Tuesday, January 28, 2014

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?




7 comments:

Matt Franko said...

"We are NOT constrained by a net lack of knowledge."


I dont know about this Roger... I see us suffering under a general lack of key knowledge at this time...

Most humans think: "We're out of money!" at this time... or "govt cannot just spend its own currency" at this time...

So the knowledge about currency systems seems to be generally absent ... not all of us are without this knowledge so maybe this is what you mean by "net lack of knowledge" ie some of us have this knowledge but imo not many of us, we are more or less a handful of the now 7B humans...

rsp,

Tom Hickey said...

It's not only the lack of knowledge, or the maldistribution of knowledge, but also different ideologies as ways of structuring information wrt values. People can thus agree on the facts and come to different conclusions about what this implies for action. Or it can also lead to people arriving at different information ("facts") based on the same given by construing data differently. These differences arise from nature, that is, differences of disposition, and nurture, that is, learning, sub-culture, interests, etc. This is hugely complex and it is a challenge that pluralistic societies continually face.

Anonymous said...

Too many recipe books; not enough cooks ....? (Information is not knowledge). It all boils down to one simple question - on your seventy laps on average around the sun - is there anyone with a mirror, can show you:

1) Who am I?
2) What am I doing here?
3) What am I meant to do?
4) What will happen to me?

Basic questions from the days we sat around campfires instead of the TV. The rest is just a distraction - the product of a confused mind of a being, which does not recognise its own nature because it is unable to recognise itself. There, very simply stated, is your ‘problem’.

The solution begins with the power of feeling, not thought. The path to the self is the path of feeling, and in the end, is far more profound than thought. Self-knowledge arrives on the wings of the most elevated breath, pulse of feeling; a strong pillar within, that connects the self to the Energy that created it - mind is all but still. Only then, is there certainty.

Group learning and creation is not the problem. Individual consciousness is; self-knowledge is. Groups are chains, matrices with weaker and stronger links. Yes, groups have a primary role to play in nature. But mind is the problem maker and obviously not the right tool to fix problems. Mind is the slave of desire. The human self sits at its centre, hypnotised by the world. We have enough recipe books ….

After 200,000 years on the road, what does it mean to be a human being?

Unknown said...

In all honesty, I still don't have a strong hold in understanding Europe's economic standing, so this is new information that I'm still processing or trying to understand. Anyway, my friends and I at the School of Entrepreneurship have discussed about this topic before. We used a method called Creative Problem Solving to first identify how we can plan out the marketing process. We concluded that our team is democratic; therefore, we are to vote on a leader. Since we all agreed on this, we, the members, are therefore obliged to abide by our team leader's decision and support him in any way we can. So far that's what we have agreed on, but the actual marketing strategy is still under process. We are to present ‘Ideas’, and which proposal seems more promising will be again voted on. What do you think?

Roger Erickson said...

it's one thing for a group to LEARN something ...

and another thing altogether for that group to KEEP that knowledge.

And yet another thing altogether ... to learn how to USE that knowledge, and KEEP that additional lesson ... through practice.

“What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.”
— Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1832)

Matt Franko said...

"that group to KEEP that knowledge"

I would think that is what the job of the academe is supposed to be Roger... FAIL!

Also I would point out, as far as 'the creative process', we usually dont have to create a bridge 5 times until "we get it right"... or anything else of significance that we create.

You have a development phase (if necessary) followed by a design phase followed by a production phase, all conducted under project authority... if you do the design phase correctly, you always end up producing what you wanted... this is the way that at least the creative part of the world works.

Authority is absent from view in the present era and we have these libertarian morons of all sorts all running amok going around crying "we're out of money! ... we're out of money!! "... this is the main problem for humans right now... smack down all the true hard core libertarians and all of this goes away pronto...

rsp,

john lutz said...

is it a LACK of knowledge - or RESISTANCE to listen & learn (what's out there and available for all to see)?