Active Structures" that examine how to use these techniques to damp out waves and vibrations which otherwise would weaken or shatter the structure.

The theory carries over just as well into dynamic information structures in computing, and dynamic social structures that could weaken or collapse, that we want to make extremely strong even though they are sparse and thin and lightweight. Even "control", viewed in the right dimensions, is an entity that we want to "hold together" and not "fall part" or "lose the center", but we want control by management or government to be as "light" and "sparse" as possible to get the job done.

For example, the US Air Traffic Control system is designed to keep planes from running into each other, but within those constraints, pilots can do pretty much whatever they want to. Pilots can say - "No, that doesn't work for me. How about this instead" and get different clearances. It's the pilots that can see out the window and know what's going on in the plane and weather around them, not the "controllers". This is another example of a hybrid vertical loop, where the controllers issue "orders" and "clearances" and yet the pilots can give information that changes the "orders". It is actually run from the bottom up, and just consolidated from the top down. Controllers only redirect traffic when they are force to by weather, for example - they never tell you that you don't want to fly to Miami, you should think about flying to Memphis this time of year.

So, what would an active-strength social structure look and act like? How could you recognize one if you saw it? How could you see where active-strength would help.

Well, for one thing, if you try to push it over, it will rally and push back on you, not crumble and flee. In war, some cultures are incredibly strong at fighting back in spirit as well as in body. Whatever this active spirit is, it is the key to their strength, and war strategists focus primarily on how to break the spirit of the opponent, because the military collapse always follows from that.

So, the flip side of that is figuring out what it takes to make our own spirit strong.

This "spirit" thing or concept is important. Whatever a "spirit" is, in this sense, it describes what holds the team together against all odds and keeps it running at or beyond its capacity.
"Team spirit" is more real in terms of changing outcomes than just certain color clothes and cheers.

Similarly, doctors know that some patients have a "strong spirit" and can survive trauma or burdens that would simply kill patients with "weak spirit." Many doctors have seen at least one patient simply decide to "let go" and proceed to die. What's that about? It's also really frustrating because the strong spirited patients tend to complain a lot and are a "lot of trouble" for the nurses.

People have the capacity to be very strong together, but they don't always use it. It's hard to understand, and you can't "see" whatever it is we call "spirit" directly, and yet it seems to be a word that has a scientifically measurable outcome. I'm using the term "spirit" here more like the active sense of something, not like a "ghost".

One thing is clear - opponents or people with no spirit simply crumble and crumple under pressure or duress. Whatever this spirit thing is, it affects biomedical outcomes as well as social-level outcomes, in measurable ways.

Further reading :
A Wiki on "active architecture" you can participate in is here. Active Architecture in the meaning of a building aware of and responsive to its occupants is here.

A much more technical look at the subject would be "An Active Architecture Approach to Dynamic System Co-evolution" by Morrison, et. al., which is about the conceptual "architecture" of the information structures that happen inside computers - and how to make they adaptive and dynamic and capable of learning and evolving but not collapsing.

Templeton, Toyota, and Dynamics

Well, today I'm ramping up to getting another day of Toyota Production System type "lean" training, and reading John Templeton's book "Worldwide Laws of Life - 200 Eternal Spiritual Principles", looking for overlaps. (At $11.95 a copy, a good deal!)

I'm also finally learning how muscles work (better late than never) and it's just fascinating.

I mean, this is really strange and not something we learned in physics in college - this "body building" mathematics. As a True Believer ("exponent"?) of hierarchically symmetric principles, of course, I assume that many of the same patterns that govern development of strong arms or abs govern the development of strong corporations or state or nation economie -- with some specific to each level as well.

But muscles. Wow. You make them get stronger by breaking them down and using them up. We can't even decide in our terminology whether this is "down" or "up" -- which instantly calls to mind non-transitive dice and Hofstadler's (Escher's) strange loops, and feedback mechanism.

Now, what is the template here, the reusable pattern? If I break my car down, it stays "down".
If I "work out" (Now a new direction!) I make space or gaps or folds or niches somehow that end up getting "filled in" with interest. Again signature linguistic clues to strange loops.

So, Templeton, one of the richest men on earth, really believes in a concept of "giving" which involves delayed but amplified "receiving" - and finds a spiritual basis for this in Christian scriptures. He says (page xx):

"Of course, an activity of this kind creates an activity in the lives of the givers into which more good can flow!"

So, he seems to be saying that "good" and "goods" (in a commercial sense) follow the same behavior patterns.

Still, I don't find a word in English for this loop, this pattern of behavior that muscles have where you have to use them up to make room for them to automagically refill or recharge.

I noted yesterday to my wife that it was good for rechargable batteries to let them run down, in fact, to go out of your way to run them down to just about zero and recharge them a few times, or they lose the ability to be charged up at all. Curious. Some even recommend that you do this as soon as you purchase them, and that, if you leave them in the recharger and "overcharge" them, they'll become useless and run out much, much faster than new batteries. They won't be able to "hold a charge", whatever that means (in general). (Now, we add the "let go" and "hold on" axis added.)

But, in my System Dynamics course we're studying how to model social processes using "stocks and flows" to capture the feedback structures.

I and a few other students are looking deeper, and asking what it is exactly in social systems, that "holds" any of these structures in place. In typical texts, like Franklin's "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" there are marvelously powerful equations and tools and software for designing great systems - but they all assume that the parts you build with don't simply fall part as soon as you connect them up.

In the real social world, that assumption is false, at least by default. Anything you build today will be much more likely to be gone tomorrow than still there when you wake up. So, if we want to draw on the power of Control System Engineering, we first have to figure out how to make, or model, parts that don't simply fall part like they're made of sand. This becomes a required precursor step.

And, parts don't "get made" in social systems, which have a truly funny sort of "clay" to sculpt things out of. Parts of any scale larger than trivial have to get "grown", like muscles, which gets me back to where I started.

I realized my vocabulary of words and concepts to describe how muscles "grow" by using them "up" is missing almost all they key words, which, as Whorf pointed out, makes it hard to think about, let alone discuss. Or , if words fail me, maybe a good picture or an animation or something.

How general is this phenomenon? Can we make employees "grow" by "using them up?" Can we make companies grow by "using them up?' Can we make nations grow by using them up?

Hmm. Well, start with employees. Any good employee actually wants to be "used" in a "good sense" (alert - two solutions!) not in a "bad sense". They want to be "exploited", again in the "good meaning" of that word, not the "bad meaning." (nuance alert!)

They want, in short, to be "used up ..[and recharged to a stronger state] " like MUSCLES, not "used up ... and discarded, like soap. In fact, it's HARD-to-impossible for an employee, or a member of a sports team, or a member of the Army, to "be all you can be" without an external social structure forcing [ nuanced word] you [nuanced noun] to "use yourself up" and "push yourself" and get through the pain / "the annoying feel of weakness leaving the body."

And, wow, are we not wired linearly for this multiday-process-loop. In the short run, rather than happily encouraging us to use them, our muscles complain bitterly about being disturbed from their slumber. Once "warmed up" or after a "great workout" they change their tune, and suddenly we get an "endorphine high" -- but that's way later than when we need it. So even this loop, maybe a month long, of getting the "pull" of the endorphine high to reach back around the feedback loop and inform the bitching-muscle part is nuanced and subtle and something no one ever explained to me before, let alone modeled for me or for a company or department or team growth process.

So, from the starting point, using up a muscle seems "hard" and "painful", and people who do it seem incomprehensible. I mean, they jog in the sleet in the middle of icy roads. Clearly insane.
Yet, "once you get into it" (nuance) the perspective changes and suddenly it becomes both possible and then enjoyable and rewarding.

But, I just don't have good pictures or words for the parts here. There's a ten-minute to 1 hour loop proess of warming up, a 2-5 day process of "recharging", and a 1-2 month process of learning that this is building you up not tearing you down that all have to fit hand-in-glove for this thing to fly at all.

It does fly, it can fly, and I'm finally figuring that out, much to the dismay of my downstairs neighbors who hear my weight-bench and think the ceiling is falling at 6 AM. The 6 AM part doesn't help.

So I can DO it, but I can't MODEL it yet so I can discuss it with someone else, let alone a very busy manager, and say "you need to do THIS" with your people, not "THAT", -- or better, build a "flight simulator" so they can interact and figure this out for themselves.

Boy, social literacy in this one alone would fix a lot of problems in how managers try to "develop" employees or teams and "fail.'

There's a lot of nuance, non-intuitive non-transitive loops, and multiple solution equations here that make this thing, relatively easy to do, very hard to explain in words.

Maybe, with Vensim modeling, I can simulate it comprehensibly and in a way it can be shared with others and discussed at a business meeting.

There are some other subtleties here, the motion equivalents of "a lap" - something that both is and isn't really there. (I mean, where does your lap "go" when you stand up?)

There are things that are like momentum or worse, angular momentum with its bicycle wheel or gyroscopic force that can be stabilizing or maddeningly sideways.

Somehow, though, back to Templeton, building "wealth" and social capital involves a lot of "giving and receiving" and the residual side effects of muscle-building as a result of that cycle, so that, if it is repeated a lot, it gets stronger and wealthier and "healthier" and more "alive."

This suggests that "wealth" is a flow-process, like a lap, not a static-noun, like "a rock" or "a gold bar." It suggests that building up wealth is like building up muscles, where you have to "give" to "receive."

That's just fascinating. I have to build one.

Well, off to learn about "lean manufacturing" and what makes some companies thrive and others become run-down, un-fit for business, and finally fall apart like sand in the wind.

This has so much to do with "life" and "health" and "wealth" and feedback processes! I think they all have to come as a bundle, at each level, and across levels, to work at all.
Batteries and muscles have to "recharge" from outside resources, and it's not through any "action" (at THAT EXACT TIME) that the battery "does" that it gets recharged. People have to "build muscles" or "heal" the "damage" [?] which happens when we sleep, not when we are "doing " something or when the doctor "does something." The best we can do is get out of the way of the natural process [ hah!] that actually does the healing out of sight, off-line, in secret, where it is so easy to be forgotten while being the key to the whole thing.

Ciao.

Wade