Functional Social Support Networks are The Groundwater.
I have written about Functional Social Support Networks in previous articles, and now, since attending a presentation by the Racial Equity Institute, I, honest to god, believe that the problem we are scoping is not just IN…The Groundwater… it IS… The Groundwater.
I recently posted something on Linked-in that was about solving the right problem. BUT, I didn’t say what the problem was.
In this article I will expose the problem with my own roots of knowledge, relay some key takeaways from The Groundwater Approach presentation and conclude on a key point of miss-alignment.
Exposition
Excuse me while I guide myself, and perhaps you with me, through this rabbit hole, to groundwater.
First of all, I was WOW-ed to see some of those in attendance. Apprehensive about introducing myself, it took 10 minutes to let myself think, “I deserve to be here,” before I nervously entered my name and focus into the chat.
Nick Desisto - Designer. Functional Social Support Researcher. Behavior Change and Design Transformation.
Now, through writing, I afford myself some time to gather rosebuds.
REI’s presentation was graciously hosted by Leon Bailey, Senior VP for Human Resources and Organizational Culture at the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven. It was after that I found out that Leon has a Docturate Degree in Ministry. This made me curious because it seemed like a reasonable alternative to an MBA for those who are more human-centered. You see… I had considered divinity school before, alongside cognitive science, but was led elsewhere to an MDES, a design thinking version of an MBA. I still ended up studying cognitive science, at MIT, and through that and other qualitative research I defined FSS contructs, a critical gap-between social science and theology, or at least Christian Theology. In reflection on this intersection, religion and social science, the Tao, which can err on the more literal side of water metaphors, could have some cultural knowledge to shed on the mechanics of Functional Social Support (FSS). The Tao was my post-Catholic transcendental-minded philosophy of high school.
My Ground.
While I renewed my religious framework in undergrad, I myself am interested in secular questions, and have since remained loyal to my cross-generational transfer learning investigations.
In the article excerpt below, “Psychological Aspects of Minority Group Membership: The Concepts of Kurt Lewin,” Miriam Lewin Papanek points out Lewin’s experience and inquiry into minority cultures.
He thought that group membership was “part of the ‘ground’ upon which a person stands.”
Christian rhetoric echos this analogy, calling the grounds of others sinking-sand, perhaps as a retention characteristic of their own marketing efforts meant to prevent the perception of ideological backpropitiation.
When I moved to build out my own ground, I designed behavior on the scale of architecture, took a course called Communication for Structural and Sustainable Social Change, and adjusted my focus to the community scale through urban planning. I did all this as I, for work, monitored and modulated community behavior through programming according to a DEI strategy.
When I felt assured on my own grounds, I began to feel a call into the world. I felt called to take action and investigate cross-cultural communication, so I did.
In the Field — on the Ground of Others.
Through observation, and by planning a community-focused primary school, I built new understanding on new ground.
Sparing all the details, my ethnographic work, together with my design work, became a form of human-centered Making-Research, an approach I now credit to Elizabeth Sanders along side whoever-and-all-who developed the Continuous Discovery and Delivery framework.
There I found perspective on sustainability, some unique insights and a whole lot of interesting behaviors and practices, a handful of which were completely unique to African and the Ugandan way of life. And… I found a feel, that made my heart sing T I A.
You know how Christmas-Time has a feel to it? …or how The-Beach has a feel to it? or Church… Art Galleries ….Locker Rooms. Places and times have feels to them.
While “times of year” and the “particularity of places” may have affect-inducing physiological properties, like what is suggested and attested to of the Sedona Vortexes, my reasoning suggests that shared-affect is first psychologically constructed, then shaped and maintained through FSS Networks and the mechanics that support them, namely Organizational Level Archetypes (OLAs), which I’ve written about it here.
And now, I am also suggesting that schematically specific feelings, like The-Beach or Christmas-Time regress to a mean feel, and when you are in touch with that average feel of a place, that means you’ve struck The Groundwater. The degree to which one can tap into The Groundwater and use it to “Read the Room” for information, this sort of gathering is the foundation of how people make decisions in natural contexts.
That aside, and speaking loosely, if you are in a place for too little time, you won’t develop a good sense for the place and its specific mix. You will only have access through others in that area. That is one reason why I do not like to investigate any place for less than a month. I’ll pontificate on True Ethnography at some point, and when I do a link will show up >here<.
The Groundwater Approach points to The Groundwater; a commons that everyone draws from, a commons that runs across and bridges territories. REI’s stance on WHAT “The Groundwater” IS… relative their focus, remains to be heard👂. I will reveal their focus along with a more targeted redirection at the end of of this article.
Whether the presenters are able to speak of this “groundwater” in terms of collective intelligence and psychodynamics, human constructs, without being discounted for “sounding spiritual” 👻, or WORSE being discounted for bringing up something important that could be UNMEASURABLE … this is still unclear.
But, you know my answer. The Groundwater is Functional Social Support (FSS) Networks and the mechanics that make such possible.
The Groundwater Approach
Dr. Deborah Stroman and Kyri Murdough’s presentation, focused on the bookends, comparing black and white, and opened with a story, a story about coming upon a dead fish and the concerns that might cross your mind.
Then they compared that to coming upon a pond, or a lake, of dead fish floating broadside in the water. The imagery kind of says it all.
But, for those of you that are like …
The image of a whole lake of dead fish, suggests that Black People, as a population, are being killed in mass.
The image calls to mind a few questions…
- What’s poisoning ALL of them?
- Is it something in the groundwater?
- And, who has control of that?
They move forward in the presentation to show some dishearteningly un-shocking statistics from reputable research institutions/sources that explain how black folks experience selection discrimination.
And they smartly move to disprove the common argument that “It is Not Race, but Class that is the issue,” which is hard information to integrate.
For more detailed information, go to their website, give them an email and get a hold of their pdf-data-presentation, or work with them to give a presentation to your leadership. They’re a business.
Two Key Takeaways
1. White Advantage.
While it might be a simple re-framing of the term white privilege, I think it’s a good one. The word privilege never contextualized the circumstance well enough. And I think perhaps where the term white supremacy goes a little too far, the word privilege tip-toes too much.
Intended or not, “having the advantage” makes me think of tennis scoring procedure. It takes those with the advantage at game-point just 1 more point to win, where it takes 3 for those without the advantage.
2. Out of sight, out of mind.
In other words, You don’t have to worry about things that are not a part of your world.
REI’s presentation of that sentiment seemed to mean that when you compare the things that black people worry about to the things that white people worry about, there is huge disparity in the type of worries. Many of the things that black folks worry about would never cross the mind of a white person.
Analysis
This is difficult to parse because these things are in some fashion self-fulfilling, where black expectations act as a force against them.
If black folks don’t presume or consider racism as a reason for how they are being treated, it will leave them blind and open to the status quo and the mean feel distributes resources according to the dominant culture.
The problem with this is that it becomes a war for resources.
People don’t stop warring until they have an answer that makes enough sense to them, or when they feel better. People can get really crafty with this and there are more than a few skillful / deceptive tactics.
Apart from 1. logical tricks of meaning, the simplest being lying, or 2. the physical comedy of postures like chest puffing, perhaps the most effective tricks are those where emotion is used as a Trojan Horse. Calm speech seems to be the vehicle-masking practice of the day, which is afforded more policing power than other emotions, which is ironic because being cool and calm is often aided by not caring and/or SO MUCH emotional deregulation that it progresses toward detachment. To which the response could be “DANNNnG! THAT’s Cold and Busted 🥶.”
Look into my vision-based tool for Decoding Positive Affect to help bring more context to this point, it’s HERE.
While that’s happening there’s a group of white folks that “don’t know,” and can’t grasp what’s going on, so they can’t help. As long as these unknowing folks are “connected” through the groundwater to others exacting abuse, they’re connection acts in support of white supremacy.
Projecting suspicion alone, even if the person projecting such has no biases and projects no stereotypes, the problem then becomes letting black folks enjoy their sinking sand. Letting fears of discrimination originating in the minds of Black People attack them, and doing this until they fall in line with the dominant culture. This is a problem.
The whole endpoint of the Groundwater Approach, in my point of view, is that an issue like this cannot be dealt with on the order of individuals according to societal fallout procedures. It’s an Public health issue because an entire race is being poisoned.
Measuring how connected people are to The Groundwater to account for each of their continuous partworths leading toward positive and negative outcomes… this is a majorly difficult problem to solve. I titled this article Functional Social Support Networks are The Groundwater, but that’s not quite a true statement as much as they are consumers of it and a way to measure it. Word strings are the most accessible proxy for tracking and accounting for these connections and for determining which contributions are poisonous or preditory.
It gets viscous 🔃. As speech gets more effective and also more discreet and it controls natural resources, The Groundwater, …targets keep moving and the behavior gets more policed, which begets more cleverness and the cycle continues. If outcomes do not change as a result of such increased intervention then the problem is deeper. It’s in the groundwater.
AND tracking is beside the point because words… , as developed by visual design, — which I have written about in my soon to publish chapter/article “Language 1, Sensation” — : they are just tools for intent and regard. They are not a direct measure of resource distributions or availability.
Words are not a direct measure of resource distributions or availability.
Sidenote. Feeling and sensation do measure the groundwater, and, they lead to integration and concept formation. For example, if white folks, the unaware ones, don’t feel OUTRAGE, or, if anger is conditioned out of human experience there will be no progress.
Integrating this information.
Dehydration or Assimilation
So, it seems… it’s not a gun to the head of those under the thumb of “society,” but something closer to dehydration. That thirst for resources forces people to act white, or like professionals, OLA users that act in accordance with the dominant culture: taken together these folks and their coded barriers work to reinforce and feed resources back into the dominant culture. If dominant = white, then white culture = supreme culture. This logical string is why people are fighting for equity.
The mean feel is white. There are some pretty wrought current-state dynamics in addition to reasons for why the world may have selected for a strategy that is being pinned on white people, but regardless of what you say, it doesn’t change the analytics. The current state of things is killing black folks. Some group is resistant to the poison that was “somehow” put in the well, that same group is gulping down groundwater like it’s kool-aid, and they are content watching it kill everyone else. A successful strategy indeed.
This is, in essence, the same strategy made plain in the 2007 film There Will Be Blood by Best Actor in a Leading Role, Daniel Day-Lewis.
To paraphrase the below gif sequence, Daniel says…I don’t need to pay you for your land to get all your resources. All I need to do is use an extraction technique that you are not unaware of.
There Will Be Blood (2007) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
I don’t think it’s a far leap to say that subversion and resource acquisition through FSS is a remnant or extension of slavery.
Sidenote. How to solve this problem starts with figuring out a way to pay folks for emotional labor. I’m working it.
Conclusions
1. Everyone has to learn to process poison and tolerate those abusing the commons.
2. White Advantage is a great term.
3. To acknowledge The Groundwater is to acknowledge a physical or metaphysical construct as a resource. This is something Nobel Prize winning Psychologist and Economist Daniel Kahneman would agree with.
Whether “mental energy” is for-humans or of-everything elucidates what to do next.
In the past, I had said regarding my own fish-flocking and bird-murmuration metaphor, “It is unclear if OLA-mediated governance functions similarly in non-human populations.” This means that if OLAs of varying size are contributed to by non-humans, then a possible solution forward, apart from giving non-whites more attention, is planting tress where non-whites are, so they can live longer.
The folks at Racial Equity Institute and I differ regarding how the problem should be addressed. They think systems are the problem, and I am not quite clear on what that means. I think I am of the position that they may be leaving that definition open because it’s too difficult to talk irl about the reals we’re managing.
They say that systems are the problem. My suggestion is that they pivot away from systems and toward my focus. My focus being on the mechanical aspects of how OLAs work relative selection decisions. This is a good move forward because “Every Interaction has a Real Context.” What I mean by that is, when we make choices relative designed interactions all of them are made in the context of real OLA(s) type influences. A claim, I digress to mention here.
At the intersection of OLAs and Decision-Making, a deeper focus of mine is socio-technical regime change mediated by equity-based controls. Whether such could be developed by pivoting what is happening in the Monitoring Technology and Security-Capability Development space toward HR, or… whether such equity based controls are to be set forth in policies for trusted employees to reinforce with their natural OLA tech… this is not yet clear to me. Maybe when it’s good it will still be a little of both.
As they at the Race Equity Institute (REI) hone their storytelling and break down arguments historically used to shift attention away from race as the most key correlating factor driving inequity, namely class and the idea that the behaviors that black people exhibit are somehow leading them to poorer outcomes, I look forward to seeing how they develop metrics to support their impact and what services might be required to shine more light this very difficult subject matter. (This is an ask to breathe and for folks struggling in these areas to contact me and ask me for my help).
Some People that might want to contact me
- People making Safe areas and areas of planned exposure. Like parks and schools, where security functions provide for ubiquitous coverage.
- Monitoring-reduction strategy workers.
- Interviewers that question whether their hiring practices require specific types of meter and utterances.
Clap and share if it helps put talk to how you walk your walk!
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