Five ins

From eg

The five ins correspond to the top five of the twelve levers:

5. The instructional rules of the system (such as incentives, punishment, constraints)
4. The infrastructural power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure - See four ins for an analysis conflating 4 and 5.
3. The integrity reflected in the goal of the system
2. The individual mindset or paradigm that the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises out of
1. The insolence that provides courage to transcend paradigms, e.g. by trolling

Outputs of these five, when managed successfully, are measured as a triple bottom line:

social capital (voluntary cooperation) enhanced via stronger social bond relationships and resilience of these under pressure to avoid expensive substitutions requiring cash
natural capital restored or at least not substantially harmed by the overall action so as not to present future harms or require expensive subsititutions made from infrastructure
financial capital (capacity to pay for cooperation) that reflect actual gains in the overall productive capacity and efficiency of a system, not merely converted capital assets

A capital asset model relating the styles of capital, plus tests for integrity and tolerance of insolence are required to implement the five ins change model. Also useful: all ECG control terms and the ability to discern distinctions made in the ECG operational distinction quiz. The category:CC-by-nc-noderivs by ECG lists most applicable pages.

[edit] leadership as the top five

A leader embodies the top three attributes: an individual of insolence and integrity who employs their persuasion and perception powers to change structures and instructions.

However non-controversial this thesis may be, each element of this assignment of order to the chaos of human leadership and instruction deserves its own separate examination and justification. The least controversial aspect is probably the assertion that leverage of the goal, mindset or transformative attitude is higher, for the limited scope to which it applies, than the infrastructure or detailed instructions by which a goal is carried out.

Among the more controversial implications of this model:

that insolence is a force greater than integrity or individual initiative, or perhaps
that initiative itself does not provide any leverage whatsoever (while insolence does - an assertion that will please anarchists), or perhaps
that inference does not appear (inference capacity used as leverage, such as most lawyers provide only for their own clients, has reliably very bad outcomes), or perhaps
that infrastructural constraints impose conventions that rule over any instruction, and cannot be overruled by instruction (contrary to what most anarchists seem to think).

At least for economic enterprises, which cannot easily unmake or blow up infrastructure, nor overrule basic instructions like professions or holy books, leadership may mostly consist of pointing out the relatively obvious ways in which these five ins constrain decisions. This in turn implies an innate understanding of the triple bottom line and its implications.

[edit] management of the bottom nine

This leaves the other seven of the twelve levers exclusively to the manager, a person mostly concerned with tracking commitment, stepping through plans and surveying a very wide range of outputs. Not to say that managers don't write instructions or define infrastructures, only that they should not do so. That good managers don't make policy decisions and accordingly don't play a role in rewriting instructional capital that directly affects human actors "such as incentives, punishment, constraints". That's the role of the leader, to set goals that reflect a particular notion of integrity so as to more or less constrain the deep framing that sets up/down and in/out - the orientational metaphors.

Agreeing on infrastructure and instruction is the specific duty of managers and leaders. If they fail, they can send only confused contradictory signals to all their charges and watch them psychologically harmed by instructions that send them into conflict with each other and with infrastructures that simply do not support them carrying out instruction.

To establish the correct relation between managers and leaders, then, requires having a realistic understanding of how these two areas, infrastructure and instruction, overlap and influence each other. See category:infra and category:ultra for more detailed analysis of signal infrastructure and the goal of healthy signal infrastructure.

[edit] infrastructure rules instruction

It will surprise some people that infrastructure has higher leverage than instruction. However, infrastructure embodies so many instructions that it gives rise to convention. While instructions can tell us how to test what we know, or what we should normally do, we are not usually immediately killed for not following them. Infrastructure however can kill us instantly for disobeying its conventions, e.g. trying to cross a street on a red light. There are no trials, no arguments. Infrastructural capital conveys its own rule-sets and these will override, in general, those of ideology. This is certainly the view of Marxist and neoclassical economics. Both raise this economic determinism to economism, a very prevalent dogma in which economic relationships and control of infrastructure always trump any other factor, instructional or ideological. However, there are very many more examples of different classes within a common culture allying to repel outsiders, than those of each class allying with their fellow classmen (!) from the next culture over. So economism and the prevailing power of infrastructural convention over instructional rules aren't a way to justify any particular dogma. It's simply an observation that if the infrastructure fits a certain view of the world, that view of the world is far more likely to be propagated and extended. If you doubt it, have a look at railway tracks. They are as wide as they are because that's how far apart Roman cart-tracks were 2000 years ago. Or the alphabet. Or rectangular buildings. In each case, a prior infrastructure determines what's built next.

While it's relatively easy to write instructions that can be expressed and followed within the current infrastructure, it's radically more difficult to write instructions that can't be easily followed. Imagine a set of instructions to walk from one place in the city to another. If they follow the pre-laid routes of roads and sidewalks, they can be expressed in simple terms: "turn left at... turn right... to the stop sign". If you tried however to express a route that took you through shortcuts, alleys, backyards, and so on, you'd be stuck with far less standard terms and hobbled by utter lack of convention ("the big tree with the fork in it... over the picket fence... around the garage"). Nor would there be any assurance, as there would be with street directions, that things would not change. A big tree can be cut down, a picket fence replaced. But we don't let citizens re-route the street or take down the stop sign - at least not permanently.

Perhaps the only group that will not be surprised at all at this dominance of conventions and prior infrastructure over instructions are computer programmers. Their expression is strictly limited by pre-existing command sets that are ultimately constrained by hardware implementations of certain instructions (and not others) on microprocessors. And they deal with instructions explicitly and necessarily to make that hardware work, because there's no other way of manipulating it reliably. So while it isn't that difficult to imagine using a screwdriver as a weapon or a hammer as a back-scratcher, it's much more difficult to even imagine a microprocessor executing an instruction to compose a good poem or buy us a beer.

The group that may fight it the most are professors. They'll refuse to acknowledge, most of them, that what they teach is hopelessly biased by the infrastructure that presents it: classrooms, textbooks, labs, exams, theses, peer-reviewed journals, and an environment of cozy consensus in which the truly radical thesis is always reliably marginalized without a shot at tenure. Experimental scientists, who understand better the role of apparatus and confirmation bias in experiments, and some of whom even talk directly about how these will converge into an infrastructure bias, will resist the idea less. Though it remains difficult to find say a physicist using a particle accelerator who admits that what comes out of the particle acclerator is nothing more or less than the justification to keep funding the particle accelerator. That the infrastructure itself determines what's right.

There are obviously time scales or domains where instructions determine infrastructures - the particle accelerator was designed by people who tried their very best, devoted their whole careers probably, to reducing (they would say "removing") the possibility that the accelerator would simply return results that would validate their pre-existing biases. A systemic bias is however very hard to overcome. The most we can hope for is that each successive generation builds infrastructure that is more, not less, compatible with those instructions by which we hope to live, and with the natural capital and nature's services. (See biomimicry for an extended treatment of those basic problems.)

See four ins for an analysis that assumes no infrastructure bias and instead assumes that power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure is inherent within the system itself. In other words, it assumes the system has no hardware or other infrastructural constraints, e.g. an online service, a political party or some similar flexible entity.

[edit] changing rules: the impacts

Changes to instructional capital and infrastructural capital can be traumatic. In addition they must be both internally and externally consistent, usually requiring that an inter-related set of rules (instructions) and tools (infrastructure) must change at once.

A doctrine or rule set is a number of rules that deal with the same problem domain or mechanism. An extensible understanding of rule sets, that is, one that can evolve with new domains or mechanisms, requires again integrating some of the understanding of programming, provisioning and sysopping (combined into open configuration doctrine. See all doctrines for more examples from signal infrastructure.).

[edit] it depends

Rule sets depend on power, goals, mindsets and flexibility (the ability to either ignore or transcend) in fairly obvious ways. Without power they can't be imposed or enforced at all. Without goals shared by those that execute them, they will not be reliably executed. Without mindsets they can be neither justified nor extended to cover new situations nor is it likely that anyone could be convinced that the rules "worked". Without the ability to make exceptions or to recognize that a ruleset needs to be discarded entirely or rewritten, finally, the ruleset could become a self-justifying automaton, runaway instructional capital, of exactly the kind that is often portrayed in films about robots on rampages.

[edit] it predicts

What's more, the rules can't even exist without some definitions, some binding, to the accepted-as-real environment of affordance that we construct from our cognition so as to enable our action in the world. (See enactivist for more such philosophy.)

Most routinely, we predict an outcome before we act. Rules help us avoid the worst outcomes. When we change rules, it's because we have seen unacceptable outcomes from following the old rules.

[edit] we resist

When changing rules, we might consider what occurs before new rules are adopted. The process corresponds to the twelve levers insofar as the higher leverage is granted begrudgingly by any society, culture, organization or group, for the very good reason that reckless experimentation is dangerous. That changing one's mind-set is likely to expose one (and one's loved ones) to all the dangers of premature adoption of immature concepts.

That is, we resist for a good reason. The risk of bodily harm must be minimized, and that is not what happens if we recklessly adopt, for instance, new religions or guiding concepts.

[edit] we accept

However, some changes are inevitable. Understanding how necessary and inevitable changes happen may allow us to better recognize a difficult transition and make it happen without so much suffering, and potentially (if the change is to political institutions) increase in morbidity. (See DALY for the standard measure of morbidity used in policy.).

The instantiation, aggregation, reconciliation and codification, and assimilation of the changed systems could be described in many ways. Biological metaphors are commonly used to describe changes that are advertised as inevitable. In programming, more specifically the classic object model, programmers define verb/noun/types and the underlying data it includes and methods it reveals to other objects to manipulate it. An object is “instantiated” when provisioning sets aside some storage for a process that will gather the data and other processes that will respond to the methods using the data: an instance. Notably, any object that contains its model and can instantiate itself using only the pre-existing infrastructure with no additional processes is called a virus. Those that capture all resources within reach are called a worm. Those that allocate resources for one purpose but then use them for another are called a trojan horse. (See virus/worm/trojan and execution control for more detailed explanation of these distinctions in the context of sysopping)

[edit] we afford

However, it's highly questionable to suggest that the power, goals, mindsets and flexibility required to recognize, adapt (design), or otherwise apply a ruleset should be analogized either to poorly-understood-but-inevitable natural processes, nor to well-understood and intentional instructional ones. Since we accept that most rulesets are very much constrained by prior infrastructural capital and instructional capital, as it is perceived by the cognition of the individual (especially individual leaders), then we're best advised to think more cognitively.

Today cognitive science generally describes cognitive processes not in terms of pre-existing templates or ideals (as in Plato's Cave), not in terms of simpler biological or cellular models bubbling up to create concepts directly (as Scrooge accused Marley's ghost of being a bit of undigested potato!). Rather, they're described in terms of the affordance perceived in the environment, the prototypes of useful packages of such affordances, and the resemblance or similarity of perceived objects to the prototypes, such that we recognize their affordances. A berry will trigger our expectation of taste, a hammer will trigger our desire to construct, an old man with a beard may trigger our prior experiences of being told what to do. Probably why God is so often portrayed that way.

[edit] changing rules: the stages

Collective cognition begins with the perception of the change by several individuals who recognize and react to it, but it must proceed to individuals sharing their experiences with each other, aggregating these to find commonalities to work out the prototypes and essential tests and characteristics, then internalize and reconcile competing configured solutions. One of which will almost inevitably assimilate the others, to form the next infrastructure and next constitution (or other similar rules-defining document).

[edit] recognition and initial reaction

The first phase begins when we recognize that rules have changed. Until this happens, no concious change can happen. If there was no case, no instance, in which the failures of pre-existing rules were not observed to have already caused some breach of protocol or a deficient response, then there'd be no argument and no possibility of changing rules. A theoretical or hypothetical case is not enough. Is never enough. Simply because changes are expensive, possibilities are many, and high impact low probability scenarios dominate any risk as regret analysis. Until an example of a given type of event has actually occurred, then, its probability is zero. See thought for more on this.

At least four things will be going on simultaneously at this phase:

A new concept will be recognized and named, possibly as a synthesis or construction of other concepts, but always with a new name. It will usually emerge from compromise as people with different backgrounds or perspectives struggle. (See Wikipedia troll and trolling in general, the process by which unfamiliar new concepts emerge in wikis).
The new concept will be deemed to apply or be occurring or coming to exist somewhere as a result of deliberate action. That is, someone will be seen to be taking some action that causes the concept to becom real. This may be a pilot project but it may simply be a prototype or proof of concept that has not been applied to solve any real problem. A praxis and lingo begins to emerge, a way to describe and talk about the problems of applying the new concept. For instance, if you invent a hammer, you now can use the word "hammer" as a verb. (See verb:namespace for some implications of this.)
A reactive process of resisting the change will begin as soon as the change is seen by anyone as significant at all. This process continues right until the change is no longer seen as a change - the ultra-reflexive integration of the change into original praxis. Any significant change alters access/identity/mindset, so those who have enjoyed some advantage must necessarily refuse or at least resist a loss of status, power, financial means, moral tenets, or (most importantly because they imply all of these) fulltime staff jobs. (See fulltime staff through history for a more complete account.).

It's important to note that most resistance probably occurs simply because the result of a change is something unknown. Hersh argues that human beings are naturally inclined to value what they already have, as if it were four times more valuable than what they know they can receive in return. There's an immense risk aversion factor built into us, and while this made sense in a world where our knowledge came only from our own experience, it makes far less sense in organized society sharing vast reliable instructional capital.

[edit] leadership as reassurance

During this phase, leaders will probably have to reassure everyone else that certain basic concepts of integrity aren't changing, and keep pointing out the instructional capital that aren't changing. For instance, even if an entirely new legal regime is coming into force, there will be areas of law that it doesn't affect, and this should be pointed out often. An example is same-sex marriage, a civil matter that has no real bearing on religious definitions of marriage which remain defined as in those religions, but which aroused great resistance among those that saw civil and religious marriage as a consequence of each other. Constant emphasis to individual experience and the cases in which the prior ruleset is unsatisfactory is recommended. For instance, the fact that one prominent lesbian, Rosie O'Donnell, suffered her partner being forced to testify in a tax case in New York, convinced many people that the rights of married gays were inferior and could not be brought up to par without the actual use of the word "marriage" to describe.

This is not the time for insolence or major infrastructural investments internally however tempting it is - however to advocate others going first may not be a bad idea! It is definitely not time to reveal self-interested arguments for particular changes that may benefit oneself, nor to reveal that others may be volunteering to become guinea pigs for a potentially extremely disruptive idea. Again, reassurance of colleagues may be required.

[edit] socializing organized reaction/resistance and initial reflection

Socialization begins when many people begin to behave as if the concept is real. A reflective process ensues in which they cognize many competing versions of a doctrine:

They adopt concepts from others and begin to use it to describe the world they see - it affects their behaviour; for instance, they act to avoid a hazard that they'd previously not recognized as existing at all
An epistemic community begins to socialize taxonomy relevant to the change and talk among themselves - they may codify internal rule sets within the colony that they've created (- see colonize) but will eventually be forced to share them with others. (The growth of wiki troll culture is a particularly overt example of such events.)
A discontinuity then forms between different “colonies” where two or more such colonies are tying to instantiate different rule sets. A protocol war or tool war may occur. An edit war (battle to control details) or troll war (to control trust in specific sources or authorities) may occur. (See ontological warfare on this.) The propaganda can be extreme, involving many claims or assertion that the old rules no longer apply, followed – usually precipitously – by assertion by “the real world” that the old rules do indeed still apply. (See Canadian libel and this particularly asinine example)

"In mathematics, a discontinuity is a place where one rule set ends and another begins. Mathematicians don’t like them. destruction of a culture so that a new culture can be established. You are not changing people’s minds. You are changing their behavior and hoping that their minds will follow. While behavior modification is a legitimate psychological technique, the issue is pulling it off at the nation state level." - Aucoin

[edit] leadership as rallying

The competing factions that interpret the new instructional rules differently are constantly trying to define each other's "incentives, punishment, constraints" as wholly wrongheaded and "in the wrong direction". See Forrester's Law for more on this. Social capital will necessarily be lost, and a lot of time and financial capital, if only due to the fact that allies one day are opponents the next, straining relations inside teams as well as within them. Confusion reigns. As Kipling suggests in "If", a leader in this situation is focused not on reassuring anyone about what won't change (if this was known, it should have been done in the previous phase!) but on rallying those who are demoralized. Picking a few infrastructural goals and particularly clear-minded individuals who can moderate between factions to achieve those goals is worthwhile.

Some insolence is now required to shut up the people who want to "go back to the way things were before". Even if possible, it's probably unpopular, and certainly no easier than going forward. Some integrity is sacrificed just to keep social peace in this phase - promises will be made and not kept because circumstances change quickly and often drastically. The less an individual uses absolute-sounding language now, the better.

Eventually the rule set that emerges compromises the old rule set and the new, leading to:

[edit] reconciling, reframing and reflexivity

Reconciling the tyranny of small differences and minor troll-sysop struggle that characterizes a protocol war may happen quickly or painfully slowly. Either way, the new concept becomes embedded in the common instructional capital and perhaps also in their consciousness. A reflexive process begins when "most people have accepted that new rules have emerged, internalized them, and reconciled themselves to adopt an instantiation. Boundary conditions have formed, and the “wars” have started at the margins over which model within a number of models will be instantiated." - Bryan Aucoin, in The Phases of Rule-Set Change, 2005, in which he also remarks that this may occur collaboratively, violently, or via a trusted broker:

"In a Collaborative Process, the colonies agree to keep their respective rule sets and establish a protocol for mapping, translation and management at the boundaries. The colonies usually trend in one of two directions: Integration, which is a rather slow process of reconciliation and codification based upon building consensus (Think European Union); or Sectification, which is the further proliferation of new colonies based upon slightly different rule sets (think modern Christianity)."
"In a Violent Process, one colony tries to take over another and enforce its rule set upon the other. (Think hostile business takeovers … and war)." (Note this definition of violent is not operational and does not satisfy living ontology constraints.)
"In a Trusted Broker Process, the colonies agree to a process of reconciliation and codification in which each colony agrees to a shared protocol for reconciling differences. The process may be embodied in a shared organization empowered to arbitrate or in an outside “third party” that is trusted by the all the colonies."
"There is actually a fourth model: Dysfunction. The world views and rule sets of the colonies are so disparate that they cannot be reconciled. There is no basis for collaboration, neither is strong enough to conquer the other, and there is no trusted broker. This is the Mideast."

[edit] leadership as brokering

By now, the contracts between factions are much clearer and perhaps even quantitative. A core of instructional rules and infrastructural supports for these exists. There are some recognized individuals who are perceived as having the integrity to deal with the new environment. From them, and them only, insolence is tolerated but only for the purposes of preventing breaches of contract and assuring others that closure isn't compromised. By now the concept of diplomacy applies: strategic reconciling.

The leader's own behaviour becomes a model for everyone else's. The leader integrates the new mindset and begins to focus and filter others' goals using that mindset.

[edit] ultra-reflexive integration: assimilation into the next infrastructure

Eventually, any change ceases to be a change. It's understood as part of the plan and accepted as inevitable. Problems are now analyzed in terms of the available solutions - that is, instructions have begun to be anticipate the solution. A range of solutions are available, possibly seen as a commodity and evaluated by simple quantitative metrics of comparison. There's much less thinking or arguing going on, because thought happened already, and arguments are mature. Some evidence/source/authority has become very widely accepted. The concept becomes “infrastructure.” The rule set governs that infrastructure. Like electricity, roads or the Internet, we just use it and we take it for granted.

Our goal/process/audits are the last thing to change. When they are stated entirely in the new terms, when the processes are entirely specified per the new constraints (e.g. the triple bottom line), and the audits are conducted by persons who are well aware of most of the common problems and methods of cheating, the ultra-reflexive process (applying a concept not just to the self but to all one's peers, using whatever degree of force, etc.) has terminated and become indistinguishable from the baseline. Any change to the new rules will now trigger a reactive process identical to the one that resulted in the new process we now use.

[edit] leader as auditor-general

Because all processes must now satisfy not the relatively pragmatic constraints of diplomats ("sufficing") but strictor auditor controls, and because emotional adjustments have been made, the role of the leader changes in this last phase to be an auditor his or her self. The instructional language they use must be exactly that used by an auditor, to help socialize taxonomy further. The infrastructural power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure must be exercised only to achieve a simpler set of instructions (key!). Every goal must be examined for its effect on integrity: Does it contradict a prior promise? Does it defer/refer/infer to our prior understandings? Can we relate it to other goals in a logical defensible way?

As this last question suggests, the category:defensible has changed and now applies to the new processes. The definition of integrity itself has probably become stricter. A lot less latitude is made for exceptional individuals, maybe none - they've moved on to other less defined problems anyway. Insolence has only one use now: defense of what's changed and social reassurance of a (temporary but emotionally necessary) satisfied state of achievement.

[edit] Aucoin's metaphors

As part of his assumption of inevitability, Aucoin offers a parallel to Kubler-Ross’s description of the stages associated with death and dying. Simply put, Kubler-Ross describes the emotional states a person goes through as they proceed through the phases I described above, as that person wrestles with the concept of dying. Denial is the reactive resistance to the concept of dying as it is instantiated into the person’s psyche. Negotiation is part of the process of assimilation. Anger and depression are part of the reconciliation phase as the person reconciles himself or herself to a new rule set. Acceptance occurs with dying - it becomes “psychic infrastructure.”

Aucoin's almost careless fusion of metaphors throughout his short paper is particularly striking. The "creation, instantiation, proliferation, mutation, and final reconciliation" of a new concept is described by him using mixed metaphors: some biological, some mechanical. What's more, he claims all his metaphors are scale-independent: "the model is extensible to multiple concepts. “Communism” and “Capitalism” are an example. Both were instantiated, went through a process of assimilation, and forged a boundary condition. The Cold War was a period of Collaboration during the Reconciliation and Codification Phase – because there was one well-defined rule set that governed the behavior of both colonies. Reconciliation and codification began in earnest with the fall of Soviet Union." Of course, quite a bit of change must have been going on before that.

Perhaps it's better to be more cautious, and stick to metaphors accepted as valid within the field where the change occurs. Rather than claim validity by analogy to all others.