Fixity & Control vs. Agility and Emergence
posted by Eleanor Wynn on December 11, 2006
We have been through some recent self-examination and reorganization. The great philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose teachings I followed through the writings of Hubert Dreyfus, made a number of memorable statements in and amongst the dense thicket of Germanic philosophy he put forth. “Breakdowns cause reflection” is one of those bywords I repeat from time to time. I think it applies to our current phase. Others, including Josh Bancroft have referred to the “salad” of solutions but that is a natural result of breakdowns.
Being, Time and Meaning In Heidegger’s view (I was enough to have Dreyfus as a graduate adviser; he was so lucid, while Heidegger is dense—I could not have read this by myself)…in Heidegger’s view, first of all, the deep part: humans know they are going to die, unlike animals (?). Knowing this, they are aware of time and its inevitable march. This knowing, what Heidegger actually refers to as Being, wants to make that time seem meaningful, otherwise, what’s the point? Meaning does not exist in the head of one person alone. We see on the streets and busses people who alone know the meaning of life. We call them crazy. Meaning as we understand it, must be shared. Not only is it shared, it is constructed, by people, together. If you have heard the term “social construction of knowledge”, that is what it refers to. And, BTW, there is social construction of science, social construction of engineering, so don’t think you can escape it. In fact, that is just the point: by trying to imagine that your world of meaning is fixed while that of others is nutso, you just dig yourself a deeper hole. But, I don’t want to go beyond this point, because then I would have to do a critique of post-modernism and I really don’t want to go there.
Readiness-to-hand So, in the world of constructed meaning, there wind up being a lot of things and thoughts that are just there all along as far as we are concerned (“thrownness” is what MH calls this). You are a carpenter, you are going to pound a nail, you reach without looking for your hammer, which of course you have with you, and there it is, ready-to-hand. No reflection required. The less reflection, the better, as it is an embodied kind of knowledge, built up over experience of life. OK, then you reach for the hammer, pick it up, the head falls off. Now the hammer is present-at-hand. Hammer is there, but is not being a hammer. You have to think to yourself: “How is this hammer made?” Because you will need to put it back together. You then must contemplate the logic of the hammer and take your attention away from its use, the use you were in the middle of.
Breakdowns cause reflection So, there you just had a breakdown and are now reflecting on hammers, the wood part, the metal part, the way it fits together, what may be missing from it to get it back together, do you have to go to the store for that? etc. This is what we call analysis. In this philosophy, analysis is not a primary form of Being, it is a secondary one, one that happens when flow is interrupted. While you are reflecting, many options may come up. Should you have a different kind of hammer? Who the heck bought this hammer anyway? Speaking of which, I remember the awe with which I beheld the massive professional hammer a contractor brought to the house—there is definitely a status and power element among hammers, there’s another direction to go.
The urge to fixity One of the thought modes that reduces the anxiety of the “nothing is real” (other than being able to land on Mars and such) side of this is to have a sense of being right and certain and knowing the proper and exact method for doing things so that they are determined to turn out as intended. Determinism is the derogatory term many of the philosophical relativists throw at any science that claims that x is unquestionably the result of y and only y. Complexity science or systems science nicely bridges the gap here by saying a host of things can result in y, depending on starting conditions and other agents present in the system. This solution makes me for one happy and content that my two major worldviews can get along. And that is why I look to complexity science for answers to many questions that puzzle us today. Including how to have an agile corporation. (PS cannot be done on a large scale without IT.) But people are still clinging to determinism because it leaves them with fewer variables to fiddle with, easier equations, etc. Actually though, it is a path fraught with failure.
Agility: what it is Rock-climbers and kayakers need to be agile, so do dancers. Lots of other athletes do too, but those three are all dealing directly with forces of nature: geology, hydrodynamics and gravity. Nature has patterns and by having strategies for a range of patterns, you can be agile. What you don’t want to do as an agile athlete is take the first easy handhold, what looks like the most fun piece of river ahead, or with dance maybe the longest leap. You have to look ahead many steps to see where you will wind up, and over all of the steps, which is the surest path to success, avoiding the famed “Widowmaker”, the handhold to nowhere or overshooting the guy who is supposed to catch you. You are actually taking a wee chance with each move, but overall your cumulative chance is better. And if conditions change in the middle of what you were doing, you are poised to change—remember, you have more than one strategy. You are agile, not deterministic.
Looking ahead I am hoping that the community of complexity geeks that has formed here at Intel IT will continue our mission to cohere around the agility vision as we go forward through the necessary weight-loss regime. We are using the term “network-centric” to include everything from top-level policy-making, to training, to self-forming distributed communities, to goal-oriented teams, to the desktop display (we did machine learning on that—promise, next blog on how many extra thousands of clicks there are in your life). Strange convoluted world that it is, network-centric as a term came out of US Command and Control Research Program. Because of the chaotic world that any large military force now faces. I say strange because we still think of military organization as the perfect example of control. Not anymore. I think there is hope in many visions for new organizational structures that will provide agility, adaptiveness and robustness; and as it happens, they will do it mainly by means of Information Technology. So the technology has to include that vision, too. We are definitely here to help.
Comments (3)
tagged: agility, breakdowns, complexity, determinism, Heidegger, information technology, organization
Comments
Dec 13 | Micheil said:
Dr. Wynn, your blog is truly insightful and a kick in the pants to read. Your Fixity blog inspired me to read your other postings. All of them are exceptional. Here are some of my thoughts to your most recent posting:
Computers are deterministic. That much is true. The reality that we experience as humans is, possibly, less so. At least, so much as we can perceive. Indeed, determinism in science as we know it today my not be completely accurate but it provides a way to get a good notion of why something is happening to some order of accuracy. One could argue that determinism is in fact a very likely reality, but humans are unable to account or perceive every variable to a problem. For example, Newton’s Laws are still taught as an introduction to kinetics, but they really offer only first order approximations. Yet, they get us on the right path! My point is that determinism is not wrought with failure, but plagued by uncertainty and our inability (or blatant omission) to know everything about everything at a specific time. In fact, that relates to The Uncertainty Principle. I love when physics comes into play in philosophy.
That being said, I think your argument as to what agility might be, well, it might break down. I agree that agility is the ability to act with success in a given situation, but I disagree that agility is tightly coupled to planning. Planning certainly increases your likelihood of success but it is not really a part of being agile. Agility might better be described as a by-product of training, inherit in skill and function. A rock-climber, a kayaker and a dancer (boy, that sounds like the beginning of a bad joke) are trained in their particular sport. That training conditions them to make decisions, sometimes “without thinking” — it becomes instinctual. So, what training can we apply to information technology? What functions does information technology need or not need? I don’t have an answer to those questions, but maybe it lies in the analogy of your three sportsmen(women). Throughout time, they have learned from their predecessors and their own experience what has worked and what has not; what skills should be honed and how to do it; what natural (genetics/physical) limits they have and how to overcome those deficits. I think information technology is evolutionary and we should not fool ourselves that “we expect the unexpected” and therefore plan ahead. Certainly, agility is not planning.
(Also, geology is not a force of nature, unless maybe someone is throwing a mountain at you. Gravity is the culprit in all three sports but I appreciate the merit of your analogy. Without gravity water doesn’t fall down hill, climbers don’t fall down mountains, and dancers float off into space. Hmm. So, maybe you could still dance without gravity. I guess that would look like synchronized swimming.)
If one thing is certain it is that THIS IS a strange and convoluted world! Information is increasing at some obnoxious rate. I’m not sure how one measures technology but it seems to be on some upward trend, and maybe that says that technology is trendy. But what is the purpose of information AND technology? Are they like peanut butter and chocolate? two great tastes that taste great together? I believe the hardest thing is this: asking the right questions; identifying the problem, if there is one. In this case it is most likely that the question is, what is the problem?
Dec 24 | Eleanor Wynn said:
Micheil, thanks for your kind words. I can see that I create confusion with too dense metaphors. I never said computers were deterministic. In fact, the breakthrough in computing has been the ability to be non-deterministic, i.e. machine learning programs that follow what happens and make sense of it rather than try to specify everything (Andy Clark’s book Being There describes this philosophy). Tom Dietterich of Oregon State (and now also of a company) specifically emphasizes the value of machine learning with human intervention. The program checks with a person periodically to see whether there is “sense” in what it is doing. Sense really cannot be specified, one of the mysteries of natural language. I will use that topic for another blog. As far as your logical analysis of my other metaphors about kayaking, etc., I am grateful for the close attention. I am trying to say that it is often the case we need to deal with uncontrollable “forces” or “factors” and cannot just plow through them with plans. Rather, our plans should include the variability to adapt just-in-time.
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