Who should be in a group?

The theory

I always wanted this blog to be impersonal, neutral, boring nerdy stuff about how things self-organize, in human groups and in nature. Then life happens. There was a biggie in summer, when my husband died. Well, there's been another biggie this week, when I got laid off.

Which leads me straight to the question: Who should be in a group? This is part of what you need to think about as soon as you have a group. Even if it's a group of volunteers, does it mean that we should merrily accept anybody that comes and never ask anyone to go? Are the people who come always "the right people", or should we be looking for what we need?

There is a very simple rule of thumb you can apply whenever you wonder who should be there. Every member of a group needs to have two things:

• Something to give: Why does everybody else want this person here? If you start feeling that the answer is: "Well, nobody wants this person here..." something needs to be done about it. Either the person has to start offering something, or has to go.
• Something to take: Why does this person want to be here? If somebody starts feeling like they aren't getting anything from being here, they will go. Unless somebody notices first and they get given something they want.

Even when there is give and take, people may feel that the exchange isn't fair. When the general feeling is that a person is taking more than they're giving, there's trouble. Most people are careful to balance their goodwill books, to the point of keeping detailed track of what favours are owed to who.

The reverse is also true: whenever there's trouble in a group, people start looking for somebody who must be taking more than they're giving. This isn't necessarily the case (problems can be for all sorts of reasons), but it's such a common human reaction, that every time there is a recession, lay-offs are a common solution.

The practice

Experiment 1

The "give and take" rule doesn't apply just to humans, it's also the base of every community in nature. Look for examples of groups of animals - a beehive, a school of fish, a rabbit warren, or a family of birds - and try to answer these questions:

1. What does each individual give and take? This may include:

• Food
• A chance to rest
• Shelter
• Protection
• Propagation of the species

2. What happens with individuals that take more than they give? What happens with individuals that give much more than they take?

Experiment 2

You can do this in any group you are part of. Ask everyone to make a list of the things that they give to the group. Then another list of the things that they take. Then compare lists.

1. Are there many things in common between lists?

2. Is there anything that is given or taken that appears only in the list of one or two people? Does this look like it makes people more powerful or more vulnerable to have this special thing in their list?

3. Are there people that have one or two things only in their give list or their take list? Does this look like it makes people more powerful or more vulnerable?

Double bind

The theory

A commenter on the last post about how people change their mind said: "If people have to be manipulated into believing the truth, they aren't really believing the truth." This is a very good point, but not as easy as it seems at first blush. Because in actual fact, most of the things that we believe are true, we don't believe them because we know them first-hand or because we are following some careful logical reasoning. For example, most of my readers will believe that climate change is caused by humans burning fossil fuels, and that world oil production is already in decline or is going to decline soon. But we don't know these things first-hand, and if we are entirely honest with ourselves, we don't know all the ins and outs of the matter. We believe these things partly by reasoning and partly by accepting the authority of other people that we think are experts on the matter. Strictly speaking, we may have been manipulated into believing this.

Still, there are a few things we can take into account to reduce the chances of making mistakes, and one of them, as the commenter suggested, is knowing a bit more about our biases. I talked about this already on a previous post (Why things go wrong: emotional reasons). So today I'd like to touch on a particular case, a very nasty kind of confusion that is most often responsible for the worst tangles people knot themselves in. It's called "double bind". It happens when somebody believes at the same time three things:

• Belief 1
• Belief 2 that contradicts belief 1
• Belief 3 that states there isn't a contradiction between beliefs 1 and 2, or that if there is a contradiction, it shouldn't be talked about.
  

A couple of real life examples:

• The Earth is round, because it's the logical conclusion of observations.
• The Earth is flat, because it says so in the Bible, and the Bible is God's word.
• The Bible only contains the literal truth.

• You love your son dearly
• Your son is being asked to serve in a war, where there are good chances he'll be killed.
• You are patriotic, so you see your nation as your family. There is no difference between the loyalty you feel for your nation and the loyalty you feel for your family.
  

This is particularly relevant for activists that are trying to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels. One important reason that it's so difficult to convince some people to take some actions, is because they are tied in a double bind. The most common forms of this are:

The human ingenuity argument:

• Reduction in the use of fossil fuels is necessary to avoid climate change and deal with peak oil, both of which would have disastrous consequences.
• Increase in the use of fossil fuels is necessary to grow the economy, especially in developing countries.
  
• Human ingenuity will find a way out of this contradiction in time to avoid any disastrous problems.

The positivity argument:

• Reduction in the use of fossil fuels is necessary to avoid climate change and deal with peak oil, both of which would have disastrous consequences.
• Increase in the use of fossil fuels is almost certain in the current world political climate.
  
• Being negative about the outlook will lead people to inaction, so we must avoid pointing out this contradiction.

The behaviour of somebody trapped in a double bind is different from the behaviour of somebody that simply has to deal with bad news, even extremely bad news. Let's see it by comparing two typical examples:

Very bad news - your son has a possibly fatal disease:

• You know and accept that the solution to your problem may be difficult or impossible.
• You can express freely any mixed feelings and doubts
• Usual reactions include: Sadness, anger, efforts to limit the damage, efforts to prevent any further harm.

Double bind - your son must go to war:

• You feel like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't.
• You don't feel like you are allowed to express any mixed feelings or doubts.
• Usual reactions include: confusion, fear, erratic behaviour, denial, rationalization, actions to increase personal comfort that don't deal with the problem or are definitely inappropriate.
  

This comparison should make it easy to figure out when you are dealing with somebody trapped in a double bind.

The practice

Experiment 1

Animals get can get pulled in two opposite directions, the same as humans. When they do, they can engage in what's called displacement behaviour: Instead of doing something appropriate to the situation, they do something else, such as eating or grooming. Have you ever seen this? What was the exact situation?

Experiment 2

Do you know any example of somebody who seems to be trapped in a double bind? Next time that you try to talk with them about the issue, avoid a frontal attack and try something more roundabout. It's sometimes said that beliefs are like tables that are held by several legs. Try to figure out what are the legs for the particular belief that seems to be blocking this person. Ask them: Why do you believe that?

Once you have an impression about the legs for those beliefs, you can look at each of them in turn: Is this probably true but doesn't really support this belief? Is this probably false?

Another very useful question to ask is: when did you start believing that? It's much more difficult to change somebody's mind when they have been believing something since their childhood.

People don't change their mind the way they are supposed to

The theory

Ocassionally I get unsubscribe requests to the mailing list that tells people of updates to this site. Most of them happened when the site was launched, but a couple have arrived later. Every single one of them has been short and to the point, with the exception of one that I got recently, that contained some nasty swearing. This was a contact in my list that has always hated me, for no clear reason I can see, because we have never had much contact in the first place. As far as I can tell, he has some serious prejudices about me based on rumours, that he's never changed in the face of clear evidence that he might be wrong and that in any case, he doesn't know that much about me. And this takes me to an issue that most people don't think about, but it's sadly true: people don't change their minds about things the way they are supposed to. That's one of the reasons that influencing other people can be so difficult.

The way people are supposed to change their mind is something like this: They have some kind of rational belief based on their experience. You give them evidence that proves that they are wrong. They consider the evidence and, finding it convincing, they change their mind. Sadly, it isn't at all like that.

There have been experiments done on real people who had a wrong belief related to something that was in the news, after providing them with overwhelmingly clear evidence that their belief was wrong. To make the different answers clear, let's imagine the following wrong belief: "Bobby ripped Alice's dress and that's why Alice slapped him." People were given conclusive evidence that Bobby didn't rip Alice's dress, including Alice herself saying that the dress wasn't ripped at all. The results were as follows:

• About 1 in 3 (33%) just continued defending their position, finding an alternative justification to actions justified previously with this fact and downplaying the importance of this particular fact. "Bobby is a creep anyway, he deserves being slapped. It doesn't really matter what he did on this particular case."
  
• About 1 in 6 (16%) continued to believe what they believed before, and were unable to explain why they continued believing it. "I'm sure Bobby ripped the dress, I know he did."
  
• About another 1 in 6 (16%) defended that there must have been a good reason for the action justified with this fact, because otherwise it wouldn't have been done. "Alice wouldn't have slapped Bobby without good reason."
• About 1 in 7 (14%) said that they had never believed the fact anyway. "Oh, I never really believed that Bobby ripped her dress, it was clearly gossip."
  
• About 1 in 8 (12%) found some argument to continue believing what they believed. "I still think Bobby ripped the dress, I think Alice is lying to defend him."
• About 1 in 15 (7%) simply refused to discuss the matter. "I don't know, who knows what happened anyway?"
• Only 2% (about 1 in 50) did as they were supposed to: They said they considered the evidence, and changed their mind. "OK, I'm convinced, the dress wasn't ripped."
  

The statistics are depressing. Half the people will ignore the fact and continue defending an action justified with that fact, either finding alternative reasons for it or just assuming that there must have been good reason. More than a quarter will continue believing what they believed before anyway. Only 1 in 6 people will change their mind on the face of overwhelming evidence, and the vast majority of those will deny that it was the evidence, but will pretend or convince themselves that they have always believed what they believe now. And the rest will just refuse to talk about it.

All of these reactions are familiar to people that campaign about climate change. People's beliefs are incredibly "sticky", especially when they are beliefs used to justify certain actions. What can be done? A few approaches that might help:

• For those that continue defending their right to not change their actions, you can ask them, point black: "What would need to happen to convince you that you should/shouldn't do this?" Most people will give you an answer, they don't want to appear completely unreasonable and inflexible. Then see if you can provide them with the evidence or motivation that they require.
• For those that continue denying the facts, the best strategy is often an appeal to authority. Find out whose opinions they hold in high regard, and try to locate examples of those people defending the facts that you are presenting.
  
• Don't press people who actually change their mind to admit that you changed their mind. Most people resist admitting that their mind can be changed, they like to believe they are consistent. Let them be, or they may rather go back to their old beliefs.
  
• Don't press people who refuse to talk about it. For some people, this is a stage they need to go through before changing their mind. Pressing them can produce the opposite results of what you want.

The practice

This is your chance to shine! Use the techniques outlined in the post about influence to prepare a talk to convince people about something you consider important. Then, on the questions & answers session, use the pointers above to finish convincing the unconvinced.

Complexity

The theory

Some of my readers come from rather academic backgrounds, and make comments that sound like "Jabberwockies and slithy-toves are irrelevant!" (This seems to be the most usual type of communication from a university professor, as far as I can tell). A bit of googling is usually needed to understand what is their pet peeve, which may or may not have something to do with what you were talking about. I recently got one of those, and it got me thinking about something I've been wanting to post about for a while, and dreading at the same time. Complexity.

Complexity is one of the key concepts when you talk about systems. But it's difficult to talk about it because it's... well, complex. There are many definitions of complexity, and one of the most common says that a system is complex if it has emergent behaviour, in other words, it does things you wouldn't have guessed if somebody just told you about its parts and how they are put together. I don't like very much that definition because it's almost like saying: "A system is complex if you find it hard to understand" and that is really saying more about your intelligence than about the system. For example, you can tell the physics of the sea surface are more complex than the physics of the surface of a small lake, because the sea has waves and tides. Waves and tides are emergent behaviour that shows only in large bodies of water.

Another definition, that I like more, says that a system is complex if it's highly structured, in other words, if you can recognize a lot of clear patterns and configurations inside it. Highly structured systems almost always have emergent behaviour, so the two definitions are for most purposes equivalent. For example, a plant is definitely more complex than a rock, it has many more structures, configurations and all sorts of stuff going on inside it. It also has plenty of emergent behaviour: it grows, turns its leaves towards the light, etc. If you had never seen a plant in your life you wouldn't have guessed it could do that in a million years.

The most rigurous definitions, loved by mathematicians and people so brainy that they wish there was a quicker way of speaking formulas, use formulas that translated to plain English mean: a system is complex if it would take you a long time to describe it, when you describe it in the simplest possible terms. That has a bit of both of the other definitions: highly structured systems and anything that has emergent behaviour are going to be difficult to describe. For example, it would be much more complicated to describe a plant than it is to describe a rock. But for us plain mortals this definition sounds more "fuzzy", even though mathematically it isn't fuzzy at all, so I recommend that you stay with the idea that a complex system is something with a lot of different complicated patterns in it.

Complex is often confused with complicated, but they are different ideas. A complicated system has a lot of different parts, but the structure may be very simple. Complicated systems are a challenge to your memory and patience, complex systems are a challenge to your intelligence - often a challenge you will fail. A city is complex and complicated; beehives are complex but not too complicated; the people on a beach (that don't interact much with each other) and the sand and pebbles on the beach are simple systems; chess games and many gardens are complicated, but not very complex.

Whenever you are looking at any system, try to estimate how complex it is. The following are good signs that the system is complex:

• The system has a memory. It behaves differently depending on what has happened in the past. A plant has some memory, a rock doesn't.
• The system is nested. You can see that the parts it's made of have smaller parts inside them. A plant has leaves, roots, etc, that are made up of cells, that have a lot of interesting bits inside them called organelles.
• The system has a structured network. By this I mean that connections in the system make a network where some nodes are very highly connected while most of them aren't. In a forest, certain plants are eaten by lots of animals, while some are eaten only by a few. That's part of what makes a forest complex.
• You see the butterfly effect in action. The name of the butterfly effect comes from a saying about complex systems, "a butterfly beating its wings in Brazil could cause a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico a couple of months later". In complex systems, a small change can cause a huge difference in future behaviour. For example, some tiny vibrations in the air made by a small speaker make a sound that a little girl hears as: "Get lost." The girl starts crying, runs away and shortly afterwards she's well and truly lost. This could be followed by even bigger consequences.
• The system has lots of feedback. "Feedback" means that the result of an event has an influence in the chances of it happening again. For example, you get angry at somebody and you shout at them. Depending on how much this person loves you and their personality, this will reduce or increase the chances that this person does again what made you angry. What's unlikely is that they are completely indifferent. People give feedback to each other all the time, though sometimes they get positive and negative feedback mixed up.
• You have trouble to understand what's going on. This almost guarantees that the system is complex.

The practice

Experiment 1

Think of an organization you are part of (it could be your place of work or a voluntary organization you take part in). Ask the following questions:

• Is the internal structure simple, complex or complicated?
  
• Have you seen the organization behaving in a way unexpectectly well coordinated?
  
• Does it keep good records?
  
• Does it have subgroups within groups?
  
• What is the internal network like?
  
• Is it possible to make big permanent changes by starting small?
  
• Is there lots of feedback?

This should give you a feeling for how complex it is.

An organization that is too simple is just disorganized. Working inside it feels like walking through treacle: a lot of the time you feel like you can't get anywhere.

It's uncommon that an organization is too complex, but nowadays it happens more and more, mostly thanks to modern information and comms technology. You can tell it is if it seems to be taxing your brain a lot just to do the common things that you are supposed to do all the time, and you can't keep up with the speed that things are changing.

Experiment 2

Go to the nearest garden to where you live. It could be a park or a vegetable garden, it doesn't matter.

• Does it look simple, complex or just complicated?
• Is there anything in it that surprises you?
• How does it change with the seasons? Does it go round the same cycle every year, or do you see changes each year?
• How do changes start? Do they start small, or are they complete overhauls?
  
• What patterns can you see in the way different plants are situated?
• What interactions do you notice between plants? Are there many of them or few?
• How long do you think it would keep its character if there were no gardeners?
  
• Do these observations tell you something about what kind of training the gardeners had?

Tipping points

The theory

I'm going to deal today with the third question that's being debated about the constitution of an organization. The question is: "Should the quorum for general meetings be a fixed number or a percentage of membership?"

This ties in directly with the question of magic numbers that I wrote about in my last post. If you just think about that, it sounds like a strong case for a fixed number: It's easier to deal with a group when you know what kind of behaviour to expect. If you are thinking that when the organization grows or shrinks, the style of meetings will have to change, that makes it more difficult to prepare meetings. Keeping a fixed quorum is a way of keeping the size of meetings roughly about the same. If a meeting gets too big for comfort, the least enthusiastic people will decide themselves not to come to the next one, knowing that their presence isn't really necessary.

But there is another way of looking at this. Groups of people don't exist in a void, they exist as parts of larger groups. The people that come regularly to meetings are part of the larger group of people that consider themselves members of the organization, and that group is part of the larger group of people involved in similar issues in the city (in our case, environmental issues), and all the greenies are part of the larger group of all the residents in the city. The amount of influence that a group has within a larger group depends on several things, and one of the most important is the size of both groups.

It's magic numbers all over again, but this time think about proportions.

• If the small group is less than 0.5% of the larger group, they will feel like a very small minority that many people don't even know anything about. The first tipping point is reached when they are roughly around 0.5% of the larger group, when they are 1 in about 200, because that's when most people know at least one member of the smaller group. This is the threshold for awareness. That changes members of the smaller group from being an exotic exception to being something everybody's heard about. In the 70s, greenies crossed this tipping point in many places, going from being part of the lunatic fringe to a group of people with some ideas that everybody had heard about.
• If the small group is about 2% of the larger group, or 1 in 50 people, they will cross the second tipping point. This is the threshold for having a voice. At this point, the small group can have a say in large meetings, because usually there will be one of their members at most large meetings within the larger group. This point usually happens shortly after the first one. People are often surprised how new social movements can go from being almost unheard of to getting a clear voice in a matter of a few years, but it isn't so strange when you think of the numbers.
• If the small group is about 10% of the larger group, or 1 in 10 people, they will cross the third tipping point. That's when most times that a group of members of the larger group is sitting around a table is likely to include a member of the smaller group. The person in the smaller group will have a good chance, not only to have a say, but also to discuss things in more detail, and if this person is a good talker, it's a very good chance to be a big influence in the table. This is the threshold for normality. If people belonging to the small group were considered a bit weird before, after this tipping point most people will think they are very normal.
• If the small group is about half the size of the larger group, you'd expect that on average, if you took two people from the larger group, one would be part of the subgroup and the other wouldn't. They could have a comfortable conversation about any differences they had. If everything else is the same, they would feel like equals. If the person that isn't in the smaller group knows that everybody in the smaller group agrees on something, this person will think they're probably outnumbered and not push their case. That's the last tipping point: reaching a majority. Once a small group has a majority within a larger group, they know they are in control of the larger group.

Of course, these tipping points are only approximate, but they can give a very good idea of where a group stands.

If you were following closely the explanations above, you will have noticed that each tipping point happens when the smaller group is roughly 4 or 5 times larger than the previous tipping point. Social movements often grow exponentially: when the time has come for a new idea, the number of people that agree with that idea doubles in a fixed period of time, usually a few years, until there are as many people as possible agreeing with the idea (it's pretty much impossible for a tycoon to become communist). Once the first tipping point is passed, the rest of tipping points often appear to fall like dominoes, one after the other, in a relatively short period of time. Within 10 or 20 years, the same statement can go from "true without a doubt" to "false without a doubt" for the majority of people.



Applying this to the case of a green organization within a city: In most places, greenies have passed the tipping point of normality. In some places they are even a majority. There are so many of them now that a new green organization will find that it isn't so easy for them to cross the first two thresholds within the green community. It used to be that the first and second tipping points were crossed almost automatically, there were so few greenies that as soon as half a dozen people got together, they could be confident that all the rest of greenies within the city would know at least of one of them, and they would have a chance to have a say in any green consultation. Not any more. Nowadays, new organizations need to make an effort just so that other people notice that they exist.

When it comes to deciding on a quorum for meetings, ideally you want to pass the tipping point for control, but if your members aren't very keen on meetings, at the very least the tipping point for normality needs to be passed. Otherwise, you could have a situation where the people that go to meetings aren't even considered very normal by the rest of members, and many of them haven't had a chance to have a good talk with anybody that goes to meetings, and don't feel represented by them. You will get an apathetic membership, that even though in theory may be a significant proportion of all the greenies in the city, in practice see themselves as something else most of the time. The influence of a group is only as much as the influence of people that openly declare themselves as members of the group. You want all your members to feel and behave like they are members of the organization, not just the ones that regularly come to meetings.

If the quorum for general meetings is a fixed number, when the membership grows you run the risk that the tipping points for control and normality are passed in reverse. After the quorum passes the tipping point for normality, it's likely that the organization becomes unable to grow further, unless other factors are at play. Apathetic memberships don't usually grow very much; in fact, they tend to shrink. The only way out of this is having a quorum for meetings set at a percentage of membership, and when the meetings grow too large to work as they were usually working, change the way that meetings are done to serve the larger number.

The practice

Once again, think of all the groups of people you belong to, and order them from smallest to biggest. The first one should be only you, the next should be you and your partner if you have one, the next your family. Include anything you can think of: your circle of closest friends, the organization you work in, the team of people you work with, any association you belong to, your neighbourhood, the location you live in, your country. Estimate the number of people in each group. Think of the groups that are within bigger groups: Do the tipping points mentioned above seem to apply? If they don't, why do you think they aren't working as usual in this case?

Magic numbers

The theory

I'm going to tackle today the second question debated by this organization trying to draw up their constitution. The question for today is: "Should the organization have a register of members?"

The answer I'd give is a clear, resounding "YES", for any organization or group of people that you care to imagine. If you can possibly know who are the people in that group and you have a way of contacting each of them, it will make everything so much easier for everyone. If there is any reason people would like to be anonymous, find ways of keeping them anonymous... but at the very least, count them. There are many reasons for this, so I'll just focus on one of them today. It has to do with working at different scales.

People behave differently in groups of different sizes. Think of a meeting of two people, five people, 50 people, 200 people. People behave completely different in each of those groups. This has to do with practical limitations.

Two people are able to talk comfortably with each other and discuss any topic in any depth that both of them want. Five people can still talk comfortably, but the most introverted among them will say a lot less and may leave lots of things unsaid of what they are thinking, while the most extroverted will dominate unless somebody is trying to compensate this. Fifty people can't possibly engage in a group conversation. Turns have to be respected, people will have to raise hands to ask to speak, and chances are that many of them won't talk at all, unless they are all asked to introduce themselves in order or something like that. The only other alternative for fifty people is to divide into a lot of smaller groups that talk with each other, like in any birthday party. Two hundred is getting to the point that most people wouldn't even be able to remember everybody else they saw in the meeting, even if this was a regular meeting that happened again and again. Many people will keep behaving as if they are among strangers, no matter how many times the meeting is repeated.

If you don't keep a register of members, a lot of the time you won't even know what numbers to expect if you ask for people to come to an event, or to respond to any kind of calling. And it will be impossible to prepare appropriately, because the right preparation will depend on the number of people you get.

When it comes to groups of humans, the two main limits that explain different behaviour in groups of different sizes are:

• People can't listen and speak at the same time. In a group, you can have two kind of situations: either everybody is listening to the same person, and in that case they don't get a chance to speak, or people divide into smaller groups that chat with each other, and in that case they don't get a chance to hear what other groups are saying.
• People's memory is limited. Anybody can remember clearly the names, faces and a couple of personal details of five new people. Fifty new people is a stretch that only a few could manage. Two hundred is a stretch for most people, even if you have repeated chances to see them again.

Other animals are limited in different ways, and that affects in other ways the size of the groups that they usually make. For example, humans often prefer smaller groups because they like to talk, and talk is difficult in big groups. And they want to keep tabs of a lot of information on other people, while most animals couldn't possibly keep all that gossip in their minds. Other apes, such as chimps and gorillas, are able to remember details about their fellow chimps and gorillas, but because their capacity is more limited, their groups aren't ever as big as a human tribe. On the other hand, most animals don't talk or keep tabs on anyone except their closest family, they just keep visual contact with each other and make the ocassional sound that may be somewhat informative to others, but nothing like language. That's why many animals are quite comfortable in big herds, some much bigger than human tribes. But then, most animals don't want too much competition for food, and that is what often limits the size of their groups.

The practice

Experiment 1

Do some bird-watching and compare flocks of birds. Which birds have the biggest flocks? Which birds have smaller flocks? Which are usually solitary? Can you work out why different birds flock in different numbers?

Experiment 2

Think of all the groups of people you belong to, and order them from smallest to biggest. The first one should be only you, the next should be you and your partner if you have one, the next your family. Include anything you can think of: your circle of closest friends, the organization you work in, the team of people you work with, any association you belong to, your neighbourhood, the location you live in, your country. Estimate the number of people in each group. Can you notice things in common in the smallest groups? Can you notice things in common in the biggest groups? In what way are small groups different from big groups? What sizes seem to be the barriers that mark the difference between "small and intimate", "small", "like a big family", "so big I just feel like a number"?

How we see networks: the view from the node

The theory

I'm currently involved in the efforts of an organization to draw up their constitution. I have no idea if the efforts are going anywhere, but there are a number of questions that are hotly contested, and I thought it would be useful for other people to post my take on those questions on this blog. The first question is: "Should the organization have a chair?" Most people are interpreting "chair" here as "a central authority figure". There are ongoing discussions about the exact job description of the chair, but what is clear is that the question isn't so much about what the chair does as about having some kind of central authority.

This question takes us again to the subject of networks. Organizations are networks of people. Each of us sees the network from a different point of view. At the same time, there is often (but not always) some kind of "official" view of the network, some way of looking at it that is considered the standard view. In many organizations, they have some kind of "organization chart" that shows what's supposed to be everybody's place. What this "organization chart" shows is usually the view from the vantage point of the CEO. On the other hand, a receptionist often has another completely different view.

From the point of view of a CEO, there are usually a number of managers underneath, each of them with a number of underlings, all the way down to the "little people". From the point of view of a receptionist, there are a number of people she contacts regularly, whoever needs to meet people at the door often, maybe a contact in human resources, another one with the cleaners, another one in sales, etc. Each of them will take matters to somebody else as and when needed. The receptionist may be quite hazy on what happens with people after they cross the door, or may be very well informed, it really depends on how intelligent and curious she or he is.

The important thing to realise is that both the CEO and the receptionist actually have a lot of power in a company. The CEO may have the formal authority, but the receptionist gets to decide who can go through the door. That's a hell of a lot of power! And both know a lot of key people within the company.

Similar situations can happen in any kind of network, and not just networks of people. For example, think of food webs, the networks that represent which living creatures eat which. Usually, they are drawn with the biggest predators at the top. But not always. Compare these two food webs of marine life:



They both represent the same ecosystem roughly, but the first one has the biggest predator at the top, humans. The second is a food web drawn around krill, which is what's called a keystone species. A keystone species is any living creature that has such a critical place in the ecology, that if their numbers go down, the whole ecosystem could be in trouble.

This is a very important thing to realise. You can look at any network from the point of view of any node, and it will look different. And when you look at it from some nodes, it may become immediately clear that this node is very important for the whole network, but you may not see it until you think about that particular node.

There are several keystone species in any ecosystem, and there never is a single central authority figure in any organization that has more than 12 or so people. As soon as it gets any bigger, chances are that there will be several people in key positions of power, that if they went or refused to do their work properly, could cause endless trouble to everyone else (unless the network has a rather unusual structure - and in most unusual structures you would find it impossible to work anyway).

So the question becomes rather: "Should we only recognize one of these positions as an official position of power? Or do we make it clear that we realise there are several key positions?" Different situations call for a different answer to this question, but at least you need to be aware that this is the real question.

The practice

Experiment 1

Find a patch of wildlife that you have easy access to. A garden will do, but wild is best.

1. Pick a common plant and try to draw the food web around it. What animals seem to eat that plant? What eating connections can you identify between these animals?
2. Pick a common bird or bird-sized animal and try to do the same. What does this bird eat? Does any other animal eat this bird? What other eating connections can you see around these animals?

Compare the two. Could any of the two be a keystone species? If you can't tell, what would you need to know to be able to tell?

Experiment 2

Think of an organization you work in. If it has an organizational chart, get a copy of it. If not, try to draw yourself what it would look like.

Now, have some fun and draw it from several unusual points of view: a receptionist or administrator, the person dealing with your IT systems, or a person dealing with marketing and promotion. Try any other interesting point of view that you can think of. Can you start to see that there are several key positions?

What to think about second-hand information

The theory

A commenter on my last post about how information spreads pointed out the difficulties in deciding what to think about second-hand information: how much should you trust it? This is a very tricky part of the problem of doing good thinking.

There are a few questions that can help you decide how much to trust second-hand information.

• Does this person know what they are talking about firsthand? Do they know about the facts they are talking about because they personally witnessed them or discovered them? The more hops there are between you and the original facts, the more degraded the information will be.
• What is the nature of the information? Some things are harder to fake than others. Anybody can make up a story, even on the spot. A photograph can be easily retouched, but it takes time and effort. Retouching a video takes a lot more effort, and few people can do it.
• Is the information anecdotal or statistical? "Anecdotal" means that somebody is telling you one story about one person, in one place, at one time. "Statistical" means that somebody has collected data from a large number of people or situations, and added up the numbers. If you are interested in a general picture, rather than a single story, statistical information is always more reliable.
• How long ago did the facts happen? The longer it's been since it happened, the more chances that people have forgotten or twisted the facts since then.
• How much of what this person is telling you is about their feelings? The more the person talks about their feelings, the more they are likely to be mixing feelings up with facts, and altering facts in their mind to match their feelings about them.
• Who is this person trying to reach? People always tell things for a reason and with a specific audience in mind. Do you know why this person is telling you this? Does this person have reasons to try to deceive you or whoever they are talking to? Is this person trying to "sell" something? (literally or in the general sense). Is this person likely to want to hide something about this from their audience?
  
• Can you compare the facts this person is giving you with other independent sources? "Independent sources" means that you think it's unlikely that this person has talked with the other source and compared notes. If you can be sure that the sources are independent, this can be a powerful way of finding out the truth, because it's very likely that they're both telling the truth if they both say the same thing. This is why the police are very careful to interrogate suspects separately, and attempt to catch them before they have had a chance to agree on a story. They know that their suspects are usually the kind of people who lie often, but the chances of two liars coming up with exactly the same lie are slim.

If you ask yourself all these questions, you should have a clear idea of how trustworthy is this information.

The practice

Apply these questions to the following statements. Please research and find your own sources.

• Solar and wind power are the best sources of energy for the purpose of reducing carbon emissions.
• Using renewable energy will reduce our dependence on imports from countries that currently have very different interests from ours.
• Using more renewable energy will create more jobs locally.
• Electric cars will substantially reduce demand for oil.
  

What are your conclusions?

How information spreads

The theory

I'm going to continue with the theme of communication to help the reader that has communication issues in her organization. What I'm going to touch on today's post is how information spreads. This is something I touched on when I talked about kinds of networks, but it deserves more detail.

The first thing to understand is, information often doesn't spread. This is, in part, because not all links are equally strong. We tell lots of details of our lives to our closest family and friends, but we don't speak a lot with acquaintances. Information spreads much more certainly, and with more detail, to the closest people. The message will spread through weaker links only when it's important enough or interesting enough, and there aren't any barriers to telling (for example, if it's in your self-interest to keep it secret).

Even if somebody does the job of telling, it doesn't always mean that the other side will do the job of listening. Again, we pay closest attention to things that the closest people to us tell us, to things that are important to us, and things that are interesting to us. And even when something hits all the right buttons, there are all sorts of reasons we may be distracted with something else and not listen.

It's a well-observed fact that bad news tends to spread faster and wider than good news. There are several reasons for this. Bad news is often more useful to more people than good news. Bad news for others are often a warning that allow you to prepare so the same thing doesn't happen to yourself. Also, spreading bad news about somebody you don't like is a way you can have your revenge on them without any consequences to yourself. It also has the nice side effect that it can make you look good in comparison.

When you think about it, it isn't surprising that most news in the media are bad - they are what customers want to hear! Every time that a media outlet tries the "positive news" angle, readers or viewers start yawning.

When information does spread, it still degrades. The more hops the message had to do before it reached you, the more degraded it will be. There are three ways that a story will degrade:

• Flattening: When people re-tell a story, they eliminate all the details from it that they think are less relevant to the story, or that may contradict the main story they want to tell.
• Sharpening: People add details or elaborate on parts of the to the story (sometimes with a liberal use of imagination) to make sure that the point reaches all the way home.
• Assimilation: People will make the story fit within their existing mental framework and pre-conceptions.

Put this together with the lightning-fast spread of bad news, and you can get a deadly cocktail, of a horrible rumour getting completely out of hand and becoming worse and worse with every re-telling. That's why it's important that communication channels in an organization are as direct, open and transparent as possible.

The practice

Experiment 1

Play a game of "Chinese whispers" with five or six people. When you compare the original story with the last one, remember that this is what happens all the time in real life!

Experiment 2

Make a diagram representing all the communication channels of an organization you are part of. If there is any kind of information that takes three or more hops to reach destination, there are high risks that the information is too degraded when it arrives. Can you find any cases when information takes three or more hops? Can you find ways of reducing the number of hops, or preserving the information as intact as possible?

Why do some people turn a deaf ear?

The theory

I've recently received an email from a reader that is looking for positive solutions to deal with communication problems in the organization she's in. The problem, as far as I can tell, doesn't seem to be that people don't get informed of what happens - the problem is that some people are turning a deaf ear to some things.

This isn't so much a problem with communications as it is with influence. The best way of looking at this problem is turning the question on its head: Why do some people listen attentively and carefully? Looking at it this way, these are the characteristics of the ideal listener:

• Commited to the issue you want to talk about. If the people you are talking to don't seem commited, the simplest approach is asking where are the people that really care about this matter.
• Confident. Anxiety makes people distracted and unable to hear what you are saying, they will hear instead what they are afraid to hear. If you get the impression that you are talking to an anxious audience, you have to try to reassure them before you say anything else.
• Questioning. Somebody who isn't able to question what they already believe makes a very poor listener. If it looks like people are having trouble questioning their previous beliefs, you'll have to be very careful about providing solid evidence to support what you are saying. A very difficult situation can arise when somebody is starting to doubt previous beliefs, but still furiously clinging to them. Then you will have the extremely difficult combination of somebody who is unquestioning but anxious at the same time. I have never found out what is the right way of dealing with this - any suggestions are welcome!
  
• Clued up. It isn't strictly necessary to talk with people that already know well the issues you want to talk about, but it helps a lot. If it looks like you are talking to an uninformed audience, be very careful to explain everything from scratch.

Everybody notices when somebody else is turning a deaf ear, but you never notice when you are turning a deaf ear yourself. To give a personal example, a friend of mine was going through a painful relationship. He said: "I don't understand why my wife is always shouting at me. What is her problem?" My friend said: "I'm sure she's telling you all the time. Come on, what is the most common complaint she's always shouting about?" The unhappy husband couldn't say. Clearly, he wasn't listening!

It's a good rule to remember: if something isn't working, there are good chances that somebody has already told you what's wrong. And you weren't listening.

If you cultivate the qualities of a good listener, this should happen less and less.

Update: I got the following comment from somebody who receives updates about this site by email: "Ecology as a discipline had its chance to be relevant in 1960-1970 but all those who focused on single populations and their models and evolutionary ecology undermined whatever chance Ecology had to be relevant. It is irrelevant now, give or take a conservation biology issue or two. (As per your "who I am -- and Ecology's deaf ear)". It's a pretty good example of somebody who clearly didn't pay much attention to the contents of this site, and such things are very common. Lots of people that we talk to simply aren't commited to the issues that we're talking about, and put what you tell them through the filter of the issues that they are commited to.

The practice

Think of the last instance when you could tell that somebody was turning a deaf ear. Which qualities of a good listener were missing? Can you find a way to make this person into a better listener? If not, can you find a person that will be a good listener for this particular issue?

Influence

The theory

My post about death got a lot of reactions, not surprisingly. In one of the meetings of the writing group I go to, somebody said once that death and love are the two things guaranteed to get the interest of everybody. Especially if the story is true and personal, as mine.

But my latest posts have been a tad too dark for some people, and I should compensate by going to the other great theme that everybody is interested in: love. But, because I'm trying to stick to stuff useful to eco-activists (even though I sometimes digress), I will be a bit broader than "boy-meets-girl" or "person-meets-person-of-appropriate-sexual-orientation". So, instead of talking about romantic love, I'll tackle the more general issue of influence. This is something that can happen whenever there is a link between two people.

There is a popular view that says that it's impossible to change somebody else. That's so patently untrue that I can't understand how some people can think that. People are changing each other all the time. For some obvious examples, think of anything that you've picked from friends or lovers that you didn't do before.

If you are an activist, it's almost sure that you want to influence other people to see things your way, and you've tried all sorts of things, with varying success. You probably have some ideas of what works and what doesn't, or maybe you have concluded that it's all a big mystery. The good news is that a lot of people have dedicated a lot of time to study this subject, and by now it's pretty well known what kind of things are most likely to influence people.

The fundamental thing that you need to know is that people have been social for millions of years, even before they could be called "human beings" and were just apes. This means that when somebody is influenced, it's almost always that some deep instinct is telling them that it would be a good thing to change in this way. And instincts can be wrong sometimes, but they are right a lot of the time.

Some of the instincts that play a part in influence are:

• Avoiding difficulty: That's an instinct that all animals have - in fact, humans are exceptional because, with our big brains, we sometimes actively look for complications, for the sake of entertainment... But as a general rule, people, like all animals, prefer the simple, safe and familiar. Between several options, if one is presented as simple, safe and familiar, it's always going to be popular. This is especially effective when we are distracted, nervous or confused, because all these things interfere with the hard thinking needed to realise that maybe the complicated or new choice is better in some way. That's why advertisers and propagandists often deliberately confuse people.
• Curiosity: Because we're so damn clever, we just can't help ourselves wondering about all sorts of things. Anything that looks new and interesting is going to attract our attention, and get us in the right frame of mind to consider doing something different, as long as it all seems safe enough and good clean fun.
• Looking for number one... and for number two: Like all living beings, we have a survival instinct and we'll always look for things good for ourselves. We all know that. But in our capitalist individualistic society, it's seldom mentioned that we are also very much social animals, and often number two is as important or more than number one... You know who is number two, the person or the small circle of people closest to you. Ordinary people die and make noble sacrifices for their loved ones, not just heroes. If a choice is good for you and for the closest people to you, it's a no-brainer. But our social instincts go well beyond our closest circle. If everything else is the same, even a small thing in common with a stranger will make you prefer that person and what that person is saying.
  
• Following the leader: Part and parcel of being social animals is that some people are leaders. I'm not going to go here into how and why somebody becomes a leader. The important thing is that people will follow their leaders, sometimes even against all of the other instincts I listed above - think of soldiers following difficult orders without questioning them, risking their own lives and sometimes the lives of good friends.
• Being consistent: Most people don't see it this way and call it a matter of principles, but our social instincts are the fundamental reason we like to be consistent. Being spontaneous and flexible could be the best thing when we are alone. But it makes other people's lives a lot easier when we are consistent and predictable, and we always behave according to the same rules. If something is presented as consistent with the rules we already follow, we are very likely to accept it.

The practice

Experiment 1

In the post about difficult problems there was an experiment to do if you have a pet that keeps doing something that you would like it to stop doing. The experiment revolved around removing all possible difficulties. But if that isn't working, or the problem is rather that there is something you would like it to do but it isn't doing, it may be better to try to influence it using the other instincts listed above. Most pets are intelligent enough to have some curiosity. Many are social, so getting them to follow the leader (that's likely to be you) or look for number two (their young) is reasonably easy. What doesn't work so well is expecting them to be consistent. It takes somebody very clever and very flexible to see the advantages of behaving predictably, even if it makes you look stupid!

For example, let's suppose that your cat keeps scratching furniture. You can experiment with different approaches to influence your cat:

• Avoiding difficulty: Make sure that your cat undestands there will be trouble when it scratches furniture. Get it out of the way, shout at it and be generally ungrateful about it. Spraying a cat with water is an easy way of inconveniencing them without inconveniencing yourself much.
  
• Curiosity: The problem can be that your cat doesn't have a good scratching pad. Cats know when their claws are too long, and do everything they can to wear them out. A nice new scratching pad will attract their curiosity, and they are likely to become fond of it when they notice how good it is for scratching compared with other surfaces.
  
• Following the leader: A cat that has never used a scratching pad may not know what to do. Demonstrate the scratching pad with your own nails, then you can also hold them next to it and scratch their claws to show them.
  

Experiment 2

Have you ever been involved in producing any educational or promotional material that clearly failed in its goal of influencing people? This is your chance to have a second look at it and figure out what went wrong. This is best done by a group of people, because different people have different reactions to the same material.

What insticts of the list above do you think the material appealed to? Was there any instinct in the list that was actually pushing people away? (For example, was it asking people to take on more trouble in their lives or be inconsistent with the way they behave normally?)

Try to fix the material so that it pushes all the buttons and there is nothing that pushes people away. Some instincts could be pushed quite weakly, but try to touch on all, the effect is much stronger if they reinforce each other. If it's unavoidable to give up on one or two of the list - sometimes you have to ask people to do difficult things - say clearly that this may go against some of their instincts, but make sure that all the others are touched as hard as you can.

For example, when Kennedy proposed to go to the moon within a decade, he knew he couldn't possibly say that it would be avoiding difficulty. And he couldn't say that it was necessary for individual Americans or their families. So what did he say?

"For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding. Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation [...] But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win!"

Can you see? He admitted openly his defeat on the bases he knew were lost - no, it isn't easy, and we don't need it. But all the other important instincts for influence - look for number one and two (the Russians might put weapons up there!), curiosity, follow leadership, and be consistent with the American way - were not just touched, they were hammered in.

Why things go wrong: emotional reasons

The theory

A commenter on the post about classifying asked: "How useful is it to classify carbon emissions separately from pollution?" That's a very good question, but I'm not going to give my own answer... yet. Instead, I'd like to say that it's a fine example of a question that can easily be answered wrong for all sorts of emotional reasons... one of those that shows why some problems are really difficult. Let's use it to go through a whole bunch of emotional reasons that lead to wrong answers:

• Clinging to the past: People cling to the past. We can't help it. If we first got involved in the environmental movement because we heard about pollution, the answer to that question is obvious. If we only got involved after we started worrying about climate change and we never cared much for pollution, the answer is also obvious. But different. One of my readers asked once: "How does one make a group forward-looking rather than backward-looking?" The truth is, people are naturally backward-looking. Which normally works quite well. Problem is, it's hard to tell that it's stopped working.
• Unpleasant associations: Pollution is dirty, who wants to talk about it? On the other hand, carbon dioxide is a transparent gas with no smell at all, and a normal part of the atmosphere anyway. Shouldn't this mean that they should be treated separately? On the other hand, if you want people to feel that this apparently clean and innocent gas is a very nasty thing, shouldn't this mean that they should be seen as the same?
• Crowd psychology: The crowd of old environmentalists and the crowd of new climate changers are not the same crowd. The answer to the question will depend a lot on which crowd you associate with.
• Wrong or irrelevant comparisons: Different chemical compounds are, well, different. How do you choose which ones to put in the "pollutant" bag? Is a division in just two categories (good stuff here, bad pollutants there) a good idea to start with? Whether you put carbon dioxide in or out the "pollutant" bag, wouldn't you be making some wrong or irrelevant comparisons?
• The wrong option is attractive: As you can see, I'm not being very clear about which option I think is best. I'd just like to point out that both options can seem immensely attractive. If carbon emissions are a different thing from pollution, it makes it easy to get a lot of attention if your activities are about carbon emissions only, and you don't have to worry about pollution in general or feel guilty about not looking at that. If they are a form of pollution, you can just use a lot of stuff that you already had for general pollution and make it fit.
• Habit and inertia: If you are used to deal with pollution in general, you want to classify carbon emissions as pollution because that's what you are used to do. If you are used to think of carbon emissions as something very different from anything that's been a problem before, you don't want to change your mental habits either.

Getting wrong answers to questions leads to wrong actions. As the commenter already noticed: "If we think about 'pollution' as a group of different types of substance emission, and consider the need to manage them in tandem, we would be developing a different set of solutions, than if we just try to address carbon emission on its own." Then, it may be that trying to make carbon emissions fit a model best suited for some types of traditional chemical pollution makes the problem worse.

Think about all these difficulties to give a good answer to the question, and then try to answer it. Is carbon dioxide a pollutant? To help you think, it's useful to list the five valid answers to every yes/no question:

1) Yes

2) No

3) I don't know

4) Yes and no (the answer depends on assumptions that haven't been specified - "is a chameleon green?")

5) Mu (the question has incorrect assumptions - the correct answer to "Are you still beating your wife?")

My own answer to the question, at the bottom of the post.

The practice

Experiment 1

It's easy to see other people's flawed reasoning, but much harder to recognize your own. To start getting a feel for your own limitations, it may be easier to watch pets. What are the limits of what you can expect of a dog? A cat? A hamster? For example, how many things can they remember for how long?

Once you have a fair idea of the limits for different animals, it's a lot easier to think about the limits for humans. You don't have unlimited memory or unlimited capacity to understand the consequences of everything. You can't analyze every issue in detail and come up with a good answer, you use shortcuts. What shortcuts do you personally use often?

Experiment 2

Can you think of other examples of questions that are easy to answer wrong? Go through the list above and try to describe the pitfalls. After that, try to give a good answer. My own answer below may give you inspiration... maybe as something rather flawed that you'd rather avoid.

MY ANSWER

Yes and no.

With the definition of an environmentalist, the answer is a resounding "yes". Pollution is anything that causes harm, instability or discomfort in an ecosystem. Carbon emissions cause climate change, and climate change causes plenty of harm to ecosystems all over the Earth.

The popular definition of pollution is more restrictive, though. An environmentalist may talk about light pollution or thermal pollution, a layman would never say that. Most people think that pollution means only chemical and radioactive pollution, toxic to animals or plants. Under that restrictive definition, carbon dioxide isn't pollution. It isn't toxic.

In situations like this, where the layman and the expert definition of a word are different, it can be much safer to abandon the word altogether. Instead of talking of pollution in general, one can use "harm to the ecosystem/the Earth". And when you mean chemical pollution specifically, it may be best to use the whole "chemical pollution" instead of saying just "pollution" for shorthand... or mention by name the specific chemicals.

What happens when connectivity goes down?

The theory

One of my readers commented that things aren't as "black & white" as I put them in my last post on connectivity. Of course, reality is never, ever, ever, as neat as theory. I'd like to elaborate a bit more on what happens when we go from high to low connectivity, just because, from the point of view of most people, it's their idea of unmitigated disaster. A lot of connection is good, little connection is terrible.

In the first example I gave, I said the difference between a dead body and a living one is that a living body is highly connected. In that case, losing connectivity sounds like very, very bad. That is, until you realise how nightmarish would be a world if nothing could die. We couldn't eat, for a start: we animals can only eat other living things, and they must die, either before or while we eat them. So nobody would have any energy to move. There would be absolutely no space for anything new to be born, because soon all the available space would be taken up by living beings. Most changes would be impossible. It would be a crowded, stuffy, static, unchanging world. And that's exactly what tends to happen in highly connected environments where there are few ways of releasing connections. When it happens between people, this situation is called "bureaucracy"; when it happens in a forest, it's called a climax forest community, that will easily become something else as soon as something disturbs it. When it happens in a computer network, techies tend to call it "an expensive mess".

Going from high to low connectivity means that links are lost. As I explained in What's in a link?, links usually mean one or several of three things: time spent together, material flows, or information flows. If a link is broken, something is released: there's either more time or materials available (sending and receiving information also use up time). In ecosystems theory, the expressions "in collapse" and "in release phase" are often used interchangeably: an ecosystem that's losing connectivity is collapsing, but there are also plenty of resources being released that opportunists can use up. It's a necessary stage before renewal is possible.

Any time that a connection is lost, it's good to think: what is being released? It's a very common problem in an organization or group within an organization to try to keep it going even when everybody knows that it isn't doing very well and it isn't producing the results everybody hoped for. If you are involved in any group that is in this situation, it may be useful to describe the situation as resources that want to be released. What time and materials are people investing in this, that might be invested in something better if the group was disbanded?

Some people may have the attitude that it's better to do a little than nothing at all, and they may be correct. But this can be an even stronger argument for release. Some situations can be kept for long periods of time in a bad, but not bad enough state, because enough is being done to keep things going to a minimum, but not enough to get the results that are really needed. If all attempts to increase time or resources allocated to the task have failed, releasing can be the method that gets some alarm bells ringing. If the situation is really a lot worse if nobody does any work at all, somebody will notice that.

Going back to the question I asked myself on the previous post on connectivity: What effect is going to have peak oil, when transport becomes more and more costly? It's a fair bet that transport will reduce, and when those connections are lost, what is being released? Clearly, a lot of materials will stay where they were instead of zipping around the world. Instead of the rather uniform look that we have today in all the cities in the world, places will have to return to have their unique flavour. Different places will build houses with different materials, the same will go for furniture and most heavy things. Even wind turbines could be done with local materials and local techniques. Very light, expensive things will probably still trade round the world. In the old times, it was spices, in the future it will almost certainly be electronic gadgets. On the other hand, some heavy things will have to start looking very different. Cars, for example, may become something much more like boats: expensive and often highly customized. Not many people will have them, and those people will be divided among the rich and those that need it for their livelihood (imagine truckers living in their trucks).

On the other hand, if we stay just as connected when it comes to information flows, it means that all that busy time we spend trying to talk to hundreds of people will be still used up. Some people say that they expect post peak oil time to be slower and calmer, thinking it will be like pre-industrial times. I see no reason to think that. If we stay just as connected in terms of information, we'll keep rushing around madly trying to juggle a hundred things in our heads the same as before.

In my last post, I compared our possible future situation after peak oil seriously affects transport with an imaginary animal that had no proper circulatory system but had a nervous system. I said I didn't think there was such an animal. I was wrong: jellyfish don't have blood vessels, but they do have a nerve net. It helps a lot that they live in the sea, and seawater goes through all of their body and transports the oxygen and nutrients to all their cells. It's interesting that jellyfish have a rather impressive ability to regenerate, especially in their polyp form (the simplest stage of their lifecycle). I find jellyfish more interesting than most trees (that have a more complicated circulatory system but no nervous system); if my wild analogy has any use at all, future times will be more interesting than pre-industrial times. The individual cells of jellyfish are far more complex than the individual cells of trees, in fact, they have some of the most complex cells of any living creature. Maybe, and this is a wild guess, people will have to be as complex as they can be to cope with the future that's coming, and at the same time very resilient and able to re-create a human settlement starting from very little.

Wild speculations aside, it will be a good time for those that can think of a loss of a connection not so much as a loss, but as a release.

The practice

Experiment 1

If you have ever noticed anything about gardens, you'll have seen that one of the main differences between a garden an a patch of land that's been left to grow wild is that people create a lot of barriers in their gardens: walls, paths, clearly demarcated patches, seeds put carefully in some places, fertilizers and other additions to soil put selectively in some places but not others, areas that are watered and areas that aren't, weeds and insects more or less selectively eliminated. A lot of what gardeners do creates barriers and removes connectivity in the garden ecosystem.

The experiment is the following: see what happens when you don't do that. On a corner of a garden or allotment, plant seeds of your favourite flowers or vegetables all mixed up. It's more interesting if you do this under a tree. You can keep the area disconnected from the rest of the garden, but inside that area, let everything be as connected and mixed up as they like. What happens? Ideally, keep this running for two years. Do you understand better some of the things you've been told to do with certain plants? Which kinds of barriers make sense and are useful?

Experiment 2

Most of us have been told that keeping connections alive is very good. What this actually means is that many of us are overconnected.

Do this experiment to find out if you are overconnected:

1. List your usual commitments over a month, and how much time you dedicate on average to them. This should include work, family, time spent with friends, and time spent with specific hobbies or other activities you think are worthwhile.

2. Next to it, list how much time you would like to dedicate to each of them over a month, in an ideal universe where days had as many hours as you need. After this, calculate how many waking hours your ideal day would have. If it's more than 16, you know that you are overconnected.

3. Decide which ones of these connections to release, until your day only needs 16 waking hours.

Experiment 3

Are you involved in any group that is in the situation described in the theory section, still going but not really producing much results? In that case, it may be good to get all the people in the group to answer the following questions:

1. How much time and what resources are used to keep the group going?

2. What would the time and resources be used for if they weren't captured by the activities of this group?

3. What would happen if nobody did any of the things that the group does? Would it ring any alarm bells?

Then, try to decide collectively if there is a good argument to release.

Connectivity

The theory

When I wrote the post about death I had a good old rant about what I was feeling like ranting about at the time. Quite understandable rant under the circumstances, I hope you'll agree. But I've been thinking about it since, and I realised, I missed a great chance to describe one of the fundamental differences between a living body and a dead one. Again, sorry if you find the subject unpleasant, but old-fashioned analytical thinking misses a lot of the important stuff here, and systems thinking can say plenty that is useful.

The old way of telling if a body was dead or alive was to check if the heart was beating. Nowadays, we have machines that can keep the heart beating forever. The new way of telling if a body is dead or alive is to check if the brain is still active. The first method tells us if the circulatory system, that keeps blood flowing throughout our body, is still active. The second method tells us if the nervous system, that keeps information flowing inside our body, is still active. Both methods are testing a fundamental property of a system: connectivity. Blood and nerve impulses are the two flows that keep all the cells in our body heavily interconnected. Eliminate one or the other, and the body isn't a person any more, but a collection of cells. And once they stop being well connected, individual cells can't manage to stay alive on their own for very long.

Connectivity means how much each part is connected to other parts, or more accurately, the strength of the relationships between different parts. In other words, how much changes in one part of the system affects other parts of the system. For example, the transport system of rich countries and the different organs inside the body have high connectivity; beachgoers and tiger communities have low connectivity.

People who worry about oil depletion (peak oil), worry because they know that oil is essential for transport in the world. And less oil means that the world will go from being highly connected and globalized, to less connected. The burning question is whether this is going to happen in the way of a catastrophic collapse (as it happens when an animal dies) or the change can be reasonably gentle (like people losing touch with their friends in college as they get older).

To make the question even more interesting and difficult to answer, the world has recently increased enormously in connectivity in terms of information, and soon will have to reduce connectivity in terms of flow of materials. Imagine that in the early days of the evolution of animals, when they first developed a nervous system, nerves had developed incredibly fast, but shortly afterwards animals were forced to reduce the flow of blood dramatically. Is this even possible? I don't know of any example of an animal with a highly developed nervous system and a very simple circulatory system, but then, the analogy may not be useful at all.

The only thing we know for sure is that highly connected and poorly connected systems are quite different. Many people fall in the trap of thinking that one kind is fundamentally better than the other (nowadays, the "highly connected" fans are quite loud) but there isn't a better kind: it all depends on the situation.

A good way of understanding the differences between highly connected and poorly connected systems is to think about how people behave in groups when they are constanly keeping in touch with each other, in comparison with situations where people behave independently and don't communicate a lot.

Highly connected groups produce great collaboration and coordination. They produce big solutions to big problems. Decision-making is often pretty good, because different points of view have their say. They can also produce big, visible actions. That's the plus side.

The minus side is that usually some people get excluded, and some individuals may feel threatened or forced by the group to do things they didn't really want to do. They often have a poor analysis of different options ("group think" only happens in groups!). And they aren't very good at watching their surroundings, highly connected groups are often inward-looking.

On the other hand, poorly connected groups have the advantage that anyone can easily join (not many connections to make!). They easily adapt to specific needs of specific individuals. They are also good at analysis and observation, that's why we speak positively of independent analysis and independent observation.

On the other, negative hand, poorly connected groups can only produce small scale solutions. There is little coordination, which makes a whole lot of plans impossible. They aren't good for making decisions, because there isn't enough deliberation among their members. And any actions are in a small scale.

All these considerations may be very handy when you are trying to find solutions to specific problems. Is it better resolved by a highly or poorly connected group?

The practice

Experiment 1

Think of an organization you are part of (it could be your place of work or a voluntary organization you take part in). What are the main aims of the organization? How well connected are the people within it? Is the level of connection well suited to what the organization is trying to do? If not, how could you increase or reduce the level of connection?

Experiment 2

Go to the nearest garden to where you live. It could be a park or a vegetable garden, it doesn't matter. How much interaction do you think there is between different plants? Does it look highly or poorly connected? (Hint: Plants can't move, so the connections between them are often done by animals. Does it look like there are many or few species of animals living there?)

What do you think it would look like if it was more or less connected? (Another hint: as a rule of thumb, the taller the plants - trees - in an ecosystem, the more connected it is. This may not apply in highly artificial environments. Can you imagine why this rule of thumb works? Interestingly, this also applies to human habitats, highly connected cities usually have the tallest buildings. Again, can you imagine why?)

The hierarchy of life

The theory

In my last post, I broke my own rule of trying not to mention in a post a technical term that I haven't explained in previous posts. OK, I had excellent reasons to break the rules, but still, I'd like to compensate for it by explaining immediately afterwards.

The term I used was the hierarchy of life. This is a very useful concept when you are trying to understand how living systems operate at different scales. Small living systems organize into bigger living systems, all the way up to the whole Earth (to use the technical word, the whole biosphere). To make it easier to understand, I'll use human beings as an example, and I'll skip some of the levels that are less interesting.

• Cells: At the lowest level, or bodies are made up of cells. (Well, this isn't really the lowest level, but the things that happen at a smaller scale than this aren't fascinating unless you like peering into electron microscopes). Cells are nothing but tiny living things, that live their little independent lives, and can happily survive on their own if the conditions around them match exactly what they find inside our bodies. Cells are constantly dying and renewing inside our bodies. Most of the cells that make up your body now didn't exist seven years ago.
• Organs: Cells make up all your organs: the heart, the brain, the stomach, etc. Each organ is a relatively independent system: if you hurt badly your leg, your heart will continue beating without any trouble.
• Human bodies: Your body is made up of all your organs working together in a beautifully orchestrated system. Human beings are quite independent of each other and can survive on their own for long periods, but without each other's help their physical and mental wellbeing is in danger.
• Villages, towns and cities and their bioregions: People live together in populations of different sizes. Some living creatures create their own ecosystems around them, and humans are particularly impressive in that respect. They bring all sorts of materials from long distances to build their refuges, and they eliminate most other living creatures except a few that they like (grass, park trees and pigeons) and a few that have become extremely good at adapting to the conditions they create (cockroaches and rats). Cities need agricultural land around them to support them, and together they can be called a bioregion, that can exist relatively independent of the surrounding land.
• The Earth: There is a rather fancy, long and complicated word to describe all the bits of the Earth that have been touched by human presence: the anthroposphere. By now, this is pretty much the whole Earth, so we'd better call a spade a spade. Life on Earth depends on the Sun to continue existing, but apart from that, it exists quite independently. James Lovelock is famous for his theory that the whole Earth is a self-controlling system, though some people have their doubts, and they ask: and how did it become self-controlling? I'm agnostic on the question of whether the Earth has been a self-controlling system for millions of years (though the evidence is compelling). But I'm pretty certain that by now, when humans are controlling just about all the ecosystems, the Earth is definitely self-controlling. Whether the Earth is currently doing a great job of controlling itself is a matter of debate, the latest news on climate change suggest it's doing quite poorly.

This is a useful overview of all the scales in the bigger picture, and I won't repeat this again. From now on, most of the posts are going to focus on scales somewhere in between individuals and cities, with the occasional jump to the whole Earth.

The practice

Experiment 1

Watch Powers of Ten. Just watch it. It should be required at schools. I never figured out how anybody is supposed to understand their place in the Universe without this.

Experiment 2

The hierarchy of life, as I described it, is done in a few big jumps. There are actually a lot of smaller intermediate levels. Try to think all the intermediate levels between an individual and a whole city.

There isn't a single correct answer to this one. Try to discover several possible ladders. How much influence do you have at each of those levels? Which ladder makes you look more important? Does any ladder make you think you need to learn more about something?