How May We Permit Ourselves To Scale Up The Product of GROUP_LEARNING X GROUP_CREATING?

   (Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)



We've all learned a lot, since bumping into Warren Mosler, branching out of other fields, and having to learn what we didn't want to have to know about ... namely the difference between sane and insane aggregate economic policy.

Yet it's not at all clear what that knowledge gets us, if we don't know how to leverage what we all now know.

There's a famous, very old quote (dubiously attributed to Caesar), that triggered a still evolving thought process.

"It's better to create than to learn. Creating is the essence of life." JC, ~50BC

Yet where would individuals or electorates be, if they hadn't LEARNED that insight? :( [They'd be roughly where WE are?]

2000 yrs later, we've only slightly restated that train of thought.

“If only HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive." then-CEO Lew Platt, of HP

Platt's quote is touted as key to the explosively growing field of knowledge management or "KM", proving that all humanity can, will and does miss it's own, prior points.

What IS the obvious point? If we marry together the lessons attributed to Caesar, Darwin & Shewhart//Deming, we get: 

"If we all continuously learned & shared just how little we all need to share, in real time, in order for our nation to CREATE faster/leaner/better culture ... then we'd never have to worry about our Democracy." RGE :)

It seems obvious that we can't separate learning & creating ... except by dying. 

Our REAL, not just nominal, question is how to scale up the product of GROUP_LEARNING x GROUP_CREATING.

Any ideas about new methods that would allow us to create more of that "product?" 

We are NOT constrained by a net lack of knowledge.

Rather, we're lacking methods for letting ourselves sample enough KNOWN options. Worse, we have known option-exploring methods, but lack methods for allowing ourselves to apply distributed use of those subclasses of known methods, whether little or widely known. 

The outcome is that our population is in the same situation as HP's staff was 20 years ago. The US electorate is overflowing with knowledge and practiced methods ... and lacks only a few extra submethods for triggering exploration of national options. Those options can be better explored WITH an ongoing cascade of parsing methods, from best known methods (if they still apply to a non-recognizable pattern, or new context), to desparately_random trial & error.

The more I ponder this, the more our current Democracy reminds me of a patient with Parkinson's disease. Those patients can initially DO most things if prompted by triggering cues, but progressively suffer from declining ability to self-trigger their own voluntary actions. Their symptoms start with difficulty triggering physical movements, and progress to inability to trigger voluntary thoughts, and eventually even autonomic impulses such as breathing.

The evolved operations of vertebrate behavior-motor physiology reveal sub-parts of the basal ganglia as critical brain structures which "gate" all the inter-dependency circuits allowing conditional behavior of individuals.

The factors gating the more distributed functions of a human culture are not specific cultural ganglia. Rather, they are the distributed checks & balances we attempt to maintain, and the sub-methods we employ for creating, KEEPING and extending necessary cultural checks and balances.

We always need NEW METHODS, for tuning and adding to our repertoire of checks and balances, the operations we depend upon in order to explore our emerging options.

The only thing we know for sure about choosing the policy-formation methods we need is that they must help us steer - faster/leaner/better - through the unpredictable obstacle course that we loosely call "succeeding contexts."

Does that help? What core methods can we employ MORE of, in order to create, KEEP and extend the distributed checks and balances which we continuously need MORE of?