Answering the Ancient Riddles
It’s time to reveal the solutions to the riddles blocking the OD fix that mankind failed to solve for twelve thousand years straight. Attaining and sustaining Plan B application, starting in 2013, proved the barriers blocking the path to the solution were identified and had been overcome. Getting to Plan B was like solving a picture puzzle with many alien parts mixed in, and no picture or title on the parts container box.
Twelve thousand years of failed attempts provided no clues to the riddles. Just like the gnomes guarding the bridges, you have to solve the riddles one after another to continue your journey. Most attempts to fix Plan A failed to identify the riddle that ruined them. This became the first barrier. Is there a Plan B to be sought? The Establishment keeps saying no because there is no Plan B, there are no riddles, and get over it.
Immediate Riddles of System Plan B
- Is there such a thing as a Plan B for prosperous social functioning? An alternative to the Plan A standard for the Stone Age?
- Can we get there from Plan A, damaged goods, as-is?
- Why is it so difficult to promote Plan B?
There is no historical record in all of humankind of a Plan B society that:
- Anyone knew it was a Plan B society, distinct from the one instinctive to invariant human nature
- Was self-sustaining, not transient
All historical records of humanity start with Stone Age life and follow that paradigm forward in time as it encounters the “Age of Tall Hierarchies.” As such, they can only describe Plan A dysfunctions and the variety of consequences that follow. Their books on a perfected Utopia, labelled rank fiction, consist of imagined fixes for particular evils of Plan A.
The prime mover of Plan B, its paradigm, is no longer the paramount riddle thwarting a prosperous human society. If paradigm B had been understood for what it was four thousand years ago, Plan B would have been the norm from the Iron Age forward. It would be the standard organizing system in every hierarchy having more than three layers.
The first evidence of tall-hierarchy human society , Gobekli Tepe, in Ice Age Turkey 12K years ago, grew to more than three layers of hierarchy and immediately morphed into Plan A. After it collapsed, it took a few millennia before Agricultural-Age humanity dared form its second city in Mesopotamia.
The challenge of tall hierarchies is control of the collective means to achieve particular collective ends, such as stability and perpetuation. When that control is top-down authority, the 2½ rule strips potentates of their power to direct the producers. Crippled by GIGO, the Plan A society, as it must, collides with both the Second Law and Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety above the Bremermann’s Limit. Those conditions of natural law erase the possibility of goal attainment. Since only variety destroys variety, the explosion of multiplicity drives the complexity of control far above that mathematically possible. Control theory cannot compensate for multiplicity above Bremermann’s limit, with or without intelligence amplification (Ashby).
Since no administration could provide the control variety necessary to devour the variety exhibited by the population as-is, the head shed chooses to compress the variety within the population by force, i.e., infusing fear and threat of punishment. Once homogenized to negligible variety choices can be manipulated at will. Forced constriction of variety is done by depersonalization, obedience to authority, and rules of task action. You’re just a number, readily replaced, and you do as you are told. Only conformance to herd policy can provide your security, so you are conditioned to believe. In fact it is the dysfunctional herd that is causing your insecurity.
Strategy is a system of makeshifts. Prudence is more than a science. It is bringing knowledge to bear on practical life, the further elaboration of an original guiding idea under constantly changing circumstances. It is the art of acting under the pressure of the most demanding conditions…
That is why general principles, rules derived from them, and systems based on these rules cannot possibly have any value for strategy. Helmuth von Moltke the Elder 1878
There is no riddle about Plan A consequences. You suffer them daily and you know they come from abuse of authority and the organizational dysfunction it causes and nurtures. Yes, it’s irrational.
The two riddles about Plan B went unspoken and unsolved for twelve millennia.
- Plan B itself, self-sustainable. Could it exist? If a Plan B was possible, what would it look like, act like?
- How to transpose the staff of OD Plan A as-is into the staff of Plan B, same organizational chart?
In truth, we attained Plan B in 2013 only by repeatedly trying to solve the second riddle first. We had no reference for what Plan B looked like until we got there, but we were prepared to recognize it. (Argyris) With the algorithm for reaching Plan B in hand in 2013, it was reverse engineered to capture the generic process that always leads to it. This procedure highlighted the fallacious assumptions that defeated us for half a century. We get no comfort from proving we were dupes, patsies to the rulers. We couldn’t bring ourselves to believe that all the functionalities of government hierarchy could be 3-D corrupt, even SCOTUS, in collective concert.
Again we learned the hard way that hierarchical society has the big, structural, essential assumptions and operating factors wrong. Forget the irritating side shows of unintended consequences, it’s the main support pillars of social functioning that are ignored, unstudied, and undiscussed. The Establishment holds off Plan B by duping the population to believe Plan A is all there is, all there ever was. Commandment number one, “No other Gods before me.”
Social conditioning is so effective, at least 97% of the global human population has no idea about the origins of the task actions they execute in their operational reality. Those 97%, unaware of the process that delivers the imperatives to act to their teleprompters, are not consciously making the choices they implement. In short, 97% of humanity is the perfect stooge for manipulation to act against their own best interests. The vulnerability is exploited by social media, Silicon Valley, the vested and cognizant others, to incredible, unprecedented wealth. Imagine 97% of the brains of the human population have been highjacked, unaware of the fact. Feeding the process that enslaves their way of life.
Solving the multiplicity riddle
No social system operating policy can avoid confronting the multiplicity, complexity riddle. A society cannot exist without a solution to this complexity, not even for a short time. How do you get cooperation and collaboration towards a positive collective goal when everybody involved is making different choices? Baitball homogenation.
With social status as the paramount factor in social behavior, there are two methodologies that resolve this complexity riddle. One defines Plan A and the other defines Plan B. One method uses the force of social authority (application to West Point) while the other method, democratic, uses goal-seeking performance (graduating from West Point).
What you learn from Plan A history is that authoritarianism fails social foundations catastrophically. You do not get requisite collaboration by force, by threats of punishment, by taking away basic inalienable human rights. What you do get instantly is permanent distrust and Ca’canny.
As can be easily demonstrated, using “drive” on subordinates drops workforce productivity by at least 25%. Since all Plan A’s issue commands by force, the costs are absorbed by each perpetrator as administrative overhead, levelling the competitive playing field. The Plan A solution of the multiplicity barrier by depersonalization only holds until the funds to support the dysfunctional organization habit run out. Typically, the ends of the collective are abrupt.
What you learn from Plan B is that using goal-attaining performance to answer the riddle reverses Ca’canny, stopping the losses, while bringing on ingenuity to deliver substantial benefits, the likes of which Plan A potentates have never experienced. They cannot imagine the positive effect of unfettered inalienable human rights on the success of their organization. That’s why the hefty competitive advantage brought by Plan B has no response from Plan A competition.
Plan B resolves the unavoidable multiplicity barrier by positive collaborative achievement. The validating sign of its successful implant is spontaneous workforce intramural teasing. The differences of variety multiplicity are handled by mutual kidding. The interventionist knows when Plan B is kicking in when his keystones wards start having fun with him to his face in public. It is proof positive that the tribe of keystones has formed and the interventionist has been awarded membership. What do striking personality differences matter when the social system is thriving? In operation, Plan B shows how people with contrasting personalities and biases can work together seamlessly and in good humor towards a common goal, gaining in mutual respect daily. It is the most beautiful social behavior on planet Earth. If you don’t witness Plan B society in action, your frame of reference for living is incomplete.
Cognitive demand
Regarding the choice between Plan A and Plan B, it is important to weigh the great difference in effort outlay between the two. Mentally, Plan B requires eternal vigilance and non-stop use of the 10% conscious mind, including gatekeeping duty on the fiction-laden 90% subconscious mind. Plan B requires intelligent preventive maintenance. Plan B uses avatar forays into the future to evaluate possibilities for disturbances and opportunities before the fact. Cognitive demand is front-end loaded and remains high throughout. High cognitive exertion requires glucose resupply interludes.
Plan B has a high startup cost but avoids the costs of responding to foreseeable consequences after the fact. It navigates by foresight with a GPS for mid-course corrections. It has an ideology that cannot fail.
In stark contrast, Plan A has zero startup cost, no preemption of disturbances, and no preventative maintenance. Hindsight-driven cognitive demand remains at zero until after the consequences start streaming. The agenda is determined from then on by event-driven crises and their relative urgency forms the daily schedule of work. The actual cause of the consequences never makes the agenda.
An unsolved riddle remains
The years since the 2013 advent of Plan B, in spite of obvious Plan B success and flourishing organizations, has not brought a solution to the last remaining riddle. Why does the existence of Plan B cause catatonia in Plan A organizations? It has been eight years of non-stop failure on our part to promote Plan B top down. All we have learned from our many failures that the remaining riddle will be solved, if it exists, by the process of elimination. The obvious, logical avenues to pursue have all gone down in flames. It has been a grand experiment in sociology, that no sociologist wants to know about. It has been a grand experiment in leadership, that no one running management schools wants to know about. Even the notoriously ruthless and greedy organizations, like venture capitalists, don’t want to know about Plan B. The government? You’ve got to be kidding.
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