Social media and implications for work and education

 The millenial generation (Generation Y / "digital natives")  has arrived, with their tools,  and this has profound implications for education and the nature of the workplace.

Introduction:

Goleman and others have written about "social intelligence" or "group intelligence." [cite]   I want to look at a single more directly observable impact of this infrastructure on the nature of "one's own work" or what it means to be "a worker."      That then has implications for how we should be socializing, training, and educating these people.



The new generation of people and their tools

Wikipedia:

Characteristics of the generation vary by region, depending on social and economic conditions. However, it is generally marked by an increased use and familiarity with communications, media, and digital technologies. 

 With them they bring "social media" -- bi-directional web-2 initially, such as Facebook (tm),  then PDA/"cell-phone" enabled technologies = Twitter (tw),  "texting",  real-time clients to web-2 applications (google maps, web log posts from a phone, etc.)

The trend is clear, and huge:   faster communication (measured in seconds or less),  more reliable infrastructure, more widely-deployed access ("wi-fi hot-spots"),  higher bandwidth (youTube(tm) video or small-screen television live),   far wider active user-base and user-literacy [close to 100% of this generation, cite Pew...], and a greater willingness to be a social-being, with documents, mail, photos, preferences, and details of one's life immediately visible and searchable over the web by anyone from anywhere.

Furthermore, the latest trend [cite?] is to "always-on" connection,  where people simply live with their communications device 24/7,  and may exchange several or even hundreds of messages per hour, often multiplexing and being actively involved in multiple simultaneous conversations in different compartmented windows.

This has profound implications for education and the nature of the workplace.

Goleman and others have written about "social intelligence" or "group intelligence."   I want to look at a single more directly observable impact of this infrastructure on the nature of "one's own work" or what it means to be "a worker."      That then has implications for how we should be socializing, training, and educating these people.


Pair-programming in computing

[ details about the nature and amazing effectiveness of pair-programming, personal experiences.  cites]


Safety, reliability, quality, and economics of pair-programming

[ huge benefit, cites]


Theoretical basis for this situation

[ literature on team-based decision models;   aperture-synthesis in astronomy, etc.]



The big question - chair-turning consultation

On the one hand, people can in many settings, from universities to hospitals to most service businesses,  be always-connected to each other. Such connections provide a way for real-time, very short-term, immediate collaboration, equivalent to spinning in one's chair and asking one's office mate a question.

 On the other hand, the quantity of information in any field is increasing faster than any human can keep up with, as well as changing and being updated too rapidly to track.    There is no way to know everything, or even to be sure anything you "know" is still the current best-wisdom or current policy.  We can be certain of only one thing -- our mental picture of things, in particular and general,  has gaps, and has out-dated fragments that we haven't yet realized are outdated.

Many studies [ critical cites ] show that consultation while making decisions may appear, in the very short run to slow things down, but in terms of its astounding impact on the quality of the decisions, in the medium to long term dramatically speeds things up by reducing or eliminating rework caused by bad mental models, bad data, "guessing", or a "good-enough" attitude that would not be supportable if working along side a second person who was watching.

All of this says that people SHOULD be working this way, openly, in constant contact and short-term consultation about anything they are uncertain about, and even (or especially) things they feel certain about.
As various wags including Donald Rumsfield have pointed out, what causes our defeats is "the things we don't know that we don't know, or things we know that aren't so."

I had the experience of managing a team of sophisticated programmers working on a mission-critical, life-safety medical system.    It was still a challenge to get people to work with each other and to immediately seek consultation when they weren't sure about something, rather than "punting" or "guessing" or "covering up" the weak spots in their own work.

The reason for this was clear -- these people had been raised in an educational system that stressed that they should be "doing their own work."       Despite clueless instructors assigning "group work" to equally clueless students, who hated it,   when it got down to real grades,  what mattered was "your own work."  On an exam that really mattered,  you were rewarded for "doing your own work" and failed in disgrace if you "cheated" by consulting with others about something you were unsure of.

Then, thrown into the workplace,  after a decade or two of such competitive, fragmenting, corrosive, education, these people have trouble "working as a team" and seeking help when they need it, and not covering up in shame anything they are not certain about, so they "look better."

College and university faculty are given 6 years to achieve tenure, during which time the total emphasis is on doing their own work.   Then,   they are supposed to help teach ways to deal with "interdisciplinary teams."

The new models of work and education

A worker (and a person) should be seen as someone who is plugged into "the cloud",  who has the experience, attitudes, and technological savvy and tools to be able to ask for and get advice about anything in a few seconds, or look up and evaluate web-based data about facts, policies, or status of projects in a few moments with sufficient ease that they do it when they should with no big deal about it.

When a worker, or programmer, or analyst, or nurse, or doctor, or nurses-aide runs into a situation they are unsure about, or feel they should consult on, it should be fast and easy for them to do so, it should be habitual for them to do so, and they should be encouraged to do so and rewarded to do so, in public.

It should be like washing hands -- you should be seen by the patient doing it, because it's the right thing to do. It should not be something done secretly, furtively, with some guilt or shame in the back room -- or worse, not done when it should have been because there was no standard way to do so, or because someone was watching.

This is a complete reversal of our culture and educational standards.

It is also a trend that appears, to me, to be unstoppable.   There is little question that decisions made by constant consultation are better, safer, more-reliable and more cost-effective than other decisions.  There are far fewer disasters caused by ignorance or isolated islands of mis-information.

Those who do so will have better results, better bottom lines, etc. than those who don't -- once we are past the white-water turbulence of work and educational infrastructures that punish people for acting this way.

Our educational experience, by this model and in this light, should be more one of socialization to work this way, and getting used to the tools and practices of instant consulting,  evaluating and resolving conflicting viewpoints and data obtained over the web,  etc.

Our exams should be much harder, to the point of realistic, in terms of the types of problems asked and the time-frame in which an answer is expected -- but should be open-book, open-notes, open cell-phone, open-pda,  with unlimited options of calling friends or experts for advice.

What matters that the individual student be able to do is to swim in that ocean easily.  It does not matter that they be a storehouse of facts,  because facts become quickly stale.   Things they use a lot will become familiar, and things they never use will have no time wasted on them.

The concept of "mentoring" or "parenting" or what a college-degree would focus more on pair-wise traveling into that ocean and helping the student become familiar with what to do and how to do it to become a functioning and valued member of "the cloud", both giving help and getting it on a daily, hourly, minute by minute basis.

Such "cloud-enabled" people, who knew how to know their own limits, would be vastly more employable and re-employable in different fields as times changed, because their skill-base is largely independent of the particular field they are working in.

Business owners and managers in general could care less whether an employee "does his own work" or consults with others or experts, so long as the work gets done, rapidly, correctly the first time.

Counter-forces

Aside from centuries of legacy momentum in the opposite direction, and all the problems of paradigm-shifts,  an additional roadblock is evident in the area of power and redistribution of power.

In classic organizations, knowledge is power. Compartmentalization and fragmentation and competition between workers to "look good" is the classic Machiavellian method of keeping the lords balancing each other out, so none of them ever gets strong enough to challenge the Prince or King.

The new cloud-enabled group consciousness and comparing notes will, in fact, allow workers the ability to "get organized", with all that means to those who abuse, exploit, or lead-with-falsehood.   Such groups may not even articulate or realize the reasons for their gut-based aversion to social media, but this doesn't stop the vengeance and venom with which this social-media is treated as a threat to their power.

Wrapped in language of "efficiency" and "not wasting company time with gossip" and "protecting corporate secrets",   many consulting companies specialize, today, in helping management shut down, snuff out, and totally suppress the use of social media in the workplace.

Such is typical of any paradigm shift.  This is by no means a "self-working" transition, and many small efforts to change will be shot down, shut down,  with intense punitive action far beyond what would seem called for.

Anyone "pushing" these new technologies and social media should be prepared to be treated as a heretic, trouble-maker, labor-organizer,  etc.,   and to trigger the most intense organizational "immune response" that can be delivered to cleanse the system of something it recognizes as "not me."

Employees who consult widely and regularly with a wide range of advisors will not just "think outside the box", they will simply have no "box" anymore.  The social media gets rid of the "box" entirely.

They will not only question legacy policies, and management decisions, they will show up with an armful of supporting documentation and, worse (to management) supporters.  

For this to work,  management has to transition as well to an open-style, where it is not THEIR job to "be right" but their job to "ask the right questions".  Literature abounds these days on such leadership styles. It should be used. [cites go here]

If the United States Army,  one of the most hierarchical and mission-oriented organizations in the world,  is going this direction,  there must be no problem in it interfering with accomplishing the mission -- in fact, it must be viewed as helping accomplish the mission.

And, in my opinion, it is invaluable at getting out of the mess we're in and the boxed-in legacy mis-thinking and wrong mental-models that hold us back.

Three white-papers I wrote are directly related to this topic:

Spectacular teams through active strength, not more SOP's   [ powerpoint ]

The Case of the Crash of Comair 5191 - Lexington Kentucky August 2006 [MS Word document]

Disaster Preparedness Tools for Public Health staff and Civilians  [ MS Word Document,  on use of social media for making dyadic-pairs for working in high-stress unstructured disaster situations.]

Wade

On resistance to "social media"

http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/military-announces-new-social-media-policy/

February 26, 2010, 5:29 pm

Military Announces New Social Media Policy

By JAMES DAO

Many months behind schedule, the Department of Defense on Friday issued a new policy that, on the surface, seems likely to expand access to popular social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter by troops using military computers. ...

The development is considered a step forward by advocates of social networking in the military. Those advocates have complained for years that local commanders, sometimes for vague or arbitrary reasons, have shut down personal blogs or restricted access to social networking sites that an increasing number of troops use to maintain contact with friends and families. A growing number of deployed units have also begun using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other networking sites to share photographs, release official information and disseminate newsletters.

US army and social media

February 26, 2010, 5:29 pm

Military Announces New Social Media Policy

By JAMES DAO

Many months behind schedule, the Department of Defense on Friday issued a new policy that, on the surface, seems likely to expand access to popular social networking sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter by troops using military computers.

The new policy, which can be found here, says that the default policy of the department will be to allow access to social networking sites from the military’s non-classified computer network, known by its acronym, NIPRNET (for Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network.)
...
A growing number of deployed units have also begun using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and other networking sites to share photographs, release official information and disseminate newsletters.
...
“This directive recognizes the importance of balancing appropriate security measures while maximizing the capabilities afforded by 21st Century Internet tools,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense William J. Lynn III in a statement.
...
Lindy Kyzer, who advices the Army’s Chief of Public Affairs on social media issues, said that while the new policy does leave much discretion in the hands of local commanders, it also opens up access to social networking in several significant ways.
...

An interesting note, Price Floyd, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, broke the news of the policy announcement on his Twitter feed, not via the traditional route of a press release.

• Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

US Army and twitter

http://twitter.com/USArmy

Leadership in the US Army of the future - concepts

This is from: www.army.mil 

"The official home page of the US Army".

 

Dempsey talks TRADOC future, leader development at AUSA

Feb 25, 2010
By Carroll Kim (TRADOC Public Affairs)

Photo credit Sgt. Angelica Golindano


Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commanding general of Training and Doctrine Command, gives a speech during the Winter Symposium for the Association of the United States Army in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., on Feb. 25, 2010. The speech was on TRADOC's perspective on the Army's need to adapt and decentralize while retaining the fundamentals that have succeeded throughout the Army's history.

Related Links

• TRADOC on Twitter
• TRADOC on Facebook

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (Feb. 25, 2010) -- Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, delivered remarks on leader and concept development during the Association of the United States Army Winter Symposium and Exposition here today.

Dempsey began by explaining the conditions of the battlefield and its ramifications on the force and leader development.

"If you think about what was going on ... in the late 19th century, that was an age of discovery and science and how systems fit together and the Industrial Age was affecting the social fabric and so forth," he said.

"Systems are interdependent. And in their interdependence, if you want to keep up with the systems, then you have to evolve at least as fast as the system. And if you want to get ahead of the system, you have to evolve at least twice as fast."

A way that TRADOC has been focusing on these concerns is through the Army Capstone Concept, published in December. The Capstone Concept addresses the conditions of the battlefield and how the Army is evolving to meet those demands through technology.

"It causes [leaders] to reconsider, rethink and challenge the assumptions upon which previous capstone concepts were made," he said. "Some of the assumptions we've made about technology have just not been realized because adversaries, or potential adversaries, understand what it takes to deliver those first."

Dempsey continued, "They've decentralized ... they use the network and they've proliferated the technology. They live among the population. Which means that you can't gain the kind of knowledge you think you can from a distance, and deal with it exclusively through precision."

In order to combat decentralization, the Army has also had to decentralize and provide more decision-making power into the lower ranks.

"We've done it remarkably well and for the most part, invisibly. There are implications to that decentralization. If you're on a path to build the network that affects echelons above [the brigade combat team], now you find yourself in a situation where what you really want is a network optimized at echelons below BCT."

However, decentralization has also been met with challenges, but Dempsey believes that systems have to be able to adapt to new audiences, situations and needs.

"Those kinds of challenges clearer to us today after the challenges of the past eight years, but it also means that though you should, in reaction to the changes in the world, decentralize, you also better recognize that at some point, you may have to have the ability to reaggregate those resources."

Dempsey also cited changes in leader development because of the different roles of Soldiers provided by full-spectrum operations.

"We've conceded that a leader must be grounded in not only tactics, techniques and procedures of force-on-force, but also in integrating his capabilities with other capabilities in a battle space that's increasingly crowded and increasingly transparent. So now we choose the term 'mission command' because we think it sends the right message on what we're about."

As decision-making abilities move down the ranks, Dempsey reinforced that junior leaders need to be empowered with orders that have a balance of guidance and room for the junior leader to critically think and apply their skills to develop the situation.

"We used to sit and think that the best information came from the top down, but this document implies that the best information comes from the bottom up. And if it does, you have to prepare young people to deliver it and you have to prepare them to prevail in it."

Dempsey assured a balance between preparing for future operations and maintaining a professional ethos will continue to be achieved through TRADOC schools.

"I'm worried about a drift in our fundamentals," he said. "We will not allow that to happen. So as we hurry helter-skelter we will never forget the fact that there are things that are fundamental to our profession."

Concluding his remarks, Dempsey took a look at the Army's role in national security in a quickly changing world.

"We've talked about an environment where competitiveness is the norm. We're in a competitive security environment. The dimension in which we have to prevail is the competitive learning environment because if we prevail here, we can make the changes and adaptations," he said.

On the Tea Party

Ann Arbor, MI

February 18th, 2010

6:38 am

So, the battle cry is "Anarchists, unite!" ?

A different framework is that the problem is not that coordinated groups of people exist, but that such groups as they grow and age tend to become depressingly blind, inefficient, arrogant, ineffective, amoral, immoral, self-serving, and corrupt.

If you view that as a fact of life, smaller is better, fine. Discard the car and we'll all walk.  If you view this as a design flaw, like a stuck gas pedal, and one that could be fixed, that changes everything.  Fix the car so we can all go much farther than we can walk.

Humans are individually not very reliable, but these days much is known about how to build highly reliable systems out of unreliable components.

We have very sophisticated theory and tools in "control system engineering" about "checks and balances", regulatory feedback-loops, stability, responsiveness, etc. See for example "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" by Franklin, 5th edition.   All kinds of cars, planes, and equipment is built using that stuff. It works.

"It has a demon, blow it up!" is a pretty primitive approach to problem solving. Why not use the technology we have to design and model large human organizations that might actually function correctly?

Or at least use it to simulate and model proposed changes and see whether, under broad assumptions, the changed model would perform any better than the current model.

The problem is almost certainly that it's not breaking on any given part, it's breaking "between the parts" on a system level. It's not the pieces that are wrong, but the way the pieces relate to each other that's broken.

It's like airplanes. A plane is a collection of parts, each one being too heavy to fly. The power of the plane is in how the parts work together, not in any one magic "flying" part that the others ride on.

It's not right to seek a leader who can fly, and it's not right to abandon the idea of large groups, corporations, governments, etc. in favor of us all learning how to jump higher as the best we'll ever do.

The structure CAN be made to fly.  We HAVE the tools to do that. Now is the wrong time to quit.

Govenment "auto-braking" - as rampant short-term greed prevails

February 17, 2010

New York Times

Excerpts from the article on the "gridlock" nature of the problem,   leaving out the part about debt.
The photo is from an amazing collection of photos of Detroit, on Flickr, by "Detroitderek Photography".

I've pondered how to teach "systems thinking" as a whole, but one specific example is brought to mind by the article below -- some very basic facts about flying a plane.

Most people seem to believe that if you want a plane to go "up",  you would pull back on the control yoke and point the plane "up".
That isn't actually true.

If you pull back on the controls,   it is true that for a very brief time, the plane climb a little by consuming forward speed (and slowing down).  BUT -- if you continue to hold the controls back, as the plane slows more and more,  it will start shuddering, and,having lost flying speed,  start falling to the ground. If you insist on pointing the plane up even more at that point, you will crash.  Period.

There is no free lunch.  If you want the plane to climb for real, consistently, over time, and stay up,  you need to use the engine via the throttle.  You need to provide power.   You don't need to raise the nose of the plane at all -- just add power and you will climb.

There are amazing parallels in thinking here in politicians who discovered that plundering our nation's hard-won resources and spending them and calling the rise in "GDP" income, things appeared to be going "up".    Right now, we're at the "shuddering" and "losing flying speed" stage.

If short-term greed isn't replaced by hard work, as with the airplane,  there is only one foreseeable outcome.

People need to get their noses out of the air, individually and collectively. "Me first, Me now, only Me" is not a survivable strategy, or national policy, or cultural norm we should even tolerate, let alone praise when it has a short-term benefit at an even larger long-term cost.

This is a 1st grader type of perceptual error,  akin to a dog with his leash around a tree who can't reach his food dish and isn't willing to walk away from the food back to get unwrapped around the tree.   Pulling harder and harder is not the right answer.

The question is how to teach that perception, to about 6 billion people,  in under two years.   Our engine is the collection of virtues we once respected:   honesty, hard work, integrity, compassion, perseverance, hope.  They made the country great, and abandoning them is making the country sink.      In the very short run, turning away from them has a short-term visible gain,   but there is always a longer-term, significantly larger loss that comes with it.

So, the more we "win" the "behinder we get."   There is no sequence of such short-term gains that will get us to prosperity and economic health.    We need to walk AWAY from the food of short-term gain, back to the tree and get our leash unstuck, and recover "flying speed" before the wings stop doing their magical thing of producing lift and simply turn into heavy weights.

A plane has been described as a collection of parts, any one of which, by itself, would simply fall out of the sky.   This is true for the nation as well.   It doesn't fly because this part is "better than" that part -- it flies because the parts WORK TOGETHER.      If you remove the "working together" part, all you have left is a bunch of rocks in the sky, that will, duh,  fall down.

Party Gridlock in Washington Feeds New Fear of a Debt Crisis

By JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — Senator Evan Bayh’s comments this week about a dysfunctional Congress reflected a complaint being directed at Washington with increasing frequency, and there is broad agreement among critics about Exhibit A: The unwillingness of the two parties to compromise...


Yet rarely has the political system seemed more polarized and less able to solve big problems that involve trust, tough choices and little short-term gain. The main urgency for both parties seems to be about pinning blame on the other, before November’s elections, ...

Mr. Bayh, the centrist Democrat from Indiana, lodged his complaint about excessive partisanship and Congressional gridlock on Monday by way of explaining his decision not to seek re-election.

“I used to think it would take a global financial crisis to get both parties to the table, but we just had one,” said G. William Hoagland, who was a fiscal policy adviser to Senate Republican leaders and a witness to past bipartisan budget summits. “These days I wonder if this country is even governable.”

Sensing political advantage, Republicans are resisting President Obama’s call for a bipartisan commission ...

“There isn’t a single sitting member of Congress — not one — that doesn’t know exactly where we’re headed,” Mr. Simpson said.... “And to use the politics of fear and division and hate on each other — we are at a point right now where it doesn’t make a damn whether you’re a Democrat or a Republican if you’ve forgotten you’re an American.”

Elected Republicans, however, are under intense pressure from their party’s conservative base to oppose any tax increases — a line in the sand that dims any prospects for bipartisan cooperation....


But anger about big deficits has stoked the populism roiling politics, and Republicans as well as some conservative Democrats want to cut spending right now as a way of addressing perceptions among voters that government has gotten too big, too intrusive and too profligate.

Many analysts say the president and Congress could send a strong signal to global markets by agreeing this year to a package of both long-term tax increases and spending reductions...

As debt rises, so do interest costs; by 2014, at a projected $516 billion, they will exceed the budget for annual appropriations for domestic programs. The government will be competing with the private sector for credit, forcing interest rates higher and imperiling future prosperity.

Lesser financial and fiscal crises have brought the two parties together to compromise on tough choices about taxes and spending.  .. Those bipartisan deals were done during times of divided government, when one party had the White House and the other controlled at least one chamber of Congress, giving each side some governing responsibility to find solutions. Now, with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the parties have less incentive to work together.

Republicans today see opposition as a way back to power in November, and their party is more ideologically antitax than in the past, especially now that it is courting the Tea Party movement. Conservative activists so oppose compromise of any sort that several lawmakers have drawn primary challengers for working with Democrats.

Because the worst of the fiscal problem remains years away and therefore somewhat hypothetical to most people, there is also not the same incentive to act immediately that drove, for example, the 1983 deal, when Social Security was facing an imminent crisis.

More than Mr. Obama could have imagined, the situation now tests his promise to break Washington’s gridlock and to lead in making “the hard choices.”

Yet politicians’ failure to reduce deficits has long reflected voters’ opposition to the necessary steps.

Comment on Kristoff - physiology of politics (NY Times 2-14-2010)

Your article says "“What research like ours may help with is in figuring out how to construct an argument in a way that is going to meaningfully connect with those on the other side,” Dr. Smith said."

I think you've fallen into the trap of thinking that logical arguments are what shape perceptions, instead of vice-versa. That may be somewhat true for academics, but I don't think it's true for most people, who are more in the "Some things you have to believe to see" camp.

Don't fall into the psychological trap of thinking that most people are like the people you hang around with. They're not. They might as well be a different species.  The type of logical discussion taught in the academy is not how those other people operate.  In fact, to them logic is unpleasant and irrelevant.  That is not going to change before the next election, or go away because it means your whole campaign strategy needs to be rethought from the ground up.

The rest of the USA population does not admire academics and wish they had PhDs too.  Get past that error in the model.  What your eyes and the daily news tells you is, in fact true - There is NOT a shared value among the general population that education and logic are either important or desired traits. This is hard to accept for academics who are immersed in a world in which those are universal values.

Be pragmatic. Accept empirical data. Count the votes.  A campaign based on "facts" and "reasoning" is doomed to fail before it begins.  If you can't accept that, let someone else drive.

Someone said once "Man is not a rational animal - he is a rationalizing animal." This is worth some serious pondering.

Put another way -- as you probably have observed but simply cannot accept, there is NO ordering of the "dots" (facts) that will be "connected" in their brains to make a persuasive, perception-altering "case" or "argument." In fact, there is macho pride in who can dismiss the largest fact and keep on trucking. It is not about facts, and it can NEVER be won on the basis of facts and logical arguments.

I think what is at work is more of a flock or swarm peripheral vision effect, where they don't trust their own eyes or judgment, but they DO subliminally perceive and implicitly trust which way the herd or swarm is apparently moving. What counts is "impressions" of attitudes, from as many apparently different sides at once, over and over and over.

No one could make a logical argument that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attack, and yet over half the American populace believed that (or perceived that to be what everyone thought) on the day we attacked. In this game, however much stress it causes academics, facts are simply irrelevant. Sheer volume of impressions of what "everyone thinks" are all that matter.

Of course, to round that out, a tacit understanding that it is "bad" or traitorous or antisocial to even consider or look at any input from the "other side" helps keep the percentage of supportive impressions high enough to keep the lock in place.

So, in that model of "how things work", volume matters -- volume in terms of number of impressions, and volume in terms of decibels. Facts have negative value. Appeal to facts gets the mental door slammed with disgust at "damn elites trying to make me feel stupid."

It's a sad and depression model, but I submit to those who do work on empirical facts that this model is a pretty good fit for what we see going on around us. I recommend reading "Thank you for smoking" to get a short course in how such flim-flam is applied in practice, since the readership of this column surely reads for information.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thank_You_for_Smoking_(novel)

The sober and sad fact is that there are apparently more US voters who watch TV than read (or think) as a basis for their opinions. And at this point they are bonding over shared disdain for elites (aka education, logic, facts, algebra, calculus, big words, complex ideas, etc.)

Back to the point. There is NO set of facts that will crack that lock on their vote. Abandon that approach. Follow the Republican lead and treat American voters as mindless flock animals who sustain on non-verbal peripheral vision clues about where everyone else is and is going.

Sigh.

What we all got wrong

What We All Got Wrong

Sat Feb 13 03:04:51 GMT 2010 by Wade Schuette
Comments on "Survival of the fittest theory", New Scientist, 6 Feb 2010 p28

Moving to Darwin was a hard paradigm shift, and now moving beyond Darwin will similarly be attacked and wrongly stereotyped as regression, and lumped as fanaticism and enemy action. It is as if the US Congress's protocol ("never yield on anything") is controlling our models instead of rational and civil discussion.

What I see is brash decrees of what is "obvious" on both sides, by people who can't even analyze or predict the simplest multi-level feedback loop.

There are battles between "the genes do it" or "the animals do it" or "the species do it" and very little interest in the far more likely reality -- they all do it, and simultaneously, bidirectionally, filled with feedback loops on multiple scales of time and space.

"Science" has great power for open-loop systems and equations, but almost no tools or reliable insights on complex closed-loop systems.

What is clear is that humans are somewhere in the middle of a hierarchy of living control systems where cells have some life of their own, organs have some life of their own, individual humans have some life of their own, aggregate human clusters such as corporations and nations and cultures have some life of their own, etc. It's a mess computationally and totally unjustifiable to "simplify" it by tossing out that aspect of it.


[ Added note by author:   As we were taught at Johns Hopkins, it is becoming clear that the impact of "psychosocial" factors on what has classically been called "biomedical health" is at least as large, if not larger, than "biological" factors.  As we open our eyes to such pathways, they are starting to show up everywhere. How can anyone say that policy decisions at the national level about health care funding do not, ultimately, alter the "fitness" landscape and inflluence, perhaps heavily, who lives, who dies, and who has children?

Or take the state of the "national economy" and "the stock market", which are aggregate entities with a very powerful influence on the odds that human cells will be exposed to "unusual" levels of alcohol these days, let alone the immune-suppressing impact of "depression" on multiple spatial scales. It's all tangled together, bidirectionally.  It goes upwards as well:  a single fatigued, depressed , and drunk person, attempting to do something stupid on an airplane, can change the entire behavior of an entire country. These are very real intra-life-form interactions that cross many orders of magnitudes in scale.  You can't ignore them because of some legacy political decision about what constitutes "alive" or "life". ]

On top of that, the increasingly dominant organized life-form on the planet, aka "corporations", can not only replicate and divide and reproduce, they can also "merge".

And, to boot, they can modify their internal operations and structure, in close to real-time, based not just on the past, but on observations about the present and even predictions of future conditions.

If you believe, as I do, in some kind of hierarchical, scale-invariant symmetry and invariance of the mathematics of key control-loops, the implication is clear -- EVERY level of life has some capacity to adapt its own internal structure and what it propagates based on current events, not just past discrete, acute "reproductive" events.

Given the empirical behavior of the parts of the world we can see around us every day, and read about in the paper, and our almost total inability to model complex feedback systems, I can't see any "scientific" justification for boldly ruling out such aspects of life based on their political and religious ramifications.

Life appears to be self-catalyzing, and there is as much downward pressure on the direction of the planet from meta-organisms (e.g. corporations, religions, terrorists) as there is upwards pressure from genetics and emergence.

In the US a corporation has announced plans, on top of it's constitutional right of free speech, to run for office of the President.

Seems like the definition of "alive" needs some tweaking, even before the computer network sits up and asks for the vote as well.

And, if downward pressure on evolution, to force it in certain directions, is an aspect of the nature of LIFE (and it is in the only case we know about), then, in the limit, regardless how unpopular, it is not credible to discount all reports, however distorted, of "direction" on evolution around us, and, "from above."

Take where we are and add a billion years.

It seems the question shouldn't be is there intervention in evolution from "above", but what the nature of that intervention, today, is.

Maybe I've missed something in the last few decades, but I'm unaware that science has calibrated and reliable equipment to measure even, say, CIA intervention in country X, let alone much larger- scale, longer-term and perhaps less-obvious tilts to the evolutionary playing field.

There is a way out

The issues we are calling "problems" seem to all be "symptoms" of one deeper actual problem, and if we don't fix that, the symptoms will simply, like whack-a-mole, emerge somewhere else.

Of course, nobody wants to fix it, and besides they argue, its hard to fix -- as if fixing the rest of the mess we're all in is easy or cheap.

The "it" I'm referring to is the core of civilized behavior, a culture that encourages, if not demands, a few basic virtues: honesty, respect, compassion, integrity, and humility.

Once, I thought pretty much all religions agreed on those. "Science", in a massive disservice to mankind, seems to have undermined religion but not replaced the parts required for a civilization to continue to operate with something at least as good. We now have a high-tech, zero-wisdom society. Great.

Again, please dear reader, ignore the "hard" part and ponder what would happen if these were repaired.

Example - the "mortgage meltdown" would not have occurred, not due to astounding oversight by some Czar, but because average people would have consulted each other before biting at sucker bait. Even those who bit the bait could have decided to pool forces and move in together and share the rent or mortgage, instead of sinking into catastrophe separately.

Mass behavior can be changed -- ask the TV, tobacco or alcohol advertising gurus -- it's what they do.

The point is it simply doesn't work to make a world where everyone is out for maximum greed, selfishness, and rudeness and then we try to constrain that explosion with endless leaky regulations and regulators.

It is NOT a given that "people are just like that." We make them like that.

We can change what we make each other. There is no other way out, and we will keep on being forced to confront this inconvenient issue until we finally yield and deal with it.

Failure of our national security system indeed

New York Times columnist Maureen Down discusses the "chilling episode on Flight 253" today, and the eerie resonance with Katrina and wondering what planet FEMA was on.   My comment on the latest system failure,  echoing ever again T.S. Eliot's perception that mankind is always "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good."

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I think the most important lesson we refuse to accept is that there are no "technical" systems, only "socio-technical" ones. Day after day, decade after decade, we see cover stories headlined "Our Technology will Save Us!", followed by a story of the social failings that have made our problems worse with every short-sighted and ill-conceived attempt to fix them.

It doesn't matter whether it is "hardware" or "software" or vast administration-ware or corporation-ware -- the products of our hands and minds always reflect our spirit and hearts, and lately, the spirit is dismal and the hearts vary between contempt and indifference.

The result is always the same, as though we designed an amazing machine, and then built it from clay instead of metal. You can always point at some technical place where it broke, but that is not the real culprit, not the real cause we should blame for the failure.

Our corporations, economy, administrations, national security policy and practice, our Congress, our "nation building" abroad and our Katrina rebuilding at home are "ungovernable" and patent failures, but our solution is to seek "more math and science", more technology.

Surely it doesn't matter that we treat each other badly, does it?

Yes, it does. Fix it where it's broken, in our weak suit, the true core of our civilization, which has nothing to do with computers or databases or national strategic planning. Otherwise, we will just get more and more of the same.

Thoughts on leadership

In Sharon Daloz Park's book Leadership Can Be Taught, she describes Harvard's leadership program.

A phrase that caught my eye was this:

In this view, the function of leadership is to mobilize people -- groups, organizations, societies -- to address their toughest problems.

...[to] assist people in moving beyond the edge of familiar patterns into the unknown terrain of greater complexity, new learning, and new behaviors, usually requiring loss, grief, conflict, risk stress, and creativity.

They call for changes of heart and mind- the transformation of long-standing habits and deeply held assumptions and values.

and on page 220

This phase of the imagination process requires wading into the swamp of conflicting passions, forces, values, perspectives, personalities, and factions. It requires also creating a container (time, place, norms of working) in which the conflicts can be orchestrated to become productive. Orchestrating the conflict requires naming the truth and uncovering the work that needs to be done -- however attractive or painful it may be - at a rate that can be borne, and regulating the heat that is being generated. It depends on a practice of presence taht makes it possible to build trust, partnerships, and alliances within the conflicted field and to clarify the purpose and future prospect that make the current anguish and angst worthwhile.

...

There is .. the fire of inspiration that sustains the practice of adaptive leadership. ... They acknowledge that there is something that, as it were, moves them, moves thorugh them, and fires their imagination. .... authentic inspiration arises from a depth of worthy purpose and is the energizing (though often demanding) force that evokes possibility and fuels the capacity to stay the course. Inspiration is the wellspring of courage, arising from a way of seeing -- or seeing through-- that transcends and thus resists solutions that pose as ultimate.

I would suggest that her observations on leadership are correct as far as they go, but they can and should be extended further, to contemplate the result of exercising such leadership. We can, as it were, look at the "fruits" of this endeavor, aside from accomplishing the stated task or mission. Exactly how it is accomplished, at what cost to the future, is pivotal.

The people being led, I would say, need to end up as a stronger community, for this to be true leadership. Accomplishing a goal by fragmenting the community, and reaching one group's needs at the dismaying expense of others is not leadership. When the process is done, people should be bonded closer to each other, for having tackled that problem, and succeeded, together.

And, secondly, the surrounding world needs to end up stronger as well -- the success of the group being motivate cannot have been achieved at the expense of the larger community.

If either the internal or external communities have been harmed, the success is a transient illusion, and only a "success" due to poor bookkeeping. When all that energy has shaken out, and the communities have retaliated for their damage, the success and more will have been removed.

So -- a leader can guide the group to discover solutions that are win-win-win solutions, where all parties feel better off and there is no lasting anger or animosity or damage done "on the side" in some manner that often is swept under the rug.

Much of the above can be modeled as a step in the evolutionary development of the larger Life of humanity on the planet. It is as though Life is attempting to fold its own molecule or shape in a certain way and has run into a snag, building up frustrated pressure in that direction. The task of the group, faciliated by the leader, is to uncover the snags and release them so that the natural forward development of Life can continue.

This model suggests that it is not necessary to create a way for Life to succeed in this improvement in shape -- only necessary to find what is in the way of it and remove that, and, almost always, what is in the way of it is actually ... us, and our habits and legacy patterns. The pressure, guidance, and running to completion are all external, manifesting as "inspiration" beyond our own wisdom.

If we stop here and take this as our tentative model, we see already the conflicts with typical Western corporate culture. Staff in general, and managers in particular, especially MBA's, are not in the habit of wanting to be "closer" to their peers, in terms of endearment, let alone closer to their employees or their subordinate's subordinates. They view themselves and their power as the ability to compete with, defeat, out-maneuver, and get rid of others who would be in the way or who would share credit for victory.

Similarly, corporate missions in Western society are typically to "beat" other corporations, to assume that wealth is finite and "zero sum" and therefore their goal is to acquire as much of it as possible at the expense of anyone and anything in their way.

The contrast could hardly be larger between the legacy model of heroic individual leadership in a zero-sum contest for victory, and externally-inspired group emergent development toward a sustainable future. The first is essentially the discovery and use of "fission" power, and the second is essentially the discovery and use of "fusion" power.

Sharpening the axe

US President Abe Lincoln once said that if he had ten minutes to cut down a tree, he'd spend the first five "sharpening the axe."

Once upon a time, to cut down the "trees" of problems our society was running into, we had the "axe" of "smart people." This mostly seemed to work, and we developed huge systems of education to find "the right people" and make them smart.

As our society got more complex, and the problems grew larger and interconnected, those smart people were not smart enough to solve them, and we tried harder and harder.

What has happened, however, as this picture shows,

is that now the problems are so large and complex that even the smartest smart person cannot solve them, and it only gets worse from here on out into the future. We can't "wait this one out."

And, we have pretty well run out of ways to make smart people smarter. Already we ask them to go to school for 20 years or more, and even that doesn't seem to be working very well these days.

So, it's time to find a new "axe", something much more powerful than "smart people", and we have that -- it's called "smart teams".

Interestingly, the problems we face in making a smart team is just like the problem computer scientists had in making a "supercomputer" -- they finally figured out that it simply did not work to make a single, really, really, really smart computer --- what DID work was to figure out how to network together a cluster a half-million smaller computers so they acted in concert. That, actually, is what an "operating system" does. This took off the barriers, and suddenly it seems if we want more problem-solving power, we can add on more computers to the network.

So far, so good, but we haven't done the same thing with people. What concerns me is that we haven't even articulated this as a problem we should all be working on.

Teams of people can be smarter than the smartest individual person. We can, as the folk wisdom says, "get by with a little help from our friends."



The operative word is is "can". Sometimes, teams of people arrange themselves into "committees", a shape in which very little useful work actually ever gets done.

Sometimes people arrange themselves into hierarchical shapes, called "corporations" that sometimes get smart work done, but often only make larger versions of single-person mistakes.

Curiously, we know very little about what makes teams of people work well. And we know almost nothing about why the largest size team of people that seems able to function as a team is under 100 people.

We do know that if we want very high performance teams, producing very high quality work, the people cannot work "at arms length." They must take down the normal walls between each other, become vulnerable, become emotional, become intimate ( not in the sexual sense of the word, but in the "close" sense of the word.) and care about each other in a positive way. That seems to be required, and to help. Literature on some successful case studies is building up at last.

Our social problems are more likely "ten-thousand person size trees", while we are still working with 10-person "axes".

We don't know off-hand how to make a ten-thousand-person-size axe.

We do know, that for somethings like radio astronomy, we can "synthesize" a large telescope by getting a large number of small ones to "work together", as this photo shows.

Side note - for radio telescopes to work together as one, they can't just work separately and dump their results into a common basket -- they have to become aware of each other and synchronize their "phase" information as well, not just their "amplitude" information. Like lasers, there is a "synchronization" issue that has to be addressed for this idea to work.

This process is called "aperture synthesis" and it works in practice, as the photo above shows.

So, the problem is hard. So what? We didn't know how to get to the moon either, but when we needed to go there, or wanted to go there, we put in a lot of work and figured out how to do it.

We need to figure out how to make a ten-thousand-person size problem solving "axe". It's a problem worth solving, because we can then use the answer to that to solve most of our other social problems that no smart people know how to fix any more.


As the "Houston, we have a problem" graph above illustrates, this problem is not going to "go away" on its own, and it is not going to "solve itself." We will not solve this problem by making even smarter people and waiting for them to "solve it."

No, this problem needs to be solved by "regular" people, pooling notes on what has worked so far, historically, in making teams that work, and what hasn't worked, and then having a large scale discussion and head-scratching session about what might work, and just trying it until we find out how to get past this roadblock.

At least, that gives us a fixed target to work on, instead of an ever changing crisis of the day, and we can recruit the newspapers and top government officials to point at this and say "This is what we need to solve, everyone! If you have spare time, discuss this among yourselves and see what you can come up with!"

You know, we have millions of people on this planet that are (a) unemployed and (b) connected to the internet. Previous actions like the SETI project have tapped into their COMPUTERS unused power to solve large problems, like looking for intelligent life. What if we could tap into the human being's ability to work together, recognize patterns, and take some kinds of actions.

Even if this was only 1 percent efficient, we could make up for that easily by adding 100 times as many people into the web. One thing we do have is lots of underutilized people, many of whom would welcome something to do that felt useful. Another thing we have, or could have is high-speed internet access for those people.

And people don't all need to be in one place. People who need to "meet", or have complex "face-to-face" interactions, could potentially have those interactions in virtual reality worlds, such as Second Life or Forterra. The question is, what would nudge all that interaction from undirected Facebook-type chatter into powerful, laser-beam coherent focus that could pick up large problems , grapple with them, and solve them.

There is a crucial distinction I need to make here.

I'm not talking about the classic "divide and conquer"model

(which is what SETI uses, actually) where each of a million people is given one millionth of the work to do. That would constitute bringing the problem down to the level of the individual person.

What I'm talking about is the opposite -- bringing the collective grasp-size of the collection-of-people UP to the scale and scope of the problem. It has to be done that way, because "decomposing" the problem into parts loses crucial interaction terms and make any "solution" incorrect.

Otherwise, "Man must wait on street corner for long time before roast duck fly into mouth."

Wade

Notes:

In health care, the National Institutes of Medicine has realized that there is a problem that can be solved, which they term "microsystems" -- getting small teams of front-line care providers to work together extremely well.

In military circles, "Force transformation" is the buzz-word. Previous posts here on the US Army Leadership Field Manual FM22-100 have discussed realizations in the military about how effective teams have to be structured to operate in uncertain, rapidly changing worlds.

The ability of a group of people to have, effectively, computational power far beyond that expected is one of the findings in recent work in "social intelligence" and "the power of groups",
and "swarm intelligence."

Those findings give us hope that the "emotional components" of people are not flaws or bugs in rational machines, but are, in fact, the necessary connective tissue for reassembly of those fragments of living thinking protoplasm into a larger, self-aware, problem solving collection of protoplasm.

We don't want to remove human emotions from the workplace -- we want to turn them up full volume, and align them with the task at hand, because that's how people can synchronize with each other and act "in one spirit" or "as if one."

It is as if, by removing the walls and barriers between people, and getting rid of the Western concept of working "at arms length" in a "professional manner", we are moving from the energy released by fission to the much larger energy released by fusion -- in this case, the fusion of human beings, by the activity of working on a problem, into a persistent much stronger unified state, ready to be used again for just that purpose, and getting stronger with each use.

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Mathematical sidebar (advanced) -- in tensor calculus, any tensor of rank N can be decomposed (or constructed) into a larger number of tensors of rank N-1 working together. (As with relational database, there are simpler objects like tables and complex relationships that must be maintained as contstraints.) Carrying out that process iteratively guarantees us that any tensor of any rank can be completely represented by a sufficient number of tensors of rank one and a sufficient number of relationships and constraints. What that suggests to my eyes is that a wide range of complex mental activities can be "synthesized" out of a sufficiently large number of individuals of lower "rank" thinking, if (and only if) certain relationships are defined and maintained during the interaction.

In other words, there is very strong physical and mathematical basis for believing this "intelligence synthesis" process is theoretically feasible, for the class of problems that can be represented by tensor equations -- which Einstein believed spanned all physical problems. It is certainly a much larger class of problems than we can solve today.

Specifically, "Decomposition of a Tensor into a Sum of Vector Products): Theorem. In an n-dimensional space, any tensor of rank q > 1 can be written as the sum of n -to-the power (q-1) tensor products of vectors with q factors each." (From Introduction to General Relativity, by Adler, Bazin, and Schiffer, McGraw-Hill, 1965, p25).


========

further reading (not mathematical!)

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help(my thoughts)
Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper, MIT)
High-Reliability.org web site
Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety - Texas

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Nineteen case studies of health care organizations that dramatically improved their operations through the use of feedback-regulated small-team ("microsystems") operations are well documented in another post
here:


A great deal of accessible literature and some excellent videos are here:
Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship, at the U of Michigan Ross School of Business

http://www.bus.umich.edu/positive/pos-research/pastpositivesessions.htm

http://www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/POS-Research/Readings-to-Get-Started.htm


Positive Deviance - (the new business model)

Consider this excerpt from the US Army Leadership Field Manual (FM 22-100)

1-3: Leadership starts at the top, with the character of the leader, with your
character. In order to lead others you have to make sure your own house is in
order.
1-7: The example you set is just as important as the words you
speak.
1-8: Purpose ... does not mean that as a leader you must explain every
decision to the satisfaction of your subordinates. It does mean that you must
earn their trust: they must know from experience that you care about them and
would not ask them to do something - particularly something dangerous - unless
there was a good reason...
1-10: Trust is a basic bond of leadership, and it
must be developed over time.
1-15: People who are trained this way will
accomplish the mission, even when no one is watching.
1-23: you demonstrate
your character through your behavior.
1-56: Effective leaders strive to
create an environment of trust and understanding that encourages their
subordinates to seize the initiative and act.
1-74: The ultimate end of war,
at least as America fights it, is to restore peace.
4-9: Be aware of barriers
to listening. Don't form your response while the other person is still
talking.
4-20: Critical Reasoning ... means looking at a problem from several
points of view instead of just being satisfied with the first answer that comes
to mind.
4-24: Ethical leaders do the right things for the right reasons all
the time, even when no one is watching.

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)
Houston - we have another problem (My thoughts on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Mindfulness and fighting wild fires, and the value of simulations for training

Professor Karl Weick at the University of Michigan has written extensively on the need for "mindfulness" in emergency situations, such as, literally, fighting forest fires.

A mindful crew or crew-chief will be aware that they are operating on a mental model, and that model may be incorrect, so they must be alert to even very small signs that they have completely misconstrued the situation.

There are lessons here, on a longer time scale, for every leader, civilian or military.

Here are some public documents on the subject.

http://www.wy.blm.gov/fireuse/2009mtg/presentations/HROs-mindfulness.ppt

Teaching Mindfulness to Wildland Firefighters (Fire Management Today, Spring 2008, Dave Thomas)

For the last 3 years I have taught half-day workshops, conducted 1-hour lectures, and provided general awareness speeches about the Weick/ Sutcliffe model of High Reliability Organizing as described in their book Managing the Unexpected: Assuring High Performance in an Age of Complexity.

This article is a series of musings, conjectures, and recommendations pulled from this teaching experience. My intent is to pass on some of the lessons that I have learned teaching High Reliability Organizing, and to pose recommendations for further study...

Today, however, mainly due to the heating of the Earth through global warming and a build up of fuels -firefighters are working within an environmental framework of weather and fuel never experienced before. Errors that we might have "got away with" in the past could more easily become catastrophic today....

Next, I explain the irrationality (mindlessness) of always learning our primary safety lessons through trial and error. It is our job to be better at anticipating errors before they occur, before a brutal audit forces us to notice the discrepant events in the fire environment. The following quotation, which reinforces this view, is taken from French disaster expert Pat Lagadec:

"The ability to deal with a crisis situation is largely dependent on structures that have been developed before chaos arrives. The event can ... be considered an abrupt brutal audit: at a moment's notice, everything that was left unprepared becomes a complex problem, and every weakness comes rushing to the forefront."...

High Reliability Organizing

NEW! France-USA High Reliability Organizing in Incident Management Teams Project
Just like NYPD detective "Popeye" Doyle, who traveled to Marseilles in the 1970s hit movie “the French Connection” so too, did a Forest Service NIMO team this past December. Only it wasn’t for crime busting this time. It was a landmark match-up between two French and American Incident Management Teams to capture what makes these teams so successful in complex, rapidly changing, stressful situations. It is hypothesized that they exhibit many of the behaviors that directly align with high reliability organizing (HRO) concepts and principles.

( More to come)


More information:

The France-USA HRO Project (French Web Site, from Bouches du Rhone with video)
http://hro-fires.com/exercices_live.html

High-Reliability Organizing - Roberts, with Weick and Sutcliff:
http://www.wildfirelessons.net/HRO.aspx

Center for Catastrophic Risk Management, Berkely CA
http://ccrm.berkeley.edu

Communication and Information technologies:
New tools for DISASTER management
Jean-Michel DUMAZ (1)
Bouches-du-Rhône Fire Department – MARSEILLE - FRANCE
2nd International Conference on Urban Disaster Reduction
November 27~29, 2007

The Bouches du Rhône
Fire Department


Wade

Hypnotized in high places - Northwest Flight 188

( picture of vulcan cockpit from u07ch on flickr -- Click for larger view.)

So, yesteday, it seems that a Northwest flight #188 overflew its destination city as the FAA attempted desperately to reach it. According to the NY Daily News,

Crew members aboard Northwest Airlines Flight 188 told the Federal Aviation Administration they were distracted during an intense discussion over airline policy and lost track of their location in the bizarre Wednesday night error.

I wrote a comment to ABC News, after reading the other 200 or so comments, as follows (spacing put back in for clarity and ease of reading).

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There are always multiple levels of contributing factors, from personal to procedural to crew interaction to cockpit design to job design to corporate policy to FAA policy.

For safety, versus lawsuits, it's worth looking at each level of that nested hierarchy of contexts to seek ways to reduce the odds of this type of thing recurring. If we do that, we don't need to know for sure what happened -- only what might have happened that we are now aware of is a gap in our current system that is relatively easy to fix without side effects.

I think the context of the discussion could be expanded in two ways, both of which involve asking "What other events is this event like?" in a much larger framework.For example, I note an uncanny resemblance between this situation and the behavior of CEO's and government regulators as the nation financial situation flew up to the red line, and past it, while thousands of people screamed and called for attention below, and those above seemed to be ... asleep? ... arguing?... out to lunch?

This is not just situational unawareness, it is unawareness or a shared-delusional-mesmerized state that cannot be broken into by repeated efforts from outside and below, in the corporate and governmental boardrooms.

I'm not saying that just to b####, although b####ing can be fun -- I'm saying that human beings, even those with superb qualifications in isolation, can manage, collectively, to get themselves set up so that those "above" are completely and thoroughly "cut off" from input and flying blind or simply not flying at all anymore.

Again, not as legal blame for this accident, but as a route to understanding "what goes wrong with human interactions", this event could spur us to look at that much larger question, asking seriously, "No, seriously, how could THIS KIND OF THING ever actually happen?"

The truth is, socially, it happens A LOT.

There is something structurally seriously wrong with our mental model of how a hierarchical command structure ACTUALLY functions versus how we IMAGINE it to function.The lives destroyed and lost on a corporate and national level from THIS KIND of error are far more than the lives lost in this latest incident (zero).

Wade_AA

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(picture by aeneastudio on Flickr)

Other observations I've made about structural blindness and delusional-mesmerism in high places:

Why we have so much trouble seeing

Why are so many flights delayed? The circle of blame


Model induced blindness and FEMA

It's a year since Katrina made it obvious that people watching CNN knew more about what was going on top government officials.

We have to ask how that is even possible. It defies our intuition, although not our experience, which is interesting.

While the "blame-game" remains in high-gear, Systems Thinking leads us to discount the obvious "bad people" and look for deeper root-causes in the social structure. FEMA Director Brown has been replaced, but the systems problems are harder to see and may still be there....

The power of delusion

It is an astonishing fact of life, which the Times article reveals, that the desire for life to be simpler is so powerful that it can cause 10,000 "trained" scientists, with PhD's, to take 30 years to finally collectively observe what others outside their mutual-blindness-field already knew.

As I've said, textbooks such as "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" are in their 5th editions in Control System Engineering, but biologists, and much of public health's biomedical research community, discount that literature to the point of invisibility and effectively treat it with contempt. To them, this literature does not exist. When seen, it "comes as news to them", and is promptly forgotten, because it conflicts with the shared myth of their culture, and cultural myths always win out over boring contrary evidence.

The Way Things Are (The "Yarn Harlot" tells it like it is, beverage alert!)

There are some truths. Things that just are the way they are, and no amount of desperate human optimism will change them. Allow me to demonstrate.
The guys showed up with the new stove. I went out front to meet them....

OK, Seriously... WHY didn't we see it coming?

High-reliability human systems have been studied extensively, from Chernobyl to The Bay of Pigs to Challenger to aircraft cockpit teams to hospital surgical teams to the US Army Leadership Field Manual. The answer always comes down to the same thing -- dissenting views need to be heard, and dissenters need what Harvard Professor Amy Edmondson calls "Psychological Safety" or they will wilt and become ineffective. This is how humans always behave and unless steps are taken it always breaks along this fault line.

The right question then should be, who is going to take charge of seeing that those steps are taken and that level of social literacy achieved?

I can't emphasize enough how much more important this is than more math and science, in the absence of this. As T.S. Eliot said, we repeatedly get burned "dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, but the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be."

Much of my weblog is about what we really need to do to avoid such errors in judgment.

====
Various related posts:

My 40 page multilevel structural analysis of
the Crash of Comair 5191 crash in Lexington KY. August 2006
with extensive links to source materials

related webpost with links to Comair 5191 cockpit voice recorder transcripts.


Information on the investigation of the crash of Continental flight 3407 in Buffalo, NY Feb 13, 2009, from the Buffalo News.

On Thursday, Feb. 12, 2009 at 10:20 p.m., Continental flight 3407, en route from Newark, N.J., spun from the sky and crashed into a home as it made its approach to Buffalo Niagara International Airport. All 49 people on board the plane were killed, as was one man in the house in Clarence Center. It was the worst aviation accident in Western New York history.

...A moment later, the co-pilot, Rebecca Lynn Shaw, complained of her own inexperience.

"I've never seen icing conditions," she said. "I've never de-iced. I've never seen any. I've never experienced any of that. I don't want to have to experience that and make those kinds of calls. You know I'd 've freaked out. I'd have like seen this much ice and thought oh my gosh we were going to crash."

Moments later, the crew lowered the plane's flaps and landing gear, and the plane quickly encountered trouble.

Things we have to believe to see

Why men don't ask for directions

Pisa/OECD - Why our education stresses the wrong way of seeing

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

Active strength through emergent synthesis

US - Economy of arrogance (and blindness)

Virtue drives the bottom line - secrets of high-reliability systems

High-Relability Organizations and asking for help

Secrets of High-Reliability Organizations (in depth, academic paper)

High-Reliability.org web site

Threat and Error Management - aviation and hospital safety

Failure is perhaps our most taboo subject (link to John Gall Systemantics)

The importance of social relationships.

Houston - we have another problem (on complexity and limits of one person's mind)

Institute of Medicine - Crossing the Quality Chasm and microsystems (small group teamwork)

Here's a few quotations from MIT Professor John Sterman's textbook "Business Dynamics".

Many advocate the development of systems thinking - the ability to see the world as a complex system, in which we understand that "you can't just do one thing" and that "everything is connected to everything else." (p4)

Such learning is difficult and rare because a variety of structural impediments thwart the feedback processes required for learning to be successful. (p5)

Quoting Lewis Thomas (1974):

When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatisfied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing things with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century.... You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obligated to understand ... the whole system ... Intervening is a way of causing trouble.

IN reality there are no side effects, there are just effects.

Unanticipated side effects arise because we too often act as if cause and effect were always closely linked in time and space. (p 11)

And, this crucial comment by Sterman, reflecting the same observation by persons such as John Maynard Keynes.

Most of us do not appreciate the ubiquity and invisibility of mental models, instead believing naively that our senses reveal the world as it is (p16).

My additional note on this crucial insight. The reality is that the world, as it shows up on the mental TV screen we watch, is NOT the world that is actually out there. It has been more than rose-tinted by our brains. It has had entire chunks of the scene edited out entirely, and other chunks that "should go there " put in their place. A whole set of things that have given us pain or conflict in the past have been summarily removed, without so much as a place-holder left where they were. A set of things we hope might be true have been "helpfully" added to the scene. People's behavior, where it deviated from what we expected, has been "corrected" to show us them acting "the way we KNOW the are", not the way they actually are.

We are, in other words, flying almost entirely blind. We have papered over the front and side windows of our cars with pictures of the way we WANT the road to be, and are driving and turning the steering wheel based on those internal delusions.

Throughout evolution, this has been useful to reduce the immense fire-hose of data to a smaller set we can live with -- and, if we do a bad job of managing it, heck, we just die off and don't reproduce and others who do better jobs have children and go on. No big deal.

The problem comes when those living in such delusional and self-confirming, often self-congratulory worlds are given the power to rule our communities, our corporations, or our governments and they continue onwards believing that what shows up on their mental TV screens IS in fact what is going on out there, and believing, therefore, that those voices of dissenting views are, in fact, some kind of misguided or enemy action that should best be suppressed, shut out by locked cockpit doors or isolated fortress war-rooms, etc.

I'm not saying that solving this problem of filtering the fire-hose of complexity down to a size we can comprehend and use as a guide for steering is an easy one -- but I am saying that it is the kind of hard, complex problem that can yield its secrets to methodical research and study, and it is THAT research we desperately need at this time in our lives on Earth.

This is where it is breaking.

This is where we need to fix it.

Well, at least, that's what MY internal mental TV is showing me right now as the "obvious truth".

Wade