One Vision One Strategy One Voice

What good comes from an economic collapse? It often forces a re-configuration of power relationships for the better. Occasionally it creates an opportunity for accomplishing fundamental structural improvement. Institutions tend to deflect threats to the status quo by recycling leadership. But sometimes the sheer scale of a disruption closes off that avenue. In such cases, immediate structural evolution may be the only way to avoid extinction.

Now that old style capitalism has done its thing again, perhaps there is an opportunity to make it smarter. Most of the current post-collapse discussion centers on the past. It debates the merits and limits of Keynesian economics, socialism or the New Deal’s attempt to regulate the booms and busts out of our economic system. Some people, overwhelmed by nostalgia for some imagined golden age of security, even long for autocracy; single party rule, communism, Disneyfied feudalism as per The Lion King. It is fascinating how little of the public discussion entertains the possibility of a leap forward rather than backward.

History documents our genius for mesmerizing people into compliant behavior. It is filled with a pageantry of gods, goddesses, conquering heroes, charismatic leaders and, lately, secular-poetic philosophies of governance used to secure social organization. Standing on the shoulders of so many schisms and isms, how is it possible that we have made so little progress that we can yet again have brought the roof down on our heads?

A reporter once asked the philosopher James Luther Adams to sum up the history of the Twentieth Century. Reaching back to Henry David Thoreau, he quipped, "Improved means to unimproved ends." So we seem destined to continue on into the Twenty-first century; unless of course, we do something about it. Or, as seems increasingly likely, nature does something about us.

Obviously self improvement is no trivial pursuit even for a species as adaptable as Homo sapiens. If there had been no progress at all over the course of history, it would be pointless for us to do anything about the mess we have made but eat drink and be merry. But there has been progress. There is a clear trend in the cultural evolution of human relations; a slow, painstaking drive toward optimism.

Robert Wright in Non Zero describes it as a cumulative capacity for creating and sustaining positive sum (win-win) behavior. He sees competition and cooperation like the catch and release of a car jack incrementally raising productivity and making distribution increasingly egalitarian. That seems like a fair assessment of the last 5,000 years—with a nod to the brutality of the increments.

The down-side of this progress is that it has been either too fast or too slow. It has been too fast in that we have not had time to evolve a natural discipline for living within our environmental means. It has been too slow in that social culture has not evolved governors that force us to sustain the environment that sustains us. Now we find ourselves in a race against time. It is a race that, if we have not already lost, we will likely win only by the skin of our chinny chin chins.

Where I live, in Maine, global warming is very real. Since 1912, the tide now rises eight inches higher in our harbors. One hundred years ago, the sea froze so solidly that each winter a road was opened across the ocean ice as a shortcut from Brunswick to Portland. Twenty-five years ago, when I moved to Maine and bought a house on Quahog Bay, the January freeze, though dramatically reduced, still stretched hundreds of yards from shore and reached two feet in thickness. Today only a skim, a few inches thick at most, struggles out from the beach in the dead of winter.

If you see a rock coming at you, but you can't decide which way to dodge, is the rock the critical problem or is it your inability to choose wisely and act? A University of Maryland Program on International Policy Attitudes poll in 2006 determined that 65% of people worldwide considered climate change a serious problem. Two thirds of us already see the rock, but, at the institutional level, we mostly continue posturing like Daffy Duck—sound and fury signifying not much.

If global warming is a game of Russian roulette, there is already at least one bullet in the chamber. For each five years that we fail to arrest the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, add a bullet, spin the cylinder and pull the trigger. We know how this game ends.

For the most part, our social institutions have demonstrated their inability to respond appropriately in a timely manner. That is peculiar because scientists have been doing research on how to quickly make wise decisions for over a hundred years.

The first scientific study of group decision-making was undertaken in England in 1906 at an agricultural fair on a whim. The famous, octogenarian psychologist Francis Galton noticed that a butcher’s booth was holding a contest to see who could come closest in guessing the dressed weight of the ox they were exhibiting. He decided that it was a perfect opportunity to prove a truism for aristocratic gentleman of the time that the mob, as a whole, is less smart than its smartest member. He discovered otherwise.

What was most amazing about the result was the dog that didn’t bark. Instead of precipitating a tidal wave of research and subsequent re-evaluation of the practice of institutional governance, it was ignored.
A hundred years of research later, most of it done in the last three decades, we know that groups can consistently make better decisions faster than the smartest individual member as long as certain requirements are met—for instance, as in Galton’s experiment, everyone gets to see the whole ox (transparency).

For whatever reasons, the broader world has largely missed or dismissed this opportunity to increase the IQ of its institutions. This is doubly peculiar because history is full of examples of the superiority of collective intelligence: the Beatles together—or separately; Rome as a republic, or as an empire; Lincoln’s team of rivals; the fabled skunk works of Lockheed Martin. The value of collective intelligence is intuitively recognized in our institutions; juries are made up of 12 people, corporations have boards of directors, American Idol has three judges.

In spite of this, we have not yet leveraged the research on collective intelligence to improve government or organizational management. Nor have we refined its use where we traditionally do apply it. Apparently, there is something about behaving wisely, as that is scientifically defined, which is apparently irrelevant to most people in position to make and implement executive decisions.

If you think this does not include you, let’s see. Do you have siblings? If you do, this should be easy. Remember, as a child, maneuvering to be the one who cut the cake assuming that he who cuts gets the biggest slice? Maybe you never did anything like that, but you certainly know someone who did.
Do you remember how that went down—all the indignation, yelling, the inevitable parental intervention—“if you cut, you chose last.” In my case, given the ferocity of my siblings, that struggle was about a very marginal amount of extra-cake. How often in our society do we find ourselves competing to have a bigger slice rather than cooperating to make a bigger cake?

Reactively competitive behavior, probably rooted in the reptilian—grab it and run—part of our brains, has turned finally and undeniably toxic. Uncomfortable, frightening, or threatening as it may be for us to awaken and empower the collective intelligence of humanity, we can no longer afford the pessimism of win-lose behavior. There is no longer time for two steps forward one step back, incremental improvement away from pessimistic elitism toward universal, positive-sum behavior. It is essential now that we embrace a muscular, active idealism.

Usually when our path forks between idealism and pragmatism, the pragmatic path wins because it usually goes downhill. If our only concern is the quality of the trip, that works. If we have any interest in the destination, it doesn't.

A study of 200,000 executives sponsored a few years ago by Lee Hecht Harrison, a large executive outplacement firm, determined that American executives were at their weakest in strategic thinking. That's not so surprising since they are expected to excel in an economic system obsessively focused on quarterly results.

Our whole economic system has been focused on the trip. As long as the trip was easy, no one complained that senior executives were putting multi-billion dollar institutions at extreme risk in order to slip a few million dollars in windfall bonuses in their pockets. That began to change when the rest of the stakeholders caught sight of the ultimate destination.

You might have expected a universal change of heart but habits die hard. Many of those executives and their political enablers are still trying desperately to flog the donkey forward in spite of the waiting debtor's remorse for the vast majority of us.

There is still no real public discussion about the destination at the end of our traveling. Where should our society be going and what changes will be necessary to allow us to reach that goal? Such a discussion would require that we look up, that we entertain choosing an uphill path. It would require that we genuinely open the system to politically dangerous memes like aspiration, compassion and affiliation.

We would each have to ask ourselves and each other when in our lives we have felt truly and fully wonderful. Was it that last pay raise, the up tick in our portfolio, the birth of a child, lifting someone up who had fallen down, walking barefoot in the grass without fear of stepping on broken glass?

Who are we going to become? Answer this carefully. The consequences are real and they are inescapable. No amount of wealth, privilege, or power will secure any of us against the outcome of the wrong choice. Whether the socio-economic game that a culture plays is optimistic or pessimistic has become decisive.

Pessimistic strategies focus on consolidating wealth rather than creating it. They tend to be parasitic or predatory. Being focused on extracting existing wealth, they are short term oriented. And since every transaction entails costs, even as they concentrate wealth, they tend to generate a net loss to the broader system; the potential for massive loss is real, however well it may be disguised.

A 700 trillion dollar tidal wave of derivatives overhangs the world's 79 trillion dollar economy. Most people do not even know what a derivative is in spite of Warren Buffet in the Berkshire Hathaway annual report for 2002 describing them as “financial weapons of mass destruction.” Our financial sector is a perfect example of rampant pessimism. It is also a laboratory for who we are in the grand scheme of things.

Because all is a win-lose game for them, pessimistic leaders strive to secure prerogatives by any means. As gatekeepers, interested in limiting participation, they gum up the works and make society less resilient, creative and vital.

In dramatic contrast, optimistic strategies orient toward inventing new value. They are expansive and inclusive. Rather than grabbing the whole egg, shell and all, they spread the wealth around. The optimist regards the world from the perspective of an emerging future and bases present action on genuine growth.
Optimistic leaders act as catalysts and stewards, equating self interest with the overall vitality of the system.

Annalee Saxenian points out in Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 that the main reason that Silicon Valley in California replaced Route 128 in Massachusetts as the technology capital of the world was that Silicon Valley culture was, at that time, somewhat more optimistic than that of Route 128.

Instead of the vertical integration and cut-throat, last gladiator standing style competition endemic to the East Coast, the West Coast formed a web of interdependent contributors, suppliers and producers. Often companies on the West Coast were competing while simultaneously cooperating. This created a robust, innovative and fast growing economic regional system as distinct from the hill top corporate castles of the East Coast.

For the first time, one species, ours, has the power to destroy the whole biosphere. The history of empires is that they collapse. Usually they take down with them everything that they can. This time everything is everything.

We need a new definition of winning, one based on sustainability. Victory is no longer a victory if someone loses. In the language of optimism, a victory is when all the participants and stakeholders benefit. Then we have to implement that definition.

There is a reason the French have the best health care system in the world. They willingly take to the barricades to get what they want. There is a reason Germans lead the world in alternative energy installation. Everyone pays for it. There is a reason the Swedes have the most egalitarian of societies. Their commitment to social responsibility is as great as their love of individualism.

Just so, there are reasons for who we are. Since who we currently are is not sustainable, we need to understand those reasons and use them as entry points for change. One of the central reasons we are who we are is that our institutions consistently make bad decisions. To make “bad” a little more definitive, we can lean on Barbara Kellerman’s characterization in Bad Leadership, “…incompetent, rigid, intemperate, callous, corrupt, insular or evil.” For topical examples of all seven, just read any day’s New York Times. Consequently, one of the most essential steps to becoming sustainable is programming our institutions to make wise decisions.

There are four essential requirements for being consistently wise. Interestingly, processes already exist for meeting those requirements in a variety of venues. All that is required to transform decision making in this country is to identify best practices and enforce—or at least promote—them. And there you have the core problem; the science of this is simpler than the politics.

The first requirement for making a wise decision is one of the most politically challenging. The decision makers must include, either directly or indirectly, all stakeholders in the outcome of the decision. In the oldest versions of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale, pre-Disney, there was no wicked fairy. The fairy who put the kingdom to sleep was simply the one the King and Queen forgot to invite to the ball. Inclusiveness is critical for creating outcomes that can be readily implemented without significant blow back.

The second requirement also rubs against the grain of contemporary institutional practice. All participants have to be independent. That means they can be neither intimidated nor bribed; no Whip driven, party-line votes in Congress, no CEO appointed executive boards, no corporate controlled press, no “with us or against us” polarization.

It may be more humane that we have institutionalized bribery, in the form of lobbying for instance, rather than physical intimidation to sway politicians, but the end result is still parochial decisions.

The third requirement is generally more nearly honored but rarely fully understood. The decision makers must include subject matter experts along with people who have detailed practical experience. Nothing new there, but they must also include a few wild cards. Wild cards are people who offer stupid, ridiculous or audacious questions or suggestions.

The human mind is a rut building machine. Experience or education lays tracks across consciousness and then the brain paves them over for quick access. Wild cards help jog the experts and the old timers out of their habitual ways of perceiving and thinking. For instance, the original idea to fly a plane directly from runway to orbit evolved from a meeting of engineers and elementary school students.

The structure of the conversation went something like this—Student: “Let’s fly into space.” Engineer: “We can’t.” Student: “Why not?” Engineer: “Don’t have powerful enough engines.” Student: “Can’t we make more powerful engines.” Engineer, pulling out notepad: “Well, I did read something about some crazy idea called a scramjet….”

The path to breakthroughs goes through the Silly Gate, which is protected by a mortifying guardian, the Fear of Mockery. The descent into silliness spurs imaginative associations that often open the way to breakthrough ideas. As uncomfortable as inciting it may be, out-of-the-box thinking is essential to wisdom.

The last requirement has been historically the most difficult both politically and practically. In order to be wise, a decision has to be a synthesis of the inputs. This is really hard to swallow. Trial by combat is as embedded in human cultures and institutions as the struggle between our super-ego and id are embedded in our psyches. In a tense situation, seriously entertaining the other guy’s point of view, much less incorporating it, just doesn’t feel safe.

Even when willing, few people know how. After the election of Barack Obama, the organization Change.Org decided to identify the ten most important actions that the Obama administration should pursue during its first term.

To accomplish this, they invited people to visit their web site, contribute suggestions and then vote up or down on all the submissions. Over half a million people participated. Predictably, this lowest common denominator process concluded that the most important action for Obama to pursue as President was the legalization of marijuana. Up and down voting more often promotes institutionalized stupidity than genuine synthesis.

Had the Change.Org designers done nothing more than replace the up-down vote with a simple ranking for each suggestion, they would have promoted some synthesis. Here is how this works.

Imagine that you are a town manager. A tornado alert is sounded followed by a massive storm. You need to know how to respond. All of the town’s employees have GPS enabled phones and you have the infrastructure to poll all phones simultaneously. You send out a message, “Is there storm damage in your immediate vicinity, yes or no.” The answers from the phones are displayed on a map on your laptop as red (yes) or green (no) dots representing the situation at the location of each phone. What you see in response to your question is red dots all over the map. This tells you what you already anticipated. There was a big storm and there is widespread damage.

Change this scenario a little. This time your message reads, “Look around you and rank the severity of damage that you see in your immediate vicinity from 1 to 5.” Now your computer screen fills with color coded dots ranging from blue, green, yellow, orange to red. You see a corridor of red dots crossing the north side of town. In a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds, you have assessed the situation and are able to triage and direct emergency services to where they are needed.

This is an example of collective intelligence. The observers understood their immediate situations. You did not painstakingly collect raw data person by person and analyze it. Data was evaluated at the source and self organized more or less instantly on your computer screen.

In the Change.Org situation, even if legalizing marijuana made the top ten, it would almost certainly not have been ranked number one. As embarrassed as they were, to their credit, Change.Org did not try to bury the result. Instead they listed the ten winners, “in no particular order.”

The most disheartening aspect of the Change.Org case is that this author among others, sent scores of emails warning Change.Org about what was likely to happen. Then, a few months later, the Obama administration undertook an almost identical exercise called The Citizen’s Briefing Book via the www.whitehouse.gov web site. The same mob decision approach, the one so passionately despised by Franklin, Madison and Jefferson when they argued for making the United States a republic rather than a direct democracy, was used with the same predictable results.

This illustrates how easy it is to make poor decisions when there is little or no understanding of the architectures of participation. There is nothing inherently obvious in the process of promoting collective intelligence, other than that thorough communication and trust are essential precursors. Neither the mob approach nor the parochial elite approach work. The elite approach fails because its exclusivity creates “wicked” fairies. The mob approach fails because there is no qualitative appraisal of information.

If the global environmental crisis is as serious as most of us believe, our objective must be to produce highest common denominator decisions that do not end up creating more problems than they solve. In the history of our species, we have never more desperately needed the synthesis of originality, agility and sustainability.
In spite of this, I seriously doubt that any of us entertain any illusions that fundamental change will start from inside our formal institutions. The real work of creating a sustainable future will have to be done in a different venue. Fortunately, the most powerful mechanism for positive change on the planet is wide open and that is where this transformation has already begun.

I first experienced the Web in its infancy in the late 1970s. As far as I knew then, it was just people using computer terminals to communicate cross country. But when you set your telephone handset into a thingy with two rubber suction cups, you instantly had access to relevant information within a trust-base social system called the worldwide scientific community. As such win-win systems tend to, it grew at an astronomical rate.

From its beginning, people used it to promote change; not just garden variety innovation, but real structural transformation. There is nothing new about encyclopedias or socializing, but social networking sites and the Wikipedia are dramatically more powerful structures for disseminating usable information and promoting social cohesion than the structures that preceded them.

Mostly, the Net’s evolution has been stigmergic, like termites constructing a twenty foot tall insect arcology by leaving tiny mud balls at the end of scent trails laid down by anonymous siblings. While spontaneous, indirect coordination among people pursuing their individual passions has improved the usefulness of the Net, we are not likely that way to fully tap its potential as a medium for mobilizing our collective intelligence.
The public policy side of the Internet is an example of the difference between what is and what could be.

Moveon.org has been one of the earliest pioneers in using the Net to influence political policy. Despite being a relatively populist organization, it uses the big media few-to-many model. It substitutes progressive political activists for capitalists while contributors fill the role of advertisers. The activists, using intuition and ideology, decide which policies to promote. To the contributors they sell productions designed to support topical political positions; typically letter campaigns or ads.

During its emergence, Moveon.org did several many-to-few experiments apparently looking for a way to engage public participation in developing its policy agenda. All of these attempts were based on a vote up or down model and produced disappointing results. The organization seems to have settled for having the contributors prioritize set piece lists of issues provided by the leadership.

Moveon.org and similar Net based proselytizers provide a welcome leavening agent in the political system, but there is little synthesis and thus little engagement of a larger collective intelligence.
While Moveon.org is representative of the typical missed opportunity to use the Net to promote collective intelligence, there are plenty of successes. Everyone is well aware of the Wikipedia. It is fashionable to complain about inaccuracies in the articles but research indicates that they are as accurate as most encyclopedias. More important, inaccuracies are typically corrected in the space of hours rather than months.

Wikipedia has even been a superior source for information on breaking news as it was in the shootings at Virginia Tech. Students were updating and correcting the entry as events unfolded.

Wikis have shined in catalyzing focused stigmergic behavior in emergencies. A Wiki blossomed overnight to provide support for victims of hurricane Katrina—part of the Wiki was devoted to re-uniting dispersed families. A Wiki spontaneously emerged in advance of hurricane Ike. It helped people at risk track the storm and prepare for it.

The United States Patent Office has discovered another use for many to one process. The search for prior art is a particularly time consuming and therefore costly aspect of securing a patent. The patent office has now made it possible for interested citizens to do the searches themselves and alert the patent office to potential examples. This dramatically shortens search time and cost. Many hands make light work.

In another example of mobilizing collective intelligence on the web, researchers at the University of Washington posted an online game to help them explore protein folding. Anyone can download the game and play Foldit. Thousands of people, having fun, are actually fulfilling the function of a vast supercomputer entirely dedicated to discovering all the possible ways a protein might be folded to produce different biological effects.

As with ants, bees and termites, self organization can give rise to superior adaptive behavior. The Internet is effective in that respect; making it easier for individuals to communicate, verify, organize and engage. This reinforces positive sum behavior.

The essential next stage is to make the structure of self organization more accessible, friendly and consciously self improving. The insect equivalent would be all of the termites jointly designing their arcology in response to emerging conditions as they simultaneously build it.

We can add structures to the Internet that will expand the use of our collective intelligence. The actual design of such structures is not particularly difficult. Much of that has already been evolving in pockets of innovation for decades.

Almost fifteen years ago, using a wise decision model based process called the Advanced Management CatalystTM (AMCat), a diverse group of industry experts created a strategy for the United States shipbuilding industry in three days.

Through synthesizing their wide range of knowledge and experience, they also discovered a critical constraint on the future of American shipbuilding. While U.S. marine research was the best in the world, American companies were not translating that research into mainstream performance. The insights from this event traveled like wildfire throughout the industry.

The technology and infrastructure is in place to support rapid implementation of such stigmergic decision processes. We are talking about months, not years, to do this. That is good because we cannot have wise and universally compelling decisions soon enough.

With structures in place that leverage collective intelligence, the initiative of thousands, someday millions, of people can be brought to bear on creating and implementing a vision for humanity’s common future. We will be able to share a vision, act from a strategy and communicate with a clear voice. People will support what they have personally participated in creating.