Saturday, November 24, 2007
Friday, November 23, 2007
Speaking of local expertise - Google Maps
According to the Washington Post this morning, Google Maps is now embracing the concept of local expertise and allowing users to fix things that are wrong on the the maps, "Wikipedia style". This is great, shows the power of web-2 technology, and illustrates exactly what my last two posts in the nature of stable, locally-driven adaptive change is about. (See Adaptation and Control and the FM 3-24, and Unity and Adaptation, continued. )
First, millions of people are recruited, effectively, at zero cost to Google, to review the maps and their findings are harvested by the maps themselves. This covers the "adaptive" part. Second, the changes are rate-limited, so that no major catastrophe could result even from a malicious user who simply wanted to cause trouble. No item can be moved more than 200 yards, and schools, hospitals, and police stations can't be moved without approval at all.
This is great! I love it!
This is the kind of change that, say, medical record systems, or for that matter, any record keeping system really needs: users who spot an error can somehow, in some way, either change the error and fix it, or at least register a question-mark on the suspect data point, and after enough question-marks are recorded, some authorized human can look at it and agree to the change and make it.
The system has another property I discussed, as does Wikipedia -- it is self-correcting and user-enforced norms provide the control stability in which this dynamic change takes place. So long as all the recent changes are clearly visible, everyone knows that some of them are in error or malicious, and need to be taken "with a grain of salt" --i.e. skeptically. But program code or data that has stood the test of time, and been there for years without anyone questioning it, can be shown in "gold" instead of newbie "green" and relied on more.
With this caveat, the ability to be a little skeptical of news, and open eyes, the social norms control mechanism works as well as a staff of highly-paid, highly-trained editors, but at much less cost, i.e, free. But, unlike the bottleneck created by a central staff of experts, regardless how expert, the system can also adapt and change if enough people on the front lines see something wrong that would surprise even the expert.
Thank you Google for illustrating how a massive-parallel, rate-governed, social-norm enforced system can beat centrally-managed, authority-enforced architecture for both reliability and adaptability. And, every time a thousand new areas of expertise are needed, the system automatically adjusts and accepts input from the crowd, way faster than a thousand new experts could be located and hired and put on staff. And, when the expert's expertise turns out to be stale, or outmoded, the system can keep on changing much more easily than trying to upgrade or fire an entrenched "expert". ( Similar to the problems with tenure at universities these days. The long time constant and depth of expertise is great, unless the world is changing so fast that those turn into liabililities, not assets.)
Here's the cite and an few quotes.
Google lets users fine tune its maps
by Catherine Rampell
Washington Post, Nov 23, 2007
I suggested such a thing back in 1994 or so, at an American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Washington -- suggesting that this was a good task for the operating system to handle, and not force individual applications to figure out how to collect and share user notes and responses. At the time, it got a round of applause from a room of 1000 people who agreed with the idea. We seem to be finally getting there, with Web-2 technology and Google, not Microsoft, leading the way.
As my prior post emphasized, the interaction term can be way more important than the "self" term. Everything we do in life is "stone soup", that can be opened up for small improvements that local villagers it turns out are eager and willing to make for free. The result can be a fantastic broth starting with simply a pot of water and a "magic stone" -- and a willingness to accept input from others about small changes that might improve things a little.
Then, the power of numbers and wisdom of crowds can take over, and finish creating soup from a stone.
We have lots of stones and water -- now what we need is more players like Google to make it easy for us to help each other out just a little bit, and the social norms that hold the plan together, and reasonable rate-regulators to protect us against ill-advised rapid change or some person's private agenda. It works! It's a great model! We should do more of it!
First, millions of people are recruited, effectively, at zero cost to Google, to review the maps and their findings are harvested by the maps themselves. This covers the "adaptive" part. Second, the changes are rate-limited, so that no major catastrophe could result even from a malicious user who simply wanted to cause trouble. No item can be moved more than 200 yards, and schools, hospitals, and police stations can't be moved without approval at all.
This is great! I love it!
This is the kind of change that, say, medical record systems, or for that matter, any record keeping system really needs: users who spot an error can somehow, in some way, either change the error and fix it, or at least register a question-mark on the suspect data point, and after enough question-marks are recorded, some authorized human can look at it and agree to the change and make it.
The system has another property I discussed, as does Wikipedia -- it is self-correcting and user-enforced norms provide the control stability in which this dynamic change takes place. So long as all the recent changes are clearly visible, everyone knows that some of them are in error or malicious, and need to be taken "with a grain of salt" --i.e. skeptically. But program code or data that has stood the test of time, and been there for years without anyone questioning it, can be shown in "gold" instead of newbie "green" and relied on more.
With this caveat, the ability to be a little skeptical of news, and open eyes, the social norms control mechanism works as well as a staff of highly-paid, highly-trained editors, but at much less cost, i.e, free. But, unlike the bottleneck created by a central staff of experts, regardless how expert, the system can also adapt and change if enough people on the front lines see something wrong that would surprise even the expert.
Thank you Google for illustrating how a massive-parallel, rate-governed, social-norm enforced system can beat centrally-managed, authority-enforced architecture for both reliability and adaptability. And, every time a thousand new areas of expertise are needed, the system automatically adjusts and accepts input from the crowd, way faster than a thousand new experts could be located and hired and put on staff. And, when the expert's expertise turns out to be stale, or outmoded, the system can keep on changing much more easily than trying to upgrade or fire an entrenched "expert". ( Similar to the problems with tenure at universities these days. The long time constant and depth of expertise is great, unless the world is changing so fast that those turn into liabililities, not assets.)
Here's the cite and an few quotes.
Google lets users fine tune its maps
by Catherine Rampell
Washington Post, Nov 23, 2007
This is the same sort of thing I've advocated Wiki's for in terms of help manuals for many computer systems. We're not sure what alien race writes the manuals, but they are not in customary English and not helpful. They really need actual local users to be able at least to stick on sticky notes, and comment on what some paragraph means, or that you need to ignore this instruction and see page 285 instead. Then, they're actually useful.Tired of getting bad directions? Google Maps, Google's popular mapping and driving directions tool, is now letting users correct its maps, Wikipedia-style.
Google, the company with the most frequently used search engine, has been beefing up its other features over the last several years in an effort to develop more user-generated, interactive content. ... The new map feature is part of this larger effort to exploit the collective knowledge of Google users.
[Said] Google spokeswoman Kate Hurowitz. "Accurate, detailed local information about neighborhoods, towns and the world around us is important to our users, and yet no one knows a town better than the people that live there."
Starting this week, users with Google accounts can move the small green arrows that pinpoint addresses on its maps. To avoid "monkeying with markers," Google said, there are restrictions on which markers may be edited: Moving a place marker more than 200 yards requires Google's approval. Users also cannot edit the locations of schools, hospitals, police stations or businesses that are registered with Google's Local Business Center. Visitors to Google Maps can choose to see the original location for all markers that have been changed.
I suggested such a thing back in 1994 or so, at an American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference in Washington -- suggesting that this was a good task for the operating system to handle, and not force individual applications to figure out how to collect and share user notes and responses. At the time, it got a round of applause from a room of 1000 people who agreed with the idea. We seem to be finally getting there, with Web-2 technology and Google, not Microsoft, leading the way.
As my prior post emphasized, the interaction term can be way more important than the "self" term. Everything we do in life is "stone soup", that can be opened up for small improvements that local villagers it turns out are eager and willing to make for free. The result can be a fantastic broth starting with simply a pot of water and a "magic stone" -- and a willingness to accept input from others about small changes that might improve things a little.
Then, the power of numbers and wisdom of crowds can take over, and finish creating soup from a stone.
We have lots of stones and water -- now what we need is more players like Google to make it easy for us to help each other out just a little bit, and the social norms that hold the plan together, and reasonable rate-regulators to protect us against ill-advised rapid change or some person's private agenda. It works! It's a great model! We should do more of it!
Unity and adaptation - continued
Picking up from yesterday's post, can we be sure of anything about the nature of any solution to the fractal organization problem? Let's try tackling this first in the static case, then in the dynamic case, then in the dynamic, time and space short with noise case.
This is a general solution to the co-evolving properties of Life - ever becoming more specialized in order to deal with life, and yet always having to communicate fast enough and be agile and able to move as one when external changes or dangers require it.
The specialization part is relatively easy and automatic, the re-integration part is where we all get stuck.
First, consider our physical bodies. We start with, effectively, the "stem cells" that are in the news lately, that can become anything. Then those specialize and specialize more and specialize more. Why doesn't our body fragment into a zillion pieces that refuse to talk to each other , like our societies are tending to do? I note in passing that even a slight tendency to fragment results in what we call a loss of overall system functioning, or "ill health" and requires reintegration, or "wholistic" recovery and reconnection.
Why is this such a big deal. It's such a big deal because of the wonderful property of relationships, a boon and a curse at the same time. Between any two things is a third thing, a relationship. I've posted on this before. At one end of the mathematical spectrum, the two things, like billiard balls, dominate and the relationship, occasion interactions, seem sort of tacked on. Some businesses and people have relationships about that level - occasional ships passing in the night, exchanging messages, then back to the cubicle for "parallel play" kind of work, as if no one else was there.
Usually, this is a very low-powered arrangement, because of the fact that each of the "objects" or "actors", the billiard balls, has a small and finite amount of energy and complexity. Not so for the relationship. Relationships, like the "angle" between two vectors in complex space, for the mathematically inclined, are unbounded. They can be arbitrarily complicated and hold arbitrarily large amounts of energy.
Mostly, we are continually surprised by this fact. We occasionally see a group of people rise above the billiard ball state to one where the interactional energy is storing a lot of energy, in "teamwork". And, as with sports teams like (sigh) the Michigan Wolverines, this dynamic "synergy" is a quicksilvery kind of thing that comes and goes and depends on "coaching" or something subtle. Subtle, yes, but powerful? Yes! The skill or thingie that can take a bunch of ragtag individuals and make them into "a team" is very highly praised, and very rare.
Going back to physics models, this interaction energy can be hundreds of times more powerful than the "self-energy", even for dumb things like atoms or large billiard balls like black holes. In fact, in the limit of that end of the continuum or spectrum, the interaction is everything and the self effectively vanishes. It's the mirror image of billiard balls as the stable thing and "interactions" as the occasional interruption -- it's a world where the interactions and relationships are the stable thing and the "objects" are occasional interruptions. (As if the Spirit occasionally takes an embodied form briefly, then it's over.)
That is the world that scientists believe exists in the super high energy worlds near the center of every galaxy, the disk shaped collection of ten trillion stars like the milky way.
What's the rule here? The design says that objects, or "self", is a very limited concept, but that relationships and interactions are where "The action" is, long term.
So, there is a fairly well developed mathematical machinery for understanding this kind of interaction, where the relationship or context itself becomes as important, then more important than the things having the relationship. For dumb atoms, the spectacular result is galactic centers of almost unimaginably high energies. At a planetary scale and larger, this is the field called "General Relativity" that Einstein studied.
But, we're humans, not atoms. We are, whatever it means, "alive". Our molecules and cells are dominated by this interaction energy field called "life", and when we "die" that goes away, and we are left with the heap of atoms, almost an afterthought, that was at the base of that interactional field. At that point, yes, we are "just a heap of molecules of water, carbon, oxygen, etc."
But when we are alive, we are something more. We live and breathe and operate in that space that soars far above the constraints of mere atoms. Our cells themselves are alive, already, so we are built up of relationships among living relationships, not relationships among molecules. And each of those relationships has a "life of its own", but we also have a potentially much larger "life together".
Coherence doesn't go from zero to one - it goes from zero to infinity. That's important to realize.
We're not facing the possibility of a 10% impact of "synergy" on top of our own small lives, we're facing a possible 100% or 1000% or more impact. Two people by themselves may be almost inert, or tending to "go out" as solitary coals from a fire do; but put together and interacting, may be huge. This is the key to sports team "teamwork". This is the key to why human relationships of just two people "in love" can be so amazingly powerful.
And, this is the key to The Toyota Way - at the core, it is a process for the organization members to stumble slowly, almost blindly, up the evolutionary scale in almost real time, discovering the huge power inherent in "working together". No manager can direct this result, no human can describe it well, but, together, collectively, over time, we can just keep on experimenting with a million tiny improvements and way-find our way up that invisible mountain to greatness.
But, Toyota took 50 years. We need to understand this well enough that we can make it all happen in 5 years, or 5 months. Is it possible that that is possible?
We can learn to control our brain-waves, our alpha rhythm, or the beating of our heart. Yoga masters can retreat into the mountains, shut out distractions, and master this in a few small decades. Or, we can connect to a biofeedback monitor and master it in ten minutes. As Tony Robbins, the performance improvement guru said when asked how long something takes, "How long do you want it to take?"
Now, there is something else about people that can be forgotten - something very surprising. We don't replicate by budding. We don't grow take one of our existing arms, say, and break it off like a salamander's tail or half an earthworm, and have both halves grow back into full people. We do something much more complicated -- we start over again at a single cell between each generation.
Why? That's a huge amount of work. There must be a huge reason.
One reason is genetic mixing and cross-over, yes. But the world is multi-valued, and just because we find one reason doesn't mean we found them all.
And, here's another puzzle. How can it be that each new generation's infants are so powerfully strong and dynamic and adaptive, when they are born to parents who are getting old and set in their ways and having parts already start to break? That's strange, isn't it? Where does this "new life" or "new youth and vitality" come from? (And can I buy some more of it?) It can't be packed inside the DNA, because by now we've unfolded that sucker a million times or more, many times per generation, and it would have run out.
No, the new youth and vitality and life comes from this "synergy" part -- the dynamic relationship among the parts that has to be rebuilt from the ground up every generation, and, astoundingly, is.
Well, maybe these two things are related - the pushing the entire thing through a keyhole the size of one cell, and the sudden burst of new vitality and energy that seems to come as a miracle from nowhere.
I think they are related. What our bodies have at that stage are millions, then billions of cells that very recently were all a single cell, and still remember, in some real way, that total unity of being. It's hard to get more unified than being one cell.
Then, as the parts specialize and specialize more, not hands and arms and legs and eyes, they start migrating into these secondary and tertiary silos, with a common heritage but no longer working on exactly the same problem, locally. We "get old" and set in our ways.
Well, good news, boys and girls. Toyota has proven that at least one organization can be "revitalized" or "vitalized" from the ground up. It doesn't have to just "go downhill."
We only need one case to prove it can happen and we have that case.
What are the secrets of the solution? Well, as I just discussed, "unity" is a big deal. The cells of our body have to be in constant awareness of their inherent similarity, of the fact that they all came down the same tree, from the same start, even though they chose different pathways to turn into from the stem-cell stage. For people to pull-off an organizational miracle of revitalization, they too probably have to get back in touch with the core "unity" that makes all humans "equal" in where we started in life - as single cells -- an further back than that.
That is one unity that surpasses all diversity, and we need to treasure every possible source of unity, because those are what hold together the chalice into which we want life to pour our new life and new youth. For Toyota, this involved a tremendous flattening of the organizational pyramid or hierarchy, and acceptance of the astounding idea that management and labor are the same kind of people. All kinds of prejudice and stereotypes about other groups being inherently and irrevocably "different" have to be let go of, and removed, for this to take off and soar without holding the brakes on.
"We are one" has to be made real in every way that we have control over, to open the door the the ways we don't have direct control over.
Then, our vitality can become unbounded again, we can regenerate lost parts, and we can rise up to arbitrarily high performance and ability to cope with and adapt to the world's challenges.
Well, in theory. Starting with, say, any large organization such as a tertiary medical center that has already differentiated into different branches and specialties and sub-specialities and sub-sub-specialties, each of which is internally convinced it is "superior" to all the others -- how does that work in practice? And doctors don't want to think of themselves as "the same as" a secretary or janitor, the think of themselves as "better than" such people. Then what?
Then we have what we have today. We get institutional level fragmentation, arthritis, inability to adapt, inability to cope, dysfunction on increasingly larger scales, and, if left unchecked, the inevitable and inexorable end point of all that fragmentation -- institutional old age and finally institutional death.
But that is not the end point of life, just the end point of a life style in which the power is all leaking out through barriers to change and stereotypes of expectations and prejudices of history or power that are holding onto constraints that need to be discarded.
What to do is not something that a few managers, or an outside consulting firm can come in and go, oh yes, change these reporting relationships and replace these people and you'll be fine. The change that's required is organic. Every part of the being of the beast has participate in being aware of the presence of the other parts, and accepting them as "equal", and letting the obvious ways of improving things happen, even if that changes long-standing cherished boundaries that used to help us make sense of life and keep it under control.
The boundaries that used to be the solution to control necessary for life to thrive and be prosperous have become the problems.
Our human organizations are held in place by norms and expectations, that can change in a heartbeat, but tend not to. Our expectations are prisoners to our beliefs and our prejudices based on what happened in the past. We are in a world recreated every day anew based on those prejudices and self-fulfilling expectations. It can change in a day, if we let go of our pre-conceived notions (prejudices) that are holding it back.
So, in theory this is possible. In a different scale of life we see this happen all the time. On corporate scales we have seen it happen at least once. In sports teams, we see it happen often enough to pay a lot of money to watch games for those few seconds of ecstasy when the team "gets it together" for a few moments of "momentum" and changes everything. All bets are off when that player takes the field.
But this still seems like luck or magic, some kind of art that happens rarely, but sadly will not happen to us. We say the incantations, arrange the magical items, but the rain doesn't fall. Why not? What are we doing wrong?
How can we make the more like building a bridge or skyscraper so it doesn't tend to fall down as soon as we're done?
We have trillions of examples, across all scales of life from viruses to nations, where this phenomenon has shown glimpses of itself. Again, we need to pool notes and reveal the phantom shape that keeps playing out around us.
That's what learning is about, on a social level - finding out what actually works with our eyes open, trading notes, realizing what might work just one tenth of one percent better and trying it to see if it does, over and over again.
And knowing we need to let go of the old shapes and old solutions that are the new problems. But not in a revolutionary way, which is chaotic and risky, but in an evolutionary way, stable and methodical and systematic. All changes have to be tiny, small enough that we can hit the "Undo" button if they don't work, or the "commit and accept" button if they do, times a zillion, persisted over time. That's all it takes. That, and time will do the trick.
Well, and enough belief in the process to be willing to devote the time and energy to overcoming despair and trying it. We keep looking for single-step solutions that have a huge impact, which is at the wrong end of the spectrum.
As the Institute of Medicine noted in Crossing the Quality Chasm -- we don't need a billion dollar solution -- we need a billion one-dollar solutions.
That's what the Toyota Way, or continuous improvement, or learning organizations are all about. Very small changes, so "control" is never lost, repeated over and over. We are not good at comprehending the power of a compounded change. We think it should "look" big.
It doesn't, not with our usual eyes. Amazingly small things can have an amazingly large impact, and we have been not looking for solutions of that nature.
If we rotate by half a degree a day, which is almost nothing, we will turn by 180 degrees, a complete U-turn, in a year. That's the sweet spot that combines unbroken control with unbounded upwards evolution and learning -- persistent motion, just above zero, in some direction or with some coherent generating process.
It's exactly the opposite of the end where contractors or vendors can charge big bucks, because the individual changes are so tiny, as well as completely unpredictable in advance. We can define the process, but not say much about the path, except that it will surprise us. And big budget programs want pathways spelled out in advance, and big changes to happen that are visible.
Big outcomes come from the other end as well, and only from it once the world becomes so entangled -- a billion $1 changes, not a $billion change, remember.
So, now the question has been rotated around yet again to what process, or ethic, or belief, or mechanism will hold together such a collective effort over a long time, with such "little" visible or tangible result in the short run?
Again, quoting Tony Robbins, "We over-estimate what we can do in a year; we underestimate what we can do in a decade."
And here we reach the point where science has to look to religion or culture for clues as to what gets people to pick a direction and stick with it over a long period of time, even with little immediate tangible outcome? "Faith" comes to mind, faith in a process, not blind faith, but faith based on the experience of other parts of the world that has been comprehended and understood. Eyes open faith based on evidence of what actually works in practice.
And, since this is a bootstrap feedback loop we're trying to get rolling, a tornado we're hoping to induce, the faith in the unity of mankind requires seeing the unity, which requires pooling notes across diversity, which we tend not to do since we already concluded it's not there. Those pre-judgments of despair have to be let go, suspended for a while, based on solid theory and maybe advanced computer simulations or something that can make vivid animations showing that this can and does work.
Our bodies work which requires this miracle to be possible in practice. Galactic centers work. This isn't magic, but it is math beyond our usual training and experience. We're used to the cold, dark rock, the billiard-ball end of the universe, even though our textbooks tell us that 99% of the universe is at the opposite end, in the "plasma" state of matter, or state of being, at the blinding light end of the spectrum.
We just need to resolve to move towards the light, a little bit more every day, with every person expected to pitch in and help a little, and no one expected to have "a plan" other than the Toyota type process of continual exploration and mutual assistance.
The Light is there, and we need to move, because the old ways just aren't working any more, but we can move slowly and methodically, without disruption or ripping or tearing the fabric of society, if we all move a tiny bit forward each day.
That's the Way.
No one can tell you what change you need to make at the levels you live in. Something can change, but no one really knows which way is up, given how much things interact and have surprising results. So we need to move very slowly so that news from the outlying districts has time to make it into town.
And, at least have of our tiny exploratory moves will be in the "wrong" direction, that is, we will be surprised that the result is the opposite of what we expected. That's cool. That's how it should be. We tried something, we learned something. That's success not failure. Tomorrow, reverse direction and take two steps. We end up way ahead of where we'd be if we just stood here dithering, or analyzing. We're in motion and found the right direction with a simple experiment.
Just like the eye guy does, switching lenses in and out. "Better HERE.... or HERE?" That's all we need to do, but everyone needs to do it, every day, for a long time.
And that's what the problem has now rotated into. What does it take to get everyone to participate in doing something that takes a long time and has very little positive feedback, although some, as it is unfolding?
If we crack that problem, we can get learning organizations that adapt, and if we get those, we can solve most of the rest of our problems.
And, as with any bootstrap feedback process, it won't start overnight. It will start small, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, pick up speed and steam at the same time. It will develop momentum and start to snowball once it gets rolling.
All the standard financial analysis garbage like Extended Value Added ("EVA") misdirect us to ignore solutions that don't solve the problem this quarter in one huge step. "Prioritize" or "let the government do it" are pushed as solution paths.
This is at the other end. Everyone does a little, not someone does a lot. Initially we see close to nothing, although it better be positive or we should reverse it, but the change picks up speed as it starts to make a noticeable dent in things.
To try it, we have to see it, or have trust -- and cynicism is pretty large these days, judging from the polls, so seeing is better. This is where science can help, by making some vivid animations of how this process can work that are persuasive to some critical mass of people to give it a try, eyes open, and see what happens.
No one's apple cart should be over-turned, since it only changes 0.1% of things at a time, slowly, and reversibly. It's safe. But it gets us out of here.
And, the amazing thing about constant-force processes, is that they pick up speed. As with rocket ships or jet aircraft, the power is proportional to the velocity. Runways for some of our most powerful jets are still two miles long, because at initial slow speeds they are lumbering beasts that make a lot of noise and don't seem to be getting up much speed. We need to hold that setting and wait a little -- and check that speed again.
Once it's actually airborne, it picks up speed faster and faster and we can pull the nose up and break the sound barrier in a vertical climb out. But we have to make it past that really, really slow starting of the roll-out.
That's what we need to figure out how to bring about.
A billion one-dollar solutions. It will work. It's how we got this far, and why your body is able to function and sit there reading this. But what will give us the persistence to try, that's the question to look at.
This is a general solution to the co-evolving properties of Life - ever becoming more specialized in order to deal with life, and yet always having to communicate fast enough and be agile and able to move as one when external changes or dangers require it.
The specialization part is relatively easy and automatic, the re-integration part is where we all get stuck.
First, consider our physical bodies. We start with, effectively, the "stem cells" that are in the news lately, that can become anything. Then those specialize and specialize more and specialize more. Why doesn't our body fragment into a zillion pieces that refuse to talk to each other , like our societies are tending to do? I note in passing that even a slight tendency to fragment results in what we call a loss of overall system functioning, or "ill health" and requires reintegration, or "wholistic" recovery and reconnection.
Why is this such a big deal. It's such a big deal because of the wonderful property of relationships, a boon and a curse at the same time. Between any two things is a third thing, a relationship. I've posted on this before. At one end of the mathematical spectrum, the two things, like billiard balls, dominate and the relationship, occasion interactions, seem sort of tacked on. Some businesses and people have relationships about that level - occasional ships passing in the night, exchanging messages, then back to the cubicle for "parallel play" kind of work, as if no one else was there.
Usually, this is a very low-powered arrangement, because of the fact that each of the "objects" or "actors", the billiard balls, has a small and finite amount of energy and complexity. Not so for the relationship. Relationships, like the "angle" between two vectors in complex space, for the mathematically inclined, are unbounded. They can be arbitrarily complicated and hold arbitrarily large amounts of energy.
Mostly, we are continually surprised by this fact. We occasionally see a group of people rise above the billiard ball state to one where the interactional energy is storing a lot of energy, in "teamwork". And, as with sports teams like (sigh) the Michigan Wolverines, this dynamic "synergy" is a quicksilvery kind of thing that comes and goes and depends on "coaching" or something subtle. Subtle, yes, but powerful? Yes! The skill or thingie that can take a bunch of ragtag individuals and make them into "a team" is very highly praised, and very rare.
Going back to physics models, this interaction energy can be hundreds of times more powerful than the "self-energy", even for dumb things like atoms or large billiard balls like black holes. In fact, in the limit of that end of the continuum or spectrum, the interaction is everything and the self effectively vanishes. It's the mirror image of billiard balls as the stable thing and "interactions" as the occasional interruption -- it's a world where the interactions and relationships are the stable thing and the "objects" are occasional interruptions. (As if the Spirit occasionally takes an embodied form briefly, then it's over.)
That is the world that scientists believe exists in the super high energy worlds near the center of every galaxy, the disk shaped collection of ten trillion stars like the milky way.
What's the rule here? The design says that objects, or "self", is a very limited concept, but that relationships and interactions are where "The action" is, long term.
So, there is a fairly well developed mathematical machinery for understanding this kind of interaction, where the relationship or context itself becomes as important, then more important than the things having the relationship. For dumb atoms, the spectacular result is galactic centers of almost unimaginably high energies. At a planetary scale and larger, this is the field called "General Relativity" that Einstein studied.
But, we're humans, not atoms. We are, whatever it means, "alive". Our molecules and cells are dominated by this interaction energy field called "life", and when we "die" that goes away, and we are left with the heap of atoms, almost an afterthought, that was at the base of that interactional field. At that point, yes, we are "just a heap of molecules of water, carbon, oxygen, etc."
But when we are alive, we are something more. We live and breathe and operate in that space that soars far above the constraints of mere atoms. Our cells themselves are alive, already, so we are built up of relationships among living relationships, not relationships among molecules. And each of those relationships has a "life of its own", but we also have a potentially much larger "life together".
Coherence doesn't go from zero to one - it goes from zero to infinity. That's important to realize.
We're not facing the possibility of a 10% impact of "synergy" on top of our own small lives, we're facing a possible 100% or 1000% or more impact. Two people by themselves may be almost inert, or tending to "go out" as solitary coals from a fire do; but put together and interacting, may be huge. This is the key to sports team "teamwork". This is the key to why human relationships of just two people "in love" can be so amazingly powerful.
And, this is the key to The Toyota Way - at the core, it is a process for the organization members to stumble slowly, almost blindly, up the evolutionary scale in almost real time, discovering the huge power inherent in "working together". No manager can direct this result, no human can describe it well, but, together, collectively, over time, we can just keep on experimenting with a million tiny improvements and way-find our way up that invisible mountain to greatness.
But, Toyota took 50 years. We need to understand this well enough that we can make it all happen in 5 years, or 5 months. Is it possible that that is possible?
We can learn to control our brain-waves, our alpha rhythm, or the beating of our heart. Yoga masters can retreat into the mountains, shut out distractions, and master this in a few small decades. Or, we can connect to a biofeedback monitor and master it in ten minutes. As Tony Robbins, the performance improvement guru said when asked how long something takes, "How long do you want it to take?"
Now, there is something else about people that can be forgotten - something very surprising. We don't replicate by budding. We don't grow take one of our existing arms, say, and break it off like a salamander's tail or half an earthworm, and have both halves grow back into full people. We do something much more complicated -- we start over again at a single cell between each generation.
Why? That's a huge amount of work. There must be a huge reason.
One reason is genetic mixing and cross-over, yes. But the world is multi-valued, and just because we find one reason doesn't mean we found them all.
And, here's another puzzle. How can it be that each new generation's infants are so powerfully strong and dynamic and adaptive, when they are born to parents who are getting old and set in their ways and having parts already start to break? That's strange, isn't it? Where does this "new life" or "new youth and vitality" come from? (And can I buy some more of it?) It can't be packed inside the DNA, because by now we've unfolded that sucker a million times or more, many times per generation, and it would have run out.
No, the new youth and vitality and life comes from this "synergy" part -- the dynamic relationship among the parts that has to be rebuilt from the ground up every generation, and, astoundingly, is.
Well, maybe these two things are related - the pushing the entire thing through a keyhole the size of one cell, and the sudden burst of new vitality and energy that seems to come as a miracle from nowhere.
I think they are related. What our bodies have at that stage are millions, then billions of cells that very recently were all a single cell, and still remember, in some real way, that total unity of being. It's hard to get more unified than being one cell.
Then, as the parts specialize and specialize more, not hands and arms and legs and eyes, they start migrating into these secondary and tertiary silos, with a common heritage but no longer working on exactly the same problem, locally. We "get old" and set in our ways.
Well, good news, boys and girls. Toyota has proven that at least one organization can be "revitalized" or "vitalized" from the ground up. It doesn't have to just "go downhill."
We only need one case to prove it can happen and we have that case.
What are the secrets of the solution? Well, as I just discussed, "unity" is a big deal. The cells of our body have to be in constant awareness of their inherent similarity, of the fact that they all came down the same tree, from the same start, even though they chose different pathways to turn into from the stem-cell stage. For people to pull-off an organizational miracle of revitalization, they too probably have to get back in touch with the core "unity" that makes all humans "equal" in where we started in life - as single cells -- an further back than that.
That is one unity that surpasses all diversity, and we need to treasure every possible source of unity, because those are what hold together the chalice into which we want life to pour our new life and new youth. For Toyota, this involved a tremendous flattening of the organizational pyramid or hierarchy, and acceptance of the astounding idea that management and labor are the same kind of people. All kinds of prejudice and stereotypes about other groups being inherently and irrevocably "different" have to be let go of, and removed, for this to take off and soar without holding the brakes on.
"We are one" has to be made real in every way that we have control over, to open the door the the ways we don't have direct control over.
Then, our vitality can become unbounded again, we can regenerate lost parts, and we can rise up to arbitrarily high performance and ability to cope with and adapt to the world's challenges.
Well, in theory. Starting with, say, any large organization such as a tertiary medical center that has already differentiated into different branches and specialties and sub-specialities and sub-sub-specialties, each of which is internally convinced it is "superior" to all the others -- how does that work in practice? And doctors don't want to think of themselves as "the same as" a secretary or janitor, the think of themselves as "better than" such people. Then what?
Then we have what we have today. We get institutional level fragmentation, arthritis, inability to adapt, inability to cope, dysfunction on increasingly larger scales, and, if left unchecked, the inevitable and inexorable end point of all that fragmentation -- institutional old age and finally institutional death.
But that is not the end point of life, just the end point of a life style in which the power is all leaking out through barriers to change and stereotypes of expectations and prejudices of history or power that are holding onto constraints that need to be discarded.
What to do is not something that a few managers, or an outside consulting firm can come in and go, oh yes, change these reporting relationships and replace these people and you'll be fine. The change that's required is organic. Every part of the being of the beast has participate in being aware of the presence of the other parts, and accepting them as "equal", and letting the obvious ways of improving things happen, even if that changes long-standing cherished boundaries that used to help us make sense of life and keep it under control.
The boundaries that used to be the solution to control necessary for life to thrive and be prosperous have become the problems.
Our human organizations are held in place by norms and expectations, that can change in a heartbeat, but tend not to. Our expectations are prisoners to our beliefs and our prejudices based on what happened in the past. We are in a world recreated every day anew based on those prejudices and self-fulfilling expectations. It can change in a day, if we let go of our pre-conceived notions (prejudices) that are holding it back.
So, in theory this is possible. In a different scale of life we see this happen all the time. On corporate scales we have seen it happen at least once. In sports teams, we see it happen often enough to pay a lot of money to watch games for those few seconds of ecstasy when the team "gets it together" for a few moments of "momentum" and changes everything. All bets are off when that player takes the field.
But this still seems like luck or magic, some kind of art that happens rarely, but sadly will not happen to us. We say the incantations, arrange the magical items, but the rain doesn't fall. Why not? What are we doing wrong?
How can we make the more like building a bridge or skyscraper so it doesn't tend to fall down as soon as we're done?
We have trillions of examples, across all scales of life from viruses to nations, where this phenomenon has shown glimpses of itself. Again, we need to pool notes and reveal the phantom shape that keeps playing out around us.
That's what learning is about, on a social level - finding out what actually works with our eyes open, trading notes, realizing what might work just one tenth of one percent better and trying it to see if it does, over and over again.
And knowing we need to let go of the old shapes and old solutions that are the new problems. But not in a revolutionary way, which is chaotic and risky, but in an evolutionary way, stable and methodical and systematic. All changes have to be tiny, small enough that we can hit the "Undo" button if they don't work, or the "commit and accept" button if they do, times a zillion, persisted over time. That's all it takes. That, and time will do the trick.
Well, and enough belief in the process to be willing to devote the time and energy to overcoming despair and trying it. We keep looking for single-step solutions that have a huge impact, which is at the wrong end of the spectrum.
As the Institute of Medicine noted in Crossing the Quality Chasm -- we don't need a billion dollar solution -- we need a billion one-dollar solutions.
That's what the Toyota Way, or continuous improvement, or learning organizations are all about. Very small changes, so "control" is never lost, repeated over and over. We are not good at comprehending the power of a compounded change. We think it should "look" big.
It doesn't, not with our usual eyes. Amazingly small things can have an amazingly large impact, and we have been not looking for solutions of that nature.
If we rotate by half a degree a day, which is almost nothing, we will turn by 180 degrees, a complete U-turn, in a year. That's the sweet spot that combines unbroken control with unbounded upwards evolution and learning -- persistent motion, just above zero, in some direction or with some coherent generating process.
It's exactly the opposite of the end where contractors or vendors can charge big bucks, because the individual changes are so tiny, as well as completely unpredictable in advance. We can define the process, but not say much about the path, except that it will surprise us. And big budget programs want pathways spelled out in advance, and big changes to happen that are visible.
Big outcomes come from the other end as well, and only from it once the world becomes so entangled -- a billion $1 changes, not a $billion change, remember.
So, now the question has been rotated around yet again to what process, or ethic, or belief, or mechanism will hold together such a collective effort over a long time, with such "little" visible or tangible result in the short run?
Again, quoting Tony Robbins, "We over-estimate what we can do in a year; we underestimate what we can do in a decade."
And here we reach the point where science has to look to religion or culture for clues as to what gets people to pick a direction and stick with it over a long period of time, even with little immediate tangible outcome? "Faith" comes to mind, faith in a process, not blind faith, but faith based on the experience of other parts of the world that has been comprehended and understood. Eyes open faith based on evidence of what actually works in practice.
And, since this is a bootstrap feedback loop we're trying to get rolling, a tornado we're hoping to induce, the faith in the unity of mankind requires seeing the unity, which requires pooling notes across diversity, which we tend not to do since we already concluded it's not there. Those pre-judgments of despair have to be let go, suspended for a while, based on solid theory and maybe advanced computer simulations or something that can make vivid animations showing that this can and does work.
Our bodies work which requires this miracle to be possible in practice. Galactic centers work. This isn't magic, but it is math beyond our usual training and experience. We're used to the cold, dark rock, the billiard-ball end of the universe, even though our textbooks tell us that 99% of the universe is at the opposite end, in the "plasma" state of matter, or state of being, at the blinding light end of the spectrum.
We just need to resolve to move towards the light, a little bit more every day, with every person expected to pitch in and help a little, and no one expected to have "a plan" other than the Toyota type process of continual exploration and mutual assistance.
The Light is there, and we need to move, because the old ways just aren't working any more, but we can move slowly and methodically, without disruption or ripping or tearing the fabric of society, if we all move a tiny bit forward each day.
That's the Way.
No one can tell you what change you need to make at the levels you live in. Something can change, but no one really knows which way is up, given how much things interact and have surprising results. So we need to move very slowly so that news from the outlying districts has time to make it into town.
And, at least have of our tiny exploratory moves will be in the "wrong" direction, that is, we will be surprised that the result is the opposite of what we expected. That's cool. That's how it should be. We tried something, we learned something. That's success not failure. Tomorrow, reverse direction and take two steps. We end up way ahead of where we'd be if we just stood here dithering, or analyzing. We're in motion and found the right direction with a simple experiment.
Just like the eye guy does, switching lenses in and out. "Better HERE.... or HERE?" That's all we need to do, but everyone needs to do it, every day, for a long time.
And that's what the problem has now rotated into. What does it take to get everyone to participate in doing something that takes a long time and has very little positive feedback, although some, as it is unfolding?
If we crack that problem, we can get learning organizations that adapt, and if we get those, we can solve most of the rest of our problems.
And, as with any bootstrap feedback process, it won't start overnight. It will start small, and slowly, almost imperceptibly, pick up speed and steam at the same time. It will develop momentum and start to snowball once it gets rolling.
All the standard financial analysis garbage like Extended Value Added ("EVA") misdirect us to ignore solutions that don't solve the problem this quarter in one huge step. "Prioritize" or "let the government do it" are pushed as solution paths.
This is at the other end. Everyone does a little, not someone does a lot. Initially we see close to nothing, although it better be positive or we should reverse it, but the change picks up speed as it starts to make a noticeable dent in things.
To try it, we have to see it, or have trust -- and cynicism is pretty large these days, judging from the polls, so seeing is better. This is where science can help, by making some vivid animations of how this process can work that are persuasive to some critical mass of people to give it a try, eyes open, and see what happens.
No one's apple cart should be over-turned, since it only changes 0.1% of things at a time, slowly, and reversibly. It's safe. But it gets us out of here.
And, the amazing thing about constant-force processes, is that they pick up speed. As with rocket ships or jet aircraft, the power is proportional to the velocity. Runways for some of our most powerful jets are still two miles long, because at initial slow speeds they are lumbering beasts that make a lot of noise and don't seem to be getting up much speed. We need to hold that setting and wait a little -- and check that speed again.
Once it's actually airborne, it picks up speed faster and faster and we can pull the nose up and break the sound barrier in a vertical climb out. But we have to make it past that really, really slow starting of the roll-out.
That's what we need to figure out how to bring about.
A billion one-dollar solutions. It will work. It's how we got this far, and why your body is able to function and sit there reading this. But what will give us the persistence to try, that's the question to look at.
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Adaptation versus control - and the Army FM 3-24
Too often, the effort to use centralized command to achieve unity of action and speed of response, perversely, fragments action and slows reactions and recognition of problems. The US Army's new FM 3-24 counterinsurgency manual gets part of this right. FEMA still has it wrong, as does the US National Incident Management system. Katrina illustrated what such a system can deliver, regardless who is at the helm. Bad design, not bad people, is the core problem.
Thanks to Anne Applebaum on Slate for posting a link to Fred Kaplan's "Counterinsurgency by the Book" .(Nov 19, 2007), and some trail that led me through Rant Street's "FM 3-24" posting on the subject that kicked off my interest in this.
These immodest conclusions follow from some very basic principles of nature that describe how any system can operate, regardless of design details. I've described these in earlier posts as a need for a "vertical" loop between the front-line staff and headquarters, and a "horizontal" loop between everyone and the outside world.
The classic model of centralized control worked when problems were relatively simple and the purpose of the size of an organization was to expand the muscle power, since the people "at the top" had enough brain power to understand the problems involved. Primarily what was involved was correcting deviations from a known solution to a known problem, and enforcing a status quo that had already proven to work. The strength of this system was stability in the face of external and internal disruptions.
So, regardless how the external world varied, the system could re-establish equilibrium and restore working order back to the state that worked.
Unfortunately, times change, "the cheese moves", and this strength in a new context became a liability not a strength. Rephrasing John Gall, "The old solution became the new problem." Because, when the external world changed permanently, not due to noise, to a new shape with new demands, the internal system still kept on recreating the old way of doing things that "always worked before." The old system could not adapt to a permanently changed external world.
That would be bad enough to wreak havoc, but things got worse. Not only did the external world change once, but now it keeps on changing and changing again. Now it is not enough to have some non-zero learning curve, the speed of learning has to keep up with the speed of change in the world. Old ways become obsolete overnight. This is a whole new ballgame.
And, things got worse than that. Not only did the problems keep changing, but the nature of the problems keeps getting more complicated to even begin to describe, let alone to fully comprehend. So, instead of a change requiring a brief note to headquarters that "they moved from there to here", the changes require a short course in some new subject area to even get a new vocabulary of what "they" are doing now. Lacking that shared vocabulary, a huge amount of information has to stream up to headquarters to be comprehended in real-time.
This is one of those situations described by algorithms in computer science, but the short of it is that it doesn't matter how bright the people are at the top or center of all this. As things continue to get more complex and move faster, at some point the task will always exceed the ability of the center to handle. We've already passed that point in most industries, and in most international situations.
It doesn't help to demand that reports to the center "distill" the problem, or boil it down, or "make it simpler" or focus on the 2-3 key points and "prioritize." These problems don't boil down any more, and they have 20 or maybe 200 points that are simultaneously "key". Like 200 holes in the floor of your boat, "which ones do we block first" doesn't actually reach to cover the task you face. All of them have to be dealt with, and within the next 15 minutes, and then 200 new ones will arise to replace them.
It seems like a losing battle. That's because it is a losing battle, to try to solve that problem using a fixed size group of people in the center "orchestrating" everything base on "their understanding" of "the situation.' That problem requires a different approach, a better algorithm.
The better way is to distribute control away from the center, and empower the front as much as possible. Instead of trying to acquire power, you have to try to delegate it across the whole organization. Then you have a chance of scaling up to the rapid fire changes of situation that are happening. Even then it's not clear there is a single variable called "winning" that you could theoretically know and monitor to see if you are doing it or not. Too much is in flight, in flux, and hasn't yet come home to roost, let alone had time for you to hear about it and understand the full implications of what you heard.
Finally, as I discussed in my white paper on disaster preparedness competencies, when things start going wrong, and stress levels increase, there is an unstoppable tendency at the top to circle the wagons, to close ranks, and to focus on trying to see that "orders" are carried out. This is not a good time to suggest learning a new set of skills and new mental model. It is not a good time to suggest that the assumptions behind the old plan bear no resemblance to the actual situation on the ground. It is a terrible time to suggest that public statements about things "working" are actually incorrect.
Again, if the world simply replayed over and over the prior battle scenes, this might work. The problem is, that's not what's happening. Entirely new situations are happening, that never happened before, and aren't in the play-book. Things we never thought could happen just did. All bets are off. All the practice scenarios are irrelevant.
So precisely when the center needs to hear the most surprising news, that their mental model is wrong about what's out there, is when the center shuts down all incoming traffic that bears such news.
So, it's critical that organizations be capable of learning very rapidly, when more than just the facts are changing, but the whole model of what's happening is wrong. This requires a learning organization that has practiced that scenario over and over before this point -- it's not a new way of doing things you can suddenly switch to in mid-stream.
It requires that the eyes and brainpower of the entire organization be mobilized, not just the muscles. And it requires distributing control as far down the chain of command, as close to the front as possible, so that responses can be as fast and instantaneous as possible.
Our bodies learned this and when our hand touches an unexpectedly hot stove, the arm doesn't wait for the news to get up to the brain and be understood -- it jerks the hand off the stove on its own authority. There is no other way to do this.
The problem looks at first glance like simple signal processing. There isn't time for an impulse to travel up to the brain and back, maybe 150 milliseconds, when a 50 millisecond response is required. As with fluent keyboarding, the fingers have to work faster than the brain can follow.
But for rapid-fire corporate battles or unfolding military situations, it's not an impulse that has to travel to headquarters -- it's a totally new CONTEXT that needs to be conveyed before the CONTENT of the message makes any sense at all. Now multiply this times 1000, speed it up, and realize that any human being can only have one context at a time, and it takes a while to change contexts.
You see the problem. Contexts cannot be processed at that speed, even if contents could be. Contents can often be distilled, by reducing them to words that are simple -- in a given shared context. If the context isn't shared, distillation is not possible, period.
Period.
This is why neurosurgeons can talk to each other, and internal medicine doctors can talk to each other, but when they try to talk across specialties, things break down. And none of them can talk to "computer people" who use entirely different language and concepts to make sense of large scale problems. ( I mean, designing a medical records system, not fixing someone's PC login.) You need the secondary and tertiary and now quaternary experts to begin to understand the problem -- but they can only talk to each other even more with each step of sub-specialization. Conclusions don't "carry across specialties."
So, largely, the only people who can understand much of the local and possibly critically important details of what's going on at front number 3,187 are people who are embedded there who have spent months coming up to speed on the situation. And there is no way they can reduce that context to a 3-page report. They can discuss it with each other in a 3-page report, but the words mean something special that would be missed if you just sent that to headquarters. "Distilling" only works in shared contexts. Period.
Statements or facts taken out of context are worse than misleading.
So, this is already a very long post, but maybe I can write a shorter version tomorrow. But let me complete the thought, with apologies.
So, to be agile and adaptive, decision-making in some ways has to get pushed to the front.
But not in every way. And life operates on multiple levels simultaneously, and we have to win on every one of those levels to win the war. None can be neglected.
So, a fragmented world of every front-line person doing his or her own thing is great for some problems, but terrible for others.
We need the diversity to get depth and resolution of crucial details. But, now, on top of it, we need a kind of unity that is not homogeneity.
We need, as I always come back to, "unity over diversity" or "unity in diversity".
Command and control still has to operate or the large-scale, high-order problems cannot be dealt with. Once you distribute decision-making, how do you ever regain coherent control over the emergent outcome, for which you are responsible "at the top" ?
This is a problem of "emergence." It's not possible to "have" control, but it is possible to ensure that control and coherence are "had."
Huh? This is a tricky nuance so let me hit it from several directions. You can design processes that your are confident will result in emergent coherence and sensible action based on the best understanding of the most data, but you cannot "run" the processes in real-time -- in real-time you can mostly just watch.
If all of the parts have practiced working together and responding to each other's needs, the whole thing can click and adapt. You can get a sort of "phase lock loop" holding the parts together, like the low pressure at the center of a tornado or hurricane. If you've made sure that the vertical and horizontal loops are in place and work better and better each day, that's the best you can prepare for times of stress.
Here's a few quotes from the US Army's new Field Manual FM3-24 on "Counterinsurgency" that illustrate the thinking I'm talking about. This is an unclassified document, available on the web, by the way, and says: "Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited."
This publication is available at Army Knowledge Online (www.us.army.mil) and
General Dennis J. Reimer Training and Doctrine Digital Library at (www.train.army.mil).
"This is a game of wits and will. You’ve got to be learning and adapting constantly to survive."
General Peter J. Schoomaker, USA, 2004. The manual's introduction continues:
And, the military is directly confronted with the tension between a need for agile, dynamic response from the field, and a need for overall coherence and control of the whole enterprise.
From the smallest robot or bacterium to the entire nation, the very same rules of adaptation apply. Internal coherence, internal order based on constantly updated news, and external awareness of changed circumstances are crucial. Mental models that don't work have to be let go of rapidly, by a constant effort to assume nothing and watch to see what is actually happening and if it matches what you expected to happen.
This is, no big surprise, a key part of the Toyota Way, the philosophy and strategy that let Toyota overtake America's car companies, even on their own ground.
The core lessons of a need for specialized diversity, and a need for an overarching unity on top of that, are the single most important lesson that the military, government, and industry need to focus on.
Again, no big surprise, the very same issues arise in all major religions -- there has to be adaptation to fit local cultures, an overarching unity, and a way to adapt and recognize when some mental model doesn't work.
As the old comment at medical school graduation goes, "Half of what we just taught you is wrong -- the problem is, we don't know which half. "
Every person, every nation, every company, every culture, every religion has to face this cybernetic core problem to survive over time. Every community and organization has this problem to solve.
It is one context that we can all relate to and connect to. We all need internal coherence and external adaptation, and a way to keep those operational in a rapidly changing world.
"Unity in diversity" is worth more study, and worth learning how to see this very same template in every organization around us.
We should pool our notes and learn from each other what works and what doesn't. Most people's frustrations with their boss, or their company, or larger organizations have a great deal to do with breakdowns of exactly these two functions - learning within the organization, failure to hear and be heard, failure to make use of existing people and eyes, and adapting to changing situations outside the organization without spilling the soup or losing coherence, order, and enough control to keep the thing on the road.
I wish 1 percent of media time and space was devoted to comparing notes on what we know about that issue.
=============
Related posts:
Second half of this post at "Unity and Adaptation Continued"
Example: Google Maps lets users update the data
What's wrong with decision making at the top (in general)
Further reading:
US Army Leadership Field Manual FM 22-100 (now replaced) as a model for US Business.
Rant Street's links to yet another web copy of FM 3-24.
Thanks to Anne Applebaum on Slate for posting a link to Fred Kaplan's "Counterinsurgency by the Book" .(Nov 19, 2007), and some trail that led me through Rant Street's "FM 3-24" posting on the subject that kicked off my interest in this.
These immodest conclusions follow from some very basic principles of nature that describe how any system can operate, regardless of design details. I've described these in earlier posts as a need for a "vertical" loop between the front-line staff and headquarters, and a "horizontal" loop between everyone and the outside world.
The classic model of centralized control worked when problems were relatively simple and the purpose of the size of an organization was to expand the muscle power, since the people "at the top" had enough brain power to understand the problems involved. Primarily what was involved was correcting deviations from a known solution to a known problem, and enforcing a status quo that had already proven to work. The strength of this system was stability in the face of external and internal disruptions.
So, regardless how the external world varied, the system could re-establish equilibrium and restore working order back to the state that worked.
Unfortunately, times change, "the cheese moves", and this strength in a new context became a liability not a strength. Rephrasing John Gall, "The old solution became the new problem." Because, when the external world changed permanently, not due to noise, to a new shape with new demands, the internal system still kept on recreating the old way of doing things that "always worked before." The old system could not adapt to a permanently changed external world.
That would be bad enough to wreak havoc, but things got worse. Not only did the external world change once, but now it keeps on changing and changing again. Now it is not enough to have some non-zero learning curve, the speed of learning has to keep up with the speed of change in the world. Old ways become obsolete overnight. This is a whole new ballgame.
And, things got worse than that. Not only did the problems keep changing, but the nature of the problems keeps getting more complicated to even begin to describe, let alone to fully comprehend. So, instead of a change requiring a brief note to headquarters that "they moved from there to here", the changes require a short course in some new subject area to even get a new vocabulary of what "they" are doing now. Lacking that shared vocabulary, a huge amount of information has to stream up to headquarters to be comprehended in real-time.
This is one of those situations described by algorithms in computer science, but the short of it is that it doesn't matter how bright the people are at the top or center of all this. As things continue to get more complex and move faster, at some point the task will always exceed the ability of the center to handle. We've already passed that point in most industries, and in most international situations.
It doesn't help to demand that reports to the center "distill" the problem, or boil it down, or "make it simpler" or focus on the 2-3 key points and "prioritize." These problems don't boil down any more, and they have 20 or maybe 200 points that are simultaneously "key". Like 200 holes in the floor of your boat, "which ones do we block first" doesn't actually reach to cover the task you face. All of them have to be dealt with, and within the next 15 minutes, and then 200 new ones will arise to replace them.
It seems like a losing battle. That's because it is a losing battle, to try to solve that problem using a fixed size group of people in the center "orchestrating" everything base on "their understanding" of "the situation.' That problem requires a different approach, a better algorithm.
The better way is to distribute control away from the center, and empower the front as much as possible. Instead of trying to acquire power, you have to try to delegate it across the whole organization. Then you have a chance of scaling up to the rapid fire changes of situation that are happening. Even then it's not clear there is a single variable called "winning" that you could theoretically know and monitor to see if you are doing it or not. Too much is in flight, in flux, and hasn't yet come home to roost, let alone had time for you to hear about it and understand the full implications of what you heard.
Finally, as I discussed in my white paper on disaster preparedness competencies, when things start going wrong, and stress levels increase, there is an unstoppable tendency at the top to circle the wagons, to close ranks, and to focus on trying to see that "orders" are carried out. This is not a good time to suggest learning a new set of skills and new mental model. It is not a good time to suggest that the assumptions behind the old plan bear no resemblance to the actual situation on the ground. It is a terrible time to suggest that public statements about things "working" are actually incorrect.
Again, if the world simply replayed over and over the prior battle scenes, this might work. The problem is, that's not what's happening. Entirely new situations are happening, that never happened before, and aren't in the play-book. Things we never thought could happen just did. All bets are off. All the practice scenarios are irrelevant.
So precisely when the center needs to hear the most surprising news, that their mental model is wrong about what's out there, is when the center shuts down all incoming traffic that bears such news.
So, it's critical that organizations be capable of learning very rapidly, when more than just the facts are changing, but the whole model of what's happening is wrong. This requires a learning organization that has practiced that scenario over and over before this point -- it's not a new way of doing things you can suddenly switch to in mid-stream.
It requires that the eyes and brainpower of the entire organization be mobilized, not just the muscles. And it requires distributing control as far down the chain of command, as close to the front as possible, so that responses can be as fast and instantaneous as possible.
Our bodies learned this and when our hand touches an unexpectedly hot stove, the arm doesn't wait for the news to get up to the brain and be understood -- it jerks the hand off the stove on its own authority. There is no other way to do this.
The problem looks at first glance like simple signal processing. There isn't time for an impulse to travel up to the brain and back, maybe 150 milliseconds, when a 50 millisecond response is required. As with fluent keyboarding, the fingers have to work faster than the brain can follow.
But for rapid-fire corporate battles or unfolding military situations, it's not an impulse that has to travel to headquarters -- it's a totally new CONTEXT that needs to be conveyed before the CONTENT of the message makes any sense at all. Now multiply this times 1000, speed it up, and realize that any human being can only have one context at a time, and it takes a while to change contexts.
You see the problem. Contexts cannot be processed at that speed, even if contents could be. Contents can often be distilled, by reducing them to words that are simple -- in a given shared context. If the context isn't shared, distillation is not possible, period.
Period.
This is why neurosurgeons can talk to each other, and internal medicine doctors can talk to each other, but when they try to talk across specialties, things break down. And none of them can talk to "computer people" who use entirely different language and concepts to make sense of large scale problems. ( I mean, designing a medical records system, not fixing someone's PC login.) You need the secondary and tertiary and now quaternary experts to begin to understand the problem -- but they can only talk to each other even more with each step of sub-specialization. Conclusions don't "carry across specialties."
So, largely, the only people who can understand much of the local and possibly critically important details of what's going on at front number 3,187 are people who are embedded there who have spent months coming up to speed on the situation. And there is no way they can reduce that context to a 3-page report. They can discuss it with each other in a 3-page report, but the words mean something special that would be missed if you just sent that to headquarters. "Distilling" only works in shared contexts. Period.
Statements or facts taken out of context are worse than misleading.
So, this is already a very long post, but maybe I can write a shorter version tomorrow. But let me complete the thought, with apologies.
So, to be agile and adaptive, decision-making in some ways has to get pushed to the front.
But not in every way. And life operates on multiple levels simultaneously, and we have to win on every one of those levels to win the war. None can be neglected.
So, a fragmented world of every front-line person doing his or her own thing is great for some problems, but terrible for others.
We need the diversity to get depth and resolution of crucial details. But, now, on top of it, we need a kind of unity that is not homogeneity.
We need, as I always come back to, "unity over diversity" or "unity in diversity".
Command and control still has to operate or the large-scale, high-order problems cannot be dealt with. Once you distribute decision-making, how do you ever regain coherent control over the emergent outcome, for which you are responsible "at the top" ?
This is a problem of "emergence." It's not possible to "have" control, but it is possible to ensure that control and coherence are "had."
Huh? This is a tricky nuance so let me hit it from several directions. You can design processes that your are confident will result in emergent coherence and sensible action based on the best understanding of the most data, but you cannot "run" the processes in real-time -- in real-time you can mostly just watch.
If all of the parts have practiced working together and responding to each other's needs, the whole thing can click and adapt. You can get a sort of "phase lock loop" holding the parts together, like the low pressure at the center of a tornado or hurricane. If you've made sure that the vertical and horizontal loops are in place and work better and better each day, that's the best you can prepare for times of stress.
Here's a few quotes from the US Army's new Field Manual FM3-24 on "Counterinsurgency" that illustrate the thinking I'm talking about. This is an unclassified document, available on the web, by the way, and says: "Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited."
This publication is available at Army Knowledge Online (www.us.army.mil) and
General Dennis J. Reimer Training and Doctrine Digital Library at (www.train.army.mil).
"This is a game of wits and will. You’ve got to be learning and adapting constantly to survive."
General Peter J. Schoomaker, USA, 2004. The manual's introduction continues:
I don't quote the military because I think life should be waged as a war, but because I think they are forced to face consequences of their actions and forced to learn how to learn in ways that any organization can profit from studying.
Perhaps more importantly, it provides techniques for generating and incorporating lessons learned during those operations—an essential requirement for success against today’s adaptive foes. Using these techniques and processes can keep U.S. forces more agile and adaptive than
their irregular enemies.
One common feature of insurgencies is that the government that is being targeted generally takes awhile to recognize that an insurgency is occurring.
In COIN, the side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly—the better learning organization—usually wins. Counterinsurgencies have been called learning competitions. Thus, this publication identifies “Learn and Adapt” as a modern COIN imperative for U.S. forces. However, Soldiers and Marines cannot wait until they are alerted to deploy to prepare for a COIN mission.
Adapting occurs as Soldiers and Marines apply what they have learned through study and experience, assess the results of their actions, and continue to learn during operations.
As learning organizations, the Army and Marine Corps encourage Soldiers and Marines to pay attention to the rapidly changing situations that characterize COIN operations. Current tactics, techniques, and procedures sometimes do not achieve the desired results. When that happens, successful leaders engage in a directed search for better ways to defeat the enemy. To win, the Army and Marine Corps must rapidly develop an institutional consensus on new doctrine, publish it, and carefully observe its impact on mission accomplishment. This learning cycle should repeat continuously as U.S. counterinsurgents seek to learn faster than the insurgent enemy.
The side that learns faster and adapts more rapidly wins.
And, the military is directly confronted with the tension between a need for agile, dynamic response from the field, and a need for overall coherence and control of the whole enterprise.
From the smallest robot or bacterium to the entire nation, the very same rules of adaptation apply. Internal coherence, internal order based on constantly updated news, and external awareness of changed circumstances are crucial. Mental models that don't work have to be let go of rapidly, by a constant effort to assume nothing and watch to see what is actually happening and if it matches what you expected to happen.
This is, no big surprise, a key part of the Toyota Way, the philosophy and strategy that let Toyota overtake America's car companies, even on their own ground.
The core lessons of a need for specialized diversity, and a need for an overarching unity on top of that, are the single most important lesson that the military, government, and industry need to focus on.
Again, no big surprise, the very same issues arise in all major religions -- there has to be adaptation to fit local cultures, an overarching unity, and a way to adapt and recognize when some mental model doesn't work.
As the old comment at medical school graduation goes, "Half of what we just taught you is wrong -- the problem is, we don't know which half. "
Every person, every nation, every company, every culture, every religion has to face this cybernetic core problem to survive over time. Every community and organization has this problem to solve.
It is one context that we can all relate to and connect to. We all need internal coherence and external adaptation, and a way to keep those operational in a rapidly changing world.
"Unity in diversity" is worth more study, and worth learning how to see this very same template in every organization around us.
We should pool our notes and learn from each other what works and what doesn't. Most people's frustrations with their boss, or their company, or larger organizations have a great deal to do with breakdowns of exactly these two functions - learning within the organization, failure to hear and be heard, failure to make use of existing people and eyes, and adapting to changing situations outside the organization without spilling the soup or losing coherence, order, and enough control to keep the thing on the road.
I wish 1 percent of media time and space was devoted to comparing notes on what we know about that issue.
=============
Related posts:
Second half of this post at "Unity and Adaptation Continued"
Example: Google Maps lets users update the data
What's wrong with decision making at the top (in general)
Further reading:
US Army Leadership Field Manual FM 22-100 (now replaced) as a model for US Business.
Rant Street's links to yet another web copy of FM 3-24.
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
U.S. Prison System a Costly Failure: report
The ability to reveal feedback loops and distant causes is not an academic exercise. It has very real implications for social policies based on what people "see" happening. An article by Reuters this morning on a new study of the U.S. Prison system shows the divide, of people who clearly see that harsh punishment is working, to people who clearly see that it's a disaster.
There are many other social policies, and social actions, such as the War in Iraq, that similarly divide people into "camps", which polarize and decide that the "other" groups are clearly idiots and out of touch with reality, or motivated by evil forces, or dupes of evil leaders, or something -- which leads to the conclusion that the "other" group needs to be "stopped" or "attacked" so that "we" can "win."
In a great many of these situations, the problems are less those of "bad people" and more those of feedback systems that take on a life of their own and cause events to transpire despite the best efforts of those caught up in the system to stop them.
John Gall, in his absolutely marvelous book on Systemantics, uses humor to make it easier to delve into these "system problems" comfortably and safely. The book is at first read just roll-on-the-floor-laughing funny, but after some reflection, it is profound and deserves rereading at least once a year.
(see also "Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject" )
I used to buy copies for all my staff. ("Systemantics - The underground Text of Systems Lore; How Systems Really Work, and How they Fail", (c) 1975, 77, 86, 88,90, ...) Gall is a doctor, now emeritus last time I checked, and was at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, where he observed the remarkable difficulties in getting computer systems, and for that matter most everything, to work in a sensible fashion.
Let me quote John Gall's book, then look at the morning's news on prisons in that frame of mind.
Gall says (and this is in 1975, mind you):
A short list of some of his other axioms are on Wikipedia here, but those lose the flavor of the book, which is a must-read item.
I could not agree more with Gall. The effects of feedback are just not obvious to untrained humans, and hard to see for those with extensive training, according to Professor John Sterman at MIT, in his 1000 page textbook "Business Dynamics." Not only does feedback make all kinds of problems that appear to be the "fault" of other "bad people" we love to blame, but first it distorts our perceptions, and then it alters our beliefs and convictions in order to support the first mistake.
The impact is amazingly strong, and the illusion that things are "clearly" and "obviously" the fault of some other person is powerful enough to lead entire societies to actual warfare.
Here's the report on the US Prison system that I promised, with a few key phrases bolded that relate to what Gall is talking about.
U.S. Prison System a CostlyFailure: report
And, as John Gall points out, we have almost everyone convinced that the world would in fact work marvelously well if only everyone else would see the wisdom of accepting the solution and System that the first group is proposing, which frames the problem as one of trying to "win" the debate, to elect "candidates" who will "do the right thing" and finally "fix the problem."
And, we have the very few, like John Gall and systems thinkers, who realize this is all a huge misunderstanding and are wringing their hands trying to find out how to explain the issues so that people can finally see what is going wrong and where.
Again, following Gall's spirit of advice, we need to focus not on any one particular issue and get bent out of shape over that, regardless how obvious our righteousness is, and step back and focus on why it is we are having all this trouble reaching an actual consensus on the issue.
Hint - the answer is not "bad people" or "dumb people." The answer is that we need to learn how to make "systems" become visible so that we can see where it is going wrong. Things are breaking in places where we didn't even realize there were places, so we don't look there.
And blame is so easy. But generally wrong.
We should start with the assumption that most people, MOST people, are relatively sane and well intentioned, so
The "why" has to do with systems effects, with feedback, that distorts causality, distorts time and space, distorts our perceptions, and then distorts the social markers we use to latch down those perceptions into beliefs and convictions we can act on, which then changes the people we are comfortable interacting with so we end up talking mostly to people who agree with us, further increasing our mistaken certainty.
Humans are extraordinarily good at discounting "facts" that don't agree with their beliefs, and waving around triumphantly "facts" that do agree with their beliefs, so the net effect is to inform their visual system to help out and start making the "wrong facts" completely invisible, which it helpfully does, and to make the "right facts" vivid, which it does. Then we "see" the world in "obvious" colors and can't comprehend how any sane person could disagree with us. We are not good at "hypothesis testing" and looking for evidence that our cherished beliefs are in need of an update in some areas. That's uncomfortable anyway. It's more fun to exult in how stupid "they" are and how "right" we are.
It's easy to use the "OR" model and say the problem is that EITHER they are right OR we are right. It's hard to use the "AND" model and say "Maybe we're BOTH right... and both incomplete" and search for the unity above diversity, the "elephant" instead of the "tree" or "leaf" solution. But that's where we are now, and it means nothing important is getting resolved.
This is a very expensive error. It is ripping apart our society, making our governments dysfunctional, leading to intractable wars and economic depressions, none of which are necessary.
The first step in civilization is the minimal amount of humility to accept that, despite all the evidence, it is barely possible that we, ourselves, might be wrong on something that we are sure is right. The second step is to figure out how to compare notes and "learn" from each other without jumping up and down in gloating glee when we prove to be "right" and someone else proves to be "wrong" on some fact -- as that just shuts down the whole process again.
And we need enough faith in each other to believe that long ago, before they got so mired in self-fulfilling error, most of the other people in the room were sane and well-intentioned and, under that idiotic front they have now, is a person you could actually talk to and relate to.
If we could get that far, it might be enough, with a lot of public discussion of how systems effects work, to start defusing and disentangling the social bottlenecks that are strangling us today.
Instead of trying to shout each other down and win by 51%, we need to say "I don't see anything that supports your point of view, but maybe I missed it. Help me understand. What is it that you see that I don't that might explain why we conclude such different things are going on?"
That's "civility". We seem to have lost it somewhere and need to turn the car around and go get it back again.
There are many other social policies, and social actions, such as the War in Iraq, that similarly divide people into "camps", which polarize and decide that the "other" groups are clearly idiots and out of touch with reality, or motivated by evil forces, or dupes of evil leaders, or something -- which leads to the conclusion that the "other" group needs to be "stopped" or "attacked" so that "we" can "win."
In a great many of these situations, the problems are less those of "bad people" and more those of feedback systems that take on a life of their own and cause events to transpire despite the best efforts of those caught up in the system to stop them.
John Gall, in his absolutely marvelous book on Systemantics, uses humor to make it easier to delve into these "system problems" comfortably and safely. The book is at first read just roll-on-the-floor-laughing funny, but after some reflection, it is profound and deserves rereading at least once a year.
(see also "Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject" )
I used to buy copies for all my staff. ("Systemantics - The underground Text of Systems Lore; How Systems Really Work, and How they Fail", (c) 1975, 77, 86, 88,90, ...) Gall is a doctor, now emeritus last time I checked, and was at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor, where he observed the remarkable difficulties in getting computer systems, and for that matter most everything, to work in a sensible fashion.
Let me quote John Gall's book, then look at the morning's news on prisons in that frame of mind.
Gall says (and this is in 1975, mind you):
All around us we see a world of paradox: deep, ironic, and intractable. A world in which .. the richest nations slip into demoralizing economic recession; the strongest nations go to war against the smallest and weakest and are unable to win; a world in which revolution against tyrannical systems themselves become tyrannies....
Why is this? How does it come about that things turn out so differently from what common sense would expect?
... Reformers blame everything on "the system" and propose new systems that would -- they assert -- guarantee a brave new world of justice, peace, and abundance. Everyone, it seems, has his own idea of what the problem is and how it can be corrected. But all agree on one point - that their own System would work very well if only it were universally adopted.
The point of view espoused in this essay is more radical and at the same time more pessimistic. Stated as succinctly as possible: the fundamental problem does not lie in any particular System, but rather in Systems As Such.
No one can afford not to understand the basic principles of How Systems Work. Ignorance of those basic laws is bound to lead to unrealistic expectations of the type that have plagued dreamers, schemers, and so called men of affairs from earliest times.
All over the world, in great metropolitan centers as well as in the remotest rural backwaters in sophisticated electrons laboratories and in dingy clerical offices, people everywhere are struggling with a Problem:
THING AREN'T WORKING VERY WELL.
...
This observation ha gradually come to be recognized as an on going fact of life, an inseparable component of the Human Condition. We give it here in full:
- THINGS ARE INDEED NOT WORKING VERY WELL,
- IN FACT THEY NEVER DID...
- REALITY IS MORE COMPLEX THAT IT SEEMS....
- THE OLD SYSTEM IS NOW THE NEW PROBLEM....
A short list of some of his other axioms are on Wikipedia here, but those lose the flavor of the book, which is a must-read item.
I could not agree more with Gall. The effects of feedback are just not obvious to untrained humans, and hard to see for those with extensive training, according to Professor John Sterman at MIT, in his 1000 page textbook "Business Dynamics." Not only does feedback make all kinds of problems that appear to be the "fault" of other "bad people" we love to blame, but first it distorts our perceptions, and then it alters our beliefs and convictions in order to support the first mistake.
The impact is amazingly strong, and the illusion that things are "clearly" and "obviously" the fault of some other person is powerful enough to lead entire societies to actual warfare.
Here's the report on the US Prison system that I promised, with a few key phrases bolded that relate to what Gall is talking about.
U.S. Prison System a CostlyFailure: report
Randall Mikkelsen
Nov 21, 2007
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The number of people in U.S. prisons has risen eight-fold since 1970, with little impact on crime but at great cost to taxpayers and society, researchers said in a report calling for a major justice-system overhaul.
... the U.S. prison population of 2.2 million -- nearly one-fourth of the world's total.
It recommends shorter sentences and parole terms, alternative punishments, more help for released inmates and decriminalizing recreational drugs. ...
But the recommendations run counter to decades of broad U.S. public and political support for getting tough on criminals through longer, harsher prison terms and to the Bush administration's anti-drug and strict-sentencing policies...
"Our contemporary laws and justice system practices exacerbate the crime problem, unnecessarily damage the lives of millions of people (and) waste tens of billions of dollars each year," it said.
The report was produced by the JFA Institute, a Washington criminal-justice research group, and its authors included eight criminologists from major U.S. public universities. It was funded by the Rosenbaum Foundation and by financier and political activist George Soros' Open Society Institute.
The Justice Department dismissed the recommendations and cited findings that about 25 percent of the violent-crime drop in the 1990s can be attributed to increases in imprisonment....
More than 1.5 million people are now in U.S. state and federal prisons, up from 196,429 in 1970, the report said. Another 750,000 people are in local jails. The U.S. incarceration rate is the world's highest, followed by Russia, according to 2006 figures compiled by Kings College in London.
Although the U.S. crime rate began declining in the 1990s it is still about the same as in 1973, the JFA report said. But the prison population has s soared because sentences have gotten longer and people who violate parole or probation, even with minor lapses, are more likely to be imprisoned.
"The system is almost feeding on itself now. It takes years and years and years to get out of this system and we do not see any positive impact on the crime rates," JFA President James Austin, a co-author of the report, told a news conference.
The report said the prison population is projected to grow by another 192,000 in five years, at a cost of $27.5 billion to build and operate additional prisons.
At current rates, one-third of all black males, one-sixth of Latino males, and one in 17 white males will go to prison during their lives. Women represent the fastest-growing segment of the prison population, the report said.
"The massive incarceration of young males from mostly poor- and working-class neighborhoods, and the taking of women from their families and jobs, has crippled their potential for forming healthy families and achieving economic gains," it said.
We have here all the elements John Gall mentions. We have a system that seems to have a life of its own, and is tending to expand to fill the known universe, despite no change in the crime rates in 34 years. We have a country that proclaims itself the model for "freedom" with the highest imprisonment rate in the world, higher than Russia, China, or any of the "Evil Empire" -- a fact that is well document but seems to keep coming as a surprise to many people.
We have a system ostensibly designed to resolve the problems of urban crime that seems to be sustaining the problem of urban crime by destroying black families and the ability of blacks to find employment.
And, as John Gall points out, we have almost everyone convinced that the world would in fact work marvelously well if only everyone else would see the wisdom of accepting the solution and System that the first group is proposing, which frames the problem as one of trying to "win" the debate, to elect "candidates" who will "do the right thing" and finally "fix the problem."
And, we have the very few, like John Gall and systems thinkers, who realize this is all a huge misunderstanding and are wringing their hands trying to find out how to explain the issues so that people can finally see what is going wrong and where.
Again, following Gall's spirit of advice, we need to focus not on any one particular issue and get bent out of shape over that, regardless how obvious our righteousness is, and step back and focus on why it is we are having all this trouble reaching an actual consensus on the issue.
Hint - the answer is not "bad people" or "dumb people." The answer is that we need to learn how to make "systems" become visible so that we can see where it is going wrong. Things are breaking in places where we didn't even realize there were places, so we don't look there.
And blame is so easy. But generally wrong.
We should start with the assumption that most people, MOST people, are relatively sane and well intentioned, so
the question we need to stop acting as if it's solved is"Why can't we reach a consensus on this?"The same battle is going on between sects or branches of major religions, and between religions and between religions and science. We settle for the easy conclusion that the "other camps" are clearly populated by demented fools or bad people, but that's not it at all.
The "why" has to do with systems effects, with feedback, that distorts causality, distorts time and space, distorts our perceptions, and then distorts the social markers we use to latch down those perceptions into beliefs and convictions we can act on, which then changes the people we are comfortable interacting with so we end up talking mostly to people who agree with us, further increasing our mistaken certainty.
Humans are extraordinarily good at discounting "facts" that don't agree with their beliefs, and waving around triumphantly "facts" that do agree with their beliefs, so the net effect is to inform their visual system to help out and start making the "wrong facts" completely invisible, which it helpfully does, and to make the "right facts" vivid, which it does. Then we "see" the world in "obvious" colors and can't comprehend how any sane person could disagree with us. We are not good at "hypothesis testing" and looking for evidence that our cherished beliefs are in need of an update in some areas. That's uncomfortable anyway. It's more fun to exult in how stupid "they" are and how "right" we are.
It's easy to use the "OR" model and say the problem is that EITHER they are right OR we are right. It's hard to use the "AND" model and say "Maybe we're BOTH right... and both incomplete" and search for the unity above diversity, the "elephant" instead of the "tree" or "leaf" solution. But that's where we are now, and it means nothing important is getting resolved.
This is a very expensive error. It is ripping apart our society, making our governments dysfunctional, leading to intractable wars and economic depressions, none of which are necessary.
The first step in civilization is the minimal amount of humility to accept that, despite all the evidence, it is barely possible that we, ourselves, might be wrong on something that we are sure is right. The second step is to figure out how to compare notes and "learn" from each other without jumping up and down in gloating glee when we prove to be "right" and someone else proves to be "wrong" on some fact -- as that just shuts down the whole process again.
And we need enough faith in each other to believe that long ago, before they got so mired in self-fulfilling error, most of the other people in the room were sane and well-intentioned and, under that idiotic front they have now, is a person you could actually talk to and relate to.
If we could get that far, it might be enough, with a lot of public discussion of how systems effects work, to start defusing and disentangling the social bottlenecks that are strangling us today.
Instead of trying to shout each other down and win by 51%, we need to say "I don't see anything that supports your point of view, but maybe I missed it. Help me understand. What is it that you see that I don't that might explain why we conclude such different things are going on?"
That's "civility". We seem to have lost it somewhere and need to turn the car around and go get it back again.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Employee English as a unity in diversity problem
The "question" of what language employees "should" speak while at work in the US can be viewed in different frameworks, which give different answers. This is a perfect example of the "same content" having a completely different meaning in a "different context", and a good discussion case for how to grapple with that kind of social issue.
The case in point involved two women at a Salvation Army thrift store, who had been there 5 years, who were caught speaking Spanish to each other while they were sorting clothes. For this act, they were fired, let go from their jobs. The US Government's EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) brought an action against the Salvation Army to reinstate the women. Congressmen took action to block the EEOC. The issue has escalated to a heated battle in Congress that you can read about in "English only workplace rules stir debate", LA Times, Nov 20,2007. Briefly:
I will attempt to focus more on how we, as a society, attempt to think about and discuss this kind of problem than on which way this particular issue should be resolved. They are different problems, and the disagreement over the issue surfaces the far more general structural problem that
In more mature societies, like Japan, this "let's fight" approach to decision-making went out of fashion a thousand or more years ago. If our children attempt to resolve what TV show to watch by a fist-fight, we intervene and tell them to "grow up." It's good advice.
Right now, according to the LA Times, the question of how to deal with employees and English has succeeded in blocking passage of a budget bill in the US Congress, which was due October 1st -- 6 weeks ago. I suspect there are other issues similarly blocked. It seems obvious to me, and to much of the world outside Washington, that this entire process of reaching decisions has run out of steam, and it will only get worse as problems get more complex and the ones we have neglected start piling up even higher in the back room.
One such issue is annoying, but we now have so many issues that our infrastructure is crumbling, government can't function, and the world would be rolling on the floor laughing at us if we didn't also have a huge army, nuclear weapons and, apparently, poor self-regulation.
How do we fix that state of affairs?
Let's go back and look at this problem from at least two viewpoints, seeking what are rational concerns, not irrational conclusions.
From the employer's point of view, it is, I think a legitimate and responsible concern to want to maintain sufficient control over events so that the business can continue to operate and grow. I am guessing here that managers who don't speak a second language feel they can't manage what's going on if they can't understand what people on their staff are saying to them. And managers want employees who have to work together to be able to communicate fairly effortlessly so they can coordinate efforts to get the job done. If a third employee, say, couldn't assist because that employee didn't speak Spanish and the two women refused to speak English in that case, this would be a problem. Those are reasonable concerns.
On the other hand, the EEOC seems justified in intervening when unvarnished ignorance or prejudice or bigotry or paranoia on the part of managers punishes people for actions that are causing no harm to the business. Prohibiting an employee from talking over the phone to her child in Spanish during a work-break or lunch would seem an obvious example of that.
An international business framework, on the other hand, would say that the US needs to wake up to the fact that the rest of the world, and many customers, do not speak English, or would prefer to use some other language if possible. It would seem that a fully bilingual staff and management would not only solve the management issues, but would make a far more powerful business able to work directly with many more customers.
And, on a different level, employees do speak a different language than management, even when they are all speaking in English. That isn't fixed by demanding everyone speak English.
It is reasonable to work towards a common language that people can use when they need to come together, and in most of the USA that was not previously part of Mexico or Spain, that would probably be English. A common language is good.
It seems unreasonable to expect that diverse subcultures should all be abandoned in order to homogenize everyone and abandon the richness and capacity that a multilingual and multi-cultural workforce brings to the job.
I agree whole-heartedly that internal communication within most business organizations today in the USA is just terrible, and this poses a serious threat to their operation and survival. Also, communication between the business and the outside world is pretty bad, and poses a similar threat.
Both business and individuals have legitimate needs to thrive and grow, but in the Big Picture these cannot possibly ever be met by homogenizing the workforce. A common language is good, but as an "auxiliary language", when we need to cross cultures, not as a one-size-fits-all requirement. People need to coordinate and collaborate, yes -- but the wider solution to that is to improve our ability to collaborate across diversity, not to eliminate diversity.
The multi-level view, accepting the legitimacy of corporate needs as well as individual employees, if carried out correctly, leads inexorably to a focus on solving issues of "unity in diversity." That resolves issues at all levels. Only that resolves issues at all levels. Anything else is ultimately a waste of time, that will have to be redone. In "lean manufacturing" terms, it is "muda" - trying to solve a problem by getting good at something you shouldn't be doing in the first place, and blocking the actual solution in the process.
In medicine, attacking symptoms instead of problems is called "quackery." It's recognized as a bad thing that, first of all, actually does harm. It's a good concept. If we want health at all levels, a healthy society, healthy world-connected business, and healthy individuals, we need to focus our limited resources on the right problem: unity in diversity.
As a side-bar, I wonder how much of this issue would loom so huge in the US if we had the belief that Americans, like the rest of the world, were genetically capable of learning to function well in several different languages. I feel there is an unspoken fear, or anxiety, or maybe a spoken one, that we are somehow incapable of learning other languages, so we have this unspoken constraint on which language that should be. We see this as an "OR" problem, not an "AND" problem.
I wrote Noam Chomsky at MIT, one of the world's best linguists, actually, and asked him whether he thought Americans had some issue that prevented them from learning multiple languages. He replied no, in his mind it was just that we'd managed to get by this far without needing to do that so people felt no pressure to learn other languages.
On a separate tangent, I note that some "conservatives" or whatever the term is these days believe that it is not the appropriate job of "government" to be micromanaging the internals of companies, although that concept doesn't seem to scale down, as they then also believe it's OK for managers to micromanage employees. I agree, somewhat, it it shouldn't be the Federal Government that has to intervene to push companies to wake up to the world and diversity, if the right people would pick up that task and do their job. In my mind, that would be the stockholders and investors who are trying to maximize their wealth and the ability of companies they have invested in to thrive. Enlightened investors, looking at the world, would almost certainly think company management should stop being parochial and short-sighted and get with the new world-scale program.
I'm baffled as to why they don't express that sentiment more loudly and focus instead on short-term gains that are devastating long-term gains. A sin of "youth" I guess, that hasn't yet realized that the end of the road of maximum short-term gains is ruin, not victory.
Maybe it really is that we don't train our children to think about different reference frames. The strategy "Sacrifice the future for today", when we get to the tomorrow we're trying to survive to reach, actually plays out as "You sacrificed today for yesterday, which is gone now." We've been doing a lot of that lately, and now "The future isn't what it used to be."
Today's NY Times also has an article on how widespread the psychological phenomenon is of "denial." Maybe that's relevant to this discussion.
In any case, if you keep throwing out all the past, it's really hard to be a "learning organization." We seem to have, as a nation, a problem in being better able to deal with the day each day. If anything, judging from the state of Congress, or the local governments in Michigan and California we seem increasingly less able to deal with each day. We have what T.S. Eliot described as an "age that moves progressively backwards."
While other people or places or things may be "to blame" for causing some issues we face, it's hard to look any place but the mirror for an inability to learn from experience.
As I said once, if each step takes you further from your goal, you will never reach it.
We have some piece of our social structure in backwards, it would appear.
The case in point involved two women at a Salvation Army thrift store, who had been there 5 years, who were caught speaking Spanish to each other while they were sorting clothes. For this act, they were fired, let go from their jobs. The US Government's EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) brought an action against the Salvation Army to reinstate the women. Congressmen took action to block the EEOC. The issue has escalated to a heated battle in Congress that you can read about in "English only workplace rules stir debate", LA Times, Nov 20,2007. Briefly:
WASHINGTON --(AP News) A government lawsuit against the Salvation Army has the House and Senate at loggerheads over whether to nullify a law that prohibits employers from firing people who don't speak English on the job.
The fight illustrates the explosiveness of immigration as an issue in the 2008 elections.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are pushing hard to protect employers who require their workers to speak English, but Democratic leaders have blocked the move despite narrow vote tallies in the GOP's favor.
For more than 30 years, federal rules have generally barred employers from establishing English-only requirements for their workers.
But in a demonstration of the volatility of the immigration issue, Senate Republicans have won passage of legislation preventing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from enforcing the rules against English-only workplaces.
House Democratic leaders, meanwhile, have promised Latino lawmakers that the language issue was a nonstarter and the resulting impasse has stalled the underlying budget bill, which lawmakers had hoped to send to President Bush this week....
I will attempt to focus more on how we, as a society, attempt to think about and discuss this kind of problem than on which way this particular issue should be resolved. They are different problems, and the disagreement over the issue surfaces the far more general structural problem that
we, in the US, don't know how to resolve such issues, only how to fight over them until one side gets 51% of the votes and can "win."At least, for a few years ... then problems embedded in that solution become more visible, and the "other side" gets 51% of the vote, and "wins" and changes the rules. At least, for a few years ... Etc.
In more mature societies, like Japan, this "let's fight" approach to decision-making went out of fashion a thousand or more years ago. If our children attempt to resolve what TV show to watch by a fist-fight, we intervene and tell them to "grow up." It's good advice.
Right now, according to the LA Times, the question of how to deal with employees and English has succeeded in blocking passage of a budget bill in the US Congress, which was due October 1st -- 6 weeks ago. I suspect there are other issues similarly blocked. It seems obvious to me, and to much of the world outside Washington, that this entire process of reaching decisions has run out of steam, and it will only get worse as problems get more complex and the ones we have neglected start piling up even higher in the back room.
If we're waiting until the world gets simpler again, it will be a very long wait.Now, in my mind, the up-stream issue here isn't English, it's how we can learn as a society to resolve issues instead of whatever you call it that we do now. By "resolve", I mean that happy case where the root issues are actually fixed, and the symptoms don't keep popping up again and causing yet more conflict. We can "check it off" our list. We can be done, once and for all, with it and with the hard feelings and on-going damage the current 51% solutions are causing. We can stop the bleeding, not just put on a new bandage.
One such issue is annoying, but we now have so many issues that our infrastructure is crumbling, government can't function, and the world would be rolling on the floor laughing at us if we didn't also have a huge army, nuclear weapons and, apparently, poor self-regulation.
How do we fix that state of affairs?
Let's go back and look at this problem from at least two viewpoints, seeking what are rational concerns, not irrational conclusions.
From the employer's point of view, it is, I think a legitimate and responsible concern to want to maintain sufficient control over events so that the business can continue to operate and grow. I am guessing here that managers who don't speak a second language feel they can't manage what's going on if they can't understand what people on their staff are saying to them. And managers want employees who have to work together to be able to communicate fairly effortlessly so they can coordinate efforts to get the job done. If a third employee, say, couldn't assist because that employee didn't speak Spanish and the two women refused to speak English in that case, this would be a problem. Those are reasonable concerns.
On the other hand, the EEOC seems justified in intervening when unvarnished ignorance or prejudice or bigotry or paranoia on the part of managers punishes people for actions that are causing no harm to the business. Prohibiting an employee from talking over the phone to her child in Spanish during a work-break or lunch would seem an obvious example of that.
An international business framework, on the other hand, would say that the US needs to wake up to the fact that the rest of the world, and many customers, do not speak English, or would prefer to use some other language if possible. It would seem that a fully bilingual staff and management would not only solve the management issues, but would make a far more powerful business able to work directly with many more customers.
And, on a different level, employees do speak a different language than management, even when they are all speaking in English. That isn't fixed by demanding everyone speak English.
It is reasonable to work towards a common language that people can use when they need to come together, and in most of the USA that was not previously part of Mexico or Spain, that would probably be English. A common language is good.
It seems unreasonable to expect that diverse subcultures should all be abandoned in order to homogenize everyone and abandon the richness and capacity that a multilingual and multi-cultural workforce brings to the job.
Unity is needed above diversity, not instead of diversity.The situation can be framed at a local scale that "the problem" is diversity, and the diversity should be made to go away so business can thrive. If we stand back and look at the larger scale, at the international world today, that's a poor frame. So, the situation could be framed differently - that "the problem" is that we, as a society, are not very literate or mature in how to work with and across diversity, and we need to fix that, so that business can thrive even more on an international stage.
I agree whole-heartedly that internal communication within most business organizations today in the USA is just terrible, and this poses a serious threat to their operation and survival. Also, communication between the business and the outside world is pretty bad, and poses a similar threat.
These communication issues damage the "vertical internal loop" and the "horizontal external loop" of feedback that are the minimum capacity of any cybernetic adaptive system period. (see my earlier posts on the two loops ).Demanding everyone speak English cannot even fix the internal loop, because subcultures use English differently, and forcing English-only damages the external loop in today's world. A common language is a good thing, but the context for it has to be not only diversity-tolerant, but diversity-embracing and encouraging and nurturing, or you've solved the wrong problem.
Both business and individuals have legitimate needs to thrive and grow, but in the Big Picture these cannot possibly ever be met by homogenizing the workforce. A common language is good, but as an "auxiliary language", when we need to cross cultures, not as a one-size-fits-all requirement. People need to coordinate and collaborate, yes -- but the wider solution to that is to improve our ability to collaborate across diversity, not to eliminate diversity.
The multi-level view, accepting the legitimacy of corporate needs as well as individual employees, if carried out correctly, leads inexorably to a focus on solving issues of "unity in diversity." That resolves issues at all levels. Only that resolves issues at all levels. Anything else is ultimately a waste of time, that will have to be redone. In "lean manufacturing" terms, it is "muda" - trying to solve a problem by getting good at something you shouldn't be doing in the first place, and blocking the actual solution in the process.
In medicine, attacking symptoms instead of problems is called "quackery." It's recognized as a bad thing that, first of all, actually does harm. It's a good concept. If we want health at all levels, a healthy society, healthy world-connected business, and healthy individuals, we need to focus our limited resources on the right problem: unity in diversity.
As a side-bar, I wonder how much of this issue would loom so huge in the US if we had the belief that Americans, like the rest of the world, were genetically capable of learning to function well in several different languages. I feel there is an unspoken fear, or anxiety, or maybe a spoken one, that we are somehow incapable of learning other languages, so we have this unspoken constraint on which language that should be. We see this as an "OR" problem, not an "AND" problem.
I wrote Noam Chomsky at MIT, one of the world's best linguists, actually, and asked him whether he thought Americans had some issue that prevented them from learning multiple languages. He replied no, in his mind it was just that we'd managed to get by this far without needing to do that so people felt no pressure to learn other languages.
On a separate tangent, I note that some "conservatives" or whatever the term is these days believe that it is not the appropriate job of "government" to be micromanaging the internals of companies, although that concept doesn't seem to scale down, as they then also believe it's OK for managers to micromanage employees. I agree, somewhat, it it shouldn't be the Federal Government that has to intervene to push companies to wake up to the world and diversity, if the right people would pick up that task and do their job. In my mind, that would be the stockholders and investors who are trying to maximize their wealth and the ability of companies they have invested in to thrive. Enlightened investors, looking at the world, would almost certainly think company management should stop being parochial and short-sighted and get with the new world-scale program.
I'm baffled as to why they don't express that sentiment more loudly and focus instead on short-term gains that are devastating long-term gains. A sin of "youth" I guess, that hasn't yet realized that the end of the road of maximum short-term gains is ruin, not victory.
Maybe it really is that we don't train our children to think about different reference frames. The strategy "Sacrifice the future for today", when we get to the tomorrow we're trying to survive to reach, actually plays out as "You sacrificed today for yesterday, which is gone now." We've been doing a lot of that lately, and now "The future isn't what it used to be."
Today's NY Times also has an article on how widespread the psychological phenomenon is of "denial." Maybe that's relevant to this discussion.
In any case, if you keep throwing out all the past, it's really hard to be a "learning organization." We seem to have, as a nation, a problem in being better able to deal with the day each day. If anything, judging from the state of Congress, or the local governments in Michigan and California we seem increasingly less able to deal with each day. We have what T.S. Eliot described as an "age that moves progressively backwards."
While other people or places or things may be "to blame" for causing some issues we face, it's hard to look any place but the mirror for an inability to learn from experience.
As I said once, if each step takes you further from your goal, you will never reach it.
We have some piece of our social structure in backwards, it would appear.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
On a prayer
"Love God, then do what's obvious." I think it was St. Augustine who gave that advice when asked how to deal with hard moral choices. Seen from the right angle, the answer is obvious.Physicists use the same technique to crack very hard problems, but call it something different. "Reframing" is what my last two posts called it, or context-shifting. Whatever it's called, it works.
Today I'll consider that as one type of "prayer" and look at how it can help us get through the day.
I'm drawing heavily as well on my 1965 dog-eared copy of "A Teacher's Manual - Ten Basic Steps Toward Christian Maturity" from Campus Crusade for Christ, Bill Bright, ed., but this is not a technique that can't be used by Jews or Moslems or atheists.
Summing it all up is a quote in Ten Steps from Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran church, which I recall as this:
"Work, work, work! From early morning to late at night. Some days I have so much to do I have to spend the first three hours in prayer!"I'll put that next to a quote I probably mis-remember the words of as well from President Abraham Lincoln, a former logger. "If I had ten minutes to chop down a tree, I'd spend the first five sharpening my axe."
And finally, my quote from Charles Schultz's cartoon dog Snoopy: " Did you ever notice, that if you think about something at 2 AM, and then again at noon the next day, you get two different answers?"
Why's this work? Well, humans have a very limited mental capacity, given the problems we're trying to solve. If there are, say, 10 factors involved, and they interact, we have about 100 direct interactions, each of which has 10 more second order interactions, each of which has 10 more third-order interactions, etc. The mind boggles. Mathematicians might make a 10 x 10 grid or array of numbers, a "matrix", where the number in the ith-row and the j'th column tries to capture how those two items interact.
There is a trick, however. If the problem is "rotated" to a new set of coordinates, a new reference frame, these numbers all change. For many problems there is a "best" set of cordinates, a best way to look at them, for which all the numbers off the diagonal "go away". All the complexity vanishes. The problem reduces to 10 items that don't interact, and can be solved easily. The answer is obvious. There's not quiz, but for completeness for those who want to follow this trail, the coordinates are called "eigenvectors" and the numbers are "eigenvalues".
So, one way a physicist cracks a hard problem is to describe it in any convenient reference frame, then mathematically rotate that frame around to this best frame, and only then actually doing what most people think of "solving", that is, plugging in the numbers, which at that point looks "easy" because, at that point, it is!
There are many kinds and many purposes of prayer, but one kind is this kind - an activity like that used by Martin Luther, to effectively rotate the problem, or the viewpoint, or the viewer, around to where it's obvious how to proceed. I use this technique every day. I don't know how I ever got along without it.
It does require "thinking globally and acting locally." You have to let go of the "accidental reference frame" you are immersed in, with your local issues and concerns, and seek to realign yourself with the Big Picture, God's reference frame, and that set of values. If you can do this "letting go" and "dying to self", you can re-pent, that is re-think, that is "turn and be healed." Not too surprisingly, it's hard to "rotate" something if part of it is stuck, even a tiny part. You have to truly "let go" or sigh and "submit" to God's will, not your own. Then it works ... sometimes. But when it works, wow, does it work! Amazing solutions you'd have never thought of come popping into your head -- most of which involve having to rely on or trust or forgive other people, which is the thing your own ego was hoping to avoid.
Some solutions allow everyone to win. Let me rephrase that. Some solutions require that everyone win, and won't work if you try to "win" at the "expense" of others. Some egos have a hard time with that and walk sadly away, muttering that such an outcome isn't "winning" in their mind.
Well, as I said, there's only one lifeboat Earth, with several hundred holes in the bottom, and it really is no solution at all to just "fix my end of the boat" so that "I'm floating higher than them now!" Tis a short-lived victory dance. Worse if your solution involved speeding the rate at which "they" are sinking. That reminds me of the current mortgage / credit disaster, where some people thought they'd get rich by defrauding poor people and the world's bankers -- then discovered that "things are connected" on a larger scale than they were paying attention to.
Following up on my last several posts, note that this solution technique doesn't involve anything that's on your desk, or in your workspace -- it involves changing the invisible but profoundly important context in which you are operating to one that works better.
For Christians, this often involves reading the Bible, or reflecting on memorized passages of Scripture, but I have to stress that this is not an analytic activity in the sense people usually mean. This doesn't involve classic logic, of finding one verse that says "A implies B", and another verse that says "B implies C" and then computing that this means A implies C, or any sort of detailed symbol or word processing activity. The big step here is not "content processing" that science and reason is so good at, it is "context processing" that science tends to forget exists.
Nothing in this approach depends on whether it was "7 days" or "7 billion years" it took to create the Earth. Those details wash out, and are not worth fighting over, in my mind. Attacks by Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists don't matter. What matters is aligning your own spirit and "getting with the program."
As with Snoopy, once this is done, the very same effort to tackle the very same problem that didn't work before, suddenly works. In fact, it works so well that the answer is "obvious" and doesn't require any further computational struggling at all, once you "see" what is involved and going on.
Done in a group, this is a key component, I think, in what the Baha'is call "consultation", which is an effort to apply rational thought after first establishing a spiritual framework and keeping that in place. Like filling the area with water, formerly "heavy" logs, too heavy to lift, suddenly become buoyant and can be moved by a child. That's the desired outcome of the process.
Similarly, when Baha'is talk about "spiritual solutions to economic problems" I think immediately of this kind of effect. We are blinded to perfectly good, immediately available solutions by our attachment to accidental local frames of thinking, and constraints involving "competition" and "winning" or "exposing weakness" or "exposing helplessness." It's an advanced social version of the urban legend tendency, taken too lightly, of men who prefer to drive all day, lost, rather than stop and ask for directions.
In fact, let me wrap this up with an equally sexist joke, about a very serious problem we have that has to be addressed. Three travelers, two men and an woman, come to a raging river.
One man looks, and says "No problem, I'm strong!" , ties his belongings in his shirt, revealing his muscular arms, and tries to swim heroically across, but is swept away. The second man says, "I can beat that with technology!", grabs a local rowboat and tries to row heroically across, but is swept away. The woman watches them being carried downstream and says "Oh, for God's sake!" and walks across the bridge.
I think we're being swept away, as a society, surrounded by help we refuse to see.
(credits - "If prayer doesn't work,there is always satellite" by Carol Mitchell
"Teamwork" photo from "Ollieda" )
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Frames and religious truth
If the meaning of words depends on context, and you move to a new context, then what does it mean to have "the same message?" And, generally, if you don't move at all but just wait, a new context will come to you. Then what does it mean to be faithful to the original message?
This problem is faced by all organizations or religions that survive a long time, and has a lot to do with what is required in order to survive a long time and across multiple contexts and cultures.
Sincere thinkers in Islam are struggling now with both the problems of "same message in different cultures" and "same message in different times." These problems are at least as large as the clash with Western values, that are visible daily on TV and over the internet.
This is not an easy conversation. In some parts of the Mideast, it seems there is an attempt to preserve the message, seemingly put at risk by Islam's heyday of leading the world in technology, by preserving the culture in which it was written, which means denying the last 700 years of technical progress. That's not working very well.
Spreading Islam to other cultural areas of the world has its own issues. Here's a few excerpts from a piece by Tom Peter in the Christian Science Monitor "Cultures clash in US Mosques" (May 17, 2007). (bolding added).
This problem is faced by all organizations or religions that survive a long time, and has a lot to do with what is required in order to survive a long time and across multiple contexts and cultures.
Sincere thinkers in Islam are struggling now with both the problems of "same message in different cultures" and "same message in different times." These problems are at least as large as the clash with Western values, that are visible daily on TV and over the internet.
This is not an easy conversation. In some parts of the Mideast, it seems there is an attempt to preserve the message, seemingly put at risk by Islam's heyday of leading the world in technology, by preserving the culture in which it was written, which means denying the last 700 years of technical progress. That's not working very well.
Spreading Islam to other cultural areas of the world has its own issues. Here's a few excerpts from a piece by Tom Peter in the Christian Science Monitor "Cultures clash in US Mosques" (May 17, 2007). (bolding added).
Like any good Muslim, Ali Karjoo-Ravary went to mosque on Friday seeking spiritual inspiration. What the 19-year-old Iranian-American found, however, was something completely different.
... Even as he made out the imam's words, the message made little sense. "The entire sermon was about 'Don't let a girl pat your back. It can lead to things,' " Karjoo-Ravary recounts.
The imam's disconnect with American culture shocked Karjoo-Ravary. Trying to gauge the reaction of other young congregants, he spotted a cluster of teenagers and 20-somethings toward the back of the mosque... The entire group had tuned out the sermon and was texting busily.
"There's just a very different worldview."Though much attention is given to sectarian differences within Islam – such as Shiites versus Sunnis – equally sizable gaps can exist between regional variants. Every culture that adopted Islam infused its local traditions into the religion – from the food eaten at religious holidays to the social boundaries between men and women. Provided these indigenous customs don't clash with the theological core of Islam, this is perfectly permissible, says Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who leads the Al-Farah Mosque in New York City.
In the US, however, the regional varieties are coming closer together, which can create friction.
"The immigrant generation is still living psychologically in their homeland," says Imam Abdul Rauf. "The second generation is the one that begins to assert itself as belonging to the new society."
Though Abdul Rauf moved to America at age 17, he spent his childhood in Egypt, Malaysia, and England. The experience, he says, taught him the difference between "what is religious and what is cultural."
"In our communities, the challenge is people who just won't let go of ideas that they think define Islam when in fact it just defines the culture in which they were born," says Asra Nomani, a second generation Muslim-American in Morgantown, W. Va., and author of "Standing Alone in Mecca: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam."
"When [immigrant imams] are helping you and answering your questions, they're giving it from the perspective of wherever they're from without taking into consideration where they are, what's the context, what's the country like, what's the culture of the country," says Gulrukh Rahman, a Pakistani Muslim in New York City who has lived in the US for 12 years. "A lot of that is pushing young people away from the mosque."
Those who embrace foreign imams are often urged to withdraw from American culture, says Ms. Rahman. She worries that these communities will become completely shut off and needlessly reclusive.
"We have to integrate," says Nehela. "I teach my brothers and my sisters here that you have to build a strong relationship with your neighbors. Get to know them and help them."
Of course, this is not just a problem of religions. Any long-standing legal tradition has the problem that precedents use words and concepts in ways that may not make any sense today, and the question is who is authorized to recognize that and "change the law" in order to preserve the spirit of the original? Once you open the door to changing the law, how do you stop total collapse from all inconvenient precedents?
Again, the problem is that there is huge value stored in the level of control embodied in the existing set of laws, that are always fighting forces that would break or dissolve them. How do you preserve the values of the past without necessarily clinging to the ways these values were expressed in the past. Can content be distinguished from accidents of context?
Similarly, if religion A at one time in history says "X", and religion B at another time in history, in another place says "Y", what is a valid way to determine whether X and Y are the same or different, after accounting for the change in context?
This gets into the nuanced area of distinguishing the "spirit of the law" from "the letter of the law", which a good judge will pay attention to. Many parties today, with very high priced attorneys, stay within the "letter of the law" while grossly violating the spirit. This seems wrong.
So if we believe that crowds have wisdom and emergent perception, and we are trying to figure out what different religions "saw" or "see", we can't get hung up on the words used and try to compare "the letter of the law" -- we need to punch through to the spirit of the law and compare that, corrected for the change in context in space, time, and culture.
And, in turn, that requires some wisdom in distinguishing between, basically, pixels and "an image". Images, it turns out, are subtle things, and far more subtle than strings of symbols or words.
For one thing, images ride up over their pixels with a life of their own, independent of the pixels. You can take a picture of George Washington and change every other pixel to pure
black, or white, or a random mix of the two, and you can still "see the image". No pixel matters or is critical, and yet, they all matter. It's not a picture of my cat.
Most arguments about religion, it seems to me, get lost in comparing letters of the law, or words, or pixels, and lose track of the entire bigger picture. Molehills are made into mountains dividing philosophies and moralities that are almost identical in terms of what behavior they exhort, giving many a convenient excuse to ignore them all.
All of which comes to the realization that understanding how content and context interact is not only a problem of science, or of commerce, or management versus labor, or medicine versus surgery, or clinical health versus public health, but it is also a core problem of theology and interfaith relationships. The battles between subgroups within a religion over meaning of some small thing can blow it all out of proportion, and end up being more widespread and violent than battles between religions.
And, of course, as in "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", differences in unspoken context can complicate communications between men and women every day.
Some of the differences may be honest differences, some may be efforts to subvert or hijack the point, but I suspect many differences are figments of our minds and we are killing each other because we simply don't grasp the power that world-view and perspective and context have to alter the meaning of content.
Any way we can find to educate ourselves and our children in the power of context and how failure to account for it can cause misunderstanding and conflict would seem like something we should focus on and support and include as part of our K-12 education.
And, for passionate atheists like Richard Dawkins, I'd suggest that in understanding why religion is so widespread and powerful, they need to stop looking at the content and discounting this word or that, and look instead at the context, at the frame that religions bring to surround thinking about real-world problems, and evaluate the impact of that frame.
As I quoted Snoopy saying in my last post, effectively, frames change everything. Some things you need to believe to see. If we recast what we see as battles to the death over values into questions of accounting for different frames, most of the causes of or excuses for violence go away.
Again, the problem is that there is huge value stored in the level of control embodied in the existing set of laws, that are always fighting forces that would break or dissolve them. How do you preserve the values of the past without necessarily clinging to the ways these values were expressed in the past. Can content be distinguished from accidents of context?
Similarly, if religion A at one time in history says "X", and religion B at another time in history, in another place says "Y", what is a valid way to determine whether X and Y are the same or different, after accounting for the change in context?
This gets into the nuanced area of distinguishing the "spirit of the law" from "the letter of the law", which a good judge will pay attention to. Many parties today, with very high priced attorneys, stay within the "letter of the law" while grossly violating the spirit. This seems wrong.
So if we believe that crowds have wisdom and emergent perception, and we are trying to figure out what different religions "saw" or "see", we can't get hung up on the words used and try to compare "the letter of the law" -- we need to punch through to the spirit of the law and compare that, corrected for the change in context in space, time, and culture.
And, in turn, that requires some wisdom in distinguishing between, basically, pixels and "an image". Images, it turns out, are subtle things, and far more subtle than strings of symbols or words.
For one thing, images ride up over their pixels with a life of their own, independent of the pixels. You can take a picture of George Washington and change every other pixel to pure
black, or white, or a random mix of the two, and you can still "see the image". No pixel matters or is critical, and yet, they all matter. It's not a picture of my cat.
Most arguments about religion, it seems to me, get lost in comparing letters of the law, or words, or pixels, and lose track of the entire bigger picture. Molehills are made into mountains dividing philosophies and moralities that are almost identical in terms of what behavior they exhort, giving many a convenient excuse to ignore them all.
All of which comes to the realization that understanding how content and context interact is not only a problem of science, or of commerce, or management versus labor, or medicine versus surgery, or clinical health versus public health, but it is also a core problem of theology and interfaith relationships. The battles between subgroups within a religion over meaning of some small thing can blow it all out of proportion, and end up being more widespread and violent than battles between religions.
And, of course, as in "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus", differences in unspoken context can complicate communications between men and women every day.
Some of the differences may be honest differences, some may be efforts to subvert or hijack the point, but I suspect many differences are figments of our minds and we are killing each other because we simply don't grasp the power that world-view and perspective and context have to alter the meaning of content.
Any way we can find to educate ourselves and our children in the power of context and how failure to account for it can cause misunderstanding and conflict would seem like something we should focus on and support and include as part of our K-12 education.
And, for passionate atheists like Richard Dawkins, I'd suggest that in understanding why religion is so widespread and powerful, they need to stop looking at the content and discounting this word or that, and look instead at the context, at the frame that religions bring to surround thinking about real-world problems, and evaluate the impact of that frame.
As I quoted Snoopy saying in my last post, effectively, frames change everything. Some things you need to believe to see. If we recast what we see as battles to the death over values into questions of accounting for different frames, most of the causes of or excuses for violence go away.
I've been framed!
There are two ways to change the meaning of something - you can change the something, or you can change the context in which you say it. If we don't account for this, we will make terrible mistakes in communicating with each other, and even with ourselves. If we grasp this, we can overcome many of the problems that plague our world today, which are results of unrealized context shifts. We have content processors but what we need now are "context-processors."
We all know that a quote, taken "by itself" out of context can be totally different than what it meant at the time. This is often visible in courtroom dramas, where the person is asked by the attorney, "Answer, yes or no, did you say this?" followed by some damning phrase or sentence that sounds totally wrong out of context. We all know this is unfair and somehow wrong, but don't have a strong way to assert that or to understand how pervasive this effect is.
It doesn't just affect communications. It affects our ability to work alone!
My favorite expression of this truth was a cartoon one day by Charles Schultz of Snoopy, the dog, lying on top of his doghouse, staring at the stars and pondering. He said:
Did you ever noticeThis cartoon is profound. Slow down and consider that this means. This says that a correctly functioning human being has a context-sensitive thinker-thingie that produces different answers to the same inputs depending on what larger context it is sitting in at the time.
that if you think about something at 2 AM
and then again at noon the next day
you get two different answers?
This is, in my mind, a "feature not a bug." In fact, this seems to me to be the key to reconciling humans and resolving age old conflicts that have seemed totally impossible to tackle.
This is also a critical insight in trying to figure out how to make decisions today that don't seem totally stupid tomorrow.
That's true whether you are a person, a group, a corporation, or a nation.
We are walking around comparing "content" and failing to account for different "context" in which that content was perceived or generated. In small, local worlds where context is shared and identical among people, we used to be able to get away with that. Once we start trying to cross cultures or "silos" of expertise, and do something interdisciplinary or international, this tends to trip us up every time. We didn't learn the "general case."
Content is explicit, obvious, the kind of thing you can hit with a hammer. Context is implicit, invisible, unstated, and hard to describe even when you try. But it is vital that we learn how to do this, to get by in a diverse world - a world in which different people are operating in different contexts but trying to communicate with each other over space and time.
It is crucial when we try to take some thought or observation, about a patient, say, and "record it" in some electronic database where we will pull it up a year later and compare the two to see what changed. Are we capturing what we need to do that assessment correctly? Are we writing something down in words that will bring up the right thoughts to a different doctor next year?
Tragically, we have failed, socially, to understand the full implications of this issue. The miracle of technology allows us to store or send content across space at the speed of light, but, oopsie, forgot about the context part of the message. What gets delivered is not what was sent, in huge ways.
It does not have to be this way. In the same way that we have built computers that do content-processing correctly, we can build environments that do context-processing correctly. It is critically important that we learn how to do that.Now, these effects are not flaws in humans that would go away if we were all "rational" or "scientists" or if we all based our judgment on "data" and "evidence." These effects are properties of the very nature of space, time, and information itself. We cannot "get around them" or ignore them. We are going to have to learn how to account for them correctly.
It doesn't have to be hard, but it does have to be done, or we'll keep fighting needless wars, between parties that actually agree with each other but don't realize it.
Take the example of "perspective" -- a distortion of space where it appears to each observer that things "far away from them" are small, and things "close to them" are large, and as you move towards a distant building or mountain it "gets larger."
At some point in life as infants we figure out that the thing we're looking at actually isn't changing size at all, it's an illusion, a distortion, caused by where we are looking from, our viewpoint. If we didn't correct for this, we could argue all day about which of two things was "bigger" and what was "fair" and not get a resolution, because A looks bigger to me than B, but looks smaller to you. Once we correct for that perspective distortion, we can resolve that question in a way that makes us both happy. This happened so early in our lives we forget we had to learn it.
There is a popular misconception that because things are "relative", there is no underlying reality, and no way to ever reconcile them. Einstein said the opposite. He said that actually, once you understand what is going on, you can completely reconcile observations made by two competent observers, relative to their own reference frames, all the time, every time. You can totally account for the changes, say, in perspective between two observers, and figure out entirely how the world I see needs to be warped and twisted to give the world you see.
Computer animators and virtual worlds have to deal with this "perspective" or "viewpoint" transformation all the time. It's a lot of bookkeeping under the covers, but straight-forward if you do it carefully.
Unfortunately, there are other shifts in context that are less familiar to us that impact our ability to reach agreement. The problem is very deep, as I said, built into the nature of space and time itself.
Once, in my astrophysics grad student days, I took a course in Cosmology and General Relativity. I didn't get it all, but I got enough to get the story, which is not that hard to tell, and does not require math. Please don't flee. There will be no quiz. Everyone one here gets an "A".The essence of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity could be distilled down to three insights, widely misunderstood. You don't need to be Einstein to understand these ideas.
The insights are that
- content and context are completely equivalent in what can be said, though widely different in what can be expressed easily in each;
- you cannot change one without affecting the other;
- if you do your sums right, the changes are completely predictable.
In the world described by relativity, the meaning of a very concrete phrase or physical expression or very real measurement of velocity, say, changes as you slide it around in space and time, most famously if you attach the observation to different observers traveling at different speeds. I can only observe your speed "relative to me", so depending on how fast I'm going, I'll measure something different.
This is no big deal. People in a car on the highway appear stationary to each other, even though the car is speeding down the road.
Or, if I'm standing on the Earth, I see the sun, obviously moving across the sky, going around the Earth. If I'm standing in some space ship off to the side, I see the earth spinning and the sun remaining fixed. These observations are both right, relative to the "reference frame" in which they were made. To reconcile them you have to account for the different in frames used by two completely competent observers.
Implications
==========
Well, what does this mean? For one thing, it means that where you work or spend time thinking or talking to each other affects what result you'll come up with. A decision that is "obvious", made in a bunker-like dimly-lit War-Room deep underground might not be at all the same decision that would have been made, given the "same facts", in a cheery, sunny deck in a woodsy retreat on a warm spring day.
It means that an "obvious" decision about what to do next, made standing in an urban war zone with explosions in the distance is not the same decision, given the same information, that is "obvious" viewed by people safely out of harm's way, at their leisure, later, reviewing the tapes over coffee and some nice Danish.
In fact, as a child, I observed that the behaviors that seemed to make the great leaders "great" in war movies wasn't that they were brilliant, but that they simply managed to remain stable and sane when the world around them had gone to hell. They remained connected to a larger, stable world despite the fact that their body was located in a locally unstable one.
Maybe, there is value in having content-intensive work like "science" embedded in larger stabler social frameworks that religions have sometimes produced in the past. I find it fascinating that, according to a recent issue of New Scientist, geneticists are discovering that far from being "junk DNA", the DNA between the 22,000 genes that code for proteins (content) may be even more important, and this "junk" codes for the larger context that decides when and whether that content should be expressed, or modified in the way it is expressed. (Junking the Junk DNA, New Scientist, July 11, 2007).
Yesterday, I did a post on the software world "Second Life" and possible roles of virtual reality in getting people to experience worlds they couldn't get to on their own. Today, I want to add to that the idea that virtual worlds are virtual contexts, which means that you can conceivably adjust not just the contents of a scene, but the context of the scene in which those contents are embedded.
This may be the tool we need to explore more how context and content interact with each other for humans, and to learn how susceptible we all are to "framing" of an issue. We can understand how advertisers or demagogues try to use propaganda techniques to shift the frames of discussions so that, even though we seem to be the same people, we end up making different decisions. Even though we don't feel manipulated, we have been - by Madison Avenue agencies that know how to send broadband messages in context-modulation that bypass all our cognitive protections against content-manipulation. That's what TV is all about, to them.
Dirty pool aside, honest and diligent CEO's and civic leaders need to understand what an idea will sound like, or be taken to mean, in hundreds of different contexts, to know how to process the input they get, or how to say anything that won't offend one group or another.
If nothing else, cars for Latin America, for example, shouldn't be named "Nova" - since "No va" in Spanish means "won't go." Underarm deodorant shouldn't be advertised in Tokyo using a happy octopus logo, since in Japan an octopus doesn't have 8 arms -- it has 8 legs. Oopsie.
(photo Walking Alone, by me, on Flickr)
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