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."

Is This Possible? Start Continuously Re-Building a "National Map of Vulnerable Processes"

Everyone, and every organization, and every nation would benefit by doing this more formally. (A more organized attempt to "know ourselves" - and keep that profile up to date. That's what dictates cultural adaptive rate.)

That would be 100x more important than only the following.

Hacker Creates Worldwide Map of Vulnerable Devices

Vulnerable equipment? That's certainly important, but it in reality also the least of our worries! There are always options for improving all equipment and all tools. All the hard lessons about system dynamics, however, converge to a simple fact. ADAPTIVE RATE dictates survival, i.e., the methods we use to change any and all equipment, tools, processes and operations in general.

Given hierarchies in systemic organization, i.e., (all linked by diverse operations) ... we are always using countless emerging methods to map diverse operations to emerging context hierarchies. The historical pattern, rarely excepted by surprises, constitutes a design-build hierarchy. Recognize context, then set and achieve major goals (one at a time, in sequence), using context-dictated policies, policy-constrained strategies, and strategy-constrained tactics. Tools and equipment - if not selected per the above hierarchy - can easily become a fatal resource sink.

Context...................O
..................m.........P
Goals............e.........E
..................t..........R
Policies.........h.........A
..................o..........T
Strategies......d..........I
..................s..........O
Tactics.....................N
(tools/equip.)...............S


It is always true that novel options for linking, sequencing and staging net activities (i.e., re-organizing) - are both dominated - AND most threatened - by resiliency issues further up that hierarchy.

After all, thinking organizations are always, via practice, rebuilding the following, iterative mappings.

"National Map of Changing Context"
"National Map of Vulnerable Goals"
"National Map of Vulnerable Policies"
"National Map of Vulnerable Strategies"
"National Map of Vulnerable Tactics"
"National Map of Vulnerable Equipment"
"National Map of Vulnerable Tools"

Out of those mappings comes an always unpredictable list of what has to start changing soonest.
Evolution of complex systems means that survivors are those that are quickest to adequately refine infinitely nested, evolving methods for re-mapping context-navigation operations to changing context.
The iterative stages of evolving faster/better/leaner methods stretches is an unbroken stack, extending from human culture back to enzymes and further back, to the physics of quarks - maybe beyond.

At our level, luckily, we need only focus our attention only on, say, the latest 5 layers of this nested stack of methods. All our tasks are subsumed into a general process of continuously re-building two, inter-dependent and iterative mapping processes:

  semi-static....................... more-dynamic
 "National Map of                     "National Map of
Vulnerable Processes"               Vulnerable Methods"
.................................... (for adjusting any/all processes; on-demand)

Creating those 2, overall maps describes the, often intangible, outcome of OBT&E exercises, aka, effective team building.

It's somewhat chilling that we're still struggling to scalably restate principles that were - at least in context - already obvious over 2000 years ago. Somehow, we're raising citizens that don't practice knowing themselves and their situations, and therefore can't see emerging group options for the spurious details?
I can't imagine what could happen if we changed our training methods, but it gives me the chills just trying to imagine it.

Can we do this? We have so far, for about 3.5 Billion years.  The ONLY thing generating any doubt is us. Luckily, our kids don't even see what the adults have learned to fear.  Our job, mostly, is to not stay in their way too long.