Key Topic - If We Care About "Our People" - Any Comments?

Anthropology and evolution studies the historical process of "making hunters & gatherers, into thinkers and builders." That has obvious implications for the challenges currently facing our Middle Class.

That's been happening since the dawn of time, in pauses & spurts. From hunter-gatherer humans to tribal/cultural humans was only the latest step.

Our biggest, perennial question is, how to keep growing the spurt/digest cycle across bigger aggregates?

We ALWAYS face demand for more thinking, and bigger cultural building ... on a greater scale?

So how we do that? Where do we go from here?

That's a huge topic, yet it just occurred to me that the physiology of sleep is a useful lesson. The physiology of sleep involves multi-tasking, but one function seems to be the review of reality-navigation options.

Basically, an analog network of cells takes in a LOT of information everyday. To navigate unpredictably changing contexts, it has to take time out to re-iterate, digest, review, recognize and SELECT replicable, ADAPTIVE, useful patterns from that data.

Our bodies & brains simply can't keep up with adaptation in real time. Adaptation requires analysis, testing & SELECTION.

[Mathematically, that implies that we're only chasing context, at maybe 1/3 it's rate of change. We can chase by plodding, but never keep up, let alone catch up? There may be some exceptions and advancements, via delegation of interleaved tasks, but that's a topic for subsequent discussion.]

Most histories of humans suggest that we've achieved ~the following in the physiology of humans and the culture of human-aggregates.

1) 5-8 hours/day of USEFUL data gathering (maybe only 2-5, really);

2) 5-8 hours/day of USEFUL inter/intra-person waking review (discourse & thinking);

3) 5-8 hours/day of neural cycling/reviewing/distilling (sleep).

Anything less than that, and individuals & groups stray too far behind the data onslaught, & are labeled as "insane," or aristocrats, Control Frauds, politicians, rogue states, or ... "empires." :)

What's that imply about nations & cultures?
We're just a larger ensemble. Trying to stay sane, on a national, not just a small-group level.

Our net numbers take in full bandwidth data.
Our own actions & interactions throw off all the additional data we need.

So the data regarding adaptive policy-options is always there. Sensing it, and reporting/analyzing/testing/assessing enough of it, fast enough, among one another? That's what is rate limiting for the adaptive agility of any and all groups.

What about our nation as an adaptive group?

All indications suggest that we're spending far too much time haphazardly doing, and not enough time reviewing? At least as a functioning nation-group.

Reviewing comes in - at least - two forms (and likely in a near-infinite, tailing curve of interaction "levels," going all the way back down to molecular & even quantum statistical evolution).

1) reviewing local data in local ensembles (personal thinking, small group discussion)

2) reviewing subsets of national data, in national ensembles (national thinking, national group discussion; of necessarily limited topics)

Multiple questions immediately arise.

For 320 million people, how many levels of review is required, to distill topics and data down to agile segments? (e.g. tactics, strategy, policy, milestone goals, Desired National Outcome)

Perhaps we need to delegate far more decision-making to county and town levels, not just state legislatures, let alone agency bureaucracies?

How do we achieve - and maintain - enough crosstalk between all processes at all levels, to achieve national agility?

I could go on and on, but it's already clear that our whole nation is missing what's perhaps the most pressing question of all. How to train students in K-12 education to even be aware of the most pressing question of all? We need to change K-12 education as fast as economic challenges change. We are obviously NOT doing that right now.

"How to achieve - and maintain, and GROW - net Agility of a growing aggregate?"

If we don't teach context awareness, or Situational Awareness, to a large enough proportion of our students - before they reach voting age - then we obviously can't maintain an informed electorate capable of navigating through unpredictable obstacle courses with adequate group agility.

Suggestion to citizens. Start volunteering at your local elementary schools. NOT, I repeat NOT to do mundane busywork, but to tell students real life stories, and update their situational awareness of where their country is, and where it is going. If upcoming citizens are not far better prepared to be far more involved in updating context awareness, at far higher rates than at present ... then we cannot attain and maintain a functioning democracy. It's that simple.

There is no alternative?

"We know not of the future and cannot plan for it much. But we can ... determine .. what [group, adaptive rate we can express], whenever .. the hour strikes ... ."
Paraphrasing Joshua Chamberlain

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

There's a steady stream of articles every year on this topic, everywhere EXCEPT the front page of your local, corporate media outlet.

Example: Ethics and Complex Systems

Key passage for me was this. "The reason [for] the lack of concern with ethics as a focus is that ethics are an important, perhaps the most important, guide for managing complex systems. One of the points that John Kay argues persuasively in his book Obliquity is that most systems are so complex that we cannot map an efficient path through them. He’s taken pairs of companies in the same industry, similarly endowed, one of which focused on maximizing shareholder value, the other which set a richer set of goals which seldom included making shareholders wealthy. The ones with the loftier aspirations also did better for stockholders."

These discussions of "group mission" by non-biologists or non-anthropologists always strike me as searching for higher meaning, while leaving more to search for and summarize.

Of COURSE every succeeding context is MORE complex than the last one. If it isn't, nothing is changing or evolving.

Seen from the light of additional disciplines, EVERY discipline in isolation is, of course, lacking as it faces each new context. Overall, just like war is too important to leave to the generals, EVERY old and emerging process of an evolving, WHOLE SYSTEM is too big to be left to the PRESUMED process owners. (Surely that holds for often-obtuse, rules-based application of the law as well?) Not surprisingly, every additional bit of perspective improves sustainable pathway - aka, policy - selection. This is just like benefiting from a higher ladder in the middle of a corn maze. It's also called "democracy," remember that quaint subject?

So what members of any & all social order always need is more perspective? We always need an even better sense of a bigger system in transition, traveling along an endless, meandering pathway, and one tasked with not straying too far off course? From past situations to our current one, and on to unpredictable future situations? That always puts things in perspective, like widening a peephole to a window, and then climbing a hill to look down on your camp (or context).

One immediate conclusion is that we as a growing population are always neglecting a core task? And that task is "How to build, then keep, then accelerate achievement of MORE net-situational awareness among our entire electorate?" Let's call it "Group Context Awareness."

My gut feeling is that our Founders called this outcome an Informed Electorate, and worried about it a lot. They also called their response the teaching of Civics. Said that way, it also drives home the fact that humans have been discussing this as a critical topic throughout the history of organized culture. Certainly longer than recorded history, and back to the onset of even moderate-size tribal systems.

The question we're now facing is how to grow and keep growing group-context-awareness even as our population doubles again, from 315 million to somewhere past 600 million. Once put that way, it comes down to discovering and adopting new methods, fast enough. That's what Adaptive Rate means. Since we have zero predictive power in such complex systems, we have to fall back on adaptive power, and do enough trial & error exploration to keep our growing tribe together.

Why keep it together? To reap the insanely large return-on-coordination possible IF we can coordinate on a larger scale. WWII certainly demonstrated that, and we did all that purely with pencil & paper! We could be doing astounding things today, if we would only commit to mobilizing ourselves to tilt at windmills worth achieving.

We always have our own, growing tiger by the tail, and we must either hold on to our growing mobilization skills, or let go and die. To me, holding on as a group means instilling a sense of purpose into emerging generations, so that they are aware of this challenge, and therefore align and APPLY their millions of distributed decision-making paradigms to solving it, by orienting all their local adjustments to common, AS WELL AS personal, goals. Organizing on a larger scale is always a 2-stage optimization task - our current stage (already achieved) PLUS the emerging stage (our bigger scale).

Even while it's irritating enough already, common goals are much easier to enunciate than the methods themselves. All we can do is enunciate past organizational principles, and challenge kids to get better at what I'll call "Mobilization Games." If evolution is occurring, and we're in an Adaptive Race, then lets just be honest with all kids, and give them safe Mobilization Games platforms that allow them to safely prepare for the future.

As DoD-rebels repeatedly say, quoting Froebel, group discovery works faster when we don't FURTHER prejudice and thereby constrain practice or play groups with our own suggestions. Let 'em PRACTICE generating and selecting from their own diversity. Make self-mobilization their fall-back habit. That's how they'll get good at it, and stay good at it once we're gone.

Yet we need to safely challenge our emerging population. So we're still left with a challenging conundrum, how to recruit our constituents to practice exploring their [Local+Net] group options without instilling bias or prejudice.

After some consideration here's what imagination suggests. Act like unbiased "Kindern" ourselves, and just try many platforms that recruit citizens to organize themselves, NOT for us, or under our aegis?

Then we can TEST those platforms as "electoral Kindergartens." That way we can safely - with care to avoid prejudice - continuously work on recruiting our electorate to challenge THEMSELVES without prejudice.

The hard part will be to protect ourselves & our electorate from our own, inevitable prejudices! :)

Luckily, Natural Selection removes us all pretty quickly, so how much damage can we do? Certainly not as much as we've BEEN inflicting, by NOT practicing at accelerating our own, net mobilization!

One outcome of this train of thought is the old suggestion that we need fewer politicians, and more "parents" interested in encouraging but not owning national policy - so we can enlarge our Policy Space, and increase our Policy Agility. Considering the new methods always required only brings us back to ENCOURAGING kids to invent their own methods, ones that help electorates improve the net, adaptive quality of distributed decision-making. Then we need to quit constraining them. It's a delicate process, but we've been doing this for 3.5 billion years. It sure as hell ain't gonna stop without us. It's OUR TASK to get in paradigm, or continue aiding and abetting self-suicide.

The "Evolving Aggregate's Task"

How fast is the USA dissolving, from the inside out, as the ratio of engagement to disengagement declines? And what can we not just do, but BEST DO about it?

For quick, situational awareness, let's consider a recent, mini case-report.

Vallejo, Calif., once bankrupt, is now a model for cities in an age of austerity

If this is a model experience & response, then American cities - and states - are still in shockingly deep trouble. Vallejo, CA's unfolding story reminds me more of a pathetic Lord of the Flies than a stirring story of insanely impressive innovation & evolution. The thrust of the Vallejo article is that this is one model for how to re-organize in an "age of austerity." A more audacious response would be to refute the defeatist strategy of austerity, and instead commit to shaping the supposed "age" that our dispirited aggregate seems to be resigning itself to.

The pattern I see is:

1) dismal context awareness of US citizens and aggregates (the whole world is always changing, but most of us, individually & collectively, are woefully out of paradigm - and ongoing "paradigms" are not static, but continue to change)

2) initial consequence is that far too many not only didn't see it coming, but didn't even get the license # of the SituationDeliveryVan (SDV) that just ran over them.

3) given the still-lagging situational awareness, many are still sitting listlessly in the same road, vulnerable to the same and new SDVans & their increasingly frequent "stocking" runs. (SD, Inc. is accelerating expansion of their fleet, if you hadn't yet noticed.)

What are we NOT seeing? Why AREN'T we seeing these things, soon enough?

Where are the scouts contributing the info required to build civic, situational awareness (SA)?

Where are the local command & review teams, staff, councils & delegated officers RAPIDLY summarizing SA from that info?  When our kids are resorting to spontaneous attempts at reorganization - through gangs - you know we're too disengaged.  If we don't take  our kids to work, or elsewhere, soon enough, they'll look for secondary options.

Where are the agile, strategic responses - that should have been initiated 30 years ago?

What the hell happened to American ingenuity & distributed resilience?

And above all else, where is the will, initiative & automatic instinct to act locally without letting communities dissolve?  Prevention is a lot easier than - repeatedly - reconstituting losses.

Martial law from above is a last gasp ploy when civic law isn't self-organizing from below.

So why isn't bottom-up civic-law self-organizing, in more places, sooner?

It's hard to put one's finger on what critical step is missing when a previously self-aggregating aggregate fails to continue organizing - or why it even started slowing it's rate of mobilization.

Ecologists, biologists, historians, military-strategists and system-scientists have long studied this general issue - how aggregates alter rates of adaptive mobilization at any scale - and there are some obvious, if initial, clues as to what's lagging.

Aggregate Instrumentation
Every growing aggregate can generate many combinations of more components and higher component transaction-rates. To preserve aggregate agility in any new organizational pattern, a rapidly increasing amount of situational awareness information must be passed through existing and/or new inter-component, communication channels. In short, a growing aggregate must scale aggregate self-instrumentation much faster than it's actual organic growth. In general, if the size of an aggregate doubles, to maintain similar agility, the amount of info-passing across all components may have to initially increase by a multiple of n-factorial.

That's why brain-size grows faster than body size as one compares different sized animals with similar agility. And if you want increasing agility simultaneously with aggregate growth, then even further, genius-level innovation is required. In the USA, civic-coordination services have to grow at a rate faster, not slower than population and/or economic growth. If they don't, the USA will regress, not prosper.

Aggregate Selective Tuning
To re-adapt to changing situations, a growing aggregate must be constantly re-tuned, very cleverly. The general pattern seen in all model systems that succeed is 2-step re-iteration. Surviving systems periodically re-connect everything to everything, then relax to the minimum connectivity patterns needed for that particular situation. Then they do it all over again. That's the basic pattern seen in the dramatic sexual recombination of genes, in the chemical gradients generated as an embryo grows from one to billions of organized cells, and in the development of neural organization in the developing brain. It's also what happens in tribes, armies, neighborhoods, markets, nations and international markets. New components (i.e., kids/students) go out and meet many peers, then briefly settle into defined adult roles before making room for a succeeding wave of adaptive components able to re-connect & re-tune into novel patterns. Explore, tune in, re-spawn & bow out.

There are too many sub-steps involved to possibly list & review in this article, but even these two, simple observations above allow us to ask further, pertinent questions.

Why are our systems failing?  Why is our adaptive rate declining?
Why are we not adequately scouting all the emerging data lines affecting our aggregate? There are many headlights coming down all roads converging on our unfolding situations. What distributed incentives are we failing to adjust, thereby allowing diverse SDVans to slip through more often, to run over parts of our aggregate with increasing frequency?

Why aren't we adequately reviewing & summarizing our own, distributed knowledge, fast enough? Why, as situations, our size, and our complexity change, are we not re-connecting everything to everything ... frequently enough & quickly enough? Why should an aggregate with our aggregate knowledge ever be in a position of effectively saying "no one could have predicted we wouldn't listen to some of our own people" - or even not knowing that such diverse scouting reports exist?

Institutional hubris simply reflects lack of situational practice, which in turn follows failure to review scaling data. In short, we have too many people over-analyzing insufficient data, when we already know that all data is meaningless without context, and that most data is irrelevant even with context. 

Simple conclusion is that we're spawning options faster than we're exploring them, and are getting distracted in the process. That's inherently a failure to rank options and prioritize pursuit of the largest returns. We're failing to cross our own chasm!

This is a recurring, general problem which I've previously named the "Traveling Entrepreneur's Task." Seeing as how the task scales up to be a rate-limiting task for all evolving aggregates, this task may be better named the "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task."

 The general expression of this task is to select the optimal path through a dynamic "space" where options constantly expand or shrink  as a consequence of any action taken. The general solution is to painstakingly map and take that path which continually grows the number of available, aggregate options. In a separate post I'll lay out some of the task parameters that have emerged, from multiple fields.

As Warren Mosler astutely asks, "How do you get people to explore their options?"   Why aren't we even adequately aware of the relative returns on all our spiraling options? Or that there are many, and that the number increases every day?  Heck, if an aggregate is not familiar with it's various options, it seems inescapable that, as a start, they're not exploring enough of them before choosing which to spend time digging in to.

Why aren't we at least reporting, listing, evaluating and ranking all our aggregate options? Tribal groups throughout history have faced this question, and it seems to have limited any & all colony sizes, from termites to humans. 

One answer is that we're simply not discussing our aggregate options widely, deeply or quickly enough. Why not? Perhaps we're simply not allowing ourselves enough time for group discussion. In all prior tribal systems, inordinate amounts of time were spent discussing aggregate options, precisely so that they could be ranked & pursued wisely, not randomly. Natural selection strongly favored those aggregates that measured & considered not just twice, but many times, before cutting into emerging situations. The same lesson is echoed in much business literature, as "slow down, and choose wisely, not randomly." If not, your aggregate never crosses the chasm to achieve its full Output potential.

Why do growing aggregates cycle in & out of optimally organized, aggregate behavior patterns? One obvious answer involves the ratio between distributed methods and emerging success rates. Aggregate strategy is, of necessity, the sum of an aggregate's distributed tactics or methods. Distributed incentive structures work adequately only if not saturated, or unduly frustrated. Obviously, an aggregate may fail to scale due to too much success, leading to distributed apathy & component "obesity."  Or, it may fail to scale due to a "systemic shock" response, where something triggers too much hoarding of resources in some model of the "central" organs of culture. The obvious problem is that reduced circulation of any sort of resource, from commodities to information, reduces aggregate agility.  In either case, the underlying causality is that the distributed methods - & incentives for using them - weren't adjusted with enough systemic agility.

In that case, the solution, if one even appears, occurs in an indirect, nested system response.  Some previously non-existent or seemingly negligible aggregate component becomes part of newly significant aggregate tuning instrumentation.

When a systemic shock reflex kicks in - for whatever reason - it's a sign of a overwhelmed system's desperate attempt to use outmoded reflexes to solve situations it has failed to adequately scout, consider, probe, surf and prepare for.

Sometimes a shock reflex may work, and sometimes it may lead to a self-induced death spiral not absolutely dictated by context. The overall lesson is that an ounce of adaptive prevention prevents multiples of pain, cure & lost output. It's far better to never fall into a systemic shock reflex, because it reveals a system already in a state of confusion, randomly falling back on old vs emerging strategies.

That's the absolutely last behavior an agile aggregate EVER wants to find itself expressing in a novel situation.

Systemic shock - i.e., rising disparity - is a graphic admission that an aggregate has been dozing on the watch, and has no idea whether another SituationDeliveryVan may be about to arrive, with or without it's headlights on.

Slow change in our distributed incentive systems may thus lead us to cycles of accelerating or declining aggregate growth rates.  The question is what to do about it?  How do we continually add protective sub-loops preemptively protecting us from such system bugs? 

Again, answers are already apparent from previously studied model systems. Every known process in biology or biochemistry seems to be simultaneously expressed in at least triplicate, affected by short, medium and long-term feedback mechanisms - call them checks & balances if you will.  This critical lesson, apparent in densely engineered, prior systems, may be exactly what we're failing to pay enough attention to as our aggregate explores it's own, new frontiers of scale.

Parallel system feedback systems with diverse time constants provide a general framework for smoothing out adaptive responses over multiple situations.  An aggregate employing this strategy is less likely to fall into the trap of over-adapting to any one situation while reducing it's chances of transitioning to the next, inevitably different situation.  Other evolved aggregates have shown us that survival of Entrepreneurial Aggregates means taking a middle path, where minimally-adequate adaptation to each situation allows adequate preparation for the next situation.

Is our culture adequately instrumented, from local to national levels?

In our nation, states, counties, cities, towns, schools, neighborhoods and families - do we have enough, different feedback systems with adequately differing time-constants? 

Are we letting the signal strength from those feedback channels scale automatically?   

Do we prepare our citizens - through actual practice - to listen and respond to that multiple and changing signal spectrum?  

As our aggregate size and complexity grows rapidly, are we spawning enough feedback systems with enough different time constants to keep our aggregate agile? 

To even achieve that last step, are we modeling our combined map of aggregate-feedback-methods-to-context, so that we can adequately FOCUS on aggregate tuning, which always delivers the highest return? 

It seems certain that we can always do that, but if we only remind ourselves that the highest return in any organized aggregate is ALWAYS the return-on-coordination.

In fact, to survive, we need to move on to a more powerful version of that message.  The highest return in any organized aggregate is ALWAYS the return-on-rate-of-coordination.

Seems obvious that success follows adaptive rate.  It's not sufficient to adapt, if your aggregate always finds that another aggregate has already done so a decade before, has moved on, and is already out of sight, disappeared into a future your aggregate won't share.

Methods for recursively tuning rate-of-return-on-coordination therefore offer themselves as the general, dynamic solution to the continually scaling "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task" or, more directly, the Evolving Aggregate's Task.

As promised, a follow-on post will begin to list the diverse parameters subtly affecting the "Entrepreneurial Aggregate's Task." There's no way that such a listing task will ever end. No one person or component of any system can ever know them all, at any one time ... and our list will never stop growing .. unless the USA dies.