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.
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.
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?”
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.
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.
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