WebII-The Global Brain and Sustainable Organizations

WebII, The Global Brain, and Sustainable Organizations

The next stage in technology will go way beyond shared health records and continual monitoring of physical status - after all, these are still linear data streams.  With the advent of practical nanotechnology, folks will be permanently linked in serial conversations and collaborations with each other over the web - in effect we'll all be part of the global brain.  Universities (if they survive) will transition into data collation points, where independent lines of linear data get merged and synthesized by meta-data domain experts  - truly "connecting the dots".  

One barrier to this next stage is the notion of a "broadband".  Using the brain as an analogy, the neural net is a web of short wireless links between brain cells that can survive a significant wound, because the cells(links) create a new path around the traumatized area. A broadly dispersed set of radio bandwidths - with repeaters, boosters, and signal scanners can be linked (voluntarily) to any person wherever they are at all times.  Data can be routed both to and from the targeted cell-person who is both a receiver and a transmitter. A company called Time Domain is emerging in this space with an embryonic hardware solution.... there will be many more.    

Because of the above, Tim O'Reilly is right when he says “The race is to own certain classes of core data.” www.oreilly.com.  The issue is whether Universities retain a sufficiency of domain experts and meta-domain experts to serve the public interest or whether these folks are bought by corporations to serve narrower interests.  The open source community is a potential bastion against corporate control of data.  The old agricultural extension services model translated and distributed what used to be best in class thinking and practice to that age's unit of production - the small farm.  The citizen is the current small farm.

Web II, the Global Brain and Sustainable Organizations

Howard Bloom’s Global Brain offers an interesting evolutionary perspective on what I am calling Adaptive Alignment in line with Sustainable Organization. He suggests that there are five processes that have been engaged in by life forms from bacteria to humanity and that these processes are the mechanism of a mass mind or a global brain…. these are the communication network that allows for species sustainability. He provides convincing examples and illustrations of these throughout the book. To get to them quickly, they are;

Conformity Enforcers
Diversity Generators
Inner Judges
Resource Shifters
Inter-group Tournaments

Look at some of the blogs and their operationalizing of what Web II will become. An example is the seminal piece by O'Reilly What is Web 2.0 and the explicative articles by Dion Hinchcliffe at http://web2.wsj2.com/. Draw your own conclusions. This is a great time to be alive!

The Sustainable Brain

The Sustainable Brain
I offer the following application of current brain research as an explanatory frame for our evolutionary viability, our sustainability. Because satisfying models and theories are parsimonious and diagramable - elegant, I proffer a single map of the brain segmented into four property spaces by two intersecting vectors. A series of concentric circles indicates the degree of comprehensiveness, expansiveness, complexity or inclusiveness. One should, however, consider that the range of the circle may be larger in one quadrant than another.

From mapping, I shift to primary characteristics of the action of the brain, the processing that occurs in each region of the brain.
From primary characteristics of the processing, I shift to the characteristics of the output of each region.
I shift to the language used by the AI community to describe the processing an artificial brain might do. This is an attempt to merge processing with characteristics
I then offer a map of the four products these algorithms might produce and propose they are the necessary and sufficient root metaphors for comprehensive understanding of real world phenomena. Steve Popper’s world hypotheses did not map the same way these do, but his intension was identical to mine. Martin Groder helped me clarify these and introduced me to Steve Popper's work.
I then offer the four paths of inquiry that would drive the production of the “products” above. We are now in the realm of conscious individual actors performing thought. We are beyond structure and in the action or the verb.

I then offer a pair of emotional maps that result from the thought actions or actual behavior that result from the processing above. The first map reflects failure to process effectively. The second reflects success. We are in the realm of psychology and anticipating that the brain itself is engineered to induce these “primaries”; both positive and negative.
Shame is an internal experience of self-doubt and anxiety related to the ability to measure up to expectations. It is not fear in the sense of “threat”, but a sense of being off the mark, being stained or being unfit to be a member. When people say they are ashamed, they usually share an inability or inadequacy – “I have a club foot”, “I was unable to stay chaste”, “I was never smart enough to graduate”.

In regard to Curiosity versus Fear. The fear that I mean here is a visceral fear, the kind that induces flight…an animal fear. It is the danger felt by a deer when a wolf is in the neighborhood. When the fear is absent, and the animal is “safe”, the animal relaxes and explores the environment. A person does as well. That is what I mean by curiosity… it is the open-minded exploration of the environment. Those who are prejudiced…. who shut out alternatives or new ways of thinking and being feel a visceral threat to their narrow perspectives on the world. They feel safe in the confines of their fanatic belief. They are not free to be curious…. instead they censor.

In regard to Guilt and Meaning/Purpose. The guilty are guilty of deeds or actions. Implied is their knowledge of good or right behavior or standards and expectations and their violation of it despite their knowing what is right. That is why the guilty are punished. It is because they exercised their will against the law or the rule or the standard. A guilty act is committed against a meaning or a value the community has set as a norm, it contradicts the purpose or direction of the group that the act is committed against. If I subscribe to a set of values, to a set of “meanings”….. if I subscribe to a “purpose” for my actions; then behavior I engage in that contravenes those meanings or purposes is labeled as a sin or a criminal act…. acts for which I am guilty. If, however I am comfortable and congruent in my behavior with the meaning and purpose for my actions, I am guilt free and focused.

It is interesting to consider the link between despair and love/connection and classification. At first glance it seems counter-intuitive that grouping things would be the path to loving them. Upon consideration, however, the fact that people automatically respond as if objects and beings are good or bad or strong or weak or fast or slow or stable or unstable (these are Charles Osgood’s primary semantic factors) within their classifications is largely responsible for much of what motivates human behavior. As the believer opposes the infidel, one clan the other families, one team other teams; all are shaping classifications of who to love and be connected to: and love leads to further refinement as illustrated by the Eskimo who so loves his snow that he has many categories for it and the Zulu who so loves his cattle that he has many categories for their coloration. While love or connection may begin in olfactory or other chemical familiarity and affinity, it ends in making of meaningful groups of things in an individual’s world and provides the underlying grouping that gets operated upon when the linking of things together occurs in mechanical processing and the chain of causality occurs in systemic processing.

This final map takes the four pairs of “personal” emotional resources and applies them to any continuously viable entity; such as a person, a family, or a corporation. These are the labels used to describe organizational sustainability.

Human Patterns Heuristics and Adaptive Alignment

Human Patterns, Heuristics, and Adaptive Alignment

I wanted to present a richer way to think about Adaptive Alignment to readers of the blog. In a conversation with Martin Groder MD, the most intuitive and adaptive diagnostician I’ve ever encountered; he gave an example of how he learned to shut off his psychiatric education in order to respond to what was in front of him. The example was of his first exposure to the Synanon game, an explosive group process where members of the group (the “rat pack”) sense vulnerabilities in participants and break through their defenses. This was used in the 60’s and 70’s primarily with people with severe character problems. Marty listened to the process, integrated it with his training, listened to the interaction between the group and one of its members, shaped a diagnosis, formulated a summary set of sentences, and offered these to the group. They listened in stunned silence. Then one of the participants said: “I’d like to thank Dr. Groder for showing us his ability to talk like a psychiatrist. Now, if you don’t mind, Dr. Groder, we’d like to get back to doing the work of the group.” Marty says he never “thought” in the game after that. That does not mean he did not use his training. His training gave him shortcuts – heuristics – to approach the people he was working with.

Human Patterns and the plethora of little models that “explain” how an individual might deal with “conflict” or “manage” or select a “work role” are similar shortcuts; they give a little frame and enable a quicker path to the issue at hand. Adaptive Alignment is the ability to use heuristics in real time so we don’t have to think, but are free to react. Software that could help to pre-sort, pre-screen, pre-weight, pre-allocate and yet not prejudice an outcome or a finding would be a tremendous asset for a researcher. The heuristics would be loaded at the front end, but the information or data itself, live and untrammeled, would draw the response from the researcher or end user. Human Patterns Software does attempt to do this; and I think could be engineered to do it even better. These issues are at the interstice of so many disciplines that we often pass each other, even in the daylight, forgetting to react in favor of our customary channels of thought. Following are two excepts from or about folks that are sharing these woods – one (Gonczi) is an Adult Educator, the other (Goldberg) is a Brain Researcher.

Advances in educational thinking and
their implications for professional
education

Andrew Gonczi


“The old research concentrates on coding of items of knowledge and
development of rules to manipulate them. It takes artificial situations such as chess
playing and builds in rules based on precoded information. The new research, by
contrast, attempts to model the real world. It is endeavoring to model a brain prepared
for action. It takes a horizontal slice of the world as opposed to the vertical slice of the
earlier research. So for example robots have been designed to react to their environment
without all the pre-coding of information of the old AI. These new robots have sets of
circuits working in parallel and each system receives information from other systems
and passes them on. The result is that the Robots are able to tolerate imperfect data, are
able to complete patterns and are fast at doing it. They use their environment to solve
problems.

To summarize, the old Cognitive science conceptualizes memory as retrieval from the
container. It assumes that cognition is centralized, that the body is outside the process
and that the environment is a problem to be overcome. Recent research sees memory as
the recreation of patterns in a decentralized way across the brain. The environment is an
active resource which helps us to solve problems and the body is part of the
computational loop (Clark 98). To clarify, it is not that the patterns are stored in the
mind, rather they are in the environment and that our brain interacts with the
environment to produce the appropriate pattern - i.e. to act intelligently.

The implication of this new research for professional education is profound. It
challenges the traditional view of knowledge which is held by most university staff
involved in professional preparation- that there is a distinction between knowing that
and knowing how. Both forms of knowledge are better understood as part of a holistic
process of pattern recognition. What it suggests is a quite different kind of mind to the
one conjured up by the container metaphor. It is a mind which does not contain
knowledge but is knowledgeable (Bereiter 1996, 2000). It also provides us with a
framework for thinking about the perennial problem of professional education, the
theory-practice gap. What it suggests too is that the old dichotomies between thinking
and doing, mind and body are fundamentally wrong and that as a consequence we need
to rethink our assumptions about how to produce capable practitioner. The most
important of these assumptions is the primacy of propositional knowledge in our
courses and the assumption that such knowledge is the basis of the ability to transfer
knowledge and skills over many contexts. This is not to suggest that we abandon codified knowledge but rather that we must rethink its connection to the world of
practice and the tacit knowledge which develops through acting in and on the world.”

The Moment of Truth?
By Sue M. Halpern
by Malcolm Gladwell
Little, Brown, 277 pp., $25.95
by Elkhonon Goldberg
Gotham Books, 337 pp., $26.00
“Goldberg's brain-imaging research has borne this out. The right hemisphere is activated when an individual is in the early stages of acquiring a new cognitive skill but as that task is mastered, the left brain takes over:
The right-to-left transfer could also be demonstrated for various real-life professional skills, which take years to acquire. Novices performing the tasks requiring such skills showed clear right-hemisphere activation. But skilled professionals showed distinct left-hemisphere activation while performing the same tasks.
It is the same across the age span: brain-imaging studies have shown that young people have more activation on the right side of the brain, and that it shifts to the left as we get older:
Contrary to previously well-entrenched beliefs, the right hemisphere is the dominant hemisphere at early stages of life. But as we move through the life span it gradually loses ground to the left hemisphere, as the latter accumulates an ever-increasing "library" of efficient pattern-recognition devices in the form of neural attractors.
Imagine two bird watchers, one experienced, one a beginner. The experienced one catches a glimpse of a large, yellowish bird flickering overhead and calls out "evening grosbeak." Meanwhile the novice frantically flips through a field guide, shuttling between pages of yellow birds, birds with crowned heads, birds with large silhouettes, birds that undulate as they fly. The experienced bird watcher has synthesized all that data and internalized a signature pattern, while the novice must rely on an external device— the field guide—which can only provide information, not synthesis, and inefficiently at that.”

RETHINKING ERIK ERIKSON

RETHINKING ERIK ERIKSON’S DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL

Since I have been considering sustainability from an individual as well as an organizational point of view, my mentor referred me to Terrance Real’s I Don’t Want to Talk About It and Jean Miller and others’ The Healing Connection. Both books do a full court press on the importance of sustained connections with caregivers and the serious consequences that follow from breaks in relationships. Both also use case examples as teaching tools and include disclosures of the clinician about her/his in-session practices processes and methods, so that a reader does not have to already subscribe to a clinical school and point of view to be able to think critically about the material. Both challenge the notion of an uninvolved or removed therapeutic actor. Relationship itself is the both the cause and the cure.

This Buberesque “I-Thou” frame of reference has always been a significant strand in the therapeutic community; but it had been relegated to the touchy feely Rogerians and others of their ilk. More feminine and less potent clinicians like Social Workers, Chaplains, and Nurses used to advocate for this approach. Potent and masculine therapies were more cognitive and behavioral and emphasized thought and reason and control. The third path was chemical or electrical; shocking or drugging a “disorder” into submission.

My Dad was a girly therapist. As a South African GP with a practice in the African Townships, he had worked with Witch Doctors. He told me it was because they could communicate better than he could with his patients; that they understood the context. After emigrating here in the sixties, he became a psychiatrist and did family therapy. He called himself an Eriksonian Sullivanian with a Freudian Analytic foundation. He introduced art therapy to Richmond, Virginia. He died young and unrecognized. There were a group of these girly therapists associated with each other through the Virginia Treatment Center for Children. Mouche Lindermann and Virginia Saunders were also in my dad’s cadre. I don’t remember the names of the others and I think they might all be gone now. They would get together and attempt to fill in an 8X8 matrix based on Erikson’s developmental stages. They had oral, anal and genital correlations, introjects and projections, transferences and …. you get the picture. You can sense their struggle to be true to their faith and traditions, their clinical parents, and their experience of families as fundamental systems. I think they resonated with Erikson because he uncovered a developmental model that went beyond a model of pathology.

I don’t think Erikson ever wrote directly about families, but if you read his work, the intersection of the person with the context is at the heart of it. He wrote a wonderful little article in Daedalus in 1968 that actually evaluated leadership as the intersection of the individual leader with his community. Timing and context and individual synergy all folded together into an elegant property space diagram. As my Dad did, I think Erikson is pretty wonderful. Read his Childhood in Society for a foundation in his developmental model. I think Erikson missed something, though. Here are his eight stages:

Trust versus Mistrust
Autonomy versus Shame or Doubt
Initiative versus Guilt
Industry versus Inferiority
Identity versus Identity Confusion/Diffusion
Companionship (Mating) versus Isolation
Productivity versus Stagnation
Integrity versus Despair

A personality evolves through the resolution of the issue presented by each stage. The interaction between how the environment or context supports the resolution and the resolutions of prior stages drive and shape the resolution of the current stage. It is a dynamic model. It encompasses the entire life cycle. I think Erikson missed a stage between Productivity and Integrity. I would want to label that stage “Generativity”. In line with Terrance Real and Jean Miller, I would contrast it with Depression or Disconnection. It is the setting of the matrix or context for the following generation, the enabling of “Sustainability” for the human race and the planet. In Erikson’s day, I don’t think that the lifespan was long enough or the ecological crisis was present enough for him to see its outline. Look at what happens if this additional stage is interposed. The first three stages of childhood have to do with:

Connection = Trust versus Mistrust (Winnicot’s notion of “good enough mothering” is worth referring to to get the historical sense of this - and then Miller and Real)
Integrity = Autonomy (Me-I) versus Shame
Action = Initiative versus Guilt

The next three stages of youth and young adulthood then reiterate the same themes:

Action = Industry versus Inferiority
Integrity = Identity versus Identity Diffusion/Confusion
Connection = Companionship versus Isolation

In the frame I’m proposing, the next three stages of adulthood also reiterate the themes:

Action = Productivity versus Stagnation (Work Identity and Career Performance)
Connection = Generativity versus Depression
Integrity = Integrity versus Despair (Have I been true to my values and aspirations)

Note that there is another embedded response to the work of Real and Miller: that, while they have correctly focused the lens on a pivot for development that has been undervalued; there are two additional pivots for full development. I can subscribe to the notion that Connection is the base of the triangle of the three, the first line or precursor, but the other vectors must also be present and developed for a rich and full life.

Tactics for Vested Engagement - Keeping it Simple

Recently, my mentor Martin Groder MD, suggested I read Bounded Choice by Janja Lalich. While the book is about True Believers and charismatic cults, it is a wonderful study in Vested Engagement and how not to lead Sustainable Organizations. While I found the book to be terribly repetitive and her theoretical “models” inflated with sociological jargon, it led me to synthesize a set of 10 tools to generate Vested Engagement. The pivotal issue that separates a cult from a potentially Sustainable Organization is that the focus of the cult is on a charismatic leader and on system of beliefs that preludes adaptive alignment. See my posting on Leadership of Sustainable Organizations for more about leadership.

Initiation – take people into the organization with ceremony and import
Ranks – insure that folks have a way of seeing up to heroes and down to newbies
Badges and Medals – develop markers or distinctions that indicate commitment or paticipation in campaigns or wars
Uniforms and Songs – have a code of conduct and/or dress and/or language that trades individuality for a sense of inclusion and membership
Enemies – identify an organization to oppose on the basis of culture or values, not merely competition
Creed and Motto – create an easily stated - out of reach ideal for members to aspire to
Confession and/or Testimony and/or Witnessing – create group events where members interpret themselves to another as failed or transformed or transforming in order to meet the ideal described in the creed or motto
Regulated Dissonance and/or Double-Binds and/or Crises – create situations where the choice to remain a member is an outcome of a conflict over irreconcilable values such as means versus ends, individuality versus conformity, faith versus works, etc.
Threat of Expulsion – periodically publicly apply standards in the creed or motto to define a member(s) as not measuring up to the ideal in the creed or motto
Merge Personal Identity With the Organization – use affinity networks to coopt familial relationships or friendships so that the member does not need to go outside the organization for intimacy or identity affirmation

Leading The Sustainable Organization – 7 Principles

Charismatic Role Rejection – The leader rejects merging of the organization with his/her person. A corollary of this is that interests and issues should trump parties. Thus the active member with aspirations to lead will define and clarify interests and issues related to the whole, rather than form a splinter group that arrogates to itself a special knowledge or relationship to the mission. (Constitutional Convention)
Detached Statesmanship – The leader makes decisions based on the organization’s canon and viability, not on personal advantage. (Public Servant)
Cooperative With External Principled Power Centers – The leader resists rejection of other power centers provided they share 5-7 below. Thus, members from different belief systems (institutions, faiths) can be members in good standing. (Doctors Without Borders)
Flexible or Non-Intrusive Process Management – The leader actively supports a separation of processes from principles, so the organization can adapt readily to changes in the context or matrix of which it is a part. (G.E.)
Contained and Constrained Set Of Principles/Standards Applied Equally To All Members – The leader adamantly supports as few principles and rules as are necessary and sufficient for the organization to maintain an identity consistent with it’s founding mission. (March of Dimes)
Permeable Membership Boundaries – The leader is inclusive of all who can subscribe to 1-5 above. (Israel’s Right of Return, Mandela’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission)
Merit Driven Distribution of Authority, Status, And Power – The leader supports open access for any member who is capable of 1-6 above. (Athens)

Zenger and Folkman meet Kouzes and Posner at the Sustainability Table

In Zenger's interview with David Creelman of http://www.hr.com/, Zenger conversationally defines his five "extraordinary leadership" competencies with their associated sub-competencies. Here they are:

1. Character
a Integrity
b Honesty
c Doing what you say you are going to do
d Predictability
2. Personal Competence
a Problem solving skills
b Technical proficiency
c Being receptive to new ideas
3. Driving for results
a Setting lofty goals
b Having a clear view of what needs to be accomplished
c Being very focused on goals or results
d Taking responsibility to achieve those goals
4. Interpersonal competency
a Inspiring and motivating other people
b Being perceived as a good team player
c Prolific and powerful communicator
5. Leading change
a Having a vision of the future
b Antenna out to look at what is going on in the outside world

Compare these against Kouzes and Posner 5 factors associated with Leadership Behavior. These were drawn down from www.josseybass.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-9644.html

1. Model the Way
a Establish principles concerning the way people (constituents, peers, colleagues, and customers alike) should be treated
b Establish the way goals should be pursued
c Create standards of excellence
d Set an example for others to follow
e Set interim goals so that people can achieve small wins as they work toward larger objectives
f Unravel bureaucracy when it impedes action
g Put up signposts when people are unsure of where to go or how to get there
h Create opportunities for victory
2. Enable Others to Act
a Foster collaboration and build spirited teams
b Actively involve others
c Understand that mutual respect is what sustains extraordinary efforts
d Strive to create an atmosphere of trust and human dignity.
e Strengthen others, making each person feel capable and powerful
3. Challenge the Process
a Search for opportunities to change the status quo
b Look for innovative ways to improve the organization
c Experiment and take risks.
d Accept disappointments as learning opportunities
4. Encourage the Heart
a Recognize contributions that individuals make
b Members share in the rewards of their efforts
c Leaders celebrate accomplishments
d Make people feel like heroes
5. Inspire a Shared Vision
a Passionately believe that they can make a difference
b Envision the future, creating an ideal and unique image of what the organization can become
c Exercise magnetism and quiet persuasion to enlist others in their dreams
c Breathe life into their visions and get people to see exciting possibilities for the future

Zenger has added in features that can be better captured through 360 feedback, but let?s ask whether there might be a better way to deal with both 5 competency views. Let?s cluster the lists of associated competencies and sort them into natural or related groups. Use your own judgment to decide if I am fair and reasonable in my grouping. Test to see if these items can be better assigned to other groups.

Cascaded Context 1 - Standards
1. Create standards of excellence
2. Establish the way goals should be pursued
3. Setting lofty goals
4. Being very focused on goals or results
5. Having a clear view of what needs to be accomplished

Cascaded Context 2 - Future
6. Having a vision of the future
7. Being receptive to new ideas
8. Search for opportunities to change the status quo
9. Look for innovative ways to improve the organization
10. Experiment and take risks.
11. Envision the future, creating an ideal and unique image of what the organization can become

Vested Engagement 1 = Character and Trust
12. Integrity
13. Honesty
14. Doing what you say you are going to do
15. Taking responsibility to achieve those goals
16. Accept disappointments as learning opportunities
17. Passionately believe that they can make a difference
18. Set an example for others to follow
19. Establish principles concerning the way people (constituents, peers, colleagues, and customers alike) should be treated

Vested Engagement 2 = Membering and Communication
20. Prolific and powerful communicator
21. Being perceived as a good team player
22. Members share in the rewards of their efforts
23. Leaders celebrate accomplishments
24. Create an atmosphere of trust and human dignity
25. Build spirited teams
26. Foster collaboration
27. Understand that mutual respect is what sustains extraordinary efforts
28. Actively involve others
29. Make people feel like heroes
30. Recognize contributions that individuals make
31. Inspiring and motivating other people
32. Exercise magnetism and quiet persuasion to enlist others in their dreams
33. Breathe life into their visions and get people to see exciting possibilities for the future

requisite Competencies 1 = Skills
34. Problem solving skills
35. Technical proficiency

Requisite Competencies 2 = Methods
36. Set interim goals so that people can achieve small wins as they work toward larger objectives
37. Unravel bureaucracy when it impedes action
38. Put up signposts when people are unsure of where to go or how to get there
39. Create opportunities for victory
40. Strengthen others, making each person feel capable and powerful

Adaptive Alignment
41. Predictability
42. Antenna out to look at what is going on in the outside world

Let me now proffer a response to these two commonly touted models of leadership. Look for yourself! You can see how thin their focus on requisite competencies is. That is probably why Jaques, who had such a sound and logical view of leadership, felt so isolated. What should be added is much of Jaques' focus, such as proper organizational layering, rational supervision chains and structures, assignments based on time horizon and capacity. But the other piece that is hugely and obviously missing is the need for Adaptive Alignment. Only 2 items out of 42 can be primarily allocated to Adaptive Alignment. This is why we are so threatened by the adaptive capacity of China and India and others! Our leaders are not being trained or supported in real time feedback and response. A Sustainable Organization frame of reference informs us of the flaws in these maps of leadership. Lest you think we are too harsh on these guys ... notice that we don't even bother to review the pabulum and outright nonsense that Jack Welsh uses to sell his speaking engagements. Remember the good old days when we could actually believe that Tom Peters had found the grail.