Dubai Sunrise, from the Conrad Hotel

How did we get started with the most recent, modern chapter of design?  Pre- big ‘D’ Design Thinking, lots of engineers went to school to learn design — stuff like Thermodynamics, Statics, Circuits and Dynamics.  They still learn this today, and most of the subject matter engineers cover in their degree programs matches what was taught over 100 years ago.

For those that don’t know what is actually taught in those classes, don’t worry.  Here’s the basics.  Usually a class is centered around a particular branch of physics — thermodynamics, for the most part, is about the physics of boiling water — vital information if you want to design a boiler for a steam locomotive, or a reactor vessel for cooking up some chemicals.  Information about the process is calculated — there are lots of formulas.  Some are so well known that they are part of what are called ‘codes and standards’, where engineers literally over generations have worked out the predictability of such situations that the answers are really what we engineers call ‘plug and chug’ problems.  You select the right algorithm, put in the numbers, and, well, ‘plug and chug’.

This process is not trivial.  Many of these formulae are complex, and knowing which one to pick is important.  Results from one set of formulae, like thermodynamics, where one might calculate temperature and pressure of a reaction, then feed ANOTHER set of algorithms to calculate the stress in materials used in the boiler.  Those feed yet another set of formulae regarding selection of materials for actually constructing a boiler.  If all this isn’t done correctly, the boiler could explode, killing people.  In fact, this is what happened that spurred the birth of much of the engineering profession.  Steamships and locomotives were blowing up — so algorithmic methods were developed that gave predictive capacity to designers so that this wouldn’t happen.

Refinement of such processes happened over time.  And in many ways, there was no arguing with the results.  It wasn’t about empathy or connection with a customer, as it is with so much of consumer design today.  It was about making a locomotive that could pull 100 coal cars up a mountain.

This mindset, or rather, v-Meme set, continues today in a good hunk of engineering, and without question in engineering education.  Legalistic/Absolutistic in nature, governed by algorithms, with only one right answer, hierarchies of engineers have been created to solve many of these problems.  Much of the work used to take a career to master, and there are still many certifications that say what engineers get to sign off on certain types of design.

Algorithmic design is often the bedrock of families of designs.  One of my favorites is below — the Titan missile family.  

Through addition of extra rockets, refinement of existing technology, substitution of materials, all these different types of things — an algorithmic smorgasbord of rockets, for varying missions and payloads, ranging from satellites to nuclear warheads, has been created.

Designing a rocket engine, or perhaps a better example, modifying the fundamental design of a liquid fuel rocket engine, where a propellant and an oxidizer are mixed in a combustion chamber, doesn’t require input from a focus group.  It, on the surface, doesn’t really require much empathy at all — though obviously, engineers working on a large project need some level of empathy to share successfully information.  This is ‘In-group’ empathy at its finest — a group of individuals, taking extremely similar curricula,  trading information in a language that is largely impenetrable to the masses — so much that such kind of talk is called, appropriately ‘rocket science’!

And who do you need in order to make progress?  The basic design of a rocket engine hasn’t changed that much.  The effort required to get it all to work hasn’t either (lots! rocket engines are basically controlled explosions encased in metal), though refinement continues, with adoption of new materials and such.  But who you need are authorities — lots of them.  Experts with increasingly fine-grain knowledge about very specific areas.  You need legalistic authorities, and they need to be absolutistic in their thinking.  If they’re not, then your rocket will blow up.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that such people organize themselves in authoritarian hierarchies.  It’s the knowledge set that is needed.  Until very recently, such projects were often headed up by one individual — the master designer.  No better example exists of transcultural similarity than aircraft fighter design from the first flight to the late ’60s.  Mitsubishi’s chief designer, Jiro Horikoshi, was responsible for the famous WWII fighter, the Mitsubishi A6M Zero.  Dr Waldemar Voigt and Robert Lusser led the team that designed the first operational jet fighter, the ME-262 — this after the Messerschmitt Bf-109 .  Edgar Schmued, was the chief designer of both the P-51 Mustang and the F-86 Sabre while at North American Aviation.

Because of the social structure of such teams, integration of the design effort necessarily had to be mostly at the top.  There had to be a chief designer, one with experience and capable of mastery of multiple disciplines.  And here is the main thing — the level of detail and complexity was such that one person could still innovate.  The need for complex, transdisciplinary teams in order to innovate had not yet arrived.

If there is a takeaway, that is it — complexity of systems had not yet increased to the point where it was essentially impossible for one person to know everything for success to occur.  But there are others.  Manifestation of reliability were many and varied.  While one might argue that each of those designers, at the top of their pyramid, could reliably be predicted to create breakthrough visions in aircraft production, the breakthrough aircraft, in the traditional sense, were not reliable. The Me-262, for example, had only an eight hour engine life, before both engines had to be swapped out.  The hierarchies that would develop the sophisticated jet engines that power our own commercial jet fleets had not yet had a chance to evolve.  The exotic materials, the advanced turbine blade designs, and the integrated and aggregated information that was required had not yet arisen — because the social structures required to produce that knowledge that would then produce those designs did not yet exist.

Takeaways:  Algorithmic design is the basis of many of the systems that create modern life.  It is non-empathetic in nature, and backed up by social hierarchies that are legalistic in nature, and practice complex rule following.  Creativity has its place, but the laws of physics must be followed — because those are the rules that govern the game.  And that leads to the legalistic hierarchies that are required to produce the knowledge — in a never-ending feedback loop.

Pantanal Cacique Bird (a Weaver Bird variety)

Well, it’s taken a while, but we’re finally getting around to one of the big themes of this whole blog — Design Thinking, and a larger, systemic understanding of both design and the design process.

What is Design Thinking?  That’s a very good question.  The most broadly accepted definition is a mode of thinking that lends itself to innovating new solutions, instead of just solving old problems.  This spins out into all sorts of angles from all sorts of experts — from solving ‘wicked problems’ — problems resistant to resolution for a variety of reasons, both technical and social, to epiphanies.  We’ve covered some of these phenomena earlier and shown how they are intrinsically part of social structure — but there’s more to unpack.

There’s some leads toward how to do Design Thinking in these definitions — tools, methods, processes and such are the typical way of approaching the topic.  What we’d like to do is understand Design Thinking on a deeper level, so that as managers or constructors of design teams, we can understand whom, and what processes we have to assemble, and what sidebars and culture needs to be generated so that we can do Design Thinking consistently, at the right level, for consistent innovation.

As I’ve explained in earlier posts, we arrived at this point of wanting to understand Design Thinking with the diversity of various group thought processes (and their outputs) by way of Conway’s Law — the idea that a manifested design will resemble in structure the communication network (and therefore the social/relational structure — that design team thing!) that created it.

We then introduced the Big Idea of the Intermediate Corollary, illustrated below:

and that led us to the idea of how people socially organize (and their empathetic levels) will dictate what they CAN know or design, or are CAPABLE of routinely processing.  This is then summed up in the following slide:

which, then again extends off the right side of the slide to the design itself.  Synergistic designs, for example, require empathetic teams who can readily exchange information with high levels of coherence — meaning, basically, they can pretty much understand what the other side is talking about, and know when to trust them.  Synergy is often a good thing.  But for anyone trying to debug a synergistic system, they know it can be a bad thing as well.  Trying to find a root cause of failure for a synergistic system is far more difficult than for one that has been well-compartmentalized — because everything is hooked together, and changing one thing ends up having unpredictable consequences with the other parts.

In the past couple of posts, we’ve also explored the idea of metacognition — knowing what you don’t know — and then showed how various social structures either promote or impede its existence.   Different levels of innovation are going to require different levels of exploration, as well as people who are comfortable with those different levels.  There is no ‘one size fits all’ — just an awareness of ‘what size fits you’!

If we’ve accepted the idea that Conway’s Law is true (and there’s been a fair amount of study that indicates that it is), then we also have to recognize that there is going to be, if we want to be sticklers about all of it, a different level of Design Thinking for every social structure — each one processing a different level of existent (or non-existent) synergy.

But instead of listing out every one, associated with every major v-Meme, let’s go at this from a different tack.  Let’s look at the fundamental dichotomy of human relationships — belief-based, externally defined relationships vs. independently generated, trust-based relationships — and go from there.

Externally-defined relationships tend to maximize reliability.  Reliability, in the case of relationships, goes along with predictability.  If you talk to a doctor, the odds are that person knows something about medicine and healing.  If you talk to a mechanic, that person likely knows something about fixing your car. And so on.  If it’s a broadly recognized title, that person likely has a document or diploma behind their name.  (Mathematicians will recognize such a diploma as an integral representation of information inside that person’s head — it’s functionally a single point, scalar representation of years of training!)

It then follows that if people in networks or hierarchies dominated by externally defined relationships do design, they’re also very likely to be familiar with, and able to refine prior art.  (For math junkies — since the interaction is simplex, and information is only aggregated in an additive fashion at a level above the nodes where it’s generated, odds are the process is also meta-linear in nature.)

Therefore, in a hierarchy, design mostly consists of refinement.  Old stuff made better, but likely no new stuff.  This is still design, of course, but is typically not what is generally understood to be Design Thinking by the majority of design practitioners.

Things are considerably different for organizations that allow more independently generated, data driven, trust-based relationships.  There, the social structure is more flexible, and determined not just by managers, but to some extent by the individuals inside the organization.  Also very important are relationships they have with customers outside the organization.  Because of the nature of those relationships — more unpredictable information exchange, more interface with the customer by more people inside the organization — these kinds of networks are more likely to have Design Thinking that maximizes validity —  will the design make the customer happy?  With the customer actively in the mix, with multiple employees, this dramatically increases.

That’s a start.  There’s much more to say.  And I will — in the next couple of blog posts.

Takeaways:  If you believe Conway, then you have to believe that design thinking will vary based on the social structure that is doing the designing.  The easiest way to split it apart, however, is from the external relationship definition/independent relationship definition dichotomy.  These two types will maximize either reliability or validity. 

This is not what most of the Design Community calls Design (Big D) Thinking, however.  Design Thinking is usually associated with jumps in innovation, or new ways of thinking about problems, as opposed to refinement.

Further reading:  I didn’t want to go into it in the main body of the post, but design thinking has been around for a while — since the ’40s, if you believe Wikipedia.  I certainly didn’t invent it.  

Definitions are all over the map, not surprisingly, because those definitions are made by various experts who occupy various v-Meme levels.  As I said above, breaking things up along the ‘solve the problem vs. innovate the solution’ isn’t too bad a way to approach it.  The ‘proactive vs. reactive’ paradigm (watch this 3 minute video by colleague Roger Martin, Dean at the Rotman School, University of Toronto, and David M. Kelley and Tim Brown of IDEO) maps well to the social/relational structure stuff in this blog — basically, if you’ve got metacognition, and you’re functioning at a Performance v-Meme level, then you’re going to try to innovate to reach a goal, instead of just willy-nilly refining a product.  

My personal opinion is the main discriminator, as it’s understood on the outside, is that Design Thinking drives multiple-solution thinking followed by down-selection, as opposed to single-solution thinking.  We’ll unpack this a little more as we go along.

Wild land fire, Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Clearwater NF, Idaho

Sometimes, when I read my own prose, I find myself victim to the same Dunning-Kruger effects I discuss.  Seems like I did this in the last post, so let me expand.

One of the interesting concepts that come out of Roger Martin’s book, The Design of Business, where he presents the system model for business evolution going from mystery -> heuristic -> algorithm.  In this previous post, I document how this also relates to a regression in social/relational structure, and in a related fashion, empathetic development.  Martin does a good job of contrasting this to what he calls the reliability/validity trade-off.  As a company ages, if it is not careful, it will follow a decay path where Legalistic/Algorithmic v-Meme hierarchies will slowly subsume the organization, and creativity will die.  The only person who gets to be creative is the person with Creative in their title.

This should not come as a surprise to readers of this blog.  If one understands rational empathy, and the creative energy it releases through unpredictable, nonlinear interactions between independent actors as a primary driver, then when you give everyone a job with a title, and tell them with whom they get to talk to, it’s  no surprise that you get in to a ‘New Idea Rut’.  Everyone’s saying the same old, same old, to the same old.  Barring a personal crisis in someone’s life, there’s just nothing new under the sun.

But hierarchies (and to some extent, power structures) are good at some level of incremental, algorithmic improvement.  If we’re trying to grow our company with ‘solid growth’ — 4%/year — it might be prudent to just keep on with incremental product improvements.  But as anyone with a high school math background might remember, even 4% a year turns into exponential growth — something we count on for compound interest, our kids’ college savings account, and our retirement.  And companies, sooner or later, will reach size thresholds, or business/innovation events will happen that will demand restructuring and re-thinking.

So why do people cling to past ways, especially in Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme environments? This gets back to the core principles that we’ve discussed regarding Reliability and Validity, and the way we form relationships.  It’s a good guess that if we want an authority on engineering, we’d go talk to a Licensed Professional Engineer, or an engineering professor.  But if we wanted someone to tell us how to hang-glide — a profoundly aerodynamic venture, but something a little more off the beaten path– we’re as likely to have a Valid discussion with an amateur hobbyist as an engineering prof in my department whose specialty is micro-fluidics.

Going back to the business world — an Authoritarian company is likely to seek the usual outlets for product refinement, which might seem like it makes sense.  But over time, their metacognitive reach is going to naturally shrink and shrink.  The knowledge that they may have  becomes more reliable, in that it is tried-and-true.  But as circumstances change, that lack of metacognition prevents proactive solutions.  The product or the game can only change after a failure.  There’s no better example than Kodak’s demise.  The largest film photo company in the world utterly failed to understand the power of the digital revolution.  And now they’re pretty much gone.

What’s so interesting about this insight is now we can understand the roots of how someone thinks when they say things like ‘you learn more from your failures than your successes.’  If there ever was an Authoritarian v-Meme statement, it’s that one.  Because of the lack of metacognitive sweep — actively confronting unknowns without fear — there’s just no learning.  Except when things fall apart.  And then it’s a surprise.

Contrast that to a Performance v-Meme.  If we want to improve, we design Process for Practice, and adapt strategy to find out what we don’t know, before it fails.  When confronted with the question, “do you learn more from your successes than failures?” folks might say that they learned more from failure, but that’s just the lower v-Memes talking.  In the class I teach, the Industrial Design Clinic, I teach successful practice, with an emphasis on Design Thinking and an exploration of multiple options.  Because there is no engineering company in this world that will accept a graduate who constantly, chronically fails after shipping product.  Even if they’re learning.

Takeaways:  Understanding how demands from the different v-Memes reinforce Reliability and Validity is key in not falling into the trap of only incremental product performance.  I’m sure the folks at Kodak thought film was going to last forever.

Further reading:  Complacency, Reliability?  Poe-tay-toe, Poe-tah-to.  Read here for a quickie piece on Kodak’s downfall.  Published in Forbes, no less.

Big Sand Lake,Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, Clearwater National Forest, Idaho

Why are Authoritarians so sure of themselves, while the self-aware are constantly questioning their very existence?  And how do these very large questions fit into the larger schema of social/relational structure?

One of the things that I work with students on is development of metacognition, which is the technical term for “knowing/being aware of what you don’t know.”  At its root, metacognition involves an individual self-assessing knowledge that they have, being aware of knowledge that they do not have, and in its largest form, being aware of the fact that there may be more subjects/areas that they haven’t encountered yet.  In a certain sense, this is a meta-awareness.  Though I was never a big fan of Donald Rumsfeld, one of the most profound things he ever said was his famous ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ comments.  The quote is reproduced below:

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Donald Rumsfeld

Rumsfeld didn’t invent the idea of metacognition — that probably goes back to the great Buddhist and Hindu philosophers.  But by packaging it in contemporary lingo, and then being subject to the scorn of the press corps, speaks loudly about the level of media discourse today.  And not in the press corps’ favor.  In an evolved society, knowing what you don’t know is a key toward curing your ignorance — not an insult toward your status.

How can we understand metacognition in terms of empathetic development?  Profound metacognition requires that we have a data-driven, inner dialogue with ourselves — assessing what we know relative to the data available — and at some level, still valuing ourselves at the end of the process — in short, we have to develop empathy for ourselves.

If, after such an assessment, we feel worthless because there is so much we don’t know, that is extremely telling about the social/relational structure we exist in, and how it influences our thoughts.  Accurate assessment of metacognition involves us having a developed, independently generated relationship with ourselves, and at some level, also involves our developed ability to trust our own judgment.  That implies that we have some sense of our own agency (we get to evaluate whether we should trust our judgment, instead of having someone on the outside tell us whether we should trust it or not) and in a healthy, developed form, is a behavior only manifested at v-Meme levels (Performance and above) where independent relational behavior comes into play.

With this definition, we can then see that the Principle of Reinforcement will play heavily into whether we have metacognition or not.  Different social structures will dictate to their constituencies incentives (or disincentives) for metacognitive development and belonging, which then makes it interlocked with empathetic development — our primary practice tool for our own neurological processing.  We have to know that we don’t know how someone else feels in order to make the decision to collect the data to assess their emotional and cognitive state.

This is a complex thought.  But one can really see how this works when examining the different motivators relative to the different v-Memes.  Authoritarians, when confronted with their ignorance, are going to be insulted.  Their status will be diminished — hence the desire for metacognitive development is relatively low.  Those in the Legalistic v-Meme will still be tentative in their recognition of things they don’t know.  They will want the assurance of new, transformative algorithms to take them from their current, known state to newer, unknown information.

It is when we move past the primarily Belief-based social organization structures that we start to see metacognitive development accelerate.  Performance-based organizations, when confronted with unknowns that impede progress toward the goal, will recognize them, and construct mechanisms to solve those unknowns.  Communitarians will recognize unknowns as part of the hidden mystery of every individual in the community, and part of the process of increasing individuation in their community member assessment.

Higher v-Memes than these ratchet up the state, in that they force the observer to confront their position of observation.  Self-aware Global Systemic will start the cycle of asking what one’s self-interest is in knowing/not knowing.  Global Holistic will start the process of understanding the larger connection of not-knowing to potential impacts, short and long.  And just saying — I haven’t gotten this all figured out.

Nothing demonstrates this better than watching an academic audience interact with a speaker.  And I’m not talking students — I’m talking professors.  A speaker can throw out softball question after softball question in order to get the audience to participate.  But professors, by and large, unless they are a recognized authority, will largely, passively sit and not answer.  They intrinsically know that their status is directly related to always pronouncing the right answer.  Why take a chance, when there may be a trick involved?

There’s a flip side to understanding metacognition.  Aggressive lack of metacognition manifests itself both at the levels of profound sophistication and expertise, as well as in the world of profound ignorance.  The Dunning-Kruger Effect, which I have discussed before in this blog, documents this with Legalistic v-Meme reliability.  The short version is that the ignorant self-assess at a much higher level of competency than they actually possess.  And the highly skilled, if their empathetic development is lower, will self-assess at a much lower level of competency than they have — they take for granted that people don’t know stuff that they, in fact, know.

One can see how this ties back to the level of empathetic connection.  If you’re an expert giving a talk, and you’re not connected to others, you don’t see them yawning.  You just keep going on and on.  And the other side?  There are plenty of examples of aggressive ignorance out there.  They can’t see the faces turning red when they yell — or they don’t care.

Real metacognition is a great way of evaluating true expertise.  Someone with a profound sense of metacognition will readily confess to things that they know, as well as things that they don’t know.  With this thought, one can see how metacognitive development hooks back into the notions of reliability vs. validity.  If someone can recognize their level of expertise, odds are that when they give an answer, it will be valid, subject to the data presented, as well as reliable.  It will be both correct AND reproducible.  Contrast that to someone who is an expert in one thing, but doesn’t recognize their own metacognitive limitations.  For them, every problem is a nail, and they’re the hammer.

Takeaways:  Metacognition is intrinsically tied to empathetic development, which then loops it all back into social structure and the acceptability of admitting you don’t know something.  The Dark Side shows up with the well-documented Dunning-Kruger effect.

Further reading:  The famous book, How People Learn, documents the  pattern of learning that experts use to master other fields.  There’s much to take apart about this book (not surprisingly, written by academics and authoritarians,) but in case you need some level of proof of how this works, it is contained therein.

Further watching:  Perhaps the most profound demonstration of Authoritarian lack of metacognition (in a humorous vein!)  Sergeant Schultz, from Hogan’s Heros!

Just a quick post — not everyone’s story has a happy ending, but there’s no question that with data-driven, adaptive thinking that shows up at the higher v-Memes, there are simply more of these possible.

Rising Tide Carwash was started by a father of a child on the autism spectrum, in part to give his 24 year old son a life outside of a room in the house.  There is a lot more that goes into making a successful business than just a feel-good perspective, and I personally shy away from any idea of a quick fix.  But the fact that SOME young people are out of their rooms that have autism is good enough for an announcement on my blog.  See:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nationswell/meet-the-gutsy-dad-that-s_b_7903320.html

The data-driven mind, well-scaffolded, has access to many solutions.  Let’s all keep evolving!

Christmas Market, Vienna, Austria

One of the interesting things I’ve watched in American society is the devolution of many traditional forms of communication with increased formalism.  At the same time that the world (really through the Internet) is driving increased connection, I see increasing, bizarre formalism in basic communication.

One of the ways that this manifests itself is in greetings/salutations and closings in e-mail.  When I was in high school, we were all taught how to write a letter.  Inevitably, it started with

Dear So-and-So,

And dependent on whether the relationship was formal or informal, So-and-So was either Mr. Jones, or Ms. Bates, or some such.  Punctuation was, for all intents and purposes, with a comma, a brief pause before the letter stated intent.

At the end of any given letter, to whomever, formal or informal, one wrote

Sincerely,

These things were so standard, they were included in the dictionary.

Now I get all sorts of various salutations, often with no title, and almost always with a colon.

Mr. Pezeshki:

or

Chuck:

So brusque!  So Authoritarian v-Meme!  No hope of friendship or independent connection there!  This person means business!  Or some assertion of status!

Closing statements now are often along the line of

Respectfully,

or

Very respectfully

or the very annoying

Kind regards,

Huh?  You mean when you asked whether a textbook was required for class, you were afraid of being disrespectful?  Are you looking down on your keyboard with winsome emotion as you sign off?  If I only give you regards, are they simply not kind enough?  What if I say Best? (my standard)  I always thought Cheers was OK — my British friends all say this as they are getting off the telephone.  I once had a woman tell me See you later, skater! that has now been enshrined in my best friend folklore.  Huh?

Standard protocols in societies free up more bandwidth for real relationships.  I understand the idea of expression of individuality, but the reality is that more idiosyncratic protocols just increase isolation.

Sincerely,

Chuck

Fog on White Sand Lake, high in the Bitterroot Mountains, Clearwater NF, ID

An interesting article on freshman social networks by Yale researcher, physician and Silliman House director, Nicholas Christakis.

He makes the observation

“In fact, studies that my colleagues and I have conducted of face-to-face social networks of college students and of the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania reveal that, in fundamental ways, they are not very different.”

For readers of this blog, this is, of course, not surprising.  Both Tanzanian hunters and freshman college students are likely to be centered square in the Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme, and so process relationships and interests in much the same way.

In the piece, he doesn’t mention empathy, but I wrote him a note — I’m hoping he will write back.  As I mentioned before, empathy level dictates information coherence levels in transfers between actors (a phenomenon he alludes to in the piece), with higher forms of empathy possessing more nonlinear aspects of behavior.

Another interesting point of the article is that he notes that when young people are plopped together initially, there is an explosion of friendships (independently generated, trust-based, data-driven relationships!)  But after about three weeks, the effect starts to die down, and then settle back to the externally defined groupings that people in that cohort’s brains are comfortable with.  The takeaway?  Epiphanies without follow-up don’t last.

Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray, Spiral v- Meme Evolution

In the last post, we talked about one of the benefits of more highly evolved employees — a more profound, variable sense of time scales.  And then talked about the movie Groundhog Day, a classic as far as evolutionary enlightenment.  We ended with the question — how do you get individuals to evolve from externally defined, belief-based relationships to independently generated, data-driven, trust-based relationships?  How do we start the process of development of rational, and even global empathy?

If you want people to have independently generated, trust-based, data driven relationships with others, the first person they must have them with is themselves.  And in Groundhog Day, this is accurately portrayed.  The first thing Bill Murray’s character, Phil Conners, does to break the destructive rut he is in with his Legalism is learn to play the piano.  He goes on to learn French, ice carve, and a host of other things, for those that remember the movie.  But the first big step is at the keyboard.

What does this mean? Performance, mastery and appropriate calibration/grounding are the key things that develop one’s relationship with oneself.  When you make a mistake at the keyboard, the piano lets you know.  Either it sounds right, or not.  One can listen to recordings and determine if the piece is being played correctly — it makes sense to benchmark against other standards.  But the ivories don’t lie.

Not surprisingly, this same evolutionary principle is in play with my students in the Industrial Design Clinic.  By giving them a real customer, that wants a real product, it radically rearranges the circuits in their head.  No longer can they make up reports that they intrinsically know teachers will never read.  No longer can they make up reports that are automatically 20 pages long to get an ‘A’.  The purpose-driven life starts with an authentic experience.

It is always an amazement to my students that their customers read their reports.  Instead of the usual glossing over that professors (or TAs) give the stack of reports, my customers give detailed feedback.  They complain if reports are TOO LONG.  It’s a shock to the system.  And it starts the process.

Back to Groundhog Day.  Phil Conners continues up the evolutionary ladder.  The next step is Communitarianism, and represented by his development of relationship between himself and the insurance salesman, his old high school comrade, Ned Ryerson.  At some level, that might be predictable.

But the next transition — to the Global Systemic/Second Tier Self Awareness is one of the most interesting in the movie.  As Phil becomes more empathetically connected with everyone in Punxatawny, he encounters an old, homeless man.  He  does the best he can to save him, over and over.  Yet the old man always dies.

What is being communicated here is the developmental stage of self separation and differentiation necessary for self awareness.  In order to become truly self aware, one must realize that one simply cannot project one’s persona onto someone else.  The movie does this with a stark contrast — Phil Conners lives on, and the old homeless man dies.  Yet at the same time, Phil learns the larger value of a complete, rational compassion.  He can only help the old man in his transition — and it is enough.

After this, the movie trips on up the next two levels — Phil is involved in a fractal temporal and spatial fashion with everyone in Punxsatawny (he always has to be in the same place, at the same time every day to catch the kid falling out of the tree.)   And at the final ball, with the potential, chronically unrequited love interest, his weather producer, Rita, played by Andie MacDowell, not only is he empathetically connected with everyone in Punxsatawny, he is also helping them.  This is a v-Meme that doesn’t show up on the prior Spiral chart —  known as Coral/Bodhisattva. In Mahayana Buddhism, a Bodhisattva is essentially someone who has stayed behind from ascending to Nirvana to help all sentient beings on their path.  It is only after getting to this point that Phil wakes up in bed, next to Rita, unconsummated, of course, with the clothes he is wearing from the night before.  The time cycle has been broken.  He is enlightened.

Since it is an American movie, of course, the lovely Rita wants to get married to Phil, and naturally he agrees.  When she asks him where he would like to live, he says “why not right here in Punxsatawny?”  If you’re enlightened, it doesn’t matter where you’re living.  But then after that, he says “but we’ll rent.”  He still has a capacity for self-discrimination.

The movie has many lessons for employee evolution, and is especially helpful for finding paths for meaning in work for all ages.  Though not everyone is at all the same, my observations of my students confirm the Performance/Goal-Based v-Meme development that happens between the ages of 19-26.  After that, I have found a steady cycle of clients looking for that Communitarian v-Meme transition around the age of 35.  What is interesting is that they often approach the university through athletics.  Football is, unsurprisingly, popular as a Communitarian gateway.  Everyone wants to be a member of the ‘Cougar Nation’ (our mascot is the Cougar.)  When the fascination with football wears a little thin, mechanical engineers often find me and the IDC as a way to contribute.

The next transition happens around the age of 52, often in the wake of a personal, mid-life crisis.  Facing one’s own death, regardless of prior v-Meme evolution, often causes personal epiphanies.  People in this age group are concerned about larger and longer legacies, and interestingly enough, are not as concerned with student projects and bottom lines.  I work with them to form meaningful relationships and structures, not just for completing projects, but also providing career and life advice.  In recent years, the IDC is also involved with several non-profit projects, and I have successfully utilized one colleague/friend to develop low-cost prosthetics as well as UAV systems for conservation.

Nothing is written, empathetic-development-wise, however.  People often get stuck.  Not everyone will become an enlightened master or employee.  But by increasing one’s own awareness as a leader, one can help both the individual and the company you work for along the way.

Weaverbird, Pantanal, Brazil

A long, long time ago, in a post far, far away :-), I explained the basics of  Spiral Dynamics v-Meme evolution.  Naturally, throughout this blog, this is also coupled with all the others — societal, and empathetic evolution.  But to get out of the spaghetti trap that inevitably comes up when talking about all of this (there are days I like to say “Hey, I know what the whole elephant looks like, and I’m all tangled up with him in a big ball of spaghetti!”) let’s just set those causal connections aside — go ‘Open Loop,’ as it were. How do we understand that personal evolution that we need to promote to reduce conflict?  And why should we care if our employees are enlightened?  Shouldn’t they just listen, and do their job?  Can’t have people meditating on the job, after all!

But really — why do you want enlightened employees?  What principles can we borrow from empathetic evolution to help us understand how higher levels of empathy can assist in the workplace?

To start, evolved minds will have a variety of temporal scales programmed into their neurons that they can operate under.  An enlightened person can more effectively sort the priorities of quarterly reports, yearly summaries, and whose turn it is to clean the coffee pots.  An example is in order — where you can see the consequences when folks DON’T have this.

In my Industrial Design Clinic (IDC), I have somewhere between 60-80 students a semester, all working on their final project for graduation.  There are some 10-15 projects/semester, all with a deliverable.  My age cohort is, not surprisingly, very uniform — most around 21-24, looking to graduate.  As I’ve said earlier, they’re transitioning out of complete externally defined relationships, into the land of independently generated relationships and their first real brush with high-stakes rational empathy.  They have a customer — usually, their very first in their profession!

That means that most of them are very egocentric.  There are only a couple of recognized time scales in their head — their own Survival v-Meme time scale (I wanna drink a beer tonight!), my imposed Authoritarian time scale (canonical design process) and of course, graduation.  My authority is in profound eclipse by this time.  In the back of their heads, they know that whatever they do, they’re likely to graduate.  It’s up to me and my system to stimulate higher-evolutionary behavior in order for them to complete their task.

So what do I have them do?  I have them draw up a schedule for work, multiple times during the semester.  Not surprisingly, the first couple rounds of the schedule are utter B.S.  They have been taught in other classes about Gantt charts and the like — and their charts are typically very linear (as one would expect from their empathetic development and relational sophistication) with broad, generic topics like ‘Research/Development/Design’.  Underneath task assignments are the personnel listing.  Mostly, these are ‘All’.

Which, as anyone who’s worked knows, means ‘None’.  Everyone’s responsible, and no one’s responsible.  All mid-term deliverables are vague, so nothing can get done.  Being a young Authoritarian means having poor executive function — someone else is supposed to tell you what to do.  They’ve had 16 years of education beating THAT lesson in their head.  Do what your betters tell you.

I go at the kids, full-tilt, of course.  The schedule must have multiple paths.  It must have measurable deliverables.  Pairing, as I’ve mentioned before, is big.  Multiple people must be assigned and justify their behavior across the group.

What happens, with poor temporal evolution?  In scheduling, there is a method called Critical Path Analysis, or Critical Path Method (CPM)  In this method, the schedule is laid out as a branching tree, re-converging at the end of the process when the deliverable is shipped.  One route through the network of tasks is the ‘Critical Path’ — the longest time through.  All the other paths have what is called ‘Slack’ — extra days/weeks that exist because those tasks are not on the Critical Path.

Inevitably, the majority of the student groups let all tasks not on the Critical Path slip until, instead of having one Critical Path, you have Critical Paths along ALL the project branches.  Now, if anything comes ups, the project is screwed on the delivery date.  The students do this because they have poor metacognitive awareness and an un-evolved sense of time.  Low responsibility, present because of low empathy, means that nothing will happen until the Survival v-Meme kicks in.  There’s a lot more to unpack here.

It’s in your business’ interest to have employees with a highly evolved sense of time.  It allows appropriate job scheduling and discrimination, for one.  The above is just one example.  You can’t get everyone to be a Zen master, but the more people you can push up the chain, likely, you’re better off.  There are others, of course — but this is a big one.

So how do you do it?  The best example I’ve come up with in explaining the various v-Meme transitions is the movie Groundhog Day, with Bill Murray. Groundhog Day, besides being entertaining, is a very interesting movie.  It’s been translated into (at my last check) over 35 languages.  It’s on a number of ‘best movies of all time’ lists, and I’ve found that I can travel far back into rural China and almost always, find someone who’s seen it.  This is pretty amazing for a movie that is ostensibly about a colloquial American holiday, and not a very famous one at that. But what the movie is about, of course, is the search for human enlightenment.  And that is a transcultural, universal theme.

The movie starts out with Bill Murray, as Phil Conners, a weatherman, stuck in a snowstorm in Punxsatawny, PA, the Groundhog Capital of the world, for the annual Groundhog Day celebration.  It’s all too low-level for Phil, and after he films his clip, he tries to get out of town.  Survival v-Meme all the way – he gets turned back in the snowstorm, as the freeway is closed.

Then the major plot device of the movie kicks in.  Stuck in a magical loop (Tribal/Magical v-Meme), with a totem animal — the groundhog — Phil is forced to repeat that same day over and over again.

The first part of the movie displays Phil in all his Authoritarian/Egocentric glory.  He stuffs his face with donuts.  Impervious to consequentiality, he steals single pieces of information from women to use to get them into bed the following day.  He indulges himself.  And none of it makes him happy.

Phil then moves into the Legalistic v-Meme part of the movie.  He attempts to break the rules of the system, mostly through trying to kill himself.  He tries to kill the groundhog.  Nothing works.

In the first half of the movie, what is interesting is that Phil has almost completely, an externally defined or exploitative relationship not just with others, but himself. He’s going to be the next NYC weatherman, and so on.  And then comes the admission — “I’m not really sure I even like myself.”

But how does Phil start the path toward independent relational generation?  Pause before reading the next paragraph and think.

Most people I’ve talked to will immediately say ‘he gets involved with the community,’ or something similar.  This is actually not true.  We often view community interaction as a way for evolutionary growth, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  But in order for Phil to first have an independent relationship with others, there’s an important person he has to have one with first.  Himself.

And how he does this is the key toward evolving your cohort in the 21-35 year old age group.  The answer awaits in the next blog post!

Steamboat Bend, Yampa River, Utah in Dinosaur National Monument

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“If you want epiphanies, you have to put them in the schedule.”  Phil Brick, Politics Professor, Whitman College, on his Semester in the West program

I’ve been short on solutions in the last three posts — namely, because there honestly aren’t any simple ones.  When you have two people in conflict, and the way they structure knowledge is fundamentally different, meta-structures are not easily reconciled — let alone fundamental beliefs and precepts.  Those that argue folks just need to sit down and talk it out?  Well, it’s not that it never works.  But often it’s not just a failure to communicate.  It’s a failure to truly connect.

One of the things that I have seen work in resolving conflict is the creation of opportunity by leadership for shared epiphanies between warring parties.  Note that this will NOT work with relational disruptors.  But for those involved in Healthy Evolutionary Conflict, the elevation in empathetic connection that can occur with shared experience should not be underestimated.

In my youth, I used to be a hard-core whitewater kayaker.  I originally moved out to the West because of my obsession with the sport.  Running hard whitewater was still in its infancy when I started (1979), and basically, you had to paddle with whoever was available who could paddle at that level.

When I moved to Pullman, WA, in 1988, I also became intensively involved with the environmental/old-growth protection movement.  I went on to write a book on the larger issues involving my home watershed — the Clearwater River in North-Central Idaho, called Wild to the Last:  Environmental Conflict in the Clearwater (WSU Press, 1998).

While working on the book, I had more than one logger who was my kayaking buddy.  I am still friends with these people now.  I am convinced that what bound us together was shared experience.  Loggers like being in the woods;  I like being in the woods.  Additionally, we would have to share a Survival v-Meme level interdependence.  If someone went for a swim in some of the rivers we paddled, without a strong cohort to rescue them, that person could drown.  Additionally, there were lots of opportunities to develop shared heuristics — sometimes we’d run particular rapids;  other times we’d have to find ways to carry around them.  The harder rivers were always team efforts.  A particular empathetic ladder practiced by one of my friends was the instilled practice of fetching each other a beer.  If someone asked you to get up and get them a cold one, you did.

At the same time, we were relentless in our taunting of each other if you went for a swim, and failed to roll your boat.  I asked one of the guys one time why we were so hard on each other — his response was simple.  “Dude — keeps you safe.”  You don’t want to be the butt of the next joke.   So you make your roll.

For bridging large gaps, there is nothing like shared, stressful experiences that bring out deep core values in all people.  One finds almost no healthy person on this planet that doesn’t understand the guest/host relationship, or the fact that most people care deeply for at least a few people.  But bringing out these connections requires making time for them.  If you have nothing in your organization except endless work and meetings, you shouldn’t expect anyone to care about anyone else.  Almost every workplace has formal relations and titles.  But independent relationships take time to develop.  And without these, there will be little trust or shared responsibility in an organization — especially when times get tough.

The starting quote at the top of this post was told to me by a friend and another professor, Phil Brick, who teaches at Whitman College.  Whitman is a small, elite school, filled with some of the smartest and self-aware kids I’ve ever gotten to teach.  Phil had launched a pioneering active learning program at Whitman, called Semester in the West, where students would travel around in a van to various sites of environmental conflict all the way from Washington to Arizona and New Mexico.  He had tagged me for explaining forest politics to his kids, on the ground in the Clearwater National Forest.

As a fellow professor and environmental activist, I asked him that evening to show me his schedule for the semester.  It was fall, and I was scheduled early on, and was curious what they would do as the light failed.  Battery-operated LED headlamps had recently come into vogue, so that was one question that was answered.  About 11 or so weeks into it, he had a week in Nevada labeled ‘Epiphany Week’.  I asked him about that.  “How can you expect students to have time to have any realizations if you don’t schedule them in?”

At that point, I had an epiphany.

The best solution for resolving conflict is avoiding it in the first place.  Some conflict is inevitable, but if you have chronic conflict in your organization, it means that leadership has set up a non-viable structure for getting the job done.  As the Star Trek blog post shows, you can have different v-Meme actors in any organization and have them form a functional, high-performance team if their roles are appropriate.  But organizations that do not put some priority on individual growth of their workforce are asking for trouble.  Because people will grow and evolve, regardless.

Since this blog is going to get turned into a book, there’s a little voice in the back of my head that says ‘Create things that are Internet listicles!’  But a better thing to tell you, the reader, is this:  what is the structure of the organization that is causing the conflict?  Have you looked at your scaffolding, and appropriately balanced authority, rules, and the ability to change rules?  Do you provide opportunities for data-driven relationships, or are you obsessed with titles?  If you create irrational environments, you should expect irrational people.  And irrational people get into fights.  If you need a bottom line motivation, fights cost money.  But hopefully, by this point in this whole blog, you should be motivated by more than that.  If you’re not, you’re likely not really needing higher synergies to get the job done.  Though I’d argue that even a lawn service company will benefit from structuring environments and roles to avoid conflict.  Happy employees figure out better ways to make happier customers.  One of the things I also do with my students is have them work through what is commonly known as the Five Whys, or some form of root cause analysis.  Having two warring parties write these kinds of things down separately, and then have them be empathetically reconciled, where both sides have to engage in a more rational empathy, can be useful.  If you practice knowledge structure identification yourself, you can also bring both parties along by serving as a bridge for larger consequentiality of action — the things that people often find are missing.

But there is no substitute for shared experience in empathy construction.  As well as epiphanies.  Make time for them — and the reflective time that is also required.