Life: What’s the Big Deal?

At first, at least for our universe, there was the Big Bang. The universe materialized and expanded and manifested apparent order in the form of stars and galaxies and superclusters and dark matter and black holes and so on. But it also began to run down. This running-down behavior is called entropy and ultimate entropy is believed to be the end state of our universe. However, not too long after the Big Bang the Little Bang occurred. This Little Bang, fortunately for us, was characterized by the emergence of life. And according to luminaries such as Albert Szent-Györgyi life began, against all odds, to run up.

Now this does not mean that life forms, at least in the material world, don’t eventually die and ultimately exhibit entropy. But it does mean that life in almost all of its forms continues to escape to higher and higher orders of existence and processing. This anti-entropy, or syntropy, is a hallmark of life. And, so far, it appears to be the biggest-damned deal the universe has to offer. So even more than the Big Bang, one could argue, life is the big deal. Life and its perpetuity is why we are here. Whether we’re talking about physical or metaphysical, material or spiritual, solid or ephemeral, life in all of its manifestations seem to be the primary purpose of the universe.

So here’s the paradox. We have, seemingly, a universe with a strong anthropic principle guiding it but we also have a universe that is ultimately running down. And while, in the short run, entropy and syntropy often work together to support life, entropy will eventually annihilate life unless life finds a way to overcome entropy. And to add to the confusion we, as supposedly the highest manifestations of life on our planet, seem all too often to pursue our own entropic demise. In far too many instances we hoard value and externalize cost, wage war, allow and often promote poverty, despoil and diminish our natural resources, retard progress for our own self-interest, and generally act as if we personally can escape entropy and live well even if everyone and everything else suffers and dies.

However, we cannot, and will not, escape entropy unless we are actively pursuing its opposite. Why? Because entropy is the default mode. All we have to do to promote entropy is to do nothing. If we wish to promote life and to enhance its quality we must be pursuing syntropy. But syntropy, the product of life’s Little Bang, requires thoughtful action. It is not a passive activity and it is not the purview of the empty or selfish mind.

Therefore, towards the effective pursuit of syntropy, with all due commitment and integrity, we dedicate this endeavor of which you may choose to become a part – to wisely and thoughtfully and earnestly perpetrate life in all of its best manifestations, and to enhance humanity’s quality of life and ability to contribute to the common good.

Posted by Paul on July 27, 2008

To Nudge or Not to Nudge…?

Systemic change appears to be what we need, but how will it be accomplished? Will it be a painful shove or an elegant nudge? Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) seem to think that the elegant path is the one to travel. In their most recent book entitled “Nudge” they suggest that small changes, albeit the right ones, can have a profound effect on how people behave. For example, they point out that when the city of San Marcos, California began comparing a person’s utility use to his or her neighbors’ (right on the utility bill) heavy users started reducing their consumption. They also found that when school cafeterias began placing healthful foods at the front of the food line the students chose them more often than less healthful options.

These examples of social-norms marketing and direct environmental manipulation show that people can be nudged into doing the right thing without the hassle of overtly changing their minds or taking away their choices. And even though one could certainly argue that any form of manipulation has its dark side, this particular form is at the very least an honest one. Presenting the best choice first and giving people a broader understanding of what is really going on and what other people are really thinking and doing is very often a very good thing. And, of course, the nudge factor isn’t limited to doing these things. There are lots of other options that we will probably need.

Humanity, like a fast-moving marble swirling around inside a bowl, is living near to chaos (Gleick, 1987; Laszlo, 2008; Prigogine & Stengers, 1984; Waldrop, 1992). That is, we’re about to leap out of the bowl, away from the great attractor of our current systems, institutions, and artifacts towards another great attractor (bowl) that will likely be much different. And this could either be a very good or a very bad thing. Therefore, it would be far better if we directed our own course, preferably in an elegant way, since left undirected the vast majority of all mutations die far short of their goal (Laszlo, 1987).

As we approach our “leap from the bowl” it has become clear that doing nothing is in the same league with trying to do more of the same. That is, it is neither functional nor available. So if we wish to take charge of our transition we must ask whether we will do it through a shove or a nudge, by pulling with all of our might on the rudder or by tweaking a trim tab (Willens, 1984), through bloody revolution or by releasing a butterfly that flaps its wings and causes a hurricane (Ormerod, 2000)?

A man once told me that he never did things the easy way, that whenever someone told him that something was impossible he went out and did whatever it took just to prove them wrong. But what if someone told him that it was impossible to do things the easy way?

Gleick, J. (1987). Chaos: Making a new science. New York: Viking.
Laszlo, E. (1987). Evolution: The grand synthesis. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala.
Laszlo, E. (2008). The chaos point: The world at the crossroads. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions, Bear & Company.
Ormerod, P. (2000). Butterfly economics: A new general theory of social and economic behavior. New York: Basic Books.
Prigogine, I., & Stengers, I. (1984). Order out of Chaos: Man's new dialogue with nature. New York: Bantam Books, Inc.
Thaler, R. H., & Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Waldrop, M. M. (1992). Complexity: The emerging science at the edge of order and chaos. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Willens, H. (1984). The trimtab factor: How business executives can help solve the nuclear weapons crisis. New York: William Morrow.

Posted by Paul on July 27, 2008

Use It or Lose It

When it comes to getting people to change in a significant way there is hardly anything better than a new artifact. A transformation of our systems or institutions can also do the trick. However, such a feat can take a lot of time and effort and is subject to the stultifying forces of partisan bickering. But a good artifact – boy, there’s hardly anything like it to get people thinking and acting differently regardless of their ideological differences.

Which is why it was so disappointing that our government virtually ignored the emerging artifacts of wave four over the last eight years – those artifacts being the convergent products of bioengineering, nanotechnology, machine cognition, macro-robotics, new materials and new energy. Rather, we seem to have been encouraged to pursue a reverse march towards the nineteenth century. And while this has been very profitable for a few, it will eventually spell disaster for the rest of us.

Fortunately there seems to be a tipping point occurring in the American meta-mind regarding environmental sustainability. And the artifacts that are associated with restoring the environment and ending the energy crisis are coming on like gangbusters. One of the better resources for revealing these artifacts is a new book from Environmental Defense Fund entitled, “Earth: The Sequel.” It’s a grand read from start to finish and is very up to date, which is a difficult feat in the world of books, especially those pertaining to new technologies. It is also a valuable read in that it gives us a sense of hope, something that has been missing in the American psyche for a while.

Paradoxically, these new technologies, and the artifacts that they create through their convergence, have been languishing under the polemics of political and economic special interests. But with new policies that support restorative technologies, and remove the subsidy of destructive and antiquated technology, they might just have a fighting chance. (They might even become viral and take over anyway.) And you can bet that waiting in the wings will be similar tipping points and artifacts for promoting economic, social, and human sustainability.

But it is important to note that there is a profound difference between an implicit understanding of something and an explicit demonstration of it. We can realize that we need to do something different, and we can even know what to do, but in the final analysis we must marshal the will and the resources do it. In other words, we need to create a context for using the “next great things” to our advantage and then we need to use them. All artifacts can be profoundly influential whether they are a new energy source or a new mode of transportation or a new and creative form of architecture. But the old adage still holds, we must use it or lose it. And what we will use or lose in this next iteration of human history will be of planetary consequence.

Posted by Paul on July 27, 2008

“I’m not sure, Officer, I think it was a walk-by ignoring…”

There’s an old joke about a snail that is mugged by a couple of turtles. When the police arrive they as the snail to describe the muggers and the snail replies, “I’m not sure…it all happened so fast!”

Dudley and I frequently talk with our readers and workshop participants about the notion of a person’s “worldview” and its relationship to the space-time-complexity domain in which they operate. But a few recent examples in Time magazine have renewed my astonishment at just how small the social space in America has become. One article tells of traffic police who watch in amazement as a highway camera shows 75 cars driving past a man lying on the pavement (a victim of a hit-and-run accident and sprawled no more than a few feet from the flow of traffic) before someone finally stopped to offer assistance. Another story tells of a woman who collapsed on the floor in the waiting area of a hospital emergency room. The hospital video revealed employees ignoring her for more than an hour before finally realizing that she was dead. (If you don’t believe me, you can watch it on You Tube.)

But these are only a couple of the more egregious examples of the insensitivity of a common politic that has grown long on bravado and very, very short on compassion. When discussing space, time, and complexity I like to talk about them on a continuum. Time goes from short to long, complexity goes from one to many, and space goes from small to big. These various scales came into play for me as I watched the fireworks on the 4th of July as they splayed out in blazing glory behind decidedly the biggest phallic symbol in Washington besides the one residing in the White House. And as I joined with millions of Americans in our annual orgy of martial testosterone, beer, and barbecue I had the somewhat amusing thought, “You can have one, small, and short or you can have many, long, and big!”

However, it wasn’t that funny when I also realized that we seem to easily band together to celebrate our independence and freedom but we seem all too often to balk at supporting each other in equally important ways. In the day-to-day world our antennae seem to pull in and our sphere of perception frequently narrows to our own concerns and ambitions, blinding us to the opportunities we have to help those around us who could really use a helping hand. Like the biblical people of rank and wealth, of religious and political correctness who crossed the road to avoid helping the man of little account who lay cut and bleeding by the wayside, we either just don’t see the opportunity or actively choose to ignore it. But in the celebration of our nation’s birth what do we want for America to stand for, the Pharisee or the Samaritan, the cars that drive by because something or someone more important is occupying their thoughts, or the person who decides to stop? I think our very survival may hang on the answer to that question.

Posted by Paul on July 27, 2008

Helping "the Bottom of the Pyramid" May Be Beyond the Shark Mind's Capability

There’s a defining characteristic of the Shark Worldview that seems to defy all attempts to introduce it to the learning curve.

That’s the habit Shark worldview users have of latching onto “the one right answer” and ignoring other possibilities and/or evidence that not a single approach or tool or formula will work well for everyone.

None of us who read C.K. Prahalad’s globally popular (mostly among businesspeople and other devotees of the idea that capitalism is the needed economic elixir for all that ails the planet) book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, were surprised at his claim that he knew how to eradicate poverty on Earth by the year 2020.

Prahalad is a “professor of strategy” at the University of Michigan business school. (Business schools are hatcheries of the made-to-order Shark worldview users that corporate business demands.) Prahalad and some of his graduate students hit on the idea of looking at the four billion people who live on less than $2 a day as a market to be developed instead of as poor to be pitied.

They then fanned out (mostly the graduate students) through the Third World looking for off-the-beaten-path entrepreneurs who had already anticipated their big idea—that good can be done by marketing something to the poor that they find useful and making a profit.

The UofM researchers came up with some promising examples, mostly in India. They wrote up their findings in so-called “case studies” that Dr. Prahalad made much of in his book. And business professors around the world, recognizing a glamorous idea when they saw one, suddenly had their students studying how businesses, especially modestly sized ones, could tap into what is reputed to be a largely virginal $5 trillion dollar worldwide market of poor people.

Immediately, there was a backlash. Almost anyone who had first-hand experience with trying to eliminate poverty pooh-poohed Prahalad’s optimism that the “bottom of the pyramid” is ready to be transformed into a caldron of entrepreneurship that will eliminate poverty in short order. Oases of excellence would soon be churning out new goods and services for the extremely poor, and from this unaccustomed capitalistic seedbed, a transformative wave of immense catch-up dimensions would move out through the masses, improving their lives. At least, this was pretty much Prahalad’s promise.

But experts like former World Bank executive, Paul Collier, now head of Oxford University’s Centre for the Study of African Economies, said not a chance. At least, not for huge numbers of hapless, trapped, desperately poor people.

Collier wrote his own book (published in the spring, 2007). Called “The Bottom Billion”, his work argued that civil war, bad governance, corruption and over-dependence on extracting and exporting natural resources has about a billion of the world’s poor in an unrelenting death grip entrapping them in an absolute decline in living standards.

Because of the obvious flaws stemming from Prahalad’s B-school-nurtured Shark Worldview bias toward finding the one right answer and prescribing it for universal use, I gave the book very little thought time after its reading and the appearance of a host of negative reviews in academic and NGO circles.

So it was with surprise the other day that a colleague called my attention to a lengthy piece on the Web site of the Filipino news service, abs-cbnNEWS.com, that indicated the Prahalad’s ideas have taken serious root in some Third World communities and are bearing some fruit.

Just the other day, a group of business experts and scientists from Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines met in Southeast Asia to discuss how to expand the idea of “iBOP”—innovation for the base of the pyramid.”

But as I read through the article, my suspicions grew that the naysayers of Prahalad’s predictions have been proven largely correct. Mostly what seems to be happening is more of the same old, same old: foundations and a scattering of governments are funding projects like the Filipino-invented “ram pump.” Made from door hinges, it can force water a couple of hundred meters upwards without fuel. Villagers can help make them. But this really doesn’t qualify as a pro-poor invention developed for profit by a promising up-from-being-poor entrepreneur.

Collier says something much more complex, much dicey, more daring will be needed to extract the billion at the bottom in the 50 failing states he has identified. The people at the top are going to have to go into these societies, take them over, clean them up, put new laws and leaders in place, create global trade policies that will aid these new “baby” economies and develop a wholly new international outlook backed by new charters.

Pulling that off is the kind of task we DolphinThink advocates foresee as needed the thinking skills of the Deep See-Change Dolphin. For certain, and Iraq being exhibit No. 1 of our doubting, it is not a task at which the Shark Worldview users who have been celebrating the Gospel of iBOP could be expected to succeed.

Too much to change to envision and integrate, too much one-best-answer “ideology” to jettison, too much power to be shifted and redistributed. Wisely.—Dudley

To read the article referenced above, go here:
Science for the poor

Posted by Dudley on July 27, 2008