How to Tune Our Economy? Practice, Focus and Coordinated Policy Development Effort

Commentary by Roger Erickson

"Much current analysis centers on the use of organization and communication of information to improve operational efficiency. For corp. management this could be useful. It is of no interest to too many in political office. Their minds are already made up and more information is superfluous." John Lounsbury, GEI

John's comment accurately drives home the point that it is our political policy methods that are completely obsolete and dysfunctional - regardless of the operational details. We have to change our policy development methods. That simple point has to be faced. Without it, we're wasting our time with all other "investing" issues.

How do we invest in improved policy development methods? If we don't find a way, no amount of investment in strategy and/or tactics will matter.

If the minds of our politicians are already made up, and immune to further information or feedback, that simply means that the same holds for the minds of most of our electorate. What do we do about that stark fact? How does a recombinant system that is that badly out of tune repair itself? For a start, it's hard to imagine 315 million people exploring emerging options if they're not yet aware of how many group options they have or how to find them, let alone how to adaptively explore those options.

There is endless literature on how increasingly complex systems are continuously tuned, year after year, decade after decade, millenia after millenia. The records of key steps are legion, from physics to chemistry to geology to biology to culture - and some key principles are easily discernable.

So why don't we bother to prepare our electorate to utilize those easily visible organizational principles? Why do we struggle to maintain an adequately informed electorate? Look in the mirror. The answer is a distributed one, requiring constantly evolving methods just to maintain the same enduring principles. Do YOU even want more information, or is YOUR mind already made up, rendering even you immune to additional information? If you're not immune, please read on, leave your comments, and/or write to me at rge (aat) OperationsInstitute (dott) come on!

Difficult organizational tasks are always solved through some version of the following process.

Eventually, via accumulated feedback, a process map becomes apparent, visualizing all the "places to intervene in a system." The control points. And with every step of growth, even that list changes and grows, every day! Plus, even keeping up with the growing list of supposed control points isn't even half of the task! [Once you read the list of "clutch, brake, accelerator, gear-shift, steering wheel" - you're fully capable of safely driving a car, right?]

Secondarily, further trial and error feedback indicates a sub-map, visualizing all the "methods for gracefully intervening in known control points." That's where inter-dependency maps start to be appreciated. Such maps are less easily described, and require experience, not just data. Total surprises are the norm. And, this map too changes continuously, even faster than the first map. That's why KM (knowledge mgt) specialists agree that over 70% of how all human systems work and continuously adapt is never explicitly written down. Instead, cultural operations, large and small, are only implicitly passed on, via "monkey see / monkey do" emulation or on-site experience. We all spend our lives embracing and extending muddle-through. Half the genius of our Constitution is it's brevity and focus on principles, and it's disregard for unpredictable details. Changing our Constitution neither precludes nor guarantees adaptive change in our culture. Only altering the cultural methods which we focus on will help us.

There is no other way. It's hard enough to write down parts lists, so any attempts to list or even describe the permutations of parts-list interactions and interdependencies that can occur in different situations immediately gets out of hand. It's simply not productive to even bother writing down all the past, present and emerging interdependencies. It's literally far faster to explore which subset are currently emerging, rather than try to read about the near-infinite super-set of inter-dependencies that could be but isn't currently occurring - at least not predominantly.

We could easily get lost in this necessary introduction, so let's arbitrarily focus, and bring the topic back to maintaining the policy space and policy agility of the USA. That's certainly a complicated task with attributes that change rapidly and continously. We've established that our task cannot be dismissed as either simple or easy. It requires actual thought.

Where are, say, the 50 most fundamental places to intervene in a policy apparatus that scales from local to national policy offices?

What are, say, the 5 most fundamental methods for gracefully intervening, in that diverse policy apparatus? Our goal is to produce desired outcomes by adroitly tweaking all our emerging policy control points both differently and simultaneously. We want to be better at that than any other nation on earth.

Again, we could be at this forever, so let's jump to a focus on changing the electorate's mind about minimum thresholds for what US politicians should be interested in. Does our electorate even understand the paragraphs above? Are our policy staff capable of maintaining our policy agility? When you're done laughing .. to tears ... we'll continue.

Ready yet? Take your time. Come back tomorrow if necessary - or even next week. It's a sobering thought, so if necessary, go get inebriated before returning.

Let's face it. An uninformed electorate isn't likely to elect useful politicians. We can't even predict the growing number of things an electorate should know, to maintain just-adequate Situational Awareness. Nor could we even list those things even if we could predict them!

Yet we can review and focus on key emerging methods that will allow us to regain adequate Situational Awareness, on-demand. After that, we still need the discipline to demand that those methods be used, practiced widely enough to matter, and constantly reviewed and adjusted further. Perhaps we need to focus on our own group agility, and prepare our students to keep that ultimate prize in mind as their #1 goal? We can leave them complete freedom to discover how, as their situations change. If we don't make them aware of why group agility matters, it won't matter how hard our disorganized individual offspring work at uncoordinated tasks.

There's a simple fact we keep coming back to with large economies and populations. "The more degrees of freedom a population has, the more organizational discipline it needs." If a focus on the emerging, key principles required for new situations isn't found ... the bigger organizations fail faster.

It's easier to man and operate a small boat than an aircraft carrier or cruise ship. Without a helluva lot more policy discipline - at least about key principles - an larger crew on a larger boat is dead in the water, and can quickly become a stinking mess. Witness the recent cruise line debacles.

Evolution is an iterative process, involving ways of selectively implementing succeeding layers of unpredictable methods. The key methods that matter are those that allow scalable discipline to be focused on the few things that will deliver access to additional degrees of freedom - i.e., expand our options. There's a needle in every every layer of every growing haystack.

To evolve, we need to focus on finding those needles - not the infinite list of things that are resource sinks but offer no additional degrees of freedom. To even be capable of evolving our culture, we need citizens prepared to pursue that goal, and practiced at the pursuit. If we don't prepare, we're deluding ourselves about our chances, and those we leave for our offspring.

This isn't rocket science. An ignorant electorate absolutely limits our degrees of freedom. Distributed ignorance drastically reduces our group options. A prolonged period of population ignorance absolutely precludes our survival.

So, how do we continually update the very methods groups use to continuously grow organization even as group size and capabilities grow? Sports coaching methods help a little, but they maintain fixed team sizes, so don't answer enough of our questions. Clues from all existing and emerging disciplines must be sifted and combined, just to keep up with demand to optimally organize all interdependencies.

Here's one example of what's being discussed in just one field tasked with constantly increasing demand for more group agility and more distributed group organization. In warfare, the quality of distibuted decision-making means life and death for entire militaries.

Misinterpretation and Confusion: What is Mission Command and Can the US Army Make it Work

That title raises an obvious question for US citizens. "What is Cultural Adaptive Rate, and Can the US Democracy Make it Work?"

Your feedback is needed. By everyone.