What makes problems difficult

The theory

The reader question I will consider for today's post is: "How does one make a group forward-looking rather than backward-looking?"

This takes me back to the wheel of life, that I have been talking about in other posts. Like I said at the end of the post, self-controlling systems can still go wrong. And they can go wrong at any stage of the wheel:

Jared Diamond, in a chapter of his extremely interesting book Collapse, tries to explain how societies can sometimes get into so much trouble that they collapse. He divides difficult problems in four categories, that can be mapped roughly to the wheel of life, and they apply not just to societies, but to any self-controlling system:

• Some problems are difficult to anticipate: People, like just about all living creatures, are naturally backward-looking: it's a lot easier to remember the past than to anticipate the future. Failure to anticipate a problem is a failure of thinking and feeling the right things when the early warning signals appear. It has to be said, humans are by far the best at anticipating on this Earth, but even the best can fail. You can try to avoid this by recruiting the best thinkers and putting them in touch with people with the best records for accurate "gut feelings", but there are no guarantees. Examples of problems difficult to anticipate are frogs failing to guess when it's a good time to cross the road (the problem is far too difficult for a frog's intelligence), and bankers failing to anticipate a global financial collapse.
• Some problems are difficult to see: It's pretty much impossible to do something about a problem if you don't notice it. This is a failure of watching. Examples of problems difficult to see are most types of chemical pollution if you don't have the right equipment to detect it (for example, if you are a bird), and people who don't believe in climate change because they can't notice much change in weather patterns.
• Some problems are difficult to act on: Jared Diamond says that, perhaps surprisingly, most problems that destroy societies fall into this category. This is a failure of choosing. People may notice that there is a problem, they think it's a problem and feel it's wrong, but still can't decide what to do about it or decide to do something that is clearly not helping. Many accusations of people being backward-looking actually mean that people are deciding to go for old solutions because they can't bring themselves to do something new. Examples of problems difficult to act on are a pigeon getting all confused in front of a mirror, and the trouble world leaders have every time that they try to sign a world treaty.
• Some problems are difficult to resolve: Even when a decision is made, the action to be taken can itself be extremely difficult. This is a failure of doing. For those that can't see how difficult it is, it can look like laziness, indecision, plain old stubbornness or inability to do something different. A good example is a fly trying to get out of a window. We all have seen them hitting the glass again and again until somebody opens the window, and they will still hit the glass a few times before they manage to get out. But from the point of view of a fly, there is really no other solution but keep bumping their heads (which must be somewhat painful) until they get out. They can't see the glass, and they are too simple to have the faintest clue of what the problem is. All they may know is that in the past, if they hit again and again this strange barrier of hard air, it will eventually let them go. It's tough, but for a fly, it's the only solution. A human example can be a famine. There are a number of things people can do if it happens to them, none of them pleasant or easy.

In short, being forward-looking and having all the right new solutions to new problems is anything but easy. But a good understanding of why problems can be so difficult is a first step towards finding those exciting new solutions. If you can identify which step of the wheel of life seems to be broken, you can apply your energies to fixing it.

The practice

Experiment 1

Do you have a pet that keeps doing something that you would like it to stop doing? Do you have a garden that is giving you too much work? Instead of trying to fight the problem constantly, try a new approach: why isn't this animal or plant already doing what you would like it to do? It's already self-controlling, why isn't it already keeping itself to the boundaries you would like? It already knows how to keep within a boundary, that's for sure.

This little story may give you inspiration:

The palace gardens of the Emperor of New China were famous in the whole world, and justly so: the chief gardener was a real artist. With the passing of years, the style of the gardens changed slowly, and they looked wilder, more like a forest than a garden. But still, it was an incredibly beautiful forest, and the Emperor loved it.

One day, the Emperor died and was buried like an acorn, and his son took his place. He heard unsettling news about the gardener: he had dismissed most of his helpers, he never pruned the trees and he almost didn't work. When the new Emperor asked the gardener, he mused strange things about talking with plants in a language they could understand. He said plants and trees didn't understand scissors, because they kept growing the same way; he said one should explain them what one wanted with light and water. The Emperor thought the gardener was a bit crazy, but the gardens were lovelier than ever, so he kept him at his service.

Time passed, and one day a messenger came and told the new Emperor, who was old by now, that the gardener had died at a very advanced age after a long illness. The Emperor was very surprised, because the gardens weren't neglected at all. But the surprise was much bigger when he knew that the old gardener had never gone out in the last ten years. He'd made a garden that didn't need care at all: just rainwater and sunlight. The shapes of plants weren't cut with scissors, but modelled by water and light and different kinds of soil.

In more practical terms, try to identify what kind of problem your pet or plant has:

• Is it too difficult to understand for a simple creature what you want? Can you make it far simpler?
• Is it difficult for your pet or plant to detect what you want? Can you use something that your pet or plant can perceive easily?
• Is the choice itself difficult? Can you make your preferred option much easier to choose?
• Is what you want to difficult to do? Can you make it easier?

Experiment 2

Pick your pet peeve: a favourite personal problem that you still haven't been able to resolve. Try to figure out what makes it difficult according to the points above. Is it difficult to anticipate when it's going to happen again? Is it difficult to notice until it's too late? Does it present you with difficult choices? Is it that what you have to do is, in itself, difficult? Or is it a combination of two or more of these?

Once you have identified what are the problem steps in the wheel of life, try to see if there is any way that you could strengthen those very steps. Some future posts will have more guidance on this, but try to think something yourself for a start.

Kinds of networks

The theory

The reader question I will try to address for today's post is: "How does one make a group outward-looking rather than inward-looking?"

This question takes us again to the theme of networks. Because what makes a group look inwards or outwards is fundamentally the kind of communications network it has, both for internal and external communications.

Let's have a look at different kinds of networks and how they work:

• The line or chain: This is the simplest kind of network there is, so simple that many people wouldn't even call it a network. When people talk about it, usually they are thinking about a part of a bigger network, as when they say "a food chain" or "a command chain". The most important thing you need to know about a chain is that anything that is passed along that chain (information, food, materials) has a risk of being lost or degraded in some way at each step, and the transmission from one end to the other will be slow. An animal at the top of a food chain has only access to a small percentage of the available calories, but at the same time, it has a higher risk of accumulating pollutants in its body. And we all know that information tends to get degraded or lost when it goes up or down a command chain.
• The ring or cycle: A cycle can compensate, to a certain extent, for the losses that happen along a chain. In ecology cycles are common, we have for example the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the oxygen cycle and the nitrogen cycle. What is lost at one end may be recovered at the other end. Good organizations have feedback mechanisms that will allow people to know if the supplies or information provided at one end arrived intact at the other end, and if not, some mechanism to recycle.
• The star: A star is a network with a central node, called hub, connected to several other nodes. It has the advantage that the connection between the hub and the other nodes is direct, with minimal losses. The hub has the best access to information, food, etc. On the other hand, links often need some kind of maintenance. The hub may spend a lot of time, energy, money, or other resources, just keeping those links working. A good example of a star network is a mother that provides for her young. The mother has often complete control over what she will give to her young, and they are completely dependant on her. But keeping her young will take out a lot of her energy and time.
• The bus: The idea of bus comes for computer networks, where a simple cable can do the function of a central hub. Sometimes, what is doing the function of a central hub is very different from the nodes, it's something big and passive. For example, a river connects in some way all the plants and animals living inside and at the banks of the river. Or a website could keep all the members of an organization in touch with each other. You could say that the river or the website are buses.
• The tree: A tree is a network that combines some of the best characteristics of stars and chains. On one hand, it keeps the distances between two nodes reasonably short, avoiding the problems of a long chain. On the other hand, each of the hubs has a reasonably small number of links, avoiding the problems of a big star. Trees are found in all sorts of situations, starting with... trees, with all their leaves connected in this way. Another well-known example is hierarchical trees in organizations.
• The fully connected network: A fully connected network is one where every node is connected to every other node. They are usually rather small networks, because maintaining a link is often costly or difficult. For example, in an embryo all the cells will be touching each other up until the point it reaches eight cells: from then on, they lose direct contact. An example from human communication networks is mailing lists: everybody receives all the messages. As soon as there are too many people sending too many emails, they lose popularity.
• The mesh: A mesh is a network where the links are easily done and undone, and are often changing. In some species, networks formed by family ties are very stable, while in others, they are a mesh. Human social networks are often a mesh, as well.

When it comes to communication networks, looking inwards or outwards depends on how many links a node has and how stable they are. Unstable links promote looking outwards, looking for new links to form. Also, the less links there are, the more time a node will have to look outwards. In the types of networks described above, the most inward-looking nodes are (in this order) those in a fully-connected network, the hub of a star, and the hubs of a tree - the closest to the root, the more inward-looking. Nodes in chains and cycles also tend to be quite inward-looking, partly because communication problems also increase the focus inward. The most outward-looking nodes (in this order) are the nodes of a mesh, the outer nodes of a star or a bus, and the outer nodes of a tree.

The practice

Experiment 1

This is a useful experiment to see how a network can look very different depending on which parts of it we are looking at. The network in this experiment will be a food web. To do this, you will need access to a patch of wildlife.

1. Pick a common plant you can see. If you don't know the name of the plant, ask or look in a plant guide to find out what it is.

2. Sit and look at it until you see an insect that will eat it. Identify the insect.

3. Find out a bird or other animal that is likely to eat that insect. You could do this by direct observation, if you are patient enough, or just find out from books or the Internet.

4. Continue up the food chain until you reach an animal that doesn't have natural predators. You have just identified a complete food chain.

5. This food chain, in fact, can also be seen as a cycle. Find out which microbes will decompose the final predator when it dies, converting it into fertilizer for the original plant.

6. Find out what other animals this final predator will eat. Now you can see this part of the food web is a star.

Experiment 2

Start with the experiment 1 in the post on networks. A few questions after you have drawn the red, black and green networks:

• Do you think that the red network is a mesh? Do you think that the green network is a mesh? Is this good or bad?
• Does any part of any network look like a long chain? Is there any way of making that chain shorter?
• Does any part of any network look like a cycle? Is this helping for feedback? Could it be used for feedback if it isn't working like that now?
• What parts of the network look like a star? Do you think the hubs may be overworked? Is there any way you could create something like a bus?
• Does any part of any network look like a tree? Are the people involved aware of this?
• Does any part of any network look like a fully connected network? Is this taking up too much time and resources? Should the groups merge?

The steps of the wheel of life

The theory

An issue that was raised in the emails that I have received so far could be summarized in the following question: "How does one avoid the strange 'new age' beliefs that are found in many green groups?" I had to smile because this comes from a Buddhist that gave me a Tarot deck as a parting gift. In his defense I must say he didn't say exactly that, I'm paraphrasing, but I'm sure you recognize the feeling is common enough.

The truth is that most people are uncomfortable, to different degrees, with any religious / spiritual / philosophical beliefs that are too different from their own. And at the same time, many people see a religious / spiritual / philosophical dimension in their relationship with the environment. Put both together, and you often will see people drifting apart for reasons they don't dare to say. Nobody likes to tell anybody: "Listen, you are in awe about such ridiculous things!"

The problem, of course, isn't exclusive to green groups. It's a general issue in our society. We may have tolerance for other belief systems, but that's as far as it goes. I think the fundamental problem is that belief systems deal with a general area of life that our society still doesn't know very well how to deal with. And I won't say that this area is mysterious, mystical and trascendent stuff. I think this dark area is the two sections of the wheel of life that are most often missed: Feel and Choose. I can't think of a single spiritual belief (including atheist beliefs) that isn't directly related to one or both of those.

So it's the perfect moment to look in a bit more detail at each of the parts of the wheel of life:

• Watch: The meaning of "watch" here is using all your senses and all the available sources of information. To watch properly, you need to take your time before you start thinking, not jumping to conclusions. This is something that most people find very difficult to do, but once you learn the trick, you will avoid many mistakes.
• Think: Thinking means connecting everything you have watched now with everything you have watched in the past, and trying to find any patterns. Most of the time, the pattern will be so clear that it will need very little thinking. But if there is time, it's often worthwhile to give something a bit more thought and see if any other patterns emerge.
• Feel: We live in a society that often misunderstands completely what feelings are. They are not some archaic remnant from our past as monkeys that is meant to disappear when we evolve further, and they aren't either there to experience fully, wallow in and help you ignore your thoughts and justify any choice. Emotions are fundamentally evaluations, they tell us immediately if something is good or bad, and what kind of good or bad. And they are meant to work together with our thoughts, that's why there is an arrow going back from Feel to Think. Thoughts affect our feelings and feelings affect our thoughts.
• Choose: This is also often misunderstood. You may even have heard somebody saying that choice doesn't even exist, that people believe that we choose but our environment, genes and brain structure completely determine what we are going to do next. But clearly we choose, and clearly we often make wrong choices. The trick to making good choices is to do right all the steps that come before, and when you get to the point of choosing, pick the one that feels closest to right.
• Do: How often people go through all the steps, make a firm decision, and then don't do it? Once you decide to do something, it's best to take action immediately. Don't tell yourself that you can't do anything right now, a first step is usually very simple. It may be something like setting an appointment, finding some information or talking to somebody.
• Watch again: This is often forgotten: the wheel of life closes back on itself. If you do something, and then don't watch to see if you got the results you expected, you might as well not have bothered to do anything in the first place.

The practice

If you haven't done the experiments in the previous post, the wheel of life, what are you waiting for?

The wheel of life: the basic self-controlling loop

The theory

I have received several questions by email from friends who have read the blog so far. One of them, a telecomms engineer, made several good points, among them one that could be summarized in the question: "How does one avoid the anti-technology attitude that many green groups have?"

This is a complicated issue that would deserve several posts to reply. And with my mathematical background, I'm inclined to start from the beginning and look at a much wider question: How do people, groups, living creatures and ecosystems stay in the right course and avoid going in the wrong direction?

The answer is that all living beings and ecosystems are self-controlling systems. And in every self-controlling system you can find some variation of what cyberneticists call a self-controlling loop. I prefer to call it "the wheel of life", because it's typical of living systems, and, let's face it, it isn't so much of a mouthful. The wheel of life looks like this:

If this looks a bit confusing, a very simple example will let you see how it works. Imagine a bee trying to get to a yummy-looking flower. The bee will first watch her surroundings. Then she will do a tiny bit of thinking, as much as a bee can do, which isn't a lot. She may think something like: "The flower is a bit more sunwards" or "The wind is a bit stronger than before". Then she will feel something like: "Hmmm... sunwards is good" or "I want to beat my wings harder". All this is more complicated than what a bee can think or feel, mind you, but there isn't any easy way to put a person into the really simple mind of a bee. Then the bee will choose a flying course and follow it. And continue watching her surroundings...

I like using short, simple words because most people understand them without any trouble. But if you have seen some variation of the loop before, they were probably using the long words in brackets. Brainy people like long words, they can't help themselves.

And there are good chances that you have seen some version of the loop before. If you know anything about permaculture, you have seen the loop observe > analyze > design > implement > observe. "Design" there is shorthand for "evaluate and select". Another place you may have seen the loop is as the rational planning model, that is summarized with the loop observe (define goals and system) > analyze (generate and analyze solutions) > evaluate > select > implement > observe.

The wheel of life is what keeps things going in just about anything that self-regulates: people, bees, big organizations, computers to some extent, etc. Because it's a loop, if there is a mistake at any point, it tends to correct itself automatically. For example, let's suppose that our bee didn't see very well where she was going. She might have thought that the flower was somewhere else, and corrected course to the wrong direction. But then, watching again, she would have noticed her mistake and corrected course again.

But the wheel of life, wonderful as it is, doesn't always fix every problem. There are situations when a self-controlling system can still go wrong. But that is for another post.

The practice

Experiment 1

If you are running any project, no matter at what stage it is, it's always useful to see it as a self-controlling system and compare it with the wheel of life. The project should go through something like the following stages:

1. Watch: Look at the current situation. What is there that makes you want to change it? What are your goals? What obstacles are there to change? What means do you have to change it? Collect as much information as you can.

2. Think: Now that you have all the information, what is the picture that emerges? Do you still want to change the same things as before? Do you still want to change anything at all? Do you have a clearer idea of what your goals are? (you should, really, or you haven't done your homework properly). Do you know how to deal with the obstacles? Would it be better to wait for ? Or does the issue look more urgent than before? And the most important question: what are your options, realistically?

3. Feel: This is the point that a lot of people just don't know how to do. Everybody has feelings, it's just that most people don't have the slightest idea of what to do about them. The best thing to do is think about all the options, one by one, and ask yourself how you feel about them. Happy? Sad? Scared? Angry? Surprised? Like you really want to do it? Some mixture of several feelings? Which one makes you feel better? How do the other people that are involved in this feel about the different options?

4. Choose: If you have done right the step above, and you are the main decision-maker, the choice should be pretty clear and straight-forward by now. If this is a project involving several people, they may disagree and you will need to follow some kind of group decision-making process. This is something I will touch on future posts.

5. Do: This is often easier said than done. You will find that during the "do" stage of any project you go many times through several small wheels of life: you have to keep watching, thinking, feeling, choosing, and doing all the time.
6. Watch again: This is the most often forgotten part of any project. Now that it's finished, what does it look like? Are you satisfied with it? Did it accomplish the goals you had at the beginning? Will you need to repeat the whole project again at some time in the future? Will it need regular maintenance? Is there anything that still needs change? Were you correct in the expectations that you had at the beginning?

No matter where you are currently in your project, it's often useful to look back at what you have done so far and check if you followed the steps as thoroughly as you should have. And the wheel of life will give you a blueprint for the steps that you haven't done yet.

Experiment 2

Do you grow anything in your garden? Do you have a pet? Do you have access to any place where you can watch wildlife? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, you can do this experiment.

This is about watching living creatures and learning how they self-regulate. Observe them and try to figure out how they do each of the steps of the wheel of life:

1. Watch: What can this creature sense? Light? Colour? Sound? Taste? Chemical products? Warmth? Pressure? Humidity?

2. Think: Can they solve simple problems? "Simple" may mean really, really simple. When I was little, I had a book about scientific experiments that included one called: "A maze for a plant". It involved putting a beansprout in a closed box with a really simple maze, and the sprout would quickly grow towards the place with the most light. Apparently earthworms can also learn a simple T-shaped maze, and eventually know that nice compost is always found on the right side.

3. Feel: Everything else being equal, what does this creature prefer? Hot? Cold? Wet? Dry?Sunny places? Dark places? Particular types of food or soil?

4. Choose: What does this creature do when given a choice? Is it shy? Does it try a bit of one and then the other? Does it just pick one, whatever is nearest?

5. Do: What can this creature do? Can it move? How fast? Does it have different ways of moving? How does it eat? How does it grow? Does it always grow in the same way? Can it communicate with others of the same kind?

Finally, try to put all this together until you have a clear idea of how this creature manages to keep alive every day and deal with the difficulties that it normally comes across. People often discover that after an experiment like this, they stop looking down at other living beings and realise that they are perfectly capable of managing without the help of humans or anybody else, thank you very much.