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.