[These notes, published in the Washington Deming Study group
January 1996 newsletter, are posted here with permission of
the Washington Deming Study Group. To obtain more information
about the WDSG and its activities, see the special section on
the TQM BBS or call WDSG at 301-340-0325.]

Notes from WDSG December 5, 1995 
Meeting
Speaker: Joel Barker

Joel spoke of a series of ideas that he has been examining for
the past ten years. The focus of these ideas are:

-- Wealth

-- Innovation

-- Complexity and Self-similarity

Joel defined a great dilemma facing the world today which
causes an equally great paradox. The dilemma is the search for
similarity. We see it in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia,
religious warfare in the middle east, reappearance of Nazism,
and fundamentalists showing complete intolerance to others.
How can we understand the "rationality" of the homogeneous
argument? The work of George Land helps us to understand the
growth patterns of everything from individuals to ecological
systems.

3 Stages of Growth 

Stage 1 - Accretion; when an organism, community, or
individual begins to grow by pulling in all the necessary
elements it needs to survive. Think of an infant. Accretion
looks selfish, but it is a required stage of survival.

Stage 2 - Replication; when an organism, community, or
individual has developed beyond the immediate survival needs
of stage 1. In this stage connection with similar entities are
sought for support and acknowledgment. In this stage other
entities look and act like the organism itself. Identity comes
from likeness. In human development the teen-age years are
replication.

Stage 3 - Mutualism; when an organism, community, or
individual look for something with different attributes to
exchange with and strengthen one another. In this stage there
is search for new combinations based on heterogeneity.

Why do we find so many groups caught in stage 2, replication?
There is power being with everyone who is like us. Everyone in
the group agrees with decisions, reinforcing the "rightness"
of the decision. The level of predictability is high when
individuals are alike. It gives individuals in the group a
sense of security.

Joel then used the paradigm effect as a second explanation of
behavior. Drawing on the work of Thomas Kuhn, Joel has
expanded the work on paradigm theories. Paradigms act as
powerful perceptual filters through which people view the
world. Individual's paradigms form their assumptions about the
world. For example there are intelligent people in the U.S.
who are sure that there is a government conspiracy to take
away their right to bear arms. Some of these people believe
that the Oklahoma City bombing was done by federal agents to
make the militia look bad. Sounds crazy to those of us that
see the world through a different paradigm lens. But if you
accept their assumptions, then you can see how they interpret
the data available to them. They will assume that a person who
interprets the data in a fundamentally different way is lying
to them. 

According to Joel, "The power of paradigms is that they
physiologically affect our ability to see the world. Quite
literally what is obvious to one person may be totally
invisible to another." 

Homogeneous groups share the same paradigms which makes it
easy to reach agreement and create strong bonds. This has the
effect of creating stronger barriers to communication with the
rest of the world - those that are different. In this mode,
life is binomial - the group is right, and others are wrong.
There is a feedback loop that leads to fanaticism. Although
there are some short term advantages to fanaticism, in the
long term it is a dead end to growth and development - of
organisms, individuals, communities, and species.

The Need for Diversity in the 21st Century There is a family
of words to be considered here: 

-- Complexity

-- Divergency

-- Heterogeneity

-- Variety

The following 5 reasons add up to a very strong basis for 
humans to seek diversity.

1. Ecological research concludes: Complex systems are better 
able to deal with large scale shocks and survive. Complex
(diverse) systems regain their health sooner than the simpler
(homogeneous) systems.

2. George Land's work shows that: Mutuality has orders of
magnitudes of combinations which allow for solutions to
problems not available any other way. The power of the third
stage lies in its ability to create new complexities that
could not have been possible in the second stage of self-similarity.

3. Physicists Prigogine and Stengers theorize that complexity
is the natural direction of the universe. Moving from
simplicity to complexity is an evolutionary pathway. Notice
how this complements Land's phases of development. Prigogine
showed that during the transition, a single entity can
determine which way the next system will develop. Joel
emphasized the significance of this phenomenon, "This means
that a single individual can rise above the statistics of the
norm to make fundamental alterations in the future."

Prigogine also claims that there is no way to predict what the
next system will be like from the previous system. Joel
believes Prigogine's work supports complexity and diversity,
which then supports the theory that the quest for homogeneity
is anti-evolutionary.

4. Chaos theory and complexity reinforces Prigogine's work.
Chaos theory shows that simple systems can generate complex
systems over time. Time is the key variable. Factal research
has demonstrated that simple equations iterated over time will
generate amazingly complex natural forms. This is a new
paradigm, complexity from simplicity. Joel emphasized, "If the
future is not predictable, then free will really does exist.
And with free will comes the ability to shape the future, the
essence of innovation." Mathematically we can support the
concept of free will. 

Innovation and New Wealth 

Definition of new wealth - wealth that generates value that
was never there before. In Dr. Deming's terms it is making the
"pie" bigger, rather than just slice the pie into different
pieces. 

Joel contends that "Paradigm shift innovation opens entirely
new conceptual territories and generates new wealth." Who are
the paradigm shifters? The research of Joel, Land, Drucker and
others finds: The most likely person to change a paradigm is
an OUTSIDER, someone who does not know or practice the
prevailing paradigm. 

Joel gave the following examples of outsiders that are
currently major assumptions in the Western world:

--Chile has created a powerfully effective free market
social security system. Of course you would have
predicted this from a third world dictatorship!

--A small company, Orbital Engine, in Perth, Australia
has designed and built a 2 cycle super-low pollution
piston engine. The engine is so effective that in highly
polluted cities like Saigon, the exhaust is cleaner than
the air it takes in. Perth, Australia immediately comes
to mind in terms of mechanical genius!

--Mt. Edgecumbe High School in Sitka, Alaska leads the
way in  innovative change to an educational system by 
applying Profound Knowledge. A school on an island with a
student body  primarily composed of Native Alaskans is
where everyone would  look for educational innovation.
Note that in the educational  community, the unique
aspects of this school are still cited by some as the
reason for the school's success, demonstrating the power
of Land's stage 2, replication.

--Last, but certainly not least, you would expect to find
the world's  amazing banking and entrepreneurial success
story in the Mondragon Cooperative in Basque Spain.

All of these examples demonstrate the nature of paradigm
shifts, the shift will be initiated from outside of the
current paradigm thinkers. Paradigm shifters are the outsider
that homogeneous societies fear. Yet, in the fundamental and
profound change that the innovators (outsiders) bring is the
ability to solve problems that had been deemed unsolvable with
the old paradigm. 

How does this connect with new wealth? It is those unlike
ourselves who will provide the source for new wealth and new
solutions to societal problems. You can only access these
people if you are open to diversity because, by definition,
outsiders must be different from you. Seeking mutualism rather
than self-similarity will provide long term success. As Joel
stated,

"If we wish to be absolutely pragmatic about our long
term futures, then it is pragmatic to create societies
where diversity flourishes, is celebrated and embraced."

Conclusion

What we have is a loop, perhaps some would call a system of 
development.

1. Diversity provides long term robustness and the ability to
survive major system trauma.

2. Diversity creates a larger universe of options through the
results of mutualistic combinations.

3. Diversity is the result of simple systems iterating over
time and the nature of the universe to move forward to greater
complexity.

4. Diversity creates through growing complexity the need for
new paradigms to understand and interact with that complexity.

5. The source of new paradigms, outsiders, are the result of
diversity, not similarity.

The fear of outsiders by many societies, ironically,
disconnects them from their own future. Joel spoke of the need
to respect and listen to outsiders because, if we do not, we
cannot access the new ways of seeing the world, of solving
problems, and of renewing ourselves. We are each other's
outsiders. Joel believes that those who do not think like us,
who live with different paradigms, are our greatest allies in
solving our own problems. No one sees the entire world.
"Perhaps that is the greatest challenge of the 21st century:
to make a world that works for all while allowing diversity to
thrive." 

Joel believes that if we can address this challenge and take a
new path towards diversity, we may in fact find:

"That which we fear the most is our greatest strength."

Newsletter notes written by Kay L. Carlson