Building blocks, research, and EVA

In the early 1990's a truly terrible thing happened - Fortune magazine published a cover story on a new technique called Economic Value Added - a trademarked term. In short, at least as utilized, this seemed to say that the way to value any investment, including a company, was how much money it made, net, last quarter. Investments with positive EVA should be kept, and those with negative EVA should be dropped.

A fast search in Google for that reference found this first hit from a random site by Casparija:

The current interest in the concept apparently results from a trademarked version of EVA(TM) which has been suggested and promoted by Stern Stewart & Co.. (See "The Real Key to Creating Wealth," *FORTUNE*, September 20, 1993 pp. 38-40, 45, 48, 50. See also "America's Best Wealth Creators," *FORTUNE* December 27, 1993, for a list of the 200 largest non-financial organizations which shows that more than half had NEGATIVE EVA(TM).)

That sounds about right and I haven't verified it. But I do recall I was working for Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research in Ann Arbor at the time, and the executives were getting all excited about this concept -- largely because the financial analysts were all excited by it.

This is also a modified version of what might be called "momentum investing", namely, invest in things that went up yesterday, regardless what they do, regardless why they went up. And as soon as they stop going up, ditch them.

I also recall that I went over to the administration building and tried to have a conversation that this strategy was absurd - that every single drug we had that was a blockbuster had been developed after a 12 year period of research where it lost money, and, if we had followed this strategy, we would never have had any of those drugs (like Lipitor). The argument fell on deaf ears. It seemed like such a nice concept, and was so much easier to understand than all that Net Present Value stuff.

So, sure enough, Warner Lambert quickly decided that drug research was a "loser" and sold Parke-Davis to Pfizer so they could concentrate on today's winners. Then investors put the pressure on all companies, and one after another the companies caved in and abandoned their long-term research programs. ATT demolished Bell Labs. Drug companies bailed on research. The Federal Government basically closed NASA and all the major federal research laboratories or told them to work only on things that made money this quarter.

Well, that was 14 years ago. Now, guess what. Nothing is coming out of the other end of those research pipelines. For some reason, scratch your head, everyone else also decided to bail on long-term investments, and did, and suddenly the old ones are running out and there is nothing new to replace it with.

Just amazing.

I read that the US is considering sending another manned mission to the moon. Last time Kennedy did this, in a crash program, it took 7 years from start to finish, and no one was sure we could do it. This time, knowing everything we know now, it is estimated that it will take 14-20 years to do the same thing. Or longer. (Or, I might add, forever.)

Ann Arbor also used to be the home to ERIM, which was very low profile but had what I think was the largest collection of signal processing and image processing people in the world under one roof. They did top secret stuff like designing the guidance systems for missiles and all sorts of "remote sensing" - learning how to read amazing details from satellite photos.. I tried to get them to help us at Parke Davis with an image processing problem we had, and met a few people.

It had taken 20 years to slowly collect those people into a self-sustaining critical mass. Then the government in infinite wisdom decided we didn't need this, and the company basically folded and disassembled, as NASA was doing, leaving a thin shell that was sold to someone else. I think they make money now designing systems to read license plates of passing cars or some such mundane task. Many or most of the good people left, and won't be coming back, and our schools don't seem to be making any more of them.

Maybe EVA was just a sign of the times, and the groundswell was already in motion of abandoning common sense and investment fundamentals, and going after what glittered most brightly in the sun. It seemed so clever. No more long weeks or months in the library or on-line trying to understand what a company did and what the industry did - now you could invest in 5 minutes without even knowing what line of business the company was in!

And, gosh-a-roo Mr. Peters, some companies were making 200% per year profit and those were the ones to leap on for sure.

The only problem there is that everyone wanted to do that, and there were very few companies doing that. Everyone wanted to bail out of solid, reliable, large companies that "just" made 5-10% per year, every year, solid as a rock. So those companies started to sink, to the extent they were held up by stock-market opinion. There mere fact that they employed 200,000 people and supported entire states was irrelevant - they were "losers".

So, the CEO's of those companies drank the same Kool-Aid, and started looking for glittering short-term winners that were almost all long-term losers, because that's what investors were rewarding. No one was looking forward. Everyone was steering by looking out the back window.

That got us where we are today. A dessert of has-been companies, with nothing new coming out the pipeline, wringing our hands about the "loss of innovation" in America, while all the exciting growth seems to be abroad.

This was a predictable outcome of that strategy.

Again, the core problem here has nothing to do with EVA - it has to do with the fact that, collectively, we have no capacity for long-term learning, or, for learning and then abiding by lessons that take a long-time to learn.

And that IS a problem.

Santayana, or someone, said that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Yep.

After a while, you have to hope that the lesson sinks in that short-term thinking is not a good guide to managing our lives. Simply going with what looks attractive on a personal, corporate, or national level will get us into deep trouble every time.

We need, on every level, a larger structure, slowly changing, that persists and accumulates wisdom, AND THAT WE LISTEN TO. Academia also served that role once, as has every major religion. But it doesn't do any good if the knowledge is all over there and the decisions are being made over here.

Science didn't like religion's way of being normative, of demanding compliance, and thought in an experiment for the last few centuries that it would be totally "neutral" and "value free" and wouldn't that be better? Well, I don't know. Was it?

Now scientists are shocked to discover that politicians, and most of the public, either don't know anything about science, or don't care, and regardless, don't want to limit their behavior to things that scientists tell them are important. And with no history of authority and obedience, they got what they built. An abstract world that may be "right" that has no connectivity to the decisions being made out here.

On top of that, many scientists (not all) also seem to want to destroy religion entirely, thinking that the problem is that there is too little objective knowledge, evidence-based reasoning.

The last few posts and this one present a different scenario -- where it doesn't matter how much evidence-based reasoning you have, if the users of that process only look in the very short range world around them at that instant for the evidence. Now we'll use "evidence" to be SURE we're chasing the latest flash in the pan that we're now scientifically CERTAIN is the brightest flash around.

Doh.

Science does no one any good unless is has some grip, some power, some hold on people's behavior. "Having" it has no benefit, by itself. And Science, as an institution, spent the last 300 years ripping out all the "authority" worship, and toning down all the papers until the strongest language that is acceptable reads like "This evidence may suggest that ..."

Whoopie. That'll move the crowd, you betcha.

Not.

A pure-knowledge strategy that doesn't involve submission to a higher authority can't carry the social load that real life puts on it.

Admittedly, the authorities can become rigid and dogmatic and lose all connection to the real world, just as science, paradoxically, has done.

Which gets us back to my "vertical loop" model of the core building block of any adaptive, surviving company, or person, or nation. There has to be order coming down met with obedience, and surprising news from the front going up, met with receptivity and updating the mental model and map. Then you have a cybernetic flow, and adaptation can take place, along with learning.

But some of the learning has to be lessons that take a long time to learn, maybe generations to learn, and that involves some special attention as to how that will work in practice. And, over the last 5,000 years, what has worked and what hasn't?

None of this depends on technology, or is changed because now there is more technology than there used to be. These are properties of any system of intelligent, context-sensitive beings, at any scale.

We just need to get clear what has worked, and what cannot possibly work, and then compare that to what we're doing, and see where we're trying to do something that's impossible, and stop doing that.

Red flags go up on the field when the word "just" appears, as it did in that last sentence.

This task isn't trivial, although it is quite straight-forward and common sense does help a lot and gives us good insight and intuition.

We cannot operate very long without a larger structure around us that persists our best wisdom and feeds it back to us in authoritative ways that we agree to abide by, provided the authorities, in turn, listen to us about what's working and what isn't and update their maps as needed.

Without that, any amount of science and logic and math will still be captive to the amazing capacity of humans, or executives, or governments to be caught up in local fads and chase "easy solutions" to hard problems, knowing full well that this is an exercise in denial and that, going down this pretty path, things will only be worse tomorrow.

We know we're all prone to that behavioral flaw.

Now we need to compensate for it using each other as a buffer.

If we insist on freedom from all interfering authority as a life-style, it won't work. It can't work.

If we abide authority and the authority has no learning curve, that won't work.

Somewhere in-between is the sweet spot.

Finding it is the task.

Admitting it will be required before we can discuss it.

Discussing it will be necessary to solve it.

We should start.

Building blocks - asking directions and drunk driving

Honestly, I'm working to reduce 12 pages to 2 on this important subject! In the past 2 posts I've reflected on how humans depend on context for sense-making and motivation, how we can be that "context" for each other, and why that leads naturally to religious or professional groups to help us "be all we can be".

Our friends can remember for us that we should get up and jog with them, or that we asked them to help us not drive when we're drunk. In an abstract sense, we can use our friends to sort of shift our perception over time, so that "the morning after" is more vivid and powerful "the night before. "Enforcement" is not required for social norms - the simple fact that we share a perception of what we "should" and what we "should not do" and what we "promised" or "resolved" to do is usually enough to get us past our "weak spots" and "bad days".

And, people are smart enough to realize, after they grow up, that they need this outside assist to not join the crowd of "smart people who do dumb things." The first step in humility is realizing that neither wealth nor brains or education will make "us" so good, in isolation, that we wouldn't do even better with a "little help from our friends."

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, people in the US seem to think that they are some sort of super-genetic creatures who are "above" the need for friends. There seems to be a norm that "leaning on others" is a bad thing, some sort of "mooching" or parasitic behavior or a sign of "weakness" that makes us unacceptable not only as leaders, but even as colleagues or friends. This conceit is really sad, and tremendously damaging to the society.

The latest example of this is the 2.5 million families that recently signed up for just terrible mortgages on new homes, and are waking up to the fact that they can't make the payments that they signed up for, past the initial low rate period.

Our jaws should drop to the floor in surprise at this - not because it's surprising that 2.5 million people are weak or uneducated or in trouble, but because 2.5 million people didn't ask for help when making that big a decision.

Now, of course, oh yes, after it's too late, suddenly the full impact of how bad a decision this sinks in. All the damage this has caused everyone, to our economy, our banking system, our corporate ability to raise money, our jobs, the probable recession and cuts in social services and fire and police protection and school teachers -- this was all totally unnecessary. There were plenty of other people who understood these facts, and no shortage of telephones or on-line sources or neighborhood wise people.

It is not the individual weakness and lack of experience that is startling - it is the fact that, as a society, we've lost the collective strength that would prevent that predictable weakness from turning into an actual problem. We aren't asking each other for help, and aren't giving it enough.

For reasons that again I cannot grasp, our entire education system seems to be based on the assumption that group strength is some kind of bad thing, and that we need to be "strong enough to not need help" so that we can "do our own work." This is an absurd goal. No person will ever be that "good". No CEO will ever be that smart. No King or President will ever be so wise they don't need advisors. Even Nobel Prize winners have weak spots and blind spots and bad days.

No one can possibly know everything or be strong all the time. Everyone has to sleep. Everyone has to inhale sometime. Everyone has short-term crises that use up all their internal coping energy and they need to fall back on their social bank account to bridge over until they can recover.

So why do we have a whole country that pretends we are "better than that?"

This concept or "mental model" makes us sitting ducks, easy prey for every con man, advertiser, or politico that comes along, as they surely will, and attempts to take advantage of us. It paralyzes us, just at the moment we should be reaching out for help.

It leaves males driving around for hours when it would take a minute to stop and "ask for directions." Some of those "drivers" are our department managers, CEO's, and governmental leaders, who are also trained that asking for directions is "bad."

While our consumer-based culture may not have created that tendency to be divided and conquered, it certainly doesn't hesitate to move in for the kill and take advantage of a whole population conditioned to be proud of the fact that they are behaving stupidly.

This makes the work of those of us in the quality and high-reliability field much harder. It becomes a major challenge, as all the books and academic papers describe, to simply get people to help each other and to ask for help. The guru of quality, W. Edwards Deming, was just furious with the whole Western civilization's concept of "school" and "education" and annoyed many people by saying so loudly.

As you may know, no one wanted to hear Deming in the US, so he went to Japan, which did want to hear him, and which built a whole culture of quality based on his ideas, which is what we're facing now in companies like Toyota, built around the core concept of employees helping each other out instead of competing with each other to be "perfect" individuals.

Our top schools' educational programs are build around books like "Leading with Questions" by Marquart, which charge $10,000 apiece to teach people that it's OK for an executive to not know how to do everything, and to ask everyone else how it should be done.

It's hard to count the number of other problems we see around us in society that are the result of this single error in our model of how life should work. On every side, we see bad decisions made worse by cover-ups or refusal to accept the fact that the bad idea isn't actually working.

It doesn't have to be this way. Nothing in human nature prevents us from making friends and relying on them to make it through the day and make it through our lives.

But recently, the full power of the media seems devoted to teaching the opposite lesson - that other people are enemies, that we need to be strong and being strong means we don't ever ask directions. I can understand why individual marketing departments think this is a great idea. What I can't understand is why we put up with it, and why we drink this Kool-Aid, and why our government doesn't realize the damage this is doing to our personal, corporate, and national ability to thrive and prosper.

In the short run, I suppose, it makes us "easy to govern", but in the long run it makes the society we build become "ungovernable" because nothing works any more. Even things that used to work don't work. Our aviation system becomes a nightmare. Our urban infrastructure of pipes and wires and roads is crumbling. Now, with the mortgage mess, our banks and staggering around and firing their CEO's, and housing is collapsing and jobs are going away.

That's not good. And it is 100% predictable, because this need for a larger group of friends to get us over the weak spots and temptation to take the short-cut happens on every level, not just to humans, but also to corporations and states and nations.

It's that role that religion has been trying to manage for the last 5000 years -- being a larger framework to hold the lessons that take a while to learn, and the lessons that require overcoming temptation to cheat or take the short cut, or to drive while drunk, or to head off to bed with that person that we will truly regret in the morning.

We are all weak, but that is no reason we cannot all be strong for each other. It's a timing thing. We are not all weak on the same day, or at the same moment, or in the same way so that the whole of us can be a buffer and get us each over whatever personal pot-hole we're falling into now, until a strong arm grabs us and steadies us and keeps us safe.

This is a role we absolutely must do for each other. We will never be able to get past this or grow beyond it. No amount of technology will make it go away. Every crowd of computers or robots or humans or companies or cells or Martians will face the same challenge. This is a universal truth.

And, we can "take it to the bank." Or, more likely, our bank account will certainly take a hit if we ignore this basic fact of life. If enough of us ignore it, the bank itself will fail. If even more of us ignore it, the entire banking system will fail. If even more of us ignore it, the whole country will fail.

Hello? This isn't rocket science. As the Beatle's song "I get by with a little help from my friends" shows, this is actually common sense and our shared experience.

But it is growing weak from official neglect. Which is to say, in a democracy, it's our own fault and we're doing this to ourselves.

We can continue to be proud and arrogant and think we don't need each other, but we'd be wrong. The Psalms of David in the Old Testament of the Christian Bible say "Pride goes before a fall." It was true 3000 years ago. It's still true.

It's a building block, a stable foundation we can plan on still being true tomorrow and 3000 years form now.

So, we tried something - living without that -- and it turns out not to work very well. In fact, it seems to be crashing around our heads right now.

If you trace back almost everything that's going wrong around you, sooner or later you will come across a point where this refusal to cooperate allowed the fatal flaw got into the building design, or allowed someone, somewhere to drive drunk, or sign up for a "super incredible unbelievably good mortgage deal" or some other nonsense.

We need to stop blaming individuals for being human, and look in the mirror, and stop congratulating ourselves for being super-human. We're not super-human, and that's never going to change, but it's also OK, because we can cope with it if we just help each other out.

To get there, we need a culture that supports that as a value and a social norm. We need to hear it every day on TV and in the movies and in our popular music.

The answer is right here, right in front of us. We don't need a $500 billion study commission to figure out that this is where a lot of stuff is going wrong.

I'm hearing from religions that the way we deal with each other is something that needs work. I'm hearing it increasingly from industry studies into corporate productivity and safety. I'm seeing it in simulations. But I'm not seeing it on television or hearing any of our politicians call this by name.

We don't hear that much from academic researchers, but, there's a problem -- these are people who are "experts" and who have built a whole universe where intellectual Rambo-ism is the norm -- at the opposite end of the spectrum from Deming. This crowd wants to pour new trillions of dollars into "education" where we will produce students better at "math and science" in order for our companies and country to be strong.

Won't work.

Can't work, unless we fix this other problem, this social problem first. Every gain we make in commercial innovation will be flushed away by larger scale drunk driving.

First, fix what's obviously and clearly wrong socially. Then, with a social system that actually works, address the other problems that are still there.

This doesn't require socialism or communism or overturning the profit motive or some total disruption of free markets or any change in the pecking order. It only requires that we work together more within that structure, and do the obvious things to help that happen, and see where that gets us.

References for Building Blocks

Here are some of the missing references for the last post.

1) Nifty materials that are solid if you move fast, but liquid if you move slowly:
Some of this used to be sold under the name "Silly Putty" in the US. If seemed to have the consistency of chewing gum, but if you hit it with a hammer it shattered instead of slashing, then all the chunks sort of melted in place and became gooey again.

Here's a link to a marvelous YouTube video of some young people with a huge hot-tub sized vat of such a substance, demonstrating that you can run across the top if it if you move fast, but you'll sink into it if you stop moving. The YouTube description says:

They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid.

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non_Newtonian Fluid

2) Stirling Engines

Again, Wikipedia has a very nice article on "Stirling Engines", along with a fully animated
diagram. One of the figures is shown here. There are two cylinders, one touching something that's hot and one touching something cold. Each cylinder has a piston, connected to a common flywheel. The connections make the two pistons move out of phase, so they are not both fully down at the same time. The connected cylinders are filled some gas, which could be just air.

The engine converts that temperature difference into a rotational motion of the flywheel. There are no other key parts required, no spark-plugs or valves.

If you go to Google Images, you can see many photographs of actually constructed Stirling engines. Another nice animation from MIT is here with a slightly different design.

Building blocks for real progress

When I was an image-processing guru at Parke-Davis research, I used to tell people not to trust any result that depended on what threshold or cutoff they used to measure their pictures. Real results would be there at any cutoff, and publishing any other "results" would be regretted later. The same lesson applies to planning at all levels and time-frames.

So, if you or your company or your country comes up with some "great" plan that looks terrific on a 1-quarter or 1-year horizon, but looks wretched on a ten year horizon, you should "raise your hands slowly and step away from the vehicle."

Complaints hat this makes your planning "harder" are both ill-founded and ill-advised. They are ill-advised, because if all anyone needs to do to plan is pick the obvious short-run "solution", then they can hire kids out of high-school to do that and fire you and save a bundle. They are ill-founded because this strategy will actually make your life much easier, once you-all master it. (Unfortunately, the "all" part is an issue, and we'll get to that below.)

There's a trick used in physics to solve very complex problems. It goes like this. First, you find anything, regardless how small, in fact the smaller the better, that works. Then you find a second something, also tiny, that also works. You keep on looking until you have a whole library of tiny things that work. Then, you build the actual solution you are after out of any combination of the tiny things, because, if they work separately, they'll also work together.
(Well, if you included that as a constraint when you were looking for things that "work".)

The tricky part is finding things that don't depend on the "accidental" world you happen to be in at the moment. The reason is simple - if part of the world around you isn't fixed, then it can change. If it changes, and you answer relied on it being true, then your answer is no longer true. This is just common sense.

Well, easier said than done. It's like the old medical school parting words: "Half of what you just learned is wrong -- we just don't know which half. "

This, my friends, is what all this "diversity" is for. If the thingie you are considering for a tiny truth is actually true, and actually doesn't depend on context, then it will be as true for THEM, over there, as for you over here. If they are the same as you, you don't learn anything by comparing notes, because you all will share the same false assumptions and blind spots. But if they are different from you, then you can both learn something by comparing notes.

In fact, the more different from you the are, the more you can learn from them, from seeing what is true in their context. The the more different kinds of different you go through, the more wisdom you can get.

But, of course, "Half of what you know is wrong" is true for them too. So, the real question is, not to focus on what you disagree on, but to focus on what you agree on. If you pick a wide enough range of diverse contexts, and something seems to be true in all of them, that's a really good candidate for one of these building-block truths.

What's a building block look like? They usually are more like conditions or adjectives than nouns. So, "Half of what you know is wrong" is an example. It doesn't tell you which half, but it does tell you what not to rely on - namely, that your mental model is entirely correct. In other words, any strategy that doesn't include a feedback loop and a learning curve and permission to challenge the internal mental map we're navigating with will be ill-advised.

Like Mapquest or Google maps -- any map, ANY map, that has been around long enough to exist is already wrong somewhere. Some bridge is out. Some road is under construction. Some road exists but is under water right now due to flooding. Some road never was there in the first place - the guys that look at satellite photos mistook a fence for a road. Etc.

Google Maps, as I recently discussed, now has a way that users who see something wrong can post a comment and even, gasp, a correction - within limits.

Both of those are crucial elements in this sort of dynamic feedback loop, if you want BOTH flexibility and stability. It has to be rigorous, but not rigid. It has to move, but be stable and reliable. It has to change with feedback, but not change too much all at once. For some changes it has to get multiple people to assert something is wrong to make a change, so no one person can mess up everything by accident or on purpose. It needs the properties that a good Wiki has, like Wikipedia, of being "mostly right, almost all the time" which is superior in most cases for navigation than something that was 100% right - two years ago when the last expert had a chance to check it. That last thing is like replacing the dirty windshield on your car with a crystal clear video of what you would have seen -- an hour ago -- looking where you're looking.

Even a very dirty "now" trumps a crystal-clear "then" for the purpose of not running into something in the road now.

So, moral of the story - treasure diversity because it may not be right but it will help you figure out where you might be wrong and where to look instead for things that are actually "true" in all cases, not just the few cases you and people like you have experienced and mistake for "every possible case."

Anyway, another point here is that most of our lives is spent, like a helicopter's blades, spinning in our own prop-wash. Most of the "world" humans live in today is urban, and in places like the US, most of that is manually constructed. And most of the "problems" we face on a daily basis weren't even here 1000 years ago -- they're problems that we invented by "solving" previous problems the wrong way. That is, what we called "solutions' were only "solutions for the short run that make us happy today but that we'll really regret when we get back to them tomorrow."

Unfortunately, now every day is some prior day's "tomorrow", and every day we face the consequences of our own contempt for the future, which goes full cycle and comes back to us as, golly gee, contempt for us. We say "screw tomorrow, solve today" and when it's tomorrow and we get "screwed" we some how fail to grasp that we did this to ourselves.

But now that the problem is worse than it was, we repeat the process. The more extreme the problems become, the shorter our planning horizon, the sooner the bad-side of our two-sided decisions come back to haunt us.

So, almost everything the country seems to be striving for is actually some way, not to solve a problem, but to put off a little longer having to face a problem, which deep down we know is only going to make the problem worse when we finally are cornered and have no choice but to face it.

Example - all the budget nonsense that state governments are doing right now.

But more things are examples of this. Most of science and technology is focused on a similar misguided mission. So, for example, it was a "great thing" for farmers in India to get electric water pumps that would pull up water from deep in the aquifer and let them grow way more food than before. Well, it was "great" as the population increased and their dependence on this steady stream of water and income grew, until today, when the water has pretty much been exhausted. Now, they are back to facing poverty, but at a whole larger level than before. More water wasn't a solution, it was an "amplifying delay tactic". Let me call than an ADT.

Worldwide, solving the "big problems" are all like this. They're like trying to deal with congestion on highways by adding lanes to the roads -- that let more people live further away, move the suburbs, and then fill up again and now when the highway is closed, twice as much traffic has to snarl its way through back roads. We got a short term win at the expense of a long-term loss. And the short-term win was only good for a short while, but the long-term loss seems to go on forever. Looking forwards, the short-term looks inviting.

Looking backwards, we say "Why did I do that? Why do I keep on doing that? Why can't I learn?"

There's the point. The only way out of this perpetual cycle of digging ourselves deeper in a hole is to have a learning curve that is stronger than our short-term urgent greed.

They say "If you're in a hole, stop digging."

At this point, all our scientific energy seems to go into digging deeper - more water, more energy, more everything except what we actually need - namely, a social learning curve that helps us grow up enough to overcome the temptation, next time, to sacrifice the future for the present.

Once we master self-discipline and self-control, then cheaper energy and water might be nice, but right now they would only double the size of the problem -- like those science fiction monsters that grow with every attack on them.

We need to ask, what has ever in history allowed people to have long-term perspective? How was it that Moses could persuade everyone that they should save up seven years of food to tide them over bad years, thousands of years ago, and today we can't seem to plan one year ahead?

We have enough facts and enough knowledge. Now what we need is more wisdom.

Where does that come from? Well, that's the right question to be asking. We really need more wisdom, ahead of more health care insurance, lower (or higher) interest rates, different social policies on immigration, etc.

Back up a step everyone, and look at how we process the information we have now. Are we making good use of each other's wisdom and eyes? Nope.

Could we be? Yep.

Should we? Yep.

If we don't, what we will get will be more of the same, digging us deeper and deeper into tomorrow's hole with today's "solutions."

First, sharpen the axe. THEN cut down tree. Right now, we have more a club than an axe, and it's pretty bad at chopping down trees.

So, where do we store learning so that it has sufficient power over us "next time"? Well, it will have zero power over us unless we are willing to submit to some outside power.

Storing learning inside ourselves clearly doesn't work. Storing it outside will work only if we are in the habit of paying attention to, in fact, paying heed to some outside agency.

If we insist on being "free" from all outside agencies, we are also "free" from that annoying learning capacity, and "free" to keep on repeating the same mistakes over and over.

Some level of submission, of obedience, is required to make this work. This is a stunning concept to Americans, so I'll stop this post right here, for some reflection time.

Reality, having rigid bones gives a runner speed over a totally "free" jellyfish.

This dynamic motion thing, listening to authority but also being able to update the authority feedback loop, that's what we need to master, based on any examples of it we can find anywhere at any level.

This is another one of those situations where the best situation is somewhere in the middle, not at the end where you'd think it would be. It's like "Little's Law" which I described in an earlier post, where the maximum throughput though a system is not with things at "maximum capacity", but about 20% back from that. The maximum passenger thoughput on airplanes is at about an 80% load factor. The maximum rate of processing patients through a hospital is inthe 80-85% full range. Above those levels, due to congestion, everything slows down. The more you jam in, the slower it gets. If every nook and cranny is full, it stops entirely.

Same with "freedom". The maximum value of "freedom" is not at the 100% free end, but more like the 85% free end. Some constraints are valuable. Some yielding and submitting to outside agencies, even if freely selected and elected, will be required, for maximum power.

Runners with stiff bones are more free than jellyfish. Think about it. WHAT you submit to matters, but the fact of submission is built into the system where you can't remove it.

So, one more pass through that concept, which is part of the "vertical loop" of feedback that I mention in prior posts and my Baha'i presentation.

People have no internal absolute reference point. People live in a context that "floats" or in electrical terms, has no absolute "ground". Since everything you think is a mixture of your logic and your context, and the context floats, you have no absolute control, on a moment by moment basis, of whether you're right or now wrong -- it will look the same to you from inside your context.

BUT, you have the external world to the rescue. You can build your learning in outside you, where it is not subject to your own moods and context variations. That solves the "where to put it" problem but doesn't make it helpful if you (tomorrow, when you need it) refuse to listen to (you, today, when you see the downside.)

So you (tomorrow) will have to learn how to submit to you(today). That means you have to learn how to submit to an external agency. More than that, it means you have to be able to submit to the agency exactly when it matters, namely, when you disagree with it and are strongly tempted to override it.

So, you need to be in a very deep habit of obedience, and willing to let your external friends and agents tell you when you have gone off the deep end. That has to be practiced a lot during good times to hold up to the pressure when it's a bad time and you(then) really really want to do the same bad thing that you(now) realize is a bad thing to do.

All of which only works if the thingie you are submitting to has an update mechanism so that as the world changes, it changes with it to keep the wisdom effect constant.

This idea of needing to voluntarily submit to an external authority on purpose is the basis of all government and corporate authority, but it also only works if the authority has an updatable map and an update process that's working. Otherwise, you've gone out the other side, from rigor to rigidity.

It's this dynamic stability in the sweet spot in the middle that we need to learn how to make more vivid, and more obvious, and learn how to think about it and talk about it with each other.
We need to see it working in action, and see when it breaks and how to fix it when it breaks.

If we get this vertical loop working, and the horizontal one I talk about elsewhere, we're most of the way home. These are, I believe, invariants. They are constants. Any culture, any adaptive agency, human, animal, machine, Martian, robot, whatever, has to have these adaptive loops in place to learn and to remember its learned lessons when it matters later.

Like any "tough love" the system has to be both demanding and nurturing and responsive. But, I don't think humanity can get past the current white-water point without solving this problem of self-governance and learning over time.

That's more important than new clever ways to delay the inevitable.

All behavior-governing systems face this dilemma or paradox. They need, like starch-based colloids or silly-putty, to be rigid in the short-run and flexible in the long-run.

The normative system called "science", which denies it's a religion but has the same problem if not the same properties, both denies that it listens to authority and insists on enforcing its authority. In the short run, live within the rules. In the long run, challenge the rules, discover that the earth goes around the sun, that genes "jump", that continents "drift", that inheritance goes around DNA as well as through it, etc. In the short run, live within the model and map; in the long run, update the model and map. Both have to happen at once.

All legal systems have to face this same problem -- relying for learning on precedent, but knowing when to break precedent because the situation is "unprecedented." When do "new" rules have to be put in place to end up with the "same" result that we used to get with the "old" rules but we don't get any more, because something out there has changed?

All religions have to face this problem. When are the "old ways" something we need to enforce, and when should they be overturned and changed to "new ways" to accomplish NOW the exact same EFFECT as what the old ways THEN accomplished - but don't any more.

So, this is a pretty "big" problem. It's universal. It's underneath government, corporate policies, religions, and science. We all have run up against this same problem, this same "elephant" that is not really a tree, and not a rope, and not a leaf.

It's not an infinitely complex thing. It's just an unfamiliar thing. It's about as complex as a Stirling engine, with a few parts and something that shifts "phase" and carries momentum over time. But it does have this structure that cannot be simplified any further without destroying it. We have to rise to it, not drag it down to the simpler level that we would prefer it to be.

We can do this. We have computers and simulation and animation and tools. The basic "governance cycle" is something we can model and learn about through simulation, since it's pretty hard or immoral to experiment on the real world, even though we all do every day.

We should be able to pool our notes from different contexts, looking for what it is that's constant across all of them. What's the same about religion, science, and commerce? That's where to start.

What's the same today as it was 3000 years ago? That's where to start.

Learning. Adaptation. Dynamic Stability. Sort of a "bank" or reservoir or fly-wheel for "normative pressure" that we invest in in good times and can draw from (or down upon us) in bad times, meaning, times when if left to our own devices, we'd do the wrong thing but when, with social pressure, we'd do the right thing. This is a sort of flavor of "social capital." We have a flywheel for "obedience" as well, because if we don't learn that in the good times we will surely not follow it when we disagree with it, even if everyone around us assures us that it's us that has changed, not the world, and that we're having a really bad day.

If we can build F-22 jets, we can figure out how to build a dynamically stable governing process and troubleshoot the one we have, and see why the results today are, should I say, disappointing?

Japanese social networking in the news

Today's Washington Post has an article "Japan's Bloggers: Humble Giants of the Web".

Here's a few highlights:

Although English speakers outnumber Japanese speakers by more than 5-1, slightly more blog postings are written in Japanese than in English, according to Technorati, the Internet search engine that monitors the blogosphere.

By some estimates, as much as 40 percent of Japanese blogging is done on mobile phones...

Blogging in Japan, though, is a far tamer beast than in the United States and the rest of the English-speaking world. Japan's conformist culture has embraced a technology that Americans often use for abrasive self-promotion and refashioned it as a soothingly nonconfrontational medium for getting along.

Bloggers here shy away from politics and barbed language. They rarely trumpet their expertise. While Americans blog to stand out, the Japanese do it to fit in, blogging about small stuff: cats and flowers, bicycles and breakfast, gadgets and TV stars....

"Behavior is more important than technology," said Joichi Ito, a board member at Technorati and an expert on how people around the world use the Internet. "In Japan, it is not socially acceptable to pursue fame."

Technorati found that of all recorded blog postings in the fourth quarter of last year, 37 percent were written in Japanese, 36 percent in English and 8 percent in Chinese

Isn't it interesting how a country that generates a company like Toyota, that's running circles around GM and Ford, puts more emphasis on social harmony than on "competition"?

It appears that maximum competition, at the individual level, does not result in maximum "competitiveness" at the corporate level.

The "togetherness effect"

Yesterday I commented on the OECD's international student assessment, and I'd like to complete that thought. I believe that there is a solid path to the future from here, but it is not paved with math and science. Supercomputers today are actually super-powerful networks of hundreds of thousands of simple individual computers. That design pattern works. We simply need to use the same design pattern socially.

The power we need to manage our society and overcome our obstacles is already here in the "white space" between us, not in making each one of us some sort of all-wise genius.

So we need to learn how to manage the white space. In computer science, this would be called a distributed "operating system." The term "social capital" is related to this. "Emergence" and "synergy" and "teamwork" are related terms.

"Non-linear" is a related term. What that term is trying to convey is that the sum of two things is often greater than you would expect, and is much larger than what you think you'd get by adding up each thing separately.

One example that used to be familiar to every human, but is much rarer now, is a property of actual fires made of actual wood burning, or at least real charcoal in a grill. When it gets to that stage where the visible flame is mostly out and the coals are red-hot, it has a "non-linear" property. If you lay out these red-hot coals in a long row separated by a hand-width, they will probably die out. If you heap them into a pile, where each is near many others, they will glow brightly and keep going. You can do this experiment and see this for yourself. This is a "real fact." And it is a very important fact to keep in mind.

Or, if you're more scientific, you can look up the references to "cavity radiators", which say the same thing. If you take a piece of metal with a hollow space inside it, and drill a small hole into that cavity, and heat the metal until the outside just starts to glow, you'll see that the small hole you drilled is glowing much more brightly than the outside of the metal.

Here's a link to cavity radiation, also known as "black body radiation". Here's a relevant quote from that link:

"Blackbody radiation" or "cavity radiation" refers to an object or system which absorbs all radiation incident upon it and re-radiates energy which is characteristic of this radiating system only, not dependent upon the type of radiation which is incident upon it.

The brightness is a property of the fact that the hole allows each molecule to "see" many more molecules across it that it would "see" if it were just surrounded by the dozen nearest neighbors it has in a solid form. The brightness arises from this interaction, from this mutual encouragement and stimulation. Well, the math gets way more complicated, but that's the net effect.

It's a property of nature, and it's an important one to be sure you know, and be sure you believe in with unshakable faith. Things together burn more brightly than things separately. The "extra" brightness is a property of the "togetherness", not a property of the things.

In fact, the effect of the "togetherness factor" is so powerful that it really doesn't matter what the things are. In the limit, the nature of the "things" simply drops out of the equations, and the "togetherness" takes on a life of its own.

You can read about this. You can try the experiment with charcoal and verify it. This actually works. You can read about today's supercomputers here. This actually works.

So, now here is the huge emotional and intellectual leap: If this "togetherness factor" effect is so real and powerful, why aren't we using it more to solve our social problems?

As I reflected in my last post, why are we still obsessed with trying to make the "things" super powerful (and experts in math and science), when, in the end, what actually matters is the togetherness effect?

In fact, as W. Edwards Deming was so vocal about, our so-called "educational system" seems designed to destroy the togetherness, instead of to encourage it. Our concept of a "school" is a place where students compete to see whose "thing" is bigger, or better, or smarter, and then we can select those with the "best" thingies and boost them up even more with top honors and praise and scholarships and prizes until they have super-hot-shot-great thingies, even better than the Chinese, you betcha. And then, oh boy, then we'll "win" for sure.

Huh? Researchers in computer science gave up that approach 25 years ago, when they discovered that networks were way easier to build than super-cpu's. IBM's "Blue Gene" architecture has 65,000 dual-chip processors all networked together.

Researchers in Artificial Intelligence gave up the idea 25 years ago when they discovered that networks of very simple "rules" produced more "intelligence", way more easily, than some huge "if-then-else" program that turned out to be impossible to write anyway. I was on a panel on Expert Systems in Anaheim at a conference once, at the table with a team that had just redesigned the aiming program for the Hubble Space Telescope. They had reduced one "supercomplex" program with 50,000 lines of FORTRAN to 210 simple rules, which was 1000 times easier to write, and to maintain, and to debug, and took a lot less room to boot. The rules were things like "If the solar panels are out, don't plan to use stars they block as guide stars."

My expert program scheduled students into rooms for the Cornell Business School, while maximizing odds students could get their desired courses, faculty could sleep late, no one had courses Friday afternoons, the women were evenly distributed in different sections of classes, everyone had a section of something with every other person at least once, groups of 20 students had multiple classes together so you only needed to find one friend to get notes for all the classes you missed, etc. It was still being used 8 years after I left, maybe it's been replaced now. I would have never tried to take on those specs with a classical program written in some language like PL/1 or C or even LISP. Using many simple rules instead of one huge program let me write something 100 times more powerful than I could have otherwise.

I picked the idea of using rules because they are so easy to change and evolve over time. If a rule changes in the real world, or someone realizes a new rule or constraint, you just change that one rule in the system and hit the "run again" button. That's it. No logic diagrams or long nights wondering if every possible case has been thought of.

Not surprisingly, in this context, is the fact that biological genes operate exactly the same way. No single gene does one job -- mostly, they all interact with each other and it's the interaction that does the heavy logic and lifting. So, even God / Nature / biology selected this as the design pattern that made sense to use for the long haul. Since I'm a big believer in patterns that transcend any particular level or scale, and can be reused on other levels and scales, I'd say, if it works for genes and it works for computers then it should work for people - or for sure we should look and see if it does or not. It's a really easy solution to really hard problems and we'd be fools not to check it out near the start of our homework assignment.

This is the trick used to pack a human being into a mere 25,000 protein-encoding genes, which is only 5,000 more genes than a roundworm has. That's because the number 25,000 factorial is way larger than 20,000 factorial. It's not the genes that make us human - it's the interaction between the genes. The "program" is in the "white space" between the genes. When our bodies break, much of the time, as with current parallel processing software, the breakdown is "between the lines" not "on a line of code" -- that is, it's the collaboration that's broken.

Note also that our bodies have no such thing as a "master gene" or a "king gene" or a "Rambo gene" that directs all of the other genes and tells them what to do. Fascinating. The same thing is true of our visual system - we have subsystems that detect edges, or color, or texture, or motion, but there is no "king system" that runs all the subsystems -- the subsystems just kind of keep up a continual dialog with each other about "what do you make of THAT?" and the vision "emerges" from that interaction. This is a very, very, very powerful design pattern.

Ditto for large-scale heaps of legacy systems, such as a major medical center might have. All these fragments have to try to talk to each other successfully, and most of the breakdowns are not "in" a system so much as "between" systems. Again, it's the white-space on the chart of "systems" that is the "system" we need to keep an eye on.

I've been pondering this for some time. See Intelligent Agent Infrastructures For Supporting Collaborative Work (Sen, Durfee, and Schuette, 1995 - Computer Science and Engineering graduate project, EECS Department, University of Michigan)

In radio astronomy we can find other examples. The huge 1000 foot "dish" antenna at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, was great, and I have a spot in my heart for it since my then room-mate at Cornell designed the central antenna, but times more on and arrays of many smaller dishes are more powerful and more flexible and way cheaper to build. It's all the same principle. Many things, working together, can always trump one big thing. Always. Supercomputers. Intelligence. Perception of the universe. Always.

The same thing is true of sports teams, or of any kind of team. The teamwork factor, or what I'm calling the "togetherness effect" can be more powerful than any single superstar. Great coaches look for good players that, above all, are good team-players, not egotistical superstars.

The "Rambo" model is dead, or should be. It fights back and tries to stay alive, tries to keep its grip on our consciousness, tries to keep us mesmerized in believing in it.

I could speculate on the role of male psychology and biology on this historical obsession with whose thing is larger, but the honest to God truth is that size doesn't matter. What matters is the togetherness effect. If we could advance past the 1600's into the 21st century and recognize that, we could solve our social problems instead of being perplexed and baffled as to why even our best schools aren't putting out students with thingies so good that they are solving our problems for us.

I mean, come on, guys. Get over it.

"Group work" should not be some sort of after-thought that is tacked on to our "education" if there is time at the end. Group work, and how to make groups work, should be the focus of our entire educational process. Everything else can be "tacked on" if there is time at the end.

There are physical laws involved here. There is no way to make a single computer chip that is so powerful that you can't do ten times better with a network of much smaller chips. Or 100 times. Or an unlimited factor times. The "up" part is in the interaction, not in the thingie.

We have our educational system entirely backwards. That's what Deming said. I agree.

Pouring our national treasure into trying to generate a few more students with super-fantastic math and science understanding is not the answer. "These are not the droids we're looking for." If we did succeed, say, which could take 30-40 years, and every American could score a perfect score on the SAT exam, it wouldn't solve our social problems. Look at Oxford, as I mentioned yesterday - a community of brilliant scholars and they can barely manage to keep the place operating, if that. We'd succeed in making a bigger one of those. Big deal. Whoopie.

Look, reflect, and learn. This is a curve. The road turns here. The future is not in the same direction we were going, even though it is the same road. The cheese has moved.

I just don't know how to say it more vividly. If you open your eyes it's right there. The answer is right there. We can pull our heads out of the sand of cultural depression about the size of our thingies, and get on with life, and solve our problems, and go explore the stars and find really neat stuff.

Also known as "God has a wonderful plan for your life." Look at the center of the neighboring galaxy, where the interactions are millions of times more powerful than "they should be", and feel the power that is right here, waiting for us to accept. There is hope, after all, for even us.


Photo credits:
M31 (Andromeda) Galaxy, Arecibo and Very Large Array radio telescopes are all from Wikipedia.
Cavity radiator pictures are from the textbook Physics by Halliday & Resnick, 2nd ed.

PISA - OECD Programme for International Student Assessment

Comparison of students in the OECD countries was in the news today, with the latest report on science and math among 15-year olds. I want to present a contrary view, that "individual" performance that matters today, now, this decade, has little to do with math and science, and a lot to do with how we interact with and relate to each other. That's where we should be looking.

A typical AP news item is here "Other Countries' Students Surpass the U.S. on Tests" and the actual Programme for International Student Assessment report is here. US scores for reading are not included, since, ironically, the printed test in the US was not proofread adequately and was offset a page, making all the references to "the diagram on the facing page" nonsensical.

The report itself is 350 pages, and even the executive summary is 56 pages long. Results for the US are rather dismal, and you can read those yourself. A few highlights that I thought were interesting related to differences between males and females, which I quote further below.

I object to the entire test, not as being "wrong" so much as being misleading and supporting the efforts to "teach to the test" we see in the US, and certainly here in Michigan.

Local news shows that the areas called "social studies", "civics", group music, literature, history, government, and humanities in general, as well as team sports, are being neglected or eliminated in order to improve school rankings and funding. Ratings of schools in New York City recently have created a hornet's nest of debate over "corrective action" required for "bad schools."

I've thought about these issues most of my life. Early in my life, I taught one year at the high-school level in trade school, 10th-12th grade "problem students" from a tri-county area in upstate New York. I taught MBA's for two years at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management. And I've spent most of my adult life in a large university setting, paying attention to educational issues. At Cornell University, at one point, I was the Director of Institutional Planning and Analysis, and very focused on long-term directions in education. I'm currently involved with work involving "leadership training" and quality improvement among teams and executives.

And, my undergraduate major was Physics, heavy on the Math, with a lot of Computer Science thrown in, at which I did very well, so I'm not speaking as one biased against something I can't do, motivated by "sour grapes."

But I have to say that, after a lifetime watching this issue, I don't believe that an increased focus on "science, math, and reading" is where we need to be focusing our attention.

There are two crucial assumptions behind this focus on science and math in this multi-level world we live in. One assumption, on the individual level, is that a child in the US, say, can get the best future for himself or herself by seeking to become excellent in these areas, and in fact to become competitive with international students for good jobs. The other assumption is that, if many or most students succeeded at this goal, things would be much better for the country as a whole -- economically, on a corporate level, militarily, and in terms of the quality of our health and daily lives.

Both assumptions seem patently false to me. They represent the worst of denial, "tooth-fairy" wishful thinking, and unexamined models of how things work.

Regarding the first assumption, the US is so far in the hole at this point, after years of neglect and unjustified self-confidence, that the odds we can make our students individually competitive in a global marketplace are very low, in my judgment. We have a whole generation, if not two, of teachers in place who don't really understand their own subject areas. We have an ethic and status quo of speaking and reading only one language, and being proud of not doing very well at that.

And, we have a hugely anti-intellectual culture in many places, where students attempting to excel are punished by their peers. In fact, the only thing US students seem to rank highest on, based on research studies, is their self-esteem. In other words, there is a disconnect between how they actually perform and how they think of themselves as performing. At that, the USA seems to excel.

This has been a long time coming, and the resistance to the perception of a problem is deep, despite vivid descriptions of this by educators, industrial leaders like Bill Gates and Ross Perot, etc. In the late 1980's, the B-school at Cornell considered setting up an outreach program in Europe, and did a survey of alums living there to get a sense of what we should be teaching. The answers were uniform and startling. Basically, they were a mix between laughter and scorn that the US management education had anything to offer Europe. We weren't even in the running.

Meanwhile, our graduate schools have been making it in science and engineering only by a huge influx of foreign students, in some cases 70% of the graduate student body, because we couldn't find qualified American students. In the life sciences, the ratio seems more like 90% from walking around and peering into labs, but I don't know the exact numbers. It seems clear that, if China stopped sending graduate students and post-docs, the Life Science mission in Michigan would be essentially gutted.

So, the top 10% of our students might be able to compete in that marketplace, but it's just not clear to me that the other 90% of them will stand much of a chance, in the next decade, of catching up. The odds would shift if we could use the power of television and marketing to market multi-lingual, multi-cultural education, familiarity with the world, and an ethic of hard work and putting off present pleasure to invest in the future benefits. Instead, despite whip-cracking from above and jawboning about a need for education, the country seems to be heading towards increased parochialism and isolationism, rejection of science, rejection of reading, and focusing on instant gratification and distracting "entertainment" as the end-point of life.

This seems to me part of a consistent and predictable pattern of denial of inconvenient truth, combined with a helpless/hopeless syndrome, combined with a startling inability, at every level, to carry on reasoned discussion and reach agreement on "hard issues". As I'm writing this, the Michigan government still hasn't sorted out the budget, due last October 1st. The Federal Government is ten days from either a shutdown, or a bitter "showdown", knock-down, screaming public battle over the budget, also due last October 1st. Social security is probably out of control. Health care costs are clearly out of control.

Oh, and the credit markets and home mortgages are out of control. The US debt passed $9 trillion, almost half of which was incurred during the current administration and is accelerating in the wrong direction, out of control, and for that matter almost entirely out of sight of most citizens who either don't know, don't care, or care but feel helpless to do anything about it. It is unmentioned in the political debates. Whatever is going on in the middle East isn't impressing anyone either.

So, I have to ask, what fraction of that mess would be improved if all the participants were simply better at math and science?

Right. Essentially none of it. We are not dying, as a country, because of a lack of math and science. It is something else entirely.


We are dying, I would suggest, from an inability to work together and to reason together and to make hard choices together.

So, now we get to the second assumption I refer to well above, that if only we had more technology, oh boy, then things would be fine for the country, you betcha.

Not.

I'm not a Luddite. We don't have to return our technology to the store and get a refund since it didn't work as advertised, although that's an interesting thought. This "better life" we citizens were promised seems to be less and less likely. The promise of having world control and dominion through advanced technology and weaponry also seems to be surprisingly distant.

Maybe, it is not true that "technology will save us." Either individually or collectively.

If more of the same results in more of the same, I'd say we're going the wrong direction.

So, before we rush off to focus what's left of our national treasure on a solution to our problems, we need to have a serious look at whether we're addressing the right problem, and, if so, are we doing it with an intervention that has any chance at all of working as designed. We need to be alert to signs of wishful thinking and denial and avoiding hard-choices and painful subjects, or subjects which produce high-emotions and social conflict.

What about the argument that if we just had more math and science, that level of logical thinking would fix everything? I have to look at our centers of academic wisdom, our universities, and ask how good a job they do at dealing with internal conflicts and making hard choices. I am not impressed. They don't make the choice that a world composed almost entirely of highly trained people, who are strong in math and science, seems to be any better than the rest of us at making hard choices and managing its own affairs.

I referred in an earlier post to the University of Oxford, which has been in business for over 1100 years now. If there was any place that highly educated people should have had a chance to sort out these issues, you'd expect to find it there. Yet what I read in their on-line documents is that they have spent years arguing over what e-mail system to use, and cannot reach any resolution on the issue.

Would more math and science knowledge help them out? I doubt it. Do they just "need more time" on the exam? I doubt it.

Frankly, I'd suggest doing this. Take technology off the table entirely. Imagine for a moment, as I have, that the problem is not that we have insufficient math and science and engineering to be able to thrive and prosper and be healthy and happy as individuals and as companies and as a society.

Then, hmm, what is the problem? Where is this process of prosperity-reaching breaking down?

Whether it is a symptom or a root-cause, it's clear that our ability to get together, put our heads together, and come to grips with our own problems is not very good. In fact, it probably deserves a failing grade, based on how well the annual budgets are coming along and how civil and rational the discussion is about selection of the next US president.

So, back to my opinion of this whole PISA - Programme for International Student Assessment.

It appears to me that the mental model of that assessment is that only one level matters of the multi-leveled biological world of life that we live in - and that is the "individual." And even there, I find the conclusions unhelpful.

I think we need to take that level off the table as well, keeping technology off it, and say, yes, but what else is needed to make this baby fly?

Very bright individuals, by themselves, can deal with some issues -- fewer these days than you'd think, after accounting for not only internal roadblocks like depression and unexplained fatigue and ill-health, but for external roadblocks in getting almost anything done - which is like trying to get anywhere on an airplane this holiday season in the short 2-3 hours that you'd think a jet aircraft could deliver.

In fact, that's a perfect example. We have jet aircraft, that can go 550 miles per hour, and cross the country, potentially, in 4 hours. Yet, to travel from Detroit to Miami, say, for Christmas, it would be good to leave, oh, 1-3 days for the trip.

Would it help if we had even faster planes? Nope. We've run out of what we can buy with faster individual planes, and need to look at how the system of many planes, interacting, behaves.

This is exactly what's going on with education. We've run out of what we can by with brighter individuals, and need to look at the system of how many individuals, interacting, behaves.

Pouring our remaining bank-account into making faster planes or brighter individuals have equally likely chances of fixing the problems, which are not at the individual level but at the "system" level.

Now, this is nuanced and subtle. The behavior at the system level is dependent on what sort of internal decision-making and behavior-generating rules individuals use. If you change the nature of the individuals, you will definitely change the nature of the emergent system behavior. All research in complex systems shows that.

So, I come full circle. The "problem" has to do with something "wrong" inside individuals that our educational system should strive to make "right' -- but the something has close to nothing to do with math and science, per se.

Yes, maybe if science advanced another 200 years at the speed it's going, you could get to the root problem that direction, but we don't have 200 years, so that's not very helpful.

We need to leap ahead, pull our heads out of the box, climb a tree, and see where this path goes.

It seems to me that a closer first-approximation to where the "wrongness" is that we need to address is suggested by words like: morality, integrity, honesty, humility, sincerity, trust, compassion, civility. In fact, a really big word is this one: maturity.

As a society, in the US, the term "adult" or "mature" seems to have been hijacked to mean "old enough to buy pornography and alcohol and cigarettes and drive a car and generally behave like an adolescent jerk and not have to listen to anyone anymore or take advice about anything."

What the educational situation highlights instead is that the US students are the world leaders in what could be termed pride, arrogance, self-esteem, or conceit. Which means they are also world leaders in unawareness of reality or denial of same.

Which means they are breaking precisely the key feedback loop required for any adaptive entity to, well, adapt to changed conditions in its environment -- namely, it has to be aware of the gap between where it is and where it should be, and it has to be responding to that awareness.

Of course, awareness of a gap produces internal conflict, that seeks to be resolved. It will, in fact, be resolved, come what may. So, if the gap cannot be closed, then the awareness of it will generally be shut off instead. That seems to be what has happened here. We don't want to be so far behind, we don't like being behind, it doesn't reflect well on our leadership to be behind, we can't deal with being behind, so we will effectively agree to ignore it and act as if it doesn't matter one bit to us. And maybe it will go away.

Not.
Summary so far:

• Houston, we have a serious problem here.
• It's not going away.
• In fact, it seems to be getting worse.
• Pouring another decade of math and science into it looks unlikely to help, on any level.
• Technology will not save us this time.

and

• We are going to have to grow up and learn how to act like adults and work with each other and with hard-choices and sacrificing some short-term desires for long-term needs, and some personal desires for some social requirements of continued existence.
  

In other words, the "individual" performance that matters today, now, this decade, has little to do with math and science, and a lot to do with how we interact with and relate to each other.

That's what we need to develop metrics and tests for, and that's what we need to go back to the drawing board and figure out how to do, since we obviously don't know it now.

And, incidentally, that's why so much of this weblog is devoted to "religion" and "social feedback".

There are things outside science that we need to get good at, whether science can help us with them or not. If you get past the high-profile single-issue religious zealots, a large fraction of what religious people are trying to tell scientists is the above message.

I care less about whether life was created in 7 days or 7 billion years than I do whether people have some basis on which to grow up and deal with each other that doesn't involve killing the other party as the only imagined "solution." All major religions attempt to provide such a basis.

Scientists say that atheistic philosophy can serve the same purpose, but that's not obviously true based on any society that has thrived based on technology, absent some embedding religion.

The problems we face as a society are not "in the box" or "in the org chart" that science is good at dealing with. They are in the context, the "white space" between boxes, where, historically, science and mathematics have not gone. To be fair, science is increasingly aware that there is something important going on in this "complex adaptive living system" space.

Our solutions involve things like "norms" and the word "should", which are areas, again, that science, trying to fight off a legacy of "proof by intimidation or inquisition" thought it could get away from by being scrupulously "objective" and "distant" .

While there can be a lot of debate about which "norm" is "right", I'd suggest that norms which result in the destruction of all life on the planet, or of our own society, are probably worth re-examining. It would seem to be a wiser choice to select our norms from the set of norms that actually generate a future for us.

That issue can be thought about scientifically, maybe even at some point using mathematics or simulation and animation to gain insight about the implications, downstream, of processes too complex for our finite brains to comprehend.

These advances require focusing attention on how people relate, how they work together, what works and what doesn't, what's worked out how in the past, what works in different cultures and countries, etc. But, those are the humanities, the subjects that "science and math" fixations are driving out of our school systems.

We have to address how we "should" treat each other. It's a hard issue. It's a bootstrap issue, because our inability to face and deal well with conflict and emotion and differing perspectives makes it hard to deal with precisely those issues.

So, it's a feedback loop. We need to spiral it towards better mutual understanding, not away from that. We need to take on pain to do that. And face reality. Both of which we cannot do in a single step, but these have to be approached slowly, hesitantly, but insistently.

I saw a bumper sticker the other day that seems relevant. "I will speak the truth, even if my voice shakes."

The answer is over there, I think.

==========
I promised some interesting information from the PISA executive summary, so here it is.

Males and females showed no difference in average science performance in the majority of countries, including 22 of the 30 OECD countries. In 12 countries, females outperformed males, on average, while males outperformed females in 8 countries. Most of these differences were small. In no OECD country was the gender difference larger than 12 points on the science scale.

This is different from reading and mathematics where significant gender differences were observed.

However, similarities in average performance mask certain gender differences: In most countries, females were stronger in identifying scientific issues, while males were stronger at explaining phenomena scientifically. Males performed substantially better than females when answering physics questions.

Reading is the area with the largest gender gaps. In all OECD countries in PISA 2006 , females performed better in reading on average than males. In twelve countries, the gap was at least 50 score points.

Photo credits:
Amish barn raising (Swarming) by heyburn3 (click on it to go there).
Team crossing stream photo credit: Ollieda
Houston Graphic by the author.

Righty tighty, lefty loosey

The Washington Post had another article today, Less Free to Move Around the Cabin, on the dismal state of those traveling by air this holiday season, with things only heading from bad to worse as prices of aviation fuel rise. Methinks the industry is turning the nut the wrong direction. "Righty tighty, lefty loosey." The worse things get, the worse they make things by a backwards strategy.

I responded in a comment in the Post, followed by a shorter summary, which I present here in reverse order, and maybe I can get some comments or afterthoughts to this line of reasoning.

Short version:

I get too wordy, so I wanted to restate my prior post more concisely. Maybe, it's not possible to make lots of money for stockholders by treating both employees and customers like cattle, while treating top management like kings with no spending limit.

12/3/2007 6:58:24 AM

Long version:

The odds of cascades of delays go up to 100% as the planes pass the maximum efficient load, which sounds like it's around 80-85% full. That's a fact of general systems and mathematics of Little's Law, which I discuss on my weblog in more detail. (see: Why are so many flights delayed). Nothing can be done to change that law, so there's no relief there.

The real question here, it seems to me, is why Southwest, which is known for having good human relations with employees and never forcing layoffs even in hard times, can make a profit while bigger airlines cannot.

Everything they taught us MBA's talked about "economies of scale." By that logic, Southwest should be broke. Instead we have dis-economies of scale. Same laws of physics apply, larger airlines should be able to get cheaper prices on almost everything.

So my reading is that what the large airlines are doing is destroying human morale and the economies caused indirectly by cooperation and collaboration, which are easy to see in the bottom line but hard to trace back to the causes. CEO's paid huge salaries while pilots and flight attendants and mechanics lose their pensions. There's a huge cost to that unfairness the US hasn't sprung to.

Toyota has, and they can do things much more efficiently than US auto companies. They know how to listen as well as preach, and they know how to make a workplace where employees enjoy working AND work efficiently.

Maybe this analysis misses something, but I think the question of how Southwest survives seems to be the only place with possible leverage here.

12/3/2007 6:41:25 AM

The core issue here is a critical one and a central theme to this weblog -- what is the magic that makes a corporation thrive, or any adaptive collection of people, from a team to a nation?

It's not magic, it's "synergy" - the non-linear power revealed when people work together on purpose sincerely, as opposed to the silent, sullen, competitive model US industry grew up with and which is serving us so poorly today, compared to the Toyota model.

I've posted before how the "product" of two things ranges from zero to infinity, based on the "angle" or relationship between them, mathematically. If the relationships are kept in the "real number" range, the maximum product of A and B is A times B. If we can move into what are called "complex numbers", there is no upper limit.

The problem is that the world is so complex today that the only way to operate at a profit is to use your limited resources up in that hyper-productive range. The problem is that this means the wealth-generating power of the organization chart is actually in the white space, not in the little boxes.

If you restrict life to the boxes, there is a finite limit on resources available, and if the CEO or stockholders are going to extract more wealth from the living body of the organization, it comes out of the flesh of the organization and diminishes the remaining life.

The problem then, as my post on why flights are late shows in a chart, is that we get into a death spiral. The less life the organization has, the less efficiently it works. The less efficiently it works, the larger percent of operating capital is extracted to send anything to the CEO and the stockholders. The larger percent extracted, the less life is left in the organization.

The result of turning the nut or loop that direction is clearly predictable -- after extracting so much blood from the animal, it dies. This is a model that is about as enlightened as blood letting was, the kind that killed our first US President, George Washington.

But, the feedback loop doesn't care which way it goes. Whatever direction you get it moving, it will accelerate in that direction. So, it can just as easily go the other way, with CEO's taking less a percent out of the company, reinvesting more in the "white space" of human values and social capital, which can (if done correctly) make the whole beast operate more efficiently and effectively, which creates so much more wealth that the smaller percent is a larger sum of money, which lets the CEO take out a smaller percent next time, so it grows more, etc.

By treating companies the way our fishing fleet treated the Georges Banks, once the richest fishing area in the world, we are going to end up the same way the Georges Banks ended up - an underwater desert, of no value to anyone. We ate all the seed corn.

This world of synergy and distant, diffuse causality is a new environment and the learning curve of American industry is startlingly low -- even with models like Toyota in cars or Southwest with airplanes.

The only way out of the airline delay crunch is to have more planes, or to raise the prices so high that most people give up flying. The price raising strategy, pretty much GM's strategy for the auto market, only takes you so far, and you discover there is an upper limit to what people or businesses will pay for your product or service, and a finite number of really rich people, who can just "go around" and buy their own jets if commercial travel is going to be such a pain. Again, a death spiral in that direction.

Ironically, this feedback loop is doubled because one passenger on a private Lear jet takes up more airspace than 450 passengers on a 747, so every rich passenger or business that's driven away makes the congestion problem that much worse for everyone else, while apparently solving it for themselves, for the short run -- until everyone does it, and then the final state of man is worse than the first.

The "more planes" requires lower operating costs with the same size staff, which means getting into that "white space" of synergy. There's no question this is hard to visualize, but it's critical to figure out how to make this sufficiently solid and visible that it affects the way business measures itself. We've just been terrible at good accounting for "human factors" on an individual basis, and close to zero on accounting for "social factors" on a social capital level.

That has to change or the "obvious" choice for which way to run the spiral will continue to be wrong. And the worse things get, the more fixated and obsessive CEO's will get on layoffs and other "cost cutting" moves, or simply despair, grab their $20,000,000 golden parachute and bail out because, strangely, the "bigger whip" and "deeper cut" strategy just doesn't seem to be working. Then the Board can hire some gunslinger with an ever bigger whip who promises deeper cuts, and keep turning the nut the wrong direction.

To them, it "doesn't make sense" to go the other way, and is seen as "failure" to admit that the numbers all indicate the present strategy seems to be failing to help, or , God forbid, actually making things worse.

Not to worry, I guess. The planet will weed out all the "over my dead corporation" CEO's and replace them with younger, thriving, agile companies, probably Asian, like Toyota.

Unfortunately, as investors notice that profits are down in old-model companies and up in new-model companies, they'll shift their investments to the new ones, putting even more pressure on the old ones to "make a profit."

There is no more profit to be made inside that loop, stealing from Peter to pay Paul. The profit is off to the side, and the whole structure has to be rotated the other direction so it will spiral up the bolt instead of down it.

I wish there was a more vivid way to illustrate or animate that problem and process, but the headwinds of legacy thinking are very strong.