Robert Paterson's Weblog

Complex or Complicated

I have had some biting comments about how silly I am to make a distinction between Complex and Complicated. According to the dictionaries used by these commenters, there is no difference and I am just a wanker.

So in hope of more undertstanding I bring in the big gun - Johnnie Moore.

Here is the pdf of his brilliant chapter on this topic in the More Space Book Project where he clearly shows the difference and the issues of confusing the two.

Here you can hear his podcast as he reads the chapter and if you want, you can either buy the book or see other chapters. ( I am another author)

Trusted Space - Human Development 1

So what does this mysterious looking diagram have to do with understanding human development? What does it tell us about our roles as parents? What does it tell us about school? Can it tell us something about literacy - about obesity - about behavior about whether your children will cope well with life or not.

Will it make a difference to your lives, to the lives of your children and to society - I hope so.

It's going to tell you a lot about all of these things - more than I can fit into one post - so I will keep the science in the background (Follow the link for the support for all I am going to talk about here) and I will focus on the essential here. I will also split this up into a number of posts.

Here is the big idea - Complex Systems are exceptionally sensitive to what are described as Initial Conditions. Raising a child is a complex project because there are so many variables. As every parent knows - there is no job out there more challenging or hence more complex than raising our kids.

This implies that what happens to our children when they are very very young will have the greatest impact on how they turn out. But this is not how we behave or spend our resources and money. In fact we spend most on things that have little or no impact while ignoring what is essential to meet the challenge of Initial Conditions. We don't even know what are the few best things that we can do to meet these needs. This is what I hope to help you see more clearly.

To understand the importance of Initial Conditions, let's go back to the rocket going to the moon for a minute.

Imagine what would happen if at launch the speed was too low to get into orbit. The rocket would fall back to Earth. Imagine if the speed had been too high? The Rocket would have gone directly out into space and never would have ben able to retrurn. There is no course correction for these two failures. Once you are falling out of orbit - you cannot get back. Once you are on track to leave the system there is no coming back.

Later however there are more and more course correction that will work PROVIDED YOU HAVE GOT THE FIRST BIT OF THE TRIP CORRECT. We saw that with Apollo 13.

Well this is true for all complex systems that ALL USE THIS TRAJECTORY.

Here is a close up of the early years for humans. The Trusted Space, where the greatest leverage and sensitivity to Intial Conditions is located  in the boxes have have the curve labelled 1 1 2 3 5 and 8. These periods drive the curve for our entire life. It is here that we decide what kind of world we we live in - is it a safe one or not? We decide who we are. Are we worthy or not? It is here that we go safely into orbit ready for life's mission, or where we fall back or become lost in space. What do I mean fall back or become lost in space?

What this slide shows us is that in spite of billions spent in trying to help kids read in school, that we are making no progress. It is too late!

What this shows is that what appears to be a tiny gap in ability at 6 widens out in spite of every attempt to close it by the school system.

Here is another more linear view of the trajectory. There are two two year olds here. One can understand 300 words and the other 150. By the age of 15 (Grade 10) the one who understood 300 words is at a second year of university level in ability to comprehend and act in the world. The one who understood 150 has plateaued at grade 5. (I will explain this all in more detail later.)

Does this trajectory apply only to learning and literacy? No the development of our worldview by 3 not only affects how our brain is wired up, it also sets the norms for our chemical reactions to stress. This is when we are wired or not to act out and or to have addictions. This is where we will find the key to the obesity epidemic and to the fact that 30% of our kids arrive in school unable to behave in social settings.

We know that there is a problem. On PEI we know that we have a literacy crisis and we know that we have an obesity/diabetes crisis. Good for us - we know that we have a problem at last. But the deeper problem is that we think that we can find a solution by investing more too late.

As we start to understand how Development really works, we will find that adding more T/A's at school is a waste. We will discover that adding more Gym to school will not help a jot in confronting obesity.

In my next posts I will go deeper into what is happening in the first 6 years.  I will also describe the simple things that we can all do that will make a difference. The solutions are I promise very simple.

How the Real New Economy Works

Part 1 - A Clash of Civilizations


The largest of all the statues on Easter Island was the last to be cut in a desperate attempt to appease the Gods that had failed the priests and the people.  This hanging onto a world view that no longer works has been the cause of many collapses of civilizations in human history. if we are not careful, this too may be our own fate.  Are we holding on to a machine view that no longer works? Are we in effect using an approach that must destroy us?

The Easter Islanders, the Babylonians and the Mayans had no alternative. Or they had none that their conventional wisdom and their power structures would accept. So they were doomed. We however, in the nick of time, can see a new view of reality that has been proven not in an obscure lab but in the furnace of North American Business. There is hope if we give up our reliance on a machine view and if we adopt a natural view. But to adopt a new world view demands that we "see" it and that we give up hoping that if only we used the old view harder that we might finally make it work.

My hope is that in the next few posts, I can help you see a clear and comprehensive set of rules for how the natural view is working in practice

But first - please a questionnaire. When you have seen this short deck, please ask yourself - "Do I believe that any further investment in the status quo will bring me benefit or harm?"  Can you see any good reason to keep on investing in our current system?

Download brokenins2.pdf

So what then do I mean by my use of the term a Clash of Civilizations?

It's all about an irony. The irony is that two men set in motion events in 1905 that have finally met in opposition in 2006 and represent possibly the most violent clash of culture confronting humans since the advent of writing set in motion the end of hunter gatherer life and the beginning of a hierarchical system based on property and agriculture.

The two men are of course Henry Ford who founded the Ford Motor Company in 1905 and Albert Einstein who had his Annus Mirabilis also in 1905.  Ford's ideas of a deterministic and machine approach to complexity have swept through every aspect of organized life. His view of how the world should work completely dominates how we see ourselves and the world about us.

Einstein's views were also equally persuasive but were confined to the world of physics. They were seen to operate only on the vast scale of the universe and were never considered as being applicable to the mundane world of man and our own planet.

Here is the irony. In physics, Einstein' ideas were quickly proved to provide a much more accurate picture of how everything worked than the Newtonian machine view of the universe.  Yet in our day to day lives we made the Newtonian system utterly triumphant. For many years, the Ford model was a genuinely useful proxy and raised living standards all over the world. Now it has become I fear, the source a series of problems that if unchecked will destroy us.

So where's the Clash? Surely the relative universe only operates on a universe scale? Not any more.

What the Internet has done has been to collapse the time space continuum in our daily lives. Let me repeat that. The Internet has collapsed time and space in our daily lives. The conditions to sweep away a deterministic view of reality have arrived.

In physics there could be no compromise. The better idea prevailed. So today the institutions of our time brace themselves for a fight to the death. We see evidence of the battles to come in the fight over net neutrality. We see the fear of blogging in the media and in organizations. The stakes are the very future of our planet.

Wright (2004) in his Canadian Broadcasting Corporation 2004 Massey Lecture presents a clear outline of the scale of the challenge we face: 

“Yet despite the wreckage of past civilizations littering the earth, the overall experiment of civilization has continued to spread and grow.  The numbers (insofar as they can be estimated) break down as follows: a world population of about 200 million at Rome’s height, in the second century A.D.; about 400 million by 1500, when Europe reached the Americas; one billion people by 1825, at the start of the Coal Age; 2 billion by 1925, when the Oil Age gets under way; and 6 billion by the year 2000.  Even more startling than the growth is the acceleration.  Adding 200 million after Rome took thirteen centuries; adding the last 200 million took only three years”

“We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. 

If we don’t do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard.  Our fate will twist out of our hands.  And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past” 

In this short series I will do what scientists who followed Einstein in physics did. I will use my observation to observe the new element of the relative institutional universe, such as Wikipedia. eBay, Google, Starbucks and Southwest and extract by observation the new rules as they have emerged in human society.

In part 2 - The Myth of Resources - I will begin by observing Wikipedia and eBay

Technorati Tags: Culture, Organization, Relationships

The Great Return 6 - The way home 1

The machine model sees work and work relationships like this.

We are so used to this that we think it is normal. Work is broken up into pieces and people are fitted in as parts. Most of the energy and cost in the organization is used up in control. In fact control and the preservation of the organization at all costs is the real mission.

The budget process is the most important process in the traditional organization. Budgets, not value, determine who has the power. Controlling large budgets, large numbers of people and large physical plant is what gives you power. At a time when the jargon is all about being close to the customer, the traditional reward system values being a bureaucrat. The further you are away from the customer, the more powerful you become. Career success is determined by obtaining and using good bureaucratic skills. The result is a managerial emphasis and a bias against creativity.

In fact, a real organization looks like this.

There is a hierarchy but of connectedness. Everything in this network is designed to enhance the "Whole". Such a network is constantly evolving. In a machine you have to break it to change. In a network, change is normal. The network also learns from every point. A traditional organization restricts the input to the top.

Traditional organizations are engineered and as such can easily only fit one purpose - so when the environment changes, they cannot. They are like this Wendy House. If the kids grew up what would they use it for?

Organic organizations are like Lego. The parts fit in many ways to build whatever is needed.

Machine structures were fine in their day but are hopeless, by design, in times of change. So any organization that imagines that they can maintain a traditional structure at a time of accelerating and disruptive change is acting out a fantasy.

Not only is the traditional organization obsolete in times of change but it also drives a huge personal cost for all involved not the least the employee. At the heart of the costs are the issues of control which we have talked about before and the costs in family and child rearing caused by the artificial split between work and home.

As we become a more urban world, commuting to and from work drives many costs. First we don't see our children during the day. Second we don't socialize with our neighbors and have to replace the interaction with the neighbor or the grocer with a radio personality or with music on our iPod. The only social interaction we have is with the co-workers who all compete with us and hence have mainly 'autistic' relationships with us.

What do I mean by this? The workplace is full of friendly words about people being our most important asset and teamwork etc. But the reality is that this is all lies. The organization comes first. And under stress it is every man for himself. I suspect that we get so used to these instrumental relationships that we take them home with us and use them with our partners and worse with our children. We no longer feel real at work and increasingly not at home either as most women are now in this workforce. No wonder 40% of working women take antidepressants!

So why then are we so addicted to things, food and drugs? Is it because our deep primate needs to be in real relationships have been denied? Do we not have such a hunger to mean something and to belong that not finding it at home or at work, we find it in food and other addictions?

The good news is that we don't have to have a revolution. The revolution is under way. All we have to know is what it is so that we can see if we want to choose a better life.

More later

Technorati Tags: Change, Culture, Family, Networks, Organization, Relationships

No Knee Surgery if you are fat

Well it is starting to happen. The UK Healthcare system is beginning to discriminate for behaviour.

CAROLINE MALLAN
SPECIAL TO THE STAR

London—Britain's cherished universal health-care system has started denying treatment to fat people.

The first official move to refuse surgery happened last month when a local health authority in Ipswich, northeast of London, announced that obese people would not be given hip and knee replacements.

The move, which has been met with both praise and condemnation, comes amid a story all too familiar to Canadians — hospitals facing cash shortages at a time when the population is both growing and aging.

Dr. Brian Keeble, head of public health for Ipswich, acknowledged that while the added risks of hip and knee surgery on obese patients were a factor in the move, so was the reality of limited resources.

As I carry my logs down to the basement, I can feel my own knees crumbling. A load of 30 pounds of wood really makes a difference. So what about my own excess load of 30 pounds? If I weighed 30 pounds less my creaky knees would be fine. Is not my weight the first issue in helping me have better knees? How would having surgery help when I am 30 pounds overweight. Why should I tie up limited resources when my knees are a function of my weight?

I think one of the myths of universal healthcare is that I can behave any way I want and still be entitled to treatment. I only have to take the pill or have the surgery. Nothing is required of me in terms of my own behaviour. The reality is that today much of what is treated by the healthcare system is driven by behaviour. So the medical treatment is only a band-aid delivered at great cost that will do nothing. Worse it prevents other work such as more public health that does make a difference. Worse it will crowd out most of government spending.

The trend is clear. If we insist on having a public healthcare system - rationing will increase. Now it is wait times. Soon it will be a push back on behaviour. Smokers - now is the time to give it up. Soon you will be penalized by the system.

Technorati Tags: Healthcare

Going Home on Change this

Todd kindly put up my closing chapter in More Space as a PDF on Change This
If you would like to see or use it -

Here is the link

Quebec Separation - Is sucking up the answer?

Well Quebec separating is back on the agenda. What is the rest response to this from the rest of Canada?

20 years of sucking up does not seem to have helped. Sucking up? In all the Fed/Prov deals - Quebec has successfully played the "If you don't give me more - I won't play" card and we have all gone along. Will giving Quebec even better deals - vis the Early Years agenda or another $500 million in equalization really convince Quebecers that they should remain in Canada? Quebec invariable gets a better deal and we put up with it because we hope that this will turn the tide. We all support bilingualism for the same reason. This special treatment is not healthy for any of us and will only increase bitterness on both sides. It widens the breach rather than closes it.

Being tough doesn't seem to work either. Who will knuckle under because of a threat? Threats make a people stronger.

There has to be a third way.

There has to be a new deal for all Canadians. Is it only Quebecers who feel that they do not have enough say? Canada of 2005 is not the Canada of 1867.

Many will say that we are bored with constitutional issues. But I assure you that if Quebec chooses to separate then constitutional issues will not be boring. Better we all take the initiative and think of a deal that will help us all.

Let's consider setting up a more adult Canada where each region and its people have as much control as they can have for their own destiny without Mummy Ottawa treating us all like kids. For accepting that we are kids has meant that what passes for government today are childish squabbles about who gets what. What passes for leadership is bribing us with our own money or in making excuses that Ottawa is the villain.

What would an adult Canadian Confederation look like? I think that at its heart would be the principle that Communities rank first - this is where we live, where our kids go to school, where we go to our doctors where the roads that we travel daily exist etc. If we gave the citizen and the community most of the power, it would mean that we would have to have to reverse the tax system to start with communities where we live. Most Canadian live in cities. Cities provide the economic engine for the provinces and for the nation - yet we have a system that was designed to represent a rural Canada of 150 years ago. This is a true revolution. Imagine citizens would have to be responsible for most of what happened where they lived rather than begging the province or the feds to give back their money. What would this responsibility do to people?

Regions come second. Atlantic Canadians share a culture and an environment that is different from Quebec that is different from Ontario and so on. We are all "Distinct" in this context. This is where a common approach to education and health makes sense. This is where a common environmental and energy approach makes sense. Not at a national level.

The Feds come last. What do we need a federal government for? Surely it is to represent all of us in areas such as Trade, Defence, Foreign policy and the infrastructure that supports our common economic and social interests. Over the last 30 years, the Feds have done a poor job here. They have beggared the CBC and have walked away from rail, roads and air travel. They have kept our defence force at pathetic levels. They continue to perform poorly in trade and Canada's international influence is weaker than at any time since before 1914. Instead they have been playing games with the provinces and with so called economic development. What has ACOA done for Atlantic Canada? Is there any sign that all its efforts will turn the corner? What has equalization done but to create further dependency?

In this Canada we would all have to grow up. In our communities we would have to invest wisely. In our provinces, we would not longer be able to blame Ottawa. In Ottawa we would be accountable for the few critical national systems.

How will this happen? I doubt that we could ever even begin this debate unless Quebec points a gun at the nation which they might well do. Until then let's stop the sucking up and the threats and let's start talking about a grown up Canada where we drop the child/parent roles and the co-dependency.

Target misses its sales targets and the economy holds its breath

Target announced yesterday that it was not able to hit the sales mark. Wall Street stumbled and there is fear that we could have a poor retail Christmas.

Am I alone in wondering what a strange world we live in when it is Shopping that defines the value of what we do?

What a strange world that is built upon a worship of consumption of things that most of don't even need anymore.

We then have to go out and do work that is drudgery to pay for our habit. We go into debt to keep on buying and become slaves to a system and we don't even know that we have lost our freedom.

I know these thoughts are not new - but in a way they are for me. I have known how odd this has been for many years. What is different for me is that now I feel it so keenly. What about you? If you step back and touch base - does shopping as a life force seem an odd centre for our lives?

Living in a big city in 5 years time?

Imagine it is 2010 - you live in the suburbs of a big city. You teach at York University. Gas prices are about $8.00 a litre (The China factor) and are just going up to $12 as the coup in Saudi Arabia has taken Saudi oil off the market. You wonder how you are going to cope.

Your heating bill (you are on natural gas) is already $2,500 a month in the Jan-March period. You keep the thermostat down to 15c and you wear a lot more clothes. You still have a car. It costs you $400 a month in gas and you keep the mileage way down. You sold the SUV years ago and drive an Echo now. Ford and GM closed their doors in 2007. Daimler Chrysler is in Chapter 11 and is not expected to survive. Your new Echo gets 1,000 k per fill up. You don't see many big cars anymore. People who drive them look stupid. All of the family have bikes and there is a nice new store that has opened up in the neighborhood. It has most of the basics and sells wine and beer. The wine is from Ontario though. It is too expensive to buy imported wine.

You still have to drive to the supermarket once a month. Food has doubled in price and you no longer get those nice California lettuces or fruit from Israel. You are thinking of putting in a vegetable garden in your yard. Your neighbor has chickens. You objected when she did that at first now you are thinking of doing the same. You have just bought this cool book about how the Cubans adjusted to the end of cheap oil and the end of sugar sales in the 1980's. You have the time now - too expensive to travel anymore. You haven't seen your mother in 18 months. She had to take the train. Train travel is way up. Air travel has collapsed. It's not even a cost issue. There just are not many seats for most of the major airlines have gone bankrupt and only a basic intercity service using small planes is available for regular folk like you. Driving long distance is for emergencies only. There is talk of ferries coming back on the Great Lakes and up and down the St Lawrence.

You and some friends have set up a local school. The regular schools have shifted the year to the summer. They can't afford to heat in the Jan- April period. You have to pay a bus diesel supplement or take your own kid to school. You and many have opted to take your kids out and school them in the neighborhood. You have the time to do this now as you spend most of the week at home.

Some of you still have jobs but few go into town to work much anymore - you have to telecommute. Nearly all your courses are now taught online. Students found that their costs of attending class were higher than the fees and they demanded an online alternative. Thank goodness because you had the same cost issue. It was costing you more to go to work than it was worth. The York campus is like a ghost town. Enrollment is dropping like a stone though. Kids are going to trade schools more than University. You are part of a task force looking at how to offer a radically cheaper and better online alternative that students can take part time.

The economic and employment fall out has been widespread. The stock market crash of 2007 has taken the bloom of investment banking. The Saudi coup has only depressed investment even further. Thousands of well paid people in the sector are unemployed and are mainly unemployable. Who needs their skills? Worse, the housing crash has locked everyone into their houses and has made moving very difficult. The one good thing is that the Housing Protection Act brought in by the new NDP government makes it all but impossible for banks to evict defaulted owners provided they pay something every month. The banks agreed because it gave them the fiction that the housing assets need not be written off completely. This act has been pivotal in preventing a complete collapse and has helped bring back life to neighborhoods and has taken the worst of all worries off the minds of most people who feared being made homeless.

In this context property taxes were way out of line. The great strike of 2009 when activists mobilized a 4 month witholding of tax has forced the cities hands. Of course this has lead to major layoffs in city staffs and services. Garbage and road maintenance were the first services to get cut. you are coping with the garbage better than you thought you could. First of all you are not buying a lot and secondly everyone is composting at home now. The roads are a concern. At some point they will start to degrade and then what will happen?

Most middle class people have had to cash in their RRSP's . As many were unemployed the tax hit was not too bad but this also contributed to the sorry state of the markets. Many now wonder how they will make it though their senior years. Pensions have been adversely affected by the crash and most are under water and many have sponsors that are no longer in business.

The good news is that many of the 20 plus year old kids have been forced home and somehow with more hands on deck and more to do at home that keeps life going maybe the family as a valuable social unit is coming back?

You used to shop alot. But now all that you have goes into energy and food. Anyway there is not much to buy. Retail is shrinking rapidly. Most of the independent truckers who were the arteries of the just in time world went to the wall in 2007 now and the Saudi move will be the last straw. Moving goods around is no longer feasible. The economy is flat on its back. The banks are in effect all bust and are kept alive, as they were in Japan in the 1990's, by the government. Most of the assets they hold, houses, trucks factories, planes etc are worth only a fraction of what they were when they became collateral. There are of course only two Canadian banks left - the TD/RBC and the Scotia/BMO. CIBC was bought by HSBC. More than 50,000 lost their jobs in the process.

Of course demand for goods from China has collapsed and you wonder if Wal*Mart will survive. At least demand for oil in China has collapsed too but with Saudi offline prices for oil are moving up again. There is a lot of worry about how China will react to the ending of its own dream. Japan is rearming as the anti Japanese rhetoric builds in Beijing.

Tensions between Canada and the US continue to rise. After being effectively locked out of US markets in 2008 all Canadians know that NAFTA is now a joke. No joke is the growing envy in the US over Canada's water and oil supplies. The US military need the oil sands and they don't care that it costs more to produce that it has in energy value. The water shortages in the South, in the mid west and in California have put water at the top of the agenda. It is easier for US politicians to look for more in Canada than to deal with the shortage at home. Water became a major issue in the election. Will Canada be a target? We certainly cannot defend our selves and somehow we are not the terrorist types.

The Iraqisation plan of course failed as the Vietnamisation plan failed in Vietnam but it was the only face saving way out. Now Iraq is made up of three warring factions. It was bad enough when the fundamentalist took over in Egypt but now they have killed the King in Saudi Arabia the Middle East looks worse than it ever has. Israel is under siege. Extreme Zionists are talking up a Masada last stand and those who can leave, the able and the fit, are slipping away as it is clear that Armageddon is inevitable.

You used to think that your cousin who moved to PEI in the 1990' was mad now you are not so sure anymore ....
To be continued

What would a sustainable PEI be like? Point of View Tuesday Nov 1 at 7.30

Terry Allen the host of Point of View on Eastlink has asked me to drop by for tomorrow's show. - Point of View

We are going to talk about what would a sustainable PEI be like.

My hope is to talk about three tracks:

1. Energy - How could PEI mitigate the effects of very expensive oil - I am making the assumption that oil prices will have to move significantly higher in the next 2-5 years as production drops and world consumption rises
2. Fiscal - What PEI will have to do to wean itself off the Federal Teat - I am making the assumption that bringing home the bacon from Ottawa will soon be harder and harder to pull off as other provinces such as Ontario move from have to have not
3. Demographic - How will PEI get through the demographic imbalance when in 15 years more than half of us will be over 65 and we will only be having 500 babies a year

I will write more tomorrow about what I think we could do