Initialization

Plan A

The 21^st Century finds everyone on planet Earth confronting two inescapable truths. As we live today in a world that is designed, just look up, we live in a world of dysfunctioning organizations, just look out! No one can deny either of these truths in public without being laughed at.

For most of the 200K-year history of modern man, however, it was otherwise. Since anything else would have meant extinction, sapient man took Nature as he encountered it and considered himself part of it. His social systems were small and intimate. Organizational dysfunction (OD) was not how our young branch of genus Homo progressed through the several Ages to smart-phone living. OD is the antithesis of Darwinian survival. Societies of hairless apes, like ours, ignore their ODs at their peril.

It is impossible to gaze at man’s stunning technological achievements of recent decades without being awed by the genius that enabled them. Even chimpanzees have to admit that Homo sapiens can, on occasion, be a uniquely-savvy Homo. People that were smart enough to build the internet, it is widely heralded, are certainly smart enough to attain any goal, solve any problem they set their minds to. No end to technological advancement can be foreseen. No threat is too cantankerous for science to solve. Oh?

What then about upgrading social system operations to constructively accommodate all these changes science brought to our material way of life? Why can’t we obtain benevolent cultural advances to match up with beneficial scientific and technological prowess? How bad does dysfunction have to get before science comes to our social rescue? And, if science can mitigate the menace, why did it hold back while the notorious atrocities of OD were accumulating to such monstrous quantities?

Surely species Homo sapiens, it is often claimed, a species that managed to design its own environment and get all those complex systems of metal and flesh to the moon, will figure out survival of its own species without descending into organizational incompetence, ineffectiveness, and self-annihilation? Surely this genius species of genus Homo could figure out how to align his social operations to support his technical infrastructure? Surely knowledgeable and innovative people could avoid the apparently-scripted rise and fall of great civilizations? What could be so intractable about intelligently, purposely, beneficially changing social operations to be aligned with changing circumstances?

Well, the record of ten thousand generations attests that all of man’s various attempts to align his social norms in that regard, to evolve, have been dismal failures. With respect to OD, all formal disciplines, all sciences, plagued to the hilt by OD themselves, have failed. Man is either too ignorant about psychological income and social capital to do so or he is deliberately investing an enormous amount of his resources in self-delusion in prelude to his self-destruction. Over the last 150 years, our species squandered one quadrillion dollar$ in misguided, ineffective efforts to remedy the OD plague, making “social intelligence” an oxymoron in the process. What would observers in outer-space think of such reckless, protracted ineptitude?

There is no functional difference in social system performances between the aftermath of Stonehenge and post-Apollo NASA. The collective genius of Stonehenge stands witness today in England. It is still curious as to the pagan society that organized the great feat and why it then went defunct. The pyramids of Giza that came after Stonehenge stand witness today to Egyptian technological and project-organizational brilliance. Why did the society that delivered a top wonder of the world then go defunct? The Saturn rocket of Apollo stands witness today in a huge Cape Canaveral showroom. It is unknown still why the splendid social machinery that delivered man to the moon then rapidly disintegrated down the OD rabbit hole along with the crews of Challenger and Columbia.

Lessons-learned from the history of OD channeled our response to the challenge. Looking at the OD forest, it is clear that intelligence and technical competency have no direct connections regarding social system self-destruction. Being smart, informed, and credentialed has nothing to do with choices for behaving as a group on Quaalude. The instructions and the imperative to obey them come to everyone individually wrapped from wetware central, located adjacent to your conscious mind. In one-way-only communication, with a brain colonized alike by social conditioning, you do as the grey-matter of your subconscious mind posts on your teleprompter.

Psychically untethered after years of failure, we decided it was essential to implement a lasting fix before we could identify and understand the core mechanisms of action needed for a fix in the first place. How could you objectively account for the true effects and real costs of OD without having the ideal operation, same people, same workplace, for comparison?

When the real and various consequences of OD to humanity tallied out, blowing away our wildest estimates, it became apparent that the amount of damage and injury produced by OD is not a factor going into the decision to operate in OD. Having depersonalized the stakeholders, the perpetrators don’t care about the amount of damage or where it is accumulating. They only care about keeping operating differentials with peers and competitors at zero.

The focus then became:

• How does the (black box) central control room decide who is going to do what?
• Is there a backdoor wormhole to adjust the black-box wetware that regulates social behavior?

The guiding principle in our quest was to shun previous, candidate methods of remedy already proven to fail. From history and our mentors we learned that all of the “obvious” solutions always needed more time, more money, and “better” leaders before benefits could be realized. “Then, it’ll work” they say. We were to learn the biggest lie of all was “Don’t worry, as the wreckage piles up, ‘they’ will come to their senses and implement our ‘it has-to-work’ strategy.” To impotent solution candidates the answer is never. “They” won’t even implement strategies that could benefit!

Nothing is so easy as to find fault with human institutions and nothing is so difficult as to suggest practical improvements. Condorcet and Godwin 1785

It was essential to factor-in the brute truth that for this fix, almost there is nowhere. Close doesn’t count. There is no blazed trail to follow. There is no picture on the puzzle box, no installation manual. You can neither specify the objective nor define the mission. Giving the objective a name, like Utopia/Shangri la, is not a specification for planning the mission to get there.

Rudolf Starkermann’s maxim hits home, “For those adventurers goal-seeking above the mentor line, you can’t figure out how to advance to the next level before you arrive there, recognize it, and look back.” Starkermann also provided us with “How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?”

Plan B

The pragmatic “fix” for menacing societal ineptitude, for any society, turned out to be generic – and it is in hand. Simplicity itself, the fix is group functioning as the fleshy material it is, leveraging the laws of the material universe toward its compelling purpose, while providing the stuff, tangible and psychological, the group requires to remain viable. The fix is an allocation of responsibility and discretion best for goal-seeking effectiveness within the boundaries established by the indifferent laws of nature. Expressed another way, the fix is efficient production of the necessaries of species survival by psychologically successful people. The fix is productive, risk-informed husbandry of species viability – keystone of social system immortality. The strategy of life there is shaped by a blend of intelligence and knowledge of the approaching future.

Since social system immortality is attainable, anything short of immortality reflects a flawed operating paradigm. Since nothing ever stays the same, what worked before can’t work today. That means the fix is always being improved in anticipation of the arriving future. It both does and is, changing by our design.

Each year, in the USA, a nominal one million business organizations go defunct. Since this record is set by conventional operating practice, year after year, one might logically think the social norms driving such high mortality rates would be open to question. What you find instead is reinforcement of the strategies proven to fail. In case you are confused, there are several hundred universities you can attend that will teach you how to fail your business, navigating by venerable business as usual, and award you a degree that attests to that competency. What was Harvard’s reaction to the results of its big study of graduate performance? No more studies. No confusion there.

The fix is totally operational. It works by quickly and seamlessly displacing the toxic behavioral norms of before-operations (metamorphosis) with the norms of ideal operations, i.e., excellence. The difference between the before and the after norms will deliver no less than a 25% operational cost refund/windfall. You will eventually notice that the size of the windfall, promptly delivered at that, is not a factor going into the decision to transmute.

When you witness management leaving the huge benefit package on the table and retaining OD, it settles the “choice” issue and purifies your thinking about efficient cause. It certifies the barrier to operational excellence as completely psychological and not material in the slightest degree.

This 4-book series on social system dynamics, both healthy and unhealthy varieties, is dedicated to the proposition that Homo can keep on advancing the design of his world – technical, physical and psychological – to suit both his survival needs and his druthers, without also having to suffer the pangs and hindrances of his malfunctioning organizations.

The proposition was vindicated by engineering an industrial-strength metamorphosis (2013) – the caterpillar of dysfunction transmuted, within a cocoon, into the butterfly of excellence that is still going strong. It is the magnificent metamorphosis (M²) delivered. Pay no attention to the decades of trial and error stacked behind the curtain.

There are logical, scientific, and pragmatic reasons why the metamorphosis process that works is generic and why the outcome is self-sustaining. Engineering and implementing the metamorphosis is described in the set of four books. This book is focused on the key factors of ubiquity and free choice.

Brace yourself for disturbing truths – recognized, not learned by study. Social malfunction, all varieties, is and always has been a free choice of the victims. Further, everybody on the planet recognizes this when they have, on occasion, freely chosen to be an OD accomplice. Everyone understands: “Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life down here.” We have met the enemy and he is us (Walt Kelly).

The mission statement

The mission that bonds the Kindle Quintet together is the systematic transmutation of received organizational dysfunction into something worthy of a sapient species. When we were sucked into the sociology, social system behavior business decades ago, our goal was strictly limited to bringing rationality, harmony, and productivity to nuclear power plant (NPP) projects. When the commercial nuclear industry collapsed on our heads, we were out of NPP construction projects on which to test candidate solutions as well as our jobs. We note with extreme sadness that the USA NPPs in construction license today are mired in the identical self-inflicted dilemmas that characterized NPP projects in the 1970s and while writing this book (31Jul17) were officially scrapped. Oh, the humanity!

The self-orchestrated demise of the NPP construction industry did not mean the end of organizational dysfunctions for us to study. We were to experience that large, novel projects, like the Big Dig in Boston, are exceedingly dysfunctional and identical in their dysfunctions. By a twist of fate, good or bad luck depending on your point of view, we began an engagement (2001) that provided an endless supply of dysfunctional organizations ripe for testing candidate solutions. Instead of two tests a year, we’re averaging 200/year – still.

Continuing the cycle of testing, redesign, and retesting on the proving grounds, eventually delivered an accumulation of incremental progress that, in 2013, ignited the long-sought chain reaction to ideal organizational performance – excellence. It is now demonstrable in your shop that the methodology is an all-purpose capsule – any social system, anywhere. The approach that succeeded, self-sustaining, had to be generic because organizational dysfunction turned out to be everywhere the same and in all the languages. Since physical root-causes are ruled-out, the efficient cause narrowed down to psychological-behavioral.

The “natural” spontaneous ubiquity of OD testifies to the colonized-mind compulsion to form and support dysfunctional social systems. It is the path of least organizational resistance; the path of least labor of thinking; promiscuous devotion to the untrue. With no beneficiary anywhere in sight, social conditioning cultivates lose-lose acquiescence to collapse. “Ignore the contradictions and do as you are told,” we are told. Collective, unfiltered social conditioning, metastasized out of rational action, plants the seeds of its own destruction. By any measure, social conditioning is doing yeoman’s service for social mortality. If the grand plan of Nature is to drive Homo sapiens to extinction, it’s succeeding.

The psychological platform of human nature that empowers OD is beyond dispute, incontrovertible. The fact that ubiquitous organizational dysfunction can be transmuted by a generic methodology into excellence is also indisputable.

There is no reason for anyone to endure the consequences of organizational dysfunction, never was. There are no rights of the head shed superior to the rights of humanity. It’s a free choice to victimhood being made by the victims – demonstrable as such on anyone’s social system, good or bad. Didn’t they tell you?

The first thing to be observed about all controversies between scientific parties is the large amount of mutual misunderstandings that enters into them. This element is not absent even in the most advanced sciences where homogeneous training, habits of exact statement, and a high level of general competence could be expected to exclude it. But where, as in business, conditions in all these respects are immediately less favorable than they are in mathematics or physics, men have an inadequate notion of what the other fellow really worries about. Hence a great part of the fighting is directed against positions which are indeed hostile fortresses in the imagination of the warrior but which on inspection turn out to be harmless windmills. Joseph Schumpeter (1921)

 

Construction of the platform begins

Ubiquity

The first pillar supporting the platform upon which the M² metamorphosis is based, a stipulation of fact introduced above, is that organizational dysfunction (OD) is ubiquitous and functionally invariant. It is everywhere on the planet where humans choose to live in large groups and it is delivered in broad daylight by the same mechanisms of action. Most of the books written today, fiction and non-fiction, include features and stories of OD in their narratives. You can look back to the Sheriff of Nottingham or forward to the Klingons. Thousands of wars between societies on the books, where both sides lose, with OD as the prime mover. Blinded by facts, no one is curious. Only the attire differs.

This reference point for ubiquity is the only one in the platform based in part upon empirical evidence. Since nowhere else in this deluge of concepts and toolsmithy is there a call for faith or “trust,” controverting this stipulation is done by individual testing in the operational reality. The claim of universality, by itself, means that you can test for ubiquity for yourself, anywhere and anytime. Just break the silence. Study species extinctions and re-evaluate what’s going on today with Homo sapiens society.

The forces of genome and universal law that bend social systems to dysfunction, adherence unavoidable, are many. They collaborate and gang-up. Even though a study of human’s history in this regard might be convincing otherwise, there is no law of Nature, no mathematical physics, no module of invariant human nature, no Brainware that insists large social systems of Homo sapiens must be dysfunctional to exist. The unanimous choice for OD is not built into our genome as the only possibility of social living. That a better way to operate a society is possible is why Cyrus II is called Cyrus the Great, even in the bible.

No architecture of a social system, no organizational chart, is bad or good by virtue of its configuration on paper. Such is an abstraction. It is in the dynamics of social interaction where everything deemed good or bad behavior is settled by outcomes attained. While the laws of the universe do not restrict what lines of authority are expressed, natural law contains laws of kinematics, control theory, thermodynamics, and conservation that determine the absolute limits of possible roles, interactions, and system stability limits. Those limits apply to industrial process control in identical fashion as they do to sociology. Generally, like racing machines, the highest performance levels attainable occur in close proximity to the system stability limit. For material systems, of metal or of flesh, the forcefields of nature make no distinction.

In the end, when all is said and done, OD gets traction from futile attempts of norm-driven man to defy laws of the material universe. Since not all social systems are dysfunctional, it is clear that natural law does permit alignments benevolent to modern man that man can chose to implement. As M² derivation unfolds, the noble truth that man suffers the consequences of organizational malfunction by his choice will be derived by several routes – equifinality.

Now that the irrational has become respectable and unstoppable, the subject of OD itself is undiscussable in polite society, a taboo. This societal more means that your independent testing of OD ubiquity will be considered silence-breaking an elephant in the room. Accordingly, experience shows it’s best to confine such high-emotional-voltage testing to private, informal encounters – unless you’re a small child watching a naked emperor parading by.

Studies of organizational dysfunction have consistently shown a relationship of malfunction intensity with time. As you have noticed, all large institutions, like airlines, become more and more dysfunctional as they age. As you might then expect, the most dysfunctional of human social systems, hands down, are man’s institutions of religion. So much for the mitigating value of mores, ethics, morals, custom and divine guidance in avoiding inhumanity, atrocity, and genocide.

The omnipresence of OD, all continents, nations and languages, cross-generational, is a significant indicator of the origin and mechanisms of action of OD. You can immediately rule out personalities and cultures as candidates of cause to examine. The quest to specify the attributes of “leadership,” ostensibly so you could grow effective leaders as you need them, like wheat, is millennia old. It has been as successful as looking for the pot of gold at rainbow’s end – even for the Irish.

For centuries, academia has strived in its notoriously-dysfunctional way, to be a hothouse for producing effective leaders. Centuries of embarrassing failures in specifying the magical attributes of superleadership have changed nothing. So much for the effectiveness of “higher-learning” institutions to deliver higher-performing graduates. No amount of failure will change the curriculum.

While many additional factors impinge, to be sure, we can base everything needed for M² derivation on the common denominators of indifferent universal law and invariant human nature. While human nature can adapt to new circumstances of viability maintenance, science has shown it takes a thousand years of protracted exposure to environmental change for the human genome to begin to alter its physical composition. Having an unsupervised, colonized, subconscious decide your actions, while your conscious mind is diverted elsewhere, your Homo-genome reflex picks dysfunction and malfunction each and every time.

The current rate of change of the human context is terribly out of synch with Nature’s ability to adapt human nature to changing circumstances. In our 21^st century, astronauts rocket off in spaceships endowed with the wetware of human nature unchanged since the Bronze Age. This mismatch between rates of material context and technological change and rates of automatic, natural response by genetic endowments drives much of what we experience in OD world. We are mechanics skilled in repairing a Model T, taking our toolbox of wrenches and saws to work into a 21^st century Wall Street computer department. Operations mismatch is the order of the day, all day. Where is Darwinian evolution in all this?

Before the 2013 attainment of critical-mass ignition, this crime of command called OD was an unprovable conjecture easily dismissed by any potentate. Today, this ignoble truth can be exhibited live on any business organization in less than a day. We call the show “Catatonia on Demand.” How long do you think you would last in your organization for inviting this demo? Take note of your reaction to that question and consider it a preview of coming attractions. From this point forward, the use of empirical evidence and historical fact will be limited to example a theory-in-use, not derive it.

Choice

The second pillar supporting the platform of M² is “free choice” and it’s a Big Kahuna. Establishments have colonized the minds of the population to believe that the venerable system of operating society in vogue today is the only one possible. If there is perforce no choice in the matter of operating strategy, significance aside, then you accept whatever this “norm” produces as beyond human control and, accordingly, satisfying divine intent. Organizational dysfunction (OD) is thereby just business as usual mores, by god. Tinker with divine will at your peril.

If there is no choice but OD, then the strategy for living defaults to how best to cope with its consequences. You will find that all the social discourse about OD, and it’s active everywhere, is not about eradicating OD itself. The level of concern has been reduced to carping about consequential details and remedies immediately addressing the details of damage. The pressure of OD accommodation over time is the compelling force that builds the great wealth gap between the top and bottom tiers. Income disparity is a distinguishing characteristic of OD and the ratio is directly proportional to OD intensity. The gap of conspicuous consumption itself goes all the way back to the Bronze Age.

The now-demonstrable fact of the matter is that organizational malfunction is a choice made by the workforce, deliberate at that, freely made. Because OD is the prevailing methodology, it is arbitrarily labelled Plan A, business as usual. The strategy of operations alternative to Plan A is called Plan B. It is perforce not business as usual.

It’s in your own best interest to come to grips with the fact that the atrocities committed by the ruling class on the population, over millennia, were consequences of free choice of the population. How is this known? The population is free to choose otherwise – on its own accord. How is this known? You can experience this free choice implemented in an organization like yours. You can experience this free choice in your own organization. You can choose it for yourself and no one can stop you.

By 1890, it was well known that OD was a choice because people had witnessed both healthy and sick organizational dynamics. Concerned participants noted the massive transmutation from ubiquitous OD to ideal that occurred during 1917 when the USA mobilized patriotism for WW I. Finally, workforce-society witnessed the full-spectrum relapse back to OD triggered by the Armistice – in abject horror. It was the largest shockwave to ever hit USA society.

As hinted above, there are two independent ways by which skepticism about the free-choice matter is settled:

1. On-site examination and evaluation of Plan B operations, transmuted from Plan A operations. That is, the people animating Plan B are the same people who were formerly animating Plan A. They freely chose to metamorphose and you can validate that fact by direct, in situ contact.
2. You can implement the M² in your organization. Even the reaction you get from recommending M² validates that everyone senses there could/must be a Plan B. When the people of Plan A are invited to transmute to Plan B – and they adamantly choose to stay with OD. They know there is a choice and they’re making it.

Some OD history

While organizational dysfunction (OD) has a long history back to ancient times, its total eclipse of global society is relatively recent. The earliest documentation on dysfunctional government is found on cuneiform tablets prepared by Mesopotamian scribes, circa 3.5K BCE. Workers left complaints about incompetent pharaonic administrators on interior pyramid walls. Every once-flourishing civilization that fell had plenty to say about the dysfunctions of decline, Holy Scripture no exception. If people of today’s mess somehow met with the Mesopotamian scribes, they would discover their stories of societal dysfunction to be the same. That’s blue-ribbon invariance for you.

What everyone means by dysfunction is the organization’s leadership proclaiming rational intentions, acclaimed by all, followed by taking task actions counter to the proclamations. Like parents telling you what’s best for you to do while they, themselves, are doing the opposite. Comment about the incongruity on exhibit is always attended with the warning “Don’t bring this up again.” Dysfunction’s paradox begins.

How do you navigate appropriately through life with social systems that declare objectives you subscribe to and then act in ways defeating their attainment – all the while expecting you to ignore the violence to reason and carry on? If you obediently support the actions, do your job, you become an agent of the menacing paradox. If you don’t, you lose your membership. Either way, the advertised objectives are set beyond your reach. What kind of way to live is that?

Never underestimate the power of people manning dysfunctional groups. You do not know what factors go into your own decision-making mind. How then could anyone know what factors tilt the scales for groups? We are certain only of two aspects.

1. The decision-making program of group dynamics is common to all social systems. It’s part of invariant human nature.
2. There are many factors thought to matter in choosing group operations that don’t.

Sea change

Until 250 years ago, humanity survived palace politics because government ineptitude rarely reached the hinterlands people. The population lived on farms and the rural road system was so ridiculous, local communities had to be self-sufficient. Without practical commerce, whatever was needed had to be produced on location. And so it was.

Whether we will or not, the group system is here to stay, and every man interested in public affairs must recognize that it has to be dealt with as a condition, to be favored in such a way as to minimize its abuses and to increase its utility. William Howard Taft 1910

Wherever people congregated in large numbers, they needed commerce to survive. From the first, big commerce never failed to go dysfunctional, a Babylonian experience that precipitated the codes (punishments) of Hammurabi. It will come as no surprise to find that the people in the Levant reacted to his codes just as we do today with the myriad regulatory agencies of government. Punishment by Hammurabi did not mitigate organizational dysfunction five thousand years ago. Punishment for rule violation fails today.

What happened 250 years ago that brought organizational dysfunction into everybody’s way of life, city and country, was a handful of inventions, most of them made in Great Britain, that enabled a community to produce textile stuff in quantities far larger than they could consume. It is ironic that Adam Smith was the benefactor of James Watt at a critical time in his development of steam engines. Everybody else chased James Watt and his power amplifiers away.

When commerce exploded on the scene to take pecuniary advantage of the surplus production, adequate roads, canals, and harbors quickly followed. With the conditions requisite for big business in place, the plague of organizational dysfunction attending big industry and commerce went viral.

It was not human nature that changed. Natural law did not suspend its indifference. The social environment changed while the behavioral mores and norms of social behavior stayed put. In time, the mismatch with technological and commercial advancements pushed things operational to instability. Suddenly, the same instinctual behaviors that kept humanity going in primitive times became, in the new circumstances, counterproductive. Unconscious instinct, acting on reflex, unfiltered, does not work. Therein lies the rub.

Now that the means to transmute the behavioral set from its primitive mode and align relationships appropriate to industrial revolution circumstances has been established, the heavy fog of paradox has been lifted. It has become easy to demonstrate that organizational dysfunction is a seamless, no-brainer choice, subconsciously spontaneous to be sure, but it is not a necessary one. At all times, you are free to choose effectiveness in rational prosperity and build a temple of excellence for yourself. Only the social punishment you receive for not choosing OD varies.

How could these institutional norms carry fire and sword round half the world? There must be a defect in my understanding. Charles Darwin 1862

Zero-sum bummer

In dysfunction, organizational behavior is being shaped by human nature’s competitive reflexes. Most social species function in the zero-sum Coliseum. The social organization convinces itself every day that zero sum is nature’s intention, as all sides seem eager to play it. When you compete in the zero-sum game as well as you can, the party line goes, you are doing the best that can be done to benefit the organization. At every level, someone, some level, some competitor, some nation has to lose. Zero-sum-permeated decision-making is often a major contributor to organizational dysfunction. Most zero-sum social games are illegitimate, especially those ending in genocide. That is, the size of the pie being contested is not fixed. Organizational prosperity is never zero-sum. That’s why Homo has the creative bent. He can chose to be rule-based, or not.

Nothing in human history came anywhere near the raft of astounding technological innovations that ingenuity and commerce brought to society during the champion era (1885-1925).

• Railroads
• Iron
• Telephone
• Wireless radio
• Internal combustion engines
• Automobile
  • Roads
• Airplane
• Electric lighting and motors
• Central station electricity
• Steam-powered battleships
• Phonograph
• Moving pictures
• X-ray and radioactivity
• General relativity
• Pasteur medicine
• Combine harvester
• Structural steel
• Reinforced concrete
• Industrial revolution
  • Big Business
  • Urbanization and infrastructure
    • Sanitation
    • Water
  • Immigration
  • Economy bust/boom cycling
  • Overpopulation
  • World war

A word about innovation

With brains only existing in individuals, on this earth at least, no accounts have ever been recorded of social-system creativity. No patent ever was awarded to an organization. All creative acts occur perforce within an individual cranium. Patents can have multiple authors, to be sure, but inventors are individually named.

All problem solving, all goal-seeking, is a consortium of individual creative efforts. Since eighty some percent of every social system is comprised of the workforce and problem-solving is a critical competency for keeping the organization viable, logic would have it that if your mindset is focused on organizational excellence, you will take every measure available to encourage creativity and innovation by the workforce. It is the instinct of workmanship writ large. All viability maintenance features creativity. You have to be creatively resourceful to live.

It is immediately apparent that rule-based operations and the creative bent are at odds. Innovation is, by definition, the replacing of arbitrary, obsolete rules of operation. When the head shed sets policy and procedures as infallible, it announces that instances of creativity will be punished. This is not the stuff of organizational excellence (OE).

In M², creativity and innovation are equal-opportunity employers. The vectors are shown, by example and self-test, how to reverse-engineer the fetish of rule-based behavior ingrained into the workers by social colonization. The heroic work of Whiting Williams, a century ago, investigated workforce creativity embedded as a worker himself in several foreign countries as well as around the USA. He found the creative bent and the instinct of workmanship the same in every language. His books are in the .pdf collection.

Vectors soon discover that the combination of angst release and creativity encouragement in their men produces a jump in operational productivity like no other – and it’s pure windfall. No one who has witnessed this transmutation can be the same, social-system-wise, afterwards. It’s another “Holy Shit!”

For the goal of the 2017 quintet, we define organizational excellence (OE) as the highest level of social system performance and effectiveness in viability husbandry attainable-sustainable under natural law – and validating that that is the case. The effective husbandry of viability function, for us, is the ideal – immortality – what “Done” looks like.

As all know, the workforce is a group of squads of worker bees, each squad headed by a full-time foreman/vector. When the individual vectors metamorphose in M², evolve in Darwinian fashion, they instinctively entrain themselves into “collective effervescence” – the felicitous human feeling of being an essential part of something larger than oneself (e.g., the Apollo moon project, Stonehenge).

In a few months, this splendid orientation travels by reciprocity from the vectors to the entire workforce. Everyone involved immediately recognizes the Glinda-grade “magic” when collective effervescence of the workforce locks into place. “You had the power all along,” she says. The vectors say “Holy shit, she’s right!”

This form of social cohesion is fully benevolent, resistant to disturbance, very supportive of creative expression, and spurs innovations for advancement that would otherwise be inaccessible. There is material expression of this felicitous state by measuring levels of the oxytocin molecule in the blood of participants. This dynamic is, exactly, social system dynamics excellence and it can be validated by bloodwork to measure hormone levels. No wonder turnover plummets. Outsiders can’t help but notice OE. Everyone wants the oxytocin-surge high.

The independent validation by measuring hormone levels, an objective system that can’t be fooled, will be discussed at length in the next book in the set.

As will be detailed in Book Two, the difference in operating costs between a workforce in the ideal zone and the business-as-usual state is a nominal two to one. Since the only factor distinguishing them is their psychological states, the benefit of doubled productivity by the same staff, same capital investment, is pure economic windfall. Since the zone of reciprocity continues to expand outward indefinitely, ideal operations means that the windfall grows over time to be larger than the tax refund from as-received organizational dysfunction (OD). Of course Utopia is affluent!

The objectives of Book One, ubiquity and choices, free choices, have been introduced. It’s the first landing on the inferential grand staircase, a way station for assimilation and reflection. The interludes feature commentary on the history of the organizational dysfunction (OD) menace. It is critically important to recognize the OD “tax” on humanity. If there was no OD, there would be no metamorphosis. Survival of the species would be on instinct-automatic.

Cognitive Rest Stops

Respecting the laws that limit the amount of complexity a human brain can handle in one sitting, the rungs in the ladder of logic to excellence are used as cognition-equipment rest periods so that assimilation of input can take place. The interludes in each book are filled with relevant quotations, citations, excerpts, and adaptations from the authors active in the champion era, 1885 to 1925 CE. As previously mentioned, these are the people who experienced the thrill of organizational successes and the agony of organizational implosions – and documented them. The champions are the people who witnessed the transformation from atrocious dysfunction to the high productivity times of WW I and saw, to their horror, the immediate return to malfunction when the armistice was signed.

They were furious, to a man, at the betrayal of promises made during wartime mobilization by potentates of government and industry they trusted, the consequences to those betrayed, and the failure of society to stem the torrent of inhumanity that flowed across the USA because of it – a flood that went all the way to WW II. A sampling of champion qualifications:

Frederick Taylor invented scientific management in Philadelphia’s iron industry (1885). Henry Gantt worked in machine shops (1895). Harrington Emerson grew up in railroading (1890). Redfield came up through shipping and was Secretary of Commerce, 1914-1918. Munson was a professional soldier (1915). Whiting Williams was HR director for a Cleveland manufacturer (1918). Redfield Gardiner was seasoned in foremanship training during WWI. Herbert Clark Hoover, POTUS, spearheaded a massive engineering study of organizational efficiency in the USA (1919). The report was an indictment of industrial management – a culture of managing unchanged to this day.

The library of .pdfs covering this period of enormous social context change, 8 GB worth of books, articles, and journals, is available gratis on a thumb drive. It includes all the authors below:

M² Champions

1880 to 1925

Norman Ware ◊ Lester F. Ward ◊ T. Ribot ◊ Akin Karoly ◊ Harrington Emerson ◊ William Cox Redfield ◊ John Rogers Commons ◊ Charles Buxton Going ◊ Fred J. Miller ◊ Frederick W. Taylor ◊ Henry Laurance Gantt ◊ Robert Franklin Hoxie ◊ John B. Bury ◊ Paul Monroe ◊ Arthur Twinning Hadley ◊ Charles A. Ellwood ◊ Robert F. Foerster ◊ George B. Hugo ◊ Edward Ewing Pratt ◊ Walter Dill Scott ◊ Morris L. Cooke ◊ Irving King ◊ Hugo Munsterberg ◊ Morris A. Briscoe ◊ C. Bertrand Thompson ◊ Frank Tracy Carlton ◊ James W. Driscoll ◊ Robert W. Dunn ◊ Charles Richmond Henderson ◊ Elias St. Elmo Lewis ◊ Joseph H. Willets ◊ C. E. Knoeppel ◊ Herbert N. Casson ◊ Dwight Thompson Farnham ◊ Frances A. Kellor ◊ Dexter Kimball ◊ C. H. Cooley ◊ H. E. Morgan ◊ John Leitch ◊ John Carl Cabe ◊ George D. Babcock ◊ Miles Menander Dawson ◊ Harry J. Porter ◊ Thorstein Veblen ◊ Winthrop Talbot ◊ James W. Driscoll ◊ Herbert Spencer ◊ John R. Dunlap ◊ Sir Herbert Edward Morgan ◊ Samuel Gompers ◊ Henry Wood Shelton ◊ John B. Frey ◊ Harry G.T. Cannons ◊ Eugene W. Debs ◊ Sherman Rogers ◊ Robert B. Wolf ◊ Charles R. Towson ◊ Glen Lion Gardiner ◊ Charles W. Allen ◊ Lightener Whitmer ◊ W. R. Bassett ◊ Harry F. Farquhar ◊ Malcom Keir ◊ Leon Ardzrooni ◊ Henry Chellew ◊ R.L. Cornick ◊ G. Stanley Hall ◊ Edward Cary Hayes ◊ M. and A. D. McKillop ◊ Royal Meeker ◊ Harlow S. Person ◊ Edward Carle Purrington ◊ Mathew Woll ◊ Jerome Dowd ◊ Hugo Deimer (LaSalle) ◊ Dexter Kimball ◊ Arland D. Weeks ◊ John Stuart Mill ◊ Edward D. Jones ◊ Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth ◊ Meyer and Daniel Bloomfield ◊ Robert Grimshaw ◊ Herbert Spencer ◊ Charles Henderson ◊ G. Stanley Hall ◊ George H. Roberts (Whitley) ◊ George L. Bell ◊ Lawrence Robert Dicksee ◊ H. Feldman ◊ F. Stuart Chapin ◊ William Bassett ◊ Lester F. Ward ◊ Edward Lyman Munson ◊ Herbert C. Hoover ◊ Charles Whiting Williams ◊ John Graham Brooks ◊ Sidney Webb ◊ G.D.H. Cole ◊ Enoch Burwin Gowin ◊ Louis Ruthenberg ◊ Sumner H. Slichter ◊ Lionel Edie ◊ Robert Ely ◊ Charles O. Menger ◊ John R. Montgomery ◊ Edgar A. Metcalf ◊ Lionel Webb ◊ Douglas N. Monroe ◊ James R. Ribot ◊ George L. Ashley ◊ John D. Laughlin ◊ Louis M. Shadwell ◊ William W. Wallace ◊ Jason I. Ross ◊ Thomas B. McDougall ◊ Frank T. Borgardus ◊ Vladimir Portenar ◊  Lawrence L. Lauck ◊ James Thomas MacIver ◊ Ronald W. Baker ◊ Howard K. Chellen ◊ Paul L. Purrington ◊ Leon Carroll Marshall ◊ Robert J. Paton ◊ John C. Dewey ◊ Sidney N. Perlman

1925-1993

Morris S. Viteles ◊ Glen Gardiner ◊ W.R. Bion ◊ Harry King Tootle ◊ R. H. L. Lee ◊ Amitai Etzioni ◊ Gary F. Hanke ◊ Casey Ichniowski ◊Michael Mestre ◊ John P. Keenan ◊ Moreno Grison ◊ Gordon Falk Bloom ◊ J. Morris McInnes ◊ James W. Driscoll ◊ Frank Tracy Carlton ◊ Thomas A. Barocci

Mentors

Chris Argyris ◊ Rudolf Starkermann ◊ John N. Warfield ◊ Stafford Beer ◊ W. Ross Ashby ◊ Joseph Mario Franceschi ◊ Lionell K. Griffith ◊ Carl R. Rogers ◊ Robert Whitney ◊ V. Z. Caracristi

There are at least six lessons to be gleaned from the interlude material:

1. There was nothing going on in the champion era that isn’t going on today. The OD is identical.
2. There is nothing going on today that is not included in the champion era documentation.
3. There are few ideas for a fix, of any kind, that weren’t conceived and tested by a champion.
4. You have nothing in your library on management and organizational behavior, which contains little published before 1990, that comes close to the scope and intensity of first-hand truth from the champions on the front-lines.
5. The wholesale atrocities committed on the population at large provided no incentive for correction.
6. The strength of the grip that standard culture has on promoting and sustaining organizational dysfunction cannot be overestimated.

While it is true that we, originally ignorant of the champion-era history, “hypothesized” many of the concepts in OD during our run-up, the fact remains. The champions were there a century before us reporting from the front lines – making the same conclusions we did when encountering the same behavior. Since the champions have a way of expressing the self-defeating shenanigans in an authentic style, it’s best to have them lead. Everything in the interlude anthologies is included on the .pdf thumbdrive documentation. You can go directly to the source file by keyword search and experience the unabridged context for yourself.

Prequalification

The interludes focus on 1885-1925 organizational dysfunction (OD) as reported by the champions. The OD is exactly the same bill of fare today, of course, but with the champions gone, no writer after them had personal experience with the full before/after contrast – until the 2013 metamorphosis from malfunction to excellence. To those now experiencing the transmutation to OE, reversing back to OD is unthinkable. No wonder the champions were livid and died angry. They knew, first hand, that the carnage was unnecessary – and it was being chosen by honest citizens, while they watched!

Plenty of experience in the trenches of implementation has made the requisites of successful metamorphosis clear. Foremen are automatically qualified. For these vectors, it’s a joyful experience from day one. Just as in medicine, a vector is the evolutionary means by which the benefits of the potentially effective medication are carried into the target areas of the host systems. Outsiders attempting to be vectors, like motivational speakers, are perforce strategically impotent.

Excellence in social system functioning is a bundled set of practices that attenuates the causes of OD and delivers:

• The benefit package windfalls
• Opportunity for psychological success for all
• Intelligent navigation, defined as “appropriate selection”
• Positive, progressive reciprocity
• New opportunities for productivity advancement
• Benevolence

Most people in the population don’t function in the “vector” role, a level that is part of every hierarchy. Non-vectors cannot change their OD environment even if they transmuted on a personal basis. For the non-vectors, M² can be a mixed bag. Stipulating organizational dysfunction (OD) ubiquity as fact is one thing. Acting on the knowledge to launch remedial action is another.

The aim of this prequalification step is to help non-vectors decide if continuing on would be for their own net benefit, i.e., if the city is worth the siege. When personal transmutation is finished, non-vectors will still be operating in OD at work. It’s all about recognition, not obligation. You can self-administer the following checklist. Read and heed.

The downside of individual, non-vector transmutation

• The labor of thinking. You must gatekeep imperatives posted by your subconscious on your inner-self teleprompter during all your awake time, especially at work:
  • The learning load is novel, endless, and challenging
  • You must keep your conscious brain “On”
    • You must work your conscious brain near its limits of handling complexity, most of the time
  • You must gain awareness of the obstacles and punishments the organization places in your path
  • Absolute responsibility for results
• You must, at all times, avoid attempts to defy natural law. No matter its social-media popularity, attempting so has nothing to recommend it
• You must be prepared for a change in social status within your existing social systems. When you metamorphose to a butterfly, caterpillars no longer want anything to do with you. It wipes out most of your Rolodex.

The keener their productivity, the more likely they will be contributing to purposes which go far beyond their local perspective. John Stuart Mill  1866

The upside of individual non-vector transmutation

• Understanding the drivers of the paradoxes of social life flushes away angst permanently
  • Mental health
  • Physical health
  • Felicity
• Angst blowdown releases a quantum leap in free energy available for learning and goal-seeking service
• It wipes out most of your Rolodex
• Immediate benefits in social interactions. Your personal productivity and effectiveness goes way up
• Flawless discrimination between the attainable and pursuits of the impossible
• Outside of work: positive reciprocity

The distinction that separates non-vector candidates for M² from the others in the population is “Man-in-the-Middle.” Anyone who is not a MitM, should exit now. Management is disqualified because of the invariant mindset, inaccessible to reason. Worker bees are disqualified because learning cannot change the reality of foreman dominance at work. The demarcation is exact and it’s called the Franceschi Fitting. The FF is derived, defined and discussed in Book Three.

The unique role of the vector level

Vectors are “the chosen ones” in M² for the following reasons:

• They are “men in the middle” in perpetuity. In a hierarchical no-man’s zone, socially ostracized in both directions, they never have anything “social” to lose. They enter ready-minded, recognizing that any change could only be for the better. Men in the middle was a description in vogue by 1880. It represents the bottom link in the chain of command – as the head shed sees it. It represents the ceiling court of appeal for the workforce, as labor sees it.
• They and they alone are in full control of advancing workforce productivity and effectiveness
  • They have willingly taken responsibility for outcomes in fair exchange for autonomy
  • They do not need permissions or approvals to design and execute workforce task actions
• They control the degree of psychological success attainable by the workforce
• They vector-in, as sole source, collective effervescence.

In order for anyone to go through the M² process, he must decide if what he has to lose socially is less valuable than what he has to gain psychologically. You cannot gain psychological success and retain your social credentials at the same time. For all levels above the vector level, maintaining social standing in the organization is paramount over all else. All levels above the vector level are predisposed to abuse the levels below. The vector level is where all head shed abuse accumulates. When the vector looks up the organization, all he has to lose in the transmutation is abuse.

For the level subordinate to the vector level, the role itself is final. There is no alternative to the worker-grunt taking orders from the vector. Their reason for that restriction is not personality but the stability limits of group dynamics set by natural law. Install a policy that allows every worker to do whatever he thinks best and the organization will be in rigor mortis before the morning coffee break. Stones will remain in their quarries.

You can decide for yourself. It’s a very personal free choice. Social standing means different things for different people. Taking outcome responsibility for a pack of ingrates is not everyone’s idea of a fun activity.

It is assumed, henceforth, that you have read and understood the prequalification checklist and freely made the choice to proceed. If you are not qualified and you continue on, the outcome is perforce on you. For those with a ready mind, personalized help is always available. From here on, you will be considered a peer in conscious-mind mode.

You know how to do research on the internet. You can check on our choice of fit words. Well aware that some key words used are not familiar to a teenager, we go out of our way to find and use the best word fit to the situation, polysyllabic or not. For example, we use “Ca’canny” to stand for the deliberate withholding of operational efficiency. The word came out of Scotland centuries ago from the 1745 rebellion and was in common use throughout the champion era.

It’s always best to start at the beginning

The purpose of any species in forming a social system of its individuals is attainment of an explicit goal. Unless we have a purpose there is no reason why individuals should try to cooperate together at all or why anyone should try to organize them. Once an organization is set up, a human group is in being, all the individual and personal motives which have induced persons to join the group, which keep them in the game and playing the game, assume great importance in their minds.

People derive social satisfactions from working together. And they build up, often unconsciously, very elaborate codes of behavior, and loyalties, and affections and antipathies, which may have little or nothing to do with the formal organization of the undertaking, the official relationships which their superiors recognize. Every organization and every part of every organization must be an expression of the purpose of the undertaking concerned or it is meaningless and therefore redundant.

As all know, once a collective has been assembled, what it does as a community of individuals affirms or denies its manifest purpose. Homo sapiens is the only species, so far, that heralds the purpose of the various organizations it forms as it forms them. The goal registered as the reason for organizing and centering a group of people, usually complying with a government regulation, can be used as a travel guide to observe the activity flow downhill, from stated purpose to consequential outcomes.

Once the social system begins to deliver results, validate the stated purpose. Just climb the inferential staircase back up from what the organization produces toward the span of possible purposes that would be logically consistent with what it actually does. If the reverse-engineered conclusion finds the stated goal within the span of rationale, all’s well.

In practice, however, in the ever-changing operational reality of business as usual, it is the exception, rather than the rule, that the original, stated purpose of forming a social system remains congruent with what it delivers. Leaving the mismatch uncorrected marks the end of trust in the navigation system in use. Blind drift ensues. It goes from bad to worse.

On the island of a highly-effective social system, remote from business as usual, the heralded goal is the operational goal. It’s what individual members use as their navigational aid and goals and task actions are perforce transparent. Straight up is the only way to validate consistency with the organizational purpose, a connection monitored mutually and incessantly by everyone in the immediate vicinity of the work. It determines if there will be mutual trust.

The “standard” business-as-usual organization navigating by its “subconscious” is intentionally opaque and defensive. Encountering aggressive resistance to any connecting of the dots is your proof positive that whatever is steering the organization day by day is unknown by its agents. And, if the agents don’t know the group goal, cohesion is impossible. The result is waste, damage and injury. The governing factor is not the goodness or evilness of the head shed, but the amount of damage it can do.

Coming to work in a place where the goals of work are obscure and adrift, creeping randomly by the winds of authorless whim, is a source of insecurity and high anxiety. There is nothing concrete you can produce that objectively justifies your employment. Self-image takes a hit. You are an agent of absurdity and it does not digest well.

This whole M² enterprise is organized to keep the goal tethered to reality – even as it must adapt the goal structure as disturbances enter and conditions change, always adjusting with an eye to the future. Defining the goal from vision to catalog part numbers, and keeping its ladder of quality information updated, is the glue that keeps goal-seeking cohesive and effective. What must be avoided, at all costs, is to lose goal-orientation as the alignment star for choosing task action. In organizational excellence, the goal specification is explicit and posted to encourage discussion. The goal is the goal, even when it creeps.

Your special benefit

A reward is now offered to those non-vectors, MitM to a man, making it this far. You can take possession of a unique gift of great power, utility, and versatility. Only M² could manufacture a gift for lubricating your grind this significant.

You know the feeling of head-shed betrayal. Everyone has gone through that horrible experience where abuse by the organization has triggered the “efficiency withdrawal” reflex the Scots named Ca’canny about 1750. This scene is where, in reflex self-defense, you silently decide to hold back your instincts of efficiency and workmanship to “get back” at your tormentors. While you achieve the unexamined effect of gutting workforce productivity, Ca’canny has downsides:

• Holding back on your instinct of workmanship dramatically lowers your self esteem
• Ca’canny engenders negative reciprocity
• Dropping productivity erodes the viability of the organization you work for
• While it is your only defense, the head shed has effective countermeasures. You end up where you started.

Knowledge of M² basics provides you with an offensive weapon that will stun management. As you well know, management normalizes your Ca’canny defense by simply paying the freight as an unavoidable cost of doing business. Management knows that its competitors are paying the same freight, so for head-shed think it cancels out. The labor-management confrontation is usually so lop-sided in financial power, the head shed is incapable of imagining the workforce with an offensive armament of any kind. Now you can load up a “weapon” of offense that can send the mind of management to the brink of madness.

We have used this tear-gas artifact on the perpetrators of angst so many times it’s second nature. It never fails to disable the solidified, brittle mind of the target. Since we are outsiders, the damage registers, but is easily disavowed. As insiders, you get the Full-Monty effect. That management has no defense against this weapon exhibits as catatonia. This is a significant benefit for ready-minded non-vectors as well. Detailed instructions for safe use are provided in Book 3.

As you likely have guessed, the dart that paralyzes management is confronting the fact there is a Plan B – and their workforce is informed about it. If you act naïve, you can actually witness paralysis of the executive subconscious taking place.

Preparing for the metamorphosis

There are some basic premises of M² that should be implanted or refurbished upfront. They will make your M² adventure easier on everyone. Top gun is the conscious/subconscious matter mentioned earlier. It is a common denominator of communication and transactions. Making errors on classification of mind streams flowing about you can be quite damaging. Who hasn’t responded to a blast of emotion (subconscious) with rational thinking (conscious) and paid dearly for the error?

Your mental machinery in the cranium contains brains of the conscious mind, to be sure, but as discussed earlier, most of the brainpower contained in the skull provided by your genome, about 90% of the total, has been permanently allocated to the functioning of your subconscious unconscious. The psychological sciences handle this acute disparity by claiming your conscious self can call up what it wills from the unconscious labyrinth for objective contemplation and decision making and then shove the information so derived back down to the archives of the subconscious. That is, functionally, the “hidden” disparity doesn’t matter because conscious you is in rational control of your well-being. Not even the scientists that make such claim are able to do that trick.

The subjective universe in which social organizations function is as real as the material world in which they act. The human brain, from whence human nature emanates, allocates 90% of its resources to subconscious information processing and 10% of its power to conscious information processing – the functional facilities you can use for rational thought. When “awake,” the conscious brainpower apparatus processes information at 40 bits/sec. Meanwhile, night and day, the unconscious brain cranks at 11,000,000 bits/sec. No contest.

Since subconscious and unconscious have identical definitions (APA), we call the big brain 90% subunconscious. It is the source and host of self-deception, including our optical illusions. With 30,000 times the information processing resources at its disposal, the subconscious brain owns the feed to your motivational teleprompter display. The conscious brain has veto power before teleprompter imperative is turned into task action.

Because the number of pathways for information to travel among the billions of neurons is unfathomably huge, human understanding of the subunconscious process is categorically impossible. We can read the teleprompter outputs of subunconscious, but one can know neither the inputs nor the processing mechanisms of action that display what you are to do. While you can know about some aspects of your subunconscious that no one else could know, for all practical purposes your subunconscious is a black box. That means intercourse amongst humans is largely conducted by subunconscious brains opaque even to their individual owners.

It is easy to demonstrate that this claim of conscious brain supremacy is contingent, conditional, and rarely the case in today’s tense operational reality. The more significant the occasion, the more likely your rational conscious mind is shaking in fear in the back seat.

The most defining, treacherous and intimate relationship in the universe is the one we have with ourselves. We routinely believe in what we don’t believe in, lying to ourselves and believing the lie. In practical existence, this singularly-human propensity sabotages our own goal-seeking efforts. The implications of self-deception in organizational functioning shape the trajectory of social system viability.

The thesis underlying the demonstration claims that the subconscious unconscious, consisting of the processes in the mind which occur automatically and are not available to introspection, include our irrational thought, biased memories, skewed interests, and warped motivations, and can, in situations of vital importance, make task-action decisions for you that override all of your conscious, moral, espoused intentions. Your subconscious can “coerce” you to do things against your will and welfare and convince you it did no such thing.

Each of us navigates using a self-contained microcosm: a complex of contradictory motives that compete below the level of our self-awareness. Intrinsic paradox makes our task-action selections vulnerable to a vast repertoire of specious evasions of reality. The curse of self-deception delivered by our genome places the bets we make about the unknowable, arriving future. We imagine we are familiar with self-deception, but its triggers and functioning are unknowable, its perplexities innumerable.

In the beginning was deception. Take the distinguishing criteria of deception into the Garden of Eden and logic must conclude that the only one telling the truth in the temptation story, God included, was the serpent. Your subconscious mind, a virtuoso of deception, cannot discriminate between mischief it perpetrates on others and mischief it commits on you. When your subunconscious helps you willfully deceive another person, it is your ally. When it deceives you, it can be your assassin.

The subunconscious brain 90% can overpower the conscious brain 10% choices on matters of extreme significance to y our viability and way of life – and, like optical illusions, that capability is readily demonstrated.

The power of the unconscious mind to overrule the conscious mind in feeding your teleprompter, while situationally contingent, is non-reciprocal. While you can gatekeep and intercept subconscious mischief before it is executed, before you become its victim, your conscious mind has no say in its operation. It’s hard to fathom that the genome Nature designed exclusively for Homo assembles a brain with the majority of its processing power devoted to self-deception, propagating beliefs that are not true. It doesn’t trust you to make intelligent decisions in your own behalf. With this dude inside your skull, who needs an enemy?

In a world just like ours, but without the Human species, matter will go on obeying the laws of the universe as it always did. No observer is necessary. Note however that deception has no existence independent of the perspective that humanity takes on life. Deception is a human judgement made on the basis of human nature and experience. The debris of deception is always part of your choices of task action.

Learning about self-deception is the intertwining of two soliloquies, creator and interlocutor, silent and separated in time. Your external dialogues in presentation are filtered by your internal dialogs as it selects what, if anything, to assimilate and pass on to your teleprompter. There is no such thing as absolute understanding of your selection process. Just reflect that everyone who had a hand in your socialization was operating on self-deception – unaware of his crime.

The best thing you can ever do for your self-control is to accept the facts of subconscious mind supremacy regarding your teleprompter and your veto power. It is the grandfather of issues. Only by realizing the lop-sided brainpower differential can you take rational gatekeeper action to protect your interests. No one can gatekeep your built-in assassin for you.

Commit the following attributes of the two minds to your core memory. You will be using this knowledge to filter the imperatives posted by your subconscious. Think Pandora’s Box if you don’t.

Subconscious mind characteristics

• Opaque, unknowable, black box, inaccessible to reason
• Instant, reflexive, ruthless
• Has no ethics, morals, scruples
• Controls the cranium’s one-way-mirror teleprompter
  • Chooses on automatic, intuition, whim
• Impervious to disturbance
  • Feedback of consequences
  • Truth
  • Paradoxes
  • Risk
• Oblivious to false and missing information
  • Never attempts to validate “truth”
  • Oblivious to feedback of non-confirmatory information
• Defensive
  • Anti-prying, anti-curious, anti-fact-gathering
  • Demands faith, blind acquiescence
  • Baffled by the 2^nd Law, coming and going
• Hindsight exclusive
• Passionate, emotional, acts with reckless abandon

Conscious mind characteristics

• Opaque, unknowable, inaccessible
• Veto power over the subconscious imperatives
• Slow, hesitant
• Sensitive to information quality
  • Constantly seeking actionable-grade truth
• Goal-oriented
  • Foresight
  • Risk assessment
  • Self-evaluation
  • Feedback-orientated
• Objective, logical, transparent
  • Calculating
  • Ladder of logic
• Only the conscious mind can deal with the 2^nd Law
• Sensitive to disturbance
• Curious
• Impassionate, moral, pragmatic
• Paradox averse

 

Additional subconscious attributes

• 95% of the task action imperatives posted on your teleprompter that average man executes, are produced by the subconscious
• Your subconscious assumes it knows everything (IKE)
  • Everything in its memory library is fiction
  • It processes on what it has, fiction
    • It creates facts as necessary to choose task actions
  • It cannot distinguish its compilation of fake reality, delusion, from material reality
  • It cannot implement Gödel’s proof
  • It cannot handle negatives – “don’t” and “not”
  • It cannot infer or deduce, make conclusions and arguments based on formal logic
  • Defensive: most of its resources goes to the coverup of previous errors
  • It doesn’t know what is best for you and perforce doesn’t care
  • It cannot distinguish right from wrong. It acts
  • It only knows a manipulated image of the present and reacts, believing its own flawed memory over the facts it faces
  • Uninfluenced by morals, it acts oblivious to consequences
  • It frets over what is already lost by its incompetency
  • Normal is illogical and irrational
    • Risk indifferent
    • Consequences indifferent
  • It cannot handle future, consider potential consequences – it is exclusively hindsight
  • It cannot deal with the 2^nd Law
  • It is uninfluenced by morals, ethics, integrity and humanitarianism
  • Acts only on its memory, not presented facts
  • It cannot foresee, formulate goals and objectives. It doesn’t goal-seek anything.
  • It has no benchmark references. It doesn’t check itself against any standards. No stop rules

Instinct

Instinct is an innate, inbred fixed pattern of behavior responding to certain stimuli. There are established criteria which distinguish instinctual from other kinds of behavior. To be considered instinctual, a behavior must:

• Be automatic
• Be irresistible
• Occur at some point in development
• Be triggered by some event in the environment
• Occur in every member of the species
• Be unmodifiable
• Govern behavior for which the organism needs no training

Alexander Jamieson, in the first volume of his A Dictionary of Mechanical Science, Arts, Manufactures, and Miscellaneous Knowledge (1829), defined the term instinct as “an appellation given to the sagacity and natural inclinations of brutes, which supplies the place of reason in mankind.” Jamieson’s definition has a lot of history going for it.

The primary outlet of human instincts is shaped by the subconscious

Always appropriate instincts

• Survival
• Workmanship
• Curiosity, creativity
• Benevolence
• Efficiency
• Productivity
• Teamwork, collaboration
• Reciprocity
• Harmony with nature

Conditionally appropriate instincts

• Domination, aggression
• Acquisition
• Competition, zero-sum
• Obedience to authority

The use of conscious/unconscious awareness is vital to M² success. The compelling reason is simple. The supreme dynamic in organizational intelligence is in how it deals with the 2^nd Law factor in viability husbandry. Only the conscious mind can be potent against 2^nd Law degradation of all matter. The subconscious mind, from every angle, is a colossal misfit to the 2^nd Law. Disregarding what cannot be ignored without Nature’s punishment is how, exactly, the organization became grotesquely dysfunctional in the first place.

The man of intelligence has the special privilege of being able to contemplate and understand universal laws, so as to draw from them the greatest possible benefit, avoiding any rebellion against these supreme laws and rules. Everyone adheres to the laws of nature, everyone conforms, everyone obeys. Encouragement and persuasion are unnecessary. With adherence unavoidable, the man of intelligence is concerned about avoiding attempts to defy universal law.

Ignorance of this natural order was the root cause of public and private distress. Transgressions of the rule of avoidance are the most widespread and usual causes of the physical evils that afflict men. Instruction on the laws of the natural order would form the basis of a good society. Without this knowledge, governments and the conduct of men can be characterized only by obscurity, aberration, confusion and disorder.  Francois  Quesnay  (1752AD)

There is no doubt that the difference between brain-off, just mimic what your peers are doing, and the labor of thinking for advancement is substantial. For those running brain-dead on status quo, the heavy, unending use of the conscious mind necessary to reach and grasp excellence can come as a jolt. There is no way to assuage that fact. There is no sugar to help this medicine go down. The answer to the common response: “How did I get this far in the mess without thinking for myself?” is by your free choice.

Always respond to conscious with conscious. Never respond to subconscious with conscious or with subconscious. An irrational exchange means stalemate – status quo wins, you lose.

Intermediate conclusions

Digesting the facts about the operation and influence of the unconscious mind takes time. The attributes, limitations, and propensities of the subunconscious brain are sobering by themselves. When you add in the fact that every piece of information it warehouses for use in deliberations is fiction, subconscious is GIGO city. And, hogging 90% of the available computation resources, this unknowable, untrustworthy, fleshy contraption is making 95% of your task-action choices? Not on our watch.

The fact of this monster assassin of your welfare is not just another constraint in the cauldron. GIGO is not a constraint to work around. It’s much too significant to allow activity until its gatekeeper is in place. In M² GIGO is a stop rule. You will encounter other noble truths in the Kindle Quartet, like depersonalization, that also rank as zero-discussion stop rules.

What does go into task action choices?

The facts about the unknowable processors in the mind are sobering enough. When you add-in the limitations of the unconscious brain, with 90% of the processing power, it’s clear that the two black boxes comprising our mind are uncontrollable from outside and the inside. The only rational action left for our consciousness to take is to gatekeep the compulsions before they become a menace to ourselves and society.

While we can never know the factors that the subconscious evaluates to make choices, testing gives us a handle on what factors do not weigh-in:

• Humanitarian
  • Morale, self-image
  • Physical health
  • Psychological health
  • Morals, ethics, mores
  • Regulatory
  • Public perception
• Material
  • Quality
  • Safety, damage, injury
  • Turnover
  • Availability
  • Productivity
  • Profit, ROI
  • Reciprocity
• Future
  • Risk-informed, decision-making
  • Past performance, lessons learned
  • Feedback
  • Actionable quality information

We know these factors don’t enter into head-shed command choices because we have tested each one thousands of times around the globe. You can run tests on this as well. Just highlight the item of your test in your offering of Plan B. While we never proffer innovations that aren’t material and proven, ones we have to deliver on, experience has shown you can spook management just by breaking silence on the idea itself. Regarding Plan B, no one ever calls your bluff. The terror you witness is not that Plan B might fail – they’re equipped with plausible answers for that, but on the outside, remote chance that it would succeed – for which no instructions appear on the captive’s teleprompter.

Incontrovertible

When the word incontrovertible is used as an adjective for a concept in M², it means the concept itself includes Karl Popper-grade provisions for two separate, independent ways to disprove the concept, Popper’s “falsifiability.” The first method provided is transparent, scrutable connectivity to natural law, mathematical physics. The second way provided to controvert the concepts is direct access to live implementations. You take your examination gear into the field of implementation, take measurements of the organizational dynamics as you wish, and evaluate the data. That’s as transparent as it gets.

Several of the concepts reduced to practice came from Rudolf Starkermann’s work in dynamic simulation of social systems (Starkermann.com). Your review of the configuration and parameterization of the models is encouraged. Tens of thousands of simulation runs were made during a 40-year investigation. The structure on which these models were arranged is industrial control theory.

Investigating concepts in live implementation is powerful falsification because many veterans of the transmutations and concepts are there to interview, on the job, cheek by jowl. There’s something special about physical contact with the work scene and the people animating it at the same time. There’s something that rings of truth when two people are having a conversation about something material that is right in front of them. There’s no room for misunderstandings to get started when you’re both standing there looking at the same thing.

As originally designed into the specification, essentially all of the concepts and the toolsmithy in the M² are demonstrable. With plenty of experience in the bank, we have learned how to demonstrate your choice in your circumstances on demand. There are three reasons for working-in demonstrability as a deliverable of the M² development project.

1. It is unsurpassed as a way to learn system dynamics, locate errors
   1. Demonstration is ally to explanation
   2. An ideal venue for Q & A
2. It serves Popperian falsifiability requirements
   1. It provides objective grounds for discrediting the platform
3. Refusal of an offer to demonstrate does not controvert the platform
   1. It is an efficient, quick screening technique incapable of error

Experience shows that most people acknowledge the fact that their refusal to follow up with learning by direct contact means that their support for OD will continue no matter what. It’s all one needs to know.

A word about intrinsic complexity

Complexity is as complexity does. The human genome and human nature, being invariant over a lifetime, impose strict limits on the level of complexity an individual can handle with his conscious mind and expect any degree of success. While the subconscious mind handles complexity of any amount by ignoring it, the conscious mind encounters a limit where all of its objective, goal-seeking competency suddenly plunges to zero. Accordingly, in M² it is necessary to recognize complexity and multiplicity, as-you-go. When things have complexified past your limit, it is time to stop and apply systems-engineering practices so as to drive the level of complexity down below your bafflement tolerance ceiling.

Procedures used by systems freaks for dealing with complexity work but you have to use them. Many issues of complexity in this social behavior arena can be quantified by the mathematics of multiplicity. While such complexity-simplifiers as the 2½ rule were obtained from the serious calculations of dynamics, to be sure, everybody immediately validates the 2½ rule by their own direct experience in another “Holy Shit!” recognition event.

Another simplifier, POSIWID, from control theory can simplify any black-box complexity in behavior. The Purpose Of the System Is What It Does, cuts through any amount of complexity and deception in the process by comparing results with stated intentions.

It is important to distinguish between the beliefs and opinions paraded by men on the one hand and those betrayed by their actions on the other. Friedrich Hayek 1924

For other examples of simplification by toolsmithy, the 4-person democratic group limit is found by counting communication loops. The 36% limit of turnover, for another, is computed using a simple algebraic equation.

Most of the components of the benefit package, such as turnover reduction, can be assessed by counting. Turnover is the stadium scoreboard of OD and OE. The benefits to morale and esprit de corps may not express in numerical units but everyone recognizes low morale when they see it.

Progressing

By now, you should be comfortable with the special champion’s era people and appreciate their experience-driven intensity for implementing a fix. After these eyewitnesses to the cycle died, the push for remedy tapered off to today’s resignation and acceptance of the OD condition as the divine-destiny social norm. Unlike the champions, there’s no living experience with the ideal state to contrast to the OD state.

Having been exposed to the continuation of atrocities, a victim yourself no doubt, you might think that news of a genuine cure, a quick authentic fix, a happy way of life, would be eagerly embraced. If you assumed further that organizationally oppressed peoples would be anxious for OD relief, you’d be wrong on both counts.

Our M² application experience shows that only after excellence is established with the vectors does the enthusiasm for relief explode on the scene. For this reason, nothing is better than going to an implementation site and interviewing the M² veterans in situ, one on one at their work face. There are dozens of 5-yr veterans now, all shifts, and you can interview and question as many “butterflies” as you like. There are many vectors in the cocoon stage you can interview, often at the same industrial complex. When you get back to home base, you will have experienced the same before and after contrast that, a century ago, turned concerned citizens into our illustrious champions. You will have witnessed how the metamorphosis is accomplished.

After you interview some M² veterans, you will be invited into the cocoon where you can witness the metamorphosis process for yourself. Yes, it all has to fit together. That’s why it works. Meanwhile, there’s always more toolsmithy to learn. Every concept, every tool featured in the Kindle Quartet, can be taken out and immediately applied in your environs. You will benefit from the trials straightaway and you don’t have to ask for permission from anyone to do so. Start anywhere.

Let them bethink themselves that they are the enemies of their own desires. For in nature practical results are not only the means to improve well-being but the guarantee of truth. The rule of religion, that a man should show his faith by his works, holds good in natural philosophy too. Science also must be known by works. It is by the witness of works, rather than by logic or even observation, that truth be revealed or be established. Whence it follows that the improvement in man’s mind and the improvement of his lot are one and the same.  Adam Smith (1758)

 

Gödel’s Maxim

During the 1930s, working in Princeton with Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel came up with the mathematical-physics proof for what every polymath had been thinking all along. Kurt had Einstein check his mathematics of his theory that the moving exhibit of consequences you experience as part of living can never have the efficient causes (Aristotle) at the same “level” you ran into the material consequences. Both Einstein and Gödel were delighted at the proof and occasionally claimed joint ownership. Look around you and you will notice reckless attempts to defy this law of Nature everywhere.

We hold that a good part of the reason social system operational performance has not paced the technological advances is that the people of a society are colonized to believe organizational malfunction is caused by the defective personal attributes of individual potentates elected to office. The head shed ran off with the corporate treasury? You elected greedy people. Loser.

An apothegm derived from Gödel: “Anybody serious about problem-solving that doesn’t align the social context first, before opening his toolbox, is a fool.”

As you review the stories from the anthologies, you will see that failure to align with Gödel has enormous consequences. To this day, organizations repeat practices proven to fail again and again, since centuries ago – never learning the lessons, never trying to learn the lessons on display at higher levels of abstraction. For example, the USA has a healthcare system, created by lobbyists commissioned by perpetrators and voted in by politicians, that baffles every lobbyist and politician that engages it with reform in mind. Loaded with detailed abuses from their constituents, they micromanage their micro-fixes of those manifest abuses into Congressional paralysis. Oh, the humanity!

As you continue, you will notice that, fully respecting Gödel, the issue of OD has been raised up to a level where you can understand its true origins. You can then understand how the fix must be generic, globally effective, and self-sustaining. That part of the puzzle will not be found in the anthologies.

There is no organizational system that is not founded on ignorance of the laws of nature. The inventors and defenders of these absurdities could not foresee the successive perfection of the human mind. Condorcet (1882)

Turing’s Theory

Using mathematical physics, Alan Turing proved (1946) that if you insist on claiming infallibility, you cannot also have intelligence. First off, infallibility is categorically unsustainable in that the 2^nd Law eats it for lunch. Second off, intelligence is solving problems in developing knowledge and that entails trial and error. Infallible rejects knowledge development.

You witness attempts to defy this law of the universe everywhere. Infallible rule-based behavior is the glory of the closed-minded and the death of innovation and advancement. All attempts to hold things steady status quo end up increasing decay and instability. No one beats the 2^nd Law. No one gets out of this life alive.

The Franceschi Fitting

The very fact that task action is taking place assures that somewhere between the corporate vision, creed, doctrine, pledge and task selection an individual invented a “fitting” that connected on one end to generalized functions, abstract (alleviate poverty), to physical functions, material (feed the poor). The generalized function ties upward to the vision articulated by the head shed while the physical function is translated into tangibles – catalog part numbers for procurement by the workforce – and task action begins. The genius to spotlight and elaborate on this significant, creative act was Dr. Joseph Mario Franceschi. It is the climax of all design.

What he did was to stage the invention formally, specify the information, and supply a set of tools for completing the assignment.

Joe found by cruel experience on large, complex projects that too many errors are made when this crucial act, that must occur in all design, all art, is left to blind drift and whim of the “Unknown Soldier.” When no one knows who invented the Franceschi Fitting (FF) and the assumptions that based his invention, the risk of system failure to meet expectations, also whim, skyrockets. As time moves forward and thermodynamics change everything material, the chances that all the original assumptions remain valid approach zero. When system failure is then used as the basis of redesign and backfit, the costly process is called long-cycle Run Break and Fix. Following the history of any government project like Hanford, Rocky Flats, or Savannah River will provide scores of organizational-dysfunction examples of turning honest citizens into enemies of their communities.

In every case of complexity by multiplicity, you can assume that the goals set for the project are wrong. It is actually a simple matter to demonstrate this truism by getting out the facts for systematic assessment and discussion. When this audit process is vetoed by management, the risk of project failure becomes certainty – everyone knows it and initializes their CYA file system.

By highlighting the FF and all its upstream and downstream ramifications, the creative process can be supported with appropriate information, dynamic simulation, and proving-ground facilities. FF design is an act of intelligence, appropriate selection, which is itself a function of knowledge developed. The more ground truth, actionable-quality information (AQI), you know about the situation, the more likely your design will be an effective solution. Real problems require real solutions.

The cost of organizational dysfunction

Organizational dysfunction (OD) produces a variety of ramified, distributed but interlocked consequences – manifesting as a bundle. The cost of OD is a pillar of the platform and it does not need faith to render it incontrovertible. The costs are assembled by direct measurements of the material case. Validating one of the consequences in the bundle, validates them all. You never find an OD cost component increase by itself: e.g., you never find low quality with high morale.

The cost of OD is reviewed in particulars and in depth in Book 2 (Dystopia). The subject is brought up for non-vectors here to prevent accidents. An organization in OD is extremely sensitive about its unnecessary costs and workforce atrocities. It goes out of its way to not record them. Accordingly, it is hostile to any and all efforts to compile them. The drawing and its earlier companion were published in 1911. See anything not applicable to today?

You can run that test without getting permissions or taking risks by measuring the cost component “turnover.” It is one cost variable in the bundle, a report card that can’t be hidden from the workforce, and it is loaded with meaning. As will be discussed later on, mathematical physics dictates that any organization with 36% turnover or more, cannot get out of OD – period.  No matter the expertise and resources thrown at an OD fix, anything above 36% turnover is an irresponsible pursuit of the impossible and that includes us PEs. If the methodology we implement doesn’t drive turnover down below 36% within 4 months, we are required by law as licensed professionals to withdraw from the engagement. In practice, it is easy to forecast the impact on turnover, error-free, within a week after kickoff. We’re in it for the outcome, not the income.

The costs of OD are tallied by comparing the performance of the organization in OD (caterpillar) with the same organization transmuted to ideal mode (butterfly). The costs before are compared to the costs after; the norm of business as usual compared to what is attainable with excellence. How do you know such sterling operational performance is attainable? Because you attained it. See the butterfly for yourself; note it is self-sustaining. The cost to species Homo sapiens for engaging and perpetuating organizational dysfunction over the last 2 centuries exceeds a quadrillion dollar$. Incontrovertible.

The speed of M²

The metamorphosis is a sprint, not a marathon. If you don’t assemble the butterfly before the cocoon disintegrates from turnover, the butterfly is stillborn. This demonstrable fact makes for a handy rule. Any concept for operational improvement, valid or not, that takes more than 3 months to implement will fail. No management guru ever came in promising less than 3 years. The average claimed for culture change is a decade of protracted effort. That means never.

Attendance during the M² process is a strict rule because the sequence of successful metamorphosis is strict. After a vector goes past the inflection point, he is eligible for makeup episodes.

Provisioning for the transmutation

It’s a strange situation indeed. The vectors come equipped with a ready mind and most of the core knowledge already in place. What the vectors get from the interventionist is silence-breaking of what it is they consciously recognize – but never get to discuss. The reason we call the first two episodes of Season 1 “Shock and Awe” is that the individual vectors are stunned to find out they already possess the critical, essential, sociotechnical stuff of transmutation. It’s never “Hey Doc, would you explain this concept again for me?” It’s always “Holy Shit!” The vectors don’t need the Kindle Quartet to metamorphose, they’re doing it in real time with the interventionist. The quintet is not written for the vectors or used by them during the cocoon stage.

For the non-vector aspirants to excellence, there’s more to it than an open mind. You may have the same embedded knowledge as the vectors, probably more, but unlike the vectors, men in the middle, you have social standings to lose. You don’t have a way to test everything out immediately in your local work scene. You need the Kindle Quintet to make it through. As a single, the benefits of excellence knowledge for you are good, but compared to the vector, modest. You are being provisioned with some concepts and toolsmithy to get started. You can test as opportunity presents itself.

A word about material reality

The operational reality marks the distinguishing difference between organizational dysfunction (OD) and excellence, between caterpillar and butterfly. How can a better way be a better way and not show up in reality? The reason dysfunction is so intractable is that outcome reality, good or bad, plays no role in choosing what to do next.

When organizational excellence is the unifying standard, and it’s always measured by instruments attached to the operational reality, the data that validates delivery of the benefit package, has to be real, thorough and transparent. There can be no such thing as excellence by faith or authoritative opinion.

In excellence, the relationship to reality is absolute. It is the 2^nd Law, the most secure and material-real of all the natural laws, that sends any response to entropy accumulations not welded to 2^nd Law reality straight to hell. It is the hunger for actionable quality information (AQI) that necessitates incessant attention of the conscious mind and exclusion of the subconscious-mind attributes.

Dealing with 2^nd Law reality means there is and can be no such thing as status quo, steady state. Simply put, if your goal-seeking productivity is not going up, it is going down. Throwing public relations at reality does not change the reality. At some point in degradation you switch from net producer to net consumer. Going parasitical is not the stuff of species survival.

There are noble truths, self-evident, you should assimilate into your marrow before you storm the castle. Review and resolve any issues you may have with the following statements.

• The dynamic functioning of a social system is by free choice of its individual members. There is nothing in natural law or human nature that compels organizational dysfunction. There is nothing in natural law or human nature that forbids organizational success. Nature is indifferent. Social instincts are not innately competitive or destructive.
• The processing power of the human brain, unfathomable in its mechanisms of action, is 90% allocated to the subconscious and 10% to the conscious mind. The limitations of the subconscious mind are immutable.
• Defective information going in, provided by any source for any reason in any amount, cannot deliver correct answers coming out. Babbage axiom. GIGO
• Attempts to defy natural law are pursuits of the impossible.
• The subunconscious mind is incapable of Ashby intelligence.
• Metamorphosis to excellence is a sprint (36% rule) not a marathon
• The paramount priority in any viability husbandry situation is dealing effectively with the 2^nd
• Organizational dysfunction is universal and recognized as such
• Organizational prosperity, Plan B, excellence, has been established as a universal option. Refusing to audit implementations does not invalidate the option.

Concept collection

• Human Nature invariant
• Natural law indifferent, omnipresent
• Conscious/unconscious mind
  • 10% of brainpower allocated to conscious, 90% to unconscious
  • Critical attributes of unconscious 90%
    • The teleprompter
  • Operational instincts, reflexes, phobias, biases
  • Psychological resistance
  • Ashby intelligence
• Align working context first
• Communication
  • Applied Shannon
  • Outcome choice
  • Rogerian triad
• Learning
  • Knowledge development as basis of intelligence
  • Information quality, GIGO
  • Conscious mind exclusive
  • Local, particular, future
• Free personal choice at all times
  • Unconscious is always OD
  • Conscious can choose OE
• Responsibility/autonomy MITM
• Franceschi Fitting, planning v design
  • Exclusive vector role
  • What “done” looks like
• Trust
• Truth, reality, actionable quality information (AQI)
• The Nash Equilibrium
• Psychological success, Maslow hierarchy
• Positive reciprocity

Toolsmithy Collection

• Goal specification and context alignment
• POSIWID
• 2½ rule
• 36% turnover rule
• 4-person democratic group rule
• Bad Burrito rule (GIGO)
• Rasmussen TDBD
• Penetrations
• Dependency matrix
• Popper
• Nash
• Turing
• Ashby
• Gödel

 

Stipulations

1. Organizational dysfunction levies a tax on the organizational accounts and we all get to pay it. The tax on productivity extracted upfront by dysfunction comes as an itemized bundle of charges including:
   1. Reduced productivity
      1. Deliberate withholding of efficiency, Ca’canny, soldiering
   2. Turnover and absenteeism
   3. Damage
      1. Reputation
      2. Public relations

• Self-image

1. Injury
   1. Physical
   2. Psychological
      1. Morale

• Regulatory

1. Quality
   1. Of products and services
   2. Of life
2. Waste, rejects
3. Lost opportunities
   1. Innovation
   2. Positive reciprocity
4. The components of the dysfunction bundle are interlocked and self-regenerative. If you work to improve one component and succeed, the minute your corrective activity is withdrawn, the situation rapidly returns things to their original state – the Nash Equilibrium, mathematical physics, automatically engineers the restoration.
5. While everyone attests that they do live and suffer amongst dysfunctional organizations, social conditioning has convinced them that no alternative scheme for Homo sapiens is possible. You silently acquiesce into subservience, even acting as agent to dysfunction, because there is no Plan B. The record of social system performance in this regard, every Age, provides an overwhelming amount of evidence to support the assumption. Its exceptions are transient and fleeting.

 

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