The Good Side of the Principle of Reinforcement

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

Huangshan Sunrise

Sunrise over Huangshan, Anhui Province, China

Sometimes, when considering how the social physics works, it’s all too easy to fall into the rut of looking at the Dark Side.

But the Principle of Reinforcement works for positive empathetic construction as well.  One of the key elements of Spiral Dynamics is that the core principles are fundamentally coded inside of each of us, waiting to be unlocked.  So also, then, is it true that positive empathetic growth is possible, if the social/relational structures are correct for the desired behavior.

One of the interesting parts of my job is that I am the self-anointed Director of The Industrial Design Clinic – the curricular vehicle that we use for the students’ ‘capstone’ class — the last class they’re supposed to take before leaving to take jobs in industry.  In this class, undergraduate seniors are given a project, in groups typically of 4-6 people, where they are supposed to complete a piece of work from an industrial sponsor before they graduate.  At some level, it resembles the old idea from the guilds of a young person completing a ‘masterpiece’ before being allowed to graduate from an apprenticeship.  The main difference is that they must do it in groups, and it must meet specification.

The first step in the class, therefore, is that the spec. must be drafted.  This is done in conjunction with the industrial client mentioned above.  This happens on a site visit to the customer’s facility, to establish an empathetic baseline with that person, and let the students see first-hand the environment that typically the project must work in.  Nothing like boots on the ground — especially from an empathetic development perspective.  Looking at someone’s face lets the students know exactly what’s important to them.

Once the project is delivered, the customer must sign off on the fact that the product meets the specification.  And additionally, the customer must also be happy.

Though other classes in other engineering programs resemble my program on the surface, precious few have the emphasis on completion and customer satisfaction mine has.  Also, the usual interface for the industrial sponsor with the students is as a mentor — replacing the role of professor as an experienced engineer, directing the project.

I never ran projects this way — mostly fueled by my old Catholic guilt (legalistic/absolutistic failure?.)  I was charging money, and having the customer basically direct the work just didn’t sit right with me.  So, as the director of the clinic, I told them they couldn’t bother the customer except at scheduled intervals to assure coherence with the larger project schedule and goals.

Where are the students along the Spiral?  Like most kids their age, they’re pretty externally defined, ensconced in status-chasing and egocentricity.  New clothes, a motorcycle, and for the most part, a pleasant and not overbearing attitude of the world being about them.  They follow rules for the most part — my students aren’t a bunch of sociopaths.  And they’ve been bombarded for the last four years with tons and tons of algorithmic thought — rule following for everything from technical English papers to thermodynamics problems.

What that means is that they’re pretty Authoritarian/Legalistic.  Which means, of course, that they’re used to the fragmented social structure of the academy — to the point where it’s as natural as the air that they breathe.  That’s the Principle of Reinforcement in action.

And then they meet me.  I give them a client, and put them into groups.  Fair enough — they’ve done group work before.  Universities are full of talk about how we train kids to ‘collaborate’.

But what does that mean in the context of the inherent social structure of the university?  It means that the kids follow orders — they go visit the company that’s hosting their project, and duly write their spec., using a template called a House of Quality, using a process called Quality Function Deployment.  All of this is accepted current practice.  QFD comes from the Harvard Business School.

But what is fascinating is how the kids start the project.  They take whatever the immediate task is, and then divide that into however many members are in the group.  If there are 4 members, then the first deliverable, the spec., will have four different parts.  If there are 6, they’ll split it into six parts, and so on.

It’s easy enough to see where this behavior comes from.  There are tons of university edicts telling students that if they share work, they’ll be accused of cheating.  Grading also factors in here — students figure they’ll be put on the spot to show their contribution, and if the work isn’t divided — and fairly — they’ll potentially fail.  All this, once again, is naturally produced by the social structure.  Grading is a status-based sorting exercise, regardless of the rationale applied.  And the idea of ‘fairness’ is an inherent legalistic classification.

Where does synergy come into this picture?  The answer is “it doesn’t.”  Synergies are not a natural part of the social/relational structure of the academy.   It’s the reason we continue, whenever confronted with a new discipline, to create a new silo.  The organizational structure is self-replicating, quite literally ad infinitum.

When I started doing all of this, I had no benefit of the various theories I am laying out in this blog.  I just knew that the kids did weak work.  There was little fact-checking, and precious little reality behind a large amount of the work products.  Schedules created were meaningless, filled with fuzzy subjects like ‘design’ or ‘research’.  Milestones had no potential for accountability.

How then to evolve the students to be integrative team players in an authoritarian environment?  The answer was surprisingly simple.  As the chief authority, I ordered it.  But as discussed previously, ordering it is not enough.  I had to create cultural and organizational sidebars to create the behavior from the students I wanted to see.  Those sidebars will be the subject of the next blog post.

Takeaways:  It is a function of sentience that inside of almost all humans (there are exceptions) we have the potential to unlock all the different empathetic modes and climb up the Spiral.  But sometimes, as the boss, you have to order it up.  If you do it right, you’ll see the emergent behavior you want to see.

Further Reading:  Good scaffolding matters.  It never hurts to have a House of Quality as part of your specification when doing design.

The Principle of Reinforcement (III)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Big Drink

Bull elephant in Safari Camp, Manyaleti Game Reserve, Greater Kruger Park — this elephant is playing by a well-defined set of rules in his head.  He would get inches away from any guest at the camp on his way to water without violence, but would likely stomp any human that got too close to him outside the camp boundary.

It’s all fine and good to talk about nation-building in Iraq, but what about life in contemporary organizations?  With the autonomy granted to corporate management in the U.S. body of law toward maximizing shareholder profit (whatever that means!) much of the structure of the modern business organization rests on the shoulders of whatever management decides to do.  If a manager is, for example, an authoritarian, he or she can implement whatever power and control structures they desire for whatever ends they want.  That’s the wicked fascination with authority — as well as a misinterpretation for what it actually means.

How does the Principle of Reinforcement actually work in this circumstance?  Let’s say you take an assortment of employees from contemporary U.S. society, spread out across the middle hunk of the SD v-memes — authoritarians, legalistic/absolutistic types, performance-based individuals, and the assorted communitarian.   Different experiences, different levels of empathetic sophistication.

Over time, since the boss can shape the sidebars, if power and control are what matters, then the function of the organization will start mapping itself to the titles possessed in the power structure.  In other words, people will start assuming responsibility solely for their job titles — regardless what their real abilities are.

In order to maintain status, individuals who are higher in the power structure have to perceive themselves to be just a little better than the folks beneath them.  In case anyone has any doubts, there are always the perks for the executives, and assigned parking spots in the lots. That results in low-level depression in the workforce, who are mostly the recipients of fragmented non-empathetic (or anti-empathetic!) communication.  The workforce does what the authority structure believes it is  supposed to because it is told to do it.

Information does not pass up.  If the commands are irrational and belief-based on the title of the giver of commands, then over time, the workforce will become passive.  “I’m just waiting to do what the boss tells me to do.”

That’s the problem with control strategies — while some appropriate authority is required in any organization (dependent on the outcomes desired), overbearing authorities, besides just depressing the workforce temporarily, create long-term problems with passivity.  This in turn affects job performance.  And why wouldn’t it?  Performance is not what is being optimized anyway.  People will feel disconnected from the organization — but that’s the way the organization is structured.  Personal responsibility takes a dive, of course,  because that requires some level of rational empathy and agreement regarding work definition and meaning.  Such outcomes are an undeniable result of the social physics of the situation.

What’s so amazing is the level of justification present in contemporary society for more and more authoritarian means toward ostensibly developing societal harmony.  Such systems, with their core dynamics, create lower levels of personal and social responsibility, more information fragmentation, and higher error transfer rates.  In short, the system itself takes a random sample of a diverse population, with all their different relational modes, and creates people that embody its v-Meme.  Dumping different individuals of different races, genders, and cultures will, in the end, make little difference as far as outcomes from the organization.  One either conforms or gets out.

The Principle of Reinforcement works with other v-Memes as well.  Consider a legalistic hierarchy — a typical government agency.  If rules are expected to be rigidly enforced, without any deference to personal agency, similar passive dynamics also become emergent.  “I’m just following the rules.”  Or “take it up with the governor.”  The problem is that there is no way any set of non-trivial situations can be completely covered just by rules alone — that’s mathematically provable.  Yet organizations that can’t recognize this — that are what I called v-Meme limited — will then respond to any new problem with even more rules.  Which then creates more exceptions — and so on.

Takeaway — The Principle of Reinforcement will, over time, create people inside organizations that match the organizational structure and management direction.  The negative side of this is discussed above — authoritarian or solely rule-based management structures will inherently create passive employees, or ones only capable of following rule sets.  Since there is no way that rules can capture all of the exceptions, such organizations inherently become low performance and have extensive morale problems.

Further Thinking — can we understand the current crisis ongoing with policing in America using these principles?  What positive suggestions are suggested that might change some of the current issues of conflict?

The Principle of Reinforcement — Continued (II)

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ Leave a comment

generations

Grandmother and Grandson, Hobo Cedar Grove, Idaho

Let’s state a little more succinctly the Principle of Reinforcement.  Here goes:

“The Principle of Reinforcement says that between any society and the people that make up that society, there is a fundamental reinforcement of relational structure and level of empathy that occurs between the majority of individuals in that society, and the larger societal organs (such as government) themselves.  If the authority of one is removed from the other, then the one whom authority is removed will exhibit emergent behavior inherent in its relational structure and level of empathetic development.”

The short version is that societies and the people that are inside a given society reinforce each other.  But if there is a mismatch, things will rise or fall to the level of the remaining party.  Authoritarian governments won’t tend to last among people who fundamentally believe that they should be free, and create checks and balances that control authoritarian tendencies in their governments.  But the converse is true — something like a legalistic democracy won’t last if people are still organized along tribal lines.

This gives insight for managing social/organizational change, whether at the company level, or for national governments.  One of the key insights is, if you want stable transitions, as a general rule, you can only evolve an organization (or a country) one level at a time from its current v-Meme level.  The self-similarity property — that says that people and the societies they make up will share the same v-Meme if they are stable, is important here.  Too large a difference in the way that either governments or the people they govern process information is an invitation for revolution and crisis.

Let’s start with an example of how social change is NOT supposed to work — or rather, how events evolved exactly as SD and the Principle of Reinforcement would have predicted.

Consider the situation in Iraq.  We all now know that invading Iraq was, at least in the short-term, a very bad mistake.  Iraq is now in chaos, and ISIS (the Islamic State) now controls a huge swath of the country, with all sorts of psychopathic 7th Century videos of beheadings gracing our 21st Century technologies.  The current Iraqi Army (very poorly defined even as an entity in contemporary news media — are they a mix of Sunni and Shiite, or just Shiite?) are prone to running.

What’s the simple view?  Wasn’t Saddam Hussein an evil tyrant?  Wasn’t he just keeping the people down?  We came in, with a superior, united, modestly international force, and wanted to give them a Constitution that would make their world better.  And if there was a little more efficiency in the whole oil production deal, wouldn’t we have all been better off?

Looking at things from a more realistic v-Meme perspective, one can see where the problems occurred.  Saddam himself, likely a psychopathic narcissist (collapsed Authoritarian Red v-Meme), and certainly not so much an enlightened despot, at least across the board, used what one might generously call his Tribal – v-Meme/Purple Management skills (he himself heavily identified as a Tikriti, and had no problem terrorizing others outside that group to achieve his aims) to unite and modernize a country filled with relational and empathetic schisms.  Shiite vs. Sunni was only part of it — Baghdad itself was a sophisticated Middle Eastern city, with modern amenities, with some representation of performance-based, modern trans-cultural communities.  Contrast that with the Marsh Arabs — some of the more profound victims of Saddam’s 20th Century development plans, including massive re-routing of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — who occupied a decidedly tribal/magical perspective, as well as being stigmatized for their Shia Muslim faith.

Describing the entire landscape of Iraq in terms of SD v-Memes would be a paper in itself.  But the short version was that Saddam was an Authoritarian (probably little argument there!) and came to power through brutally uniting the tribes that made up a bunch of Iraq.  There was simply not the level of empathetic connection in the society, so defined by identity in the various tribal and authoritarian groups, to support a legalistic/performance-based democracy, even in the best of circumstances.  That’s two levels on the Spiral.  And that’s not even beginning to unpack the various Authoritarian schemes from the Western powers, chiefly the U.S., that doomed a modern Iraq from the beginning as well.  What might stick in some people’s throat is the SD analysis that Saddam was, even as a dictator, more empathetically evolved than the country he governed.  So much for equating empathy with sympathy and compassion.

Had the entire country’s populace been more evolved empathetically, with less focus on independent groups, and more emphasis on the individual, with a substructure of laws that granted some level of individual rights with exceptions for Saddam — then yes — taking out Saddam would have released the more empathetically developed populace from his tyranny.  But as we found out, and manipulated for our own control (mistakes made include, for example, disbanding the Iraqi Army after Saddam’s initial defeat) that same population, the society wasn’t ready for democracy.  That good hunk of Iraq was still locked in Sunni/Shia rivalries, with the tribes largely left on the outside, and subject to even greater persecutions when Saddam’s rigid authority was lifted.

That led to the chaos that we see now, compounded by the destruction of infrastructure caused by the U.S. invasion.  Nothing like spooling Baghdad, a city of 7+ million, back to the Survival v-Meme level, by bombing water treatment facilities and basic infrastructure.

That’s what the Principle of Reinforcement tells you.  You look at the society itself, and then you look at how the society lets people manage relationships, or the other way around.  If you want a performance-based legalistic democracy, and the social authority doesn’t conform, you better have it as the ground level in the general population.  Because once you remove that social authority, you’re going to get what that ground level is.

If you don’t have the empathetic evolution somewhere — either in the people themselves, or in the authority, you’re going nowhere.

Takeaways:  Understanding, as objectively as possible, the empathetic development of a society, culture, and its participants is extremely important (through SD or other means) in understanding how that culture will change when large-scale change occurs — be it from a hurricane, war, or corporate merger.  Though there may be selected spots of good or bad behavior, overall, the self-similar nature of empathetic connection will establish itself.  Ships will rise, or sink, to their natural level.   And that is tied intrinsically to empathetic development.

The Principle of Reinforcement — SD and Society

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 12 Comments

pyramidpeak

Pyramid Peak, Gospel Mountains, Idaho

Last post, I discussed a blueprint for SD and the individual.  We started off as an infant, and ended up close to the top as a fully realized human, connected to the larger world, with meaning and purpose.  Most humans don’t get there on a large scale, of course, but wouldn’t it be nice?

In a similar fashion, so also can we look at societies.  See the figure below:

Slide04

Before we go any further, I want to establish a huge debt of intellectual authorship to Don Beck and his little ad flyer, as well as my general web reading and Ken Wilber.  No plagiarism here — for the most part, this part of SD is well-explored.

It’s also, at some level, a controversial subject.  The minute you start saying that one type of system is more evolved than another, you really get people going.  Enviros come out and say “look at tribal societies.  They haven’t wrecked the Earth.    Aren’t they better?”  Right Wingers come out and say “Don’t tell me about those European socialists.  Everyone knows what a bunch of crackpots they are — borderline commies they are with their health care systems and government pension plans!”  Inevitably, everyone starts applying their moral judgments (typically, but not always, a very legalistic/blue v-Meme concept) to whatever the contrasting system is.

As such, one needs a different way of understanding the evolution of societies.  And that’s where empathy — or really types and levels of connection comes in.  Societies higher up the Spiral have more evolved empathetic traits.  More people are connected to more people (or other sentient actors, like dogs), with different types of relationships.  As societies move up the Spiral, there is an increasing relational diversity and definition.

Once we understand that, it’s not surprising that the more evolved societies have more safety nets.  If you’re truly connected to other people, for example, wouldn’t it make sense to care about their health?  That level of connection would directly affect how your own health was perceived.  Lower on the Spiral, we see more pronounced In-group/Out-group dynamics.  Life during wartime (a very Tribal/Authoritarian v-Meme) consists of demonizing the enemy, to a point where after the fact, even leaders of more advanced nations can distance themselves from decisions made.

One of my favorite examples involved the fire-bombing of Germany by the Allied Powers during WWII.  Though one can certainly argue about the fire-bombing, the war was one we had to win — Hitler would have enslaved a continent given the opportunity.  At the same time, because of the ineffectiveness of high-altitude bombing of factories in Germany, Churchill gave the nod to Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, to drop thousands of incendiary bombs over civilian centers in Germany, to light them on fire.  (Incendiary bombs, for those so interested, were basically bundles of automobile flares designed to catch stuff on fire.)  Dresden was the most famous of these, but far from the only one.  Harris was known as “Butcher” Harris by his own men.  And not because of what he was doing to the Germans.  It was his own disregard for bomber crews’ lives that gave him that moniker.

This campaign led to firestorms that incinerated entire cities, and their civilian inhabitants — a war crime , with Arthur “Bomber” Harris as the architect.  After the war, Churchill was slow to bring Harris back into the fold of acceptable personalities, though Harris was not tried for war crimes.  In post-war, communitarian England, one didn’t quite know how to process the obvious savagery that we as the Good Guys committed.  It seems kind of trivial to say something like we were completely empathetically disconnected from the German population (as well as the Japanese population) during WWII, but it does explain well how we were able to execute the last part of the war in the fashion we did.

Which leads to what I call the Principle of Reinforcement.  Societies (and the cultures and leaders that drive them) will reinforce certain v-Memes (and through extension, the levels of empathy) in the populace due to circumstances in the world, as well as their own worldview.  And people will also reinforce their societies with their changing social/relational evolution.  It goes back and forth — what we in engineering called a ‘coupled system.’  Which came first?  Totally dependent on the circumstances and context.  This is not simply a chicken-and-egg question.

Takeaways:  Societies evolve along the Spiral, just like people, going back and forth between the I- and We- v-Memes.  Certain historical circumstances will trigger that nested nature of the Spiral, so it’s not just how far you’ve come.  There are other things buried inside of us that come out when circumstances are right.  Finally, the Principle of Reinforcement gives insight on how both societies, organizations, and the people in them evolve.  Neither is always the leader in driving change, for good or ill.

Further Reading:  In Jorg Friedrich’s book, Der Brand (The Fire) he describes the destruction of the German homeland in excruciating detail, for those so interested.  It’s a pretty traumatic read.  Friedrich himself is a pretty interesting fellow, one well worth contemplating his own v-Memes.

The Meaning of the Meaning of Life, the Universe and Everything

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

firesnags2When you’re dealing with something like Spiral Dynamics, most folks get caught up either in a.) a superficial understanding of surface-level definitions (perilous, when one considers the nested, emergent structure of SD — remember how once you get up to a particular level, you’ve got all the stuff underneath you at some level of your disposal?) or an attitude that it simply can’t be understood.  Both views aren’t very useful.  But SD really is.  You simply have to start thinking evolutionarily.  That’s a mouthful.

What does that mean for you?  You have to realize that any system, or person that you’re looking at, both has the place it is at currently, and then the forces or dynamics that create change.  If you want to make progress understanding either the system or that person, you draw a boundary around either/or, and you don’t worry so much about someone screaming at you about the fact that what you’re talking about is connected to something else.  Because everything is connected. Unless, of course, you want the input.

Let’s consider an ideal person in the U.S. and apply the SD paradigm of growth to a person. Slide01 See the figure above.

Survival mode is at the bottom, and few will argue that a baby is in a big-time ‘I’ mode!  Magical thinking is Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  If you ask a 4-year-old how Santa gets all those presents to all those kids, she will tell you ‘reindeer’! And then get pretty mad when you start pulling out those ‘Santa burning up on re-entry’ calculations.

I think that most folks are in agreement that young people need appropriate authority, and good rules.  Following all that is the need for performance, mastery and achievement, followed by community.  After that, being around other unique people hopefully drives self-awareness — that we really different than others in a meaningful way.  The final step (on this chart) is ‘Global Holistic’ — and the interpretation on the slide is as good a way as any in coming to terms with it.  How do you fit into the larger world?  How big is that world?

One way to tell if your own world is positively evolutionary is to look at if the current v-Meme you’re at is backed up by the level above.  Does your authority follow rules?  Or do they lie?  Are your rules targeted toward producing benefit, or control?  Does what you produce benefit the community as well as yourself? Does your community encourage you speaking out on issues? (development of personal agency.)  Or do they just want you to follow the rules?

Additionally, there’s a very important concept that comes up, that I call scaffolding.  Remember that any v-Meme not only contains the new information in it, but is nested with all the stuff below that.  Let’s say you’re pretty performance-oriented and want to make a lot of money.  But you had a bad relationship with your father, the authority figure, and his rules.  Are you going to rebel against authority, or cheat on your taxes?  It depends on the individual, the other v-Memes, and how they affected your empathetic development.  One of the interesting things I’ve observed is what I call v-Meme acceleration (you’re more empathetically advanced for your age) or devolution (you’re at a place where you might be very performance-focused, but in the end all you want to do is buy fancy cars — pretty egocentric.)  Naturally, these things apply to human communities as well.  Which is the subject of our next blog post…

Takeaways:  SD can be mapped to numerous parts of human social evolution.  The slide above is one example for a typical person living in the U.S.  But SD is trans-cultural.  One can apply this to any person in the world, with shifts in ages and growth dependent on their culture.  Scaffolding is a big concept — what we are now is built on our past.  If we skip stages, odds are the holes will show up sooner or later.

Further Reading:  While prepping for this blog post, I was trying to figure out how to escape the recursive trap implied in the title sentence.  That made me remember the famous story about the world being on the back of a turtle, and then that turtle being on the back of a turtle, and so on.  Turns out I’m not the only one looking to use that analogy.  Read here about Turtles all the way down!

The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

spiraldynamics

About 60 years ago, one of the great thinkers of the last century, Clare W. Graves, a psychologist at Union College, developed a theory of adult human development that he called “The Emergent Cyclical Levels of Existence Theory” (ECLET).  This theory, which states that humans, and societies made up of these individuals, pass through a self-similar transformation on the way up, in an open-ended format. The chart above shows eight levels, but Graves wanted it to be open-ended because he believed that there was no ‘uber human’ that could be perfectly realized.  Don Beck, who was Grave’s lifelong student, further advanced the theory, and named it Spiral Dynamics (SD).  His chart is above, and if I could pick one thing to put on a plate very similar to the one on the Voyager spacecraft, it would be Beck’s chart.  Don Beck worked with Chris Cowan to further develop the theory, and was followed by one of the great philosophers of our time, Ken Wilber, and his own variant of the theory, Spiral Dynamics Integral, and Integral Theory in general.

One of the big ideas that Graves had was that human beings, and the societies they inhabited, would traverse the different levels as the needs of the people and the culture demanded.  There was to be no static assessment — just a fluid interpretation moving up and down.  The way I like to understand this is that Graves, while talking about human values, wanted that conversation to be mostly perceptual — free of moral judgment.  That’s the spirit that I follow when I use his theory.  And a simple example might be in order.

Let’s say you’re this incredibly evolved person, from top to bottom. One of the key elements in SD is that once you evolve to, or past a certain level, you have not just the mode you have evolved to. You also have access to the lower levels, or ‘Value Memes’ (v-Memes for short) of the other levels.  In a simple example, you might be invited to a sharing dinner for a retirement of a dear colleague.  There might be several independent relationships (or friends!) that matter to you at the dinner, and you also might have brought something special as a gift for the person or the group.  All very communitarian.

But if the building caught on fire, and you didn’t know the exit, you’d be pretty happy to hear some authoritarian yell ‘Get out over there!’

I’ve spent the better part of the last six years thinking about Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics.  There are some elegant thoughts in the chart above, and they’ve really helped guide my own thinking.  But I’m not prone to much mysticism.  Mysticism generally exists to explain big stuff that we can’t wrap our minds around in cause-and-effect.

Much is made in the SD literature (as much as there is out there) regarding the Tier 1 – Tier 2 transition.  The idea is that upon gaining self-awareness, there is much that can be gained as far as insight goes.  I pretty much agree with that.

But my contributions to SD mostly focus around understanding how the Spiral got put together in the first place.  What drives the thread that moves societies and people along up the Spiral?  How do we create the conditions so that people will naturally become more balanced, data-driven thinkers, while reflecting on past lessons?  What ties it all together?  That’s where empathy comes in.  When you add that key ingredient of understanding, then things start falling out and getting simpler.

If you want to follow along, it really helps to memorize the titles of the v-Memes, as well as the dominant social structures at the bottom of the chart.  I’ll go through a v-Meme description of my own devising for the various modes as well.

But the real secret is you have to read, and think about this stuff.  Empathy is about connections, and if there is a key to understanding, certainly some of the most important connections are the ones in your head.  They’re your own gift to yourself.

Takeaways:  Spiral Dynamics is cool.  It explains both the development of human communities, as well as the development of human beings themselves, back and forth in a never-ending climb.  Well, for some of us.  The other big thing is you have to think about it.  SD is a true meta-structure for sentience, and tied together by empathetic development.  That’s the real story of this blog.

Further Reading:  I kinda seized up thinking about this, because the reality is that the reading out there on SD is mostly not-so-hot.  But then I remembered one of my favorite books from my young adulthood — The Foundation Trilogy — that profiles the fall and rise of the Galactic Empire.  If you want to be Hari Seldon, you gotta start with Spiral Dynamics.

Culture and Empathy — Sidebars, or Why the Two Lovers in a Chinese Movie have to Die

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 1 Comment

Wedding picture 2

Wedding day, Alicia, me, Conor and Braden

It’s not easy to pigeonhole culture. But we can start with the British Dictionary’s definition: “the total of the inherited ideas, beliefs, values and knowledge that constitute the shared bases of social action.” Cultures  dictate aggregate societal views of relationships, as well as various mores, and as such are inextricably wound up with the levels of empathy in a society.  More tribal or authoritarian cultures are less empathetic, and more belief-based.  More evolved cultures tend to be more empathetic, and have more space for reason.

As such, cultures state what relationships are externally defined, as well as what space exists for independently generated relationships.  My preferred concept for this is that cultures provide the sidebars for the fundamental organizational principles in a given society, and as such, can bring reinforcement for certain types of lower-empathetic behavior, as well as provide ladders for higher-level modes of empathy that may not be widespread in a given society.  Cultures can bring out the best or worst in us.

One of my favorite ways of figuring out how empathy works in a given society is to look at their literature, or even more fun, their movies, and see how people interact.  Or rather, how they’re allowed to interact.  Great works of literature, of course, are signs of the times.  Reading Homer’s Odyssey lets you know that life in Chthonic transition Greece was not very empathetic, and certainly no picnic.  When Odysseus returns home, his son Telemachus hangs the various servant girls in the suitors’ court.  Can you imagine how the press would cover a mass hanging of women today?

Current cultures in transition also show empathy levels in love stories.  In the U.S., for example, it’s not enough to have formal roles for the various family members.  In the movie Meet the Fockers, everyone in two families — one very traditional authoritarian, and one more of the peace-and-love hippie variety — have to form independently generated, trust-based relationships.  Of course, this is very difficult, if not impossible, for reasons that we will cover (if you want to hold on to a term, the problem is what I call v-Meme mismatch) and some version of uncomfortable hilarity ensues.  Well, sort of.

Movies out of China are particularly fascinating.  In Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you know that the main character, Li Mu Bai, is gonna die when he falls in love with the daughter of the governor, and that there’s going to be even more carnage when the other beautiful woman in the film, Shu Lien, falls in love with Li Mu Bai.  The plot is complicated, but the bottom line is that even 15 years ago, Chinese society didn’t allow people to fall in love and get married.  In fact, for that transgression of independent relational generation, pretty much everyone gets killed, and no one gets laid.  Things are changing — but the fact that the movie is an icon in China tells you something.

One can also see devolution of cultures as well.  For those film buffs, contrast the typical current puff fare of ‘girl meets boy’ with the usual ‘they have a crisis’ and then ‘they get married and live happily every after.’  In relational terms, that would be usually some impulsive, magical connection, followed by independent relational generation, and finishing up with external relational definition and approval by society (husband and wife).  Everyone has to get a title to be bona-fide.  Contrast that to almost 50 years ago, and the movie The Graduate.  Dustin Hoffman sleeps with his potential mother-in-law, and gets the girl.  How about that?

Takeaways:  Culture is core to how empathy both manifests, and evolves in societies.  Watching movies and monitoring relational health, as well as physical health of the characters, is a great way to see how much latitude folks get in picking who they hang out with, as well as how things are changing over time in that culture.

Fun to watch:  Cinema Paradiso — what does this tell you about conflicting empathetic levels in post WWII Italian society?  (and hey — it’s a fun, great movie!)

So How Does Empathy Synchronize Time?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 4 Comments

Jumeirah Station

Jumeirah station, Dubai, UAE

One of the more interesting thoughts that I’ve had about empathy is how it has to work to both generate and synchronize time scales in the brain.  Why?  Or rather how does that work?

If one understands that empathetic connection, at whatever level of the pyramid we’re at, is the bedrock of how the communication channel between two people (or more) works, then one starts realizing that the context of the relationship must also provide cues on how time is processed.  It is, in many ways, similar to how two computers have to be synchronized in order to talk to each other on the Internet.  There are protocols that must be followed — from external (like a meeting time) to independent sources (watching someone’s face in a round of poker.)

Except it is learned from the outside — different social structures and cultures have different senses of time.  And if you’re put inside one, you either have to adapt or be ignored.

Consider a tribal social structure.  Anyone who’s worked in these situations know the meaning of ‘Indian time.’  It can be used in a derogatory fashion.  But it is also insightful, and for someone that has worked in parallel with tribal cultures, a useful construct.

The short version is that there are two time scales in tribal societies — a long time ago, and somewhat in the present.  One can add perhaps a nature-based, animistic trigger to some of this (the Lakota had a ‘Moon of Popping Trees’ for the middle of the winter, when things were so cold the trees would literally freeze.)  A friend of mine doing work in Mongolia told me of a story once where she was told to meet someone ‘tomorrow’ — but tomorrow turned out to be a week later.  In Barry Lopez’s classic book, Arctic Dreams, he talks about walking with Inuit hunters and have them calibrate time in terms of distance, blurring the two variables.  Looking across the horizon, they would pronounce the distance in terms of some time in the future.

Other social orders have other time scales.  Survival-based social structures only have the now.  Authoritarian structures have the Now where the boss is.  Before the railroads, the clock in a town was set by high noon in the town square.  After the railroads, which required a legal hierarchy in order not just to make sure the trains ran on time, but also that they didn’t wreck into each other, the government gave us time scales.  Time is self-reinforcing along many self-similar orders.  It’s no surprise that the British Empire established Greenwich Mean Time as the time where the day starts.  That’s the advantage of having a map of your holdings that stretches around the world.

Since relationships are where we practice the vast majority of our information processing, it should come as no surprise that the various social orders affect the way we view time — or if we view time (or consequentiality) at all.  And that such repetition should beat down in our fundamental neural circuits?  Why do you think we use expressions like ‘we just didn’t click’?

Takeaways:  Empathy and social connection directly create and calibrate our brain’s notion of time, as well as our ability to think consequentially.  Reflecting on our own temporal scale will tell us how much are able to care about both the small stuff (our next dental appointment) and the big stuff (like global warming)  which will all be tied back to how we construct relationships.  Which is all about empathy.

Further reading:  neuroscience plods along, failing to account for our connectivity — but this fine scale stuff is still interesting. 

Independently Generated Relationships — What does Having Friends Really Mean?

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 2 Comments

Chucklochsa

Chuck on a high-water Lochsa River, Idaho, Spring 2011  (Allison Thomas photo)

For those that like to guess, you might think that writing down a complicated line like ‘Independently Generated Relationships’ is a complicated, professor-ese way of saying that you’ve got some mates.  And at some level, this is true.  But it also reflects on the neural process that one goes to pick those friends.  Do you pick friends based on position or status?  Or do you pick friends because they’re nice to you, or you find them funny?  One is belief-based, status-oriented thinking.   The second is extremely data-driven.

Likely, you might have met someone with whom you share a label with.  For me, in my youth, that would have been associated with the term ‘kayaker’.  I was a passionate whitewater buff from about 17 to 46.  I was fascinated with wild country, and those that also loved wild places.  But in the end, because of the inherent danger of the sport, for the most part, I ended up paddling with people I trusted and knew.  When your life is on the line running Class V, you need people that you know what they’ll do in a given situation.  And the only way you can build that is with strong, rational empathy.  You have to assess the information stream coming from that individual.  Labels don’t work.  It’s the type of  relationship that maximize validity — you’ve shared an experience with someone.  You know they can do it because you — no one else — watched them do it before.  It’s in your own brain.

Very often, independently generated relationships are performance-based.  If you’re crunching on a big project, and you need a critical part machined, if you’re an engineer, it doesn’t help to take a hierarchical position with your machinist — that somehow, they’re a lesser person than you.  If you’ve developed a strong trust relationship with that person, it’s very likely that you’ve seen their work.  You know their sense of timescale.  Likely that you’ve also treated them in an egalitarian fashion.  And if you’ve done the empathetic relational work, it’s also almost certain that the person, if they spot an error you’ve made, will communicate back to you what that error is.  One of the key signs of relationships that maximize validity is duplex communication and confirmation.  Both parties know the relationship is data-driven, and actively provide data in both directions.

That’s the thing about independently generated relationships — because of their duplex nature, they are fundamentally error-correcting.  You can’t make significant, complex technology without them.  If you’re building something like a commercial airplane, with a minimum of 300,000 parts, there is an inherent error rate that exists in its assembly.  And without a constant stream of feedback on what goes together and what doesn’t, you simply can’t get the bugs out.  The rareness of existence of that rational empathetic culture globally is one of the main reasons that commercial jets are built in only a handful of locations in the world.

And here’s the other thing.  In order to have a team of individuals design a plane, on a very basic level, they must also be rational.  At some level, every plane is different.  You need the lower levels of scaffolding: expert knowledge of materials and components; advanced algorithms for stress analysis and propulsion;  codes and inspections by the FAA.  All matter.  But without duplex information flow, it’s all for naught.  Too many exceptions.  Too many heuristics.

As one relates, so they think.  If you want rational people, they have to have rational relationships.  That describes a situation where some level of agency is required in order to develop the people to fulfill tasks requiring complex thinking.

Takeaways:  Independent relationships are built on data exchange, which leads to trust, differentiation (I’m good/not good at something someone else is good/not good at,) and agency — someone’s fundamental responsibility to themselves, that gives them the ability to act independently.  Friendships are a key type of independently generated relationship — but they’re not the only one.

Independently Generated vs. Externally Defined — Trust vs. Loyalty

~ Chuck Pezeshki ~ 6 Comments

Huangshan stairs

Endless stairs, Anhui Province/Huangshan, Anhui Province, China

One of the things that starts happening once you set up the relational dichotomy of independently generated, trust-based, data-driven relationships vs. externally defined relationships is that certain behaviors, thoughts and actions also clearly start falling in the various bins associated with these two fundamental empathetic/relational types.

One of the biggest is the difference between trust and loyalty.  Trust is inherently associated with something inside yourself, and ties itself back to data you’ve collected on the other person.  One can march down through the various idioms — trust is earned; trust is fragile; trust, once broken, is hard to regain.

Loyalty, though, is completely different.  No surprise that members of the military or government take loyalty oaths.  They are asked for explicit declarations of faith in institutions, or the people who are placed in authority by those institutions.  There’s many an infantryman who might have felt loyalty to their country, but did not trust their commanding officer.

It’s also interesting how it’s quite easy to pull up temporally dependent definitions of trust — as trust is fundamentally based on a data collection exercise.  It’s what we in the sciences call a time series — a fluctuating variable charted out over time.  Contrast that to loyalty — it’s what scientists and mathematicians call a binary scalar value.  Either you’re loyal to your country or not.  A loyal friend or not.  Loyal fan or not.  You can’t be sorta loyal, just like you can’t be sorta pregnant.

Words like this give insight and clues into how the brain processes different empathetic modes, and how different relational types either develop, or don’t develop timescales in the brain.  In the land of externally defined relationships, time seems not to have as much meaning to the individual.  Relationships, defined by the outside, elude control of a person.  Friendships, though, depend on time — calibrated by that time series of data known as trust.  And that creates interesting synchronization potentials in the brains of people that engage in that kind of relational development, that don’t exist at all in individuals immersed in organizations immersed in external definition.

One of my old girlfriends was Chinese.  She had lived an amazing, but tumultuous life, passing through the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the Tian’namen Square Incident (she was there) before emigrating to the United States.  “I am a very loyal woman,” she would tell me.  But I never felt she trusted me at all!

Takeaways:  There are many traits that naturally fall out under the Independent/External relationship dichotomy.  Trust and loyalty are just an example.  Trust depends on data and some rational process, loyalty depends on belief and emotion.  All corollaries can tell us important things about how the brain processes time — and that has enormous consequences for how we synchronize actions with others.

Further Reading:  Nothing better than the life of Musashi — a samurai turned Zen monk, who swings back and forth between both relational types.