Marble Canyon, Grand Canyon, Arizona, March, 2009

My debating/collaborating/empathizing partner, Jake Leachman, is really knocking one out of the park today, so I thought I’d point folks toward his stuff.  It’s NOT trivial, and it sure helps if you have a physics/thermodynamics background.  But it’s a great first step toward stepping along a mathematically grounded, guiding principles path toward understanding human evolution.

Here’s the link.

What’s the backstory here to all this stuff?  Here’s the short version.  If you accept that this post is true — that at some level, the Master Equation of Culture + Structure = Behavior creates what one sees in the world today, then one of the big questions that comes up is “well, what makes structure and how does THAT work?”  My materials science colleagues work on this all the time for everything from steel to ceramics.  They make plots called phase diagrams that look like this.

Iron-carbon phase diagram, courtesy of Sebastian Brosen

What this particular plot tells you is what happens (behavior) to iron (structure) when you heat it and add some carbon (culture).  Dependent on the various conditions, the metal changes phase and becomes the stuff we use for all sorts of things, including low-carbon steel, cast iron, and such.

What about human societies?  We have some characterization of the different phases of humanity — that starting point is Spiral Dynamics.  Empathy characterizes the bond strength/information transfer and coherence between individual actors in a society.  So what happens when you cook a bunch of people with different cultural influences?  How do we reach those breakpoints where we move up the Spiral and evolve?  Can we make a phase diagram for humanity?  The diagram above is only two dimensions (carbon % and temperature.)  How many dimensions would you need to capture the actual behavior of a human community?

Asking these questions is important, as Jake points out.  Currently, psychological research has a repeatability in their various experiments of about 50%.  Understanding human behavior solely from the Legalistic v-Meme isn’t taking us where we need to go.  When I look at the engineering education research, I also find it discouraging.  No big questions get asked — and the small questions aren’t really worth answering.  Clearly we need a paradigm shift in how we approach understanding ourselves.

What does The Matrix really look like?  Jake takes a great first shot at laying down the thermodynamics of human change.

 

Field of Sunflowers, in the Burgenland, Austria

The link below is a stunning modestly long post regarding conversion to the Amish faith/way of life that is perhaps the best piece of evidence I’ve read about how Authoritarian Legalism limits empathetic connection.  The Amish, or Plain Folk, live in a highly prescriptive world that denounces modernity, to different levels.  The current perception in the modern zeitgeist is that group cultures must, by definition, be more empathetic.  This extremely accurate piece shows the real trade-offs that happen with low-empathetic group dynamics. Not surprisingly, some of it is not very pretty.

Can an Outsider Ever Truly Become Amish?

I do realize that this is a long read (it’s even listed as such!) but worth it for those attempting to understand how temporal, spatial and energetic scales are truly calibrated by levels of empathy and social structure.  The bottom line in this piece?  Don’t go to church, or break an edict — even those with lifelong attachments get thrown out of the church.  When structures limit empathetic development, the in-group/out-group dynamics are tremendous.

Further Watching:  The movie ‘Witness’ with Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis, about investigating a murder in Amish Country captures some of the conflicts and beauties in an extremely entertaining and watchable movie.  The movie won Academy Awards for Original Screenplay and Film Editing.  Highly entertaining, and believable.

Paper wasps — the Pantanal, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, 2006

Every now and again, folks send me stuff about empathy.  Such was the case with this piece below, a short animation published on the Atlantic ‘s website, and titled Against Empathy.  The video is put together by the animator, with content and narration by Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom.  It’s pretty short (less than 3 min.) and in it, Bloom equates empathy to selfish moralizing. In the course of the video, he knocks charitable giving, saying that empathy leads to people giving small amounts of money to lots of charity, which causes the various charities to lose money, instead of the ostensibly dispassionate, non-empathetic giver who is a more effective altruist.  Bloom goes on to say that charities don’t know what they’re doing in the context of fundraising (he knows, but not them) and that empathy is fundamentally impulsive and destroys consequential behavior.

There’s more — he also points to leaders psychopathically using empathy against us, and then says that having empathy starts wars, which end up in lots of people dying.  If we go to war against ISIS, he argues, it will be because of empathy and wanting to help the people in Syria.  But there will be many more victims than people save, and we essentially won’t care.

Oh boy.

I could spend a whole lot of time refuting point by point what Bloom says — but what’s more interesting is to dig beneath the surface and attempt to understand why he’s saying what he’s saying.  And that context is far more interesting than writing a long soliloquy on nuance in the context of Bloom’s argument.  At the same time, it’s important to spend just a little time with his various points so you don’t think I’m dodging the argument.  Here goes!

1.  Bloom defines empathy as the rush you get from instantaneously connecting on an issue or thing that prompts impulsive behavior on your part.  There is no duplex information flow in Bloom’s definition — it’s just one way, and it’s all about you.
2. Bloom is pretty clearly anti-agency for anyone but himself — at least in the context of his argument.  If you’re giving $5 to the Heifer Project, it’s not about helping the Heifer Project.  You’re an impulsive slave to instantaneous emotion (simplex again) and need to be told by your more rational betters how to give money.
3. Not even charitable organizations know what the right thing to do — they are running fundraising strategies that must lose them money.  A more logical authority needs to tell them how to really help their cause.  There’s only one reason for doing what they’re doing when soliciting small donations — that is increasing the size of their bankroll — and they’re doing it wrong.
4. Empathy causes war because it creates an in-group with people across the world who we ignorantly decide to save, and then we kill them through our good intentions.
5. Therefore, empathy is bad, and you need to disconnect from people around the world if you really want to be a moral person.

What do I have to say on the topical information above?

1.  Empathy is far more complex than a rush one gets in isolation.  It is all about connection, and doesn’t exist without another actor in the equation.  That’s not just my opinion — it’s all the other empathy researchers out there.  It is true that my empathy pyramid is my own representation of evolutionary empathy.  But it’s all based on stacking and arranging the research of others for a systemic and systematic perspective.  Bloom is being manipulative and conflating empathy with sympathy, and a defective, egocentric, potentially narcissistic sympathy at that.
2. Even in low level v-Meme systems, empathy is a function of personal agency.  Higher forms of empathy require more agency, which means more filtering/resistance/data processing when an Expert from the Outside tells you what to do.  We’ll get around to talking about why Bloom might be doing what he’s doing below.  He is the Expert from the Outside — a professor at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. If you’re status-based, why should you believe me over him?  Or believe anyone besides him?
3. There are many reasons that charities solicit small donations — chief among them for receiving large matching grants from foundations wanting those charities to expand their outreach and grow their donor pool. Some of it involves direct outreach and growing their member base that read their magazines and literature, which may come in handy in lobbying state governments in all their myriad forms.  There are literally thousands of reasons for NGOs to take loss leadership on one type of fundraising in exchange for social capital in another.  And Bloom brings no data showing that even his main point is even valid.  Even on the surface, his main point doesn’t hold up.  Organizations that lose money over time go out of business.  But he’s big on using his authority once again to get you to believe him, and deprive the NGOs of agency.  Time to remember W. Edwards Deming’s favorite statement — “In God we trust.  All others must bring data.”
4. Vanishingly few wars are started by enlarging in-group dynamics to include the people we are attacking.  Nation-states start wars because their leadership have effectively created the target nation as an out-group that deserves whatever it gets.  We attacked Iraq because our government declared that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Millions of people in the U.S. took to the streets to keep the Iraqi people inside the In-group, and NOT make war.  In the current situation with ISIS, attacks by Western powers are triggered by terrorist attacks, which create profound in-group/out-group dynamics that enable leaders to launch counter-attacks.  It is true that pleas for sympathy (not empathy) come from leaders of belligerents, but they are almost always ancillary to the real motive — a lack of empathetic connection to the population we are attacking.
5. A perversion of the Legalistic/Absolutistic v-Meme is the moralism that says empathy is bad.  At some level, Bloom constructs his argument around the idea that empathy is as he has defined it — an impulsive, egocentric squirt of go juice in the limbic system — instead of the broader accepted definition of empathy, with mirroring behavior, affective and cognitive empathy that is used in the psychological community, or my evolutionary model that links all these things together.  Yet he is still using this to say that ‘this is connection’ . And by arguing against it, he causes a person who may want to do the right thing to mistrust their feelings and perceptions.  What that causes is, of course, a loss of agency, and a willingness to accept both the opinion of an authority, and the control that comes along with that.  Don’t trust your own mind.  Let your betters do the thinking for you.  Like him.

What is more interesting about this piece is not that argumentation and refutation.  What is far more interesting (at least to me!) is how he would construct the argument, and why he would say it.  That, of course, has to come out of his own brain wiring and the social/relational structure he resides in.  Once we understand that, we can understand him — and why he would make the argument is he is making.  And then you can decide whether you want to believe him or not.

To start, it’s pretty clear that Bloom is speaking with the voice of the Authoritarian v-Meme.  He’s the psychology professor at Yale, he went to school at MIT, he’s written a bunch of books, and as such, he gets to create definitions out of thin air.  He’s ensconced deeply inside an Authority-based system — not just any system, but one recognizable around the world.  That creates powerful effects from the Principle of Reinforcement, regardless of the self-referential peril in all of it.

As far as creating coherence with his larger community of psychological professionals, that’s not his job.  At Yale, he’s supposed to be a thought leader. He’s deeply concerned about people connecting, because when people connect, that has the potential to diminish his authority.  As an Authoritarian, he’s not likely aware of this — it’s just what they do — but it comes out of deep automatic programming in his own brain.

And standing up and saying something like Empathy is Bad, and the Root of Our Problems in the world — well, that will get attention.  Getting attention will increase his status, and that will make him even more of an expert. It’s hard to believe that he hasn’t read any of the empathy literature — there’s a lot of it, and that likely makes his position deliberate.  But there’s no hay to be made by standing up and saying ‘Empathy is Good’ because, in general, this society, at this point in time, wouldn’t remark upon that as a unique opinion. That’s not going to get you on any talk show, or sell many books.

And while it’s true Bloom is taking advantage of the general public’s lack of specific knowledge about empathy, and using his authority to assert a different definition and follow on with ostensibly immoral acts, it doesn’t mean that the public’s beliefs are wrong.  What I’ve found giving talks to different audiences is that people’s understandings regarding empathy are incomplete.  When I organize my stuff and present it to them, it makes sense.  At some level it matches their experience — after all, it’s not their job to stare at a wall and think about this stuff, going over and over it to make sure the categorization is consistent.  That’s what I do.

What’s always fascinating, though, about an Authoritarian projection of any concept is what it tells you about a.) how that person views other people, and b.) the extent of their own limited subset of behaviors that they project on others in conveying an understanding of a social phenomenon.  This is where Bloom gets pretty scary.  The only reason Bloom can see for charitable giving is narcissism and self-pleasuring.  Altruistic behavior can only exist in the context of a lack of emotion and connection.  Forget real attachment — that doesn’t exist in the rabble.  That soldier that threw himself on the grenade didn’t do it because he loved his buddies and was profoundly empathetically connected to them through a series of traumatic experiences.  He did it because he thought it would feel good.

And one of the likely reasons that Bloom is advancing the thesis that connection is bad?  It makes people feel bad.  And when people feel bad, they become passive.  And passive people are far more easy to control.  That allows more of that Authoritarian v-Meme to dominate, regardless of the fact that Bloom himself won’t necessarily be the benefactor of that control.  That’s the thing about v-Memes — they want to propagate, and they have lots of agents out there doing the propagation.

One can also see how Bloom’s argument maximizes reliability — which is a key element of Authoritarianism in general.  If someone does something good, it’s because they got an instantaneous buzz off of it.  No need to get to know someone more deeply, or understand the longer history behind their thought process.  The passage of time doesn’t exist in Bloom’s projection of his world onto yours — so as the Authority, it doesn’t exist in yours either.  You have no agency, and therefore, no consequence.  It’s simplistic, right/wrong thinking — empathy decreases morality.  Being connected makes you more immoral in your actions.  And why?  Because he said so.

But it fails the basics of validity — is something an obvious, demonstrable outcome of whatever theory one has.  Authoritarians like Bloom almost always have no problem with this, as they believe they control the truth inside their own head.  But the reality of empathy, which this entire blog is devoted to, is far more complex.  Going full Zen dualism on you, empathy, as the primary factor in information coherence, can lead to good or bad consequences.  And those are dependent on observed time and spatial scales, which, as has been discussed, empathy manifests developmentally.  Getting to the objective truth of any action, as philosopher Ken Wilber has discussed, is profoundly difficult.  It’s not just categorizing a feel-good moment.  But that level of complexity, with its mix of independent agency and external forcing, is apparently outside Bloom’s ability for comprehension, at least with regards to empathy.

One of my favorite stories for illustrating exactly the larger dynamic of why empathy is threatening to Authorities is the story of Boko Haram’s kidnapping of the 276 schoolgirls in Nigeria.  I’ve discussed this earlier here, but it’s illustrative, and worth a re-tell.  Most people are familiar with the story, but the short version is this:  Boko Haram, a radical, tribal Islamic militant organization operating in northern Nigeria, kidnapped 276 schoolgirls with the intent of distributing them to their fighters as wives.  The world found out about it, and it dominated the news cycle for months.  The girls were never released, but the event spurred international engagement in resolving Nigeria’s situation that continues to this day.

How does empathetic development matter in the case of Boko Haram?  100 years ago, a group like theirs might kidnap girls and no one anywhere in the world would know.  Fast forward fifty years, and now a cultural anthropologist — an authority — might be on hand to tell us that such kidnappings were routine, though this one might be anomalous in its size.  Such an expert would also likely tell us that this was a manifestation of the culture in the area, and we would be engaging in cultural imperialism if we became outraged.  In today’s world, though, with the Internet and mass connection, a large and varied data stream is being sent into every household regarding the incident — from Facebook and Twitter to the more traditional news organizations.  Even Michelle Obama posted a photo and hashtag #bringbackourgirls on her Twitter account.  No longer would the academic authority’s sole opinion hold up — that somehow this was acceptable as a cultural/externally defined manifestation of behavior.  The global public had decided it was wrong.

That doesn’t mean the collective intelligence is always long-term moral, and certainly there is room for discussion.  But one thing that is abundantly clear — collective intelligence, empathetically connected, is a profound threat to the Authoritarian v-Meme.  So should it be any surprise that one of the last bastions of perceived international Authority — the faculty at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world — might send forth an emissary to wound the empathetic development beast that they perceive is threatening their existence?

If anything, Bloom’s thesis and lack of integrative ability should be one more wake-up call to the academy.  Regardless if Bloom publishes his book or not, the emergent trends are all on the side of more empathetic connection.  And understanding this, in my opinion, with its shades of gray, would be a much better use of a developed mind.

 

 

 

 

Katoomba Overlook, Blue Mountains, Australia

Slate, an online magazine with some modest video features, ran this piece today, on the difference between male and female brains.

http://www.slate.com/articles/video/video/2016/03/the_difference_between_male_and_female_brains_video.html

Readers of this blog will likely not be surprised to hear the punchline of the video — the most recent research on brains indicate that there are no significant, documentable differences between male and female brains.  The video is still worth a watch (it’s short) because, if anything, in the 3 odd minutes it lays out the evolution of the social structures that generated the knowledge that originally told us the opposite — that there were categorical differences between male and female processors.  Hierarchies of experts set up to study the issue (like university faculties) originally pronounced huge differences.  But as finer and finer granulation happened — queer, gay, trans, etc., couple with trauma, experience and so forth — we ended up, not surprisingly, one step away from the Communitarian v-Meme.  Interestingly enough, it’s all there in that video.  They actually talk about those things.

What does that mean?  What I’ve already said.  That we are a sum of a spectrum of biology, and a spectrum of experiences.  Legalistic v-Meme categorizers are gonna still categorize — people in these types of social structures are going to come up with increasingly sophisticated categorization schemes.  But what does it mean when your categories are down to everyone as their own little snowflake?

There’s a purpose in all this study — and it’s the scaffolding principles we’ve talked about.  If you’ve ever wondered what was the point of the academic focus on such areas as Queer Studies, here it is.  That fine-scaling is actually an important part of the trajectory of how time-dependent collective intelligence, organized into legalistic hierarchies, comes to the point of definitively concluding that there are no differences.  Synergistic, guiding-principle thinking can, and does emerge, once the granulation gets to the level that the researchers decide that they can reliably say there are no differences.  That’s the point of this.

Starting from the other end of the empathetic evolutionary scale — positing guiding principles through reason and philosophy, as we do on this blog — is inherently more perilous in the arena of public opinion.  I’ve said it before on this blog — the brain, like the hand, is an evolutionary adaptation of the circumstances of the prehistoric ur-human, up to when we moved out of the Survival v-Meme.  Then it became, in connected aggregate, a very different kind of node in a network.  And though we’re stuck with the hardware, we continue to evolve the connected empathetic software, which is far more complex than most people are willing to give credit to.  Just like the Panda’s Thumb, which evolved so that the panda could eat bamboo.  But once the panda got the thumb, it’s highly likely that they figured out other things to do with it.  It’s no different with brains.  Once we got past the day-to-day survival aspects, we had to find something else to do.  And evolving as mesoscale predators, down there in the Survival v-Meme, we already had it in the cards to collaborate.

I know that some people reading this are still going to cling to the ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus’ stereotypes.  But personally, I’m hopeful.  Recognizing core neural capacity of all sentient beings is going to give our entire civilization greater metacognitive stretch.  More diversity means more solutions, in a bigger solution space, available for the big problems.  Now more than ever that’s critical. Dismantling gender stereotypes doesn’t give us fewer bins — it actually gives us more.  You are unique because you actually are unique.  That’s pretty cool.

On a lighter note –if  there’s a real aspirational hero in the mix, it’s gotta be Aquaman, who used to be able to telepathically communicate with all sea creatures.  Yeah, he was a white dude with some serious white privilege, being a descendant of a former queen of Atlantis.  But if we could decide that there really was only sentience and connection, we’d quickly move past the stage of accepting that members of our own species were equals.  And then we finally might make some progress in talking to dolphins — and hammerhead sharks!

Further Reading — bizarrely, this article in the Guardian makes exactly the point I just referenced regarding the value of things like Queer Theory and how reliability (which some might feel is beating a dead horse) actually matters in the arc of society.  I just got this after finishing editing the above post!  

 

Dancing with a Clown, on the Zocalo, Mexico City

One of the challenging and frustrating things is life is when you have a friend who can’t figure out how to fix their life all the while they’re participating in self-destructive behaviors that keep them there.  I know that I’ve frustrated my own friends in this fashion — so I hope this gives them a chuckle as well.  Bottom line?  Establish an appropriate level of emotional empathy.  Then play the Authoritarian v-Meme card.  If that doesn’t work, go Full Survival Mode!  Bob Newhart at his best…

 

Takeaway Worth Contemplating — Why does this skit work?  Brilliant acting, as well as resonant temporal and spatial representation of the various v-Memes.  Best portrayal of an shortened Authoritarian time scale that you’re likely to get.  🙂

Pulled off the Interwebs — Rey and Leia’s hug at the end of The Force Awakens

OK — let’s have a little fun in attempting to use v-Meme theory to analyze a mini-tempest-in-a-teapot regarding J.J. Abrams reflective knowledge-of-self in plot decisions in The Force Awakens.  Regular readers of this blog might remember this post where we discuss the relative low level of empathetic evolution in the whole Star Wars series (especially this episode) and how that low level might make the whole series fun to watch, but not particularly transformative.  And unfortunately telling about the state of our own society today.

But back to our Master Class.  At the end of the latest movie, when Chewbacca and Rey were stepping off the Millennium Falcon, Leia, instead of hugging her old friend and fellow warrior Chewbacca, gives Rey a hug first.  Here’s a link that discusses this.

In this interview, J.J. Abrams, the film’s director claims the following:

“That was probably one of the mistakes I made in that. My thinking at the time was that Chewbacca, despite the pain he was feeling, was focused on trying to save Finn and getting him taken care of. So I tried to have Chewbacca go off with him. And [meanwhile to] focus on Rey, and then have Rey find Leia and Leia find Rey. The idea being that both of them being strong with the Force and never having met, would know about each other — that Leia would have been told about her beyond what we saw onscreen and Rey of course would have learned about Leia. And that reunion would be a meeting and a reunion all in one, and a sort of commiseration of their mutual loss.”

OK, folks — I’m calling v-Meme Bullpuckey.  What we’re really seeing is a continuation of the low level v-Memes that haunt the entire flick (and the Star Wars saga in general) and was absolutely consistent with the general theme.  George Lucas declared back in Episode 1 that all this stuff was biologically inherited (though potentially trans-species) and set up all sorts of genetic destiny in the series.  The whole lot is predicated around the Magical Authoritarianism of the Force, with some nod to Authoritarian Legalism with the whole Jedi schtick.  It’s not a meritocracy — it’s a biological caste system, that attempts to be trans-species through the Good Old Midichlorian Club.  And that joins people far more in the movies than the power of Independently Generated Trust-Based Relationships and larger, more evolved empathy.

So it’s no surprise to all of us empathetic evolutionary warriors that Abrams would have Leia hug Rey — biological connection uber alles, be that White Woman <-> White Woman or Midichlorian Level (Abrams declares the latter.) We already know that Chewy, super-cool Sasquatch that he is, is not one of the Biologically Chosen — no matter how many medals he has for Galactic Heroism.  In-group/Out-group dynamics much?  How could it be different?  There’s also likely some lacking of trans-species empathy as well — no speculative higher Galactic Holistic resonances.  They can’t even exist in the writers’ minds.  But we don’t have to go down that classification road.  Abrams’ own words supports my first hypothesis.

Now here’s an independently generated, trust-based, data-driven relationship I can get get behind… Disney press photo

Of course, some might disagree.  But the striking thing is how our minds (in this case, Abrams’ mind) generate consistent v-Meme interpretation.  Especially when we’re not aware of it.

Just a quick note — Abrams, in his comments, does reveal that he’s thought a lot about this — and at age 49, he’s right on time in our society/culture with budding, larger self-awareness.  Another small testament to the power of evolutionary empathy and all our ability to grow.  That means the next movie might actually be profound.  We’ll see.  The baggage of the series is pretty heavy down in the lower v-Memes.  But one can hope.  And since we’re already committed to Magical Thinking, maybe if we all cross our fingers!  😉

Student/Prototyping Instructor (PI) and Craig Forest, Associate Professor, School of ME, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, in the woodshop 

One of the questions that’s been getting batted around a lot is ‘how do we recruit technical Millennials, and once they’re recruited, how do we keep them?’  The Millennial Generation is generally assumed to have been born between the late ’80s and the early ’00s.  Readers of this blog will hopefully not be surprised to hear me be a bit skeptical toward the idea of a Millennial Generation.  They are sentient, evolutionary actors like all other humans in history, and subject to the same dynamics as all others.  And, of course, that would be true.

At the same time, the world of culture and externalities does produce different v-Meme spectra as we evolve as societies.  It may not be particularly useful to say things like ‘Millennials are just selfish’ — that’s branding a particular characteristic that more than likely reflects the writer’s own self-projection.  And the studies were likely done when the Millennials were mostly teenagers.  What teenagers aren’t self-centered?  Some of the conclusions are more in line with where people are age-wise developmentally than any deep insight.

But it is useful to consider how societies evolve empathetically in aggregate.  We don’t have the same v-Meme set as Genghis Khan’s armies, and we can’t go back without serious psychopathic devolution.  Subject of a future post — similar to expert knowledge, societies as a whole down convert more complex empathetic behavior into the culture and expected automatic/limbic thought processes.  And then there’s the whole issue of epigenetic transfer as well — which has ‘hot button issue’ written all over it.  But I digress.

The point of all of this is that Millennials can indeed be a valid label, if one considers it from a v-Meme spectra perspective.  What that means is that the level of activation of the six basic v-Memes — from Survival to Communitarian — can vary from past generations (Boomers, Generation X, and such.)  Older keepers of the keys for organizations-in-place can start the process of adapting work processes and environments to accommodate the different evolved empathetic mindsets of those that follow.

Don’t think that this means throwing out all past organizational knowledge.  In the case of large Legalistic/Performance v-Meme organizations like Boeing, there will always be a need for Reliability in design, and the appropriate scaffolding that will enable this.  The need for extensive certification processes, as well as back-and-forth between design engineers, manufacturing engineers and the FAA isn’t going to go away if we don’t want airliners to fall out of the sky. But the expansion of communication, sharing of information, and speed-up of the innovation cycle has the potential for much more revolutionary approaches to flight.

Ploughing throw all the Millennial research, for me, is pretty dull.  First off, it’s all over the map.  Millennials are alternately more selfish and narcissistic, or more community-oriented and social-change conscious.  It depends on who you ask.

It’s time for a different hypothesis — one v-Meme-centered.  Let’s assume that Millennials are part of a pattern of social/relational empathetic evolution, as all stable generations before them have been.  We can determine how this might be the case by looking at the balance of their externally defined relationships that matter, as compared to their independently generated relationships. Here, the data is easy to find and plentiful.  Add in their communication patterns — duplex vs. simplex — and we can hypothesize how their brains might actually work.  Millennials are most likely to talk to their parents via cell phone at least 1.5 times/day.  They own computers and all different types of tech.  They text message constantly.  They get their empathetic needs met differently, with less actual presence and more telepresence, like social media/Instagram/Facebook.  The whole of their communication space is duplex, with very little one-way transmission.  I see this in my own teenagers.  Mark Prensky coined the term digital native to describe them.  They are also more open to change than previous generations — not surprising, since many of their conceptualizations are data-driven.  And money matters less.

What that means, not surprisingly, is that they are less status-conscious.  With the ability to reach out to others in diverse communities of interest, there aren’t any single icons of status, because that depends on your own personal preference.  Not surprisingly, with diffuse networks, driven by specific interests, Authoritarian and Legalistic v-Memes are in decline, while Performance/Goal-Oriented v-Memes and Communitarian data processing are ascendant. Millennials are more connected informationally with each other, making them better at rational empathy, even if, with less face-to-face contact, their emotional empathetic skills are less developed.  The question that drops out of this for employers is how to make the Real World at least as interesting topically, and more enriching emotionally as their own, created virtual one.

One answer to this question can be found in a creation of my good friend, Professor Craig Forest at Georgia Tech.  Called the Invention Studio, it is a leader in the Makerspace movement, which in the academy is an attempt to shift students to more studio-based learning.  Located organizationally under the George Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering — one of the largest mechanical engineering departments in the world numerically — the Invention Studio was founded in 2009.  “I gave the key to the first and only room to 10 students who had volunteered because they already knew how to use the machine shop, and their volunteering guaranteed further access for their senior design process.  But what happened instead was they began to care about it as their own and recruited new users.  They began to hang out there on the couches and it became a place they called home.”

Here’s a video about the Invention Studio that’s worth the two minutes to orient yourself.

Not surprisingly, the video is focused on the capabilities and projects emerging from the Invention Studio — a direct manifestation of the Performance/Goal-Oriented v-Meme the students are growing into, out of the Legalistic Authoritarianism of university culture, which is just as strong at Georgia Tech as it is in any other institution — albeit an extremely well-funded one.  Social/relational structure is still, at some level, destiny.  The Invention Studio fills in what’s missing in the social environment, creating a testbed for evolving students’ empathetic development.

I met Craig at the 2014 Capstone Design Conference when he approached me after a workshop I was giving on managing relational dynamics.  We struck up a friendship that day.  As a result, I had the pleasure of visiting Craig’s rapidly expanding and vibrant operation just last week.  It is an energetic, friendly and positive environment, and a true empathetic growth accelerator for all the students.  Craig implicitly started it with the principles of Servant Leadership 2.0 in mind, with that small group of students.  In our conversations, he pointed out another student leader, Chris Quintero, who embodied the same Servant Leadership 2.0 skills.  “Chris could communicate the values of the new club and their mission and also get down to the details realizing the need for, and then going out and finding and buying t-shirts, power tools or pizza – whatever was needed.  He provided a single contact for me – he requested the first Makerbot.  So all I had to do was make it rain.”

From a physical infrastructure viewpoint, the Invention Studio is well-equipped.  For 3-D printing alone (only one part of a series of dedicated rooms) there are 30 consumer-grade printers, and 10 professional printers that run an average of 20 hrs./day.  Heavy use dictates that they are constantly being rebuilt by student volunteers.  The Studio itself is run by approximately 80 Prototyping Instructors (PIs), servicing about 1000-2000 students/month with woodworking, 3D printing, metalworking, electrical circuit construction and other modes.  Students work and participate in the Invention Studio for free.  Rapid prototyping is free.  Materials are paid for by a tech fee and revenues from Capstone Design.  But students don’t mindlessly exploit the resources, nor waste.  Their system is self-monitoring and self-regulating, through the efforts of the PIs.  There’s all the details here if you need them.  But those are surface-level.

Monitoring the bank of 3D printers

What’s more fascinating in the context of this blog is to observe the social evolution of the space.  Started by a Servant Leader 2.0 (Craig) and fractalized down to the student level (Chris), the origination culture of the space was established high up on the Spiral, with strong Guiding Principles with Bodhisattva leanings.  Both individuals were in it to serve and learn.  Craig made the comment that the most important part of the Invention Studio is the couches, which are really out in an alcove attached to the main hall, where students talk, eat, and sleep.  Openness is written into the v-MemeNA.  If the PIs see someone shrinking back, looking confused, they make it a point to help that person.  And though original recruitment of PIs was founded on potentially selfish interest — access to the tools was primary — the community rapidly evolved around shared interest and competent.  A fantastic example of an empathetic ladder.

One of the more fascinating aspects from my observation was the extremely high levels of social skills among the students I talked to.  Ranging from full-on Geek to more average expectations, the communication style of all the young people was direct, empathetic and friendly.  For a profession known for having more than its fair share of folks on the Asperger’s Scale, the Invention Studio is a fantastic accelerator and integrator for young people that normally would have a tough time connecting in the more rigid, status-conscious world of fraternities and sororities.

As the Invention Studio has grown, the need for structured leadership has also grown.  This has been requested by the students — a profound sign of emergence.  At what I have found to be natural breakpoints — approximately 80 PIs — the PIs themselves self-organized to elect a servant leader president.  One of the topics Craig and I discussed was the need to make explicit the Guiding Principles that are woven through the fabric of the organization, to better insure that the service principles are not lost to necessary algorithmic rule scaffolding.  Maintaining an environment based on larger shared heuristics can be challenging, because there will be some best practices that are discovered, and those will create natural social pressures for more algorithmic thinking. I’m confident that Craig and his students will navigate these waters successfully.  We discussed making formal and informal relationship maps, posting these on the walls so students could become explicitly aware of both the declared structure of the organization, as well as acceptable information pathways that have already been created by students.  I have confidence that these too, will become naturally emergent as needs arise.

What’s can we learn from the Invention Studio as far as keeping Millennials engaged and involved?  A big part of it is filling in the need for Millennials to grow in emotional empathy while being engaged with some level of autonomy with others.  Meeting the Vice-President of Operations who just flew in from the coast isn’t going to provide much motivation to them.  Title-based leadership without competency just isn’t going to work with the majority.  One of the key takeaways is how Craig uses his Millennials to manage and suggest new tech, while operating underneath a broader social umbrella.  This is a technique I use as well in the Industrial Design Clinic.  Students are much more likely to be tuned into new technology, so when they suggest stuff, if we can afford it, we buy it.  That way, individuals can feel directly valued for their unique skills, while working in an evolved social environment that inherently builds social competencies they may not have been exposed to.

Part of it also means management has to change.  Receptivity to new ways of working that are familiar to Millennials, but not so much to older employees, such as more complex on-line environments, is going to be important.  In the Invention Studio, students can queue 3-D printing jobs from across the university.  There’s no requirement to show up and drop the cards in the card reader.  And social spaces need to be friendly and accessible.  Our organizations have to continue to evolve — because through that process of v-Meme downconversion, it’s just expected that we’re going to start at a higher level.

It’s really not that hard.  And as I continue exploring this space, I’ll post.

 

 

 

Up on the mainsail yard, almost out to the yardarm.  Cap’n Bob’s immortal words yelled at this moment — ‘ya won’t fall off if ya don’t let go…’  in the Whitsunday Islands, Australia, on the Coral Trekker.

On this blog, we’ve looked at the evolution of design thinking — from Authoritarian v-Meme (I’m the brilliant genius and folks should do what I say!) to Communitarian v-Meme design.  We’ve examined Algorithmic Design, and moved through to Heuristic Design, or the standard gated design process most practitioners are familiar with. All map to the various v-Meme levels in Spiral Dynamics, and different stages of empathetic development.  So what’s the master pattern here?  Since all designs must originate from the knowledge of the designers, there is an implicit mapping back to the thought processes characterizing each of the Spiral levels, in the I- and We v-Meme pattern — as well as the social/relational structures of the organizations that we function within.

But before we dive headlong into another open-ended Theory of Everything for Design, let’s go one step further and unpack a paradigm developed by Daniel Kahneman, of Thinking Fast and Slow fame, and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Kahneman called impulsive, fast thinking ‘System 1’ thinking, and logical, slow thinking by the individual as ‘System 2’ thinking.  These thinking modes are constrained to the individual — and it’s not surprising that Kahneman would stick down at that level.  While his book is fascinating and a major contribution, it’s also pretty clear that the demands of academia are centered around reliability.  And he’s an academic, in a fragmented social structure centered around the individual.  The number of experiments proving the same concept, and centered on individuals in the book is a powerful reflection of the Legalistic/Absolutistic thinking required by the current university system.  You walk away absolutely thinking he’s right — which is the point!  Here’s a nice graphic illustrating System 1 thinking.

When you cross the street, you look both ways.  Even if it’s a One-Way Street.

How about System 2?  What could be better than allusion to Mr. Spock:

There are always those logical procedures that undergird the process of the logical mind.

And it’s a great start.  So, if there’s System 1 thinking, and System 2 thinking, there has to be System 3 thinking.  Right?  Let’s define System 3 thinking as the first collective thinking mode, requiring the combined processing that empathy fundamentally demands, between Designer/s and Customers.

Successful System 3 communication will embody the initial rational place-taking between the responsible designer and his/her customers.  Performance-based thinking, built with customer input is the minimum required for a successful design.

What about System 4 thinking?  I like to conceive of System 4 thinking along the lines of a high-performance team, with coordinated practices, plays and strategies that also embody the nested nature of all our previous work — System 4 will also include Systems 1, 2 and 3 scaffolding. And that principle will hold as we move on up.

Egalitarian, rational, data-driven exchange, coupled with respectful lessons from everyone’s past experience will characterize System 4.

System 5 thinking is the first of the Spiral self-aware Tier 2 modes.  Now, there is a requirement for the designer to be self-aware of their biases, and reflective on how their strengths, weaknesses and past experiences play into the role of design.  Here’s a graphic that shows this concept:

Up from System 5, now my own enlightenment and insight becomes less clear. System 6 thinking may take many different modes.  An example might be a globally networked teams headed by a self-aware designer, or more likely, a group of designers.  Remember back to the posts on Servant Leadership 2.0?  Now the need becomes apparent.

But on a local level, I like the metaphor of a very tight group of designers as musicians, riffing off each other’s immediate and long-term patterns.  Jazz band might be a good term.  Or we could use the Beatles as a metaphor for a group growing, changing, and collaborating in many different modes over time.

(For those interested in reading about the empathetic dynamics of the Beatles, I highly recommend the recent book by Josh Schenk, called  Powers of Two, also about innovation and creativity!)

Above System 6?  Enlightenment-wise, I’m fading fast.  If it follows the pattern of Spiral Dynamics, System 7 needs to be an I-mode.  Ken Wilber has explored the idea of what it means in the modern age to be a Bodhisattva, the Mahayana Buddhist term for an enlightened being that has stayed behind from entering Nirvana to help others do so.  This corresponds to the Coral I-mode v-Meme in SD –a designer that has sublimated their desires and needs to understanding completely  both the short-term and long-term needs of his/her customer and helping them along their path.

Hualin Temple, built to commemorate Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, in Guangzhou, China

Once we get up in these rarified spaces, I’m gasping for my own air of insight.  But the pattern is clear.  We can think about continual empathetic evolution.  But as with all paths to larger awareness and enlightenment, we have to do the work.  And just because I’m only able to get to System 7 doesn’t mean that there’s not more on top.  The process will always be open-ended.

Further Reading:  I wrote a paper on this concept, called “Understanding Engineering Relational and Knowledge Structures for Facilitation of Collaboration and Global Development,” for the American Society of Mechanical Engineering’s 2014 Annual Meeting, called IMECE.  It’s a nice compact explanation, with empathetic evolution and SD thrown in.  

 

 

 

Rogers and Bill, Granite Rapid, Grand Canyon, 2009 — still rowing, Rogers is in his early 70s.

In this previous post, we’ve talked about the choices between sophistication and evolution in the context of organizational change.  There are always exceptions, but there’s also no question that sophistication is easier.  Modifying techniques and fractalizing on smaller scales the v-Meme that an organization is already in doesn’t require personal growth and empathetic development.  More often than not, it’s just better time management and segmentation.

But there are limits in this approach.  You can only fragment time (or space) down so far, or increase the energetics (read that as money/resources) in an organization before diminishing returns set in.

In order to understand this idea, an example is helpful.  Twenty years ago, there used to exist a clerical class dedicated to supporting business and engineering professionals.  Then Microsoft Excel and Word came on strong, and an entire cohort of jobs were systematically eliminated.  Job responsibilities were shifted to the group of professionals that a priori had counted on secretarial support to do things like fill in travel reimbursement forms, manage simple budgets, do typing and such.  Now, the expectation became that all documents would be typed, edited, etc. by the professionals themselves.  Though leaves were pruned off the hierarchical tree, the fundamental organizational structure did not change.  Financial performance might have improved — there were certainly less people to pay.  But the number of work hours in the last twenty years has also steadily increased, as the aggregation process accelerated.  I haven’t seen a study on this, but I’m sure also that the error rate for all these more clerical tasks has gone up.  There was implicit systemic knowledge in all those people’s heads.  And now those folks aren’t here any more.

But what does empathetic evolution really look like?  A great example can be taken from design practice — namely from the evolved design process of one of the leaders in design thinking: IDEO.  Founded in 1991 as a commercial concern, IDEO established an open platform in 2011 dedicated to solving problems in developing countries called OpenIDEO.  OpenIDEO bills itself as a “global community working together to design solutions for the world’s biggest challenges.” That’s a tall order.  The way they function comes through in understanding the implicit structure of OpenIDEO.  The main principle is creating a software platform for partnering between organizations that are local and on-the-ground in the communities of interest, and professionals or students working on the problem, thus bringing community-based organizational efforts between the two cohorts.

OpenIDEO initiates activities through issuing Challenges, defined from their web page as:

“usually a three to five month collaborative process that focuses our attention on a specific issue and creates a space for community members to contribute, refine and prototype solutions.”

Challenges are then part of larger Programs, defined as:

“long-term partnerships where we tackle a specific issue area—like climate change or international development—by launching multiple challenges, events and other activities that lead to the creation of far-reaching, innovative solutions.”

Implicit in the language of both of these statements is the idea of partners and collaborations, and deliberate empathetic statements about community members bringing ideas and processes to the table.  This maps well to the idea of a truly Communitarian v-Meme design process, where lots of different people, with lots of different ideas on how to accomplish things, are going to be included in coming to consensus and a final solution.

OpenIDEO offers two dominant modes for connection between team members.  Once you subscribe to participate in a challenge, you can assemble your own team through self-generation once an idea you have is posted.  Agency is enormous — once you’ve subscribed to trying to do something, you can actively recruit individuals to help you who are also interested in the same problem.  An integrated software platform allows individuals to select in or out through electronic communication channels on projects of interest.

Additionally, OpenIDEO utilizes the MeetUp concept so that individuals collocated in a given community can see each other in person and establish empathetic social relationships.  Individual cities have volunteer coordinators that let interested external parties know times and places where OpenIDEO aficionados can gather.  All this is available on the first-level web page, so there is no a priori screening of people looking for social contact.

OpenIDEO also posts what I call its Origination Culture on its webpage.  Listed are Guiding Principles, as well as lower-level scaffolding under the heading Methods and Actions.  The Guiding Principles are:

1. Lead with Empathy
2. Together is Better
3. Learn by Doing
4. Make it Happen

Lead with Empathy, in the case of IDEO, is embodied by the idea that research by an individual on a problem or audience can lead to more profound place-taking exchanges.  This is a solid empathetic ladder for much of the audience that would connect to OpenIDEO, as it assumes that they start from a place of egocentricity.  Together is Better works with standard empathetic engagement tools of post sharing, MeetUps, and comments to build understanding.  Learn by Doing is a very standard ‘build and test’ Performance-based behavior, with feedback and sharing being required.  Finally, Make it Happen involves support for fundraising.

One of the nicer features of the OpenIDEO founders’ insights is that they have recognized the need for both v-Meme and technical scaffolding of participants in the design process.  Good scaffolding produces convergent heuristics at the Communitarian level, and creates a better potential for executable solutions that incorporate more insight from more people.  The toolkits available range from brainstorming,  conducting a successful customer interview, visualization, to a user experience map tool.  Feedback from users is scaffolded out at the algorithmic level, with everything from standard test protocols to suggestions on how to manage emotions.

What might be the next level of evolution for OpenIDEO?  Empathetic development and Spiral Dynamics point the way.  The OpenIDEO community is already working on global connection through its various challenges and initiatives.  That’s great — but it jumps over some of the personal development work that might lead to more successes.  A self-reflection and differentiation course for the more involved might yield great benefits in probabilities of successful ideation.  In the next post, we’ll discuss an evolutionary path for designers that could directly be applied to the overarching design theoretical approach of OpenIDEO.

Takeaways:  While I’m not sure I’d recommend an open-source approach for designing the next rocket engine in a time-constrained environment, there is much to like about an approach that has in its v-Meme-NA a process for a true Communitarian v-Meme-based process for folding multiple heuristics together.  OpenIDEO is used mostly on problems in the developing world, including clever methods for water purification, improvement of agriculture and such.  It offers a solid approach for solving community-based problems that require only a certain amount of refined tech, but lots of target community participation in actually executing the solutions.

 

 

 

Cycling along the Neusiedlersee, in the Burgenland, Austria 

One of the topics often thrown around when talking about creativity is the idea of chaos leading to diversity of thought.  So much that a fair amount of people have suggested that nonlinear dynamics that create chaos are directly applicable to social dynamics.  As someone who’s got the bona-fides — I did my Ph.D. research on characterizing chaotic motion, sometimes it seems like it’s verbiage that might have some tie to chaos theory.  And to be fair, people use the term ‘chaos’ in different ways — mostly to distinguish from truly random behavior.  This is a summative article from a blog post on Scientific American that walks through some of the latest thinking.

But it turns out the the allusions are right — and the answer in how to understand how this is true is, not surprisingly, tied to empathy.  But we’ll have to discuss a little background in the math-world-without-math.

In understanding system dynamics, there are two kinds of systems.  We’ll talk about them below.

Linear Systems

Linear systems work in a way we can easily predict.  The basics are this:  You put an input into a linear system.  The output that’s hooked to the input responds to the input a little bit — actually a proportional amount, in a predictable way.

Here’s an example.  Consider the temperature dial on one of your stove burners.  You give the dial a bit of a twist, from ‘1’ to ‘2’.  The stove top gets PROPORTIONALLY hotter.  It may take a little time for the burner to heat up, but once it does, you can guess pretty easily how much hotter it’s gotten — or how much more quickly your food is going to cook.

And that’s it — linear systems can be completely characterized by two things — what’s called a gain — which is proportional constant between the input (in this case, the stove dial) and the output (the burner temperature) and the phase lag, which is what systems folks call the amount of time for the output to roughly follow the input.  Very predictable.  If you wiggle the dial around, with some appropriate lag, the system will follow the wiggles.

It turns out that linear systems behavior also corresponds to the bottom two levels of the empathy pyramid.  Mirroring behavior can be mapped to a gain of 1 (the mimicking action directly maps — think ‘I yawn, you yawn’) with a phase lag (a person needs to see someone yawning, and it takes about a second — the phase lag — but then they yawn.)

Emotional empathy is a little more complicated, but it still falls into what systems theorists would call a linear behavior.  Imagine you hear an infant crying — maybe it’s your kid.  Hopefully, you pick the baby up and start to soothe it.  As long as the Big Three are taken care of (food, sleep, and poop) the baby will stop crying after a couple of minutes.  Sobs turn into sniffles, and sniffles usually turn into sleep.  Any parent worth their salt know that if it doesn’t stop, something else is wrong.

What’s going on with this system is what a systems theorist would call exponential decay.  The baby is crying, you interact, and after a certain amount of time, the response to the stimulus (crying, soothing) asymptotically approaches zero (the baby stops crying).  This is also the hallmark of what a systems theorist would call a First Order Linear System.  Believe it or not, lots of phenomena in the world fit into the category of a first order linear system.  Water draining out of a tub is one.  Heating up a room is another.  And emotional empathy is a third.

But now things start to become more complicated and unpredictable.

Nonlinear Systems

Nonlinear systems are the larger class of systems that basically encompass all phenomena we deal with in the world.  Now hang with me here.  Linear systems, just like those matryoshka dolls, are really just a subset of nonlinear systems.  They approximate the behavior of a system for a given range.

Let’s go back to our stove example.  We go to the burner control, and turn up the knob to 1.  The burner gets hotter.  Same for 2, 3, and on up to 10.  Each time we turn the knob up a bit, we get a calibrated, proportional response to the input.  But what happens when we get to 10?  The knob won’t turn any further.  And even if it could, the burner might be limited by a circuit in the stove. It could only get so hot. No longer would we see the predictable, proportional response that we are expecting.

Instead, we would see what we would call nonlinear behavior.  I’m going to put a list of really simple things you’d see around your home, and the term systems theorists might use to describe them.

1.  Can’t turn the knob any further (nonholonomic constraint.)
2. Burner too hot, it melts the pot (material phase transformation)
3. Wind blows on the venetian blinds and they start vibrating (Hopf bifurcation)
4. Sit on your plastic lawn chair and the back leg collapses (dynamic buckling/jump phenomenon)
5. Pollute water enough that fish can’t breathe (saturation condition)
6. Turn volume up so loud your speaker blows (clipping)

And so on.  There are quite a few good books out there that can explain nonlinear theory and give practical examples.  Here’s one.

The popular press likes to rave about how complicated nonlinear theory is — and it can be.  But we’ve evolved in a nonlinear world, and our brains are actually quite adept at nonlinear estimation.  The big thing to remember is that the response of a given system to an input is proportional, up to a point — and then something changes.  As a kid, you’ve crawled out on that branch just to the point where you thought it might break, and then stopped.  That’s nonlinear system estimation.

How does this relate to empathy?  Moving up the next level on the empathy pyramid, we encounter rational empathy.  Rational empathy is place-taking empathy — where we each have some opinion or idea, and through a process of exchange, including attempts at shared coherence, we can either a.) change the person’s mind we’re talking to, b.) keep our own opinion about what’s going on, or c.) build a new concept or concepts through shared exploration.

It turns out that we can model this with a Second Order Nonlinear Differential Equation — one in particular, called a Duffing equation with negative linear stiffness.  Oddly enough, this is the equation I beat to death for my Ph.D. In case you’re curious, I’ve done quite a bit of confirmation bias soul-searching along the lines of how this equation works from over thirty years.  But it’s not just familiarity.  It turns out that the Duffing system maps very well to the rational place-taking problem.

Consider two people working over a design idea.  They both have their opinion on what the solution it is.  We could graph the way this works by representing it as a two-well potential problem.  See the figure below.

(Art courtesy of Braden Pezeshki)

Let’s represent their moving shared opinion by a ball, rolling down in this system.  When one person speaks, their opinion is represented.  If we add a little emotional energy from both interacting parties, we can see the ball will roll around between the two wells.  As long as they pump energy into the system, dependent on the persuasiveness, or argument of the party, either a.) the ball will settle down into one of the two wells of opinion, or b.) the ball will bounce back and forth between both wells, in the larger super-well.

We can plot these solutions using something systems dynamicists call a phase diagram.  We’re going to have to analogize pretty heavily here — so I want my mathematical colleagues to Roll With It!  A phase diagram for a nonlinear oscillator is typically represented by a plot of velocity vs. position, with time running in the background.  This yields a plot like this:

 

We can analogize the entire plot as a representation of energetics vs. position/design elements mapping to velocity and position, and come up with some insights from our two-well potential oscillator, and the (a.) and (b.) potential solutions we discussed (and make intuitive sense) above.  Those are shown in the diagrams below:

Figure a — limit cycle oscillations around each of the opinion equilibria

Figure b.  Limit cycle oscillation around both equilibria

Nothing starts out perfectly synchronized.  The time that it takes for two people to settle to a standard, coherent opinion, is represented by what is called a ‘transient trajectory’.  This is the back-and-forth necessary for two people to come to an agreement around a given idea.  This final coherent idea in the phase space is represented by a ‘limit cycle’ — a stable trajectory around a given information space.  The shape of that idea, much like the limit cycle, is dependent on the information characteristics of the space, as well as where one starts the discussion (initial conditions) as well as how much energy is dumped into the system — what’s known as a forcing function.

Here’s a picture of a transient in the process of settling down — note the dark overlap as the opinions/trajectories superimpose on each other.

Many interesting phenomena of this system map to the Design Thinking space.  In no particular order, these are:

1. Transients — or time to agreement — are totally dependent on initial conditions, and for a nonlinear system, you often can’t guess how long it’s going to take for things to converge to a final solution a priori.  However, one can predict average times, and a statistical approach might be useful for design science.
2. When there are no externalities taking energy out of the system (characterized as damping by the systems theorists) transients can take a long time.  Anyone sitting in a long design review can relate to this phenomenon!  Things like deadlines and such provide constraints that can force solutions as well.
3. Multiple solutions are possible — and as energy put into the system goes up, the process of traversing the design space spreads in wider and wider arcs.
4. When people can’t reach agreement, or there is a creative tension between two equally competing ideas, you could plot something similar to a chaotic attractor.  The way these things are usually represented is with a Poincare’ map — where every cycle of the oscillator, you plot one point at the same period each time.  What pops out is a pattern that has far more definition than a random cloud of points, and also has properties of self-similarity — in the case of a Poincare’ map, the same amount of stripes to dots.  A figure I found on the Internet was from my old Ph.D. thesis, the original document which I can’t find!

(In case you’re wondering how does one get such a crummy plot, this was made in 1985 on a Tektronix phosphor display, where after plotting, one hit the button on the thermal printer, and out popped a plasticky plot that you could the put on a Xerox machine.)

This is a complex post.  I’m going to work on explaining this better in the future.  But you can see the patterns.  Rational empathy, with its back-and-forth, offers a nonlinear mechanism that unlocks all sorts of potentials for deterministically explaining creativity — even if the process is indeed chaotic.