Picking up from yesterday's post, can we be sure of anything about the nature of any solution to the fractal organization problem? Let's try tackling this first in the static case, then in the dynamic case, then in the dynamic, time and space short with noise case.
This is a general solution to the co-evolving properties of Life - ever becoming more specialized in order to deal with life, and yet always having to communicate fast enough and be agile and able to move as one when external changes or dangers require it.
The specialization part is relatively easy and automatic, the re-integration part is where we all get stuck.
First, consider our physical bodies. We start with, effectively, the "stem cells" that are in the news lately, that can become anything. Then those specialize and specialize more and specialize more. Why doesn't our body fragment into a zillion pieces that refuse to talk to each other , like our societies are tending to do? I note in passing that even a slight tendency to fragment results in what we call a loss of overall system functioning, or "ill health" and requires reintegration, or "wholistic" recovery and reconnection.
Why is this such a big deal. It's such a big deal because of the wonderful property of relationships, a boon and a curse at the same time. Between any two things is a third thing, a relationship. I've posted on this before. At one end of the mathematical spectrum, the two things, like billiard balls, dominate and the relationship, occasion interactions, seem sort of tacked on. Some businesses and people have relationships about that level - occasional ships passing in the night, exchanging messages, then back to the cubicle for "parallel play" kind of work, as if no one else was there.
Usually, this is a very low-powered arrangement, because of the fact that each of the "objects" or "actors", the billiard balls, has a small and finite amount of energy and complexity. Not so for the relationship. Relationships, like the "angle" between two vectors in complex space, for the mathematically inclined, are unbounded. They can be arbitrarily complicated and hold arbitrarily large amounts of energy.
Mostly, we are continually surprised by this fact. We occasionally see a group of people rise above the billiard ball state to one where the interactional energy is storing a lot of energy, in "teamwork". And, as with sports teams like (sigh) the Michigan Wolverines, this dynamic "synergy" is a quicksilvery kind of thing that comes and goes and depends on "coaching" or something subtle. Subtle, yes, but powerful? Yes! The skill or thingie that can take a bunch of ragtag individuals and make them into "a team" is very highly praised, and very rare.
Going back to physics models, this interaction energy can be hundreds of times more powerful than the "self-energy", even for dumb things like atoms or large billiard balls like black holes. In fact, in the limit of that end of the continuum or spectrum, the interaction is everything and the self effectively vanishes. It's the mirror image of billiard balls as the stable thing and "interactions" as the occasional interruption -- it's a world where the interactions and relationships are the stable thing and the "objects" are occasional interruptions. (As if the Spirit occasionally takes an embodied form briefly, then it's over.)
That is the world that scientists believe exists in the super high energy worlds near the center of every galaxy, the disk shaped collection of ten trillion stars like the milky way.
What's the rule here? The design says that objects, or "self", is a very limited concept, but that relationships and interactions are where "The action" is, long term.
So, there is a fairly well developed mathematical machinery for understanding this kind of interaction, where the relationship or context itself becomes as important, then more important than the things having the relationship. For dumb atoms, the spectacular result is galactic centers of almost unimaginably high energies. At a planetary scale and larger, this is the field called "General Relativity" that Einstein studied.
But, we're humans, not atoms. We are, whatever it means, "alive". Our molecules and cells are dominated by this interaction energy field called "life", and when we "die" that goes away, and we are left with the heap of atoms, almost an afterthought, that was at the base of that interactional field. At that point, yes, we are "just a heap of molecules of water, carbon, oxygen, etc."
But when we are alive, we are something more. We live and breathe and operate in that space that soars far above the constraints of mere atoms. Our cells themselves are alive, already, so we are built up of relationships among living relationships, not relationships among molecules. And each of those relationships has a "life of its own", but we also have a potentially much larger "life together".
Coherence doesn't go from zero to one - it goes from zero to infinity. That's important to realize.
We're not facing the possibility of a 10% impact of "synergy" on top of our own small lives, we're facing a possible 100% or 1000% or more impact. Two people by themselves may be almost inert, or tending to "go out" as solitary coals from a fire do; but put together and interacting, may be huge. This is the key to sports team "teamwork". This is the key to why human relationships of just two people "in love" can be so amazingly powerful.
And, this is the key to The Toyota Way - at the core, it is a process for the organization members to stumble slowly, almost blindly, up the evolutionary scale in almost real time, discovering the huge power inherent in "working together". No manager can direct this result, no human can describe it well, but, together, collectively, over time, we can just keep on experimenting with a million tiny improvements and way-find our way up that invisible mountain to greatness.
But, Toyota took 50 years. We need to understand this well enough that we can make it all happen in 5 years, or 5 months. Is it possible that that is possible?
We can learn to control our brain-waves, our alpha rhythm, or the beating of our heart. Yoga masters can retreat into the mountains, shut out distractions, and master this in a few small decades. Or, we can connect to a biofeedback monitor and master it in ten minutes. As Tony Robbins, the performance improvement guru said when asked how long something takes, "How long do you want it to take?"
Now, there is something else about people that can be forgotten - something very surprising. We don't replicate by budding. We don't grow take one of our existing arms, say, and break it off like a salamander's tail or half an earthworm, and have both halves grow back into full people. We do something much more complicated -- we start over again at a single cell between each generation.
Why? That's a huge amount of work. There must be a huge reason.
One reason is genetic mixing and cross-over, yes. But the world is multi-valued, and just because we find one reason doesn't mean we found them all.
And, here's another puzzle. How can it be that each new generation's infants are so powerfully strong and dynamic and adaptive, when they are born to parents who are getting old and set in their ways and having parts already start to break? That's strange, isn't it? Where does this "new life" or "new youth and vitality" come from? (And can I buy some more of it?) It can't be packed inside the DNA, because by now we've unfolded that sucker a million times or more, many times per generation, and it would have run out.
No, the new youth and vitality and life comes from this "synergy" part -- the dynamic relationship among the parts that has to be rebuilt from the ground up every generation, and, astoundingly, is.
Well, maybe these two things are related - the pushing the entire thing through a keyhole the size of one cell, and the sudden burst of new vitality and energy that seems to come as a miracle from nowhere.
I think they are related. What our bodies have at that stage are millions, then billions of cells that very recently were all a single cell, and still remember, in some real way, that total unity of being. It's hard to get more unified than being one cell.
Then, as the parts specialize and specialize more, not hands and arms and legs and eyes, they start migrating into these secondary and tertiary silos, with a common heritage but no longer working on exactly the same problem, locally. We "get old" and set in our ways.
Well, good news, boys and girls. Toyota has proven that at least one organization can be "revitalized" or "vitalized" from the ground up. It doesn't have to just "go downhill."
We only need one case to prove it can happen and we have that case.
What are the secrets of the solution? Well, as I just discussed, "unity" is a big deal. The cells of our body have to be in constant awareness of their inherent similarity, of the fact that they all came down the same tree, from the same start, even though they chose different pathways to turn into from the stem-cell stage. For people to pull-off an organizational miracle of revitalization, they too probably have to get back in touch with the core "unity" that makes all humans "equal" in where we started in life - as single cells -- an further back than that.
That is one unity that surpasses all diversity, and we need to treasure every possible source of unity, because those are what hold together the chalice into which we want life to pour our new life and new youth. For Toyota, this involved a tremendous flattening of the organizational pyramid or hierarchy, and acceptance of the astounding idea that management and labor are the same kind of people. All kinds of prejudice and stereotypes about other groups being inherently and irrevocably "different" have to be let go of, and removed, for this to take off and soar without holding the brakes on.
"We are one" has to be made real in every way that we have control over, to open the door the the ways we don't have direct control over.
Then, our vitality can become unbounded again, we can regenerate lost parts, and we can rise up to arbitrarily high performance and ability to cope with and adapt to the world's challenges.
Well, in theory. Starting with, say, any large organization such as a tertiary medical center that has already differentiated into different branches and specialties and sub-specialities and sub-sub-specialties, each of which is internally convinced it is "superior" to all the others -- how does that work in practice? And doctors don't want to think of themselves as "the same as" a secretary or janitor, the think of themselves as "better than" such people. Then what?
Then we have what we have today. We get institutional level fragmentation, arthritis, inability to adapt, inability to cope, dysfunction on increasingly larger scales, and, if left unchecked, the inevitable and inexorable end point of all that fragmentation -- institutional old age and finally institutional death.
But that is not the end point of life, just the end point of a life style in which the power is all leaking out through barriers to change and stereotypes of expectations and prejudices of history or power that are holding onto constraints that need to be discarded.
What to do is not something that a few managers, or an outside consulting firm can come in and go, oh yes, change these reporting relationships and replace these people and you'll be fine. The change that's required is organic. Every part of the being of the beast has participate in being aware of the presence of the other parts, and accepting them as "equal", and letting the obvious ways of improving things happen, even if that changes long-standing cherished boundaries that used to help us make sense of life and keep it under control.
The boundaries that used to be the solution to control necessary for life to thrive and be prosperous have become the problems.
Our human organizations are held in place by norms and expectations, that can change in a heartbeat, but tend not to. Our expectations are prisoners to our beliefs and our prejudices based on what happened in the past. We are in a world recreated every day anew based on those prejudices and self-fulfilling expectations. It can change in a day, if we let go of our pre-conceived notions (prejudices) that are holding it back.
So, in theory this is possible. In a different scale of life we see this happen all the time. On corporate scales we have seen it happen at least once. In sports teams, we see it happen often enough to pay a lot of money to watch games for those few seconds of ecstasy when the team "gets it together" for a few moments of "momentum" and changes everything. All bets are off when that player takes the field.
But this still seems like luck or magic, some kind of art that happens rarely, but sadly will not happen to us. We say the incantations, arrange the magical items, but the rain doesn't fall. Why not? What are we doing wrong?
How can we make the more like building a bridge or skyscraper so it doesn't tend to fall down as soon as we're done?
We have trillions of examples, across all scales of life from viruses to nations, where this phenomenon has shown glimpses of itself. Again, we need to pool notes and reveal the phantom shape that keeps playing out around us.
That's what learning is about, on a social level - finding out what actually works with our eyes open, trading notes, realizing what might work just one tenth of one percent better and trying it to see if it does, over and over again.
And knowing we need to let go of the old shapes and old solutions that are the new problems. But not in a revolutionary way, which is chaotic and risky, but in an evolutionary way, stable and methodical and systematic. All changes have to be tiny, small enough that we can hit the "Undo" button if they don't work, or the "commit and accept" button if they do, times a zillion, persisted over time. That's all it takes. That, and time will do the trick.
Well, and enough belief in the process to be willing to devote the time and energy to overcoming despair and trying it. We keep looking for single-step solutions that have a huge impact, which is at the wrong end of the spectrum.
As the Institute of Medicine noted in Crossing the Quality Chasm -- we don't need a billion dollar solution -- we need a billion one-dollar solutions.
That's what the Toyota Way, or continuous improvement, or learning organizations are all about. Very small changes, so "control" is never lost, repeated over and over. We are not good at comprehending the power of a compounded change. We think it should "look" big.
It doesn't, not with our usual eyes. Amazingly small things can have an amazingly large impact, and we have been not looking for solutions of that nature.
If we rotate by half a degree a day, which is almost nothing, we will turn by 180 degrees, a complete U-turn, in a year. That's the sweet spot that combines unbroken control with unbounded upwards evolution and learning -- persistent motion, just above zero, in some direction or with some coherent generating process.
It's exactly the opposite of the end where contractors or vendors can charge big bucks, because the individual changes are so tiny, as well as completely unpredictable in advance. We can define the process, but not say much about the path, except that it will surprise us. And big budget programs want pathways spelled out in advance, and big changes to happen that are visible.
Big outcomes come from the other end as well, and only from it once the world becomes so entangled -- a billion $1 changes, not a $billion change, remember.
So, now the question has been rotated around yet again to what process, or ethic, or belief, or mechanism will hold together such a collective effort over a long time, with such "little" visible or tangible result in the short run?
Again, quoting Tony Robbins, "We over-estimate what we can do in a year; we underestimate what we can do in a decade."
And here we reach the point where science has to look to religion or culture for clues as to what gets people to pick a direction and stick with it over a long period of time, even with little immediate tangible outcome? "Faith" comes to mind, faith in a process, not blind faith, but faith based on the experience of other parts of the world that has been comprehended and understood. Eyes open faith based on evidence of what actually works in practice.
And, since this is a bootstrap feedback loop we're trying to get rolling, a tornado we're hoping to induce, the faith in the unity of mankind requires seeing the unity, which requires pooling notes across diversity, which we tend not to do since we already concluded it's not there. Those pre-judgments of despair have to be let go, suspended for a while, based on solid theory and maybe advanced computer simulations or something that can make vivid animations showing that this can and does work.
Our bodies work which requires this miracle to be possible in practice. Galactic centers work. This isn't magic, but it is math beyond our usual training and experience. We're used to the cold, dark rock, the billiard-ball end of the universe, even though our textbooks tell us that 99% of the universe is at the opposite end, in the "plasma" state of matter, or state of being, at the blinding light end of the spectrum.
We just need to resolve to move towards the light, a little bit more every day, with every person expected to pitch in and help a little, and no one expected to have "a plan" other than the Toyota type process of continual exploration and mutual assistance.
The Light is there, and we need to move, because the old ways just aren't working any more, but we can move slowly and methodically, without disruption or ripping or tearing the fabric of society, if we all move a tiny bit forward each day.
That's the Way.
No one can tell you what change you need to make at the levels you live in. Something can change, but no one really knows which way is up, given how much things interact and have surprising results. So we need to move very slowly so that news from the outlying districts has time to make it into town.
And, at least have of our tiny exploratory moves will be in the "wrong" direction, that is, we will be surprised that the result is the opposite of what we expected. That's cool. That's how it should be. We tried something, we learned something. That's success not failure. Tomorrow, reverse direction and take two steps. We end up way ahead of where we'd be if we just stood here dithering, or analyzing. We're in motion and found the right direction with a simple experiment.
Just like the eye guy does, switching lenses in and out. "Better HERE.... or HERE?" That's all we need to do, but everyone needs to do it, every day, for a long time.
And that's what the problem has now rotated into. What does it take to get everyone to participate in doing something that takes a long time and has very little positive feedback, although some, as it is unfolding?
If we crack that problem, we can get learning organizations that adapt, and if we get those, we can solve most of the rest of our problems.
And, as with any bootstrap feedback process, it won't start overnight. It will start small, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, pick up speed and steam at the same time. It will develop momentum and start to snowball once it gets rolling.
All the standard financial analysis garbage like Extended Value Added ("EVA") misdirect us to ignore solutions that don't solve the problem this quarter in one huge step. "Prioritize" or "let the government do it" are pushed as solution paths.
This is at the other end. Everyone does a little, not someone does a lot. Initially we see close to nothing, although it better be positive or we should reverse it, but the change picks up speed as it starts to make a noticeable dent in things.
To try it, we have to see it, or have trust -- and cynicism is pretty large these days, judging from the polls, so seeing is better. This is where science can help, by making some vivid animations of how this process can work that are persuasive to some critical mass of people to give it a try, eyes open, and see what happens.
No one's apple cart should be over-turned, since it only changes 0.1% of things at a time, slowly, and reversibly. It's safe. But it gets us out of here.
And, the amazing thing about constant-force processes, is that they pick up speed. As with rocket ships or jet aircraft, the power is proportional to the velocity. Runways for some of our most powerful jets are still two miles long, because at initial slow speeds they are lumbering beasts that make a lot of noise and don't seem to be getting up much speed. We need to hold that setting and wait a little -- and check that speed again.
Once it's actually airborne, it picks up speed faster and faster and we can pull the nose up and break the sound barrier in a vertical climb out. But we have to make it past that really, really slow starting of the roll-out.
That's what we need to figure out how to bring about.
A billion one-dollar solutions. It will work. It's how we got this far, and why your body is able to function and sit there reading this. But what will give us the persistence to try, that's the question to look at.
Showing posts with label unity in diversity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unity in diversity. Show all posts
Friday, November 23, 2007
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Employee English as a unity in diversity problem
The "question" of what language employees "should" speak while at work in the US can be viewed in different frameworks, which give different answers. This is a perfect example of the "same content" having a completely different meaning in a "different context", and a good discussion case for how to grapple with that kind of social issue.
The case in point involved two women at a Salvation Army thrift store, who had been there 5 years, who were caught speaking Spanish to each other while they were sorting clothes. For this act, they were fired, let go from their jobs. The US Government's EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) brought an action against the Salvation Army to reinstate the women. Congressmen took action to block the EEOC. The issue has escalated to a heated battle in Congress that you can read about in "English only workplace rules stir debate", LA Times, Nov 20,2007. Briefly:
I will attempt to focus more on how we, as a society, attempt to think about and discuss this kind of problem than on which way this particular issue should be resolved. They are different problems, and the disagreement over the issue surfaces the far more general structural problem that
In more mature societies, like Japan, this "let's fight" approach to decision-making went out of fashion a thousand or more years ago. If our children attempt to resolve what TV show to watch by a fist-fight, we intervene and tell them to "grow up." It's good advice.
Right now, according to the LA Times, the question of how to deal with employees and English has succeeded in blocking passage of a budget bill in the US Congress, which was due October 1st -- 6 weeks ago. I suspect there are other issues similarly blocked. It seems obvious to me, and to much of the world outside Washington, that this entire process of reaching decisions has run out of steam, and it will only get worse as problems get more complex and the ones we have neglected start piling up even higher in the back room.
One such issue is annoying, but we now have so many issues that our infrastructure is crumbling, government can't function, and the world would be rolling on the floor laughing at us if we didn't also have a huge army, nuclear weapons and, apparently, poor self-regulation.
How do we fix that state of affairs?
Let's go back and look at this problem from at least two viewpoints, seeking what are rational concerns, not irrational conclusions.
From the employer's point of view, it is, I think a legitimate and responsible concern to want to maintain sufficient control over events so that the business can continue to operate and grow. I am guessing here that managers who don't speak a second language feel they can't manage what's going on if they can't understand what people on their staff are saying to them. And managers want employees who have to work together to be able to communicate fairly effortlessly so they can coordinate efforts to get the job done. If a third employee, say, couldn't assist because that employee didn't speak Spanish and the two women refused to speak English in that case, this would be a problem. Those are reasonable concerns.
On the other hand, the EEOC seems justified in intervening when unvarnished ignorance or prejudice or bigotry or paranoia on the part of managers punishes people for actions that are causing no harm to the business. Prohibiting an employee from talking over the phone to her child in Spanish during a work-break or lunch would seem an obvious example of that.
An international business framework, on the other hand, would say that the US needs to wake up to the fact that the rest of the world, and many customers, do not speak English, or would prefer to use some other language if possible. It would seem that a fully bilingual staff and management would not only solve the management issues, but would make a far more powerful business able to work directly with many more customers.
And, on a different level, employees do speak a different language than management, even when they are all speaking in English. That isn't fixed by demanding everyone speak English.
It is reasonable to work towards a common language that people can use when they need to come together, and in most of the USA that was not previously part of Mexico or Spain, that would probably be English. A common language is good.
It seems unreasonable to expect that diverse subcultures should all be abandoned in order to homogenize everyone and abandon the richness and capacity that a multilingual and multi-cultural workforce brings to the job.
I agree whole-heartedly that internal communication within most business organizations today in the USA is just terrible, and this poses a serious threat to their operation and survival. Also, communication between the business and the outside world is pretty bad, and poses a similar threat.
Both business and individuals have legitimate needs to thrive and grow, but in the Big Picture these cannot possibly ever be met by homogenizing the workforce. A common language is good, but as an "auxiliary language", when we need to cross cultures, not as a one-size-fits-all requirement. People need to coordinate and collaborate, yes -- but the wider solution to that is to improve our ability to collaborate across diversity, not to eliminate diversity.
The multi-level view, accepting the legitimacy of corporate needs as well as individual employees, if carried out correctly, leads inexorably to a focus on solving issues of "unity in diversity." That resolves issues at all levels. Only that resolves issues at all levels. Anything else is ultimately a waste of time, that will have to be redone. In "lean manufacturing" terms, it is "muda" - trying to solve a problem by getting good at something you shouldn't be doing in the first place, and blocking the actual solution in the process.
In medicine, attacking symptoms instead of problems is called "quackery." It's recognized as a bad thing that, first of all, actually does harm. It's a good concept. If we want health at all levels, a healthy society, healthy world-connected business, and healthy individuals, we need to focus our limited resources on the right problem: unity in diversity.
As a side-bar, I wonder how much of this issue would loom so huge in the US if we had the belief that Americans, like the rest of the world, were genetically capable of learning to function well in several different languages. I feel there is an unspoken fear, or anxiety, or maybe a spoken one, that we are somehow incapable of learning other languages, so we have this unspoken constraint on which language that should be. We see this as an "OR" problem, not an "AND" problem.
I wrote Noam Chomsky at MIT, one of the world's best linguists, actually, and asked him whether he thought Americans had some issue that prevented them from learning multiple languages. He replied no, in his mind it was just that we'd managed to get by this far without needing to do that so people felt no pressure to learn other languages.
On a separate tangent, I note that some "conservatives" or whatever the term is these days believe that it is not the appropriate job of "government" to be micromanaging the internals of companies, although that concept doesn't seem to scale down, as they then also believe it's OK for managers to micromanage employees. I agree, somewhat, it it shouldn't be the Federal Government that has to intervene to push companies to wake up to the world and diversity, if the right people would pick up that task and do their job. In my mind, that would be the stockholders and investors who are trying to maximize their wealth and the ability of companies they have invested in to thrive. Enlightened investors, looking at the world, would almost certainly think company management should stop being parochial and short-sighted and get with the new world-scale program.
I'm baffled as to why they don't express that sentiment more loudly and focus instead on short-term gains that are devastating long-term gains. A sin of "youth" I guess, that hasn't yet realized that the end of the road of maximum short-term gains is ruin, not victory.
Maybe it really is that we don't train our children to think about different reference frames. The strategy "Sacrifice the future for today", when we get to the tomorrow we're trying to survive to reach, actually plays out as "You sacrificed today for yesterday, which is gone now." We've been doing a lot of that lately, and now "The future isn't what it used to be."
Today's NY Times also has an article on how widespread the psychological phenomenon is of "denial." Maybe that's relevant to this discussion.
In any case, if you keep throwing out all the past, it's really hard to be a "learning organization." We seem to have, as a nation, a problem in being better able to deal with the day each day. If anything, judging from the state of Congress, or the local governments in Michigan and California we seem increasingly less able to deal with each day. We have what T.S. Eliot described as an "age that moves progressively backwards."
While other people or places or things may be "to blame" for causing some issues we face, it's hard to look any place but the mirror for an inability to learn from experience.
As I said once, if each step takes you further from your goal, you will never reach it.
We have some piece of our social structure in backwards, it would appear.
The case in point involved two women at a Salvation Army thrift store, who had been there 5 years, who were caught speaking Spanish to each other while they were sorting clothes. For this act, they were fired, let go from their jobs. The US Government's EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) brought an action against the Salvation Army to reinstate the women. Congressmen took action to block the EEOC. The issue has escalated to a heated battle in Congress that you can read about in "English only workplace rules stir debate", LA Times, Nov 20,2007. Briefly:
WASHINGTON --(AP News) A government lawsuit against the Salvation Army has the House and Senate at loggerheads over whether to nullify a law that prohibits employers from firing people who don't speak English on the job.
The fight illustrates the explosiveness of immigration as an issue in the 2008 elections.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are pushing hard to protect employers who require their workers to speak English, but Democratic leaders have blocked the move despite narrow vote tallies in the GOP's favor.
For more than 30 years, federal rules have generally barred employers from establishing English-only requirements for their workers.
But in a demonstration of the volatility of the immigration issue, Senate Republicans have won passage of legislation preventing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from enforcing the rules against English-only workplaces.
House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have promised Latino lawmakers that the language issue was a nonstarter and the resulting impasse has stalled the underlying budget bill, which lawmakers had hoped to send to President Bush this week....
I will attempt to focus more on how we, as a society, attempt to think about and discuss this kind of problem than on which way this particular issue should be resolved. They are different problems, and the disagreement over the issue surfaces the far more general structural problem that
we, in the US, don't know how to resolve such issues, only how to fight over them until one side gets 51% of the votes and can "win."At least, for a few years ... then problems embedded in that solution become more visible, and the "other side" gets 51% of the vote, and "wins" and changes the rules. At least, for a few years ... Etc.
In more mature societies, like Japan, this "let's fight" approach to decision-making went out of fashion a thousand or more years ago. If our children attempt to resolve what TV show to watch by a fist-fight, we intervene and tell them to "grow up." It's good advice.
Right now, according to the LA Times, the question of how to deal with employees and English has succeeded in blocking passage of a budget bill in the US Congress, which was due October 1st -- 6 weeks ago. I suspect there are other issues similarly blocked. It seems obvious to me, and to much of the world outside Washington, that this entire process of reaching decisions has run out of steam, and it will only get worse as problems get more complex and the ones we have neglected start piling up even higher in the back room.
If we're waiting until the world gets simpler again, it will be a very long wait.Now, in my mind, the up-stream issue here isn't English, it's how we can learn as a society to resolve issues instead of whatever you call it that we do now. By "resolve", I mean that happy case where the root issues are actually fixed, and the symptoms don't keep popping up again and causing yet more conflict. We can "check it off" our list. We can be done, once and for all, with it and with the hard feelings and on-going damage the current 51% solutions are causing. We can stop the bleeding, not just put on a new bandage.
One such issue is annoying, but we now have so many issues that our infrastructure is crumbling, government can't function, and the world would be rolling on the floor laughing at us if we didn't also have a huge army, nuclear weapons and, apparently, poor self-regulation.
How do we fix that state of affairs?
Let's go back and look at this problem from at least two viewpoints, seeking what are rational concerns, not irrational conclusions.
From the employer's point of view, it is, I think a legitimate and responsible concern to want to maintain sufficient control over events so that the business can continue to operate and grow. I am guessing here that managers who don't speak a second language feel they can't manage what's going on if they can't understand what people on their staff are saying to them. And managers want employees who have to work together to be able to communicate fairly effortlessly so they can coordinate efforts to get the job done. If a third employee, say, couldn't assist because that employee didn't speak Spanish and the two women refused to speak English in that case, this would be a problem. Those are reasonable concerns.
On the other hand, the EEOC seems justified in intervening when unvarnished ignorance or prejudice or bigotry or paranoia on the part of managers punishes people for actions that are causing no harm to the business. Prohibiting an employee from talking over the phone to her child in Spanish during a work-break or lunch would seem an obvious example of that.
An international business framework, on the other hand, would say that the US needs to wake up to the fact that the rest of the world, and many customers, do not speak English, or would prefer to use some other language if possible. It would seem that a fully bilingual staff and management would not only solve the management issues, but would make a far more powerful business able to work directly with many more customers.
And, on a different level, employees do speak a different language than management, even when they are all speaking in English. That isn't fixed by demanding everyone speak English.
It is reasonable to work towards a common language that people can use when they need to come together, and in most of the USA that was not previously part of Mexico or Spain, that would probably be English. A common language is good.
It seems unreasonable to expect that diverse subcultures should all be abandoned in order to homogenize everyone and abandon the richness and capacity that a multilingual and multi-cultural workforce brings to the job.
Unity is needed above diversity, not instead of diversity.The situation can be framed at a local scale that "the problem" is diversity, and the diversity should be made to go away so business can thrive. If we stand back and look at the larger scale, at the international world today, that's a poor frame. So, the situation could be framed differently - that "the problem" is that we, as a society, are not very literate or mature in how to work with and across diversity, and we need to fix that, so that business can thrive even more on an international stage.
I agree whole-heartedly that internal communication within most business organizations today in the USA is just terrible, and this poses a serious threat to their operation and survival. Also, communication between the business and the outside world is pretty bad, and poses a similar threat.
These communication issues damage the "vertical internal loop" and the "horizontal external loop" of feedback that are the minimum capacity of any cybernetic adaptive system period. (see my earlier posts on the two loops ).Demanding everyone speak English cannot even fix the internal loop, because subcultures use English differently, and forcing English-only damages the external loop in today's world. A common language is a good thing, but the context for it has to be not only diversity-tolerant, but diversity-embracing and encouraging and nurturing, or you've solved the wrong problem.
Both business and individuals have legitimate needs to thrive and grow, but in the Big Picture these cannot possibly ever be met by homogenizing the workforce. A common language is good, but as an "auxiliary language", when we need to cross cultures, not as a one-size-fits-all requirement. People need to coordinate and collaborate, yes -- but the wider solution to that is to improve our ability to collaborate across diversity, not to eliminate diversity.
The multi-level view, accepting the legitimacy of corporate needs as well as individual employees, if carried out correctly, leads inexorably to a focus on solving issues of "unity in diversity." That resolves issues at all levels. Only that resolves issues at all levels. Anything else is ultimately a waste of time, that will have to be redone. In "lean manufacturing" terms, it is "muda" - trying to solve a problem by getting good at something you shouldn't be doing in the first place, and blocking the actual solution in the process.
In medicine, attacking symptoms instead of problems is called "quackery." It's recognized as a bad thing that, first of all, actually does harm. It's a good concept. If we want health at all levels, a healthy society, healthy world-connected business, and healthy individuals, we need to focus our limited resources on the right problem: unity in diversity.
As a side-bar, I wonder how much of this issue would loom so huge in the US if we had the belief that Americans, like the rest of the world, were genetically capable of learning to function well in several different languages. I feel there is an unspoken fear, or anxiety, or maybe a spoken one, that we are somehow incapable of learning other languages, so we have this unspoken constraint on which language that should be. We see this as an "OR" problem, not an "AND" problem.
I wrote Noam Chomsky at MIT, one of the world's best linguists, actually, and asked him whether he thought Americans had some issue that prevented them from learning multiple languages. He replied no, in his mind it was just that we'd managed to get by this far without needing to do that so people felt no pressure to learn other languages.
On a separate tangent, I note that some "conservatives" or whatever the term is these days believe that it is not the appropriate job of "government" to be micromanaging the internals of companies, although that concept doesn't seem to scale down, as they then also believe it's OK for managers to micromanage employees. I agree, somewhat, it it shouldn't be the Federal Government that has to intervene to push companies to wake up to the world and diversity, if the right people would pick up that task and do their job. In my mind, that would be the stockholders and investors who are trying to maximize their wealth and the ability of companies they have invested in to thrive. Enlightened investors, looking at the world, would almost certainly think company management should stop being parochial and short-sighted and get with the new world-scale program.
I'm baffled as to why they don't express that sentiment more loudly and focus instead on short-term gains that are devastating long-term gains. A sin of "youth" I guess, that hasn't yet realized that the end of the road of maximum short-term gains is ruin, not victory.
Maybe it really is that we don't train our children to think about different reference frames. The strategy "Sacrifice the future for today", when we get to the tomorrow we're trying to survive to reach, actually plays out as "You sacrificed today for yesterday, which is gone now." We've been doing a lot of that lately, and now "The future isn't what it used to be."
Today's NY Times also has an article on how widespread the psychological phenomenon is of "denial." Maybe that's relevant to this discussion.
In any case, if you keep throwing out all the past, it's really hard to be a "learning organization." We seem to have, as a nation, a problem in being better able to deal with the day each day. If anything, judging from the state of Congress, or the local governments in Michigan and California we seem increasingly less able to deal with each day. We have what T.S. Eliot described as an "age that moves progressively backwards."
While other people or places or things may be "to blame" for causing some issues we face, it's hard to look any place but the mirror for an inability to learn from experience.
As I said once, if each step takes you further from your goal, you will never reach it.
We have some piece of our social structure in backwards, it would appear.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Active strength through emergent synthesis
My recent post on "active strength" really isn't complete without a mention of what astronomers are doing now to boost their ability to see farther into space and detect even larger structures.As the picture shows, many radio telescopes (the satellite dish-shaped things) are often used simultaneously to get a better view.
But, something almost magic is going on here that you can't see from the picture. If you simply collected and added up the signals from each dish, and you had, say 100 dishes, you'd end up with a picture with the same crummy resolution one dish has, but 100 times as bright. So, you could see dim objects you couldn't see before, but you absolutely cannot see any more fine structure than you could before. The picture is, effectively, still blurry. You have, effectively, a pinhole camera where the pinhole is the size of the dish.
A law known as Bracewell's Law says that it doesn't matter how many images you take and add up, you can't get better resolution with many images than you can get with one image. (There's an exception, of course, for "hyper-resolution" that I'll talk about sometime.)
To get a less blurry picture, you need to resolve details. However, Bracewell's law prevents you from resolving details finer than the ratio of the wavelength you are using to the diameter of the dish.
But, there's another sort of exception. If you spread out some dishes as in the picture, and you do the right thing mathematically, you can get as good resolution as if you had a dish with a diameter equal to the distance between the farthest separated dishes. So, with one dish in Arizona, and another in England, the effective diameter is 8,000 kilometers or so.
The process is called "aperture synthesis", and I had a more technical prior post on it here.
The points relevant to active strength and social constructs where people work as one are these:
- If we work together we can see way better than if we work separately
- All of us have a larger "diameter" than the largest single one of us, hands down.
- The more distance there is between our dishes, the better we can resolve ambiguity in what we're looking at. (Effectively, "diversity" helps, and the more axes and larger distance we can get, the better.)
If we can pull it off, our power goes up from some number "N" which is the number of us, to something like N-squared, a much larger number. And here's the astounding thing - no single molecule in a laser is doing any more work than it did when the light was incoherent -- all that changed is that the radiation is synchronized and coherent. The power results simply from changing the timing of what we do, not from doing something harder.
A small change in synchronization or timing can make an orchestra sound terrible, and a small change can make it sound fantastic. Same instruments, same sounds, just a slight change in how the parts relate to the whole.
Or, for a sports team, it helps to have great individual players, but it helps more to have teamwork that "clicks" so everyone suddenly starts acting as one completely coherent player spread out over many people. That's the few seconds of a 3 hour game that makes the three hours worth while to watch. It's why some coaches don't want "great individuals" but want "great team players." An activated, coherent team will always be more powerful than the "best individual" on it or on the opposing team.
Coherent unity is a winning strategy.This is basically the magic behind The Toyota Way. By stabilizing what everyone does so it's known by others, visible, and fully predictable, and by forcing everyone to be aware of what everyone else is doing, that last 1 percent can be crossed and everyone can suddenly see with hyper-resolution eyes and think with an aperture-synthesis brain the size of the whole workforce. It only works if individuals are willing to let the team be larger than their own egos, which can be a problem in some cultures.
So, we should set our sights on more than just "working together", and aim for the much more powerful goal of "working as one." This is part of why "unity in diversity" is such a powerful concept, way more so than you'd think.
Unfortunately, we're at a point in social evolution where the team matters more than the individual now.So, we end up with some very fine companies being thwarted by a state government, say, that cannot get its act together and manage the state, or by a county government that cannot get its act together and manage the county.
There is a backlash by some very bright individuals and their families at social obstacles everyone else presents to their brightness being "all it can be." The reality is that unharnessed individuals going off on their own for their own benefit is not the kind of creativity we are most in need of right now. That's not where it's breaking.
I discuss this in my post "Houston, we have another problem!" and showed this diagram. The basic message is this. It doesn't matter how smart we can make one person. One person is like "one dish" in radio telescopes. Take any person and make them a million times smarter, and the complexity of social problems that 6 billion people can produce, in real time, is still vastly larger than that person will ever comprehend. There is only one "algorithm" that keeps up with "everyone" with their N-factorial interactions, and that is "everyone" in a coherent effort to work together.
Compared to the size of the problem, even a person with an IQ of a million is effectively an ant trying to comprehend quantum mechanics. This startling idea really hasn't sunk in yet. This will never "go back" to the way it was, the old days, where one person could "know it all" and "rule the world." We have an educational system trying to produce individual smart people and what we need is an educational system that produces collectively smart teams. The curves have crossed forever:
So, the Arecibo radio telescoe, with a 1000-foot diameter dish, is not being funded because the days of huge single "RAMBO" type solutions are over, replaced by networks of individuals where the network is the key to the power. No single "dish" will ever compete again.
IBM stopped trying to make super "CPU's" years ago, and their new "supercomputer", as everyone's, is really a network of 860,000 smaller cpu's, and the key to it (what a surprise!) is how well the smaller cpu's can figure out for themselves what to do and how to do it, without being programmed or controlled by some "master cpu". The "operating system" is the key.
This isn't theory. This is practice. We have a school system designed to develop leaders for 19th century industry, in a 21st century world. We don't need a 20% fix or even a 50% improvement in "productivity" or "teaching skills" or "scores on the GRE."
What we need is a complete transformation of the whole point and purpose of education. Now that no one can know everything, what few things is it just critical that we all know? I think "how to work together" is in that short list.The paradox is this. Great individuals aren't of value unless they can work together as one in teams. That requires solving how anyone can work together in teams. Once we solve that, we don't need "supermen" individuals any more, because a network made up of just a lot of regular people cooperating will end up being more powerful.
The power is in the network, not in the individuals in the network. Or, more precisely, the power emerges through the network, but is way more powerful than the network.
But, this is not a "team" like that used by ants or bees or termite communities. Those are built from individuals who are entirely inflexible, and the whole structure is rigid to the point of being brittle. If the world changes outside the range of motion of the hive to adapt, the hive will die. Applied to humans, that's the tyranny model.
Humans are, we hope, a much higher-level creature than ants. What we need to strive for is a higher-order community more like Air-Traffic Control, where we have enough imposed and accepted order that we don't run into or damage each other, but beyond that we have flexibility to adapt locally to whatever is going on. Instead of "rigid strength" we seek "active strength".
That picture describes, once again, something that looks like "unity in diversity", with "independent investigation of the truth". It seeks harmony but not homogeneity, unity but not uniformity. The overall structure is not rigid, but can learn and adapt and change as the environment changes or the problem we are all addressing changes.
So, if we collectively decided that we wanted to get some roots down on other planets around other stars, we might take on one shape that is superbly good for solving interstellar travel. But we would be "transformers" as a society, and could flexibly change our overall shape to meet the needs. The flexibility is crucial, because the creativity of such a structure will be enormous, so we will polish off problems that have been here for millenia, before lunch, and then move on from there. Like an airplane picking up speed, we'd need to start tucking in our wings as we get to the speed of sound, and being air-tight as we got above the atmosphere and switchted to rocket power, etc.
No rigid hierarchy or structure would work for that, but neither would the chaos of anarchy -- we need an adaptive, flexible core network that helps us hold on to a certain shape at a certain time, and then, when it is the right time, to let go of that shape again and move on to something else.
As societies, we've managed to get the "hold on to this shape" part down, but we're not very good yet at "now let go of that and move on." The only "let go" we're generally familiar with is disruptive and revolutionary, or anarchy. Like the ants, we've build some corporate and social structures that were fantastically good solutions to problems we had 200 years ago. Or, like Southeast Michigan, we've build a social structure that worked fine 50 years ago.
Our problem now is that it's not 50 years ago, it's not 200 years ago, it's now. This is a new world, and "the cheese has moved." We don't have very much experience figuring out which parts of our culture are crucial to hang on to , and which parts are in the way and we need to let go of. And, that is made complex because the value of things needs to be assessed over hundreds of years, not over 3 months, or we'll miss the point of some structure and "throw out the baby with the bathwater."
That's where we are today. Disruptive external pressures are demanding that we adapt and transform the way we live and our social structures to new realities, and we have very little personal experience with that magnitude of change, let alone that rate of change. In China, cities like Shanghai have experienced 1000 years of growth in one generation and are a little dizzy from the altitude change and need time to adjust. This is totally new. Change has never come this fast. In 1500, kings could take weeks or years deciding what do to; now the world changes in 12 minutes.
So we are doing what physics does all the time, "searching for invariants of the motion". Amid all the apparent chaos, what are the few things that need to say the same? What can we release our death-grip on, and what should we hold on to even tighter? Where have we mistaken "positions" for "interests" and gotten stuck on some local maximum and missed the big picture?
That's where we need "active strength", and enough trust to let go a little bit and see if things get better or worse, and prepare to be surprised.
For Islam and Christianity and Judaism, the challenge today is to disentangle what is degeneration from what is regeneration, to block the first and embrace the second. These are decisions we need all of us to grapple with, not just a few of us.As a recent post discussed, evangelical Christianity is struggling with this right now. In the Mideast, everyone is struggling with this right now - modernism versus tradition, chaos versus order, new versus old, what to hang on to and fight to the death to defend, and what it's OK to let go of now, finally, since that storm is over and now the wind is from a different direction and the challenges are different.
As with any active structure or building, the parts may need to shift "positions" in order to keep on doing a good job of the interests of keeping the building upright as the winds shift direction and velocity. It's the same task, the same goal, but new ways of accomplishing it.
It's the task of technology not to replace humans and cultures in this sense-making, but to enable them to do it faster and better, dropping less on the way. Even technology is falling into its own wake, with the support of advanced bookkeeping yielding to support of social collaboration and redefining entirely the purpose and values of "I.T." We've moved from "data processing" to "word processing" to "image processing" and are getting beyond "content processing" into the realm of "context processing". We're getting beyond information and into living and dynamic social wisdom. We're getting beyond what someone said to why they said it and who they are, anyway, and how come they never call anymore?
It's a new day.
Wade
Monday, October 22, 2007
Sunday, October 21, 2007
unity without diversity is bad for everyone
It's not the size, it's the lack of diversity -- the world financial markets show us the risks of unity without diversity, and the 366 point drop in the Dow Jones last friday is just a taste of it.
There is also a risk in perverting the language that is not mentioned, as the term "hedge" used to mean "to make safer with a contrary bet" whereas today it appears to mean "to make riskier by highly leveraging the same bet".
Of course, once upon a time, a "bank" was a conservative, responsible place that had long-term plans and stability, not a place with a fortune that could rise or fall, as one shocked European banker noted, with the federal funds rate changing by one point for one quarter.
Here's the highlights from an article today that touches those points.
One World Taking Risks Together
New York Times
by Nelson D. Schwartz
Oct 21, 2007
Actually, there's nothing wrong with this aspect of traditional economic theory, only with how well people read the book. Statistics says that the overall risk will go down if the individual risks happen independently - which is to day, it's a truly diverse world, where knowing what's going on in place A doesn't tell you what's going on in place B. And that is true.HUGE financial losses in the United States spark fears in Europe.... the Panic of 1907, which culminated exactly 100 years ago today.
But this time around, it may take much longer to repair the damage and restore confidence than it did a century ago. It’s not only that the sums are larger now...It’s also that the breadth and complexity of today’s global markets create risks so great that no group of business leaders — or even a single country — can control them.
It wasn’t supposed to work this way. Interconnected global markets should make the world economy more stable, according to traditional economic theory, with risk spread more widely and strength in one region offsetting weakness in another.
“In practice, we’re not seeing that happening,” says Richard Bookstaber, a veteran hedge fund manager and author of a new book, “A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds and the Perils of Financial Innovation.”
Although international financial links are nothing new, as the Panic of 1907 shows, what’s different now is how closely international markets are correlated with one another.
“As markets become more linked, diversification doesn’t work as well.”
As a result, Mr. Bookstaber argues that today’s global financial markets may actually be more risky than in the past. That’s because the same types of investors are taking on the risky bets and then simultaneously heading for the exits when trouble comes, even if they’re on opposite sides of the world.
But if everyone uses exactly the same strategy, the power of diversity reduces to the leaf-in-the-wind behavior of one individual, just with everyone else along for the ride.This is also why tyranny doesn't work, and cannot work as a governmental system for very long, or why we see the same risks in "Theory X" companies that may be huge but really are only slaves of a few guys at the top with a big magnifying glass.
Diversity is not what unity must overcome - it is what gives unity strength.
An ecology with a single kind of plant in it will collapse as soon as the first virus figures out where lunch is located. Any global world with a single kind of thinking is equally unstable. This is a basic law of nature and statistics and cannot be overcome by wishful thinking or by anyone who was "right in the past."
Including diverse cultures and people in the decision-making process is not "accommodation" -- it is recognizing a case where all of us are actually much wiser than some of us.
It also illustrates the need for actually educating people so that they actually understand basic concepts and don't simply try to echo mindlessly what others are doing. Without "independent investigation of the truth", the system breaks down.
Again, let me refer to the basic principles held and advocated by the Baha'i Faith, as a set of guidelines I urge everyone to investigate independently. These are the kinds of things we should be studying in school.
Whether it is "race unity" or "unity of religions" the "unity" the Baha'is advocate is not the false "unity" achieved if everyone comes around to my point of view - it is the true unity that emerges from everyone keeping their independence on all but those things we need to stop killing each other and talk like adults about common issues.
It involves submission to God, not to some different self-appointed leader, and just enough civilization to have a "learning culture" that doesn't rip itself to shreds over the fact that the world appears very different to different people and at different times.
Global domination or "conquest" by any one nation or culture or way of thinking is a recipe for disaster, as the financial markets are telling us over and over. We do not all want to be clones of any one approach. Those who dream of global conquest are chasing a phantom that only exists in dreams, because simplifying any system that much will cause it to collapse.
That's the key lesson that we need to understand. Systems require diversity for the magic to work. You can prove it with math and you can simulate it on computers. Or we can keep on watching what happens around us when we try to deny that natural law - about like trying to deny the law of gravity.
This is just critical at this stage in nation-state development, where huge countries are in the middle of preparing for a massive confrontation over who will "dominate" the world. No one can "dominate" the world without destroying it and imploding. We are gearing up on a fool's mission that cannot possibly succeed for anyone. There will be no winners of that fight.
The reason world conquest has failed in the past is not that it was incomplete, but that it tried to be too complete. It squeezed the life out of all it touched with a unity without diversity. It didn't work not because of some error in execution, but because the whole idea is fatally flawed. It's impossible. It can't ever work, regardless how brilliantly executed. We need to let go of it.
So here's the take-away lesson.
All the frequencies matter. There's no point in reading the "news" if you don't spend equal time reflecting on the "olds", or you'll end up with a false impression of what's going on, really. In fact, as the Times article begins, we should have learned more from exactly 100 years ago friday and what happened then. Most of what is around us is actually more "old" than "new".
I remember watching two experts play the board game "Go" one day. Every now and then what looked like a surprise move would take a whole army and change the board. When it was over I comment on how much the board changed from move to move. They both looked at me baffled and replied that the board hadn't changed by more than half a point in the last 100 moves. I just wasn't able to see what was really going on by looking at what was changing. I needed to stop looking at the "field" and look at the "ground" instead for a while.
In regards to world conquest? To quote the "Whopper" computer in the old movie "War Games" -- "Hmm. Curious game. The only way to win is not to play."
(photo credit: moto browniano on Flickr)
Thursday, October 18, 2007
Science, religion, and business - three ways of seeing life
Science, religion, and business may capture three different ways of knowing about life. They seem to correspond to the "near field", "far field", and "intermediate field" properties of a radiating antenna.
What does that mean and how is it helpful?
This isn't a math lesson but one example may be useful, so here it is:
What's the point? The point is that all three observers and measurements are "right", from their point of view.
These really do seem to have a lot of resemblance to the ways of knowing the world that are described by science, business, and religion respectively. Science tends to be very accurate and short-range, specializing is studying phenomena that can be studied "in isolation" - the core of the "scientific method". Religion tends to be very far-range, specializing in dealing with the biggest picture one can get - everything, with all the parts connected together, over all space and time.
And business tends to occupy the very messy place in the middle, often despised by both sides.
From science's viewpoint, business thinking is too messy and imprecise. It is "unclean." It deals with too much at once.
From religion's viewpoint, business is too down-to-earth and pragmatic and short-sighted. It is unclean. It deals with too little. Like "science" it is viewed as neglecting the very important human and non-quantitative factors that are critical.
So, this is the world into which "system thinking" and "system dynamics" really comes to play, trying to cross the gap from the "science" world where things can be studied separately, into the business world, where it seems everything happens at once and nothing can be known with certainty. It is a world where action is more important than study, where feedback from motion has more wisdom in it than any amount of analysis from a static point of view.
It is a world perhaps like the one birds occupy, where static vision may not be very good, but high-speed motion vision is astoundingly good, and they can fly through a tree of twigs at 40 miles per hour without hitting something. It's a different way of seeing.
And, one of the unspoken and perhaps unrealized terrors of systems thinking is that, by legitimizing the concept of looking "upwards", some legitimacy spills over into the concept of "religious studies" of the world - the perceived arch-enemy of science.
Like a rock-climber on a cliff face, the question is how to include a little more within one's grasp, without holding so little now that one slides off the cliff to one's death below. What's always worked before is the commandment and teaching to narrow one's view an focus, to cut down scope, to consider less. As one moves towards the intermediate field, the complexity rises as does opportunity for error.
This model does raise the new idea that the complexity doesn't rise forever - in fact, the complexity goes up, but then goes back down again, and, at a high enough level, the complexity gets back down to a manageable level. In physics, this happens in thermodynamics, when you stop looking at molecules and start looking at "a gas". The area inbetween is a mess. Single molecules are relatively easy to study, as are large-scale gases.
So, one issue for systems dynamics is how much more to include in the boundaries. It may be that "more is less", and that adding some additional factors make the model harder, but adding more and refactoring to a larger scale may make that complexity, legitimately, go away again.
What does that mean and how is it helpful?
This isn't a math lesson but one example may be useful, so here it is:
When physicists or engineers analyze electromagnetic waves radiating from an antenna, something unfamiliar appears: there are three different worlds, that tell different stories. The worlds appear initially to be in total conflict with each other, yet they can't be.
Very near the antenna, much closer than one wavelength of the signal, the radiated power appears to follow one law - it may clearly fall off as (1/r) where r is the radial distance away.
The measurements and math are quite clear and easy to do. The answer is clear.
Very far from the antenna, many wavelengths away, the radiated power clearly can be measured to fall off as (1/(r*r*r)) or 1 over r-cubed. The measurements and math are easy to do. The answer is clear. (but different from the one above).
And, in between, the equations are a mess, measurements are much harder to make sense of, and a third world applies, possibly the field varies as the inverse square of the distance.
What's the point? The point is that all three observers and measurements are "right", from their point of view.
These really do seem to have a lot of resemblance to the ways of knowing the world that are described by science, business, and religion respectively. Science tends to be very accurate and short-range, specializing is studying phenomena that can be studied "in isolation" - the core of the "scientific method". Religion tends to be very far-range, specializing in dealing with the biggest picture one can get - everything, with all the parts connected together, over all space and time.
And business tends to occupy the very messy place in the middle, often despised by both sides.
From science's viewpoint, business thinking is too messy and imprecise. It is "unclean." It deals with too much at once.
From religion's viewpoint, business is too down-to-earth and pragmatic and short-sighted. It is unclean. It deals with too little. Like "science" it is viewed as neglecting the very important human and non-quantitative factors that are critical.
So, this is the world into which "system thinking" and "system dynamics" really comes to play, trying to cross the gap from the "science" world where things can be studied separately, into the business world, where it seems everything happens at once and nothing can be known with certainty. It is a world where action is more important than study, where feedback from motion has more wisdom in it than any amount of analysis from a static point of view.
It is a world perhaps like the one birds occupy, where static vision may not be very good, but high-speed motion vision is astoundingly good, and they can fly through a tree of twigs at 40 miles per hour without hitting something. It's a different way of seeing.
And, one of the unspoken and perhaps unrealized terrors of systems thinking is that, by legitimizing the concept of looking "upwards", some legitimacy spills over into the concept of "religious studies" of the world - the perceived arch-enemy of science.
Like a rock-climber on a cliff face, the question is how to include a little more within one's grasp, without holding so little now that one slides off the cliff to one's death below. What's always worked before is the commandment and teaching to narrow one's view an focus, to cut down scope, to consider less. As one moves towards the intermediate field, the complexity rises as does opportunity for error.
This model does raise the new idea that the complexity doesn't rise forever - in fact, the complexity goes up, but then goes back down again, and, at a high enough level, the complexity gets back down to a manageable level. In physics, this happens in thermodynamics, when you stop looking at molecules and start looking at "a gas". The area inbetween is a mess. Single molecules are relatively easy to study, as are large-scale gases.
So, one issue for systems dynamics is how much more to include in the boundaries. It may be that "more is less", and that adding some additional factors make the model harder, but adding more and refactoring to a larger scale may make that complexity, legitimately, go away again.
Science meets religion
Speakers at the National Press Club presented new initiatives by the Center for Inquire-Transnational, according to an article in [November 16,2006] Washington Post. I'll summarize the article here and go on below to comment on the philosophy.
My analysis of that:
There are at least three hypotheses in contention in the policy arena:
1) All religion is bunk and should be replaced by science
2) All science is bunk and should be replaced by religion
3) Science and religion are compatible
The "Center for Inquiry - Transnational" seems to be firmly in position #1.
Position #2 is subdivided into incompatible parts by actually being
2) All science (and also your religion) is bunk and should be replaced by (my) religion.
Position #3 is also subdivided into two distinct cases
3a) -- Separate but equal: so long as religion stays in its place, and science stays in its place, and the two never meet in the middle, they are "compatible". A significant number of researchers and scientists are in this camp.
3b) -- ultimately compatible: there is only one reality which has multiple valid views, the "incompatibility" between religion and science is largely due to misunderstanding, and religion(s) and science need to be brought together and reworked into a new paradigm that embraces both.
Position #3 is certainly is my own working hypothesis and is the way I understand the Baha'i Faith as well. I present this here less as an advertisement and more to make the case that "religion" is perfectly capable of embracing multiple viewpoints and scientific principles, and does not automatically equate to "fanatic" or "closed-minded" or "intolerant."
We need to distinguish, as it were "the baby" and "the bathwater."
The nature of "competing" versus "complementary" views
Let me bring this topic back to "systems thinking," the theme of this weblog. It is generally recognized in software systems analysis that most complex systems are larger than the human brain can comprehend in a single view or perspective.
Here's a quote from a current best practices technical textbook by Nick Rozanski and Eoin Woods, entitled Software Systems Architecture - Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2005) :
Until recently, scientists who dealt with parts of reality that could be studied in isolation (with open causal pathways and no feedback) couldn't even comprehend or tolerate the work of scientists who deal with parts of reality that cannot be studied in isolation (with complex systems, intractable feedback). The whole nature of "causality" and "the scientific method" are being revamped and revitalized to deal with complex systems. Let's see where that gets us.
The R21 research RFA I mentioned in an earlier post (Houston, we have another problem!) is an effort precisely to cross those artificial barriers between models of the world at different scales and levels of abstraction.
In some ways all I'm saying is that, if you keep going up in scale, you'll come to a scale where issues commonly termed "religious" or possibly "theological" are the current common way of modeling and investigating and understanding what mankind has observed about itself over millenia.
It is not surprising that the tools, concepts, and approaches are different from those used by civil engineers. Sociologists and psychologists and biologists disagree all the time. That doesn't say anything about whether the data are ultimately compatible in a more comprehensive model.
We have all heardthe story of the blind men who encounter an elephant, with one finding the tail, one finding a leg, one finding the ear, and arguing about whether they have come across a
huge rope, or a tree, or a huge blanket, or whatever.
What's really pivotal here is that these differences do not automatically make the viewpoints incompatible. "Incompatible" would mean that the viewpoints cannot be reconciled into being fully valid points in a larger picture. The viewpoints of the elephant can be reconciled, and must be, if one is to understand what an "elephant" is.
The question of incompatible is this: after accounting for the different observers' perspectives and viewpoints, are the observations still irreconcilably different?
Humans are not born understanding that others see the world differently than they do. Two very hard facts to accept are (1) sometimes both viewpoints are "right", and (2) sometimes the other person's viewpoint is "right" and your own, regardless how obviously true it is to you, is wrong.
Some of this accounting for viewpoint or "frame" or "reference frame" or "perspective" is something we do every day. If I look at people in the distance, I could say - "Look, people get smaller as they move farther away from me." Then other people could say "No, you're wrong, you get smaller as you move away from me!" Possibly they could fight a war in which "size matters" and battle over who it is that "get's smaller". In point of fact, of course, no one "gets smaller" they just "look smaller".
Why discarding "religion" as a whole is a very bad idea:
Actually, it's ironic that many scientists, who spend all day trying to isolate their work from the rest of reality in order to study it, now abruptly seem to realize that science itself is a social activity and only takes place in a social context.
Yes, religion and spirituality are similar to gasoline and can alternately blow up in your face, or move your fleet of automobiles. The recent work in top-performing organizations, and high-reliability organizations, all point to a need for some key traits to make them work: honesty, integrity, and compassion - variables that religions have kept central for thousands of years, despite their having "no place" in science as it was practiced. "Scientific" and machine-based models of humans, business, and commerce have resulted in as much human carnage as spiritually based models - more, in fact, when the destructive power of mankind was amplified and the integrative, compassionate side demeaned and neglected.
In fact, isn't it precisely because "science" has built huge new technologies of mass destruction and climate change, but neglected the equivalent tools of reintegration and wholeness preached by religion, that we now face the prospect of demolishing our entire planet?
I'd argue that our best route is not to despise and discard religions of the world, but to understand what it is they were trying to tell us and ask ourselves if that's not something we need to hear.
Think Tank Will Promote Thinking=================
Advocates Want Science, Not Faith, at Core of Public PolicyBy Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 15, 2006; A19Concerned that the voice of science and secularism is growing ever fainter in the White House, on Capitol Hill and in culture, a group of prominent scientists and advocates of strict church-state separation yesterday announced formation of a Washington think tank designed to promote "rationalism" as the basis of public policy.
The brainchild of Paul Kurtz, founder of the Center for Inquiry-Transnational, the small public policy office will lobby and sometimes litigate on behalf of science-based decision making and against religion in government affairs.
The announcement was accompanied by release of a "Declaration in Defense of Science and Secularism," which bemoans what signers say is a growing lack of understanding of the nature of scientific inquiry and the value of a rational approach to life.
"This disdain for science is aggravated by the excessive influence of religious doctrine on our public policies," the declaration says. "We cannot hope to convince those in other countries of the dangers of religious fundamentalism when religious fundamentalists influence our policies at home."
"Unfortunately, not only do too many well-meaning people base their conceptions of the universe on ancient books -- such as the Bible and the Koran -- rather than scientific inquiry, but politicians of all parties encourage and abet this scientific ignorance," reads the declaration, which was signed by, among others, three Nobel Prize winners.
Kurtz, ...said the methods of science,..., "are being challenged culturally in the United States today as never before."
Several speakers also had strong words for the media, ...
Lawrence M. Krauss, an author and theoretical physicist at Case Western Reserve University, said the scientific community has done a "poor job" of explaining its logic and benefits to the public....
The goals of the new group are to establish relationships with sympathetic legislators, provide experts to give testimony before Congress, speak publicly on issues when they are in the news, and submit friend-of-the-court briefs in Supreme Court cases involving science and religion. The Center for Inquiry-Transnational, a nonprofit organization, is funded by memberships.
My analysis of that:
There are at least three hypotheses in contention in the policy arena:
1) All religion is bunk and should be replaced by science
2) All science is bunk and should be replaced by religion
3) Science and religion are compatible
The "Center for Inquiry - Transnational" seems to be firmly in position #1.
Position #2 is subdivided into incompatible parts by actually being
2) All science (and also your religion) is bunk and should be replaced by (my) religion.
Position #3 is also subdivided into two distinct cases
3a) -- Separate but equal: so long as religion stays in its place, and science stays in its place, and the two never meet in the middle, they are "compatible". A significant number of researchers and scientists are in this camp.
3b) -- ultimately compatible: there is only one reality which has multiple valid views, the "incompatibility" between religion and science is largely due to misunderstanding, and religion(s) and science need to be brought together and reworked into a new paradigm that embraces both.
Position #3 is certainly is my own working hypothesis and is the way I understand the Baha'i Faith as well. I present this here less as an advertisement and more to make the case that "religion" is perfectly capable of embracing multiple viewpoints and scientific principles, and does not automatically equate to "fanatic" or "closed-minded" or "intolerant."
We need to distinguish, as it were "the baby" and "the bathwater."
One of the most insidious forms of prejudice is racism, about which the Baha'is stated position is:Baha'i Social principles include:
- full equality between women and men in all departments of life and at every level of society.
- the elimination of all forms of prejudice.
- the establishment of a world commonwealth of nations.
- recognition of the common origin and fundamental unity of purpose of all religions.
- spiritual solutions to economic problems and the removal of economic barriers and restrictions.
- the abolition of extremes of wealth and poverty.
Racism is the most challenging issue confronting America. A nation whose ancestry includes every people on earth, whose motto is E pluribus unum, whose ideals of freedom under law have inspired millions throughout the world, cannot continue to harbor prejudice against any racial or ethnic group without betraying itself.
The nature of "competing" versus "complementary" views
Let me bring this topic back to "systems thinking," the theme of this weblog. It is generally recognized in software systems analysis that most complex systems are larger than the human brain can comprehend in a single view or perspective.
Here's a quote from a current best practices technical textbook by Nick Rozanski and Eoin Woods, entitled Software Systems Architecture - Working with Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives (Addison-Wesley, 2005) :
If you read the more recent literature on software architecture, one of the first useful discoveries you will make is the concept of an architectural view. An architectural view is a description of one aspect of a system's architecture and is an application of the timeless problem-solving principle of "divide and conquer." By considering a system's architecture through a number of distinct views, you can understand, define, and communicate a complex architecture in a partitioned fashion and thus avoid overwhelming your readers with it's overall complexity.... Using viewpoints and views to guide the architecture definition process is a core theme of this book.Many people are working right now on the problems we've created for ourselves by partitioning the scientific viewpoint of the world into silos which may seldom speak with each other. A major axis along which such silo-building has occured is the scale of activity within life on the earth. So we have cellular scientists, and tissue scientists and individual-being studying scientists and those that study small groups of people and those that study huge collections of people. It's increasingly clear that public health problems cross those artificial historical divisions.
Until recently, scientists who dealt with parts of reality that could be studied in isolation (with open causal pathways and no feedback) couldn't even comprehend or tolerate the work of scientists who deal with parts of reality that cannot be studied in isolation (with complex systems, intractable feedback). The whole nature of "causality" and "the scientific method" are being revamped and revitalized to deal with complex systems. Let's see where that gets us.
The R21 research RFA I mentioned in an earlier post (Houston, we have another problem!) is an effort precisely to cross those artificial barriers between models of the world at different scales and levels of abstraction.
Earlier this week, the National Institutes of Health (in the U.S.)
announced the availability of $3M to fund approximately 10 projects
designed to facilitate "Interdisciplinary Research via Methodological
and Technological Innovation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences."
Complete details about the grant program are available online at:
http://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/rfa-files/RFA-RM-07-004.html
In some ways all I'm saying is that, if you keep going up in scale, you'll come to a scale where issues commonly termed "religious" or possibly "theological" are the current common way of modeling and investigating and understanding what mankind has observed about itself over millenia.
It is not surprising that the tools, concepts, and approaches are different from those used by civil engineers. Sociologists and psychologists and biologists disagree all the time. That doesn't say anything about whether the data are ultimately compatible in a more comprehensive model.
We have all heardthe story of the blind men who encounter an elephant, with one finding the tail, one finding a leg, one finding the ear, and arguing about whether they have come across a
huge rope, or a tree, or a huge blanket, or whatever.
What's really pivotal here is that these differences do not automatically make the viewpoints incompatible. "Incompatible" would mean that the viewpoints cannot be reconciled into being fully valid points in a larger picture. The viewpoints of the elephant can be reconciled, and must be, if one is to understand what an "elephant" is.
The question of incompatible is this: after accounting for the different observers' perspectives and viewpoints, are the observations still irreconcilably different?
Humans are not born understanding that others see the world differently than they do. Two very hard facts to accept are (1) sometimes both viewpoints are "right", and (2) sometimes the other person's viewpoint is "right" and your own, regardless how obviously true it is to you, is wrong.
Some of this accounting for viewpoint or "frame" or "reference frame" or "perspective" is something we do every day. If I look at people in the distance, I could say - "Look, people get smaller as they move farther away from me." Then other people could say "No, you're wrong, you get smaller as you move away from me!" Possibly they could fight a war in which "size matters" and battle over who it is that "get's smaller". In point of fact, of course, no one "gets smaller" they just "look smaller".
Why discarding "religion" as a whole is a very bad idea:
Actually, it's ironic that many scientists, who spend all day trying to isolate their work from the rest of reality in order to study it, now abruptly seem to realize that science itself is a social activity and only takes place in a social context.
Yes, religion and spirituality are similar to gasoline and can alternately blow up in your face, or move your fleet of automobiles. The recent work in top-performing organizations, and high-reliability organizations, all point to a need for some key traits to make them work: honesty, integrity, and compassion - variables that religions have kept central for thousands of years, despite their having "no place" in science as it was practiced. "Scientific" and machine-based models of humans, business, and commerce have resulted in as much human carnage as spiritually based models - more, in fact, when the destructive power of mankind was amplified and the integrative, compassionate side demeaned and neglected.
In fact, isn't it precisely because "science" has built huge new technologies of mass destruction and climate change, but neglected the equivalent tools of reintegration and wholeness preached by religion, that we now face the prospect of demolishing our entire planet?
I'd argue that our best route is not to despise and discard religions of the world, but to understand what it is they were trying to tell us and ask ourselves if that's not something we need to hear.
[originally posted 11/16/06 on my other weblob, cscwteam.blogspot.com ]
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Washington post on Immigrants and Nobel Prize
Immigrants and Laureates
America's two other winners of Nobel prizes show how important it is that the U.S.get immigration policy right.By Carl Schramm and Robert Litan (Emphasis added)
Friday, October 12, 2007; 5:05 PMAl Gore's Nobel Peace Prize is getting almost all the attention, but America's two other new Nobel laureates also have interesting stories. Geneticists Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies won the Nobel Prize in medicine for their work in gene targeting. And while their honor highlights the quality of American research, it also shows how our scientific community is enriched by highly skilled immigrants.
Capecchi, who endured a heart-wrenching early childhood in wartime Italy, immigrated with his mother to the United States after World War II, who survived the Dachau concentration camp. Today, he leads research teams at the University of Utah. Smithies, a native of Britain, came to the United States in the 1950s to work at the University of Wisconsin and has spent the last 19 years at the University of North Carolina. Both are now U.S. citizens.
Foreign-born researchers are common in the U.S. academic and scientific communities. In fact, more than a third of American Nobel laureates in the sciences over the last 15 years were born outside the U.S. These scientists are conducting research with extraordinary promise for improving lives, as well as great potential to produce commercialized therapies and technologies that drive U.S. innovation and economic growth.
The U.S. should welcome these highly skilled researchers and innovators. Unfortunately, recent trends in immigration policy are making it more difficult for foreign-born scientists and engineers to put their skills to work in this country -- and that could have profoundly negative implications for the U.S. economy.
...But the difficulties are getting worse. The U.S. has responded to an increased demand for entry -- driven by the fact that it is a global leader in science, technology and innovation -- by capping the number of visas available to immigrants from any one country. As a result, the wait time for visa processing for countries with the largest populations, such as India and China, is close to six years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that increasing numbers of skilled workers from India and China have begun to return home, where the economies are booming.
Furthermore, tightened immigration screening in the U.S. following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 has lengthened processing delays. Of course, national security must always be our top priority. But policymakers must come to grips with the potential damage to the U.S. economy and scientific community if many of the world's brightest people decide it is too difficult to work in the United States and take their skills elsewhere.
...
Carl Schramm is president and chief executive and Robert Litan is vice president for research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation.
========
Comment: Assuming the major purpose of the immigration policy restrictions is to improve "security", I have to wonder whether that is (a) the secure future of the nation as a player on the global stage, or (b) the security of North American Prejudice and Stereotypes.
I recall news a few years ago about limitations on foreigners to a conference in the US on the subject of cryptography. The administration claimed to be concerned that "secrets would leak out" to foreigners. The conference organizers replied that the people who had the innovative techniques were the foreigners, and the point of the conference was to bring those "secrets" into our hands.
The challenge is to make the evidence of the actual outcome of policies so vivid that it can overcome the old mental stereotype in which "this should have worked!"
Certainly the teaching of Public Health when dealing with "complex systems' is that any policy should come with a built-in process that:
- is prepared to see surprising, contrary, and paradoxical results
- measures and evaluates the actual result
- undoes the policy if it is not working, or possibly
- reverses the policy if the outcomes were the exact opposite of what was desired.
Un-learning is particularly difficult for some people. They can learn something fine one way, but then they can't adapt when the situation changes and a new way is required. This is actually a clinical mental problem called "perseveration" and is often measured by psychologists with something called the Wisconsin Card Sorting test.
I think some wag defined "obsession" as the tendency, when something is producing the wrong results, to do even more of it hoping that will work. This can be a form of denial when a cherished belief or stereotype is challenged or threatened with being overturned.
I recall the "Sven and Ollie" joke Garrison Keillor told on Prairie Home Companion. Sven walks in and Ollie's ears are both bandaged.
"What happened?!" he asks.
"Oh", says Ollie, "I was ironing when the phone rang and I put the iron up to my ear instead of the phone."
"I see. But what happened to your other ear?"
" Ahh. After I got burned, I tried to call 911."
It is true that there are other competing and valid concerns with immigration policy. Flooding the country with new people of any type, in the absence of a system for accommodating them can be a disaster.
Still, simple statistics tell us that with more people, the top of the bell curve should be higher. China, with 1.6 billion people, will tend to have a top 10% that is higher than the top 10% in the US, with 300 million people.
Again, the question shouldn't be whether to add more people, but why we have, so far, been unable to learn how to use people intelligently so that more people is better.
I fear sometimes that, with "two economies" (one corporate and one human being), that humans are viewed as dead weight, not as contributing assets. It's amazing to me every time a company, under pressure to perform, makes stockholders happy by firing a fifth of its staff. If all those people were present and not contributing, shouldn't the CEO get sacked?
This gets back to "obsession" and the wry comment that "The whippings will continue until morale improves!"
- Fragmented humans tend to add up to dead weight, where more is worse.
- Unified humans tend to add up to greater power, where more is better.
- The problem is not with the number of people - it's in lacking "unity in diversity".
We should be able to add people to a group, and get more output. (blue line, above, labeled "Hope". What we tend to actually get is the red line, labeled "actual", which is where dread "committees" are born.
There is a way to get astounding good results out of people, where more is better. Use the search box above to look up "positive deviance".That's our problem. Figure out how to make "unity in diversity" work, and this will fix most of the other problems, or provide you the mechanism with the brainpower to figure out how to fix them.
(Also see my other post - "Houston, we have another problem". )
W.
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