Systems Change and the Nudging-problem
I think that social systems change is a popular thing and in high demand now, because of the Ethical problems of Nudging.
In practice, today in Western civilization we now have an agreement that we consider existentialism as a valid source of personal identity and meaning for life: we all write our own stories of life and democracy should respect that. We want to offer everyone freedom from structural oppression.
From this we can derive that structural problems are real and they manifest every time when an individual is forced to React and answer “correctly” instead of discovering a novel solution by applying ones own skill set pragmatically.
The Limits of Mechanical Thinking
Gilles Deleuze defines this Reactive thinking as Dogmatic Image of Thought that mostly focuses on coherent logical narrative that is immune to new information (we face this at Facebook all the time) and the existential way of thinking is called Active Thinking; both are derived from Nietzsche and in a sense Active Thinking loves Socrates as it appreciates learning about unknown-unknowns, while Dogmatic Image of Thought of known-knowns is often attributed to Aristotelian-Platonic thinking from determinism and metaphysical logically coherent Forms.
The Dogmatic Image of Thought was made popular by Descartes, then fixed by Kant and proven useful by Newton in classic mechanical physics of static systems. Kant merely criticised Descartes’s idea of “rationalistic theory” and claimed it to be “transcendental idealism” and he thought that we needed a better method for approaching psychological skepticism of logical claims; unfortunately this example was taken as “guide book” by Adam Smith and Karl Marx and all the other early sociologists who contributed in the creation of the foundations of Western Democracies.
In short, this means that in mathematics Descartes ridiculed complex numbers as useless, which is why Simple Harmonic Oscillation is taught with real numbers even today, while in practice it is just a “complex number” system. The limits of this kind of thinking were discovered by Euler and later properly formalized by Riemann (Analytic Continuation); Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are both based on Riemann’s mathematics. They both are dynamic systems instead of static classic systems and the problems between exact sciences and humanistic sciences seem to stem from this difference.
Michael Commons developed the Model of Hierarchical Complexity in the early 20th century in order to measure cognitive differences between human beings. He was able to discover that it was typical for human beings to learn in proxies: often what limits one person from becoming better at something is that they need to unlearn to avoid something, while learning to avoid that something was essential part of evolving to the current stage of cognition.
While Commons’ system is quite impressive and the amount of research he has done is quite grand, I think the most interesting aspect is this: while each adult human being ranks often within 5 stages (of total of +15), with proper tools they are often able to increase their capability with 1 or 2 stages.
John Vervaeke defines technology as pursuit of developing tools that fit human body in a way that allows us to change our physical environments more efficiently. Then he defines psychotechnologies as pusuit of developing tools that fit human mind in a way that allows us to change our social environments more efficiently.
If my hypothesis about the essence of Nudging problem being the core driver of social systems / organization change innovation, then I think Wilberian ideas such as Teal, while they might have their origin in Commons-like thinking they have missed the golden nugget of focusing on tool building instead of definitions for “what others ought to become”.
Often when people first get introduced to Wilberian ideas, they get exited and want to “level up”. This is problematic because it actually is a symptom caused by Nudging and a kind of false premise that self-transcendental without tools is easy. I am not saying that Wilberian ideas are hollow of tools, but I think the focus is wrong. I am not an expert of Wilberian ideas, but I merely talk from the experience of how I have been exposed to Wilberian ideas by many organizational consultants, the Hanzi Freinacht project and many similar web phenomenas.
In the original conception of Model of Hiearchical Complexity Commons’ never suggested that there exists internal identity or evolutionary basis for the cognitive skills. Commons was researching “surface identities” that emerged when an individual was presented with a problem that demanded usage of cognitive capabilities. It was not supposed to provide a stamp or stigma that “now you are level 12 human being!” as it has been mistakenly referenced by some developmental psychology theory.
This is important because after Nietzsche and Heidegger started the existentialistic project, it was followed by structuralists and post-structuralists.
The Problem of Structuralistic Systems Thinking
There is this special relationship between psychological identities and structuralism: it can be thought that psychological identities are a narrow representation of the structures of the society. In a sense structuralism claims that there exists surface identities (explicit) and underlying identities (implicit). Structuralism has a kind of essentialistic assumption about the nature of underlying identities, from which the surface identities emerge. In this sense structuralism has kind of adopted Aristotelian teleology (implicit; mental disorders caused by unique snowflake identities) and Platonic Forms (explicit; this is today well known as Patriarchy in feministic theories in this context).
Post-structuralism instead proposes that this essentialism of the underlying identity is a bad move as it is ontologically problematic as it seems that it is mostly defined by the context of the research or institution rather than being able to prove any universal attributes. We should focus on the surface identities as an empirical study field and work our way from there through codependent networked descriptions of systems. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze both have their own separate theories about how these surface identities come to be, the former proposes a materialistic history theory while the other proposes emergence from complexity (as observed by Commons).
The dark side of structuralism can perhaps be best sensed by eternal workshops, where organizations try to define themselves but often the definitions are about fictional stereotypes of idealistic (Platos Forms) individuals that do not exist. When individuals are reduced to narrow set of expectations and definitions we lose to the harmful side of Nudging and cause existential crisis to the individuals of the organization by denying perfectly functional ways of thinking about their roles and processes in the organization.
A post-structuralistic approach to the same problem would be not to define anything but instead give the individuals tools for establishing enough structure to the specific contexts. And this is exactly what Teal and other methods claims to do, but it ignores one important fact: when people limited to only use psychotechnologies from the toolbox of Dogmatic Image of Thought to apply these methods, the opposite of the intended outcome often happens and bad forms of Taylorian Nudging emerges (“slave to the machine”). This probably happens as when we approach adulthood we need to replace imagination with logical systems (dogmatic form of “scientific thinking”) and once “imagination” is learned to be bad, then creative thinking (which valuable empirical hypothesis generation needs) might get locked behind this logical dogma of “adult thinking”.
Teal can not be taught top-down, or even bottoms-up. Teal needs to be taught through mimicry and play, where individuals are exposed to self-organization by “genetic algorithmic model of working”. It sounds scary, but in practice it just means that instead of trying to define everything statically, we need to learn to be more dynamic. To facilitate an environment where success is easy to spot in others and mimicry can happen. And this is really hard thing to do and it can not be done at once, neither is it even possible that whole organization would become “Teal” just by using some structures, because if “Tealness” is explicitly stated (by processes in place) but not implicitly followed (existentially friendly working environment), the systems tend to collapse.
Nietzsche and Four Tools for Systems Thinking
In the story of Three Metamorphosis Nietzsche describes society as ruled by a Golden Dragon, who always gives the Camels and Lions moral norms in the form of denial: “you ought not to…”. The Camels follow these rules with pride while Lions attack the norms (and despise the Camels), but are ashamed of their role in the outskirts of the city (or siloed basements) where the fiery breath of the Dragon can not kill them. To tame the Golden Dragon one must become a Child and engage the Golden Dragon with a playful game where new rules are playfully experimented on. Recognizing these modes of working in oneself might be one of the best psychotechnologies towards the proper form of Teal and similar system dynamic models of organizations.
“Teal” as a Platonic Form is a mistake in my opinion. That idea is not “the Realism of Teal”. The key problem of “Being Teal” is that there is no such thing, but rather we can “Become more Teal (or childish in an adult ego free manner as accountable and responsible players of shared game)” a kind of protosynthesis, where we never level up (while in practice we eventually will feel superior).
What I think we need is a “Teal” as a Complex Adaptive System that has “evolutionary pain sensors” for Nudging. I have had some success for achieving this by using these four ideas (the links point to learning materials, if you want something shorter, just ask me):
- Active Thinking (Gilles Deleuze): instead of having conversations about known-knowns the interesting things start to happen when we start from unknown-unknowns and intersubjectively as a group approach the known-unknowns and known-knowns from there; this opposes forceful logical coherency and association from experience fallacies in narratives efficiently. “Socrates pushes us to think beyond Platonic Forms and Aristotelian teleology; he shows us what we do not know”.
- Relevancy Realization (John Vervaeke): often we are stuck in problems because our framing of it is incorrect. Our past experiences keep us there. Trying new ideas can make the important new aspects more visible. (Awakening from the Meaning crisis lecture series has many valuable psychotechnologies introduced).
- Complexity (Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute): dynamic systems do have structures, there is always something that generates a big flow, which is consumed by similar end-terminals that transform the generated thing to something valuable. These systems scale through self-similarity, because that way designs can be reused and recognized correctly through association, which allows for homeostatic and cybernetic learning to read signals more efficiently.
- Games as Systems (Michael Sellers): our relationship with realism is always based on a scenario that is a subset of the whole real. For this reason even work organization can be modeled as a “game design” document and this is useful because it captures well the tokens, rules and agency of the Avatars and how we expect the Avatar to learn the game mechanics of the system as a satisfying enjoyable experience.
I think these four are important because all organizations need structures, means of learning, meaningful goal generation and methods for focusing attention on information (ontology). The Nudging problem arises from traditional top-down education, static hierarchical structures and roles, non-self defined explicit goals (cog in a machine) and focusing on reacting from what we already know (assembly line). The alternative would be game-like learning frameworks (Sellers), complex-adaptive systems as a dynamic organization model (West), psychotechnologies for goal and solution seeking (Vervaeke) and proactive knowledge management (Deleuze). The four are neatly intercompatible, while they come from different disciplines which makes their value kind of increase (philosophy, cognitive sciences, systems analytics and systems design).
Final Words
I am a total newbie to systems change thinking and Teal, but I have been exposed to these ideas quite often. As someone coming from a very different perspective, to me it seems like these are some important flaws in how people try to “teach me” Teal ideas and I think the concrete ideas for these four issues seemed missing from the big picture and having been over driven by this kind of “cult of leveling up” / structuralistic essentialism (that often happens in evolutionary psychology when the implications are over extended and cognitive dynamics ignored).
Feel free to comment as this blog post is more like an learning experiment for me rather than an article where I tell what I know to be true. This is probably a great start for me of be wrong in many ways. I have thought that social change innovation is not a thing for me but I have been drifting to that direction lately, so please, educate me :)
PS: I am building learning materials about all these ideas in Complexicated Assemblage Facebook group. We just started seven weeks ago, but we have almost beta version of Deleuze materials done (check the “Guides / Units” section of the group)
