Extraordinary and Essential

You have reached the website of the extraordinary and essential Men in the Middle (MitM)

Since everyone in a social species like ours is cognizant of their social rank, every “man in the middle” is well aware of his exceptional social status, namely zero. While everyone has worked for a MitM, not everyone has had the MitM squeeze-box social experience. The MitM level in every hierarchy locates the interface between the upper-class consumers’ value system and the value system of the producers that supply them with their necessaries and luxuries.

As the most powerful and influential role in hierarchical society, MitMs gatekeep communication going up and down the hierarchy. To his work crew, the MitM is organizational governance. To the head shed, the MitM is the workforce. In business as usual, worker complaints about the organization are received by the MitM for transmitting up the chain of command. Head shed complaints about work performance that are sent down the chain of command terminate at the MitM for remedial action. The “standard” organizational manual of operations is called “Plan A.”

The MitM echelon in society is essential and extraordinary in several ways:

1. It alone, directly and exclusively controls the productivity of 88% of the collective’s roster. The MitM designs and assigns the revenue producing work every workday, voluntarily and authentically taking responsibility for attaining surplus outcomes. MitMs feature the key essentials of social effectiveness; proximity, frequency, and duration. Its level in the hierarchy is the custodian of workforce creativity, a firehose of innovation it can turn on or off at will. Like the wolves of Yellowstone, MitMs are the de facto keystones of human ecosystems.
2. Significantly, it is also the only tier in the hierarchy that can resolve the large, complex, multi-disciplined problems confronting the organization that no head shed on earth can solve. This extraordinary capability consolidates scatter and variety because, being in the middle, the keystones have no social status to lose and 88% of the individuals in the organization labor under their sole direction.
3. The implications of this competency in performance, the benefit package it can deliver to individual and society, is generous, life-significant, and accessible in no other way. The benefit package even includes the elimination of organizational corruption at its source. It facilitates the survival of our species by increasing resiliency.

A typical MitM is a high producer who has been mugged by his social conditioning, Plan A. WLL 2023

A plan that transduces a dysfunctional, complacent Plan A social system into a prosperous one, an enactive process called Plan B by the MitMs that created it, has been innovated. Plan B is an ideology, an algorithm of intelligent task selection: goal-setting, thinking, decision, action, and choose again better, a psychological mindset of prudency, a methodology of high-stakes problem solving (choice-making) that has become essential to the survival of our “civilized” species. Plan B radiates its benefits throughout the organization through intrinsic keystone social power.

The MitM level is all about solving the unavoidable significant problems impinging on the organization that no other level in the hierarchy can solve, an objective that centers this website. Keystones of the social hierarchy have zero functional redundancy. They are the center of the interdependence of social success.

To narrow the wide world of problem solving down to the MitM zone, the profusion of issues assaulting our species that require a response, mental and physical, are sorted into three categories. Each category of problem difficulty correlates to its own category of requisite “thinking.”

1. Simple recurrent problems, encompassed, understood, and eventually solved by an individual subconscious mind on autopilot. (93%) These are popularly called nobrainers. No cognition is involved. Self-correction is built into the habit-building process. Category one.
2. Complex, large-scale problems requiring the collaboration, cooperation, and coordination of many others to solve, that have successful precedents to emulate. (6%) While the thinking that underwrites appropriate selection can have moments of serious cognition, it has the backstop GPS of precedent to navigate by. Infrastructure is an example of Cat 2 projects. The process is not self-correcting on autopilot. Category two.
3. Complex, large scale problems requiring the collaboration, cooperation, and coordination (C³) of many disciplines that, when remaining unsolved, become extremely detrimental to species survival. (1%) There is no success reference to emulate. There is no GPS of the goal. Originated by organizational dysfunction (OD), a psychological condition and a cause, Cat 3s are incompletely encompassed, grossly misunderstood, and cursed with no meaningful specification of the goal to navigate by. These long-lived sociotechnical disasters create a debris field of failed attempts to fix them. The wreckage heap of Cat 3 fiascoes points nowhere. In these cases, considerable, conscious, high-stakes “thinking” is necessary because the only way forward is the process of elimination (POE). As we have personally experienced Cat 3s for several decades, we consider the level of conscious thinking required to succeed to be cognition’s top gun. Akin to writing poetry. Category three.

This website is focused on Cat 3 world, a domain of social intelligence and technological knowledge that could be specified only after the first Cat 3 success, finally orchestrated by MitMs in 2013, was in hand. “Plan B” is a recursive algorithm of intelligent selection, goal-setting, decision, action, and mindset for high-stakes problem solving (appropriate choice-making) that has become essential to the survival of our “sapiens” species.

As mentioned above, the resocialization process that establishes and maintains Plan B performance is the theme of this website. It is noteworthy that by the time the social system malfunctions of “Plan A,” business as usual, are remedied, the original Cat 3 technical dilemmas have already shrunk by half, by itself. The sweep and scope of Plan B is so large, getting your head around it presents the biggest challenge to your cognitive apparatus you’ll ever encounter.

A question from us to society: Why did you deliberately establish and empower a social hierarchy where the ruling class is legally exempt from any responsibility for causing bad outcomes?

What the MitM level can do for Cat 3 issues

Extraordinary claims

The MitM level, taking authentic responsibility for solving a Cat 3 issue, such as organizational dysfunction (OD), starting with the malfunctioning organization as-is, using a generic process, can promptly bring it into a flourishing state. The resocialization process itself is well proven. It assures success will be delivered as you go, recognized by everyone from the start. As it is all psychological, there is nothing material to buy (no inertia). The fecund benefit package goes far beyond fixing OD into areas of bringing prosperity and increasing competitive advantage, that no one in OD knew were even available. Details are provided here.

Extraordinary, incontrovertible evidence

This website provides the analytical basis, evidence and logic that ties generic Plan B to immutable natural law. Refusing to evaluate and critique the analytical case does nothing to disprove Plan B claims. In fact, refusing to follow up on this proof affirms them. Today, the definitive validation of the Plan B ideology is an implementation within the Plan A organization itself. It is the most efficient way to establish the validity of Plan B and it takes less that two weeks to run the test.

Plan B implementations, available for your evaluation on site, face to face, provide the operational evidence for Plan B. Refusing to host or visit a live implementation does not disprove Plan B claims. Since it only takes two weeks until everyone involved knows this resocialization process is going to work, cost is not a factor. Those participants who don’t want it to work, will extract themselves from the situation. Their departure is a positive sign of success.

This extraordinary innovation in social functioning tunes the psychological mechanisms that comprise social behavior, collaboration, cooperation, and coordination (C³). Unlike the cotton gin and sewing machine, where you can see how things work and make physical repairs, matters of entangled subconscious minds are strictly Black Box (BB) affairs. While you can vary inputs and observe outputs from the BB, what goes on inside the BB that processes inputs into outputs is eternally unknowable. In fact your subconscious mind itself, the powerful computer that does the data processing, is physically reconfigured and reprogrammed every night during routine subconscious-mind maintenance. So much for status quo.

Obstacles to the Obvious

How can you get your mind around an awesome innovation in social intelligence that is so significant to our species, your social systems, and your way of life all at the same time? Your socialization and your governance has banned your curiosity, your inalienable rights, effective adult learning, and advancing your mental skills (thinking) for solving high-stakes problems. Who can get their mind around an innovation in method ideology that can assure species survival? How could an invention of this scope and scale be duly appreciated by people socialized to depend on clueless, inept authorities to tell them what to believe and do? Well, they can’t and we’ve gotten over it.

All Cat 3 solutions are system solutions for Plan A malfunction that involve many collaborating, cooperating, and coordinating individuals. To wit.

What can’t be seen at the start of an expedition to prosperity is the armada of psychological mines, booby traps, lies, deceptions, and sabotage deliberately placed in your path to Plan B by the Establishment consumers and Luddites. While you will encounter the obstacles for sure, you are not provided with the reasons why they’re placed there.

Only in 20/20 hindsight did we recognize the obvious – that the Plan A social system responsible for the progressive degeneration of the organization is hostile to a fix. That is, the value system in use by the ruling class does not include prosperity, security, health, or welfare of the people in the organization that it rules with impunity.

We are living in the most fearmongering time in human history. And the main reason for this is that there’s a lot of power and money available to individuals and organizations who can perpetuate these fears.

Your fear is worth billions to Silicon Valley and your government. And fortunately for them, your fear is also very easy to manipulate. We’re wired to respond to it above everything else. Your subconscious mind is mostly a stress-reactive machine for threat detection and response . Its primary job is to keep us alive, which is why it’s so easy to flip people into fear. Barry Glassner

Value systems in use are essential knowledge for predicting social behavior. The ruling sinecure value system is noteworthy for what’s not on its list, including its performance. Neither the amount of carnage it causes nor the amount of benefits it foregoes are values held by the Establishment. That is why “ain’t it awful” entreaties sent bottom-up the ladder of authority have never gained positive traction.

The biggest self-inflicted scam in the history of humankind is conducted in broad daylight with the willing cooperation of its victims. Producers like us tend to be blind to social corruption realities and blindly obedient to the rulers that intentionally abuse them. Value-system-wise, the topmost value of the ruling class is class distinctions – the source of its entitled social status as consumers obtained by opinion, not performance. To sustain that privileged status, the authorities will throw the whole society under the bullet train to extinction. Mergers and acquisitions are examples of workforce carnage at the hands of their “commanders.” Think about what Disney did to itself. Send up your drone, take in the global scene, and apprehend Plan A carnage for yourself.

You have been socialized to be a tyro under the control of the sinecured ruling class. Authority makes your choices for you and since you are your choices, you become indentured to people you don’t even know. You produce their self-entitled consumer necessities and luxuries and turn a blind eye to the roadblocks they place in your path to self-respect. You accept the abuse as appropriate to the class distinctions they artificially created.

The plot quickly thickens when you confront the operational reality. You witness the great lengths the Establishment goes to in socializing its producer class, that’s you, to fail in Cat 3 conditions. That is, to not make prudent choices of effort where it matters most. Add in the fact that the Establishment and its lackeys know they themselves are incapable of making prudent choices in high stakes social situations. That’s how they contract the imposter syndrome. It explains, by itself, what is going on in the world. It is a lose lose strategy.

Since they cannot justify their entitlements by merit, sinecures resort to creating their essential class distinctions by preventing any other class from bringing prosperity to the collective. The ruling class makes no effort to advance its own intellectual skills, prudent thinking, for effective choice making. Since it’s only the class differential that counts, it deskills and obstructs the producer class, preventing it from gaining or using requisite thinking competency. It is why the rulers sponsor and sustain slums and homelessness. Their value system is revealed by what it does.

Values are like fingerprints. Nobodies are the same, but you leave them all over everything you do. Elvis Presley

Quo Vadis curiosity?

No one wonders about the social mechanisms of action that delivered the repeating record of civilization rise and fall. No one wonders how all these robust, flourishing societies over the millennia of human history managed to rise, prosper, and fall in exactly the same way. No one wonders why did all the sciences, technologies, and crafts go out of their way to avoid researching the core psychological issues of organizational dysfunction (OD), the elephants in the room, and especially the intellection that underwrites appropriate selections. The long term connection of OD to species extinction is being directly experienced by everyone. Anyone notice that in Plan A, business as usual, there is no such thing as free speech?

When the benefits started gushing in with the advent of Plan B in 2013, we learned we started without valid benchmarks of the full significance of what was achieved with the OD solution. The zero response received from the authorities benefiting greatly from Plan B provided the psychological basis for explaining why societies invariably chose extinction over prosperity. Plan B reveals the sinecures as impostors. Human nature is invariant and our inherited genome that expresses it is the Stone Age model.

Business as usual results in a bewildering morass of contradictions: confusion within roles, a lack of co-ordination among functions, failure to share ideas, and slow decision-making bring managers unnecessary complexity, stress, and conflict. Often those at the top of an organization are oblivious to these problems or, worse, pass them off.

Signature characteristics of Plan A dysfunctioning

• Depersonalization
• Mindless obedience to impoverished authority
• Conflicting distinctions in class value systems
• A priori truth
• Dependably-bad choice making
• Aversion to high-stakes thinking
• Fear mongering
• Opacity, elephants in the room
• Reductionism (fatal)
• Sinecure corruption (inherent)
• Artificial zero-sum interactions
• The undiscussables
• Zero responsibility for OD results
• Captured by the Nash Equilibrium, “Whack a Mole”
• Ca’ canny, efficiency withdrawal

Science has shown the adult individual makes 35,000 choices per day. Of those, 122 are informed. Do the math.

Decision making styles and strategies guide the process:

• Impulsiveness — Leverage the first option you are gives and be done.
• Compliance — Choosing with the most pleasing, comfortable and popular option as it pertains to those impacted.
• Delegating — Not making the decision yourself, but pushing it off to trusted others.
• Avoidance/deflection — Either avoiding or ignoring decisions in an effort to avoid responsibility for their impact of just simply preventing them from overwhelming you
• Balancing — Weighing the factors involved, studying them and then using the information to render the best decision in the moment.
• Prioritizing and Reflecting — Putting the most energy, thought and effort into those decisions that will have the greatest impact.

We use a combination of these decision-making strategies in order to cope with the sheer volume of decisions that must be made. The decision-making strategy is the first choice that’s made.

The kicker driving this all-psychological affair is built into the architecture of the human central nervous system, Stone Age model. Our subconscious mind is 40,000 times more powerful than our conscious mind. It controls all our senses and actuators. It has its own mental models of reality, recognition programs unknowable in detail. It runs all our programs designed by Nature for Stone Age survival. It has the ability to sense a need to react, make the choice of action, and then post that choice on your subconscious-conscious mind interface teleprompter in a centisecond. Even so, Cat 3 problems baffle the subconscious mind. Its memory banks are filled with unreliable information (garbage), spring-loaded for GIGO pollution of goal seeking efforts. Its intuition is wrong more than random chance. You can’t solve what you don’t understand.

The prime directive

The paramount species functionality of every viable species is choice-making. You are your choices. How you allocate your efforts, cerebral and physical, drives your life trajectory. Consistently make prudent choices and you flourish, win win. Consistently make bad choices and you rot in hell, lose lose. Either way, it’s always your choice. Prudent choice-making is produced from comprehensive thinking skills and protracted cognitive effort. There are no shortcuts.

Human choice-making, abandoned to its genome, invariably leads to various forms of self-deception and bad selections, individually and socially; and at the left, right, and mainstream of economic, political, and community issues. That’s why your conscious mind must act as gatekeeper to your efforts.

That choice-making, a system control technique, is the basic function of species viability is beyond dispute. As a psychological process, selection involves “thinking” mechanisms that control the preparation of candidate solutions using a value system already in the cranial memory banks to select among the candidates. The subconscious mind always acts first.

The thinking process, incredibly complex, underwrites the choice-making process. Do you suppose the people who don’t know how they make choices know any more about how they think? Do you suppose they keep up with the best practices of high-stakes thinking? How about the amalgam of conscious mind, subconscious mind interaction on thinking for cat 3 problems?

The 2013 breakthrough to Plan B makes Cat 3 problems solvable in two distinct phases, social barrier removal always comes first before technical challenges are faced. Plan B is generic and it resocializes the Plan A organization as-is from lethargy to prosperity.

It’s unfortunate but demonstrably true that the plodding conscious mind has to take responsibility for making prudent choices on Cat 3 problems and only MitMs can be authentically responsible for outcome success. In a nutshell, that’s the magic of keeping flourishing societies viable while facing an uncertain arriving future.

We know from first-hand experience that anyone can receive significant personal benefits from learning and applying the Plan B ideology to his situation. The payoffs of positive reciprocity stream added value in all social encounters.

Rules are choices made without objective justification by people you don’t know in conditions that no longer exist. A rule is an arbitrary imperative with its brains shot out by the 2^nd Law. WLL 2023

The approach

The methodology used to resocialize a malfunctioning Plan A situation into Plan B is hyperlearning, free speech, silence breaking, and then testing of what’s learned in practical day to day operations. It’s a defection of the victim class. The hyperlearning environment commences with the toxic factors that have to be unlearned. The MitM solves his Cat 3 issue by bringing its MitM social system up to Plan B standards before letting work on the technical system ramp up. When accomplished, as mentioned earlier, he finds that half of the technical system issues that concerned him at the start have disappeared on their own. He is riding the tsunami of creativity generated by the uncaged workforce. This website derives and discusses why this defection is necessary and why it works.

In MitM world, credentials don’t matter. Judge the merit of the resocialization process by three measures:

1. Is it true?
2. Does the interventionist know what he’s talking about?
3. Does it work?

Website Layout

There are 40 system-related subjects on this website covered in 210 “pages,” some the size of a book. Allow plenty of time for ingestion of one gallery before moving on to the next, in the sequence presented. Yes, it takes considerable cognitive effort. In Plan B world, the demand for conscious, astute thinking is incessant. Yes, it’s unprecedented. Nobrainer choice making is the enemy of Plan B.

Cross disciplinary because OD is a system problem, subjects range from mathematical physics to the necessary role of emotions in creativity. There is something herein to offend and awe everyone. Remember, everything on this website can be demonstrated in your shop with your people. Your choice.

Standardized tests can’t measure initiative, creativity, imagination, conceptual thinking, curiosity, effort, irony, judgment, commitment, nuance, good will, ethical reflection, or a host of other valuable dispositions and attributes. What they can measure and count are isolated skills, specific facts and function, content knowledge, the least interesting and least significant aspects of learning. Merit determined through the opinionated evaluations of teachers, while being able to assess the valuable qualities that cannot be assessed by standardized testing, are unreliable as the opinions, insights, biases, and standards of the teachers vary greatly. If the system of evaluation is corrupt, non-transparent, opinionated or misguided, decisions regarding who has the highest merit can be highly fallible. William C. Ayers

The same aspect is true of credentials.

Table of contents

The banner menu at the top of this page shows six galleries of “pages” arranged in the sequence of consumption that has proven itself by experience. While it’s quite natural to sample the galleries and pages, whatever confusion happens is on you.

1. Foundational: The basic knowledge and tools to start the expedition right
2. Health: Getting rid of insecurity and angst to free up your internal energy to make progress
3. GYAT Social: Getting Your Act of social intelligence Together
4. GYAT Technical: Getting your Cat 3 technical system act together in a high-performance Plan B social system environment
5. MitM: Concepts and tools expressly designed for the keystone position
6. Athenium: The knowledge base supporting Plan B. Included are our many publications, history, the arsenal, and various insights. It is background information in convenient form for the MitMs who constructed and continuously upgrade this website.

Visits: 51