Anneliese, at the Garden House in the 13th District of Vienna.  Viennese know how to really play the Beer Game!

One of the interesting examples at the beginning of Peter Senge’s book, The Fifth Discipline, that’s intended to demonstrate the power of systems thinking, is a game called the Beer Game.  Invented at MIT in the ’60s, Senge uses this in his classes to teach supply chain dynamics.

The basic outline goes like this: In the game, there are three parties ostensibly working together to sell beer:  a retailer, a wholesaler, and a marketing director for a brewery.  The beer in question, ‘Lover’s Beer’ is distributed throughout a network of convenience stores, and the primary mode of communication is a check-mark sheet of how many cases a retailer wants to order on a weekly basis.  Every week, a truck driver brings beer to the retailer, and every week, the retailer hands the order sheet to the truck driver.  The truck driver then aggregates those sheets through the wholesaler, which then goes back to the brewery.

Simple. An exception is inserted into the game that increases demand.  Turns out, a music video is released by a young rock band, and demand starts to climb.  The cascade of circumstances with retailers starting to order more beer, and wholesalers demanding more leads to consternation and increased production at the brewery.  The end game is that because there is a lag in the actual production of beer — it takes two weeks, at least, to brew, there is overshoot.  The effect of the video wears off, and demand levels off back at the standard, pre-video level.  All three players end up with extra stock that they can’t get rid of, and everyone is unhappy.

Senge makes very clear in his book that everyone playing is NOT allowed to talk to each other — they have an externally defined relationship with each other, and that’s that.  No one has time for anything else — classic power structure/hierarchical behavior.  The only communication that comes is simplex-type information sheets that show aggregate beer orders in one direction (from customer to brewery/wholesaler), and then, of course, the actual beer in another (from brewery/wholesaler to the customer.)  Senge, though likely not an Authoritarian himself,  is no stranger to Authoritarian v-Meme systems — he prescribes no conversation, overwork, and the vast availability inside a given convenience store as part of the game.  Fragmentation, fragmentation, fragmentation.

But what becomes fascinating is how he ends the game, which at some level is a plea for changing what engineers would know as an open-loop system (no corrective feedback possible) to a closed loop feedback system — a very algorithmic approach, where some control signal is ‘fed back’ either upstream or downstream to modulate the oversupply production.  He has the retailer and the marketing manager at the brewery sit down and have a conversation — right before, in the story, the marketing manager resigns for the overproduction of beer.

What’s even more fascinating is that Senge’s role-play of the marketing manager has the marketing manager quit to save his reputation — a status-based, lower v-Meme behavior if there ever was one.  Instead of arguing that this marketing manager has been through this boom-and-bust cycle once now (he was hired at the start of the game!) and now is Wise After the Event, the guy is canned.  What he’s doing, of course, is expressing how Senge views the world — he, like all of us, can never escape the dominant v-Memes that we have inside of our head — in this case, like the book, a plea for a combination of Legalistic v-Meme thinking coupled with a Performance/Goal-Based v-Meme evolution.

And then Senge gives us the answer, which is, not surprisingly, systems thinking.  Absolutely nothing wrong with that, at least on a superficial level.  If all three parties understood the interrelationships algorithmically in their supply chain, then these things wouldn’t happen.  We can plunk down modified versions of these forms, or set up some model for understanding slow-down and expansion of system boundaries, and we can eliminate these types of problems.  Senge alludes strongly to communication.  But don’t they already have communication?  The forms with check boxes?  Senge in his own solutions, is v-Meme limited.  And without a larger self-awareness, he can’t see where he might go.

Looking at things from a more global v-Meme perspective, Senge is arguing — rightfully so, in a limited way — that if we had just a little movement from pure, arbitrary, impulsive authoritarianism, to a generalized understanding of the algorithmic laws that govern system behavior, we could dramatically improve system performance.  We would start to see the development of the idea of consequential thought among the actors.  And with increasingly sophisticated understandings of system dynamics, we could develop an increasingly sophisticated predictive model of how to buffer what systems modelers call perturbations to the stability of the system.

But let’s reframe this debate, inserting the empathetic development of independently generated, data-driven, trust-based relationships into the mix.  Instead of title-driven relationships, where we have a retailer, we have Sue, the owner of the convenience store.  Instead of a truck driver, we have Mike.  And instead of a marketing director, we have Pierre. Mike is dropping off beer at Sue’s store.  It’s a small store, and anyone rolling in is immediately noticed — especially someone unloading beer.

“What’s up, Mike?” Sue asks.  “Anyone around selling more beer than usual?  Any promotions, or specials from the head shack?” “Nothing this week, Sue,” he replies.  “Anything unusual on your end?” “Well, I’ve been selling out quicker from this beer — Lover’s Beer.  Kinda weird — it’s not that good,” Sue replies. “I don’t like it,” Mike says.  “But kids nowadays…I’ll see if I can get some more of that.” “Sounds good,” Sue says. Mike goes back to the distributor, and passes the information on about things he’s seen on the route.  A couple of weeks pass, with the same pattern of beer lag that is seen in the original game.  Mike returns to Sue’s store. Sue says “Mike!  I’m selling out of that beer!  Gotta have some more of it, and you’re not bringing any more.  Here’s another order!” And then Mike demonstrates the power of empathetic connection, and the elevation of responsibility that comes when people are connected.  “You know, Sue, I know you want some more.  Seems like they’re backed up at the brewery.  But I’ve been driving a beer truck for a long time, and the last thing I want to do is show up with 40 cases of that crummy stuff and you not be able to sell it.  I’m gonna sit on your order until we can at least fill your backlog.”

One can easily imagine the ripple effects that come with similar dialogues between the truck driver, his other customers, his boss, and Pierre, the marketing manager.  Pierre’s job is to pay attention to who’s out in front of his product placement efforts.  He’s likely seen the video, or heard about it, especially if he’s developed empathetic relationships himself across his network.  If everyone is a sensor on his network, and engaged in duplex, empathetic communication, the aggregate intelligence regarding the extent of the perturbation is quickly known.  The system itself — profoundly dependent on empathy and empathetic relationships — doesn’t have to fix itself to some arbitrary time constant in the system — like the week between ordering, or the two weeks necessary to brew more beer.

Independent relationships can transcend these externalities, and with that changing time scale, adjust themselves to deal appropriately with the effect of the release of a music video.  The entire knowledge structure becomes much more rich, with a much better definition of metacognitive unknowns, like “we just don’t understand much about young kids today!” This is, of course, what I believe Senge, had he had the concept of the dichotomy of relationships, would say.  What is created with just a little empathetic, duplex communication, and a good dollop of independent relational generation, is a far greater, more sophisticated and robust learning organization than one that just learns algorithmic modes of prediction.

Ordinary folks might just call it friendships, or common sense.  But one can see that those labels are misleading.  The actual sophistication embedded in the system, and emergent in times of change, with rapidly changing time scales, is actually a mechanism for maintaining information coherence across all affected parties.  And I’d argue is a much happier solution to the Beer Game than just a fragmented network of titles.

If you think that this example only applies to small-scale situations like beer at a brewery, the whole Boeing 787 supply integration chain is filled with similar stories.  Back in 2004, when Boeing was gearing up to design and manufacture their first composite airliner, the top management staked out Boeing’s new role as solely a systems integrator of parts around the world.  Boeing would sit in the middle, the airplane would be a virtual one first, with an entire digital model sitting out in cyberspace.  Companies from all over the world would be able to bid on whatever parts they thought they could manufacture, and then those parts would converge on the Everett, WA plant, and the new facility in Charleston, SC.

It all SOUNDS good (high status, accepted mental model), and system-y, until one starts to really unpack the reality of the scenario.  And then one starts to realize how deeply flawed and arbitrary the whole idea is. To start, the 787 Dreamliner has around 2.3 million parts.  With an Authoritarian v-Meme set, once the design is made, then parts must be right.  But anyone with just a lick of skepticism would realize that getting 2.3 million parts correctly designed and up on the web for bid is nigh on impossible.  There is no way, in an open loop format, that you could drive the error rate low enough that the plane could fly.  When you add on the issue then of a manufacturer making the parts, and having them all be correct, you can quickly see that the whole airplane would, sooner or later, run into a complexity crisis.

And it did.  From rivet availability to deburring the backs of rivet holes, errors that ended up having to be fixed far downstream in the process from where they originated kept cropping up and delaying first flight — for three years.  Even now, with the relocation of 787 construction to a non-unionized workforce in South Carolina (no Legalistic v-Meme scaffolding!) 787s are rolling off late and losing money — about $10M an airplane. Clearly, higher-level, empathetic emergent dynamics are necessary to create contemporary, high tech products.

In closing, I’ll tell you I was recently at a large American Society of Mechanical Engineers meeting in Montreal, Quebec.  Speaking were several industry leaders, who were, in various ways, addressing this complexity crisis.  When asked what was the source of most of their pressing problems, all said the same thing — “social”. It’s not just about beer.

Fish Creek at high water, Lochsa River tributary, Idaho

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Arthur C. Clarke

By far, one of the best management books to appear out of the late ’90s is the text ‘The Fifth Discipline — the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization’ by Peter Senge, a Senior Lecturer at MIT and co-faculty at the Complex Systems Institute.  Senge, if not the inventor of the concept of ‘systems thinking’ was certainly one of the first authors to attempt to mainstream the idea into modern world business culture.

What is systems thinking?  In short, it is the process of realizing that things and outcomes are hooked to each other, and that only by understanding and considering more complex patterns of cause-and-effect, can we develop a more profound understanding of our current situation, as well as future outcomes.  Intrinsic in this is the practice of drawing system boundaries.  Though it may be true that everything in the world is hooked to everything else, determining effective action relies on accurately sizing and including the components of the system one can have effect on.

The book has much to like — in certain ways, Senge has written the management version of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, or Russell’s Principia Mathematica — attempts at a completeness of categorization of ways of thoughts, though to be fair, Senge declares multiple times no such aspirations as did Wittgenstein and Russell.

It is an extremely useful read.  Senge lays out many Authoritarian v-Meme modes of thought in contemporary business, and then proposes more complex, algorithmic Legalistic v-Meme patterns in kind of a mix-and-match style throughout the book.  But there are contradictory modes.  Senge, while talking about the organization, spends virtually the whole book talking about teaching the individual.  There is not a single mention of empathy in the whole book, though he alludes to lots of empathetic concepts.  With many of his examples, he compacts and conflates lots of synergistic higher v-Meme behavior, and even alludes quite often to spirituality — which sounds good.  But what does any of it really mean?  There is no real pattern except the selection based on his authority.  And there is precious little attempt to apply systems thinking to systems thinking — a meta-level version of understanding why we do what we do.

That said, understanding his perspective is extremely useful for moving past his ideas and developing more complex, synergistic paradigms.  In many ways, The Fifth Discipline stretches the paradigm of the individual and algorithmic thinking as far as it can likely go.  No one has described a Legalistic v-Meme version of Flatland better.  There is talk of evolution, of course, as well as structure.  And lots of talk about how imposed structure will change organizations.  In a very important way, The Fifth Discipline prepares one for the next step — toward realizing the unending progression of enlightenment proposed through understanding empathetic development and Integral Theory.

What’s at least as interesting is how Senge himself demonstrates how his own social structures limit his own writing.  Senge, as a Senior Lecturer at MIT, is inside his own modestly rigid hierarchy.  The people he largely uses for his business examples are high-status, aspirational and enlightened authoritarians from contemporary business practice in large organizations.  His own thought patterns, also aspirational toward higher connection and empathetic development, must be placed inside the Legalistic/Algorithmic box.  Heuristics, combined heuristics, and Guiding Principle v-Meme thinking are arbitrarily mashed down into the mix, but there is little discrimination or understanding between the separation.  Senge talks a lot about intuition, but intuition without appropriate scaffolding leads to more impulsive thought.  How one gets to profound, intuitive thought is explored somewhat through analogies, and to be fair, he understands clearly the value of experience and goal-based thinking in organizations.

Senge talks quite a bit about  spirituality, and as a personal thing, I am not a big fan.  We do not need the Divine as a way of progressing our organizations and their empathetic development.  It’s not that I am a cold-blooded, chronic rationalist.  It’s just that one of the keys to accepting that one is on some path to higher enlightenment is that our understanding and embrace of metacognition has to be constant.  There will always be information and ways of knowing that we just don’t know — yet.    It was Buddha himself, when asked the famous question “Is there a Buddha higher than Buddha?” that he answered, “well, maybe.  But it’s not me!”

The quote by Arthur C. Clarke at the beginning of this post is particularly insightful.  Whenever we try to perceive things too far above our own developmental v-Meme level, it’s going to appear as magic, or whatever more acceptable term we’d like to apply.  The key is to understand that it is not.  What is required is an embrace of the fundamental humility that we simply have not arrived — and never will.

Secesh River, Secesh Roadless Area, Payette National Forest, Idaho

As I discussed in the previous post, v-Meme Scaffolding is important — without it, we open our organizations and our messages to corruption — some of it virtual, some of it quite real.

It might be helpful to understand an example that, over time, have been highly resonant  of both well-scaffolded messages, as well as organizations.  One of my favorites is the original series of Star Trek.  Almost everyone can recognize the four characters below:

Bridge Crew of the Starship Enterprise, from the Star Trek, the Original Series

For those that forget, we’ve got Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, and Commander Scott.  No question that these four are a high performance, if not just a little sexist team.  Lieutenant Uhura at least made it on the bridge — a major first — but she was sentenced to answer the phone.

Still the personalities, and their different levels of empathetic interaction, are highly instructive on how they were effective.  Consider the basic plot of the show — the Enterprise is thrust into a situation where there are major metacognitive unknowns — whether it was an unknown alien civilization, or trouble with Tribbles.  There were always Survival-level stakes — the Enterprise was in constant jeopardy of being destroyed.  Yet time and again, this integrative v-Meme team would think their way through the situations, and largely remain friends.

How did that work?  First off, we have Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott, head of engineering.  Even though he had an informal nickname — ‘Scotty’ — he was pure Authoritarian.  The Captain was the captain — I have yet to find a single instance where Scotty calls Kirk ‘Jim’.  He’s two v-Memes removed from Captain Kirk, and when the Captain tells Scotty to turn the Warp Drive past maximum, Scotty might say “I don’t know how much longer she can take it, Cap’n!” — but he turns up the dial anyway.  He follows orders.

Next up the v-Meme ladder is Mr. Spock.  A Vulcan, and the chief science officer, he is the master of logical, algorithmic thinking.  He is famous, of course, for mastering his emotions, and viewing this as a pathway to superior status.  Yet time and again, algorithmic thinking, while leading to reliable results, fails the validity test.  The one answer he comes up with might be part of the solution — but not all of it.

For that, we need the more complex, empathetic profile of Captain James T. Kirk.  Ever the integrative, multiple-solution, performance-based thinker, he’s not afraid to assert his authority in times of crisis.  But he also demonstrates a broad range of both emotional empathy, as well as rational empathy.  His ability to trade places with the alien mind enables him to very accurately guess what his adversaries are going to do — and saves the Enterprise from getting blown up on numerous occasions.

Finally there is Dr. McCoy, the deeply empathetic communitarian.  McCoy often speaks as the voice and liaison of those lower in the service hierarchy than any of the bridge officers, and is prone to using a combination of humor and grumpiness — emotional affect — to convey his points.  As a doctor, he processes data for diagnoses of difficult problems.  But he also takes his role in promoting psychological well-being very seriously — and demonstrates a deep sense of emotional empathy.

One of the easiest ways I’ve noticed to diagnose the v-Memes operative in any work environment is how people use titles, as well as the degree of dependence.  Star Trek is no exception.  Scotty NEVER calls Captain Kirk by his first name — typical of a true authoritarian.  Spock mixes it up — calling him Jim in more relaxed situations, as well as Captain when the phasers are firing.  McCoy is famous for almost always calling Captain Kirk by his first name.  Note that this would be extremely consistent with their representative v-Memes.

Additionally, v-Meme conflicts are also well-represented with the characters.  McCoy and Spock are often in conflict — rules vs. exceptions for individuals.  McCoy basically never talks to Scotty — the 3 v-Meme gap would mean they would have a hard time understanding each other anyway.  Captain Kirk sits in the middle of all of them.  Yet even the two level v-Meme difference between Kirk and Scotty pops up every now and again.  In the famous episode ‘The Trouble with Tribbles’ — Scotty and the engineering crew end up getting into a bar fight with some Klingons on a space station.  When interrogated about the brawl, Kirk asks what happened to get things started.  Scotty then goes on to explain that the Klingons had called Kirk many names — but Scotty told the Captain he had specific orders to not get into a fight from him.  So he let it pass.  It was only when the Klingons started insulting the U.S.S. Enterprise — the core sense of Scotty’s identity — that the fists flew.

The original Star Trek premise also promised its viewers a much more egalitarian, evolved, self-aware world — truly embodying the Global Holistic v-Meme.  What is interesting is that after the series ended, a fan community sprouted up, complete with costumes, and Trekkie conventions.  William Shatner even made a movie about it — called Get A Life!  What’s fascinating is that Shatner starts out being very cynical about all the folks participating — but is won over when he recognizes and realizes the higher ideals that this group of geeks are attempting to embody.

I doubt Shatner or the most of the Trekkies have ever thought much about empathetic development.  But it is fascinating that when people come together, under a set of higher guiding principles that everyone has to follow in order to be part of a larger group, that beautiful things can happen.  Even if they involve adults playing dress-up.

Takeaway:  Balanced Teams have balanced v-Memes — and real leaders use this stuff to understand both strengths and weaknesses of how individuals in their organizations work — and process knowledge.  The Original Series Star Trek is a great example that’s easily recognizable of v-Memes on display — and who you want to do what.