The world’s first pianoforte, created by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1732), in the Academia Gallery, Florence, Italy

A very interesting piece ran on the website of Foreign Affairs, the magazine of the Council on Foreign Relations, titled “What Science Can’t Explain — A New Study Reveals the Blind Faith Behind Neuroscience.” Authored by By Mikkel Krenchel and Christian Madsbjerg, partners at a consulting firm specializing in the human sciences called ReD, they offer strategic advice to business.  Their statement from their web page is below:

“All of our work begins with an exploration of the customers’ world— using social science tools to understand how people experience their reality and, in turn, offering businesses a “reality check” on what is meaningful to people.”

This statement alone should be resonant with readers of this blog.  Using the terms I like to use, I could shorten this to “We specialize in empathetic connection to our customers, as well as helping with assuring validity of their perspective regarding their customers.”

The piece in Foreign Affairs goes on to discuss a couple of topics.  The first is a discovery, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy that showed one error in fMRI software used for brain scans that decalibrated approximately 70% of all research from the  past 15 years.  This puts in doubt over 40,000 articles on brain function in the published literature.  With this discovery, the reliability of a huge hunk of neuroscience, which has gone to finer and finer scales, claiming this part of the brain, or that part, performs this particular function, because of certain environmental influences that cause the particular area to glow (or not) on an fMRI scan, is in doubt.  That in itself is interesting.

But the whole science behind fMRIs in the first place — not the elaborate construction of machines, nor the refinement of techniques to create those pictures — is based on a principle that, as the authors say clearly, something that would give pause if people understood it.  From the piece above:

“And indeed, it is easy to embrace claims from such studies uncritically. They are brain scans, after all. And they are alluringly simple: it takes neither a rocket- nor a neuro-scientist to discern that in two side-by-side photos of brains, the one labeled “when in love” looks brighter and different. Meanwhile, the underlying science is impenetrably complex enough to make it impossible for mere mortals without years of experience to challenge it. Invoking the authority of neuroscience allows you to easily win any argument. “

Except it’s not that complex.  fMRIs show brain activity in terms of increased blood flow  in the center under study.  The generalized thesis is that increased blood flow means the neurons in that part are more active, and thus more processing is being done. It’s better than phrenology, for sure. But it’s also not a whole lot more advanced than “we looked at a circuit, and when the resistors heated up, we determined that was where the action was.”

And how about validity? The idea that a particular part of the brain is solely responsible for particular thoughts belies the entire emergent, evolutionary, and massively connected nature of the organ.  Our brains are not organs that appeared overnight.  They appeared over literally hundreds of millions of years. And all the parts, while certainly having some level of differentiation, are all wired together.

Where does our understanding of the fragmented brain — or rather, that the brain is a mostly fragmented organ, composed of starkly differentiated pieces — come from? It comes from the fragmented social structures present in institutions that study brains. Why?  Because the social structure really doesn’t have a good way of generating knowledge except fragmented parts, due to research questions of smaller and smaller scope that can result in the status-based leveling of paper publication.  Holistic functioning, especially at this time in technological development of fMRIs, is almost impossible to study.  So, if you want to write papers on brains, you better have tools that allow finer and finer scales of whatever it is that you’re trying to measure.  In the case of fMRIs, that’s blood flows, and that can be localized to 2-3mm of the spot on the brain with the activity.

How can we surmise that brains actually work?  A better, less crude (but still crude!) approximation might be a circuit analogy.  Parts of the brain are wired together with lots of neuronal pathways, that have the ability to change dependent on the circumstances.  We also know that this is true.  Due to neuroplasticity, people injured in certain parts of the brain often recover fully as the brain re-wires itself around the damaged part.  This model, which I use extensively in this blog, allows building on some of the knowledge and long-term understanding of brain function using reason.  Most of the stuff I discuss starts from an understanding of function of a particular part, then thinks through how those units would function together to give a particular action. That’s the basis of my whole Neurobiology of Education post.

When coupled and informed with results from fMRIs, I’d argue that my method is much higher on the validity scale.  You can understand how, for example, the amygdala, which is in charge of fear (or confirm that it is active during fear using an fMRI,) shuts down the hippocampus, which is in charge of integrating information, during times of stress. But actually proving this completely with something like an fMRI — or perhaps better said, creating a reliable, duplicable experiment, when a person has their head shoved inside an fMRI machine, is almost impossible. How do you trigger a person to feel fear (or any other emotion) consistently, while learning a task, in such an environment?

fMRI machine — Creative Commons

The authors don’t stop there.  The point they’re really trying to make is below:

“It also points to a more general scientism that increasingly pervades academic, public, and even business discourse. In all fields, there is an implicit but increasingly strong belief that the only things that matter are those that are measureable and that the only way to make sense of the world is through the hard sciences and quantifiable, objective data.”

The authors go on to make a case for research in the humanities as a way to get at integrated, connected experience, hitting people where they know it will hurt — or convince.  How do you quantify love?  That’s been a stumper forever, because attachment is a multi-faceted thing.  The authors invoke what I’d like to call the ‘messiness’ principle, which is how folks deal with stuff where they don’t have a good model of how information is created.  But they are doing better than most in getting to the heart of one of the problems that our Theory of Empathetic Evolution addresses — namely how to disagree with someone who’s full-on ‘sciencing’ you when what they say  quite obviously doesn’t match what you can see and hear with your own eyes. It’s an argument aimed at confronting the reliability stick being beat over your head, when the data that you’re collecting from direct experience — the validity helmet — is being walloped in an attempt to assert power and control over your own thoughts.  ‘Sciencing’ someone can be just another form of gaslighting, and a tool of yet another collapsed-egocentric Authoritarian with an empathy disorder.

I went to the authors’ web page and read about their consulting firm. They’re sophisticated thinkers, and believe in both the power of reason, and the great works of philosophers (they’re big on Heidegger, for example.)  It’s a method of understanding that is necessarily complex and anthropologically centered, which is all well and good.  But it still suffers from the meta-structures of knowledge present in it, and over time, sticking with the 2-D knowledge meta-structure that comprises all of academia, where it’s a choice between either reliability or validity. Even when you give yourself the ability to take little hops off Flatland and make connections, you can only get you so far. The authors have come down pretty hard on the side of validity, or as they might say it, Truth. But the minute that you do this, without confronting the necessary temporal, spatial and energetic scales — that fundamental thermodynamics thing — you’re setting up a dichotomy.  If things are True, then there is the implication that its opposite must be False. And those time-invariant concepts are still going to require modification in an ever-changing world.

 

Reading the authors’ paper leads to as strong an argument that one could make for our knowledge structure-based Theory of Empathetic Evolution. Instead of a Flatland 2-D knowledge meta-structure, where laid out on the same playing field is scientific thinking, tribal knowledge, authority-based assertions, personal experience AND collected personal experience, we can understand that these are more or less complete evolutions of the social structures beneath them. Empathetic Evolution allows us to go 3-D.

The big, connected, cross-referenced picture of empathy, neural function, and Spiral Dynamics

How does that work? Science, mostly constrained to the Legalistic v-Meme mode, absent the occasional Guiding Principle flash, can mostly only establish testable, repeatable hypotheses. But it can establish a baseline for data collection that says you have to go out and find facts that can be validated.  That leads to supporting both individual and group heuristics (Performance and Communitarian v-Meme) higher up on the Spiral, as well as empathetic development, that then lead to larger, more integrated perspectives and truths that very likely are time- or spatially-dependent.  What works in one situation, may or may not work in another, dependent on when it happened and where.

When we cap it off with understanding our own biases and perspectives as researchers, we’re in Spiral Dynamics Second Tier land, and then that couples with a much more developed sense of rational AND conscious empathy. As our temporal and spatial scales expand, it’s hard to know exactly where we’ll end up.  You’ve got the famous Butterfly Effect from chaos theory, which says small changes (like a butterfly flapping its wings) can lead to large changes (like a hurricane) in other locations, due to sensitivity of initial conditions.  At the same time, the power of an evolved empathy gives one the ability to expand their social network across diverse individuals, cultures, and consciousnesses. The implication?  The butterfly may flap its wings, and maybe that has the potential to lead to a hurricane.  But through our expanded empathetic network, we may also be able to detect change in time, and turn on a fan that blows our butterfly back on to another patch of posies, and the hurricane is prevented.

And maybe we can’t figure out how to stop that butterfly.  The evolved wisdom that we might have from Empathetic Evolution will equip us with the ability to know what we can’t know.  And that self-knowledge will direct strategy that can accurately assess and compensate for alternate outcomes — like building a seawall to stop the hurricane’s storm surge — before they happen.  Consider both the aggregate knowledge and wisdom in the Dutch Oosterscheldekering.  It is both flood wall and movable barrier to keep out the North Sea during storms, while having large movable sections so that sea life can move in and out of the protected area when a storm isn’t active.  And that feature was incorporated because of large, public (read collective intelligence) outcry over closing off the estuaries on the Dutch Coast to natural interactions with the North Sea — an action that the Dutch populace were uncomfortable enough with unknown outcomes (like mass extinction, or pollution, or whatever) that they made parts of the barrier movable and more naturally adaptive.  They knew that they didn’t know, and they also likely surmised that there was stuff they didn’t know that they didn’t know.

The movable gates of the Oosterscheiderkering, Vladimir Siman photo, Creative Commons Wikipedia

 

Here they are in action — from the Dutch Infrastructure Ministry

And that kind of self-awareness is only possible in a society as empathetic as the Dutch.  It doesn’t typically happen, because most cultures are just not that evolved.  Around the world, we see the the lower v-Meme level- kind of disconnected thinking being used — from China with its Three Gorges Dam project, to Brazil, with its Belo Monte project.  Large, prestige-based projects, with very little thought to long-term consequences.  And all these were patterned after our own large scale failures in the U.S.  Problems in the Mississippi Delta from excessive dam construction on the upper Mississippi much?  How much longer does New Orleans really have, considering that the barrier islands are receding so rapidly?

If there’s a dominant insight in all of this, it’s that the best thinkers in the commercial sector are starting to confront lack of strategic performance in ways that both embody empathetic thinking, and are accessible to people in power.  That’s a great thing. Here’s a shout-out to them that they’re on the right track. As well as a reminder to them that the path is actually an evolutionary one.  We’ll see if they get in touch when I write them.  It’s time to realize that the knowledge space of what humans can collectively know isn’t flat, and accreted real estate.  It’s a Spiral, nesting larger and more comprehensive understandings inside itself, using the tools from the lower v-Memes to connect and buttress the validity of the higher understandings, bending upward out of sight.

 

 

 

 

Hiawatha Trail, Idaho — a long time ago…

I recently was turned on to Audible.com and audiobooks by a couple of friends — notably Ryan and Zach, both entrepreneurs and educators.  Audiobooks are a great way to fill in the hours of a drive for a society filled with individuals, like myself, who don’t have the time to just sit down and read a book.  They’re also great for filling in the blanks in your brain with business books, and secondary titles that you’re never going to read.  It was with that spirit that I approached one of Zach’s recommendations — Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger.  Junger, who also authored the book The Perfect Storm, as well as numerous essays, a movie, and a book on war and its effects on the people involved, doesn’t romanticize the bonding that happens in soldiers during combat.  He presents compelling portraits of the ambivalence of emotion that accompanies individuals in extreme situations — the horror and fear, as well as the love, bonding and empathy that such individuals share.

In Tribe, which was originally expanded into a book from a piece in Vanity Fair, Junger looks mostly at the issues of returning veterans from war and makes the compelling argument that what veterans really want when returning to the United States after an extended deployment is not boarding first rights on aircraft, or salutes at ball games.  What they crave is a feeling that they are part of a group that shared the sacrifice that they made — not set them up separately to take a burden that others in the society were unwilling to share.

He maps the PTSD space fairly well — the problem that individuals have when there is no group to re-integrate with, which veterans encounter all too often.  An interesting insight I had while listening was comments my psychologist wife, who used to work in a university counseling center, about rape victims and their path to recovery.  When, for example, a sorority sister was raped, the victim almost always recovered rapidly from the trauma when the sorority directly confronted the incident, and the other group sheltering the rapist.  Extended trauma almost always only happened when the in-group of the person being raped attempted to rationalize the trauma to maintain social relations with the out-group.

Junger goes on to extoll the virtues of tribal societies — their fundamental egalitarianism, their swiftness of retribution, bonding ceremonies, and their emphasis on functional identification of their members.  You are what you do, in large part, in a tribal community. He also discusses in-depth the prevention of large gaps in wealth and well-being in nomadic and semi-nomadic societies, and how that preserves the social order.  There can only be so large a gap in material possessions, because there’s only so much you can haul on your horse.

There’s extensive coverage of how Authoritarian v-Meme societies chronically disparage the underclass and their behavior in crisis.  Before the Battle of Britain, for example, the British elite were convinced that the common folk would pillage in the streets after German bombers launched the first wave of attacks.  Instead, what happened was a group cohesion that settled in that was key in surviving The Blitz and defeating the Nazis. It should come as no surprise to followers of this blog that this was the case.  Boot people back down the Spiral to the Survival/Tribal v-Meme, and they will find a way to overcome their differences rapidly.  Authoritarian/Legalistic societies depend on depressing populations to make them easier to control, and so the attitudes pre-Blitz by the English elite also should surprise no one.  As well as behavior of British society in the aftermath of the war, that led to rapid Communitarian empathetic evolution and establishment of institutions like the National Health Service.

Junger also makes the case that robust, adaptive solutions to larger problems like climate change depend, potentially, on tribal behavior.  Global warming is going to drive numerous crises with different characteristics in different ecosystems — drought in one area might need one set of solutions, while flooding in another area may require different manifestations of group cohesion.  All of this is true, of course.

But where Junger falls short in his analysis is in his lack of understanding the different levels of empathetic connection, and the ramifications of more simplistic In-group/Out-group social organization in complex societies.  The bonding of the British during the Blitz led not to restrained behavior toward the Nazis and German society at the end of the war.  It led to Arthur “Bomber” Harris and the fire bombing and leveling of virtually every German city, of which Dresden was only the most famous. And any solution for global warming is going to require not just the fine-scale networks for customized, local action.  It will also depend on a global sensor network to understand, for example, larger effects to oceans, and fisheries. And as Conway’s Law informs, that will require a spatial awareness and empathetic connections that span the planet.

Junger’s analysis that we live in a fragmented, alienated society is spot-on. But where it falls apart is in the main thesis of Tribe contrasts only of the Tribal v-Meme benefits of closeness against the Authoritarian need for status assertion, control and depression of populations.  Contemporary societies are more complex than this, and without understanding that ever-important concept of scaffolding.  What does that mean?  We have to fold in the strong national identities based on perhaps nothing other than geographic residence, with higher v-Memes allowing for individual choice and preference, and even on up to a reflective, Second Tier nature that allows question of why we’re setting up our In-groups/Out-groups the way that we are. If we don’t, we will not as a society avoid the violent excesses of Tribal societies in the past.  It’s not in the social physics cards.

Still, Junger does yeoman work in nailing the key factors that are preventing unity in our current condition, through examples from veterans not being able to find work, to Wall Street bankers and their unpunished piracy.  It’s well worth the 2.5 hour listen to give you a description of the base of inclusion that we must build on in order to not only save our veterans, but ourselves.  As long as you remember that the book, as even Junger alludes to, is a start.  Because there is no real alternative except larger empathetic evolution.

Worth watching: There’s a evolving story on tribal coalescence that’s happening on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in southern North Dakota, involving protesting an oil pipeline being built built by the Dallas-based firm, Energy Transfer Partners.  Non-affiliated individuals, as well as enrolled tribal members from across the United States have traveled to the site to protest the pipeline, which tribal members view as a threat to their clean water supply.  The video below shows a recent confrontation between construction workers and protestors.

 

There are interesting explorations of Spiral Dynamics 2nd Tier/self-aware evolution of the Tribal v-Meme, as this gathering of the tribes attempts to merge diverse cultural perspectives while maintaining unity among groups that have had difficulty achieving consensus in the past.  See this BBC piece for perspective.  

As of this posting, there has been violence.  My prediction is that there will be much more violence, and potentially protester death, before this is all over. especially if there is no injunction from the courts for further environmental/archaeological study.  The Tribal v-Meme does not back down, unlike typical, more mainstream U.S. protests.

Postscript — here’s a great piece in Outside Magazine that backs up my assertions.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about relating my developed Theory of Empathetic Evolution on to actual change maps inside organizations. How do we know change can happen, and how do we know it will stick?  Many organizations will tell you stories about becoming 6 Sigma organizations, or TQM, and how it didn’t change anything — it just gave a new oppressive tool to already oppressive management.

In that spirit, can we create guidelines from our Theory of Empathetic Evolution that can help us in our change processes?  Here are a few:

1.  The ideal pathway for change is always to evolve your people first, and then let emergent solutions come from the people themselves.

This principle is easier said than done, especially down in the lower v-Memes (Tribal/Authoritarian space.)  The reason this is so hard is because the way these lower v-Memes handle conflict usually involves decapitation!  It’s very hard to get managers who are receiving status-based (and often monetary!) benefits to change a system that they perceive diminishes their status. And since such ‘power and control’ systems have had little interest in actually increasing performance, they usually have cultural sidebars around manners or etiquette that prevent real change management discussions from happening.  Real change and growth is often an uncomfortable process, and there are people involved who have staked their ‘face’ on doing things incompetently.

The reality is, though, that higher evolved practices require changes in the organizational chart, agency, and importantly, timing and synchronicity.  You can’t run a Lean/Agile organization where the boss dictates all aspects of the timeline.  Successful Lean/Agile or higher modes depend on goal-oriented behavior in a relationally rich environment.

Team building and kaizen events can help.  Letting leadership know that this is a priority and starting a conscious process of understanding information flow in your organization is also key.  Ideas are welcome here — don’t be afraid to comment!

2.  There’s nothing to say that you can’t evolve the people and the organization at the same time.  But you have to consciously emphasize empathetic practice.

I’ve discussed empathetic ladders before on this blog.  The idea is straightforward.  You start by giving a command/idea, or structuring an environment at a lower empathetic level, that creates opportunities for development of an individual to a higher level of empathy.  One of the techniques I use with my 22 year old design students, who (trust me!) are extremely egocentric, is I order the use of empathetic tools.  Active listening, pairing on tasks, realistic timeline reviews and customer visits with scripted engineering mentor partners (all the clients the kids work with are given coaching on how they’re not supposed to tell the students any answers they come up with, for example) are all authority (me!) -ordered work practice at the beginning of my class.  There’s no allowance of much hierarchy, either — everyone working on the project is an engineer, and specialization is allowed to develop naturally.

I’m also acutely aware that my class is a rarefied environment.  As a professor with a profound legacy, students come into my class knowing what to expect.  They’re mostly mid-20s in age, and so neuroplasticity is high.  I’ve repeated the change process many times, to the point I suffer reverse Dunning-Kruger effects (not knowing exactly what I do that creates the change process.)

Still, you, as a manager have to start somewhere.  Giving training in empathetic modes, while offering experiences where they will be utilized, follows the Neurobiology of Education format we laid out earlier.  Explicit knowledge => Autobiographical Understanding, a la Daniel Siegel, is the pathway.

3.  Sometimes, you have to just fire one of your anti-empathetic managers to start the process.

There’s not an organization in existence today that doesn’t have empathy-disordered people working in it.  They’re just too prevalent.  The NIH says something like 12-14% of the population is a High Conflict Personality, so that means that the odds of your company escaping such behavior, once your numbers are greater than 20, fall dramatically.

And you can’t fire all the relational disruptors all at once. Often, if such people have been running the show for a long time, you’ll have no bench.  Fire one, and who will you replace that person with?  And like it or not, stable disruptors can have administrative skills you need.  They know the scaffolding.

At the same time the situation may seem hopeless, understanding empathetic evolution can give pathways toward success.  If the bottom level of the empathy pyramid, Mirroring Behavior, is all you have, then that’s what you have to use. “Be the change you want to see in the world,” said a paraphrased Gandhi. It strikes at the core.  Be a Servant Leader 2.0.  At the same time, whacking one of your most deviant and anti-empathetic managers also sends a message out through the anti-empathetic network.  Once you boot that bunch down to the Survival v-Meme, they’ll snap to attention pretty quickly.

How do you pick?  Look for environments inside your organization where fragmentation and relational disruption are most intense. The person at the top, or one of their primary influencers/controllers, should be your target.

A good friend of mine, Mike Johnson, called this ‘freeing the hostages.’  You don’t really know how much creativity you have at your fingertips until you figure out who the hostage taker is and remove them from your organization.  But once that person is removed, you can start to find out.  And the other hostage takers will take note.

4.  For a high performance organization, agency has to be consciously developed.

When you’ve got an underperforming organization that’s made the classic Authoritarian v-Meme deal — “Employees do what the boss says to do in trade for passivity and lack of responsibility” — you have to ease off the Authority as part of an explicit plan.

Here’s an example. Often, the people below the bosses will have lots of great ideas how to improve their work environments.  But instead of just installing a suggestion box, demand that your managers produce a certain number of organizational change directives that come from the bottom, with ways of measuring their success, and a plan for modification if things don’t reach the goals initially set. Exploration encouraged, and no punishment allowed.  Have people discuss amongst themselves, and develop a real implementation plan.  Grade high for positive motivation, low for penalties inside any plan.  At the start, there will always be a subset of employees who have been punished that will attempt to establish another In-group/Out-group dynamic, where they get to punish the bosses for past failures.  Don’t let it happen.

People working in their jobs for a long time will know what works, and what doesn’t, about the tasks they do. Require that they address their own boredom, and their own fulfillment — that injects their value of meaning in their life.  Ask them how the relational web will look after they fix the problems they perceive.  Will they like the people they work with more?  Will they be less fearful?

That starts the real process of empathetic evolution — giving action that leads to meaning and happiness to duplex, empathetic communication in the workplace.

5.  Conflict arising from v-Meme separation, between the v-Meme intent of the practice, and the empathetic evolution/v-Meme level of the people, has to be addressed.

On this blog, I’ve written a whole section on v-Meme conflict, that shows how the different value sets will have conflicts on solutions. I’m not going to re-write all that here.  But here’s the basics.  Authoritarians and Communitarians, for example, are going to see things differently. Or Legalists and Performance-based Thinkers.  A great example can be taken from my lab.

It won’t surprise you (I hope!) to find I keep a pretty open-door lab policy. I want all the different disciplines to mix and mingle, and if they bring their liberal arts boyfriend/girlfriend along to get some free printing, all the better.  I think most college students are fine people, and the interaction that may happen over a pizza is the way people grow and change. Over the years, I’ve had virtually nothing stolen from my facility, which is largely open 24/7.  Three graphics cards, a mouse, a laptop camera, that’s about it.  Students watch out for their resources — since it’s a shared responsibility space, they are the best theft-prevention system I could hope for.

Needless to say, the Authoritarians/Legalists don’t like this. No control over who goes in and out?  Aren’t resources for our own students?  And so on.  Conflict could easily arise between myself and those parties, and our goals of relational development are profoundly at loggerheads.  Or really — the Authoritarians can’t understand what I’m really trying to do.  I did give in and allow one ID card reader installation.  But I still maintain my policy.

As it is with people, so is it with preferred practice and its intended v-Meme levels.  If you have an Authoritarian organization, with Performance-based (or intended) Lean/Agile practice, things aren’t going to go very well.  Allowing people inside the process to decide scrums, sprints, and whatnot goes against the ‘Father knows best’ mentality. Likewise, we all know how Authoritarians can subvert Communitarian practice — everyone gets their say at a meeting, but nothing fundamentally changes except what the boss wants.  On and on.

How do we tell if our practice is following what we preach, as well as our social organization?  It gets back to core understanding of information flow inside our systems.  Are people given strategies that match information requirements? Do titles dictate treatment in all venues?  Are all important timescales external, yet people are given practice that requires agency?  Understanding this big question is the real insight into mismatch — and the key to understanding large-scale change.

There’s more — I’d ask my readers to leave their ideas below.

Shout-out:  To my friend, counselor and mentor, Steve Kallick, who taught me about #3.  Steve is the ‘winningest’ wilderness advocate in Western history, having been responsible for facilitating the set aside  of more protected areas than any human.  I asked him what to do, one time, about assholes in an organization.  His answer was simple, for a fundamentally Communitarian guy.  “I don’t put up with that shit.”

Some kind of Muscovy Duck — the closest picture I have to a Black Swan!  The Pantanal, Brazil, 2006

One of the interesting concepts in understanding metacognition is the idea of a ‘Black Swan’ — symbol of a theory developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, that describes a Black Swan event as (from Wikipedia)  an occurrence or design that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.  The rise of the Internet is considered a prime example.  Black Swan events come from the notion of the ‘unknown unknown’ part of metacognition.  Ostensibly, you don’t know they’re out there, and you wouldn’t necessarily know what you were looking for it, even if you were looking.

Taleb’s a smart guy, and it’s a great idea.  He is not only a professor,but a financial guru who has been a trader himself, and so has developed a whole theory around Black Swans, which he’s written about in an eponymous book.  Taleb’s theories revolve mostly around probabilistic representations of Black Swans, and probability is a good way to understand them — especially when they come from the outside.  Yet any Black Swan has to be, at some level, a created object — designed, so to speak — and the dynamics of how something is created that one has little knowledge of, as we’ve covered in this blog, can be very complex. But it can be understood.

There’s also a way of understanding Black Swans in the empathetic evolution space, though.  I’ve already talked about Chris Voss’ excellent book, Never Split the Difference, on negotiating.  In his world, a Black Swan is a idea or insight inside a negotiation that leads to paradigm-changing advantage and resolution of a problem, coming from Voss’ notion of Tactical Empathy.  Regardless, here’s the takeaway — it’s still a designed solution, and as such, has to follow the rules I’m going to lay out below.

So let’s start with a definition that utilizes what we know about empathy, and empathetic relational modes. A Black Swan is a manifestation of a design solution that was not considered or known about inside a larger, general solution space that profoundly changes our mental models regarding those families of solutions.  That means that Black Swans have the potential to be major empathy ladders, as they disrupt belief systems and force organizations to modify their social structures, create more duplex information paths, and become more data driven.

In order to give some kind of graphical representation to all of this, let’s consider how different social structures cover design spaces, and then we’ll have some idea of how Black Swans work.  Below is a plot of solution spaces for a very siloed company.

Let’s say this is a company staffed by Mechanical Engineers (MEs), represented by the X axis, and Electrical Engineers (EEs), represented by the Y axis.

The MEs in this company typically generate a range of solutions with paradigms that they’re educated with — namely things like heat, mechanical motion, fluid motion, and so on.  (Thermodynamics, Dynamics, Fluid Dynamics, etc.)  EEs have a different set of tricks up their sleeve — electricity, magnetism, microprocessors, integrated circuits (ICs).  On and on.  A customer approaches this company for a solution, and either it’s ‘All ME, all the time’ or ‘All EE, all the time.’

The best that such a company can provide is an additive solution — a EE control system laid on top of an ME primary solution, for example.  This was the state of the world when I became an engineer back in 1982 in the steel mills of Cleveland.  We had an ME solution — a rolling mill with handscrews at the top.  And we worked with an outside firm using computers to run the electric motors to turn the handscrews. The mill itself was old — probably 20 to 30 years old, and had originally had people turning handscrews on the top.  The consulting company’s job was to retrofit those drives (which had by that time already been replaced with electric motors) with computer control.

Obviously, this is a pretty non-empathetic paradigm.  There’s no desire, with this kind of organizational structure, for MEs and EEs to trade information. There are strong In-group/Out-group dynamics, and that’s decided by your title and degree.  Any completed system will be, at best, an additive manifestation of an EE and an ME part– what I call functionally ‘meta-linear’.  But just because the EEs and MEs don’t talk, it doesn’t mean there aren’t buried, unplanned-for synergies inside the final design.  And these effects may be potentially negative. Perhaps the material selected by the MEs messes magnetically with the ICs picked by the EEs.  Those synergies are also potentially nonlinear, and will only be discovered by running the solution in its environment, through a range of operating conditions.  And when we have those buried synergies, what can pop up?  A Black Swan! Something that, upon failure of the system, people will look in hindsight and say “boy, we should have anticipated that!”

On top of that, we have a whole big hunk of design space that, because of the limited awareness of our potential solutions, remains uncharted. We can’t even know what’s out there because we have no people helping us peer around and tell us.  That’s a giant lake for a Black Swan that might be spawned by a competitor.  So we have two avenues for the genesis of such a bird:  the first are the potentially negative, likely nonlinear synergies coming from meta-nonlinear actions inside our design space, driven by lack of awareness; and second, the probabilistic actions from companies and phenomena outside our design space. Not good.

Let’s modify our company a little, and give some overlap in knowledge between our EEs and MEs.  This is functionally equivalent to what we do now in engineering education — have students take classes where they get both a smidgen of information and insight into other disciplines.  We call this type of experience ‘multidisciplinary’, which, at some level, it is.  But it is not particularly well-integrated.

Now our MEs know something about EE world, and the EEs also know something about the constraints faced by MEs.  While far from perfect, this has the advantage of eliminating at least some of the negative synergies that plague the design space above.  Hopefully, because of explicit knowledge declaration, the MEs know not to build certain things out of magnetic materials that might mess up the EEs’ circuits.  And the EEs have an understanding of how MEs might make things so that they don’t ground a circuit on something where it might be designed to break so that one doesn’t see catastrophic failure.  We’re still not seeing any particular positive synergies in design, because the MEs and EEs are only peripherally talking to each other.  We still have meta-linear designs, because we still have an Authoritarian/Legalistic social structure — our MEs and EEs are all hanging off the General Manager’s primary node.  Any integration is going to happen by the person at the top of the org. chart.

We still have our large and empty Design Solution lake that external Black Swans are swimming in.  They’re out there, and we’re blissfully unaware that the big quacker might be coming to bite us in the butt.  Until he does, of course.

Now let’s introduce some higher-level rational empathy into our social structure, between our MEs and EEs.  That yields a design space map that looks like this:

With our Big Blue Empathy Arrow, we’ve added duplex interchange between our EEs and MEs.  Information is now flowing freely back and forth between both parties in the organization.  This duplex information is not constrained to just a one-off back-and-forth.  Instead, we end up with a system that generates shared coherences between the two groups — but not so much on a predictable timescale.  We have transients of indeterminate length to arrive at shared solutions.  The engineers talk back and forth until they agree — that’s the standard.  Not once, not twice, but enough to reach the goal of information coherence.  In the process, both sides become much more educated on consequences of the others’ actions.  And through mapping of paradigms from one group to another, we have the potential for a truly nonlinear breakthrough — our very own Black Swan design. A Black Swan design may be a budding-off of an old paradigm, or an entirely new jump in performance.

With empathy, and its indeterminate transients and changing social structure not only composed of a formal hierarchy, but also independently generated relationships between actors in our organization, we have now created a meta-nonlinear system.  Right off the mark, our organization is creating organizational conditions for multi-solution, blended designs.

This meta-nonlinear system’s behavior can be understood with what mathematicians call bifurcation theory.  In the case of budding, it’s the potential result of a pitchfork bifurcation.  In the case of a performance jump, it’s a Hopf bifurcation. No longer just in the realm of probability theory, we have a deterministic map that gives insights into how our Black Swan came into being.  It’s still very difficult to predict — even with simple nonlinear equations, mathematicians still struggle with coming up with useful estimations of when these phenomena occur.  But these mental models can facilitate understanding exactly how multi-solution, breakthrough thinking manifests itself.

Well-known examples of the first of the two types might be the iPod.  Look at the family diversity involved in that exercise.  And a jump in performance?  How about the Tesla, firing all wheels with their own motors.  By eliminating the heavy drivetrain and engine inside the vehicle, you get performance that looks like the video below:

We’re still not out of the woods with those probabilistic Black Swans on the outside.  They’re still swimming around in the big white Design Solution lake that our own, empathetic, integrated team may start to be aware of.  But we’ve got a start, because now our company is starting to populate the Unknown Unknown part of the design space with our own ideas, claiming the space and making it known.

How do we manage the external Black Swan part of the lake?  Let’s take one larger step into interconnected networks.

We still primarily staff our company with EEs and MEs.  There’s some overlap in training between our two specialties.  But what we’ve added is now an assortment of constituencies that also fill the Design Space.  It’s hard to convey on a 2-D plot, but we don’t even need our other parts of the network to be engineers.  In fact, we’d like it if they weren’t.  It might be nice if they understood the laws of physics.  But that’s not even necessary.  The laws of physics constrain the larger space for all designs (the Laws of Physics, after all, are The LAW!!) but any design engineer will tell you that it’s often not the case that a successful (or unsuccessful) design was constrained by the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  It might be that you were trying to sell an item with a color that was out of style.  Or you named your car ‘Nova’ (no va) in a Spanish-speaking market.

If we populate that space with specialists up and down the Spiral, we add cognitive diversity to our expanded network.  And as far as guiding ourselves in how we pick constituent groups for our expanded network, it’s all about appropriate scaffolding. Topical information, delivered by subject matter experts, matters, of course.  But there also needs to be a focus on picking different thinking modes.  Government regulators might supply some legalistic V-meme information. Non-profit groups might give insight into potential rising concerns inside that community, as well as lifecycle pathways to future sustainability challenges. Style mavens might fill in the arbitrary Authoritarian niche, identifying trend-setting celebrities and give some insight into whether straight lines or curves are going to be de rigueur  in the next design season. Customers, through direct interviews, focus groups, and  beta testing, are going to give us valuable feedback on actual use.

Slowly but surely, our Design Space fills up.  And the robustness of that ‘filling in the lake’ is directly related to the level of empathetic evolution and its direct consequence –appropriate trust –given each of the constituencies.  If we evolve our own company to be self-aware, (like Clint Eastwood said, “a man’s got to know his limitations,”) we know how much those networks know, and the level of certainty that they know stuff.  Through that network, we can now come to terms with our “known knowns”, and count on them for our “known unknowns.”  It’s impossible to ever completely map out our “unknown unknowns” out of existence, which is where those potentially negative probabilistic Black Swans reside. But with our complex network that fills the Design Solution space, we’re definitely denying them habitat.

The organization we’ve described has also been talked about before — the Wise Organization.  By creating a large, empathetically connected, duplex network of diverse stakeholders, with a core of self-aware professionals, we continue to hone what we know, and what we don’t know.  And over time, that creates the basis for your organization to create its own breakthrough designs.

Takeaway:  Black Swans are avoided with robust, interconnected design communities that focus on diversity of all kinds.  The added benefit is that such communities are much more likely to generate breakthrough designs themselves, creating Black Swans with negative consequences for their competitors!

This is also worth a read — this short article by Taleb himself regarding Ten Principles for a Black Swan-proof World. There is just a ton of wisdom in this, and worthy of how the social physics discussed in this blog directly map to Taleb’s insights.  I just love it.

 

 

Fox on the Beach, Salmon River, 2016 — Photo Braden Pezeshki

Note:  a couple of very minor plot spoilers below!

If there’s a must-watch v-Meme Movie-of-the-Year, it has to be Look Who’s Back, an insightful blacker-than-black comedy about what might happen if Hitler showed up in modern-day Germany.  The movie is actually an assemblage of standard, scripted scenes shot to tell the story, as well as inserted clips taken while they drove the actor, Oliver Masucci, dressed as Hitler around contemporary Germany.  The movie inserts this footage with the typical device of anonymity, the black bar over the eyes.  I had originally thought that this, too was a plot device for the movie.  But it’s not.  The people crowding Hitler at the Brandenburg Gate for a selfie really want one.

The basic plot is brilliant in illustrating empathetic comparison between time periods.  Hitler reappears in a cloud of smoke on top of his old bunker in Berlin, with no memory of anything between 1945 and the present.  He is homeless and disheveled. He makes his way to a newspaper stand, where he is taken in by the owner, and starts reviewing all the papers, making requests at the same time for periodicals from his time — most of which do not exist. He is discovered by an down-and-out freelancer filming a series on inner city kids’ soccer, and then the film is off to the races, with the freelancer hauling Hitler all over Germany, and placing him in a variety of venues, often for real individuals to riff off of.

In the movie, Hitler is portrayed as a real person, or really, rather as a cunning, highly intelligent, histrionic charismatic psychopath — not an iconic ideologue.  As such, it serves as an interesting piece to watch exactly how such a personality might work and gain popularity.  When people don’t act with the level of respect that Der Fuhrer thinks he deserves, he doesn’t get mad.  Instead, he pivots, connects, and empathizes with whoever the target is. And while there is little doubt that Hitler is well, Hitler, what’s fascinating is watching how in the movie, Hitler has a pan- v-Meme message that connects across his audience.  From Tribal — Hitler attributes Wikipedia as a Viking creation — to Legalistic/Absolutistic — Hitler talks about food, the environment, purity, and rightness, to Communitarian — Hitler talks about health and elder care across German society — he forms a powerful, convincing message.  As long as you’re in the In-group. The Out-group here?  Immigrants.  Initially, Hitler can’t even conceive of the Muslim immigration situation in Germany, attributing Turkish newspapers to a potential alliance with Nazi Germany that won the war.

One of the plot vehicles in the movie is for Hitler to participate in a low-brow comedy show as part of his trajectory back to popularity.  Yet, instead of reading jokes insulting all sorts of constituencies in German society– the screenwriters’ attempts to be racy  and controversial — he delivers monologues about modern society (and the cooking shows that dominate cable television) that emerge effortlessly from his psyche.  The movie captures the deliberate self-referential behavior of Hitler, and the persuasive power of such a personality when the message delivered is consistent and coherent, but ungrounded.  To the answer of whether Hitler and those he’s connected with believe this stuff, well, yes.

Compilation of the movie’s trailers

One of the more fascinating twists of Hitler’s final identification as the real thing comes from a trauma survivor.  I won’t say more, but you couldn’t ask for a more psychologically correct state from someone frozen in the past from the horrors she personally witnessed.

Personally, I laughed through about 3/4 of it.  And then in a flash, it started getting too real.  In the current United States’ political season, some of this no laughing matter.

 

 

 

Adding a level — the Introduction of Conscious Empathy

I’ve been listening to a great audiobook that corresponds to my last blog post — Chris Voss’ negotiation text, Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It.  Voss, a former FBI chief hostage negotiator, tells the story of his path to becoming a master negotiator from a very heuristically based, how-to perspective — how he learned explicit knowledge from the FBI negotiation school, and integrated this from his experience, a process we talked about extensively in our Neurobiology of Education post. As a hostage negotiator, stakes were the highest they could be. If he or his team made a mistake, innocent people died.

What did that mean for someone like Voss?  It meant that he couldn’t just rely on training or opinions of lead negotiation experts in all the various prestige outlets, like Harvard or MIT — bastions of low-empathy negotiating styles, with the typical Authoritarian/Legalistic structures of universities.  Voss talks about the predictable complex algorithms generated by these experts, that essentially worked poorly, if at all.  Voss needed adaptive, heuristic thinking.  You can run, but you can’t hide from Conway’s Law!

Which takes us back to the primary content of this blog — he couldn’t sacrifice validity for reliability in his efforts to improve his performance.  Maybe standard negotiation techniques would reliably release 50% of the hostages, or solve the problem 50% of the time.  Bu this simply wasn’t OK for only one of two hostages to get killed.  In any given situation, all the people had to live.  He could not, as he says, ‘split the difference’.

And what was his path to becoming that ultimate negotiator?  He had to learn how to connect with whatever sociopath was across from him in a locked down building, as well as master his own emotions and brainstem functions along the way.  Interestingly enough, he had to not focus on status and control — taking over his adversary’s brain through dominance.  These motivators of typical Authoritarian and Legalistic v-Memes would not get to the Performance-based v-Meme goal — all hostages released.  He had to connect to them so profoundly that their rational faculties started creating shared solutions to the impasse that would allow the target to agree to surrender, and their hostages to go free.  As we know from past posts, multiple solutions are far more likely to be emergent from independently generated, trust-based, data-driven relationships — hence the need for self-aware, conscious empathetic connection with the person on the other side of the negotiation. Even if they’re taking hostages inside a bank.

What evolved out of those very goal-based constraints was a practice of real-world empathetic skills that literally climbs up the empathy pyramid I’ve already developed.  It starts by taking an extraordinarily high-stress situation — negotiating over someone’s life when they have a gun to their head — and walking up the empathy ladder, one emergent level at a time, to build a conscious, strong, self-aware bond with whatever person, with whatever problem.

I highly recommend getting the book or listening to the audiobook. The chapter titles clearly correspond to the different levels of my modified Empathy Pyramid.  Remember that all empathy levels in the pyramid are nested — lower levels are manifested in the upper levels, and included for use and expression as one goes up. Emotional Empathy has both the emotional aspects, and mirroring behavior.  And so on up the pyramid.

• Be A Mirror  (Mirroring Behavior with an emphasis on Active Listening)
• Don’t Feel Their Pain — Label It (Emotional Empathy, directed as part of Conscious Empathy.)
• Beware ‘Yes’ — Master ‘No’ (Rational Empathy through establishment of agency in the empathetic target.  I often talk about this in the context of the personal differentiation and self-separation necessary to act independently in establishing a relationship.)
• Trigger the Two Words that Transform Any Negotiation (in the book, these two words are “That’s Right”, as opposed to “You’re Right”.  This creates the referential grounding between the negotiator and the target that allows synergies to happen.)
•  Bend Their Reality (Re-grounding their Authority in a shared sense.)
• Create the Illusion of Control (once a profound empathetic connection is established, relate to them with the Authoritarian/Egocentric v-Memes that dominate their thinking.)
• Guarantee Execution (using an appeal to reliability to execute what they expect — no surprises to boot them back into a Survival v-Meme mindset.)
• Bargain Hard (use their connection to you, along with your knowledge of their true needs to develop solutions that satisfy all parties.)
• Find the Black Swan (use discovery and metacognition to expand the solution space from its original boundaries.)

I haven’t started the last chapter, Find the Black Swan, yet, but will write on this again.  The beauty of understanding empathetic evolution is that you can predict what the author will say.  🙂

What’s fascinating for me personally is listening to the book made me realize I missed a very important part of independent empathetic development that was staring at me from Spiral Dynamics.  This core concept is ‘what part of our brain/society is in charge’ and how we can understand our own empathetic evolution in the context of all of this.  With the introduction of Conscious Empathy (Voss calls this Tactical Empathy) , we now have an individual Spiral Second Tier Thinking concept for self-awareness, a true Buddhist Third Eye paradigm where we can watch ourselves evolve a connection with a fellow human being through using developed empathetic techniques.  Note in the figure below, the brain stem is not circled.  For the fully Conscious Empathetic mind, our evolved consciousness is running the show — not flight, fright, fight or freeze.

Though Voss doesn’t reference it in the audiobook, he advocates for the well-known empathetic connectors of active listening as mirroring behavior, as well as prosodic voice — what Voss calls his ‘late night radio DJ voice’.  Prosody, the process of using varying rhythms and melodies to convey emotional affect and cement emotional empathy in the voice, has been heavily studied by pioneering empathy researcher Stephen Porges, professor of psychiatry at the University of North Carolina and groundbreaking author of The Polyvagal Theory, that maps the connections of emotional empathy to the vagus system in our intestines and beyond.  His “That’s Right” as opposed to “You’re Right” response from the person one is negotiating with is the key signal that an independently generated, data-driven, trust-based relationship based on rational empathy is in place.  By reassuring the target that you get their position, you establish the authenticity for novel problem solving to occur.

All of this now leads to a more complete, 3-D version of our Empathy Pyramid, mapped across to both Spiral Dynamics and the Triune Brain.  The unification looks like this:

Cross-Referencing Graphic for Neural Function, Empathetic Evolution and Spiral Dynamics

Throughout the book, there are more empathetic gems.  One of my favorites was “Don’t make assumptions.  Make hypotheses.”  By constantly emphasizing data driven thinking, data-driven rational empathetic relationships, and encouraging the negotiators to prove their beliefs, Voss tills fertile ground for rational thinking in venues such as negotiation and beyond.

And that leads to the Five Level Empathy Pyramid!  From here forward, that’s what I’ll be using in this blog. For those that subscribe, you can imagine how that might reaffirm much of the Design Thinking work I’ve done on this blog.  In particular, those upper-level systems of Design Thinking are going to require conscious empathy on the part of the designers.

Footnote — credit where credit is due:  Lou Agosta, of the Chicago Empathy Project, pointed out to me that using the matryoshka analogy for empathy didn’t start with me.  Franz De Waal, in his seminal text, The Age of Empathy, he has equivalent mapping in the bottom three levels of his empathy model, and rightly deserves credit for being first to talk about the nested characteristic of the bottom three levels of my Empathy Pyramid.

 

 

 

Triple Threat — Braden on the oars, with Mike and Ritche hanging on, Salmon River 2016

Parsing through my Medium feed, I came on this short and readable story by Andy Raskin, a consultant who helps corporate leaders tell effective stories for larger audiences.  The main takeaway from his story was that he had watched a corporate leader discuss connecting with a group of his employees, in an apparent negotiation over a strategic story to tell to the press.  One holdout — a salesperson — didn’t agree.  So the CEO used active listening — repeating back to the salesperson — what they said, and once the salesperson agreed to the correct representation, they moved on.  The CEO said that it was a negotiating technique he had learned from FBI negotiator Chris Voss, in his book Never Split the Difference.  

The point was the main thing the opposing party really wanted was what empathy delivers: coherence of information transfer.  (Normal people might call this being completely understood!  🙂 

And active listening, as a technique, works on all three bottom layers of the empathy pyramid: mirroring behavior, by repeating speech; emotional empathy, which in this case involved syncing voice tone and eye contact so that context is the same (wouldn’t have helped in the active listener had scorn in their voice!); and finally, rational empathy — the content of the strategic message itself, about what the person having a hard time coming to consensus believed was the truth about the larger issue.

The three points he makes are:

1.  Leadership is an emotional connection.
2. “Active Listening” (a well-known empathetic listening technique) is key to establishing connection.
3. And finally, he has a lot more to learn from the FBI negotiator, Voss.

It’s always nice to see someone like Raskin write about empathy, even if he doesn’t recognize it as such.  What more could he learn, though?  That will involve in a little more rational empathy, in understanding what knowledge structures his audience could understand, what types of social structures might be in a corporation (or a broader audience) and how those values might propagate across those social structures.  And finally, in the background, that multi -v-Meme-spanning behemoth, culture, that shapes how individuals out of the context of their organizations might also interpret a given message.

What is cool about Raskin’s final point, which may seem ambiguous, is this:  it is ambiguous!  And what’s cool about this that Raskin is telling us about himself is that he has a sense of metacognition — knowing what he doesn’t know, as well as being aware of unknown unknowns out there.  And not being afraid to admit it indicates he’s interested in improving his own performance, and is far less focused on his status.  As a consultant, he doesn’t claim to have all the answers — his story on Medium is largely a portrait of his failure in a session.  But it also means that he has the innate empathetic development to explore the larger metacognitive space.  And that’s exactly what you’d want with someone who’s writing your story, which is what he does for a living.  Because your story is your own — and only someone willing to connect to you can get close to being right.

Braden, Ritche and Mike, dropping off the edge in Black Creek Rapid, Salmon River, ID, 2016

Judging from my Facebook feed, lots of folks seem to be confused that, with the nomination of Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee for President, former Bernie Sanders supporters might make the jump to a Libertarian candidate like Gary Johnson instead of realizing supposed topical shared interest with the Democrats.   As I’ve said before, that’s the problem with attempting to understand events based solely on topical information.  Topical information does not show intent, nor trends.  In order to do that, you have to understand the v-Meme structure of the organization or society, as well as the people involved.

What does that mean?  National elections in the United States are clearly for electing officials to a tricameral  Legalistic system — the Legislative, Executive, and indirectly the Judicial Branch.  All three branches have prescribed powers, as well as checks and balances written in both the Constitution and generated law since then. What elections mean, however, is how those laws will be used to evolve or devolve society, up or down, in a v-Meme sense.  How elected officials view agency, as well as empathy, and its desirability or lack thereof, is the real, resonant force in an election.

But how does this process work?  The easiest understanding of this is what a law does to a society when it is passed.  The law is legal code.  Yet is its interpretation designed to give more control to Authority?  Is it designed to improve Performance of the system?  Let’s take a law that is designed to control Wall Street corruption, like the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.  Sarbanes-Oxley, or SOX as it is known in the corporate community, put restraints and criminal accountability on corporate boards for malfeasance.  Controlling corruption certainly makes for a higher performance society — when people can trust each other more easily, and the institutions that represent them, information can flow more quickly.  But at the same time, dependent on the make-up of the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission, a law like SOX can also be used to target certain sectors for heightened scrutiny, creating bias against sectors that perhaps did not support the election of certain officials.  So, with almost all laws, evolution can go up or down.

V-Meme recognition in voting communities inherently acknowledges this, and voters seem also to intrinsically respond to cues directed from candidates.  I already made the point in this post that Trump and Sanders were both resonant with individuals looking for more independent relational modes, while Cruz and Clinton were counting on status and prestige from past titles to carry them over the top.  If one had to characterize Libertarians — at least the ones I know — it would have to be more along the lines of Performance-based Authoritarians, with a dominant suspicion toward any Legalistic v-Meme candidate.  In the eyes of the political pundit class, the explanation might be ostensibly because of Sanders’ continuous attacks against the large institutions dominating Wall Street, as well as the obvious revolving door between the U.S. Treasury Dept. and the various major brokerage firms.

But I’d be willing to bet anyone a beer that less than 1% of the population can tell me who, or what, Warren-Pincus is, or what Obama official is now formally associated with that name.  (It’s Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary, who is now the CEO of that private equity firm.)  People trust their v-Memes for a reason — they simply don’t have the explicit, left-brained knowledge of the details of operation.  They only know their cousin lost their house to a big bank during the Countrywide mortgage collapse, and that the government wrote the Street a big check.  That’s the kind of trauma that creates some serious neuroplasticity toward increasing agency, and contempt of government control.

And it should surprise no one that the Republicans nominated a candidate who states he is about an increase in agency (and no, I don’t want to argue if this is true — I’ve already written about that!)  while the Democrats squeaked out a candidate favoring the establishment.  They already occupy the White House.  But the closeness of the race on the Democratic side shows how the current system is not holding up to evolutionary pressures.  Otherwise, how could Sanders have raised as much money for his political campaign as he did?

And spectacles like this during the convention also surely don’t help.  This woman taped her mouth shut, and alleges she was threatened with eviction from the Democratic National Convention.  Regardless whether she is telling the truth or not, the status quo of the Democrats creating an environment where such a message dominates isn’t too smart in an election year with the dynamics previously prescribed.

If this election is about anything in the minds of the voters, it is about this battle for agency, who gets to be the benefactor of this, and perception of trajectory.  And as the U.S. devolves deeper along the Spiral in all its institutions, my one prediction is that the behavior of the electorate will become more and more impulsive — not less so — with a profound edge to the candidate arguing in principle for more agency — regardless whether they deliver.  So far, my analysis has been spot-on.  If you want to understand the electorate, don’t follow the issues.  Follow the v-Memes.

 

Someone needs to coach Sarah on the v-Meme/agency issue.  I volunteer!

 

Cholla Cactus, Grand Canyon, 2009

We’ve discussed high conflict systems in the past — there are perils in responding forcefully to them, especially when you know that there is simply no way you’re going to be understood, because the v-Meme gap is just too wide.

Such was the case with Bill Nye, The Science Guy, and the battle over creation science and the existence of Noah’s Ark with Creation Museum founder Ken Ham.  In this article from Grist, writer Katie Herzog makes the point that Ham’s project of building an Ark replica in Kentucky was floundering until Nye and Ham held a debate at the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.  The resultant publicity resulted in a resurgence of donations that resurrected Ham’s Ark-building efforts.

Here’s a video of clips from the debate, compiled by Mashable.

It’s challenging to know what to do when confronted with obviously Magical v-Meme thinking.  Ham fronts for a constituency, the Young Earth adherents, that say the Earth is only about 6000 years old, that believe deeply and are not going to respond to reason.  At the same time, they’re not above some higher-level Authoritarian v-Meme borrowing to skewer their opposition.  But it’s likely worse.  People like Ham usually are apocalyptic adherents of Biblical prophesy like that contained in Revelations, which pretty dramatically proscribes the people who are going to get into Heaven at the end of the world.  Can you think of a more profound In-group/Out-group division than someone deciding whether you’re going to spend eternity on a cloud, or burning in torment for all time?  Pretty anti-empathetic and collapsed egocentric!

One of the rules we learned in politics is never repeat your opposition’s message.  While I deeply admire Nye for boldly going where those of us favoring the higher v-Memes and science have little interest, I also think it would be instructive for Nye to read this blog.  Social physics are social physics.  And it’s obvious, at least in this circumstance, that he’s giving Ham a bigger audience, and more bucks.

Takeaway:  for those looking for a refresher on a great model to understand how people think in the belief vs. reason space, I recommend reading this post on Ken Wilber’s Thought Hierarchy.  The short take-away is this:  if you’re up there in the rational space, but you’re debating with someone down in the magical/mythical ethos, the only way they can understand your argument is in context of projection — your reasoned argument (to you) is really just your own egocentric beliefs. And why should your beliefs be better than theirs, especially if they believe they’re decreed by some divine being?  You’re certainly not going to change their minds.  And in some contexts, you’re going to feed the beast.  Or get others to — with cold, hard cash.

A female version of one of the main characters in the film

I finally got around to watching Zootopia a couple of nights ago.  I’d argue that it’s the first children’s cartoon based on the idea of v-Meme evolution — at least in my experience.  The essential plot is that animals have not so much evolved genetically — they’re still identifiable as bunnies, shrews, Cape buffalos and the like.  But they have evolved memetically — there’s an integration of social order and a lack of predation among the 10% of the population that used to have the other 90% for lunch. Though the writers try to create a dichotomous predator/prey world to drive the story line, the reality is that Zootopia is already a world filled with independent relationships, and the core plot line is around this as well.  Judy Hopps, the bunny, and Nick Wilde, the fox, are friends with a shared goal, and a critical assessment of each other’s authentic personalities and abilities.

Combo montage of all the Zootopia trailers

There’s some species differentiation portrayed in the film.  The hamsters and lemmings, for example (at least that’s what I think they are!) are the only ones that get their own Habitrail Hyperloop.  But the values communicated across the film are one in profound support of not just Communitarianism — judging each animal not by their species, but by their actions and character — but also a profound examination of the role of self-awareness, and standing up to external manipulations.  We’re talking Global Systemic v-Meme here, folks!

The main villain is a psychopath who uses mental models of predators solely for relational disruption, and does her work through triangulating societal institutions against her targets, with the primary goal of power and control.  Just like we wrote about before here.

Of course, this is a Disney/Pixar movie, so there’s the typical Hero’s Journey (with a couple of twists) plot line for the main character — rabbit Judy Hopps.  What’s interesting here, though, is that the screenwriters juxtapose differently abled animals in scenes like the police training, and really stress the idea of the individual taking advantage of their unique configurations.  Very data driven indeed.

The movie wraps up with a Disney song — here again, we are seeing some very interesting inroads in animation.  Gazelle, the sexy singer, has no top and a big butt.  She’s singing a song praising experiential education that wouldn’t surprise me if it showed up as the main ballad for the next LEAN/Agile conference.  Take a look at this stanza!

I’ll keep on making those new mistakes
I’ll keep on making them every day
Those new mistakes

By far, though, from a Global Holistic perspective, what’s interesting is how the social physics of a functional, multicultural society are naturally emergent and propagate from the v-Meme set.  Everyone has mass transportation that fits them.  Food exists and is redistributed appropriately.  There are deviant actors, but legal scaffolding (as in the Zootopia police department) exists to manage them.  Inappropriate Authoritarian behavior is prosecuted — Zootopia is not a place where everyone always does the right thing, all the time.  The movie is ostensibly about confronting bias — but what it really is about is an evolution to individuation, vital for real, functional communitarian behavior. The movie designers worked for five years on this, working through, in an open, collaborative, empathetic fashion, the inconsistencies that had to be dispensed with for the movie to be a template for a positive future.  The effort shows, and serves as a lesson in the time it takes for any process to create that level of Global system continuity.

Zootopia may be fantastic, but for a cartoon, it shows the necessary social order for a sustainable future.  There’s not that many differences between Zootopia’s world and our own.  We just have to throw away our misconceptions, our historical in-group/out-group dynamics, make friendships a priority, and, well, empathetically evolve.  Who’d a thunk?

Further Reading/Watching:  For a look into a darker side of how control can creep in when we refuse to allow memetics to function, check out this storyboard of a Zootopia world that is decidedly more dystopian, where in order for the predators to be safe, they have to have a shock collar.  Interesting how one bifurcation can head a society down a completely different, devolutionary path.  

I went ahead and watched the whole documentary.  It’s actually really excellent from a progressive management point-of-view.  For those interested in how diverse workplace dynamics create positive visions where larger coherence is the goal, the whole documentary is really a must-watch.