Healing and empowering relationships

"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me"
( From Tommy, the rock opera, by The Who)

A concept that keeps coming up in looking at how relationships take shape and keep their shape as they are recreated daily is that of active vision.

This really needs a term of its own, so maybe I'll call it proactive-vision.

What is involved is a kind of looking and seeing people that is not passive, not like the way a television camera looks. It is a kind of looking that active reaches out and shapes the person or thing that is being "viewed", and helps coax or even force that "external" state into a stable viewable state.

I think you need something like Quantum Mechanics, or advanced database concepts to find scientific examples of this on other scales. In quantum mechanics, for example an electron doesn't really "have" a shape -- it has an infinity of possible shapes and it swims happily in that sea of possibilities UNTIL some crass and cruel OBSERVER comes along and, by the very act of observing, FORCES it to resolve itself into one particular shape. What is unmentioned is that the forcing has a persistent after effect, and now the electron has been forced into that shape even after the observer waltzes away to force some other electron into a single shape.

Photons, or bits of light, also have this kind of behavior -- they can enter an atom and be TENTATIVELY absorbed by the electron shell of the atom, where they sit for a while and see how that goes. If they don't like it there, they can EXIT again, exactly UNDOING what they did on entering so that the final state of the atom is exactly as if the photon was never there at all. (You can do the same thing in advanced databases -- you can execute a transaction that attempts to update all necessary tables, and, if it fails, it automatically is "rolled back" in such a way that it, effectively, never really happened.)

In other words, on at least some scales and some instances, Life or Nature has an amazing ability to try out a billion things at once, see which ones it wants to keep, and then UNdo the (billion minus one) that didn't work out as if they had never happened in the first place. They don't need to be "killed", which would leave a billion dead bodies around, they simply are UN-happened away, to coin a phrase. They are magically made to never have been here in the first place. It is and ASTOUNDINGLY efficient use of resources and, aside from some side effects, is 100% undetectable by most scientific means, because, hey, how can you detect something that never happened in the first place.

It is as if life has a "before you begin" page (one of my pet peeves) that comes in, looks around, goes "Nahh, I guess not", and leaves before it begins, taking the packaging and even the memory of the event with it as it goes, and leaving no hole behind.

Anyway, the point is that PEOPLE seem to have an equivalent sort of affair. By simply sitting and LISTENING to a person, or by LOOKING at them, as the intrusive OBSERVER, you are actually CAUSING their billions of possible states to take shape. WORSE, or BETTER, your framework for vision and your very expectations of WHAT you EXPECT to see actually has an impact in tweaking, nudging, or even FORCING that person into one of the shapes that you EXPECT to see, where they are now stuck, even if they were not there and didn't want to be there in the first place.

OBSERVATION IS INTRUSIVE. There is no such thing as "passive" observation of electrons, nor, I think, of people. Much, or even MOST of what the observer SEES was brought to the scene by the observer, not the observed person.

In other terms, life is just chock FULL of self-fulfilling expectations when it comes to what you see. Especially in situations where someone with higher authority is doing the "looking", this can be a very powerful, even determining, shaping effect.

When Professor Lev ? from Harvard was here giving a talk on Theory X (old style hierarchy) versus Theory Y (new style collaborative) teams, he gave an example where someone asked him, "Well, which is it, are people basically theory X or theory Y?" and his answer was "Yes"...
meaning, your staff or team or employees or children or students are WHATEVER you FORCE THEM or EMPOWER THEM to be by your own expectations and the way you "LOOK" at them.

If you expect them to be unruly, selfish, lazy trouble-makers, and you SEE that in them, and you keep SEEING it and persist it in your own head and mind, you will soon see much more of it because it will embody itself in the real world, and they will BECOME that way. On the other hand, if you expect them to be organized, efficient, helpful, reliable people , and you SEE traces of that and keep on persisting THAT vision of them in your mind, they will become THAT way.

Either one is a self-fulfilling PERCEPTION. This is real. This actually happens.

Reproducible research studies show that, in school, if teachers EXPECT a student to be a good student, odds are very high he or she will turn into one; and if teachers EXPECT a studentn to be bad or a trouble-maker, odds are also very high he or she will turn into one. Again, here is a very strong argument that all forms of prejudice and racism are, in fact, in themselves a kind of hate-crime, causing continual damage to the target group, and effectively FORCING The target group towards or into the very behaviors that are detested.

I recall once, in freshman Chemistry at Cornell, a teaching assistant got it into his head that I had cheated on an exam. He noted that I had simply written down the answer to a problem with no intermediate steps shown. When I explained to him that I had use the technique shown in the book to get the answer, it became apparent that he had not read the book, and further, that he was unwilling to consider the concept that he was wrong and that I was NOT a cheater. He left the meeting with words like "You got away with it this time, but I have my eye on you, and I'll GET you before the term is done!"

That single framework destroyed the rest of the course for me. I had a terrible time. I got migrane headaches when I even thought about going to class and facing him. I felt a tremendous URGE to cheat on exams, even though I don't do that, just because I was being TREATED that way so I might as well behave that way. It was a startlingly strong impulse.
At the end of the course, I literally tore my textbook into small pieces and threw it in the dumpster, along with any desire to EVER take another chemistry course again, EVER. It reshaped my life.

I can only imagine what it must be like to be black in a city where every time you walk into a store, you are followed by security guards who expect you to be shoplifting because you are obviously a thief because you are "one of those people." I can imagine the rage of President Obama's friend when the police forced their way into his house and arrested him because the neighbor reported that an obvious intruder had gone into the house. This is not a passive act, to be continually treated as a criminal or as an enemy of the rich-white-man's-system. If we do it long enough, we can FORCE people into that identity, good people who would never have gone there if not forced to by our prejudiced "observation".

The UPSIDE is that we can similarly EXPECT people to deliver their very best in such a way that we EMPOWER them to do so, and release their latent energy to do so.

Every day, in every observation, in every glance, we challenge or reaffirm our own mental model of other people and apply a persistent pressure on them for them to become the way we think they are.

It's an amazing power we hold.

We need to learn to use it wisely.

We need to expect the other people in our lives to use it wisely too, and close the loop, so that we raise each other up, each day, in a thousand small ways, instead of cutting each other down each day in a thousand small ways.

People become what you SEE them as being. TEAMS become what you SEE Them as being.

And other cultures and nations become what you SEE them as being. If you SEE them as being threats to you, your continued perception of them that way and reaction to them that way draws energy into the universe in such a way that it TURNS them INTO that threat, where you can now feel 100% justified and say, "See, they are bad people, they are troublemakers and worse, they are terrorists, they are trying to kill us, so we should kill them first!"

The totally surprising fact is that, had you seen them as being friends from the start, it is very likely that they would have turned out to be friends.

You, we, all of us, have an AMAZING power to RESHAPE the world around us by the simple act of persistent perception.

This is one reason, for example why holding onto a grudge for past behavior is a terrible thing to do -- it FORCES the person you are mad at to STAY that way, even if they want to change.

I thought the song from the rock-opera Tommy that I headed this piece with was relevant.
"See me, feel me, touch me, heal me" are part of the words of one song in that opera.

We do this every day -- except all too often it's "see me, feel me, touch me, injure me". So often in fact, that, despite the pain of isolation and loneliness, many people today simply want to stay apart from others so they are not damaged MORE by poor expectations and looks that kill.

And, yes, looks can kill. Or heal.

It's something we need to become much more aware of, and literate in managing.


In light of this effect, it's interesting to ponder the impact on President Obama to have received the Noble Peace Prize. Suddenly he has to be aware that the world outside the USA views him in a certain way.

Another implication of this effect has to do with the way we treat people in authority over us, including government officials and corporate managers and officers. If the majority of people treat someone in authority as if they are a self-interested idiot and crook, there are very good odds that the person will turn out to fulfill those expectations.

On the other hand, to treat a boss as a wise person when they are an exploitive fool is not a winning move, nor is it wise on the boss's part to treat staff as if they are competent and caring if they are incompetent and amoral.

These transitions from BAD to GOOD sides of both the boss AND the staff need to occur together. The feedback loops overlap and generate a process that will run to completion, but doesn't care whether it runs UPWARDS, generating greatness on both sides, or runs DOWNWARDS, generating pettiness on both sides.

THE REALLY tricky problem, the one I'm trying to crack using virtual reality, is getting a boss+team that has latched into the DOWN side to transition out of that state and upwards into the UPSIDE state.

The same math applies whether it is a couple trying to fix their relationship, or a workteam trying to fix their working relationships, or a nation and culture trying to fix its working relationships with other nations and cultures.

Downside (bad) states are NOT a "fact of life" -- they persist only because we actively participate in persisting them. THAT is the great hope. They are ACTIVE BEINGS, so there are no constants -- they need to be created and recreated every single new day. The very same people can just as well be latched UPWARDS into a mutually supportive state as latched DOWNWARDS into a mutually destructive state.

This is the logjam we need to get an adequate social mechanism to fix, on a case-by-case basis, whether through therapy or "healing circles" on a domestic relationship level, or on a work-team/boss level within a company.

The downside shape simply BLEEDS wealth and opportunity costs. Companies that begrudge the costs of a $12 pizza for the staff for lunch can waste $10,000 worth of good will by this bleeding shape in the same day, and not bat an eyelash at it.

If there is one thing that needs to be fixed in American industry to make us "competitive" and "thrive" again, it is this problem. If there was only one thing we could teach in our schools and colleges, it should be how to recognize and fix this problem. After that, let the empowered work-teams and domestic-couples tackle the rest of our problems.

It's a two-stage solution pathway, and, I think the right one to pursue.

Federal budget stalemate hurts the poor

While many organizations are inconvenienced, unable to plan or budget due to the failure of Congress to pass a budget by the start of this year (October 1), the limbo is literally killing individuals who depend on that funding. What isn't said is that federal budgets assume that the price of food is the same today as it was in 1989 when the guidelines were written.

It's part of the psychology that tells us "Inflation rose at a modest rate of 2% last month, excluding the volatile food and energy components." In other words, the rate of inflation experienced by corporations may have been 2%, and that experienced by individuals more like 20%, but you'd never know from those numbers.

The exclusion makes sense if food prices shoot up and down, averaging zero change. The exclusion sabotages the truth if food prices, gas prices, and heating oil prices just keep going up. With oil passing $88 a barrel yesterday, it's not clear how many hundreds of thousands or millions of people are not going to be able to afford heat this winter.

Maybe, Congress is unaware of the "hybrid" or fractal quality of this set of numbers as well, hiding the pain individuals feel from the comfort of on high. It seems that way from below. See Hybrid Images and Hybrid Reality. It would be a different kind of tragedy if the government is not responding because it actually appears to sincere people who would care if they knew that there is nothing important to care about. My "hybrid" posts discuss that possibility.

Certainly other guidelines to policy, such as the Gross Domestic Product, completely mask damaging actions and count spending our nations resources as "income" with no corresponding charge against "assets". (See Genuine Progress Indicator( Canada) :

GDP-based measures were never meant to be used as a measure of progress, as they are today. In fact, activities that degrade our quality of life, like crime, pollution, and addictive gambling, all make the economy grow. The more fish we sell and the more trees we cut down, the more the economy grows. Working longer hours makes the economy grow. And the economy can grow even if inequality and poverty increase.

The more rapidly we deplete our natural resources and the more fossil fuels we burn, the faster the economy grows. Because we assign no value to our natural capital, we actually count its depreciation as gain, like a factory owner selling off his machinery and counting it as profit.

and the US "Redefining progress", Wikipedia on the Genuine Progress Indicator with a link to the one article that is a must read if you can only read one. (But you need a subscription or to go to the library to get it.)

"If the GDP Is Up, Why Is America Down?" by Clifford Cobb, Ted Halstead, and Jonathan Rowe. Atlantic Monthly, October 1995, pp. 59-78.

Also see: Wake Up, the American Dream is over, Guardian, June 8, 2006:

Even America's richest think they're getting too many tax breaks from a government determined to keep the poor in their place. As poverty in the US grows, Paul Harris wonders what happened to the Land of Opportunity

This flawed accounting is like your child suddenly discovering that they can buy things on your credit card or their cell phone without having to "pay anything" and going on a spree. The result of that flawed perception, as we've demonstrated in our Systems Dynamics class, is that things just look just great, better than normal in fact, in a climbing curve until they abruptly hit the limit when it crashes to zero. This is what happened to the Georges Bank, once the best fishing in the world off Cape Cod, now an underground desert and junk yard.

People only respond to things they see, that seem real to them.

Supplies Dwindle at Food Pantries as Financing Bill Stalls in Washington New York Times Oct 18, 2007. by Winter Miller. emphasis added.

On a recent weekday at the BedStuy Campaign Against Hunger, one of Brooklyn’s largest food pantries, shelves that are usually piled high with staples like rice and canned meats were empty, a stark illustration of the crisis facing emergency food providers across the city.

The Brooklyn organization is among about 1,000 food pantries and soup kitchens supplied by the Food Bank for New York City, the largest distributor of free food in the city, whose mission has been crippled by what officials describe as its worst food shortage in years.

At its sprawling warehouse in Hunts Point, in the Bronx, the Food Bank is storing about half what it housed in recent years....

“It’s the first time in a few years that I could walk into the warehouse and see empty shelves,” said Lucy Cabrera, the president and chief executive of the Food Bank, which helps feed about 1.3 million people a year.

Officials at the Food Bank say the bare shelves stem from a steady decline in federal emergency food aid, though a farm bill stalled in the United States Senate could increase that aid.

According to a study to be released today by the Food Bank and Cornell University, New York City receives a little more than half the amount of emergency food annually from the federal government that it did three years ago. The shortfall is occurring as the number of families and individuals relying on soup kitchens and food pantries in New York City has risen to 1.3 million from 1 million since 2004.

The problem besetting the citywide Food Bank is also affecting providers of emergency food nationwide who are supplied by America’s Second Harvest, the country’s largest hunger relief organization, which assists 50,000 providers. Federal food donations to food banks have been stagnant since 2002.

But organizations have been hit hardest by declines in a separate federal program that buys excess crops like peaches and potatoes from farmers and then donates them to food banks. Those donations have shrunk to 89 million pounds last year from 251 million pounds in 2003.

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, says he is optimistic that the farm bill will pass within the next month. He said the delay involved sections of the bill unrelated to the nutrition portion.

Separately, the House of Representatives voted in July to increase the budget for food stamps and other nutrition programs by $4 billion, which would include an increase in emergency food assistance to $250 million from $140 million. It also would require an automatic increase in food assistance based on the rate of inflation, addressing one of the reasons food banks are now struggling.

“It’s devastating,” said the Rev. Melony Samuels, a minister at the Full Gospel Tabernacle of Faith who oversees the food pantry. “It has gotten so bad.”

In better times, the pantry might get 190 cases of assorted foods every week; now the shipments are much smaller. One recent week, all it got was six cases of peanut butter and pasta.

“In order to keep food on our shelves, we need to roll in $5,000 per month easily, and you’re looking at half or less of that coming in,” Ms. Samuels said, adding that she might not be able to stock her pantry with turkeys for Thanksgiving.

See also: Flash, US Solves World Hunger

By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 16, 2006; A01

The U.S. government has vowed that Americans will never be hungry again. But they may experience "very low food security."

Discussion of hybrid images

Detailed commentary on slide from my recent presentation

Slide 29 - Albert Einstein or Marilyn Monroe?

(picture credit: That picture is the work of researcher Gregory T Huang, from New Scientist's 31 March 2007 issue at newscientist.com, subscription required. The original covers a larger portion of the torso and the effect is much more pronounced.

===== Extended commentary on how the way humans process images can cause interpersonal conflict ==

You can see smaller partial versions of it here. The MIT Hybrid Image page is here with a three faces that are both smiling or/and frowning, depending on your distance. This illustrates the problem with the terms "or" and "and" when considering phenomena that cover a broad range of scales simultaneously. It can cause amazing conflict by two viewing groups who can't understand why the other group, looking at the "same thing" on a different scale or from a different distance, can possibly be so stupid as to see the "wrong" thing.

Another "angry illusion" on www.hemmy.net shows an angry and a calm face that change to the other expresion as you move further away.

It may be that a number of international conflicts are due to this exact phenomenon, or its analog, where those close to the front lines perceive very clearly one thing, and those at a comfortable distance away perceive something entirely different, leading to total internal chaos because of the mistaken stereotype that a perception "must be one or the other". It could explain some "you had to be there" excuses.
The sad truth is, like thinking there must be a "best", this is another comforting and simplifying error on the part of humans. Some things are both "chickens and eggs", and almost everything takes on that property as soon as you close the feedback loop of causality so A causes B which in turn causes A, and let it stabilize into a strange resonance state that we simply never see when feedback is not involved.

Regardless, this is one way that the situation at "the front lines" of an organization might be astoundingly different than the way it is so clearly and unambiguously viewed at the top. Repeatedly, the question asked by CEO's or top officials is "Why bother going down there? I can see from here!" The answer is that even you would see why if you went. That's why Toyota has a policy of "Genchi Genbutsu" -

You have to go down there and take the time necessary to settle down and actually see things from that viewpoint before you rush to judgment or speak or come up with "a plan" that won't have such a high risk of being nonsense or worse.

All our images, including mental ones that use the same hardware in our brains, have the problem of "filling in" gaps for us (to be "helpful", like Microsoft Word's paperclip) whether we asked them to or not. There is no way for us to know by looking at our mental picture that our head has papered over details it couldn't make sense of and replaced them with something that made more sense to it. (almost the definition of a magnetic "stereotype" that grabs hold if we get anywhere near it.)

Life is "fractally complex" and sometimes the fine-grained details change the entire equation. There are shapes, like the famous snowflake curve, that can be filled with paint but not painted. Our intuition misguides us. The "genchi genbutsu" rule of thumb is probably the safest bet.

Along with the other rule of thumb - "the time to furl your mainsail is the first time it occurs to you that maybe you should furl your mainsail." If it occurs to you that maybe you should go and look for yourself, don't put it off.

(from Rules of Thumb.)

Put in other terms, it's possible that there is way more energy in the high-frequency "details" than the low-frequency "overview", and that the details do NOT "go away" and can NOT be "put off till later."

That is pretty much the case with the Escher "Waterfall" picture. The tiny details that were wrong, that our eyes "helpfully" insist on discarding entirely for us from each local area of the picture, actually are coherently and systematically wrong and do not "cancel out." They are not "negligible" precisely for that reason.

In mathematical physics terms, we are used to the high-self-energy, low-interaction-energy world, where the inner product is
dominated by |a| and |b|. We tend to forget about <,> and can get away with it when thinking about rocks and simple machines. But when we get to social interactions, or plasma physics, or galactic centers and black holes, the interaction term <.> dominates, and the self-energy terms are negligible. 1 + 1 becomes dominated by the nature of "+" and doesn't care much about "1" any more. We have about zero intuition regarding that world, although we can compute the equations for it and simulate it.

Our problem is that we are trying to use cold-earth mathematics to design policies for high-energy social interactions. We try to leave out all the feedback, and all the cross-product interaction terms, and then are baffled that our results don't match the data. Hmmm.

The lessons we should learn from "system dynamics" or books like "Feedback control of dynamic systems" is that not only is the feedback usually not negligible, it actually dominates every other factor. If you want a good "first approximation", leave out all the other stuff and put back in the feedback structure and see what that gives you!

Are important vertical or horizontal loops clearly broken? Are unexpected loops clearly present, given observed behavior? Start there. If you get a "hit" don't bother with any other details until you get that fixed, because they'll all become irrelevant as soon as you reconnect, or disconnect the flow power loops. These are the kinds of "facts" that are way more important than legacy "data" that so confidently (and incorrectly) extrapolate to tell you your quest is "impossible" and "nothing can be done about that."

This whole subject touches a point that Frank Drake and Carl Sagan used to make repeatedly in class, back in my astrophysics days at Cornell University in the late 1960's. (Sagan was briefly, my advisor before he left for JPL to work on launching Voyager) I was a grad student at the Center for Radiophysics and Space Research, acronym "CRSR", but we all called it "Charlie's Radio Service and Repair. " The group did many things, including running the world's largest radio-telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico - made famous in the movie Contact (Jodie Foster) and also some James Bond movie where they fought in huge antenna.

Speaking of which, I see the Arecibo radio telescope will close if they can't raise $4 million this year. It's a sad loss - I was yelled at once by the designer of the antenna (who was my roommate) because I wasn't"symmetric about my z-axis". That was the night, after two months of struggling, he finally solved the 4-page equation for his PhD thesis, which he couldn't resist phrasing in the thesis as "It is obvious that ... "

But the passing of Arecibo, a very large but single dish, is part of the larger trend that synthesized virtual arrays made of of may smaller component telescopes are far cheaper to make and maintain and extend. As with "supercomputers", they stopped making "one" huge computer finally and now are grappling with the problem of how to get 800,000 smaller computers to "work together".

Amazing how that question keeps coming up.

Anyway - in what I term "Drake's Other law", Frank taught us that

Every time humans move to looking at a different level of the electromagnetic spectrum, we don't see just different sides of the same old things -- we see ENTIRELY NEW PREVIOUSLY UNSUSPECTED things going on.

So, back in visual days, no one knew the center of the galaxy was off in the direction of Sagittarius, but blocked by dust. We had to look in the radio frequency spectrum to discover that we were, like the Andromeda galaxy, in the midst of a huge "dish" of stars, about 2/3 of the way out from the center in one of the spiral arms.

My point is that, the same thing seems to be true of our observations of this "LIFE" thing we are part of. Every time we rotate the microscope lenses and change to a larger view, the whole nature of LIFE changes, as dramatically as Marilyn Monroe's image changed into Albert Einstein when you changed the viewing scale.

I warned about this in another post as well, discussing the properties of "mid-field" components of a radiation pattern of an antenna. The field is "obvious" and we can measure it reliably with technical equipment, and it clearly falls of as the inverse of the radius.

I said then

The cleanest and least ambiguous example, physically, is the middle-range field of a radiating dipole antenna. As discussed in a prior post, very near the antenna the power falls off as the inverse of distance. At long distances, the stable pattern can be measured to be falling off as the inverse cube of distance. And, in between, in the really annoying and complicated mid-range field, the pattern is unstable and appears, if measured, to fall off as the inverse square of distance. Worse, in the mid-range, some fields build up that behave as if they are about to be radiated into space, but then sort of change their mind and get basically sucked back into the antenna.

Very near the antenna, less than 1/10 of a wavelength away, life is good and the equations are easy. Very far from the antenna, over 100 wavelengths away, life is good and the equations are different, but easy.

In between, things get extraordinarily messy. Power seems to get created out of thin air, then go away again, if you "neglect" all the terms that are "negligible" at each end, but not in the middle.

There's a lesson there. In the creation of LIFE ON EARTH, we're in the "middle" part. You can't assume any term is "negligible" -- you have to check it out and be sure it is. And even then, you could be wrong tomorrow about what it turns out was true today.

You end up learning what it means to say "The future isn't what it used to be."
If the past changes in the future, and the future has changed from the past, you really can't be sure any extrapolation of the "present" is reliable, whether you can "prove it" or not.

Role of IT - information technolgy - in next-gen companies

Judging from Toyota and "lean" processes, what is the appropriate role of information technology ("computers and networks") in the next-generation company?

If we assume that what we're building is, essentially, a massively-parallel connnectionist computing engine (consciousness) out of people and technology, we get the suggestion that the key roles are:
transparent communication at successively larger scales
coherence-building at successively larger scales, and
transparent interactions - ("phase-lock loops") across the components of the system.

Yes, computers will still be required for tracking the trillions of details needed to run a large company today, but that is, in Peter Senge's words "detail complexity." There's a huge amount of it, but it is, relatively, simplistic in nature aside from the amount of it. Enterprise computing knows how to do that, at least in theory.

What we are looking for in the next-gen company is the thing that ties it all together, that supports the feedback loops that maintain coherence and build integrity, the same way the circulating thoughts in the brain slowly emerge an "image" out of billions of "nerve impulses" from the retina.

This is "Technology-mediated collaboration" and more, so I'll call it "technology-mediated coherence." It is what allows "aperture synthesis" in large radio telescope arrays to act as if they are a single huge individual and the gaps "don't exist."

This is pretty much what the Institute of Medicine was recommending when it urged a focus on "microsystems" recently (see prior posts on "microsystems"). The point is that a small team (5-25 people) is capable of being "self-managing" if they can simply be given the power to do so by having access to information about what their own outcomes are. This information does not need to be packaged and interpreted at successively higher levels of management and then repackaged and distributed back to them a month later as "feedback." In fact, that doesn't help much. What really helps is speed. What helps is if they can see, today at 2 PM, how they have been doing collectively, up through, say noon. They can learn to make sense of the details, and don't need "management" to try to do that for them.

In fact, given the fractal density of reality, and the successive over-simplifications required to get data into a "management report", it is a certainty that we have something far worse than the game "telephone". What will come back down the line from upper management will bear little resemblance to what went up, breeding distrust and anger on both sides.

So the role of next-gen IT is to grab hold of the 'WEB 2" technology, that allows bidirectional websites to be both read and written by people, and that includes weblogs, wikis, and "social software" that encourages interaction and cooperation, including, gasp, "gossip."

This is the stuff that, in the right climate and context, can be converted into "social capital" and converging understanding by each employee as to what everyone else is doing and why.

Where there can be dashboards, they should best be very close, in both space and time, to the decision-making actors. Lag times are incredibly dangerous, and are the source of instability in feedback systems. (Imagine trying to drive a car with a high-resolution TV screen instead of a windshield, with a fantastically clear picture of what was outside the car 15 minutes ago. )

A relevant quote from Liker's "The Toyota Way" is this (page 94) where he is talking about the problems with large batches and the delays that go with such batches:

"...there are probably weeks of work in process between operations and it
can take weeks or even months from the time a defect is caused until the time it
is discovered. By then the trail of cause and effect is cold, making it nearly
impossible to track down and identify why the defect occurred.

The hugely complex computation of making sense of such data is what human brains and visual systems are built for, and tuned for, and that machines costing a billion dollars cannot replace yet. Just give people a VIEW into what is happening as a result of what they are doing, and they will, by a miracle of connectionist distributed neural-networks, figure out what's affecting what faster than a room full of analysts with supercomputers - in most cases.

That's the role that computation needs to look at - is close-to-real-time feedback in a highly visual form to the workers of the outcome of the work currently being done. (This is a step-up from Lean manufacturing visual signal system which is a signal to management that something is amiss.)

The "swarm" is capable, like any good sports team, of making sense of "the play" long before the pundits have had a chance to replay the video 8 times and "analyze" it. Yes, there is a role for longer-term, more distant view that adds value.

But what there is NOT is a way to replace real-time feedback and visibility with ANY kind of delayed information summary. All the bases must be covered, and long-term impacts and global impacts will not be instantly visible to local workers -- but they have to be able to see what their own hands are doing or they'll be operating blind. "Dashboards" with 1-month delays on them cannot cover that gap. Too much of the information is stale by the time it arrives. Both are needed. Local feedback for local news, and successively more digested, more global feedback for successively larger and more slowly varying views.

Does ill-gotten gain produce wealth?

We know our eyes don't show us everything. The world around us is filled with WiFi radio waves, cosmic rays, infrared rays, all sorts of things we cannot see. We only perceive a very narrow part of the spectrum.

So, for the rest, we need to figure out how to tell what's there, and how to tell whether we are right or not. It's easy to make mistakes when you can't see what you're doing.

If "things" are hard to see and get right, "events" are even harder, and "causation" is harder still.

For "causation" we have to not only see two different things correctly, but also see the relationship between them correctly.

Now, we run into a second limit of human sight -- we can see most clearly when things are near us, and less clearly when things are farther away.

In fact, as the same "thing" gets farther away from us, it appears to get "smaller" to our eyes, in many senses. And, worse, the number of things at that distance just keeps on going up.

So, maybe there are 3 things going on right here, close up, highly visible. There may be 10 things going on over the space of a week with our friends or the stock market, somewhat farther away, and less visible. There may be 6 billion people on this planet, 6 billion lives and God knows how many relationships, farther away yet and so invisible we tend to forget about them. All that distant stuff becomes a big blur.

This kind of perception is great when the problems we face tend to be local as well, such as a snake on the ground or some berries that may be good to eat. But some important things are not local, and, as a species, in general, humans are pretty bad at managing those. "Out of sight, out of mind" is a good summary. First, they are far away, and we're dying close up, so they can be put off -- we figure, if we don't survive the short run, the long-run doesn't matter -- which is true.

Second, perversely, we tend to ignore distant events because there are so many of them. Our little brains get quickly overwhelmed, which is locally fatal. We miss the snake, or drive off the road while worrying about next year.

Still, when planning, we need to consider both local and distant events, because, in the long run, many things that seem far off now have a habit of suddenly being upon us. Suddenly, the final exam is here, or the term paper is due, or our mortgage payment is out of our "grace period" and is going to go up by $500/month. Suddenly the kids are grown and gone.

So, we need some basic simple rules to use here and now that will protect us in the long run, because trying to think about the long-run hurts and isn't easy to do and is often wrong anyway.

Many rules like that were distilled into the Book of Proverbs in the Christian Bible Old Testament, any many of those came from Egypt before that. They are worth reading and considering. This is a case where "the olds" may be more interesting than "the news."

As with all wisdom, some days the same words make more sense than other days, so we need to revisit them frequently and ask - "Now, from here, today, can I see something here that can help me?"

Here's one, from the Book of Proverbs, Chapter 10, verse 2, from a website BibleBrowser.com that has 20 other translations, including the Hebrew. This is part of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic writings as well.

Ill-gotten gains do not profit, But righteousness delivers from death. (Proverbs 10:2)

For now, let's just look at the first part of that: "Ill-gotten gains do not profit."

This verse says something that is pretty important, if it's true -- First it says that there are two kinds of "gain", those that are well-gotten and those that are ill-gotten. By gain I believe this would include financial return, as well as outcomes of political maneuvers, military maneuvers, office politics, treatment of your neighbors, treatment on a larger scale of other countries, etc.

The verse asserts that the benefit of such "gains" depends on how they are obtained. It asserts that, even if the events that got you this "gain" is far away from here and now, it is still connected and still affects the benefit of having such a "gain."

Is that true?

Well, it certainly flies in the face of what we usually assume today. Let's simply look at cash, money. We assume a dollar is a dollar, and there is no difference between a dollar that was obtained by fraud or a dollar that was earned honestly. We assume that the origin of us having this dollar "goes away", and , being far away, no longer matters.

The verse in Proverbs I quoted differs, and says that assumption is wrong. It says that "blood money", money we got through bad actions such as theft or fraud, will turn out not to profit us after all, even though it "looks the same" as good money and is counted the same by our bank or phone company, that accept it as payment.

Besides, the form of this "gain" has been laundered, changed, altered many times, and it has passed through many hands, so even if the original dollar, say, was contaminated and "had the cooties", the electronic figure in our on-line checking account has surely separated us from such contamination, right?

Well, the verse says no, wrong. The verse doesn't say that changing the format of the "gain" makes this effect go away. It says that bad gains will result in bad things happening to you, and isn't worth doing, or worse, is actually a net loss to you.

Hmm. Well, first, things can't stay "connected" over a long distance, can they? Actually, they can. Physics tells us that a pair of particles can be "quantum entangled" so that, even if they are taken to opposite ends of the universe, they are still "connected" and if you change one by measuring it, say, that it instantly changes the other. So, there's at least one instance where distance in space is not a barrier to connection.

Well, still - we don't have to believe something just because some old book says it, do we? No, we don -- but we might consider thinking about believing it if someone had more current, solid, reliable data and evidence that such a principle is true.

Generally, physics doesn't suggest "physical laws" that relate physical things to human actions or intentions. That doesn't mean there can't be such laws, only that this isn't the sort of thing a physicist would ever be able to get a grant to study. This isn't "physics" but is something else, akin to both physics and commerce.

So, reflecting on this question, is there any other evidence that piling up fraudulent profits ends up being a bad idea? Maybe, rephrased, "Does crime pay, or not?"

It is clear that "ill" actions, can yield "gain", often immense "gain": ranging from theft to fraud to pillaging whole countries to making billions as merchants of death ( tobacco, heroin, etc.)

The question on the table, suggested but not proven by this old text, is whether such "gain" behaves differently over time than "gain" resulting from some more honest, socially beneficial wealth-building activity.

Are fortunes made through criminal activity less "stable", or less "valuable" to their possessors than fortunes made through hard honest work? Or not only less valuable, but of zero value, or, worse, of negative value?

Should we envy those those who pull off amazing con-jobs and sell drugs and "get rich"? Obviously, some get very rich. The question is, do they simultaneously get poor in some other way, so that, overall, net, it was a lousy life-choice and a poor business decision?

Given that many people and corporations and even nations are attempting to amass fortunes in this way, by ripping off other people, this is a big question. If nothing else, maybe we want to avoid owning stock in such companies, or not stand too near such people, waiting for lightning to strike or something? Hmm.

Oh, notice by the way that this verse I'm thinking about doesn't say money is bad, or wealth is bad, or profit is bad, or commerce is bad. It implies that profit is good, actually, and is a warning that someone long ago put there, trying to share what they saw as hard-won wisdom, telling us who seek profit that we should stay away from "ill-gotten gain", which , by implication, may look very attractive but turn out not to be in the end.

Reasoning about "impact on your soul" or "Heaven or Hell" is not very popular today, so we'll skip that line of thought. So, it comes down to this question:

Aside from such things that cannot be measured by science or commerce, are there things that can be measured by science or commerce that tell us "ill gotten gains " behave differently than "well-gotten gains?'

What exactly would we look for?

Here I want to bring in a board game called "Go", although the same thing is true for other games such as chess. At one time I was the organizer of the Cornell Go Club, which had several hundred members, about 30 very active, who played this game, and I learned a lot about it. Go was required knowledge of all Samuai soldiers in ancient Japan, and I actually advocated that Cornell's Johnson School of Management, where I was teaching, should include it as part of their MBA training. (That's a Go board from Wikipedia pictured at the top of this post.)

The game is one important way to gain insight into thinking and strategy that we can expect Asians, particularly Japanese and Chinese to use to compete with the US. There aren't very many such ways, so this is important.

One thing I found is that it was essentially always possible to defeat MBA students with a very simple strategy -- keep on trading them visible material short-run gain for longer-term much more valuable "position on the board." So, the MBA's would happily capture army after army, winning battle after battle, until suddenly they realized that they had lost the war. This seemed to be bait that such fish would always take.

The game Go teaches one patience and a long-range strategy. The aim of a good player is to "win by one point". Trying to win by more is overly-adventuresome, and requires taking risks that are not warranted. A balance is required between short-range, short-term tactics and long-range, long-term strategy -- but in the end, assuming one survives the middle, it is only the long-term value of each move, seen in hindsight from there, that matters.

So that may be an example where "foolishly-gotten short-range gain that you had to trade position for doesn't profit you in the end."

This is still not yet "ill-gotten gain", the topic of this post, but is getting closer, and the reflection on the proverb is uncovering some useful wisdom, whether the proverb is "right" or not.

So, let's remove that component and try to be more explicit and narrow in the hypothesis we're trying to test. Rephrased, we have two quesitons:

• Is there something hidden set into motion by socially-destructive gain that comes back to haunt the person or company that carried out that destructive action?
• If so, is it something that would also haunt other people downstream who got paid this money for goods or services or as a stock dividend?

There's no point in looking at the second part of that if the first isn't true, so let's focus on the first part. It seems safe to assume that such an effect was considered "hidden" by the writer of the proverb, because if it was obvious, they wouldn't need to go out of their way to write it down for their children to learn, nor preserve the thought over 3000 years.

Well, we know human vision is flimsy and has trouble seeing hidden connections between things, so we can't rule this out just because it is hidden and not obvious. Doesn't prove it, just doesn't rule it out.

And questions of "mechanisms" in my book can come later. First, blind to mechanisms, we can look and see if there is some effect. Then we can spend the energy to worry about mechanisms or pathways, and before then it's not justified. This seems scientifically valid to me. Besides, "That can't be true because I can't think of how it could happen!" has been used against every breakthrough in science, and doesn't prove anything.

First, we need careful, empirical, observational field-work to simply go see what is out there that needs explaining. In Toyota's "Lean" lexicon, this is Genchi Genbutsu -- actually going down and seeing for oneself instead of assuming you can see well from the executive suite or analyst's windowless cubicle.

I guess this comes down to the core question of theology and of this post:

Do your socially-destructive actions have bad consequences for you, even if you pull off a "clean getaway" and no one sees what you did?

People today seem think that, since the "God did it" mechanism is "dead" that all the social phenomena that mechanism explained can also be thrown away. "Allie Allie in-free!" as the child's game goes.

Two notes - first, I'm looking, as always, at "scale-invariant" rules , so the "you" in that question could be a person, or any larger entity that has "intent" such as a corporation or nation. Maybe this is relevant for cells and atoms, but that's a little obscure from here. (And I'm assuming intent matters, not just inadvertent (oopsie!) accidental, incidental, or "collateral damage", although that's not proven either.)

Do destructive actions have hidden bad consequences that make the visible benefits of them irrelevant or misleading?

OK, how would we test that hypothesis? Well, even though we have to look for cases that disprove it, we can start by asking if there's any case that comes to mind that agrees with it -- or else we should abandon this effort right here. The writer had something in mind, probably a lot of somethings distilled into this advice, so we should be able to think of something.

(to be continued...)