SOMETIMES THE ANSWER IS STARING US IN THE FACE

SOMETIMES THE ANSWER IS STARING US IN THE FACE

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 2, 2010

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REFERENCE:

My missive, “Seichel, Schizophrenia, Hebeprenia, and Zeitgeist of Our Times!” (Peripatetic Philosopher June 14, 2010) reflexes a world marching to noise. There is no quiet time, no time empty of thought, no silence, only frenetic hype.

President Obama is acting tough when acting tough solves nothing, nor does calling the oilrig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico a “defining moment” equivalent to 9/11. Rhetoric will not wean us from our addiction to black gold.

Could anything be more absurd to illustrate the pusillanimity of our times than to see thousands of workers in white suits shoveling oil piles into plastic bags on our Gulf beaches? Nature has introduced man to himself, and it is not a reassuring sight.

This disaster was not inevitable. More than 30,000 oilrigs have been drilled in the Gulf without incident. Risk management was set aside, one more time, to maximize profits in a competitive industry. The gamble has proven a nightmare.

The intelligence to resist this strategy existed in the engineering community, a community more comfortable taking orders than challenging authority; a community created the modern world but abdicated control to entrepreneurs.

This is not a time to crucify British Petroleum. The corporate giant is neither Genghis Khan nor Beelzebub. It is a reflection of corporate society, no more no less. Incredibly, BP has met the government’s demands to put $20 billion in an escrow account to pay everyone who has real or imagine losses from this disaster. This is likely to elevate corruption to new levels making Katrina look like pocket change.

“You don’t want this horse to collapse in the middle of the race,” states Fadel Gheit, an energy analyst at Oppenheimer & Company. “You want a healthy BP, not a crippled one.”

DESIGN FOR PREVENTION (2010) authored by William L. Livingston IV has had the serendipity of cutting through the fog to reveal the nature of our pusillanimity. Yet, he is a voice nobody knows. An email from a reader caused me to lament this fact as I walked today.

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A READER WRITES:

I enjoyed reading about your thoughts while you walked today. Much to think about! But Jim…what is the solution? To do the opposite of what your list of things parents, teachers, governments and so-called leaders are actually doing now? The new tech age is PROGRESS! Not all good for sure! I’m just curious of how you think this can change? Do we just hit bottom on everything and survive with a better plan on how to live our lives?

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DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Read DESIGN FOR PREVENTION.

Although this is a book written for professional engineers to more effectively and judiciously engineer to requirements, it speaks to the human side of engineering.

Define the problem and you are more than half way to the solution.

Livingston defines the societal problem to my satisfaction, and of course in that definition is the process to controlling the situation. Problems are never solved only controlled. Reality bombards us with this fact but we never seem to get it.

As I walk today I find myself reflecting on some themes in Livingston’s book that stare us in the face, fragments of reality we seem unable to recognize and helpless to deal with.

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INSTITUTIONAL SOCIETY’S FLAWED INFALLIBILITY

Livingston claims that institutions at every level in every walk of life are committed to hindsight thinking. He points out that institutions operate on the premise of being infallible, that they are to be obeyed indiscriminate of the legitimacy of their claims to authority.

Dogma is not limited to religious institutions.

The purpose of an institution, he writes, is to preserve the command configuration that defines it as an institution.

It is astonishing but nonetheless true that we expect government intervention to control whatever is throwing us off course despite its history of failure.

ITEM: We saw this in Katrina.

ITEM: We see this in the oilrig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

ITEM: We are seeing it in Afghanistan.

We treat our institutions as if the embodiment of divine deliverance, which by extension allows us to behave like spoiled children.

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Institutions accept this divine personification of infallibility because they like the power, which means they selectively forget they are imperfect by definition as manmade creations. It is the strain of perpetuating this myth that makes institutional infallibility a mockery of our times.

Look at any institution.

We see the troubles of the Roman Catholic Church with its dogmatic disposition. The Holy Pontiff even claims infallibility ex cathedra relating to faith and morals. Meanwhile, we are apprised of scandalous cover-ups surfacing repeatedly of clerical sexual and psychological abuse of children.

Rigid conformity to institutional infallibility has found the Church lame to change. A similar case could be made for every institution.

Obedience to authority, Livingston argues, is blind to operational consequences as loyalty is indifferent to both stated goals and damage inflicted.

This is true of the family, school, workplace and government. Institutional society is adverse to pragmatic foresight while claiming quite the contrary. Consequently, our institutions are all lame to change.

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THE REMEDY AND THE FAULT OF OUR PROGRAMMING

The remedy is an open society of fallible institutions. This would require the loosening or their rigid configuration. Institutions need to become less rule bound and authoritative, and more inclined to foresight thinking.

Unfortunately, institutional programming resists self-correction. Individually and collectively, we need a personal trainer to guide us in all aspects of existence.

This finds us sitting on our hands waiting for deliverance from societal ills. We are rule driven, passive, reactive, blindly obedient, hindsight educated, conformists, polite, punctual, and other directed and controlled. This monumental task of doing for us what we refuse to do for ourselves has stretched beyond the purview of institutional capability.

Livingston writes:

“If you want to get an answer that won’t bring you calamity, you have to be aligned with reality and not be held in bondage by perceptual blinkers surgically implanted during social conditioning, augmented by cognitive bias, and cemented in place by the commitment to defend the infallibility of Yin ideology (hindsight thinking).”

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We daily experience the double whammy of institutional infallibility and fear of putting ourselves at odds with our programming.

Complicating the matter, we substitute rhetoric for reality, idealism for ideas, intention for action, while sacrificing safety and security for freedom.

We aggressively avoid anything that would upset the status quo. We imagine we have dodged a bullet – another Great Depression – when indicators suggest we are on life support.

The stimulus package has not worked. We are still flirting with double-digit unemployment. Meanwhile, people feed their panic by rushing out to buy the latest gadget.

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Something is wrong when finance and law have become the professions of choice. A litigious society prefers to sue when things go wrong rather than anticipate and prevent them from happening.

ITEM: Seven engineers for every lawyer graduated in 1953, now it is a one to one ratio.

ITEM: Each year some 800,000 engineers graduate from our universities.

ITEM: Each year some 800,000 lawyers graduate from our universities.

Metaphorically, I see lawyers like a swarm of locusts preying on and exploiting the under belly of society, and then leaving only the psychological debris in their wake. In the Tampa Bay area, we have more lawyers than citizens of my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, 33,000.

Livingston sees this emanating from an institutional policy of “ready, break, fix,” and strategy of “ready, fire, aim.” Small wonder lawyers are needed.

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“Engineering,” Livingston says, “has become a center of devout heresy. Engineers are within the system but not of it.” There is no time to absorb conventionalized change leaving a mismatch between technological advancement and institutional norms.

Engineers are reluctant to take charge. Engineering, like most disciplines, is conformist in principle. He argues, and I think correctly, that education top to bottom is hindsight-based. It takes hindsight thinking (academic grades, SAT scores) to get into university. Not surprising, hindsight is the product taken from the experience.

Pundits are fond to categorize “the best and the brightest” as our salvation when they flood the marketplace primarily to make money not a difference. The world limps forward.

We applaud our entrepreneurs and celebrate their rankings as billionaires, yet financiers and electronic wunderkind invent anything. Their craft is exploitation written as opportunity.

ITEM: Xerox engineers invented the personal computer, but Steven Jobs, a non-engineer stole it, as engineers at Xerox couldn’t get management to invest in its possibilities. Hindsight thinkers!

ITEM: IBM with the most sophisticated engineering complex and R&D laboratories in the world missed the computer bubble, and had to play catch up with its hindsight momentum.

ITEM: A non-engineer named Bill Gates literally stole a software system called “dirty operating system” (DOS) from a small engineering firm, a firm that subsequently sued Microsoft twice!
Where were the engineers when it came to the software science of persuasion?

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In my four decades of human engineering, finally somebody gets it right. To wit:

(1) Bottom up functionality has displaced top down directionality in the school, church, workplace, military and government.

(2) Bottom up functionality operates in the home where top down is fundamental to children getting their legs under them.

(3) Institutions still maintain old organizational charts, still pay for privilege and not performance, and still operate as if the command-and-control staff has much to do with outcomes.

We saw how effective the government was in Katrina. We see how effective the government is with BP and the oilrig disaster. We see this repeated in the military in Afghanistan.

ITEM: The best brains have failed in government. The best brains in the petroleum industry have failed in the Gulf Coast. The best brains in the military are chasing their own tail from pillar to post. The best brains in the church are busy protecting its image at the expense of its moral responsibility. Hindsight thinkers!

One wonders when enough is enough.

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THE INVISIBLE INSTITUTIONAL HAND

Livingston knows and respects Natural Law and the power of entropy. He is a student of control theory. Nature is. Nature cannot be denied. Buddhism expresses it this way: “You cannot push the water.” Institutions whether they like it or not bend to control theory as do we all.

Moreover, there is no such thing as “free will,” as the systemic pressure dictates how we behave. If the system is sick, we will be sick. If the system is dysfunctional, failure and constant perturbations will be routine.

I have seen systemic pressure in action. When I was in the military, I saw young men who didn’t smoke, drink or swear, and attended church regularly, bend to peer pressure. For years, I was consultant to major police departments across the Atlantic seaboard from New York City to Miami, and saw behavioral change consistent with systemic institutional cognitive biases.

Social behavior ultimately yields to natural law. Livingston writes, “Engineers are instinctively drawn to the concept of Universal Law in general and control theory in particular, which have a lot to do with shaping the behavior of human organizations.”

My take on organizational cultures follow this formula:

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior establishes whether the organization will vegetate, flounder, expire or survive (Leadership Manifesto, AQP Journal, Winter 202, p. 24).

Put another way, the chain-of-command with infallibility authority may defy control theory and impose draconian practices as “business as usual,” but at the risk of missed schedules, scrap and rework costs, missed timely feedback, and missed opportunity.

When an organization cannot breathe, six silent passive behaviors fester in the shadows.

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Culture is an integration of natural law. The immutable laws of nature are at root in our communal behavior. Livingston writes:

“The core truth of operative life lies deeper than verbal description of what we perceive and what has been organized into belief systems."

Culture is indeed the invisible hand to the Livingston premise: the purpose of an organization is what it does. Likewise, the purpose of our lives is not what we say we will do but how we actually behave.

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