Readers of this blog will likely not be surprised to hear the punchline of the video — the most recent research on brains indicate that there are no significant, documentable differences between male and female brains. The video is still worth a watch (it’s short) because, if anything, in the 3 odd minutes it lays out the evolution of the social structures that generated the knowledge that originally told us the opposite — that there were categorical differences between male and female processors. Hierarchies of experts set up to study the issue (like university faculties) originally pronounced huge differences. But as finer and finer granulation happened — queer, gay, trans, etc., couple with trauma, experience and so forth — we ended up, not surprisingly, one step away from the Communitarian v-Meme. Interestingly enough, it’s all there in that video. They actually talk about those things.
What does that mean? What I’ve already said. That we are a sum of a spectrum of biology, and a spectrum of experiences. Legalistic v-Meme categorizers are gonna still categorize — people in these types of social structures are going to come up with increasingly sophisticated categorization schemes. But what does it mean when your categories are down to everyone as their own little snowflake?
There’s a purpose in all this study — and it’s the scaffolding principles we’ve talked about. If you’ve ever wondered what was the point of the academic focus on such areas as Queer Studies, here it is. That fine-scaling is actually an important part of the trajectory of how time-dependent collective intelligence, organized into legalistic hierarchies, comes to the point of definitively concluding that there are no differences. Synergistic, guiding-principle thinking can, and does emerge, once the granulation gets to the level that the researchers decide that they can reliably say there are no differences. That’s the point of this.
Starting from the other end of the empathetic evolutionary scale — positing guiding principles through reason and philosophy, as we do on this blog — is inherently more perilous in the arena of public opinion. I’ve said it before on this blog — the brain, like the hand, is an evolutionary adaptation of the circumstances of the prehistoric ur-human, up to when we moved out of the Survival v-Meme. Then it became, in connected aggregate, a very different kind of node in a network. And though we’re stuck with the hardware, we continue to evolve the connected empathetic software, which is far more complex than most people are willing to give credit to. Just like the Panda’s Thumb, which evolved so that the panda could eat bamboo. But once the panda got the thumb, it’s highly likely that they figured out other things to do with it. It’s no different with brains. Once we got past the day-to-day survival aspects, we had to find something else to do. And evolving as mesoscale predators, down there in the Survival v-Meme, we already had it in the cards to collaborate.
I know that some people reading this are still going to cling to the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ stereotypes. But personally, I’m hopeful. Recognizing core neural capacity of all sentient beings is going to give our entire civilization greater metacognitive stretch. More diversity means more solutions, in a bigger solution space, available for the big problems. Now more than ever that’s critical. Dismantling gender stereotypes doesn’t give us fewer bins — it actually gives us more. You are unique because you actually are unique. That’s pretty cool.
On a lighter note –if there’s a real aspirational hero in the mix, it’s gotta be Aquaman, who used to be able to telepathically communicate with all sea creatures. Yeah, he was a white dude with some serious white privilege, being a descendant of a former queen of Atlantis. But if we could decide that there really was only sentience and connection, we’d quickly move past the stage of accepting that members of our own species were equals. And then we finally might make some progress in talking to dolphins — and hammerhead sharks!
Further Reading — bizarrely, this article in the Guardian makes exactly the point I just referenced regarding the value of things like Queer Theory and how reliability (which some might feel is beating a dead horse) actually matters in the arc of society. I just got this after finishing editing the above post!
One of the challenging and frustrating things is life is when you have a friend who can’t figure out how to fix their life all the while they’re participating in self-destructive behaviors that keep them there. I know that I’ve frustrated my own friends in this fashion — so I hope this gives them a chuckle as well. Bottom line? Establish an appropriate level of emotional empathy. Then play the Authoritarian v-Meme card. If that doesn’t work, go Full Survival Mode! Bob Newhart at his best…
Takeaway Worth Contemplating — Why does this skit work? Brilliant acting, as well as resonant temporal and spatial representation of the various v-Memes. Best portrayal of an shortened Authoritarian time scale that you’re likely to get. 🙂
Pulled off the Interwebs — Rey and Leia’s hug at the end of The Force Awakens
OK — let’s have a little fun in attempting to use v-Meme theory to analyze a mini-tempest-in-a-teapot regarding J.J. Abrams reflective knowledge-of-self in plot decisions in The Force Awakens. Regular readers of this blog might remember this post where we discuss the relative low level of empathetic evolution in the whole Star Wars series (especially this episode) and how that low level might make the whole series fun to watch, but not particularly transformative. And unfortunately telling about the state of our own society today.
But back to our Master Class. At the end of the latest movie, when Chewbacca and Rey were stepping off the Millennium Falcon, Leia, instead of hugging her old friend and fellow warrior Chewbacca, gives Rey a hug first. Here’s a link that discusses this.
In this interview, J.J. Abrams, the film’s director claims the following:
“That was probably one of the mistakes I made in that. My thinking at the time was that Chewbacca, despite the pain he was feeling, was focused on trying to save Finn and getting him taken care of. So I tried to have Chewbacca go off with him. And [meanwhile to] focus on Rey, and then have Rey find Leia and Leia find Rey. The idea being that both of them being strong with the Force and never having met, would know about each other — that Leia would have been told about her beyond what we saw onscreen and Rey of course would have learned about Leia. And that reunion would be a meeting and a reunion all in one, and a sort of commiseration of their mutual loss.”
OK, folks — I’m calling v-Meme Bullpuckey. What we’re really seeing is a continuation of the low level v-Memes that haunt the entire flick (and the Star Wars saga in general) and was absolutely consistent with the general theme. George Lucas declared back in Episode 1 that all this stuff was biologically inherited (though potentially trans-species) and set up all sorts of genetic destiny in the series. The whole lot is predicated around the Magical Authoritarianism of the Force, with some nod to Authoritarian Legalism with the whole Jedi schtick. It’s not a meritocracy — it’s a biological caste system, that attempts to be trans-species through the Good Old Midichlorian Club. And that joins people far more in the movies than the power of Independently Generated Trust-Based Relationships and larger, more evolved empathy.
So it’s no surprise to all of us empathetic evolutionary warriors that Abrams would have Leia hug Rey — biological connection uber alles, be that White Woman <-> White Woman or Midichlorian Level (Abrams declares the latter.) We already know that Chewy, super-cool Sasquatch that he is, is not one of the Biologically Chosen — no matter how many medals he has for Galactic Heroism. In-group/Out-group dynamics much? How could it be different? There’s also likely some lacking of trans-species empathy as well — no speculative higher Galactic Holistic resonances. They can’t even exist in the writers’ minds. But we don’t have to go down that classification road. Abrams’ own words supports my first hypothesis.
Now here’s an independently generated, trust-based, data-driven relationship I can get get behind… Disney press photo
Of course, some might disagree. But the striking thing is how our minds (in this case, Abrams’ mind) generate consistent v-Meme interpretation. Especially when we’re not aware of it.
Just a quick note — Abrams, in his comments, does reveal that he’s thought a lot about this — and at age 49, he’s right on time in our society/culture with budding, larger self-awareness. Another small testament to the power of evolutionary empathy and all our ability to grow. That means the next movie might actually be profound. We’ll see. The baggage of the series is pretty heavy down in the lower v-Memes. But one can hope. And since we’re already committed to Magical Thinking, maybe if we all cross our fingers! 😉
Student/Prototyping Instructor (PI) and Craig Forest, Associate Professor, School of ME, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, in the woodshop
One of the questions that’s been getting batted around a lot is ‘how do we recruit technical Millennials, and once they’re recruited, how do we keep them?’ The Millennial Generation is generally assumed to have been born between the late ’80s and the early ’00s. Readers of this blog will hopefully not be surprised to hear me be a bit skeptical toward the idea of a Millennial Generation. They are sentient, evolutionary actors like all other humans in history, and subject to the same dynamics as all others. And, of course, that would be true.
At the same time, the world of culture and externalities does produce different v-Meme spectra as we evolve as societies. It may not be particularly useful to say things like ‘Millennials are just selfish’ — that’s branding a particular characteristic that more than likely reflects the writer’s own self-projection. And the studies were likely done when the Millennials were mostly teenagers. What teenagers aren’t self-centered? Some of the conclusions are more in line with where people are age-wise developmentally than any deep insight.
But it is useful to consider how societies evolve empathetically in aggregate. We don’t have the same v-Meme set as Genghis Khan’s armies, and we can’t go back without serious psychopathic devolution. Subject of a future post — similar to expert knowledge, societies as a whole down convert more complex empathetic behavior into the culture and expected automatic/limbic thought processes. And then there’s the whole issue of epigenetic transfer as well — which has ‘hot button issue’ written all over it. But I digress.
The point of all of this is that Millennials can indeed be a valid label, if one considers it from a v-Meme spectra perspective. What that means is that the level of activation of the six basic v-Memes — from Survival to Communitarian — can vary from past generations (Boomers, Generation X, and such.) Older keepers of the keys for organizations-in-place can start the process of adapting work processes and environments to accommodate the different evolved empathetic mindsets of those that follow.
Don’t think that this means throwing out all past organizational knowledge. In the case of large Legalistic/Performance v-Meme organizations like Boeing, there will always be a need for Reliability in design, and the appropriate scaffolding that will enable this. The need for extensive certification processes, as well as back-and-forth between design engineers, manufacturing engineers and the FAA isn’t going to go away if we don’t want airliners to fall out of the sky. But the expansion of communication, sharing of information, and speed-up of the innovation cycle has the potential for much more revolutionary approaches to flight.
It’s time for a different hypothesis — one v-Meme-centered. Let’s assume that Millennials are part of a pattern of social/relational empathetic evolution, as all stable generations before them have been. We can determine how this might be the case by looking at the balance of their externally defined relationships that matter, as compared to their independently generated relationships. Here, the data is easy to find and plentiful. Add in their communication patterns — duplex vs. simplex — and we can hypothesize how their brains might actually work. Millennials are most likely to talk to their parents via cell phone at least 1.5 times/day. They own computers and all different types of tech. They text message constantly. They get their empathetic needs met differently, with less actual presence and more telepresence, like social media/Instagram/Facebook. The whole of their communication space is duplex, with very little one-way transmission. I see this in my own teenagers. Mark Prensky coined the term digital native to describe them. They are also more open to change than previous generations — not surprising, since many of their conceptualizations are data-driven. And money matters less.
What that means, not surprisingly, is that they are less status-conscious. With the ability to reach out to others in diverse communities of interest, there aren’t any single icons of status, because that depends on your own personal preference. Not surprisingly, with diffuse networks, driven by specific interests, Authoritarian and Legalistic v-Memes are in decline, while Performance/Goal-Oriented v-Memes and Communitarian data processing are ascendant. Millennials are more connected informationally with each other, making them better at rational empathy, even if, with less face-to-face contact, their emotional empathetic skills are less developed. The question that drops out of this for employers is how to make the Real World at least as interesting topically, and more enriching emotionally as their own, created virtual one.
One answer to this question can be found in a creation of my good friend, Professor Craig Forest at Georgia Tech. Called the Invention Studio, it is a leader in the Makerspace movement, which in the academy is an attempt to shift students to more studio-based learning. Located organizationally under the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering — one of the largest mechanical engineering departments in the world numerically — the Invention Studio was founded in 2009. “I gave the key to the first and only room to 10 students who had volunteered because they already knew how to use the machine shop, and their volunteering guaranteed further access for their senior design process. But what happened instead was they began to care about it as their own and recruited new users. They began to hang out there on the couches and it became a place they called home.”
Here’s a video about the Invention Studio that’s worth the two minutes to orient yourself.
Not surprisingly, the video is focused on the capabilities and projects emerging from the Invention Studio — a direct manifestation of the Performance/Goal-Oriented v-Meme the students are growing into, out of the Legalistic Authoritarianism of university culture, which is just as strong at Georgia Tech as it is in any other institution — albeit an extremely well-funded one. Social/relational structure is still, at some level, destiny. The Invention Studio fills in what’s missing in the social environment, creating a testbed for evolving students’ empathetic development.
I met Craig at the 2014 Capstone Design Conference when he approached me after a workshop I was giving on managing relational dynamics. We struck up a friendship that day. As a result, I had the pleasure of visiting Craig’s rapidly expanding and vibrant operation just last week. It is an energetic, friendly and positive environment, and a true empathetic growth accelerator for all the students. Craig implicitly started it with the principles of Servant Leadership 2.0 in mind, with that small group of students. In our conversations, he pointed out another student leader, Chris Quintero, who embodied the same Servant Leadership 2.0 skills. “Chris could communicate the values of the new club and their mission and also get down to the details realizing the need for, and then going out and finding and buying t-shirts, power tools or pizza – whatever was needed. He provided a single contact for me – he requested the first Makerbot. So all I had to do was make it rain.”
From a physical infrastructure viewpoint, the Invention Studio is well-equipped. For 3-D printing alone (only one part of a series of dedicated rooms) there are 30 consumer-grade printers, and 10 professional printers that run an average of 20 hrs./day. Heavy use dictates that they are constantly being rebuilt by student volunteers. The Studio itself is run by approximately 80 Prototyping Instructors (PIs), servicing about 1000-2000 students/month with woodworking, 3D printing, metalworking, electrical circuit construction and other modes. Students work and participate in the Invention Studio for free. Rapid prototyping is free. Materials are paid for by a tech fee and revenues from Capstone Design. But students don’t mindlessly exploit the resources, nor waste. Their system is self-monitoring and self-regulating, through the efforts of the PIs. There’s all the details here if you need them. But those are surface-level.
Monitoring the bank of 3D printers
What’s more fascinating in the context of this blog is to observe the social evolution of the space. Started by a Servant Leader 2.0 (Craig) and fractalized down to the student level (Chris), the origination culture of the space was established high up on the Spiral, with strong Guiding Principles with Bodhisattva leanings. Both individuals were in it to serve and learn. Craig made the comment that the most important part of the Invention Studio is the couches, which are really out in an alcove attached to the main hall, where students talk, eat, and sleep. Openness is written into the v-MemeNA. If the PIs see someone shrinking back, looking confused, they make it a point to help that person. And though original recruitment of PIs was founded on potentially selfish interest — access to the tools was primary — the community rapidly evolved around shared interest and competent. A fantastic example of an empathetic ladder.
One of the more fascinating aspects from my observation was the extremely high levels of social skills among the students I talked to. Ranging from full-on Geek to more average expectations, the communication style of all the young people was direct, empathetic and friendly. For a profession known for having more than its fair share of folks on the Asperger’s Scale, the Invention Studio is a fantastic accelerator and integrator for young people that normally would have a tough time connecting in the more rigid, status-conscious world of fraternities and sororities.
As the Invention Studio has grown, the need for structured leadership has also grown. This has been requested by the students — a profound sign of emergence. At what I have found to be natural breakpoints — approximately 80 PIs — the PIs themselves self-organized to elect a servant leader president. One of the topics Craig and I discussed was the need to make explicit the Guiding Principles that are woven through the fabric of the organization, to better insure that the service principles are not lost to necessary algorithmic rule scaffolding. Maintaining an environment based on larger shared heuristics can be challenging, because there will be some best practices that are discovered, and those will create natural social pressures for more algorithmic thinking. I’m confident that Craig and his students will navigate these waters successfully. We discussed making formal and informal relationship maps, posting these on the walls so students could become explicitly aware of both the declared structure of the organization, as well as acceptable information pathways that have already been created by students. I have confidence that these too, will become naturally emergent as needs arise.
What’s can we learn from the Invention Studio as far as keeping Millennials engaged and involved? A big part of it is filling in the need for Millennials to grow in emotional empathy while being engaged with some level of autonomy with others. Meeting the Vice-President of Operations who just flew in from the coast isn’t going to provide much motivation to them. Title-based leadership without competency just isn’t going to work with the majority. One of the key takeaways is how Craig uses his Millennials to manage and suggest new tech, while operating underneath a broader social umbrella. This is a technique I use as well in the Industrial Design Clinic. Students are much more likely to be tuned into new technology, so when they suggest stuff, if we can afford it, we buy it. That way, individuals can feel directly valued for their unique skills, while working in an evolved social environment that inherently builds social competencies they may not have been exposed to.
Part of it also means management has to change. Receptivity to new ways of working that are familiar to Millennials, but not so much to older employees, such as more complex on-line environments, is going to be important. In the Invention Studio, students can queue 3-D printing jobs from across the university. There’s no requirement to show up and drop the cards in the card reader. And social spaces need to be friendly and accessible. Our organizations have to continue to evolve — because through that process of v-Meme downconversion, it’s just expected that we’re going to start at a higher level.
It’s really not that hard. And as I continue exploring this space, I’ll post.
Up on the mainsail yard, almost out to the yardarm. Cap’n Bob’s immortal words yelled at this moment — ‘ya won’t fall off if ya don’t let go…’ in the Whitsunday Islands, Australia, on the Coral Trekker.
On this blog, we’ve looked at the evolution of design thinking — from Authoritarian v-Meme (I’m the brilliant genius and folks should do what I say!) to Communitarian v-Meme design. We’ve examined Algorithmic Design, and moved through to Heuristic Design, or the standard gated design process most practitioners are familiar with. All map to the various v-Meme levels in Spiral Dynamics, and different stages of empathetic development. So what’s the master pattern here? Since all designs must originate from the knowledge of the designers, there is an implicit mapping back to the thought processes characterizing each of the Spiral levels, in the I- and We v-Meme pattern — as well as the social/relational structures of the organizations that we function within.
But before we dive headlong into another open-ended Theory of Everything for Design, let’s go one step further and unpack a paradigm developed by Daniel Kahneman, of Thinking Fast and Slowfame, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Kahneman called impulsive, fast thinking ‘System 1’ thinking, and logical, slow thinking by the individual as ‘System 2’ thinking. These thinking modes are constrained to the individual — and it’s not surprising that Kahneman would stick down at that level. While his book is fascinating and a major contribution, it’s also pretty clear that the demands of academia are centered around reliability. And he’s an academic, in a fragmented social structure centered around the individual. The number of experiments proving the same concept, and centered on individuals in the book is a powerful reflection of the Legalistic/Absolutistic thinking required by the current university system. You walk away absolutely thinking he’s right — which is the point! Here’s a nice graphic illustrating System 1 thinking.
When you cross the street, you look both ways. Even if it’s a One-Way Street.
How about System 2? What could be better than allusion to Mr. Spock:
There are always those logical procedures that undergird the process of the logical mind.
And it’s a great start. So, if there’s System 1 thinking, and System 2 thinking, there has to be System 3 thinking. Right? Let’s define System 3 thinking as the first collective thinking mode, requiring the combined processing that empathy fundamentally demands, between Designer/s and Customers.
Successful System 3 communication will embody the initial rational place-taking between the responsible designer and his/her customers. Performance-based thinking, built with customer input is the minimum required for a successful design.
What about System 4 thinking? I like to conceive of System 4 thinking along the lines of a high-performance team, with coordinated practices, plays and strategies that also embody the nested nature of all our previous work — System 4 will also include Systems 1, 2 and 3 scaffolding. And that principle will hold as we move on up.
Egalitarian, rational, data-driven exchange, coupled with respectful lessons from everyone’s past experience will characterize System 4.
System 5 thinking is the first of the Spiral self-aware Tier 2 modes. Now, there is a requirement for the designer to be self-aware of their biases, and reflective on how their strengths, weaknesses and past experiences play into the role of design. Here’s a graphic that shows this concept:
Up from System 5, now my own enlightenment and insight becomes less clear. System 6 thinking may take many different modes. An example might be a globally networked teams headed by a self-aware designer, or more likely, a group of designers. Remember back to the posts on Servant Leadership 2.0? Now the need becomes apparent.
But on a local level, I like the metaphor of a very tight group of designers as musicians, riffing off each other’s immediate and long-term patterns. Jazz band might be a good term. Or we could use the Beatles as a metaphor for a group growing, changing, and collaborating in many different modes over time.
(For those interested in reading about the empathetic dynamics of the Beatles, I highly recommend the recent book by Josh Schenk, called Powers of Two, also about innovation and creativity!)
Above System 6? Enlightenment-wise, I’m fading fast. If it follows the pattern of Spiral Dynamics, System 7 needs to be an I-mode. Ken Wilber has explored the idea of what it means in the modern age to be a Bodhisattva, the Mahayana Buddhist term for an enlightened being that has stayed behind from entering Nirvana to help others do so. This corresponds to the Coral I-mode v-Meme in SD –a designer that has sublimated their desires and needs to understanding completely both the short-term and long-term needs of his/her customer and helping them along their path.
Hualin Temple, built to commemorate Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, in Guangzhou, China
Once we get up in these rarified spaces, I’m gasping for my own air of insight. But the pattern is clear. We can think about continual empathetic evolution. But as with all paths to larger awareness and enlightenment, we have to do the work. And just because I’m only able to get to System 7 doesn’t mean that there’s not more on top. The process will always be open-ended.
Further Reading: I wrote a paper on this concept, called “Understanding Engineering Relational and Knowledge Structures for Facilitation of Collaboration and Global Development,” for the American Society of Mechanical Engineering’s 2014 Annual Meeting, called IMECE. It’s a nice compact explanation, with empathetic evolution and SD thrown in.
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!
Student/Prototyping Instructor (PI) and Craig Forest, Associate Professor, School of ME, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, in the woodshop 
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 