 Regular
readers know one of my big pet projects is to create a framework for
solving, or at least coping with, complex problems (in business and in
society) using approaches suited to complex systems, rather than the failed approaches suited to merely complicated systems that, for the most part, have only made the world's wicked problems worse.
This
project was initially inspired by the work of complex adaptive systems
theorists (like Dave Snowden and Otto Scharmer) and
complex-system-savvy social activists and change consultants (like Open
Space leaders Michael Herman and Chris Corrigan). For awhile, I used
the name AHA!: Processes and Capacities for Complex System Learning & Discovery
for this project. The idea was to create a 'toolkit' of processes and
capacities that people could use to tackle complex problems, which
might eventually lead to a collective body of knowledge or even a
theory or set of methodologies that had been shown to work. I was
aware, from Chris' work, that these processes and capacities have in
fact been around for millennia, long before civilization and its
simplistic one-size-fits-all solutions (to be replaced next month by
the next fad solution) came along. So in a way, AHA! was more of a project to rediscover and relearn these processes (including Open Space, Snowden's ABIDE process, tapping the Wisdom of Crowds, and Scharmer's 'U' presencing process, which is in turn based on Varela's work), than to invent them. Recently I proposed a rough-hewn idea to try to integrate these four approaches into a single framework.
As
I have studied different systems and ontologies, it has become
increasingly apparent to me that all ecological and all social systems
are inherently complex, and that, beyond minuscule scale, simplistic
hierarchical decision-making processes (the ones that overwhelmingly
prevail in business and political organizations today) are utterly
inadequate for dealing with such systems. In fact, I am convinced that
the myth that efficiency is achieved by 'dumb' hierarchical systems,
and the myth that such efficiency improves rather than weakens these
systems, is a colossal and self-serving lie that is in the process of
being exploded, spiraling out of control, and is wreaking huge social and
environmental cost and damage in the process.
I've also explained that business and politicians (and most adults) loathe complexity
because it renders them powerless and shows their arrogant presumptions
to have all the 'right answers' to be preposterous. Endless and
intractable war, global warming, influenza pandemic risks, incapacity
to deal with 'natural' disasters, and our general lack of resilience in
coping with anything we don't and can't control (and every day we see
more evidence of how little we really can control) all illustrate the
absurdity of trying to manage what cannot be managed, predict what
cannot be predicted, and get people to behave in ways they cannot and
do things they cannot and will not ever do.
Complex approaches
are more time-consuming, necessarily involve vastly more knowledge and
understanding than is 'efficient' to obtain, require more patience and
experimentation, require trust in the individual rather than the
hierarchy to decide what to do and to take the responsibility to do it,
and entail massively more consultation, attention, listening,
competencies and constant adaptation and improvisation than
merely-complicated approaches. Whereas complicated-system
cause-and-effect driven solutions can be deduced by analysis,
complex-system understanding of appropriate approaches can only emerge
over time. Civilization society has little patience for this
'inefficient', exhausting, and imprecise way of doing things -- even if
it may well be the only way that can work.
The basis for sharing and building on this understanding of complexity is through stories and bottom-up working models,
not top-down, hierarchical, constructed systems that everyone has to
'buy into'. Stories for learning, working models for discovery -- these
are the means to emerging understanding and effectively and sustainably
dealing with complexity.
A couple of times I have tried to see
what we can learn about embracing complexity from indigenous cultures.
Gatherer-hunters, after all, adapt to the complex environment, while
civilized humans try to simplify and control it. Gatherer-hunters
succeeded for three million years, while the civilized humans that
exterminated and displaced them have made a mess of it, despite their
best intentions, throughout the mere thirty millennia their model has
prevailed on our planet. I attempted to catalogue a set of capacities of adaptation, discovery and learning about complex systems.
Building on this, Princen's The Logic of Sufficiency has proposed an extensive set of (incomplete) principles, assumptions and theory for dealing with complex adaptive systems,
drawing on learnings from businesses and local communities that have
have achieved sustained success where competing hierarchical approaches
and processes have, while achieving short-term profit and wealth,
proved unsustainable and in the long run disastrous.
In order to learn more about indigenous (= born into and part of,
rather than controlling/dominating) cultures' approaches to complexity,
I have been wading through anthropologist Hugh Brody's far-reaching and
scholarly personal memoir based on extensive study of such cultures, The Other Side of Eden,
written six years ago. It is an indication of how radically my
worldview has been changed by an awareness of how much civilization
oversimplifies and 'dumbs down' our perceptions of reality that I read
this book, an exhaustive panoramic view of six gatherer-hunter
cultures, carefully and patiently. A year ago, even, I would never have
looked at it -- too many stories, too long, not synthesized down to the
essential message and the proposed action plan -- I would simply not
have had time for such a book. But this is an immensely important work,
because it attempts to tell us the stories of these cultures as much as
possible on their own terms, in their own context, and in their own
words (Brody took great pains to learn Inuktitut and a working
knowledge of other gatherer-hunter languages, and explains how much is
lost in a simple 'translation' of the stories of one culture to one
that is so utterly different). Brody's is no 'noble savage' portrait --
the cultures he describes are far from perfect, but they are 'right'
for the places in which they evolved. These cultures are extraordinarily different
from civilization cultures, far more different than is apparent to
anyone without the discipline that Brody takes to understand them, not
as a means of contrast or reconciliation with our culture, but in their
own, utterly, almost unimaginably different life-context.
All
six gatherer-hunter cultures share an approach to life and to
understanding of the world that is profoundly complex-adaptive. They
had no choice -- the rugged, demanding, unforgiving climates of these
cultures cannot be controlled, tamed, imposed upon, civilized, planted,
or 'settled'. So for thousands of years the people of these cultures
have figured out and followed what works. That means rather than
changing the environment, trying to exercise Dominion over it, they
have adapted themselves to
the environment, and become (or remained) an integral part of it. In
the arctic, subarctic, rainforest and desert areas where they still
predominate in numbers if not in environmental impact, these cultures
are like giant tectonic plates grinding up against and still coexisting
separate from but alongside the tectonic plate of civilized, settled
humanity, which now occupies 90% of the Earth's land and comprises 99%
of its human population. Civilized, settled humanity has not figured
out, yet, how to settle this final 10%, but they're working on it.
The Other Side of Eden
is hard work, and mining the learnings about how gatherer-hunter
cultures embrace and adapt to their complex environments takes great
concentration, but it is a necessary process. The catalogue of
learnings below is an extreme, possibly dangerous oversimplification of
what came out, to me, from Brody's astonishing first-person stories. I
would urge readers who care about the malaise of our culture and want
to understand how indigenous cultures succeed through adaptation to
complexity, to read the whole book, just for the experience of trying
to see the world through an utterly foreign, different frame.
Here,
then, is the catalogue of my learnings and discoveries from this book.
I think it takes us one step closer to an overall framework or theory
for dealing with complex problems:
- indigenous peoples are
almost never authoritarian with their children; children learn by
doing, by making mistakes, and by hearing guidance and candid comments
on their behaviour, not by being 'told what to do and not to do'
- knowledge
is absolutely critical to survival in indigenous communities; exchange
of knowledge is expected, automatic, urgent and completely candid, and
deceit and hoarding knowledge is extremely disreputable behaviour
(because it can expose others to danger) -- these are cultures of
collaboration and detailed, exhaustive knowledge-sharing, not of
competition for 'knowledge advantage'
- there is an expression
"the land is made perfect by knowledge" that stresses that what is
valued in these communities is knowledge and understanding of the
environment, not control or ownership of it
- indigenous
communications are generally extremely honest and forthright; the words
that accompany greetings are those of great joy, not politeness
- words are as precise as they need to be,
so there are completely separate words used to describe fish and other
prey, and snow, and attributes of the land, not taxonomically but by need
(e.g. there is a need for a separate word to describe snow suitable for
the construction of temporary snow shelters, so there is such a word)
-- this is not poetry or obsession, it's extremely practical, and word
differentiation is a matter of necessity, familiar observability and,
sometimes, valuable analogy
- part of the learning of indigenous
languages is learning when to speak, when and how to listen, and even
when and how to tease -- in oral cultures there is much more to language than just vocabulary, grammar and syntax
- stories
are essential, detailed, and allowed to take as much time as they need
to take to be told; interruption is considered extremely rude, though
it is often acceptable to leave if you do not find the story of interest
- indigenous
languages generally have no swear words (anger is considered 'childish'
behaviour and scrupulously suppressed), and they also have no 'status'
words (e.g. there is no concept of or words for rank or hierarchy or,
in anything close to our sense of the term, ownership, in Inuktitut)
- these
languages have evolved to facilitate analogy, as an essential tool of
learning and imagination -- drawing analogies and use of inductive reasoning are not as 'forced' or deliberate a process as they seem to be in Indo-European languages
- from
necessity, indigenous people have developed prodigious memories and
mental maps of detail, and can often recall routes and places that they
have seen only a few times many decades earlier -- in the process every
landmark is given a name to help entrench its later memory, and great
attention is paid to orienting and placing these landmarks in context
- these
cultures have an overarching respect for all life, and again this seems
more practical and adaptive than spiritual (others may disagree with me
on this) -- caching extra food, wasting nothing, not hunting just 'for
fun', not disturbing animals except for hunting, not spoiling the land,
paying attention to the animals that are being hunted -- all these
behaviours are oriented to encouraging prey to 'make themselves
available' for the hunter as a matter of reciprocal respect (their
self-sacrifice meets the hunter's real need for sustenance)
- indigenous
peoples are part of the environment, and do not see the environment as
something apart from them; they see themselves as co-stewards of the
land along with other creatures (and in some cases, with the spirits)
- by
definition, then, the place the people live in is ideal, has become so
through millennia of evolution and adaptation, and any change made to
that place is therefore necessarily for the worse
- the concept
of gatherer-hunters as 'nomadic' and civilization cultures as 'settled'
is precisely backwards -- it is the civilization cultures that despoil
or exhaust the land and expand, move on, seek new frontiers, while
gatherer-hunter cultures live in balance within large but mostly-fixed
territories for millennia; the stories of indigenous peoples of how
they 'arrived' where they now live are in total conflict with our
history of them (e.g. that they crossed the land-bridge from Asia
during ice age retreat) -- their stories are that the people emerged where they are now, rather than traveled to them
- they
have a profound respect for individual decisions; after sharing of
knowledge, if there is no consensus on action each individual is
trusted to do what he or she thinks is right and responsible, and there
are no recriminations for not conforming to what others (or some
designated or self-styled 'leader') think is appropriate
- advice
is rendered by the telling of stories and the answering of questions
when asked, not by proffering instruction or unsolicited opinions --
this is a consultative process, not a hierarchical one (elders, chiefs,
shamans are respected, but they do not have or seek power or authority over others the way the 'leaders' in our culture do)
- because
of the vast amount of detailed information that is needed to thrive in
a complex environment, people in these cultures do not depend entirely
on the conscious mind to process that information -- they appreciate
how the subconscious, dreams, and instincts play into and enrich our
understanding, and allow these elements to play an important part in
their decision-making process
- generosity (both with knowledge
and material possessions) and egalitarianism are essential elements of
these cultures, and produces an environment of great reciprocality and
trust
- much of the activity of these cultures enables the
building of great self-confidence, freedom from anxiety (fear of the
unknown), freedom from depression, and high self-esteem: the acquired
respect and trust of others, the respect for individual decisions, the
granting of individual responsibility, the learning and practice and
recognition of finely-honed skills, a culture of collaboration and
consultation -- contrast this with our culture where so much activity
has the effect of battering self-confidence and self-esteem, and
stressing helplessness and dependence
- in many cases, these
cultures carefully space the birth of children at least three years
apart, in part for practical reasons but also in part to allow parents
and adults to spend enough time and attention on each child to equip
them with the important capacities and learnings they need to succeed;
in some cases infanticide has historically been practiced when
necessary to ensure this space and opportunity for each child, and in
that case can be seen as an embracing rather than an abrogation of
responsibility
- these cultures show profound respect for women
as full equals, with roles determined by strength, stamina, skill and
capacity rather than assigned automatically by gender, and many roles
shared and alternating; the prevalence of men as hunters and of women
as gatherers reflects only the biological fact of greater strength of
most males and greater stamina of most females, and roles are
changeable without shame for those whose biological qualities are
exceptional
- there is a deliberate attention to uncertainty,
unpredictability, qualification and imprecision in indigenous
languages, with any declaration of absolute certainty seen as evidence
of oversimplification, arrogance, or poor judgement; likewise, there is
much less propensity in these languages to raise and dwell on dichotomies, the simplistic black-or-white contrasts that leave no room for subtlety, imprecision, nuance, change and uncertainty
I
confess I could not really fathom Brody's arguments about how these
cultures seem to be able to "allow one time to flow into another and
also allow themselves to move about in time" -- as much as I wanted to
understand this, to see if it approaches the concepts of eternal,
complex, multi-dimensional Now Time
that animals are argued to live in except in moments of stress. I also
could not fathom Brody's attempts to explain the propensity of
indigenous peoples to drunkenness as something more than addiction to a
substance to which they had no natural 'immunity' or resistance. One
day I hope to explore both these areas further, but I do not want them
to detract from the importance of Brody's work on complex-adaptive
culture.
So where does all this leave us? I think we need to
pull together the Snowden, Scharmer/Varela, Open Space, Wisdom of
Crowds, Princen and Brody ideas on dealing with complexity, to create
not just a toolkit and capacity/competency catalogue, but a theory,
approach and/or methodology set that provides some framework for how to
use the tools and capacities.
I've been muddling with what to call this (other than the cryptic AHA!). It is definitely not a complexity management
theory. Spare us from any more terms with 'management' in them,
especially when in complex systems the term is oxymoronic. Approach?
Framework? And for what -- dealing, coping with complex systems? With
all ecological and social systems?
With considerable
uncertainty, I've decided to coin a new word for what 'this' needs to
be, because existing English terms are all inadequate. You probably
won't like it, but the word is Let-Self-Change. Here is why I decided on this rather clumsy name:
- It incorporates three essential elements of dealing with complex systems: allowing (letting) understanding to emerge instead of trying to force it through deduction and analysis; changing oneself/ourselves
to accommodate knowledge and physical reality instead of futilely
trying to impose change on the system/environment; and adaptation and accommodation (change) rather than fighting (resistance).
- It encompasses the idea of learning and applying resilience, which I think is crucial.
- It is both a noun and a verb, thanks to the inclusion of the term 'change', which is both noun and verb.
- It
incorporates the sense of reflexivity rather than 'action upon'. The
French language appreciates that many actions are not transitive (i.e.
their object is not some 'other' person, place or thing, but the same
as the subject). English lacks this nuance and subtlety, so we need to
put the word 'self' in there to make clear that we are the subject and the object of the change. Be the change, as Gandhi said.
- My
big concern with the term 'self' is that, in our rugged individualistic
culture, it is usually assumed to mean one individual. But collective
groups also (can) self-organize and self-manage. Let-Self-Change is
both an individual and a collective action and attribute. It is noun and verb, singular and plural.
I
recognize that the term, at least in English, will be seen as
pretentious, a non-starter for serious theoretical development. But
until I, or someone, can come up with another unambiguous
term, Let-Self-Change will have to do. It's growing on me. I have used
hyphenated English terms to describe complex concepts before
("being-a-part-of") and I think they have their place.
There are
a whole series of urgent and important applications for a theory,
framework, approach and/or methodology for Let-Self-Change. Virtually
all of the critical problems facing our society and the
environment-of-which-we-are-a-part require it, since none of the merely
complicated approaches have even come close to addressing them
effectively. That includes global warming, the many wars between the
affluent and the desperate (the so-called "war on terror"), the threat
of pandemic diseases (human, plant and animal), the utter failure of
our political, economic, educational and health care systems, and on
and on.
But I think the applications for Let-Self-Change are
much broader even than this. I believe it may be key to the process of
creating Natural Enterprises, both (a) the process of deciding,
personally and with business partners, what business to create, at the
intersection, the 'sweet spot' where your Gift (what you are uniquely
good at), your Passion (what you love doing) and your Purpose (what
there is a great need for) intersect; and (b) the complex, iterative
process of researching and then creating, improvisationally, a Natural
Enterprise.
And since our bodies are also complex systems, I
believe Let-Self-Change may also be the key to taking back control of
our bodies, our minds and our health and well-being from 'experts' and
'professionals' with their one-size-fits-all solutions, their exclusion
of the patient from the wellness process, their preoccupation with
treatment rather than prevention, symptoms rather than causes, and
single organs rather than holistics, and their lawyers' insistence on
prohibiting us from self-diagnosis and self-treatment and forcing us
into learned helplessness.
A
collectively-developed, evolving Let-Self-Change theory, framework,
approach and/or methodology, and accompanying toolkit and
capacity/competency catalogue, will give us a 'map' that will allow us,
as individuals and as engaged and caring collective groups, to learn
and discover faster and more effectively, and to develop working models
of effective Let-Self-Change that others can study and, if appropriate,
follow or adapt. It will also give us a common language (perhaps
requiring a whole new vocabulary of intuitive, reflexive terms) that
will allow us to share knowledge and work together more effectively,
much as the incredibly sophisticated, detailed, and complex adaptive
Inuktitut language has allowed the indigenous peoples of the Arctic to
thrive in a seemingly 'hostile' environment, where, if they were
dependent on the merely complicated languages and systems of civilized,
'settled' humans, they would surely have failed.
I'm open to
ideas on where to go from here. I will be proposing some kind of
collaboration, perhaps an Open Space event, among some of the complex
adaptive system thought leaders referred to in this article, despite
the fact that I know some of them don't like each other very much. What
else could/should I/we be doing to move this forward? And appreciating
that this is an entirely unhierarchical and (at this stage anyway)
unfunded project, can you see a role for yourself in it? |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
