Rogers and Bill, Granite Rapid, Grand Canyon, 2009 — still rowing, Rogers is in his early 70s.
In this previous post, we’ve talked about the choices between sophistication and evolution in the context of organizational change. There are always exceptions, but there’s also no question that sophistication is easier. Modifying techniques and fractalizing on smaller scales the v-Meme that an organization is already in doesn’t require personal growth and empathetic development. More often than not, it’s just better time management and segmentation.
But there are limits in this approach. You can only fragment time (or space) down so far, or increase the energetics (read that as money/resources) in an organization before diminishing returns set in.
In order to understand this idea, an example is helpful. Twenty years ago, there used to exist a clerical class dedicated to supporting business and engineering professionals. Then Microsoft Excel and Word came on strong, and an entire cohort of jobs were systematically eliminated. Job responsibilities were shifted to the group of professionals that a priori had counted on secretarial support to do things like fill in travel reimbursement forms, manage simple budgets, do typing and such. Now, the expectation became that all documents would be typed, edited, etc. by the professionals themselves. Though leaves were pruned off the hierarchical tree, the fundamental organizational structure did not change. Financial performance might have improved — there were certainly less people to pay. But the number of work hours in the last twenty years has also steadily increased, as the aggregation process accelerated. I haven’t seen a study on this, but I’m sure also that the error rate for all these more clerical tasks has gone up. There was implicit systemic knowledge in all those people’s heads. And now those folks aren’t here any more.
But what does empathetic evolution really look like? A great example can be taken from design practice — namely from the evolved design process of one of the leaders in design thinking: IDEO. Founded in 1991 as a commercial concern, IDEO established an open platform in 2011 dedicated to solving problems in developing countries called OpenIDEO. OpenIDEO bills itself as a “global community working together to design solutions for the world’s biggest challenges.” That’s a tall order. The way they function comes through in understanding the implicit structure of OpenIDEO. The main principle is creating a software platform for partnering between organizations that are local and on-the-ground in the communities of interest, and professionals or students working on the problem, thus bringing community-based organizational efforts between the two cohorts.
OpenIDEO initiates activities through issuing Challenges, defined from their web page as:
“usually a three to five month collaborative process that focuses our attention on a specific issue and creates a space for community members to contribute, refine and prototype solutions.”
Challenges are then part of larger Programs, defined as:
“long-term partnerships where we tackle a specific issue area—like climate change or international development—by launching multiple challenges, events and other activities that lead to the creation of far-reaching, innovative solutions.”
Implicit in the language of both of these statements is the idea of partners and collaborations, and deliberate empathetic statements about community members bringing ideas and processes to the table. This maps well to the idea of a truly Communitarian v-Meme design process, where lots of different people, with lots of different ideas on how to accomplish things, are going to be included in coming to consensus and a final solution.
OpenIDEO offers two dominant modes for connection between team members. Once you subscribe to participate in a challenge, you can assemble your own team through self-generation once an idea you have is posted. Agency is enormous — once you’ve subscribed to trying to do something, you can actively recruit individuals to help you who are also interested in the same problem. An integrated software platform allows individuals to select in or out through electronic communication channels on projects of interest.
Additionally, OpenIDEO utilizes the MeetUp concept so that individuals collocated in a given community can see each other in person and establish empathetic social relationships. Individual cities have volunteer coordinators that let interested external parties know times and places where OpenIDEO aficionados can gather. All this is available on the first-level web page, so there is no a priori screening of people looking for social contact.
OpenIDEO also posts what I call its Origination Culture on its webpage. Listed are Guiding Principles, as well as lower-level scaffolding under the heading Methods and Actions. The Guiding Principles are:
Lead with Empathy
Together is Better
Learn by Doing
Make it Happen
Lead with Empathy, in the case of IDEO, is embodied by the idea that research by an individual on a problem or audience can lead to more profound place-taking exchanges. This is a solid empathetic ladder for much of the audience that would connect to OpenIDEO, as it assumes that they start from a place of egocentricity. Together is Better works with standard empathetic engagement tools of post sharing, MeetUps, and comments to build understanding. Learn by Doing is a very standard ‘build and test’ Performance-based behavior, with feedback and sharing being required. Finally, Make it Happen involves support for fundraising.
One of the nicer features of the OpenIDEO founders’ insights is that they have recognized the need for both v-Meme and technical scaffolding of participants in the design process. Good scaffolding produces convergent heuristics at the Communitarian level, and creates a better potential for executable solutions that incorporate more insight from more people. The toolkits available range from brainstorming, conducting a successful customer interview, visualization, to a user experience map tool. Feedback from users is scaffolded out at the algorithmic level, with everything from standard test protocols to suggestions on how to manage emotions.
What might be the next level of evolution for OpenIDEO? Empathetic development and Spiral Dynamics point the way. The OpenIDEO community is already working on global connection through its various challenges and initiatives. That’s great — but it jumps over some of the personal development work that might lead to more successes. A self-reflection and differentiation course for the more involved might yield great benefits in probabilities of successful ideation. In the next post, we’ll discuss an evolutionary path for designers that could directly be applied to the overarching design theoretical approach of OpenIDEO.
Takeaways: While I’m not sure I’d recommend an open-source approach for designing the next rocket engine in a time-constrained environment, there is much to like about an approach that has in its v-Meme-NA a process for a true Communitarian v-Meme-based process for folding multiple heuristics together. OpenIDEO is used mostly on problems in the developing world, including clever methods for water purification, improvement of agriculture and such. It offers a solid approach for solving community-based problems that require only a certain amount of refined tech, but lots of target community participation in actually executing the solutions.
Cycling along the Neusiedlersee, in the Burgenland, Austria
One of the topics often thrown around when talking about creativity is the idea of chaos leading to diversity of thought. So much that a fair amount of people have suggested that nonlinear dynamics that create chaos are directly applicable to social dynamics. As someone who’s got the bona-fides — I did my Ph.D. research on characterizing chaotic motion, sometimes it seems like it’s verbiage that might have some tie to chaos theory. And to be fair, people use the term ‘chaos’ in different ways — mostly to distinguish from truly random behavior. This is a summative article from a blog post on Scientific American that walks through some of the latest thinking.
But it turns out the the allusions are right — and the answer in how to understand how this is true is, not surprisingly, tied to empathy. But we’ll have to discuss a little background in the math-world-without-math.
In understanding system dynamics, there are two kinds of systems. We’ll talk about them below.
Linear Systems
Linear systems work in a way we can easily predict. The basics are this: You put an input into a linear system. The output that’s hooked to the input responds to the input a little bit — actually a proportional amount, in a predictable way.
Here’s an example. Consider the temperature dial on one of your stove burners. You give the dial a bit of a twist, from ‘1’ to ‘2’. The stove top gets PROPORTIONALLY hotter. It may take a little time for the burner to heat up, but once it does, you can guess pretty easily how much hotter it’s gotten — or how much more quickly your food is going to cook.
And that’s it — linear systems can be completely characterized by two things — what’s called a gain — which is proportional constant between the input (in this case, the stove dial) and the output (the burner temperature) and the phase lag, which is what systems folks call the amount of time for the output to roughly follow the input. Very predictable. If you wiggle the dial around, with some appropriate lag, the system will follow the wiggles.
It turns out that linear systems behavior also corresponds to the bottom two levels of the empathy pyramid. Mirroring behavior can be mapped to a gain of 1 (the mimicking action directly maps — think ‘I yawn, you yawn’) with a phase lag (a person needs to see someone yawning, and it takes about a second — the phase lag — but then they yawn.)
Emotional empathy is a little more complicated, but it still falls into what systems theorists would call a linear behavior. Imagine you hear an infant crying — maybe it’s your kid. Hopefully, you pick the baby up and start to soothe it. As long as the Big Three are taken care of (food, sleep, and poop) the baby will stop crying after a couple of minutes. Sobs turn into sniffles, and sniffles usually turn into sleep. Any parent worth their salt know that if it doesn’t stop, something else is wrong.
What’s going on with this system is what a systems theorist would call exponential decay. The baby is crying, you interact, and after a certain amount of time, the response to the stimulus (crying, soothing) asymptotically approaches zero (the baby stops crying). This is also the hallmark of what a systems theorist would call a First Order Linear System. Believe it or not, lots of phenomena in the world fit into the category of a first order linear system. Water draining out of a tub is one. Heating up a room is another. And emotional empathy is a third.
But now things start to become more complicated and unpredictable.
Nonlinear Systems
Nonlinear systems are the larger class of systems that basically encompass all phenomena we deal with in the world. Now hang with me here. Linear systems, just like those matryoshka dolls, are really just a subset of nonlinear systems. They approximate the behavior of a system for a given range.
Let’s go back to our stove example. We go to the burner control, and turn up the knob to 1. The burner gets hotter. Same for 2, 3, and on up to 10. Each time we turn the knob up a bit, we get a calibrated, proportional response to the input. But what happens when we get to 10? The knob won’t turn any further. And even if it could, the burner might be limited by a circuit in the stove. It could only get so hot. No longer would we see the predictable, proportional response that we are expecting.
Instead, we would see what we would call nonlinear behavior. I’m going to put a list of really simple things you’d see around your home, and the term systems theorists might use to describe them.
Can’t turn the knob any further (nonholonomic constraint.)
Burner too hot, it melts the pot (material phase transformation)
Wind blows on the venetian blinds and they start vibrating (Hopf bifurcation)
Sit on your plastic lawn chair and the back leg collapses (dynamic buckling/jump phenomenon)
Pollute water enough that fish can’t breathe (saturation condition)
Turn volume up so loud your speaker blows (clipping)
And so on. There are quite a few good books out there that can explain nonlinear theory and give practical examples. Here’s one.
The popular press likes to rave about how complicated nonlinear theory is — and it can be. But we’ve evolved in a nonlinear world, and our brains are actually quite adept at nonlinear estimation. The big thing to remember is that the response of a given system to an input is proportional, up to a point — and then something changes. As a kid, you’ve crawled out on that branch just to the point where you thought it might break, and then stopped. That’s nonlinear system estimation.
How does this relate to empathy? Moving up the next level on the empathy pyramid, we encounter rational empathy. Rational empathy is place-taking empathy — where we each have some opinion or idea, and through a process of exchange, including attempts at shared coherence, we can either a.) change the person’s mind we’re talking to, b.) keep our own opinion about what’s going on, or c.) build a new concept or concepts through shared exploration.
It turns out that we can model this with a Second Order Nonlinear Differential Equation — one in particular, called a Duffing equation with negative linear stiffness. Oddly enough, this is the equation I beat to death for my Ph.D. In case you’re curious, I’ve done quite a bit of confirmation bias soul-searching along the lines of how this equation works from over thirty years. But it’s not just familiarity. It turns out that the Duffing system maps very well to the rational place-taking problem.
Consider two people working over a design idea. They both have their opinion on what the solution it is. We could graph the way this works by representing it as a two-well potential problem. See the figure below.
(Art courtesy of Braden Pezeshki)
Let’s represent their moving shared opinion by a ball, rolling down in this system. When one person speaks, their opinion is represented. If we add a little emotional energy from both interacting parties, we can see the ball will roll around between the two wells. As long as they pump energy into the system, dependent on the persuasiveness, or argument of the party, either a.) the ball will settle down into one of the two wells of opinion, or b.) the ball will bounce back and forth between both wells, in the larger super-well.
We can plot these solutions using something systems dynamicists call a phase diagram. We’re going to have to analogize pretty heavily here — so I want my mathematical colleagues to Roll With It! A phase diagram for a nonlinear oscillator is typically represented by a plot of velocity vs. position, with time running in the background. This yields a plot like this:
We can analogize the entire plot as a representation of energetics vs. position/design elements mapping to velocity and position, and come up with some insights from our two-well potential oscillator, and the (a.) and (b.) potential solutions we discussed (and make intuitive sense) above. Those are shown in the diagrams below:
Figure a — limit cycle oscillations around each of the opinion equilibria
Figure b. Limit cycle oscillation around both equilibria
Nothing starts out perfectly synchronized. The time that it takes for two people to settle to a standard, coherent opinion, is represented by what is called a ‘transient trajectory’. This is the back-and-forth necessary for two people to come to an agreement around a given idea. This final coherent idea in the phase space is represented by a ‘limit cycle’ — a stable trajectory around a given information space. The shape of that idea, much like the limit cycle, is dependent on the information characteristics of the space, as well as where one starts the discussion (initial conditions) as well as how much energy is dumped into the system — what’s known as a forcing function.
Here’s a picture of a transient in the process of settling down — note the dark overlap as the opinions/trajectories superimpose on each other.
Many interesting phenomena of this system map to the Design Thinking space. In no particular order, these are:
Transients — or time to agreement — are totally dependent on initial conditions, and for a nonlinear system, you often can’t guess how long it’s going to take for things to converge to a final solution a priori. However, one can predict average times, and a statistical approach might be useful for design science.
When there are no externalities taking energy out of the system (characterized as damping by the systems theorists) transients can take a long time. Anyone sitting in a long design review can relate to this phenomenon! Things like deadlines and such provide constraints that can force solutions as well.
Multiple solutions are possible — and as energy put into the system goes up, the process of traversing the design space spreads in wider and wider arcs.
When people can’t reach agreement, or there is a creative tension between two equally competing ideas, you could plot something similar to a chaotic attractor. The way these things are usually represented is with a Poincare’ map — where every cycle of the oscillator, you plot one point at the same period each time. What pops out is a pattern that has far more definition than a random cloud of points, and also has properties of self-similarity — in the case of a Poincare’ map, the same amount of stripes to dots. A figure I found on the Internet was from my old Ph.D. thesis, the original document which I can’t find!
(In case you’re wondering how does one get such a crummy plot, this was made in 1985 on a Tektronix phosphor display, where after plotting, one hit the button on the thermal printer, and out popped a plasticky plot that you could the put on a Xerox machine.)
This is a complex post. I’m going to work on explaining this better in the future. But you can see the patterns. Rational empathy, with its back-and-forth, offers a nonlinear mechanism that unlocks all sorts of potentials for deterministically explaining creativity — even if the process is indeed chaotic.
As I’ve mentioned in past posts, there’s a lot of writing on the transition between Authoritarian/Legalistic externally-defined relationships, and Performance-based Communities, where independently generated relationships are waxing. Stephen Covey and others have owned this space for the last 30 years. Yet the subject keeps coming up in the media because of the obvious Authoritarian streak in American politics –especially this political season.
But that’s not the only place that is resistant to empathetic evolution. This great piece on Nokia’s collapse, and purchase by Microsoft, by Quy Huy and Timo Vuori of INSEAD and Aalto University respectively, a business school centered in France, and the leading institution in Finland, spells out the dynamics of Authoritarian devolution with one of the world’s leading tech. companies. Which we will return to.
Meanwhile, no one less than David Byrne, of the band The Talking Heads, wrote an insightful piece titled ‘The Echo Chamber‘, where he does a reasonable job sorting through the process of systemic Authoritarianism in the current brand of Republican politics. Byrne makes the point that others have made that the Internet makes it possible for groups of people with like-minded views to successfully screen others’ viewpoints out by only subscribing to news feeds that reaffirm what they already know. We covered this very topic when we discussed confirmation bias. What’s kind of cool, for the systems geek in me, is that Byrne even uses a nodal diagram to show the effect! His picture is below.
What Byrne’s picture shows clearly is the fundamental danger of Authoritarian systems. It creates a self-referential system — a system that gives the Authority the power to decide what the truth is, and then allows those below the primary Authority to cycle the same information among actors in the community. It’s a nice graphic of how, mechanically, the Principle of Reinforcement works. My old friend and former Forest Service biologist, Al Espinosa, had another name for this, especially when it happened at the management level — the Synergistic Stooge Effect. The success/failure of the larger social system then solely depends on how well the Authority that defines the truth is grounded. If the Authority believes something that is simply not true — like clearcuts are good for fish, or this digital thing is just a fad — sooner or later, things are going to blow up.
In a very physical sense, similar dynamics exist with circuits and measurement. Similar to an electrical circuit, when a social circuit is not grounded, one encounters signal driftdue to a floating ground— a floating away from a standard reference point (or voltage). And this can lead to instability.
It also creates problems for people outside of the system, attempting to tell people on the inside of the system that they’re wrong. It’s the ‘Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving’ problem, which Robert Reich attempts to help with this video he made.
The problem with the video is that Robert Reich doesn’t read this blog, because he would then know that Uncle Bob is an Authoritarian, and belief-based. The only way Authoritarians, who are single-answer thinkers, solve disagreement is with conflict that either ends with one of the parties being killed, or exhaustion on both sides. And while the latter is probably better than the former (who wants to deal with a dead body during the holidays?) understanding knowledge structure would make Uncle Bob’s nemesis, Professor Reich, sitting at the end of the table, work more on connection first. To be fair, Reich does get around to this in the last 10 seconds of the video. But still — it’s not about being right. First, you have to soft-connect. Beating up Uncle Bob at Thanksgiving is a violation of the guest/host relationship. And families are the archetype of a Tribal/Authoritarian society. Historically, that goes back past the ancient Greeks. The next thing you know, you’re participating in the sack of Troy over a dried-out turkey.
But back to the electricals. The circuit analogy is useful once again. What happens when you try to ground a self-referential loop is that the discharge of charge is directly related to the differential in voltage potential — how far apart you are in viewpoint. That spins up the conflict. Ugh. This is why truly rigid Authoritarian systems come apart so rapidly.
Re-grounding, when it occurs (and it’s a matter of when,) is often a v-Meme conflict effect — where one party with a larger ensemble of knowledge structures and ways of knowing encounters another. I’m a big reader of the conquistador literature. Regardless of the insane level of bloodshed perpetrated by the Spaniards, who were very much Legalistic Authoritarians (think of all those priests they hauled around with them,) the Aztecs had it coming. Perpetuating the myth that if they didn’t rip the hearts out of a certain number of captive citizens in order to make the sun come up every morning had to not end well. And it didn’t. If there’s a more profound example of the Arcing/Grounding phenomenon in Authoritarian social systems, I can’t think of one. Such is what happens when one non-empathetic social system meets one slightly more advanced. When you add in a little smallpox, the Aztecs simply didn’t have a chance.
What the conquistador example also shows is what happens when you build a large system on a non-empathetic lie — like punishing your people is way the to higher performance. No one could argue with the sophistication present in Aztec society. The art, pyramids and such were dramatic exemplars of a highly developed culture. But as we discussed here, sophistication and evolution are two different development paths — horizontal vs. evolutionary. And while sophistication might manifest itself in arts and performance culture, it also manifests itself in control, and cruelty. The only way you prevent that is with empathetic development.
Which brings us back to the issues at Nokia. Huy and Vuori state why Nokia failed pretty emphatically:
Nokia’s fall from the top of the smartphone pyramid is typically put down to three factors by executives who attempt to explain it: 1) that Nokia was technically inferior to Apple, 2) that the company was complacent and 3) that its leaders didn’t see the disruptive iPhone coming.
We argue that it was none of the above. As we have previously asserted, Nokia lost the smartphone battle because of divergent shared fears among the company’s middle and top managers led to company-wide inertia that left it powerless to respond to Apple’s game changing device.
In a recent paper, we dug deeper into why such fear was so prevalent. Based on the findings of an in-depth investigation and 76 interviews with top and middle managers, engineers and external experts, we find that this organisational fear was grounded in a culture of temperamental leaders and frightened middle managers, scared of telling the truth.
Deer in the headlights The fear that froze the company came from two places. First, the company’s top managers had a terrifying reputation, which was widely shared by middle managers—individuals who typically had titles of Vice President or Director in Nokia. We were struck by the descriptions of some members of Nokia’s board and top management as “extremely temperamental” who regularly shouted at people “at the top of their lungs”. One consultant told us it was thus very difficult to tell them things they didn’t want to hear. Threats of firings or demotions were commonplace.
There’s a lot more. But those that follow this blog can see all they need to know. There is NO WAY a cutting-edge technology company, dependent on rapid development cycles spun up by creative interchange, can survive with an Authoritarian core structure. All the signs of that Authoritarianism (as well as psychopathic Authoritarianism) are there — and not just in the impulsive, emotional outbursts. Lots of titles = lots of externally defined relationships indicate lots of belief-based thinking. The fundamental structure prevented natural, emergent behavior of information transfer from bottom to top. Stasis is the predominant mode as realistic time scales go out the window. Huy and Vuori specifically note the gap between middle and upper managers. But likely, when times got tough, there were even more exacerbated information flow problems in the company.
Huy and Vuori argue against the first three points. But if one looks at the implications of empathetic relational social structure — or the lack thereof — there is also truth in points 2 and 3. Point 2 — complacency — implies a strong negative culture toward metacognition — knowing what you don’t know, which is a hallmark of Authoritarian cultures. You don’t tell the boss that they don’t know what they’re talking about. From a reality/grounding perspective, it’s pretty unfathomable that any cell phone company outside a niche market could believe that cell phones wouldn’t continue to evolve at a rapid rate. Self referential system much?
And even point 3 — that leadership didn’t see the iPhone coming. Of course they didn’t. They had shut off all information about the SOTA in the tech world when they disrupted the link between middle and upper management. Upper management is not the group typically managing the bow wave of technology development. Their heads are in the books, or in shmoozing with key investors. They have to count on middle management, which is tasked with actual technology execution, to advise them on physical trends. So while I completely agree with Huy and Vuori’s alternate analysis, I’d put an ‘and’ between the two groups of causes, and argue that they’re both connected through the social/relational structure into which Nokia had devolved.
What’s the key takeaway? The ways we disrupt information flow in our organizations have profound consequences on our survival. Authoritarianism and its self-referential nature might suit the suits at the top for a while. And maybe a group of panderers at the bottom. But it’s no way to manage a company dealing with disruptive technological, or social change. Both of which, in the contemporary business world, are coming in spades.
Further reading: After writing this post, I got around to reading Huy and Vuori’s longer paper about Nokia’s collapse It’s great stuff — in a process full of data and information that likely will not be able to be repeated, as large companies a.) don’t collapse very often, and b.) allow academic researchers to interview everyone from top to bottom. With the authors’ focus on emotional states, there’s a whole wealth of ways to explore a key element of empathy and communication that may extend up to a subject I don’t write much about — global empathy. How do we get to the point where in a large, aggregated group, everyone knows to be afraid?
Sometimes it’s hard for me to believe the power of the Spiral, and empathetic development pairing — and then this comes along. For those not in the know, Mike Murdock of the Wisdom Center is a major figure in the ‘Prosperity Gospel’ crowd — one that believes that God bestows money as a blessing on those who work hard and are entrepreneurs — a perfect Trump-esque mix of Authoritarian and Performance-based v-Memes. And now he wants to endorse Donald Trump for President — one of the first evangelical leaders leaning in.
We’re now past New Hampshire in the primary season, and to me, it’s no surprise that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the front-runners. Yeah, I know that lots of folks find The Donald’s inherently racist messages offensive, but it really doesn’t matter. And older women are screaming about the Bernie Bros and sexism — but once again, it doesn’t matter. Why it doesn’t matter isn’t what you likely think — my viewpoint, and the fact that either I’m tolerant of racism or sexism. It doesn’t matter because there are larger forces at work, and one ignores the forces only by being short-sighted. Not because they’re not in play.
First thing, I’m neither racist nor sexist. I think inherent racism and sexism are huge problems in this country, and not just because they affect the classes that are discriminated against. They honestly affect all of us, by creating categorical classification schemes of expected behavior from different demographics. And that little nugget (which is the subject of a post all in itself) is where I’m going to leave things.
Why doesn’t it matter? Because of the two sides of the Spiral — the ‘I’ side, and the ‘We’ side, both frontrunners represent the most evolved v-Meme available to their parties in the race. Donald Trump, like it or not, is clearly a huge Performance/Goal-based ‘I’ v-Meme in a hand-tailored suit. And Sanders is also clearly a messy-haired Communitarian, with flashes of Global Systemic (personal self-awareness) and Global Holistic (transnational boundary responsibilities) brilliance. Both are appealing to the core of all voters in this race, which is down there in the Survival v-Meme, where, quite frankly, time scales are short and anything can happen.
What’s interesting is that both front-runners are appealing to independent relational definition. In Trump’s case, he talks about self-financing his own campaign and not being beholden to anyone except what he perceives as the national interest. Bernie is far more ‘We’ oriented — all his donors are small, and he makes no bones about his desire to break up the banks and the financial community that he says are running our politics.
Both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton are stuck on the sidelines of lower v-Meme external definition. Ted Cruz is running on the authority of God, and appealing to evangelicals, who seem to have mixed feelings about his messaging. Hillary Clinton is running on reliability — nothing new from her except her track record of ‘getting things done’ and using the standard Legalistic subdivisions of race and gender in her talk. The Spoken Left — the Old Liberal Legalistic/Classification voices out in the media (Ta-Nehesi Coates and Gloria Steinem comes to mind) may be screaming about the need for the Progressive Left to forfeit agency and demand reparations for African-Americans, and people like Gloria Steinem may also be demanding that young women vote for Hillary because of perceived debt — an Authoritarian argument if there ever was one.
But overall, people are really having none of this — because whatever moral debt may exists, the reality people are struggling with is physical debt — college, housing, health care. And that boots the electorate out of any perceived legalism or absolutistic fairness. They’re down to the Survival v-Meme, where those short timescales, and individual fate mean anything can happen. Epiphanies come fast and furious when you’re living paycheck to paycheck. Or getting thrown out of your home. Or even worse — can’t drink the water, as the situation in Flint, Michigan, shows.
All the various warriors for the status quo are perplexed. The media, deeply ensconced in their belief that a.) they’re objective because they ask both sides for their opinion – a lonely sole algorithm if there ever was one, and b.) saddled with a Legalistic classification scheme of the electorate that they’ve fractionated down to the precinct level, can’t even grasp what’s going on. That’s the problem with Absolutistic thinking and the Principle of Reinforcement, which translates into telling yourself over and over you’re right, and then moving toward martyrdom — you start believing you’re objective, and you give up hunting for the real truth. That’s not a very evolutionary strategy.
What’s the outcome? The two frontrunners keep up their simple message. Trump’s is ‘Make America Great Again’ on the surface, but it’s really deeper than that in the Performance v-Meme. “I’m going to make deals,” which translates into “I’m going to negotiate.” And that means multi-solution, Performance-based thinking. Yes, his In-group/Out-group empathetic dynamic is scandalous. Build a wall across the southern border? Please. But none of that matters to his supporters. The Out-group is someone who’s not a U.S. citizen. Who cares about them?
Sanders talks in Communitarian, as well as Guiding Principles codes, about income inequality, health care, and the need to end foreign wars. What does Sanders have going for him? All three of these messages translate down to the Survival v-Meme that so many voters are shrinking back into. Sanders hit even me, policy wonk that I am, with an epiphany, with wealth distribution. He said if all growth in the economy is going to the top 1% of earners, why are we worried about economic growth?
And you don’t need the details, or evolved memetic growth if you’re feeling this kind of pain. This video has been making the rounds since 2012 about wealth inequality that is stunning. Trust that things are even worse now — Pareto efficiency would assure that:
These types of messages, simple on the surface, are sophisticated empathetic ladders. People may not be in the same v-Meme as Sanders. But they’re mostly younger voters, and with that comes the receptivity to both mirroring behavior, as well as much greater neuroplasticity — their minds can more quickly adapt. Couple that with a lack of any resonance with historical boogeymen, like Communism — and Socialism is more quaintly associated more with Amsterdam and marijuana than any monstrous projection of the late Soviet Union. Here’s a flash of insight — virtually all the students in my classes were born after the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. They can’t even define Communism.
Selling reliability, as really Clinton and Cruz are doing, with this kind of thinking isn’t going to have broad appeal — and it’s no surprise. Young people can’t get jobs, and being told that they should serve themselves up eight more years of a Clinton or Cruz presidency in a state of un- or under-employment is just nuts. And with an electorate that has already decided at some level to go with independent relational v-Meme definition, changing your message mid-stream is just going to cause more v-Meme conflict. The public has already told those candidates that this is not going to be the way we roll this election. And if Clinton or Cruz change, it’s more v-Meme evidence that they ARE externally defined. Because they’re changing from outside pressure. So it’s damned if they do/damned if they don’t.
The pundit class, with their rigid, status-based hierarchies, are also suffering v-Meme limits in even understanding this. Virtually all, with their stable jobs in either the academy (which is shrinking or hell-bent on collapse), or the various think tanks, from Brookings to Heritage, can’t comprehend that their social structure only allows linear thinking, and incremental change is all that queues up in their minds. They are trapped like bugs in amber in mental models of their own making. The think tank folks’ self awareness is so low aren’t even aware they’re swimming in water filtered and provided by their funders. Rich people on the outside don’t give money to the Brookings Institute or the Heritage Foundation because they want a new opinion, or because they want an open-ended study on a current problem.
They give money to these places because they need a liberal or conservative description that is more sophisticated than the more crude model the purchaser has constructed in their head. It’s the sophistication vs. evolution trade-off discussed here. The current socio -economic system has worked so far because there’s been a.) little understanding of societal evolution and the natural empathetic dynamics discussed on this blog, and b.) because the information channels into the large body politic have been controllable. Think network TV, then cable. Not because it is Fukuyama-inevitable. Even the chattering classes have dispensed with this End of History foolishness.
And the primary information outlet that dominates the world — the Internet — that impossibly complex information heterogenizer, now equipped with personal empathetic information channels, like Facebook — fights this kind of homogenization demanded by the Authoritarian and Legalistic v-Meme classes. Though more fulfilling emotionally empathetic personal connection may be going down, you can still pick more rational empathetic connection with different groups with a mouse click. The one thought I’ve been struggling with is this: does growth of information connection and coherence make us happier? I’m starting to think that it could, but maybe not. The one conclusion I’ve come to is that connection and the synergies generated are inevitable.
What the two political laggards are really screaming about is the lack of attention to lower v-Meme scaffolding. Cruz hollers about Trump’s narcissism, and its lack of politeness. No kidding. Can’t argue there. We could use a little more classiness. But it really doesn’t matter. It’s all about detail, or the lack of a need for it, and Trump has figured out that his supporters are more than happy to leave the details to him. Trump isn’t talking about going out and starting a World War. He’s talking about making deals with people that most of America has no idea who they are. If you looked at the v-Meme spectrum of his core, I’ll bet they are solid Authoritarian-Red and Performance-based Orange. Legalistic v-Meme laws, classifications and details haven’t worked for them anyway.
They just want to know that Trump can’t be bought. And that message Trump repeats over and over again, with incontrovertible evidence. How can you be bought when you have all the toys you need? Does anyone doubt that Trump is in the Mile-High Club? When the Washington Post says Trump’s plane is better than Air Force One, think in the mindset of his supporters, that it’s all about the money. How could anyone more purely represent the interests of this country? He is, in their minds, the incorruptible authority.
Over on the ‘We’ v-Meme side of the Spiral, Clinton’s supporters can’t argue against Sanders’ validity, so they accuse him of never being able to get anything done. Clinton argues her skill in algorithmic process. This is how you step things through the House and Senate. Or the World Bank. Whatever. But since none of the things she wants to get done are things that people think NEED to be done, she’s screwed. No one can remember any of them. What’s mind-boggling is to listen to the journalistic caste talk about how all people’s votes hinge on these little details that they picked up in their news feed. Do these people actually talk to real people? Maybe. But their Legalistic v-Meme circuits guarantee that they can never really listen. It’s that empathy thing.
And then we get back to that ‘changing her mind’ thing. Regardless if African-Americans are hurting more than white folks, everyone’s hurting. The vaunted white male privileged class is dying earlier and earlier. And Native Americans, which have dealt with wretched circumstances longer than anyone, are quick to point to the Flint lead poisoning situation as just business-as-usual on the Res. Naturally, down in the Tribal v-Meme, writers are quick to make In-group/Out-group distinctions as the rationale for the Navajo’s horrible water. But maybe the real reason is that everyone has less time to care. This little snapshot from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show household work hours increasing over 20%. And that’s not adding the increased commute, nor the fact that this data stops at the year 2000. And developed empathy takes time, and information.
This piece, titled Feminists of a Certain Age, by Shasta Willson, lays out the topical discussion that relates to the v-Meme argument as well as I’ve seen it. I’d highly recommend all people on the Liberal side angry with the current situation regarding Clinton’s election to read it. I honestly have no idea how to soothe someone who is mad in their perception that past sacrifices for equal rights aren’t being honored because the Left is refusing to elect a woman President whose main calling card has been a status-based argument — most qualified Woman in the White House — instead of what she actually wants to do. That’s my own Performance-based v-Meme talking.
And it does gripe me when old activists come back to some idea that they’re due something because of their sacrifice. When you’re an activist, you shouldn’t be expecting a payback — because that is just not the way it happens. The reality behind all activism, speaking as an activist myself, is that change happens because at some level the time is right for it to happen. There is a level of luck in all successful campaigns, be they for human rights, environmental rights, or whatnot. Smart, opportunistic individuals have always been part of the driver behind social change, and I know lots of them. But the best realize that they are part of a large story of evolving sentience, and they happen to be the right person in the right time, in the right place, with the right energetics. Trying to change things when the thermodynamics aren’t on your side is next to impossible. You can’t fight the information physics. And all of us are caught up in the larger story of empathetic development on our planet. Deny this at your own peril. We all have a part to play in channeling the river of life on this planet. But never forget you are in a river.
Who will win? I honestly can’t say. There could be a singular event that changes the minds of the electorate — that’s the problem with having nuclear weapons in such numbers. They’re game-changers. And maybe Sanders will die, Trump will collapse, or I’ve overestimated the welling potential behind the forces of empathetic evolution in play. Maybe the reliability of Clinton’s political machine will be what needs to win the day on Super Tuesday. Maybe everyone in the Republican Party will rise up against Trump’s implicit liberal tendencies. Maybe someone like Michael Bloomberg will enter the race and be a better balance of reliability vs. validity. The elections are still ten months off, and every Presidential candidate out there could die — some from old age!
But the forces of empathetic evolution scoff at the long-term prospects of the individual being the critical factor in change. The days of Alexander and Genghis Khan are in the past. A poor election and bad policy propagation will only lead to a larger disruptive jump in our system. Without some redress for income inequality, I honestly don’t see revolution as much as I see civic unrest and street riots. If the candidates that are elected are externally driven, then external drivers will emerge. People in the whole stretch of history have never taken truncated life expectancy sitting down. The pundit and journalist class will thump their chest and tell you that this election is about idealism vs. realism — the first which they eschew in an absolutistic fashion (no wonder no one listens to them!), and the second that they ostensibly embrace — but whose balloon of validity is only a pinprick away from total deflation.
Bill McKibben, the famous global warming/climate change activist, really says it best in this piece. He’s talking about heart, instead of politics. And he’s absolutely right. Change validity first, and then the political system will make the outcome reliable — not the other way around. Redefine the heuristics the society operates under, and that will lead the way to more complex and correct algorithms. That’s the way the real information physics works. And I’m always going to come down on the side of physics.
Takeaway: If anything, v-Meme sophistication ain’t selling this election season. It’s all about evolution. Anything can happen!
Moravian Glory — Prague, from the Central Plaza, at night, January 2008
One of my favorite subjects to discuss at the university is the fundamental structural problems inherent in universities training designers of the future. Besides the obvious ‘customer/empathetic’ problems — listening actively to people of different status than them –there are issues that run far deeper. One makes one’s reputation at the university through in-depth exploration of a particular topic (actually expanding sophistication and complexity,) which almost always entails developing algorithmic expertise in refined models of a particular phenomenon. My advisor, whom I revere — so don’t get the wrong idea– was a specialist in the field of aeroelasticity –how flexible things flutter in the wind. He spent his entire career on this, applying various mathematical and computer models, occasionally branching out into turbulence and chaos theory to explain the relatively unpredictable results. For his creativity and diligence, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. So don’t think that there wasn’t some higher wisdom in pursuing this track.
But the world is changing. The problems facing the world require a greater synergy — and the problems, as they arise, are being met from all different sides, in all different venues. Universities are trying to catch up in the synergy game, but are fundamentally hamstrung by their anachronistic social structures, as well as decreased funding. Real change requires energetics as well as structural modification. And neither seem to be evident in the new economy.
One new area requiring design synergies is the Internet of Things (IoT). A term coined in 1999 by British entrepreneur, Kevin Ashton, it means things that do stuff hooked to the Internet that exchange data, and therefore control actions between them and some other intelligence. Obviously, reliable WiFi has accelerated the whole IoT concept, as well as the collapsing cost of sensors and actuators. Any minimal IoT system has to have some electro-mechanical component that interacts with the outside world, a sensor to take data on its condition and an actuator that takes the computed world change and does something to change the behavior of the electro-mechanical system, and an Internet hook-up, where data can be sent to The Cloud, to be analyzed and acted upon. Think an automated smart thermostat that averages temperatures and desires, and then sets the perfect temperature inside your house when you walk through the door and say “Honey, I’m home!”
There are lots of obvious examples that one could generate with the built environment. And the futuristic ideal involves you walking into that environment, waving your hands and babbling something about your wants and needs and being satisfied. I think the book/movie Solarisgets to the nexus of what the Internet of Things could be — an extraterrestrial intelligence that projects elements out of our own memory to question our desires.
That may be a long way off, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that our university education isn’t preparing any of our young engineers to get close to designing anything within the IoT space. The idea behind multidisciplinarity is that any given project, with all its different components, will have a member from every required discipline who will then in turn be responsible for each individual part. Conway’s Law says that’s an absolute minimum required. Do note how there’s little redundancy planned for. Each discipline has a bare minimum training in anything other than core specializations.
But that isn’t going to cut it. There’s no way you can have such a system with such clear boundaries. There will be instead fuzzy boundaries, and areas of overlap. The idea that you can also just add a class, or a new silo to the already bloated core curricula of all the engineering studies is just nuts. If engineering knowledge turns over every six years, the idea of having a degree program longer than five starts to stretch credulity, as well as the imagination. Sooner or later, we need to realize we can’t just train ourselves out of this box. It’s time to stop beating up our young people with our own lack of appreciation for empathetic understanding.
What happens if we proceed without the answer you know is coming — empathetic development? Sharply divided disciplinary development environments are likely to create failed projects — especially with younger engineers. I know this, because I’ve watched it happen. What occurs is that tasks are divided in a very rigid fashion, with all people only assuming their externally defined responsibility. EEs are responsible for the electrical engineering part, MEs for the mechanicals, and so on. No one makes much effort to master the different disciplines other than their own, as they are defined by their title. Then, when one part doesn’t work, the finger-pointing starts. “It’s an electrical problem — so the EE is the one who has to fix it.” Little investment leads to little connection to other team-mates, and then inherently low responsibility behavior and low agency.
What’s the answer? Of course, it’s a more pronounced rational empathy, where team-mates have active interchange so they can understand the challenges faced by other teammates attempting to solve complex problems. This creates as well a diversity of problem-solving approaches, as other teammates start cross-fertilizing the idea pool. Couple that with the parsing of trust — having a deeper historical record of whether teammates have successfully faced, and surmounted similar challenges in the past — and one can see that the real crux of developing IoT is balancing the reliability scaffolding in the individual disciplines with the validity demands of IoT — these things have to work in an integrated fashion in the Real World.
None of it is simple, and a larger set of experiments, as well as experiential learning, will be required to find some set of optimal paths. All of this is going to occur in a sea of evolving technology, against a backdrop of drop-in modularization of all the various disciplines and their parts. It’s not inconceivable that there will be a drop-on-top icon of an app that basically provides complete Internet functionality that someone might put in their Labview control system.
But understanding the different functionalities, and the paradigms represented by the disciplines, is not going away any time soon. And innovation environments are still going to require that one person, or group of people, with a great idea, to find other can-do partners that can make the system work. And those relationship skills are still going to involved developed empathy.
An interesting post popped up on one of my favorite websites — Atlas Obscura — about time, clocks, and time zones. The post is ostensibly about submariners (I’ve taught quite a few, both post and pre-duty assignment), but it’s really about controlling people with external concepts of time — to the point of violating their inherent circadian mechanisms.
A couple of points made earlier in this blog — the Tribal/Magical v-Meme doesn’t care much about short timekeeping. In the piece, they note a transplant from an Amazonian tribe to New York City had basically an impossible time matching schedules with the non-profit who was sponsoring him. He had been used to the concept of time keyed to the natural world — such as having everyone meet at sunset. Here’s the pull quote:
But even more confusing than passing through multiple time zones in a matter of hours is moving for an extended period of time to a culture that tracks time differently. Nilson Tuwe Huni Kuin (Tuwe) grew up in the Amazon as the son of the chief of the Kaxinawá people. In 2013, he moved to New York City to study English and filmmaking. Ryan Paixao volunteered translation services to Tuwe during this time, and remembers the confusion caused by the differences in how time was kept.
Peoples like the Kaxinawá don’t tend to use exact timekeeping, and will meet up at a general time, like sunset. On one of Tuwe’s first days, “I was meeting him, and after a while the people from the non profit were panicking,” says Paixao, who was there when the group finally reached Tuwe by phone. “He was like, ‘I’m getting on the train now, that’s the big deal?’ He thought they were all ridiculous…to track time to such a precise minute.”
One of the things that is interesting to note is how the obvious disconnect might contribute to social friction — and through that, v-Meme conflict. How do you feel when some one is late? What does late mean? How do you feel when someone is late to a meeting you didn’t set the time for? It’s not hard to generate time conflicts — here are a couple:
A person is late for a meeting the boss declared the time for. That person said “I didn’t have a reason for being at the meeting on time because I didn’t have anything to learn or contribute.” How do you feel? (Either the person is egocentric (Authoritarian v-Meme) or Performance-based (had another job to do.)
Boss sets the meeting at 7:00 AM in the morning, before buses start running to your school. How do people feel? (Survival v-Meme — can’t get to school, Performance v-Meme — plan ahead to account for lost bus service, Communitarian v-Meme, different members of the community live in different places, with varying levels of bus service.)
The meeting must be held at 1:00 AM in the morning because the client is in China.
How we process these events are clear bellwethers of our own sense of time, and the v-Meme level we adopt for the event. The attitude on the 2:00 AM meeting may range from “Show up for Communitarian v-Meme Support” to “we need this contract to survive.”
If you’re a ‘never show up for a meeting late’ kind of person, what does that say about you? Answers can, and will vary– and if anything, show how we move up and down the Spiral dependent on situation and our feelings.
One final point — in the article, one of the points made is how the Navajo and Hopi, all gathered in the Four Corners area, all use different time zones on their reservations. Essentially, they use time zones as a way of delineating In-Group/Out-Group dynamics. With that, we can see that one can use time not just across v-Memes, but intra-v-Memes as well to discriminate status, power and control. It’s certainly not about synchronization and performance.
Many a caiman, Mato Grosso do Sul, in the Pantanal, Brazil, 2006
I had an interesting experience the other day, that perfectly illustrated the principles of this blog. I had volunteered myself to give presentations on my program, the Industrial Design Clinic, at a university workshop on STEM education. I was part of the breakout session group (not a core presenter), giving the same presentation twice in a 60 minute hour allotted. There were three other competing breakout sessions at the same time, and approximately 40 participants. The titles of all the sessions are below:
STEM + A(RT) at WSU
LSAMP and SOLES (two programs for Hispanic retention in STEM)
NSF Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate
Piercing the ‘Fourth Wall’ in Education – Using Empathetic Connection to Authentic Audiences to Drive Student Performance – Charles Pezeshki
It’s a fun exercise to guess how many people were in the first and second session, so I won’t ruin the fun. You can also guess, in a crowd of academics, the general receptivity to the idea that empathy and connection matters. I will give you one hint — Group 1 was very receptive and open minded; Group 2 not so much.
One thing that got Group 2 really going (and not in a good way) was an assertion that I made that I could tell at-a-distance whether someone was empathetic or not by writing them a note, telling them about my interest in their work, and seeing if they write back. Those that write back are, by my quick assertion, empathetic. Those that don’t likely aren’t. My standard for whom I write to is pretty simple. I’ve read their work, and think there might be an opportunity for connection. Some people are famous or well-renowned; some people aren’t. I’ve found that it doesn’t make much difference. Some scaled statistic of both groups will write back.
One of the people that emotionally reacted (a great sign where this person does most of their thinking — this is a marker in itself) started saying ‘you can’t say that! Maybe they were busy!’ I honestly hadn’t expected such a strong reaction, and realizing that a good hunk of my audience was there to hear about my program, I redirected the conversation, and sent them, detractors as well, to my blog. I’m not too worried that those that got hot under the collar will read it– unless someone points them to this post as an affront to their status.
The person’s comment, however, made me think. Is this a fair assessment? What does it mean if someone’s too busy to write back?
If someone’s too busy, there are two likely scenarios that may be in play.
That person gets so much e-mail every day that my e-mail gets lost. I try to compensate for this scenario by adding a high-value subject line so that people know why I’m writing, and what material I’m referring to in their work (nothing like a little egocentric tagging!) From my own experience getting e-mails from potential graduate students around the world, I’d argue few e-mails get lost. There’s also no way of reliably measuring this without an experiment, and I have no idea how you’d even construct such an experiment. Considering all the various things that show up in my mailbox, it’s a pretty valid assertion that e-mails don’t get lost.
That person looks at the sender (me) and decides not to either read my e-mail or write back. Psychologists, for example, doing research in empathy NEVER write back (Legalists, and not in their in-group!) Northern Europeans almost always write back (empathetically developed societies) except those that are psychologists! Exploratory mathematicians write back — some very famous ones! Maybe I’m in their in-group, but they would have no way of knowing my background, though they might think I’m in their out-group, as a transdisciplinary dude. Or they might be empathetic. Medical doctors who publish in this area almost always write back. I’d argue the ones that don’t write back look at a.) my status, and b.) my in-group, and decide not to write back. Those that write back likely write back because the content is resonant — I can tell that by their responses. Those that don’t — well, I’ll bet if someone famous wrote them, they wouldn’t be too busy. Rejection is a status-based issue. In their world, I’m not important enough to respond to. And the idea of metacognitive stretch isn’t important (remember that metacognition and empathetic development go hand-in-hand!)
What that means, of course, is that they’re non-empathetic. And while the reliability of the assertion (limited only to the pool of potential respondents I write to — every note I write takes about 10 minutes) may be in question, the validity of my assertion is pretty high.
Q.E.D. 😉
Takeaway: Writing someone a meaningful e-mail and seeing if they write back is a great way to gauge empathy. And I’m aware that Internet trolls and massive spamming can eliminate this avenue, I’m hopeful we’ll have it for a little longer. When the topic is non-political, I’ve found that people are still pretty civil and open.
A sunny day in May, Cavtat, Croatia, on the Dalmatian Coast — 2008
Emergent behavior in social systems, especially when they’re larger, is complex. You never really know completely what will happen when you start rearranging the pieces. So it’s helpful to explain how to nibble around the edges until you develop your own systems thinking consequentiality before going full-bore with a large reorganization. That doesn’t mean you can’t fix things like inserting duplex communication channels to improve overall empathy, and starting a process of evolving up the empathetic ladder — unless you’re running galley slaves, it’s kind of tough to lose. But once you get to a certain level of performance, it just gets harder — and time scales get longer. More people have to be self-reflective and mindful. And accelerating that has been an age-old problem.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t get your feet wet with the details. One of the best ways is with what’s called Poka-yoke — a Japanese term for error-proofing, and a major feature of the Toyota Management System. Instead of telling people the right way of doing something, and expecting immediate actualization, create a way so that it’s impossible for things to go wrong. The iconic Poka-yoke is now in every automatic transmission car. It used to be that certain automatic transmission cars, if they were left in gear, could be started, with an incumbent leaping-forward if you forgot to put them in Park. Now, any vehicle with an automatic transmission must be put in Park or Neutral to start, and must have the brake depressed. No brake, no start. No unpredictable leaping forward. That’s Poka-Yoke.
There’s a bazillion of these in your home, and all have added to our aggregate safety. You can’t start the Cuisinart without closing the lid correctly. The mower has to have a safety bar retracted in order to start the mower. Have fun with this — if you’re bored with the crossword puzzle, or you have kids, see if you can identify ten in ten minutes.
One of the things Poka-Yoke did as well was start moving the needle on the idea that people are idiots — and that what Poka-Yoke really does is ‘idiot proof’ things. It’s no surprise that it’s called ‘mistake-proofing.’ I had a student group work with Genie Industries on a project once, and the manager brought up the concept. One of the students in the group said “Oh — you mean making it idiot-proof.” The manager jumped down his throat. “The people that work with me are not idiots. But everyone can get distracted, and that shouldn’t be a reason to lose a finger.” An exemplary example of expanded timescales, probabilisitic development, and Communitarian v-Meme enforcement. When we Poka-Yoke, we implement empathetic development that floats all our boats a little higher.
I am big on establishing empathetic protocols with students in the Industrial Design Clinic (IDC) as ladders for their development. Empathetic protocols are inherently meta-Poka-Yokes. The classic one the kids are exposed to is the conference call protocol. When my undergraduate seniors start in my class, they are very much little Authoritarians. Even calling the project sponsor is an activity that makes them uncomfortable. Their major concern is bugging someone who they think is far more important than them — so if the sponsor doesn’t call back, they will sit and wait. Being Authoritarians, they don’t put any value on their time, and they honestly can’t conceive that the sponsor MIGHT value their time and want them to get started — and just might be too busy and forget to get the ball rolling.
So I force them to conference with the sponsor. They are given a simple protocol — no less than two people on the phone with the sponsor at any time (at least at the beginning of the relationship). One is the talker, the other is the writer. At the end of the call, within ten minutes, minutes of the call should be posted on the web with a request from the sponsor to confirm. If the sponsor doesn’t confirm by the next call, a request is made for the sponsor to confirm before the new meeting gets started.
All this may seem mundane, but for students used to their work not mattering at all, other than for a grade, it becomes transformative practice. The emergent behavior is that students become aware of the fact that what they write matters, as it is confirmed by someone they view as an authority. They have to review and fact-check with each other, so they all share the same story. Many times, in the course of a more complex project, there will be modest specification change — so their Legalistic v-Meme is also activated. I’ve told them multiple times that in order for the specification to change (and my kids are run by their spec in my class) it must be documented, approved by the sponsor, and then re-posted in the new specifications document. If it’s not, and they embark on a changed trajectory, and the customer complains — the customer is right.
Such empathetic protocols, besides making sure the students finish on time, serve as empathetic ladders for development. They are meta-Poka-yokes — and by insisting on them, I am Poka-yoking my own process for their development. That way, I don’t have to be involved, which then transfers more responsibility to them, and develops their agency. All of this by virtue of my NOT having to intervene means that their improved practice, and their personal growth become emergent. Which means I have one less thing to worry about. And that makes me celebrate, and reaffirm my own personal motto:
There is nothing that makes me happier than seeing something wonderful happen that owes nothing to my own, personal genius.
That’s the real beauty of emergence. Because once we get the little stuff fixed by building it into the dynamics of our social system, as a manager, we can concentrate on frying bigger fish. And it’s a virtuous spiral up the Spiral. What’s not to like?
Takeaway — if there’s a larger point to be made, it’s mining successful paradigms in all systems for surface-level knowledge assurance and coherence can lead to meta-paradigms. This is a wide-open field — and, in my opinion, the future of management science.
At the front entrance to the Prater, the large amusement park in Vienna, Austria. 2008.
Last week, I realized that I toss around the term, ’emergent’, without explaining it very well. And as unbelievable as it may seem, there is no real Wikipedia page explaining it — so I’m (and you’re) left to my own devices.
One of the key elements in understanding evolutionary behavior, in social systems or otherwise, is the idea of emergence and emergent behavior. The idea is this — you rearrange a structure, or apply a certain set of boundary conditions to a structure, and then all of a sudden, a new type of behavior or restructuring occurs. The best example of this in management systems that immediately comes to mind is W. Edwards Deming’s transformation of Japanese manufacturing through Statistical Quality Control. The story of Deming is well-known (thank you, Wikipedia!) In this piece, a short, but concise and meaningful description of the man and his philosophies are presented. It is very clear that Deming got the Performance-based Communitarian v-Meme profoundly. His Seven Deadly Sins that he enumerated are below, with a mapping that I added showing what bad side of the various v-Memes he was attacking:
Lack of constancy of purpose (misused Authority)
Emphasis on short-term profits (lack of an understanding of appropriate timescale, which was often external to the process — think Quarterly Reporting)
Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance (misused Authority and inappropriate application of Legalistic rules for evaluating performance)
Mobility of management (misused Authority)
Running a company on visible figures alone (All the non-empathetic lower v-Memes)
Excessive medical costs (misused Authority, as well as misplaced Legalism and lack of ability to understand consequence)
Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees (misplaced Legalism)
But if there was one master stroke that Deming did, it was placing the ability to stop the production line on the production worker. By doing this, and giving that individual the ability to show appropriate responsibility, he inverted the entire Japanese social structure. And by doing that, through appropriate scaffolding (control charts and such, a data driven culture, and so on) quality became emergent out of the various manufacturing systems. Now, instead of running machinery to meet quotas of stuff (steel, machinery, etc.) — a very knowledge-fragment/Authoritarian concept — a worker could stop the assembly line until the problem was fixed. And coupled with other tools, like Ishikawa diagrams and Root Cause Analysis, overall quality and production rates could be increased. It is important to understand that the various methods of determining metrics were fundamentally grounding these complex systems in the outside world. And that’s important, too. But the emergent dynamics propagated forced duplex empathetic communication channels between bottom and top — so that a whole new manufacturing system was formed.
The concept of emergent dynamics comes from nonlinear systems theory. The idea behind it is relatively simple. You have an equation, composed of different problem variables, and mixed up with a set of parameters. A parameter is one of those words (like heuristic!) that everyone uses, but most people have no idea what it actually means. In lay terms, a parameter is a variable you get to change. For example, let’s say you’re trying to boil water on your stovetop. The system is the pot with the water in it. The boundary conditions are what’s surrounding the pot — whether the pot has a lid on it, or the size of the burner. The main parameter you’re concerned with is the temperature control on the burner. You turn up the gas to the burner, more gas burns, and your water finally boils. The fact that the system is nonlinear means that as you turn up the gas, and the water gets hotter, it finally transitions from just hot water to boiling water — meaning now that some of the water that used to be liquid is now vapor.
The fact that the water itself goes through what is called a phase transformation — meaning, in this case, it goes from liquid to gas — is indicative of a nonlinear system. Contrast that to a linear system — as you turn up the temperature control, the water would just get hotter and hotter. We know that doesn’t happen — water gets to the point where it boils off.
So here’s where emergence comes in. Water boiling is an emergent phenomenon, naturally occurring, when you heat water long enough. It is a result of another mathematical phenomena — a bifurcation — or a fork in the road, where as a result of tweaking the governing parameter (in this case, the temperature knob) you get a radically different set of behaviors (water vapor, instead of water.)
What you’re after with your employees is very similar. You want to do something to the system (change the structure, or change the boundary conditions) so that the behavior you desire (more productivity, profits, etc.) becomes naturally emergent. Why is that so cool? Because if you figure out how to do that, then you don’t have to sit around screaming at everyone to do what you want. It just naturally happens as a function of the system physics. And understanding those system physics is what the main point of this blog is all about!
If we look at the emergent dynamics of social systems, it’s helpful to refer back to Don Beck’s card on Spiral Dynamics. See below.
Beck’s emergent forces are the personal pathways between the various colors on the Spiral — not the organizational. Each individual’s Spiral v-Meme is driven by those drivers of emergence that he lists. I like these a lot — they’re the most appealing part of Beck’s work. But there are likely others. I find myself wondering if I like them because I’m a white dude/systems theorist like Beck, and they just appeal. But I think there’s some universality in them.
Since the Spiral is based on the principle of self-similarity, we could also posit societal drivers that would create new, emergent social structures. Going from Survival to Tribal, it might be enough resources in an area that allowed long-term stability of a population of humans that would allow the persistence of information enough to allow for the establishment of a tribe of humans. Add enough people, and there might be enough striving between individuals to have one emerge as a chief, with enough people who followed that individual to insist that others follow that person’s will.
Grow population enough, and now a system of laws becomes necessary to administer the group of people. Keep going with the concept of fairness, and now it becomes important to increase production, which, if the population was constrained, might mean increasing productivity of each individual — the productivity would be an emergent behavior that would accompany identifying unique talents. Keep going, and now every person becomes valued uniquely, though sharing the larger goals of an aggregate society. Kindness and compassion would be naturally emergent behaviors.
Such a society might question itself, and want to understand how to relate to other societies that were different. Engaged in such analysis and debate, a society might structure itself to become more connected with its neighbors, for optimization of quality of life. Interdependence would be naturally emergent. And if that spread among nations, one could see very easily where new governmental organs would have to be generated based on cooperation, collaboration and negotiation — all multiple solution modalities that would become naturally emergent. The European Union has such features.
Which brings us back to the premise of this blog — if there is one factor, calibrated by a parameter, that most clearly characterizes the potential for emergence and evolution in social structures, it is the increasing information coherence between people, and within societies generated by empathy. As has been discussed, empathy itself is a multi-phase phenomena, and so it’s not as simple as dumping more salt in the water to get it to boil more quickly. But the higher levels of coordination and information coherence that more complex societies require are driven by connection between the independent agents. Regardless of the more complex, superficial reasons, symptoms, and behaviors that become emergent as empathy is developed, it all comes back to that.
There’s one last thought I’ll leave you with for a meditation. I can’t find the cite, but I remember reading that a daisy had about the same number of active DNA pairs as a human. What that says to me is that there is a limit to complexity available through genetic coding — more complex, and you can’t successfully propagate information using chemicals. It’s just a limit of the medium. So, in response to the ever-continuing drive in the universe toward complexity, a force that is poorly understood at best, the first stab at increasing it was the phenomenon of biological interdependence. Then we as a species showed up, and started the process of embodying and producing information through our social/relational organization. It was naturally emergent from the physics limiting coherence through other means of information transmission.
Where all this is headed is anyone’s guess. Will this new form of information organization be profound enough to deliver yet another emergent form of information organization? Or will be nuke/bake/destroy the planet before we get there? Stay tuned — the answer will magically, or rather, emergently appear.
Further reading: The book, 1491, by Charles Mann, is a great read that documents civilization as emergent phenomena in the Americas. The idea that Native Americans learned about complex civilizations by visiting Chinese sailors, or other such icks, is one of the most offensive racist ideas I can think of.
Prague Astronomical Clock, Prague, Czech Republic, 2009
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 