Text from a talk by John Gall at Tom Gilb's Gilbfest, London, UK, June 25'2012

PDF https://web.archive.org/web/20221206070038/http://concepts.gilb.com/dl539

Excerpts

CONTENTS

• I. INTRODUCTION
• II. SYSTEMANTICS SINCE 1976
• III. FEEDBACK, FLEXIBILITY, CREATIVITY
• IV. PROBLEM-SOLVING AS A PROBLEM TO SOLVE
• V. LEVELS OF RECURSION. SYSTEMS IN SYSTEMS OF SYSTEMS
• VI. AFTER SYSTEMANTICS, WHAT?

SECTION ONE: INTRODUCTION

I would like to set the tone for my talk by quoting a line from the American poet e e cummings, who wrote:
always the more beautiful answer who asks the more difficult question

...wonderfully concentrated language inviting us to see the deeper truth in our everyday world, to keep us from mistaking the everyday world for the truth.

My alternative title for this talk was: When is it possible to use conscious purpose without wrecking everything? Or even: How is it possible to use conscious purpose without wrecking everything? That may sound like a silly question, but I take it very seriously; and I hope that by the time I finish, you will too.

I won’t be using slides for this talk and there is a reason for that. You will be making mental images for yourself as I speak

I would rather have you remember those images that you create for yourselves rather than something flashed on a screen

2. GOETHE’S FAUST

I am only going to talk about what I can report on from personal experience. That doesn’t mean I am reporting provable facts. If I slip and say something that sounds like a pronouncement, please keep in mind that it’s only my impression. I respect facts, but impressions are what I live with. I suspect that some of you, too, as you get older, will decide to settle for probable impressions.

I didn’t write Systemantics as an expert. I wrote it as a confused student, trying out axioms—that is, my own personal brand of fuzzy logic—to try to get some clarity in my own head

a perplexed citizen trying to reconcile what I saw happening all around me with basic common sense. What I saw all around me were things that utterly defied common sense

I was thinking about writing a fourth edition of Systemantics, but I am afraid that if I wrote what I was thinking, I would probably be arrested by the thought police.

Then I woke up one morning a few days ago thinking about Germany’s great poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and his great play, Faust, the story of Dr. Faustus, the man who sold his soul to the Devil.

He is in his late thirties and is still a student and has never tasted life.

Faust makes a pact with the Devil

Goethe did not bother to spell out the moral to his audience—namely, that Faust, in getting his own way, has wrecked everything

Part Two—the part nobody reads—is the really interesting part. Faust has become an Administrator, a Bureaucrat, a Project Leader, an Entrepreneur

To carry out his project, he has to evict an old couple who are living happily in their little cabin and who refuse to sell out to Faust. The eviction doesn’t go well, the old couple are killed by the agents sent to evict them, their cottage catches fire and burns to the ground, and Faust again wrecks everything.

Faust never takes any responsibility for the disasters he has caused. He doesn’t see it that way at all. He thinks of himself as a tragic hero, a victim of circumstance

I think that in this one play Goethe has posed a core problem for modern man—namely: being in possession of the powerful tool of conscious thought, how to use it without wrecking everything.

SECTION TWO: SYSTEMANTICS SINCE 1976

1. BLACK SWANS AND OTHER BETES NOIRES

My emphasis then was on what you would probably call the Black Swan effect—that is, on some unimaginably rare event happening and surprising everyone. Who would ever have dreamed that the White House could simply lose the Red Telephone—the nuclear hot line between Kennedy and Krushchev? I

It was Nassim Taleb who pointed out that these rare events—individually so rare — cumulatively become common because there are so many circumstances in which they can occur. It turns out that Black Swans are like Black Holes in Astronomy. They are everywhere, and so it only makes sense to devise some strategy for taking this fact into account.

Since 1976 I have learned of the Red Queen effect, the Court Jester effect, the Frankenstein effect, Self-organized Criticality, the Boundary Problem, and the Information Silo Effect

2. SYSTEMS IDEAS SINCE 1976

People were applying the concepts of Cybernetics to human interactions

William Ross Ashby was building a machine called the Homeostat, with 256,000 distinct states, in his search for something called “autonomy.”

Gregory Bateson was pointing out that the very notion of unilateral power is a delusion. It violates Newton’s Law that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Evolution always means Co-evolution

Alfred Korzybski was explaining that our very language allows us to commit the logical error of using the names of classes of things as if they were the actual names of individual things — for example, the word "apple" for that hard red sphere that you bought last month when you went to the supermarket, that looks better than the real thing but definitely does not taste better than the real thing

Temple Grandin, that wonderful high-functioning autistic lady whose animal-friendly cattle chutes dominate the world’s cattle markets, calls it “abstractification,” a typically human mistake

I had even heard of Margaret Mead’s wonderful phrase, the cybernetics of cybernetics, but I surely didn’t understand the fact that, at that level, everything changes. It’s one thing to interact with a system designed to do just one thing, to provide material output. Even if you get surprises, you still don’t feel totally bewildered. But when the system you are dealing with is truly autonomous, that is, when the system itself evaluates your requests and decides which response out of an infinite number of possible responses it is going to give you— well, that’s just another situation entirely.

SECTION THREE: FEEDBACK

I was interviewed a few years ago by a representative of a business journal who asked me how to get systems to work better

maximizing efficiency is the error of having a single goal, what William Blake once called “Newton’s sleep.” I could have told him that Bateson felt so strongly about the attempt to maximize that he applied the phrase “original sin” to it. For Bateson, optimization is the goal

Getting back to the journalist’s question, I thought and thought and finally hit on the three words: Feedback, Flexibility, and Creativity.

1. FEEDBACK

Stafford Beer and Feedback in Living Organisms

In my opinion feedback still gets far too little attention. Stafford Beer—the pioneering special operations theorist—way back in the 1970’s recommended looking at biological systems for inspiration

The amount of feedback that is built into living organisms differs by many orders of magnitude from the amount that we build into manmade systems

some of our biggest manmade systems seem like simple wind-up toys. On a supertanker, an alarm bell rings if the engines aren't working, but doesn't indicate where the malfunction is or what kind it is. It could be a loose wire— or it could be that an eighty-foot wave has just crushed in the bow of the ship, flooding the engine room

The human brain has pro bably the greatest complexity in the smallest space in the entire universe. And all our research so far confirms that it is meaningful complexity. It’s all there for specific purposes.

Mirror Neurons

We have such a flood of feedback that we can construct, inside our own brain, a working model of ourself as a feeling, sensing, responsive entity, updated in real time, like a 3- D hologram, and also models of the persons with whom we are interacting at the moment.

The people who do brain imaging have even been able to locate the neurons that make that internal model of ourselves and others. They are called mirror neurons.

In other words, mirror neurons encode abstract ideas (such as the idea of a banana, even if it can’t be seen) and complex ideas like intentions or goals.”

This capacity is the basis for empathy and the awareness that other people have feelings and points of view.” (End quote.) What would a management system be like that had that kind of feedback?

Long term memory

short-term memory tends to go—somewhere around the age of eighty, or seventy, or even earlier in some persons—and memory for names. But seldom do you hear anyone talking about the fact that long-term memory gets better and better

Integration of Life Experience

the brain begins to put the dots together, to make conscious links between one experience and another, between one historical fact and another. A person begins to experience one’s entire life history as an integrated narrative

There’s the famous case of the successful business man who woke up one morning and announced, “Oh, so that’s what I’ve been doing all my life!” and promptly gave up his business interests and embarked on a different existence. That’s actually what happened to Stafford Beer, as those of you who are familiar with his life story already know, and to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and to Benjamin Whorf, and many others.

This integrating capacity of the human brain is perhaps its most marvelous achievement. And you have to be old—usually fifty or sixty years old—to reach that point where it dawns on your conscious mind that that’s what’s going on.

A corporate database is not a corporate memory, and corporate entities do not self - integrate. Is this a deficiency, and if so, what can be done?

2. FLEXIBILITY

Flexibility means the willingness to act in response to the feedback message by actually changing how the system works. (agility? meta-agility?)

The sad fact is, people in human systems are often ambivalent about feedback or just plain hostile. They are afraid of being overwhelmed by it

there are many Potemkin Villages in operation today, hiding and distracting us from awareness of what’s really going on. Just think of the so - called Mainstream Media.

ignoring feedback merely means that the system will eventually experience a massive unpleasant surprise rather than a small unpleasant surprise. (crisis)

3. CREATIVITY

I think of it as the ability to respond to feedback by generating multiple models of systemic change in your imagination and choosing which of those is most likely to be an improvement on the original

SECTION FOUR: PROBLEM-SOLVING AS A PROBLEM TO SOLVE

1. MOTHER NATURE

Dinosaurs into Birds

the slimmest, fastest, most agile of them did not perish by extinction like all the rest, but went on to evolve into birds. What a transformation! Talk about solving problems by changing your system!

Over the years I have become increasingly aware of the immense number of incredibly ingenious solutions to problems that Mother Nature has placed before our very eyes in the structure and behavior of living creatures. Living systems have had millions, even billions of years to perfect themselves.

2. PROBLEM SOLVING AT THE FIRST LEVEL: VARIETY

3. PROBLEM-SOLVING AT THE SECOND LEVEL: NOVELTY

what Ashby called Variety, the ability to vary responses in order to provide different feedback to the system. But there are higher levels of creativity, that not only elicit different behavior from the system, they change the basic terms of relationship between the system and the person relating to it. (Law Of Requisite Variety)

The dolphin was in fact using one of the most powerful methods of communication known, which is that of transmitting a new kind of message, a metamessage, constructed out of units of behavior that had previously been regarded as complete in themselves

In the terminology of cybernetics, the dolphin went up to the second level of cybernetic recursion and proposed a novelty, a change of frame that necessarily changed the meaning of the action at the first level.

4. PROBLEM-SOLVING AT THE THIRD LEVEL: HIGHER-LEVEL CREATIVITY

Then it was that Bateson had his inspiration. He decided to test the dolphin to find out if the dolphin could grasp the idea of doing something completely new, something that t he dolphin had never been taught before, not even once

she seemed to explode with excitement, rapidly swam the length of the pool, and proceeded to perform eight pieces of behavior she had never before exhibited, including four that had never been observed before in that species of dolphin

She had gone to the third level of cybernetic recursion, which, by the way, is just about the limit for most human beings

5. THE SCHOOL SYSTEM

Left brain/right brain

One of the problems with the school system is that it mainly is aimed at developing analytic left-brain functions. But these are precisely and exactly the functions that do not solve problems, they carry out previously discovered solutions in the form of programs.

The Deadly Command to “Pay Attention”

We are taught not to trust the spontaneous turnings of our own attention to other matters

Forget the fact that as toddlers we learned to speak our own native language and to master the subtleties of its grammar and syntax without any conscious effort

We pay attention when we are told to do so, and our unconscious mind, the strongest part of ourselves, drifts out the window

Day-dreaming and Creativity

What is amazing is not that people find creative solutions in this way, but rather that so many people remain unaware or unconvinced in the face of the facts. It is amazing that teachers tell our children not to do the very thing that the great innovators tell us they did to achieve their insights.

Command-and-Control

Another problem with the school system is that by its very structure it embodies the age - old authoritarian approach to human interactions with other humans and with Mother Nature and the world in general

That approach, which I call Command-and-Control or One-up, One-down, works if you are building a physical machine to perform a mechanical task, but it does not work at all well with people or with organizations of people—that is to say, with self-correcting, autonomous entities.

Command-and-Control applies to systems at the level of solid objects and physical forces, and even there you have to have at least two levels of cybernetic recursion to maintain stability because the system will still “hunt” around the calibration point

There is an alternative to Command-and-Control

It is a dance.

SECTION FIVE: LOGICAL LEVELS AND LEVELS OF RECURSION

1. WHEN IS AN APPLE NOT AN APPLE?

Answer: When it is an abstraction—a class of objects rather than an individual apple

Once you get above that first level, the level of material things and forces, you are dealing with abstractions. In place of physical forces, you have communication— messages, signals. And in place of material things, you have relationships—which are abstractions

The message is in the pattern—in fact, the pattern is the message. And right here is a major problem: pattern recognition

patterns are in our own head. We see them with our mind, not with our senses

The confusion of levels of recursion leads to futile attempts to physically eliminat e abstract nouns such as crime, addiction, terrorism, war, poverty, obesity—you name it. These are patterns of behavior, that is, abstractions. They have no physical existence

Abstractions—that is, ideas — don’t die. They can’t be killed.

2. POSIWID

Stafford Beer is famous for (among other things) the acronym POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does

I’ve always been confused by those two words, function and purpose. In my book Systemantics, I essentially gave up trying and said that the purpose of a system is simply whatever it can be used for.

Since then I have come to wonder if perhaps for autonomous systems, the purpose might be two or three levels of recursion above physical function

SECTION SIX: AFTER SYSTEMANTICS, WHAT?

1. THE BOUNDARY PROBLE M

What are our true boundaries? And what are the implications of all this for our own particular system? Does this mean that our systems are so interrelated that they cannot be extricated from each other? And if that is the case, how should we act?

2. CONNECTEDNESS

What does all this have to do with systems? Just this, that if I design a system with no regard for the universe that surrounds it, I will have scanty knowledge of what can impact it. That is not a formula for success. To fit my system in to the larger system of systems around it, I must go to the next higher level of recursion

Here we see also the insanity of demanding to be free of regulation. Any real- world system you can imagine is embedded in a vast network of other systems, to which it must adapt and respond—which means regulation

3. WHOLENESS

In school we are taught to pay attention, to concentrate our mind on one thing. And that is good self-discipline for simple tasks. But single-mindedness, the concentration on one thing to the exclusion of all others, is just the wrong thing for wholeness, for being a complete human being

Life demands multiple higher level goals, all balanced in the interest of being a human being. Conscious purpose then takes its place as just one element in a balanced ensemble of resources.... creativity

The project becomes transformed—spontaneous yet inevitable, radical yet commonsense, matter-of-fact yet marvelous, innovative yet within the Tao

And now this is the point where we can just get a glimpse of a possible fourth level of recursion, where life and work themselves acquire an esthetic dimension

A person is not to be used as a means to an end. A person is an end in itself. That is what is implied in the very definition of autonomy—self-regulation.

And our systems must demand and embody the same. If the systems we create are to be viable (and I’m using Stafford Beer’s own word here), if they are not to destroy us humans and the world we live in, then they too must incorporate this understanding.