Business as Usual

Most social behavior on display today runs on nobrainer automatic. No top-level meetings are held to choose an operational ideology. No one can even think of different organizational ideologies than the one we have. No SyFy writer ever conceived of a society management system different than earthling’s version. Sometimes the aliens are smarter than earthlings, sometimes not, but the ideology by which each social system operates is identical.

Start simple. To impact production, the foreman/keystone is the only one management can turn to. If it deals with the workers directly, bypassing the foreman, production stops altogether. To impact management, the foreman is the only one workers can turn to. Management can’t even understand the language of the foot soldier’s context. All you need to know about the organization is available by how the foreman thinks he is being treated by management and his reports. His assessment is ground truth reality. It cannot be wrong.

A brief barrage of truth about the mechanisms of action of social behavior, starting here and now, will help you quickly decide what’s appropriate for you. Our goal is to help you make your life meaningful and be at one with your self image, dignity, and instincts. No rocket science to learn here, there is no more to happiness than living its create-and-sustain ideology.

The realm of social dynamics, that system of unknowable, entangled subconscious minds, will either thump your noggin or hit you below the belt. There can be no middle ground in social behavior. Only reality-centered people can leverage themselves to attain happiness. We are resolutely neutral about your entryway choices.

If you have trepidations about the operational reality of social life itself, helping you to attain psychological success becomes a pursuit of the impossible. Yes, you can ignore and deny reality. What you can’t avoid, try as you will, are the cascading consequences of status quo. Mother Nature is deaf to persuasion.

Officially, reality denial/phobia is a subconscious-mind defense mechanism characterized by refusal to acknowledge (or rationalization of) unwanted or unpleasant facts, realities, thoughts, or feelings. Your pet bird is an ostrich. To alert the reality- phobic, you landed smack dab on your website from hell. Those who leave by reflex have defined themselves. There are no further questions.

For the reality-centered individual, you have found your booster rocket towards enduring happiness. As an inalienable right, no permissions are necessary to engage the sociotechnical knowledge herein that aids you to attain that goal. You control your efforts and by wisely investing your intellectual effort you can attain and sustain happiness. As we found out, once on the trail, now blazed, you cannot be stopped short of the happiness goal without your consent.

Once you are comfortable with your happiness level, your human nature yearns to live in a happy social environment. In this desire nature has given you no small assignment. Nobody can “make” the people around them happy. Your own experience on the trail attests to that. This is where the central innovation of Plan B comes into play. You focus on the keystones, ignoring all other levels in the hierarchy, bring them up to speed on stuff they already know, and watch Nature take its course. The limited burden this approach places on the interventionist is manageable, as implementation success attests. You can observe the happiness level of the keystones rise up ten minutes after episode one of season one begins.

Your self-assessment of your conscious relationship to reality consists of running tests on your social environment. Since everything worthwhile in this field is learned by the process of elimination, running live tests on social behavior concepts is fundamental to learning about primary causation of social unhappiness. If you choose to not run these tests, you already answered the questions for which these tests were designed to answer.

Either/Or Social System Attributes

Proactive about happiness

There are three chunks of social reality testing on this page for you to use to test your social context and evaluate the findings. That test experience will deliver your first Ho-Lee-Schmidt (HLS) moment of learning about the pursuit of happiness in today’s unhinged society. Most people find a dozen or more HLS jolts on this website.

It is impossible to attain and sustain happiness in the operational reality of these times and practice reality-denial at the same time. Myths and traditions do not help understanding the true architects of social behavior. As you already know, you can be temporarily happy in make believe, where the realities of sanitation, nutrition, health, potable water, and insect repellant never intrude. At some point, however, everyone has to eat and environments can rapidly go tornadic.

While the choice to be happy is free, getting there is not on cranium autopilot. Since the field of social behavior is 100% psychological, getting to the happy state requires a significant amount of focused, cognitive effort. The only shortcuts in the plodding process of elimination (POE) that we know involve speeding up the process by using intelligence amplification techniques, such as making computer-assisted dynamic simulations of social reality, millions of them.

To achieve happiness you have to attain a threshold of knowledge and skill to deal with reality in its own language and on its own terms. Reality is indifferent to “Life” and pebbles alike. Any distortion, deception, fiction, anything that is not truth, bounces off of reality’s equal-opportunity for inviting calamity clause. Reality just acts by its mathematical physics, nothing else.

Reality is unresponsive to your predispositions in sensing and information-processing systems. It does not design, plan, tradeoff, or consider stakeholders. Your subconscious mind, where reality first enters your bubble, does not consult other viewpoints to detect possible error because its operating premise is infallibility. Long range predictions are utterly unreliable.

While there are several requisites to orchestrating a happy psychologically-successful life, the paramount requirement is to be reality-centered. There is no sustainable happiness without it. We live in a world that is designed by truth-informed  producers. Reality deniers can’t invent or build anything material. A reality-denier on a construction site is a menace to the project.

The goal of this website is to help you make sense out of the crazy-insane, illogical, lose-lose social behavior going on all about you, at home and abroad. Only by understanding the originators of the surface madness of global organized society can you learn how to relate to social reality in ways that contribute to your happiness.

You can’t control what you don’t know. How does any error-prone system establish actionable-quality truth? Well, it can’t. Reality-denial practices (causes)

• Obedience, compliance to social norms
  • Rules, traditions, policies, doctrines, groupthink
  • Peer emulation
• Hope, faith, infallible-god-card
• Persecution of free speech
• Rejection of equipoise, inalienable rights, square deals, alternate views
• Hostile attacks on the reality-centered producers
• Class distinctions
• Multi-tiered legal system

“Hope is the denial of reality. It is the carrot dangled before the draft horse to keep him plodding along in a vain attempt to reach it.” “Are you saying we shouldn’t hope?” “I’m saying we should remove the carrot and walk forward with our eyes open!”  Margaret Weis

When the system has gone bad, only a system fix will work. You’re in the process of elimination (POE) work zone.

Associated behavior patterns (effects)

• Closed-minded: impervious to history, feedback, evidence, and logic
• Aversion to cognitive effort
• Reality-denial syndrome
• Imposter syndrome, act’s not together
• Social media addiction
• Binge-watching TV
• Chemical addiction
• Gambling addiction
• Chronic insecurity, fear, angst
• Virtue signaling
• Debates end in stalemate
• Deep depression, unable to recognize truth

The social ideology you already know that drives business as usual, mother superior of organizational dysfunction (OD), we label Plan A. The social ideology that powers and sustains a flourishing collective, labeled Plan B, delivers the streaming bonanza. Plan B eliminates the problems of Plan A. It does not solve them. Manifestations of reality-denial in a social system:

• Path of least organizational resistance on autopilot
• Incoherent activity
• Closed mindedness
• Making decisions on intuition, gut-feelings, pulling rank
• Centered on rules, policy, compliance
• Ignorant of the 2^nd Law, POSIWID
• Short-changing maintenance
• Exclusive top-down thinking, a basic assumption that is fractally wrong
• Assumption that high authority equals social power
• Using social practices known to fail, e.g., drive management
• Choosing with GIGO-spiced information, the bad burrito rule
• Disregard of ground truth, evidence, feedback
• Averse to risk management practices
• Hope, faith, infallible god-card
• No benchmarks of best attainable outcome, vague goal-setting
• Only Plan A is possible. No benchmarks of outcome success. No tight goal definition
• Blatant hypocrisy, fractal
• Withholding efficiency, ca’canny, instinct of workmanship
• Reaching intuition-based conclusions without justification
• No equipoise, balanced weighing of factors, tradeoffs
• High value on strong class distinctions, striations of rank
  • Imposing losses on innocent producers to bolster class distinctions
• No square deal, equipoise. Separate, unequal legal systems.
• Usurping of inalienable rights
• Opaque proceedings, defensive routines, undiscussables
• Deliberate ignorance, willful blindness
• No authentic responsibility for goal attainment
• Censure before evidence, ready-fire-aim
• Intentionally defiant to the laws of reality, regression
• Disregard of history, feedback
• Hostile to contrary evidence, contrary viewpoints
• Efforts squandered on phony issues
• Obedience to authority paramount
• Hindsight centered. Averse to forecasting, predictions. Reactionary, impulsive
• Feigned cooperation, collaboration

Languishing attributes

• Fractal corruption
• Deterioration of health, safety, and welfare
  • Angst accumulation
  • Chemical addiction
• Progressive degeneration, unrest, instability
• Paralyzed by novel disturbances.
• Reduced productivity, ca’canny
• Increased administration costs – safety, quality, turnover, unrest, regulatory

 

When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Reality tests

The relationship of the person to reality is the paramount predictor of social behavior. We have worked up some subtle ways to bring out this characteristic. These self-tests, used hundreds of times, will determine if you are reality-phobic, one way or the other. For the reality-centered, the rest of this website follows along proven methods of adult learning. The quantities of sociotechnical knowledge to transfer are too much for any other approach. The first test is for fun. It is a safe, harmless warmup.

Consider asking the biggest, most profound question never asked by organized society. It has been the paramount un-askable question of social living for a dozen or more millennia. Ask your social environment the equivalent of:

Why is it that kings, dictators, and autocrats who acquire supreme authority over their subjects, swearing to divinity by their kingship to bring peace and prosperity to all, always failed, bringing endless war and poverty instead?

End of test. Poker face. Change the subject.

The next test module is the “social system performance report card.” The purpose of this test is to gain insight into the “real” value system of the ruling classes. You will demonstrate that a flourishing organization is far from the paramount value of those with the legal authority to command its task actions. Since the learning process in these matters is confined to the process of elimination (POE), you work down the list of purposes you assumed were high on management’s list because those are the values its class has continuously espoused as top priority for centuries. This necessary approach is guaranteed to bring more disappointments than surprises.

This exam is targeted at manager types but it will work on anybody. Unlike the third test, it is a safe, risk-free test that management handles with ease and promptness. You inform the target that a scheme has been worked out and implemented for tracking the actual performance of his hierarchy – compared to the best performance the hierarchy is capable of attaining and sustaining. This examination also provides a social stability index, a computed value showing how close or far things are from a crash in organizational stability. You tell him the performance trend report card process is available for audition should he be interested. Stop. End of test. Poker face. Change the subject.

The target will react instantly, by intuition in reality-denial, and forget the offer was ever made. Your rejected offer is then tossed on the undiscussables list and life goes on. The target sensed that the trend chart was also a measure of his managerial effectiveness because he knows the gap between actual and possible increases over time on his watch. What you learned from the encounter is that management places organizational health and prosperity far below the values it does cherish, POSIWID. When the smoke from this dose of reality clears, you’re still stuck cranking on the POE.

Can you think of any mental function more important to your way of life than making prudent choices about allocating your efforts? Can you think of anything more essential to prudent choice-making than trustworthy knowledge about cause and effect (C/E) in the reality of your environment? Can you think of any skill more important to your wellbeing than applying trustworthy C/E knowledge to improve your goal-seeking batting average? What do you think your chances are of making prudent choices based upon garbage information processed by your notoriously-untrustworthy intuition?

Technical background

Thanks to the brilliant works of Rudolf Starkermann in the dynamic simulation of social behavior using mathematical physics (control theory), it is a straightforward effort to determine, for any social system configuration in the universe, the margin between its “now” operating performance and its attainable apex.

The parameters and their values used by Starkermann in “flying” social behavior around the various pylons of reality, are impossible to fake. Management can lie about their turnover rates, for example, but everyone working there knows the truth because everyone is impacted by turnover. Trust is another parameter that cannot be faked. Your subconscious mind is deciding about trustworthiness of the players in the physical scene several times per second.

Starkermann’s techniques in simulating the dynamics of social behavior, a clinic on intelligence amplification, can also measure the margin between “now system stability” and the edge of unsalvageable collapse into chaos, where goal-seeking performance ceases altogether. All dynamic systems have computable stability limits. Yes, that calculation capability includes all social systems and ecosystems.

For any system, metal or flesh, reaching its best performance for positive outcomes is like tuning the engine of a race car. Peak performance is very sensitive to changing conditions and disturbances where all directions of effect on performance are down. The further away the system operates from its best possible, the more entangled things get about restoring the optimum state. That’s why every racing team has engineering specialists in tuning engines while the car is racing, using telemetered operating data, and sending back adjustments to on-board actuators.

Practical peak performance of a social system is Plan B. The performance algorithm, based on Starkermann’s works, played a huge role in how we got to Plan B in the first place (2013). It’s parameters are well established.

For a social system locked in dysfunction, all directions of response action make matters worse. By comparing the rate of decay in performance to the rate of depletion of the treasury, the margin to collapse can be expressed in time remaining. Accuracy of that forecast is, like the volcanologists tasked to predict the next eruption, subject to many unknowable factors.

Reality denial, closed mindedness, suppression of free speech (the undiscussables) means a trajectory of life determined by a series of non sequiturs. It will be no shock to learn that a string of irrational choices can never deliver a prosperous, happy life. In 2021-22, the USA showed the world how fast social security can be destroyed by legions of bureaucrats in reality denial by role.

To summarize: what any Big Kahuna can have, just for the asking, is a running account of the performance of his organization towards goal attainment and the gap between the actual and the attainable. Also provided is its resilience-to-disturbance factor, the margin to organizational instability. This measurement capability has been in routine application in the field for more than two decades, so far without an exception. An aid impossible for a leader who cares about his people to turn down? You bet.

The languishing organization, well cloaked in opacity and defended by pathological liars, is still painfully obvious to everyone. While it can continue to be self-defeating by itself as long as its loss to 3D corruption is funded, when the money runs out, as it must, it mortally implodes. That’s why mergers and acquisitions have such a horrible track record. The transparency of the flourishing organization is also obvious to everyone. If it sustains itself against the 2^nd Law, skilled in entropy extraction, it can be immortal.

The “Plan B exists” test

The steps of this psychological exam:

1. Introduce the idea of a proven Plan B
2. Overview the comparative benefits of Plan B (B-A)
3. Assure the target that transparency of Plan B and open-house for in situ examination and evaluation are there to establish Plan B authenticity, beyond dispute. No superior validation is possible.

The differential performance between flourishing and languishing social systems is the menu of values held by the Plan-B-responsible crew, its identity, compared to the value system of Plan A business as usual for choosing task actions. When the head shed refuses to physically audition Plan B, it reveals its utter contempt for the values Plan B holds sacred. For one example, to refuse a boost in productivity is also to refuse improving workforce health. Intuition, oblivious to regression science, has it that high productivity and high turnover go together when the evidence shows the opposite is true – when the instinct of workmanship is set free.

Unlike the animated reaction in test two, the targets of test three go catatonic. Test over. Poker face. Disconnect and distance.

You do not have to be a Plan B veteran to run the test. You don’t have to know the scientifiker derivations of Plan B features on this website to justify your claims. The target who refuses to follow up on incontrovertible Plan B by engaging it directly, will never inquire. It is the defense of deliberate ignorance, willful blindness, classic reality denial. This impulsive self defense quickly wears off, leaving the target saddled with his imposter syndrome.

When science showed that 70% of reality deniers exhibited the imposter syndrome, we were at first quite skeptical of such a high figure. When we equipped to test for the syndrome, our experience changed our minds. In these times, watching the newscasts deny reality as a norm is looking at unhappy people infected with the imposter syndrome, the lot.

The Gorilla Glue of social behavior

The Nash Equilibrium is a control that nature places on social behavior for both A and B situations. As you have experienced in OD, any system element that attempts to change its operations for the better is attacked by the other elements in the system and socially forced back in place. This builds a hotbed for corruption that never fails to produce bumper crops.

The scrupulously indifferent Nash Equilibrium, of Nobel Prize fame, provides the same service to a flourishing social system. Any element that changes for the worse is visited by the other elements in the social system to help restore high performance of the collective. Because it is detected as an error and corrected before damage has been done, corruption can’t gain a foothold. Promptness in catching errors is a precondition for prosperity and happiness. Early detection takes proximity, good benchmarks, frames of reference, and vigilance. Don’t leave port without it.

Overview of the Plan B benefit windfall

This table is used in conducting test #3.

Comparative B-A streaming benefits

• Productivity increase ≥25%
• Health, physical and psychic, step improvements
• Safety, all kinds, losses cut in half
• Quality, instinct of workmanship liberated
• Administrative workload reduced by half
  • Turnover backed down to background levels

Benefits of Plan B unavailable in Plan A

• Resilience to disturbances, problem solving capability
• Corruption proof, futureproof
• Competitive advantage, innovation on steroids
• Positive reciprocity, benefits multiplier
• Franchise

Discussion

Plan B does not fix the individual consequences of Plan A, it eliminates them. The step productivity increase comes from nailing the causes of ca’canny, purely psychological, and giving workforce creativity and workmanship free reign. The jump comes early in the transposition process because participants want to show their capabilities and trustworthiness. It’s the instinct of workmanship you can see in Stone Age artifacts.

The health benefits of flourishing compared to the ills of languishing are dramatic. Everyone notices.

In 2013, when Plan B first went operational in a sprawling industrial complex, we were astonished by the size of the drop in losses that took place. Nothing like it had ever been recorded in the safety business. That’s what installing “watching your back” can do. Same result as special forces.

Releasing the instinct of workmanship to do its thing results in better quality, reduced waste, and fewer rejects. It is pride and self-image on steroids.

In plan B, turnover practically stops in it’s tracks. The misfits to plan B take themselves out of the action on their own. It’s a clinic on what the workforce people really value. These are effects not causes from installing Plan B. With the various stakeholders satisfied by performance, the administrative load is cut in half.

The Plan B building process is failure-proof. As every implementation you visit can attest, the chances for the program to succeed are settled to everyone’s satisfaction in the first week of installation. When management gets wind of that fact, its first reaction is fear. Not all management’s honor their stop-rule signoff. The impact on the organization when that happens is akin to a M&A takeover.

Plan B bonuses

Plan B brings new categories of benefits unknown to bureaucracy as usual. Beyond zero sum, there is no limit to the size of benefit possible when the amount of creativity is raised by orders of magnitude. Workforce people have mental capacities and proclivities for innovation as good as the best professionals. They are the equal of anyone in problem solving. When you go from 2% of the roster to 88% of the roster thinking new, there’s no telling what inventions will ensue.

The competitive advantage of Plan B, since it is produced by ideology, has been called unfair by vanquished competitors. You can invite them to open house without concern, they would rather go bankrupt than change their ways of operating. That was proven by NCR, Dayton Ohio, by CEO William Patterson in the 1890s. Thousands of people came to see his operation for themselves.

Corruption-proofing,  “You can’t cheat an honest man,” is built-in to Plan B, as discussed earlier. Futureproofing is the reward a flourishing society gives itself. Your collective has more problem-solving capacity than any foreseeable disturbance could throw at it. Should Godzilla enter the scene, an action plan would be put in place without panic.

Positive reciprocity is a streaming benefit that has no upper limit. It is the slowest acting of the benefits but it expands by 2ⁿ. Full of pleasant surprises, we foster positive reciprocity every day in every social encounter that comes our way. Of course, positive reciprocity is powered by people happy to be doing it. No doubt, positive reciprocity is a joyful scene that attracts others on the spot. When they see the happiness display, those numbed by social dysfunction want a piece of the action.

Franchising Plan B is the workforce payoff for due diligence. Details of franchising are covered on its own page.

Nothing would be more fatal than a government of states to get into the hands of experts. Expert knowledge is limited knowledge: and the unlimited ignorance of the plain man who knows only what hurts is a safer guide than any vigorous direction of a specialist. Why should you assume that all except doctors and engineers are drones or worse?

If the ruler is to be an expert in anything, he should be an expert in everything; and that is plainly impossible. Everyone is capable to varying degrees of guiding his own life in the things that concern him. Winston Churchill, in a letter to H.G. Wells

Onward

The wealth of practical knowledge about flourishing provided on this website, including the roots of happiness, about improving your way of life through applied social intelligence, is our legacy to society. In this fascinating new/old arena there is no waiting to receive payoffs and there is nothing to buy.

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