Woman standing next to her bomb shelter in her ancestral home, Mekong Delta, Vietnam, 2013

One of the authors that stands as a major inspiration in my writing is Isaac Asimov.  Of the books he’s written, the series that stands pre-eminent  is The Foundation Trilogy.  Asimov himself said he modeled the series after  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, written by Edward Gibbon, between the years 1776-1788.  I haven’t read the latter, but with recent events, I’m pretty inspired to plough through it.

The plot of the Foundation Trilogy is this:  The Galactic Empire is dying.  One man, Hari Seldon, invents a new field, blending sociology and mathematics, called Psychohistory.  Based on the idea that billions of humans now create an inevitable probabilistic calculus, where  the individual no longer matters, Psychohistory utilizes complex mathematics and statistics to predict the inevitable future, with limited bifurcations that can be directed with limited intervention.

Further, Psychohistory predicts the Empire will collapse.  What will replace it will be 30,000 years of chaos and suffering, if nothing is done, as the collapse is inevitable.  Seldon, using the insights gained from his new discipline, creates The Seldon Plan, which, if followed, will reduce the Interregnum from the psychohistorically predicted 30,000 years down to only 1000.  It involves establishing two Foundations — the First Foundation, dedicated to technology preservation and development, and the Second Foundation, dedicated to continued social development and advancement of the field of psychohistory.  The Theory of Empathetic Evolution that myself and a handful of others are working on owes directly to Asimov’s inspiration.

The books are amazingly prescient. Asimov was a genius of the age, and The Foundation Trilogy has been called some of the best science fiction writing ever.  Asimov predicted the trend of miniaturization, introduced the idea of space travel through hyperspace, and a put forward a host of other insights about centralization of power and its fundamental fragility.  His evolutionary steps for the First Foundation walk up through the Spiral v-Meme levels from Authority-based government, to Legalistic clerics, through Performance v-Meme Traders.  All events were predicted, and ostensibly backdoor-manipulated by a group of telepaths embedded in the Second Foundation,  following the Seldon Plan.

Asimov alludes to the larger concept of emergence through the idea of the Plan working as long as no one believes anyone is manipulating the plan. But he hedges his bets, likely as much by his own level of v-Meme development (he was a biochemistry professor, and likely had a big hunk of Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme behavior — big on rule-following, and not so big on things spontaneously happening) as a plot device, with the existence of the Second Foundation — people who operate outside the laws of known physics through the display and use of telepathic abilities.  Much like Manifest Destiny, The Plan marches on through the first book, growing the power of the First Foundation and pointing toward the inevitable closing of the Interregnum to 1000 years, instead of the natural occurrence interval of 30,000 years.

That is, until the middle of the second book, Foundation and Empire.  The first part of the second book is dedicated to the inevitability of the Seldon Plan, where the Foundation meets the Empire in combat, and wins by default.  Internal conflicts inside the Empire assure its collapse before it can attack the First Foundation.

But in the second half, a new character is introduced. The Mule, a mutant, with ‘mentalic’ powers that previously had only existed with certain members of the Second Foundation, arrives on the scene. He disrupts the inevitability of the continued evolution of the First Foundation and potential early ending of the Interregnum.  The Mule, as an individual, could not have been predicted by the Seldon Plan, focused as it was on the statistical movements of vast numbers of peoples and populations across the galaxy. Single-handedly, The Mule, through telepathic manipulation, defeats and takes over the Foundation’s growing empire, which has become increasingly control-oriented and out-of-touch with the outer planets in its rapidly expanding sphere of influence.

Sound familiar?

So, is Trump the Mule?  I know I couldn’t be the one to have that thought for the first time.  I went looking for an idea originator and found this.  Does Donald Trump exist outside the Theory of Empathetic Evolution, or merely outside of Asimov’s Theory of Psychohistory?  Should I just hang up my spurs and concede that Asimov’s mind is greater than the coalition of friends I’ve put together to sort things through?  Or is there some larger set of insights that we can generate that show exactly what Trump really stands for, and how we should respond?

There are two critical insights that need to be made about whether Trump is actually part of our own larger Seldon Plan, or if he is actually an anomaly, like Asimov’s Mule, that could not have been predicted.  These are thoughts and strategies contained in our own Theory of Empathetic Evolution that were not contained in the Foundation Trilogy.

The first is the concept of empathetic evolution and devolution of societies and organizations. One of the largest gaps in my early thinking, that I attribute to being an American, is the notion that things will only get better and better — societies — or at least American society– only evolves.  This led to my deeper understanding that societal evolution will track along the lines of more people, forming more and diverse relationships with each other.  By extension, leaders of societies engaging in evolution, would, as also established by Don Beck, likely be at or one level higher in social evolution than the people they lead. They would therefore use their higher level of v-Meme development to create relationships more in number, and greater in diversity.

Asimov (and initially myself,) gave only cursory thought in the trilogy to how devolution of societies would take place.  He spent a lot of time in the novels alluding to Psychohistory and the collapse of the Galactic Empire, while writing a little florid prose on its corruption. But he didn’t talk about how, other than sophisticated mathematics would be involved.  Devolution was happening to the Galactic Empire, of course, and its events mapped to Asimov’s inspirational texts by Gibbon. But other than its disintegration, Asimov gave it short shrift.

That’s fine.  The Foundation Trilogy is a work of fiction, after all.  No one said that its a requirement that the author of a piece of science fiction has to fill out all the details of a piece of technology to write about it.  That would defeat the purpose.

The second major failure of Asimov’s imagination in devising a Theory of Psychohistory is that while he posited the existence of mathematics, aggregated with probability theory, he failed to account for the individual.  Asimov’s psychohistory is only applicable when population sizes become large (whatever large means in the context of the Galactic Empire!) and he clearly states in the first book, large means billions.  Thus, he missed one of the most important parts of our own Theory of Empathetic Evolution — the fundamental self-similar nature of sentience.  It starts from the structure of our own neural pathways, up through individuals with the Principle of Reinforcement, and extends beyond to societies and how they create information in aggregate.  Asimov guessed at chaos and complex systems theory.  But for the framework of Psychohistory, he settled for statistical thermodynamics.

Regarding the first point — though devolution is not covered specifically in Asimov’s psychohistory, devolution is addressed in the Theory of Empathetic Evolution.  By direct extension, if a leader of a society that is evolving can be at or one v-Meme level above the society they are leading, and creating more and diverse relationships, the reverse is true for a devolving society.  A leader will be at or one v-Meme level below.  And instead of creating more and more diverse relationships between members, such a leader would destroy relationships, and work toward aggregating and creating grouped relational boundaries where before there were none.  We already have a name for relational disruptors — the empathy disordered.  I wrote a long piece here about Trump, the narcissistic authoritarian here.

What’s fascinating about Asimov’s Mule is that he possesses many of the attributes of the anti-empathetic that I’ve already written about here.  I’ve stated that narcissists have a super-radar that allows them to use their empathy to mirror others’ behavior precisely, creating a seductive image of themself to their target who they’re attempting to manipulate.  Asimov’s Mule has the added advantage of a magical device that amplifies his power for manipulating others mind — the Visi-Sonor.  Yet fundamentally, what Asimov is describing is a narcissistic psychopath — someone who can inspire fear and/or adoration through manipulation.  In our Theory of Empathetic Evolution, even the Mule isn’t the Mule.  The positive use of his telepathy would really be another evolved form of empathy.  Outside the reach of our evolutionary understanding, it would appear as magic.  But as described by Asimov, in the more negative sense, it’s just the same old anti-empathetic razzle-dazzle.

With regards to the second point, as I said above, Asimov did not have access to the mathematical concept of fractals and the associated ideas of self similarity that we have today. Further, he was likely culturally influenced by his adopted country — the U.S. — since he immigrated when he was only three years old, with the Performance/Goal-Based v-Meme of the role of the individual to transcend the system.  Asimov created the Mule as someone outside his system, and seemingly impervious to the laws of psychohistory.  By doing so, Asimov indirectly did us a favor with developing our own Theory of Empathetic Evolution.  While statistical approaches might indeed be part of our own mathematics in predicting larger societal phase changes, in the end our own efforts are saved by self-similarity.  Neither the Mule, nor Trump, are outside the system.

Other things that Asimov got right, however, are interesting in their own right.  The Mule was created in part by trauma.  He was tormented as a child because of his appearance, and if we scroll back to our understanding of the nature vs. nurture aspect of creation of the anti-empathetic, it is likely this mix of genetics and environment that caused the expression of the megalomania of the Mule.  In the books, the Mule is also set up as an sort of philosopher king.  Yet even after the intervention by the Second Foundation, that stops the Mule’s relentless advance across the galaxy, Asimov implicitly creates bounds on the Mule’s effect.  He is named the Mule because he is sterile, and as with all philosopher kings, there can be no larger continuity with an Authoritarian form of government.  Sooner or later, empires based on genetics, instead of larger forms of government based on memetics, are doomed to fail.  Biology is not enough to assure transfer of information to completely run a large and successful collective.

Which brings us back to the question, “Is Trump the Mule?” The answer is both yes, according to Asimov’s Psychohistory, and no, according to our Theory of Empathetic Evolution.  Donald Trump may have existed outside the contemporary system of American politics, with its odd mix of legalistic democracy and performance-based guiding principles embodied in the Constitution. But in the larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution scheme of things,he’s just another relational disruptor inside a system declining for other reasons.  In fact, if we understand our own Theory of Empathetic Evolution, not only is he predictable, Donald Trump is inevitable.

How is that so?  Let’s review these more recent posts (here and here) on how social systems devolve.  All social systems, as created artifacts of aggregated and structured information, are subject to the general laws of thermodynamics.  What that means is that they have to boil down to matters of temporal and spatial scale (time and distance of expanse) as well as energetics (easily thought of as money). When money across the majority of society declines, as our tax and education policies have pretty much demanded and created, you reach a level of depressed energetics ripe for a disruptor to come to power.  That disruptor is going to use manipulation of mental models to appeal to certain members of the larger constituency that they are being treated unfairly.

And that larger constituency is going to be composed of a variety of groups, each with their own evolutionary and devolutionary potentials.  In the case of Donald Trump, it’s no surprise that smaller racist groups, like the KKK, and individuals flock to Trump’s devolutionary message.  Because to them, it’s aspirational AND evolutionary.  Heck — it’s a recruitment tool.  Those groups are down there wallowing in the Tribal/Magical – Authoritarian grouping anyway, and Trump is, as a Performance-based Authoritarian, v-Meme speaking, sending them a message that they can interpret as spot-on, or even move up.  It offers them greater connection and mainstreaming of their viewpoint.  Political analysts call this type of messaging ‘dog whistles’ — sounds that normal folks can’t hear, and only dogs, with their specialized hearing can detect.  In this case, these messages are resonant, and those that have moved past them don’t respond to them.  Especially if they’re perceived in the culture as derogatory.

Meanwhile, the larger mainstreamed part of Trump’s constituency can’t really see it.  They’re supporting Trump because to them, he’s an outsider, and because they’re economically/energetically aggrieved.  It’s not that those darker messages aren’t in there somewhere.  But they’re not drivers.  As an example, I come from a particularly backward part of the country — central Appalachia.  I grew up in a pretty racist environment, and there’s no question that old messages of racist hate are buried.

But more on the surface and far stronger is the idea of working for a living, and seeing the decay and collapse of their community. If you read the basic population dynamics of my hometown, Portsmouth, Ohio, you’ll see a community that existed at a population high of 40,000, with its own NFL team in the 1940s, to now around 20,000 people, and a collapsed industrial base and a rampant prescription drug and illegal heroin problem. I know the people of Portsmouth, and if there’s a barometer of individual racism, it’s interracial marriage.  Among my classmates, predominantly white, no one would whisper a peep if one of their kids brought home someone they were dating from a different race or ethnicity — as long as they had a job.  That’s Performance-based Authoritarian v-Memes for you — exactly what Trump is.

I’d argue that you could look at the economic winners, and see the same positive evolutionary drivers are pre-eminent in areas that voted for Clinton.  The areas/states that supported the Democrats this last election in the presidential election, in great majority, are not experiencing the energetic catastrophe that most of the country is facing.  Population is flocking to those areas, expanding temporal and spatial empathetic scales.  An influx of new residents means a diversity of ideas and perspectives, and that has to grow empathy through exchange. When it comes to money, to visit Seattle now, with Amazon doubling its workforce downtown from some 25,000 to 50,000, is to tap into a wild energy that’s pretty incomprehensible.

Yet it’s only available to a certain global elite –educated citizens, as well as immigrants with H1 visas and trained in data science and related areas.  The people from my hometown couldn’t tap into that if they wanted.  They are already demographically in the losing Out-Group, and not surprisingly, looking for a champion.

So along comes a classic, narcissistic relational disruptor — Donald Trump.  He seems to embody the powers of the Mule — the ability to create an image in the minds of his constituency that has little relevance to his physical reality.  As a narcissist, he has no integral worldview outside his own fragmented self-image.

But he can mirror behavior.  Before the primary season, back in 2014, if you methodically reviewed his policy positions, Trump might have been considered a centrist Democrat.  Before the election, a reasonably objective reviewer of his topical statements would conclude that he’s a conservative Republican.  Yet already, only one week after the election, he’s shifting again.  No on dismantling Obamacare.  Waffling on building a wall with Mexico.  And so on.

What’s the reality?  As a classic impulsive narcissist, the only consistent theme that will dictate his continued policy direction is generating narcissistic supply for himself, and retaliation toward constituencies that tap into his wrath.  And he’ll surround himself by people that pretty much look like him.  Not surprisingly, the solidified In-Group that dominates his transition team is not the evangelical wing of the Republican Party, nor the Tea Party Republicans that voted for him.  Instead, it’s Wall Street and Goldman Sachs, and K-Street lobbyists.  They’re conservative globalists — not inveterate nationalists and cornpone Bible-thumping politicians from the Heartland.

And not surprisingly, he’s placed a number of family members on his transition team.  That’s classic Authoritarian behavior.  Loyalty is paramount.  Trump’s not stupid.  He knows that all those people he stomped on in the Republican Party, on his way to the nomination as their candidate, and his eventual election, are going to want blood.  If they don’t, they’re positively craven and can’t be trusted anyway. Trump’s got his version of the Mule’s Visi-Sonor — Twitter.  True to his narcissistic impulses, he’s still attacking the New York Times after the election.

What to do about Trump?  One of the first rules of defusing a High Conflict personality is to not feed the beast. How to do that is the subject of my next post.  Be glad of one thing — we’ve moved past Psychohistory.  And the answer, of course, is more empathetic evolution.  But who has to do what means that the progressive movement is going to have to confront its own demons.

 

 

 

Riot Police at a Strike, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2013

I’m guessing that folks are attempting to process the election, and I promise that I’ll write a piece on exactly who Donald Trump is and what he’s very likely to do (remember — I’m batting 1.000 far before any of the other pundits — check those publication dates! — by applying our Theory of Empathetic Evolution — read this first piece and this second piece) but other important matters are also rolling.  The short version is Trump is The Mule from Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, and the way we got here is the process of re-grounding that I’ve discussed before.  Of course, it’s worrisome, but I’ll also tell you how we’ll have to fix it.

In the meantime, I’ve put up a new masthead post on Fundamentals of Knowledge Structures.  These give the building blocks of all sentient knowledge, up to my level of enlightenment.  Feel free to add or criticize.  It also facilitates construction of the foundation for work done by my two colleagues, Jake Leachman and Kshitij Jerath, professors at WSU, both with an interest in complex systems and thermodynamics.  I don’t think Kshitij has a blog yet, but Jake does here.  Check it out!

Yours Truly, having too much fun with a Bolivian Parade Dancer, Buenos Aires, Argentina

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about how important non-verbal communication is as part of empathy.  It’s very challenging, because, believe it or not, there’s been little research done on it that has declarative answers.  The most famous research that’s often quoted was done in the late ’60s/ early ’70s by Albert Mehrabian, that came up with the 55%/38%/7% ratio, for body language, tone of voice, and actual words spoken.  This rolled over from the 60%/40% previous research on facial vs. vocal components to communication.  Every teacher in the world that’s remotely paying attention knows that students don’t get half of what’s said to them.  And there has been research on proximity for educational information transfer — students who sit closer to the professor tend to do much better than the students in the back.

But in fairness to psychology researchers, whom I do like to pick on, it would be very hard to come up with a definitive answer regarding how much sinks in when you simply tell someone to do something.  It depends on the context of the ‘ask’, the detail in the information, and a whole lot of other factors.  Suffice it to say that just guessing 40% isn’t too bad.

And then there’s the research perspective/v-Meme channel aspect.  Authoritarians are going to want to believe that people listen to them, even if they don’t.  Most network analysis papers in collective intelligence assume perfect transmission, even if this threatens the validity of the whole premise they’re researching.  I’m guessing that all this comes out of the low-empathy levels that the researchers operate in.  So it’s no surprise that no one has pursued what is obviously a difficult question to its illogical end.

One person that has dissected the non-verbal part is empathy research rock star Stephen Porges.  Porges, a Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina, has done research into all sorts of aspects of non-verbal empathetic cues, like prosody.  Prosody is the sing-song tone of voice that we use all the time when we’re trying to calm someone down — but especially when we’re stuck with a crying baby. This goes back to the whole queuing of ‘Empathy as Time Synchronizer‘ theme on a very physical level.  When you’re connected, you have to have ways of syncing emotional and intellectual states.  That’s prosody.

He’s also written the seminal book, The Polyvagal Theory, which presents evidence that the vagus nerves, which run through your throat, and extend down into your stomach, are wired to your face.  What are the implications?  By looking at someone’s face, or even hearing just their voice, you can get a whole body read on what kind of day someone is having.

My hypothesis is that this is the base-level of our empathetic evolutionary heritage, and was a key driver in our turning into a collective species.  Imagine you’re jogging with your buddies across the Siberian tundra on a mammoth hunt. You’ve got to be able to quickly assess whether your best friend John is up to being the hucker-of-spears for the day.  And if his stomach is acting up, you’re going to be able to read it right on his face, or hear it in his voice, instantaneously.  It’s the evolutionary turning point, along with child care, of course, that launched us up the Empathy Pyramid into the world of emotional empathy.

There’s tons more here to unpack.  And for those that find this subject interesting — it really relates to my friend Edwin Rutsch’s Empathy Circles practice — you can watch a short blurb about Stephen Porges below.

Porges gives lots of interviews, many available on Youtube, and the long ones give more detail.  Highly recommended for the aficionado!

Along the roadside, outside Loreto, Baja California Sur, 2011

One of the most interesting articles to slide across my virtual desk in a while is this piece in National Geographic regarding octopuses.  The cool thing about this piece is that it covers the intricacies of the octopus’ nervous system, which is one of the most complex in the Animal Kingdom.  Neuron-count-wise, it weighs in around 500 million, split about 35% between central executive function, and 65% spread out over the skin of the octopus, and in its tentacles.  Contrast that to a cat, at around 700 million, and it might give a glimpse on why, when you stare at an octopus, it stares back at you.  Fish don’t do that.

An octopus and its nervous system is an excellent analog for how empathy and duplex information transfer, as well as distributed agency works to create an extremely high performance system.  An octopus, as the article notes, is essentially a floating bag of meat, and as such, is highly attractive as food for predators.  In order to survive, it’s had to evolve extensive mirroring behavior with its environment — octopuses are masters of camouflage.  As well as problem-solving skills.  Octopuses have to not only be able to hide.  They also have to be able to crack clams and crabs, and occasionally open jars.

Every individual sucker on an octopus’ arm is independently controlled. And when an octopus conceives a thought, multiple tentacles coordinate with each other to accomplish the given task — and since the arms of an octopus are flexible, the problem solved is what engineers call an infinite degree-of-freedom problem.  And the arms themselves appear to have distributed intelligence. Research on severed octopus tentacles indicate that even after an hour of being separated from the main body, tentacles would act as if they were attempting to grab on objects and guide them back to the octopus’ now-phantom mouth.

Additionally, all those suckers/actuators are also sensors.  An octopus can also taste and touch with its suckers.  As such, it truly is a networked, duplex-exchange information creature.  And as this video shows — this massively networked creature is also sentient.  The octopus keeper at the Monterey Aquarium describes how an octopus can discriminate between different humans in its environment.  And it has ones that it’s more, well, attached to, than others.  You can learn about it here.  Score one more animal on the theory that sentience is sentience — we all just have a different starting position in the race toward higher development.

As we evolve our own meta-understanding of how we evolve our own understanding, maybe a better metaphor for creating the organization of the future might be an octopus.  Jim Collin’s Hedgehog notwithstanding, which emerges out of Performance-based v-Meme thinking of doing one thing, and doing it well, might need an upgrade.  How about an empathetic sensor network, capable of versatility and adaptation, with the ability to grasp new situations and pull information real-time, with a reasonable amount of executive function, while understanding when it’s important to both connect and adapt to its surroundings in order to survive?  That’s the lesson of the octopus.

Tango Show, Buenos Aires, 2013

I came across this post on Medium by Charles Scalfani regarding how to rapidly learn languages.  This topic has been covered by others before, but his piece nicely reinforces concepts that I’ve discussed regarding the Neurobiology of Education and Critical Thinking . Scalfani disses hard on the academic modality of dumping grammar and vocabulary on students’ heads, and instead advises bootstrapping through conversational experience as the way we learn to speak when we’re kids.  Modern language instruction is classic ‘neglect all the principles I’ve written about here’, with lots of emphasis on Left Brain Explicit Knowledge Acquisition, and very little Right Brain Autobiographical Integration.

Here’s the super-figure to inspire you to go back and read that post.  Considering the complexity of the issue, it’s pretty minimal on the Squirrel Talk!

He does make the extremely important point that one of the big flaws in the standard academic approach to learning a language is to have kids speak in front of the class.  Since the #1 fear of Americans is public speaking, it’s no surprise that the amygdala cuts off transfer by the hippocampus from the left brain/explicit learning  to the right brain/autobiographical-holistic learning.

Standard academic teaching of foreign languages is also a great example of how knowledge structures generated by academic social structures fall far short of the task of getting students up and running with speaking languages early.  Authoritarian knowledge fragments (like vocabulary words and short phrases!) and Legalistic/Absolutistic rules (like the grammar that is drilled in) , which are the standard knowledge structures generated by academic hierarchies, are short on real meaning for students, because almost all of it ends up on the Left side of the Neocortex.  The idea that the Left brain is going to construct translated sentences — which is what almost all of us do when learning a language — implies double jeopardy when you attempt to speak to someone.  First, you have to memorize the explicit knowledge and put it on the Left side.  Then you have to access deeper meaning in your native language on the Right side.  Then that has to get pulled back and mapped on the Left side.  It’s no wonder that students too often hate learning a language, and their attempts at even simple conversations are stuttering.  It’s a whole new set of pathways that have to get trodden every time you want to make a sentence.

Where stakes really matter, and teaching has to take a minimal amount of time (Mormons, Foreign Service, and the Peace Corps!) immersion is the rule.  For myself, I have a discipline that I attempt to follow that if I’m going to visit a country, I have to at least know a little of the language.  My favorite mode is to use Pimsleur recordings, which also follow modestly that holistic mapping of a new language on top of a holistic understanding of English.  I’m no true polyglot — but I can speak five different languages mediocrely.  🙂  One of the biggest information integration insights I’ve found is that one of the keys to speaking is to integrate the base level sounds, or phonemes, into your brain at the earliest possible stage.  The further away from English (like Mandarin) a language is, the more critical this is.  People hear sounds differently in different parts of the world.  The only way to get those sounds is by actually listening to the language.  That’s where the Pimsleur recordings shine.

Academia is changing, especially with respect to teaching foreign languages.  But change is slow.  Part of the problem once again comes down to empathetic development in the academy.  There seems to be a disconnect with many language professors that the reason for learning a language is now primarily conversation.  Learning how to ask someone for directions seems much lower status than reading Goethe in German.  And these language education traditions die hard, because it was only a relatively short time ago, the idea of jetting around the globe on a whim, or for vacation, was really not an option.  So any higher Performance v-Meme need for language was mostly deciphering complex grammar of classical texts.

Now people just want to go to a beach in Costa Rica and order a mojito.  Here’s hoping that, once again, the academy catches up with the modern world.  All my professor friends out there — speaking foreign languages poorly, as opposed to not speaking them at all, is a GOOD thing.  Like Mark Twain said, nothing is more lethal to ignorance than travel.  That’s a value I know that every academic can get behind.  But the real key behind the enlightenment travel offers is true empathy for others.  And that is profoundly facilitated by connected conversation.

Never Ending Stairs — Huangshan/Yellow Mountain, Anhui Province, China 2013

In the last post, we covered Franz de Waal’s capuchin monkey experiment, where an Experimental Executor (E.E.) fed dissimilar rewards to two caged primates for the same task — fetching a rock and handing it to the person outside the cage.  De Waal used this to establish the notion that humans aren’t the only ones with a concept of fairness, and there’s an implied genetic argument to this as well.  Fair enough!

But when we look at de Waal’s experiment through a different lens, where the E.E. is now part of the system, lots of other interesting insights on collective behavior come up.  It’s helpful to go back and read the first post.  Below is the first figure that describes the experiment that de Waal discusses.

Experimental Executor Outside the System

And below is the system that we’re going to discuss.

Experimental Executor Inside the System

Let’s start with some obvious statement of facts:

1.  All actors inside the red system boundary are sentient.
2. They are communicating with each other as they are able, and all have some limited ability to see into the future.
3. The E.E. may possess a greater capacity to see into the future, but she is still limited.
4. Both monkeys can communicate with each other, and they can communicate with the E.E.
5. Even though the monkeys have no human language, they are able to communicate a range of system states/emotions to the human in the system, the E.E.
6. Information coherence in this system is extremely likely limited by the transmission mechanism — not the neural capacity of the actors.  If the monkeys could better express themselves in a way the human could understand, certainly the experiment would either end earlier or not take place!

Why state all the stuff above?  Once we accept that all actors in the system are sentient, we can now understand this experiment as a phenomenological exploration of social structure.  We can then make some observations about how those social structures map to the v-Memes in Spiral Dynamics, and what kind of knowledge structures the monkeys are able to possess.  Once we understand that, we might come to the conclusion that if we’re concerned about respecting different beings with the same level of sentience — albeit more noisy information channels, or less sophisticated ways of communicating information between actors that drag out the process of communicating between sentient actors (different time scales) — we might want to reevaluate our own empathetic development.

We know that the monkeys involved — capuchin monkeys — live in trees, and associate in a band.  There is some social structure that’s been observed, where it appears that a dominant male and female run the show.  That means the capuchins likely gets up to the Authoritarian v-Meme, as the male alpha definitely gets more sex than any of the other male monkeys.  However, sex is doled out by the females after they think they’ve gotten pregnant to the other male monkeys, as a form of communication and soothing.  These monkeys want to maintain a high level of social cohesion, as monkeys in the extended network also go out and find food across a wide area.

That means these monkeys are sensitive, like all Tribal and nascent Authoritarian systems, to the distribution of energy among all the sentient actors.  Hooked together as a band, if one monkey can’t get up and jump between the trees, it’s going to affect others.  They are at least emotionally empathetically connected.  And they have some ability to use money!  Researchers have also shown intelligence enough for tool use, and mimicking.  That places these monkeys somewhere close to humans attempting to fix a dishwasher without prior training or access to watching YouTube videos!

What’s the point of establishing this equivalency between capuchin monkeys and humans, from a point of sentience?  You might think I’m going to argue for better monkey treatment.  That monkeys are really in our In-Group, and they deserve a life outside a cage, and at a minimum, an occasional day at the ball park.  And hey — I’m all about being nice, or nicer to monkeys!

But that’s not the point to this blog post.  It’s this:  monkeys are a great stand-in for humans inside a social system, and we can draw conclusions that are spot-on about human behavior (or actually, sentient behavior) inside a given social system by observing the outcomes of de Waal’s cucumber/grape experiment.  Understanding the basics of this social network can give us insight into how human authorities work inside an authoritarian social system, and how relational disruption occurs.

Let’s start by reassigning the role of cucumbers and grapes as well.  Ignoring taste, both cucumbers and grapes are food.  Food with different energetic concentrations.  Grapes are full of sugar, and thus high energy.  Cucumbers are essentially water, and thus low/no energy. In this experiment, the Authority distributes energy across the network.  An evolved Authority might follow higher, more evolved v-Meme direction in distribution of rewards.  If the Authority had an egalitarian bent, she might give each monkey a grape for a successful rock retrieval.  The monkeys have been shown to be happy with even a bite of cucumber as long as both received the same reward.

But if the Authority was imperious, and not motivated to explain circumstances (or what we might call system boundary conditions) to the sentient actors in this system, then she might arbitrarily dole out grapes and cucumbers as her impulsive, limbic mind prompts her.  If she arbitrarily picks a favorite — if she uses her authority in a way that is indecipherable to her lower tier constituency, I’d be willing to bet that most of the monkeys treated poorly will withdraw, and become depressed.  There’s no point in fetching a rock if you’re never going to get a grape!

But some of the monkeys will realize they’re sorted into an Out-group that is going to starve to death.  I’ll bet those monkeys, over time, become High Conflict monkeys, attempting to act out to get the grapes.  Other monkeys in the Out-group may actually look up to that crazy monkey, because at least he/she doesn’t accept the status quo.  That monkey likely has a predisposition to acting out and is triggered earlier than the other monkeys — it seems highly unlikely that all the monkeys would spontaneously rise up at once.

If the Authority is arbitrary, and doles out grapes and cucumbers in an arbitrary pattern, it’s likely that over time the monkeys will both become confused.  There’s no pattern in reward, and the only task they’re permitted to do is fetch a stupid rock from a holder on the side.  Monkeys subject to this treatment are likely to both become depressed.  They can’t figure out the system, and their brains have enough circuits to remember what happened earlier.  I’ll bet these monkeys largely become nihilistic and passive.  There’s no point, when the reward is arbitrary, in stepping up performance.  Nothing really matters.

But it’s also likely that this behavior of random rewards mentally unhinges both monkeys, and they start fighting.  By switching the reward centers in the sentient actors’ brains randomly, it gives the monkeys schizophrenia.

Now we can step back and consider the Experimental Executor (E.E.)  Here we can also see how the different Authoritarian v-Meme archetypes come into play. The empathy-disordered E.E. uses preferential rewards based on arbitrary criteria to depress monkeys it wants to depress, and coddle monkeys it wants to coddle.  It uses arbitrary rewards to create chaos and confusion among members of the band, and disrupt relationships between the monkeys.  In the end, once the Authoritarian E.E. is dethroned, it’s highly likely that you’re going to end up with a lower level v-Meme, Tribal social structure among our capuchins, with profound In-Group/Out-Group dynamics.  And in the likely event that there’s not enough energy/food overall, those monkeys are going to kill each other.

What if there’s enough food?  I’ll bet the monkeys might have a short spat and go back toward some level of harmony.  But if there’s not enough?

Now we might gain some insight into how the empathy-disordered gain power in hierarchical organizations.  Let’s say we have an organization that is operating with a reduced budget relative to times past,  has some low level of turmoil, and is relatively stable.  No one is getting what they think they deserve, but everyone has enough to survive.  In through Stage Left comes an Authoritarian Relational Disruptor (ARD).  The ARD promises the Authority above them an unachievable goal that is not possible with the current energetics in the system.  He then goes inside the social community and starts doling out grapes to some representative half of the social community at a level that they feel they deserve.

But because there’s not enough grapes to go around, he has to get those grapes from somewhere.  Those he takes from the implicitly designated Out-Group.  Those monkeys in the In-Group that thought they deserved the extra rations all along are now highly supportive of the ARD. Their level of grape maintenance maps with their self assessment of what they deserved before entering the resource-constrained environment.  They’re happy, and they initially start working harder.  If the metrics around performance are keyed to the types of outputs that the higher-level authority (the one above the ARD) expects, the ARD looks like a genius!  The higher-ups remark “We always knew that was just a lower performing unit!  This ARD is just the ticket!”

What happens to the people in the Out-group?  Well, they get depressed. Constrained by culture (or a cage!) from wrapping their hands around the the ARD’s neck, they can’t actualize their obvious frustration.  Their performance drops. But because the ARD isn’t recording their performance, because he’s figured out that it’s not the metrics being tracked by his higher-ups, he feels no consequence from his actions.  And since the ARD is at best neutrally empathetic, and potentially anti-empathetic, he either feels no pain, or gets off on the pain from the Out-group.

Of course, it’s highly likely that all the people in the system, even in the depressed energetic state, were producing energetics that sustained the whole network.  So the reduced flow of energy from the Out-group does have effects.  But there is inherently a time/information lag in the system, that lag is increased because of the anti-empathetic nature of the input from the ARD.  Relational fragmentation is occurring almost instantaneously — in the context of old social bonds, who wants to go to an old friend and ask him why he got the extra grape (or raise) you thought both of you deserved?  So information transfer starts failing as well.

But over time, chaos starts creeping into the system.  Initially, people less conflict-averse start protesting working conditions.  But over time, a more profound segregation occurs, with the In-Group supporting the ARD, and the Out-Group suffering.

The dynamic continues — those averse to conflict in both sides leave if they can get out of the cage.  If the performance measures are short term and have no gearing for social harmony, then the ARD gets a promotion!  Sometimes, groups with enough self awareness and v-Meme evolution realize what’s happening and coalesce around throwing the ARD out.  Depending on the level of higher v-Memes (Legalism, Performance, Communitarian processing) systems like these recover.

But that is all time-dependent.  And if the system has expectations of continuous production, it is likely that the system will collapse.

Now you can see how looking at de Waal’s experiment is really teaching us what’s happening in the world today, with increasing gaps in wealth inequality!  All we had to do was draw the system boundary a little larger!

Braden and Conor, along the wild Selway River, 2012

One of the more intriguing videos I’ve watched in the last two years is a clip from empathy pioneer Franz de Waal’s research with capuchin monkeys.  In this experiment, de Waal is asking a basic question: do capuchin monkeys have an inherent, and an implied genetic mechanism for fairness and morality?  De Waal’s position has been, as long as I’ve read his stuff, that the differences between humans and animals aren’t nearly as great as most people would like to think.  But he starts with the widely accepted premise that humans ARE indeed different, and then constructs experiments around the popular theses (such as can certain animals recognize their reflection in the mirror) in order to prove or disprove these.

It’s a Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme hierarchical premise, which would be expected inside typical university, composed of low-empathy rigid hierarchies with lots of rules.  De Waal asks questions that make sense to that community, which then map to the mental models that people have regarding the In-Group (humans)/ Out-Group (animals) dynamics between the two. Though many might consider the work paradigm-shifting, de Waal’s questions are incrementalist, but still important.  De Waal’s goal is establishing without a doubt that a certain differences, previously postulated to exist, between humans and a species like De Waal’s capuchins, actually don’t.  So while he’s not completely flipping the paradigm — more nibbling away at the mental model that animals and people are different– he’s also maintained a distinguished career and international respect.  Something that I’m still working on!  🙂

Below is the clip from De Waal’s TED talk on the inherent sense of fairness ingrained in capuchin monkeys.  It’s short, and I highly encourage you to watch it.  The basic premise is that you have two monkeys in two cages.  Each monkey is asked to perform the same task — fetch a rock and give it to the keeper — and then in turn is rewarded for their efforts.  Chaos breaks out when one monkey is given a piece of cucumber, while for the same task, another monkey is given a grape.

The whole TED talk is below, and also well worth the watch.  De Waal shows a few other tests, as well as talking about his concept of the Pillars of Morality — Reciprocity and Fairness, and Empathy and Compassion.  De Waal ends the talk saying that many in the intellectual community don’t like this result, including philosophers and anthropologists, and insist that fairness is actually a much higher level concept.  One philosopher , according to De Waal, told him that fairness was not even discovered until the French Revolution!

Franz de Waal’s whole TEDx talk — 2012

All of this — the issue of animals and inherent morality — is interesting in and of itself.  But for those of us who believe in theories of collective sentience and empathy, there are larger lessons.  The first step is to understand de Waal himself, and his surrogates, as  social actors inside a legalistic hierarchy, asking questions of morality and fairness, that map exactly into the Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme that he exists in.  He’s not just an observer.  He’s a participant.

His experiments also reflect techniques fundamental to the dichotomous thinking of the dominant v-Meme — two monkeys are present, with an ostensibly neutral observer.  Even his experiments on elephants that are contained in the longer video match up only have two representatives.  Not surprisingly, de Waal’s emphasis on empathy is on the emotional content aspect, as discussed earlier, that also correlates with the lower v-Memes. And as we would also expect, he only giving a nod to the concept of cognitive empathy, which we fold together into rational empathy.  Measuring rational empathy in monkeys would be very difficult — and since you can’t measure it, you don’t run experiments on it and maintain fidelity to your v-Meme.  You can’t just debrief the subjects after a test.

De Waal’s system diagram — the way he perceives the grape/cucumber experiment — is shown below.  He places his lab assistant outside the system, rewarding cucumbers and grapes to the monkeys, once again reasserting the role of the scientist as neutral observer, non-empathetic and outside the system of interest, as opposed to interacting with the system whether they like it or not.  This is, of course, how the Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme views itself — removed, and only interacting as it chooses, in the timescales and spatial scales that it sets.  It’s following rules — and in control. Those monkeys are in cages, pal.

There is little or no consequential thinking exhibited by anyone in the system.  Does performing this experiment damage the monkeys’ socialization in the group?  De Waal mentions that two monkeys were pulled from the same social cluster.  Yet we have no information if de Waal and his cohort had a larger discussion — something like “we better be careful, pissing off those goddamned monkeys.  They might start beating the hell out of each other if we do this too many times.”  And interestingly enough, he also talks in the longer video about chimpanzees in similar experiments who would not take the better reward in front of a friend.  The chimp was displaying larger scale consequential thinking than displayed by the experimenters!

The point of this is NOT to judge de Waal, or his experimental set-up.  Though a discussion of higher morality might be entertaining to some of my animal rights readers, that’s not the focus of this thought experiment.  Instead, let’s see what happens when we consider a different system boundary, and what the consequences of collective sentience might be if we take the same experiment, but broaden our perspective.

Here’s a new plot, with the experimental executor inside the system boundary.

Experimental Executor is now part of the experiment

It’s the same exact situation as the reality portrayed in the video — but now our perception is different.  Now the Experimental Executor (E.E.) is engaged in an interaction with both monkeys, who are now part of a far more complex system, and playing a role as a relational disruptor between the two monkeys.  By placing the Experimental Executor inside the In Group, we uncover new dynamics.  First, the task — grabbing a rock and handing it to the E.E. — has to appear arbitrary to the monkey.  All the E.E. does is take the rock and dole out a piece of cucumber or a grape. This makes the monkey on the left extremely pissed off.  He starts banging his fist on the ground through the hole in the cage, and shakes the plexiglass.  Clearly, if he could, he’d at least pull the E.E.’s hair in retaliation for the mistreatment.  But he can’t get at the E.E.  The deprived monkey becomes more frustrated by the moment.

The lucky monkey on the right receiving the grape retreats from the commotion at the edge of his cage.  He’s not at all on getting involved with the scene on the right.  Once inside the system, by parceling out different energetic levels to people in identical situations, the E.E. is displaying anti-empathetic behavior inside the system.  It’s no longer neutral.  It has a deleterious effect, and all the monkeys know it — including, perhaps, the big monkey handing out the grape and cucumber!

Now we can start to see the effect of external relational definition inside this system.  The E.E. obviously has talked to her supervisor — Franz de Waal — outside the system, and agreed to do the experiment.  Maybe she is fundamentally empathetic to the monkeys — she doesn’t like it when the monkeys get pissed off.  She could have a self interest in this — maybe she has to go inside the cage with the monkeys later, and she knows they’ll throw poop at her.  But the entity on the outside of the system — that would be Franz de Waal himself! — is now the person doling out metaphorical cucumbers and grapes to the E.E.!

This is not intended as a topical condemnation of de Waal.  I am sure he obviously believes in his work, and is carefully constructing experiments that show the deep flaw in human thinking regarding placing animals in an out-group from a point of moral reasoning.  In that larger temporal/spatial sense, de Waal, by attempting to change ingrained mental models that consider monkeys lower forms of life, and subject to whatever whim humans decide to put them through,could be  practicing a ‘meta-morality’ — which would then be a function of more highly evolved, self-aware, 2nd Tier legalism.  The thesis might be:  “see, monkeys and humans both get connected living, so stop saying it’s OK to do things to monkeys, because they’re really just like us in our In Group.”  Even though there’s this limited consistency in the experiment — because the experiment is tormenting both monkeys.

We can also see how this whole system opens itself to the anti-empathetic.  If the lab tech. displays too much agency (and empathy!) in running the experiment, de Waal then has to assert his authority and find a different experimenter if she won’t do what he asks.  He’s doling out grapes and cucumbers as well — because maybe the E.E., just like the monkeys, on a meta-level, doesn’t have the timescales or levels of consequential thinking to appreciate de Waal’s lofty goals.  Maybe she’s worried about her roommate, who thinks working with monkeys kept in cages is just wrong.  We don’t know, as this is outside the system boundary.

But, of course, de Waal himself is inside a system — and he has to respond to the people on the outside, who view him as someone that receives cucumbers or grapes.  That might be the National Science Foundation, who funds his research.  He’s got his own set of seemingly arbitrary reviewers who are asking him to give them a figurative rock from inside his cage!  Anyone who’s sat on an NSF review panel, or have had proposals reviewed by NSF, knows how this works.  De Waal himself is a meta-monkey, along a whole bunch of other monkeys in cages, all getting money (energy) either doled out to them, or punishment dished on them.  The system replicates itself in a self-similar fashion down to the smallest scales.  Which is not surprising, considering what we know about our larger Theory of Empathetic Evolution.  It’s a low empathy system, and those in it should expect to be faced with many dichotomous choices, including some that will inherently cause relational disruption.

Poor Franz de Waal, trapped inside his own cage — a low empathy system constructed by NSF!

What can we learn from this cascade of experiments, ending up with de Waal’s capuchins squabbling in cages?  Perhaps the largest lesson is how Legalistic Hierarchies still provide relational fragmentation as part of their core functionality, through dichotomous choices. And through intrinsic mechanisms, open the door for some level of relational disruption, necessary for maintaining the hierarchy.  Imagine what those capuchins might do if they all got together as a group.  Or those grad students!

Conor and Braden getting after it, Silver Mountain, 2013 and 2011

Below is a fascinating video of people who are pursuing the ‘custom made ski’ movement in a truly novel way.  Michael Lish and Kristin Broumas pursue their craft in a custom, rolling workshop, giving lessons along the way on how to make skis to high school kids, and even the occasional wedding party.  If you subscribe to the lessons of this blog — that building an empathetic relationship with yourself, through performance and mastery, jump-starts empathetic relationships with others, then you’ll like the idea.  If you then believe that shared experience in contemplative environments gives you the space to reflect on your own development, then Community Skis could be one of the best showcases of empathetic ladders I’ve found.

Fog in the crags, Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), Anhui Province, China, 2013

I had the pleasure to spend the last week with my friend, Dr. Hesam Ostad, who directs a workgroup for a large engineering firm, Ferchau Engineering, in Stuttgart that partners with Mercedes-Benz.  Hesam and I had taught a creativity and innovation summer course in Vienna about four years ago.  In the course of our trip, we visited another one of my collaborators, Dr. Michael Richey, an Associate Fellow in Learning, Training and Development at the Boeing Company.  Mike and I were partners on his innovative program called the Boeing AerosPACE initiative, where professors from a range of institutions collaborate to deliver a coordinated program utilizing both on-line education and practice-oriented, problem-based learning in building a fixed-wing UAV.  Below is a picture taken from the fly-off last spring.

Blaine and Kyle with the plane, Boeing AerosPACE flyoff, April 2016

If you ask Mike what puzzle he’s attempting to crack, he’d be happy to tell you that he’s working to find ways to evolve a hierarchy into what he calls a ‘networked hierarchy’ — which is the challenge he faces immediately at Boeing.  His perspective originates from his own bottom-to-top job evolution, as he started at Boeing making wings some years ago, and then moved up into education.  The AerosPACE program, which involved Boeing employees, as well as professors from WSU, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Tuskegee, BYU and others, had as its stated cornerstone mission in developing virtual work techniques and teaming for students.  But there was another, unstated, and far more complex mission — getting professors from different universities to work together to pull off a synergistic program.  The design process used for the UAV was classic transitional gated design, which allowed the professors opportunities to teach technical information and fulfill class requirements, meeting expectations of rigor at the beginning of the process.  After that, the larger focus was on building the UAV.  And though it was close, at our fly-off, all the UAVs flew!

Hesam and I met Mike at the Everett factory for a tour of the Boeing 777, 787, and old 747 line.  Immediately adjacent loomed the new 777x wing facility, still locked down and hidden from any prying eyes.  We all got to climb up in a 787 ready to ship, and toured the flight deck, which looked more like the interior of a comfortable new car crossed with the command center of a futuristic spaceship than the old-style military fittings, with lines and lines of switches.

Boeing 787 Flight Deck, from Airliners.net

Another view, without the seats — Boeing.com

Mike is one of the pioneers in using Big Data in understanding personalized learning, and he’d be the first to admit that he’s at the beginning of a long journey.  But he’s stepped out and written about it, with other collaborators, on the purpose of educational research and analysis.  If we’re doing all this work, demanding educational researchers do more and more extensive data analysis, to uncover trends in how people learn, how, exactly, is this improving the educational experience?  Mike will tell you that Google uses data real-time to improve performance of the user experience.  Why can’t the educational system do the same thing?

Diligent readers of this blog will already know the answer.  Academic systems, mired deep in the Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme, don’t care much about evolving the student experience.  Masters of explicit knowledge acquisition, aggregation, and reproduction, they are going to struggle with the concept of importance of how students actually integrate and process information (they’re supposed to learn the way the professors teach!) which requires higher degrees of rational place-taking empathy. The purpose of most of that data acquisition and research in engineering education is to publish papers in journals — not adapt a Performance v-Meme perspective and attempt to improve what is done.  Further, the Absolutistic strain in academic communities will almost always say that not enough research has been done to draw definitive conclusions, and as such, it’s back to “that’s the way I learned it — it’s good enough.”

This leads to the larger question — how do we effect transformational change inside our lower v-Meme institutions?  As a large, hierarchical institution, Boeing still needs to innovate to survive.  The cockpit of the 787 shows some empathetic evolution. Improved ergonomics for the pilot and co-pilot, including luggage storage space and cupholders — are small indicators of the empathetic pressures percolating back to cockpit design.  There are likely other factors.  In long history, most of the pilots came from military backgrounds.  Now, they’re civilians, and likely have different expectations and norms.  I have no idea if the airlines ask pilots what plane they’d like to buy. But Boeing certainly does as they design aircraft.  Improved situational awareness improves performance — an issue we’ve covered in the past.

Education faces large pressures for evolution as well.  It’s no surprise that Mike and I share similar perspectives, even though we come from separate worlds.  Though his roots are in the world of commercial aerospace, and I’ve been a university educator, we’re both interested in performance-based learning.  Companies like Boeing, regardless of their social structure, don’t care much about things like grades.  They want their employees to acquire new skills that they can use to make money.  One of the things that definitely drove me, when I started the Industrial Design Clinic, was guilt over taking money and not providing value.  So I modified what I did to create goal-based behavior in my students — which really came down to justifying the value proposition.  There’s no question. Money is a great coherence generator.  And guilt? Performance/Goal-Based behavior requires a reflective attitude towards one’s performance.  Maybe the two aren’t that far separated after all!

Can we learn anything about how to evolve historic power structures and hierarchies from all this?  One lesson that comes out of Boeing AerosPACE is that a great place to start, when it comes to information flow, is to establish peer-to-peer empathetic links across organizations.  In AerosPACE, those peer-to-peer links were primarily in the student teams assembled virtually across the different universities.  There was still a professorial emphasis on named (externally defined) roles, and various technical leads (aerodynamics, weights and balances, controls, and such.)  But because the students, in the end, wanted the plane to fly, they had to develop their own relationships in exchanging the necessary information to get the UAV off the ground.

Similar dynamics happened with the organizers.  Professors, through academic culture, tend to maintain ‘collegial’ relationships with other professors from other universities that share the same discipline.  This was stretched even further by the need to extend relational status to the corporate class that was sponsoring the work, and even listening to each other and modifying curriculum and ways-of-being.  Some of this was to improve performance, and some of it was to keep a positive work culture.  But it still worked well.

And most of the social dislocation was barely noticeable.  Student teams in AerosPACE were composed of selected numbers of students from different institutions, forced to work together virtually.  Faculty advisors were only one per group.  What did that mean?  If there was a problem with a student from another institution, that student was responsible to their faculty advisor — not the more accessible faculty member from their home institution.  Classical in-group/out-group dynamics between institutions were dismantled, by using academic culture and collegiality to promote empathy development, and more of a case-by-case basis of handling student issues.

While touring the 787 line, Mike remarked “these planes have really moved past the point where any of us have a complete handle on everything in the airplane.  They are the product of a collective.”  And he’s right.  It’s easy to be impressed standing next to a 787 — as someone whose experiences with planes are mostly confined to the interior, and walking through a skyway, it’s easy to forget how big these things are — and that they fly incomprehensible distances.  Standing down next to the landing gear, and looking up at the complex of cables, wires and actuators, it’s easy to see how this thing really is bigger than any one individual.  The plane is actually a large Information Commons, where the different disciplines intersect.  How they intersect is not in some futuristic bundle of merged parts.  In order for an airliner to be maintained, there has to be some separation between different subsystems like electrical components, hydraulic components, and structural components.  Without this, when something breaks, it turns into a spaghetti unraveling problem to figure out exactly where the problem is.

Because of this need for maintainability, creating an airliner as a meta-linear construction of knowledge, which flows naturally out of the Boeing social structure, makes sense.  Without self awareness that this is what you’re doing, it does constrain innovation.  For the next ten years, we’re likely still to fly on planes that are tubes with wings. But it’s also a way that Boeing maintains configuration control, and maintainability and fleet interoperability.

Connecting information specialists at the bottom of the social structure also makes sense.  And as we’ve discussed in the past, Boeing has a whole department dedicated to this, called Liaison (pronounced Lie- a-zon) Engineers. With a system as complex as a 787, there’s no way to get rid of unintended meta-nonlinear synergies.  The 787 Lithium-Ion battery fire issue is a great example of that. But for the most part, the information and design structure will conform to the more traditional, hierarchical social structure.

We can take the lesson from aircraft construction and use it for starting the process of disciplinary integration in engineering, or really any multi-disciplinary educational experience. Instead of mixing a bunch of professors together in a stew, and waiting for them to come up with a grand plan, it would be far more evolutionary to declare a goal-based scenario, like recovering a community after a hurricane, and asking how each discipline might like to participate with a lesson over the course of a weekend.  Such lessons might be building a bridge over a washed out section (civil engineering) to get to a health care clinic (pre-med students) while sharing information about the situation quickly (software engineering for mobile phones).

The next step might be to create an situation-awareness bulletin board, shared by all disciplines in managing the crisis.  This Information Commons, much like the airplane, would be accessible to all students participating, with both formal meetings between disciplinary leaders over the course of the scenario, and encouragement to students who are not designated leaders, to reach across compartments to other students with given tasks and specialties to fix their own part of the world.  Thus, Dr. Richey’s networked hierarchy is born.  Students would be prepped for the scenario by learning disciplinary skills, as well as having all students educated in negotiation and information sharing.  Using the concepts explored in the Neurobiology of Education post, the scenario provides an integrative, autobiographical experience that dramatically advances student learning and information retention, while making professors happy by ensuring their syllabus topics are covered.

And this kind of thing might not be that hard to pull off.  Anyone living adjacent to a college campus can testify the level of organizational complexity behind pulling off a successful Homecoming weekend.  Why not use the same principles for a scenario weekend for education?  Give the professors the sharply divided pie of information that they feel is important, and let our neuroplastically advantaged students do the synergies.  It’s a win-win.  Below is a figure that shows the concept.

Information structure for starting the evolution of the Information Commons through scenario play

 

Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, at night — 2014

It should come as no surprise that I am an airplane geek.  Two of my hobbies are reading about aviation news and trends in general, and deconstructing design decisions for particular historical aircraft.  I preach to my students that they should look to WWII for examples of rapid design innovation on both sides of that war, as they show how far, how fast one can come (the war started slightly post-biplane, and ended with the jet age) with a given Authority-based expert structure.

But anyone that works in the industry knows that in this day and age, the airplane itself is the tip of the iceberg.  Commercial aircraft components are sourced across the globe, with the Big Two — Boeing and Airbus — serving primarily as system integrators.  Fuselages come from Italy, electronics from France, and even engine parts come from China.  There’s ongoing debate inside the industry, especially in the aftermath of the Boeing 787, how much critical technology should be kept in-house for maximum profitability and predictability in production, as aircraft orders from the airlines go out ten years or further for a particular model.

Inevitably, once we back away from the romance of particular aircraft configurations (blended, flying wings anyone?) aircraft are basically a system of moving people from Point A to Point B. And as the industry evolves, it will be forced to confront what others in heavy industry are starting to move towards.  More evolution is coming.  And the future is in what are called Product Service Systems.  What is a Product Service System?  In a nutshell, it’s buying a service — or really an experience, like getting from Point A to Point B, from a company, or network of integrated companies, instead of a particular item.

I learned about Product Service Systems (PSS) about eight years ago from my colleague Tim McAloone, a professor of sustainability at the DTU — the Technical University of Denmark.  Tim was doing research in PSS mostly because of the sustainability aspects.  It’s very difficult to manage lifecycle of all the various parts of a given product without essentially popping up another level above the product you make and asking ‘what exactly is this product providing to a customer as far as larger utility?’

An easy example might be instead of supplying a copier to an office, what one might do is provide a reproduction service.  Everyone needs copies, be they digital, paper or otherwise.  In the case of paper copies, a PSS that worked providing this service would then be in charge of where the paper came from, how it was processed into copies, as well as the final recycling/disposal of the copies used by the organization.  This allows entire lifecycle modification for hitting environmental/sustainability goals, instead of optimizing only one aspect of an operation.

But this concept doesn’t come easy, especially to Authoritarian and Legalistic hierarchies, and their fragmented thinking models. Just as a local example, I attempted to get our local middle school to adopt such a model regarding photo copies for their own operation, and have it managed by a student club in order to teach about sustainability.  I was met by utter puzzlement from the local teachers who wanted to teach kids about the environment.  Though well-meaning, the only thing they could comprehend was having kids who cared about the environment don latex gloves and sort garbage for recycling. No wonder we have problems with disempowerment amongst our young people for innovative solutions to environmental issues!

The advantages of PSS regarding sustainability have been well-documented.  But there’s another thing that’s happening in the world.  And that’s the effect of broad-scale digital connection and Big Data. Both these things offer new insights into how to provide end-result services and experiences.

One can see this happen on your own computer, with travel websites.  Expedia offers the ability to book everything from traditional hotels, flights and such to vacation rentals. There’s a natural expansion to every branch of your travel experience.  John Deere is rapidly moving into Smart/Connected/Whatever! Farming, where the service being sold is plowed ground that you participate in.  Though the idea may have started in an academic venue, centered around sustainability, it is spreading out in the commercial sector even without sustainability as the explicitly stated goal.

As I mentioned before, when it comes to air travel, the tip of the iceberg is the airplane.  Air travel itself is a complex, interconnected PSS involved with getting any given person from where they are to where they want to go.  As these services become more digitally linked, driven by the emergent dynamics of the need, they become a de facto system that drives profits across the network.  It makes this article in Aviation Week and Space Technology, titled ‘Getting Positioned for Digital Disruption’, by aerospace analyst Michael Goldberg of the Bain Group particularly timely.  Whether one is prepared or not, these elements of systems integration are becoming naturally emergent, as we evolve through the availability of greater and greater amounts of information.  And as that information becomes available, lower-level firms are seizing the opportunities provided to connect the dots, often just between two components or classes of information.

Goldberg makes this point endorsing PSS in the context of another hot-button term of the day — digital disruption. As he says it, “The confluence of connectivity, big data and leaps in computing and software capabilities are disrupting old business models and enabling digital-savvy startups and other competitors to push into new markets.” That’s PSS.

For those that don’t want to give Aviation Week the click-through and sign up, Goldberg asks four questions regarding digital disruption that I’ve turned these into themes from my blog below.  Since I’m all about not stealing content directly, you can go there if you want his language specifically– Aviation Week is worth the e-mail.

Summarized, these directly relate to the PSS explanation above.

1. Is the customer no longer in love with the product, and in love with the service?
2. Can someone outside provide part of your PSS?
3. How do we retrain employees to utilize information from across the relational space?
4. Can we use more traditional, Senge-style systems thinking to generate systems models that minimize investment risk?

Goldberg then offers four strategies.  Placed in the language of Empathetic Evolution, these turn into descriptors for firms adapting to this change in the information landscape:

1. They focus on information flow in their companies, and have a profound understanding of that information flow.
2. They explore what they don’t know, and actively develop metacognition to know what they don’t know, and become aware of unknown unknowns.
3. They expand their relational networks outside traditional sources to prevent Black Swans.
4. And because I couldn’t say it better myself, here’s the final takeaway:  “They recruit digital thinkers and create a culture of risk acceptance. New talent is required to compete in a digitized world. Top innovators will attract and hire new talent in part by creating a more open, collaborative and risk-taking culture.”

Goldberg couches it in terms of the technology, leaning heavily on the particular digital modality.  It is an Aerospace virtual rag, after all.  But those familiar with the Principles of Empathetic Evolution realize that it’s not just about computers or data.  That’s been around for a long time.

It’s really about social structure inside, and across, a set of companies.  It requires outcome-oriented, Performance-based Communities at a minimum.  None of this can happen in the traditional Authoritarian/Legalistic social structure.  Let’s pull Goldberg’s points apart individually so we can understand this more deeply.

1.  In a typical Authoritarian/Legalistic social structure, information is only supposed to flow either down through commands from the hierarchy, or up, because the knowledge workers at the bottom create something that the decision makers above them are supposed to aggregate.  Without empathetic networks and duplex information flow, though, no one knows how many of the orders were understood, or received.  And the individual fragmented knowledge creators at the bottom haven’t talked even to peer users of their discoveries, and have no idea whether the people above them even understood their conclusions.
2. As we’ve discussed before, Authoritarians don’t like being told they don’t know stuff.  It hurts their status, and this actively discourages metacognition.  We can’t know what we don’t know, and need to learn, if we are fundamentally incurious.
3. When it comes to expanding relational networks, in the eyes of the Legalistic Authoritarians, the only people worth talking to are the ones from perceived superior institutions, with fancier titles.  That chokes off all the folks out there potentially swimming in seas of new ideas, as well as potential collaborators with whom discussions would generate truly disruptive creativity.  Why pay attention to someone who doesn’t have a Nobel Prize?   Why would the lunch lady have anything useful to say?
4. Legalistic Authoritarians don’t believe in having worker bees talk to each other.  We all know that given the opportunity, those worker bees are a bunch of shirkers and prone to talk about their kids’ last soccer tournament — not the thing they spend most of their lives doing and being educated to do!

All sarcasm aside, as an educator, this piece is a clarion call for what employees in the future are going to be required to do — and it’s all about sharing information across traditional and non-traditional boundaries.  And if you want your company to survive in the long-term, it’s the same deep truth — except it takes time to develop and enshrine as your corporate culture.

What happens if your company doesn’t change?  The emergent dynamics of information flow are already on the loose, and the change will happen anyway.  It’s just that your company or institution won’t be a part of it.  While spreading information used to require a more profound focus from the folks at the top, the Internet has changed the game.  Information will flow in all directions, regardless of the wishes of the elite.  And that will create the emergent behavior that leads, in the end, to PSS.  Stay tuned.

Takeaway:  Though it’s been around for a while, we’re on the cusp of seeing Product Service Systems, either loosely connected, or tightly connected, move to the fore.  There’s no time like the present for evolving your own corporate, or academic social structure to deal with these inevitable changes.  If you don’t, don’t be surprised if you’re left by the roadside of history.