The Ultimate Human Dilemma (UHD Part 5)

In 2013, when I got serious about writing the “Ultimate Human Dilemma” the biggest question I would get from friends and colleagues was, “what is the UHD exactly?”

I would always think to myself, “I already said it. It is the frictions between the functions.” But even as I would be thinking this, I also knew what they were saying. As much as I think it should be a personal journey once you have the lens to see it, I owe you more than simply “the frictions between the functions.”

(If you haven’t read previous articles then you might be confused. “Functions” relate to brain functions as characterized by Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator, with a much needed simplification I call MBTI 2.0.)

Now I know where the confusion lies. I realize the frictions between the functions are only the source of the UHD. Even the name itself suggests a bit more does it not? The definition of dilemma is — a difficult situation or problem. And not just any situation or problem, but one that is of ‘Ultimate Human’ level. That certainly implies a relatively big dilemma, therefore I owe you a more understandable explanation than merely framing its source.

As it turns out, I have had the answer this whole time. I just never intended to use it as support for the UHD but rather as a set up for the UHS — The Ultimate Human Solution, which of course, is yet to come. I refer to this as the Global Conditions and Circumstances. These are the things we are all currently experiencing that show us just how critical it has become at the individual and team/organizational level. Keep in mind the frictions between the functions have always been there, just not to the point that they are today. A flint stone against a knife’s edge only creates a spark when the frictional force produces it.

In a previous article I provided a compilation of Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator data that shows that 75% of the population is Sensing (S) and 25% is intuitive (N). Using my MBTI 2.0 terminology, this means 75% is Interpolative brain hardware and 25% Extrapolative. (At the end I will give you my personal theory as to how it got this far out of balance.)

This is very important to remember because it sets up a statistical probability of where frictions would be found. What I mean is, the “starting pool” is 75/25. Each area of profession has a likelihood of attraction from certain personality types, which means, a probability of concentrations of certain function types. For example, if the senior leadership of a company is comprised of the more commonly found interpolative brain hardware, by definition, it is a challenge (if not nearly impossible) for them to see things outside of their own experience range (what they use to interpolate.) Yet they are not aware of this limitation because they don’t know what it is like to operate someone else’s brain. Frictions mount when the company needs extrapolative functions but decision makers cannot interpolate when visionary ideas are presented. It leads to an increasing level of frictions, eventually reaching what I call Synaptic Divide. This is what happens when there is no longer elastic recovery. The proverbial rubber band has been stretched to the point that it stays in the stretched state, also known as reaching the point of hysteresis.

The way I had intended to frame the Global Conditions and Circumstances (as set up for the UHS) was to use an appropriate engineering term that explains these human frictions. Respectfully, it is not just an engineering term but an actual law — the 3rd Law of Thermodynamics which introduces us to the term ‘entropy.’

The definition of entropy is the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system. In layman’s terms, it means everything moves increasingly to more disorder and there is no such thing as a perfect system. There are ALWAYS losses of energy through friction. It is no different if we are talking about the engine of a sports car or your project team at work. We design engines to minimize these frictional losses yet we operate in groups, teams, and organizations without any consideration of the same.

Human entropy is what leads to civilizations crumbling on the other side of their rise. It explains why companies, institutions, and governments eventually fail, and why history repeats itself. What I find so intriguing is that we are able to engineer and build things that minimize entropy losses yet we are unable to do so amongst ourselves. But to be fair, we are unable to see it when it happens and we lack the (engineered) societal filter against it. We continue to unknowingly let human forces deteriorate the foundation of progress to the point that we “throw the rod” in our proverbial engines. This is where the UP Factors become humanity’s missing yard stick.

In order to show you the forces of increased human entropy, scientifically-speaking, I must show them as a rate of change over time. As already stated, the frictions between the functions have always been there. It is what has changed over the last 50 years I want you to think about. This is the ramming pressure into the Cuisinart of humanity.

We are going to start this time journey with the decades of the 70s, 80s, 90s and then the last 17 years. During this span, our lives may have become increasingly easier, but also busier, more hectic, stressful and distracting. We went not from the separation of church and state but rather separation of work and home.

I was born in the 1970’s and what I remember is that I had a lot of time to daydream and find creative ways to fascinate and entertain myself. But I also remember thinking that Russia was the only other country that mattered, China was what you found if you kept digging, and party phone lines were fun for kids, not for adults. If you were expecting a call, you stayed home, and when your parents told you what time and where to meet, you made sure you always knew what time it was.

Looking back, maybe because of my age at the time, but the 1980’s seemed like what everyone said about the 1960’s. What I remember is year-over-year technological advancements for both consumers and companies. Japan became a critical challenger nation that kept moving the bar for who could advance consumer-centric innovation more rapidly.

The 1990’s seemed to be the decade of economic prosperity and technological advancements never before seen. Satellite and cable television became standard and the rest of the world became relevant to everyday conversations. The world really has never been the same since. We closed out the century holding our breath, literally, with Y2K. There was a thrill in the air around the disruption to the status quo, and certainly much anxiety with all of the doomsday prepping. But as Y2K proved to be a non-issue, now I wonder if we should revise the acronym’s meaning to “Yet 2 Know?” It seemed to feel that way. No one had ever thought past the year 1999 in designing databases and systems. It was like everyone knew and felt that everything would soon change. That’s it, just that it would change and do so significantly.

Over the next 17 years much indeed has changed. The only true 8–4 or 9–5 jobs are the ones for which people must actually clock in and clock out.

We develop our identities through online connectivity with others from way outside of our immediate locale and are too busy and overwhelmed to have life-long friendships. Individuality and the discovery of “self” are on the rise but not from the “peoply” way but rather the searching through social media to find it. If anyone had to wait in lines without a phone or music to keep them entertained, anger management would be a bigger industry than dating sites.

When I was a kid we had activities and we played sports, but we also played with friends, outside, and seemingly often. The myriad of options for select teams, clubs, camps, and ways to make you smarter is simply, using a politically correct criticism, different than previous decades.

What is Fueling Human Entropy

Think back for a just a moment on your own memory of the last several decades. Look at how fast things have changed. They say you can boil a frog, without it jumping out of the water, by increasing the temperature very slowly. Sounds a bit harsh I know, but it is true. Society accepts big changes when they come at us slowly. Looking back, I would say we have been pushing the limit of just how fast the frog can be boiled.

As the life-changing (and therefore distracting) years have gone by there have been a few sources of entropy that have essentially added “wobble” to our already pseudo-functional chaos. What I will ask you to do now is hold on to that recollection of the last several decades as I walk you through these sources of substantial increase in human entropy. Then think about how these frictions between the functions, that have always existed, have led to our current level of individual stresses and team/organizational dysfunction.

Population Growth & Rate of Technology Adoption:

The planet is adding the population equivalent of Akron, Ohio each day. We went from just under 3 billion people in 1959 to over 7 billion today. There is a practical limit to how many people the earth can hold, and not just from a resources perspective. There should be a probability curve based on population that leads to a self-inflicted implosion (I don’t have one nor have I ever seen such), but it makes intuitive sense — there is a limit to how big a team or organization can be before chaos shows itself (see the Dunbar Number.) What I can say for certain is that if you keep adding people to the equation of organizational and societal stability the way we have, even John Nash would be unable to balance the math.

The rate of technology growth has changed as much as the population itself. It used to take half a lifetime for 50% of households to embrace, adopt, and afford new technologies that were mere life conveniences. But not anymore. We consume them like movie popcorn. The general shape of the curve from telephone to the internet is quite similar to the evolution of man. Think about it, practice makes permanent and we hand down skills and competencies from generation to generation. Things go from “learned second nature” to “born first nature”.

Communications & Travel Technology:

Let’s start with travel technology. The first commercial jet didn’t enter the scene until the 1950’s. The first wide-body jet wasn’t until the 1970’s. Deregulation in the U.S. happened in 1978 and it changed the world forever. Globalization became possible. Today there are >2,000 airlines, >23,000 aircraft and >4,000 airports. You can get from Detroit, MI to Beijing in just over 10 hours and it is 6,600 miles away. To drive from Cincinnati, OH to Los Angeles, CA takes 32 hours by car and is only 2,175 miles. Communication technology is nothing but the laces in the shoes allowing us to run anywhere and communicate with anyone at the same time.

Today, we can say the Butterfly Effect is even more tangibly real. A butterfly no longer has to flap its wings to have an effect on others half way around the world. They can do it by merely moving their much tinier lips. To put it more “interpolatively,” the people or bosses with whom you had frictions or Negative Synapses in the 1970’s and 1980’s were almost always in the same building or at least same country. Today they can be half way around the world and have a direct impact on you and your family. The world is smaller, with more people in it. The scale and scope of what needs to be done are far more complex than it was 50 years ago.

Work Complexity:

It is simply that. The complexity of the work we must do in today’s world is unprecedented. It is no longer the case that skilled eyes, hands, and muscle create value. It is the brain and the computer mouse that creates the value and work products. When our brains are taxed day in and day out we fall victim to the seduction of a bazillion entertainment temptations and numbing escapes. And when everyone seems to be doing it, we generally tend to follow suit and do the same. For increasingly more of us, there is just not enough undistracted brain time at the end of each day. And when a moment does present itself, it gets overwhelmed by how many things are on our “to do one-day” lists. Political leaders of nations prefer it this way. Unwanted thought leaders spur unwanted followers. More on this at the end of the article.

Globalization of the “Globe”:

Airline deregulation opened up the world to a more “free-able” market and the wherewithal to provide governance and oversight because of fast, convenient and cost-effective international travel. It catalyzed North American and Western European companies to leverage massive supplies of low-cost labor in India and Asia-Pacific. It is hard for me to imagine that happening if the U.S. hadn’t deregulated the airline industry, but then I realize it was inevitable. A sobering view of the repercussions, that we have yet to counteract, is the reality behind “job growth” in America.

1990–2008 there was a net growth of 27MM new jobs. The two top non-tradeable sectors are the government at 22MM and healthcare at 16MM. These two were responsible for 37% of the growth in jobs. The rest went to retail, construction, hotel, and restaurant jobs. In 1990 there were 34MM jobs in manufacturing, engineering and consulting. By 2008 only 600,000 new jobs had been created and the vast majority were in finance and high-end technology and engineering disciplines.

The U.S. taught the world how to create GDP — make stuff the rest of the world wants to buy. The rest of the world learned how to do the same while we stopped doing it. For every 5 ocean containers that go back to Asia, 4 are empty. And you don’t want to know what the top products are in the 1 out of 5 that is filled. I will give you a hint, it rhymes with “skunk.” Just google it and you will see why there is a trend of buying these containers and creating things with them.

Fear of Exposure & Litigation:

This one is very real and undoubtedly permanent, and should be taken seriously.

You now know the population statistics of brain hardware. Statistically, you will find the majority of companies and institutions are being run by sensing/interpolating hardware. This is because the Sensing/Thinking combinations naturally gravitate to what German sociologist Max Weber gave us — the bureaucracy. Weber saw the potential value of the bureaucracy — as things grew and became more complex it added needed efficiency. The systematic processes and organized hierarchies were necessary to maintain order, maximize efficiency and eliminate favoritism. He also warned, however, that if left “unfettered” it would be a threat to individual freedom and trap them in an impersonal “iron cage” of rule-based control.

Since satellites and the first 24-hour FOR PROFIT news station entered the scene (CNN), companies and institutions alike are even more likely to be run by interpolative functions. Why? Because the common traits of these functions fit the current and imminent needs, such as respect for the hierarchy’s rules, maintaining the “chalk lines” of employees, and the focus on near-term results. What was previously a statistical likelihood is today an almost sure bet that the top leadership is some version of interpolative hardware. The Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk’s of the world will still enter the scene periodically, but it will be fewer and fewer over time. Remember, once you invite private equity into your business, you run a very high probability of interpolative brain hardware taking over, compounded by the added likelihood of low scores of their individual UP Factors.

Out-of-the-box extrapolative vision can be dangerous to a company who must grow methodically and in a controllable fashion. Most companies, when faced with a choice between focusing on long-term innovation possibilities versus ensuring record profits quarter by quarter, almost always choose the latter. If decisions need to be made that are dispassionate or in the “gray areas,” the last thing the shareholders and Board of Directors want is for leaders to emerge that have the potential to go rogue against their wishes (or demands.)

Lack of Rules of Engagement and Disingenuous Employee Fairness:

In a previous article I talked about how ‘HR’ used to be called the Personnel Department, then Human Resources, but for all practical purposes today it is knows simply as ‘HR.’ For an increasing number of companies, I would suggest the department be renamed ‘ASSROID’ which stands for the Advisors to the Secretive System of Regulatory, Occupational, and Institutional Defense.

We continue to hear or read about companies that got caught doing unethical things to meet the impatient expectations of shareholders (and just think about how many have not been exposed.) No company executive wants to be exposed or accused of something on the nightly world news, so those that do get caught are likely the ones that are getting the most desperate with their actions and decisions.

In truth, no one wants to leave their company. They leave because of their boss or the scars of the iron cage of bureaucracy.

The HR department blossoms best in the creation of relative terms, a.k.a. buzz words. They “sound good” but mean nothing and cannot be objectively defined. For example, Operational Excellence is generally defined as a philosophy of the workplace where problem-solving, teamwork, and leadership results in the ongoing improvement in an organization. The process involves focusing on the customers’ needs, keeping the employees positive and empowered, and continually improving the current activities in the workplace. If we drilled into each of these terms it would prove to be almost impossible to objectively measure any of them. They want it to be this way. This way it can be as subjective as necessary to do what “needs to be done” and hire, fire and promote as they desire.

With this now in mind, here is a set of expectations issued by an undisclosed HR organization. As you read them, ask yourself, “how can these actually be objectively measured?”

• Respect every individual
• Lead with humility
• Seek perfection
• Assure quality at the source
• Flow and pull value
• Embrace scientific thinking
• Focus on process
• Think systemically
• Create constancy of purpose
• Create value for the customer

As you should agree, no manager can say objectively that an employee does or doesn’t possess these traits, virtues, behaviors or whatever you want to call them. Yet they can be used to pick the teams and promote the managers of desire under the veil of these mantras.

How We REALLY Pick Our Teams:

• Reminds them of themselves
• Finds them attractive (but not usually in a physical nature, they just like them)
• Approves or conversely disapproves of their “work process”
• Sees them as a career threat
• Doesn’t like them by influence of what someone else has told them
• Trust/distrust
• The buddy/favor system (senior managers who sponsor middle managers and trading the favors owed)

How managers pick their teams or recommend/promote individuals is a galvanized internal system that keeps siphoning the same interpolative brain hardware to the top. Unfortunately, we see the ones that reach the top being the ones that eschew others to get there (see the previous article on this topic.) The asymmetry of functions continues to skew and the conditions and circumstances today are showing no signs of letting up. The chance of the attributes of visionary intuition/extrapolative hardware getting to the top ranks is limited at best. Especially for larger publicly traded companies and government institutions.

So, when you read these lists of the top things a CEO should do or the key attributes a leader should have, remember that one cannot be what their functions do not allow. And, you do not radically change who you are without consideration of the UP Factors.

This is a foundational element to why it takes years to build a positive culture and only a fraction of that time to sour one (it only takes one Machiavellian to destroy a whole team.) And an imbalance of functions between management and line workers will expedite hysteresis from the inevitable Synaptic Divide. Passion and distrust are inversely proportional. Such a company ends up with disgruntled competent (and incompetent) workers and a strong odor of doubt, suspicion, and distrust for the organization itself, no matter how many restructuring efforts and rebranding of the mantras.

If the company is publicly traded, then it certainly has shareholders whose main goal is to grow their investment each and every quarter. It doesn’t take very many flat or negative quarters to result in severe impatience, leading to organizational changes, acquisitions and business unit sell-offs, down-sizing, etc. Unfortunately, the snowflakes who area actually responsible for the avalanche generally remains intact, which only fuels the Synaptic Divide.

Stop and think about this for a moment. What functions do you think control the majority of the capital that drives today’s biggest investors and equity investment companies? Exactly, sensing/interpolative hardware, and arguably mostly thinking software, but there is certainly dominant feeling software as well. Generally speaking, the sensing hardware/thinking software dominant brains do become convinced that the process is more important than the people. You can discern a lot about a company merely by what they say about themselves on their websites and how they post their job openings. Here is an example of what one particular company says is its “pillars of value.”

1. Measures Results/Performance Metrics
2. Clear & Succinct Communications
3. Roles & Responsibilities
4. Accountability
5. Process Oriented
6. Policies, Procedures & Compliance

This particular company will never be an innovation leader because the innovators it needs will not stay there for fear of suffocation. People make the difference, not the process.

So Why Has the Population Become So Skewed in Interpolative/Extrapolative Hardware?

I spent considerable time contemplating this very question even before the genesis of the UHD was conceived. No matter how you look at it, one thing is true — it is a function of birth rates and death rates throughout history.

It is nonsense to suggest that being intuitive/extrapolative leads to a higher probability of heart disease or other genetic, immune or health problems. There is no fundamental basis to say fertility is lower among extrapolative brain hardware other than perhaps a personal preference for how many offspring they comparatively have.

My theory is simply this:

Unwanted leaders generate unwanted followers. When the Romans took over new territories they wanted “business as usual” — pay your taxes, continue on and don’t stir the emotions of the people. THAT is what they patrolled the streets looking for. Which are the functions more probable to inspire as thought leaders?

Answer: Intuitive/extrapolative.

Throughout history, from Kings taking over lands, religious inquisitions, witch hunts etc., we have been riddled with examples of the purging of the intuitive/extrapolative individuals. It does not take very many centuries of this to lead to the imbalance that we have today. An imbalance that is a LARGE PART OF THE ULTIMATE HUMAN DILEMMA. We need visionary capacity more now than ever yet we are largely unaware as a society of what is being described here, and what my previous and future articles have and will reveal.

Einstein once said “the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

When we need vision the most we are at a time where we are the most incapacitated to do so.

Encouragingly, history is flush with examples of change and inflection points that were created by either intuitive/feeling or intuitive/thinking people. Here are a few to consider:

INTUITIVE/EXTRAPOLATIVE FEELING & THINKING COMBINATIONS THROUGHOUT HISTORY

Mahatma Gandhi, Confucius, Jesus Christ, Mikhail Gorbachev, William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Sri Krishna, Plato, Louis Pasteur, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, Johann Sebastian Bach, Anne Frank, James Watt, Vincent van Gogh, Michelangelo, John Lennon, Dalai Lama, Beethoven, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Karl Marx, Noam Chomsky, Socrates, Dwight Eisenhower, Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Marie Curie, Charles de Gaulle, John F. Kennedy, Boris Yeltsin, Margaret Thatcher, Albert Einstein, Copernicus, Oscar Wilde, Paul the Apostle, Nikola Tesla, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Gautama Buddha, Muhammad, Adolf Hitler, Ben Franklin, Woodrow Wilson, Christopher Columbus, Leonardo da Vinci, Napoleon Bonaparte, Simon Bolivar, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles Darwin, Sir Isaac Newton, Akbar, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong

For sake of time and length, I left a few sources of entropy out and combined a few into one, but overall this is it. This is the definition of the UHD (Ultimate Human Dilemma) and why it’s important.

I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Feel free to give me a ‘like,’ post comments or questions or feel free to reach out to me directly at ultimatehumandilemma@gmail.com or visit our website at www.up-factorllc.com