Start Right to End Right

Overview

One of the lessons we learned from our long ordeal with sociotechnology was that dealing with this organizational behavior business is tricky in multiple ways. Standard operating procedures don’t work for developing social intelligence. After many failures, we deduced that the law of nature that loomed large for launching the campaign was nature’s law of optimality. The law states that if you don’t start right, your loss is a sunk cost. Nothing can be done to recover the losses in resources incurred by heading off in the wrong direction. The centerpiece in this conundrum is trust. To start wrong on trust building, because of the speed of the subconscious mind in recognition, is fighting the headwind of distrust.

In the world of sociotechnology, if you don’t start right, you will fail from day one. The chances you will start right by intuition are zero. When you have no successes to refer to for guidance, the place to start becomes a crap shoot where the odds are stacked high against you. The important thing is to recognize this constraint and never start the same way that failed – again. We shudder at all the efforts being made to fix organizational dysfunction that, starting wrong, are barreling down the track to failure. At one time they was us.

Because our technical and political environment is rapidly growing more complex and ridiculous by the day, while our Stone Age ideology for living together stays the same, our species is headed towards extinction. All species go extinct the same way. Conditions change and ideology doesn’t adapt. This website announces an extraordinary development in social system ideology – an upgrade to global society’s operating manual designed to preserve our species from extinction in an arriving future increasingly loaded with unfamiliar disturbances

Everyone on the planet knows things are getting progressively worse, not better, under the ideology of nobrainer business as usual, Plan A. It is clear that the instructions for social living coded in our genome, evolved for Stone Age conditions, continuously in service since, has been kept well beyond its sell-by date.

At this time, for example, China is graduating eleven million students per year to comply with stated government policy, but China has jobs for only 65% of them. Guess what that disparity will lead to. The correct answer is that next year China will graduate even more students with even fewer jobs available for them. China will deal harshly with the mischief these educated unemployed will cause. Guess what punishing the citizens for following orders will lead to? Mao’s Red Guards?

Since an adaptation to the operational reality will not take place by itself with the ideology so long in use, a change of operating philosophy and procedures appropriate for healthy survival in our fast-changing context is essential. Yes, it’s much easier to hope for divine intervention than it is to think it through.

Experience has clearly shown that the scope and sweep of this operating manual for today’s and tomorrow’s contextual reality is well beyond the intellectual grasp of the subconscious human mind, the same one that runs all of our sensor systems. Those fearing that a change in ideology means a loss in their social status are more than willing to suffer the consequences of status quo. After all, we were socialized to not think for ourselves. How wrong could our vast society be? Stay tuned.

The overriding fact of this mess is that the changing environment society operates in today is a voracious energy hog. If you choose to face the familiar consequences of not changing, you will have to deal with the escalating material consequences stemming from your choice. This certainty is unavoidable. If you choose instead to stop the hemorrhage of effort and grief going to damage control, you will have to think with your conscious mind at high levels of effort and for extended periods. This certainty is also unavoidable. Your choice.

The truth remains that the ideology of social living that brought us this dilemma is utterly incapable of fixing itself. The law of nature that delivers this situation, first mathematically defined a century ago, informs that if there is to be a fix of a dysfunctional system, it must be a system fix and come from the outside-in at a higher level than the consequences. The Gödel-Einstein law is validated all day, every day by bureaucracies. Recorded history has no exceptions.

The layout of this website follows the derivation and development of the fix for the destruction and injury that Plan A inflicts of humanity. It is named Plan B. It starts from our protracted despair with the high viscosity of Plan A organizations to produce and ends with our joy in attaining the goal of Plan B. Transmuting Plan A into a prospering, thriving, flourishing Plan B collective, and its husbandry to future-proof human society, is fun city. The work is demanding but foolproof and things only get better. Plan B is where complacency goes to die.

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. Adam Smith

Site map

1. Introduction
   1. Overview and map
   2. Breaking silence: the culprit mechanisms of action in system Plan A
   3. Specification of the fix, what “done” looks like, before and after 2013.
2. The A->B transposition process
   1. Health
   2. GYAT
   3. FLLP
3. System Plan B benefit packages
   1. Extraordinary claims
   2. Extraordinary evidence
4. Husbandry: future-proofing System Plan B
5. The arsenal

There are galleries for Keystone reference and a massive repository of historical and hysterical reference material for the interventionists and anyone else. Of course, each visitor to the MitM website chooses his path through this Fun-House labyrinth for himself. We guarantee there are silence breakers within that will jar your awareness and stuff you will find annoying. We can’t predict the reactions, which will be which, before we post.

The passions are the only orators that convince. Francois de La Rochefoucauld 1642 CE

Our genome evolved by Nature for Stone Age living. It was key to survival of our species for those times and the horse humanity rode in on to today’s mess. As fate is having it, the Stone Age template is counterproductive in our Age of ubiquitous hierarchical, bureaucratic collectives and fast-advancing technology.

While the pace of genome adaptation is measured in millennia, today’s pace of change in social environment is measured in months. We have been left defenseless against the organizational dysfunction (OD) era of modern times. The fact intuition-driven OD is the same around the globe, no matter the Nation or its religions, testifies to its ancient common origin. Nature’s resilience to context-induced OD is far too sluggish to be of any value in staving off this threat of species extinction.

Fortunately, Nature built a contingency plan into our genome for situations just like the one we’re in. She provided us with a conscious mind endowed with veto power over what our subconscious mind dishes up on our task-action teleprompter. The only thing humans can control consciously is their efforts. Nothing else.

There’s nothing wrong with Plan A that a return to Stone Age conditions wouldn’t fix. Just watch the documentaries of nomadic tribes and those newly discovered communities in the Amazon rainforest. These people, living in isolated, primitive harsh conditions, are happy people! Everyone has what they need and no one is harmed by tribal life. While their young children could be seamlessly exchanged with our young children, the adults would never make it. There’s a lesson on genetics vs environment for us right there.

For the unprecedented rate of changing conditions mankind must face today, keeping pace is strictly a conscious-mind affair. The only tool you have is your veto power over the subconscious mind. That the computational power of the subconscious mind, where intuition dwells, is forty thousand times that of the conscious mind, cannot matter. You go with what you have. Yes, it takes much longer for the conscious mind to gather facts and rigorously work through the logic of their assembly into knowledge. If you don’t perform triage on your streaming subconscious mind imperatives, your future will match that of your peers.

It all boils down to a free choice. Going with your untrustworthy intuition like everyone else, or putting your conscious mind to serious work dealing with the things in the operational reality that can’t be changed. It’s a stressful condition where your conscious mind can run out of glucose before you finish your agenda for the day – and there’s nothing you can do about it. Overriding your Stone Age intuition in matters of social behavior is not for the faint of heart. Either way you choose, there’s a price to be paid. Status quo means extinction, flourishing means serious cognitive efforts.

Plan B is the template of social behavior appropriate for these turbulent, unstable times, which are likely to get more complex with time. It provides resiliency for dealing with the approaching future. Plan B functions on natural laws and established principles of social behavior proven to be successful. Simple proven principles at its core is why it works. Yes, complexity is tamed by simplicity.

Using the social relationships that met specifications and discarding those that did not, is consistent with the process of elimination, the only method that has a chance to hit on the fix. The wreckage of system Plan A, by itself, points nowhere. Notice that the current administration of the USA learns nothing from its malfunctioning policies, especially that a doubling down of failed policy makes matters worse.

The subconscious mind doesn’t recognize complexity. The cycle time of its processor is much too fast (a centisecond). Since it takes time to accumulate trustworthy information and logically put things together, like days, the wizard of the subconscious mind makes things up to fill in the gaps, so as to have a plausible excuse for manifest errors, exactly like the Wizard of Oz. Creation stories are examples of subconscious-mind handiwork transcending national borders and religious creeds. That’s why all creation stories follow the same script.

Why survival of our species is in peril and your options:

• If you’d like to know why hierarchies treat their revenue generators so badly, a lose-lose proposition, you’ll find the answers here. Having this knowledge will relieve some of your accumulated angst.
• If you’d like to know why leadership and management roles are filled with incompetents, like forever, you’ll find the reasons on this website. It will save you from expecting the head shed to do what it can’t, Warfield’s dictum.
• If you’d like to register “trustworthy” in the subconscious minds of those in your social environment, the process that always works is described on this website. Social life for you changes for the better when you are “read” as trustworthy.
• If you’d like to register as “competent” in the subconscious minds of those who interact with you, the “secret” resides herein.

When you are perceived as having your act together (GYAT) and trustworthy, you automatically become a “go-to” person. Your high social status (power) by reciprocity advances with your goal-seeking performance. Those in the higher echelons of the hierarchy will consider you a threat to their presumed “big picture seat” infallibility. That’s how others will know you have taken the catbird seat of the workforce.

Labour was the first price, the original purchase – money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labour, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased. Who controls labor, controls the economy. Adam Smith

What done looks like

Specification of the fix and the process of elimination (POE)

When you’re into the dismal swamp of the POE, because that’s the only hope of finding a system fix in circumstances where an authentic fix has no precedent, no example of success, you’ve have a puzzle box filled with stuff that may or may not be relevant and no picture of the solution on its cover. There are no veterans to consult. You’re on your own. Like it or not, you’re above the mentor line (ML). You will get no sympathy.

We found several wise men also chasing the fix for OD but staying within their own discipline who agreed to instruct us on their conclusions and criticize our work, multidisciplinary by necessity.

From Ashby and Ackoff we learned the fix, if there was one, would be a system fix. Argyris instructed us that the fix had to be generic, sustainable, and resilient. He never said such a fix had to be possible. He warned us that culture change is a long process. He thought we were smart enough to stop our quest right there.

Rudolf Starkermann, our heroic mentor, taught us that the use of “drive” and coercion via threats of punishments were wildly counterproductive. His pioneering work in the dynamic simulation of social systems using control theory led to the 2½ rule. He determined that the system fix had to be built around feedforward control, not feedback control. Prevention rather than damage control.

Stafford Beer taught us POSIWID as a basic POE instrument for getting around facades and coverups to get at the truth. He attempted several fixes, a big one in Chile, that showed us what fails big time.

Jens Rasmussen set the top-down break-down structure that Joseph Franceschi used to express his Franceschi Fitting (FF). The FF solves the responsibility assignment problem, a key factor in both Plan A and Plan B social systems, where responsibility has to be married to the autonomy to attain the goal.

From this platform of scattered but reliable knowledge we devised candidate fixes for testing as part of the process of elimination. Using each failure to keep the good and toss the bad gradually educated us to recognize success when it blossomed in 2013.

Since Plan B is a system fix you can’t tell in advance which particular consequences  of Plan A will disappear on their own.

Our contribution to Plan B development was building the missing building blocks of the process puzzle that were necessary to succeed.

• The foreman is the social ecosystem keystone species, not the head shed
• Top down is impotent, counterproductive
• The framework for workforce interaction is the Rogerian Triad
  • Worker dignity paramount
  • Personalization of master/apprentice relationships
  • No losers, no zero sum competitions
  • A square deal or no deal
  • No attempts to defy natural laws, saintly intentions doesn’t count
  • Responsibility taken with autonomy given, publicized and overt
• System fix only, no reductionism. You can’t tell in advance what consequences will fix themselves
• Ideal adult learning conditions, hyperlearning for foremen
  • The use of proven adult-learning formats, no exceptions, to establish hyperlearning conditions.
• The basic workforce building block is the foreman and his reports, performing to specifications.

If there’s a law of nature that you don’t understand but are attempting to defy, don’t think Nature will give you a hall pass. You will be punished as if you had evil intent. If you are being punished, don’t worry, find out which law you neglected to learn and you’ll do better with your next candidate fix. That’s how everybody learned about natural law in the first place. That’s why, exactly, the genuine fix has to be generic. If it wasn’t, the Plan A catastrophe would have to be personality-based and there’s no reliable evidence to support that conclusion.

The existence of irrational Plan A and flourishing Plan B both ratify a power of the mind.

Visits: 63