Ideas I wanted to remember and share.
“The most important assumptions of a model are not in the equations, but what’s not in them; not in the documentation, but unstated; not in the variables on the computer screen, but in the blank spaces around them.”
-John Sterman
(as quoted in Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics)
“Two prime ministers are sitting in a room discussing affairs of state. Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his fist on the desk. The resident prime minister admonishes him: ‘Peter,’ he says, ‘kindly remember Rule Number 6,’ whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws.”
After a number of similar scenes occur, “the visiting prime minister addresses his colleague: ‘My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this. Would you be willing to share with me the secret of Rule Number 6?’ ‘Very simple,’ replies the resident prime minister. ‘Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so damn seriously.’ ‘Ah,’ says his visitor, ‘that is a fine rule.’ After a moment of pondering, he inquires, ‘And what, may I ask, are the other rules?'”
“‘There aren’t any.'”
-Rosamund and Benjamin Zander,
The Art of Possibility (2000, p.79)
Is it number 6 to emphasize that as one rule among many, it doesn’t take itself so seriously? (Meta-Rule Number 6.)
“It’s easier to armor ourselves than to step out of our armor. … Staying present with your shame takes far more courage than riding it into aggression. Staying present with your shame, neither indulging in it nor avoiding it, furthers the authentic warrior in you, the one who can sit in the fire of deep challenge and difficulty, and remain present without numbing himself or disconnecting from others. Remaining present with your shame takes guts. Doing so deepens your capacity for vulnerability, and therefore also your capacity for being in truly intimate relationship.”
“If men want an arena that calls forth their full heroism, this is it: to heed the call to face our planetary disasters and disaster-making with huge resolve and stamina and compassion. Imagine all the energy that goes into armoring and overprotecting ourselves (overbudgeting for defense) instead of going into truly facing and cleaning up the mess we’ve made of our home—and our own inner terrain.”
“Remember that emotion and reason work best when they work together.”
-Robert Augustus Masters, To Be A Man
(p. 38-39, 127-128, 282)
“Dynamic systems studies usually are not designed to predict what will happen. Rather, they’re designed to explore what would happen, if a number of driving factors unfold in a range of different ways.”
-Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems (p. 46)
“The argument against great design is always cost and speed. The discussion about cost and speed is not really about cost and speed. It is an agenda that declares that human experience is a low priority. […] Don’t ever take the argument about no funds and no time at face value. Our stance about cost and speed is simply a measure of our commitment.”
“There is more than enough time and just enough money.”
-Peter Block (Community: The Structure of Belonging p.162)
“The deep challenge here is… letting go of our comforting illusion of control, the illusion that we’ve done our job as leaders: we’ve done all the analysis, we’ve got the plan, things are going to go according to plan. Paradoxically, it’s only when we give up the illusion of control that we get the real thing, by shifting to sense-and-respond.”
-Frederic Laloux, Reinventing Organizations
(illustrated version, p. 118)
In 2009, a researcher surveyed 35 quantitative analysts who build forecast models across a variety of industries and government. Out of those, “just one respondent stated he had ever attempted to check actual outcomes against original forecasts.” In other words, almost no one actually checked to see whether their predictions came true. Even the one respondent who did say he checked didn’t keep any hard data about the level of accuracy.
The inevitable consequence is that “fundamentally flawed models that don’t even come close to matching the eventual observations may be used without question indefinitely.”
It’s easy to imagine why model builders may not proactively want to check their past predictions. For one thing, if the results are poor enough, it could make it hard to justify hiring the model builder in the future.
But why don’t businesspeople who use the model forecasts in their decision-making specifically request such retrospective analysis?
It’s possible that some model users do that tracking themselves, so it didn’t show up in the survey of model builders described above.
But I also suspect it has a lot to do with the discomfort we feel around uncertainty. Mainstream business culture is oriented around the concepts of “measure, predict, control”. So the less accurately it turns out we can predict, the more that entire world view is undermined. If you are committed to the world view, if indeed your entire career and belief system is predicated on the world view, you will tend to do whatever you can to avoid potential disconfirming evidence.
Fortunately, next-stage organizations are beginning to appear, with an entirely different world view characterized by “sense and respond”. Prediction is far less critical, and uncertainty is far less problematic. This indeed makes quantitative models themselves less important (but by no means irrelevant). In situations where these models continue to be used, I hope to see more acceptance not just of retrospective analysis, but of other indicators of uncertainty such as confidence intervals and statistical significance.
“I suggested that [a teacher in one of my workshops] translate her statement ‘I have to give grades because it’s district policy’ to ‘I choose to give grades because I want…’ She answered without hesitation, “I choose to give grades because I want to keep my job,” while hastening to add, “But I don’t like saying it that way. It makes me feel so responsible for what I’m doing.”
“‘That’s why I want you to do it that way,’ I replied.”
-Marshall B. Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication (p. 21)
“To cut through illusion, we have to get disillusioned — the more thoroughly the better — so long as we do so at a pace that allows for proper digestion of the shifts we’re making.
“A crucial challenge is to stop treating disillusionment as a problem or something negative, and use it as an awakening force. To be disillusioned is to see through illusion, in conjunction with releasing its hold on us. We thus become disenchanted, no longer spellbound.”
-Robert Augustus Masters, To Be A Man (p. 61)
A remarkable thing happened to me about a year ago. The simple act of reading a book healed the intermittent back pain that I had lived with for almost ten years — pain that had resisted multiple rounds of physical therapy, massage therapy, yoga, stretching, standing desks, and ergonomic chairs.
Again: I merely read a book, and the pain was gone within about a month. Moreover, this was not “all in my head”: my physical therapist and massage therapist both found significant changes in my physical muscle tissue during that period.
I know it sounds ridiculous, because it sounded ridiculous to me when a friend of a family member relayed her own similar story. But as I read the book she recommended — Healing Back Pain: The mind-body connection by Dr. John E. Sarno (and there are other similar books) — I began to understand the emerging science of mind-body interactions and it all started to make a lot of sense.
Megan summarized the findings this way: “Most recurrent or long-term pain in the neck, shoulder, back, and buttocks is caused by your autonomic (unconscious) nervous system restricting oxygen flow to these regions, and this oxygen deprivation causes pain. Your autonomous brain does this to distract you or relieve you from having to deal with difficult emotions, such as anger, sadness, and fear, especially when these emotions are not deemed acceptable by you and/or your society (e.g., it’s not ok to be angry).”
It turns out that the unconscious nervous system controls a vast array of body systems, including the regulation of blood flow, digestion, healing, immune system activity, and many more, so there are plenty of plausible pathways for the mind to create physical pain and discomfort. Meanwhile, our cultures have a tremendous number of ways of encouraging us to repress and numb our emotions. So the ingredients are all there, bountifully. It turns out that this isn’t pseudo-science — nor ridiculous at all.
Yet the idea of psychologically caused pain is still so foreign to the Western world that no doctor or physical therapist in ten years ever said anything to me about this area of study. I’m not here to vilify them — on the contrary, I had some wonderful physical therapists who taught me exercises that I still practice for general strength and health. But I do feel a responsibility to spread the word, because so many others also experience chronic back, neck, shoulder, stomach, and other types of pain and related conditions.
Unfortunately, I can’t summarize in a short blog post the core of the cure — namely, learning to face the emotional difficulties that are the true cause of most chronic pain. But Dr. Sarno says that the material covered in his book was sufficient to help the vast majority of his patients. I count myself among them.