REPLY Society Strategy Development (SD7084)

[SDMAIL peter Luttik]

Posted by  "peter Luttik" <peter.luttik at dotank.nl>

I really enjoyed reading the responses to my note about change 
resistance.  First I need to clarify to Steve that my intention was to 
focus on understanding the role change resistance playes in structuring 
and maintaining social systems.   If you take the view that survival of 
social systems is good, that means that change resistance has also a 
positive role to play.

The US federal papers and the founding fathers intention to limit power 
and decision making - which they considered a positive design feature 
also plays a role.   Basicly every growth cycle with limits to balance 
it is unstable and collapses justs as quickly as it grew.   So slowing 
down change is allready at a very fundamental level necessary to bring 
stability.

Second John's paper triggered me on the role of intuition in decision 
making.  I look at intuition as the acquired insight or in argyris terms 
the mental models of individuals or organisations, whose origins - the 
data pool and selection thereoff has become inaccessible.  Who reads the 
federal papers anyway :).   Many cultural mental models have that 
character.  E.g. as a dutchman married to an American I find the US 
friendliness appealing, albeit sometimes superficial, while my wife 
likes the dutch openness as long as it doesn't become to rude.   The 
call that the frontier versus the island intuition.   The US frontier 
required one to make friends quickly and avoid enemies.   The dutch 
islands behind dikes required one to solve differences even if it took 
some effort.   Most of us don't live either at the frontier or at an 
island, but the intuitive behaviour is through training and example 
sustained.     Most of us don't think about the function of 
superficiality or rudeness (or their positive sides), but just live with 
them.   Could it be that the vast majority of our shared knowledge is in 
that sense intuitive - without knowledge of its origins (for most): why 
do we need to cut costs, focus on stakeholders or shareholders, be on 
time etc.  

To me strategic decisionmaking is mostly a process of clarifying 
intuitions, both on values as well as processes.   What do we all know 
to be true and right, so much so that we never talk about it?   A key 
role of working with systems models is to start working on the visible 
side of our knowledge - the things we are aware off (and we often aren't 
good in) and explore the invisible values and knowledge.   Mental models 
not as source of resistances but as viable and sustaining memes (Dawkins?)

Maybe in our search for change and adaptation we should learn to value 
the achievements of those memes and then move forward.   I will spend 
the next two days trying to understand why the dutch farming community 
is doing so well (even though like all farmers they are complaining 
endlessly).   Trying to move from the accepted knowledge and myths to 
the underlying roots has allready been a wonderfull learning journey, 
which gave me lots of respect for the complexity and the strengths of 
the historically grown structures.   We modelled that and are now going 
to test its resiliance against some extreme but possible futures to see 
what we can learn from that.  

Our reason for existence has always been to promote change, adaptation 
and identifying new directions.   And I believe that to be critical in a 
society where most forces responsible for steering us look backwards, 
while change is speeding up.

 But maybe we need to add uncovering the value(s) created in the 
past.    A systemically learning society could then avoid the short cuts 
of populism as well as the blockades fueled by fears of the future to 
move societal  performance to a higher level.

Or is that overly careful and should we accept our role a the "jester of 
the king': telling truth in a funny way.   Or that of the ants without a 
sense of smell, who get lost, often die, but sometimes find the new 
sources of food that the "normal ants" following their smell path will 
never uncover.  

Does this still make sense and does it help in finding strategic 
direction for SD??

Peter
Posted by  "peter Luttik" <peter.luttik at dotank.nl>
posting date  Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:42:29 +0200