Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject

"At the very least it is hoped that this little book may serve as a warning to those who read it, thus helping to counter the headlong rush into Systemism that characterizes our age...

SYSTEMISM n. 1. The state of mindless belief in Systems; the belief that Systems can be made to function to achieve desired goals. 2. The state of being immersed in Systems; the state of being a Systems-person."

(John Gall, "Systemantics - How Systems Really Work and How they Fail.)

Gall, continues

Systems-functions are not the result of human intransigence. We take it as given that people are generally doing the very best they know how. Our point, repeatedly stressed in this text, is that Systems operate according to Laws of Nature, and that Laws of Nature are not suspended to accommodate our human shortcomings. There is no alternative but to learning How Systems Work... Whoever does not study the Laws of Systemantics and learn them that way is destined to learn them the hard way...

S. Freud, in his great work on the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, directed attention to the lapses, failures, and mishaps resulting from forces operating within the individual. We, on the other hand, are interested in those lapses, failures, and mishaps that are attributable to the (mal)functioning of the Systems surrounding the individual, within which the individual is immersed, and with which he or she must interact and attempt to cope in everyday life.

Specifically, we are interested, not in the process of forgetting to mail a letter, but in the Post Office Box that is too full to accept the letter.

...

And like those lapses followed up by Freud, these lapses have a way of eluding us, of disappearing from our consciousness once the painful event is over. Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject.

...

When Memory is thus deliberately frustrated in its basic task of protecting us from too much awareness, we see what we had hitherto failed to notice: that malfunction is the rule and flawless operation the exception.

...

The advent of the Computer Revolution merely provides new opportunities for errors at levels of complexity and grandiosity not previously attainable.

...

The world may largely consist of Fuzzy Systems, but fuzzy thinking is definitely not the way to Cope with them, let alone to Prevail.

Comment - John Gall's book is, in my mind, one of the most delightful and yet profound books on "Systems" ever written. I have made a point to reread it at least once every year since 1975, and to buy copies for all my staff and friends at the slightest excuse.

Based, presumably, on his experiences as a physician at the University of Michigan, be captures with humor the best attitude any of us can hope for to take and use to frame the indelicate problem of "systems" in our lives, or, God forbid, systems we are part of and partly responsible for.

A very brief sampling of his summary rules is here. Wikipedia has many more, but I heartily recommend the trip to Amazon to get the latest updated version of his wit and wisdom.

Some of his Rules:

REALITY IS MORE COMPLEX THAN IT SEEMS.

Under precisely controlled experimental conditions,a test animal will behave as it damn well pleases.

THINGS AREN'T WORKING VERY WELL (and never did).

SYSTEMS IN GENERAL WORK POORLY OR NOT AT ALL.

(The behavior is often an unexpected way of failing.)

NEW SYSTEMS MEAN NEW PROBLEMS.

SYSTEMS TEND TO EXPAND TO FILL THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

THE SYSTEM ALWAYS FIGHTS BACK.

THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOW THE NEW PROBLEM.

A LARGE SYSTEM, PRODUCED BY EXPANDING THE DIMENSIONS OF A SMALLER SYSTEM,
DOES NOT BEHAVE LIKE THE SMALLER SYSTEM.

TO THOSE WITHIN A SYSTEM, THE OUTSIDE REALITY TENDS TO PALE AND DISAPPEAR.

THE CHART IS NOT THE PATIENT.

Unfortunately, this slogan with its humanistic implications, turned out to be misleading. The nurses were neither attending the patients nor making notations in the charts. They were in the hospital auditorium, taking a course in Interdisciplinary Function. (The art of correlating one's own professional activities more and more with those of other professionals, while actually doing less and less. )

"In cold fact, a SYSTEM is building ships, and the SYSTEM is the shipbuilder."

PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING.

THE SYSTEM ITSELF DOES NOT DO WHAT IT SAYS IT IS DOING.

and, "Closely related to Orwellian Newspeak and Doublethink, The confusion of Input and Output."

A giant program to Conquer Cancer is begun. At the end of five years, cancer has not been conquered, but one thousand research papers have been published. In addition, one million copies of a pamphlet entitled "You and the War Against Cancer" have been distributed. These publications will absolutely be regarded as Output rather than Input. The cancerous multiplication of paperwork will not be regarded as a malignancy.

[previously published 9/5/06 in my prior weblog ; photo is from my own Ann Arbor photos. ].

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

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.

Nancy Krieger's Spider located? Response to Putnam

I was pondering Harvard researcher Nancy Krieger's question about reconciling apparent signs of a conspiracy to exploit the poor with lack of any actual suspects. Admittedly, in the Tobacco industry, there was an actual conspiracy, but it wasn't "directed" at blacks or the poor in an evil way -- they just "happened" to be easy victims. How does that happen?

( ref: Krieger N. Epidemiology and the web of causation: has anyone seen the spider? Soc Sci Med, 1994, 39:887-903.)

I think the answer may lie in the nature of systems thinking and feedback loops. As I've discussed, even the simplest goal-seeking feedback loop acts as if it has a mind of its own, and is a sort of "proto-life", or "MAWBA" - (Might As Well Be Alive.) of a more fundamental nature than even cells or DNA. This is the core of silicon life forms as well, or any system of any material that is adaptive and cybernetic.

All we need to explain the observed concentration of exploitation on poverty-laden areas is a single feedback loop and minimal dynamics. Here's the causal loop:


And the dynamics are similar to the charge build-up that precedes a lightning stroke:


Any "pressure" acts almost alive, as if it is consciously seeking a way out, probing every weakness. Once it finds even a tiny gap, as with the over-topping the levees in New Orleans, positive feedback enlarges the hole and momentum builds up flowing towards that hole.

Catastrophe ensures, both mathematically and physically, or in our case, socially. In fact, in the weather case, the addition of the Coriolis force can create a tornado or hurricane that even feeds on energy in the environment and grows larger and stronger.

So, we don't actually need a "conspiracy" - we just need pressure and a situation where weakness is exploited and exploitation leads to weakness, which leads to more exploitation, which leads to more weakness, etc. in an exponentially increasing cascade.

With active corporate MBA's looking to see what other corporations are doing, once one starts making money exploiting the poor, others rush to follow suit, attracting still others, etc.

My suspicion is that the relationship that Robert Putnam has found between diversity and a loss of social capital

Robert D. Putnam (2007), E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture
Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2), 137–174.

is actually a reflection of the fact that the above-mentioned feedback loop differentially focuses exploitation on the poor, making them poorer, which induces more exploitation, etc. The end point of that Markov chain is death of the target population, I suppose, unless something else stops it sooner.

The key driver in making this catastrophe is collective willingness to exploit the weak for profit, and collective tolerance for this activity, probably based on a belief that this is "an unavoidable effect of free markets."

These earlier posts in this weblog are relevant for further reading:
E Pluribus Unum
Unity in Diversity is the central problem
Systems Explanations for Student Behavior
Being a Robot 101 - The Cybernetic Loop
Part A of Why Sloops Matter
Another gentle introduction to Control Loops
Causal Loop Diagrams, Stories and Macrobes
Systems Dynamics, Worcester Polytech and Social Policy

Wade

The tipping point concept of non-transitivity

(above - picture of a set of 3 non-transitive dice from Grand Illusions website.)

What I'm seeing is not that people can't "think big", because they can. The US President can go from tying his shoe to considering Armageddon in a heartbeat. We all are free to consider BIG problems or TINY problems and the "auto-zoom" feature of our brains makes whatever we're considering fill out mental screen.

So, it's easy to be misled by small examples into thinking they're BIG issues. We don't seem to come with "ground wires" that keep our feet on the same ground.

That's probably a lot of what goes on in my favorite Snoopy cartoon where he's lying on top of the doghouse and thinking:

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?

But this morning I'm focused on why it is that a loop is so surprisingly hard for people to grasp.

I think it's not the wider view or scale, because people can do that "zoom" so effortlessly they don't even see it happen.

I think its that

• The value of "constants" changes with scale, and
• the relative ordering is non-transitive.

People aren't overly baffled when what looks like a short-term great idea turns out, in the long term, to be a terrible idea. As Dennis the Menace said, standing in a corner for punishment, "How come dumb ideas look so great while you're doing them?"

But each time people run into this, it's like suggesting to a Labrador Retriever that it might be time to go for a walk. "Oh, my God! Yes! A Walk! What an astonishing idea!" (Thank you Dave Barry for that thought about Labs.) The idea is visible, and logical, and sensible, but somehow it fades away to nothing between uses. We keep forgetting it.

The most likely reason I can imagine for that is that there is a larger idea, a context idea, that this change-with-scale property violates or offends, and, as soon as our conscious mind lets go of it, the cleanup crew in our brain looks for where to put it back and, mystified by it, decides it must be trash, because it doesn't fit anywhere with something bigger we preserve.

That's the easy one.

The loop thingie is ten times harder for people to grasp, even once. Even when people see it, touch it, play with it, some part of their brain rejects the concept as "clearly false" and is preparing to disassemble and discard it as soon as possible to restore sanity and normalcy.

And the problem isn't with a loop. People grasp the concept "circle." People don't run screaming from a "hula hoop" toy. It's more subtle.

It's more like the sense when you put a twist in a loop of paper, ending up with a Mobius strip. This does not feel right. This is uncomfortable, and barely tolerable, regardless how many times you've played with them or tried to cut one apart lengthwise and failed.

But, no, it's even worse than that. It's an M. C. Esher type loop, with a twist in a dimension that we don't even recognize as a dimension when we TRY to focus on it with our full attention.

It's a property of the children's game "rock paper scissors" - where there are three rules:
rock smashes (beats) scissors
scissors cuts (beats) paper
paper covers (beats) rock

So, there is no "best" one. This turns out to be a much more widespread phenomenon that we would prefer. We see it but reject it. For most things with multiple dimensions, the term "best" is meaningless, but we're so attached to it, we want to make it true anyway. We can't get resolution if we admit that there is no "best mate" or "best house" or "best job" or "best employee" or "best candidate" or "best football team". If you compare them by pairs, each pair seems to have a "better", but if you make a map of "better" it has no top or "best", but instead goes in a loop, or more than one loop. It's uncomfortable and a little scary. Things we thought we could rely on turn out to be shaky. We try to forget it, and succeed. Over and over.





Here's the classic example - the "non-transitive dice" that Martin Gardner described decades ago, and that Ivars Peterson attributes to Bradley Efron, a statistician at Stanford University.


You can read about these, but you just have to buy a set, or build a set out of construction paper, and even then you can see it but you can't believe it. There is no best one of these 4 dice, or of the 3 at the top of this post. A beats B, B beats C, C beats D, and D goes around the end of the barn and comes back and beats A. It's a loop and it just seems wrong.

(So, warning, don't try to win money with these, because the loser will be convinced you must have cheated.)

Well, as always, you must be wondering what this all has to do with health care or the problems of the world. So, back a few days ago I posted an analysis I did of why so many airlines are running late these days. Included in that was this loop diagram, that I made up, that you can click on to zoom up to readable size.



This one is a circle of "blame", where the blame is "non-transitive." Each set of people, in their local world, can blame the next group down the chain for the problem, and is clearly "right" -- which would be OK except that the list of blamee's goes in a full circle back to the "blamers."

Again, if you view this one box and it's neighbors at a time, it seems fine and makes sense. But if you put them all together in a circle, something seems to have gone terribly wrong.
Like this Esher print I love (from Wikipedia)


Or this one of stairs from Wikipedia.

There is wrongness there. But the wrongness is subtle.

That happens a lot more than we hold in our heads to be true.

So, where this comes down to Earth is the following conclusion. If people are going to learn about system dynamics and feedback loops, we need to get them past the point where very simple loops like the ones shown above, are perfectly sensible and acceptable, instead of where they are now, which suffers the mental version of tissue-rejection.

The problems will not come to us. We must go to them.

There is no way to make a circle into a line, regardless how "linear" a little part of the edge is if we simply elect to ignore the parts that go out of sight on each side of a narrow field of view.

Three facts seem to be true:

• Closed circles of causality make us queasy.
• Closed circles of "blame" make us and our legal system very uncomfortable.
• Closed circles of "blame" that show that what's happening to us is our own fault coming back to haunt us with a lag time and amplification are just intolerable thoughts and are rejected out of hand instantly. That's crazy talk.
  

We need to learn to be able to see BOTH lines and circles of causality without becoming queasy and needing a drink.

Suggestions welcome as to how to do that.

Wade

-------
from Ivar Peterson's MathTrek

Gardner, Martin. 1987. Nontransitive paradoxes. In Time Travel and Other Mathematical Bewilderments. New York: W.H. Freeman.

______. 1983. Nontransitive dice and other probability paradoxes. In Wheels, Life, and Other Mathematical Amusements. New York: W.H. Freeman.

One possible source of nontransitive dice is toy and novelty collector Tim Rowett. He offers a set of "Magic Dice" along with rules for several games at http://www.grand-illusions.com/magicdice.htm. You can find out more about Rowett's collection at http://www.grand-illusions.com/tim/tim.htm.

Bees, infection, lean, and emergent immune systems

"What's good for the hive is good for the bees." That's one of the posters near the cafe at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore. I recall it's described as an "African saying."

I've gone on at great length looking for the right way to describe and convey the difference between multi-level organization and, well, "heaps."

There seems to be an extremely strong bias in the US against anything that has to do with higher organizational levels of humans - unless it's man-made, centrally-planned, top-down business organizations. Anything "bottom up" has a cultural repellent overtone of collectivism or labor-movements or community-organizers ( read "troublemakers") or socialism or communism or Star Trek's ultimate bogeyman - "The Borg."

It's puzzling. It's as if there's a conviction on the one hand that the country has passed through its entire need for "social and economic development" and is trying to forget that awkward, teenager stage when things didn't work out well, now that ... um ... we have everything perfectly under control?

That's pretty much a "theory X" model, where all the expertise is concentrated at the top, and the only thing everyone below that level is good for is blind obedient labor or paying taxes. And maybe that did work in the middle ages or for running plantations or companies where the labor was just an extension of the company's founder.

But, that model also ran out of steam a few decades ago, as more companies started being "knowledge based" with "knowledge workers," all of which meant that the center of mass of the expertise was moving from the executive wing to the shop floor. In hospitals, for example, there was a traumatic transition, that's still happening, where the main administrator of the hospital would now be a professional administrator, who was not even a medical doctor. The expertise in medical matters was shifting out to the floor, and the expertise in central administration was becoming, gasp, "administration" -- which previously had been sort of a dirty "four-letter word", the kind of thing that only worn out doctors would do when they couldn't keep up with "real work."

All this is morphing slowly, and with loud shrieks and moans and strenuous objections, towards "theory Y" where the laborers are assumed to be highly competent experts and in touch with reality on the floor or "ground truth" or "in country" or whatever the context is. Central "management's" role became less to "direct" or "manage" the operation than to "orchestrate" it. There' s no way the new "conductors" could even begin to grasp how to operate one of the "instruments" out there in the orchestra, let alone be the fount of all wisdom on every one of the sub-sub-sub-specialties and stay current on every relevant journal and attend every important conference.

So, it's a new "paradigm." The "chain of command" doesn't go away, but the nature of the command is distinguished very carefully from "information flow".

Now, if you look at this through the high-magnification lens, it doesn't look very different from the old model. (see picture below).


To see the difference, you need to rotate the microscope lenses around to a lower-power, broader field-of-view lens, and you can see what's changed, or what has to change, to make this new model work as advertised.

The big changes are that:

• News about the outside world comes in at the bottom (the front, the ground troops), and loops up to the top, where it has an effect, altering the new, revised orders that come back down the chain. That loop is travelled many times, but is still relatively slow.
• There is a very fast local loop, where feedback about performance comes right into the low level team, which responds to it on the spot, with no involvement of management. This is akin to your hand retracting from a hot stove without having to check in with the brain first. Or equivalent to the Coast Guard in Katrina, where they were pre-authorized to make decisions on their own without bothering headquarters.
• In Theory X, the news comes in the top, which has limited bandwidth or a small 1-person pipe, then only some of it goes down and some is lost at each level, depending on upper managers to recognize what lower employees care about. Finally a dribble of news makes it to the front. The troops report what they see and differences with what the orders seem to imply, but at each level going back up the chain, half of that is deleted by managers who think they know what the boss actually cares about. By the time the internal news gets up to the boss, 3 months later,
• it's unrecognizable.
• TheoryX is very hard to steer with. The Boss is effectively blind to what's going on inside, the troops are essentially blind to what the boss sees outside, and the whole thing feels like "pushing" on a rope.
• Theory Y is very easy to steer with. Most of the heavy lifting is done at each level with fast feedback that never has to go up to the brain and back down to the hand. Because the loop upwards is fast and phase-locked, news at the front actually makes it up to the top, which can change the mental model and the marching orders. The troops effectively control the boss, the same way the water-level controls the hand when filling a glass of water.
• Carrying on the "rope" analogy, it's like PULLING on a rope that goes out to a pulley and comes back to a pulley and goes in a big loop. You can accomplish "pushing" your clothes out to dry by "pulling" on the rope. The LOOP does the magic. You need the loop.

Well, I came in to talk about bees and emergent immune systems, and I've headed off in what seems a different direction, so now let's stop, turn around, and look a the "bee problem" from the top of this mountain we just climbed.

What's the problem? As the Los Angeles Times put it this morning,
Suddenly, the bees are simply vanishing.

by Jia-Rui Chong and Thomas H. Maugh II
June 10, 2007

The puzzling phenomenon, known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD, has been reported in 35 states, five Canadian provinces and several European countries. The die-off has cost U.S. beekeepers about $150 million in losses and an uncertain amount for farmers scrambling to find bees to pollinate their crops.

Scientists have scoured the country, finding eerily abandoned hives in which the bees seem to have simply left their honey and broods of baby bees.

"We've never experienced bees going off and leaving brood behind," said Pennsylvania-based beekeeper Dave Hackenberg. "It was like a mother going off and leaving her kids."

Researchers have picked through the abandoned hives, dissected thousands of bees, and tested for viruses, bacteria, pesticides and mites.

So far, they are stumped.

The problem seems to be both a parasite (that can be killed by irradiating the hive), and a simultaneous breakdown in the bee's immune systems. The article states:

Several researchers, including entomologist Diana Cox-Foster of Penn State and Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University, have been sifting through bees that have been ground up, looking for viruses and bacteria.

"We were shocked by the huge number of pathogens present in each adult bee," Cox-Foster said at a recent meeting of bee researchers convened by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The large number of pathogens suggested, she said, that the bees' immune systems had been suppressed, allowing the proliferation of infections.

The article goes on looking at parasites, but I want to hit the brakes here, get off the highway, and go up the side road of looking at the question of suppression of immune systems. This is pure speculation, but possibly important speculation.

What catches my attention here is that there is a natural, multi-level beastie here - and that is that honeybees don't exist as individuals, they exist as parts-of-a-hive. Increasingly research is showing that humans have lot of the same tendencies, but for bees this is extreme. If you remove a honeybee from its hive, I suspect it will simply die - as will a human cell if you remove it from a human body. (That's why it's so hard to cultivate human "cell-lines".)

The latest literature on humans shows that it's not just that a person's immune system reflects the "health" of their own body, but it also reflects whether the person has become isolated and fragmented from society. One of the most painful things for a person, that is sort of surprising in the "rational actor" model, is that the imprisonment in "solitary confinement" is extremely draining, even to prisoners. The need for daily interaction with other humans is tangible.

Chimps, if removed from their herd, have been shown to sacrifice a chance for food for a chance to open a window and see what the other chimps are doing. This is a deep, biological need, not confined to one species, or, as the human cell example shows, not confined to a single "level" of organizational hierarchy.

The point is this. If you forget what your eyes see, and look at what the mathematics show, human beings, or bees, or cells, are not the shape your eye sees. They have parts of their physiological control and regulatory systems that extend out into their larger social structure. Those are important parts, and if those parts are not well, or damaged, the damage is quickly manifested in the local physiology of the individual as well.

For tax or legal purposes, or buying a train ticket, we are separate "individuals". For purposes of computing how regulatory processes operate, and how they fail, we are not nearly so "separate". Because our eyes don't show us these invisible (but very real) connections, we tend to discount them, or ignore them. We do so at our peril.

These tendrils of our "meta-bodies" are like having our blood diverted from our bodies in tubes in a dialysis unit, run out to some other place, processed and cleaned up, and returned to our bodies through some other tube. We can say that is not "me", but in the sense that a breakdown in that system can directly cause you to be sick or die, it really is "you".

Apparently, cells, chimps, bees, humans, whatever, develop many such external loops in their interactions with each other. These can be so great that it is common to hear a person say that when a loved one abandons them or dies, "it is as if a part of me died."

Alternatively, it's been shown that cells with even damaged DNA's can be supported by a "field effect" from neighboring healthy cells, and not become cancerous. [ I'll track down the reference.] Notice that the "life sciences" spend a huge amount of effort on "signal transduction" and ways signals are communicated between cells, or between genes with "genetic circuits", but there's little use of a model that this low-level communication, if it persists, really has to be part of a high-level closed feedback control loops with a mind of its own, and the key thing to do is to find that loop. As I showed a few days ago, tracing out the loop is a challenge, because control information leaps happily from medium to medium, now in neurons, now in voice, now in electromagnetic waves, now in liquid flow, etc. The point is if you know there MUST be a closed loop, so that the cells can PULL on the ROPE (discussed above), then you are encouraged to find the rest of the pieces.

And, then, of course, if you're a drug company, you have a whole new set of intervention points at the meta-loop level.

In extreme cases, when the culture and society collapses, the impact can be dramatic. I suspect that collapse of cultural integrity is part of what is going on in the huge rise in suicide rates among native Americans right now. The history of the Pima Indians, in the USA, shows a dramatic collapse of physical and social health, going from a tribe with almost no diabetes and one with a reputation for being extremely cordial in 1800, to one with something like 80% diabetes rates and a high rate of suicide and interpersonal violence. Many factors are put forward to explain this, but I'm biased to looking at multi-level models for this kind of effect.

So, if something is killing off the honeybees, and the something is enabled by an apparent collapse of the individuals "immune systems", then other people will start looking at what's wrong with "this bee" (the "clinical medicine" model), and I'd prefer to start the investigation at the other end and ask "Is something wrong with the hive?"

In other words, what's "broken" for each bee may not be "inside the box" of that bee's "body", but may be out in the external part of the control-system-body that is connected into and through the "hive." In the analogy, the "dialysis machine" is broken, or the tubes running to it are clogged or kinked, or something like that.

I think this can be a very powerful model, to think that there are TWO life-forms involved that may need medical attention. One is a lot of individual cells, or bees, or people. The other is a much larger scale emergent thingie, that we'd call "our body", or "the hive" or "society" respectively.

To date, we've considered emergent thingies as if they would evaporate if you took away the tiny things that make up the big thingie.

But I've presented many cases where the emergent thingie suddenly transitions, becomes self aware, and takes on "a life of its own" and even acts as if it has "a mind of its own."

For humans, the emergent thingie is very familiar - it's "us". Cells may have formed the substrate in which our spirit was formed (or placed, if you prefer that model), but now that spirit has definitely taken on a life and identity and mind of its own that is only remotely related to the lives of the cells that once made it up, but now are subordinate to it.

We see the same pattern in many other places. Mental images in human or machine vision start by being made up of many small patches of data or patterns, but once they combine into an overall "vision" or "percept", that thingie takes on a life of its own and even if we remove the source data it persists. In fact, even if the data now refute it, it can continue to persist, and defend itself, and change what we look at in order to sustain itself. Wow.

So, I think it is safe to say that everyone recognizes that bees have a very strong social component to their daily activity and identity. And, like corporations that continue to exist long after the founders have died or left, "hives" tend to persist even if individual bees die off.

But, OK, say the hive is a living thing that has a "meta-body" and has something that is appropriately called "health" that is a mostly-independent factor from the health of the individuals within it. I say "mostly" because it's only in the short term that they may appear to be separate -- in the long term, they are tightly coupled because feedback loops have compounded the "weak interactions" and "loose coupling" into dominant factors.

So, if the bees are dying, it may be because the hive-scale-thingie is dying first. As with any feedback loop, causal "directions" become a meaningless concept. The hive and the individuals rise or fall as one, in a upward or downward spiral feedback loop pattern.

But, it still can make sense for humans to talk about "psychological problems" or "immune system problems" that are defined at the large-scale, meta-body level and may not even make sense at the individual cell level.

The point is, things can "break" or "be wrong" at that large scale.

That's why I keep on flashing that M.C. Esher picture of the waterfall -- everything is healthy locally, but it's broken globally. The two are completely distinct, in the short run. (but coupled in the long run in any living thing.)

Is this what's going on with the bees? I have no idea. But I am pretty certain that very few people who aren't systems analysts would even start with that approach and look there for signs of something wrong at that level. So, it would be "baffling."

This is exactly what many social and corporate organizational problems are. At a local level, we see the equivalent of "bees dying" or "employees burning out" or "employees quitting" and we are baffled as to what's wrong with them. Sometimes, the problem isn't at that level. Sometimes it's a structural problem, a "systems" problem. Those are hard to see to begin with, and impossible to see if you don't look for them on purpose and methodically.

A great deal of management literature these days, including The Toyota Way by Jeffrey Liker, describe problems and solutions at the meta-level, without ever springing, in my mind, to the overall pattern they are pointing to. This is an emergent-organism that has a meta-body. It acts like its alive, and it can have disorders and dysfunctions and "health" and often needs "medical attention" at its own scale. (But save us from most "consultants"!)

If you look at all the emphasis on "vision" or "spirit" or "direction" or "identity" in the management literature, you can simplify it all to an effort to create a self-aware, self-sustaining, emergent beastie at the meta-level -- a beastie that will then turn around and form a nurturing context and reshape and empower the people that just gave it life.

So, it's one thing if you push up emergent life, and when you let go it falls down again. That's one case. In this other case, it's more like a radio antenna or something -- you push up emergent life and push so hard or well that the life breaks loose and is radiated out and takes on an existence of its own outside the antenna. Then, you can shut down the transmitter or dismantle the antenna, and the radiated wave just keeps on propagating outward.

Except in this case, it's more like a ring-vortex wave that just sits in place, like a little donut-shaped "halo" above us. It doesn't shoot off a the speed of light, but instead turns around and comes back and embraces the parts that just created it.

I think this is what we're trying to do with corporate management these days, effectively.
I think that's what "lean" and "six-sigma" and "Toyota Production System" are about. They're about creating a culture that is vital, and self-sustaining and that reaches around people and becomes the sea they swim in and draw life from, while they complete the cycle and return the favor.

That requires a lot of complete loops to work, and they have to be vertically oriented. We need to have the vertical donut model, not the open-ended "tree" model of management to bring all the pieces into "phase-lock" and allow a laser-beam output, not incoherent light.

And, when it breaks, we need "doctors" of the corporate spirit to bring it into alignment with a pattern that works again.

But it's not "the Borg" and it's not scary and it's not homogenization and it's not domination and it's not an abandonment of a social hierarchy -- but it is a different use of those pathways, a transforming use, that uses vertical close-paths to make the top the bottom and bring vertical unity to the compound-level beast. Then, it works. Then, it's great!

Note: All closed paths are "loops", so any causal loop diagram will have lots of "loops".

Most of those loops aren't dominant. What will be dominant will be the FEEDBACK CONTROL LOOPS. These will be self-aware, self-repairing, persistent, goal-seeking loops. THOSE are the key players over any long period of time in living systems. Those are where things break, or never got formed in the first place. And those are the intervention points for a sustainable intervention.

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.

Systems Thinking and the emergence of new Life

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

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

I'd like to suggest, as others have, that the process of exploration is more a spiral or helix than a circle, and we, individually and collectively, may go through multiple cycles of coming back to where we were, except that now it's "different" than the last time we were "here."

There is a motion, very much akin to an actual mechanical screw, in which we apply a rotational force or motion, but the result is a much harder to achieve motion in a wholly different direction.

As I sometimes do, I was rereading Practical Challenges of Systems Thinking and Modeling in Public Health this morning, seeing if the article had changed in meaning since I last read it [ Trochim WM, Calebra DA, Milstein B, Gallagher RS, Leischow SJ, American Journal of Public Health, March 2006, V96, No. 3]. Most of those people are at Cornell, in fact, in my old stomping ground, MVR Hall. Bobby Milstein is at the CDC, and Scott Leischow at NCI.

As one of my favorite philosophers, Charles Schulz's dog Snoopy, noted one day:

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

Anyway, I got a different answer I wanted to share.

Still reverberating from my post on the Ten Lessons from Physics yesterday, I realized there is another candidate for important lessons in reducing complexity to a manageable level from physics that may be relevant to "Systems Thinking."

I already described yesterday how immensely complex interactions at one level, such as gas molecules, can get reduced to a few very simple but aggregate-scale concepts on the next level, such as "pressure, volume, and temperature", that are meaningless words on the individual molecule's level. In between those scales there was a forbidden zone, computationally intractable from either end.

Near the first easy end, only a few things only occasionally interacting, we have some room to actually compute the motions of several planets or billiard balls - much to the dismay of students of introductory physics.

What I can bring home from my foray into physics, however, is the news that there is also an easy zone at the other end - the end of immense numbers and immense interaction.

There is a continuum actually, and a sort of "continuous paradigm shift" as you go from the first easy end (few things, little interaction) to the other easy end (huge number of things and interactions) and that is in "what goes away."

At the lower easy end, the interactions go away, and we think in terms of "objects", mostly, that have properties, such as position and velocity.

At the upper easy end, it is the objects that go away, and we think in terms of persistent interactions that have self-energy and properties. This "regime" is the one that most of the visible universe inhabits, except for some relatively cold rocks (planets). It is the world of plasma, of high-energy physics, of stars, of the huge interactions at the centers of galaxies.

This is akin to the near-field, mid-field, and far-field of a radiating antenna - the math is relatively easy at either very near the antenna, or very far from the antenna - it's only at intermediate distances away that things become totally strange and slippery. I discussed that issue before.

In any case, we have here a two-dimensional entity, not a one-dimensional one, so it is now capable of being non-transitive and forming what Hofsteader called "a strange loop", akin to M.C. Escher's waterfalls or staircases. As the number of actors and intensity of interactions increases, one dimension, objects, diminishes in importance, the other dimension, interactions, increase in importance, until we reach the limit point, mathematically, and physically, where the initial objects simply drop out of the equation entirely and we are left only with the persistent interactions - which, voila, close the loop, the snake bites its tail, and these persistent interactions become the "objects" for the next level of existence and we start our next turn
around the greater helix of Life.

It's a smooth transition, easily modeled, not a "leap". It only looks like a leap if we go across the screw threads, not along them.

So, the meaning of "an entity" is really only locally defined, in an asymptotic way.. well below its level, the concept or entity is too large to be perceived, as "temperature" is to a molecule or "admission to Harvard" is to one of our body's cells. Then, as we think about sliding up to larger and larger scales, this concept has very strong meaning and dominates the local equations in the local time frame at the local scale, and then, as we keep on going, it goes away again forever, as does our problem starting our car on January 12th in terms of international relations.

OK, nice metaphor, but how is it useful? Do we have a name for these "persistent interactions"?

Aha! In physics, one type of persistent interaction is a "soliton". I'll skip the details, but these are waves that don't die out as they travel, but just keep on going. Fascinating.

What I do want to suggest for these persistent interactions is, at one scale, the idea of self-aware regulatory feedback loops. This concept is applicable at any scale, size, or time-frame and seems to be invariant and a core building block of life. Cells do it. The endocrine system does it. People do it. Corporations do it. Nations do it. Ecosystems do it. Policy makes and lawyers actively work on "regulations" that are, one realizes, actually supposed to be part of an on-going dance and regulatory feedback loop. Hospitals and doctors and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid do this dance. The fact that there is a dance is the constant, and it's a very specific kind of dance that Control System Engineers know very well, and have tools to deal with.

I've gone on at great length in my recent MPH Capstone presentation at Johns Hopkins about these loops, and the fact that a closed, regulatory feedback loop is a qualitatively different animal than a "network" of interactions or a "web" of interactions or some Systems Dynamics Causal Loop Diagram. The loop has several properties that are very distinct from what is sloppily called "feedback":

• The loop persists over time.
• The loop is self-aware and can tell "itself" from "other" and do repairs, that is it has some kind of rudimentary immune system and damage repair system.
• To accomplish stability in a changing world, and overcome the problems Godel pointed out, the loop probably has formed alliances with other loops, either horizontally (peer loops) or vertically (management loops) where "you tell me if I'm losing it without realizing it and I'll do the same for you."
• The goal of the regulatory process has to include stability and survival, yes, but on top of that there is some goal, or direction, or "intent", and that goal may, in fact, be set by other loops (management) or peers (norms) or the surrounding context (tissue), or distant context (the pituitary gland).

Such loops will consequently differentially survive and persist, and end up dominating the landscape. They will tend to survive and persist best, if they are compatible with the larger scale activity that is going on, of course - if they are "aligned" with larger and larger contexts - but in Life this is a bidirectional game and the larger context goals may still be in flux and controllable by the lower level actors - until we get "phase lock" in that vertical dimension, the image finds a home and latches into place, and the whole entity is now stable on multiple levels at once. A solution has been found. Life, at a whole new level, has emerged.

Such loops are also exquisitely powerful in a computational sense. It's a long story, but closed feedback loops are IIR and open feedback loops are FIR, and IIR is infinitely more powerful than FIR. I'll get back to that tomorrow. In any case, no Control System Engineer would even imaging using an "open-loop" system if a "closed-loop regulatory feedback control system" were available. You get much better performance, stability, cost, robustness, response-time, tunability, etc. with closed-loop systems.

So, where's that get us? It's time to head off to my day job. Let's lash this down.

Of all the possible, N-factorial loops on causal loop diagrams, or in physical reality of the whole hierarchy of self-organizing Life, which includes people and corporations and nations, the winners will be the relatively persistent closed feedback loops. These will form, in many real senses, meta-life, or actors in their own rights with their own agendas and local worlds and local reference frames in which they are important and most of the rest of life is reduced to "an environment" in which they swim.

This "meta-life" will emerge at ever higher and higher organizational levels.

If you want to tweak, or tune, or improve the behavior and outcomes of any of these local entities (cells, the pancreas, the endocrine system, a person, a team, a corporation, the tobacco industy, the auto industry, a whole culture or nation or broken nation or proto-nation), then this model suggests focusing on finding a way to nudge it towards this stable and viable condition. "Nudge" means find existing proto-regulatory feedback loops that are almost closed, and close them. This pushes the whole "holon" (Ken Wilber's word) towards a stable attractor, a hold-fast, a sort of resonant notch or Lagrange point, where it can exist consistently with Life above and Life below it efficiently and effectively.

This is consistent with the focus on "microsystems" of the Institute of Medicine's Crossing the Quality Chasm, but goes beyond that and suggests a type of completion or stabilization of an actual meta-life process is the key variable to a sustainable intervention. It suggests what to look for, what to measure, and how to tweak it, and a fundamental principle of physics that supports that type of intervention as being principle-based.

It's also consistent with Senge's Presence and Stephen Covey's "8th habit" and focuses on the use of local feedback processes to bring about a change in a person or small team or an entire corporation that needs "restructuring" to return to an innovative, agile, productive state.

And it's consistent with my previous posts that Public Health, by its own logic, has to embrace improving the performance of corporations as well as populations of people, because both types of meta-life interact strongly, and, as many people in southeast Michigan are aware, if the corporate health is not well, the employee lives will not be well either. These do not need to be in conflict, and should be totally consistent objectives from both sides.

Neat. We should try simulating this and see how it behaves. We need to know how to measure such things, how to parametrize them, how to reverse engineer the underlying simple model from observable features, and how to nudge the various mathematical poles in the control-world towards the correct quadrant and tell (with p<0.01) whether our intervention is working or not - or, more precisely, we need to navigate and steer the intervention, in a minute-by-minute short-scale piloting fashion, around the rocks and to completion and need this compass to recover our direction after each swerve to avoid some obstacle or seize some favorable wind.

My Comair 5191 crash analysis now available

Because "systems thinking" is a difficult concept to describe, I wrote and just posted a paper analyzing a commercial aircraft disaster - the crash of Comair 5191 - in Lexington Kentucky, August, 2006. This is a full-length (30 page) analysis with pictures and diagrams and source materials, aside from the cockpit voice recorder transcripts, which are linked below. The final NTSB findings on the case are not yet out, to my knowledge.

It's a little rough around the edges, but it starts with the basic astounded question of how two, fully trained pilots, not under pressure, could taxi to and attempt to take off from the wrong runway, resulting in the death of all on-board except the one who was flying the plane, who was pulled from the flaming wreckage by a first responder. The runway was a few hundred yards too short for the plane to have made it off the ground safely.

So, it goes from "How on earth could this have happened!?" to "Oh... There but for the grace of God go I." Only the new commercial pilots on the pilot chat blogs couldn't imagine how such a thing could ever happen to them. It brought to mind the old saying "There are bold pilots, and there are old pilots." In this case, however, the rest of the world conspired to set the stage.

As with "errors" in hospitals, it typically takes a whole team of people to align their actions in the wrong way (the "swiss cheese model"), for someone to buy the gun, someone to load the gun, someone to cock the hammer, someone to hand it to the poor last guy in the chain, and that guy to pull the trigger. For legal purposes, blame is assessed one way, a way this paper does not assess. For purposes of safety engineering, and seeing where interventions might help to avoid ever having this happen again, we need to look at a whole different set of factors that set the stage for this "accident".

Please contact me if you'd like to use this paper (or a newer, better version) for instructional material. Thanks!

( Note: I am a private pilot, but I'm not a member of the NTSB or any official agency, and this analysis is a personal analysis for instructional purposes in safety engineering, not intended for legal purposes. I have no relationship that I know of to anyone involved in this case. These are all real, living people and my reconstruction may be entirely wrong. The point is to honor those who died by learning everything we can from their deaths so this won't happen again.)

Prior Posts:
Comair 5191 - Confirmation Bias and Framing (1/20/07)
Cockpit voice recorder transcripts
Washington DC Crash of Air Florida was 25 years ago - remembered
(with links to BMJ, High-reliability engineering, TEM, etc.)

The Sixth Discipline for Learning Organizations

There are some things common to the diverse fields of medicine, public health, business, religion, science, and the military.

• They all tackle problems which result in "success" or "failure" in a changing world.
• Failure can cost property, lives, or even entire nations and cultures.
  
• "Success" depends on how well they can detect failure and adapt to it.
• They all have bright people, but really operate more at the organizational level
  
• Adaptation depends on how good the organization is at seeing and learning.

So, a book like Peter Senge's The Fifth Discipline - The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization is very important to us all, and impacts us on many fronts.

Senge points out an extremely pivotal insight: there are two different kinds of complexity, and most of what we do is focused on the wrong one.

He describes "detail complexity", which is the type we are familiar with, where there are thousands or even millions of details to be kept track of and managed. That one we're pretty good at, with the help of computers.

But then he goes on (on page 71 of the 2006 revision):

But there is a second type of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where the cause and effect are subtle, and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning, and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity...

When the same action has dramatically different effects in the short run and the long, there is dynamic complexity. When an action has one set of consequences locally and a very different set of consequences in a different part of the system, there is dynamic complexity. When obvious interventions produce non-obvious consequences, there is dynamic complexity.

He adds

"The real leverage in most management situations lie in understanding dynamic complexity, not detail complexity."

This understanding comes from "system thinking" and that, in turn "starts with understanding a simple concept called feedback."

Of course, to say feedback is "simple" is misleading. The impact of feedback is wildly subtle, counter-intuitive, perplexing, and paradoxical to most of us. Some simply refuse to accept the concept at all because it overturns so many cherished notions of how the world works and how things "should" be.

Senge goes on, echoing many others and American Indian culture, "Reality is made up of circles but we see straight lines."

The point is that when people or things form a causal loop, where each thing influences the next one down the chain, and the chain is closed, then all our notions of "causality" are thrown out the window. Every actor in that loop is both the cause and the prisoner of the effects of the entire loop. In many ways, the shape of the loop becomes the dominant "cause" of what unfolds, far more so than the people caught up within it.

Senge describes a person filling a glass of water. As seen by a person, their hand is controlling the level of water in the glass, and adjusting it as the glass fills. A perfectly valid alternative description is that the level of the water in the glass is controlling the hand, causing the hand to close the faucet as the level reaches the right place.

Both descriptions are partially correct. The hand affects the water level, and the water level, in turn affects the hand. There is a feedback loop in place. Both are "causes" and both are "effects," and "which came first" is an irrelevant question.

It is the intrinsic property of complex systems to be dense with such feedback loops between the people inside them, making everyone a cause and everyone a trapped recipient of effects.

This means bad news and good news.

The bad news is that, if the output of "the system" is wrong, then the blame should be shared among everyone in the system, not just the last person to touch something that failed.

The good news is that every person in the system therefore also has the opportunity to change the flows and impact the system's output. In conflict situations, either party has the ability to increase the tension or decrease the tension.

In fact, in most conflict situations, the whole reason for the conflict in the first place is that there are feedback loops that are reflecting each sides actions into later behaviors by the other side, which are misinterpreted as new "actions", not "reactions."

Thus, in 2006, when Hezbollah forces in Syria reacted to Israel's capture of many of their own, they captured two Israeli soldiers in return. However, Israel saw this not as a reaction, but as a new "unprovoked action", which therefore demanded a new massive "reaction" and counter strike - a 34 day assault by Israel. The counter strike, in turn, was perceived by Hezbollah as a new "unprovoked attack", and the cycle simply continues to feed itself.

This is a classic no-win situation, where each side downplays the value of lives of the other side, and feels that the loss of one of their own should be responded to by killing two of the "others",
in order to "get even" and also "be even." By that flawed match, the conflict spirals out of control because there will never be an "even" situation.

On a smaller scale, within organizations, the same phenomenon occurs - but generally without actual explosives and death. The vast majority of conflicts can actually be traced back to people, or teams, or departments, or divisions, or managers blaming others for behavior that is simply the downstream result of their own earlier behavior, reflected and sometimes amplified through the structure of "the system" of feedback loops and lags. Similarly, management and labor can get into the same endless loop of conflict over "getting even" for behaviors that are the result of their own, forgotten, earlier actions.

In a bizarre sort of hallucinogenic dance, at all levels from personal to national, we are fighting demons that are simply the delayed reflections of our own earlier behavior, which we fail to recognize and blame instead on the "others" being "bad."

Senge mentioned the problem with dynamic complexity over space and over time, but he missed the third dimension, namely, over scale, or location in the hierarchy of life. Actions or interventions may look very different, ranging from great to wretched, as we rotate the lenses in our microscope stage and view different time-horizons, different space-horizons, and different perspectives from the bottom of the organization to the top.

Worse, actors in one place who perceive, at their location, time, and scale that their own actions are "good" may be completely baffled by hostile responses coming from actors at other locations, times, or level who are only responding to the "terrible" thing being done to them by that obviously uncaring and bad person somewhere else. And, of course, this would mean that those people responding with hostility must be "bad people" and need to be fired, neutralized, or killed, depending on the context of the conflict.

Dennis Severance describes the same kind of error being made by a mythical management in the book Making I/T Work. That management tries to impose an an enterprise-wide computer system, runs into "hostility", tries to "deal with" the "opponents" by firing them, and then is blind-sided when the computer system, "out of the blue, with no notice", fails to operate as intended, and they can't grasp why no one ever warned them of problems. The fact that those who raised these issues at the start were fired for their "hostility" is completely lost. This is a very common problem across industries.

These problems are not, as they might seem, problems of perception, but are actually problems of the intrinsic properties of systems. The people in these systems are all well-intended, doing "good jobs" locally, and yet, like M.C. Escher's pictures, taken together form an impossible loop that simply can't operate.

The variables that depend on the horizon of space, time, or scale are the keys here, and are as surprising as seeing an object that is red close up turn to look green when you back up several steps. This seems "impossible". Actually, New Scientist published a marvelous picture a month ago that, if viewed close up, was Albert Einstein, but if you backed up across the room, changed into Marilyn Monroe.

( Hybrid images: Now you see them…

• 31 March 2007
• NewScientist.com
• Gregory T. Huang )
  

These system effects are much more prevalent than people realize, and are the things that are "to blame" for most of the conflict and corporate dysfunction and national conflict around us.

It is clear to me, and I'd say to Peter Senge, that these effects need to be somehow made visible and accessible to everyone, at every level, from every country, so that we can get enough comprehension for people to see that, in Walt Kelly's Pogo's words, "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Of course, many scientists, working a small scales, would have a hard time accepting wisdom from theologians, working at large scales, who see different pictures in the same world. Biomedical researchers, used to looking down the microscope for the cause of problems, are not prone to look out the window instead, and even less to consider that their own scientific culture could be implicated in producing the conditions that produced the cancer that they are now working to "cure".

Still, the logic of Senge's arguments is sound. "All" that is required is for people to stop blaming others for all the pain and recognize that the others are just as good people and are just as trapped in the pain, and, in any case, as with Jimmy Buffet in Margaritaville, they might realize that, yes, maybe, they themselves might be partly to blame.

If this looks remarkably like the basic golden rule of most religions ("Do unto others what you would have them do unto you") that's because it is. Other really annoying commandments like "Forgive us our sins as we forgive others" also come readily to mind.

Like the "Marilyn Einstein" photo, reality is multi-scaled, and the scientists have the fine-detail or high-frequency detail right, and the religions may be wrong on details but have the long-wavelength, larger picture right.

All of this should be something that can be animated, simulated, and taught in K-12 school, as well as in continuing education. And it should be.

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