Dynamic inputs both Internal and
External
"Dynamic inputs to a nation include both internal and external forces."
— What is that supposed to mean?
Any group of humans that does things together will conduct itself
according to a fairly large number of motivating factors. Some of the
factors will
be the activities of the members of the group. These activities will be
related to internal motivational forces, environmental factors, and
motivational factors and actions that impinge on them. Please examine
this idea in terms of a fictitious but plausible human community. Most
or all of the group may be hungry. The weather may be good for food
gathering or bad. There may be a neighboring community nearby that
is also sure to be hungry and ready to go out to gather food. So out of
all of these factors a decision will arise as to how many community
members are to remain at home to take care of those too young to join
in
the hunt and to carry on maintenance activities, which community
members are to go out to obtain food, the various details regarding who
is in charge of group activities while securing food, etc. But their
plans will also be influenced by the diminished potential for finding
food resources in proximity to the people living nearby, the potential
for friction or even conflict if their group trespasses on the other
group's territory, etc.
As population sizes increase, as geographical ranges expand, etc., the
number of factors that a leader must manage will increase. Even when
there
are only two people in a group, the moods and priorities of each of
them
may ebb and flow. When a group get larger there are more and more
changes that may occur, and sometimes many relatively small changes
will all tend in the
same direction thus causing a major change in group behavior.
A competent leader will understand that it is a mistake to plan on
humans behaving like automatons. An attractive force, e.g., extorting
the people to work toward a common goal, will draw even individuals at
the bottom of a hierarchy toward unity and harmony in their activities,
just as a magnet will cause long chains of metal filings to form
automatically. A negative force, e.g., punishing people for any
behavior that is seen as detracting from the goals set by the leader,
will have individuals behaving in incoherent ways because the potential
for punishment drives people to do anything that they believe will
avoid their being punished. Perhaps the least destructive behavior that
can be achieved under these conditions will be that individuals, to the
extent possible, will simply avoid acting.
For real-world indications of how these two main types of leadership
work, compare the industrial production or the agricultural production
of North Korea and South Korea.
As an exercise in introspection, or perhaps as a small-scale interview
project conducted among people in your personal circle, consider how
you or your friends would behave in two different kinds of working
environments. In the first, you are given demerits for any failures
such as inability to meet a daily production quota, when you see a
better way to perform some task than the employer-approved method you
are reprimanded and told you are not being paid to think, your
workplace environment and even the restrooms are under electronic
surveillance, records are kept of any telephone calls or e-mails
received or initiated by you while on the job, etc. In the
second, you are kept informed as to the positive goals of your
organization. (Perhaps your company buys bulk beans, cleans the beans,
and packages them in one pound containers for retail sale. Customers do
not always get the dust-free product they would like. A problem of
greater seriousness is that sometimes bean-sized pebbles get picked up
by the bean harvesting machinery and in the end customers are injured
when they try to chew them. Your company has the goal of selling clean
beans free of insects and any other foreign material.) You would be
rewarded if you changed procedures to eliminate more foreign matter in
the final product. Workers are divided into self-governing teams of
between ten and fifteen members, and with rare exception are able to
deal with people who don't do their fair share of the work or who
create other problems. The exceptions are generally so serious that
there will be an open process of investigation and adjudication.
The more complex a system is, the more potential failure points may be
involved. Not only are there more things to go wrong individually, but
a failure at one point may lead to a cascade of failures fanning out
behind it. When New York City was hit by the superstorm called Sandy in
2012, everyone could see flooding would be an immediate consequence.
What nobody seems to have thought about was the consequence of hospital
basements filling with water and putting emergency electrical
generators out of action. Nor had they considered how they could
evacuate patients when electrically powered elevators became
inoperative. In the 9/11 catastrophe the city learned that policemen
and firemen could not communicate with each other because their radios
shared no common frequencies.
When complex systems develop problems, a top-down system of control
through a chain of command, and a bottom-up system of intelligence
gathering and reporting simply will not work. Whoever is coordinating
rescue activities for such a complex system will ideally have direct
access when needed to all nodes of control in the chain of command and
information transmission, and will also be able to depend on individual
initiates at each level to meet the general goal of restoring good
function to the system. It must be expected that new problems may
emerge at any time, and that adequate coordination of efforts will not
always be easy because of snags that develop or because the need to
coordinate two activities is not seen soon enough to get things to come
together at the right time.
To rescue patients from a hospital it is necessary not only to bring
them down from upper floors, but they will require transportation from
the flood-impaired hospital to some other suitable refuge. There will
be no ambulances in service because the roads around the hospital are
flooded. So news of the need for boats must be transmitted up the chain
of information to someone who can send out orders to bring in the
boats. In the whole process of storm recovery there will be many such
"brushfire" events to be handled. It would be counterproductive for
some "decider" official to give angry orders, saying that the boats
need to be there "yesterday."
Is it now clear that the best preparation for such emergencies will be
individuals at each level of control and coordination who can maintain
a map of all parts of the system that they must try to govern? Ideally,
a commander in such a situation would have a mental map that is being
constantly updated as new information comes in. The next best basis for
action would be a physical map of connections that had been carefully
laid out beforehand. Some provision must be made for keeping the map
continually updated. The constant need for any complex system to be
actively shaped the way a potter shapes clay on a potter's wheel is a
fact that cannot be ignored. Constant change is the nature of such
systems, Constant adaptation to those changes is the price that a
leader must pay even to try to keep the system working properly. It is
impossible for a leader to do everything, so delegation of leadership
functions is important. However, sometimes two or more low-probability
events will happen to occur together, and the unanticipated
consequences may have major destructive effects. One example of such
combinations of unusual sources was Superstorm Sandy itself. The storm
itself was very powerful, but instead of being blown out to sea in the
ordinary way of such hurricanes, it was blocked by a ridge of high
pressure over Greenland and it also combined with an arctic front which
added to its power. It spent much more time over the area around New
York City because its path brought it in roughly perpendicular to the
eastern coast of the United States and it was only moving west at about
13 mph when it hit land.
The best maps and the best efforts at prediction will sometimes be
visited by a "black swan" event. A black swan is an event that over a
long stretch of history has never been
seen until, finally, someone sees it. That it occurs is nobody's fault.
The only possible preparation for such an event lies in the general
kinds of operations that are
intended to provide overall resilience to a system. In Master Sun's Art of War,
one of the preparations he made for the defense of his country was to
cache food and military supplies at well distributed hidden points
within his own territory so that in the event of an invasion his army
might always find emergency supplies readily at hand.
Rigid top-down control is subject to failure when unforeseen
circumstances prevent execution of the leader's plan. Lt. General Paul
von Riper gives the example of a military officer who orders a
contingent of his troops to take over a hill, establish heavy
weapon positions at its summit and await orders. When the officer in
command is informed of approaching enemy forces he radios those atop
the hill to direct mortar fire on the enemy. At this point he learns
that from the top of that hill, due to high trees and substantial
undergrowth, it is impossible to see the road. That kind of hitch is
why General von Riper instructs officers under his command to tell
their subordinates what their planned actions are intended to
accomplish. In the just-mentioned example, the squad leader, upon
ascending the hill and realizing that the road cannot be seen from
there, will on his own initiative find a more suitable hill and
establish his weapon position where it can accomplish the intended
result. When he sees the approaching enemy troops he does not
need to wait for a superior's command to begin firing because he has
already been ordered to do so. If something tipped them off to there
being an ultra- high-value intelligence target in the enemy convoy,
then that black swan could be met with a greatly revised plan of action
designed to capture the intelligence target as its primary goal and
make interdiction of the enemy column a secondary objective.
Further readings:
The book The Improbability Principle
by David J. Hand, is introduced in a brief article in the Science News Magazine for 17 May
2014, p. 33. (See also, www.sciencenews.org)
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This page was last revised on 17 August 2016