Braden with the Roi (King) of the Nice Carnival Parade, 2008, Nice, France

Let’s get this straight.  Philosophers who are far more sophisticated than me, as well as neuroscientists and a list of other professions, have been working on the problem of how people think for as long as humans have been on the planet.  But we need a model so we can move forward in our understanding of knowledge in social networks.  And that’s what we’re talking about today — a model, simple enough to be useful.

Since I like Ken Wilber, let’s start with his stuff — the idea that we can split individual human thought into a fundamental dichotomy — belief, and reason.  This is a useful division.  There’s only two categories (handy!), and it also maps to some basics in brain function, a la Daniel Kahneman and his book Thinking Fast and Slow.  Belief is associated with the impulsive, compacted, downloaded part of the brain otherwise known as the limbic system.  And reason ostensibly sits in the pre-frontal cortex — that big hunk of sophisticated gray matter that supposedly separates us from the lower beasts.  Maybe!

Here’s a little slide from a PowerPoint I give to help lay it out.

We’ve made the case in the past that reason, when coupled with interactions with other people, comes along with a developed rational empathy, and that it involves taking data from a given circumstance and processing it in a complex way to come up with a conclusion.  We’ve been using math paradigms in the past, and we’ll use one now — your brain takes the data and does a functional transformation that allows you to reach a conclusion.  It may take a little while, brain-wise — this is Kahneman’s slow thinking after all.  But it knocks around in your frontal lobes, and at some point, your brain reaches a conclusion.  Depending on your development, you’ve applied an algorithm, or a heuristic, or some combination of heuristics.  As people say about relationships sometimes, “it’s complicated.”

Contrast that to belief.  Belief is something that has been processed, either by you, or more likely, larger society.  That aggregation has been in the past, and boiled down to one thing or another.  It is not as dependent on the current situation, though the current situation could trigger emergence of the belief.

In mathematics, you could represent belief as an Direct Integral Function.  What’s that?  Basically, that’s a long sum of information, all added up and normalized in some way or another, where the more complex nature of the information is averaged out.  You can’t know exactly how a belief came into being, because while there may be some obvious factors, there are also some less obvious factors involved whose independent detail have been lost in that averaging process.  Just like a single number — an average, for example — doesn’t tell you about the shape of the probability distribution that the average represents, a belief can’t really tell you about all the data that went into it.

And that’s important — because when someone tells you “well, the reason for the belief is…” you know they’re full of it.  Belief, as some meta-integral of a complex of data, can’t be explained solely through reason.  There’s other stuff buried in there.

That doesn’t mean that beliefs aren’t good things.  One of my favorite examples is asking people what they do when they cross the street.  Inevitably, they say “look both ways.”  That’s been pounded into their head by mother and father since they were four.  I’ll then ask them “well, what if it’s a one-way street?”

Why do we look both ways?  And why is this particular belief useful?  It arms us with a short-time, semi-automatic response that keeps us from getting run over.  Imagine if we took a more rational approach toward cross the street.  We’d approach the street, evaluate whether the street was one-way or two-way, and then make a decision to collect data.  We might consider the speed limit, and road condition.  Then we’d have to sit down and scratch our head.  By the time we finally got across the street, we’d be late for our meeting.  Or we might get hit by a car.

Belief is also interesting in that it’s fundamentally binary in nature.  Either you believe something, or you don’t.  It should be no surprise that belief maps to the lower levels of the Spiral as the dominant mode of thinking.  As an Authoritarian, you either believe something or you don’t, depending on who they are and their status.  Legalistic v-Meme right/wrong corresponds to the concepts of rules as well — you either violate them or keep them.  No questions asked.

Reason becomes a more complex beast.  Reason at its beginnings starts in the Legalistic v-Meme, with logical processes that require data particular to a situation.  Decision logic comes into play — if/then lets us separate different cases, and handle a wider variety of situations.  As we introduce more variability due to independent agency, we get a broader, probabilistic flavor to our reasoning, and we start to see the emergence of heuristics.  It just gets more complex from there.

We can, however, with a little help from our friend, Ken Wilber, place this into a system of evolving thought.  That structure is in the Powerpoint Slide below:

One can see a rough mapping easily between these levels and the Spiral.  Magical maps to Tribal/Magical v-Meme organization (in terms of time scales, we get short-time/long-time dynamics).  Mythical certainly mixes in there, as well as moving on up into belief-based Authoritarianism.  In our own society, we see a lot of Mythical thinking around the United States Constitution, as an example.  But that’s not the only place.  Most faculty are largely Mythical/Rational.  Ask any university prof why they teach a particular class a certain way, they’ll be quick to tell you that it’s the way their graduate advisor did it.  Graduate school — now THAT was a mythical time!

Rational thinking — people like the idea of rationality, and to be sure, it’s a data driven ladder to better things.  But few people consider the downsides of rationality — it’s dependence on how good the data actually is.  You can use a rational-algorithmic, or rational-heuristic process.  But it’s Garbage In/Garbage Out — your decision is only going to be as good as both the process AND the data.

Multiple perspectives/Plural thinking map well to Communitarianism — everyone has an opinion, and everyone should be included in part of the process.  Until the process just doesn’t work any more.  So it’s not perfect, either.  One can start seeing that there are some fundamental information theoretic/thermodynamic balances at work between belief and reason.  If you don’t have enough time, space and energetics in your data or in your beliefs, no matter where you are in Wilber’s hierarchy, you’re not going to make good decisions.

Last up is Integral Thought — the idea that you can reach the truth, but it is hard, and it takes a long time.  Here’s an insight into this — why Servant Leadership 2.0, or advanced design practice all offer pathways to Integral Thought.  You have to be self-reflective, and consider your own bias — especially confirmation bias.  You can’t get to an objective truth until you can see how you’re part of the larger system that generates it.  And if you’re a big part of it, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle rears its head — the very act of observing and potentially interacting changes the truth itself.  As a manager, it’s something to remember.

The last part of understanding belief and reason, as well as their structure in Wilber’s Thought Hierarchy, is understanding who can understand what.  Someone operating lower on the hierarchy simply can’t understand thoughts constructed higher on the hierarchy.  What is the implication of this?  Let’s say you’re arguing with someone who is a Bible Literalist — that means that they view every sentence in the Bible as an absolute truth.  You approach an argument with that person that you’re going to change their mind.  You present data, what you feel is proof that the Bible has been translated from the original Hebrew.  They don’t buy it.  You try, and try, dredging up information, photos and such.  They won’t budge.  Why?

This is a classic example of clash of levels on the Thought Hierarchy.  The Bible Literalist is likely operating from at a maximum a Mythical framework, and they may even believe in a Magical perspective, where they believe the Bible issues exact dates for various events, such as the Apocalypse.  What is important is to understand how they view your argument.  The short answer is that it is only a representation of your belief — that the only objective truth, in their mind, is that you can only argue FOR your beliefs.  How about that for an Authoritarian/Egocentric v-Meme mapping?

The same principle operates up the Hierarchy.  Someone who is a Plural thinker is going to have problems with an Integral thinker — you don’t get out of the frame until you become self-aware.  So, if the person who you’re arguing with isn’t, you’re stuck.  Or maybe you’re stuck.

It’s not hard to take Wilber’s Thought Hierarchy and map this back to the whole series on differential v-Meme conflict that I wrote here.  People at different v-Meme levels not only do not have the same structure and synergy in their knowledge levels.  They literally are not using the same parts of their brain to communicate with each other.  And at the lower levels, their ability to connect and trust are also radically diminished  — so they have absolutely no reason to listen to anyone else that doesn’t match their thoughts.  The necessary neural patterning is just not there.

One of the interesting things I’ve noticed as a teacher is that a majority of young people have a leg up in this situation because of their inherent neural plasticity.  If they’ve been properly prepared, they literally can wrap their heads around thoughts (through a combination of mirroring behavior and general receptivity) that older people will struggle with.  And more importantly, if they’ve been patterned successfully with a variety of complex algorithmic thinking processes, even though they core-dump specific knowledge after any given test, they can rapidly re-assimilate it if needed.  One of the things about students receiving a B.S. in engineering, which emphasizes complexity and sophistication of algorithmic thought compared to a more skill-based degree, is that they have this capacity.  Many a plant manager has told me “I never expect them to know anything.  But they are just different, and pick things up faster.”  I’d argue that this isn’t just a result of sorting out ‘smarter’ kids with advanced degrees.  It’s actually a function of Wilber’s Thought Hierarchy in action — and the incumbent linkage to more sophisticated social structures that students are required to have.

Takeaways:  Pay attention to the arguments people use, and you can usually pretty quickly figure out if they are working on principles of belief or reason.  But pay attention to the way you think as well.  Getting to truth is hard for any one person — and it’s likely if you want to develop a real Integral perspective, you’re going to have to work on your empathy as well.  It’s a never-ending process.

 

Torero, Granada, Spain, 2009

Personal change is hard, and organizational change can be even tougher.  When it’s hundreds of people (or thousands), getting everyone on board involves more than just rearranging the deck chairs in the executive suite — not that rearranging said deck chairs is necessarily a bad idea.  It likely won’t do enough — and that’s the problem.

How can we use the concepts of empathetic connection to understand a change process before crisis?  It is helpful to lay out a few guiding principles.  Here are two:

1.  Changing the social structure information channels from simplex (one way) to duplex (two way) will create reorganization of that social structure over time.  There will be different kinds of emergent behavior that will arise when this happens.  This is what I call organizational Evolution.
2. Creating rules that govern how information channels can be used inside an organization will not necessarily change the social structure, nor particularly create emergent change.  But it can be used to increase fidelity inside those channels, and the sophistication of behavior of people inside the organization.  This is what I call an increase in organizational Sophistication.

These two guiding principles map well to the Spiral.  Bottom line?  Change is either up or out.  Up is really the same as Spiral evolution or progression — creating an organization where more and diverse types of relationships are a natural outgrowth of the increased emphasis on empathetic connection and information exchange inside your organization.

What about ‘out’?  I’ve got a fancy name for this — I call this ‘Horizontal v-Meme Broadening.’  What that means is that you maintain your core social structure, but add various sidebars, processes and information that increase the sophistication of what happens inside your organization.  And how this works, just like upward evolution, is going to be different for every level on the Spiral.

In order to understand this more thoroughly, we need some new paradigms.  One of my personal favorites is the idea of a fractal, or the process of fractalization.  The theoretical definition of a fractal is an object that expresses self-similar behavior at a number of scales.  The classical example of a fractal is a tree — as the tree grows and branches, the ratio of main trunk thickness to branch thickness is maintained.  Various ways of calculating this ratio are called the fractal dimension — the general idea being that if a fractal object is made up of lines (one dimension), its fractal dimension is >1.  If a fractal object is two-dimensional, then its fractal dimension >2.  And so on.

In essence, fractal dimension tells us the n-dimensional space-covering properties of the object.  That’s a lot of math jargon!  Bottom line as applied to our new concept of sophistication?  The process of cultural, or v-Meme fractalization tells us how more and more types of behavior in a given social structure are covered by smaller and smaller replications of the social structure.

What will govern this process of sophistication?  It all has to go back to the thermodynamics of the situation — time, space and energetics.  Making your organization more sophisticated likely involves refinement of the types of dynamics that created your org chart in the first place.  And dependent on the v-Meme development level you’re at, these will vary.

Fair warning — the nested nature of any Spiral level of development will come into play — just like the aforementioned Matryoshka dolls.  What that means is that if you’re an Authoritarian v-Meme organization, odds are that the new dynamics created will maximize control at finer and finer scales, and can also affect your Tribal/Magical and Survival v-Meme levels that are embedded in your Authoritarian structure.  As you go up the Spiral, it just broadens your hand.  But if you don’t pay attention to what you’re doing, one of those internal Matryoshka v-Memes might just give your larger system a tummy ache.  That’s the way it works.

Examples of sophistication and its manifestation inside social/relational structures aren’t very hard to find.  Few organizations are pure Anything — they’re a little mix of this, a little mix of that, with a big part being determined by whatever the dominant v-Meme is.  Cultural pressures are often all over the v-Meme map, so it’s not surprising in that lack of purity.

There are, I’m sure, millions of examples of the process of increasing sophistication in societies around the world.  Long-time persistent countries are big on them.  One of my favorites is the differentiation in the process of drinking tea.  Japanese tea ceremonies, or chanoyu (茶の湯) vary at the base between informal (chakai 茶会, tea gathering) and formal (chaji (茶事, tea event))  .  The informal one lasts less than a half hour; the formal version, with rituals, comprehensive food and such, can last over four hours.  The Wikipedia article highlighted above is awesome — and shows how increasing sophistication of a given ceremony — Japanese tea ceremonies were originally spiritual practice initiated by Buddhist monks (and as such, it should be no surprise that there are tons of rules and protocols for such ceremonies, originating as they have out of the Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme!) Tea ceremonies themselves, were also considered pathways to enlightenment, and a testament to the fact that self-awareness does not always have to work its way linearly up the Spiral.  More and more sections, with more and more rules governing smaller and smaller time fragments of a fractalized process, are a hallmark of a growth of sophistication.

It’s not always Legalism that experiences this kind of fractalization of v-Meme.  Virtually every sophisticated high art in any culture lends refinement to the v-Meme, and the culture its embedded in. In China, a very choreographed type of opera made popular in Beijing is called Beijing Opera, or Jingju (京剧).  Jingju is a great example of highly stylized storytelling, used to reinforce the dominant ideas in Chinese culture at the time of the Qing Dynasty, mostly involving playing one’s part in an Authoritarian society, and doing what you’re told or getting killed.  Mao sensed the form was so powerful that he banned it and implemented “revolutionary opera” along the same lines, with his messages.  As was discussed earlier, things don’t end well for the various characters falling in love, or developing relationships outside the accepted v-Meme set!

Jingju — Beijing Opera Performance  — credit: Leonard G.

In Jingju, the roles are predefined.  Study to perform Jingju starts at an early age, with the ultimate expression of Authoritarian behavior being exhibited between the troupe organizer and the young people let on contract by their parents — indentured servitude.  Since the troupe organizer would essentially take over the raising of the child, the performer would be required to give all money from performances to the organizer until that debt was paid.  Mistakes made during performances resulted in the entire young troupe being beaten with bamboo canes, and young boys who played female roles were conscripted into a side business of sex slavery.  Now that’s some old-timey, self-similar authoritarianism!  In the modern age, not surprisingly, as China has evolved its own v-Meme set, Beijing Opera has become less popular.

There are plenty of examples at the various levels of the Spiral of sophistication of business as well.  One of my favorites involves the Boeing Company.  Building commercial aircraft is an exercise in reliability coupled with complexity management.  When you add to that, the need for interfacing with the FAA, it’s not too hard to believe that the organization that has evolved in that environment is a relatively rigid hierarchy, designed to interface with other Legalistic hierarchies and regulators.

But you can’t get all the synergies you need functioning as a Performance-influenced Legalistic Hierarchy.  Sooner or later, all those parts have to come together and fit.  And if you’re a Legalistic v-Meme hierarchy, there’s only one way to do that — add another department!  These engineers, called Liaison (pronounced Lie’- a -zon) Engineers, do the work of interfacing all the various departments and plane parts together.  The system works.

Self-similar fractal propagation isn’t confined just to the lower v-Memes.  A fascinating example of fractalization of Performance-based v-Memes can be found in what is called Agile Business Practice.  For example, in the Agile Software Development space, software evolves through a collaborative effort between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.  Based on the primary empathetic dynamic of independent relational generation and self-selection, the whole process has grown in sophistication to have stages in the process like scrums, sprints and such.  Hewing to the guiding principles below, one can see that this Performance v-Meme methodology implicitly embraces empathetic development.

Agile Manifesto

• Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software
• Welcome changing requirements, even in late development
• Working software is delivered frequently (weeks rather than months)
• Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
• Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
• Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
• Working software is the principal measure of progress
• Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
• Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential

It’s not surprising to see sophistication  in the form of lower v-Meme scaffolding in the higher v-Memes.  Probably no better example of this kind of scaffolding could be found than Dean Leffingwell’s work on the Scaled Agile Framework — a way of implementing the above principles.

Dean Leffingwell’s Scaled Agile Framework process — screen shot

Same principles — scrums, and such — but also an implied hierarchy, with Enterprise Architects, DevOps, Release Mgmt, Agile Teams, and a whole host of other titles.  The goal of all this type of scaffolding is obviously to increase predictability and reliability in an uncertain environment.  But one can see that sophistication can only take you so far — even within the bounds of a sophisticated, pipelined empathetic process based on independently generated relationships.

Sooner or later, you have to evolve.

Takeaways:  Up or Out?  Change is never easy.  Sophistication can help, and may be the answer, especially because it may increase the robustness of your lower-level scaffolding.  The challenge is knowing when you have no choice but to go up — because then, you simply have to invest in a more uncertain way in developing the people you work with.  And that’s been an age-old problem.

Further Reading:  Boy, I just love Wikipedia.  Where else could you get, virtually instantaneously, an article on Jingju, Japanese tea ceremonies, and Agile Frameworks in just seconds?  And for those that don’t want to read Wikipedia to find out all the stuff about Jingju, you can always watch this movie — Farewell My Concubine.  I only got through about 1/3 of it.  Grueling.

 

Trail up Meadow Creek, off the Selway River, Nez Perce National Forest, Idaho

There are some stories I’ve told myself so often, I forget that I haven’t completely discussed them on this blog.  One of these, alluded to, is the role of the customer in design.

The surface-level analysis of a customer in design leads to the usual conclusions, which are not, in and of themselves, wrong.  Customers provide information for specifications, and good engineers/designers analyze the customer’s situation, gathering data that leads to better designs.  It’s a virtuous connection, and certainly I’ve advocated for lots of interactions between designers and customers on this blog.

But what’s really going on in the knowledge space?  How does Conway’s Law play into this — and what does a customer, along with a developed sense of rational empathy, do?How does a customer enlarge the knowledge space that the design organization operates inside of?

Conway’s Law tells us that the design of a system or product will map to the social structure of the organization that designs it.  If that’s the case (and I’ve argued that it is!), then it should be relatively easy to map the final design to various departments and divisions inside the company that designed it.  I was reminded recently by a friend of the  classic example of this in the book Soul of a New Machine, where the engineers for the Data General MV/8000 mapped out Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX engineering department on the motherboard.

But there were no real customers involved with, in any kind of iterative way, the design of those computers.  Both organizations were in-house, working as fast as they could, to create a faster mini-computer.

Customers complicate the application of Conway’s Law much more.  A design company interviewing customers has to account for the customer’s knowledge in some fashion. There’s nothing wrong with taking some snapshots of customer needs, turning them into engineering characteristics, and placing those fragmented pieces of information into a tool like a House of Quality and chunking away with a standard design process.  That little bit will take you a long way.  The customer is cast in the role of partial Authority for what they want, and as such, since Authoritarians communicate with knowledge fragments, it fills the bill — as well as the House.  The designer uses tools/algorithms like the various parts of the House such as the roof to explain trade-offs to the customer.  And then we’re off to the races.  Or happy design land.

But what happens if the design (or maybe better stated, the product conceptualization) is earlier in the development process?  What happens if we don’t know if the design is even physically realizable?  Many design projects I’ve been involved with have been shoved further down the development scale.  I like the NASA Technology Readiness Level figure, shown below, as a good indicator of judging how many potential unknowns, both known and unknown, one might expect to encounter in a design process.

NASA Technology Readiness Level Scale

You can be sure when you’re down in the research to prove feasibility range, you’re going to be encountering some unknown unknowns — and that’s tough to calibrate with typical project planning on the Gantt Chart.

Purely physical law-based designs (like an upgrade to a chemical rocket engine) only have scientific research to deal with.  Contracts can be let with various suppliers, both upstream and downstream, even for speculative things, that are based on physical experiments being performed.  Gates can be set up, and the contract can be based on various milestones being completed.  All information can be declared explicitly in all contexts — even the ones where the knowledge hasn’t been generated.

That’s not as easily done when a customer is ingratiated into the design process.  Any given customer may or may not know why they want what they want.  They just know they want it.  A simple example might be that a customer wants a red bike.  They may want their bike to be red because that’s their personal preference.  Maybe when they were growing up, their favorite bike was red, but they’ve since forgotten this fact.  The information is integrated and downconverted inside the customer’s brain.  The unnecessary stuff — or rather, the unnecessary stuff their brain decided 20 years ago was unnecessary stuff — has been discarded.

But maybe the real reason for the bike being red is that red happens to be the one color that drives bugs away when you ride the bike in that part of the world.  And if you had a red bike, you didn’t have to worry about june bugs flying into your eyes.  Maybe it mattered more to the customer than either you or he realized.

What you, as the designer, are doing when you incorporate that level of customer input is what I call metacognitive enlargement.  You are enlarging the social structure that matters not just to include the customer, but also the background knowledge generation that the customer went through to acquire that knowledge.  You’re not just integrating his or her eyes and ears into the design.  You’re tapping into their entire network.  And you’re adding in the stuff that you know you don’t know (explicit advice from the customer), as well as the stuff you didn’t know you didn’t know (implicit insistence for certain features from the customer.)

Appropriate metacognitive enlargement, with a smart customer, dramatically enlarges the potential solution space, as well as the number of solution structures you can use to actualize the design.  Now, instead of examples based on your organization’s past successes and failures, or as yet untapped creative, independently generated interactions existing within your design groups’ interactive minds, you have access to the customer’s as well.

But we’re not through yet.  Typically, not everyone in a given organization will deal with the customer. There will be people on the front end who do that interaction.  They will need to have evolved empathy, for two reasons.  First they need to be able to control their own egocentric projection involving the customer’s stated needs.  Accurate rational empathy/place-taking is a must, and as I’ve discussed, real transitions into self-awareness of bias takes you another big step up the ladder.

But it’s more than that.  The designers need to be able to assess, in some probabilistic fashion, how much they should trust the input the customer is giving them.  As the people on the interface, they have to make a decision about the level of veracity of the customer’s information.

Superficially, the design space is some merged set of customer and designer knowledge structures, that come directly out of the customer and designer social structures.  But it is up to the designer to decide how much, and how integrally, the customer input should be utilized in the design process.

And here’s the rub — often, the customer may know implicitly, meaning they WILL NOT be able to tell the designer explicitly, why something is important.  But just because they can’t verbalize it, or draw a picture, or give the usual evidence that a designer may be used to doesn’t mean it’s NOT important.  It is then that the designer’s empathy and ability to connect that matters.

Appropriately structured design organizations, with great independent relationships, scaffolded with appropriate technology and tools, can produce reliable designs.  But without accurate customer assessment, validity will suffer.  Because, all other things equal (e.g. the customer is not a nut, or a victim of their own Dunning-Kruger bias!) the customer knows what they need.

A great example of this how metacognitive enlargement works could be found with one of my student projects.  Students were tasked with making a heat transfer measurement system for water jackets for enormous, stainless steel vats used for making wine.  Controlling temperature in the vats is important — fermentation rates are a primary factor in managing whether wine will be good or not.  And the customer had asked the students to make the system out of stainless steel.

Stainless steel is de rigeur in almost all food and beverage-based applications.  But in this case, the temperature system was not actually touching the wine.  It was only tracking the cooling water circulating in the water jackets, that were never exposed to any part of the wine.  The clients insisted, however, that the device be made of all stainless steel, which made parts difficult to order.

The students groused, but managed to deliver the system on time and on budget. It was only after that occurred that the real reason for the temperature measuring system was revealed.  The device had to be taken to trade shows, and placed next to wine vats that were the real thing the company was selling.  There was a real fear that if everything in front of THEIR customer wasn’t stainless steel, there might be some question about appropriate material selection for the vats themselves.  That would result in reduced sales, and not worth the risk (one of the big vats cost $200K).  So building the temperature measuring system out of stainless steel fittings turned out to be one of global validity, in a venue where no technical justification could be given. It was a marketing decision — but a vital one.

Closing this up, I don’t have any formula or algorithm I can give you for a good customer — ‘good’ being defined as someone who pushes your design team to their maximum performance, while keeping it real inside their own expectations.  Because empathy is maximized when it’s a two-way street.  And there’s no question that a good customer is as vital to a great design effort as the team that does the design.

Giant Western Red Cedar, Meadow Creek, Selway Tributary, Nez Perce National Forest, Idaho

In this post on her blog, my wife, who also happens to be a discussion partner and published author on trauma, brings up a very important issue regarding the issue of gaslighting that I’ve covered in the past.  In the movie Gaslight, the protagonist intentionally attempts to drive his victim (actress Ingrid Bergman) insane by messing about with the lighting in the house, with the goal of inheriting gems after driving her crazy and institutionalizing her.  It’s a diabolical plot, and good entertainment.

But is it a truly good paradigm for understanding the phenomenon? I’ve made the argument earlier that the Joker really doesn’t know what he does — in his own words, he just ‘Does Things…’

How much is the empathy-disordered HCP aware of what they do?  Or, in the context of this blog, how self-aware are they?  What are their natural time and spatial scales?  Unclear.  And while it’s certainly interesting, it doesn’t affect strategies for dealing with them all that much.  Agency doesn’t really matter when judging guilt.  Only the facts, legal age, and damage done.

3:30 PM Summer Light — Meadow Creek, Selway Tributary, Nez Perce National Forest, Idaho

Every now and again, one comes across a headline so perfect for this blog, it’s impossible to resist.  This piece in the New York Times, titled German Forest Ranger Finds That Trees Have Social Networks, Too is one of the best examples of understanding how scientists are not free from the impacts of culture, their social structure, and their own empathetic development when they generate thinking about the world around them.

For those that won’t read the piece, the writer profiles famous-in-Germany author Peter Wohlleben, a 51-year-old German forest ranger, whose book, “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate — Discoveries From a Secret World,” turned into a surprise bestseller inside of Germany.  Wohlleben’s premise is very communitarian — each tree is an individual, with an individual history, with a series of connections that would be classified as highly empathetic between that tree and its neighbors.  Trees grow thick branches away from their nearest neighbors and all sorts of stuff — which they observationally do.  This quote from the piece sums it up:

PRESENTING scientific research and his own observations in highly anthropomorphic terms, the matter-of-fact Mr. Wohlleben has delighted readers and talk-show audiences alike with the news — long known to biologists — that trees in the forest are social beings. They can count, learn and remember; nurse sick neighbors; warn each other of danger by sending electrical signals across a fungal network known as the “Wood Wide Web”; and, for reasons unknown, keep the ancient stumps of long-felled companions alive for centuries by feeding them a sugar solution through their roots.

“With his book, he changed the way I look at the forest forever,” Markus Lanz, a popular talk show host, said in an email. “Every time I walk through a beautiful woods, I think about it.”

The writer of the piece borrows from mental models he knows — the writer of the piece tells us that Wohlleben is anthropomorphizing, of course — projecting ‘human’ characteristics on trees.  Well, sort of.  What Wohlleben is really doing is projecting his well-scaffolded Communitarian v-Meme patterns on trees, and coming up with surface-level (not superficial!) truths about forest structure and organization.  Note that little clause about scientific knowledge (algorithmic understanding!) and his own observations (his own heuristics generalized) — we can see the pathway up to communitarian knowledge structures pretty easily.

And Wohlleben is well-scaffolded in German culture, all the way down to the Tribal/Magical v-Memes that dominate the entire corpus of German fairy tales.  The forest is where magical things happen in Germany (remember the Brothers Grimm!) — so much that when the Black Forest started undergoing rapid deforestation in the 18th century because of nascent pressures from the Industrial Revolution, it led to some of the first environmental legislation in history being passed in the 19th!  Talk about some serious social/relational evolution — Magical thinking, and its value, driving higher v-Meme development that literally changed the world.

It’s easy to be dismissive of people like Wohlleben (especially if you’re not so much of a communitarian v-Meme mind yourself!)  He’s anthropomorphizing.  He’s fantasizing.  And so on.  But someone like him also gives deep insight, not only into surface-level highly resonant themes AND memes about trees, but about other parts of German society.  Take the development of solar energy in Germany, for example.  By passing legislation that amplifies and resonates in Germany’s combination meritocratic communitarian culture — where people are evaluated for status on their productivity and potential — Germany is far ahead of the rest of the world for hitting power generation targets because they intrinsically accept the notion of distributed power that pops out of that Communitarian v-Meme.

Anyone doubting this that thinks all this power comes from large centralized plants (there are those as well) need only to look at the photo below.

Greifswald Kirche, C.Löser photo credit

Even a church can be retrofitted for solar power.  Now that’s distributed, communitarian v-Meme power.

Coming back to how the forest actually functions — well, with all knowledge about forests or anything, we’re v-Meme limited.  We can look at how the forest functions like a community, and learn lessons from that perspective.  But, if we’re self aware, we’re going to realize the total truth is higher up the evolutionary v-Meme ladder.  And we’re going to have no problem admitting that there are things we just can’t understand in the context of how our own awareness is wired.

And at the same time, the trees, and more importantly, the resonant Wohlleben perspective — that combination of structure and culture we discussed in our own Theory of Everything — gives tremendous business strategy takeaways.  Line up culture, social/empathetic structure of your target market, a little magical/romantic thinking that connects to deep stories your customers have, and a product that maps to all these things, and you’ll have a runaway best-seller.  It’s that simple.

It’s so simple it deserves a buzz-phrase — Triple Resonant Strategies.  Culture, Structure, and Matching, Accelerative Product Design.  When these three things feed back on each other, you’re sure to have a hit.

My old Riot Kayaks Grind, below the Flying B Ranch on the Middle Fork Salmon River

I came across this article today on Medium — a series on what they’re calling the Industrialist’s Dilemma.  The intent is to attempt to understanding how digital technology is transforming markets and systems of production for ‘Old School’ goods — like Tesla is doing for cars.  This quote from the article sums it up well, talking about Uber, AirBnB, and such:

These startups benefit from zero legacy organizational baggage, little government overhead, some of the best software talent in the world, relatively cheap startup capital, and no brand reputation to jeopardize when attempting new unproven feats (like letting people rent out their bedrooms to strangers).

The Industrialist’s Dilemma, as posed, is an excellent example of what is known as Hawkins’ Law — coined by David Hawkins, a Pharm D. doing research on anti-coagulants.

Progress does not involve replacing one theory that is wrong with one that is right, rather it involves replacing one theory that is wrong with one that is more subtly wrong.

The meta-premise in the Industrialists Dilemma is as the tools have changed, the opportunity for recreating the various businesses formerly tied to large, in-place industry has also changed.

My argument, or rather attempt to replace this theory that is wrong, with one that is more subtly wrong, is that the social/relational structure and its  information flow is the thing that creates real change.  Digital tools change the way that information can move around, and thus have the potential to rearrange the social structure of existing service provider industries as those industries adapt to provide a needed good or service.  Because changing the social structure is fundamentally disruptive to the status quo (ask any overbearing manager who is finally forced to be nice and cede authority to his/her employees) the way of doing business also comes along with a disruptive effect.

I wish I could attend the series.  I’m sure, regardless of the paradigm, it will be fascinating.  The author of the post, Aaron Levie, has promised to put lectures up on Medium.

Lantz Bar, Main Salmon River, Frank Church/River of No Return Wilderness, Idaho

I came across an interesting post today — Is the MIG 29 a Better Plane than the F 16?.   I found it on the information aggregator, Quora, that lets an expert speak their mind, as opposed to the programmatic structure of Wikipedia, that allows an averaging approach to final content.  Questions are asked, experts (or anyone) can answer. Quota then allows Upvotes and Downvotes on whether the content is good, believable, or true.  A lot of the questions asked are pretty Authoritarian, and pretty silly — along the lines of ‘who would beat who in a fight’ — including lots of Marvel superhero battles.  Would the Hulk beat the Flash?  The participants on Quora will opine.

But there’s also a fair amount of content from people with authentic experience, including a number of US Air Force pilots who will happily tell you about the experience of flying certain aircraft that are unreachable to the majority of us outside of a flight simulator program.  The post above is a little different, in that I discovered is a cross-link from another site (the Quora poster is an fanboy from Singapore, and the actual post is pulled off the F-16.net   site.  The pilot that writes, however, seems to be the real thing — and his description is especially interesting.

He notes that he has 2000 flight hours in the F-16, and 500 hours in the MiG-29, and wrote his Masters Thesis on a comparative evaluation of the two aircraft.  The F-16 and MiG-29 were introduced in 1978 and 1982 respectively, with the MiG being developed as a direct response to the development of the F-16 and F-15 in their NATO roles as air superiority fighters.  Both aircraft have similar ranges and maximum speeds.  But what is interesting is how the US and the Soviet Union decided to interpret the role of the pilot, and how that led to different emphasis in design decisions.  (The two aircraft are pictured below — the MiG-29 more closely resembles the F-15.)F-16 Fighting Falcon, 2008, from Wikipedia

Serbian MiG-29, from Wikipedia

It’s interesting to note that fighter aircraft in general are designed, with few exceptions, by relatively rigid design hierarchies (called all sorts of different things -design bureaus, etc.) that are required to interface with their respective military procurers.  Validity of design, in the case of military hardware, inevitably starts with being able to beat the other guy in a fight.  In that case, it’s not surprising to see aircraft evolution as being pretty incremental, which would also mirror the behavior (as Conway’s Law would predict) of the hierarchies’ receptivity to new ideas.  Algorithmic design is going to rule uber alles over more free-form heuristic design in almost all cases.  Why?  Because in the case of military hardware, you really only need 1%, figuratively speaking, greater performance than the next guy in a fight.  In the case of high speed, high intensity warfare, that’s enough.  And then the other guy’s dead.

There are exceptions to the rule, usually when a new threat arises, where the paradigm of the free-form design group gets involved.  There are numerous books, for example, on the SR-71, the famous USAF reconnaissance plane, designed in Lockheed’s Skunkworks, for the reader to peruse.

But most fighter aircraft (and military hardware in general) are ground out on the incremental curve.  The USAF’s Century series of fighter aircraft are a great example.  How could they be otherwise?  For the most part, the defense contractor structure has to map to the military procurement hierarchy — and that has to control design decisions.  In only special cases, well noted in the literature, like the famous Kelly Johnson of the Lockheed Skunkworks, were aircraft design groups separated from that procurement cycle.  Then, and only then, were disruptive performance breakthroughs observed.

Back to the F-16/MiG-29 comparison.  There’s no question that while the mission for both aircraft was fundamentally the same, the development of requirements started the process of divergence.  Russians have been known, for example, for their advanced abilities in aerodynamic analysis, and while the F-16 is no slouch, the MiG-29’s claim to fame is performing a variety of ‘high angle of attack’ maneuvers, like The Cobra, at airshows.  The Cobra involves pulling up the stick on the aircraft very rapidly, into what will turn into a stall, like a cobra rearing its head, and then falling back down in a reversal of direction.  For those that like that kind of thing, you can watch this Youtube video.  The ‘smoke’ you see is actually water condensation in low pressure areas, caused by shedding vortices from the high angle of attack maneuvering.

Flashy, and sure to impress at an airshow, like we would expect from an status-based, Authoritarian v-Meme dominated culture like the Soviet Union.  And though F-16 pilots claim the same ability to execute this maneuver, this is not the primary selling point of the airplane.  Its overall performance has made the F-16 the plane of choice in the export market — not surprising, considering it comes out of the US Legalistic-Performance-based v-Meme culture.  In the article, the pilot discusses the reality of losing all forward airspeed, and the problems with that as a useful maneuver.  Go figure.

The real kicker when comparing the two aircraft comes comparing how they take care of the pilot, and maximizing what’s known in the business as Situational Awareness (SA).  In this regard, the MiG falls far short.  Formations of MiGs are meant to be centrally controlled from the ground, whereas F-16s are supposed to fly in formation with each pilot having much greater autonomy, with better information flow to each independent pilot through sophisticated Heads Up Displays (HUDs), and the ability to choose to change tactics.  The short version?  Even though fighter aircraft designs are the result of literally thousands of design decisions, you can’t run from the social structure of your corporation, nor the cultural sidebars that influence it.

Here’s the telling quote from the piece:

“The MiG-29’s design was a result of the Soviet view on tactical aviation and the level of technology available to their aircraft industry. The pilot was not meant to have a lot of SA. The center of fighter execution was the ground controller. The pilot’s job was to do as instructed and not to make independent decisions. Even the data link system in the MiG-29 was not meant to enhance the pilot’s SA. He was merely linked steering, altitude and heading cues to follow from the controller. If the MiG-29 pilot is cut off from his controller, his autonomous capabilities are extremely limited. Western fighter pilots are given the tools they need to make independent tactical decisions. The mission commander is a pilot on the scene. All other assets are there to assist and not to direct. If the F-16 pilot loses contact with support assets such as the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft, he has all the tools to complete the mission autonomously.”

Where does this come from?  Especially in the Soviet Union, it was perceived that the person on the ground, with more advanced, centralized radar, would have a better view of the fight.  And if those pilots in the MiG-29s would just do as they’re told, they would win — at least that’s the v-Meme talking.  Note the lack of appreciation in the design process of the ability of a ground controller to have the timescales in his head to adapt and react to a rapidly changing, multi-aircraft battlefield environment.  The thought, quite literally, never occurred to them — that real-time data and pilot adaptation would be more important than their beliefs about how air war was supposed to occur.

The actual conflict data supports the analysis above.  In every conflict between F-16/F-15 fighters and MiG-29s, the F-series has prevailed.  According to this website, which sells MiG-29 rides!, a study found F-16 has a 92:13 kill/loss ratio, with MiG 29 having a 16:28 kill/loss ratio.

Before folks start chanting ‘USA, USA!’ one should realize that I wasn’t able to find any cites that indicated true reflective capacity in the various US design decisions that created the F-16.  More, it was a naturally emergent design that came out of a history of fighter aircraft evolution and the naturally dominant social/relational empathetic structure.  We won by virtue of the fundamental characteristics of our social structure — not because we were, no pun intended, self-piloting.  Our own Legalistic/Performance v-Meme culture favored more pilot agency and autonomy, so we naturally built an aircraft that built more of these design features into it.  Authoritarian v-Meme features are implicitly and explicitly layered in the MiG-29, like one of those 100 layer tortes.  The result is, not surprisingly, a loser.

And the analysis can go on.  The latest widely deployed Russian fighter aircraft embody all the design lessons of ‘4th Generation’ fighters built around the world — which means that they learned these lessons regarding taking care of the pilot, too — after the fact.  For example, HUDs are common now — we’re starting to see the technology used in automobiles! But the more Authoritarian v-Meme the development system is, and the culture it is subsumed in, the more fundamentally reactive they MUST be.  The Authoritarian v-Meme corporation cannot get ahead.  Fumbling along in its Status-based thinking mode, it limits metacognition, and  its own efforts tend to be confined to mirroring behavior.  Don’t believe it?  Look at this latest Sukhoi T-50 (first flight 2010.)  F-22 much? (First flight 1997.)   With organizations stuck in lower empathetic modes, it’s going to be a game of constant catch-up.  See the pictures below:

“Lockheed Martin F-22A Raptor JSOH” by Rob Shenk from Great Falls, VA, USA – F-22 RaptorUploaded by Diaa abdelmoneim. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Commons – https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lockheed_Martin_F-22A_Raptor_JSOH.jpg#/media/File:Lockheed_Martin_F-22A_Raptor_JSOH.jpg

Alex Beltyukov – http://www.airliners.net/photo/Russia—Air/Sukhoi-T-50/2002344/L/

Such is the power of the v-Memes in our heads — and their inevitable emergence outside in our implicit concerns and design decisions.  If the story of the F-16 vs. the MiG-29 is cautionary in any way, it’s also that outside cultural boundary conditions (such as the shape of one fighter aircraft influencing another one — think fighter design culture) can only take you so far.  If your corporation implements outside strategies to compete, without creating a social structure that actually creates innovation, and values agency of the people inside, it’s only going to get you so far.  You’ll never escape playing catch-up.  And that can, quite literally, be detrimental to your survival.

 

 

 

On the row out, upstream from Riggins, ID, Main Salmon River

One of the things I’ve been pondering is the effect of trauma on evolution and development in people and organizations.  Trauma can be a powerful reset for both, taking people from whatever v-Meme they’re comfortably (or not) residing, and likely shoving them back down the Spiral to the Survival v-Meme.  When you’re traumatized, you hunker down and hope something isn’t going to kill you.  That’s a reduction in one’s temporal and spatial scales, and as we’ve discussed in the past, a reduction in empathetic capacity, as connection must follow the rules of thermodynamics — time, space and energetics must all come into play.  Reduce all three, and you’re sliding back down the empathetic pyramid.  Think about how someone else thinks?  Or feel sorry for someone else?  Please.  We’ve got our own problems here.

And then there’s a cascade of effects.  How we respond to trauma (or heal from it) definitely changes the way we perceive and process the world.  It could make us more rigid and less likely to explore unfamiliar spaces, both physical and virtual.  This may lead to a corresponding decrease in metacognition — a longing for the comfortable known knowns.  “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” goes back to 1576 and George Pettie.

But maybe not.  Trauma is also associated with a psychological phenomena called hypervigilance.  Hypervigilance is an increased level of sensory arousal that leads to anxiety, an increased sense of arousal, and a constant scanning of the environment for threats.  Hypervigilance itself is a bad thing.  But the habit it teaches — another mode for stimulating the brain for data-driven processing — might be a more profound pathway for empathetic evolution.  Especially if there is healing, and the neural systems return to what Dr. Dan Siegel has called ‘The Window of Tolerance’, the benefits to empathetic development — especially rational, place-taking empathy due to the data-driven nature of the transition experience (always watching out to make sure you’re not going to get creamed!)  can’t be understated.

With appropriate recovery, it could dismantle old beliefs that failed us and make us more aware of our surroundings — essentially giving us a data-driven outlook, and a corresponding increase in metacognition, that we might not have naturally had.  I’ve always been pretty data-driven myself, even at a young age.  And lest someone thinks that is some admission of benevolent precociousness, it’s far more likely a result of being in charge of my alcoholic father, whose rapidly changing mood drove my place-taking empathetic development.  What to do with Papa was my problem from the age of nine.  Needless to say, it didn’t make one feel like mapping behavior to the old Authoritarian v-Meme societal definitions and expectations.  At the same time, one can see the issues with inappropriate developmental progression.  No nine-year-old, even if they’re rational, has a very good ability to discriminate from good and bad data.

Research in the last 20 years has led other interesting angles on the effects of trauma — some that are truly mind-boggling.  The developing field of epigenetics —  behavioral patterns, dispensations and knowledge passed not just through the memetic structure of cultures, organizations, and communities, but through the actual genetic code of the sentient actors, is becoming more well understood.  In this article, researchers Moshe Szyf, a molecular biologist, and Michael Meaney, a neurobiologist, both at McGill University, showed the effect of maternal care and trauma on the neurochemistry of rats, and how this was passed from generation to generation.  The short version?  If you came from a traumatized rat mother, you could see genetic change and pass down the effects of that trauma through the generations.

Research on complex behavior is preliminary, but one thing the reader might think about is the value of the Tribal/Magical v-Meme.  Epigenetics give a potential scientific explanation to magical beliefs held around the world regarding reincarnation.  And while it’s important not to get too carried away with this — do remember that it’s the purpose of this blog to explain complex social phenomena without reference to magic or mystery — it’s important to recognize the potential power of aggregated, collective knowledge.

One of the other interesting meditative potentials is to consider how psychosocial development creates actual physical neurogenic structures inside the brain. As we move up the ladder of empathetic development, I’d argue our brains physically change.  And as was discussed previously in the post on Dunning-Kruger, research has been done showing that experts effectively go through a v-Meme compaction of more sophisticated knowledge structures, creating automatic, impulsive behavior that normally would reside in the pre-frontal cortex, does some process of migration to utilize other parts of the brain.  In my thinking, it’s much more likely that simple structures, or predilections toward more complex structures, are more likely to be transmitted than the actual complex structures themselves.   People initially scoffed, then considered seriously, then scoffed again at the experiment on transfer of RNA in cannibalistic planaria (flatworms).  Epigenetics research opens up, once again, this can of worms.

And some entire cultures bet on it.  According to their faith, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama, gets to specify whether he will reincarnate or not.  If so, he lays out a series of symbols and such that a child, who will be the reincarnated one, will recognize, that monks in charge of finding the child will know that this individual is the one.  Discounting the more complex story, clearly there exists some subsets of children that have a v-Memetic ‘leg up’ on evolutionary intelligence — and epigenetic theory offers an explanation for how that might occur.

Instead of looking at the higher v-Memes and their potential for physiological changes in the brain, one of the more interesting thought questions I’ve proposed involves the darker side of all this — the psychological state of Genghis Khan’s army.  When it comes to percentages of historic rape-and-pillage, no one can really compete with the Great Khan.  And while it’s true that WWII killed more folks (this video by Neil Halloran  is a great video to put it in perspective), no one beats Genghis’ percentages.  The Mongol Conquest wiped out 40 million people in a much smaller world, while spreading the genes of the Khan himself (through his sons) to something like 8% of the Asian population.  That’s a lot of raping.  How did their brains hold up?

We might connect v-Meme development (or lack thereof) and empathetic level (pretty doggone low) to the supposition that Genghis Khan’s army did not seem to suffer too much from PTSD.  One of the largest tribal cultures in history, due to low empathetic development, just did not feel the pain that a more empathetic culture might feel in the amount of historic destruction the Mongol Hordes did across central Asia and into Europe.  And while interesting theories have been proposed (see this book) on why the Khan’s armies were stopped, such as delamination due to heat, one I haven’t seen is that the Mongol Armies suffered from psychological damage — because they likely didn’t.  Their brains were simply not empathetically connected enough to register a shock.  For them, raping and pillaging were just another day at the office.  They couldn’t suffer certain kinds of trauma — can’t damage circuits that aren’t there.  It gives kind of an inverse credence to the notion that sensitive people are more likely to be hurt.

And you don’t have to look at a particular racist perspective to rationalize this.  Alexander’s Macedonian armies, while perhaps a little more constrained with regards to local populations, were still embedded deeply in the Chthonic transition of tribal authoritarianism.  Though the Greeks gave us some major v-Meme evolutionary tracks, the Hellenic farmers had a very similar predilection for constant warfare, with a little time for planting crops.  They did only a roughly modified version of Genghis Khan’s tactics.

Contrast that to the modern view of warfare, which has something like 11-20% of active duty soldiers getting PTSD during any given year of active warfare.  We’ve changed — or rather, our brains have changed.  And considering how that may be related in epigenetics of populations and their dominant empathetic social structures.  We’re more empathetically developed, and as such, just more connected to everyone.  So when we go out and kill Vietnamese villagers, or even currently, hear about 276 kidnapped young girls in Nigeria, not only do we react.  We have the neural circuits to feel their pain.

Even post-Enlightenment, that level of devolution can happen — make no mistake.  But it takes a radical, psychopathic departure of authority to devolve us, and it’s simply rare.  But things could be conflated.  In Daniel Goldhagen’s famous book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, he makes the profound point that most of the Germans and Austrians, a more genetically homogeneous population pool, who worked in the concentration camps weren’t profoundly affected by the carnage they created, or thought much of it.  Could it be more than profound In-group/Out-group dynamics?  Having an epigenetic, historic disposition toward dehumanizing Jews would explain a lot — as opposed to the more common, psychopathic devolution being exhibited by ISIS.  And then there’s the obvious takeaway from all of this regarding the Jewish population.  What’s the epigenetic effect of the Holocaust on an entire population?  How does one recover an entire, self-restricted gene pool?  Others have asked that question, and answered with research.

There’s much to think about here.  I’ve done most of my own pondering on genes vs. memes.  Hardware vs. Software.  Maybe a better paradigm might be Hardware vs. Firmware vs. Software.  Genetics <-> Epigenetics <-> Memes.  Stay tuned.  And keep thinking yourselves!

 

Side stream, Main Salmon River, Idaho

How can we wrap our head around this conflation/conflagration of empathy, psychology, social structure, knowledge creation and design in a meaningful way, that will lead to insight on how to understand, fix, and evolve our organization? I’ve put a lot of things out on the table and tied them together — but there’s a lot of red meat to chew on with this blog.

I was inspired by a comment by Mike (who I’m pretty sure is a friend of mine from industry that I’m involved with a collaborative project with, but until he outs himself, I’ll let him keep his anonymity!)  who boiled it down to ‘structure + behavior = culture.’  Well, sort of.  I’m more inclined toward the basic equation ‘structure + culture = behavior’ — in other words, our organizational structure, which contains inherent, emergent dynamics, is modified by culture, both corporate and community/national/international, basically what I’ve been calling externally defined influences, to create behavior of the individuals in the system.  That all sounds pretty good, and if you’re not a math major, you’re probably happy with that simple addition relationship.

But what it is, more likely, is what engineers and mathematicians call a Boundary Value Problem (BVP)– or if you want to get super-picky, it’s a time-dependent BVP.  Since it is far too easy to get lost in the weeds with this kind of talk, let’s slow it down and give a simple example.

One way engineers solve complex physical phenomena is to use mathematics to construct what is called a mathematical model of a given problem.  Because of mathematical models, believe it or not, your world is filled with things that otherwise couldn’t exist — or would take forever in a trial-and-error world to create.  Modern aircraft, for example, are now designed completely on the computer, and actual, physical testing occurs only at very selected points in the design cycle.  The Wright Brothers may have figured out their airfoil design in a little bench top wind tunnel.  But the reality is that today’s aircraft have those virtual wind tunnels inside their computer models, in the form of a representation of a boundary value problem.

You don’t need to go full aerospace to have BVPs.  A pot of boiling water is a great example of one.  Water inside the pot is the medium we’re exploring the behavior (it’s going to boil!)  The system boundary is, of course, the pot itself.  That’s holding the water in.  And then the boundary conditions — what’s going on outside the pot — is, of course, the flame from the burner on your stove, and the open air the pot is exposed to on all the other sides.  Engineers might be interested in lots of different aspects of this situation (we boil lots of stuff to make all sorts of stuff!) and will adjust their analysis accordingly.  Maybe we want to predict how the water acts when it boils.  Maybe we want to see how long it takes for the water to boil off.  Modelers would adjust the complexity and time scale of the model — and on and on.  Trust me — it’s endless.

Similar in both form and function, the parts of our Theory of Everything — our Elephant wrapped in Spaghetti — map well to this concept.  Organizational and empathetic structure are the internal medium — the core stuff (the water) that we’re looking at.  Boundary conditions map well, conceptually, to culture and elements of change we can bring on the outside.  We can rearrange the internal structure (you want to make water boil faster, for example, add salt)  and expect different organizational results when we let it stew for a while.  As well, we can change the external culture of our organizations and also expect similar kinds of development.  Dragon boat racing events might have a similar effect on team unity in the Pearl River Delta of Guongdong Province as softball tournaments in the Midwest.

We’ve done a lot of understanding of the fundamental constituent relationships inside social organizations, with Spiral Dynamics and its various v-Memes.  But what exactly, is culture?  Can we understand culture using our BVP analogy in a way that could allow meaningful application?

Culture is a popular subject in the academy.  There are entire departments devoted to studying different aspects of it, and it maps well to the v-Memes present across the academic system.  But what is it?  Here’s my shot at a definition:

Culture is a trans v-Memetic set of sidebars and conditions that influence the individuals inside a given social system to display certain behaviors.  Culture comes from a broad spectrum of influences, mainly relating to persistence and continuity in living conditions and environments of the people inside it, and establishes In-Group and Out-Group dynamics of those people.  Additionally, culture allots, on average, different degrees of agency to those people influenced by it, and demands certain empathetic behavior in certain situations.  People who evolve past the agency the culture allots can either be change agents inside that culture.  Or they can be cast out of that culture.  Culture can create, as well as offer accepted solution paths, to the various v-Meme conflicts individuals inside that group.  Culture is adaptive, but slowly adaptive, as it is based on many averages of many situations inside a group of people possessing it.

Boy, now that’s a word salad!  Let’s pull this apart.

One term I’m fond of using when discussing culture is the idea of what I’ve named cultural sidebars.  Cultural sidebars are primary empathetic influencers of people.  They create behavior inside an organization that conflicts with the fundamental, emergent behavior of that social structure.  Often, the cultural sidebar is a highly evolved, empathetic behavior that ameliorates bad behavior.  Other times, the cultural sidebar can create terrible violence and tragedy that otherwise would be outside the nominal range of behavior for a society.  Think Nazi-ism and the Jews.

Let’s consider an example –Chinese society.  It is a great example of a Magical/Authoritarian society –that would be the water in our pot–with extremely strong empathetic sidebars — cultural influences on the outside designed to keep, in this case, the Authoritarian water from boiling!

The value of individual agency is extremely low in China, making many Westerners declare China to be a ‘group’ culture, which would, on the surface, imply a high level of inherent empathy and sharing.  And while anyone who’s spent much time in China will certainly acknowledge the fundamental graciousness and highly developed sense of hospitality toward foreigners inside China, it’s an authoritarian, egocentric culture. Han Chinese believe (like lots of folks around the world — Chinese people are certainly not alone in this In-Group affectation) that they are the Chosen people.

Because of the culture, it’s a great place to visit.  At the same time, considering its cataclysmic history in the last one hundred years, it’s amazing that it’s there at all.  I’m not discounting the Japanese Invasion of Manchuria, and its consequences.  Yet China has waged war against itself internally as well, with the Communist Revolution in 1949, the Great Leap Forward in 1958, and the Cultural Revolution, from 1966-1976, that found over 37 million persecuted, and millions dead.

Yet China has persisted as an entity for over 2500 years, and though there have been periods of reform, and great philosophical advancement, the fundamental context of a narcissistic authoritarian government has not changed.  How is that so?

The answer is in sophistication of cultural sidebars down through the ages, that prescribe behavior in literally thousands of situations, as well as  provide safety valves for people living under the authoritarian thumb of warlord or emperor. I discussed chengyu in an earlier post.  Chengyu are those idiomatic expressions that describe many life situations in China (and other cultures as well!) that often possess a double meaning.  One is what I call the noble meaning — the high-minded sounding of whatever words are rolling off the tongue.  But often, chengyu have another, more palliative definition — designed to make fun of those same noblemen, who might be not that noble.

Another great example of a cultural sidebar in Chinese culture might be found in this example from the documentary, Last Train Home, by Lixin Fan, about the largest yearly human migration on Earth — the yearly return of literally 138 million people from across China, to their homeland, for the celebration of Chinese New Year.  In the movie is one particular, striking scene — there are thousands of Chinese workers, waiting to get on a train to take them back to their families.  The passenger car door is surrounded by those moveable metal fences, and most of the people are waiting behind them.  Guards are on the inside of the fences.

But not all.  Every now and again, an individual will jump over the fence.  What do you think happens?  What do the guards do, and what can we learn about Chinese society from this simple example?  (I’ve put a nice picture for you to meditate on!  Scroll down when you want the answer!)

Friend Steve flyfishing, Main Salmon River, Frank Church/River of No Return, ID

The guards caught him, and gently placed him back on the other side of the railing!

This is a perfect example of a cultural sidebar — a behavior that’s out-of-character for the fundamental Authoritarianism that China is known for.  If this happened in the U.S., the guards would likely have beaten him up and had him arrested.  Why?  Because we have a much higher evolved sense of legalism in the society.  The guy broke the rules, and deserved to be punished.

But China is an evolved, authoritarian society — laws don’t hold the same as they do in our world.  And if you want to stay in power, you don’t just beat the hell out of everyone that does something you don’t want them do.  You let it slide.  Empathetic?  Absolutely.  But pragmatic as well.  There are 1,000 people on the other side of those barriers.  The guards might get to beat up one guy.  But there are 1000 people on the other side with the same Authoritarian v-Meme programmed in their head, with the same potential for impulsive behavior.  If you want to extend the timescale of your Authoritarian system, you have to give a little, too.

Academia is another space where the social structure — a very harsh Legalistic Authoritarianism — is modulated by cultural sidebars.  The concept of collegiality, for example, dictates the terms of engagement for a whole group of highly intelligent folks with often very limited social skills, and egocentric objectives.  Responsibilities toward students are often very prescribed in academic cultures, because a larger sense of responsibility and trust aren’t cultivated in the social structure.

It’s also a great example of how cultures can decline when environmental conditions change.  The lack of money and material support from the public sector has been in decline for a number of years, and instead of faculty having cultural sidebars to protect them from the vicissitudes of the social structure (that’s what tenure is supposed to be about!) more and more are contingent.  It leads to a decline of cohesion, and not surprisingly, all levels of empathy across the board.  The historic academic culture won’t maintain itself, with the more egalitarian influences and sidebars folks have taken for granted.  Faculty commentators themselves are prone to using terms like ‘the increased corporatism’ of the university system.  But what’s really happening is the decline of the sidebars — which lets the social structure exercise its more unsavory, authoritarian aspects.

How can we apply this to the world of modern business?  The modern business organization often straddles the Legalistic/Performance-Based v-Meme divide — hence the tons of already extant business literature (Covey, etc.) working on that transformation.  If we want those higher levels of synergistic behavior, it might not be a bad idea to steal some pages from a higher v-Meme socialist country’s playbook.

Here’s an example.  I was recently at a project sponsor for my Industrial Design Clinic’s open house.  I asked him, just out of curiosity, if there was on-site child care.  He said ‘no’.  I told him that it would increase the receptivity of women wanting to come work for him.  I’ve worked on the child care issue before, and while it is important for men, it turns out to be a critical factor in decision making for women.

He’s a really nice, progressive guy, and wasn’t particularly un-receptive to the idea.  But he replied ‘we already have an over 50/50 split in female employment, with quite an assortment of accomplished female scientists.  I think it would be a tough sell to top management that we need to attract more.’  I replied, “so you’re comfortable having these women worry about their kids all day instead of thinking about their responsibilities and being creative?  How much are you paying all these Ph.Ds per hour anyway?”

Understanding this post means you’re walking away with two thoughts — what can you do to change the structure of your organization?  That structural change will likely have lots of reverberations inside your organization, and may be a great long-term goal.  But you can attack some of your synergy and coordination problems with cultural sidebars.  Don’t be afraid to contact me with stories of unpredictable, positive consequence!

Takeaway:  Stick with simple for the first round of any explanation.  Structure + Culture = Behavior.  Then let loose the BVPs on them… 

 

 

 

Avant garde music band from Taiwan, ‘A Moving Sound’ at the Jones Theatre in Daggy Hall, Washington State University

Though I’d argue that my views on diversity are just common sense– that we are engaged neurally by diversity much more than the idea of different experiences allows — is out of the mainstream, it’s nice to see some formal research validation.  You can check out this op-ed in the New York Times which basically offers a simplistic view of what my empathetic theory predicts.

And here’s my original post, which basically argues that empathetic development is increased with diversity because we can’t just assume that others think like us — we’re confronted with physical and potentially cognitive differences that drive our rational empathetic development.  Which in turn stretches those brain muscles…

As J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan once said, “Oh, the cleverness of me!”  😉