It may seem as if I harbor a special enmity for Nicole-Anne Boyer since I have repeatedly dunked her pigtails in the ink well^{1, 2}, but as usual it's a special affection expressed through close attention and criticism. She's the best of the lot at WorldChanging, by a wide margin, and has her own blog at Fuzzy Signals, a venue worth visiting regularly and so resident in my blog roll.

Her most recent post, Jamming in the Flux: Insights For A WorldChanger's Strategic Agenda, is a fine example. The core of the post is an introduction to C.S. Holling's Panarchy cycle and the group of fellow travelers at the Resilience Alliance. Their magazine, Ecology & Society, is the first resource listed at right and they are among my most important influences. That Boyer seems to value them too shows why I pay attention to her. The Fluxology category here includes direct references to Holling et. al. as well as amplifications and applications of related insights.

But Boyer's post also includes what I see as a misapplication and misunderstanding of Panarchy - the stale old cybernetic ideas of intervention in systems viewed from afar and manipulated to subvert their purposes.

The good news is that we have more opportunity than ever before to change the parameters of the system, and do so peacefully and thoughtfully. If the Resilience network’s findings are true, this means that the central challenge of the moment is to trigger a bunch of "mini" cycles which may mitigate the severity of the release point. These will accelerate the metabolism of our learning, create a wide pool of social ingenuity, so that we can be more resilient and adaptive -- so that we manage this transition with the least amount of “destruction” and the best amount of “creation.” We want to avoid situations like the French Revolution where there was too much change and destruction of its social capital, something which took many years to recover from and made it hard for the country to embark on the renewal phase...

... elements of our collective work seems to touch on aspects of Holing's list. This framework also puts the work of Worldchanging in perspective and may help us think about our strategic agenda more clearly. What kinds of questions does it suggest to us? Where should we best intervene in the system? Does this model help us tell our story in a more compelling and credible way? I think it does.

This attitude and approach, standing outside systems and seeking to poke and prod them to achieve objectives external to those systems, is classic cybernetics, the old command and control blunder that caused so much harm and misery last century.

It doesn't work, can't work, since it isn't possible to understand any system well enough to usefully control it from outside. Which mini cycles should be triggered to mitigate the severity of the current deconstruction meta cycle? How are they identified? How much harm will error in these decisions cause? How much harm in a future meta cycle will be caused by tinkering with this one? Why trigger mini cycles when they are already occuring? What will the next meta cycle look like if no intervention is done? What is the system trying to become? Have these people understood that Hari Seldon was a fictional character and that the concepts are self-debunking?

No one has a clue, no one can have a clue, that is Holling's main point. This is the rot at the center of the whole world changing concept. They don't have a clue what the consequences of their acts will be. They have neither the information nor the mental tools to make useful analyses. No one does. What drives them are biases, things that squick them out about life and that they work to harm, but they have no idea what the consequences of their destructive impulses will be. This matters because past interventions by fellow travelers with similar biases have had dire negative consequences. By attacking their enemies they usually make things worse rather than better, indeed, in many cases their best choice would have been to attack themselves since they were the problem rather than the solution, the sickness rather than the medicine.

Poke and hope interventions can indeed cause change, but not necessarily desirable change. The key insight that paleo-activists wedded to cybernetic approaches require in order to update themselves is that the way to improve systems is to help them achieve their own goals rather than attempting to impose external goals on them. They need to grasp the truth that social wisdom is inherently distributed, not knowable or predictable in advance by self-appointed change agents, and that efforts to manipulate this discovery machine degrade the quality of its performance.

The way to do that is from inside such systems not outside, and the specific acts required are the hard labor of participation. Rather than standing aside directing the parade we can only help by pitching in to help pull our own wagons. We each have to work on tasks at hand rather than flitting from camp to camp meddling in the work of others. In Boyer's case this might mean that it is futurism, activism and the whole socioeconomic meddler business that she needs to work on. It is collapsing, deconstructing, just as every other system is doing during this phase. There is remembering to do - identifying the few useful elements of current practice - revolution to do - tearing down the old system - and reconstruction to do - building a better knowledge base and practice. Happily, there is evidence that Boyer is doing this.

Since this theory tries to transcend human and natural cycles, and its very shape appeals to ancient wisdoms and other ways of knowing, this big picture scope might help us engage with other points of view. Clearly, the biggest worldview rift cleaving the world today is a fundamental ideological difference over how change is perceived. To reduce this grossly, we have roughly two groups in collision: conservatives and progressives. For conservatives, change is perceived as a negative thing, an enemy of tradition which should be preserved. For progressives, change is inherently good, a driver of life and renewal, while tradition and the status quo is something to be challenged and overturned. Most people have a combination of both tendencies in themselves; all of us love and hate change. But the Panarchy model showed me that all healthy resilience civilizations have an ideological division of labor between progressives and conservatives: a system of checks and balances where both elements -- continuity and change -- are present and allow themselves to be at work. While we don't like talking with people with a different view, especially in polarized America, finding useful transitional objects to dialogue around is essential if real worldchanging is going to happen without force. My hope is that modified models like the Panarchy cycle, accompanied with real life stories and examples, might be the sturdy planks in the conceptual bridge to the other side, a tool to have a better dialogue for how to build a better world.

This is a sensible assertion if we understand her conception of audience. She is speaking to narrow minded and obdurate paleo-activists who have lived their lives in echo chambers where dissenters are demonized for sport and to affirm their own identities as superior people. It's a bit shocking for them to hear that the demons not only have a useful role but are in fact essential. It isn't that this is a new idea, it's been part of thoughtful dialogue for all of the past century and likely far longer, but paleo-activists are a bit like children who haven't yet gained any social skills and so don't realize that they harm themselves as well as others by being self centered and uncooperative. Since Chekhov's time there has been a continuous dialogue about the difference between nihilism and progressivism, the tendency of young minds however aged to strike out at irritants with no concept of the future or reform, just blind rage and a will to destroy since they fail to see the value in things as they are. They are intellectual "homicide bombers" intent on blowing up enemies as well as themselves.

The problem, I think, for activists is that progress isn't exciting and progressivism is a humble stick-to-the-knitting sort of role. They would simply be citizens striving to do well rather than movers and shakers, revolutionaries, public intellectuals and political powers that history will remember. It may not be exciting or lead to fame, fortune and beautiful lovers, and it doesn't have the frisson of danger, the most addictive drug of revolutionaries, but this is what is required. Our labors to gather information, analyze it and develop useful models of systems can help each of us in our humble individual efforts and it is the net benefit of large numbers of educated and insightful citizens doing humble tasks with greater skill that has a large aggregate beneficial effect on the system. We each labor in obscurity but our combined efforts are large.

Perhaps even more confusing for activists are the inevitable conflicting behaviors of individuals who draw differing insights from the same information. This offends the systems thinkers since it seems wasteful and counterproductive. It isn't, it's how systems work. The net benefit is the important consideration, the combined vector of individual and conflicting forces. This is the greatest threat to cybernetic thinkers since it requires them to consider the possibility that they are not just wrong in their own views, but that they have no hope of ever being right, that their attempts are futile and their methods false. Worse, their impotent failure may be necessary, the failed experiment and negative lesson that is of most value as a cautionary tale for others.

» Bookish Excuses from Crumb Trail
I have nothing useful to report, I've been busy reading, unless you count that crap at M&M 1, 2. But, the A2 crew has produced some nice chewy stuff for those of a geekish persuasion or aspiration. See It’s code, Jim, but not as we know it at Notional......[read more]
Tracked: October 3, 2004 11:35 AM