A Variety Show—Your Ability to Respond
What happens when a toddler has a greater repertoire of behaviours than you have responses? You only have to think about when your ability to respond is limited: too tired, drunk, worn out, stressed. When we can’t respond adequately, we end up on the receiving end of whatever is happening.
This is a very interesting general point. It doesn’t matter about the content (becoming a refrain in these blogs): the toddler may be ebullient or furious, über-bright or a bit thick, the same effect will occur. It is a bit like who takes the initiative in a game: they can hand out punishment as long as they retain their advantage.
If we go straight to the point for organisations: an organisation is a device for expanding the repertoire of responses to situations.[1] Many managers don’t understand this and try to restrict the repertoire of responses to ones they approve of. This is a massive mistake because it limits what the organisation can do to what those managers can imagine, and then there is not much point in having an organisation in the first place.
The technical name for this effect is variety. Management models like the viable system model (VSM) are built around the notion that some sources of variety inside the organisation need amplifying so that they can deal with more situations (more variety in the environment). And some variety in the environment needs to be attenuated, by saying things like “we will treat all these situations as the same even though they aren’t” or “we will not accept these sorts of people as customers”. We spoke in a previous blog post about asymmetric design, where the majority of cases are handled in a standard procedure and the oddballs are handled using human judgment.
Education again
Both my sons are very musical and back in the day were both at Dartford Grammar School, a school that ranks highly on various schemes. Being musical, they were involved in school concerts, both the official, termly event and various more informal concerts organised by the students, typically for charity. The concerts organised by the students were buzzing with energy, pulling forth all sorts of talent from the students. The formal school concerts went from awful to completely dire, complete with the headmaster telling the audience that they got better every time.[2]
I tried to engage the school in a conversation about these differences, but they could not or would not see what was in front of their noses. My notion was that there were lots of clues in the situation to improve music education in the school, even without putting any extra staff effort into the work. This is probably an example of variety mismatch: the students were capable of generating far more creative challenges than the school could respond to.
This is generally true in school and often college education. John Raven reports that every questionnaire he has run in various countries around the world and with a range of stakeholders (students, teachers, parents, community, etc.) has come up with the same result. Some notion that students need to become better thinkers, more capable citizens, than the previous generation comes top every time — if you ask!
If ever there was a time when it was clear that the present generation has messed things up and that the next generation will be do or die, it is now. But schools cannot generate the variety to meet this demand. Even though it is always what is asked for, demanded even, it is almost never an aim of a school or a college. And there is certainly no planning for how it might be delivered, the way all other educational aim might be planned for. This is what I failed to get Dartford Grammar School interested in.
Dartford Grammar School promotes the International Baccalaureate with its students. A compulsory part of the IB course is Theory of Knowledge. Doesn’t that sound good? Where does our knowledge come from and what is it based on? Having helped with homework and essays it appears that passing the Theory of Knowledge requires you to put “Karl Popper” in every other sentence. Knowledge must be falsifiable. I don’t have anything against Karl Popper but we have managed to write a whole year’s worth of blogs on the subject of knowledge without needing to mention his name. A whole compulsory module on the Theory of Knowledge and almost zero variety to meet the students’ challenges.
Home school and unschool
If school fails to meet the aspirations of parents, parents and their offspring will go elsewhere. It seems the legendary 1% in the US often send their offspring to alternative providers such as Steiner schools. So far as I am concerned, the full realisation of how counter-productive schooling is as a system and as a concept is the notion of unschool, where children are not taught and develop very different life skills closer to what we are talking about here.[3]
The key notion is that when schools fail to meet the variety of the challenge they become useless. It is more like a tipping point rather than a gradual decline. How many students know that school is failing them? More than 50%? How can that be? Well, that is the way that it works.
I came across a useful statistic last weekend. Parents in this class of people whose challenge has not been met tend to band together to offer activities on a mutual basis to their children who do not attend school. The number of people in the Birmingham Facebook group for home-schoolers is 1500. While not a high percentage of school age children in the area, it is certainly a measure of the abject failure of the system. The commitment and resources needed to home-school is huge. These are people who know that their children will become better educated by not going to school. Digest that.
Labelling a child as a “failure” is a criminal act against that child. For a child, who has learned so much from life before entering school, to be labelled a failure, just because s/he doesn’t see any sense in the mostly senseless knowledge we offer in most schools, is unfair — to say the least; it is really outrageous. But few of us around the world seem to be outraged, simply because we usually lose our senses in the process of getting educated. ~ Munir Fasheh
The other measure I would use of essentially the same thing is the list of subjects that well-meaning people would like to have on the curriculum. There is scarcely a week goes by without a new demand for inclusion. So if we take society as a stakeholder for education, then education is failing on many, many fronts to deliver what society needs. Which is simply another description of schools not exerting enough variety to meet the challenges. And losing the initiative.
System thinking in schools
I have a colleague, Kerry Turner, who would like to introduce systems thinking into schools. In fact she is signed up for a PhD at Hull to study that process. So is “introducing systems thinking” (whatever that might be) another would-be addition to the curriculum, or is this project potentially a way to address John Raven’s findings? Kerry has certainly already been warned off the former course of action, and steered interestingly towards particularly disadvantaged children as a suitable laboratory.
Systems thinking means many contradictory things to many different people. Kerry starts with causal loop diagrams where circular causation is the norm. Remember Nora Bateson, Short Arcs of Larger Circles. If we think we have a linear causal relationship like dietary fat causing clogged arteries, the one thing we know almost for certain is that there are all sorts of bodily control mechanisms that regulate many parts of that apparent causation — which turns out to be wrong anyway. So insisting, as we explored a little in Catching a Ball with a Homeostat, that reality is mediated by many nested mechanisms that produce the appearances that we then invent stories to connect, would be a start.
Think about the emphasis in the school curriculum on facts, on things in the world. No matter which subject. Real systems thinking would make it almost impossible to write examinations with unambiguous answers to questions. That is something that could give us hope that students were learning to think, and that the best of them would effortlessly surpass their teachers, examiners, parents.[4] Of course, that is why it won’t happen and why it is unlikely that the present generation of students will be better thinkers than the previous one. QED.
Incidentally, this surpassing does already happen. One of my sons tutored his music group of peers for the IB exam, predicted exactly which questions would come up and they all got top marks, not at all as predicted by the staff. But of course no-one knows this because the variety equations do not allow it to be seen.
Under McEducation for All, learning and knowledge, along with everything else in life, is to be extracted from an abundant gift of the commons and converted into a scarce good that can be processed, packaged and cleverly sold to us. McEducation for All tells us that we must all walk on a single universal, linear, standardized path of education and development, which is dictated by the logic of the industrial-military system. ~ Manish Jain
That variety show
If we fail to match the variety of the environment we are working into, we fail in our primary task, we fail in what we set out to do. And many times we don’t even notice because we don’t have the variety to notice what the environment is throwing at us. Really.
We make the same mistake again and again and again. We try to direct a complex, adaptive system by establishing measures to work against, KPIs if you like. We know those measures cannot capture the complexity of what we are working with but we insist that the schemes will work. Madness of course is doing the same thing and expecting different outcomes.[5] Biomarkers like cholesterol in medicine, exam scores in education, GDP to measure economic activity, price to measure value, on and on. The same failure every time. We end up, if we are lucky, producing the measure and not the state we want. Statins reduce cholesterol but don’t reduce strokes or mortality.
Remember that old saw “you can only manage what you can measure”? From this perspective every part of that statement is a warning. Trying to “manage” a situation is often an attempted imposition of meaning and order that makes things more unmanageable. “Measurement” is usually loaded with an unacknowledged or even uncomprehended narrative about what things mean. And the implied narrative of the statement itself is that things must be managed. To my eyes, almost all the “management” of ecosystems in the last century degraded them faster than they would have degraded otherwise. Allan Savory admits to having culled 40,000 elephants on a wrong analysis that they were over-grazing. At least he recognised it and reformed his thinking completely.
This century is the century of the soil, when finally some farmers are recognizing the existential significance of “dirt”. Every agriculturally based empire in the history of the world collapsed as they destroyed their environment and ecosystem services. It is sheer hubris to think we are any different. There are now food products that are sold as being the products of regenerating the soil ecosystem. The soil is a more complex ecosystem than the rainforest, but we can’t see it. Its massive variety gets ignored as “dirt” because we have such a lack of relationship with it, such a narrow window to observe it even if we wanted to. We let big agriculture prey on our very life support system and extol plant-based diets as saving the planet. And we are wrong, wrong, wrong because we cannot respond to the signals coming to us from the soil we rely on. Variety.
[1] If you could do everything yourself, you might. But you can’t, so you club together with like-minded folks who have complementary skills in order to manage more than any of you could on your own. The diversity is part of the magic.
[2] Not for the first time in this blog, we encounter an official pronouncement that masks its opposite…
[3] There’s at least one version that turns the school outside-in, so that the lectures are attended remotely, at home in your own time, and the ‘homework’ is done collectively through discussion and discourse, together at school.
[4] I seem to remember a saying that a good student surpasses the teacher, but the interweb comes back only with articles about how to be a good student teacher… It takes a special kind of teacher indeed to relish being surpassed, to find ways of grading work that they don’t understand, etc. There’s a saying from Steve Jobs that A players hire other A players, but B players hire only C players. (Not that A/B/C is a particularly useful way of thinking about people…)
[5] Equal and opposite madness, of course, is doing the same thing and expecting the same results, even though the environment will have shifted and learning occurred since the last time…
