Monthly Archives: September 2006

PROBLEM MODELS

Jeezum… from the blog about stuff Integral (aka Ken Wilber et al) Mystery of Existence,

Dangers of models
In writing the aqal review of local organizations, and also talking with a friend yesterday who’s very much into integral things, I am reminded of the dangers of Spiral Dynamics, and of any map, framework or model.

As with any map, or sets of ideas, it can be taken as a relative or an absolute truth, it can be used in service of shadow projections, and it can be used with more or less heart and empathy.

Relative and absolute truths

The clearest danger is in taking it as an absolute truth, to mistake the map for the terrain, to put more faith in and emphasis on what the model says rather than what the terrain is doing.

Seeing any map as a relative truth, it becomes a tool of temporary and practical value, an aid for navigating and functioning in the world. There is nothing absolute about it. Just a tool that works more or less well in any situation. A tool with no inherent value, which can be modified and discarded as needed. It remains secondary to the terrain, to life itself.

“Just a tool that works more or less well in any situation.” No, a model works for exacting reasons in only situations for which those reasons hold. Always the question begged by a model has to do with how these reasons are commensurate with a precise situation where the utility of the model is demonstrable.

The model is not the thing modeled. A model describes and may depict operations. If you could start up a model of an internal combustion engine it would not be a model.

The description is not the thing described. The danger implicit in any model comes about from their reification. This turn immediatly causes a category error. It does so even if the utility of a model lends itself to the description of predictable consequences of the operations of the thing modeled.

Models may be more or less accurate but they cannot be absolutely true. Their accuracy refers to the accuracy of their description, and given predictive utility, their predictions. But, models are by their categorical (or domain) nature are always, by definition,always reductive.

Every model’s utility is constrained for many reasons but one of the primary reasons is that for every model the implicate description is not complete, nor can it be completely accurate. It is okay to qualify the truthfulness of the description compilation and the model itself, but absurd to say a model is itself and otherwise relatively or absolutely true. A model is true relative to a qualified frame of reference. If you can think of a universal model unhinged from a relation to a frame of reference, please let me know!

And, now I must go on at length about a very pet peeve.

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under folk psychology

BIG FUN AT DANCING EDGES

A long excerpt from a book-length Ph.D. dissertation evokes the scope of Robert Stuart Houghton’s theorizing about education. A Chaotic Paradigm: An Alternative World View of the Foundations of Educational Inquiry. It’s gist is this: there is an implicit potential able to emerge and realize substantial effects were learning to be concerned with the actual nature of an ‘implicitly able’ human system. This is my language, (one can tell, it’s oblique!) and way of highlighting the idea that interesting innovations are products of unstability and discontinuity.

Certain curriculum scholars have also identified and discussed the value of these concepts of holism and self-organization (Doll, 1986; Romberg, 1984; Romberg et al, 1987; Sawada and Caley, 1985) for building a new educational paradigm. These scholars in turn were following the tracks laid out by general system theorists (Ackoff, 1974; Bertalanffy, 1968) and later the nonlinear system theory of Prigogine (1977, 1980, 1984).

They have used the concepts of self-organizationist writers like Prigogine in a variety of ways. They make their points about holism and self-organization clearly and in detail. However, the concept of unpredictability receives much less explanation and emphasis. Just how this unpredictability comes about is not clear and curious linkages indicate a need for further thought. For example, integrating holism and self-organization with a multi-causal model that is to be judged by its “predictive power” (Romberg et al, 1987) takes a stand that chaos theory would open to question.

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under education

WE DON’T SEE THE SAME SEEING

Jon Strand writes:At nearly 40 years of age I have a couple of basic understandings of life. Pretty simple stuff really. They are as follows:

  • Perception is reality, and people don’t always share the same perception
  • Each of us has a distinct world view (or mental model) of how the world works that is built up, elaborated and refined over time. This is all based on our own experience of the world – it is rare that any two people share the exact same model
  • He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows he does not know, knows. (~ Lao Tsu)
  • Most of us are blissfully unaware of why we do the things we do… we like to think were in charge, however, our subconscious is really running the show (and we don’t really have access to that – which is why I really like something Fouro shared with me a few years ago: “Self knowledge brings happiness”)

Although it could not be my own perspective that “perception is reality,” my informal co-counseled research over the past two years is partly centered on the construct “each of us has a distinct world view”.

As always, this posit is much more interesting for its ramifications and especially the counter-intuitive ones. Prominent among those would be the world view that supposes each of us is not distinctly different from each other. …the opposite of Jon’s insight. This second world view co-exists with the ‘other one’.
Think about whether you run into people with this second world view, ‘people are pretty much the same’. Do such people tend to understand everybody is a slightly different variation on the same basic model, and, as it sometimes happens, the person with this world view self-reports, remarkably, that they happen to be one of the more superior variations on the purportedly singular motif! You can sample and test this hypothesis out.

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under adult learning

Teaching Cartoon: Timing

Sufi Teaching Cartoon - Timing

Leave a Comment

Filed under humor

UNDER NUMBERS

Mark Schenk, writing at Anecdote | If you can’t measure it…

I recently heard a presentation that mentioned the truism ‘if you can’t measure it you can’t manage it. It reminded me of how uncomfortable I have always been with this statement and the way it gets touted like a mantra in some organisations. If we view the functions of management as ‘plan, organise, lead, control, direct’, then both ‘measuring and managing’ appear to be more appropriate in an ordered world where cause and effect are knowable. For complex situations, where cause and effect cannot be predicted with acccuracy, the concepts of measure and manage aren’t sufficient to be successful. Measure and manage also don’t make any allowance for emergence and tend to overlook any unintended consequences. Fortunately I think many more people recite this truism than really believe it.

I prefer to view the function of management as ‘creating the conditions that enable people to be successful’. I also much prefer the concept expressed by Albert Einstein: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”.

Nor is the count the thing counted. In the best case and presumptively, business degreed managers had to slog through math coursework framed by an explanation of what is the difference between metrics and the phenomena measured, and, crucially, what metrics cannot measure. There’s another crucial step just beyond this which would be to explain how because something can’t be measured accurately (or at all,) doesn’t mitigate its phenomenal effects.

You can test this by asking any manager how the metrics implicate the operations of the thing measured, and, how those operations hang together systematically to describe measurable differentials and contingencies unfolded over time. Note there is in an old fashioned sense a kind of newtonian hydraulics implicit under the numbers.

The key point is that there exist other differentiated and contingent phenomena which are also implicit in the (so-called) system and these are not accurately quantifiable. Which is to say there is, necessarily, a kind of uncertainty principal at work in systematic metrical extrapolations and systematic qualitative descriptions because only some of the effects in a system can be, in effect, computed and qualitatively apprehended.

It follows from this that any rigorous system-awareness would also necessarily acknowledge the cognitive bias made effective through any and all sensemaking which is overly reductive, overly deterministic, overly blind to this uncertainty factor.

This open up to something very interesting. Suppose, then, that there are tacit workarounds to this problem of fuzziness. Those workarounds would instantiate various ad hoc heurisms and I would tentatively submit those heuristic features are not easily measured.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Gregory Bateson, psychology

ADDENDA: KETS DE VRIES

In synch with yesterday’s post, I note today Dr. Kets De Vries’s article, Reaping the Whirlwind:Managing Creative People (pdf:2000; INSEAD) is available on the web.

Leave a Comment

Filed under social psychology, organizational development

PLEASE WALK YOUR RIGHTEOUS TALK

Steve Hardy at Creative Generalist has done a valuable capture from Caterina, in turn captured from a presentation by Intuit’s Keoki Andrus. Moreover, comments to the post of origin elaborate a fuller itemization. Here’s two of the lists compiled by Steve.

Seven Deadly Deficiencies
1. Contempt for others
2. Obsession with self
3. Commitment dysfunction
4. Inflexible mindset
5. No productive focus
6. Unrelenting pessimism
7. Embraces Dilbertian views of leaders

Eight Ways to Wipe Out High Performers
1. Work overload
2. Lack autonomy (micromanagement)
3. Skimpy rewards
4. Loss of connection
5. Unfairness
6. Value conflicts
7. Let low-performers ride
8. Create an environment of fear, uncertainty and doubt

These are ways to wipe out colleagues and subordinates regardless of the ‘height’ of their performance. I, or anybody, could add to these lists. The deadliest deficiency in my experience is hypocricy, talking up commitments and principles while walking them down, right out of existence.  #2 Obsession with self,  is especially destructive when it is paired with deficits of self-knowledge.

This latter pairing can result in very annoying, hypocritical, behaviors. The ready example, because I’ve been subjected to the behavior so many times, is when someone presents for approval a strength that is actually a weakness. If I had a dime for every time a piss-poor listener tried to get me to acknowledge that they are a really good listener, I’d have a lot of dimes.

(For the record, I can be a good listener but it takes a big effort on my part!)

It is a common aspect of the positive face people wish to present that people elevate some of their weak characteristics. Yet, it is also my experience that the hunt for validation is often a red flag. In other words, people don’t need to be reminded of what your best qualities are; they should be self-evident and speak for themselves.

As an old timer, this subject always brings to my mind the great work of Manfred F.R. Kets de Vries, and, also, the framework concerned with the problem of the Personaprovided by C.G. Jung; see CW7, |Two Essays on Analytic Psychology|. Between the two the continuum between typical eruptions of self-deception and horrid narcissism is brilliantly covered.

Continue reading

Leave a Comment

Filed under analytic(al) psychology

HUME. FLUX AND REFLUX OF POLYTHEISM AND THEISM

It is remarkable, that the principles of religion have a kind of flux and reflux in the human mind, and that men have a natural tendency to rise from idolatry to theism, and to sink again from theism into idolatry. The vulgar, that is, indeed, all mankind, a few excepted, being ignorant and uninstructed, never elevate their contemplation to the heavens, or penetrate by their disquisitions into the secret structure of vegetable or animal bodies; so far as to discover a supreme mind or original providence, which bestowed order on every part of nature. They consider these admirable works in a more confined and selfish view; and finding their own happiness and misery to depend on the secret influence and unforeseen concurrence of external objects, they regard; with perpetual attention, the , which govern all these natural events, and distribute pleasure and pain, good and ill, by their powerful, but silent, operation. The unknown causes are still appealed to on every emergence; and in this general appearance or confused image, are the perpetual objects of human hopes and fears, wishes and apprehensions. By degrees, the active imagination of men, uneasy in this abstract conception of objects, about which it is incessantly employed, begins to render them more particular, and to clothe them in shapes more suitable to its natural comprehension. It represents them to be sensible, intelligent beings, like mankind; actuated by love and hatred, and flexible by gifts and entreaties, by prayers and sacrifices. Hence the origin of religion: And hence the origin of idolatry or polytheism.

But the same anxious concern for happiness, which begets the idea of these invisible, intelligent powers, allows not mankind to remain long in the first simple conception of them; as powerful, but limited beings; masters of human fate, but slaves to destiny and the course of nature. Men’s exaggerated praises and compliments still swell their idea upon them; and elevating their deities to the utmost bounds of perfection, at last beget the attributes of unity and infinity, simplicity and spirituality. Such refined ideas, being somewhat disproportioned to vulgar comprehension, remain not long in their original purity; but require to be supported by the notion of inferior mediators or subordinate agents, which interpose between mankind and their supreme deity. These demi-gods or middle beings, partaking more of human nature, and being more familiar to us, become the chief objects of devotion, and gradually recal that idolatry, which had been formerly banished by the ardent prayers and panegyrics of timorous and indigent mortals. But as these idolatrous religions fall every day into grosser and more vulgar conceptions, they at last destroy themselves, and, by the vile representations, which they form of their deities, make the tide turn again towards theism. But so great is the propensity, in this alternate revolution of human sentiments, to return back to idolatry, that the utmost precaution is not able effectually to prevent it. And of this, some theists, particularly the Jews and Muslims, have been sensible; as appears by their banishing all the arts of statuary and painting, and not allowing the representations, even of human figures, to be taken by marble or colours; lest the common infirmity of mankind should thence produce idolatry. The feeble apprehensions of men cannot be satisfied with conceiving their deity as a pure spirit and perfect intelligence; and yet their natural terrors keep them from imputing to him the least shadow of limitation and imperfection. They fluctuate between these opposite sentiments. The same infirmity still drags them downwards, from an omnipotent and spiritual deity, to a limited and corporeal one, and from a corporeal and limited deity to a statue or visible representation. The same endeavour at elevation still pushes them upwards, from the statue or material image to the invisible power; and from the invisible power to an infinitely perfect deity, the creator and sovereign of the universe.

Leave a Comment

Filed under philosophy, psychology, Religion