Sapient Governance III -- Strategic Level

Strategic Management

Prior articles:

1. SG I, Part A - What would an operational level governance look like?
2. SG I, Part B - Operational level for human society
3. SG II, Part A - Coordination level (Logistical) for human society
4. SG II, Part B - Coordination level (Tactical) for human society

If you haven't read these you may not be able to follow the current posting.

Now in this installment:
SG III - Strategic Management

Having covered the nature of coordination level hierarchical control, I turn, at last, to strategic management, the highest level in the hierarchy. As with the prior installments I first discuss strategic control in nature to show that this is, indeed, the natural way to organize governance systems. In the essay I write:

A strategy is often characterized as a long-term program of actions, to be carried out by the tactical and logistic controllers, geared to position the entity in the most favorable way as the future unfolds.

But it turns out that for almost all of the natural living world strategic management is actually achieved by virtue of evolution. It is only in primates, especially the great apes, that we see the emergence of an explicit form of individually selectable strategic decisions in brains. In man the extent of strategic management is quite advanced. Natural human strategic thinking not only covers the individual but includes family, friends, and villages. It extends farther into the future than coordination planning. And it depends heavily on an accurate assessment of the environment, the dynamics of components in the environment, and of one's own (and the group's own) capabilities.

I spend some time explaining the evolutionarily recent parts of the human brain that are responsible for strategic decision processing and its relationship to the coordination level. I then discuss the strategic thinking/planning cycle and how it relies on a wealth of tacit knowledge in order for judgment to guide these kinds of decisions. That knowledge, I explain, is in the form of neural-based models of everything outside of that patch of brain, including other parts of the brain. Models are essential for forward thinking. One runs one's model of the world in fast forward in order to anticipate a more distant future while also running the models of tactical interactions so as to imagine what one should be doing in the future to best situate with the environment at that time.

Having argued that the hierarchical control model is complete in the human brain, I turn to human organizations as examples where the model has naturally evolved outside the heads of any one individual. Management science has begun to study these structures in a formal way. Most larger organizations and many small ones actively engage in strategic planning to do exactly what an individual is doing - trying to better their situation in their environments.

And finally I examine various governance systems that have evolved in different countries and different times. They all show the tendency to form natural management hierarchies. This tells us that our social enterprises are undergoing evolution toward that form. I examine some of the failings, especially at the nation-state level. But I argue that we have reached a stage in our development where we need to consider the whole world as one system in need of a complete, and hence sapient, hierarchical governance system. It would be complete with a well functioning strategic level of management.

This completes this series of essays outlining the main points of hierarchical, sapient governance. In future blogs I will take up these points in various ways as I continue to ask what kind of world do we want? And, what kind of world can we have?

Comments

[Wayne Hamilton]

George:
I've grown accustomed to your plan...
your jotting downs and
laying outs...
So now I see my funny questions
don't affect the process much
and now I must go back into my little rabbit hutch
where I can mull it over some...
and let you do the same...
accustomed to your plannnnnn.

[Larry shultz]

George, I like how you tie in the structure of our brain with evolution and your postulation that this structure when looked at from a planetary level can allow global sapience. Personaly I think that humans have to tie watersheds, bioregions,geographic provinces,and geological plates into a planetary system of social governence with proper feedback loops similar to the checks and balances of democratic systems.
In order to have sustainable societies we have to know the effects of our actions on all levels including the natural weathering processes. the flux and pulses of energy and elements through ecosytems is what sustains us. If anything is holy it is this.

[George Mobus]

Wayne you crack me up! See you on the 17th!

[George Mobus]

Larry,

I absolutely, totally agree. In the not-too-distant-future I will be introducing the notion of a strategic plan for Planet Earth that makes this relationship explicit.

I'm open to suggestions for how to parse the Ecos with humanity as a subset!

George

[Larry Shultz]

George,
I have had a musing for a long time that the reason we like fractals in nature, art, and music is because of the fractal structure of the brain and its neural interconnections.
For homo sapians political to fully develop I expect that the same nature, art, and music will be part of the answer. Another important development is remote sensing, so now we can see our planetary stock via satelite. Of course the internet as it is like a brain of brains.

We have to pay strong attention to natural ecosystems mineral fluxes and try to lower rather then increase them. When I lived in NH I used to think about the need to measure magnesium fluxes on the Merrimack River. Magnesium and Phosphorus are limiting nutrients in the Sugar Maple Beach Yellow Birch bioregion and as such we have to make sure that no more flows out of the system than is released via the weathering process. All ecosystems have "short barrel staves" we should carefully watch them. Some seminal work in this area took place in the White Mts of NH, see Pattern and Process in a Forested Ecosystems, Likens et al.
Shy, rare, threatend, extirpated, and rare species are also important to have a handle on.
I think sustainable governance will also in some way involve myth as we will always be information limited. I heard Wendell Berry say we should watch out for the forlorn pursuit of the informed decision. We should always try to assmble more information, this is where great questions lead us but not have decision paralysis by analsis. This is where our great cultural signposts of myth and philosophy intersect with the polital decisions of the day.

[George Mobus]

Hi Larry.

One of the things I want to address in a future post is the self-similarity that occurs in hierarchical control systems. I've actually mentioned this in a prior post on HCS. It turns out that sufficiently complex operations units actually have internal coordination controls as well as a primitive strategic controller. For example, an assembly line has supervisors and a manager that is thinking about what resources the assembly line will need in the future.

Similarly, a strategic management unit (say Marketing) has its own operations processes, mostly paper/computer apps.

In the same way it is easy to see this fractal structure in a complex organism like a human. The brain structure, you mentioned, but at every level of complexity, from cells to whole, you can see the fractal structure of hierarchical control. This is a deep subject!

Cheers

[Wayne Hamilton]

Actually I like the fractal idea in that it's a popular representation of simple iterative analysis. Perhaps the brain does this too, so that our sensors keep pinging until the echos start to look like...."that's a snake climbing my sleeping tree!"