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By now you’ve probably realized that all fathers, responsible fathers according to the culture of their tribe, are MitMs. They are monitored top-down by the community and given unsolicited attention when community norms are not met. As the head of the household, fathers are held responsible for “good” behavior of their children, bottom up, a pursuit of the impossible. That’s as MitM as it gets.
The best introduction to the purpose of this website was written a century ago by Henry Sturgis Dennison.
Men are living together and working together in organized groups more and more each year. The increase of populations, the improvements in intercommunication, and the fast-growing intricacies of the political, industrial, and commercial worlds have brought into the foreground of importance the problems of making a success of group life.
The task of facing these problems definitely and consciously, and of analyzing and making progress in solving them, is here considered the task of organization engineering is to move the men and women of a nation, army, a church, or a corporation are its sources of power. An organization’s greatest strength will be realized if all of its members are strong and strongly impelled, if their acts lose no effectiveness by frictions, conflicts, or unbalance, and trend in a single direction, reinforcing, supplementing, and regenerating each other.
An organization which is attempting to realize its greatest possibilities will thus, in the nature of the case, try to surround its members with such influences as will bring forth from them spontaneous effort, and build up in them maximum abilities. Its ideal will be to provide just those conditions under which men work most readily and effectively. The organization will be “using” men, but its success will exactly correspond to the extent to which this use results in their free, interested, and spontaneous activity.
To understand fully the nature of the men and women in a working group, and to relate them to each other and to the organization as a whole in such ways that quite literally they “work with a will,” is a task of engineering. All the strength of an organization comes from its members, the incentives, the habits, and the traditions which guide and demanding powers of analysis, sympathy, and imagination.
Attention must focus upon causes and effects in the field of human behavior. Effective action must be founded in an inclusive and sympathetic but, nevertheless, accurate, detached, and scientific appreciation of human nature. Hence it is here regarded as a task requiring the training and technique of an engineer. As in electrical engineering we organize a field of electrical forces and resistances by arranging them into a structure of maximum usefulness, so in organization engineering we must seek to arrange a field of human forces and resistances—human motives, purposes, feelings, knowledges, and abilities— so that they interwork for maximum usefulness.
The primary data of any project in organization engineering are the special characteristics of just those human beings by whom it is to be manned. Proposals for representative forms of government, for liberty of interpretation, for measures of military discipline, or for functionalized factory management cannot be judged in abstraction. Their discussion is significant only as applied to men and women of known characteristics.
The men and women members of an organization, to whom its incentives and its rules apply, vary widely among themselves in physical powers, in mental development, and in their responses to emotional stimuli. Organization engineering has first to discover within any given group the prevailing conditions and develop its forms of organization and general operating measures so as to accommodate itself to them.
It will also, where it is possible by selection and training, make closer adaptation of its members to the purposes of the organization and to each other. The ultimate in organization would require that the incentives, regulations, and personal contacts of each member should be such as to allow him to develop and put to most valuable use all of his powers. Since no two members are exactly alike there would be, theoretically, separate provisions for each. But all members, though different, are compounded of quite similar elements; their differences are in large part differences in the proportions in which these elements are represented.
The Foundations of Social Intelligence
Social systems are ecological systems composed of entangled subconscious minds, nothing else. The laws of ecology that apply to all fauna and flora species and their respective ecosystems apply as well to organizations of individuals. These systems are dynamic in predictable ways. To flourish as ecological systems, collectives must align with the laws that channel organizational behavior into making the requisite choices that infuse prosperity, like tuning up a race car. Flourishing organizations have high survival value, successful in dealing with disturbances. Futureproof.
To simplify your burden in understanding the concepts comprising this significant advance in social intelligence, it will help to sort the human population you know into two world views:
- The producer of prosperity, one who produces more than he consumes, by necessity he is reality-centered.
- The consumer of prosperity, the producer’s excess production, the entitled one who produces less than what he consumes is categorically reality-phobic.
If you’re not one, you’re the other. Producers view the subject matter of this website quite differently than consumers. One is curious about reality, the other is repelled – no explanation needed. If you consider yourself an entitled consumer, you will deny reality to protect your social status. If you don’t know what reality denial leads to, you’ll find out the hard way.
The statement concerning social behavior that centers our operating philosophy is all encompassing and concise: It is dynamical performance that expresses the principles of organization and operations in use, Plan A or Plan B, in toto. As it satisfies Popper’s falsifiability criteria, it is incontrovertible.
The Plan A platform comes from our genome. For Homo sapiens, social genetics holds consensus as an indispensable condition. To be productive, consensus requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience and insight. When consensus comes under the dominance of the ruling class as consumers, groupthink, the social process is at odds with reality. The individual surrenders the powers on which his functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends. Conformity in modern society is so strong that reasonably intelligent and well-meaning people are more than willing to call white black to preserve their social status. The man in the middle, always a compelled producer, is so precious to us precisely because he has no social status to lose. Reality and knowing its cause/effects is his forte. His role as master in his master/apprentice relationships with his revenue crew is secured exactly because of his knowledge about reality and what makes it tick.
The platform of Plan B development is Nature:
- Natural law, mathematical physics
- Human nature, invariant genome
Since empirical evidence of Plan A, a posteriori, was not navigationally viable, our ridiculous, process of elimination (POE) stumble towards Plan B windfalls involved extensive dynamic simulation of hierarchical social behavior, based on control theory (Starkermann), to develop cause/effect knowledge. Human nature provides its many biases, foibles, and significant limitations. Hierarchical behavior is governed by Nature’s laws that apply to all ecosystems, all hierarchies. Since human society is a composite of ecosystems, fractal, its functioning is directly comparable to other ecosystems which have received far more scientific attention regarding their dynamics.
The data and mathematical physics produced by the environmental sciences for ecosystems are a glove fit to the trophic human social hierarchy. Experience has shown that what people will acknowledge as pertinent under the ecosystem banner, will be rejected as dangerous heresy under the ensign of social behavior.
All trophic ecosystems deal with the operational reality by processing material and energy subject to channeling by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the conservation laws. The distribution of mass and energy has the producing levels holding the great bulk of the material and energy of the entire ecosystem. The conspicuous consuming levels of the trophic hierarchy serve as system stabilizers. You have to be comfortable with control theory to appreciate the mathematical physics behind that one. No opinions are involved in knowing this relationship.
Even the learning system is novel
A supercharged learning experience, namely hyperlearning, is featured on this website. Ron Prichard had to engineer the method of hyperlearning because all the standard teaching systems were failing him in getting his MitM group to Plan B. It took years before his endlessly-revised methodology for adult learning, the Front Line Leader Program (FLLP) hit paydirt in 2013 .
The path to the benefit packages is not provided as a check list of tasks for the MitM to accomplish. The path is marked by a series of tasks that have to get done, and why, leaving the rest of the choices up to you. There is nothing to buy.
Distinguishing Plan A from Plan B
The criteria of discernment is coherency of activity, reality. Coherent navigation of task action means logical and consistent. The synonyms of coherent form a beautiful bouquet.
The synonyms of incoherent make for an bad day.
This is why, exactly, no one could label a particular situation in error. Visit a Plan B implementation and witness the contrast for yourself. Your subconscious mind picks up on it in a centisecond.
The benefit packages
The generic process that transmutes Plan A to Plan B delivers six streaming benefit packages in progression, referred to as flow:
- Health
- GYAT
- Plan B MitM’s unit revenue crew
- FLLP
- Plan B MitM workforces
- Competitive advantage and franchise
Starting right is reaching the mental health milestone, angst blowdown. Starting any other way is the borrowing of trouble.
The first two benefit packages of Plan B are obtainable by anyone centered on reality, anywhere, anytime, no permissions necessary. The next four benefit packages are only obtainable for the men in the middle and their revenue-crew producers, covered in this website. All Plan B benefits received by consumers are indirect, second order. The entitled ones don’t want to know reality.
Each completed step forward towards Plan B, following a standard of care, is rewarded with a benefits package. The next page in this opening salvo of pages is for choosing your strategic benefit-package goal. Everyone starts with health. The streaming benefit packages are cumulative and for life. In order to receive the second windfall, GYAT, you had to secure the benefit package of health. Remember, entitled consumers cannot also be socially intelligent about flourishing.
The GYAT (got your act together) objective is heavy on adult hyperlearning and takes considerable cognitive effort. On occasion, the mental exertion can deplete the glucose supply in the cranium. GYAT has its own gallery of pages on the banner menu. Getting coherent with the operational reality is a tremendous, protracted commitment of your conscious mind resources. Some report the pain of an energy tank empty from thinking is worse than passing a kidney stone. When you are perceived as having GYAT, a reflexive determination made by the subconscious mind of everyone around you, their social status opinions of you will change. The producers will gather around smiling while the entitled consumers will scurry away. Beautiful and automatic.
Futureproofing
The paramount reality for the individual in these turbulent times is the pace and scope of change. There are unforeseen advances within established disciplines and a multiplication of disciplines that impinge on social operations at a rate never seen before in human history. In some disciplines the college freshman is taught a bunch of technical stuff that becomes obsolete before he graduates. Instead of bringing new technology into his organization from university, the new graduate enters the work scene unusable as-is.
What it takes today to be futureproof is different in kind. Confidence in one’s future security is directly proportional to his skills in managing change when confronting novel problems especially significant problems that go unsolved. The problems that confront the organization in these times can have many causes, many effects, both at the same time, of course. There are new materials, devices, and techniques peppered throughout the context. Some you create yourself and some crash into you. All problems coming at you today have a social behavior component and the ever-changing context changes the behavior. Surely you’ve noticed.
The path to futureproofing yourself these days is to acquire and hone your skills in handling unforeseeable disturbances, material and social, resiliency. The consequences of not having these skills in cause and effect with reality are on exhibit everywhere and they are ugly. They prioritize as health, security, and psychological success. Confidence in your future only comes from personal competency in shaping your future and from taking in stride whatever fate throws at you.
When futureproofing you can only depend on yourself. Reliance upon another to flourish is not a plan. It is a wish. The same rationale applies to your social systems because the same forces are at work. Punishing your workforce to maintain class distinctions is not the stuff of resilience and competitive advantage. While everyone has a free choice to futureproof or not, for the MitM without social status by authority, ostracized by role, it’s a nobrainer. With social status by opinion paramount, consumers know from experience that going futureproof will be sharply criticized as disobedience to consumer groupthink dogma.
Attaining futureproof grade means independent thinking with reality and that means personal responsibility for results. It is a long uphill hike for your conscious mind. When you reach the top, you acquire the Sisyphus burden. The following day you get to do the climb again. Yes, it is a PITA. Yes, it is inescapable.
Since everything in the futureproofing arena is psychological, it means that your progress in this regard is measurable by bloodwork, with data reliability beyond dispute. Those suffering in languishing mode have a profile of chemicals in their blood dramatically different than those in flourishing status. It was bloodwork that enabled science to learn that the health improvement comes as a burst near the end of the struggle. Partway there offers little change in psychological health.
You well know when your stress is a pulse that your hormones can save your life. When your stress is persistent, your hormones can kill you. The morbidity data in this regard is overwhelming and incontrovertible. When the industrial revolution first formed in the 18th century in England, the policy of the upper class was to keep the workforce close to the starvation level. It’s still the policy.
Ongoing Plan B implementations, each considered an experiment, are producing new knowledge. The FLLP advancements made since 2013 have cut the time to reach the early process milestones, such as GYAT, by a third.
For entitled consumers, those who live in a world apart from the folks producing in the operational reality, interaction between producers and parasites is detrimental to both. The entitlement-seekers, in refusing to learn about reality, resent attempts to introduce hard evidence to their activity. It’s a lose-lose proposition no matter how you look at it. If there is a Holy Grail for authoritarians, we shall never know it. Meanwhile, it’s produce or get out of the way.
Much to our surprise, the higher up we get above the mentor line, the larger the advances in conceptual simplification. We no longer think there is an upper end state. The other galleries of pages on this website serve to benchmark progress and to remind us of the deficiencies and dead-wrong assumptions that hampered our ascent.
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