Moravian Glory — Prague, from the Central Plaza, at night, January 2008

One of my favorite subjects to discuss at the university is the fundamental structural problems inherent in universities training designers of the future.  Besides the obvious ‘customer/empathetic’ problems — listening actively to people of different status than them –there are issues that run far deeper.  One makes one’s reputation at the university through in-depth exploration of a particular topic (actually expanding sophistication and complexity,) which almost always entails developing algorithmic expertise in refined models of a particular phenomenon.  My advisor, whom I revere — so don’t get the wrong idea– was a specialist in the field of aeroelasticity –how flexible things flutter in the wind.  He spent his entire career on this, applying various mathematical and computer models, occasionally branching out into turbulence and chaos theory to explain the relatively unpredictable results.  For his creativity and diligence, he was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering.  So don’t think that there wasn’t some higher wisdom in pursuing this track.

But the world is changing.  The problems facing the world require a greater synergy — and the problems, as they arise, are being met from all different sides, in all different venues.  Universities are trying to catch up in the synergy game, but are fundamentally hamstrung by their anachronistic social structures, as well as decreased funding.  Real change requires energetics as well as structural modification.  And neither seem to be evident in the new economy.

One new area requiring design synergies is the Internet of Things (IoT).  A term coined in 1999 by British entrepreneur, Kevin Ashton, it means things that do stuff hooked to the Internet that exchange data, and therefore control actions between them and some other intelligence.  Obviously, reliable WiFi has accelerated the whole IoT concept, as well as the collapsing cost of sensors and actuators.  Any minimal IoT system has to have some electro-mechanical component that interacts with the outside world, a sensor to take data on its condition and an actuator that takes the computed world change and does something to change the behavior of the electro-mechanical system, and an Internet hook-up, where data can be sent to The Cloud, to be analyzed and acted upon.  Think an automated smart thermostat that averages temperatures and desires, and then sets the perfect temperature inside your house when you walk through the door and say “Honey, I’m home!”

There are lots of obvious examples that one could generate with the built environment.  And the futuristic ideal involves you walking into that environment, waving your hands and babbling something about your wants and needs and being satisfied.  I think the book/movie Solaris gets to the nexus of what the Internet of Things could be — an extraterrestrial intelligence that projects elements out of our own memory to question our desires.

That may be a long way off, but it’s becoming increasingly obvious that our university education isn’t preparing any of our young engineers to get close to designing anything within the IoT space.  The idea behind multidisciplinarity is that any given project, with all its different components, will have a member from every required discipline who will then in turn be responsible for each individual part.  Conway’s Law says that’s an absolute minimum required.  Do note how there’s little redundancy planned for.  Each discipline has a bare minimum training in anything other than core specializations.

But that isn’t going to cut it.  There’s no way you can have such a system with such clear boundaries.  There will be instead fuzzy boundaries, and areas of overlap.  The idea that you can also just add a class, or a new silo to the already bloated core curricula of all the engineering studies is just nuts.  If engineering knowledge turns over every six years, the idea of having a degree program longer than five starts to stretch credulity, as well as the imagination.  Sooner or later, we need to realize we can’t just train ourselves out of this box.  It’s time to stop beating up our young people with our own lack of appreciation for empathetic understanding.

What happens if we proceed without the answer you know is coming — empathetic development?  Sharply divided disciplinary development environments are likely to create failed projects — especially with younger engineers.  I know this, because I’ve watched it happen.  What occurs is that tasks are divided in a very rigid fashion, with all people only assuming their externally defined responsibility.  EEs are responsible for the electrical engineering part, MEs for the mechanicals, and so on.  No one makes much effort to master the different disciplines other than their own, as they are defined by their title.  Then, when one part doesn’t work, the finger-pointing starts.  “It’s an electrical problem — so the EE is the one who has to fix it.”  Little investment leads to little connection to other team-mates, and then inherently low responsibility behavior and low agency.

What’s the answer?  Of course, it’s a more pronounced rational empathy, where team-mates have active interchange so they can understand the challenges faced by other teammates attempting to solve complex problems.  This creates as well a diversity of problem-solving approaches, as other teammates start cross-fertilizing the idea pool.  Couple that with the parsing of trust — having a deeper historical record of whether teammates have successfully faced, and surmounted similar challenges in the past — and one can see that the real crux of developing IoT is balancing the reliability scaffolding in the individual disciplines with the validity demands of IoT — these things have to work in an integrated fashion in the Real World.

None of it is simple, and a larger set of experiments, as well as experiential learning, will be required to find some set of optimal paths.  All of this is going to occur in a sea of evolving technology, against a backdrop of drop-in modularization of all the various disciplines and their parts.  It’s not inconceivable that there will be a drop-on-top icon of an app that basically provides complete Internet functionality that someone might put in their Labview control system.

But understanding the different functionalities, and the paradigms represented by the disciplines, is not going away any time soon.  And innovation environments are still going to require that one person, or group of people, with a great idea, to find other can-do partners that can make the system work.  And those relationship skills are still going to involved developed empathy.

Prague Astronomical Clock, Prague, Czech Republic, 2009

An interesting post popped up on one of my favorite websites — Atlas Obscura — about time, clocks, and time zones.  The post is ostensibly about submariners (I’ve taught quite a few, both post and pre-duty assignment), but it’s really about controlling people with external concepts of time — to the point of violating their inherent circadian mechanisms.

A couple of points made earlier in this blog — the Tribal/Magical v-Meme doesn’t care much about short timekeeping.  In the piece, they note a transplant from an Amazonian tribe to New York City had basically an impossible time matching schedules with the non-profit who was sponsoring him.  He had been used to the concept of time keyed to the natural world — such as having everyone meet at sunset.  Here’s the pull quote:

But even more confusing than passing through multiple time zones in a matter of hours is moving for an extended period of time to a culture that tracks time differently. Nilson Tuwe Huni Kuin (Tuwe) grew up in the Amazon as the son of the chief of the Kaxinawá people. In 2013, he moved to New York City to study English and filmmaking. Ryan Paixao volunteered translation services to Tuwe during this time, and remembers the confusion caused by the differences in how time was kept.

Peoples like the Kaxinawá don’t tend to use exact timekeeping, and will meet up at a general time, like sunset. On one of Tuwe’s first days, “I was meeting him, and after a while the people from the non profit were panicking,” says Paixao, who was there when the group finally reached Tuwe by phone. “He was like, ‘I’m getting on the train now, that’s the big deal?’ He thought they were all ridiculous…to track time to such a precise minute.”

One of the things that is interesting to note is how the obvious disconnect might contribute to social friction — and through that, v-Meme conflict.  How do you feel when some one is late?  What does late mean?  How do you feel when someone is late to a meeting you didn’t set the time for?  It’s not hard to generate time conflicts — here are a couple:

1.  A person is late for a meeting the boss declared the time for.  That person said “I didn’t have a reason for being at the meeting on time because I didn’t have anything to learn or contribute.”  How do you feel?  (Either the person is egocentric (Authoritarian v-Meme) or Performance-based (had another job to do.)
2. Boss sets the meeting at 7:00 AM in the morning, before buses start running to your school.  How do people feel? (Survival v-Meme — can’t get to school, Performance v-Meme — plan ahead to account for lost bus service, Communitarian v-Meme, different members of the community live in different places, with varying levels of bus service.)
3. The meeting must be held at 1:00 AM in the morning because the client is in China.

How we process these events are clear bellwethers of our own sense of time, and the v-Meme level we adopt for the event.  The attitude on the 2:00 AM meeting may range from “Show up for Communitarian v-Meme Support” to “we need this contract to survive.”

If you’re a ‘never show up for a meeting late’ kind of person, what does that say about you?  Answers can, and will vary– and if anything, show how we move up and down the Spiral dependent on situation and our feelings.

One final point — in the article, one of the points made is how the Navajo and Hopi, all gathered in the Four Corners area, all use different time zones on their reservations.  Essentially, they use time zones as a way of delineating In-Group/Out-Group dynamics.  With that, we can see that one can use time not just across v-Memes, but intra-v-Memes as well to discriminate status, power and control.  It’s certainly not about synchronization and performance.

Many a caiman, Mato Grosso do Sul, in the Pantanal, Brazil, 2006

I had an interesting experience the other day, that perfectly illustrated the principles of this blog.  I had volunteered myself to give presentations on my program, the Industrial Design Clinic, at a university workshop on STEM education. I was part of the breakout session group (not a core presenter), giving the same presentation twice in a 60 minute hour allotted.  There were three other competing breakout sessions at the same time, and approximately 40 participants.  The titles of all the sessions are below:

STEM + A(RT) at WSU

LSAMP and SOLES (two programs for Hispanic retention in STEM)

NSF Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate

 Piercing the ‘Fourth Wall’ in Education – Using Empathetic Connection to Authentic Audiences to Drive Student Performance – Charles Pezeshki

It’s a fun exercise to guess how many people were in the first and second session, so I won’t ruin the fun.  You can also guess, in a crowd of academics, the general receptivity to the idea that empathy and connection matters.  I will give you one hint — Group 1 was very receptive and open minded;  Group 2 not so much.

One thing that got Group 2 really going (and not in a good way) was an assertion that I made that I could tell at-a-distance whether someone was empathetic or not by writing them a note, telling them about my interest in their work, and seeing if they write back.  Those that write back are, by my quick assertion, empathetic.  Those that don’t likely aren’t.  My standard for whom I write to is pretty simple.  I’ve read their work, and think there might be an opportunity for connection.  Some people are famous or well-renowned;  some people aren’t.  I’ve found that it doesn’t make much difference.  Some scaled statistic of both groups will write back.

One of the people that emotionally reacted (a great sign where this person does most of their thinking — this is a marker in itself) started saying ‘you can’t say that!  Maybe they were busy!’  I honestly hadn’t expected such a strong reaction, and realizing that a good hunk of my audience was there to hear about my program, I redirected the conversation, and sent them, detractors as well, to my blog.  I’m not too worried that those that got hot under the collar will read it– unless someone points them to this post as an affront to their status.

The person’s comment, however, made me think.  Is this a fair assessment?  What does it mean if someone’s too busy to write back?

If someone’s too busy, there are two likely scenarios that may be in play.

1.  That person gets so much e-mail every day that my e-mail gets lost.  I try to compensate for this scenario by adding a high-value subject line so that people know why I’m writing, and what material I’m referring to in their work (nothing like a little egocentric tagging!)  From my own experience getting e-mails from potential graduate students around the world, I’d argue few e-mails get lost.  There’s also no way of reliably measuring this without an experiment, and I have no idea how you’d even construct such an experiment.  Considering all the various things that show up in my mailbox, it’s a pretty valid assertion that e-mails don’t get lost.
2. That person looks at the sender (me) and decides not to either read my e-mail or write back.  Psychologists, for example, doing research in empathy NEVER write back (Legalists, and not in their in-group!) Northern Europeans almost always write back (empathetically developed societies) except those that are psychologists!  Exploratory mathematicians write back — some very famous ones!  Maybe I’m in their in-group, but they would have no way of knowing my background, though they might think I’m in their out-group, as a transdisciplinary dude.  Or they might be empathetic.  Medical doctors who publish in this area almost always write back.  I’d argue the ones that don’t write back look at a.) my status, and b.) my in-group, and decide not to write back.  Those that write back likely write back because the content is resonant — I can tell that by their responses.  Those that don’t — well, I’ll bet if someone famous wrote them, they wouldn’t be too busy.  Rejection is a status-based issue.  In their world, I’m not important enough to respond to.  And the idea of metacognitive stretch isn’t important (remember that metacognition and empathetic development go hand-in-hand!)

What that means, of course, is that they’re non-empathetic.  And while the reliability of the assertion (limited only to the pool of potential respondents I write to — every note I write takes about 10 minutes) may be in question, the validity of my assertion is pretty high.

Q.E.D.  😉

Takeaway:  Writing someone a meaningful e-mail and seeing if they write back is a great way to gauge empathy.  And I’m aware that Internet trolls and massive spamming can eliminate this avenue, I’m hopeful we’ll have it for a little longer.  When the topic is non-political, I’ve found that people are still pretty civil and open.

 

A sunny day in May, Cavtat, Croatia, on the Dalmatian Coast — 2008

Emergent behavior in social systems, especially when they’re larger, is complex.  You never really know completely what will happen when you start rearranging the pieces.  So it’s helpful to explain how to nibble around the edges until you develop your own systems thinking consequentiality before going full-bore with a large reorganization.  That doesn’t mean you can’t fix things like inserting duplex communication channels to improve overall empathy, and starting a process of evolving up the empathetic ladder — unless you’re running galley slaves, it’s kind of tough to lose.  But once you get to a certain level of performance, it just gets harder — and time scales get longer.  More people have to be self-reflective and mindful.  And accelerating that has been an age-old problem.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t get your feet wet with the details.  One of the best ways is with what’s called Poka-yoke — a Japanese term for error-proofing, and a major feature of the Toyota Management System.  Instead of telling people the right way of doing something, and expecting immediate actualization, create a way so that it’s impossible for things to go wrong.  The iconic Poka-yoke is now in every automatic transmission car.  It used to be that certain automatic transmission cars, if they were left in gear, could be started, with an incumbent leaping-forward if you forgot to put them in Park.  Now, any vehicle with an automatic transmission must be put in Park or Neutral to start, and must have the brake depressed.  No brake, no start.  No unpredictable leaping forward.  That’s Poka-Yoke.

There’s a bazillion of these in your home, and all have added to our aggregate safety.  You can’t start the Cuisinart without closing the lid correctly.  The mower has to have a safety bar retracted in order to start the mower.  Have fun with this — if you’re bored with the crossword puzzle, or you have kids, see if you can identify ten in ten minutes.

One of the things Poka-Yoke did as well was start moving the needle on the idea that people are idiots — and that what Poka-Yoke really does is ‘idiot proof’ things.  It’s no surprise that it’s called ‘mistake-proofing.’  I had a student group work with Genie Industries on a project once, and the manager brought up the concept. One of the students in the group said “Oh — you mean making it idiot-proof.”  The manager jumped down his throat.  “The people that work with me are not idiots.  But everyone can get distracted, and that shouldn’t be a reason to lose a finger.”  An exemplary example of expanded timescales, probabilisitic development, and Communitarian v-Meme enforcement.  When we Poka-Yoke, we implement empathetic development that floats all our boats a little higher.

I am big on establishing empathetic protocols with students in the Industrial Design Clinic (IDC) as ladders for their development.  Empathetic protocols are inherently meta-Poka-Yokes.  The classic one the kids are exposed to is the conference call protocol.  When my undergraduate seniors start in my class, they are very much little Authoritarians.  Even calling the project sponsor is an activity that makes them uncomfortable.  Their major concern is bugging someone who they think is far more important than them — so if the sponsor doesn’t call back, they will sit and wait.  Being Authoritarians, they don’t put any value on their time, and they honestly can’t conceive that the sponsor MIGHT value their time and want them to get started — and just might be too busy and forget to get the ball rolling.

So I force them to conference with the sponsor.  They are given a simple protocol — no less than two people on the phone with the sponsor at any time (at least at the beginning of the relationship).  One is the talker, the other is the writer.  At the end of the call, within ten minutes, minutes of the call should be posted on the web with a request from the sponsor to confirm.  If the sponsor doesn’t confirm by the next call, a request is made for the sponsor to confirm before the new meeting gets started.

All this may seem mundane, but for students used to their work not mattering at all, other than for a grade, it becomes transformative practice.  The emergent behavior is that students become aware of the fact that what they write matters, as it is confirmed by someone they view as an authority.  They have to review and fact-check with each other, so they all share the same story.  Many times, in the course of a more complex project, there will be modest specification change — so their Legalistic v-Meme is also activated.  I’ve told them multiple times that in order for the specification to change (and my kids are run by their spec in my class) it must be documented, approved by the sponsor, and then re-posted in the new specifications document.  If it’s not, and they embark on a changed trajectory, and the customer complains — the customer is right.

Such empathetic protocols, besides making sure the students finish on time, serve as empathetic ladders for development.  They are meta-Poka-yokes — and by insisting on them, I am Poka-yoking my own process for their development.  That way, I don’t have to be involved, which then transfers more responsibility to them, and develops their agency. All of this by virtue of my NOT having to intervene means that their improved practice, and their personal growth become emergent.  Which means I have one less thing to worry about.  And that makes me celebrate, and reaffirm my own personal motto:

There is nothing that makes me happier than seeing something wonderful happen that owes nothing to my own, personal genius.

That’s the real beauty of emergence.  Because once we get the little stuff fixed by building it into the dynamics of our social system, as a manager, we can concentrate on frying bigger fish.  And it’s a virtuous spiral up the Spiral.  What’s not to like?

Takeaway — if there’s a larger point to be made, it’s mining successful paradigms in all systems for surface-level knowledge assurance and coherence can lead to meta-paradigms.  This is a wide-open field — and, in my opinion, the future of management science.

 

At the front entrance to the Prater, the large amusement park in Vienna, Austria.  2008.

Last week, I realized that I toss around the term, ’emergent’, without explaining it very well.  And as unbelievable as it may seem, there is no real Wikipedia page explaining it — so I’m (and you’re) left to my own devices.

One of the key elements in understanding evolutionary behavior, in social systems or otherwise, is the idea of emergence and emergent behavior.  The idea is this — you rearrange a structure, or apply a certain set of boundary conditions to a structure, and then all of a sudden, a new type of behavior or restructuring occurs.  The best example of this in management systems that immediately comes to mind is W. Edwards Deming’s transformation of Japanese manufacturing through Statistical Quality Control.  The story of Deming is well-known (thank you, Wikipedia!)  In this piece, a short, but concise and meaningful description of the man and his philosophies are presented.  It is very clear that Deming got the Performance-based Communitarian v-Meme profoundly.  His Seven Deadly Sins that he enumerated are below, with a mapping that I added showing what bad side of the various v-Memes he was attacking:

1. Lack of constancy of purpose (misused Authority)
2. Emphasis on short-term profits (lack of an understanding of appropriate timescale, which was often external to the process — think Quarterly Reporting)
3. Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance (misused Authority and inappropriate application of Legalistic rules for evaluating performance)
4. Mobility of management (misused Authority)
5. Running a company on visible figures alone (All the non-empathetic lower v-Memes)
6. Excessive medical costs (misused Authority, as well as misplaced Legalism and lack of ability to understand consequence)
7. Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees (misplaced Legalism)

But if there was one master stroke that Deming did, it was placing the ability to stop the production line on the production worker.  By doing this, and giving that individual the ability to show appropriate responsibility, he inverted the entire Japanese social structure.  And by doing that, through appropriate scaffolding (control charts and such, a data driven culture, and so on) quality became emergent out of the various manufacturing systems.  Now, instead of running machinery to meet quotas of stuff (steel, machinery, etc.) — a very knowledge-fragment/Authoritarian concept — a worker could stop the assembly line  until the problem was fixed.  And coupled with other tools, like Ishikawa diagrams and Root Cause Analysis, overall quality and production rates could be increased.  It is important to understand that the various methods of determining metrics were fundamentally grounding these complex systems in the outside world.  And that’s important, too.  But the emergent dynamics propagated forced duplex empathetic communication channels between bottom and top — so that a whole new manufacturing system was formed.

The concept of emergent dynamics comes from nonlinear systems theory.  The idea behind it is relatively simple.  You have an equation, composed of different problem variables, and mixed up with a set of parameters.  A parameter is one of those words (like heuristic!) that everyone uses, but most people have no idea what it actually means.  In lay terms, a parameter is a variable you get to change.  For example, let’s say you’re trying to boil water on your stovetop.  The system is the pot with the water in it.  The boundary conditions are what’s surrounding the pot — whether the pot has a lid on it, or the size of the burner.  The main parameter you’re concerned with is the temperature control on the burner.  You turn up the gas to the burner, more gas burns, and your water finally boils.  The fact that the system is nonlinear means that as you turn up the gas, and the water gets hotter, it finally transitions from just hot water to boiling water — meaning now that some of the water that used to be liquid is now vapor.

The fact that the water itself goes through what is called a phase transformation — meaning, in this case, it goes from liquid to gas — is indicative of a nonlinear system.  Contrast that to a linear system — as you turn up the temperature control, the water would just get hotter and hotter. We know that doesn’t happen — water gets to the point where it boils off.

So here’s where emergence comes in.  Water boiling is an emergent phenomenon, naturally occurring, when you heat water long enough. It is a result of another mathematical phenomena — a bifurcation — or a fork in the road, where as a result of tweaking the governing parameter (in this case, the temperature knob) you get a radically different set of behaviors (water vapor, instead of water.)

What you’re after with your employees is very similar.  You want to do something to the system (change the structure, or change the boundary conditions) so that the behavior you desire (more productivity, profits, etc.) becomes naturally emergent.  Why is that so cool?  Because if you figure out how to do that, then you don’t have to sit around screaming at everyone to do what you want.  It just naturally happens as a function of the system physics.  And understanding those system physics is what the main point of this blog is all about!

If we look at the emergent dynamics of social systems, it’s helpful to refer back to Don Beck’s card on Spiral Dynamics.  See below.

Beck’s emergent forces are the personal pathways between the various colors on the Spiral — not the organizational.  Each individual’s Spiral v-Meme is driven by those drivers of emergence that he lists.  I like these a lot — they’re the most appealing part of Beck’s work.  But there are likely others.  I find myself wondering if I like them because I’m a white dude/systems theorist like Beck, and they just appeal.  But I think there’s some universality in them.

Since the Spiral is based on the principle of self-similarity, we could also posit societal drivers that would create new, emergent social structures.  Going from Survival to Tribal, it might be enough resources in an area that allowed long-term stability of a population of humans that would allow the persistence of information enough to allow for the establishment of a tribe of humans.  Add enough people, and there might be enough striving between individuals to have one emerge as a chief, with enough people who followed that individual to insist that others follow that person’s will.

Grow population enough, and now a system of laws becomes necessary to administer the group of people.  Keep going with the concept of fairness, and now it becomes important to increase production, which, if the population was constrained, might mean increasing productivity of each individual — the productivity would be an emergent behavior that would accompany identifying unique talents.  Keep going, and now every person becomes valued uniquely, though sharing the larger goals of an aggregate society.  Kindness and compassion would be naturally emergent behaviors.

Such a society might question itself, and want to understand how to relate to other societies that were different.  Engaged in such analysis and debate, a society might structure itself to become more connected with its neighbors, for optimization of quality of life.  Interdependence would be naturally emergent.  And if that spread among nations, one could see very easily where new governmental organs would have to be generated based on cooperation, collaboration and negotiation — all multiple solution modalities that would become naturally emergent.  The European Union has such features.

Which brings us back to the premise of this blog — if there is one factor, calibrated by a parameter, that most clearly characterizes the potential for emergence and evolution in social structures, it is the increasing information coherence between people, and within societies generated by empathy.  As has been discussed, empathy itself is a multi-phase phenomena, and so it’s not as simple as dumping more salt in the water to get it to boil more quickly. But the higher levels of coordination and information coherence that more complex societies require are driven by connection between the independent agents.  Regardless of the more complex, superficial reasons, symptoms, and behaviors that become emergent as empathy is developed, it all comes back to that.

There’s one last thought I’ll leave you with for a meditation.  I can’t find the cite, but I remember reading that a daisy had about the same number of active DNA pairs as a human.  What that says to me is that there is a limit to complexity available through genetic coding — more complex, and you can’t successfully propagate information using chemicals.  It’s just a limit of the medium.  So, in response to the ever-continuing drive in the universe toward complexity, a force that is poorly understood at best, the first stab at increasing it was the phenomenon of biological interdependence.  Then we as a species showed up, and started the process of embodying and producing information through our social/relational organization.  It was naturally emergent from the physics limiting coherence through other means of information transmission.

Where all this is headed is anyone’s guess.  Will this new form of information organization be profound enough to deliver yet another emergent form of information organization?  Or will be nuke/bake/destroy the planet before we get there?  Stay tuned — the answer will magically, or rather, emergently appear.

Further reading:  The book, 1491, by Charles Mann, is a great read that documents civilization as emergent phenomena in the Americas.  The idea that Native Americans learned about complex civilizations by visiting Chinese sailors, or other such icks, is one of the most offensive racist ideas I can think of.  

 

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.