The Titanian Academic Education Project

Add comments

OVERVIEW OF THE
TITANIAN™ ACADEMIC EDUCATION PROJECT

Introduction
Our current educational system is fraught with many obstacles to the development of a student’s creativity. Not the least of these is the long-established custom of motivating students with rewards and punishments. Students under this system earn rewards and avoid punishments by achieving high test scores on tests that measure their ability to regurgitate old information rather than to create new information. The resulting culture instills fear in the students affected: fear of getting the “wrong” answer, fear of getting low grades, and fear of embarrassment and humiliation. Such fears inevitably limit or diminish the student’s ability to be creative, and in many instances destroys this ability utterly.

A Historical Lesson
In 1950 a similar situation plagued the manufacturing industries of Japan, which were still attempting to recover from World War II. At that time Japanese industrial creativity was at an all time low, so the words “made in Japan” were considered worldwide to mean “cheap shoddy imitation”. Having little to lose, Japanese industrialists decided to apply the management methodology suggested to them by the American expert, William Edward Deming. So effective were Deming’s suggestions, which he unassumingly labeled “Statistical Quality Control”, that within five years Japanese industry had regained the respect of industrialists the world over. By 1960 Japanese industries ranked among the world’s best, and by 1965 they were outperforming their overseas competitors without exception. Clearly, this phenomenal success by Japanese industry proves that Dr. Deming’s suggestions acted as a powerful catalyst of industrial creativity.

In the years that followed, Japanese educators attempted to apply Deming’s management methodology to the field of education. But this worthy experiment failed to do for Japanese education what the preceding experiment had done for Japanese industry. We know now how it failed and how to correct the errors made in the attempt.

The Podolsky-Sulliger Contribution
In 1991 two mental health professionals, Robert E. Podolsky and Gregory R. Sulliger, were haunted by the fact that humanity is failing to evolve socially in spite of making rapid advances technologically. Seeing this situation as potentially fatal for humankind, they set out to discover what would have to happen for the trend to be reversed and for humanity to thrive in a realistically imaginable future. In 1993, after analyzing and discussing this question for two years, the two put down on paper a set of definitions and principles which, if widely adopted by our societal institutions, might suffice to ensure humanity’s long-term success as a species. They called this document the Bill of Ethics.

In 2001 it came to Podolsky’s attention that Dr. Deming’s admonitions to Japanese industry, as well as to industry generally, had a logical relationship to the Bill of Ethics. By analyzing the two sets of principles together he soon proved that Deming’s Admonitions comprise a subset of the logical consequences of the Bill of Ethics and wrote up this proof in an article called, “Dr. Deming’s Admonitions” This discovery is significant in two ways. First, it proves that application of the principles contained in the Bill of Ethics to the workings of industry produces a massive increase in that industry’s creativity and vastly increases its success, thus confirming the validity of the Bill of Ethics as applied to industry.

Secondly, Podolsky’s discovery opened the way for him to examine the Japanese’ ill-fated experiment with Demingized education through the “logical lens” of the Bill of Ethics. In doing so he quickly discovered how the Japanese had gone astray in their attempt to apply Deming’s industrial admonitions to their educational system. He then went on to derive from the Bill of Ethics a new set of Deming-esque admonitions that comprise the core of the new student-centered educational paradigm that we call the Titanian Academic Education Project. To follow his reasoning and read his conclusions, refer to “Ethical Education” reproduced below.

Conclusion
We in Titania stand ready to share with you the new educational paradigm and, should you choose to adopt it, to consult with you concerning the challenges that you will doubtlessly encounter as you begin to deploy it in practice. We are confident that if you and your colleagues learn and persevere, we may all one day live in a world of peace, love, creativity, and freedom.

ETHICAL EDUCATION
The Application of Deming
Management Methods to Education

An Excerpt from
Heart and Mind
by Robert E. Podolsky

Abstract: This article points out briefly some of the weaknesses in the Japanese interpretation of Deming’s principles as applied to education and explains how the success of Deming’s method in industry is due mainly to the ethical principles inherent in that method.  Then a new set of Deming-style admonitions for education is derived to conform to these ethical principles and the suggestion is made that future experiments in quality-conscious education utilize these admonitions rather than Deming’s original “fourteen points”. 

Introduction
On the website of the International Journal of Educational Management appears a well written 1995 article by Kosaku Yoshida “Kosaku Yoshida”  of the School of Management, California State University, Carson, California, USA.  The article is entitled The Deming Approach to Education: A Comparative Study of the USA and Japan [1].  This article contains much that is excellent concerning the managerial principles pioneered by Dr. William Edwards Deming and proven so efficacious by the great experiment conducted by Japanese industry.  The article also explains many of the features of the Japanese system of public education, especially the relation between cooperative education as practiced in Japanese classrooms and Deming’s admonition to reduce variation in a company’s products.

It is indeed most laudable that the Japanese have the courage and wisdom to attempt applying Deming’s management methods to education; and it is most encouraging that a similar attempt is being made in some American school systems.  As Dr. Yoshida points out, however, the Japanese educational system is not without its flaws.  It is desirable therefore that those wishing to emulate the Japanese attempt at Deming-style education be aware of the mistakes that have been made by the Japanese in this attempt; and hopefully avoid duplicating the mistakes along with the successful elements of the method.

In the present article I point out briefly some of the weaknesses in the Japanese interpretation of Deming’s principles as applied to education and explain how the success of Deming’s method in industry is due mainly to the ethical principles inherent in that method.  Then I derive a new set of admonitions for education to conform to these ethical principles and suggest that future experiments in quality-conscious education utilize these admonitions rather than Deming’s original “fourteen points”.

The Power of Dr. Deming’s Method
As the Japanese have proven industrially there can be no doubt that the Deming management method is powerful and effective; in fact the most successful approach to industrial management in existence today.  This fact is widely known.  Not so well understood is the source of this managerial power.  Many newcomers to Deming’s methodology have assumed that the power is derived from the mathematics tying managerial statistics to measurable observables that characterize the performance of the system under scrutiny.  This assumption is false.  While measurement and mathematical precision are necessary to the successful application of the Deming method they are not sufficient.  They are artifacts of the system; but they are not the source of its power.

As I have suggested elsewhere, the source of the power of Dr. Deming’s admonitions as applied to industry is the fact that their application results in improved ethical relations between all the people who come in contact with one another as a result of the presence of the company using the method.  In order to apply the Deming method successfully outside the industrial realm for which it was intended the relation between Deming’s method and its underlying ethics must be clearly understood.  Only then can this powerful method be properly reformatted for use in education, government, charity, religion, and any number of other settings in which one might want to derive the benefits inherent in the method’s power.  In examining the method from this perspective we can gain a still more “profound” appreciation of the forces at work when the Deming method is properly applied.

Questions Unasked…and Unanswered
It is a substantive weakness of the Japanese educational system that the following questions have not been properly asked and answered:

· Is it optimal that the “product” of Japanese education is competent (high-scoring) workers?
· If the “customer” is industry; who ultimately pays the costs and what are they?
· If the supplier is the student’s family, what is the quid pro quo?
· What is the competitive significance of the fact that cooperative groups evolve leaders?
· How are cooperatively taught children to learn to compete?
· Why change from cooperative education at lower levels to competitive college entrance later?
· What is the significance of the existence of “prestigious schools” successful competition for which confers financial rewards?
· What does it mean if variation of student performance is made less than variation of innate ability?

Omissions in Dr. Yoshida’s Article
It is possible that the Japanese have already considered the following points; but Dr. Yoshida’s article does not discuss them; and they are critical for optimization of the Deming-based educational system:

  • Until the ultimate purpose of education is well defined and the supplier / “manufacturer” / customer roles properly established (or dropped altogether) it is inappropriate to define what process corresponds to reduction of variation in the “product”.
  • Deming’s admonitions pertain to manufacturing; but not necessarily to education.  Translation from one realm to the other is more complex than treated in the article. In education maximization of academic test performance does not necessarily optimize the system; in fact probably not.
  • Before a system can be optimized strategically via the Deming method it must be optimized ethically.  If this is not done the system will amplify ethical weaknesses and eventually destroy itself.
  • The source of value in the Deming method is the fact that when applied in an industrial setting it adds positive ethical features to systems that are otherwise often devoid of true ethical controls.
  • Deming’s admonitions are shown elsewhere to be the logical consequences of a more general set of ethical principles (The Bill of Ethics).  More about this is described below.
  • To translate the Deming method into the educational realm I suggest it is necessary to derive educational admonitions from the more general Bill of Ethics.
  • Competition is an important part of life and a cornerstone of evolution.  Ethical schools must provide an ethical means for children to learn to participate in competition.

Definitions
Throughout the rest of this article repeated mention will be made of several terms that must be defined at the outset.

  • Dr. Deming ’s Admonitions: I use this expression to include the original “Fourteen Points” that Deming called to the attention of American industry in combination with both the “Seven Deadly Diseases” that he said plagued western businesses and with the “Four Obstacles” that he said must be overcome to make an industrial company function optimally.  For details of these twenty-five admonitions I refer the reader to page 34 of Mary Walton’s excellent book for beginners in this field [2]. See also the previous chapter of this book.
  • The Ethics: In its simplest form this expression can be said to refer in this article to the definition of an ethical act and the logical consequences thereof.  For an extensive explanation of these terms I refer the reader to Book 2 of this series.  Briefly I choose to define an ethical act as any act that increases creativity, and/or any of its logical equivalents (see below), for at least one person (including the person acting) without limiting or diminishing creativity for anyone.

From the above definition the Bill of Ethics deduces the ten main principles needed to make ethical day-to-day decisions on a practical basis.  It also delineates the relationship between ethics and law implied by the definition above.  At times I will refer to the Bill of Ethics and its logical consequences as “the Ethics”.

  • Creativity may be seen as the product of ethical awareness and intelligence, as symbolized by the equation: C=EI.  As such it may be increased in two ways; by increasing someone’s ethical awareness (or equivalently their degree of personal evolution, love, and/or growth) or by increasing the intelligence of someone who doesn’t use their intelligence destructively (say by increasing their access to objective truth, their grasp of true information, their access to energy, or their freedom); where by intelligence generally I mean the ability to predict and control the environment or to initiate and sustain causal relationships between events in the observable world. Hence “increasing creativity” encompasses any increase in any of the resources listed above or in any other resource that increases awareness or intelligence.
  • Logical Equivalents of Creativity:  By this expression we refer to those resources that must increase when creativity is increased and decrease when creativity is diminished, or vice versa, as explained above.  Conversely when any logically equivalent resource is changed creativity must change accordingly. There is no limit to how many such equivalencies one may list.
  • Persons or People: Since ethical discrimination only applies to the acts of people or persons (the acts of young children and animals, for example, are ethically neutral or natural; neither ethical nor unethical) it is necessary that we define what we mean by “person” in this context.  I call a “person” any being that possesses awareness of his or her (or its) own awareness.  Thus dolphins, whales, elephants, and chimpanzees would be included in this definition; but chickens and butterflies would not.  In the not-too-distant future there are likely to be machines that qualify as “persons” in this sense.

Deming and Ethics
Now we are ready to discuss the relationship between Dr. Deming’s admonitions and the ethics of business.  I have shown elsewhere that the entire Deming methodology as defined by the Admonitions can be proven to be a subset of the logical consequences of the Ethics.  This makes it obvious that at their core the Admonitions are ethical admonitions rather than statistical or technical admonitions.  In other words, if an industrial company were to adopt the Bill of Ethics as the keystone of its bylaws, and if the terms of the bylaws were strictly enforced, the company would have to be managed in accordance with the Deming Admonitions.  And it is possible that other admonitions might also be derived that are not contained in the twenty-five principles set down by Dr. Deming.  But at the very least his admonitions would have to be upheld.  Let’s see what the implications are for education.

Adapting the Admonitions to Education
Since Dr. Deming’s Admonitions are logical consequences of The Ethics as applied to industry, there will be nothing lost ethically if we properly adapt the admonitions to the educational environment.  In the previous chapter I restated the Admonitions as follows with no loss of information and none added to the Deming formulation:

1. Adopt the new philosophy. Accept the Admonitions.
2. Take action. Accomplish the transformation [implied by the admonitions].
3. Commit to constantly and forever improve the product, the service, and the system that provides them.
4. Institute vigorous education, training, and retraining of workers to do their jobs. Stress teamwork and statistical technique.

5. Institute leadership.

5.a. Help people do a better job.
5.b. Encourage pride of workmanship.
5.c. Provide both opportunity and security, thereby reducing mobility of management.
5.d. Engage in long range planning.
5.e. Improve communication and cooperation between staff areas and between people.

6.  Do what works; stop doing what doesn’t work.

6.a. Stop mass inspection.
6.b. Stop basing long range decisions on short term considerations.
6.c. Stop trying to motivate educators with slogans, targets, and exhortations.
6.d. Stop relying on technology to solve problems; but incorporate it into the methodology
6.e. Stop following examples; develop specific solutions.
6.f. Stop purchasing based on price tag alone.
6.g. Drive out fear; stop intimidating your personnel.
6.g(1) Stop using numerical quotas, tests, and grades as “motivation”.
6.g(2) Stop using performance evaluations or reviews.
Clearly, Admonitions 1., 2., 4., and 5. are applicable and usable in their current forms.  Admonition 6. is applicable, but detailed admonitions 6.a. through 6.g. require some changes; so for the time being we will use the following list as a starting point for the new Educational Admonitions:

1. Adopt the new philosophy. Accept the Admonitions.
2. Take action. Accomplish the transformation [implied by the admonitions].
3. Institute vigorous education, training, and retraining of workers to do their jobs. Stress teamwork and statistical technique.
4. Institute leadership.

4.a. Help people do a better job.
4.b. Encourage pride of workmanship.
4.c. Provide both opportunity and security, thereby reducing mobility of management.
4.d. Engage in long range planning.
4.e. Improve communication and cooperation between staff areas and between people.

5. Do what works; stop doing what doesn’t work.

Now let’s consider Admonition 3.: Commit to constantly and forever improve the product, the service, and the system that provides them.  This is the crux of the challenge in adapting Dr. Deming’s Admonitions to the educational arena.  We need to know answers to these questions:

1.    What is the product?
2.    What is the service?
3.    Who is being served?
4.    What is the system that provides the product/service?
5.    Is a business model, involving products, services, providers, and customers, appropriate to education?

What Education Is
As young children we are told that we have to go to school to learn the skills we will need as adults in today’s world; to get jobs; to make a living.  In effect we are told that it is we who are being served by education.  Most us of accept this explanation; but few of us believe it.  And still fewer thrive on the experience.  The reality is that most children don’t like school.  They endure it.  Later they rationalize the coercion of school by saying, “It was for our own good; we couldn’t be making a living without it; and so forth.”  Then they go out and tell their own children the same lame excuses.  Who benefits from these lies?

Albert Einstein once compared attendance at public school with the experience of a ravenous tiger that is force-fed until it has no appetite left at all.  Children, in case the reader has forgotten, come into the world with an intense appetite for information… useful, true information.  This appetite is called “curiosity”.  Yet by the age of eighteen most children have had most of their curiosity drilled out of them.  They don’t love to learn any more.  What kind of “education” does this to children?  How can it possibly serve them?  In fact it doesn’t.  Why then has our educational system become what it is today?

I maintain that a publicly funded school system that trains competent workers to participate in the nation’s industries and which sorts and pigeonholes them by subject matter and grades predominantly benefits the prospective employers.  By perusing diplomas and grade transcripts the prospective employer can identify those individuals most likely to meet their needs at minimal cost for testing and training.  Who said it was the responsibility of the public, the student, the parents of the student, or the educational institution to spare the employer such costs?  Yet this is what the public has accepted the world over.  But it isn’t the employee who gets to enjoy the profits that a business generates; it is the employer or business owner.

Like it or not this is the system that is.  As education changed from the “broadening experience” of Liberal Arts enjoyed by the well-to-do to the job-training experience almost universally experienced today, the customer for education shifted from the individual student to the future employer.  Seen as a business, today’s educational system manufactures workers for the use of employers.  The suppliers of raw materials are the parents of the students and, as far as publicly funded education is concerned, the taxpayer foots the bill.  Note too that most taxpayers don’t get to spend the corporate profits generated by the “use” of the product workers.  In most situations it is the customer who pays for the product and enjoys its use.  Somehow in this situation the taxpayer has been duped.  Surely this is not ethical.  Let’s not be fooled by rationalizations about how the taxpayer benefits from the resulting “good economy”; or how the public owns the stock that represents the hiring corporation; or any of the rest of such nonsense that we are commonly told.  The vast majority of taxpayers don’t receive any dividends.  A tiny minority enjoys the benefit of vast corporate dividends.  The rest of us just go along with the plan and facilitate the continuation of what is.

So we are ready now to examine education through the lens of The Ethics and to discover what education could be if it were truly ethical; as we might imagine Dr. Deming would have admonished us to make it if he had applied his principles to education rather than to industry.

Educational Ethics
Article 3 of the Bill of Ethics enumerates the following principles that are logical consequences of our definition of an ethical act and which apply directly to education:

3.1    …to act ethically each person must do their utmost to maximize creativity and its equivalents.
3.2    Ethical actions always increase someone’s creativity;
3.3    Ethical actions never destroy, limit or diminish anyone’s creativity;
3.4    From the foregoing we infer that unethical means can never achieve ethical ends, this principle rejecting the notion that we  can ethically sacrifice the creativity of the individual for the “greater good” of society, the “many”, and so forth; from which it follows that:
3.5    Unethical means always produce unethical results (ends); trivial means always produce trivial results at best; and similarly
3.6    Means which are not ethical ends in themselves are never ethical;
3.7    From the foregoing it is also apparent that inaction is unethical. Creativity cannot be passively expanded or increased… this must  be done actively to overcome entropic destruction inherent in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This principle is basically equivalent to the adage that, “For evil to triumph it is only necessary for good men to do nothing.”;
3.8    It also follows that it is unethical to tolerate unethical behavior. To do so is to violate Section 3.7 above. For this reason we are ethically bound to defend ourselves and others actively against injury or deceit when we or they are imminently imperiled by   another’s unethical behavior; from which:

3.8.1 It follows that it is unethical to augment the creativity of anyone whom one reasonably believes will use such augmented resources unethically… and it is therefore ethical to withhold the augmentation of creative resources from anyone whose ethical commitment one reasonably distrusts; and furthermore:

3.9 It is ethical to learn and unethical to be certain. When we close our minds on a subject we cease to learn… to increase our own awareness and creativity. Learning always increases creativity; and
3.10 It is ethical to doubt. Ceasing to have doubts about a subject we become certain about it and have ceased to learn. Doubts create new questions …some of which yield new answers. Doubt is one of the cornerstones of creativity.

Before attempting to expand the Admonitions in the realm of education it is important that we create a suitable context for this endeavor.  To do this we must examine the ethical role of education in the activities of humanity.  If education must be seen as a means to provide industry a skilled work force (a goal which in and of itself is not necessarily unethical) then Article 3.6 above requires that education also be an ethical end in itself.  Article 3.9 tells us that it is ethical to learn, therefore as long as education is designed to increase creativity it is also ethical to teach.  There is no reason why education should not provide competent workers, if students desire to become competent workers and if we decide that fulfillment of this goal does not interfere with Article 3.1 which calls for the maximization of creativity.  However, if as a species we decided to take seriously the notion that ethical education is a valid end in itself, many educational practices would change, probably for the better.

So let’s examine this possibility.  What would happen if we put aside the goal of a skilled work force, maximized creativity, and observed the consequences?  Since all wealth and prosperity is the product of creativity we might find ourselves with a more skilled work force than we have now.  For starters we could abandon the industrial model upon which the Deming method is based.  We would no longer have to think in terms of suppliers, manufacturers, customers, etc.  Our goal would be simply to help our children and our youth to become the most creative adults possible.

Now the admonitions to be derived from the Deming model, as focused by the Bill of Ethics might look like this:

1. Adopt the new philosophy. Accept the Admonitions.
2. Take action. Accomplish the transformation [implied by the admonitions.
3. Institute vigorous education, training, and retraining of teachers and administrators to do their jobs more creatively. Stress teamwork and statistical technique.
4. Commit to constantly and forever expand the students’ creativity and improve the system that delivers this service.

4.a. Stimulate student curiosity at every opportunity.
4.b. Satisfy student curiosities in ways that further stimulate curiosity.
4.c. Make all information resources available to the student.
4.d. Teach students to doubt and to test the validity of new information.
4.e. Teach students the scientific method.
4.f. Share with students at the elementary level the excitement that a subject’s devotees experience at the most advance level.  Continue this process on an ongoing basis.
4.g. Eliminate all grading and rating activities for students and teachers alike.
4.h. Find ways to teach competition skills without making the educational  process competitive or stigmatic.
4.i.  Encourage the development of better teaching methods, teaching aids, and text books.
4.j. Expand the opportunity for learning experiences outside the classroom.
4.k. Involve the community in the teaching role with extensive “field trips.”
4.l.  Reward community members for participating in “field education.”
4.m. Teach students cooperative study and learning techniques.
4.n. Invent more such techniques.  Encourage such innovation.  Reward it.
4.o. Instill in every student excitement and joy in learning.
4.p. A teacher’s work with a student is done when the   student is so motivated to seek new learning, and is able to find it on his own, so that the teacher is no longer needed.

5. Institute leadership.

5.a. Help teachers do a better job. For starters, improve their education.
5.b. Encourage pride of teaching and learning.
5.c.  Provide teachers and administrators both opportunity and security, thereby reducing mobility of the educational force.
5.d. Engage in long range planning.
5.e. Improve communication and cooperation between staff and between all people involved in the education process.
5.f. Reward teachers for helping other teachers to be more effective.
5.g. Teach businesses better ways to evaluate the potential of “unsorted” job applicants who come without diplomas or transcripts.  Insist they bear the burden of paying for this activity.

6. Do what works; stop doing what doesn't work.

6.a. Drive out fear; stop intimidating your teachers and students.
6.b. Stop using grades and ratings as "motivation".
6.c. Stop using performance evaluations or reviews
6.d. Stop making long-term decisions based on short-term financial considerations.
6.e. Develop ways to measure the performance of the educational system without violating any of the foregoing admonitions.  Use this information to develop statistical models to further improve the system.

Who Says It’s Impossible?

Obviously there will be many naysayers responding to this set of Educational Admonitions.  But Dr. Deming would have liked it and seen its value.  You will note that most of the people who will object to this method are people with a vested interest in keeping education the way it is today.  Either their prestige or their finances will be seen as adversely affected if these admonitions are adopted.  The adoption of such a set of admonitions either here in the U.S. or overseas will meet with four kinds of resistance.

First, some who simply lack imagination and don’t want to change will say the transformation of education along these lines is impossible; it can’t work.   They will offer any number of spurious reasons why this is so; but the reality is simply that they don’t want to change and grow.  They have reputations and tenured teaching positions that they don’t want to risk losing; and they don’t know if they could be successful in the new educational environment that would result from the adoption of this new model.

Second, the corporate institutions that have been getting a free ride from public (tax-funded) education will bad-mouth this model even though their wealth is all built on creativity and this model maximizes creativity.

And third, since public education is a function of government, often delegated to incompetent local boards of education, the successful adoption of this methodology could have enormous implications suggesting the restructuring of many, if not all, parts of government.  Since government too is now mostly in existence to serve the big corporations, any such change would be perceived as a threat to people in many parts of government.  In this case not only are prestige and money at stake, but political power also.  This is likely to be the most vigorous source of resistance to such change.

And finally, there will be massive bureaucratic resistance to this idea. To the best of this author’s knowledge bureaucracy is the greatest source of unethical behavior on the face of our planet.  This certainly applies to every government on the planet and is the main reason so many governments have failed historically.  From the fall of ancient Rome to the recent demise of the Soviet Union the main problem has been bureaucracy.  Deming-style education will not really thrive until/unless government itself can be made less bureaucratic.

Conclusion: In his excellent article, Grading...The Deming Way [3], Del Nelson, Professor of Management at American River College, Sacramento, California asks,

“Where can we find the educational institution dedicated to inducing “joy in learning,” collaboration on a win/win basis to build a “better world” (improving health, declining poverty , decrease in bias, etc.), learning the System of Profound Knowledge, and dedicated to leading the student(s) to the path of never-ending-improvement in every facet of their lives? Our educational problems are only made worse by grades, grades on the curve, honor roles, competitive athletics, or ranking/testing of schools, none of which will support (in fact, they will directly prevent) attainment of any such system related/driven goals.”

In agreeing with this, I see that the Japanese have not gone far enough in applying the Deming Method to education.  Their system will ultimately fail unless the same ethical principles are applied to education and other parts of government that are applied to their industry.  The same is equally true in the U.S. and throughout the world.  We can only wonder where in the world these realities will first be recognized and acted upon creatively.

Having considered the Titanian Academic Education Project, let’s now turn our attention to the Titanian Law Project.

[1] Kosaku Yoshida, The Deming Approach to Education: A Comparative Study of the USA and Japan , International Journal of Educational Management, Vol. 8 No. 5, 1994, pp. 29-40, © MCB University Press, 0951-354X

[2] Mary Walton , The Deming Management Method, Putnam Publishing Group, New York, 1986.

[3] Del Nelson, Grading the Deming Way, http://deming.ces.clemson.edu/pub/den/dnelson01.htm

 

© 2001 by Robert E. Podolsky

 

Posted by Pan Vestor at 7:31 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

THE HOLOTROPIC MATRIX (HoloMat) and THE OCTOLOGUE

Add comments

THE HOLOTROPIC MATRIX (HoloMat )

and THE OCTOLOGUE

by Bob Podolsky

 Advantages of Octologues and HoloMats

From a Titanian perspective, the essential building-blocks of a plausible thriving ethical society are the Octologue and the Holotropic Matrix (HoloMat / HoloMatrix).  The Octologue and HoloMat / HoloMatrix are organizational models that convey a number of extraordinary benefits to their participants. For instance:

  • They are non-hierarchic – each participant having the same status as every other.
  • Their decisions are unanimous – thus avoiding the pitfalls of majority rule.
  • Their actions are highly ethical – each participant understanding the Ethics and committing to act in accordance therewith.
  • They are highly sensitive to feedback – and thus almost totally resistant to bureaucratization and corruption.
  • Their participants regularly engage in a communication process (Autopoesis – see below) that amplifies the creativity of the entire group.
  • They can be organized to achieve any desired ethical goal or objective – as businesses, schools, charities, etc.
  • When competing with hierarchic groups of similar size and having access to similar resources, an Octologue or HoloMat will win the competition, hands down!
  • Participants enjoy working in an Octologue/HoloMat environment far more than they do in a traditional hierarchic environment.

The Makeup of an Octologue – The Building-block of the Holotropic Matrix

John David Garcia spent twenty years researching how to maximize the creativity of a group of people working together on a joint project. After performing hundreds of experiments, he came up with an optimized model that he called an “Octet”, having the following characteristics:

  1. The group is comprised of eight people ± 1 – in other words 7 to 9 people, with 8 being best.
  2. The group is comprised of four men and four women ± 1 – again 4×4 is best, but 3×4 or 4×5 is acceptable.
  3. The group members all understand the principles of Ethics as exemplified by the Bill of Ethics and are committed to acting ethically to the best of their ability.
  4. Participation in the group is voluntary. Anyone can quit at any time for any reason.
  5. Only unanimous decisions by the group are recognized as true group decisions.
  6. A group member can only be expelled by the group if all the other members agree unanimously.
  7. The group has been trained in a communication protocol that facilitates the making of unanimous decisions.
  8. The group meets as often as it likes – once a week often being optimal – once a month being the least frequent occurrence that works – specifically to engage in a communication protocol called “Autopoesis”, a process that amplifies the group’s creativity.
  9. The group need not engage in Autopoesis at every meeting; but should do so at least once a month for meaningful results.

I was friends with John David for 17 years, until his demise in 2001, and participated in a number of his experiments in the field of maximizing creativity. My main personal contribution to John David’s work was to improve on his method of Autopoesis. In John David’s Octets, it took several days of training for a group of eight to learn the process. Using my knowledge of Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) and my 20 years experience as a clinical psychotherapist, I shortened the training time to just a few hours. Also, the onset of the Autopoesis phenomenon occurs much faster with my method. I call an Octet using my model of Autopoesis an “Octologue”. Details of the Autopoesis process are described below – but first let’s turn to the HoloMat.

The Holotropic Matrix – or HoloMat

It is obvious that many worthwhile projects require more than eight people. The solution is simple – the project is undertaken by multiple Octologues that have entered into an ethical contract with each other. More than twenty years ago I decided to call such a contractual concatenation of Octologues a Holotropic Matrix – or HoloMatTM for short – drawing a parallel between the way a hologram distributes information in such a way that the information contained is available throughout the hologram – and the way a HoloMat distributes both information and responsibility. There is no practical limit to the size of a HoloMat. For really big projects, a HoloMat could have millions of members – or even tens of millions.

One of the biggest differences between a hierarchy and a HoloMat is that a hierarchy is designed to avoid, eliminate or destroy corrective feedback and a HoloMat is designed to elicit and encourage corrective feedback.  In a Hierarchy the information flows down, in a HoloMat information flow UP!  Any participant in the HoloMat can give corrective feedback that will be valuable and be heard at any level of the organization!   - Whereas, in a hierarchy if they wanted your opinion, they would be giving it to you!

Autopoesis – The Most Unique Feature of Octologues and HoloMats

Trance: In order to explain Autopoesis most succinctly, I’ll first explain the word “trance” – a word that is much maligned and much misunderstood. Many people fear trance, thinking it’s a supernatural phenomenon – or even a “tool of the devil”. This is utter nonsense! Trance is merely something you do. It’s a label for paying attention to your sensory experience in a way that is different from what you do most of the time. It’s a totally natural phenomenon.

For instance, when you are waking up from sleep or in the process of falling asleep, you go through a stage where you are neither really asleep nor awake – it’s a trance state, an “altered state of conscious”. Similarly, when you are driving on a road with boring roadsides, you will often enter a “driving trance”, in which you are driving competently but also thinking of other things. You usually become aware of this when you approach your destination and realize that the time that has passed while you were driving “feels” less than you know it had to be. Such time distortion is one of many things you can do in trance that you can’t readily do in your normal state of awareness.

Hypnosis: While we’re on the subject of trance, let’s briefly talk about “hypnosis” – another word that is much misunderstood. When you are hypnotized, the operator (hypnotist) does not “put” you in a trance; nor can you be forced into a trance (barring the use of drugs). Rather the operator leads you into the trance state. Imagine I hold up my hand and ask you to look at it. You are, of course, free to refuse – or to do something completely different from what I’ve asked of you. So it is with hypnosis. The difference is that it is your subconscious that decides how you will respond – and in most people the subconscious is innately curious – and happy to learn new ways of perceiving. So trance is just another kind of learning experience.

And if you’re one of those folks who worry that a hypnotist might persuade them to do something against their will – or contrary to their morals – it just can’t happen. Given an obnoxious hypnotic suggestion, the subject will exit the trance and leave – often angrily.

Autopoesis – Finally

So what is Autopoesis and how does it work? Here are the basics. In a nutshell, Autopoesis is a group trance state. The members of an Octologue sit on comfortable chairs in a tight circle with their arms on the shoulders of their neighbors. Bare feet touch in the middle of the circle. A Bach fugue plays softly in the background. A hypnotic facilitator leads the experience verbally, making direct and indirect suggestions that enable the members of the group to alter their consciousness in a particular manner. The rules to which the group members have agreed are simple:

  • A subject of autopoetic interest has been agreed upon before the session;
  • Each member is encouraged to think about the subject with both his/her conscious and subconscious minds;
  • When a thought occurs to a member that seems interesting, and the member feels an urge to share the thought aloud, he/she withholds the information the first time the urge to speak occurs;
  • If the thought recurs, the person thinking it is obliged to speak it aloud – no matter how strange, weird, irrational, bizarre, or otherwise nonsensical it may seem.
  • The session continues until someone (anyone) in the group requests that it end.
  • Such sessions are usually recorded for later play-back – because participants often don’t recall what has been said – even if they were the one to have spoken.

It should be noted that it is often the strangest autopoetic comments that turn out to be the most creative and useful when carefully examined later. By this means the Octologue accesses information that no one in the group could access on their own – though many creative individuals use altered “mystical” states as part of their creative methodology. Still, the synergy of the group trance seems to act as an amplifier of each individual’s creativity – thus yielding a level of innovation greater than the sum of the individual participants’ capabilities.

What Is the Experience Like?

Some people appear to go to sleep – though this doesn’t prevent them from speaking. For most participants, the best description of the experience is that of a “shared lucid dream”. If you’ve seen it, think of the movie “Inception” with Leonardo DiCaprio for a moment. It is pleasant; it may be exciting at times; and many feel saddened or disappointed when it is over. This description applies equally well to some other forms of hypnotically induced group trances.

How Does It work?

We don’t really know for sure how Autopoesis works – but we have a hypothesis that fits the facts. According to author Michael Talbot, the universe is holographic.1 If this hypothesis is correct, and there is much evidence to support it, all the information that exists in the universe is available everywhere. A second postulate of the hypothesis is that the human brain is a quantum mechanical “machine” that is able, under the right conditions, to reach out into the holographic quantum universe and retrieve whatever information it is seeking – including both true information and false information. Science provides the tools and methodology by means of which we determine whether new information is true or false.

I must also point out that the Religious Society of Friends (a.k.a. Quakers) employs a method of group decision-making that bears some striking similarities to Autopoesis.2 Quiet contemplation… awaiting the inspiration of God… distrust of initial urges to speak… obligation to speak when the “presence” is perceived… requirement of unanimity for decisions… and much more. For certain, sitting in empty silence waiting for God’s presence to be felt…and God’s wishes to be heard and understood constitutes an “altered state of awareness” if there ever was one. Moreover, as John David Garcia pointed out, the creative acts of every great scientist may be seen as “mystical” experiences – making each a “scientific mystic” – distinctly different from a “mystical scientist”.3

The Grand Experiment:  Cultural Evolution

John David proved unequivocally, through hundreds of scientific experiments, that this process creates the greatest creativity in groups.  Creativity is what has brought us fire, the renaissance, the chair you are sitting in, and the computer you are reading this with.  Yet humanity is fraught with problems. Let us release ourselves from this self imposed bondage.   I am prepared to share the knowledge of how we may be able to do this with those individuals whose personal evolution brings us together.   Contact me now at 561-542-5800 and we will perform the “Grand Experiment”, lest this be our last generation.  Albert Einstein said “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”

Now that  you know what a HoloMat is, let’s see how this is reflected in the Constitution for Titania.

1See The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, Harper Perennial, 1991.

2 See: Beyond Majority Rule by Michael J. Sheeran, published in 1983 by the Philadelphia Yearly    Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends.

3 See Creative Transformation by John David Garcia.

Posted by Pan Vestor at 3:13 pm Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Faith is better than truth

Add comments

COMFORTING LIE #11

Faith is better than truth.

To analyze this statement and its consequences we must examine both concepts, faith and truth.

The proponents of this lie are legion, particularly among those with a religious axe to grind.  Whether the subject is faith in Christ, faith in Allah, faith in government, faith in democracy, faith in communism, faith in prayer, faith in the Bible, or faith in the market, the central message is clear: above all “have faith in faith”.  So what is faith and why should we distrust it?

Faith , we are told, is belief without resort to evidence or proof.  At one time it was an article of Christian that the sun revolved around the earth.  Skeptics were labeled as heretic and punished severely for their doubts.  Some were even burned to death for their heresy.  Others were put to death for less notable doubts. In the Soviet Union millions died for questioning the infallibility of the Communist Party.  In Europe millions died for questioning the infallibility of the Catholic Church. Today in Muslim and Communist dominated countries, in African countries run by ruthless dictators, and in South American countries run by military juntas death penalties still occur frequently.  Such murders are not always perpetrated by the state.  Often independent groups enact them, or street mobs do, or even the victims’ family members throw the fatal stones or wield the killing knives; but the state approves or condones the murders and declines to intervene.

In more “civilized” cultures today punishments for lack of faith tend to be less severe; though they still occur.  Those who question the validity of unethical laws may be harassed by government authorities and subjected to invasive scrutiny.  The pogroms of the McCarthy era are a relatively recent example in which legions of U.S. citizens lost their jobs and were publicly humiliated for lack of faith in the Democratic Fallacy, as demonstrated by involvement in support of the Robin Hood  Fallacy.  The current “War on terrorism” seems headed in a similar direction.  More mundanely, medical practitioners in the United States often lose their licenses for practices unapproved by the American Medical Association, even when those practices are effective.  We recall that Louis Pasteur was almost drummed out of medicine for suggesting that microscopic bacteria were the cause of many illnesses.  He was considered a heretic, unfaithful to the orthodox medical dogma of his time.

In short, faith is dangerous.  It results in rigid political ideologies and religious dogmas, which are almost universally false.  This fosters and supports the manipulation of the public through lies and misdirection.  It demands that we accept what we are told without doubt, without question, even in the face of contradictory evidence.  This, in turn, creates fertile ground for political and religious persecution, for genocide and inquisitions, and for pogroms, crusades, and jihads.  Today we are as susceptible as ever in history to the emergence of leaders like Genghis Kahn, Caesar, Hitler, Stalin, Peron, Amin, and others of their ilk.  The minions of today’s BORG  are more subtle than these historical villains, but no less dangerous.

If we are to escape the MATRIX and combat the BORG , we must value the truth  above faith and know how to tell one from the other.

While we are on this subject, lets consider the general method for telling true information from false information.  The method is simple.  When we believe in the truth of false information, it lowers our intelligence, which, as you probably recall is our ability to predict and control events in our environment.  For instance, if we believe the world is flat, we find we are unable to navigate between points on the earth’s surface.  By contrast, if we believe the earth is essentially spherical, we soon learn to navigate our ships and planes quite accurately.  Belief in the truth of true information increases our intelligence.

As of today, science is a finely-honed tool for discriminating (objectively) true information from false information.  That is its only purpose, and it is very good at accomplishing this task.  This is the primary criterion for distinguishing a scientific discipline from other ways of organizing our thought processes.

When we value faith more than truth, we are at risk for subscribing to the truth of fantasies, superstitions, rigid dogmas, and false ideologies.  The dissemination of such falsehoods, in the interest of the perpetuation of political power and influence, is a great and persistent evil.

It should be noted at this point that most governments benefit from the influence of organized religion.  When people believe in false ideologies they are distracted from objective truth.  This reduction of the public’s collective intelligence makes people easier to deceive and manipulate.  The Soviet regime attempted to eliminate this problem by espousing atheism and outlawing religion.  In this case the “cure” turned out to be worse than the “disease”, as Communism became the state religion and many religious groups, especially Jews, were brutally persecuted.

Return to The 12 Comforting Lies

 

Posted by admin at 2:07 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The law is the highest behavioral standard

Add comments

COMFORTING LIE #8

The law is the highest behavioral standard.

While lawyers and politicians often parrot this lie, it is amazing that anyone else believes it; but it is so much a part of American folklore that we must needs discuss it here.  Let’s dissect it a bit to make it more comprehensible.  We all know that a law is a rule, or a set of rules, that defines permissible behavior, usually by forbidding one or more behaviors that are deemed not to be permissible by those who made the law.  We also know that every profession, be it law, medicine, social work, dentistry, accounting, or whatever, has a set of rules known as the “ethics” of the profession.  This is a misnomer. These are not ethics; they are just rules that the practitioners of the profession are admonished to respect, ostensibly in the hope that if the rules are obeyed the resulting behavior will be ethical.

To explore the distinction between laws (rules) and ethics, let’s consider an illustrative example.  Suppose a young student asks you to teach him how to read.  Would it be ethical for you to do so? The sixth ethical principle states that it is ethical to learn; so, in the absence of contradictory information, it must be ethical to teach.  So, initially, your reaction to the student’s request might be to say, “Yes.  I’ll teach you to read.”

Now imagine that before you act on this decision the student reveals to you the fact that his reason for wanting to learn to read is so he can then read a book on bomb-building and subsequently build a bomb to assassinate a prominent politician.  “Aha!” you say.  “Assassination is not ethical, so it would NOT be ethical to teach this student to read.”

Can you think of another set of circumstances that might change your mind yet again?  Suppose you engaged the student in a discussion of ethics, and he became so interested in the subject that he promised you he would master the subject to your complete satisfaction before advancing his bomb-building project.  If you believed him, if he seems sincere, and if you remember that it is always ethical to teach the ethics, you might conclude that it would indeed be ethical to teach him to read.

In “real life” we never know all the facts that pertain to an ethical decision.  We gather all the information we can, apply our best ethical judgment, and decide – for better or worse.  Knowing the ethics vastly improves our chances of making a good (ethical) decision – yielding an ethical outcome.

Now let’s ask ourselves whether it would be possible to construct a set of rules, or laws, that would definitively determine whether it is a good thing to teach a student how to read.  Clearly, the rules would have to encompass all possible circumstances that might pertain.  Since this is obviously impossible, we conclude that any set of rules we might contrive would be inadequate to the task.  This is why laws often result in outcomes that are unforeseen and unethical.  They are not a substitute for the ethics.

In fact, many laws are themselves unethical, because they violate the E+ Ethic and one or more of the ten Ethical Principles.  They forbid acts that are are ethical and require acts that are unethical.  From Ethical Principle number 10 it follows logically that in a just (ethical) society we must require that all valid laws be ethical and that all unethical laws be declared invalid.  By this criterion, government edicts that are not ethical are not valid laws.  Given the true purposes of government, it is hardly surprising that the vast majority of its edicts are unethical.

Return to The 12 Comforting Lies

Posted by admin at 1:27 am Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
© 2012 Creativity and Ethics Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha
SEO Powered by Platinum SEO from Techblissonline p-2aCpFRwwOYzPA