I Still Like Ike

Free Concert at Masonic Center

The Miami Valley Symphony Orchestra is putting on a free show at the Masonic Center in Grafton Hill on Sunday, May 16th at 3 p.m.

Updatyon Summit: Struggles of an Organization Town

I recently attended the updayton summit.  I'm a newcomer to Dayton and was curious about this unique-sounding gathering.  My first impression on hearing the words Young Creatives (YCs) Summit was "what a pretentious sounding group".  I went with a list of preconceived questions (culled from this set of notes) that I wanted to try and answer through observation of how the summit was conducted and how the participants evolved their involvement.  My initial idea was to look for evidence supporting either a synergistic group process or emergent individual creativity at the summit.  I note my impressions and preconceptions upfront so that you'll understand my observations are not disinterested, though I tried to be 'minimally involved' and objective (with only limited success, the participants and facilitators were really nice and their optimism was infectious).  If you think I missed something significant please point it out in the comments. 

See Me? I'm behind the bald guy.

The updayton summit's main goal is to come up with annual projects that serve to excite YCs and will in-turn help Dayton retain recent college graduates.  The means used to achieve this goal were facilitated consensus generation and voting.  Attendees were split up by self-selected interest categories, and then further into several sub-groups.  My interest category was entrepreneur.  These sub-groups met independently at the beginning of the summit in breakout sessions to generate ideas and vote on their 'top two' options for projects.  After that, the results of all the sub-groups were collected by summit staff.  The attendees then went to panel discussions in their interest category, and then all met together in a Town Hall to vote on the final projects for the coming year. 

There were seven resulting top ideas in the entrepreneur interest category.  Six of these consisted primarily of websites.  Five of those websites were about mentoring for young entrepreneurs by established ones, entrepreneur support groups, information clearinghouses or some combination thereof.  Consensus building is certainly brutal in seeking out the lowest common denominator.  How to argue against something as innocuous and pervasive as a website in our networked age?  And what were the big success stories out of last year's summit?  Weeding and painting and, you guessed it, a web resource.  Remember, these groups met independently at the beginning of the summit.  No significant prior communication between sub-group members other than mingling at vendor booths while surfing swag. 

How does what I observed in the summit breakout sessions look in light of established thoughts on creativity (or lack thereof) in groups?  There are two superficially competing views of the group creative process.  There is the whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-parts school popularized by Stephen Covey.  In opposition, is the creative-acts-are-individual-acts school.  William Whyte's  The Organization Man provides an extensive denial of useful creative genius in groups, and a call for renewed focus on the dignity and efficacy of the individual contribution.  The former I'll call the Synergy School, the latter the Solitary School.

Here's part of Whyte's criticism of the consensus building group,

Think for a moment of the way you behave in a committee meeting.  In your capacity as group member you feel a strong impulse to seek common ground with the others.  Not just out of timidity but out of respect for the sense of the meeting you tend to soft-pedal that which would go against the grain.  And that, unfortunately, can include unorthodox ideas.  A really new idea affronts current agreement -- it wouldn't be a new idea if it didn't -- and the group, impelled as it is to agreement, is instinctively hostile to that which is divisive.  With wise leadership it can offset this bias, but the essential urge will still be to unity, to consensus.  After an idea matures -- after people learn to live with it -- the group may approve it, but that is after the fact and it is an act of acquiescence rather than creation.

I have been citing the decision-making group, and it can be argued that these defects of order do not apply to information-exchanging groups.  It is true that meeting with those of common interests can be tremendously stimulating and suggest to the individuals fresh ways of going about their own work.  But stimulus is not discovery; it is not the act of creation.  Those who recognize this limitation do not confuse the functions and, not expecting too much, profit from the meeting of minds.

Others, however, are not so wise, and fast becoming a fixture of organization life is the meeting self-consciously dedicated to creating ideas.  It is a fraud.  Much of such high-pressure creation -- cooking with gas, creating out loud, spitballing, and so forth -- is all very provocative, but if it is stimulating, it is stimulating much like alcohol.  After the glow of such a session has worn off, the residue of ideas usually turns out to be a refreshed common denominator that everybody is relieved to agree upon -- and if there is a new idea, you usually find that it came from a capital of ideas already thought out -- by individuals -- and perhaps held in escrow until someone sensed an opportune moment for its introduction.
Togetherness

The scientific conference exemplifies Whyte's informational exchange meeting.  No one attends to make decisions (or vote with dots), the attendees are looking to share their work, and learn about their colleagues' work.  These meetings are an important part of modern scientific progress.  This years' updayton meeting did have information exchange components, which I'll get to later.

The Synergy School might argue that the updayton breakout sessions can provide an opportunity for synergistic collaboration, where alternative solutions emerge that are better than any of the individual solutions brought by group members.  The Synergy School's three levels of communication are

1. The lowest level of communication coming out of low trust situations is characterized by defensiveness, protectiveness, and legalistic language which covers all the bases and spells out qualifiers and escape clauses in the event things go sour.
2. The middle level of communication is respectful communication -- where fairly mature people communicate.
3. The highest level of communication is synergistic (win/win) communication.

However, the acknowledged goal of the updayton summit is 'stimulating like alcohol' and 'engagement' rather than synergy.  So, while I went looking for evidence of high-level cooperative action I should have paid closer attention to the marketing materials and lowered my expectations accordingly.  There was no effort at establishing group trust (we didn't even introduce ourselves at the start of the breakout).  We jumped right in to the scripted consensus process.  Low-trust communication among mature professionals leading to compromise (consensus) is the best we can hope for from events like these, and, unsurprisingly, that's exactly what we got.  This naturally raises the question: why bother?  If all we can reasonably hope for is second tier communication then why invest the effort?  The gist I get from a closer look at the promotional material is 'to get buy-in for the projects which will excite YCs to stay'.  Which, in a moment of cynicism, might strike one as rather manipulative.  Instead of manufacturing radiators, now we're manufacturing community-spiritedness.  We might not be able to offer you gainful employment, but you can volunteer to weed our sidewalks!

In support of the Solitary School's idea about the capital of individual ideas, the winning project from the entrepreneur interest category was the one option that wasn't a website.  The young man whose idea formed the core of this project said, "this is something I've been writing about for years".  Something he was clearly passionate about, something that he expended his individual creative effort to flesh out beforehand on his own, and subsequently pitch to the group.  The other options presented by the members of the group were relentlessly mashed into web-sameness by the gentle actions of the facilitators and the listless shrugs of individual acquiescence from well-meaning group members searching for common ground.  When a thoughtful member of the breakout session asked the only really important question, "how do you create an innovator?"  His question was met with more shrugs around the room followed quickly by redirection from the facilitators.  Clearly that question cannot be packaged into a public relations project.

What about the skills sessions?  Surely these have redeeming aspects, the Solitary School would appreciate these as information exchange, and the Synergy School might appreciate them as 'sharpening the saw'.  The  most interesting aspect of the panel discussions was the incipient frustration I observed in some of David Gasper's comments.  Roughly, "there are so many great resources for entrepreneurs in the Dayton region.  Why don't we have more entrepreneurs!?  Dayton needs more entrepreneurs."  Some of the resources mentioned by the panelists were Dayton SCORE, EntrepenuerOhio and Dayton Business Resource Center.  As Theresa Gasper observed, "People seem to want the information PUSHED to them, but then feel overwhelmed with all the information coming at them. No one seems to want to PULL the information – meaning, many don't want to search for the info."  This is consistent with the majority of "needs" identified in the entrepreneur breakout sessions.  These folks are looking for checklists, guarantees of stability and someone to tell them what to do.  In fact, one participant in my session thought that the biggest barrier to entry for entrepreneurs was the lack of the safety net offered by nationalized health-care!  If you were to ask me what is the opposite of the entrepreneurial spirit, I could not have come up with a better answer.  Probably the opposite of the definitions the panel members gave of entrepreneur too:

• some one who has put something of value to them at risk
• some one with significant "skin in the game"

Dayton already has a tough time with entrepreneurial thinking because of its recent history as a factory town (far removed from the celebrated, early-industrial "great men").  In his article on a New Era of Joblessness, Don Peck identifies psychological work that points to an additional generational component contributing to this dearth of entrepreneurs,

Many of today’s young adults seem temperamentally unprepared for the circumstances in which they now find themselves. Jean Twenge, an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University, has carefully compared the attitudes of today’s young adults to those of previous generations when they were the same age. Using national survey data, she’s found that to an unprecedented degree, people who graduated from high school in the 2000s dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and lifestyle. Yet they also have much higher material expectations than previous generations, and believe financial success is extremely important. “There’s this idea that, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to work, but I’m still going to get all the stuff I want,’”Twenge told me. “It’s a generation in which every kid has been told, ‘You can be anything you want. You’re special.’”

In her 2006 book, Generation Me, Twenge notes that self-esteem in children began rising sharply around 1980, and hasn’t stopped since. By 1999, according to one survey, 91 percent of teens described themselves as responsible, 74 percent as physically attractive, and 79 percent as very intelligent. (More than 40 percent of teens also expected that they would be earning $75,000 a year or more by age 30; the median salary made by a 30-year-old was $27,000 that year.)Twenge attributes the shift to broad changes in parenting styles and teaching methods, in response to the growing belief that children should always feel good about themselves, no matter what. As the years have passed, efforts to boost self-esteem—and to decouple it from performance—have become widespread.

These efforts have succeeded in making today’s youth more confident and individualistic. But that may not benefit them in adulthood, particularly in this economic environment.Twenge writes that “self-esteem without basis encourages laziness rather than hard work,” and that “the ability to persevere and keep going” is “a much better predictor of life outcomes than self-esteem.” She worries that many young people might be inclined to simply give up in this job market. “You’d think if people are more individualistic, they’d be more independent,” she told me. “But it’s not really true. There’s an element of entitlement—they expect people to figure things out for them.”

Seeking 'solutions' which enable this emerging neurosis, rather than healing it, is probably not the answer to a more dynamic Dayton. 


Please don't misunderstand my criticisms of this updayton process (or cooperation in general).  I am in agreement with both Covey and Whyte that our biggest challenges require innovative cooperation to solve. 

Our most important work, the problems we hope to solve or the opportunities we hope to realize require working and collaborating with other people in a high-trust, synergistic way...
Interdependence

Let me admit that I have been talking principally about the adverse aspects of the group.  I would not wish to argue for a destructive recalcitrance, nor do I wish to undervalue the real progress we have made in co-operative effort.  But to emphasize, in these times, the virtues of the group is to be supererogatory.  Universal organization training, as I will take up in the following chapters, is now available for everybody, and it so effectively emphasizes the group spirit that there is little danger that inductees will be subverted into rebelliousness.

Over and above the overt praise for the pressures of the group, the very ease, the democratic atmosphere in which organization life is now conducted makes it all the harder for the individual to justify to himself a departure from its norm.  It would be a mistake to confuse individualism with antagonism, but the burdens of free thought are steep enough that we should not saddle ourselves with a guilty conscience as well.

Togetherness

However, what Dayton lacks towards its success is not more resources from government, more focus on community, more committee meetings or trendy bohemian culture to attract jobless hipsters.  In fact, if the attendance of the updayton summit is any indication, Dayton has no lack of optimistic joiners.  However, coddling these agreeable, cooperative, and risk-averse Organization Volk is not the answer if what you are seeking is a flowering of 1000 new entrepreneurs in Dayton.  As Whyte argues, we lack a recognition that  "[t]he central ideal -- that the individual, rather than society, must be the paramount end [...] is as vital and as applicable today as ever".  Lower the barriers to entry (taxes / zoning / regulation / government subsidized competitors), and the passionate individuals uninterested in paternalism will exploit the opportunities that emerge to deliver for Dayton's future.

[
The winner of the 'best swag contest' was MetroParks with their D-ring key fob:

Yes. My keys are now a' swingan'...
]

Explosively Formed Projectiles: An Impact of Climate Change

This new ad campaign is quite terrible. Fear-mongering with future catastrophes is not enough. If we don't pass climate legislation, then it's like we're Killing American Troops.

The part about more powerful improvised explosive devices (IEDs) being used in Iraq, and explosively formed projectiles (EFPs) likely being imported from Iran is accurate. The problem is that you don't have to have precision manufacturing to make pretty darn good devices. In fact, simply formed copper plates and modest amounts of explosive does just fine. So will passing that climate legislation to 'cure our addiction to foreign oil' save anyone from a terrorist's road-side device? Nope. Soldiers will still be in harms way. They'll continue to drive down those same roads, but now they have the additional distinction of appearing as props in climate-politics theater.

2010 Young Creatives Summit: Get the Shirt

The 2010 Young Creatives Summit is imminent here in the shining Gem City!

You may forget all the folks you meet during the networking and breakout sessions since they'll be plenty of beverages at the after-party, but you'll always have the shirt!

Get yours while there's still time.

Energy and GDP

More Google Public Data fun.

Ohio Personal Income

The Dayton Business Journal has a recent article about incomes in Ohio falling less than the national averages. Here's some interactive graphs from Google public data on the topic:

Interesting how DC is such an outlier in these graphs; it's good to be king.

Here's one that's just interesting, not necessarily Dayton, Ohio-centric (you can drag the labels around if it starts out too cluttered):
Rumors of the death of US manufacturing seem greatly exaggerated.

Zen Uncertainty

Zen Uncertainty: Attempts to understand uncertainty are mere illusions; there is only suffering.
-- WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!

Should we give up? No, there's plenty we can do to make the suffering more bearable. Lo and Mueller give an uncertainty taxonomy of five levels in their 'Physics Envy' paper:

1. Complete Certainty: the idealized deterministic world
2. Risk without Uncertainty: an honest casino
3. Fully Reducible Uncertainty: the odds in the honest casino are not posted, we have to learn them from limited experience
4. Partially Reducible Uncertainty: we're not quite sure which game at the casino we're playing so we have to learn that as well as the odds based on limited experience
5. Irreducible Uncertainty: we're not even sure if we're in the casino, we might be outside splashing around in the fountain...

At the bottom of the decent we find level infinity, Zen Uncertainty.

Section 2 of the paper provides a nice historical overview of the early work of Paul A. Samuelson, who single-handedly brought statistical mechanics to the economists, and they have never been the same since. Samuelson acknowledged the deep connection between his work and physics:

Perhaps most relevant of all for the genesis of Foundations, Edwin Bidwell Wil- son (1879–1964) was at Harvard. Wilson was the great Willard Gibbs’s last (and, essentially only) protege at Yale. He was a mathematician, a mathematical physicist, a mathematical statistician, a mathematical economist, a polymath who had done first-class work in many fields of the natural and social sciences. I was perhaps his only disciple . . . I was vaccinated early to understand that economics and physics could share the same formal mathematical theorems (Euler’s theorem on homogeneous functions, Weierstrass’s theorems on constrained maxima, Jacobi determinant identities underlying Le Chatelier reactions, etc.), while still not resting on the same empirical foundations and certainties.

Related to this theme, there's an interesting recent article over on Mobjectivist site about using ideas from physics to model income distributions.

Lo and Mueller propose to operationalize their uncertainty taxonomy with a 2-D checklist (table). The levels provide the columns across the top, and there is a row for each business component of the activity being evaluated, here's their description:

The idea of an uncertainty checklist is straightforward: it is organized as a table whose columns correspond to the five levels of uncertainty of Section 3, and whose rows correspond to all the business components of the activity under consideration. Each entry consists of all aspects of that business component falling into the particular level of uncertainty, and ideally, the individuals and policies responsible for addressing their proper execution and potential failings.

This seems like an idea that could be adapted and combined with best practices for model validation (and checklist sorts of approaches) in helping to define what sorts of uncertainties we are operating under when we make decisions using science-based decision support products.

Their final paragraph echos Lindzen's sentiments about climate science:

While physicists have historically been inspired by mathematical elegance and driven by pure logic, they also rely on the ongoing dialogue between theoretical ideals and experimental evidence. This rational, incremental, and sometimes painstaking debate between idealized quantitative models and harsh empirical realities has led to many breakthroughs in physics, and provides a clear guide for the role and limitations of quantitative methods in financial markets, and the future of finance.
-- WARNING: Physics Envy May Be Hazardous To Your Wealth!

The Social Ethic and Appeals for Technocracy

Climate activists, in discussing the implementation (or lack thereof) of policy solutions for our 'modern problems', hold forth an interesting combination of ideas about the great need for more of the Social Ethic on the one hand,

If we don't revisit the notion of collective responsibility and sobriety soon, our descendants will pay a heavy price.
-- Michael Tobis

What we lack is an ethical framework for inter-generational responsibilities (such as “pass on a habitable planet to our children”). Cost-benefit analysis avoids these ethical questions, at a time when we desperately need to address them.
-- Steve Easterbrook

and claims of the failure of democracy or public discourse on the other,

They have to see the need for pain, to sense the danger of doing nothing. They have to lead their leaders as well as follow – once they switch off, nothing good happens easily, if at all.
Wanted: an eco prophet

Perhaps we have to accept that there is no simple solution to public disbelief in science. The battle over climate change suggests that the more clearly you spell the problem out, the more you turn people away. If they don’t want to know, nothing and no one will reach them.
-- George Monbiot

Setting aside for now the unsound conflation of scientific insight with political consensus, the sentiment at the base of this meme is just as troubling. It is basically an argument that our old ethical theories and extant systems of governance are incapable of solving the problems, real or perceived, facing modern civilization. W.H. Whyte already wrote the response to this line of thought more ably than I ever could (though his target was mainly the rise of bureaucracy in business, and associated societal changes, his critique seems topical in this case as well).

My charge against the Social Ethic, then, is on precisely the grounds of contemporary usefulness it so venerates. It is not, I submit, suited to the needs of "modern man," but is instead reinforcing precisely that which least needs to be emphasized, and at the expense of that which does. Here is my bill of particulars
  It is redundant. In some societies individualism has been carried to such extremes as to endanger the society itself, and there exist today examples of individualism corrupted into a narrow egoism which prevents effective co-operation. This is a danger, there is no question of that. But is it today as pressing a danger as the oberse -- a climate which inhibits individual initiative and imagination, and the courage to exercise it against group opinion? Society is itself an education in the extrovert values, and I think it can be rightfully argued that rarely has there been a society which has preached them so hard. No man is an island unto himself, but how John Donne would writhe to hear how often and for what reasons, the thought is so tiresomely repeated.
  It is premature. To preah technique before content, the skills of getting along isolated from why and to what end the getting along is for, does not produce maturity. It produces a sort of permanent prematurity, and this is true not only of the child being taught life adjustment but of the organization man being taught well-roundedness. This is a sterile concept, and those who believe that they have mastered human relations can blind themselves to the true bases of co-operation. People don't co-operate just to co-operate; they co-operate for substantive reasons, to achieve certain goals, and unless these are comprehended the little manipulations for morale, team spirit, and such are fruitless.
And they can be worse than fruitless. Held up as the end-all of organization leadership, the skills of human relations easily tempt the new administrator into the practice of a tyranny more subtle and more pervasive than that which he means to supplant. No one wants to see the old authoritarian return, but at least it could be said of him that what he wanted primarily from you was your sweat. The new man wants your soul.
  It is delusory. It is easy to fight obvious tyranny; it is not easy to fight benevolence, and few things are more calculated to rob the individual of his defenses than the idea that his interests and those of society can be wholly compatible. The good society is the one in which they are most compatible, but they can never be completely so, and one who lets The Organization be the judge ultimately sacrifices himself. Like the good society, the good organization encourages individual expression, and many have done so. But there always remains some conflict between individual and The Organization. Is The Organization to be the arbiter? The Organization will look to its own interests, but it will look to the individual's only as The Organization interprets them.
  It is static. Organization of itself has no dynamic. The dynamic is in the individual and thus he must not only question how The Organization interprets his interests, he must question how it interprets its own. The bold new plan he feels is necessary, for example. He cannot trust that The Organization will recognize this. Most probably, it will not. It is the nature of a new idea to confound current consensus -- even the mildly new idea. It might be patently in order, but, unfortunately, the group has a vested interest in it miseries as well as its pleasures, and irrational as this may be, many a member of organization life can recall instances where the group clung to known disadvantages rather than risk the anarchies of change.
  It is self-destructive. The quest for normalcy, as we have seen in suburbia, is one of the great breeders of neuroses, and the Social Ethic only serves to exacerbate them. What is normalcy? We practice a great mutual deception. Everyone knows that they themselves are different -- that they are shy in company, perhaps, or dislike many things most people seem to like -- but they are not sure that other people are different too. Like the norms of personality testing, they see about them the sum of efforts of people like themselves to seem as normal as others and possibly a little more so. It is hard enough to learn to live with our inadequacies, and we need not make ourselves more miserable by a spurious ideal of middle-class adjustment. Adjustment to what? Nobody really knows -- and the tragedy is that they don't realize that the so-confident-seeming other people don't know either.
[...]
Science and technology do not have to be antithetical to individualism. To hold that they must be antithetical, as many European intellectuals do, is a sort of utopianism in reverse. For a century Europeans projected their dreams into America; now they are projecting their fears, and in so doing they are falling into the very trap they accuse us of. Attributing a power to the machine that we have never felt, they speak of it almost as if it were animistic and had a will of its own over and above the control of man. Thus they see our failures as inevitable, and those few who are consistent enough to pursue the logic of their charge imply that there is no hope to be found except through a retreat to the past.
This is a hopelessly pessimistic view.
The Organization Man

Whyte goes on to dismiss the nostalgic and naive caricature of individualism bandied about by the right, but rather calls for a pragmatic recognition of the natural tension between the individual and society, and that "[t]he central ideal -- that the individual, rather than society, must be the paramount end [...] is as vital and as applicable today as ever", impending climate catastrophes notwithstanding.