GOVERNANCE IN THE RELATIVE WHEN
ALLENNA LEONARD, Opening Address
ISSS Waterloo Wilfred Laurier University July 19, 2010
The theme “Governance for a Resilient Planet” came as an answer to a question: “What is the biggest threat to our viability as a complex society?”
Last year, I proposed a set of global viability indices organized on the template of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model. (Beer, 1979, 81,85)The integration of multiple perspectives using group processes such as Team Syntegrity (Beer, 1993) was suggested to flesh out the picture.
Information from real-time indices is one requirement. The capacity to use that information is the other. Most governance structures today lack the capacity to absorb, integrate and act on information in a timely and effective manner. Resilience depends upon it.
I want to touch on several points:
- the problems of resilient governance from a time scale and systems perspective
- some systems concepts related to resilience
- the limits and opportunities provided by non-transitivity and heterarchy
- some examples that work with nontransitivity and heterarchy.
Threats to resilience and opportunities to overcome them exist in the present but the decisions and actions taken in the past cast long shadows into the future. Some of our current deficiencies are the result. They constrain us now from being able to act on what we know. Tomorrow’s resilience will depend on today’s actions.
The most elegant governance structures are intrinsic - that is they are part of the nature of the entity itself. The system is brought back into control in the real -time act of going out of control.
In mechanical terms, we think of the Watt steam governor. As its speed increases towards its limit, the set of whirling balls rises and begins to block the airflow to the engine. As the engine slows, the airflow increases and it speeds up again.
We see many examples in nature with no external authority figure. The slime mold is either a group of one-celled animals or a differentiated collective depending on the amount of nutrition. A bee colony reaches a certain size and some bees leave with a new queen to start another. Symbiotic relationships, such as the lichen formed by algae and fungi, maintain a consistent balance.
Our social organizations are more complex. Technologies allow us to disregard many natural limitations. Small communities – of geography or practice - sometimes display intrinsic control. But larger institutions can become autopoetic – more interested in maintaining their internal relationships than fulfilling their stated purposes. They may become stuck and unable to learn or adapt as their environments change.
As Roger Harnden (Harnden, 2010) posted on the Metaphorum website recently:
“Disaster occurs when authority and infrastructure fall out of step – because when that happens an increasingly large number of people (citizens) are living the new infrastructure in their recurrent interactions, regardless of what social, legal or financial systems are doing.”
To think about governance as it exists today is to engage in a form of time travel. Familiar faces of governance: the government, the family, the church and the company no longer map adequately onto lived experience.
Turn the calendar back two hundred years or so. Our parliamentary systems began in the 18th century. Newtonian physics and linear causality were the latest in modern thought. They were advanced for their time and served well. But, they could not anticipate the possibility of nuclear war or environmental damage serious enough to threaten our very survival - never mind a world of nearly seven billion people with instantaneous global communication.
Governments fall short when dealing with multiple communities, variable time frames and changes of scale. They are not fast enough, flexible enough or far-sighted enough.
Family governance models from the 21st century coexist with those of the 11th. Last month, in Toronto, a father and brother were sentenced for the so-called honor killing (another name for murder) of a 16-year-old girl. Her offense? She wanted to wear western clothes and get a part time job like her friends. This month, six same-sex couples were married on a float in the Gay Pride parade – the largest in North America. People with such diametrically opposed views of authority and tradition share this city and this planet. What they do not share is a commensurate view of the boundaries and goals of governance or the balance between autonomy and cohesion.
“The Church” is no longer a monolithic institution. Most religions share versions of the Golden Rule. But, internal divisions between various strains of fundamentalists and progressives within a religion are often greater than those between people in different religions. Many religious figures reduce variety for their worshippers leading to bitter conflict.
Turn the calendar back again. Although its roots go back to the middle ages, corporations, as we know them today, essentially emerged in the 19th century. Privileges relating to the use of property, limitations on liability and the creation of artificial ‘legal persons’ were conceived as responses to conditions in the early days of the industrial revolution.
Corporations are not up to the challenge of different stakeholders, time frames and scale any more than governments. ‘Too big to fail’ and an oil spill directly affecting four states and the migrating birds and fish of two continents could not have been imagined then. Nor would the notion of limited liability have predicted a world where shareholders reap the rewards when things go well but taxpayers who had no say are on the hook when they don’t.
We get into trouble by ignoring the constraints of channel capacity. Picture yourself in the 18th century. There were printing presses, but speaking and handwriting were the dominant modes of communication. The telegraph wasn’t invented until the 19th century and radio, television and the telephone not until the first half of the 20th.
People can only absorb and reflect upon so much information at a time. Legislators are presented with bills of over a thousand pages and are vastly outnumbered by lobbyists – many of whom have a financial stake in the outcome. Citizens and business people also struggle to keep up. It’s impossible, so it is necessary to de facto delegate most complex decisions.
Incoming information needs to be consciously filtered so that people do not drown in details or miss a weak signal that is important. It is easy to forget that time, like space, is a dimension. Too many demands and too much variety have the same effect as too many cars on the road – gridlock and a lack of resilience in the face of disturbance.
If we tried to run a car with parts from many different model years, it wouldn’t move an inch. People, and other living things are more resourceful and will self-organize in the absence of a governance framework. But sometimes, instead of encouraging innovation, governance structures actively discourage it.
Governance still has the same purpose – to steer behaviour in desired directions to achieve desired results. Survival, sustainability and resilience are overriding goals. But what is done doesn’t match with what needs to be done.
How can we close the gap?
Anyone who reads the newspaper today might say that we haven’t done a very good job recently of achieving objectives and avoiding risks according to the traditional paradigm.
They’d be right.
Part of the reason is that without a systems perspective, measures don’t have requisite variety. (Ashby, 1956) The models aren’t as big as the problems they’re supposed to handle. Individuals, families and companies absorb the full impact of their environments. Their models need to have requisite variety too. Without reasonably accurate models of themselves and their environments, they can’t buffer themselves against disturbances, govern their own behaviour or allocate their resources of time and money.
There are some tools in use.
Futures research methodologies, scenario construction, Delphi, System Dynamics, the Viable System Model, the Vester Sensitivity model, Team Syntegrity, Warfield’s Structured Design Process and Bayesian and fuzzy logic and others we’ll talk about this week are all good tools, but they have to be used.
These tools depend on having a stakeholder friendly environment as well as enough information about the situation to populate the model, a cross-section of stakeholders and the time for deliberation and consideration.
Here is an example from cybernetics that applies to both observed and observing systems.
Feedback takes note of the output and adjusts the input to correct output errors or encourage preferred trends. It may be ‘negative’ – that is error correcting - or ‘positive’ - oriented toward growth or increase. A complex system will have many feedback loops, some of which are designed and some of which arise out of interactions. A complex system has to find the right balance. If negative loops do not outnumber positive ones, the systems will be unstable. But, if there are too few, growth and emergence are blocked.
To be an effective regulator, like the Watt Steam Governor, a feedback loop has to be able to get timely accurate readings and to be able to control or influence the input.
Everyone involved in governance should look at all their accountability systems and ask some hard questions.
Do they measure the right variables?
Is the time scale fast enough to catch red flags and long enough to cover the full effects?
Are there means to act on the information?
And, finally, how easy is it to game the system?
Satisfactory answers to these questions determine whether a government regulation achieves its aims, a company’s protocols are robust against lapses or a parents able to guide their children toward healthy adulthood.
Some feedback and reporting systems make things worse by allowing vicious circles or perverse reward systems to develop.
The Gulf oil spill is an example. Fines are assessed on the basis of how much oil is spilled. So, there is an advantage to being lax about recording the spillage and providing the lowest estimates possible. But, without accurate readings. scientific research and damage control are operating in the dark.
Others don’t keep going long enough to provide a full picture. Do you remember the last big spill – the Exxon Valdez? Many clean-up workers got sick afterwards and some still have serious health problems. But, these workers weren’t followed in a systematic manner. As is frequently the case with long-term occupational health problems, sick former workers have found it difficult to ‘prove’ cause and effect. Yet the statistical probability of high percentages falling ill independent of their exposure is infinitesimal.
In order to promote resilience, (Resilience Alliance, 2010) governance systems must take account of more complexity and integrate new knowledge from fields that either did not exist in the past or existed in a much simpler form. Sometimes they must relinquish certainty and act on the basis of probability or the precautionary principle.
Anthropology, biology, communication theory, mathematics, neurophysiology, physics and psychology are just a few of the disciplines that were much different or did not yet exist when governance systems were adopted.
The cybernetics of observing systems takes us in a different direction. It is not just the notion of the whole system but the appreciation of the variety of perspectives – not only ‘where you stand depends on where you sit’ but also each person’s unique constructions of reality. Their dynamics lead to complex and shifting networks of needs and preferences.
Laws, to be fair must be applied to everyone equally but the impact of consistent application is not a consistent result. Standard governance assumes linear causality and linear hierarchical preferences and structures. It depends on judicial discretion to deal with extenuating circumstances and special considerations.
It’s not complicated if the offense is when a person steals a loaf of bread. But what about when a short-sighted action harms others halfway around the world? What about the corporation or government that makes a decision based on expediency? What is the accountability for long term consequences when the responsible individuals are long gone?
Legal remedies often focus on who is to blame. But an orientation toward resilience would balance accountability with the need to move on from the situation as it is. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an example.
Twentieth century discoveries in science and mathematics have taken us in a new direction toward heterarchy and non-transitivity.
Many of us have played the game rock-paper-scissors.
Rock breaks (defeats) scissors
Scissors cuts (defeats) paper
Paper covers (defeats) rock
This circular relationship A over B, B over C, C over A is explored by Kenneth Arrow’s mathematics and demonstrated by observations and experiments in nature. For example, Warren McCulloch (McCulloch, 1945) showed that such circularities were common. He said:
“Circularities in preference instead of indicating inconsistencies, actually demonstrate consistency of a higher order than had been dreamed of in our philosophy. An organism possessed of this nervous system – (containing) six neurons – is sufficiently endowed to be unpredictable from any theory founded on a scale of values. It has a heterarchy of values and is thus interactively too rich to submit to a summum bonum.”
This has made it impossible to design, for example, a preferential voting system that satisfies all the criteria of fairness and reflects voters’ actual preferences. Never mind that even in the west, countries are struggling to make sure that traditional elections are fair and free from tampering.
When it comes to issues, the situation becomes more complex, yet decisions still must be taken on such issues as the legality or illegality of drugs, the limits of genetic manipulation and how the costs of fixing the effects of environmental damage should be divided.
How do we look for these consistencies of a higher order?
Some methodologies delve beneath the surface.
George Kelly’s (Kelly, 1955) Personal Construct Theory and Repertory Grid methodology is one approach. Kelly had people name elements that influenced their choices and compare them in groups of three. He asked them to contrast them – one to two and to tell him how they made the distinction. In this way he was able to discover their underlying constructs. These individualized constructs provided a framework – often unconscious – for the way they interpreted their world.
Donald Schon and Martin Rein (Schon & Rein, 1994) in their book “Frame Reflection” and George Lakoff (Lakoff, 2002) in his book “Moral Politics” both sought to explore or explain the bedrock of emotion and belief systems that influence how we interpret the world in front of us.
The effect is not always benign. Neuro-marketing tries to find associations that predispose people to purchasing their products.
Manipulation is a real risk.
How do governance structures to take these developments into account?
They have to depend more on parameters than on specific rules and on processes more than protocols. Establishing floors – murdering young girls is not ok, no matter what culture you come from - is one option. So is establishing ceilings – too big to fail is too big to be held accountable and should not be countenanced. Such boundaries work to guard against situations that would threaten the resilience and viability of the whole.
Bottom up has greater variety than top down.
It is well known that, while hub and spoke or tree structures are efficient for simple governance situations, heterarchies and networks are more robust when tasks and goals become more complex. Authority isn’t static but depends on the redundancy of potential command. It follows the relevant information.
But many times, the way forward is not obvious. Then, the best strategy is to engage in dialogues and processes that allow people to build heuristic measures rather than algorithmic recipes.
A practical step is to encourage approaches that involve a high degree of self-organization and self-regulation.
Some of these are familiar social innovations.
The micro-lending practices of the Grameen Bank provide small amounts of capital to borrowers who do not have collateral. Such transactions were too small to interest traditional banks and did not fit any of their models for loan guarantees.
The chaordic structure of the VISA organization designed by Dee Hock (Waldrup, 1996) provided a minimal governance structure that allowed for collaboration and competition to exist together.
Community psychotherapy as practiced in Brazil (Grandesso, 2010) provides opportunities for mental health help when there is a shortage of mental health workers. People come together and nominate their problems. The group chooses one problem to discuss and everyone shares their experience and insight about it. The mental health worker acts as a facilitator and people help each other and self-organize their responses.
LETS or local exchange trading networks (Linton, 1994) provide an interest free currency based on goods and services traded among members of a particular community. It is sometimes combined with some variety of ‘green’ dollars or pounds that do not require people to be members bartering goods and services themselves.
Transition towns (Hopkins and Heinberg, 2008) take local communities in the direction of a more local and more sustainable way of life. The town is regarded as a system. In difficult times, such as those following a disaster, networks of such towns may provide a resource for regional recovery.
Industrial symbiosis such as has arisen in the Danish community of Kallenberg (Kalundbarg, 2009) could be a model. It brings together a number of different businesses with the municipality to use their resources more effectively and sustainably.
These and other steps move toward consistency of a higher order and push the boundaries of our philosophy. They are examples of how to engage high variety environments while retaining the potential for redundancy of potential command.
Retooling governance structures to accommodate heterarchies and networks and devolve appropriate authority to them is a major challenge. It calls for more and different voices to be heard and for faster response times when things go wrong. It calls for a broad tolerance for different norms while placing a floor under which no one should fall. Ulrich Beck (Beck, 1998) called for various forms of ‘sub-politics’ to fill the variety gap. These would devolve complex decisions to broadly representative specialist bodies.
What we do now to adapt governance systems to the 21st century will likely carry forward decades if not centuries into the future. Can we follow the aboriginal peoples and plan for the seventh generation?
In the systems and cybernetics community, we have good tools and we can keep developing and extending them. We have theory behind how feedback loops work and how self-organizing groups of people can succeed. We can help them to become more resilient and work to improve resilience in the ‘relative when’.
In governance, like in comedy, timing is everything.
References
Beck, U. (1992) The Risk Society. London: Sage.
Beer, S. (1979) Heart of Enterprise. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Beer, S. (1981) Brain of the Firm, 2nd ed. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Beer, S. (1985) Diagnosing the System for Organizations. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Beer, S. (1995) Beyond Dispute: the Invention of Team Syntegrity. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
Grandesso, M. (2010) Practicas Novosas en la intervencion con familias: modelo de terapia communitaria en Brazil’ at Transformacions con la familia.
Harnden, R. (2010) Communication. Metaphorum Listserv.
Hopkins, R. and Heinberg, R. The Transition Handbook: from oil dependence to local resilience. Chelsea, UK: Green Books.
Lakoff, G. (2002) Moral Politics, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kelly, G. A (1955) Theory of Personal Constructs. New York: Norton.
Linton, M. (1994) ‘The LETS System design method’ Landsman Community Services paper # 1.3.
McCulloch, W. (1989) Heterachy of values determined by the topology of nervous nets’ in Collected Works of Warren McCulloch. Salinas CA: Intersystems Publications. pp 467-71.
Schon, D. and Rein, M. (1994) Frame Reflection: toward the resolution of intractable policy controversies. New York: Basic Books.
Waldrup, W.M. (1996)‘The trillion dollar vision of Dee Hock’ Fast Company, Oct. 31 issue.
www.resilienceallience.org (2010)
www.symbiosis.dk (2009) Description of work in Kalundberg, Denmark.