China's unfair advantage -- collective action?

Today's Wall Street Journal had an article titled "China's 'State Capitalism' Sparks a Global Backlash".

The article basically whines that China is somehow breaking unwritten rules to let "market forces" prove how successful they are, by, gasp,  actually thinking about problems and taking coherent action to address them. This is viewed as an "unfair" advantage, apparently, particularly since it embarrassingly works much better than the solution we had all agreed to worship before called "market forces."   This conflict with our deeply held religious beliefs has to be resolved, of course, by erasing the data point that is in "the wrong place" so we can continue in our comfortable myth.

The article begins:

Since the end of the Cold War, the world's powers have generally agreed on the wisdom of letting market competition -- more than government planning -- shape economic outcomes.  China's national economic strategy is disrupting that consensus ..."

I had to comment on that, and I repeat it here:

OK, let's see if I have this correct. People are upset because China has "an unfair advantage" in that the central planners in government take a strong hand in the economy. In the same breath, if told the US government was going to similarly take a strong hand in the US economy, they would scream bloody murder.

Larry Summers calls China our largest challenge, but this is an opponent that writes out their game plan 15 years in advance and publishes it for everyone to read? And we still can't beat them?

It's time to stop blaming "unfair practices", health-care costs, foreign terrorists, weather, sun spot cycles, global warming, labor, management, oil prices, education, Democrats, Republican, Liberals, Conservatives and Scout Troop #217 in New Jersey for our own monumental collective incompetence.

This reminds me of a hospital I was in that had given 2 Gigahertz laptops to 10,000 staff members, but justified the molasses speed of the central computer systems as due to "insufficient computer power".

I'd suggest that we stop considering the word "collective " to be a dirty word, abandon the idea that competing with everyone over everything is a self-evident great idea, and start looking at better ways to work together to tap the resources we, collectively, have to bring to the table.

Even the lowly slime mold, when threatened or faced with a resource challenge, can literally pull itself together into a single cohesive entity, take coherent action to address the problem, before dissolving again into ten million "separate" cells. There's something we should be learning from all this.

Blaming others for "unfair advantage" is not the way to get there.

 A more insightful view of the world is in the book "Peace - More Than an End to War", by the Baha'i Publishing Trust, which

asks them to put aside their belief that conflict and aggression are intrinsic to human nature, to overcome the paralysis of will that prevents them from finding solutions to the problems facing them.

The book continues

The Baha'i approach to the achievement of peace calls for fundamental changes in all aspects of behavior -- individual, interpersonal, corporate, and international -- based upon the belief that human beings have an innate capacity for harmony and cooperation, which unfortunately, has been suppressed by religious fanaticism and the spread of divisive ideologies.

Let me be clear that I am not advocating that the US adopt Chinese Party rule. I am pointing out that coherent social action,  even when achieved by arguably dictatorial means,   is demonstrably MORE SUCCESSFUL in the short run (5-10 years) at dealing with the problems facing us on population scales than waiting  for "market forces" to address those problems.

Please note that I fully believe that central party rule,  with the suppression of dissent,  has within it the seeds of failure to be flexible to news from the front,  and will crash and sink on those shoals, as have all other efforts to rule by decree without corresponding efforts to listen to the people and accept surprising news, even if it overturns cherished long-standing beliefs and myths.

My point is that there are more choices than the anarchy of "market forces" and the powerful-but-internally-flawed central planning model of communism.    Central planning can work only if there are extremely strong built-in structures to weed out corruption and encourage dissenting views,  so that the strong down-flow of authoritative command is equally matched by a strong up-flow of wisdom from the front about the true state of affairs, which always seems to be invisible from "the top".

Otherwise, we get the all-to-common problem, say, in the US  of central economic planners unable to see a financial bubble the size of the planet,  despite a chorus of screams from below that it was coming; or of  startling and embarrassing comment from a vice president of General Motors that "no one could have predicted"  the drop in sale of expenisive gas-guzzlers when the price of gasoline rose.

Interestingly,  the US Army addresses just such a problem in Doctrine in FM22-100, the prior version of the US Army Leadership Field Manual.    The Army epitomizes a central command structure,  and yet the manual stresses the need for two things in order for such a structure to not blindly lead us all over a cliff -- (1)  the people at the top need to be exemplary in terms of moral behavior and concern for the troops,   and (2) the people at the top need to be acutely aware of their own blindness and take active steps to learn from those "below them".

Central Planning in communist countries, and as practiced in the US,  seems to have mastered the part about "authority going down" but seems to have discarded the part about "listening with humility to those below" going up.    Sadly,  that part discarded is the part that makes it work.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with central planning , with authority, or with coherent social action.  In fact,   as China is demonstrating, these are, in the short run, far more powerful than the chaos of the marketplace "solutions".     What's wrong is only visible on a larger time scale, which is if the central authority confuses the authority-to-steer with some kind of genetic-authority-due-to-mental-brilliance.   It's an easy mistake to make.  It's the normal method of failure of power, as "power corrupts" and "absolute power corrupts absolutely".   There is no intrinsic reason for this corruption of power to be a given -- but it will be a given if explicit steps are not built in to prevent that failure mode.

The only solution to such power grabs is to have absolute demands for the highest in character values and moral integrity, honesty, and trustworthiness of those we select as our leaders.  Not only "the appearance of impropriety" but impropriety itself must be considered disqualifying for office.

Otherwise,  we know what always happens.

In any case,  it does appear that

There are spiritual solutions to "economic" problems.

So far, there don't see to be any other kind of solution for "economic problems".

Supercomputer - bah humbug!

The latest news on the supercomputer front is that the Chinese have passed the Americans with a "faster machine".

Tianhe-1, meaning Milky Way, achieved a computing speed of 2,570 trillion calculations per second, earning it the number one spot in the Top 500 (www.top500.org) survey of supercomputers.

The Jaguar computer at a US government facility in Tennessee, which had held the top spot, was ranked second with a speed of 1,750 trillion calculations per second.

 Well,  I'd like to suggest that the benchmark is pretty bogus and, like most of the rest of our educational system, measuring the wrong thing.

There are problems on which there is no speed of computation, along those lines, is sufficient to solve. The reason is that the solution requires leaping out of the frame of mind in which the problem was posed, and reframing it in order to solve either it or a better problem.

What I'm looking for is a "computer" that gets part way into a problem,  goes "AHA!", has a brilliant flash of insight, realizes it's approaching the problem from the entirely wrong direction, reframes the problem, and then solves it.

And I'm also suggesting that 2,000 trillion calculations per second should be way more than enough to support this pivot in direction.    Stop aiming at MORE OF THE SAME and start aiming our resources at better use of what we have already.

Going for more "supercomputer speed" is like taking a car capable of going 700 miles per hour and trying to get it to go 800 miles per hour.   My point is ... so what?   It's useless to me at either speed.

This is not just complaining -- it's my method of going "AHA! You guys are solving the wrong problem!".   Cause I'm not a supercomputer, I can do that.

Here's the key.  99.999% of getting a useful supercomputer means solving the operating system problem of how to get the individual sub-computers,  now close to a million of them,  to work with each other in tackling different parts of the problem in such a way that their tiny efforts add up and amount to anything. (sound familiar?)

The Chinese got the parts to talk TO each other faster.  Well, good, as far as it goes. But we've gotten past sending surface mail, as it were, between the sub-computers,  and are past sending email between them, and are up to instant-messaging and screen-sharing between them (you can see what I see.).

Now, time to stop increasing the SPEED of the communication, and start increasing the VALUE of the communication.  Instead of sending the same old messages, but faster,  we need to reconsider the whole point of WHY we are sending messages in the first place.

On a theoretical basis,  we also need to stop obsessing about sending symbol-string linear messages between the parts, and start sending multidimensional IMAGES between the parts.    These may be "Turing equivalent" in the fantasy world where we have infinite time and messages that don't degenerate with time , but in the real world we have finite time and noisy messages,  so it DOES matter which mode we use.

For one thing, if we use images to communicate,   we can get vastly more robust against noise.  You can take a picture of anything and toss in "salt and pepper noise",  changing random bits to black or white,   for a long time before the image itself is actually degraded and no longer conveying what it was supposed to picture.

What THAT, in turn, means,  is that it's OK if some of the pixels are wrong.  It's OK if some of the computing components flake out mid way through the computation and start generating garbage output.    That's a GOOD THING. (attached is a picture of my uncle Roger Schuette with his early computer, that he said tended to need to be shut down to replace a bad component about every 3 minutes. It only had a 1000 vacuum tubes. Once you get to a million subcomputers,  this reliability tends to be an issue again.)

Still, the key point is to get past processing CONTENT and start processing CONTEXT.   What needs to be recomputed is the REFERENCE FRAME,  not the data in the frame. This is a classic technique physicists and mathematicians use.    They ask, in what reference frame would the problem I'm attempting to solve become TRIVIAL (or linear).  They they solve (using Greens Functions or something like that) for the reference frame to USE, and THEN,  having done that,  return to addressing "the problem" which, when phrased in those terms (in that basis set), is now "obvious" and "trivial"  (linear).  In some cases, this is solving for the eigenvalues and eigenvectors, if those terms are familiar.

The point is,  that most of the computational energy has to be spent, and should be spent,  mulling over how the problem has been posed,  refusing to accept that the accidental framework in which this appears to be a problem is the BEST possible framework to think about it within,  and searching for an astoundingly BETTER vantage point and framework, within which the "problem" essentially, "goes away." In some ways it's searching for a better algorithm, but the idea of a better PROBLEM handle is stronger and different than a better algorithm for attacking the same old problem.

Anyway, here's my thinking on it, which is a little silly, since no one is listening, but that's never stopped me before.    Because we don't know in advance WHAT the problem REALLY is, or how it REALLY should be phrased, parsed, and decomposed into sub-tasks,    we don't really know in advance which  subcomputer should be doing what.   We have to assume that, midcourse, a given subcomputer may decide to retask itself entirely and change what it is working on, and change which other subcomputer clusters it is therefore speaking to about what as they spontaneously reassemble around a new approach and see if THAT new agile idea can let them stretch out to span the space covered by the problem, with each subcomputer cluster attempting to span the smallest part of the problem that, in the current reference frame, is closest to it and easiest to get to from here.

In other words, the computer components have to become like a liquid, or one of those neat things with a grid of wires that can take on the shape of what it is pressed against. (picture?) It has to FLOW, like a ball of tiny spheres,  (new computerized robotic "hand") attempting to get all the way around, and get a "grip on" the problem, before it can THEN tighten up it's joints and DRAG the parts of the problem around to some better position.  The current approach is more like trying to figure out which orientation of each of the joints of a computerized arm and hand will let the hand grasp the problem, and typically NONE of the orientation combinations works well, and there is a literal combinatorial explosion of ways in which each joint might twist to get the hand around all the obstacles to the right point, so it becomes computationally unbounded, requiring a "supercomputer" with superspeed to attempt to "brute-force" the way through to a solution.   That's the HARD way to solve the problem.
FORGET the robotic arm, in this metaphor.   Let the computer REINVENT the concept of "arm" instead of trying to IMPOSE an arm and ask the computer how to MOVE THAT ARM to the right place. 

In many ways this requires "swarm" intelligence, because what each computer is doing now becomes a function of what the other computers "near it" that it SEES are doing.  (The swarms of differnt types of birds may intersect and pass through each other and operate in the same part of the sky. Fun to watch.)

 And now we get back to our standard question of achieving "unity above diversity" -- letting the parts each go their own way and still having an overarching emergent consequence of that, as well as an overarching authoritative pushing and gentle nudging of that, in a highly iterated loop,  forming a sort of slime-mold metabeing that can reach out on a large scale and engulf and subsume the problem.

======


Side bar on Uncle Roger and early computer work at Barber Coleman in 1952.
From  invention.smithsonian.org/downloads/fa_cohc_abstracts_s-z.pdf

Interviewee: Interviewer: Date: Repository: Description:
Abstract:
Citation: Copyright:
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977
Roger E. Schuette Henry Tropp June 20, 1972 Archives Center, National Museum of American History Transcript, 87 pp.
Schuette began working at Barber-Colman in 1939 and soon was involved in anti-aircraft and anti-tank projects, including design of a calculating device for a rangefinder made by Eastman Kodak. During World War II, Duncan Stewart of Barber-Colman met George Stibitz while working for the National Defense Research Committee. Stewart decided his company should build a commercial computer. By 1946, Stibitz had designed a small scale serial computer with error checking circuits. The first model was completed in 1948 and a second, much superior version, the Simple Electronic Digital Computer (SEDC), in 1955. Schuette worked on the memory and an input device for the SEDC. Others introduced a compiler and improved programming. This machine was used at Barber-Colman for a few months, but the company decided not to invest in either manufacturing facilities or a national service network and did not market it. They did sell patent rights to its system for arithmetic calculations and error checking.

[Comment - I think they sold the patents to a company called International Business Machines, which DID decide to go ahead and try to build a commercial version of this bug-laden computational thingie... :)  ]

Picture of the Barber-Colman Computer with uncle Roger at the helm
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/04/capstone-slide-6.html


Uncle Roger was instrumental in my 6th grade class getting a kit for an analog computer which could play tic-tac-toe,  which, surprise, I was selected as the student to assemble it.   So I got to build my very first computer in 1957, and it definitely got under the skin and into my blood!  The thing had a front panel,  six or nine, I forget,  wooden disks that could be rotated to indicate which move the person at the corresponding step had selected for their move, and some version of lights that indicated what the next move  "the computer" was making would be.  Underneath was a maze of wires connecting the parts.

It worked way better and longer than my first Healtkit radio transmitter,  a 150 watt job that I finished the several month job of assembling and decided to turn on "just to see it light up" before I bothered to complete the antenna.  Well,  minus the load of the antenna, the power stage went ballistic and exploded, thus ending in 2 seconds THAT effort to communicate with the world!

Anyway, the analogy to corporate life is pretty good,  in terms of supercomputer issues.  What they are trying to do is find ever faster and "more efficient" ways for employees to carry out the directives of the boss, and move the fixed robotic arm around to grapple with a continuing flux of new problems. This turns out to be HARD, and so employes are driven harder and harder to be more "productive".

At the same time,  what the employees want to do, and should be able to do, is get OUTSIDE the box,  dissolve the robot arm, RECONCEPTUALIZE the problem the company faces, and SOLVE THAT, then bring that back into the original framework and see what it works out to.   Then we are talking about measuring EFFECTIVENESS not EFFICIENCY.   Then we will see quantum leaps in "productivity" and the bottom line.

As things stand now,   adding employees or computers to problem solving teams only MAKE THINGS WORSE,  because there are N-factorial NEW communication pathways that need to be established to get everyone "working on the same page."   The problem with that method of thinking is that there IS a "page" already predefined that the agents need to be brought TO.  So we have the wisdom that "adding staff to a project that is late will only make it later."

Clearly,  we are on "wrong side of the power curve" here.   We need a better approach or distributed problem solving algorithm,  SUCH THAT, with the property THAT,  adding more people INCREASES the power of the group to solve problems.  Clearly, and admittedly, the "STAR architecture", where all communications have to go through a central point,  suffers from congestion issues and fails this test -- not because adding new agents is a bad idea, but because having them go through "the boss" to get anything done is a BAD CONSTRAINT on a good idea.

This is reminscent of the fundamental problems in the design of the virtual reality world Second Life, shared by most of the alternatives, or all of them at this point -- namely,  that the focus is on the ENTITIES, not the RELATIONSHIPS, and the focus is on people (as problems) moving across solution space (FIXED grids of computers) instead of letting the COMPUTERS reshuffle themselves to adapt to the problem of the moment.    

So we have the silly and dysfunctional result that 100 people can each own a simulated island (sim),  and operate just fine, but if they all want to talk to each other and congregate on one sim,   the poor sim-server trying to do all the work is overloaded,  while 99 sim-servers sit around bored.  There is a strong emphasis in that architecture to LIMIT The attendance at meetings, or, if you come,you have to leave all your fun stuff at home.

Consider instead an architecture where the computational power flows WITH the avatar, and can be pooled, so that,  the more people who show up at a meeting, the MORE cpu power there is to do fun stuff with!    100 attendees means 100 servers are all focused on making that one virtual meeting space fully empowered to do neat stuff!

This is the basic transition we need to make, the corner we need to turn.  We don't need "faster supercomputers" we need wiser supercomputers.  We don't need "brighter employees" we need management to open up the constraints and let the employees BE collectively wise PRECISELY by coloring outside the lines, thinking outside the box, stepping outside the preconceived constraints and doing things THEIR Way not the "boss's way".    We don't need Linden Labs to take over the entire power of the Hoover Dam to run even more powerful servers -- we only need to let the servers flex so they can flow to the problem,  not sit and wait for the problem to flow to them.

We have the resources we need. We don't need more speed. We just need to reconceptualize our problem.

The king is dead - long live the king!

One of the tensions and growing polarizations in the US today, as in many countries,  is along the axis of whether more or less "government" is a good thing.

Both pro and con can marshal vivid and compelling data and arguments and stories and case studies about bad things that happen, which, in their minds, are directly due to even some of the other side's "remedy" being in place.

Both sides are apalled and amazed at how blind and stupid the other side can be at not seeing the obvious relationship between cause and effect, and can only conclude that not only are their opponents demented, they are motivated by evil intentions.

Putting such people into the same room, whether brick and mortar or virtual chat room,  results in much heat but little light,  and results in everyone leaving even more persuaded than before that their own position is correct.

Sadly,  more of this kind of thing is on the menu,  with no hope in sight that more of the same will suddenly produce wisdom.   Instead, as with the standard in US politics, what is hoped for is that a 50.02 percent margin can be obtained, even for a brief moment,  during which the majority force can crush, disable, dismantle, or destroy the minority force.  USA founder James Madison must be turning in his grave as the politics of the brutal majority becomes what he warned against in the Federalist Papers.

By alternating which of the two non-distinct parties is in power,  each can take turns destroying the work of the other, which seems to be all politics can offer today - a viewer sport akin to professional wrestling or boxing.    Great pride is taken in proving in public that one is vastly better at obstructionism than the other, and has totally blocked any motion on any social issue.

Meanwhile,  very little or no "governing" is going on,  no one is driving the bus, which is heading towards a variety of cliffs and trees with the screaming passengers in the back and the fistfight in the front.   No progress is being made on dealing with the economy,  lack of jobs, lack of innovation of anything worth exporting,  loss of morale and spirit among the troops (both civil and military), the rise of mindless pain, hate crimes, and violence as subgroups of the population follow demagogues into the temporary joy of blaming some other subgroup for all that is wrong and all the pain.

Actually,  I'd allege that things are both far worse and far better than that.  'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and all that.

(see my prior post - "Houston we have another problem" for a discussion of the limitations of human brains and corporate brains in dealing with issues.)

Things are worse, in the sense that the leadership in public and private sectors is doing its best to "focus" on "a few key priorities" amid all the 200 demands for action on fronts that seem to someone to be potentials for the end of the world as we know it if not addressed and soon.     In my mind, this focus on priorities is losing strategy from the days in which there WERE a few key determinants of outcomes.

What we have today however, is akin to a lifeboat with 200 holes in the bottom,  some larger than others.   First,  there seems to be joy in shooting new holes in the bottom of the OTHER sides part of the boat, while laughing at how now THEY are sinking more than our side is.   Second, there is a total denial of the fact that, with so many holes, there are no "handful" of "priority holes" which, if fixed, will stop the sinking.    It doesn't matter which 5 priorities are addressed -- the net impact of the remaining 195 will still sink our ship, as things are going.

Well, hmm.   Is it time to shut off the news and go back to watching sports until we all die then? Or what?  Drugs? Alcohol? Depression?  How shall we cope as the world sinks away into ruin?  Perhaps a jolly war against some newly perceived "enemy" the defeat of which will surely lift our spirits and the attacks on which will surely boost our economy and distract us from blaming, say, our system of non-government for mismanaging our resources and opportunities while, in some cases,  absconding with the national treasury?

Judging from recent experience even large scale war does not seem to have that happy impact of killing off the unemployed and boosting exports of weapons that it once did.

I'm going to take a leap,  or maybe a step, of analytic fashion and put forward the hypothesis that "Things are not working very well."  In particular,  the methods we have historically used for making sense of the world and taking action to avoid perils and acquire food and other resources are simply not doing the trick.

 It is not that "capitalism" is broken, although it is, or that "communism is broken" (although it is), or that socialism is broken, although it is.   Every "ism" appears to be broken and incapable of providing that closure between perception and action the living organism of our species needs to survive. There is no point, really, in shifting from one ism to another, or from one political party to another, because they are all flawed in the same way and provide no real alternatives.

What we have here is recognized in some circles, and I'll toss in with those,  as being a problem of what are known as "complex adaptive systems".     You can Google that term as well as I can, but, in short,   our social structures have become so complex and intertwined and filled with "feedback loops" that their behavior is neither predictable nor controllable in the legacy sense that a horse, say, could be controlled and steered.

The world is, in point of fact,  no longer "governable" from any central point.  Every aspect of the core cybernetic loop of adpative behavior is broken.   We don't perceive key variables. Information on what IS perceived is lost on translation to "the top" where "decision makers" live in some rarified atmosphere and alternative universe from the rest of us.   The decision-makers don't between them have brilliance or wisdom sufficient for the task of transforming that collected sensory data into a plan of action, nor do they have the earned trust of the populace to toss in and follow said plan if they put it forward, which they don't even bother doing any more.

And,  the plans they do have are so flawed that they fail out of the gate, causing us to decide we need to replace the decision makers with others, who only propagate the same thing happening again.

Meanwhile, not surprisingly,  things are breaking down all around us, things that require some plan of action to address and that do not find such plans of action, ANY plan of action, to be forthcoming.  The economy, jobs, educational picture, health picture,  protection of our bodies and our crops from disease, all seem to have gone out for lunch a week ago and not returned and daily we see some shocking news about how much worse they are getting and how our resources need to be pulled from the other "priority tasks" and refocused instead on these priority tasks.

Won't help.   The boat will still sink at this rate.   Whatever 5 holes we chose to patch, the other 195 extant ones will sink us, let alone the ten new ones we decide to punch through the floor under our "opponents" end of the lifeboat we are all in.

WOULD something help then?  Yes.  We desperately need the core cybernetic loop to be fixed and working -- we need to close the loop from sensing our environment to making sense of the flood of data from our senses to using that wisdom to know where to push and pull or wait in some coordinated fashion and then to adjust that intervention so, overall, we move away from peril and towards both safety and food and shelter for us all.

We need, in other words, to have THINGS under control, but we need to get rid of the crippling legacy concept that we can achieve such control by using PEOPLE -IN-CHARGE who think they are going to provide that control for us.    So, both sides are right.  We do need more in the way of SOMETHING that coordinates our actions,  and at the same time FEWER politicians and government functionaries who claim such purpose and take our money but don't deliver on that promise.

I'm not advocating anarchy here.  I'm advocating a very specific state of things where the social system CONTROLS ITSELF, without the need for "leaders" to do the controlling.   This in some ways is the dream of those who believe in  Adam Smith's "invisible hand" that would provide emergent wisdom overall if only, on the small scale, each person behaved rationally and selfishly.   Well, it's the same idea that large-scale-wise-emergent-results can occur based on small-scale-stupid-greedy actions.

Fortunately, there is a great deal know these days about "emergence" and how many small scale behaviors can "add up" to larger scale behavior.  This can be captured in computer simulations and even designed to accomplish specific goals.     To my knowledge, of course, none of this theory about how emergence occurs has been fruitfully applied to redesign of our own social governance systems.

We are in desperate need of such emergence, but at a truly wise level, not at a stupid level.  We could use guard-rails on our cliff-side highways, but are tired of governments which put the guardrails sideways across the road instead of along it -- speaking of the way regulations are designed and delivered, causing many to say we'd be better with NO "help" from the government at the rate of wisdom we've seen lately and at the rates government is charging (taxing) to fund such repeated folly.

But, emergent wisdom and emergent control IS possible, and is frequently used in small scale complex adaptive systems.    The model DOES scale up and, in theory, could be applied on a global scale.

And, yes, we CAN do better than a pure "hands off" approach, but only if we have some underlying well-tested theoretical principles on which to decide when it is of value to lay hands on, and where.

IN other words, it IS possible to have "governance" while getting rid of "government".  On a smaller scale, it is possible to have business worlds well-managed while at the same time getting rid of "management".   it is the same problem, writ small.

This transition in the corporate world is what the transition from "Theory X" management to "Theory Y" management is about.  

Now, not too surprisingly, many of those IN government and management, who might be faced with finding alternative employment involving fast food or heavy lifting,  are not overjoyed about this concept that they can all be removed.

In the US, top corporate executives now get paid something astounding, like 500 times what low-level employees make, because of the "invaluable leadership" they provide.   I'm saying, they could be paid ZERO, and put out to pasture, and the companies could have BETTER economic performance -- and it's time to explore THAT end of the spectrum.

What do "self-managed" groups, organizations, and people look like in practice? How does this work?

More in my next post. It's time to pack for today's real journey across the planet.

Peeking ahead, however, it's time in the development of true self-supporting world governance to start getting rid of world governMENTS, at least the ones that seem to be adding no value to our ability to cope with social issues.

It's time to become "agile" and utilize the power of social network technology to make our own decisions and make our own sensemaking and get rid of concepts of governments left over from the days when it took 3 months for news to get to outlying districts so that "representative government" was required.   We don't really need that intermediate any more -- we can work in the large in real time now.   

There is just a transition period ahead to transition control LOOPS of regulatory value while diminishing controlling PERSONS who are not adding value.   We can expect said persons to resist and fight back of course, and this has the risk of producing its own level of misunderstanding and violence,  by those who mistake the search for TRUE authority in government to be a search for either anarchy or a DIFFERENT set of PEOPLE to "run things" and "make decisions for us".

Central planning cannot possibly work in a complex adaptive system, except that it can work, under some constraints that can be made explicit and tested in computer simulations to demonstrate that they keep the baby while discarding the bathwater.      Central PLANNERS = bad.  Central emergent planning == GOOD,  but it won't look like what we do today that we call "planning".

The solid basis for all of this is the core cybernetic loop of sensing, sense-making,  and action-taking with good intent and open eyes.  This is the core, irreducible structure of all life, and even defines living versus dead.      We need to have MORE of that structure and control loop in place, but with FEWER people comprising it,  in the limit,  with zero people necessary "at the top" because we are all, in a holographic sense, truly part of the "control loop."    That is the ultimate "democratic government"as well as the most cost effective.

(prior post on a "gentle introduction to feedback loops" here.)

Incidentally, for those religious friends reading this,  this model of how governance can work would imply that you would see
(1)  a growing decentralization of decision making as planning and action are moved increasingly to local levels in order to respond to local conditions,   and
(2) ultimately,  in the limit,  no need for any central managing team of people because everyone has picked up the burden of managing,  so it is irrelevant if they are all males, since their light touch, in the limit,  "drops out" of the equation.

I think those aspects of change, at least those trends, are already evident.


Wade

Women's gains are slipping

The New Zealand Human Rights Commission released a report this week, "The 2010 Census of Women's Participation",  which shows that women's participation in governance, professional, and public life has started to slide,  erasing gains over the past decades, according to the Christchurch Press (8-Nov-2010).
(Image at left from flight.org)

According to that article,  women are "still being paid less for doing the same public sector jobs" and "Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner Judy McGregor said the census painted a deteriorating picture for women., saying 'New Zealand is seen as a world leader in ensuring a fair go for women. Unfortunately we risk real damage to that reputation unless there is a broad commitment to genuine change.'"

The article notes that:

Women hold less than 10 percent of directorships of the top 100 companies on the New Zealand Stock Exchange,a figure that has remained static since 2008.   There are 57 companies in the top 100 without a woman on their boards.,,,, Things are not much better in the state sector, which has traditionally been the leader for women's advancement in public life.'

The full report is available on-line here.

The newspaper article states that "The corporate sector should be embarrassed at this lack of female representation", and lists various ways pressure has been applied or could be applied to try to change this state of affairs.

What the article does not state, but seems apparent to even casual observation,  is that, especially in hard times,   embarrassment is not actually a driver of corporate behavior.  So "more of the same" will have only more of the same non-effect.  

 I have an MBA from the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in the US, and was a lecturer there, and would affirm that my own experience with MBA's supports the perception that they are not swayed by issues of shame when money is on the line elsewhere.  Most of the US MBA's I dealt with were also quite openly and unabashedly sexist.

Now, what's interesting to me is that the whole tone and tenor of the news blurb treats this as an issue of performance evaluation of executives, that they are not being "fair", etc.

What it does NOT affirm, what it SHOULD affirm, in my mind, is the connection between the lack of women and the dismal economic performance of individual companies and the economy as a whole.

I'm suggesting here a profound truth , very easy to misquote me so please bear with me, that I want to put on the table:

Hypothesis: women are NOT equal and are NOT "the same as" men.

This is a pivotal issue in this discussion.  I'm not saying the "treatment" of women, by others, should be equal.    I'm saying that women, themselves, as beings, are not "equal".

They are ALSO  neither better nor worse than men.  They are DIFFERENT from men. (See my entire set of articles on non-transitive dice.).    Males and Females are multidimensional,   in some metrics men would score higher, in some other metrics women would score higher,  and,  in situ, in organizational settings, they will behave qualitatively DIFFERENTLY in an irreducible way when they are included in the structural feedback loops of control of a company or organization.

It is doing no one a favor to pretend they are the same kind of being, and that they should be treated as "plug-compatible components" whereby any one of any gender could simply be removed from their corporate role,  and replaced by a person of "equal qualifications" of the other gender,  without having a noticeable impact on the organization.


Consider this -- if they WERE totally equivalent, then aside from issues of legacy fairness, there would be absolutely no value to companies, to boards of directors, to stockholders, or to the economy and all the other stakeholders of replacing men in certain roles with women doing the same thing in the same roles.

It is my belief that there WOULD be a profound difference if more women were in management, and it is precisely that DIFFERENCE which is the compelling argument for change,  not issues of what is "fair" or "morally right" or "demanded by regulators".

However,  precisely because women are not men,  there is a subtle but crucial distinction that needs to be made.     Most of the studies and discussions of this subject talk about conceptually replacing men in certain roles with women,   and compare the pay for such performance.   The tacit assertions of that mental model that I'd call into question are

• that the ROLES THEMSELVES are gender-neutral
• and that the ROLES are meaningfully defined in a relatively optimal and non-controversial way.

IN other words,  it may well be, and I would not be surprised if it were true, that WOMEN DO NOT DO AS WELL AS MEN IN ROLES THAT HAVE BEEN DEFINED PRECISELY TO FIT HOW MEN TEND TO BEHAVE.

Let me immediately state the corroboratory to that, that MEN WOULD EQUIVALENTLY NOT DO AS WELL AS WOMEN IN ROLES THAT WERE DEFINED PRECISELY TO FIT HOW WOMEN TEND TO APPROACH BUSINESS.

And the explicit but unstated fact that: THESE ROLES WOULD NOT BE THE SAME OR EVEN CLOSE TO THE SAME.

==== start of digression ===
 IN other words, we need to take the structural view of an organization,  where the value of a person in a structural role is largely defined by the structure of the role,  not the person in that role.  Here we get into deep truth that has been revealed by "system dynamics",  revealed in work such as The BEER GAME made popular by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and discussed in Peter Senge's "The Fifth Discipline."   (Hey, Jackie, side bar,  THIS is the kind of thing "system dynamics"  is good for.)

In fact, this type of thinking is well documented, and I believe it can be found in diverse fields, including works such as "The Making of the [American] Presidency" (Schlesinger ?) which also says that it doesn't really MATTER WHO you put into that role,   because so much of the role has been pre-defined and pre-constrained in advance, and the ROLE DEFINES THE HOLDER FAR MORE THAN THE HOLDER (re)DEFINES THE ROLE.

MIT professor Peter Senge discusses structures of human decision making where the company will suffer huge cycles of boom and bust because of the STRUCTURE OF THE ROLES,  completely independently of WHO is in the roles.    He famously reports one executive who got that message and called his company at lunch to stop the termination of an executive, realizing that the poor performance attributed to the executive was actually due to the structure of the role and constraints that person was under, not due to poor performance of the executive and, more to the point would not be FIXED by changing who was in that role.

====== end of digression ====

OK, back to my discussion of women's "equality".    It appears to me to be a massive violation of the opportunity before us to assume that women and men behave identically, given the same situation.   They don't, in my experience behave the same.   So what? 


Example, possibly useful, from science:

-- I used to teach a course in radio and TV repair, back when they had components one could actually fix short of simply discarding the set and buying a new one.    The passive objects that can be placed into circuits come in two distinct types -- capacitive and inductive.  In a mathematical sense, they behave "identically" except for the mathematical SIGN, where one has a POSITIVE value of something and the other has a NEGATIVE value of something, where even positive and negative are defined arbitrarily.       Nobody in circuit design tries to make the argument that these components are actually "EQUAL"  or "EQUIVALENT"  No one tries to FORCE an inductive component into the slot that is defined for a capacitive one, or vice versa -- that's just silly.    Circuits are designed to take unique advantage of the unique characteristics of each one, in its own right, not to make them all act like each other.    

BOTH Inductive and Capacitive components are, in fact REQUIRED if you want to make an oscillator, or a tuned circuit as in a radio, that can detect weak signals from the environment and amplify them.  They work together, sort of sloshing the energy back and forth between them, improving their detection and resolution of the signal amid the totally different perception of the world they each bring to the table.

It would be totally dysfunctional to try to use ALL inductors or ALL capacitors to do this. It would simply not work.  Period. It has nothing whatsoever to do with "fairness" or "shame."

IN my mind, we have the identical situation in corporations -- there are POTENTIAL ROLES and POTENTIAL STRUCTURES which could make great use of BOTH female and male behaviors, to detect external and internal subtle signals that the company needs to detect and respond to.  BUT THESE ARE NOT THE SAME OLD LEGACY DECISION-MAKING defined-by-males-for-males "roles".    These would be roles designed by women exquisitely taking advantage of female strengths,   roles at which males would be very hard pressed to do well at, or, in the limiting case in theory,  roles at which males were 100% incapable of doing, because, frankly, they were EXACTLY along female natural behavior lines, which is EXACTLY NOT male behavior lines.

So, we are doing a great disservice, not only to women, but to our stakeholders, by trying to force women to "behave like men" in "a man's world."    That's a no-win situation, and, in my mind,  it will never work and shouldn't be even on the table.   Women are quite capable of running businesses, but they will not run them in a way that MEN feel comfortable with, if they retain what I think are some of the true values of being female.    Women can ALSO abandon their gender and do well, often quite well, acting as men do in corporate roles -- but I don't see why that is something to aspire to. The costs seem too high.

What we need is not more "evidence" that women can "do men's work" -- we need evidence that women can do WOMEN's work, ALONG WITH THE FACT that there is a combination of women doing different roles of women's work that is AT LEAST AS POWERFUL as the combination of men's roles doing men's work.

It is, in my mind, based on system dynamics principles and on what I understand of business WRONG to assert that the classic structures that males built as economic enterprises are the ONLY WAY such living entities could possibly be structured -- or even GOOD ways to structure them.  They don't, in fact, really seem to be working very well in the long run.

A business entity needs to have the ability to sense external reality,  to sense internal reality,  and to take action which utilizes external resources to accomplish external goals in such a way that the goals are met and there is a significant profit left over as well to use to grow and repeat the cycle.  This is a cybernetic definition of a feedback loop, or of any living thing,   and can apply equally well to a female-designed organizational structure of relationships and activity as to a male-designed one.

However, there is nothing in that definition that requires executive board meetings, or PowerPoint slides,   or weekly performance reports,  or setting goals and objectives, or any of the behaviors we associate with "business enterprises."    The key point is to get a wide-ranging SENSE of IMPORTANT FACTORS in the environment and internally, and to TAKE ACTION to deal with those factors.    Nothing requires that there be analytical studies or data-crunching or computers.  ANY way of sifting through the ocean of signals to find the key things to respond to is sufficient.  If women, say, want to put much more emphasis on looking for "soft" issues such as relationships, feelings,  intuition, etc than men do,  fine, but it's an INTERNAL VARIABLE that is meaningless to measure.  The EXTERNAL behavior of the organization, the ACTION it takes,  is what matters.   How it came up with that action and mobilized it is not visible to the outside world.

  At a minimum, this will or could provide jobs to millions of women who could easily "GET IT" and work in THAT kind of female-gender-friendly environment, but who are totally TURNED OFF by the way MALES attempt to get work done with endless reports,  meetings that focus on charts of data, powerpoint slides,  rabid competition with each other or to make each other look bad, etc.


If the economy were booming, this would not be necessary, and women could leave men to do their thing and fine.  But the economy is NOT booming, and the "side effects" of male-role-dominated corporate life are destroying the planet.   It's time for a good alternative, and then for a GREAT duet.

As McGregor's "theory X" of management (Bossy, top-down, information driven competitive dog-eat-dog roles) is increasingly replaced by "theory Y" management (Collegial,  bottom-up,  emotionally supportive collaborative teams) it may be that females can find a style that works for them at last, and a style that all the new literature is showing, gasp, turns out to be far MORE productive in a dynamic environment than the legacy top-down style of management.

Let me zero in on this more.   BUSINESS, or any cybernetic organism,  is NOT about "information" and is not about "information processing" -- it is about RELATIONSHIPS, and RESPONSE TO massively ambiguous flood of signals from outside and within, only some of which are worth paying attention to.    Males and females will, I affirm,  be intrinsically good at DETECTING and responding to DIFFERENT SIGNALS, and responding to them in DIFFERENT WAYS.

These signals and behaviors are COMPLEMENTARY. They are not identical and should not be MADE identical.  That wastes the whole capacity of the organization to go BEYOND a flat, boring, uniform method of operation. That destroys the whole source of creativity.

There's a lot of loose talk of "energy" and organizations. 

=== science digression ====

Let me share a basic fact from physics (I was a physics undergraduate major)   about propagating energy waves, such as radio or TV or microwaves.    These waves, key to our power and communication technologies,   are what is known as "Electromagnetic waves" or "EM waves"  Ok -- Why are they called that? They are called that because they have TWO COMPONENTS - an "electrical" one and a "magnetic" one, and they store energy dynamically by continually tossing it back and forth between the two, at some rate or frequency that defines the "wavelength" of the "radiation".     There is no such thing as a STATIC EM Wave. The wave only makes sense in a dynamic universe.   No one comes along and says it would be more "fair" if there were equal amounts of magnetic and electrical energy here -- the mathematics says you simply need equal amounts (over time) to make it work.  Period.  Nothing about "fairness".

=== end of science digression

I see the role of females and males in possible organizations,  (not the ones we have now that were defined by males to do about as much as can be done with a single-sign structure).

I'm saying that if we stand back, figure out how women and men PREFER to operate,  and redesign the organizational roles to exquisitely fit that method of operating,  we will discover two things.  One,  the male and female roles in the sensor and feedback and relationship structures are NOT IDENTICAL and not plug-compatible, and Two,   males will do very poorly at the female roles, and females will do very poorly at the male roles.   In fact, in the limit of perfectly defined roles,  males will be completely at a loss to do ANYTHING in the female roles, and females would be completely at a loss at doing anything in a male role, because the role and function woudn't even make any intrinsic SENSE to them.   But so what? That's GOOD.  We don't want homogenization.

Let me repeat that. We are not after homogenization.  We are not after total uniformity.   We are after SPECTACULAR DIFFERENCES which, in combination with each other, played against each other, allow us VASTLY more capacity to store energy than the legacy male-defined and male-dominated model of operation that we call "corporations" or "agencies."

I realize how this will sound, but I suggest it is a total misdirection of effort to attempt to figure out how to get "more women" into "executive roles"   when the roles themselves have been defined to be offensive to women and suitable for the way MEN deal with information and relationships.

What we should be doing instead is two things:

1)  Experiment with and design many more female-only structures,  such as perhaps Nurse Managed Centers of health care,    explicitly and blatantly and brashly designed to suit the way WOMEN prefer to operate, capitalizing on their natural frequencies and harmonics and behaviors.    We need more information on that, and I feel confident that there are as many solid ways for females in large groups to coordinate and cooperate as there are for males.


THEN, we also need

2)   To put our heads together and say, given we have MALE roles, that are good at X and lousy at Y, and female roles, that are good at XNTT and lousy at X,  How can we use BOTH of them, simultaneously, to accomplish what neither one, it it's wildest dreams, could accomplish alone?

This is NOT about "fairness".  It is about making good use of the intrinsic preferences and strengths of males and females that are, I affirm,  conspicuously DIFFERENT.  It is about EXULTING the difference.

Women,  I would affirm, are not incapable of economic activity -- far from it.  But they ARE almost incapable of carrying out such activity IN THE WAY MALES HAVE HISTORICALLY DONE IT. They would (and will) break down the larger cybernetic loops of SENSING the environment and REACTING TO IT in very different ways, across different lines, across different time scales.

The END RESULT, viewed from outside the corporate entity, will be the same -- they will create a living, active,  cybernetic animal capable of detecting social needs,  detecting potentially available resources,  detecting pathways to get from point A to point B with side effects C,  and closing the loop of solving problems and what Peter Drucker would say are "solving external problems using external  resources" for which they are handsomely paid a percentage of the social benefit so produced.

They just won't do it the way MEN would do it

Which is fine.

Speaking as one from the United States -- New Zealand has a world-leadership position in getting women into roles and jobs (pilot, doctor, etc.) that had often been reserved for males in other societies.  New Zealand has a head-start on this, and can take a world-leadership role on this NEXT stage of the evolution of the role of women in social thriving of our planet.    But I think the legacy models of how to structure work to accomplish that are broken, and NOT good guides to the future. Women need to find their own voice, their own models, their own ways of doing things to have a "fair go" at it.  Women in New Zealand have a track record of being able to do this It's in the genes literally. Please, I beg of you from afar -- don't discard this fantastic treasure because you don't see how to use it!



Please comment pro or con or with your own insights!

Wade

He ain't heavy, father - he's my brother!

I was reflecting this morning, after flying out of Nelson and seeing all the sailboats, on the nature of sailboats and what insights those can give to community efforts to tap into existing winds of power in order to get where they are going.

Usually, when people think of sailboats, and what makes them "go",  they look upwards from the water line at the sails.

It's really instructive to look for a moment at the REST of what it is that makes the whole concept of a wind-driven craft actually work.

If you look at the picture above,  you can see that there is not only a keel below the sailboat, but at the end of the keel there is a very heavy weight.

Now, hmm,  why is it that a craft, designed to be driven by the wind, would consciously and intentionally add a heavy weight to the design?  What's going on here that we can learn from?

I'll skip all the mathematics and vector diagrams and note that a sailboat without a keel can only go one direction -- downwind.   The generally forgotten lowly keel is what allows a sailboat to "tack" upwind, and achieve a speed often far in excess of the wind velocity.    The counterweight at the end of the keel keeps the boat from overturning in high winds or when it is running at a high angle to the wind, and is also a necessary part of the configuration for it to work.

In some ways, it would be equally correct to call these craft "keel-boats" as "sail-boats".  The problem is that the impact of the keel is a little harder to see and less intuitive, aside from being out of sight below the water line.   This turns out to be a significant problem in hampering our insight and lessons we take away from watching such boats.

In my mind,  there is a direct analogy to this "burden that is actually a help" and it is the nature of "virtues" of business and, in particular,  a focus on honesty, openness, and a fair effort to support your clients, neighbors,  suppliers, etc. in ways you aren't required to by law.

Without the deep keel of "virtues that drive the bottom line" I think commercial enterprises can only go one direction -- downhill and downwind.  Without the heavy counterweight of social concern,  they are prone to simply capsize when hit by large gusts of cash inflow, which are definitely NOT always a blessing to companies or organizations.     These appear at first glance to be "burdens" and in short-sighted management terms are the kind of thing that is often noticed and discarded by inexperienced management philosophy.

Instead, the deep keel and burden of social responsibility is exactly what is required for the ship to function as intended.

Father Edward J. Flanagan, the founder of Boys Town, came up with a motto "He ain't heavy father - he's my brother."   I'd suggest that there are hugely powerful uplifting forces that can move our ships and our cargo,   and that the motto reveals where they are "hidden" -- in the "burden" of helping each other on a voluntary basis.

It turns out that such volunteer effort (as mothers around the world know or the whole idea of parenting would fail) releases more energy than it consumes.    We have tremendous winds around us that can power our craft, but ONLY if we don't abandon the keel and counterweights of community service as the guiding constraint.   It is sort of a "WIFI" world, filled with "broadcast power" that we can tap into,   but that will capsize us and blow us downstream unless we accept the "burden" and "constraints" (or "yoke") of social concern -- which it turns out is not a burden at all.

I'd encourage you, if you read this far, to take another 3 minutes and listen to the music and ponder the truth of the message in your heart.

(Lyrics to the popular song "He ain't heavy" are here. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_uYDPH_NAQ

lyrics to He Ain't Heavy He's My Brother / The Hollies

All-Time Greatest Hits (1990)

The road is long
With many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where
Who knows where
But I'm strong
Strong enough to carry him
He ain't heavy, he's my brother
So on we go
His welfare is of my concern
No burden is he to bear
We'll get there
For I know
He would not encumber me
He ain't heavy, he's my brother

If I'm laden, at all
I'm laden, with sadness
That everyone's heart
Isn't filled with the gladness
Of love for one another

It's a long, long road
From which there is no return
While we're on the way to there
Why not share
And the load
Doesn't weigh me down at all
He ain't heavy he's my brother
He's my brother
He ain't heavy, he's my brother

Now, the crucial take-away message here in a time of budget cutbacks and businesses all looking for ways to save money is that there are some "burdens" that should NOT be cut, despite the first appearance that they provide no assistance with the commercial mission. 

Let me make a very strong hypothesis here that I submit is valid:  A business can no more function as a purely money-driven enterprise than a sailboat can function as a sail-only craft.

You do NOT improve the characteristics of a sailboat by removing everything except the sail, things that narrow-minded naive bean-counters would say are "costs" or "burdens" and targets for cuts.

Business enterprises,  and human beings,  are living creatures that function in a social environment, picking up energy from their surroundings and, sometimes,  converting that energy into productive motion and "progress." 

To an uneducated eye,  they can "progress faster" if they cut away the "burden" and "ballast" of honest concern for each other and put all their energy into just themselves.    In the very short run, this appears to work. If you take an airplane for example,  and suddenly pull back on the control yoke and point the nose higher,  the plane will climb rapidly, and you may say, "Aha! This is the key!"

It is not the key,  however, because all you are doing is trading speed for height, and as the plane rises it will slow, start to flutter,  lose lift, and if you keep the control yoke held back,  the plane will actually lose all ability to fly and fall out of the sky.    Worse, if you feel the plane starting to wobble and you pull back even MORE on the controls,  the plane will fall out of the sky uncontrollably much faster.  It is quite a challenge of every young pilot's training to teach them, when falling in such a way that they need to push forward on the controls and point the nose of the plane DOWN, towards the ground, to regain the speed they foolishly just burned up in  false attempt to gain altitude.

When I read the papers, I see everyday the evidence that managers and decision-makers in organizations are dealing with economic hard times by doing exactly the wrong thing, and the more it causes problems, the harder and more obsessively they continue to do the wrong thing.

For organizations to fly, they need to INCREASE their humanity, not strip it away.  In a thousand small ways, as non-obvious as how a keel works on a sailboat,  it is the humanity of the organization that actually results in it going "upwind" and making progress.     Only LIFE goes uphill.    Dead things can only go downhill.

Yet our educational system keeps on stripping out "the humanities" and acting on the explicit belief that "technology will save us" or that the problems we face are due to a shortage of mathematics or science in our lives.    If only, it appears, everyone were fluent in math and science, our corporate, economic, and social woes would vanish.   The magic of new inventions and creativity would fill our sails and we'd be "home free."   If only we got rid of the impediments to progress, all this culture and language and history and the lowly social studies and music and dance, THEN oh boy, we'd be free.

My comment for the day is the idea that, no, then instead of being "free" we'd be "free to go downwind and only downnwind" and totally unable to make actual progress on ANY front, including economic prosperity or improved social conditions or health.

So, as we survey the growing economic distress and social disintegration occurring in so many places around us,  we should ponder the mental model we have of the sources of progress. What helps and what hurts?  What to keep, and what to throw away?

 It's not clear that we're making the best choices we can, given the lessons of the sailboat.

Blind plus stubborn is not a winning hand

(A short piece continuing the reflection on some of the reasons why Big IT projects, such as EHR, tend to have such a Big Failure rate.)

It is the nature of large scale IT projects, such as Electronic Health Records,  that social processes have to change, from the micro scale times the number of people affected, all the way up to the macro scale.

These processes involve feedback within levels, and between levels, so there is  substantial "rise time" and "settling time" under the best of conditions,  when  a sudden change (a.k.a. "intervention") is applied to the system,  even if the structure of the system itself is not changed.  It is like a huge mobile, but one with some parts which can change very rapidly,  and other, larger, massive parts, which often only move slowly after effects have had a chance to percolate though and, as it were, be digested by the overall system.

Very much like the Christchurch earthquake,  you can think things have settled down when suddenly there is a new strong aftershock.  And like Christchurch,  any given aftershock may be smaller in absolute terms than the first earthquake, but it may also be much shallower and closer to home and therefore MORE damaging than a large quake further away.

It always takes, it MUST take, a substantial period of time, at least three full cycles of cause and effect in the feedback loops, before all the parts of the system have managed to "feel out" how the ground rules have changed, and to learn the NEW moves required to accomplish the OLD outcomes, since the old way of doing things no longer will work.     This kind of learning, and re-synchronization (Phase lock)  truly demands multiple cycles to even be recognized as a new state of affairs, instead of simply some accident of circumstances, so it can be appropriately counter-weighted,  understood, and ultimately anticipated and reflected in the new moves that, in this new context,  gracefully produce the desired result.

It is sort of like learning how to walk after having one leg suddenly shortened by 10 centimeters.  There will continue to be surprises until most uses of that leg have been experienced in the new circumstances at least 3 times apiece.

All of this takes time, and very little of it can be planned for specificially.  Like earthquakes,  the whole system will NEED to shift, but exactly where it gets hung up, and exactly when the stress gets large enough for it to break apart and slip along a fault line is really impossible for anyone to predict.

The implication of this which matters a great deal for planning the journey is that the route CANNOT POSSIBLY BE KNOWN in advance.     No amount of central planning can cover every possible way the system will shake-down as it restabilizes. Even when the system appears to "be over it", it can suddenly slip along some new fault line in some huge way.

So,  it is not possible to say in advance that THIS is the exact roadmap that will be followed, and the exact sequence of events that will occur during "implementation".     It is not even conceptually possible to say that.  This is technically a "complex adaptive system" which means it contains stored energy and its response to being pushed on could be first of all in any direction, not just the direction it was pushed,  it could respond with any energy, not just a small amount following a small push, and it could possibly respond in waves,  with a pulse of apparent response, followed by a false quiet (eye of the hurricane) as implications of some change become gradually apparent to people, followed by a resurgent groundswell of resistance or a hornets' nest breaking loose upon fully realizing what has changed in addition to what was expected to have changed.

Also, given the scale of the system,  no one actually knows all the things the system does, or even how it accomplishes those.   The cartoon diagrams with boxes and arrows of what processes exist are generally after-the-fact guesses, because no human being actually ever designed those details,  they just sort of happened to end up that way as the clever and innovative humans sorted out what was necessary and effective to get done the visible things they needed to get done.

The system, any system, will be full of "shortcuts" -- for example,  Mary makes a daily trip from clinic A to B, and agreed, some time ago, that as long as she was going that way, she could take along the mail.     The fact that Mary is part of the mail system is not on any diagram or chart, since it's a convenient shortcut.   However, since it is not shown, it is likely that, in a rearranged system, Mary will no longer make such a daily trip.  The impact is that the mail is suddenly no longer delivered by 1 PM, but now goes the long way and arrives at 4 PM, and things that used to take one day to complete now take two days.   To central planners, this change comes as a surprise, and you can see why.  No social or biological system does "just one thing" -- They are filled with hitch-hikers who quickly figure out shortcuts and go along for the ride.   The depth of reliance on visible system outcomes on such invisible dependencies cannot be known in advance, but the longer the system has been in existence, the more such shortcuts you can expect to have moved into place, all not shown on any organizational chart.

What this means in practice is that some central planning agent or group may say "We will do things in this order: A, B, C."  but then reality reveals that step B cannot be done before step C, due to something no one had previously realized or known.

All of this is no big deal,  provided everyone sees what is wrong and agrees to change the route of the journey to order A, C, B.

It BECOMES a big deal when there is stickiness or stubbornness in the central project management office,   which may refuse to accept the news that the completion of B has been "delayed" from what they had politically promised to some group of stakeholders.

The central command office therefore may issue a decree, a demand, that no one is allowed to work on step C until step B has been completed.     This is done in the name of efficiency,  or administrative orderliness,  or to deliver what was promised by someone to someone else.     The reality on the ground may be, however, that it is not physically POSSIBLE to do step B until step C has been done because of some previously unrealized constraint.

So,  impasse occurs.   This is the exact type of impasse that is the underlying shoal upon which so many ships have been shattered, battered, and reduced to rubble.

Some central group, far from the realities or "ground truth" decrees, based on their incomplete knowledge of the situation from afar,  that B must precede C.   It is "obvious" based on their mistaken knowledge of the world, that this order makes sense and is "good".     At the same time, the workers at the front lines directly perceive that C must precede B due to some undocumented news.

 If the situation is perceived as a frank and honest search for truth, done in an eyes-open way,  the new situation can be easily resolved, getting all of A, B, and C completed in a timely fashion.  But if central authorities perceive this as a situation where their wisdom and authority have been called into question and challenged by upstarts or trouble-makers or those who "resist progress", and dig in their heels and refuse to budge,  a very different outcome will result.

IN reality, the latter case,  (perception of unwarranted resistance) appears to my reading and experience to be far more common than the former cases (acceptance of wisdom from the front lines and adjusting of the master plan to acccount for the new information.)   In fact, it's quite common in the USA at least for front line workers who persist in raising such "issues" to be demoted,  transferred, removed from "the table" ,  forbidden to speak out,  or actually have their employment terminated.      That resolves the problem of visible conflict,  and forces the problem to become the "unacknowledged elephant in the living room."

In that sort of non psychologically safe climate,  this situation repeats itself multiple times, as reality becomes filled with unacknowledged elephants,  as the lead authority trumpets how well things are going,  and as things in reality get further and further from the situation being reported to the central authority.

Finally, at some point, the world collapses catastrophically -- the worst becomes unavoidably visible, there are massive calls for investigations and finger pointing and blame,  new people are selected for leadership positions, and the whole cycle begins again.

This is , by far, the most frequent way such projects fail, from what I have seen.

There's an article in the paper this morning that illustrates what this tends to look like in practice.  It may be a different situation, but then again it may in fact be a case of what was just described.

This is from today's New Zealand Herald:


http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10685673

Clients feel pain of ACC cuts
By Martin Johnston and Simon Collins
5:30 AM Saturday Nov 6, 2010
New Zealand Herald OnLine at

Physiotherapy claims paid for by ACC have slumped by nearly a quarter, reflecting the social insurer's sharp cut backs in health treatment - at a time when New Zealand's rate of injuries is continuing to climb. ..."It's certainly having a huge impact psychologically on quite a few of our members. We've had several people who have had suicide attempts relating to the pressure they have been put under."

In healthcare, the most noticeable reductions have been in GP care and physiotherapy - because these are numerically and financially the biggest sectors funded by ACC (although these patients are generally levied a co-payment)….

But some of the greatest misery for rejected patients is likely to be in the elective surgery category and especially in shoulder surgery, where a new, hard-nosed policy has forced many on to public hospital waiting lists….

Advocates and lawyers who represent aggrieved ACC claimants say they noticed a big increase in rejections of surgery applications last year and a consequent increase in the number of cases being taken through the review process….

The proportion of surgery claims that were rejected rose to 20 per cent last year, from 12 per cent the year before.

Nelson-based advocate David Wadsworth, of Access Support Services, said, "It tells us their decision-making is flawed. Once they have made a decision, no matter what evidence we provide, they won't change their decision."... Previously ACC had often backed down when given strong evidence its decision was wrong.

Again, I have no first hand knowledge of what is going on in this sector that the piece describes, and no idea what factors are true or false or left out of the description.    What does raise red-flags on the sports play, as it were, is the language of the last two sentences, highlighted above.

My point is that we are surrounded in life, in all countries,  with situations that are parallel,  where facts that are "obvious" to one group are either unknown, or disputed, or irrelevant to another group, resulting in the type of perception and language (right or wrong) that is illustrated above.

If there is a mechanism to resolve these conflicts at the same speed as they arise, or faster, then things remain relatively stable.    But, if these types of conflicts arise FASTER THAN THEY CAN BE RESOLVED politely,    the situation can "snowball" and grow rapidly out of control, with massive increase in the conviction of "each side" that "the other side" is filled with morons or idiots or enemies or obstructionists or whatever perjorative is popular for the day.

This is the situation that has been observed at many, if not most, if not ALL "Big IT" projects.

My assessment of the situation is that the extreme difference in perceived reality in such dynamic, unpredictable, and hard-to-see fields as the social implications of software "installation" lends itself to such difficulties.  At least with a brick-and-mortar building,  everyone can go look and at least agree whether something has been built or not.  With software, people cannot even agree whether something has been built, let alone whether it is built well, functions properly, has few deep hidden flaws,  is fit for particular purpose, etc.

Conclusion -- for the SOFTWARE to "work", it may be necessary to have social and political processes in place that head off this kind of escalating battle over disputed facts, particularly disputes over whether something "works" or "doesn't work."      This situation is full of tempting opportunities to create the illusion of progress by silencing "opposition" forces with the use of authoritative cudgels,versus investigation to determine what the true facts on the ground are.

ADVICE -- if this type of political dispute is common,    this is not the right landscape in which to attempt to "install" sociotechnical software, such as an Electronic Health Record.  There are far too many surprises lurking and triggers for such breakdowns in changing social processes and all the invisible "epigenetic" processes that are not on anyone's diagram, or radar, or list of what exists today.

So, the question I'd suggest is this:   DOES a local culture intended for a BIG IT project (such as an electronic health record) HAVE a well-functioning process that detects such conflicts between "facts" and "authority" and that is capable of resolving them gracefully at least as fast as they spring up?

IF it doesn't,  then fixing THAT problem in governance and the "cybernetic loop" has to be done BEFORE proceeding with the "software installation."  Except, of course, there will be those who say, they agree it's an issue, and they'll get to it AFTER the software is installed.  ("it must go A, B, C, and occur within 5 years." )  And so it begins.....

IT's important for the sake of progress for both sides in such disputes to realize that they are operating with totally different sets of information about what is "TRUE".     Generally, and sadly,  BOTH sides of such disputes can marshall arguments and data to "prove" their own point, and BOTH sides feel they have the "high ground" of moral correctness.   Sadly, then, mistaking differences in facts to differences in INTENT,  both sides end up making unwarranted generalizations about the INTENT, COMPETENCE, FITNESS, and possibly genetic makeup of the other,  polarizing a resolvable situation into one that has dug into battle lines relating to  pride and integrity and identity.

This changes the "search for what is right" into a search for "WHO is right", which almost guarantees failure, because it now means that at least one party must be "WRONG", instead of at least one key FACT being wrong.

Big IT projects provide hundreds of triggers for this type of conflict,   a mode of failure that has nothing whatsoever to do with what kind of program is inside the shrinkwrapped box.

The extent to which this problem is widespread is hidden by a flawed process of attribution of the cause of failure to specific cases or people or events,  instead of looking more broadly and processes that are guaranteed to fail SOMEWHERE.

So,  if group A crashes their bus into a mountain due to failure of cybernetic feedback,   Group B may now say "well, that doesnt' apply to us, we don' thave mountains!" and proceed to crash their bus into large trees.    Group C comes along and says "Well that doesn't apply to us, we don' t have trees or mountains!"  and crashes their bus, due to the same failure mode,  over a cliff into the ocean.

Etc.
My point is that EVERYONE has the capacity for this failure mode, and there ARE lessons that can be learned from prior failed projects, if you look beyond the exact details of WHAT they crashed into and focus instead on how the driver-ship could have been so blind that it failed to hear the loud warnings that a problem was just up ahead.

As a rule of thumb, consider this.   It is known in project management that it is far more likely that something will go wrong with any given step than that everything will go right.    In other words, there are much higher odds that something will prove to be HARDER THAN EXPECTED than that when you try it, it proves EASIER THAN EXPECTED.

My simple question is,  in your own environment,  is there RESISTANCE to a message from the troops to upper management that a step is proving HARDER THAN EXPECTED.    Is this message considered normal run of the mill news about life,   or is it fleshed out with implications about the competence and genetic heritage of the person doing the reporting?

There is a classic Dilbert cartoon in which the "Pointy haired boss" is facing an employee. The employee reports that a project is running behind schedule, and the boss screams "WHAT?", grabs the employee, and hurls him through the picture window of the 4th floor office, presumably to his death.
In the last panel the boss sits and ponders in true bafflement "Why don't they come to me sooner?"

The reality of large IT sociotechnical projects, such as EHR's, is that you really have no idea whether this is even feasible, let alone how long it will take to accomplish.     I'd suggest it is far better to have a process that everyone buys into,  that at each stage gets everyone up to speed on what the latest news is and keeps everyone on speaking terms,  than to have a process that attempts to deliver a known state of software on a predicted timetable and budget.

Unless you have a long successful history of predicting exactly what the timetable and budget will be for such social transformations,   don't even try.  Say -- we will spend this time, we have this budget, we will use this process, we will keep everyone informed, and we'll get done whatever we can get done -- does everyone understand that?   At each step we'll learn new things about each other and about our processes and as we discover them, we'll adjust our course to take that new information into account, so even the course cannot be stated in advance, only the process by which that course is adjusted on a day to day basis.

That approach focuses our attention on a different type of question, where there is a great emphasis on picking the ROUTE from zero "completion" to 100% "completion".

Question - Is it possible (even conceptually) to define this pathway, from HERE to THERE,   with a series of intermediate points or states that are each, in their own way,  substantial progress? Or is this a type of animal that has no intermediate states of value, in which it's ALL or NOTHING?

Of particular note and value would be a 1/100th size version of the end product.  Can we come up with a fully-functioning micro-EHR which actually does work that does ONE THING of value for some people,  far far less than the total intended picture?
Here I'm picking up on John Gall's suggestions that "large systems that work are invariably shown to have evolved from small systems that work, instead of leaping full-brown from Zeus's head" (my paraphrasing of Systemantics - How Systems Fail.)

So the key question is, can we conceive of an intermediate SMALL SYSTEM,  of a type that could, over time, evolve into a large system,  that could WORK in its own right, and that we could put in, then take a break for a while and watch to see what this breaks loose in the social structure that we hadn't expected, giving us our first taste of how deeply embedded in invisible fractal space are the secret processes that "make" the "current system" capable of functioning.

Curiously, to me anyway,  This conceptual class of problem (Find a small version of A that works that we can build on), is not a common question in practicing IT organizations.  Yet, it's well known that a small victory can provide confidence, build trust,  and shake out a number of small coordination problems in a low-stress world without massive meet-the-deadline time pressure, so they can find a comfortable accomodation and their own, organic level.


It IS always true that a large scale IT system DOES require an "implementation plan."  Sadly, this is often sort of an afterthought.  Also sadly, it usually turns out that there is NO GOOD ROUTE by which to convert people from the old system to the new one.  We can't do it by building because of X. We can't do it by department organization, due to Y.  We can't do it by Service, due to Z.  We can't do it by floor because of FF.  Etc.   "HALF of the EHR" would have zero value is sort of the assumption and working belief.

THAT to me is the true research question.  We need to find a very small kernel of electronic improvement that is far LESS threatening,  far less traumatic socially,  that CAN be installed to start the DIALOG with users about "does this actually work for you? What have we missed?".

  We know it's not an EHR.  That's not the point. The point is it's an approachable subset that lets us get a far better feel and growing common understanding of even the nature of the beast that is coming down the road later.

I haven't pondered in detail or started the discussion of what such a subset might be.  It's almost certain however that there are coordination needs between departments that require far less security overhead and that could meet unmet needs.  For example, can the different department secretaries figure out who is scheduling large events when, so they don't schedule visiting speakers on exactly the same day someone else is scheduling a visiting speaker?   Very simple coordination systems are typically missing in organizations because they are too SMALL to capture the imagination of the IT budget process.   Yet,  these are non-terrifying applications that won't result in patient deaths if they have glitches, that don't need massive security, and that CAN start to feel out who can use a computer and  who is computer-phobic or actually unable to type,  etc.   Small steps. Very small steps. Unrushed. Capable of growing by contagion, not administrative decree.   Web-2 type applications that are free,  off-the-shelf, but actually helpful IN THE SMALL.

These can form the basis for an EMERGENT solution of succssively greater buy-in and willingness to use the technology by the "LITTLE PEOPLE" who are typically simply not on the planning radar.  IS there a tiny island of application that can be delivered to the Nurses?  To the nurses aides?

Small things,  which over time can slowly shift the climate and culture from computer phobic to computer-loving,  can turn out to be HUGE things.  If they are put in early, they have 3-5 years to work their pre-soak magic,  daily altering work patterns a little bit more every day.  These can pave the way to the much larger EHR delivery later. People can learn the names and phone numbers of the IT support people they will be working with. Etc.

Then, at every stage, people can say "Well, the overall project delivery has been delayed, but at least we got X, which is actually turning out to be quite helpful -- we use it every day now, so overall, we're not unhappy."

So, for example,  any decent Electronic Health Record system that has patient care plans will have a built in "tickler" or "reminder" system that people could use, when a patient does something, to also set  an alarm that 3, 6, 9, and 12 months from now they will need to come back, can you automatically remind them (AND US!) that this should happen and verify it DOES happen and let Helen in Scheduling know if it does NOT happen so we can follow up?


This kind of reminder system is pretty generic,  and I can't see a reason why it is even heavily dependent on decisions made about the REST of the EHR.   Architecture-wise,  the tickler and reminder system should be designed and developed and tested as a separate module, capable of standing on it's own.  So, then,  why not implement IT FIRST, long before the EHR, but applied to other tasks (outside the EHR) that every person and department needs to keep track of and be reminded of now?   That gets THAT step out of the way,  and out where it can be "burned in" by use, and stop being "green wood" and under the learning belt of everyone so that they all already know how to use THAT portion of the EHR so it's no stranger to them.


Similarly, there are other pieces of functionality of an EHR system that can be teased out, and delivered far earlier than the full EHR rollout of patient data.    Every one of these can build confidence, trust, and deepen the use of the help desk, support staff, hardware support teams, etc. Every success here on small things builds confidence and momentum and lowers resistance to the larger project goals.

BUT, at the same time, every tiny system is guaranteed to reveal show-stopping problems that can get fixed now.  For example, you may discover that the network lines to Clinic X always drop to totally useless performance every tuesday afternoon from 3 to 5 pm.   You have time to investigate why this is and fix it long before time-critical patient data runs into EXACTLY THE SAME PROBLEM.     These are all problems you will need to fix anyway as part of the EHR project, but this reveals them much earlier in the day when there is far more lead time to fix them on a convenient schedule.  It load-balances the delivery instead of putting it all in a massive peak near the end of "the project", so you can ramp-up staffing gradually and burn-in the staff working relationships instead of burning them OUT in a crisis mode the last 3 months of delivery.