People Live in Mental Silos

Groups of people live in group silos. We solve problems by asking others in the same silo for “help.” Does it help?

Often, solving a problem is like looking at an elephant very close up. Different people see different parts of the problem, and when asked to describe what they see, they know exactly what it is without knowing it is only a piece of it and not the whole thing.

Remember the saying? “To the man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Humans suffer from a conviction of the reality they perceive and will not change their minds until all those who describe the pieces get together and “allow themselves to” put it together like a puzzle.

This is nearly impossible in large organizations or groups of people (like political parties), particularly because everybody is passionate about what they know. This can be done when we learn to look from far away and allow us to see the whole elephant.

Many great thinkers in the 20th century thought about this, taught about this, and wrote about this. However, most people have never heard of them, and their message has become a trickle-down experience.

Why? Because our education is not a “system.” They thought teaching was more “efficient” if it was broken up by “Disciplines.” Why would somebody in humanities have to know anything about math, physics, or chemistry and vice versa? However, at the end of all that, nobody put it together to show us “the whole elephant of knowledge.”

Russell Ackoff was a brilliant and practical man, one of the few thinkers of the 20th Century that shrunk human emotional thinking to something we could understand. Ackoff, Deming, Drucker, and Goldratt, to name a few, shone lights on entities, individual logic, and our way of thinking and pointed out the use of history, true knowledge, and logic to channel it into improving all things human.

Ackoff organized “System Thinking” so that it could be understood. This is one of his thoughts on large organizations:

· “Most large social systems are pursuing objectives other than the ones they proclaim, and the ones they pursue are wrong.

• They try to do the wrong thing righter, and this makes what they do wronger. It is much better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right, because when errors are corrected, it makes doing the wrong thing wronger but the right thing righter.”

Today, we are witness to 433 Government Agencies that do exactly that. Why? They are too big “to fail” (they think) and have no checks and balances. Here are a few Examples.

· The FDA supported Purdue Pharma and knowingly allowed the opioid storm that ruined the lives of millions of people that were prescribed addictive pills under the guise they weren’t.

· The DOJ sending guns to cartels in Mexico; today, finding reasons to put innocent people in jail.

· The FBI attacking and threatening mothers for protesting the indoctrination of their children in school.

Each of the 433 Federal Government agencies is a fiefdom without restraint. This country is burying itself with increasingly corrupt organizations that take an intentional ax to separate the herd to achieve their nefarious ends.

Deming pursuing the quality of systems since the 1960s when nobody listened in the USA; he took his knowledge to Japan and had them almost kill our automotive industry single-handedly before the “locals” started to listen and learn how to build quality-in everything we do, starting with the “Toyota system.”

Taking action based on results without a theory and knowledge — without knowledge about the system, leads to other variations of results. This leads to “managing by results.” In government and private systems, this leads to throwing time and money on decisions for additional bad results.”

Drucker sent the same message but clarify the human factor in getting things done when he said

“Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things.”

Bureaucrats are the incarnation of “managers.” They are famous for doing things “by the book” they can hide behind. In contrast, leaders lead from the front. As they say in Alaska, “the scenery only changes for the lead dog.”

Doing the “right thing” often feels like conquering the unknown, requiring character conviction. This is as opposed to leading from behind, a phrase made popular during the Obama years and was first brought to the surface by a New Yorker article in 2011. Whether or not Obama said the phrase, the actions on the ground spoke for themselves at the time, as was seen in what happened in the Libya conflict. It left a taste in those who followed the results that “leading from behind” is the act of Machiavellian Manipulators. The ultimate net result? Boots on the ground, American people die.

Goldratt put all of the above in a disciplined of logic called the “Theory of Constraints.” As described in his first book, “The Goal.” Succinctly said, it is a process of thinking that leads to ongoing improvement using common sense. However, many times common sense is not common.

The Goal attempts and succeeds in showing that we can postulate a small number of assumptions and utilize them to explain a large spectrum of phenomena in industry, education, and personal life. The introduction of the book explains this using as an example the fact that “The Law of Conservation of Energy” is not true. It is just an assumption, but it works even today to explain Thermodynamics. Einstein “updated” it to be the “conservation of energy and mass.” The realization that such postulations of assumptions can work when applied to our thinking processes on anything. In corporations, it can be applied to organizations to break conflicts in operations and allow the inclusion of the entire “system,” not just pieces and parts. No “local” solutions are allowed. One station is waiting on parts while another is flooded with them. Thinking globally allows those with problems to “think outside the box” by changing an assumption.

Speaking of assumptions, it was Ackoff, in a lecture in the 1990s that he started by saying these prophetic words:

“All of our explanations rest on certain assumptions that we make. Explanations are deductions from theories that make assumptions. Every theory rests on a more general theory. The most general theory of all, the theory that each of us have is the theory of reality. Reality is a concept of the nature of the world, which is referred to as our world view. A view that the Germans refer to as Weltanschauung (weltanshang), a word for “our concept of the nature of reality.” We may not be conscious of our set of assumption about the nature of reality by all have it, we absorb it by osmosis through the process of acculturation, while growing up. The reason we share a culture is that we share a world view. The world view is the cement that holds our culture together. It characterizes what historians call “an Age.” An Age is simply a period of time in which a culture has a single shared view of the nature of reality. Therefore a change of that age, is a period in which the world view is going through a transformation from view to another. The reason for all that is the thesis of the argument that I want to present to you is that “we are in the early stages of a change in Age.” We are about to consummate, not immediately but in time, the transformation from one world view into another.”

Deming wrote about thinking globally in the introduction to the book by Howard and Sherry Gitlow titled “The Deming Guide to Quality and Competitive Position”: The introduction was titled “The Parable of the Creamians and Apajeens.” That exact parable can today be applied where the Federal Government Politicians have taken our country without our permission by taking many liberties with the Constitution. As it says in the book, “it dramatizes the plight of a people whose natural resources were abundant. They prospered in spite of themselves, without ever learning how to work together and achieve common goals. This was contrasted with a group of people who, with no natural resources, were able to work together to produce and achieve common goals and eventually surpass the group with all the resources.”