The Deeper Meaning Of Entrepreneurism ... Aggregate-Entrepreurism

(Commentary posted by Roger Erickson)






If a collection of cells (you) can act entrepreneurially, why can't a collection of 330 million citizens act as a team? They can? How? How often WILL they? And why not all of the time, or at least more often than we have been cooperating recently?

How do we get our nation to explore it's aggregate options?

First, recruit an electorate to recognize and explore their BIGGEST options? Please tell me, if you know where to start, and how to do that. Clearly, there are many options. How do we most productively explore those aggregate options?

Now THAT is an interesting topic!

How can a RAIDLY EXPANDING auto-catalytic aggregate continuously reform both its internal-feedback sensing AND external-scouting strategies to constantly re-extract adaptive, aggregate context modeling from its (exponentially expanding? factorially expanding?) "option space?" (More plainly, simply explore its rapidly expanding options.)

Why, that would make us an Entrepreneurial Aggregate! That would be a whole far greater than just the sum of our individual entrepreneurs, "entrepreneurially" sequestering resources back and forth FROM one another! :(

This is truly the "Evolving Aggregate's Task." In fact, it's quite obviously every aggregate's #1 task, by far.

Making aggregate option explorations a snap? Now that would be exciting. Much more so than just trivial tactical tasks.

That's obviously what happens when agile teams explore contexts. It's the most important task facing national aggregates, and probably the most neglected. That's what Context Nomads do, and we are all Context Nomads, all the time, whether we know it or not.

The deeper meaning of entrepreneurism is to occasionally turn away from frictions and sequestering existing resources FROM one another, to the rarely practiced activity of exploring aggregate options for creating not just more resources ... but actually creating a pool of resources another order of magnitude larger than what we could previously access. Total teamwork? What a mundane, but ignored, concept! :(

The simple truth is that we as an aggregate are always capable of creating more wealth than any of us can currently imagine. Yet instead, for spurious reasons, we spend most of our time hoarding what we've already got ... FROM one another, instead of optimally provisioning our most valuable asset, our aggregate teammates! That is embarrassingly dumb, and the opposite of being entrepreneurs.

How much of available aggregate information do we need, in order to perceive emerging, aggregate context? Not as much as we initially imagine. It's clearly a matter of data-sampling methods and context-modeling methods and option-exploration methods. Surely that's not to hard to practice, aka, between wars, not just during world wars?

A method to simplify pictures makes chemistry calculations a snap

We actually have mathematicians patenting algorithms for extracting data images from complex data sets.

Why patent? Exactly so we can constrain the adoption rate of the application of the advanced method just invented, for narrow vs aggregate gain. And thereby slow our aggregate adaptive rate? Do tell! When is too much of one method (patent protection) too much to bother with as an aggregate? When it's time to adjust, can we DISCERN when to make aggregate adjustments fast enough to keep from harming our aggregate selves? Do we have ways to even sense that, soon enough to matter? Or only long after the damage has been done?

And why slow the population penetration of new inventions at all? Do we really know what we are doing? Is too soon ever too soon?

Since those two tolerance limits change, how do we stay safely between them, and pursue that moving target?

Our application of our emerging knowledge parsing methodology is too timid.

Our emerging methods are too useful to be limited ONLY to compartively trivial applications such as medical imaging or molecular modeling.

What about modeling our own cultural context, and our our aggregate adaptive rate?





Really? What if we tried being an effective NATION? What would motivate us to try that? I mean, something other than another war?

No one person can supply adequate answers, but we can start asking more challenging questions of one another.

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?