There's A Very Simple Lesson In All This. Tuning Our Envelope Of All Known Tolerance Limits

Take our embarrassing example of Greece & EuroZone Policy, PLEASE! Before more citizens get lost in the fog of fiscal war.

In other words, how the eurozone helped lead to Greece's crisis.

These are the same people who built CERN?

How did they NOT see this coming? Why aren't Europeans probing the fundamental structure of their own cultural aggregates?

And why are they taking it out on the citizens and plebes of Greece, instead of on their own reckless lenders & profit seekers? And why are citizens & plebes across Europe egging on their own feckless leaders, and encouraging them to flog the neighboring serfs all the harder?

This is the usual plight of people who know more & more about less & less, until they know everything about nothing (especially their own context)

Lissencephalic policy apparatus, convoluted cultural outcome paths.

Or, how flat-earth level, slow witted ideologues produce criminal politics, when allowed to, by citizens acting like innocent bystanders, & pretending not to be active accomplices.

It's only when policy-forming processes are nuanced enough to be adaptive, that culture evolves.

Right now, with so few paying attention to the most simplistic fundamentals of inter-dependencies, our vast stockpile of detailed data sits unattended, as everyone assumes that policy is unimportant enough to leave to the presumed process owners. Whom everyone privately agrees are idiot politicians! Go figure. Denial is perhaps most rampant among PhDs begging the excuse of being "specialists," and thereby absolved from involvement in evolving democracy. You couldn't make this up.

Have data, won't use it to drive aggregate selection. Only nitpicking.

There's a very simple lesson in this.

Recombinant aggregates can't adapt if emerging components don't get emerging feedback & then practice contributing to aggregate selection, early and often enough. There has to be overall tolerance limits for the variance allowed across the entire envelope of tolerance limits (including time constants*) for all aggregate processes.

That's the essence of system tuning, and that's how autocatalysis slowly occurs.

For those who don't understand that paragraph .... here's:

Human Systems for Dummies

1) Recombi-NATION. A human culture or nation is a massively parallel recombinant system (even more so than a forming nervous system or a whole organism growing from an embryo). Well Duh!


2) What is a recombinant system? Recombinant systems "connect everything to everything" and then relax briefly to a selected form, before doing it all again. Again, Duh!
Evolution of species illustrates a steady progression of recombination occurring less stochastically, and more smoothly & continuously. Human culture now recombines by continuous production & education of children, in pre-k & K-12 learning systems, plus a proliferating array of adult "disciplines."


3) Connecting everything to everything, before selecting what form of relaxation is briefly safe. To be blunt, if kids don't get exposed to the entire range of human thought, soon enough & often enough, then aggregate knowledge (context awareness) cannot grow smoothly, and we instead just stockpile data-minus-context in inaccessible journals & other archives.


4) Practicing Aggregate Selection is a group exercise. Our cultures & economies can't meet the challenges of selective pressure if we can't generate adequate adaptive tempo. That only comes with early & frequent practice at addressing whatever the moment-of-selective-pressure is, i.e., our biggest policy challenges. It just never helps enough, to have students tied up for decades paying attention ONLY to trivial errata that rarely, if ever, helps extract context from excessive amounts of data.


5) Tuning our whole system, not just the components. Our culture & economies also can't generate enough adaptive tempo unless we actively involve a threshold level of multi-generational involvement in pressing policy issues. If success means surviving an endless succession of unpredictable challenges in unpredictably transient contexts, then our #1 goal is not to optimize current skills, but to develop education & training systems that maintains adaptive recombination skills and doesn't let them wax & wain with too much variance. We want to survive the hour (or the business quarter, or the budget year), but we want every new ripple of graduates to be able to solve tomorrow's challenges, and we want every new generation to be able to handle the challenges that will come 2 decades out.

Zero predictive power? Seemingly unlimited adaptive power? What would you do? Try to do too much (of the wrong thing) until you're gone? Or, prepare your kids to take over AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, and then ALSO train them to have kids soon enough ... & know how to train the grandchildren to again take over in their turn, as soon as possible? That's how to keep our species ship afloat, and our culture growing.

Term Limits is not enough, by far. We always need an annotated package of Adaptive Limits that includes:

term limits, plus ...
early education minima (mis-education limits),
lifelong exposure to aggregate challenges (mis-exposure limits),
lifelong training & education & work (human mis-allocation limits),
lifelong involvement in policy formation (mis-recombination limits).

This is simple biology-101 and anthropology-101. Every recombinant process on this planet meets that entire envelope of challenges ... or soon disappears from the stage.

Data is meaningless without context. It doesn't matter what we know, only what we know how, and why, to use ... to survive ... in the future, as well as today. We won't get there by knowing more about less, any more than we will by knowing less. Nor by arbitrarily paying attention to less of everything.

Above all else, we need to be agile about what and how we contribute to aggregate selection, and how we train to help our aggregate survive natural selection.

 * A "Hamiltonian" is the presumed equation describing some aspects of a hypothetical system. Similarly, members of any human team or aggregate eventually come to appreciate the critical interplay between the time constants of multiple processes. For some outcome to occur, many different, interacting processes have to occur with some minimal tempo, and deliver local outcomes within some critical period, i.e., with a maximum time constant. This is the basis of orchestral or band music, for example. It would be useful for students to formally grasp this as a named concept and ponder it, from pre-k onwards. The Grumbletonian? :)  Timing of cooperation is an inherent part of cooperation, and something that humans are geniuses at, even as babies - if that talent is developed, rather than neglected. Aggregate tuning is all about reducing NET frictions. Managing that begs for a consensus definition, and delivery of the summary data to track it.

The Best Asset To Accumulate Is A Toolkit Of Aggregate Coordination Skills

How do we fool ourselves? Let me start counting the ways, including a new way every year ... by default, since "Past performance does not predict future results."

A Science Perspective On The Decline Of Innovation

(restricted; precursors may be viewed here)

As another bit of next-epoch or supposedly "long-term" investment advice, this recent pdf contains some helpful perspectives and commentary, although the author sounds as though he's squarely within the NeoLiberal camp (see "Living the Lie" - or why they think that Social Democracy is to blame for current G7 economic & cultural ills).

This line caught my eye as the author's central premise.

"... the next revolution will be based on understanding and developing quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and quantum biology and all that it entails."

That's a credible hypothesis to test, yet many will either disagree, right off the bat or just chuckle. The author is not specifically wrong in his comments, it's rather that he's missing the bigger context, and therefore missing the overall point. Here are just 3 counter-indicators.

1) Biology has been harvesting quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry and quantum biology for ~3.5 billion years, just on planet earth. It's called photo-synthesis, and other forms of energy-transfer. As you will see, we're not doing anything new, although some things are subtly different.

2) The author's initial premise - that occupying many possible ecological niches is indicative of an "efficient" pass-through ecology or economy - is highly subject to local conditions. As Walter Shewhart famously said, "data is meaningless without context."
(Pick 40 islands or other micro-habitats around the world, and you can find ecologies ranging from near mono-cultures to the dense, pass-through ecologies/economies the author seems to expect. Location, location, location - or context, context, context.)

3) IF one's hypothesis is that increased energy handling (efficiency) equates to evolutionary adaptive strength, then it would seem logical to expect the next stages of human evolution to reliably follow where we can go from here, energy-handling-wise. Yet there are already many well-known flaws in that argument. Even if it were true, we'd still expect surprises. In 1870, the same author might have predicted expanded development of hydro-carbon chemistry, which would have missed the expansion of all forms of telecommunications, including the internet, not to mention quantum mechanics itself. :) Don't presume it's over.

a) Energy-handling efficiency has not reliably predicted survival across niches. In fact, the opposite is exhaustively documented. The most "efficient" (i.e., "successful") species in all archeological contexts invariably disappear from subsequent or later contexts, and are labeled as species that over-adapted to transient contexts. Ditto for corporate history. Proverbial dinosaurs go belly up. Quite literally, over-investing in efficiency has been the death of most species and investors. 

b) In contrast, the recurring lead in both ancient biological as well as current economic evolutionary races are overwhelmingly documented to go to the most agile, and NOT the most efficient. Time after time.

That discrepancy between a) and b), is amply discussed in biology, ecology, military doctrine, and systems theory.

Aggregate Adaptive Rate soon trumps efficiency, every single time. Some barely-adequate mix of efficiency plus resiliency always wins. It's just a question of when.

Which calls our attention to some subtler questions.

If it's not energy efficiency, then what is it that we ought to be smart enough to be looking for? One pat answer is "survival paths," no matter how unpredictable. Next, how do we keep ourselves on unpredictable survival paths, or at least within striking distance?

If there's a unending race, in all disciplines and all economic or cultural wars, to RAPIDLY explore emerging options, based on insufficient data, then survival follows some well-known rules of thumb, and the main competition seems to be executing these principles on increasingly larger scales, which brings up unending "problems of scale."


[As members of a social species, we're now well aware that Aggregate Agility (teamwork) trumps individual agility (contrary to NeoLiberal economic doctrine). Aggregate size matters, and the scale of aggregate-agility represents the Golden Fleece. :) ]

c) pattern recognition trumps energy-handling (the minute you know what NEW signal you're looking for, it's a race to briefly ignore the noise; agile focus beats raw power, every time) ... 

d) then adaptive "recruiting efficiency" trumps energy-handling, and that combination [c & d] determines aggregate response agility (from motor-neuron pools to military "maneuver warfare" to business marketing to cultural mobilization). Serial survival of the fittest. Or, as it's termed in education theory and military doctrine, "Outcomes-Oriented Training & Education" or OBT&E.

It's remarkable how much of military doctrine consists of concise restatements of the theory of evolution. See "Return On Coordination."

Yet so-called socialists and capitalists seem to have scared each other with irrelevant details, and keep uselessly throwing their own baby out with their own, shared bathwater.

The more I think about these issues, all roads lead to a consistent answer.

How do we invest in a democracy that ensures the highest National Adaptive Rate,

... not just energy or military or business efficiency?

Remarkably, that same question is central to the history of biology, military doctrine, democracy and the onset of the US Constitution. Our consistent goal is seemingly to "make a more perfect union."

If that goal is kept in mind, then most economic issues become incidental. There seems to be a simple, 2-step optimization occurring in all surviving aggregates. Sum(i+j), while looking for those combinations that are greater than the sum of the parts.

Where i+j are respectively:

i) Keep the components alive, and adequately provisioned (it's not a functional army if the generals hoard all the weapons)

PLUS

j) Grow the Aggregate (by expanding Net or Aggregate Agility, not just agility of some sectors, nor merely aggregate size alone)

This easily falls under the category of Group Capitalism, with tolerance limits separating it from narrow Personal Capitalism (i.e., NeoLiberal orthodoxy). I predict that the intelligence to see the difference will trump efficiency at pursuing the latter, even though the latter forms of parasitism will always follow, in unpredictable patterns. Part of survival agility includes being able to harvest what's necessary, when necessary, while also leaving tools unused in expanding toolkits when not specifically needed.

We can't provide for our grandchildren by sequestering more resources. That is, quite simply, a naive idea. Few want the heirlooms passed on by their grandparents, except as mementos, because they're hopelessly obsolete.

The best assets to accumulate are Coordination Skills. If you don't believe me, ask a Neanderthal ... if you can find a survivor. Yet instead of investing in Democracy, we're killing the Golden Goose, by hoarding current fiat instead of future options.

Here's my investment advice.

The next evolutionary leap in human culture is more likely to be based on understanding and developing "quantum perspective" on our own, aggregate context, and all that that entails.

If you can help more precisely define "quantum" - i.e., subtle - aspects of human cultural or aggregate perspective, you'll not only be rich and have a busy, fulfilling life, you may well save the human species.

Interesting Things Occurring In Italy, & In Human Cultures Everywhere. A Challenge For Current Artists, In All Medias

What do we have to change in our K-12 education - and in our nation's art - to make most citizens aware of the pattern of process flow, and it's implications for our our own culture and our cultural adaptive rate?

Consider this question.

If your parent culture (and by default EVERY culture) was a developing baby-culture ....

... then what might evolving cultures of tomorrow look like?

This question is so interesting that I'm curious to hear reactions from diverse readers.

Some people are still obsessing over how our brains have already been making memories, for many million of years.

Ho hum. Ancient history.

That history is now recognized nothing more than a trivially necessary but not sufficient lesson for application on a larger scale, to current context.

After all, data is meaningless without context. So are known principles. Further, mass education learning rate is meaningless without reference to Cultural Adaptive Rate.

What matters far more are the details of how our social interactions form human culture ... or not.

Meanwhile, a tiny trickle of people - from Marriner Eccles to Warren Mosler - have been tripping over opportunities to link systems principles to everyday real life, and to our amazingly ignorant processes for setting national policies.

see http://www.retemmt.it/

and http://primaveraeconomica.it/

I remember hearing of a literature professor in the 1960s proposing that a negligible % of individual humans were "self-aware" before the advent of classical Greek literature, ~400 BC, and their "discovery" of grammar. Was he right? There's plenty of behavioral evidence for & against, so it seems to be a statistical question, not an absolute one. Most may recognize that what some of their neurons know is not always what they as an individual actually do. :) Even more telling:

there are vast differences between what key individuals and whole disciplines claim to know ..... and how their electorates actually behave.

In regards to classic Greek culture, it's sobering to consider that it took only a tiny confluence of triggers (perhaps the combination of exposure to vast diversity, plus newfound wealth & leisure?) to unleash a wholesale transfer of attention from trivial to profound interests, in a human population long past capable of doing so.

Such transitions are in general, viewed in systems science as phase shifts in autocatalysis.

Today, 2000 years after the most famous Greeks, we have a vast human population also capable of far more than it is actually doing, or even actively considering. 

It's exciting to think that we are waiting only for some unpredictable set of trivial triggers to unleash yet another transformation in collective human thought. Humanity as a whole may come out of our next transition as predominantly "culturally aware," not just with most people individually "self-aware." Such a transition in "group context awareness" may trigger cultural blossoming far greater than the transitions historically associated with the onset of classical Greek culture.

That aggregate transformation may not be marked by great advances in how much a tiny fraction of humans do know. Rather, it may be marked by great, but subtle, advances in how soon most humans are allowed to and required to know ... what few things most must know in order to produce greater Group Intelligence, and a faster Group Adaptive Rate. Military scientists at War Colleges refer to such "teamwork" adaptive agility as the "[adaptive] quality of distributed decision-making."  I'll call it simply the return-on-coordination.

Exciting times indeed!

I'm long past convinced that such expected advances will depend NOT on adding more to what we already know about simple systems like central nervous systems, but rather, in beginning to more actively disseminate and actually APPLY even slightly larger fractions of what's already known ... about system-coordination ... to our own policy coordination.

The difference between a self-tuning electorate (agile, adaptive democracy) and an un-tuned culture (past baby-cultures) will make the dramatic difference between an untuned vs a tuned V8-engine look like trivial child's play.




How do we visualize our own Evolution of Adaptive Power?

What do we have to change in our K-12 education - and in our nation's art - to make most citizens aware of the pattern of process flow, and it's implications for our our own culture and our cultural adaptive rate?

That's a challenge for current artists, working in all medias, to visualize.

We have to visualize our possible outcomes, before we can select which ones to shoot for. With every consensus national outcome adequately visualized ... we can always impress ourselves with our own, untapped ingenuity.

We know that evolving species, and cultures, constantly increase the amount of information they can process in a unit of time, which is itself relative to Adaptation Space. To speed up our own cultural adaptive rate, we need new methods. But which ones? We continuously need newer methods for increasing and tuning key communication throughput - the key to all development. And to get those methods, we have to first visualize how to select them. In all probability, we already have the required methods ... and just don't yet know what to use them for, nor why to use them.

It turns out that methods too are meaningless without context.

Here's the challenge for poets, musicians, videographers, writers and all other artists. 

Everyone's Looking for a "Better Way" - How Do We As A People Actually Achieve It?

  Visualize many Desired Aggregate Outcomes?

  Recruit more citizens to view that palette?

  Prepare more citizens to participate in SELECTING which aggregate options we want to explore?

If we don't help select where we're going, some collection of nincompoops will ... by sheer default, if nothing else.

That would be a pity, because A Group Brain Is A Terrible Thing To Waste.

MacroEconomics: The Simple PRACTICE Of Re-Orienting All Eyes Onto Emerging Aggregate Options.

Is it just rigorously managing the supply of transaction denomination units? DON'T MAKE ME LAUGH!

Every time I read some dimwit, orthodox macro-economics discourse, I still end up wondering what it is, exactly, that we're running out of.

A line from one of the "Change" songs keeps coming back at that point too.

"I been around the world once or twice before,

and the answer ain't found in seeking more [stuff] ... I promise you that"

And there's an old Irish tribal proverb that also fits. "It is in the shelter of each other that the people live." Well Duh! That's what social species do, and in fact, all members of all ecologies.

So suddenly, once there are too many of us for our own wits to handle, we're no longer shelter to each other? Something doesn't add up here.

It must be our wits and behaviors, not our physical capabilities, or possessions that are degrading our median quality of life.

"When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at will [appear to] change."  Max Planck(?)

It's the scale, dummy? The more people we have, the bigger the tent we can hold up? Yet cultural tent design at one size does NOT scale, unchanged to provide cultural tent design at a different cultural scale.

"Much of the difficulty in reconciling scale-related axioms arises from CONFUSING MICRO-SCALE AND MACRO-SCALE INTER-RELATIONSHIPS." Max Planck

It's a mystery to me why we as a people struggle so much to see the superior value of more coordination, rather than more stuff.

We're so close!

How? Because almost everyone I meet already values their learned knowledge of how SOME relatively complex process works, and hence they don't sweat the ingredients. Ever seen a homemaker hoarding flour, or yeast, or salt, or ovens ... to ensure forever their capability to make bread? They know that that don't make no sense. Or mechanics trying to corner the market on nuts and bolts, for their retirement? No. They all grasp process scale, at least to some degree.

And yet we're still so far!

How? Because, to a person, those same people:

they just don't see our nation and electorate as just another process! 

They just haven't gotten used to seeing the bigger scale. It only takes practice, but they aren't getting enough of that practice yet.

Hence, they get sidetracked and completely swallowed up in hoarding, to gross excess, various ingredients that go into making "us" - a dynamic human culture that is much more than the sum of it's parts. For example, they all foolishly agree to hoard each other's transaction denomination units, for retirement - like athletes trying to hoard the "scorekeeping points" which their leagues create at will. 

Weepin' Jesus! Can't see dessert for all the Ding Dongs? Join the throng failing to recognize itself in the mirror.

It's astounding.

It's not the parts, dummy, it's the whole! Perhaps another addition to the books for dummies series might help.

Wholes, for Dummies! :)

Perhaps, but only if it was embedded in every year of our K-12 curriculum.

The backlog of stuff we already know about current human-culture recipes is so astoundingly large that it's either ignored or it actually gets in the way as institutional momentum or bureaucracy, as does our stockpile of ingredients.

Offer people a little bit of corn or butter, and they'll buy it all up. Give them unimaginable corn surpluses, or Butter Mountains, and they'll pay to have it hauled away for compost ..... and never examine the change in logic that accompanied the change in scale.

Every nomad understood this implicitly, 100,000 years ago. Say there are are 4 food sources, which appear at 4 times of the year, in 4 different places. First, ACTIVE nomads quickly find them all, and optimally use those resources. Is there enough for all, and excess? Always, but it required some travel.

You can picture that eventually, some lazy idiots started building fences around every new, transient resource discovered, in attempts to corner that market. Most would sit on it all year, trying not to starve between times it would blossom. Economic civil warfare began, along with leverage and enslavement. Local outcomes sometimes looked good to the dimwits withholding from the aggregate, rather than helping to keep the aggregate eye on aggregate options. Soon the net Output Gap was recognized, and it began to steadily grow.

The ongoing outcome? New layers of nomads eventually realize that their food source has become the people sitting behind the fences. Hence, the proverbial barbarian waiting at every misguided gate. Aggregate civil war escalated into unending civil war. Amazingly, aggregates grew despite themselves, but always slower than they could have. Sometimes MUCH slower, even briefly reversing the course of cultural evolution. Nevertheless, even our own genius idiots can't keep our resilient Middle Class down forever, no matter how hard they try.

This pattern continued until we witnessed the inevitable next link in that chain of idiocy.

Neo-Liberals attempting to build fences around distributed, public fiat, so they can sit on it.

BMHOTK! That's the final stage of "perfecting" the theory of idiocy, before it's tossed in the garbage bin, for good.

All our resources - including our denomination units - are all meaningless, without ability to see our emerging context.

"Those cultures are richest who can best explore emerging options soonest, with the least of their old baggage." That's my take.

Yes, countless superficial thinkers keep insisting on simple changes to our imagined cultural recipe - even though it's obvious that there cannot possibly be any isolated, simplistic solutions.

Yet there is nevertheless always something simple that's missing. It's just too subtle for most people, but ONLY because we don't teach the obvious. In fact, we train people out of seeing the obvious!

To make things easier on ourselves, we just have to re-orient our orientation coordinates to see our own evolving culture in a simpler light. No context seems simple until a context-specific coordinate system is adopted.

To re-orient whole cultures faster means a higher Cultural Adaptive Rate - despite our numeric growth. We have to face the fact that we're not doing the simple things that will cause a phase-change in the structure and process of existing human culture.

What does it take to transition a cultural engine from low potential to achieving more of it's potential? Tuning? Based on feedback from expanding system instrumentation? Requiring expanding investment in ourselves? That means realizing that the return-on-coordination is the only revenue that can cover our expanding cost of coordination. The only other option is slow suicide.

What part of tuning is it that's missing the most? Mostly the action, more than the analysis?

Both experimentation and imagination are necessary, but not sufficient. We need both. So far, we're constraining ourselves with austerity habits and hoarding stuff that in reality is only useless baggage, and that is keeping us from exploring options that are even more exciting.

To keep adapting and surviving, a culture needs to keep the entire electorate's eye on the NEXT prize. The idiocy of trying to sequester and bury Public Initiative (fiat) in the ground and hoard it is just another form of suicide. To leverage the distributed fiat we have, we first have to keep enough of it distributed. Then we need ever newer methods for driving better/faster/wider appreciation of context, throughout our electorate, no matter how fast it grows.

Aggregate Methods drive Aggregate Results.
     Aggregate Results are measured against Aggregate Desired Outcomes.
          Aggregate Desired Outcomes drive Aggregate Methods.

Or, if you will, Aggregate Practice Makes Aggregate Perfect.

That's why I prefer Marriner Eccles' actual operations over all subsequently published theories. We can always learn more from experiment than theory alone.

Eccles & FDR practiced exploring options. Then, too many bookworms spent subsequent decades theorizing about what Marriner & Franklin once did, instead of just helping us stay on our Economy Bike, exploring newly emerging options - by rushing to see the aggregate outcome of DOING things!

What other field rides a bike once, then retreats to book-reading instead of aggregate group bike riding? My head is spinning, just thinking about the ironic lunacy of it all.

Can we just close down every economics department in the country, talk less, and get back to MORE action and less theorizing, while utilizing inter-connected OBT&E?

That is, get students - & the whole Middle Class - back on the damn aggregate bike, and just let 'em PRACTICE riding it? ASAP?

So what view of context is it, exactly, that we aren't enunciating clearly enough to ourselves and teaching to our children .. that would allow us to do far more for ourselves, and make life more fulfilling for more of us?

The only conclusion I come to is that we always need even more thorough distribution of all human feedback, derived from maintaining fully distributed, full human activity. 

First, feedback minus diverse experiments is useless theory. 

Second, given the limited bandwidth of human components, useful feedback comes down to adequate, systematic re-sampling, to assess external change, changing internal capabilities and potential for further internal change.

Everyone has a responsibility to broadcast key info to key receivers.

We all have a responsibility to also adequately sample the entire spectrum of human feedback.

Simultaneously, to do either, we also have a responsibility to ensure that diverse feedback is allowed to be both broadcast and reviewed, by all.

None of us can be as smart, or active, as all of us. It's not even close.

"Organization" means getting key info to key people in key positions in key institutions, within critical time windows. All that, or nothing.

A healthy brain is one that's been nurtured adequately, developed through practice, and trained to rapidly analyze all emerging data.

Similarly, a healthy Group Brain - a human culture - is one that's been nurtured adequately, developed through practice at group discourse, and gets adequate practice at rapidly analyzing the changing spectrums of internal/external data. Leveraging that full spectrum of data/actions is what defines our emerging cultural response options. That's how we'll survive the unpredictably changing contexts we must face.

We can look either direction up and down that axis: as component "neurons" looking at their shared Group Brain ... or as the Group Brain looking at how it trains its component neurons (our individual brains).

Then, of course, we need national practice at generating alternative aggregate responses, and comparing them to our Aggregate Desired Outcome.

Did I mention that we need formal processes for continually re-estimating Aggregate Desired Outcomes, honestly? Instead of trying to rely upon the disproven process of Central Planning by too few Neo-Liberal, capitalist "elites" instead of communists? Big Difference, right?

A group has a Group Brain only if all parts talk to one another. What good is a Democracy if we don't USE it?  System intelligence is actually held in an aggregate's Body of Discourse, and expressed in aggregate actions. The more aggregate agility, the better, and aggregate agility is defined as the outcome of aggregate practice - aka, the Quality (including tempo) of Distributed Decision Making.

Where to start? You want specifics? Just generate more activity, everywhere you look, at every scale, among all citizens. And then get 'em all practicing coordinating across existing and emerging scale. If we don't, what's left of our grandchildren will, if THEY'RE left.

Why Do Management Consultants (& electorates) End Up Teaching (& accepting) The Opposite Of What They Practice?

As Walter Shewhart noted, 88 years ago, management consultants most often fail because they are hired BY executives, to help executives succeed, not BY aggregates, to make aggregates succeed. Walter formally touted the inherent advantage of controlling NET cultural process through dialectic or "context" modeling, rather than only the systemically unproductive ramblings of embarrassingly superficial "capitalist" ideologies. Walter Shewhart coined the phrase "process control" to define the ancient concept he advised us to spend far more time practicing and refining.

Not enough people listened to Shewhart. W.E. Deming spent most of his life simply trying to promote Shewhart's straightforward insights. Others from Toyota Corp to John Boyd applied Shewhart's concepts to specific industries and disciplines. Even today, however, not enough people listen to Shewhart's basic message.

As a result, simply to get paid, the typical management (executive) consultant ends up being dragged into over-training the ambition, grasp and ambition of a "leader" to think FOR their aggregate ... 

instead of ... 

getting transient_context delegates practice at the aggregate's greatest need and a delegated_leader's greatest value: constantly getting an aggregate more practice at running on auto-pilot, and not systemically failing the instant a supposed "leader" has a day of downtime (and isn't there to try to think FOR the aggregate).

And all the while, all of us - even (most) capitalists - admit that none of us is as smart as all of us.

You really couldn't make this up. It's all a cosmic joke on the entire Group-Intelligence of homo sapiens.

How do even supposed experts end up trapped in this way, teaching by default the very inverse of what they were forced, kicking and screaming, to practice, just in order to survive? In effect, we all make little compromises, accept lying to ourselves, and slowly become little Benedict Arnold's, just to avoid being cast aside, as aggregates lurch between continuous firefighting. As a consequence of endless firefighting mode, we tend to accept the myth that delegating management of EVERY succeeding context to a presumed "context-expert" or "process-owner" actually helps. It is NEVER that simple. If it were, the entire paradigm of social species would not work. Instead, we'd be dissociable machines, instead of incredibly densely_engineered works of social art.

Why do we persist in misunderstanding ourselves? Largely because we tend to over-focus on immediate (quarterly?) context, while missing the overwhelming truth, that ongoing reality transects multiple, transient contexts? We are all victims of our own, bad habit, distributed across individuals and aggregate. Is the Fallacy of Scale (or composition) always the chief failure that prevents aggregates of intelligent people from coalescing into a Group Intelligence greater than the sum of it's parts? Is sure seems to be, at least for now.

Yet simultaneously, we all readily admit that even war is too important to be left to the Generals!

In reality, every process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners. Again, you really couldn't make this up. We're playing a stupid joke on ourselves, and it never gets funny to the recipients. It's a chicken-and-egghead joke. Don't bother trying to explain it right now. Let's just leave it behind?

Once we accept lying about and ignoring the drifting conflict between local & aggregate habits - then the bad habit of over-delegating continuous control to presumed process owners (i.e., executives and managers) continues, decade after decade. All because "leaders" fail to practice discriminating the context from the local details? And all because aggregates ALLOW their "leaders" to fail them repeatedly, and simply carry on, voluntarily ceding ownership of their own context management to an endless string of "leaders," following an obsolete process.

And we STILL say that humans are intelligent?

The real heart of personnel system quandaries? Individuals always feel the conflict between personal ambitions and group ambitions.

The solution? Democracy methods.

Yes, I am NOT joking. We've formally known that for over 2300 years, and always knew it, because distributed democracy was always the human condition since the dawn of time. We only pretend to keep dabbling in the lie of delegated contingency management as a permanent solution, as the scale of our contingencies continue to grow.

To anyone familiar with biology, that cycle in social species translates to a quite familiar, ongoing transition in a balance between evolving physiological instincts and emerging cultural instincts. If you look for it, the transition is visible as a gradually changing, aggregate balance between individual and cultural habits.

1) unchecked expression of individual methods for hoarding static assets,

versus 

2) unleashed expression of distributed methods for hoarding of aggregate dynamic assets - namely coordination skills.

Our aggregate task, if we're going to maintain a viable nation-state, rather than simply a large, predatory mob? It's simple, really. Just do what James Madison advised. Keep re-developing faster/leaner/newer methods for dealing with constantly emerging factional frictions, FASTER than those unique factions and their unique frictions emerge in every new context (including the context of our own expanding numbers and/or capabilities).

Madison would undoubtedly be appalled that it's even necessary to re-invent this discussion today, 200+ years after he admonished us to never forget the lesson, and even wrote the lesson indelibly into the US Constitution!

If we don't have active methods for discovering, acknowledging, monitoring and ASSESSING every sort of faction and friction that arises, unpredictably, in our diversifying aggregate ... then we cannot even pretend to be exploring our options, or continuing to "make a more perfect union."

OpenOperations "Visual Economy" HighSchool Challenge

Open Operations is issuing a Challenge to EVERY HIGH SCHOOL IN THE USA, heck, in the world, to develop and present simple system visualizations in two categories:

1) Visual model for how Personnel System Methods make an Adaptive Organization.

2) Visual models for how Credit, currency, criminology & policy Methods make a Scalable National Economy. (5 subsections)

For more details, see below.


Why this challenge, now?  In many domain areas, we have endless criticism of things that are wrong, and and many illogical things to correct.  Take CREDIT, CURRENCY, CRIMINOLOGY AND FISCAL/TAX POLICY in general.   Despite growing numbers of critics, gridlock abounds, and OUR COUNTRY IS BECOMING A LESS RATHER THAN A MORE PERFECT UNION.  Identifying what's wrong is no longer rate limiting.  Our biggest problem is in coordinating coherent responses to what are still very distributed perceptions.  Our group-awareness of context is lagging context change, and is never adequately close to being coherent.

What to do?  Target aggregate context awareness.  How?  Here's our idea.

I just had a long talk with Peter Groen of CosiTech about the evolution of domain-specific exaqmples of "campaign momentum."

Peter is an IT person focused on distributing enabling IT tools, starting with OpenSource Health IT. He's basically the co-father of the VA's ViSTA open-source healthcare system.

I tried to impress upon Peter that there's a developmental step - widely discussed in biology - that is prior to coherent demand for tools.  Peter grasped it, and agreed in principle.

In health, for example, the bulk of our population had, after decades of education, arrived at a coherent view of personal & public health as systems.

The elements of that context awareness?  Recognition of a system, with components like vitamins, trace minerals, organs, blood pressure, infectious agents, immune responses, draining swamps, clean water, epidemiology, etc, etc.   Few now argue about the details, and instead share a common view.

With that common view came coherent context awareness.  Subsequently, citizens & clinicians began recognizing and crating tools to fill holes where the context model demanded data.  Health IT tools became obviously demanded, as one obligatory part of SYSTEM INSTRUMENTATION, but only once group awareness of a system was established.

Similarly, specific types of navigation tools proliferated AFTER more people realized that the world was round and circled the sun, not before.  For personal/public health, the response was rapidly spreading demand for all the diagnostic-tracking tools we know today, from charting of diets/exercise/toxins/nutrition all the way up to shareable electronic health records & statistics from public databases.

In the case of other systems?  We're just beginning to build coherent public awareness.  Take:

  military personnel systems;

  currency systems;

  public policy systems ... .

For these areas, THERE IS NO COHERENT CONTEXT MODEL!  Yet!

Why? First, we're not teaching the prior need for coherent context awareness to students.  Second, we don't provide enough ways for youth to PRACTICE the overriding return-on-coordination that scales up to trump any & all heroic but unscalable local practices.  Why memorize data BEFORE knowing what it's for?  Most data is irrelevant, most of the time.   Data can be generated or retrieved upon demand.  Adaptation primarily involves creating & capturing new methods for determining what tiny fraction of data matters, when it finally matters.

This is a distributed problem where adults have all the relevant data, but where AMERICA DOES NOT KNOW WHAT AMERICA KNOWS.   Worse yet, we don't know how little we need to know!   When that occurs, it's up to youth to come up with their own, coherent group-awareness of group-context.

Since DATA IS MEANINGLESS WITHOUT CONTEXT, we must first build group context-awareness before trying to utilize all the data we've been producing like projectile vomit.

Ergo, for neglected domains where coordination is now rate-limiting, our absolute first need is to disseminate simple models for visualizing & picturing system and system-component models.  

In our current context, we need simple models letting any Trudy, Nick or Harriet visualize how personnel (not just personal) methods make an organization, and how credit/currency/criminology policy methods make a national economy.  

With an iterative approach to such frameworks, people can fit in more detailed visualizations of sub-systems like credit systems, currency systems, criminology systems, and policy systems ... that are actually coherent visualizations of actual systems, rather than uncoordinated and unscalable ideologies. 

   The necessary visualization models need to be as simple as the currently popular but absolutely culturally worthless mobile-phone video games. :)

We have an emerging electorate that visualizes Grand Theft Auto better than they do Grand Theft Economy!   We can fix that.  The way to fix it soonest is to go through a logical process.

1) CREATE multiple, simple visualizations of context.

     Is the world flat or round?   

     Is an economy a dynamic equilibrium among distributed, conflicting, forces .... or a centrally commanded feudal system of, by & for the 1%, narrow-minded ideologues?

2) ADEQUATELY DISTRIBUTE competing, summary visualizations of as many models as possible.  Let juries of our peers - in Open Source courts or "selection markets" - converge to what is or isn't coherent.

3) CONVERGE to adequately shared context awareness. Then let the explosion of Open Source tools begin.  

If we can have Open Source Health tools & practices, then we can also have Open Source Policy tools & practices ... but only after achieving adequately shared public awareness of an economy as a coherent system.  If we as land and sea-faring nomads can invent celestial navigation tools and practices, then we, as Context Nomads, can also invent tools for navigating any context whatsoever.  To navigate, you first have to model which signs are most useful, and then monitor and leverage them appropriately.

Hence, Operations Institute, the OpenOperations Forum and Cosi Open Business & Economics are collaborating on a Challenge to EVERY HIGH SCHOOL IN THE USA, heck, in the world, to develop and present simple system visualizations in two categories:

1) Visual model for how Personnel System Methods make an Adaptive Organization.

2) Visual model for how Credit, currency, criminology & policy Methods make a Scalable National Economy.

Upon reflection, it seems necessary to divide scalable economics into 5, overall stages, especially for students being introduced to scalable systems theory.
     a) credit operations      b) monetary operations      c) regulatory operations      d) national policy operations [public ambitions]      e) a->d combined (adjusted, actual or "dynamic" national policy).

All models submitted for review must include a metric representing the sum "quality of distributed decision-making."   That metric will drive coherency as a selection criteria, thereby building in adaptive rate as the continuous goal, regardless of any pattern of context inputs.

All team members must be named, and - to practice coherent coordination - at least 4 disciplines must be represented.  For example: art student, choreography student, physics student, engineering student, etc, etc.

We suggest that all visualizations be submitted as YouTube videos and/or mobile phone apps.  We'll work with partners to create appropriate channels.

Open Operations Forum and collaborators will begin developing a distributed network of rewards for participating student teams.  Our initial approach will be to connect students to professions in any & all fields targeted above, and also to professionals in those fields who contribute by participation.   Thereby, participation result will be its own rewards.

Those with additional suggestions for further student incentives are free to contact us.