What Do We Do When We Have This Much Contention At The Highest Levels Of System Governance? ALLEVIATE IT!

Last Friday, I was just at a contentious seminar that turned out to be a model for nearly every systemic policy process underway today.

The forum discussed MICC decision-making & how well it aligns vs ignores critical service demands for CAS (close air support) decision-making.

http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/weapons/2013/a-seminar-on-combat-effectiveness.html

see also http://www.pogo.org/our-work/straus-military-reform-project/weapons/2013/air-force-brass-ignores-wars-lessons.html

The whole event was literally riveting, from start to finish!

Why? Ultimately, for what it revealed about our systemic governance processes, beyond even what it meant for those working with the topic at hand.

There is far, far too much to relate about the content of this forum, but here are two key points that cut through all the other details.

1) A retired AF pilot and officer, Chuck Myers, said the whole concept of CAS had been off-track from it's inception (>85 years ago), and should be re-named as MAS (maneuver-air-support) - to direct all discussion of it to the key concept of net, team agility (i.e., Adaptive Rate). Chuck seemed to be the oldest person present, yet seemed to have the most - and an astounding - grasp of system development, or appreciation for a "system," from tactics all the way up to politics. Yet, his story was one of lifelong frustration. Learning much, and passing on cogent warnings about tragic, unsolved systemic issues. Made me think of a drill-down of Eisenhower's MICC speech.

2) Chuck Myers also related a story from post-WWII, involving a legendary AF Gen he once worked with, Elwood Quesada. Quesada had suggested to the highest levels of DoD command, that AF/Army/Navy/USMC coordinate weapons platform development ... and was told by senior generals that they couldn't do that, since the competing service leaders "are the enemy."

    You can't make this stuff up!

As I understood it, that observation of deep, organizational toxicity occurred before even the Korean War! Worse, it has never been remedied, and persists, magnified, in the highest levels of our cultural policy governance, even today.
  Astounding!

(At this point my mind was already silently screaming to myself: "What about our Goddamn 2-party system - that makes an ongoing art out of having whole swaths of citizens name each other, and each other's representatives, as enemies? And all our isolated, narrow-thinking lobbyist processes? What have we descended into? And what are we going to DO about THAT?)

More direct ruminations triggered by the meeting.

The meeting agenda revolved around the immediate furor over the AF removing the A-10 CAS/MAS airplane from service, and leaving a significant needs-gap with only vague promises that it would or could be filled by alternate means. There were deeply moving testimonies from multiple service veterans documenting that morale suffered from such decision processes, starting with a sense of betrayal, progressing to organizational fatigue, and culminating in performance degradation.

Amazingly, the resulting discussion REPEATEDLY drove home the hierarchy - for systemic success - of people(affinity)/practice/equipment - in that order ... YET, the whole meeting concluded with a question rather than a conclusion: "We've nailed the problem, now what do we do about it?"

That conclusion - or lack of it - was astounding, (for an outsider) since they'd all just finished re-documenting and re-agreeing on the classic solution ... at least at THEIR level. Yet, they COULD NOT, for the life of them, see that the systemic solution was simply a process of extending the "people(affinity)" grouping to the larger set of people that every task-team has to coordinate with every year (in every evolving culture) - as both populations and their layers of organization governance expand!

Restate it this way, as a question. What did pre-homo-sapien species do, as their cell-count and physiological complexity kept evolving (from, say, 1/2 Trillion cells in some small mammal, to the 10X Trillion cells, different cell types, and different organs in the current human physiology)?

Answer: First off, all the human cell numbers in our body maintain their total group affinity, above all else, as they grow from one egg cell to the 10X Trillion cells in an adult.

System growth simply cannot outgrow it's methods for maintaining affinity and hence it's motivation for "inter-service coordination" among ALL system components.

It's either a system ... or it's a mob in some grade of civil war.

With system expansion, every (seemingly) intractable system-organization task has a solution, and that solution involves adding yet another layer of indirection - to maintain first affinity, and then coordination? Ya think?

In other words, systems evolve by coordinating on a larger scale. Success is DEFINED as reaping the astounding return-on-coordination.

That dynamic at the meeting was, for a systems scientist, simply astounding to see, and experience, and to see ignored and missed once again!

To me, it seemed to be a system not hearing feedback from it's own new trees, simply because of the increased size of today's forest. They were missing their own, self-evident solution once again, and snatching defeat from their own, migrating, jaws of victory. The bigger problem - overall - seemed to be the task of expanding our electorate's perception - situational awareness - as fast as our own, bureaucratic situations expand.

The pace of the meeting was so quick that I never could get a comment in. There were always too many people with uniforms or urgent testimony to give - all dotting more "i's" and crossing more "t's" in the sympony which the chorus was preaching to itself. That's exactly what made the meeting so riveting, and yet we simply ran out of time to discuss what to do next. But I did get to talk with a few people afterwards, and think I have a follow-up path to try to help this critical effort along.

After all, if this group - who are SO close to perfecting continuously developing methods - can't be helped to take another step, then what hope is there for all our other sectors, who haven't accumulated anywhere near as much experience at actually having to make complex social-systems work? Those would be our other congressional/industry/agency/professional complexes.

That question stuck in my mind all weekend, and I woke up Sunday morning with an epiphany ... that surviving, agile systems are those that select for feedback loops operating with at 3, parallel, time constants (an old observation in biology; that there are always AT LEAST immediate, medium and long-term response mechanisms at work, EVERYWHERE you look, involved in every process).

My epiphany was that, in human-team terms, one can say it this way:

"Leaders" save the butts of adult groups in critical situations - immediate term.

"Teachers" train adolescent groups to handle newly discovered, critical situations - medium term.

"Parents" are always adding subtle new wrinkles, preparing developing groups to avoid getting deep into whole new patterns of critical situations (prevention through early intervention, as an improved form of "steering"). Long term adaptation.

Amazingly, military science has long recognized a parallel observation (but failed to adequately apply it to their own, personnel systems?). Their counterpart of this same observation is called the "3ɪˈs" of contingency management.

That is, deal with impact/interception/instigators[causality]. Military teaching also states that if you don't manage all 3 processes in parallel, that you can't win. Right?

So, an obvious question arises. Can we continuously adapt if we don't apply the same logic to our own, system development processes?

Isn't that how we avoid developing views which lead us to disastrously label our own team members as our enemies? For Kilroy's sake! Why is that NOT our #1 priority?

The "3ɪˈs" of managing the parallel contingency of our own, changing, internal systems ... are:

total team performance (self-leadership), 

total team training,  

total team gestation (cultural development).

What's that old saying?

If war is too important to leave to the generals, then surely EVERY process is too important to be left to the presumed process owners?

That lesson quite obviously holds for owners/managers of whole systems too.

It's fatally erroneous to presume that processes AND WHOLE SYSTEMS (including ourselves and our institutions) are permanent, and not transient.

   *****

ps: Someone also just sent me a reminder of a similar issue, currently in the news.

"The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Committee investigated until 1978 and issued its final report, and concluded that Kennedy was very likely assassinated as a result of a conspiracy."  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_Select_Committee_on_Assassinations

Tactically, it no longer matters whether JFK's death was or wasn't conspiracy by whichever particular people who saw him as "the enemy." It DOES matter that we have no systemic method for dealing with this taboo subject - in a timely manner - at ALL levels of our current culture. The perennial questions are - where can we get to from HERE, where we currently are, and how soon?

The claim is that some of our own people in high-level governance positions came to view Pres. JF Kennedy and Senator RF Kennedy as "the enemy?"

Again. For Kilroy's sake! If we can't quit targeting ourselves, then how can we focus, as a team, on external challenges and explore our own, emerging options? If the return-on-coordination is always the highest return, by far, then how do we keep our eyes on that, instead of lesser, goals?

If the lesser goals are below us, then we really have seen the enemy, and it really is true that "he is us." Therefore, our chief task is selection, and eliminating those process attributes that hinder team coordination. Those friction-generating sub-processes are our biggest enemy. We just have to train ourselves to recognize "them" as we keep spawning their child-processes, in every new thing we add.

It's a process of selectively pruning the high-friction parts of all the new activities which we constantly sow amongst ourselves?  Ya think?

There's no reason why we can't be better "parents" for our evolving culture - as well as leaders and teachers - of our existing electorate. We just have to teach appreciation for our own systems ... and their evolution ... to every student by, say, 5th grade. (Or, make that age 10, if we're already going back to self-directed, Open Source, education.)

That doesn't sound like a difficult task at all. These are simple concepts. We just need to apply them more systemically.

A Thinking Electorate Capable of SELECTING A Thinking Policy Staff? Why A Liver Cell Doesn't "Retire" On It's Own.

We are now deluged with discussion of "retirement" as a personal, not a national concept.

Let's put things in perspective. The best security for an aging, human atom is to establish and help maintain coordination among the 10x Trillion atoms inside a typical human cell.

The best security for an aging liver cell is to help establish and help maintain coordination among the 10xTrillion cells and ~60 organs making up the typical human physiology.

The same holds for any single person among the ~320 million residents inside the USA.

How do WE organize on a bigger scale? What are the unimaginable returns we could reap if we'd just all work together? We have a long way to go to match previous organizational achievements. We're not even getting started, folks. Could we stop this evolving train, even if we wanted to?

Thinking ONLY as isolated individuals is obviously not the solution.

This is NOT a difficult concept to comprehend. Life-cycle utilization of aging components in an organized, GROWING AND EVOLVING system is a trivial task - IF all components just work together. Teamwork makes progress and growth incredibly easy for team members. That's why "social" atoms, molecules, cells and species evolved, and why teams work. Call it the return-on-coordination.

The opposite - team members ONLY parasitizing one another - only leads to dissolution of teams and nations, and loss of the original return on coordination - which is the highest return, BY FAR. This is 2nd nature to all kids converging on a playground, or huddling around a game. What are we doing to remove it by the time they're adults? Our real goal is to drive adaptive SELECTION at all levels, from local to national ... and then to mold mold them into NET, not random, adaptive selection. That requires a lot of connections and interactions. More than none, and less than too many. But how many in any given context? There's no pat answer, other than "just enough," but working teams can easily figure that out on a daily basis, if they try. Even large electorates can do this easily, but only if they at least try.

What happened to our founders original goal of a thinking electorate capable of selecting a thinking policy staff?

Instead, we're faced with with a flood of randomly distracting messages, like the following.

Every $5 worth of food stamps generates $9 back into the economy.

Seems to me that the whole article falls into the trap of being confused, divided & conquered, by unnamed opponents who are getting us to promote our own demise. Those opponents might even be ourselves, purely by accident! For Pete's sake! Instead of being distracted, divided and conquered by the mass of disorienting details in this story, please briefly ignore those details, and instead ask a simple question about context.

What Desired Outcome is this discussion implicitly embracing?

A strategy for an undefined SOME of us, to live off a "stabilized" serf class?

The whole discussion drifts towards an abstract view the US Middle Class as a commodity, somewhat like cattle on their way from Kansas stockyards. However, the new slaughterhouses are on Wall St., not in Chicago.

Why is this even happening? Where does this view come from? Partly because of the highly publicized - and highly abstract - economist's myth of "equilibrium" in an evolving system?

Doesn't that make you wonder who finds it convenient to SELECT economists who spout such nonsense? When all you have is a parasitic ... er, aristocratic outlook, every policy question looks like a question of ruling? By idiosyncratic Central Planning? Regardless of whether the commodity SOME have targeted for domestication involves sheep, cattle, serfs or even our former Middle Class?

For us "commodities," it doesn't matter whether we were targeted innocently or purposefully by those who think they are destined to rule. Either way, we need to refuse to go on the journey to the financial slaughterhouse others have selected for us. Stop cooperating with those targeting you, and start playing team ball with YOUR teammates in the former Middle Class.

That's how we can ALL retire while seamlessly rebuilding, not looting, our nation, and enjoy every step of that journey too.

The whole failure of Central Planning is that the perspective from yesterday's context is never sufficient to avoid mistakes in tomorrow's, bigger context. Only with constantly increasing perspective can further adjustments continue, sooner, rather than later. Adaptive adjustments are those based on expanding perspective. All other team adjustments - individual or group - tend, by definition, to be random actions, mostly maladaptive.

So why are we still drifting back to Central Planning, this time under the guise of capitalism? We can't see the context for all the fees we're charging one another?

There is a better way. We have the tools of democracy. Let's just use them. Once perspectives are broadened and stimulated to at least LOOK at our constantly changing and EXPANDING context, an element of doubt is possible. Those doubts about how we're navigating through a CHANGING situation are the only thing that keep any evolving system alive.

Without an adequate fraction of nagging doubt about all actions AND their growing connectivity, we don't re-examine our increasingly complex systems.

And if we don't re-examine emerging outcomes, and actually assess what we're seeing? Well, then don't be surprised if outcomes don't steer towards what YOU recognize as survival - for you, your kids, your neighborhood or your entire nation.

That's how we end up even dwelling - so much - on the occurrence of mal-adaptive things that clearly have no public purpose.

Take the following series, as another complement to Bill Black's scathing review of banksters, their lobbyists, and the "policy staff" which "we" SELECT to let them buy.

How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part I in a Series

How to Steal a Lot of Money: Part II in a Series

How To Steal A Lot Of Money (Part III In A Series)

How many ignored messages DOES it actually take, to make the US electorate actually wake up and re-examine what they really want?

Not mention their actual process for SELECTING their own, national policies that steer us to those outcomes?

Nor our methods for SELECTING the policy staff they task with delivering those Desired Outcomes.

The ball is distributed all over our court. We have 320 million players on our team. Can we organize this team to achieve what we want to achieve? How soon can we mobilize to do that? Before it's too late?

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.

Surviving The Bureaucratic Complexities We Create? That's A Good Way To Describe Our Challenge

At the present, we're repeating an endless debate, and questioning The Folly of [Every System?]

Won't it be better if our grandchildren can have a different debate, rather than repeating one we leave unsolved? So, can we make our debate different than the one OUR grandparents had?

Why not? Let's put it this way. Complex societies disintegrate when they cannot sustain the bureaucratic complexities they've created? So how DO they survive as long as they do, and how DO the components pick up the pieces after failing to escape traps they're not yet ready for?

One answer is abundantly documented throughout evolutionary history. Systems grow by building up methods that work, and when they hit dead-ends, the components dis-associate and start over again, from a regressed state. Then they try again. The interesting part is how long it takes 'em, and how far they back up before taking another run at it.

In short, net survival continuously tracks PARTIAL undoing, redoing, overlaying and repurposing of existing bureaucracies, families, corporations, species, phenotypes, cultures or "systems" - whatever you want to call them. They all have a lot in common, and it's useful to examine those commonalities.

In some instances, we refer to repurposing as "shaping" individual or even small group behavior patterns, through initially indirect paths that use existing momentum to get started, before re-directing it to pursuit of emerging options. The methods used to shape any situation are unique to that situation. Such changing methods have to be lived and practiced, not assumed to be fixed or in "equilibrium."

Now we have the challenge of reshaping our own, entire culture, either gracefully, or by letting it die and be reformed in another guise that allows growth on yet another scale.

This is what we do! It's what we've always done. When young, we all took things apart. Most can never be put back together again - but with enough trial and error, some useful recombination occurs. It used to be clothes, then watches, then cars, then computers. As adults, we mostly settle into bureaucracies, but inventors throughout history have always insisted on "making snowmobiles" from cannibilized components. The biggest "snowmobile" construction challenge is remaking our own, entire democracy more frequently, as Tom Jefferson suggested.

As a guide, the known processes of speciation and embryology offer some very useful, orienting lessons for everything we're going through. They serve as axioms, or basic principles to keep in mind and tie all emerging details to.

First, 3.5 billion years of species differentiation has left traces documenting the slow transformation of new forms from prior ones. Next, it is the incredibly infrequent, adaptive changes in embryology steps that reflect the growing toolkit of methods that drive speciation.

During embryological development, random hints of a historical pattern are observed, namely that some parts of ontogeny always reflect some parts of phylogeny. Parts of a developing fetus clearly START to make structures found in the adult stage of ancestral species, only to halt, undo or re-purpose the budding structures in an astoundingly long sequence of "shaping" steps that (normally, in humans) leads to birth of current humans as we know them. This net, shaping process in embryology is recognizably similar to concepts expressed in military science. All mobilization - of any system - comes down to "staging, linking and sequencing" existing and emerging components and processes on increasingly larger scales.

So, while dabbling in "nation building" elsewhere, why are we struggling to continuously rebuild our own, obviously changing, developing and evolving nation?

What about cultural embryology? Cultural embryology proceeds rather analogously to all other known evolution processes. The details at every new scale are completely different, of course, but the basic challenge remains. How do we continuously "shape" a process that starts more things every year and continuously creates ever more "institutions" that - while integral steps in the core "shaping" process - have to themselves be continuously interrupted, partially or completely undone and ultimately repurposed, bypassed or overlaid with newly emerging institutions? That's a LOT to keep up with, let alone improve. Nevertheless, it will improve, with or without our participation. The only question is whether we in the USA want to step up and lead, or follow, or even cede the path.

We've already been doing such development, of course. The USA is itself the outcome of such a recombinant process, seen in a bigger scale. Even within the USA we've been adding, ending and re-purposing institutions, and amending our Constitution.

So the real question is how to do even more of all that, more quickly? And, do it with less waste of time and resources? In short, how do we help increase the adaptive agility of our own electorate as a whole? It comes back to increasing the Adaptive Rate of the US electorate. Instead of gridlock and shutting down our democracy, how do we "stage, link and sequence" our own bureaucratic complexities faster/better/more-focused? What happened to American ingenuity?

Finally, we know from experience that the vast majority of changes we try simply won't work. Only an incredibly few changes will be adaptive. So we ought to be TRYING new things faster all the time, in small simulations, in controlled settings. Plus, we ought to be incredibly careful in considering what key things to change on a larger scale. Finally, we ought to be even more incredibly careful about assessing what is and isn't adaptive for the whole nation, when we DO test it on a large scale.

Step one is focus? On what? How about accelerated analysis of national self-awareness? That brings us directly to evaluation of what can and can't be pared from a continuous, cultural-embryology process.

At this point, evolutionary hindsight offers only some key principles. How do we actually SELECT which interaction patterns among our current, national culture to keep vs discard? That is an entirely context-dependent, trial and error process which has to be discovered rather than predicted. That means living the details, not describing past outcomes. We have zero predictive power, but seemingly unlimited Selective Power - yet ONLY if we practice selecting fast enough. Other events might easily overtake us, as has been the norm throughout history. Our biggest challenge is to keep making the USA more different, fast enough, so that it CAN survive the bureaucratic complexities which we, ourselves are continuously creating.

So our task comes down to an endlessly iterative process, one only superficially discussed here - as a suggested view for all to consider. One perspective on this is the classic paradigm for describing all "living" species:

Context Goals (or niche; no system evolves in a vacuum),
Sensory System (sampling available feedback),
Interacting Sensory Flows (cross-discipline Pattern Analysis),
Motor System (probing context, exploring options),
Natural Selection (an Assessment System).

Lets call a nation or culture an emerging species, and take another look at ourselves, and what our tasks are.

1) Do we have enough context awareness, and enough group goals? Adequate group awareness of context and challenge. Whoa! To achieve that, don't we need continuously distributed, developmental briefings on where WE as a nation are, and where WE as a nation can be and are going? Do we even have enough platforms where people CAN discuss that? Are we paying ourselves enough to leave enough time to even have those discussions? Recent, "lean" industrial models somehow converged to the idea that 2-3% of net resources should be spent on "M&E" - measurement & evaluation. That flies in the face of historical patterns in RESILIENT systems, where 30-40% of time can easily be spent on analysis of context.  Can we really afford to be lean, i.e., over-adapted to a transient context, rather than resilient and always ready for the next context? Without a sense of options worth exploring, all roads look the same? A modern nation needs awareness of options, and outcome goals, as much as any previously evolved species.*

2) Do we have an adequately diverse, national sensory system? More instrumentation is just the start. Don't we need distributed self-training all on methods for generating diversity, so that citizens are familiar with that core mission, and comfortable deploying it where needed? More civics, so WE as a people can collectively hoard coordination skills, not just personally hoard static assets?
(Has universal pursuit of "lean" gone too far in too many places, thereby reducing resiliency everywhere, including places where we diversity is critically needed?)

3) Do we need more practice generating the actual diversity needed in key places, so that we have more feedback to analyze? Shouldn't we be diversifying deployment of many new sub-methods, thereby generating distributed, bureaucratic diversity to select from?

4) Do we have enough interdisciplinary cross-talk to drive pattern analysis ACROSS disciplines? Do we need MORE cross-instrumentation, information-sharing methods, for sensing and analyzing all bureaucratic diversity? So that we can self model all available feedback patterns? Forget the NSA and idiot savant advertisers, shouldn't our electorate be evaluating ITSELF and where WE are going? How much distributed civics discussion and involvement do we need, just to maintain our current adaptive rate? How much to survive? How about to exceed our own, lagging expectations? “I’ll let you write the substance. ... You let me write the procedure, and I‘ll screw you every time.” Is that anywhere near good enough for us to survive as a nation?

5) Finally, do we need to instill and practice constant re-development of more "net" ASSESSMENT methods and systems? If WE aren't selecting where WE are going, someone else - or outside events - will be doing that selecting? Why cede Natural Selection entirely to others, or to chance? Who's driving this democracy bus anyway, it's citizens, or something less? That boils down to practice using the platforms, instrumentation, information-sharing and analysis mentioned above.

Folks, we as a people have some distributed boundaries to push, before they push us.


* The very concept of speciation is inseparable from the concept of population. All evolving species arise from interactions among a prior confederation, initially built via budding clones, then by increasingly diverse transformation events - including symbiosis, and eventually by some accelerated form of "recombination" between population members, enabled by emerging methods that create new steps, ones that previously didn't occur at all.

It's not clear what view is optimal, nation-states as competing clones, or confederations participating in interleaved "cultural-recombination" events. We still have to find out.

The same question holds within each nation. Can growing "confederations" practicing "Distributed Planning" be kept more agile, and thereby adapt faster, than Central Governments, with their innate tendency to one-size-fits-all "Central Planning?" We still have to find out. It all comes down to the NET agility of the methods that can be deployed, by either, or by some audacious combination of both, or more. The future's so bright that we can't see it. However, that's no reason to look away precisely as it's unfolding.

"Tricks - and Common Pitfalls - of the Adaptive System's Trade"

Reader Derryl Hermanutz wrote:

"Roger, You may be interested in this book on the neuropathology of psycopathy, termed "ponerology", which literally means the science of evil. Basically, congenital psycopaths lack the neural circuitry that generates effects like conscience, compassion, empathy, and the ability to connect actions with their consequences. The article describes how a pathocracy develops, when psycopaths gain control of the reigns of social systems, Psycopaths are described as human pathogens who can infect a population and cause macrosocial disease. Stalin's Soviet Union, Hitler's Germany, and today's US are cited as recent examples of pathocracies. Derryl"

The Trick of the Psychopath's Trade: Make Us Believe that Evil Comes from Others

Thanks for the link, Derryl!

That's Exactly my decade-long point, although I must say that it's inadequately stated in this particular book. I'd prefer to call this the topic the "Tricks - and Common Pitfalls - of the Adaptive System's Trade."

To me, this ponerology book basically discusses analog-network-systems in purely anthropomorphic terms. That's a potentially useful step for people who've never considered the general principles of how any highly networked system must operate, nor the changing patterns of information feedback flows that adaptive systems must generate in order to navigate in different contexts. As such the book may be very useful as an acceptable initiator, given the great diversity in citizen education we're faced with.

However, in my opinion, this highly specialized approach can easily lead people into nominal, theoretical logical traps rather than into the path of maximizing ongoing options. That's important because survival basically means selecting paths that always lead to more, not fewer, future options.
see the section here on the Traveling Entrepreneur Task, and how that relates to our current, 80-year, misguided focus on managing nominal currency metrics instead of managing net, national options.

I'd prefer to approach this topic in a more general, "Adaptive Systems" sense, since the more general a paradigm is, the more portable and scalable, it is, and the easier and faster it is to adapt to changing contexts.

My, more simplistic take:

As the population of our nation grows, we're undergoing something analogous to what all kids go through growing up. A growth spurt, not in # of cells in our body, but in number of citizens in our country. Both are examples of growing networks of inter-connected components, i.e., networked systems.

For any network, of any sort, to leverage a growth spurt, it has to re-connect all the prior & emerging system components into a new whole that is a "more perfect union" - and more than the sum of it's parts. That means coordinating on a DIFFERENT, not just a larger scale. We're talking more about distributed sociopatholoy, which is different, not just the sum of the distributed neuropatholoy or behavioral pathology of individuals.

To grow continuously, a system is always in danger of getting clumsier BEFORE it can again get AS agile, or even MORE agile than before. So far, our national setting involves a permanent population growth spurt, rather like extended adolescence - but this time it's permanent social adolescence we're talking about, as the dilemma facing every evolving culture and/or nation state.

To regain or maintain old and then advance new agility, at a larger scale, emerging tasks and organizational methods have to be tackled, practiced, and assessed. Most trial methods are soon abandoned, while a very select few are kept, after adequate trial and error. Just call them network iterations while sampling possible solutions to new tasks.

In a social experiment, the squeaky, psychopathic "big wheels" always look attractive INITIALLY, and are discarded as failed methods ONLY after enough group experience. One constant danger is that we're simply being slow to recognize & discard what DOESN'T work?

Why aren't we doing more experiments, faster? That distinction brings home one of the points made in the ponerology book, but does so much more directly. Without social checks and balances, individual behavioral pathology can be accepted by a mal-adaptive culture, thereby allowing culturo-pathology. If we focus on the rulers, we can call it pathocracy. If we focus on the followers who select their rulers and allow that form of rule, then we're really discussing a culturo-path which is worse than the sum of it's individual sociopaths.

Here's one simple point. If system components don't like the results of existing policy, then disseminating their feedback is the only responsible thing to do.

Related points. What if so few group experiments are done that components aren't even aware, soon enough, what outcomes are developing? What if distributed feedback is available, but assessment models are confused, or just slow? Or what if too few are listening to one another to discriminate useful signals from all the noise?

Net cultural failure occurs partly by failing to educate ourselves and think collectively about the quality of distributed decision-making, but also LARGELY BY SIMPLY NOT MAINTAINING ENOUGH EXPERIENCE IN ACTUALLY MAKING SELECTIONS? Without pursuing enough new goals yearly to target and then either achieve or fail at, we're simply not providing ourselves with enough activity to remain good at evaluating and selecting from our own diversity? Social practice makes perfect, so lack of social practice can easily preclude Natural Selection.

An electorate can continuously grow only if it grows any combination of it's numbers and/or it's skills, activities and tempo of social agility. Such growth can occur ONLY IF NEW METHODS ARE CONSTANTLY INVENTED, and even then, only if those new methods are all introduced, practiced, assessed and discarded or adopted faster than the sum rate function of net organic growth (again, any combination of numbers, skills, activities and tempo).

In practice, methods are useless if not actually practiced.
A mind is a terrible thing to waste?
So is a continuously growing POTENTIAL group-intelligence?

If we don't tilt the electorate of our country at goals worth achieving, we'll never even explore what we can or could be. Worse, without honing our skills with actual practice, we'll never even develop the skills to learn and educate ourselves as fast as we can.

Here's one trend and one suggested conclusion.

Social state of agility = current national survival skillset.

1st integral of social agility = education system (upping the awareness learning curve; the "what").

2nd integral of social agility = "why" education sub-system (upping the why/how learning curve)

What, where, who, how & why? If those are our next social questions, then the answers are: "context; here; us; methods; & adaptive rate."

Stated another way.

If mandatory education (1st integral of "state") seemed a prerequisite, 200 years ago, then ...

              ...
why doesn't mandatory "why/how" education seem like an obvious addition to our prerequisites for today?

One Suggested Conclusion.

We might want to re-tune all K-12 education a bit more towards the way our DoD tries to approach Officer Training Programs. Add more focus on group or social agility, rather than just isolated skills. Introduce all students to the importance of "staging, linking and sequencing" everything that goes into national agility, rather than just being isolated components never getting enough practice to actually contribute to national agility. 

#1 goal? Social Agility (continuously increasing National Adaptive Rate).

#2 goal? All citizens maintaining adequate practice at methods for pursuing that goal (NOT just knowing disconnected "facts").

That way we might generate and maintain a goal-driven electorate constantly demanding better leadership qualities in the staff they promote to public policy stewardship. We might also keep a better stockpile of citizens with more practiced "leadership" qualities, able and willing to step in and try new approaches as existing "leaders" fail to set, target and pursue worthwhile new national goals.

"Just Grow Stories" - or - Continuous Development Of Our Own Further Development

Call it methods development, or catalyst development?

A friend wrote recently, asking for advice on the utility of making an updated version of a classic "Coming of Age" story. His updated story would be aimed at making US youth aware of many key transitions looming, as they come of age in the decade from 2013 to 2023.

Such stories have a long history in western literature, known 1st as Germanic "Bildungsroman" and later in the USA as "coming of age" stories.

With no apology offered to Rudyard Kipling, maybe we should, in general, call them "Adapting to Context" stories? Their purpose will be to show how the characteristic methods utilized by the adapting person, group or entire culture were actually adjusted, to be adaptive to contexts that are not just changing, but which present constantly expanding degrees of freedom, exemplified by the Traveling Entrepreneur Task.

I think my friend hit the nail on the head. A nail we keep stubbing our toes on, then "fixing" by shooting ourselves in the injured foot.

Time for some cheap and productive prevention ... instead of such painfully expensive repair?

I think we need many such stories, each focused on the concept of adapting to context, but with new, context-appropriate twists added every generation or so. Especially for kids.

I've been wondering about the following for quite a while.

Today, individual humans are tasked with making at least 4 transitions during their lifetime.

An emergence transition, from recombination, through gestation to child (transcending birth).
Eventual transition from child to adult.
Eventual transition from adult to responsible family/clan/tribal/community-other member.
Eventual transition from tribal member to supra-tribal nation-citizen?
Eventual transition from nation-citizen to ... ?

[What's next? A cog in Star Fleet Federation? :) ]

Yet we have little or no folklore preparing kids to recognize that expanding roadmap - or even making all of them aware of it!!! No wonder incidence of frictions, stress & schizophrenia so often seem to peak at child/adult and other transitional inflection points in human development!

Every tribal culture I've read about has various "coming of age" ceremonies, of separate nature for the median male/female genders - or even for various guilds or disciplines. For tens of thousands of years of human social evolution, those transitions gradually became ever more formally acknowledged as a BIG DEAL. They formalize the transition from a childhood state to an adult state. A "virtual metamorphosis" of the sort that, e.g., insects do.


But what about transitions in social development? As an evolving social species, do we have ENOUGH and ADEQUATELY DYNAMIC folklore about enough of our accumulating AND EMERGING transitions? Even though tribal methods worked out very formal customs to ease the growth of individuals into their changing roles, few, if any, folk customs formally address the frictions of whole tribes making the transition into supra-tribal nation states, or the formal methods used to surmount those frictions.  It's as though the ONLY thing tribal context never addressed was the possibility of supra-tribal populations colliding.  Go figure.

Most tribes and other sub-groups are simply destroyed in the transition, and repeatedly lose most the ability to smoothly regenerate the tribal or sub-group launch phase. No one that I know of writes folk stories acknowledging and formalizing recent and emerging cultural transitions as a valuable, repeatable stage in continuous, group re-invention.

We don't keep ourselves abreast of the continuous transitions in our own, unending cultural embryology! Unending cultural embryology is evolution, folks!

To leverage all or our own, emerging transition phases, we have to learn to smoothly accelerate progression through them all. Why? So that our lifetimes include enough time for more of us to complete and extend our own group progressions!

Born by 9 months.
Child by 3 years.
Adult by (14 years?)
Citizen by 18 years?
Statesperson by 25 years.
  And ... ?? by age 40?

Otherwise, too much experience is always wasted on the elderly, who are left in a desperate race to contribute more of their accumulated methods to cultural Knowledge Management. The transition from egg cells to adults to group agility to cultural evolution requires comfort with and practiced experience at expanding the concepts and methods from confined degeneracy to constantly expanding regeneracy.

Surely any embryologist looking at "social embryology" or "cultural embryology" would likely say that we're neglecting critical transition phases? Most embryologists would probably say that we suck at continuous development of our own further development!

This is relevant to Germany, where the personal Bildungsroman concept was most recently reinvented, since many Germans admit that they're one of the most tribal nations on Earth. Until very recently, they kept many school units intact until graduation events. One very useful consequence of that unit retention was individual retention of unit identity and a sense of place, until transfer to a broader unit, through expected and anticipated graduation steps.

Germany is one of the few nations who managed to keep some semblance of tribal identity longer than other, recently fused tribal groupings - though even they are an amalgamation of many tribes and dialects - some of them actually non-Germanic.

However, even what the German's did is now gone. Most kids in most nations today are adrift, not being given any honest advice on what context they're really in, where their context is actually going, or what their emerging individual and group options are.

This is INCREDIBLY unproductive!

You don't screw up critical phases in embryological gestation.

Similarly, we shouldn't neglect critical phases in child/adult transition.

We sure shouldn't ignore critical adult/tribal/national personal transitions.

And we sure as hell shouldn't ignore tribal/national cultural transitions!

Do we even have FORMAL METHODS for actively analyzing the changing character of our culture? How about methods for tracking and managing the rate of that change? How about adequately assessing the ongoing OUTCOMES of our self-management methods?

Would we benefit from a rapidly growing, rapidly evolving and rapidly distributed fleet of new, OpenSource "Adapting to Context" stories, and a whole genre of expanding folklores? Surely we need stories that gracefully invite our increasing diversity of people and subgroups to help formally design our next stage of cultural embryology - so that we more consciously select the cultural transitions we make, and where they take us. That seems like a sensible step, to say the least. The alternatives seem destructive, rather than adaptive. Since we're gonna evolve, one way or another, we might as well be aware and cognizant of what we're doing? Ya think?

Given past precedent, maybe we ought to be paying very formal attention to our emerging transitions ... if we ever are to scale up to yet another level of supra-national organization.

Letting multi-national merchant corporations and cowboy financiers dictate the parameters of coming transitions seems totally random, at best. Not even our daily spectrum of online trivia makes a very attractive set of signals to sample.  We desperately need a diverse set of summaries too, not just raw, cultural data to distract, divide and uselessly conquer our future generations with.

We've Cleverly Trapped Ourselves, Swaying Part-Way Between Nation And Individual? Or Is That Stupid ... Like a Fox?

Why?

1/2 way between team and lone wolf?
1/2 way between social-coordination and social-looting

It seems inaccurate to simply call humans eusocial. That's certainly not the whole truth.

Readers can select from endless examples, but here's one, arbitrary, example, below. If you don't like THIS example, please just choose another one, instead of getting entirely side tracked on the perfection of arbitrary examples. Our goal is adaptive generalization, not fixation on details always lagging emerging context.

The opening sentences in this investment advisory article don't even make sense .. unless?

Oil slips on U.S. stimulus outlook but supply worries support "... analysts said prices were unlikely to sustain that level as European refiners cut processing rates because of gains in oil costs stemming from supply-curbing unrest in OPEC members ..."

Unless there's collusion to keep local prices at some arbitrary target?

Isn't there always at least some collusion? The balance swings between official and private? Either way, it's hard to follow the semantics of this kind of reporting. What is the underlying message implied by such confused messaging?

The underlying message when trying to combine public fiscal policy of so-called nation-states with personal-investing advice .... is that the populations of all families, neighborhoods, tribes, nation-states are suspended half-way between pursuing return-on-coordination, and pursuing supposed personal gain at distributed expense?

Such habits don't persist for millions of years without solid reasons.

So why, indeed, do we seem to keep doing this? Are we really doing so purposefully, or is the perceived outcome of diverse, mixed messaging only a spurious happenstance? A shadow thrown off by one or more other, ongoing processes?

For example, could our continuously muddled outcome occur simply because it really is excruciatingly difficult to fully integrate an additional infusion of millions of people per year - into any nation or culture, anywhere?

In contrast, few physiological entities maintain continuous growth. Lobsters, as one of many examples, manage continuous growth right up to the point of any arbitrary cause of death. Yet they do so partly through relatively slow growth rates, and also by rigidly controlling the organizational state of the adult. Evolution in most complex physiologies is largely - though not exclusively - restricted to sexual recombination events. It's apparently too difficult and risky to continuously tinker very much with models once they come off the assembly line. Human and other social cultures, in contrast, undergo continuous cultural-embryology, cultural-ontogeny and cultural-phylogeny ... all simultaneously. Cultures, in contrast to individuals, fail to evolve and survive precisely when they DO try to rigidly control their organizational state.

It's a miracle we survive ourselves at all. How do we actually do it? Why don't we focus far more on those subtleties, instead of all the spurious details? When trying to at least intelligently discuss the size of government vs size of nation, it wouldn't hurt to refer to useful analogies?

Human cultures - as super-organisms, on a completely different scale from the cellular-cultures which we call lobsters - have not only kept up continuous population growth for millennia, they've also maintained an Adaptive Rate that - usually - exceeds population growth rates. The fact that population growth rates in large, advanced nation states - or even European Unions :) - slow as a function of both organizational state and sheer numbers suggests another aspect of human cultural growth. Namely, that the absolute number of evolving system components - each increasing it's degrees of freedom - matters more than rate of population growth rate alone. Once again, absolute magnitude matters, in this case, the absolute number of inter-dependencies to manage.

Adaptive management of a constantly growing list of inter-dependencies requires exquisite maintenance of social instrumentation to distribute required patterns of feedback data. It's that simple? Why do we discuss everything BUT that simple, primary fact in our idiotic media services?

We're left with a conundrum. Growth of an entity - nation, union or culture - is a function of net Adaptive Rate. We also know that net, national Adaptive Rate is described by the running output of a long, polynomial of factors, where personal-, discipline-specific, institutional- and public-policy features constitute the cultural "factors" in that polynomial. All the growing #s of factors in those growing lists are capable of varying dramatically and triggering unpredictable inter-dependency effects. In short, every single term in that - constantly lengthening - polynomial has complex co-factors that can vary independently, but which impose dependent consequences. The output range is certainly messy. Constant cleanup is the order of every day. Let's simplistically describe a mutating human culture this way, by summing NAR, Net Adaptive Rate, including p-personal, d-discipline, i-institutional, and pp-public-policy groupings.

NAR = F(j..n)[ fp(j..n) ~ fd(j..n) ~ fi(j..n) ~ fpp(j..n)] ... at least.

That certainly doesn't do reality justice, but it's enough to begin to get a very simple point across.

For a given nation to grow into a bigger, more agile, more capable entity, it is necessary that the degrees of freedom of any subset never grow beyond local tolerance limits imposed by systemic feedback. Exceeding such tolerance limits would simply degrade inter-dependencies with all other subsets, and thereby reduce the return on net coordination of the whole. That happens in human cultures and markets, as surely as dramatically increasing the power of only one or a few pistons in a V8 internal combustion engine quickly causes more harm than good to both engine and vehicle maintenance costs - maybe even to driver & pedestrians!

Would it do your body much good if, say, your liver, turned into a SuperLiver, and tried to rapidly evolve into roles that randomly complicated the functions of the other, roughly 60 human organs, ~300 human cell types, and ~70-Trillion cells making up a functioning human physiology? Unlikely - but who's to say what our physiology will look like in another million years? In all likelihood the resulting physiological disorder triggered by your SuperLiver would seriously impair your behavior in the interim, or even kill you. With indirect help from other humans, you'd probably label your new SuperLiver as either a benign or cancerous tumor, kill or excise it, and go on a transplant waiting list to get a liver that could stay within SURVIVABLE, local Adaptive Rates.  By analogy, it's certainly relevant to ask whether the current, runaway asset-overgrowth by the 1% is killing the entire USA, not just the Middle Class.

Point is that it is excruciatingly difficult to select distributed tolerance limits that allow net adaptation. And, it is incredibly dangerous to pursue long-term projections based upon very limited samplings of full-system feedback! That should be obvious to citizens of the USA, but it obviously isn't!

How does your liver stay within tolerance limits that keep your body alive? How do all components in complex systems tie all local ambitions and rate of evolving degrees of freedom to systemic as well as local needs?

They do so by tying all local functions AND emerging interactions, to the entire spectrum of local-to-global feedback loops. Listen to all, and then practice ... knowing how to use some or all that data - when and as needed - to grow and protect the system you're a part of. Don't just grow your local wallet. The result of coordination is called evolution, and it's worked miraculously for billions of years. That is, it works when supposedly brilliant humans stoop to actually participating in the collective activity. Sound tedious? Of course. Yet it's certainly not difficult. That's the rub. To accelerate return on coordination, we need only be patiently selective.

Yes, adaptive evolution is actually quite simple to do with TEAM PRACTICE at distributed trial and error. In fact there's a very simplistic name for it. [Whole System] Outcomes-Based Training and Education - or just OBT&E for short.

OBT&E is simple to achieve via team practice - yet it is mathematically impossible to DESCRIBE via academic theory or rules. Why? Because the near-infinite lists of workable vs non-workable permutations of all possible degrees-of-freedom and actions that can be taken by say, either 70-trillion cells in a human body (at one scale) or ~320-Million citizens in a nation state, are far more rapidly selectable via ongoing feedback from ongoing trial and error than by predictive calculation! From the point of view of individuals, you might call the selection process the Traveling Entrepreneur Task.

The task is even more difficult for the sum of individuals making a human culture. No complex system can mirror and calculate all system data fast enough to execute Central Planning. That's a mathematical reality. The volume of data generated is an exponential function of our own actions. The adaptive solution is never calculable - despite what Luddite "Austrian Economists" hypothesize. It is, however, always SELECTABLE, and that's what evolutionary adaptive rate is all about. Evolution is the slow process of finding ways to tap feedback from more and more sources, so as to shield ourselves better and better from the constant effect of entropy. That's why many biologists have taken liberties with semantics & slang, to call evolution or auto-catalysis a "reverse-entropy" method. Given that agility, maybe it's even possible to fuse philosophy and actual science? Probably by abandoning the faux-religion of economics? A field that even bankers say is more trouble than it's worth.

The power of group selection, i.e., teamwork, is an age-old lesson that humans have ALWAYS known, since we evolved. We keep using teamwork because it slowly sinks for all new arrivals that we have zero net predictive power. What is it that we're all feverishly working towards? Whatever it is, it is ALWAYS far easier to cooperate on exploring those endless options, and quickly agree on whatever we can all most benefit from agreeing upon. What we are tempted to agree upon thereafter, appears to be related by some power function to the mass of what we can collectively sense and perceive, rarely including anything we can or should actually calculate with any significant precision. The group intelligence of a human culture is held in the body AND DISTRIBUTION PATTERN of it's group discourse. Similar to the function that a nervous system fills in a given physiology. The message is the same for individuals and whole cultures ... FEED YOUR BRAIN. That means both of them, your's, and your nation's. Feeding either in isolation won't help.

At the end of every day, it's again better to kick back with a cold beer & your feet up ... or at least have a clear path to doing so again, WITH addition of some capabilities that - last year - you or others convinced us that we were bored NOT having. Metalworking, steam engines, automobiles, telephones, big-screen tvs, internet, yada, yada. What's next, and - more importantly - why will we struggle to more systemically leverage it, vs clinging to poorly distributed allocation? Excessive personal hoarding of static assets causes us far more trouble than it is worth. There's no doubt that it holds us back.

It takes us far longer to learn the optimal uses for new tools and methods. Far longer than it takes to intially mis-use them.  As many have noted, net system progress tracks the transition from random application to Automatic Stabilizer function.

Our nation of ~320 million people is once again trying to arbitrarily over-expand the degrees of freedom of some small set of citizens (the tumor, some mix of Innocent Frauds & Outright Frauds), while drastically limiting the degrees of freedom of all the rest of our citizens - supposedly unexpectedly.

What is wrong with this picture?

There are 1001 ways to express HOW stupid it is. Let's have yearly student contests to re-describe the changing spectrum of those descriptions. We adults already have bigger issues to move on to.

More importantly, WHY are we doing this, repeatedly?

If nothing else, it's because we are NOT training our constant wave of new children to appreciate the evolving system they are a part of? While newcomers learn details about the disciplines, institutions and public they choose to participate in ... don't they also need to appreciate the overwhelming importance of evaluating whether or not local actions and even degrees of freedom at EVERY level are compatible with actions & degrees of freedom at all levels? "All levels" includes the WHOLE NATION that is supposed to be far greater than the sum of it's ever expanding number of parts.

Every member born into a social species faces first and foremost a colossal, monumental tuning task, and can help more than hinder ONLY if they appreciate the difference between being a wrench, lubricant or carefully selected catalyst thrown into the workings of an exquisite system. With that simple perspective always in mind, multi-level selection - in the form of distributed teamwork PRACTICE and FEEDBACK - can proceed as a matter of fact, even if unpredictably.  In practice, citizens can generate adequate group practice only if they guarantee everyone's basic needs, through Automatic Stabilizer functions. That simple truth describes the 1st step in achieving and maintaining an Agile Culture.

Our greatest focus should be on group SELECTION of the excruciatingly rare permutations of things which we can do to actually increase the Adaptive Rate of an already mind-numbingly complex and complicated human culture.

If that isn't a challenge worth going after, I don't know what is. It's a challenge that makes most local ambitions trivially boring. Why don't we make all students intimately aware of this reality, by age 10? That little effort would produce a sea-change in the adaptive rate of any culture that does it.

How could we keep citizens down in their ruts, after they've seen that great possibility? Why would we want to?