ThinkingShift

Everyone has secrets. Now I’m finding even plants have secrets. Plants such as strawberry and clover can instant message each other along a linked network. These types of plants send out runners along or under the ground and the runners become new buds. Eventually, you end up with an entangled network that shares food, water and….communication.

Scientists have discovered that during times of stress, say if plants are being attacked by some nasty fungus or leaf-eating insect, the network buzzes into action sending messages about imminent danger. The message is sent through the phloem - a tube system plants use to transport organic compounds like carbohydrates - and plants who receive the message beef up their resistance in order to face the danger. The plants undertake chemical changes to make their leaves less tasty to a caterpillar for example or harder to nibble on. But these defensive changes inhibit the ability of the network plants to grow so I’m hoping that the plants are pretty smart when it comes to knowing there’s a real danger out there. The fitness of the network relies on a plant being able to communicate with its neighbour. If the neighbour has been knocked out, then the plant second down the line will be more vulnerable to attack. Plant networks are also capable of spreading viruses.

I’m writing this post on my balcony, sitting opposite a lot of plants with interconnecting runners (see photo). I bet these plants are all whispering: “those humans are onto us at last, we’d better use secret code from now on”!

Source: National Geographic

Science (317: 482-487 (2007) has published a really interesting article on the secret life of economics. Economies grow by upgrading the products they produce and export. To conjure up a product requires a number of things - technology; skills; capital; infrastructure - and the more closely-related the product lines, the easier it is for economies to progress and attain wealth. The Science article looks at the theory of product-relatedness (aka ‘product space’).

Relatedness occurs when you have similarity of inputs such as technology, skills and so on. Nations create wealth based on how transportable the product line is to other products. So for example if a country exports technology-based products like software or computers, then the technology and skills required could be redeployed to other products that require technology input (mobile phones, plasma TVs, iPods etc) But if your country is busy exporting llamas, then it would be more difficult to redeploy the capabilities and skills to other products. Raising llamas no doubt requires a whole lot of capability around agriculture and animal husbandry (not to mention the ability to avoid the llama’s spit, which they only do to fellow llamas I hear) but it’s a narrower skill-set that may not be so easily redeployed and the related products might not be so easily definable. So it’s about relatedness and distance - llamas are more distant from technology; software and computers are more related and closer to other products that use micro-chips, software programs etc.

From a complexity perspective, countries grow wealth and progress by climbing uphill in the fitness landscape. The closer the peaks in the fitness landscape, the easier it is to jump to the next highest peak. But if the fitness landscape is flat or irregular with peaks far apart and and if you’re stuck on the periphery of the landscape, then the leap you’d have to make to a peak might be quite a long one. Network theory has been applied to try to understand why it is that poorer countries don’t seem to produce more competitive exports, whereas richer countries, in terms of the fitness landscape, seem to be located in a densely-connected core.

So if a map were to be produced: what industries or products might appear at the core? This is what the Science article is about. The article is entitled “The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations” by Hidalgo, Klinger, Barabasi and Hausmann. Albert-Lazlo Barabasi authored a book I really like - Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means. As for their research, Hidalgo et. al produced a map of the relationships between different products in economic space. You can see the map below or go here to see fuller detail.

What I think we can see from this map is that the centre or heart is occupied mainly by machinery/vehicles, chemicals and products made from metal. A number of clusters appear: garments, electronics and textiles. And then we seem to have a lot of disconnected stuff: oil out there on its own at the top of the map and disconnected from the core; cereals and tropical agriculture. So if you’re involved in exporting oil-related products, it might be harder to move towards the core; but if you’re in textiles or garments, you’re more closely connected to the densely populated centre.

Getting back to the llamas: animal agriculture is somewhat disconnected from the central cluster. So if a country is specialising in animal agriculture, they will have a harder time moving from this specialisation to another like chemicals, which is not related to llamas. But if you’re already specialising in products that populate the core (and China would be a good example of a country clustering around machinery/electronics), then you can jump around the fitness landscape with more agility. So where you are in the product space determines economic growth and progress.

Clearly, there are some key insights from this research. If a country is specialising in say mining, oil, animal agriculture, cereals (sound a tad like Australia?), then the capabilities, infrastructure and technology that supports these industries and products is quite specific and may not be easily redeployed to other industries or products.

The Science article is subscription only, but if you go here you can download a pdf version from Cesar Hidalgo’s website. I’ve only just finished reading the article, so some of my assumptions may be incorrect but I do think that using network theory to try to explain why some countries are not as wealthy as others gives us a deeper understanding of what’s going on.

You can also check out Country Maps here - Australia’s is interesting. And the site that accompanies the Science article is here.

I came across this wonderful vignette from The New York Times. It’s a short piece about the footprints of vanished places: favourite coffee shops that have long since closed; a trendy boutique that has morphed into a dry cleaners. The space may vanish, but your memory of it doesn’t. And so you carry around in your head a whole map of long-gone geographical places and perhaps memories of people who died many years ago.

It was synchronicity really reading this article as, over the last few weeks, I’ve been remembering people and places that no longer exist. I remember, for example, in Pitt Street, Sydney (opposite The Westin Hotel) on the corner of a small side street that leads into the MLC Centre - there was once a cake shop. If I say what decade this might have been in, I’d reveal that I really was born in the Jurassic Park era. The door of this cake shop (can’t remember the name) had one of those annoying wire, fly-screen doors that would smack you in the face as you entered if you weren’t careful. But it was filled with old-world cakes and biscuits, not the processed stuff we get today - brandy snaps with fresh cream; vanilla slices with real, soft yellow custard filling, not the nasty custard powder type; pastel pink and chocolate neenish tarts filled to the brim with buttery cream. Every time I walk by this vanished place, it evokes memories of another Sydney in another time. It’s curious to think of how another space has overlaid the vanished one; with people now walking over a spot where I once stood eagerly ordering a brandy snap so many years ago. An alternate, vanished universe overlaid by an existing universe. My mind still thinks I can go there at lunch time to buy something sweet and tempting, but the reality is quite different.

Similarly, when I walk through Sydney’s Strand Arcade, I expect to see a bustling health food store that once existed on the ground floor and sold “alternative” products before they were fashionable. And I expect to see a Cahill’s Restaurant where you could dine on their famous ice-cream cake with caramel sauce. You used to be able to buy this sauce in supermarkets - it was gooey, thick and a wonderful golden caramel colour. I often wonder what happened to the recipe for that famous sauce - I’ve tried to recreate it several times and I’m nearly there, but it just lacks that something special.

My mother used to talk of the Trocadero and Princes - Sydney nightclubs that were requisitioned for Australian and American armed services personnel during WWII and where people danced away their fears and uncertainties, trying to enjoy a fleeting moment of happiness in a world caught up in a maelstrom. She spoke of the dancing costumes she wore - rustling taffeta gowns and whispering soft silks. I know the spaces these nightclubs once existed in and often wonder if the spirits of laughing, dancing couples still twirl silently whilst modern city office workers walk across what was once the dance floor.

When I think of this, I recall David Bohm’s notion of the implicate order. To quote Bohm: “In terms of the implicate order one may say that everything is enfolded into everything“. The explicate or unfolded order is everything we see in this world; it’s our level of existence. The implicate order is a deeper order of existence but there is a constant flow of movement and exchange between the implicate and explicate orders - the universe constantly enfolds and unfolds so that everything in the universe is a seamless extension of everything else and hence everything is interconnected.

Cartesian duality is rejected if we accept that human consciousness, for example, is enfolded into animal consciousness and matter; that every portion of the universe enfolds the whole; that past, present and future time is constantly enfolding back into deeper levels of reality. Bohm suggests that “…sequences of moments that ’skip’ intervening spaces are just as allowable forms of time as those which seem continuous“. Rather than a linear, sequential notion of time, this suggests that the enfolding/unfolding pattern could conceivably result in ‘intervening spaces’ (perhaps thousands of years) and so just as humans may separate for long periods of time yet still “pick up from where they left off”, so may we witness Cleopatra meeting Julius Caesar for the first time as the universe and life ripples through its enfoldings/unfoldings. And so time may be reversible and fractal, a concept that would give new meaning to the adage “history repeats itself“.

If this is at all possible, then perhaps the spirits of long-gone war time dancers can come alive again as the present enfolds and unfolds on the past. Mmmmm…..perhaps I could go back in time and get my hands on that Cahill’s caramel sauce recipe, bottle it up and make millions!

Well, here’s a book I probably shouldn’t have read. In fact, it was sitting in my To Read pile for many months as I cast a wary eye at it every now and then, knowing full well that if I succumbed, it would probably spark off feelings of despair about crises in society. It’s a study of crisis brought on by the many challenges facing industralised civilisation. Probably many of you have read this book - Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization. It was the subtitle that had me thinking this would be a depressing book about societal collapse and events that have shaken the world. But I’m glad I read it.

Contemporary society places blind faith in science and mankind’s knowledge to confront and solve increasingly complex problems - terrorist attacks, energy scarcity, environmental fragility - which tend to cascade as one problem or system after another weakens or is attacked. But our blind faith may be our downfall as we face what Homer-Dixon refers to as an array of tectonic stresses facing our civilisation and raising the risk of synchronous failure.

He identifies 5 tectonic stresses:

• population stress - growing gap between rich and poor; and the rapid growth of megacities in developing countries;
• energy stress - increasing scarcity of conventional oil resources;
• environmental stress - ongoing damage to land, loss of species and habitats, forests, fisheries and so on;
• climate stress - carbon emissions cooking up the atmosphere;
• economic stress - resulting from instabilities in the global economic system and ever-widening income gaps between rich and poor.

Most of these stresses originate in our troubled relationship with nature but are compounded by two multipliers:

• the rising speed of global connectivity, which wires up people, technologies and societies like never before;
• the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people.

Stresses + multipliers = one heck of a lethal mixture that heightens the prospect of the outright collapse of the political, social and economic order in individual countries and globally ie synchronous failure. Homer-Dixon refers to the ancient Roman Empire, which drew its energy supplies, in the form of food, mainly from its conquered territories. Eventually, Imperial Rome required 8,800 square kilometres of agricultural land to grow enough wheat to feed itself. It needed enormous flows of high-quality energy to sustain itself and remain far from thermodynamic equilibrium. He argues that the resilience of a complex society is dependent on its input of high-quality energy, which it must aggressively seek out. But a society’s return on its investments to produce energy (or EROI) starts to decline when a society exhausts its energy supplies and has no new technology to find alternate sources of energy. This is what happened to Ancient Rome - it exhausted the croplands of the Empire and incoming tributes dwindled. The complexity of the centre could not be maintained and collapse occured under Draconian rule.

What has Rome to do with our contemporary society? Well, no brainer really. Our vital energy sources - oil, natural gas and so on - are depleting. They are more complex than Ancient Rome’s, which means, as Homer-Dixon says, that the unravelling of our society “..would make Rome’s decline pale by comparison“.

We might think that greater connectivity and speed can result in increased resilience but Homer-Dixon’s anecdote (about a near-miss traffic accident involving high speeds and lots of whizzing cars) wonderfully illustrated how one element’s failure in a system that is tightly interwoven can make the system less able to tolerate disturbances.

Homer-Dixon uses historical events, like the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 and subsequent tragic fire, to show how a confluence of factors can result in cascading failure. The lesson here is that random networks with loosely connected nodes can better withstand onslaught, whereas scale-free networks like electrical grids (with many nodes linking into hubs) are more vulnerable.

Drawing on the work of ecologist, Crawford Holling, Homer-Dixon points out that there are natural cycles of growth, breakdown and renewal and the contemporary challenge is to find the middle ground between dangerous rigidity and catastrophic collapse. The catastrophe of collapse allows for the birth of something new - just as trees burned in a bushfire regenerate and adapt to a changed environment - so he believes our society (headed as it is for collapse) can regenerate into a simpler and more creative form.

How? When business has a vested interest in maintaining our love affair with fossil fuels; when Governments are slow to act on climate change; and when our hedonistic society keeps us focused on money, brand-names, botox and Hollywood celebrities? How do we achieve this upside to catastrophe? Aside from loosening the connectivity so that our socioeconomic system is less vulnerable to disturbance, Homer-Dixon suggests four actions:

• address the underlying tectonic stresses so that the risk of synchronous failure across geographic and societal boundaries is lowered;
• we need to cultivate a “prospective mind” to cope better with surprise. A prospective mind, in his terms, looks for ways to prevent or forestall negative outcomes through managing things and by imagining and implementing more radical and far-reaching solutions;
• boost the overall resilience of critical systems like our energy and food supply networks; and
• we need to prepare to turn breakdown to advantage when the proverbial hits the fan.

The ‘downside’ of the book for me was I didn’t gain a real sense of how we (individuals, Governments and society) could pursue these four actions but a re-read of the book should make things clearer. It’s quite a rare read: historical accounts are examined for similarities with contemporary society, through the lens of the new sciences.

A few weeks back, I finished reading Steven Johnson’s, The Ghost Map, the last chapters of which focused on contemporary developing countries and the so-called shadow or squatter cities - these are truly becoming megacities as Homer-Dixon alludes to. These ecosystems are facing the same issues as Ancient Rome: unstable growth; inadequate energy supplies (ie water); densely-packed populations. The five tectonic stresses exist in the hothouse environment of megacities.

Shortly after reading both these books, I started to notice articles on the rise of megacities and other issues Homer-Dixon touches on. Sychronicity? Perhaps. But more likely evidence that our socioeconomic system resembles Ancient Rome - teetering on the edge of collapse. Here are some links to articles I found that support Homer-Dixon’s thesis:

• May 23 2007: Transition Day: the day a major demographic shift occured and the world’s population became more urban than rural. By 2010, 51.3% of the world’s population will be urban, resulting in a tightly woven ecosystem of humanity;
• Between 2007 and 2050, one billion people will be forced from their homes in a “migration crisis” due to conflict, natural disasters, and more particularly by large-scale development projects;
• A European underclass of hardworking migrants are feeling increasingly marginalised. Homer-Dixon suggests that this underclass will be a source of increasing civil unrest and violence. We saw urban riots in France in 2005 led by immigrants living in the poorer suburbs of Paris and the UK has recently seen a protest by illegal migrants.
• The notion of the nation state being under threat by the rise of super or megacities - some of which are larger than industrialised countries and suck rural workers into their vortex;
• Although the world is getting richer, rapidly growing economies such as India and China are experiencing a widening gap between rich and poor, despite absolute poverty diminishing somewhat.

Picked up an interesting article on leadership. Are effective leaders actually good teachers and servants? We’ve all probably had enough of the ego-fuelled leader who craves status, public adoration and well-stuffed pay packets at the expense of focusing on the people actually being led. If leaders were to think as teachers do, then what they would have in mind is setting a vision for students’ achievement; reflecting constantly on student performance; inspiring students and creating a nurturing environment of excellence and critical thinking. Servant leadership in other words.

The question becomes - is leadership inheritable or trainable? The article suggests both: some people are born with certain characteristics such as the ability to inspire, to motivate, to influence and create a compelling vision. And these characteristics are developed through actual leadership experiences. A good leader learns adaptability and flexibility in the face of unpredicted circumstances and makes sense of the surrounding context.

Of course, an inherent difficulty is leading oneself. If you’re not good at leading yourself through life, then I don’t see how you can lead others. This is about self-awareness, self-reflection and being able to honestly explore signature strengths and play to those strengths. In a previous post, I looked at Positive Psychology (PP) and the notion of signature strengths, which are divided into six clusters or virtues. Examples of signature strengths are: creativity; curiosity; social intelligence; self-control and self-regulation; modesty and humility; citizenship and teamwork; open-mindedness.

Leadership, from a positive psychology perspective, involves a shift in leadership style: from doing to people to working with and for people. This new style of leadership involves influencing the networks of employees (or agents) that proliferate in an organisation (or ecosystem). It is a fine balance between conventional direction of others and allowing emergence of dialogue and complex networks - it is paradoxical leadership. Contemporary leaders are guiding a complex adaptive system (ie the organisation) that exists between chaos and stasis (stagnation or death). Both PP and Complexity Science can teach contemporary leaders to dance between chaos and stasis; to appreciate that leadership is about mentoring, guiding and facilitating, not managing and controlling.

Mmmm….perhaps the thinkingshift-living-leadership-guide.pdf could help leaders understand that a new story is being created - the sustainable organisation, which exists in a wider ecosystem of reciprocal relationships based on trust and emergence.

I spent Easter reading Steven Johnson’s book, The Ghost Map, which is the historical account of how London’s densely-packed Soho District battled a virulent outbreak of cholera in 1854 that eventually destroyed 50,000 lives in England and Wales. It’s the story of two men with local knowledge - Dr John Snow and Rev Henry Whitehead - who pitted themselves against the medical fraternity of the time who steadfastly believed that disease was miasmic in nature (thought to be caught from the noxious atmosphere swirling around urban areas). Both men, particularly John Snow, are remembered for their discovery that cholera is a water-borne disease.

The Ghost Map illuminates an ecosystem - the urban city - and shows how the spread of a virus, the rise of an industrial city, detective work and scientific enquiry became intertwined. On August 28, 1854, working-class mother, Sarah Lewis, tossed a bucket of soiled water into a cesspool behind her squalid living quarters. Unknown to Sarah Lewis and the rest of London, her baby was infected with the Vibrio cholerae bacterium and the tossed water was contaminated and made its way into the Broad Street communal drinking well. The deadliest outbreak of cholera in London’s history was triggered.

The Broad Street water pump was the local coffeehouse of its time: people gathered from far and wide to drink the sparkling, refreshing water and the deadly, silent bacterium insinuated itself throughout the urban ecosystem via innocent human transmitters. Cholera is easily cured by ingesting large amounts of fluid and electrolytes, but this solution was unknown in a Victorian London seized with the fear of not knowing when or how cholera would strike. Maybe avian flu will become the new cholera epidemic of the 21st Century.

Dr John Snow, a celebrated anaesthesiologist, who had attended the birth of one of Queen Victoria’s children, took a bird’s eye view of the city and produced a map that showed the cholera outbreak occurred in clusters, following a distinctive pattern and a story. Snow was able to ultimately demonstrate that the Broad Street pump was responsible for the outbreak. You can check out his 1854 map here. Snow’s work and his mapping of the disease laid the foundations for epidemiology and the beginnings of modern sewage and water filtration systems.

Snow’s map was a vivid visualisation of death. Dots on the map plotted information about the location of deaths and the communal water pumps were marked with crosses. A distinct cluster of dots appeared around the Broad Street water pump, illuminating the pump as the source of contamination.

Edward Tufte talks about Snow’s map here; and this is a link to the John Snow website, which has lots of interesting resources, including a series of maps of 19th Century London.

What I particularly liked about The Ghost Map is the discussion about the contemporary developing countries and the so-called shadow or squatter cities. These ecosystems are facing the same issues Victorian London faced: unstable growth; inadequate water supplies and sanitation; densely-packed populations. Johnson states that by 2030, it is possible that a quarter of humanity will be squatters, illegally occupying land and living without appropriate civic infrastructure. These rising, dense city networks may provide ideal conditions for cholera or avian flu to run rampant throughout.

The perils of density now mean that we may need to fear a pandemic on a global, not just a local or city scale.