Robert Paterson's Weblog

Canada - The Parties Lost - The people won!

I woke up this morning in Chicago not able to stay up and watch the election results last night.

But I am very pleased. Many object to minorities but I like them - the governing party has to deal with the complexity of finding a path that works for a culturally and geographically diverse country which is Canada.

I don't envy our new Prime Minister who will have to work with his support base in the west and rural Ontario while pleasing his new supporters in Quebec while keeping the more liberal (with a small l) other parties in touch.

We will not be polarized as many find themselves in the US. Power in our country is to be found in the middle way. Canada has been very sensible. The wisdom of crowds?

Technorati Tags: Canada, Politics, puppy

My new favorite blog

A few days ago Hugh offered his advice that if you wanted to be an A list blogger one of the things that you could do was to post a picture of yourself with no clothes on. Of course if this was me I would have no readers at all.

In doing this he offered a link to Sonia Belle *** MAJOR WARNING THIS SITE SHOULD NOT BE VIEWED AT WORK***

I have to say that as with most things that Hugh says - I think that he is right - at least for Sonia. The ideal start to my day is something shrewd from Hugh and someone gorgeous from Sonia. Don't take my word for it - also Sonia's view of beauty is I think appealing for both men and women.

I just have a bit of a hunch that our legs are being pulled and that Sonia may in fact be Hugh himself - you tell me how you feel about her story

Technorati Tags: Beauty, Hugh McCleod, Nudity, story

Dirt is good for us - in small quantities

Research is finally bearing out my own pet theory - that our immune system needs a challenge, just as our muscles and our minds do.

Many mammals eat dirt. I have seen many people in West and South Africa eat dirt. Why? Because it is good for us. Dirt, as in soil, is not just bad stuff nor is it dead.

One of my habits that I don't like about me that I have not been able to change is that I bite my nails. But as I have learned more about how the immune system works, I attribute my almost never being ill. 4 bouts of flu and maybe 3 colds in my entire life to the benefits of keeping my immune system challenged y the constant introduction of bacteria.

Did you know that there is a link between homes that are very clean and allergies? Did you know that polio in the west was mainly a middle class disease in very clean homes

I suspect that one of the worst things that we can do for our health is to use anti bacterial soaps and cleaners.

Technorati Tags: Health, Healthcare, Nail Biting, puppy

The Future - How we create it

I am back for one day before continuing my now endless travels in the search for the future of public radio in the US.

Last week a staffer told me that she did not feel that she could write a piece on the future because she was herself so depressed about what it could be.

I on the other hand have mainly approached life as a naive optimist.

This is not an act of will it is just how she and I are. She is mainly pessimistic and I optimistic. I do however feel that there is a caution here. Can we predict the future? I don't think so? Can we create it? Yes I think so. How? I think that it is our thoughts that create it? What we think about the most is what we manifest in our lives.

Here is a neat joke from Johnnie Moore that reminded me how this happens.

Technorati Tags: Humour, Intention, Intuition, Johnnie Moore, The Future

Health and Medicine - It is how we live that counts the most

How our food is produced and what we eat has a major influence on behavioral diseases such as diabetes and Alzheimer's.

Researchers say less nutritious and imbalanced diets have led to growing rates of depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and Alzheimer's.

Industrialised farming has introduced pesticides and altered the body fat composition of animals farmed for meat. This and other factors have led to large reductions in key nutrients such as essential fats, vitamins and minerals being consumed by large parts of the population.

Especially important has been the drop in intake by most people of omega-3 fatty acids and an increase in the eating of foods containing omega-6 fatty acids.

According to the research by the charities the Mental Health Foundation and Sustain, this has resulted in increases in depression, as well as concentration and memory problems.

Technorati Tags: Alzheimer's, Behavior, Culture, health, Type 2 Diabetes

Alzheimer's and Lifestyle

Paradoxically today there is an article on the CBC showing research that confirms that exercise helps to reduce the onset of Alzheimer's and Dementia.

The body of research informs us that what we do and eat and how we use our mind has a huge impact on keeping aware. Alzheimer's can begin to emerge in our 40's. So there are as many good reasons to be active, eat well and to use the brain for our mental health as for say our cardio health

The bad news is that after the age of 85 - no matter what we do - 50% of us will develop dementia. We just wear out.

Technorati Tags: Behavior, Culture, health, Alzheimer's, Relationships

Type 2 Diabetes - Health & genetics - False hope

It was announced that scientists have found a genetic link to type 2 diabetes and that 21% of those who suffer have this link. Their hope is to develop a test.

This is a distraction. Most of this type of research is as well. It assumes that genetics is destiny and it is not.

For instance only 5% of us are genetically destined to develop Alzheimer's. The rest of us who develop, do so because of things that we do and how we live. The same is true with most disease such as type 2 diabetes. It is a disease of behaviour and culture. If we focus on the genetic link, we miss all hope of doing something productive.

Technorati Tags: Culture, health, Behavior, puppy, Type 2 Diabetes

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

The Great Return 5 - The Natural Human Organization

So what then are the rules for how humans best organize so that they are happy and successful?

A starting point is to remember how humans have lived for most of time.

At our deepest level, we are primates. We are intensely social. We feel best in groups. We love to be touched. In fact, when given the choice primate babies will take touch over food. Human babies that are not touched enough, can wither and die as we have found out in Romanian orphanages.

All primates groom and grooming limits the scale of the size of group that primates live in. Without grooming, the group loses cohesion and falls apart. Grooming is at best a one to one activity. As the picture shows group grooming is hard to pull off and if you have to forage for food, you need to be separated. So grooming is limited by group size and by food needs.

One of the huge breakthroughs for humans is that by developing speech we learned to groom at a distance and hence could expand the size of the social group. Robin Dunbar has done breakthrough work on this theory of language based in primate grooming and hence social scale.

In all primate groups there is a top male but the power brokers are females. The real group power is driven by the close knit team of lead females who support or depose the top male. Any man who does not understand this is blind to reality. This is why women use gossip - to build alliances. You would never see men posed like this. In primate group, women are the amps and men the volts. Men make the noise but women drive the process.

This is where the idea of "magic numbers" for ideal human social group sizes comes from. The ideal human groupings are seen in all military organizations.

• 8 the core group
• 15 the ideal team
• 30-50 the normal tribe or platoon size
• 150 - the maximum that can self organize

These are called Magic Numbers and they are the social scaling that is hardwired into humans. We see them in military units because you can't fake it in combat. Dunbar goes into great detail as to why these numbers work. Bottom line they represent scaling in social complexity. We can't handle more than 150 strong relationships.

Any human organization that does not use these building blocks is by design - dysfunctional. Which means of course that most organizations that we use today don't work well.

Ever wondered why there is so much bullying at high schools? Put 1,000 students into an undifferentiated body and you get the prison effect - where you have cliques and gangs.

If you ignore these natural laws for human organization, then you have to impose a structure. Hence the modern bureaucratic workplace and hence helplessness and dysfunction.

The really perceptive reader will have noted that the highly touted "traditional family" does not fit these numbers. It does not because the so called Traditional Family is a modern fantasy. Mom and dad and the kids is not the traditional family. Such a unit is too small to fit the needs of humans in raising the next generation and also making a living.

Ever wondered why so many families are dysfunctional? I made the point that I hardly knew of a person who did not claim some dysfunction to the head of the CIAR's human development program and asked him what was the percentage of families that coped badly. He said over 90%. I replied that there must be something wrong then. There is!

It is only in the last 150 years that some humans have tried on the fantasy of the nuclear family. 40% of North Americans are trying the fantasy of single parenting. I blame no one I am just saying that neither are part of nature's design for us. Imagine a wolf trying to raise cubs in a pack of two or worse one? Can you imagine a chimp or a baboon or a gorilla trying this? Of course not. Only we with our rational ability to create fantasies think that we can do this. It does indeed take a village to raise a child.

So Rob wants us to live like monkeys or go back to the past ignoring how modern life really works. No I don't and we can't. But if we look hard enough, we can see that tribal group life is returning, as it has to.

The new driving force is how some of us work today and the web.

More next week

Technorati Tags: Community, Culture, Family, Language, Magic Numbers, Natural Law, Organization, Patterns, Grooming, Gossip, Robin Dunbar, Tribe

The Great Return 4 - What getting it wrong means

Why should we care how we live? Can't we choose what ever way we want?

Lesson - if we break the rules of nature, we tend to pay. One of the ways modern man pays a lot is that we have poor health. What is driving the obesity and diabetes? What is driving HIV? It is not just junk food and sex but how we feel. How we feel is determined by how much control we have.

Healthcare is a bubbling issue in Canada. By healthcare we mean access to doctors and drugs. We believe that it is medicine that keeps us healthy. This is only a little true. You don't believe me? Check this out out.

TB was all but wiped out just as antibiotics were introduced in the early 1950's. What happened? TB is a disease driven by social adversity. It's on it way back today. Where? In places like Russia and in the underclass ghettos of the US where more and more people feel helpless. The highly stratified world that we live today where there is such a gap between those that have a say and those that don't is driving poor health

You think that smoking, high cholesterol etc may kill you? You think that access to drugs that reduce attendant risks are essential? I am afraid you are mistaken.

This slide tells a very different story about risks to your health. It draws on over 20 years of data taken from ;civil servants in the UK. The chart shows the key 4 grades in the hierarchy. In the Uk the Administrative grade are the top people. What Dr Marmot discovered was that it is ones relative position in the hierarchy that determines ones main risk to dying of heart disease. It is how much we feel in control that counts. Because so few people in the workplace feel that they have any control, the traditional workplace is the main driver of illness in our world today.

This slide shows a gradient for health by state in the union. The states with high social capital and relatively narrow gap between the rich and poor (say and no say - in control or helpless) have much better health outcomes (Robert Putnam)

How we fit also affects education and even crime.

So ask yourself - what is really going on in parts of Toronto?

Bottom line - how much control we have in life drives our immune system, drives how we learn, drives crime or not.

Bottom line - modern organizations tend to remove most control from most people.

So what would an organization that fit the rules of nature for humans be like? If we can see it and understand it, can we get there?

More later. PS passive watching of TV is really bad for us

Technorati Tags: Culture, Deaths, Healthcare, Ideas, Natural Law, Organization, Relationships, Robert Putnam, TV Watching, Whiehall Study