Monday, March 4, 2013

Seriously Lagging Policy Agility - A Call to Methods

Commentary by Roger Erickson

How do we fail Situational Awareness? Let me only begin to count the ways.

Obama Renews Offer to Cut Social Safety Net in Big Budget Deal

Interviews about Chinese real estate

Neo-Imperialism and the Arrogance of Ignorance

This list is too long to complete. Yet there is a very clear conclusion.

A combination of "massive corruption" / "debt crises" / wrong moves ... points to seriously lagging policy agility in governance structures .... worldwide. [We have corruption in the USA of course, just different permutations than elsewhere. Examples are Control Fraud on Wall St, the MICC, and in political campaign finance - not to mention political strategy itself.]

We're guaranteeing that our kids must live through "interesting times". Why? We have so many huge options ... and instead we're off bombing Afghanistan?  Hell, it'd be cheaper to just bomb Death Valley! And now we're gonna bomb Mali too? And, we're still preparing - and uber preparing - for what - Iran? Is our end game a plan to use drones to assassinate corrupt Communist party members across China, or honest citizens here at home? Go for both? Who's hollowing out whom?

Sounds rather like you can never go wrong underestimating the median intelligence of crowds. Methods for getting their attention have become the dominant catalytic methods for social adaptation. Having a message is necessary, but by no means sufficient - by any stretch of the imagination.

So how do we get more institutions, and their methods, to be more agile? Time to pull the fire alarm? Not a call to arms, but a call to methods. Methods for exploring cultural options faster/leaner/better.  We need another George Marshall to clear dead wood from the Pentagon, another Marriner Eccles to clear dead wood from the Fed, another FDR to clear dead wood from the Administration and SCOTUS and ... while we're at it ... another electorate, just to clear dead wood from the POTUS, Congress and all levels of political office.  If you're wondering whose methods are obsolete, look in the mirror.  It's long past time for a complete makeover in the USA.

Do you see any international trends in White Collar criminology and social anthropology to offset all this bad news? We need to damp down the stupid and encourage return-on-coordination - simultaneously. Any methods for actually getting attention? Attention for more distributed, resilient and agile democracy methods? Not yet? Why not? Do you really love your kids?

Capitalists say it all boils down to incentives. Why is it that supposedly educated people can't see the biggest return of all, the return-on-coordination? Can YOU make people see that 500 lb gorilla incentive lurking in the room? It appears to be invisible to most people.  Either that or it's so dynamic that they simply can't sense it fast enough to matter. Perhaps what we really need is ultra-high-speed Optionography - to help slow witted people sense dynamic value incentives, sooner. We used to just call that public discourse and distributed feedback.

Does Cultural AQ* = tPD/tdDF**?

* Adaptive Quotient
** ratio;
tempo of Public Discourse to tempo&distribution of Distributed Feedback;
distribute enough, diverse feedback widely & quickly enough;
then discuss & distill if widely & fast enough - to arrive at the few adaptive principles key to each situation;

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