LEADERSHIP AND COMPETENCY
I have typed in portions of an article by the complexity scholar
John Warfield with his permission to share. I think it bears
on the pedagogy of the first part of leadership, the ability to
see the levels of complication connected to the team's
incompetencies including a statistical tool for grading levels
of complexity and the likelihood of success given the make-up
of a team. I also believe this is essential in any discussion
on the future of work, including my profession.
Warfield comments on the value of accurate data and the
wise use of such in this paper on "The Great University."
He says that the Great University should be concerned
with three things:
1. Putting the learner in possession of the cultural inheritance.
2. Qualifying the learner to participate in the contemporary world.
3. Qualifying the learner to contribute to the civilization of the
future.
I believe that these are essential to any discussion of the future
of work, jobs or anything that moves forward in time and space.
I'm typing in a section of this excellent work for your examination.
>From "THE GREAT UNIVERSITY" 1995
by John N. Warfield,
Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences
George Mason University, Va.
"This leads me to the thought that whenever someone makes
a generalization, (intended to apply to a broad subspectrum
of life), its validity is likely to depend on its space-time
span. If I say something that has been valid for most of ...
36 normal lifetimes, it carries some weight, even if it
has not been valid for a few recent years. And if I say
something that has been valid largely for the western
world, it carries some weight, even if it is not valid for
the Orient, or for other parts of the earth. And yet we
seldom bother to attach space-time spans to our utterances.
These ideas introduce my first theme, an Information Scale
Proposition (P1):
Importance of Scale.
SCALE IS IMPORTANT IN DEALING WITH INFORMATION
(P1)
If something has been valid for 36 lifetimes, it is reasonable
to suppose that we have incorporated beliefs and habits drawn
from that period of time. But at the same time, it can well
be that if we look at the past few decades, i.e., at less than
one lifetime, those beliefs and habits have been superseded
by new possibilities, even if we are not tuned up to recognize
them.
And there is another aspect of this Information Scale Proposition.
If the information goods with which we deal are constantly
constrained by the necessity to package them into a small
space-time scale, e.g., pages 8 1/2 x 11 inches in dimension,
or into a time interval of 50 minutes, or onto an electronic
monitor with a screen 14 inches in diagonal, or in a one-page
memo for management (which is all they normally want to
examine, no matter what the topic may be, assigning equal
weight to corporate-survival material and rest-room keys),
or in a 2 minute news flash, we must raise the question as
to what is inherently being divorced from our purview by
the iterative presence of hundreds or thousands of small-scale
events.
This brings us to a second Information Scale Proposition (P2)
Miscalibration:
BECAUSE EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES IGNORE SCALE,
INDIVIDUALS BECOME SERIOUSLY MISCALIBRATED
IN TERMS OF INDIVIDUAL COMPETENCE. (P2)
Repetitive exposure to severely limited information scale;
accompanied by repetitive reinforcement of human
performance at that scale; engenders gross miscalibration
of human self-competence and produces gross, ingrained
insensitivity to the impact of information scale; accompanied
by a bias in favor of small-scale packages.
In simple English, this is what I am saying: in education, students
are exposed hundreds of times to small-scale information packets;
and they are tested hundreds or thousands of times on their
ability to repond to or reproduce such small-scale packets, or
inferences based on a few of those small-scale packets; and if
they do well in most of these instances, they begin to build and
to internalize as habitual behavior the idea that everything they
encounter in life is encompassed in packets of that size. They
become totally insensitive to the idea that some things that they
encounter are well beyond the range of their experience and
capacity. They are totally unequipped to know that those large-
scale phenomena which they encounter lie far beyond their
individual, life-trajectory-llimited, span-of-immediate-recall-
limited experience and capacity."
==================
Warfield gives several examples, I will limit it to one due
to the time pressure on you and my typing. REH.
==================
"Some of you are sensitive to financial disasters. The recent
savings and loan crisis in the U.S., which was precipitated by
foolish large-scale legislation enacted by Congress in 1986,
is a prominent example showing the impact on taxpayers of
enacting legislation that dealt with a situation beyond the
natural span of individual mastery, causing major and long-
lasting impact on our national solvency, and probably precluding
our ability to provide adequately for other strong social needs.
The "opportunity cost" of such blunders may even dramatically
exceed the expenses incurred. Yet we seem to continue to
ignore the thought that such blunders are not isolated, but
rather reflect the existance of a CLASS of problematic situations,
all of which are characterized by the complexity they bring to
ill-prepared human beings, falsely subjected to beliefs that,
because they are "educated", they are prepared to work with
such complexity...
================
Warfield gives many more examples: Chernobyl, Bhopal,
VietNam, Apartheid etc. and then continues. REH
================
"A study of 'strange events that regularly occur, in a variety
of cloaks, brings us to appreciate that 'the bizarre is the norm'.
What we might have thought were reasonable things that we
took for granted, seem oddly to be absent; and the rate of
occurence of events that are unexplainable in terms of commonly
-valued ideas seem to be growing.
The media regularly explains gridlock in Washington, D.C., as
founded in 'politics' or 'special interests'. Yet, how many of
these events could equally well be explained in terms of the
point of view that IT IS THE SCALE OF THE ISSUES INVOLVED,
AND THE ABSENCE OF RECOGNIZED WAYS OF COPING
WITH LARGE-SCALE ISSUES, THAT COLLECTIVELY FORCE
THE ADVENT OF POLITICAL ORIENTATIONS TO FILL THE
CAPABILITY GAPS? If a certain choice is believed clearly
to produce major political pluses, and no clearly better choice is
recognizable, who can resist accepting the presumed political
advantage?"
===============
Clearly those whose professional or cultural models deem
otherwise. If the U.S. Congress is made up of people whose
professional models are litigeous rather than problem solving,
and 2. if their professional model demand an outcome that
is yes or no, while the Congressional model is compromise
and cooperation then you have a systems war on your hands.
But I think that Warfield is on to something in pointing this
discussion of education, the Congress and in my case the
future of work and economics, towards competency and
systems relevance.
Ed you said:
>I appreciate your efforts to get a discussion going on the
>practical uses of economics in the future. But I would
>suggest that economics has no practical use other than
>being an analytical tool. That is all that it is.
If that is the case then I would say that the cultural chaos
surrounding that third sector Rifkin notes, as a result of the
use of that analytical tool by consultants trained as economists
and now working for governments and corporations, suffers
from a synergistic complexity problem. Simply put, it isn't
up to the job that it has taken.
I am involved in putting together an advisory group of
scholars from various artistic, academic and business
professions for the purpose of trying to logically
solve the cultural problem caused by the Marx's, Smiths,
Lockes, Hayaks etc and their minions in this century.
It has been done before, in Florence (those Italians
again) when Vencenzo Galileo, composer and
scientist founded the Camarata, a group of musicians,
artists, scientists, doctors and other scholars to discuss
the state of Music, art and science in Italy and why it
wasn't up to the cultural level of the Greeks of a couple
of millineums earlier. Well they founded opera and
his offsping had the courage and integrity to do a little
in the sciences as well.
Is there an economist/preacher/polemicist/ practical synergistic
scholar around willing to problem solve and extend the range
of economic scientific theory to include the rest of us?
Interested persons may contact me at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
The contacts and discussions will be on line, by phone and
slow mail.
The current members are more than distinguished and
include,
-America's greatest opera director and teacher
-One of the world's great historians and experts on
the history of American Performing Arts culture.
-The former Comptroller for the largest foundation in America
-Imminent scholar on Complexity and Institute Director
-The Nation's authority on the North American structures
of the Performing Arts from 1500 to the present.
-America's greatest composer for the voice.
-International authority on Experimental Intermedia and
foundation CEO.
Open positions are: the above economist,
CEO/Director from the film industry
Commercial music composer/director
Cultural critic from the media.
Yes I do have people in mind and are planning how
to reach them. The above positions are pro-bono,
as is mine, obviously I am not listed but am on the
list. All work will be the property of the person doing
it and any collaboration will be the property of the
collaborators. Note will be made of MCORE in any
publications and an open dialogue and problem solving
environment is the intention. The purpose is to solve
problems created by the past century of artistic/
governmental and economic ineptitude in the cultural
life of the country.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble of New York, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Warfield is considered a world expert on "complexity" with
many honors however I find that his work that speaks to me
through his definition of "complexity' is at its heart pedagogical.
That the external world is difficult to comprehend is a given but
the "why" of that difficulty must be thrown back to the person
doing the comprehending. Warfield says: Complexity is a state
found within the mind of the person confronting the problem.
There is no complexity when one knows how to solve the problem.
What this brings to me is the pedagogical truth that knowledge is
action beyond understanding raised to the level of intuition.
Such knowledge is the beginning of the leadership of teaching
and the wisdom to use professionals well on a team project. In
musical teams, there is constant testing of the conductor because
they are all highly skilled in Warfield's larger and smaller
information envelopes. There is more than a little Alpha male
involved. A great conductor can finesse an orchestra with the
power of the alpha while sending a dozen roses to each player.
It is truly wonderful to watch a great conductor and you know
that he has control and knowledge of every single moment of
every single instrument and individual.
Considerably more than is demanded of most who fancy themselves
leaders in government or business.
Ray Evans Harrell
