In February I suggested that governance should be modeled in line with hierarchical control systems (HCS) theory. My argument is based on recognition of a fundamental organizing principle in naturally evolving systems. In order to achieve and improve on the ability to sustain in a non-stationary (that is constantly evolving) environment, systems must develop the capacity to make several kinds of decisions based on both physical and temporal scopes. Operational decisions are basically real-time, error-correcting decisions. They work to keep a system basically functioning. That is they are made to keep the many functional sub-systems operating as intended to achieve an overall performance. Logistical decisions are made over a longer time scale and serve to coordinate the inter-sub-system activities. A basic problem for logistical decision making is optimization of performance over a complex set of cooperating and competing sub-systems. Tactical decisions involve actions that serve to coordinate the whole system's behavior with respect to its environment. These are mainly involved with interactions with the environment to obtain needed resources for continued existence and growth (or reproduction). Finally, at the highest level of the decision hierarchy are strategic decisions. These are the long-term actions that serve to set the goals and objectives for the lower level decision makers. Strategic management involves having a long-range notion (model) of the environment such that anticipation of how that environment will change in the future can be used to formulate tactical and logistical plans. Strategic management also uses a model of the system itself to judge the goodness of future actions relative to maintaining the organization. If the model shows some weaknesses in the system's ability to respond favorably to future changes and opportunities, then the strategic decision might involve shoring up those weakness or setting tactical plans to mitigate them.
The above description, believe it or not, applies to all kinds of complex adaptive systems. In biology it describes both the evolution of intelligent, quasi-sapient beings such as ourselves. It describes the operations of our brains. And it describes the operations of organizations of said intelligent, quasi-sapient beings, such as corporations and governments.
One of the things that the beings and their organizations do, from time to time, is think ahead and develop some kind of strategic plan. A woman might consider, consciously, what she is looking for in a man in an attempt to maximize her future marital bliss (hopelessly it turns out given the nature of most men). A corporation might study the market and consider what products its customers would prefer in order to maximize its sales in the future. Strategic thinking and planning are a natural part of individual and organizational management. But I am not sure anyone has ever thought about a strategic plan for humanity. To be frank, I doubt seriously if anyone has ever thought seriously about such a plan for a nation. One might think our founding fathers had some kind of strategic vision in place, but I suspect it amounted to little more than aspirations for a new nation. A complete strategic plan needs to consider the environment and how things are going to change. This means not only considering how your nation is going to play in the rest of the worlds' political games, but, as we can now begin to understand, how your economic structure and functions integrate with the natural world. Someone with a better knowledge of history might try to look at our founding that way.
The thing about strategic plans is that you need to have something in place before you can do much reasonable tactical and logistical planning. But the irony of that is that you generally already have an operation in place so you need logistics and tactics to keep things going smoothly. It is the original chicken-and-egg problem. It can lead to an interesting paradox. How can you effectively manage an operation if you don't have a coordination-level (tactical and logistical) plan to work from? And how can you have the latter if you don't have a good strategic plan to work from? But you can't have a good strategic plan until after you have been in operation!
The answer is that you develop iteratively. Individuals grow and mature. They have parents or guardians when they are young and learn effective behaviors as they mature. When they come of age (literally) they start thinking about the future and their interactions with the rest of their environment. The prefrontal cortex undergoes its final stages of maturation from about the age of 20 to 30, and that is where thinking about the future is mediated. Corporations generally start out as small companies and then grow and develop in complexity. Being at least as malleable as individuals they can develop management systems and levels as needed. But from the begriming the creators had some grand vision of what they wanted to accomplish and a basic understanding of their markets and customers. The HCS develops with time and experience.
Eventually, however, the process of strategic thinking and management must be distributed amongst several foci. People need to think about their jobs, their families, their education, and so on. Corporations need to think about their finances, their product development capabilities, their shifting customer desires, and so on. No one functional unit, either in an individual's brain or in the corporate upper management, can take care of it all. And that is when you have to go into formal planning. All of these strategic foci do connect at various points. If nothing else one has to consider trade-offs, say between family and job. [In a side note: it turns out that all levels of an HCS contain recursive versions of the HCS model itself. A strategic planning unit, for example, has operational sub-units analyzing each focus, a logistical unit to coordinate between them and to integrate the intersections, and a tactical unit to consider deploying the plan and planning process to the rest of the system! I've even seen a strategic manager of a strategic planning unit! In a really large complex system it can get very interesting.]
For an individual this might take many forms. The demands for considering many factors and long, long time scales may not be as great. People start thinking of retirement, for instance, long into their working lives and often after the kids have left the home. But they do think about it explicitly whether or not they put things down on paper. Organizations, by their nature, have many more factors to consider and generally have to plan over time frames exceeding the tenure of any one boss. Imagine the planning problems for Boeing or Air Bus. So organizations tend to follow more formal procedures for strategic planning. Some even do it well!
So in that middle ground, between individuals and large complex organizations, we see the tendency to engage in thinking about the future and how the self fits into it. But when we get to the state level it gets a little murky. It might be safe to say that an autocratic state has the benefit (if you want to call it that) of someone taking care of strategic planing. The dictator is the decider (are all self-styled deciders dictators?) But what about the situation in a democracy, or a republic like the US? What kind of strategic plan do we have? Who has ever asked if we have one? It clearly isn't as clear.
Now consider the situation for humanity as a whole. Think of the human species as a system. Think of it as a meta-organization. What is the strategic plan for humanity? What does the future of humanity look like? What kind of world do we want to live in? What are our strengths and weaknesses as a species? What are the opportunities and threats that face us and how do they play out over time?
It should be clear, given the global challenges we face, that these are not idle questions. Perhaps you might understand now why I ask about an upgrade to Human 2.0. Strategic planning takes a lot of wisdom. It takes a tremendous amount of understanding about how the world works and how humanity can effectively fit within the constraints of that working while still enjoying the benefits of being human, conscious, and caring. It takes a vast amount of knowledge about reality and a willingness to accept reality for what it is.
Humanity needs a strategic plan. We need to grasp what kind of future we can have given the constraints of physical reality. We need to have this plan in order to set tactical and logistical plans for developing a society that provides a platform for individual enlightenment and joy as well as functions in accordance with the dictates of nature. We have been learning in the sense of accumulating a lot of scientifically and emotionally gained knowledge. We have been a child-like species and now it is time to grow up. How shall we develop such a plan?
From George’s Post on April 28, 2008
What is the strategic plan for humanity?
I have always been an observer of humanity and after decades of observation the questions about its future have become more pressing, as the advance of civilization has meant the destruction of entire ecosystems and the creatures that lived there for millions of years or even for several thousand years as was the case of the Pre-Columbian nations in the New world.
The prospects for the future of civilization are today a delicate question made critical by a worldview that cannot be reconciled with the physical reality of what is happening on the planet in real time.
I concur with the need for a strategic plan for humanity and the improvements that may change the course of human history, however, it seems to me that in order to consider a strategic plan for humanity, one must first make a preliminary effort to establish a sense of the state of the human species and of the state of the earth environment in order to ascertain a clearer assessment of the tactical and logistic operations involved.
I believe that, that assessment is a fundamental prerequisite to any planning or to the construction of models and the mechanisms that animate them. The reason for this is precisely because of recognition of a fundamental organizing principle in naturally evolving systems that George mentions in support of hierarchical control systems (HCS) theory.
The problem is that there are two separate and distinct natures at play, one is human nature and the other is nature’s own design independent from us. We humanity are just coming into the realization of these underlying common denominators to all life, after thousands of years of independently creating a natural order that suited our arrogance of superiority over all other life.
As George puts it “we have been a child-like species and now it is time to grow up”
It is just now that we are witnessing the extent of our innocence and the irreparable damage it has caused, we are finally old enough to ask; what is the strategic plan for the survival of humanity?
Please notice that we are doing so at a time when even the most humble worm or bacteria has its own plan in place and functioning for millions of years. Over ten million other species have a comprehensive strategic plan that is fully integrated with each other and the world’s environment. All of which is now threatened by the effect of our innocence.
I have focused my work on the visualization and modeling of improvements that may bring about survival advantages or benefits to life on earth. Humanity of course is a most desirable member for a future earth, however even by the most generous of assessments; civilization is irredeemable and unsustainable and must be phased out by the increased presence of a transitional human, between Homo sapiens and whatever the name for its replacement or off-shot in our specie’s evolutionary tree.
I suggested two decades ago, that for discussion purposes the new off-shot or species be thought of as “Homo sapiens integralis” since the one thing that homo sapiens could not do was to integrate itself with the rest of life but chose instead to claim it as its disposable property.
Anyway, the main theme now is framed in a number of questions posed by George and I will try to devote a short paragraph or two to each without going into great detail.
What is the strategic plan for humanity?
At first it may be to visualize its survival in terms of a worldview that can reconcile the human nature we invented for ourselves and the nature we are a part of. Such a worldview is attainable trough a gradual replacement of our static consciousness with a closer facsimile of the dynamic and variable organization that drives natural processes.
Basically, the primary plan for humanity is to resolve to evolve consciously beyond the limitations of a faulty and fatigued worldview. Once this process is on the way physical adaptations will follow by natural or integrated design between humans and nature.
What does the future of humanity look like?
Right now I could imagine two futures for humanity:
One, the system breaks apart and humanity reverts to the barbarism that has distinguished it for most of our journey, except that they will languish amidst a collapsed environment and be reduced to small roaming groups until they go extinct.
Two, where we manage to introduce the cultural triggers to a higher consciousness where without losing our fundamental historical cultural identity humanity embraces the diversity of our species as an aspect of life on earth and of all life on earth as an integral system in motion within this universe.
The creation of a working model of world peace independent from war, like the one I’m building at present time, will provide an indicator that humanity can evolve beyond the boundary of a barbarian society and thus focus its warfare know-how to fight the tactical war against the real enemies of civilization, namely, pollution, poverty, disease, climate change and the rest. They all require military precision and discipline, same job different outcome.
What kind of world do we want to live in?
If the whole history of life on earth is compressed to the extent of one hour, life began ten minutes ago and we have been around for about one thousandth of a minute. Add to that the thought that over ninety percent of all life that ever existed has gone extinct. That indicates to me, that life has been a struggle and that we the creatures that learned the workings of life, can find in that struggle a new level of dignity as we consciously learn how to self regulate ourselves to the needs of the planet and to learn the only rule that will keep us away from our barbaric past. The rule that says that “your freedom ends where the freedom of someone else begins”
What are our strengths and weaknesses as a species?
At present our greatest strength is that we are aware that we are at an evolutionary junction where Homo sapient will have to pass the baton to the new runner who will take our species further. We know this because our intellectual fatigue is revealed by our repetition of the same errors over and over, by the use of the same themes over and over, but mostly by our inability to go beyond awareness because we do not know what to do.
Our weakness is that not having a better idea of reality, which is why the best we can do is to agree to disagree. This weakness however can be alleviated by art, at least by the kind of art that I do where a measure of utility has been introduced to the aesthetic experience. Therefore the art itself is an illustration of how the reality of an object whether mental or physical is the sum of all of its known histories including the viewer’s own history, thereby demonstrating that reality is dynamic and variable.
What are the opportunities and threats that face us and how do they play out over time?
Our best opportunity is that we as a species have the ability to evolve and have evolved at every junction where only a new version of ourselves was fit to survive from hominid to Homo sapiens. We have done this before and we can do it again. The biggest threat is time, we cannot accomplish any transformative initiatives at the time scales that we are used to embrace change, we have gotten away with it in the past but the world was in good condition and there where not over six billion of us eating at the last of the world’s resources. That is why I know that creating models of the improvements like peace as a new cultural resource with social, political and economic ramifications, will illustrate how to embrace changes in a shorter time scale. To illustrate the point, we’d had over 5,000 years of war and my project is the first attempt at creating a working model of peace.
Over time it will become clear that no one alive today has to transform into something they are not. Our courtesy to the future of our species is to allow the coming generations to embrace the new realities and redefine the old ones to suit. Those who thrive on hatred and bigotry will inevitably die the same as those who love and cherish life. Our challenge is not to pass on to the next generation the shortcomings that we now know are all that lies between the success and failure of our species.
The history of life on earth is an open book that we can begin to read with fresh eyes, we already know that our worldview, as wonderful as it is and as filled with ideas of our own design as it is, will not deliver us from extinction on its present course. Let us deliver the future of our species with a measure of dignity and respect for life reflected in the face of our children as they create the culture that will make those two qualities a true part of their genetic make up.
It is clear that life on earth, that is life as we know it, is in a tight spot. As a species, our world view has a tendency to look for single source points or the “One thing” that is the cause for this or that or for the one thing that will fix this or that problem.
Global warming for instance is a reality, what ever its sources, but we are wasting time looking for the “one culprit” when the larger reality of is that in a dynamic universe no one point is the center of expansion.
My point is that the impact on life by natural events are the result of combined causes and sources, just as the impact of civilization on the environment is the result of combined causes and sources, however, the current challenges to life as we know it are a combination from these multiple source causes. You may call what is happening in the world the result of a compounded environmental effect.
I have two questions. How are we going to educate civilization about multiple cause events? And how are we going to reduce the time lag between the time a source is identified and the time we actually do something about it?
Tiité
Posted by: Tiité | May 01, 2008 at 06:04 AM