Popular Posts

Tuesday, June 29, 2021

THE BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION -- PART FOUR


 BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION – PART FOUR


This completes the four-part rendition of author William L. Livingston, IV’s introduction in which I have attempted to make his work more accessible to a wider audience. Any errors of interpretation are mine, alone. Livingston is addressing an engineering audience that will have rapport and appreciate his engineering perspective. He is in addition to a professional engineer, quite familiar with the literature of the humanities as he is a student of human behavior and has a perspective that sometimes differs from my own. That is okay. We learn from each other and no one has privy to dogmatic truth. This may be somewhat evident in PART THREE and PART FOUR. My motivation, however, is to bring his mind to a wider audience, a mind I feel most relevant in these neglected and troubling times.

To wit, the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, when Exxon Valdez, an oil tanker owned by Exxon Shipping Company bound for Long Beach, California struck Prince William Sound's Bligh Reef, 1.5 mi (2.4 km) west of Tatitlek, Alaska at 12:04 a.m. and spilled 10.8 million gallons of US oil. The clean-up was monumental with the Exxon corporate staff dancing too often to the mythology of the cause while the ecologic environmental disaster is unlikely to ever recover.

Livingston has often written about the importance of design and prevention matters to complex systems. In 2010 he wrote a book, DESIGN FOR PREVENTION, and followed this with DESIGN FOR PREVENTION FOR DUMMIES, both of which I have read. Sometimes I wonder if anyone is listening to these professionals.

A structural consulting engineer in 2018 warmed the managers of major structural problems in the condominium that collapsed on Surfside, Miami in late June 2021. Three years passed before managers of the condominium were prepared to repair cracked columns and crumbling concrete. The consultant had found alarming evidence of “major structural damage” to the concrete slab below the pool deck and “abundant” cracking and crumbling of the columns, beams, and walls of the parking garage under the 13-story building. With more than one hundred residents of this condominium still unaccounted for scores of people are going through the rubble in search of survivors. Management is now prepared to address the consultant's concerns. I hope that corporate executives, unfamiliar with “design and prevention” matters will give Livingston’s website a look.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.


Toolsmithing



Image of dystopia cloud of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan August 1945 


There are some custom-designed, field-proven tools to assist the pilgrims in understanding dystopia, transforming, and in maintaining Utopia viable. When the tools start to quantify the true state of affairs in dystopia and provide particulars about the dysfunctions, management, if it finds out, can panic. The pilgrims relish the leverage that ground truth gives them against emotion and pulling rank.

In dystopia, no one knows how the place works. No one has a map of interactions of the organization and its outside world of vendors, regulators, and stakeholders. No one measures productivity or effectiveness. These tools allow building a map of communications that will be full of surprises and very popular with the workforce.

The technical tools organize the local and the particular information about the production process for action. Getting at the efficient cause of the problem, the tools illuminate the discrepancy between the real need and the stated goal. The marvelous psychological tool provided by Carl Rogers is effective for dealing with the angst, paradox, and lies that thwart attaining psychological success.

The analytical tools of the pilgrimage will be discussed at more length in Book 3, Utopia. Pilgrims are used to getting at the truth and keeping things honest. For several solid reasons, fiction can't get past the toolbox. The tools are material and practical. Lies are caught as errors during the process of adding things up to unity. What doesn’t get caught by the configuration tools gets caught by the dynamics tools. Sooner or later everything feeds entropy extraction. All systems have to make peace with natural law. Some of the paradigm tool names:


Rasmussen – TDBD (Top-DownBreakdown)

The Franceschi Fitting

· Relationship Matrix

· Penetrations FMEA (Failure Modes and Effects Analysis)

· Dynamic Simulations (intelligence amplification)

Running the dynamics is where errors with the conservation laws are exposed. The matter is neither created nor destroyed in production. Everybody has configuration information. No one has information on system dynamics. You win.

Sets

Frames of reference are complexity reducers. The unfathomable complex of individual social system behaviors, when hung on a rack of sets of patterns of behaviors can be understood as a single dynamic artifact. Take the rack around the globe and over time. See if you can find organizational behaviors that have no home on the tree. When satisfied, study the interactions of the sets. Done.

By recognizing that organizational behavior is constrained to patterns that are universal and timeless, your predictions of future trajectories are gold. With natural law digging the channels that constrict the possibilities, failure is impossible. When you construct your own “tree” from your own experience, all doubts are erased. To build your framework:

1. Recognize ubiquitous, recurring patterns of behavior and assign the set of patterns a unique tag.

2. Recognize and associate the sets of patterns to the host attractor.

3. Then, detect any listed pattern of behavior and you immediately know:

· Which host you’re in, dystopia or Utopia

· What patterns you will not encounter

· What patterns are there waiting for you to notice

· How to predict the trajectory of collective action

Hierarchical roles (Starkermann)

On-target dynamic simulation of social behavior came of age with Rudolf Starkermann (1924-2015). The idea struck him in Africa, working on the control system of an industrial process for Brown-Boveri. In 1954, the Swiss genius noticed parallel behaviors between the process control system he was sent to fix and the antics of the operating organizations. Simple controls went with rational behavior. Complex controls went with irrational social behavior.

He decided, on his own, to use the control system design technology of the times and apply it, as-is, to systems of flesh. He began building models using control theory templates fully proven in industrial control. When he took a professorship at the University of New Brunswick, Canada, he finally had access to mainframe computers that could run his models. He was commandeered as a mentor to our quest in 1986. Collaboration on the hierarchy began in 1994 when personal computers became powerful enough to handle the computational load. He laid out a test program for small groups, which we executed, that examined flat democratic and hierarchical configurations. Since the simulation study brought several surprises, live tests were run, over time, on real groups. When reality matched the surprises, dynamic studies were extended to larger and taller hierarchies. 

By then, Rudy had retired from UNB and chose to run the study by himself. His work was published as “Die Hierarchy,” written in Swiss-German, in 2005. It has since been translated into English. Again, the huge volume of work contained many surprises that had to be confirmed in the operational reality. It was during this protracted live test period that the first successful pilgrimage was conceived and conducted. The table of results of the massive simulation work reproduced from Starkermann’s book is pure gold.  It is available upon request. The huge volume of work contained many surprises that had to be confirmed in the operational reality. It was during this protracted live test period that the first successful pilgrimage was conceived and conducted. 

The table shows, for every spot on the hierarchy, the natural law limits indiscretion of task actions for that spot. This computation was done for hierarchies from 2 to 12 levels of hierarchy. Above 12 tiers, the changes are trivial. Armed with this tool you can easily determine whether an irrational command is from a sociopath or a manager trying to defy natural law.

The pilgrimage platform is Starkermann’s work. Just like the wormhole Nature placed with the 2nd Law for entropy extraction, the laws of hierarchy dynamics can be abided and leveraged at the same time to get desired outcomes. The 100% success rate of the pilgrimages attests to the foundation supporting the paradigm.

Personalization

Striking differences between dystopia and Utopia are found in the means by which things get accomplished. When both social systems are blind drunk, there’s no difference at all. It is the same people getting high. Understanding the difference in behavior, when sober, is to understand the differences in the mechanisms of action the same people employ to produce value.

The mechanism of action chain that starts with depersonalization and ends in genocide is launched by unchecked business as usual. When people in the workforce are handled as numbers and not as equals, you can be sure that trouble is on the way. Once the working staff is depersonalized by the head shed, it rigs the zero-sum game of labor-management relations in favor of management. Depersonalization removes humanitarian and moral factors from the arena. That is how it came to be obvious during the 19th-century growth of big business, that wage earners were being treated worse than slaves. The owners of slaves had no reason to abuse their property. Slavery was never zero-sum.

Depersonalization swings both ways. When you don’t matter, your work doesn’t matter. When you find out your work doesn’t matter, you have proof that, to your collective, you don’t matter. In Utopia, it’s the opposite. You matter so much to societal viability as a gatekeeper you are given the autonomy and trust to the matter as you think best.

When the owners engaged a zero-sum relationship with people of no cash value, they assumed the less wage they gave to the wage earners, the more they could keep for themselves. The opposite is true. The resulting inhumanity soared to such heights after the civil war, the government had to take action to stop the carnage against its citizen-taxpayers. The end game of depersonalization is to kill off the workforce – genocide.

The power of this mechanism of action, psychology expressed in deeds, is so high that it flourishes in various forms today. The first recorded denunciation of zero-sum, 1800 CE, occurred in England by an industrialist who did his before-and-after test. He announced to all that his business and his profits soared when he treated his workforce as the revenue center it was. None of his peers emulated his strategy. It’s an early instance of success phobia. The same scenario was recorded by NCR in Dayton, OH in1895, and by Remington in 1906, in Manhattan. Details are in the .pdf library. We can now generate examples of this acuity of success phobia, spawn of the instinct of domination, on-demand.

A psychological ground-truth tool

The pilgrimage paradigm has enabled a test of management, which you can give in safety. Reliable in the extreme, the score provided by the exam cannot be wrong. The test is given at an opportune time when you have the ear of the target and no crisis is underway.

Anyone can use the paradigm, as we do, for predicting human behavior in specified situations. This capability to foresee is enabled by following the prime movers of social group dynamics. When individuals of the group are in Crusoe conditions, these social forces are dormant. In a dystopia world, where behavior is rule-based perforce, very little that transpires is unpredictable. In dystopia, what is bad for society is a forced way of life that is bad for its inhabitants.

In Utopia, individuals are essentially autonomous and therefore locally and particularly unpredictable. The paradigm is the bond. It is the overall performance of viability husbandry in Utopia that is predictable. Each individual, in his way, is contributing towards the strategic welfare of his Utopia at the same time he is attending to his psychological success. What’s good for the individual is aligned with what’s good for his society. You don’t “force” the individual to do his job. He does it and does it well only because he wants to. The particulars are too tied up with innovation to be predictable. The proof of results-orientation is the happiness of the people in seeing to the prosperity of their society – Sir Thomas More’s definition of Utopia.

Can you have a happy population in a declining, incompetent society? It might be possible with inmates of an asylum going through liquidation, but angst and unhappiness are reliable markers of dystopia. In the same way, a happy workforce marks a dedication to the stuff of Utopia.

The choice available to the individual is one or the other. It’s dystopia or Utopia. Mixtures are fleeting and explosively unstable. To plot trajectories into the future, once you know which set of forces is in play, forecasting becomes perfunctory. To make on-target forecasts you must be on-target in the classification of individual mindedness.

If you actually have a Utopian and classify him erroneously as dystopian, your forecast will fail on the benign side. It’s not difficult to spot someone going against the grain of dystopia and your error can quickly be corrected. The real danger is in miss-classifying a dedicated dystopian as a potential Utopian. Dystopians are usually very clever at concealing their true allegiance and if you allow yourself to get fooled, it is the borrowing of trouble.

You can use the success of the pilgrimage, incontrovertible, as a tool for avoiding mindedness misclassification errors. Since closed minds feature success phobia, Achievemephobia, the tactic is to package the pilgrimage paradigm so that refusal to audit an implementation site exposes the phobia. Closed-mindedness has supreme control over trustworthiness and learning. Unqualified to be a pilgrim, closed-minded people are more dangerous than helpful for problem-solving projects.

Since the target may not appreciate having his psyche secrets open to view, it’s always best to be private and discreet. Either way, it comes out, the test and the results are not discussed with others. If he is open-minded, his reactions to the paradigm will be positive. If he is closed-minded, his negative reactions have been neutralized. When you have a “leader” fearful of success in attaining goals he has espoused, you can figure out the rest for yourself.

The test is patterned along the lines of the confident saleslady genius who confronted her potential customers with “If we show you practical, workable solutions to the issues you present to us as problems, are you prepared to buy?”

Homework first: 

1. Get a ballpark figure of the firm’s productivity.

2. Look for the telltales of dystopia/Utopia. If it’s not Utopia, which is a rather obvious condition and you don’t need to run the test, it’s a dystopia.

3. For any dystopia, you can guarantee a 25% windfall increase in production/profit with impunity.

4. Customize your pitch. One from the practice that has yet to fail: “In responding to your wishes to “go to the next level,” we note that you generate about $12M in deliverables per month. Service is available that can improve your productivity by 25% or more, quickly, without capital investment or change to your organizational chart. The benefits package it delivers, in your case $3M per month windfall, is self-sustaining. To address your concerns, there are implementations of this service that you can visit to examine and evaluate the method and performance claims for yourself.”

5. Offer to arrange for an in-house demonstration or an inspection trip to an application.

After the test is administered, you’re done. Mentally record the reaction and keep it on file. The initial typical manifestation of success phobia is catatonia. For that event, nothing further needs to be said. You do not need to rebut a denial of efficacy because negative objections about the service never arise. You have your answer.

The size of windfall and the offer of in situ examination preempt the usual lame excuses. Since the target recognizes his dilemma and who brought it to him, it’s best to take your feigned innocence and vacate the area. To be rejected by the closed-minded is to sidestep a pursuit of the impossible.

The miscellany of social membership

Obedience to Authority

Mindlessly following orders sent down the chain of command is not the only road to dystopia, but it is a sure, direct one. Anytime you are instructed to do your work, brain-off, you can be sure of colliding with contradiction and paradox. In Utopia, you are expected to use your intelligence. After all, you have been given autonomy in exchange for outcome responsibility and the only way to meet the challenges of husbandry is via applied intelligence.

Challenges of ideological infallibility

When you are expected to defend the enigmas rather than resolve them, you are already a hired accomplice to dystopia. The stabilizing force of the Nash Equilibrium is real. The pushback you get from others anytime you try to act rationality is material. If the system won’t let you change it, your only recourse is to act as if the system didn’t need to be fixed. There goes your internal energy.

On the yellow-brick road

Once you get going on the pilgrimage, all sorts of signs start appearing that you are en route to a happy place – one that perpetually has its act together. When the ‘shock and awe’ phase of the pilgrimage settles in, everyone on the pilgrimage has already sensed that they are going to make it and that being there in Utopia is going to be well worth the “losses” and the effort.

Yes, making the pilgrimage will affect your membership status in dystopias. The losses in your standing as members of dysfunctional organizations in dystopia are unavoidable. Neither attractor will knowingly allow dual-citizenship. Taking the pilgrimage is an act of self-improvement. Your transformation will be noticed by your social system people.

Since you are doing something proactive that anyone could do, your advances in self-improvement will be graded. Low scores will bring you credit for trying and sympathy for failure. If you ace the mutation, you will find yourself marginalized. You will be accused of orchestrating the whole thing – intentionally trying to “look better” than your peers. You have acted outside of your caste limits and you must be punished. It is an exhibit of the phobia of success.

In Utopia, thinking outside of the box and acting on your ideas for improvement is a condition of membership. Your peers are doing the same things. Measurements are made of your effectiveness, not your obedience. You are receiving, as a windfall, the benefits that other members have brought forth. It is only fair that you strive to contribute as well.

Scenario Walkthrough

Setting the stage for dystopia

Dystopia germinates when a collective reaches a combination of size (numbers of employees) and configuration (hierarchical layers) and chooses to operate through the transition by business as usual. If you want to create a dystopia with no risk of failing:

1. Employ more than 100 individuals

2. Establish a hierarchy with 4 or more levels

3. Operate like the dystopias around you

Nature, conventional practice, and time will take care of the rest.

Yes, you can have organizational dysfunction with smaller groups. Just attempt to defy the 2½ rule. Depersonalize your workforce and declare that management and labor are henceforth in a zero-sum relationship. Wasn’t that easy?

It’s not predictable when and under what circumstances dystopia initializes and takes off. If management betrayal of the workforce occurs, dystopia forms instantly. An example is the unannounced corporate takeover gambit. When the staff finds out they’ve been thrown under the merger bus, productivity freefalls to zero. If dystopia wasn’t raging before the announcement, it sure is from then on – both firms. The record of mergers and acquisitions that fail is so embarrassing, POSIWID speaks that whatever was claimed for it, was not the reason the merger was pushed through.

Once initialized, the sequence to dystopia maturity and lock-in is pretty much the same. The choice to continue business as usual as the organization passes quietly through Nature’s boundary layer is the trigger. When the 2½ rule kicks in, top management can no longer keep up with the torrent of ground truth about production. With the legal authority to command, at will, management is inclined to steer its ship of state using information from informants that are forced by their role to compress and twist what they receive by other informants – similarly constrained. Working with fiction, the head-shed helmsmen navigate the organization onto the rocks of contradiction. The instinct of domination interacts with the wreckage caused by its force to increase domination forces. This forms a cycle of progressive degeneration that ends in collapse.

When the workforce realizes it is being forced by management, fixated on Ideological conformance, into counter-productivity, it switches into defense mode – perforce – that takes the form of efficiency withdrawal, for centuries called Ca’ canny. When CYA becomes a condition of action, productivity takes a nosedive. Management, responding to production problems it caused, issues stronger commands to the workforce – now fully aware that management is clueless and ruthless. This event signals that zero-sum is the relationship in play. The more paradox descends on labor from hostile, ill-informed management, the more labor withholds defense efficiency.

The cover-up of zero-sum wreckage on productivity is facilitated by a menagerie of scapegoats, elephants, and monkeys. The ugly causes and consequences of zero-sum are declared undiscussable by both “sides.” No one dares to proclaim the truth that productivity has never been and can’t be zero-sum. As soon as the menagerie appears, Nash locks in the arrangement and keeps it stable by installing behavioral echo chambers. Management occupies itself with ways and means to short-change labor and the workforce withholds efficiency accordingly. The impact on the productivity of zero-sum idiocy has been measured for centuries. For “normal” cases, the loss is at least 25%. Extreme zero-sum gamesmanship can drop productivity by 75% or more. The pilgrimage guarantees no less than a 25% gain in productivity – self-sustained.

You have a standing invitation to visit any of the pilgrimage places and examine and evaluate the paradigm claims for yourself. The refusal to audit a live application does not invalidate the claims of the P2U.

The lesson learned is that high productivity can never be taken for granted. It is always transient and fleeting. Viability husbandry requires intelligent and never-ending attention. Native instincts may get the job done for a spell, but operating by the “rules” of the glorious past has a sell-by date. The key indicator is a proactive, ongoing effort to increase productivity. This long-term maintenance need is satisfied with subsequent “seasons” of six episodes each that maintain the veteran pilgrims, already self-confident, and pushes up towards Maslow’s self-actualized level.

Why?

Now that the machinery and dynamics of dystopia have been deciphered in ways that you can falsify by your own experience and testing, the central question remains. Why does a species supposedly at the top of the Darwinian intelligence scale navigate itself to extinction? Millennia after millennia? Or, if you prefer, what makes emulating the strategy of self-extinction intelligent? The question was referred to the scientific study of causation, called etiology. It remains unanswered. As Utopia is not Nature’s choice for mankind, neither is a dystopia. Dystopia is manmade and unnecessary.

The fossil record reveals that species extinctions can be rationally attributed to events beyond the control of any species. Dramatic changes in the climate, movement of the tectonic plates, supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, and the like have been used to account for the great bulk of species extinctions. So far nothing in that class of cataclysmic events has confronted mankind’s close relatives on the tree of life that disappeared, like Neanderthal, going back eons ago. You can rule out an outrageous fortune for mankind.

If there is no material, compelling purpose for man to drive himself to extinction, POSIWID, and seeing that extinction remains the unanimous free choice of society, there is a monster dark-matter-class paradox. The fact that man in social membership, and not Crusoe, choose self-annihilation is on a collision course with his claim of top-gun intelligence. This enigma is just one of many paradoxes that distinguish dystopia. With contradiction one part truth and one part lie, Utopias, to maintain effectiveness, treat an emerging enigma just like any other error to be neutralized. Yet, the question remains; why is a societal paradox even an issue?

In our decades on the quest to develop the paradigm, nothing changed more frequently than our guess as to why all this counterproductive, cross-purposes irrationality exists. Most of the opinions of our cronies, like greed, power, and fame, have long since been proven false. Decades of experience with distinguished professionals in psychology have not delivered a testable answer either. Nothing proposed has a shred of evidence. The current best guess is an unbridled instinct of domination.

Another item in the cauldron of our ignorance is the fact that everyone knows they operate in dystopia. Everyone knows they are accessories to the condition they say they despise. They know it is manmade and that dystopia gets worse, never better, with time. Everyone already knows that infallibility of doctrine, of ideology, is unsustainable. No one knows why the populace complains about dystopia damage and then goes straightaway to enable it.

An interesting property of the Why issue is that even if the true causation was proffered, there is no direct way to validate it. Indirectly, perhaps. If the psychological cause of dystopia were to be identified, somehow, it would be vehemently denied by the perpetrators. There is a long history to this auto-response of dystopia people. Books are available about the denial of causation immediately followed by the actions previously denied. Some scholars of industrial sociology made a career out of it. We no longer think that if the why question was answered correctly, the knowledge would have utility in either pilgrimage or Utopia operations.

As knowledge and experience with social system dynamics under disturbance gathers, we think there are several reasons why dystopia covers the globe, like Sherwin-Williams paint, where any one of them can get the job done.

· React to disturbances using the path of least resistance

· Put off maintenance, husbandry, problem-solving

· Tolerate lying, opacity, cover-ups

· Depersonalization

· Obedience to authority, drive, an instinct of domination

As you will see in Book 3, Utopia, the etiological conundrum of dystopia was “solved” by taking the whole arena of social action up a level of abstraction and redesigning the context and process of viability husbandry so that the barricade to Utopia drops out of the equation. You will learn its application to “safety” as an example. When you can transform a dystopia into a Utopia on-demand, enabling immortality, the causes of dystopia paradoxes are no longer items of interest.

If you have a conjecture about the cause that can be tested, check the .pdf record. The people keeping Utopia viable know why they do what they do – because they choose what to do what’s necessary for viability husbandry and are happy doing it. Utopia is always bigger than its threats and disturbances. Take yourself to an installation and see what happens when you try to disturb it.

The distinguishing functionalities of the P2U

As you can tell from the narrative, every effort has been made to locate and credit the precedents to the pieces and parts of the P2U. Building the library of dystopia/Utopia took over two years. The empirical intermissions speak for themselves.

The precedents for the P2U paradigm found and noted, include:

· State dystopia: Ubiquitous organizational dysfunction

· State Utopia: Prosperous and happy

· Definitions of dystopia in mechanisms of action

· Definitions of Utopia in mechanisms of action

· Attempts to “fix” dystopia

It’s clear by now that the huge record of failed attempts, with no self-sustaining successes to date, indicates some stuff must have been missing or overdone in their attempts. It is what’s not there in the record that is key to understanding the “magic.” Everyone who tried to fix dystopia and failed ended up thinking the P2U paradigm was the pursuit of the impossible and concluded: “There is only one human social system possible and its name is a dystopia. Make the best of it.”

For good reasons, both the pilgrims and the workers are highly skeptical of the P2U. Dealing with that justified skepticism requires high mutual trust, which is why trust is the first order of business. The building blocks of trust are truth.

Now that the P2U is alive and well, it provides an opportunity to study the distinguishing differences. By comparing the P2U experience to the precedents safely in the library, two aspects have bubbled to the surface. They are functionalities in the P2U unique in the history of mankind – without precedent of any sort. They form the missing critical success factors that make P2U successful and self-sustaining. And, they are demonstrably connected. Unique, never before:

· A generic, universally applicable paradigm for transforming dystopia, as previously defined, into Utopia, as previously defined.

· A high-speed change of a way-of-life (Yin/Yang)

No one had ever figured out a generic paradigm to move a social system from a bad behavior state to a good behavior state and keep it there. No one ever figured out how to change the way of life of a mature social system for the better, abruptly.

In the realms of psychology and sociology, fast changes in behavior are usually attributed to reflexes. Those are simple scalar responses to a specific stimulus. An instinct is not based on prior experience. The expression of an instinct takes more time. Books are available that list hundreds of them.

Instincts are an innate, inbred, fixed pattern of behavior responding to certain stimuli, usually by homeostatic disturbances. Several criteria which distinguish instinctual from other kinds of behavior have been established. To be considered instinctual, a behavior must:

· Be automatic

· Be irresistible

· Occur at some point in the development

· Be triggered by some event in the environment

· Occur in every member of the species

· Be unmodifiable

· Govern behavior for which the organism needs no training

In mathematical physics, an instinct is a multi-directional vector, a quantity with more than two pieces of information in a vector space (linear space). Ironically, beginning with Freud and then Maslow, instincts have gone out of vogue in the behavioral sciences.

From our P2U evidence, instincts are alive and well. As with the functional definition of Utopia by Sir Thomas More’s (1478 – 1535) Utopia (1516) imagines a complex, self-contained community set on an island, in which people share a common culture and way of life. American journalist Edward Bellamy (1850 – 1898) takes up this theme in Looking Backwards (1888), imagining the world in the year 2000. Like More’s Utopia, there is no greed, corruption, or power struggles since there is no money or private property. Bellamy sees the application of rationality to economic and social problems. The idea that the new society is “the logical outcome of the operation of human nature under rational conditions” is repeated in different forms throughout the novel. He finds industry nationalized, equal distribution of wealth to all citizens, and class divisions eradicated in a new form of nationalism. Alexander Jamieson (1782–1850), a Scottish writer and schoolmaster, known as a rhetorician, has been described as a textbook writer. After the failure of his school, he worked as an actuary.

In Jamieson’s on instinct. In his A Dictionary of Mechanical Science, Arts, Manufactures, and Miscellaneous Knowledge (1829), he defined the term instinct for the first time as “an appellation given to the sagacity and natural inclinations of brutes, which supplies the place of reason in mankind.” It fits our experience just fine.

An instinct can be expressed as a vector in direction and quantity, any quantity. An instinct includes its purpose, direction, and the intensity of its application, magnitude. It is the concept of instinct as a vector that is helpful. The behavioral sciences stipulate that instincts are inborn, not acquired. You die with the same collection of instincts you were born with.

Back during the champion era of Utopia, with labor and capital at loggerheads, Thorstein Veblen (1857 – 1926) published The Instinct of Workmanship(1914). Thorstein Bunde Veblenwas an American economist and sociologist who, during his lifetime, emerged as a well-known critic of capitalism. In his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he coined the concepts of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. In his book on workmanship, there is a splendid example of an instinct with a multi-directional vector. The strength of this instinct varies greatly depending on circumstances. The P2U has shown that this key instinct does not go away under dystopia suppression. When the pilgrimage releases the chains immobilizing the instinct of workmanship, the positive results are often spectacular.

Changing the intensity of one's instinct, either way, can change others related to it and thereby propagate the change to the resultant vector. The vector of many instincts is tightly connected to truth. That is, attaining the goal of the instinct requires that the information it processes be of actionable quality. By fostering GIGO, these truth-dependent instincts can all be turned from medicine into poison in one stroke. Only in dystopia is the absence of truth inconsequential to the stability of its social systems.

Conjecture of connections

To explain the benefit the transmutation of dystopia to Utopia, to ourselves, we hold that the instincts that comprise and stabilize dystopia are different in kind and intensity from the set of instincts we see expressed in Utopia. The avalanche phenomenon suggests that each social system attractor features a trademark set of active instincts that can be triggered as a set to appear or disappear all at once.

The P2U trick is to unleash the requisite instincts of Utopia and actuate the trigger mechanisms. Pilgrims, as a rule, being MitM (i,e, “Man-in-the-Middle") have very few of the instincts driving dystopia to put back into the closet. Most of the counterproductive things the MitM does are being done under hierarchical force.

When the pilgrims have the Utopia instinct set in hand with the individual vectors combining in a resultant aimed at Utopia, the avalanche follows. Like so many things in the P2U, it’s all or nothing. This cascading effect, our conjecture, explains to us why finding the pathway from dystopia to Utopia was so bloody erratic.

While the productivity gatekeeper mutates to Utopia as a result of the pilgrimage, the workers that work under the foreman mutate via a different vector – reciprocity. Once the foremen are implementing Utopia, the workers hold on to their withheld efficiency, Ca’ canny, for another 2-3 months. When the bell-cow workers do go to Utopia, the rest follow in short order. It is just the start of the reciprocity season.

Saturday, June 26, 2021

THE BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION - PART THREE



BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION



PART THREE



NOTE:

William L. Livingston IV’s take on dystopia may surprise those of you who have never thought of this phenomenon in such naked terms or with such disturbing depths. Chances are you are not aware that dystopia invades virtually every aspect of our existence: from how we see ourselves as individuals to how we process the information that dictates how we think and behave to what we value and believe to be true.

Dystopia crushes our liberty, fraternity, and freedom. Should we follow Livingston in his analysis, we see that dystopia is palpably demonstrated in everyday life by those who control the education of our children, program our social and personal existence, manage our work, and invade our belief systems, alas, dictate our collective lives as members of society. With dystopia what once was thought of as independence and self-reliance in a democratic republic is now but a memory. Livingston is not an alarmist but a man of integrity, wisdom, courage, and character who tells it like it unfortunately is.

The pioneer researchers listed in this Part Three represent my teachers in the field of social psychology and organizational development, which is my field of endeavor. What they theorized in the decades that followed WWII still applies today in the 21st Century.

The corporate management class is essentially an invention of the past century. Management, having excelled in productivity and logistical support of that war, became heady with its contribution exploiting that public relations presumed advantage meteorically expanding its modest hierarchy of four levels of management to twelve levels concomitantly elevating its pay structure at the top from five to ten times that of the hourly worker to fifty and as much as one hundred times without a noticeable complaint from the workers in the trenches of the organization. Corporate management successfully convinced the public that it needed managers to get the work done, clearly a dystopian concept.

The dystopia of management’s position power was aptly described by the German publication, Wirtschaft Woche (Economy Week, January 16, 1987), as Amerikas Krankheit (“America’s Disease”):

Management is insensitive to workers; it supports company politics at the expense of productivity; secrecy is the measure of management’s communication; the principal product of work is paperwork; while endless perfunctory meetings are the way; an internal focus is a consuming organizational fixation only to translate into ignoring potential markets; short term planning is preferred to avoid the challenges; initiative of the individual is discouraged as you don’t know where it might lead; management isolates itself from workers by retreating behind a wall of mahogany; covert hostility to innovation is maintained while overtly being praised.

Whereas this is a reference to thirty-four years ago, Livingston's references to dystopia update the continuing failure of the complex organization to move naturally from position power to knowledge power, now enjoyed primarily by professionals as management fails to loosen the screws by a single turn. I desire here only to make Livingston’s work more accessible to a wider audience as I see it that important.

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.





THE PUPPET MASTERS ARE NOW ANACHRONISTIC.



Transition

It is tempting to rant on about dystopia. It’s the bulk of history itself. There’s so much newsworthy dystopia material constantly gushing out of the media. Discussing dystopia doings is as popular and safe as the weather. If you’re upset about organizational dysfunction, you have hundreds of groups to join that will take you in with open arms. In the first phase of our grind on the P2U (i.e., Pilgrimage to Utopia), we were in many of those clubs and surrounded by friendly, supportive comrades. Several books we published on our work during that phase, including “Have Fun at Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990) are available on Amazon.

As we became more expert in dystopia criticism, it became more obvious that collective expertise in dystopia wasn’t making a dent in the consequences of dystopia. The criticism groups went on year after year and nothing changed. One can assume it is the powerlessness of these anti-dystopia groups that binds them together. Validation of that assumption arrived when the P2U succeeded and all our memberships were immediately canceled, en masse.

Expertise in dystopia has value only to the extent it serves as a benchmark for detecting developing issues in Utopia. As you have learned, functionality of dystopia taking root in Utopia signals collapse. As any functionality of Utopia in dystopia is immediately destroyed, like whistleblowers, Utopia must exercise due vigilance in catching the symptoms of dystopia early.

This point in the derivation of P2U has provided sufficient material on the mechanisms of action of dystopia. It is time to transition out of dystopia and start designing and building the pilgrimage to Utopia. To that end, there are objective concepts and toolsmith to be learned and used.

The importance of concepts and tools to P2U is such that you should be aware of their names and applications. When you use them in design, you will become friends. The following section begins the transition process. Utopia is prosperous and immortal because it prevents and solves whatever fate slings at it. Poor dystopia, mired in unreality and fiction, is defenseless against the operational reality.

Corollaries and derivatives of Natural Law for P2U

To begin, the concepts and such will be introduced in short narrative form. This run will give you an overview of the design tools provided for the P2U. The first batch:

Gödel

· Turing

· Ashby

· Responsibility/autonomy

· GIGO

· Optimality

Kurt Friedrich G̦del (1905 Р1978): The Most Important Logician of the 20th Century

Kurt Gödel collaborated with Einstein about his cause-effect-level theorem and worked up the mathematical proof while both were at Princeton. It is one of the most important laws impinging on the process of solving problems.

The Gödel theorem states that the efficient cause (Aristotle) of the problem is never at the same level where the damage caused by the activity is manifested. The efficient cause is at least one level up in abstraction from the level where the cries of anguish emanate. Causes sink to manifest effects. There are corollaries of Gödel to the effect that a dysfunctional social system cannot be the instrument of its cure.

Dystopias make it a rule that you can only discuss the cause of a publicly odious problem at the same level in which the problem is perceived. Thus when Wall Street runs off with your retirement savings, it’s OK to blame it on the perpetrators’ greed. Just don’t blame it on a rigged financial system that goes from forming an economic bubble that bursts only to form another such bubble.

Since Gödel’s logistics are consistent with natural law, attempts at defiance of this fact are “naturally” punished. An example of such folly is the insolence with which “regulatory” agencies of the Establishment’s ignore such irregularities. Every social system established to force another social system(s) to obey its rules (controls) is attempting to defy Gödel and Turing at the same time. Does anyone notice that since Hammurabi (the sixth king of the First Babylonian dynasty, 1792 BC to c. 1750 BC) invented the regulatory “fix,” no other regulatory agency has ever attained its chartered purpose? Did anyone announce to the Establishment there must be a common failure mode? Well, there is.

Regulatory agencies attempt to control outcomes by imposing a set of rules of action (Turning) at the level where damage from past actions is manifested (Gödel). Held infallible, the rule set is attacked by the 2nd Law at several fronts. As events unfold and regulatory failure accumulates, the rules are incrementally “clarified” in a decades-long legal procedure. Never getting up to the level of cause, the engines of damage control that begat the regulatory agency in the first place continue to exert their influence, unimpeded. The only thing that prevents a regulatory institution from the noble quest of damage control and instead turns it into a public menace is time.

As the record of effectiveness worsens, regulatory agencies migrate from simple tyranny to arrogance. Protected by the civil laws that shield them from liability for ruled compliance, the regulated are left to absorb the damage for their obedience. No artifact of the Establishment wreaks more havoc on the citizenry than constructing a regulatory agency that assures the damage will continue. Facts of the “safety” record, straight lines over time, attest to the futility of regulation and regulatory-based “training.”

That is why transforming from dystopia to Utopia is accompanied by a block change in the loss and accident record. Organizations with a decade of conventional safety programs will record more than a 50% step reduction in losses. The technology of safety only registers improvements when the sociology of productivity is established. It is never the other way around.

Utopia lives by Gödel because true initiators of the bumps of life are the only way the bumps get smoothed out. In dystopia, those working on solving problems are rarely equipped with knowledge of the cause. The solvers have to collide with the cause by trial and error and that takes forever. In dystopia, even searching for the true cause of the wreckage is considered disloyal.

One of the steep hills in the pilgrimage is learning how to catch yourself from looking for the cause near the crime. It pays to switch to Gödel mode, with the onset of any problem, as a habit. The herd can go over the cliff of ignorance without you.

Alan Turing (1912 – 1954, mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist whose machine broke the German Code in WWII).

Alan Turing worked out the mathematical proof of his theorem in 1945 and presented it to the scientific community in 1946. The fact that his theorem is central to organizational functioning and still ignored in practice, speaks volumes about the power of attractor dystopia. Like Gödel, Turing is central to Utopian husbandry.

Turing’s theorem states that for any system you can have obedience to rules or you can have intelligent, effective problem-solving. The system cannot have both. Rule-based behavior permits no feedback of results obtained from following the rules. To have obedience, you sacrifice accomplishment. To achieve results irrespective of the problem at hand, do whatever works and screw the rules. In dystopia, neither good nor bad results matter. In dystopia, telling the truth of Turing to power will get you flogged. In Utopia, discussing the truth about power is an expression of faithfulness to the conditions of membership.

Allegiance to the rules is in a joint restriction to responsibility to fix and fit the outcomes. When management drives for conformance to the rules, it automatically assumes full responsibility for the results that obediently conform to the rules. When management delegates outcome responsibility while driving for compliance to corporate doctrine, it is defying Natural Law. The punishment Nature applies to this transgression is the withholding of efficiency by the workforce. To act contrary to what you know to be best is a crushing loss of freedom. For this treacherous to appropriate action, management becomes a caricature of reality that renders it impotent. Things rapidly degrade to a zero-sum game. The workforce loses. The head its shed loses in what is tantamount to a cover-up.

Dystopias go to extremes in trying to defy Turing. They insist on conformance to policies that discourage the intelligent pursuit of problem-solving. That’s why the Establishment can’t solve the problems that require actionable-quality information and intelligent, Gödel-centered creativity.

In Utopia, the signs of Turing-think are everywhere. “Rules” of action are rewritten daily as feedback is intelligently applied to redesigning tasks. Keep the stuff that works; throw away the stuff that doesn’t; synthesize other versions of the task; repeat as necessary to attain effective outcomes. You know what working the process will get you in dystopia – fired!

W. Ross Ashby (1903 – 1972), English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics

Ashby was a stalwart member of the General Systems Research community and took his turn as President. He was a member of England’s Ratio Club with Alan Turing. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (1932) is a derivative of Control Theory. It states that to control a system you must have as much variety in your control responses as the system to be controlled exhibits. As a familiar reference, it is the law of competitive sports.

Requisite variety is ignored as a natural law in a dystopia as it requires quality and quantity of information, local and particular, which is impossible to obtain in a useful time frame. Without full knowledge of system dynamics, e.g., the actual motives of labor, no control system can be devised that can guarantee full control, e.g., morale.

Ashby’s “The Purpose of the System Is What It Does” (POSIWID) also derives from control theory. It was featured and promoted by an Ashby cohort, Stafford Beer (1926 – 2002, best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics). The principle underlying POSIWID is that all systems self-regulate towards a goal. They just don’t advertise this fact.

Implemented by an appropriate control system, process systems can be given your choice of a control target. Should the control system falter, for any reason, the system will spontaneously resort to a different target. Consequently, when process performance centers fail to coincide with the stated target and nothing is done to change the deviation, system performance becomes the purpose of the system – because that is what it does.

POSIWID has frequent use in Dystopia. It sees right through camouflage and cover-ups. Invariably, the efforts of the perpetrators to explain the discrepancy serve to confirm the stated goal is bogus. There is nothing tougher on morale than to find out you’ve been wasting your time striving towards the “wrong” goal. In project operations, it is rare when the stated goal turns out to be the “right” goal to address the real problem (Gödel).

Responsibility/autonomy

This derivative of Natural Law combines mathematical physics with the dogma of psychology. Attempts to defy this principle, the pursuit of the impossible in dystopia are quite common. Utopia is very sensitive to the responsibility-for-outcomes canon. It is an essential factor in entropy extraction that appears in the design. For anyone to freely and legitimately take responsibility for a fit outcome performance, he must be the system designer. For goal-based design to succeed, the designer must have the leeway and discretion to learn about and do whatever it takes to attain the specified functionalities. Responsibility for performance is the soul of design. Cross-discipline lines? Of course.

The welded relationship of autonomy and fitness responsibility established by Natural Law, through Turing and Gödel, attains its significance in modern society because attempts to defy this fundamental principle of right living are so common. The fact this lawful marriage is never discussed does not mean people are unaware of the bond. Everyone is jolted when the authority demands that you follow the rules and mitigate the disturbance – “Or we’ll get somebody who can!” The contradiction here is that if rule-based behavior could deal with the novelty and complexity of the intrusion, it wouldn’t even be on the worklist.

Emulating a previous “solution” is not design. It is protocol-based behavior. An example is the shift of the medical empire from concern about outcomes to a focus on its duty for professional services – “Do no harm.” In society, following the protocols protect you from litigation. All the risks of outcomes, good or bad, are borne by the patient.

In contrast to the fields of medicine and education, civil engineering is fitness for application. The designer of that which is to be constructed by law is held responsible for fitness. Beginning with the Codes of Hammurabi, 1780 BCE, whatever damage occurred by building failure was forcibly inflicted on its designer, including death. Design engineer takes fitness responsibility as totally appropriate and rational. The autonomy associated with that responsibility is so ingrained in our culture that the term “to engineer something” is used pejoratively to mean doing whatever it takes, legal or not, to attain the goal which in simple language is cheating.

Compare the engineering design buyer protection plan to a regulatory agency charter. Having the authority to impose its codes, rules, and specifications by the force of law, the regulator takes zero responsibility for any damages that occur because its rules were followed. You will be fined if you don’t comply with the rules. But, if you do abide by the rules and doing so is the cause of the damage, you cannot sue the regulator. And it takes ten years to change the rules. In Utopia husbandry, the duty of service is a second-tier obligation that follows responsibility for fitness and performance. There is no other way to sustain Utopian prosperity.

The designer’s iron law: “Whoever picks the parts, owns the system’s behavior,” was the theme of Ayn Rand’s (1905 – 1982) novel, “The Fountainhead” (1943). Rand, a Russian-American writer and philosopher developed the philosophical system known as “Objectivism.” It follows that it is a condition of the professional license of the system designer that should anyone pull rank and meddle with his part selection or configuration, automatically transfers the full outcome responsibility from him over to the meddler.

In Sweden, the throne meddled with the design of its dreadnaught warship, “Vasa.” The king commanded that another deck of cannons be added to the top of the warship making it top-heavy and unstable. When launched, the Vasa immediately capsized and sank, killing everyone aboard. Centuries later, Sweden raised the Vasa out of the mud for its museum. When you visit the Vasa, you will find no mention of regal interference. In our time we have had the fate of the Challenger and Columbia.

[The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was a fatal incident in the United States space program that occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members. The disaster was the second fatal accident in the Space Shuttle program, after the 1986 breakup of Challenger soon after liftoff.]

If the responsibility for attaining specified system performance is not authentic, it doesn’t exist in the real world at all. To be genuine, responsibility can rest only with the system designer and only when he has knowingly and freely taken responsibility for delivering the desired dynamics. Attempts to defy this law trigger CYA efforts and display in the rampant finger-pointing and buck-passing that attends denial of responsibility for stakeholder damage. Wall St. may claim ignorance of this responsibility/autonomy law, but when its manufactured bubble bursts, it knows how to use the law to deny responsibility in Congressional hearings. The bottom claims obedience to authority. The top claims it’s impossible to know what’s going on in an empire too big to fail. OK, got it. We lose our retirement savings.

The no-one’s responsible factor is handled in civil law by requiring a designer-of-record seal for every construction project. In the event of damage, the court simply notes who applied the professional seal to the design. In litigation, this responsibility is non-transferrable and irrevocable. After $100M was spent in legal fees, the presiding judge of the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. On July 17, 1981, two walkways collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, one directly above the other. They crashed onto a tea dance being held in the hotel's lobby, killing 114 and injuring 216. Litigators ended the ordeal by declaring the engineer-of-record (EOR) responsible for the carnage – no excuses.

In Utopia, any designer of a more productive system who takes responsibility for delivering on his promise is perforce in fair exchange given a bandwidth of discretion that encompasses the challenge and tolerance for trials and errors. Feeding on the instinct for workmanship, the record of success of this arrangement in practice is close to 100%. Participants who fear failing on the deal will invariably remove themselves early on.

Prequalification

By now you know that every qualified pilgrim is a responsibility-taking task designer. Every pilgrim is a man-in-the-middle custodian of the Franceschi Fitting, a key intermediate level generalized functions that pupate into physical functions. The expression “pupate” is derived from an intermediate usually quiescent stage of a metamorphosis similar to the insect (such as a bee, moth, or beetle) that occurs between the larva and the imago, usually enclosed in a cocoon or protective covering, and undergoes internal changes by which larval structures are replaced by those typical of the imago.

At this level, every pilgrim is legitimately, functionally, and authentically responsible for viability husbandry – increasing productivity. The pilgrim’s role on the organizational chart (Starkermann) acts as a productivity gatekeeper, as the protagonist, within the 2½ rule.

Where there is no equivalent level on the framework that supports the organization, it is necessary to create one before the pilgrimage can begin. There are two empires in society today that have arranged their affairs so that no level in the hierarchy has responsibility for fit outcomes – education and medicine. Iatrogenic is a top cause of death in the USA where medicine and pharmaceuticals can flaunt their ambiguous sanctions without regress (e.g., The Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization in the Covid–19 pandemic) and where education has been known to act notoriously and irresponsibly in schooling your children where teachers’ unions summarily exploit their political advantage without notable regret.

This responsibility gap issue is never discussed and all attempts to close the gap have been attempts to defy Gödel. While there is no doubt the pilgrimage would deliver the benefits package, the fuss that has to be made to establish a productivity-protagonist level triggers organizational trauma. The responsibility criterion is a stopping rule for the pilgrimage. No outcome responsibility, no dice.

The fact of the matter is that education and medicine, criticized for centuries on this account, avoid change by having no level in its hierarchy outcome-responsible. This stand, easy to test, amounts to double insulation against correcting the cause of outrageous performance. The pilgrimage paradigm is truly generic, universal. Given the requisites, it can’t miss. Try to defeat it.

GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out)

The mathematical physics of GIGO doesn’t even require long division. Everyone knows what happens to the soup when sewer juice is added to the pot. Garbage in produces garbage out (GIGO). Any amount of garbage in produces all garbage out. The reason garbage is always getting into dystopia is that no proper benchmarks are set up for distinguishing trustworthy information from fiction. Even software for debugging codes has to be debugged.

In Utopia, the price of avoiding GIGO failure, trustworthy benchmarks, and eternal vigilance, is considered an unavoidable tax. It is paid as routine. Keeping GIGO in check is why responsibility is focused on the system designer. There are no half scores for keeping half of the garbage out. When you see fellow members tossing in the garbage, you have no incentive to clean up your information.

Attempts to defy GIGO are too habitual and routine to get much notice when they are executed. Getting at the truth is reserved for litigation over damages.

Law of Optimality

The mathematical physics of this law plays a big role in designing for productivity. A good chunk of the energy in dystopia is spent to cover up attempts to defy optimality law. Another example of common-sense reality, the law of optimality states that whatever resources have been wasted in errors and ineffective strategies cannot be recovered by future efficiencies. When management fails to support productivity improvements, keeping the suboptimum degrading system in service, the money lost during the lag in remedial action is unrecoverable. Globally, the unjustifiable delay in boosting productivity costs $8T/annum.

Canons of Psychology that play leading roles

Of course, human psychology is a big hitter in how people choose to animate their social systems. No one can doubt that man is a social animal, one who places his “standing” in his collectives at or close to paramount in his totem-pole of values.

When you consider the extreme actions and sacrifices man has taken to secure public esteem, the damage from operating a dystopia pales in comparison. To gain social esteem in one society, members will inflict without remorse genocide on a rival society. The tipoff of this proclivity is depersonalization. When one cabal gives rival cabals numbers or abstractions in place of names, you can be certain the vector going forward is towards genocide. Depersonalization is the prelude to zero-sum combat. The equation of behavior we use for the pilgrimage is:

Genetics + social conditioning x circumstances = behavior


Argyris on dystopia

The scholarship of Chris Argyris (1923 - 2013) centered on his Maturity/Immaturity Theory to explain the relationship of Personality & Organization Development in terms of human nature and organizational behavior. According to this theory, a person’s development is a process along with a continuous break of an immature situation to a maturity situation, which was seminal work on the learning organization. His resourceful and original work on organizational dysfunction, which went on for over 50 years, and was unmatched during his tenure. Living amid various organizations, he observed and ran tests to discredit his theories. He summarized the mechanisms of action that define dystopia in his Theory-in-use Model I:

Be in unilateral control over others and remain so

· Win, do not lose

· Suppress negative feelings

· Act rationally

To defend ideological infallibility, he codified the actions encouraged by Model I as follows:

(1) Avoid defining clear objectives and evaluating behavior in terms of achievement of the goal.

(2) Discourage inquiry and testing.

(3) Send mixed messages (act as if messages were not mixed; make topic undiscussable; act as if not doing any of the above)

(4) Be skillfully incompetent and oblivious to consequences

(5) Intercept and contaminate feedback

Argyris on Utopia

Professor Argyris set the standard by which attainment of the pilgrimage goal could be measured. He called it Theory of Use II. The toughest criterion, by far, is for Utopia to be self-sustaining. That means Utopia must have a self-regulating apparatus that does not need outside resources.

In 1960, Argyris, then a professor of Industrial Administration at Yale University, published “Understanding Organizational Behavior.” In his book, available on Amazon, Argyris proclaimed his goal and enumerated the criteria by which he will celebrate its attainment. In the 56 years since his manifesto for productive action was published, no scholar or practitioner in the field ever quarreled with or detracted from his lucid and logically-impeccable specification of the outcome. We adopted the Argyris declaration of goal and benchmark of Utopia attainment as the measure of mission realization. When the signals of paradigm success first appeared, our perceptual frameworks were ready to recognize them.

The paradigm is:

Actionable

2. Falsifiable

3. Unconditional

4. Tractable

5. Efficacious

6. Self-sustaining

7. Teachable

It will satisfy the following requisites:

· Upfront, causally transparent specification of objectives, prediction of outcomes, and the sequence of actions to produce them.

· Explicit premises, individually falsifiable.

· Structured in the form of concise causal statements of conditions under which the paradigm will hold.

· Falsifiable in whole and parts. Provisions for error detecting and error-correcting. Unconditional auditing.

· Effectiveness measurable by observable data.

· Robust ground-truth feedback process for continuous improvement.

· Final validation of effective application is measured productivity profile in the application, in situ.


Attributes:

This leads to the consequences it predicts. Delivers promises in the operational reality.

· Proactively humanitarian. Responsible steward of the quality of life.

· Foresighted, preventative, creative.

· Propagation and amplification of effectiveness by reciprocity – the supreme validation.

· Congruent with reality. No magic, intuition, faith.

· Establishes and fosters a learning context.

· Unrestrained truth-seeking. A lack of defensive routines.

· Risk-taking tolerant. No change panic.

· Implementation protocols are teachable.

· High sensitivity to disturbances and highly effective in neutralizing disturbances.

· Causes no harm in implementation. (Warfield’s dictum). Rational demands of its elements.

· There is only pass/fail on productivity benchmarking. Partial scores count as zero.

· High explanatory power, with minimal concepts and premises.

· Authentic, genuine, trust, instinctive, happy, intimate, collaborative. In other words, natural.

· Fast delivery of benefits.

 All actionable knowledge developed has the traceable pedigree to natural-law fundamentals and primitives.

· Aligned with and compelled by genetically endowed instincts.

· Provides tools for rapid, reliable status assessment.

· Incontrovertible from any perspective.

Paradox accumulating as angst

Dystopia is a social system drowning in the paradoxes it brings on itself by deliberate, willful ignorance. Living with contradictions brings cognitive dissonance and when no relief is forthcoming for that well-studied malady, contradictions accumulate in the form of angst. Individuals emotionally suffocating on angst are easy to spot and dystopias (and roadways) are filled with them. Untrustworthy, anglers cannot be productive and they are unsafe on the job.

Since internal energy is a zero-sum affair, the dilemma with angst overload is that no internal energy is available to do anything constructive. Most resources are consumed in supporting angst. This “lost” energy supply is made available to the pilgrim by angst blowdown to the interventionist’s sump during the early phases of the P2U. As one of the services of the interventionist, it can be witnessed in real-time and its positive effect is dramatic.

Maslow Abraham Harold Maslow (1908 – 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs,” a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.

The work of Abraham Maslow on human psychological needs and their ranking, first published in 1945, does not age. He objectified the definition of entelechy (i.e., the realization of potential) – what the pilgrimage is about. It is the roadmap to psychological closure, the most elusive condition in the universe. You only get signals that you’ve made closure when you arrive there.

Using the Maslow laws of self to evaluate dystopia is a sobering experience. Victims of zero-sum played with loaded dice, the working force is stuck in level one or two, to a man. The head shed never gets near the upper levels of self-actualization. They may have economic success, but psychological success eludes everyone but the sociopaths.

The contrast to Utopia could hardly be greater. The interventionists are Maslow's grade “self-transcendent,” otherwise they couldn’t do the work of skilled intervention. Most of the pilgrims eventually reach self-actualized rank – psychological success.

The trick at any Maslow tier is to husband what you have and strive upward. Transforming dystopia to Utopia is a rapid buildup of self-confidence. Angst accumulations dissipate along with self-doubts by steady tangible advances from self-implementing the concepts and using the tools. Success is a spur to more success, with entelechy remaining elusive.

The social needs of the pilgrims are very different than the rest of the hierarchy. Their self-confidence derives from success in applied knowledge more than public acclaim. The block improvements in productivity and morale speak for themselves.

The laws of motivation are structured and ordered by the Maslow scale. Motivators vary greatly by position on Maslow’s hierarchy and by organizational hierarchy. At the upper tiers, you are above the mentor line, motivation is all from within. The social systems of dystopia are helpless to assist positively. Their advice is to accept your fate and be thankful that things are not worse.

Zero-sum

There are many intelligent applications of zero-sum engagements, for sure. None exist in the humanitarian scope. Zero-sum, the hallmark of dystopia, is proof positive that workforce morale is going to hell. What could be the advantage of having the producer of your wealth furious at you? Welcome to labor-capital relations.

Carl Ransom Rogers (1902 - 1987) was an American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (and client-centered approach) in psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research.

Carl Rogers is a hero of the pilgrimage. His famous triad: empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard is the universal lubricant for the machinery of Utopia. Its tenets, genuineness: open, spontaneous, authentic, and agenda-free support provide the highest benefit/cost ratio of any tool ever devised by man. It is so easy and so effective, it begs the question: Why doesn’t everyone embrace the Rogerian triad? Why indeed.

The pilgrims are exposed to the Rogerian triad by the interventionist, which is the quintessential prelude to angst blowdown, and then instructed in deployment techniques for their use. The payoffs are shockingly high. Why do social systems leave those big payoffs on the table? Why indeed.

Perhaps it is because no one loaded down with angst can engage the Rogerian triad. It is impossible to fake genuineness. How can you uptake the woes of another individual when you have a surplus of your own? No member of a dystopia can be trusted as a blowdown tank. This dependency may explain why Rogers is underutilized, but no way is available to prove it.

Trust

Trust is a word, like safety and intelligence, in common use that has no universal, workplace definition. One of the official definitions: “Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something,” uses words that have no common, measurable understanding either. Does the word “truth” have any utility at all in today’s social milieu?

The sorry fact of the matter is that, by definition, any member of a dystopia is untrustworthy. How can you trust anyone on Noah’s Ark that spends his day drilling holes in its bottom? You can’t trust management deliberately and routinely committing felonies and you can’t trust a workforce committing the crimes of obedience that implement management’s felony. No wonder dystopias are socially toxic. OK, so you can trust them to do bad things.

For pilgrimage purposes, trust is established by a series of measurements, after the fact, that unconditional trust extended in initialization was justified by the performance. Trust has to be extended, first. You must be vulnerable to betrayal. We use a talisman to warrant to the recipient that he is trusted – until performance proves otherwise. Everything you do has to reflect total trust to detect any payoff of your trust. You can only influence the equations of trust in a positive direction by one-on-one contact. Trust cannot be established across a gap.

While destroying trust is instantaneous, because it’s brittle, building trust is tricky even under the best of circumstances. The law of optimality applies. If you don’t start right, building trust is hopeless. You can’t back fit trust. These stipulations also mean that trust, if it is to happen at all, will be attained quickly. Slow means no.

No doubt about it, trust is the paramount factor in moving the paradigm along. Trust is the first milestone and checkpoint. If trust in the interventionist is not established by then, he can take things no further until he earns his wings. The time constraints on establishing trust inbound make it essential that the interventionist be a Rogerian-Triad virtuoso. This is done, cheek by jowl, one on one, at the pilgrim’s workstation. There is never a time limit. Angst blowdown comes after trust is established when it comes.

The second boost in trust-building comes when the pilgrims test out the paradigm concepts and tools in their work scene and find out that they perform – straight out of the box. Interestingly, the interventionist is unconcerned about distributing his unconditional trust to the pilgrims. The enabling factor, validated by his experience, is his confidence in the paradigm.

In Utopia, trust is the prime mover behind productivity increase, of efficient viability husbandry. Trust has no overhead cost. In dystopia, the overhead costs to produce without trust are so high that management doesn’t want them tallied. It is as easy to detect operations based on trust as it is for production under distrust. The ambiance between the two conditions could hardly be more different.

Unexamined choice and reflex action

A major factor in building and running a dystopia is the standard practice of letting business as usual choose and act without going to the bother of consciously engaging and evaluating the facts. In dystopia, task action decisions are made by reading a subconscious brain-driven teleprompter. Background brain’s decisions made way in advance, have a record worse than random chance. The issue with impulse decision-making is that it is counterproductive to viability husbandry. Subliminal decision-making does not work.

In Utopia, the decision-makers are expected to intercept their impulses and hold them until an examination and evaluation of the relevant information have taken place. There are tools for intelligent decision-making that keep the reflexes in check. They invariably save you embarrassment. Serious blunders can often be averted by calling a recess for knee-jerk reactions until the intellect is brought into service. The success of this policy leads to a good habit of catching the produce of reflexes, cognitive bias, phobias, predispositions, impulses, paranoia, penchants, obsessions, proclivities, and manias before much damage is done.

Most of the cultivated reflexes of management, unimpaired by an intervening intellect and actionable-quality information, encourage the management of the very consequences says it seeks to avoid. The response to reflex-caused failure is to trigger another impulsive decision. It is the primal scream of progressive degeneration.

NEXT

THE BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION – PART FOUR - TOOLSMITHING