Category: Psychology

Cultivating Machinic Agency

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Causal Agency and Moral Agency have a congested interrelationship throughout philosophy, one that now plays out heavily in postmodernism-inspired film. The Matrix and its sequels explore the inability to distinguish between the simulation and the real, Blade Runner and its sequels explore the inability to draw a clear line between replicant humanity and legacy humanity, Inception explores the inability to base judgement of value upon the possibility of a higher or lower plane of consciousness, Westworld (tv) explores the line between artificial and human self-reflective conscious, and the reborn Planet of the Apes franchise explores the line between animal and human intelligence and rights.

When we study the vegetation in our desert of the real, when at last we admit how arbitrarily humanity draws up the lines of moral agency and political rights, an entire history and an immense contemporary system of inequality and injustice crash upon us. This is our hyperreality. At one time, as Nietzsche pleaded, we might have drawn up new lines of virtue and meaning, but this can only succeed when local, physically present, development of meaning is more prevalent than virtual, simulated meaning.

Melancholia, nihilism, hypocrisy, denial; these are all sources of complacency. Supposing we want to build a better understanding of the machines of our systems, we must begin from an assumption of power. The partisan nature of meaning emerges entangled with the only trait that remains, for now, distinctly human: the long memory of symbols of death, and the denial that death of Other implies death of Observer.

First, we should look with some honesty at the inequalities we believe we left behind. We will find that the line drawn in philosophy between human freedom versus the automated machines of physics and nature justified, repeatedly, enslavement, domination, inequality, torture, rape, and domestication. A brief review of the ideological between the lines of Western philosophical statements on intelligence, freedom, equality, and political economy will reveal the evolution of moral exceptions granted to the systemically privileged. At each phase, the exception moves but takes the same form, privilege provides itself exceptional claims to power based on the relegation to animal nature and machine determinism for the unprivileged.

To reclaim our capacity to anchor moral responsibility, we must embrace the loss of distinction between animal, machine, and human. This holds sweeping ramifications in judgment of past and present. Even if, out of privileged weakness, someone remains dedicated to the current regime, they should at least give honest admission of the arbitrary lines that this will draw.

The question, if we are to look it in the eyes, unflinchingly and courageously, desires to understand what morality we ought to pursue when we are not special in the universe, when we are inseparable from our physicality and ecology. It is an immense re-valuation of all values that even openly fascist modernity could not begin to mobilize. To remove the center is to open us to relativity: divinity has not blessed us with superiority, we did not evolve for carnism like proper carnivores, we are different from animals only because we develop and internalize language, we are distinct from hypothetical superintelligence only because we fear and deny our own death. We must establish a new set values based on the unlimited interconnection of will-to-power. To limit this artificially, as Western traditional oppression has, to one form-of-life, judged territorially according to intelligence, social class, ethnic appearances, gender, religion, or geography; this is the height of all ignorance.

Machinic Agency is post-nihilistic. We can only understand morally effective action, in which an entity is the steward of the efficient cause, by answering what it would take for an automaton, either super-intelligent biological or technical machine, to gain the status of moral agency. Just as Quantum Liberty removes the distinction between free will and determinism, our understanding of moral virtualization must reset our valuation-signification without distinguishing between animal, machine, and human. Nietzsche asserts that nihilism takes place when we find, “That the highest values are devaluing themselves” (WTP Aph. 2). This is the case today, when the religious privilege of stewardship results in massive environmental destruction, when political freedom results in mass incarceration, and capitalist modes of ensuring security of food and medicine leaves ghettos and nations dying from meats that slowly poison the “disposable” class.

Machinic Agency then requires a Turing test for morality. We are simply asking, “At what point does an assemblage of parts, biological or mechanical, become identified as making decisions based on value-judgements?” This test defines the artificial limits we establish for morally significant actions.

While we will later show the progression of privilege based on machination, its first major entrant also provides our starting point for the Machinic Agency test. By doubting everything except rational certainty, Descartes begins from his own existence then sets up two criteria for recognizing the consciousness of others. First, an assemblage will need the ability to respond with original expressions of normal language, not only through direct interaction (like the Turing test), but in spontaneous group dialogue that understands the context and signification of conversation among humans. If an assemblage cannot overhear a conversation, relate its implications to its historical and political context, judge it based on a value system, and defend the rationalization spontaneously, then it must not be equally human. Second, while Descartes supposed someone might build machines that could perform extraordinary tasks, and we may teach animals to perform tricks, the ability to attain virtuosity of action, including skillful improvisation rather than mere rule-based execution, was a human capacity.

We immediately the problem of privilege in this test, because it is relative to the intelligence and values of the observer. Descartes generates a test that assures anyone who cannot directly participate through displays of intelligence, language, education, and skill are lesser beings, unworthy of the privileges of the bourgeois intellectual European male. This method easily becomes a justification for sexism, colonialism, despotism, sexual repression, forced poverty, carnism, and slavery. He believes, that if we cannot recognize someone’s intelligence and virtuosity, we have no moral obligation to treat them as an equal.

Again, by means of these two tests we may likewise know the difference between men and brutes. For it is highly deserving of remark, that there are no men so dull and stupid, not even idiots, as to be incapable of joining together different words, and thereby constructing a declaration by which to make their thoughts understood; and that on the other hand, there is no other animal, however perfect or happily circumstanced, which can do the like.

– Descartes

We can juxtapose this with Hume’s empiricism, which through methodological naturalism recognizes the exceptions we ought to build into our theory of justice based on the development of moral understanding, providing the example that, if a young bachelor makes politically inflammatory statements the government should excuse for a time his youthful rebelliousness, while a father who engages in plans to take up arms to depose the king bears a greater guilt of treason; the guilt of the crime for Hume must match the burden of responsibility the agent bears through experience and understanding.

The arguments explored through our time in the desert revealed that the debate of metaphysics was always the foundation for the moral systems of inequalities established afterward. Nihilism removes this justification of privilege. We have already seen that changing the prevalent ideological system changes the outcomes that early modern philosophers allowed to taint their objectivity. The “masses” have may have subtle natural differences in cognitive ability, but even these remain suspect. Education, health, economic, and social factors produce the differentiated performance abilities. Early modern philosophers and European political systems in general treated these differences static and hereditary, based on gender or ethnic group, and we continue to recover from the consequences.

We may further confound this problem by recognizing how fluid our conception of which actions in our children are part of a “phase” and at what point the “know better” – though it seems more likely this is because they learn inconsistency of beliefs, contradictory assertions, and genuine hypocrisy from parents more than anything else. Thus, the twofold test from Descartes will certainly not help us. As Heidegger shows, Nietzsche did not establish nihilism, he revealed as an “always already” existent socio-historical process.

Philosophy often works better in science fictional scenarios. If we imagine developing a breed of intelligent chimpanzees, as what point would we believe their actions have moral significance? We would need them to have the capacity to articulate signification of non-present concepts using language. They would need to recognize patterns of intelligence in one another that make dialogue worthwhile for survival and coordination. We would need them to possess memories of past events and express them to their offspring. They would need to understand from the death of another intelligent chimpanzee that they will also die. They would need to recognize that every member of their species bears equal risk of death. They would need to value development of a social system over the hedonistic egoism in the face of this existential crisis.

Now we have evolutionary utility for morality. Realization of death, memory of what is absent, abstraction of concepts, internalization of parental vocalization, externalization through typography, these are all developments we see in our own children. Machinic Morality is the tension of short-run and long-run consequences, both in external ramifications, and in self-conscious understanding, compared against our system of values. We are capable of Machinic Agency when we have sufficient narrative and identity that our choices may either destroy, refine, or strengthen. We do this in the context of predicted outcomes for personal, interpersonal, social, and environmental preservation-enhancement.

Machinic Morality admits that distinguishing between sensory virtualization and the biological machine that produces this virtualization is a false dichotomy. Privilege of one form-of-life over another is no longer justifiable. Our special place in our socioeconomic, technological, and biological ecologies is that of paternalism: cultivation, protection, and stewardship. Any distinction between human rights and animal rights under supersensory is false. Adult humans should not possess any privilege against animals that they would not enjoy against another human. When we better understand dolphins, dogs, or trees as children of our environment, we may again act as stewards, attain to wisdom, guaranteeing the ecologies for which we have a duty of care.

Arborescent Consciousness

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Although we can properly say little about what consciousness is, we can begin like Kant by describing its modes of operation. We may hold thought as a strategic trait, then elucidate what it gains in practice. Machinic Agency sustains the tension between feeling free and observing determinism, feeling optimistic when surrounded by entropy. Just as quantum physics relies on the assumption of uncertainty to produce probability, the assumption of freedom within a system of rules itself produces liberty. In each case, the Observer plays an active role in framing and anchoring the system of values. Wherever there is observation, the combination of intelligence and consciousness, there is arborescence.

Arborescence is the branching of representations that occurs under the generalization and abstraction of semiotic analysis. Analysis splits perceptions repeatedly, creating dichotomies even where there is no perceptible opposite. This long series of breaks when drawn begin to look tree-like. The Observer creates many trees of knowledge. Philosophers are interested in cultivating these forests.

That which appears as power-law and arborescent when we focus on a trait of a population disappears into chaos and nonsense when we are not looking. That is not to say that there is no existence when we are not the Observer, but that our mind filters, prioritizes, and obscures experience like the lens of a camera, and it narrows perception through framing as well. We overlay representation in the act of analysis, and do so with increasing selfishness and optimism unless some other tree of knowledge competes for the light of the sun.

It should not surprise us that we find fractals and branches everywhere we focus, recording causality and determination along the plane of observation; these are the operative processes of the human recording of production. Moreover, we can fully expect that consciousness will succeed in making sense of what is under observation at the expense of what is not under observation. Patterns suddenly come into focus. Melodies suddenly fall into proper rhythm, shutting out contentious noises. Analysis gives us a normal distribution, spreading, branching upward from the trunk of paternalism. It is the stubbornness of the Observer to remain at the trunk once so many branches have spread that drives the role of paternalism and centralization.

It is metaphor to say that the conscious mind is arborescent, even more to speak of an unconscious at all. These are expressions. When we apply observation, gather data, select a plane of significance, truncate outliers, cancel noise, homogenize particles and investment vehicles, we as the Observer are generating the Fractal Ontology we find, creating but also projecting logic where we have no evidence of design. Just outside the peripheral vision of the mind is everything that does not need observation for The Moment. Concentration, consistency, coherency, abstraction, derivation – these are paternalistic controls over representation. The more we develop our semiotic system, the more repressive it becomes in the service of the Observer.

This implies two basic universes of thought become possible. First, we can imagine consciousness like an astronaut recording a video, floating, spiraling in space; if we keep turning we get a 360-degree image of what surrounds us (consciousness) but understand only derivations of the role or substance of the camera itself or the person recording the images. This places the intelligent observer at the center of a personal universe of representation. Second, we can imagine walking in a circle around a fixed center until we observe the entire 360-degrees available by looking at or beyond the central axis point. In this case unconscious remains in the feeling we can never attain full confidence that behind us, beyond the limits of our peripheral vision, there may not be something we are missing. In either case, Observation is the strategic outcome of the thought-drive, operating like the drive for hunger or sex. We continuously record, focus, frame, anchor, and bias our experiences (consciousness) until the moment our thought-drive must recuse itself and ask “What have I missed? What lurks in the shadows? What if there is something just behind me? What if I am dreaming and great danger awaits my body in the real world?” We can see the immediate value to the Observer of this continuous experimentation with uncertainty, lest he get so lost in his forests of knowledge as to be eaten by a cougar or bear!

The “trunk” of these two conceptions digs into something, remaining unseen but that our observable universe of thought convinces us must exist. It is the prerequisite for sense-making, this assumption that either the world “behind” our representations has substance or spirit, or that the world “within” has equivalent constituents or a ghost. We are never content, except with enormous discipline of practice, to believe that either there is no soul in our machine; or that there might be many forces working in concert, like a well-formed orchestra no longer in need of a conductor; or that this identity itself is the great lie, that we have no soul to lose or preserve at all.

This is the Rhizomatic Unconscious in which we never fully understand our own camera or relate it perfectly to the film, and can never fully incorporate into the image all the elements not captured in each shot. In this way, we observe logic and perfection in the universe not because it is there, though it might be the case. We only know that we observe an apparent logic, but wonder if we ourselves create it. We try to overcome the uncertainty principle, a mathematical solipsism of sorts, through combined will-to-power. We say, “If several observers stand in the center together, looking outward, while even more observers stand in a circle around them, looking at them and beyond them; then we can get a perfect and complete view! Then we can be sure there is not threat or uncertainty!” This very combined effort makes the feeling of liberated will at odds with the determinism of collective observation.

This has always been the goal of our institutions, from the nomadic tribe or primitive commune to our most advanced scientific laboratories and most complete mathematical models. If we work as individuals, we can take greater risks with potentially greater rewards, but if we work collectively we can attain more complete information regarding potential risks and opportunities. We tend to oscillate between extremes, both in single lifetimes and as a species.

In the meanwhile, wherever we focus, we axiomatize. The only method we have found as a collective to help the individual with their unconscious is to shout at them from across the circle, hoping they will believe us if we describe the bear behind them with enough intensity. Unfortunately, many never turn around in time. Death has already come for them in their ignorant distraction.

Observer-Abstraction Pragmatism

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“The power of moral prejudices has penetrated deeply into the most intellectual world, the world apparently most indifferent and unprejudiced, and has obviously operated in an injurious, obstructive, blinding, and distorting manner. A proper physio-psychology has to contend with unconscious antagonism in the heart of the investigator…” – Nietzsche, BGE

Humanity, in its comprehensive and strategic cruelty, has historically relied upon the trickery of the miraculated First-Observer to create theocratic despotism wherever it finds conditions are too harsh for population density to derive surplus labor value. There is another approach to the issue of cosmic Observers that reveals just how imperative it is that we develop some disposable metaphysical model as a working construct. This moral failing lies in the belief that the cosmos is intrinsically human and requires a democracy of observers for its existence. This is a sad sense of entitlement felt by those most willing to quit. However, even this axiomatization of equal participation by every conscious intelligence becomes preferable to the borderline psychoticism of polarizing re-territorialization. Namely, the borderline disorders murdered into place by Clerics of the respective Zoroastrian-Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. This is no race or class, but an invasive ideology that infects the most simplistic and superstitious forms of life; we will be fools to gamble that it may likewise infect new machines of our own creation.

In contrast with this diurnal terror, the convenience of the Vedic model lies in the capacity to allow a considerable portion of the population of its believers to independently miraculate their individual optimism biases as coping with death. This creates a collectivist universe that needs observers. Any horrible circumstance then provides a slightly mystical purpose to life-in-itself. Or this is the superior terror of moral thought, fully synthesized by the stoic monotheist, Paul of Tarsus, which failed: fear not one death but many, fear not this life, but samsara in some fresh hell of which only the jealous Jehovah-Allah may create. Lost in translation, or fulfilled by it? Such was the downfall of Rome.

Unlike other miraculated abstractions, at least the Vedanta, in the wisdom of old age, acquired well before its textual recording, is an axiomatization that can, with more consistency than most, encourage an equality that holds some representational logic. “Respect any living being, as this being might be you,” such is the best we can do in egalitarian belief.

Outside the realm of popular pseudo-psychology, we should take the Abstract Observer variable as an opportunity to exploit. Pragmatically, it is sufficient to argue that we must find Observers continuously as a textual critic, precisely because it is a superior survival instinct recording in their spare time such evidence. If there were a 50/50 split of conscious intelligence that assumed any pattern, if any unexpected event must have an agent with an intent that may cause either harm or be useful, we would expect the Agency-assumptive intelligences to gain an advantage in finding mates, killing prey, defending territories, and recognizing enemies when attacking. In other words, those who see opportunities for sex, food, and victory, even where shadows and the wind are the source, gain an increase in attempts and therefore winnings, even though the probability of success remains equal.

Fractal Ontology is the intellectual equivalent of this hunt. It provides us an opportunity, on the one hand, to take any pattern to its absolute logical limits and experiment with its applications, knowing we will later do the same with its opposite. Meanwhile, Metaphysical Agnosticism allows us to suspend the disbelief of Agency as needed for our maneuvers economics and the orientation of the Observer. We must treat the traits that ensured our survival in the forest with skepticism in the lab and optimism in the calculi. Within any scenario that searches for, but cannot find, a First-Observer, this only occurs through a forgetful self-trickery that once ensured the fitness of our species; and indeed, it could again.

The logocentric triangulation built by arborescence, in every case, is subject-object-audience. When a philosopher, physicist, or mathematician shares an idea via written language, it is an act of socioeconomic truth-value exchange. Expression through symbolic representation allows subjective understanding to circulate on the broader market of ideas. The Observer’s subjective universe, which analysis collapses and concretizes in its construction, cannot integrate without modification. The observer must reify an idea in secured symbols, also called representation. The idea is “secured” in the sense of a mortgage-backed security; likely to cause a similar collapse. It is meaningful only through convention and history, taken to mean something real, independent of the actual reality it represents. Convention therein overrules significance when anyone hopes to integrate with the macroeconomy of ideological production systems. The danger of a fetishism of the knowledge-laborer as a commodity within the system may break us. When we strip the significance of truth-value from its sociopolitical product and drop the roles of the author and the audience, we are losing vital Information Dominance.

We must also maintain constant vigilance in the presence of any interpretation of physics or metaphysics in which any element of the concretized evidence of the subjective experience obscures the role of the observer-philosopher, observer-physicist, or observer-mathematician; that is, hiding the writer(s) shaping the conclusions.

Although the art of the camera, predicated upon focus and constraint, finds its artistic bloom within strict rules, the purposeful and hidden role of the artist emerges just as Intended. Constrained expression it is just that – art, symbol, and focused emotion. When we see a similar trend in logocentric encapsulation of truth-value, we must recognize and elucidate the absolutism with which a word, as symbol universalizing several observations, forces a concretization of the Observer’s collapsed triangulation. Too conveniently does the text hide all tangential propensities, probabilities, predicates, and possibilities of The Moment. How privileged indeed is any man who is skilled in manipulating words.

Methodical First-Observer Atheism

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                “In that the NEW psychologist is about to put an end to the superstitions which have hitherto flourished with almost tropical luxuriance around the idea of the soul, he is really, as it were, thrusting himself into a new desert and a new distrust–it is possible that the older psychologists had a merrier and more comfortable time of it; eventually, however, he finds that precisely thereby he is also condemned to INVENT–and, who knows? perhaps to DISCOVER the new.” – Nietzsche, BGE

There has never been and will never be a logically necessary first-observer. Within the enquiries of intelligent consciousness, Schopenhauer and Russell easily expose the fallacies of Bishop Berkeley’s watchful deity – the overuse of one sign for many significations. The “mind” and its “idea” – representing too many problems with too little nuance. As an English-speaking population, appropriating, sampling, and remixing any word of any era we so choose, we see readily the corruption of discoveries inherent in translating all thought to Latin. The Germans of the modern era found this readily after Kant. A dead language is a closed system. While closed systems provide control for a centralizing power, open systems with semi-permeable boundaries and decentralized redundancies adapt and evolve.

                That is not to say that a theoretical first-observer lacks usefulness, likewise with a universal transcendent observing itself, or manifold object-oriented observations, aggregated in generalized observation. Our issue is methodical. Invasive Ideology builds up closed systems that refuse any hint of disposability in their first-observer constructs. There are those in the Jesuit or Vedic traditions, and more recently in the quantum sciences, that relish the Mystery itself. Mystery as an absurd realm where each of these first-observers are simultaneously the same argument.

Invasive Ideology is not content with relevance. Closed systems fight all disposability, despite all the after-market additions that accrete upon their dogma over time. Such symbols have been the source of immense harm, bigotry, and despotism. The fallacy of the anthropic argument, that an intelligent observer implies that some metaphysical entity must likewise exist, something intelligent capable of producing intelligent observers, lies precisely in the first half of the argument – if an intelligent observer is looking for an observer, they are the observer. The anthropic fallacy attempts to obscure the presence of the narrator, a tradition as old as story-telling itself.

When we watch these anthropic narrator-observers seek evidence through existential instantiation, particularized examples for the confirmation bias of their echo chamber, we find the anthropic fallacy axiomatizes the particles under one Prime Axiom. The denial of death gives rise to many closed systems of bigotry. They bring all specific examples of truth-value exchanged for strategic purposes in our species, then regard each one as an idea that lies some standard deviation from their Hegemonic Truth. Meanwhile, the actual observer, creating the narrative, pretends they were not at the scene of the crime – a sad cover-up. They deny their moral agency for all the truncating and noise canceling required, their responsibility for selecting variables and samples, their agency in establishing the level of observation and the orientation of the coordinate system.

While science willingly bears responsibility for their own distortions, doing so with great transparency, maintaining transaction histories, methodical doubt of selection parameters, external audits with peer review, in context of a liberated and intense competition of ideas, the opposite of this lies in prophecy. To many philosophers have been nothing more than hyper-vigilant prophets. In their pedantry and precision, they hide that they have merely written a long poem. The theologian writes a poem about their feelings toward human life and society, while the maxims, edicts, and constructs are axiomatized. “We hold these truths self-evident.” No matter how unreal, self-contradictory, or unhealthy those axioms become in the absence of observers that will bear full moral responsibility for the consequences of their contributions to the ideological system.

Moreover, once the system is no longer in the traceable control of moral agents but becomes independently continuous, the effects become taught as the first-causes of the closed system. Therein lies our need for suspicion, because a continuous closed system of values that requires no believers is implicitly amoral. Every effort to keep it afloat reveals an exploitation, domination, and enslavement for political economy. Thus, while nowhere in the Bible do we find judgment against suicide, the horrors of the feudal system made it necessary to keep exploited laborer alive, even against their will. Preach the sin of suicide, else the workers unable to flee political economy will flee through death instead!

The abstraction of a metaphysical construct is not merely generalization of empirical reality, it is backpropogation that elevates its place in its semiotic closed loop. As a wave function of truth-value, metaphysical effects become miraculated into a causal hegemonic category: truth-in-itself, god-in-itself, libido-in-itself, spirit-in-itself, and capital-in-itself. Each have been miraculated into a position of first-observer for their own moral and political purposes. When an effect becomes swapped for its cause, when a systemic result becomes treated as the uncaused cause, the actual observer conceals all agency. “In the beginning…” The author, meanwhile hides, with or without leaving a record of authorship! Herein lies an important discovery: transformation is the art of convincing everyone that something new is something old. The Magician-King arises with this revolutionary goal, to prepare for the future by convincing the masses of something eternal that must come to fruition.

Plato hides behind the prophecy of Socrates to tell us that we are witnessing mere shadows of truth-in-itself. Some hidden author hides behind the three major Christ narratives, wherein this philosophical messiah, strangely endowed with Buddhist stories and Stoic egalitarianism, claims his purpose is to testify Truth. The “Nature” of stoicism synthesized with the jealous god of monotheism. The hidden author axiomatizes the metaphysical construct, then miraculated it into the narrative so that Pilate can ask “What is Truth?”

One man as an honest testimony: a claim that, if treated as a sociopolitical insurgent caught between the ideological systems of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, we might agree. Joshua of Nazareth (Jesus) as social critic, supporting the rhizomes and nomads rather than the arborescence creating systemic dysfunction. Yet this did not serve the political economy of the Popes after Roman centralization crumbled. When the market forces of freely-exchanged ideas fail to establish hegemony, the ideological production systems must go to war!

This is the ultimate political victory of the Zoroastrian ideological production process, continuously developed in the factories of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic military-industrial complex of faith: only one god, only one truth, one-in-the-same; one light, one authority, one messiah-prophet. Everything else is darkness, evil, sin. Either faithful and true, or worthy not merely of eradication, but eternal torture. Imagine any contemporary individual presenting these symptoms – bipolarity of morals, lost in the mania of creation followed by the depression-rage of annihilation, borderline in the totalitarian separation of perfect-me, unworthy-them, narcissistic in the determinism of value, and sociopathic in the application of fascist conformity. Imagine this person purchasing the largest global consumer goods corporation, the largest global mercenary and security corporation and amassing an overwhelming inventory of nuclear armaments.

More rational, albeit violent if necessary, sociopolitical constructs deal swiftly with such psychosis. The Zoroastrian traditions lie in a propensity of death-denial that arises exclusively from our diurnal instincts. They allow “THE” god-in-itself to be miraculated as first-cause and we allow its ideological systems to axiomatize every depravity of bigotry and injustice with impunity. How foolish to allow tolerance of intolerance!

Freud, at least, although gaining more mass popularity than the equally inventive constructs of Nietzsche, signs his name to theories, argues with peers and students – the First Observer in the case of psychodynamic theory, as a counter-movement to the dysfunctions of religious indoctrination, recorded and known in an autograph. Whatever fiction he created, however unreal it was, he used these anti-historical myths to achieve a purpose – helping his patients. He did not, however, remove his Agency or Intent from his narrative, ensuring (at least) that the mythology could not be miraculated into prophecy – some fiction with god-in-itself as the origin.

More importantly, we can thank Freud for modeling a new behavior for scientists and philosophers. His mythologies prove the utility, when necessary, of building a metaphysical construct that is plausible enough to keep the inquiry moving forward, but unreal enough to receive significant criticism. This forces the ideological system to remain open and adapt as additional information becomes available. Even though the libido gets abstracted beyond the existential instantiation of any individual human’s complex thoughts, emotions, and behaviors regarding their own sexuality and gender, as well as the sexuality and gender of others; even though psychodynamic theory places the handy metaphysical construct in a First Observer role. It is a cosmos of sex, of desire, and a tradition worth continuing in its various fantasies precisely because sexuality is a ubiquitously significant construct. The difference lies in maintaining strict atheism toward the miraculated libido-in-itself. Sex-in-itself is not the First Observer of the cosmos causing all other supply and demand. If we hold it (or some variation) constant in our metaphysical constructs, some law of attraction we echo as well, we know this is a mental construct instead.

The facticity of human existence includes the capitalistic exchange of genetic capital, an obsession about sexual reproduction and its “standard deviations” easily explained by evolutionary emergence. Mutation, selection, and endless becoming. Those with consciousness see sexuality everywhere. We may forgive this penchant as a strategy orders of magnitude more probable to succeed in reproduction. Our generations of descent did not remove us so far from our earliest mammalian ancestors that we should ignore the existence of rodent species for which the males completely lose all personal survival instinct in favor of a relentless spread of their genetic material, at the expense of sleep, food, and safety; sex, sex, sex. The same phallic obsession drove industrial revolutions and neoliberal economic policies: supply, supply, supply!

“Where there is nothing more to see or to grasp, there is also nothing more for men to do”–that is certainly an imperative different from the Platonic one, but it may notwithstanding be the right imperative for a hardy, laborious race of machinists and bridge- builders of the future, who have nothing but ROUGH work to perform. – Nietzsche, BGE

Marx enters the arena to analyze this self-similar inherent flaw of Classical Capitalism, the propensity of the system to miraculate capital-in-itself; money as the First Observer preceding society, economic, relationships, family. Marx elucidates a psychotic causal vector of capital-in-itself as causa prima of labor, causing supply, causing demand. We will return to this problem extensively, because we burn the brand of capitalism into every theoretical construct. We see it everywhere once we tell ourselves to look for it; all these floating values of valuation and signification are so relational and exchange-driven. We can spread this as our market-based view of sex, the trickle-down economics of anti-entropy, some exchange value of god-in-itself.

To the extent this phallic-capitalistic mindset could be entirely cultural, a long-shrouded instinct, or even a category of mind, we must take care to explore each point and its counter-point. If capitalism is a projection of mind, we should pursue and test additional theoretical possibilities along its fractal ontology, but we must also, with extreme diligence, pursue every anti-construct to the best of our ability or find competitors who will. If capitalism is an underlying constant of physicality, we must likewise pursue its implications in areas that claim this as a moral justification, holding it implicitly with domineering potential bias.

Stoicism

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“If a person gave your body to any stranger he met on his way, you would certainly be angry. And do you feel no shame in handing over your own mind to be confused and mystified by anyone who happens to verbally attack you?”

-The Enchiridion, Epictetus 135 A.C.E.

Defining Valuation-Signification

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Valuation-Signification is a central concept throughout my first four books, one that combines every art, science, theory, and practice to which I have gained exposure. Its importance comes from a simple human tendency – to capture information in a form that will survive the conscious individuals who produced it so that future generations may reproduce it. To that extent, the problem of all philosophy and science is the struggle to understand valuation-signification.

The uniquely human plight lies precisely in the struggle between two genetic codes, one biological and one social. We see this immediately in our oldest available documents, the Dead Sea scrolls and The Epic of Gilgamesh. Each thrust into written history a problem of complex societies, the power of the state, the control by divine intermediaries of our sexual freedom and preferences as well as that of our plants and animals.

Research in Chaos Theory and Complex Adaptive Systems has shown that fractal scaling cascades – from the human heart to stock trading – are everywhere. Armed with the idea that patterns at order of magnitude greater scale are produced by the self-similarity and amplification of patterns far smaller levels, the common theme of all human thought becomes clear – how do we reconcile the behavior of individuals with the behavior of society? Moreover, how can we make our world better?

First, let’s define these concepts separately, valuation and signification. Valuation is the way we recognize a signal or stimulus and determine the relative importance it may have to our needs and goals. Signification is the orientation process we utilize to determine the best action to be taken on the basis of our valuation. Note that we make millions of decisions per day, but most of them are unexamined, quasi-rational decisions. The fastest decisions are made for us, non-consciously, by the brain’s “filter” framework – an immense number of potential signals are dismissed as noise in a highly automatic process if we are not reflexively observing our observation. The challenge in defining a balanced view of behavioral economics lies in the spectrum between non-conscious economic decisions and the highly complex significations in which we incorporate multiple individual, ideological, and imaginary observers directly and even as observer-chains.

Valuation refers to the initial recognition of a signifier-pattern. It begins with the pre-conscious weighting of a signal – an object moving unexpectedly, a colorful poster, a subtle facial expression from a love interest – and continues with relatively simple valuations of agency, intention, causality, and opportunity. This is precisely why we might say that individual economic behavior may be anti-rational at times – for instance, we purchase a steak without looking at the price because we too busy on reacting to a comment on social media or flirting with another supermarket shopper we find attractive.

Thus, the central assumption of classical economics – that economic decisions are exclusively valuation-based and our valuation is rational, self-interested, and motivated by the fulfillment of mostly unchanging or “static” preferences is incommensurable with all practical evidence. Instead, statistical studies on valuation – from pattern recognition to consumer willingness to pay – reveal numerous cognitive biases, socially normative quasi-logic, and emotion-charged social role fulfillment. In academic terms, valuation is “fast-thinking” most of the time and an untrained, uneducated, non-conditioned individual unaware of observation would act almost exclusively pre-consciously. The moment we recognize we are being judged or gain the capacity to compare several contradictory explanations, we are able to engage in slow-thinking. The most important element to remember, however, is that there are millions of decisions each adult makes per day, however small. The brain has limited available energy for this, and fast-thinking is its way of conserving that energy.

Valuation is social, political, and economic. A signifier – an object that gains our subjective attention and has a universalizing symbol (e.g. Dog, Tree, Hot) – is simultaneously valuable socioeconomically and sociopolitically. Under fast thinking, these three elements of valuation are simplistic and binary. The dog is socially dangerous or not, the dog is politically under control or not, the dog is owned or not. In the absence of threat (the dog is running toward me growling and barking) or triangulating objectification (that nice dog belongs to my friend Jill), fast-thinking is largely based on the binaries of ignore/react and repetition/difference. We prefer to ignore most signifiers, because decisions are expensive in aggregate. The most difficult fast-thinking to predict is fast-difference. Why did I freeze when I usually run? Why did I fight when I usually walk away? Such is the beginning much reflection.

In short, valuation is our ability to recognize an object and its primarily prejudicial worth to us as an individual. We repeat the act of buying eggs without looking at price at all so long as we feel secure in our purchase and walk down familiar hallways consumed by our smart phone to the extent we feel safe to ignore signals from our environment. Yet again, this can be anti-rational precisely because the failure to search for signals means we can no longer rationally determine that the signals are noise.

Signification is the sense-making component of socioeconomic judgment. Socioeconomic is meant philosophically here as any “relations with exchange” in the most abstract sense – a lion loose in a shopping mall is a socioeconomic problem to the extent it hopes to exchange its energy for a shopper’s flesh. The attainment of a mate and intercourse is an exchange of advertised socioeconomic value in displacement of genetic code as well the exchange and integration of the code itself. Thus, signification implies that we not only recognize the relative importance of a signal, but also recognize the need to decide a course of action from available options.

We can again separate this into fast-thinking and slow-thinking. While it may be inconvenient for the theoretical elegance of classical economics, we should not conclude that fast-thinking signification is implicitly dysfunctional or undesirable. Instead, there is a need to interrupt fast-thinking periodically for a reflective analysis under slow-thinking conditions. For example, a routine pattern of ensuring a child is fed, clothed, and arrives at school on-time can functionally rely on fast-thinking to achieve appropriate outcomes; the danger of anti-rational patterns of behavior lies in whether or not we stop to engage in slow-thinking re-valuation and take rational actions to correct pattern – Am I feeding them the right breakfast? Have they grown and I need to buy larger clothes? Is this school system serving my child’s needs? If not, have I advocated sufficiently for their needs, should I escalate, or will I need to consider relocating to another school district? Clearly, there is a balance required between fast-thinking repetition of decisions and slow-thinking analysis of pursuing a different repetition pattern.

During fast-thinking signification, we are likely to repeat the decisions of our past or the perceived normative actions others we have observed based on role and context. For instance, when our child asks about “how babies are made” we potentially have numerous mental schemas and roles that have unique normative decision patterns associated. In terms of mental schemas, there is a choice between information that we could provide and the information that is optimal to exchange. Too advanced scientific information or graphic historical narratives will not help our child, and we have normative beliefs about what is age appropriate and our role as Mother or Father in providing the correct information.

Under slow-thinking, signification can re-determine which mental schema and normative role to engage, forcing a critical re-valuation that may not only shift motivation toward a new chaos attractor, but could instigate a reactive, anti-rational decision. To continue the “sex talk” example, recalling the answer given and the possibility that the child has aged and not asked again, we may determine the necessity of engaging them to ensure updated and more appropriate information about health, personal well-being, and respect for others is communicated.

Putting them together, valuation-signification may each be fast or slow – in fast-fast, our valuation may dismiss noise and react only with a continued search for new signals, or quickly determine a threat and a fight-or-flight response with little rational (or outright anti-rational) consideration. In fast-slow, we may instantly prioritize a signifier as critically important, but think very hard about the best individual and socially normative course of action; even queuing ourselves for re-valuation at a later time. In slow-fast valuation-signification, our calculation of relative importance may take purposeful consideration after several missed or repressed signals, while our ultimate determination of significance and course action may be instantaneous and hyper-reactive, like an explosive emotional response to a phrase our partner has said many times but seemed unimportant each time considered individually. Finally, most optimism about human liberal progress is based on the potential for slow-slow valuation-signification and the assumption that enough education and equal access to information would result in common rational decisions about economics, politics, and the improvement of society.

Despite the number of variables at play when we map out the valuation-signification system as a linear single-player decision, the difficulty in reproducing this decision process in artificial intelligence or attempting to use predictive modeling for the competitive decisions of corporations lies in an even more important pattern of complex adaptive systems that we have only recently begun to research – what I frame as Continuous Experimentation. We do not have a tree-like hierarchical library of schemas, norms, and roles to peruse when we make decisions; instead there seems to be constant stirring of memories and impressions that may be contradictory, incorrect, or unimportant. This variation is a form of bounded chaos, ensuring that we try new actions or apply new interpretations often enough – despite short-run potential mistakes – to not miss a potential adaptation and suffer long-run consequences.

Due the bounded chaos of continuous experimentation, valuation-signification is not so simple as a two-by-two matrix – slow-thinking may surface many fast-thinking conclusions that we reject or displace decisions completely. We may likewise chase a long chain of observers in our analysis of forecasted consequences as a mix of fast-thinking and slow-thinking. For instance, changing jobs may impact the ability to finance college education, and a path mapping personal enjoyment of work is pitted against the paths of college education and lifetime well-being for the child based on the relatively higher or lower availability of parental savings. Long chains of predicated valuation-significations may then emerge, with multiple re-valuation, before a commitment of action is finally pursued: Signifier/fast-slow/slow-fast/fast-fast/slow-slow/Decision. Additional complexity likewise emerges from the problem of distraction – even when appropriately rational slow-slow valuation-signification is occurring, a signifier may interrupt with fast-fast redirection of attention – whether the original slow-slow decision process is resumed before a decision is made is unlikely to be perfectly likely.

In conclusion, we can only rationally decide to the extent we realize there is a choice. Not only should we search for examples of rebels, discontents, insanity, and failure that we may learn from, we must be willing to risk mistakes of our own – even thoroughly thought-through risks – or we are imprisoned by our own ignorance.

For those reading Continuous Experimentation, keep in mind that I intentionally captured youthful skeleton of my lifework with no formal research (though plenty of education and learning). The sources cited below represent the formal research I have recently begun.

Research Resources

Hoff, K., & Stiglitz, J. (2016, 6). Striving for balance in economics: Towards a theory of the social determination of behavior. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 126, 25-57.

Bosworth, S., Singer, T., & Snower, D. (2016, 6). Cooperation, motivation and social balance. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 126, 72-94.

Chater, N., & Loewenstein, G. (2016, 6). The under-appreciated drive for sense-making. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 126, 137-154.

Hoff, K., & Stiglitz, J. (2016, 6). Striving for balance in economics: Towards a theory of the social determination of behavior. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 126, 25-57.

Levy, D. (1994). Chaos Theory and Strategy: Theory, Application, and Managerial Implications. Strategic Management Journal, 15, 167-178.

 

 

Velocity, Acceleration, and “The Jolt”

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Lean-Agile owes a great deal to quantum physics, behavioral economics, and the Toyota Production System. It should not be surprising when our language about teams, programs, and value streams find themselves caught between the science of lean-agile and the metaphors of organic systems.

The metaphor side is crucial, because spoken language is processed by the emotional “side” of brain, while critical thinking and logic is processed by the cognitive “side” of the brain. Especially in a context of uncertainty and optimism toward innovation, the ability to inspire critical thinking through appeals to emotion and narrative becomes essential.

Lean-Agile Art & Science

The metaphors are easy to spot: release trains, delivery pipelines, product portfolios, architectural runways, branches, and streams. These are highly useful for an emotional connection of highly complex cognitive issues, because it is easier to imagine a tree, an airport, or a morning commute than it is to imagine vectors, superposition, and wave functions. The poetry of lean-agile is crucial to learning.

Simply: The art of transformation is the science of The Jolt.

The scientific language of lean-agile is also easy to find, because the burden of proof in any transformation effort is placed fairly and squarely on the shoulders of the system builder who wants to move from periodic marginal utility to long-run economic optimization.

The science begins rather simply. We move from Newtonian laws (hours, dollars, dates, and ROI) to Einstein and Quantum Physics (relative size, value creation, continuous delivery, and probability). Along the way we begin discussing velocity, process control, production systems, and acceleration.

There is a small problem, however. While the science of lean-agile relies on cognition and learning, one scientific construct lies in the realm of emotion and personality:

The Jolt.

The physics are not hard to summarize, but they tend to work for us only in hindsight, in a retrospective moment of privilege. Treated like a particle, a system with position and without momentum is a point. With momentum (mass that is in motion), it becomes a vector. We call the change in position over time velocity. When we want to guide the velocity to an improved velocity, we must act upon it from the outside to cause acceleration. Velocity is the derivative of position (a line). Acceleration is the derivative of velocity (a curve). The Jolt is the derivative of Acceleration, when an external force accelerates acceleration. Lean-Agile transformation is the art of causing The Jolt.

Transformation is the art of causing The Jolt.

While the science of Lean-Agile deals with velocity and acceleration, average completion and standard deviations, plotted on charts and easily analyzed using the Nelson Rules, probability theory, and behavioral economics, the art of transformation lies in cultivating a simultaneous Jolt for the enterprise as an engineered complex adaptive system of systems.

Like any of the great story-tellers of history, our Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Program Consultants, and Solution Train Engineers play an essential role in crafting the narrative that inspires changes in acceleration. Such narratives must restore the humanity of our workers, because the postmodern era has decentralized the alienation of labor – today more than ever, we alienate ourselves from our essence and its labor in ways no system ever could.

So the Art of The Jolt can take many strange forms, counter-intuitive to the development of a culture of innovation prior to its existence precisely because the naïve organization sees optimism, hope, and effort as simultaneously extrinsically and intrinsically rewarding. As philosopher Alain de Botton emphasizes, such optimism is the source of all rage in society. It should be no wonder that lean-agile efforts predicated upon optimism often die on the vine due to the rage of its sponsors.

Crisis, tragedy, alienation, loss, and pain are common among all of us. Confusion, separation, fear, and anxiety are integral to the human experience. Is it any wonder that the tendency of firms toward homogeneity (Oliver 1997) is simultaneously the alienation of all heterogeneous sentiment? Thus, to advance as a manager requires suppression of such feelings except as political economy, but to advance the transformation as a system of adaptive systems builder requires existential psychoanalysis, enough tragic story-telling, vulnerability, and authentic emotion to finally Jolt the rigidity of the system toward a new valence and equilibrium narrative (Hoff & Stiglitz).

How does The Jolt happen?

We visualize work based on totems, cards, and digital boxes meant to represent relative size. The weight of ideas we have not tested must be felt or we never develop the discipline to conclude. Information capital requires we shift the view of information inventory – there is immense cost to holding onto knowledge without market validation, even though traditional cost accounting cannot see or audit it. Again, metaphor prevails, because sticky notes are a totem for pain previously suppressed out of optimism – we may use imagery like rusting mechanical assembly parts and pieces in a warehouse due to overproduction and bullwhip effect. The critical Jolt is artistic and emotional, and it force the system to recognize how much cost and pain is being hidden on hard drives and cloud servers.

We can then trace lines of completion and progress, burn down charts and cumulative flow diagrams, to show that no matter how much pain we find in the world, our sanity is predicated on the rate at which we heal, not the rage with which we retaliate. We put on display our average rate of forgiveness, altruism, and cooperation, because the best way to alleviate individual selfishness is to treat family-system anxiety.

Next we fight for continuous funding, because learning is impossible in a state of anxiety. Well-formed teams create a support network for experimentation, the freedom to fail together, express our fears, take the time to understand and forgive the shortcomings of compatriots, and mourn our losses. The team must be large enough to make it clear that we are not alone in our pain and anxiety, but small enough that our relative exposure to new experiences can be felt personally despite the support of the group. So Retrospectives start as outward-blaming complaint sessions and do so with good reason – the supply-side person in pain has onto their rage at disappointed optimism and betrayal of promises with no demand-side action to listen systematically.

Retrospectives then mature over time, and the Scrum Master (or corollary role) must shift between therapist to the individual and therapist to the team. First is the need to convince each person’s pain and anxiety should not be alienating, but that it is human to feel lost and hopeless. Next is the process breaking apart intrinsic worth from external valuation – without anyone being responsible, the system and the individual arrive presenting symptoms of co-dependency. Then, the group is taught in isolation from their system how to forgive, relate, and reach out to others who are equally scared, anxious, and in need of help.

Only then can healthier mental schemas be taught – external forces that appear outside of our control can and should be mitigated and accounted for, every rule has exceptions and those processes are worked through to ensure adaptive behavior, functional “family”-system interaction, and long-run inter-personal resilience.

Finally, the team can harness the energy of the market, understanding that innovation is a process of solving for pains in better ways than before (Svare 2014). The discipline of stoicism and scientific method finally keeps optimism focused on learning to ask more intelligent questions rather than feeding the enterprise’s prototypical, pervasive, and ongoing gambling addiction, betting big on technical hype rather than sustainable growth.

Essential to all of this is the ability to tell personal stories of disappointed hope, fortune wiped away by mere chance, fear of loss, anxiety toward being good, strong, and brilliant enough not only for ourselves but for our network, families, and legacy. If we run out of stories of our own, of course, fiction has always been the best place to find the stories of tragedy we need in our times of greatest optimism and reciprocal anxiety – Oedipus, Socrates, Othello, Madame Bovary, and The Jungle, along with a slew of tragic film stories should give us more than enough stories when our failed products, projects, relationships, and companies leave our audience wanting more.

Conclusion

The art of transformation lies in The Jolt, one that must reverberate through every level of the system in the form of tragedy and emotional re-connection. It is only in such somber moments we can let down our walls enough to reflect, exposed to our own alienation and disappointment, about what we are part of, how little we have changed, and how slowly our hopes are achieved. Only then can the system as a whole take the decisive shift into a new stage of transformation economics.

Do not wait to tell your story – someone, somewhere, less strong, less courageous, or less willing to risk humiliation is out there, and they desperately need you to let them know that none of us are alone.

Sources Cited

Hoff, K., & Stiglitz, J. (2016, 6). Striving for balance in economics: Towards a theory of the social determination of behavior. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 126, 25-57.

Johnson, B., & Hernandez, A. (2016). Exploring Engineered Complex Adaptive Systems of Systems. Procedia Computer Science, 95, 58-65.

Oliver, C. (1997). Sustainable competitive advantage: combining institutional and resource-based views. Strategic Management Journal, 18(9), 697-713.

Svare, H. (2016, 6). User-Producer Dialogue, Workplace Innovation, and Knowledge in a Regional Innovation System. Journal of the Knowledge Economy, 7(2), 565-586.

Two Weeks’ Notice Manifesto

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This is My Manifesto

I have had a now-familiar conversation hundreds of times in my career in the software industry. A sharp, hard-working millennial – a developer, designer, consultant, or support engineer – is completely burned out. She sees no way to change her situation without starting over somewhere else and wants to personally let me know that she’s given her two weeks’ notice. The reasons are the similar to my own when I leave a job (or begin actively interviewing).

There is an over-arching struggle to find meaningful work, the ability to take pride in it, to feel that there is a purpose to what I do, and feel that there is a path toward mastery at something I can say “This is my art”.

“I’ll stand for nothing less, or never stand again.” – Chevelle

I have quit many jobs, with or without two full weeks of notice, been laid off twice, fired once (in college), and was kicked out of the Army – and I’m still early and what is a pretty successful career in technology. Since I’ve never even once written a letter of notice or resignation, I think it is about time I draft one.

More importantly, on behalf of talented Millennials everywhere, I’d like you to know – truly understand – that the two weeks’ notice we give you as a manager typically comes weeks or even months after we crafted our mental first draft, started accepting the relentless prospecting of talent scouts, and gave up on your ability to get out of way in our search for meaningful work, a purpose, and mastery of our craft.

So this is my universal – and truly honest – Two Weeks’ Notice, for every time I didn’t write one, and for the many times in my future I most likely also won’t write one. This is my Two Weeks’ Notice Manifesto, a public statement of what it takes to make me disengage despite my natural brilliance and indefatigable enthusiasm.

Money

You played hardball with my salary when I joined and have given me no path to increase it.

You are painfully arrogant – and ignorant – regarding my value in the open market.  It currently increases by 20% per year yet you think I will settle for a 5% raise (or no raise at all).

“Started from the bottom now we here.”

Proactive efforts on my part to establish clear expectations, a career path, and an informal timeline for promotion or salary increases are answered with vague notions of trust, respect, and reputation that have nothing to do with performance or the impact I have.

Most importantly, if I am giving you this notice, I have taken every opportunity available to add more economic value than you expected of me.  I have deliberately worked to increase the impact I have on value-add processes, organization-wide efficiency and effectiveness, revenue growth, and actionable metrics.  I can now see that I have exhausted my opportunities and my tangible impact on revenue and margin is now waning – removing all leverage and motivation on my part – and it is due to poor strategic decisions outside my control or that of peers.

I’m just tryna stay alive and take care of my people
And they don’t have no award for that […]
Shit don’t come with trophies, ain’t no envelopes to open
I just do it ’cause I’m ‘sposed to – Young Money, Drake

 

Growth

You treat my initial lack of understanding of the “nuance” of your backward, inefficient “processes” as some kind of failure or lack of intelligence on my part.

“A hater’s gonna hate, hate, hate, hate […] I’m just gonna shake it off.” – Taylor Swift

You provided no actual on-boarding, leaving me to my own volition to review artifacts, like some anthropologist, in an effort to mimic current practices.

You have truly valuable constructive criticism you could provide based on the decades of experience you have over me – but you prefer sarcasm, derisive rhetorical questions, and generally insult my intelligence.

You know that you – and the company – are terrible at on-boarding and that I am intelligent enough, educated enough, and experienced enough not to put up with it; so you give me preferential treatment to shut me up rather than investing in everyone.  And no, I do not take this as a sign I should stay, it is an indication that you have no plan for the future.

You have a general disbelief regarding the breadth and depth of my knowledge, skills, and experience – attempting to restrict me to the smallest possible scope of responsibilities.

Culture

You stomp out creativity and enthusiasm organization-wide but tell me not to “lose that energy”.

You are condescending and use sarcasm and deconstructionism when you do not understand my nomenclature or the vocabulary of my academic and career specialization.

 

You focus on short-term gains and their related vanity metrics (e.g. Project ROI) rather than the flow of long-term economic value

You have created a psychologically unsafe environment for the information worker, where most employees – the only employees who last – display symptoms of learned helplessness and defeat.

So I’m tearing this and everything else,
between me and what I want to do to pieces.
I’m tearing you and everything else,
between me and you to memory. – Nonpoint

Your “leadership” strips away all possible reward for prudent risk. Any feeling of accomplishment when someone takes real initiative to accomplish something meaningful in a novel way is more than negated by the likelihood of retroactive empowerment, personal insults, or deconstruction-based criticism.

Progress

You talk about “baby steps” in internal changes or excuse your inaction due to “lack of executive buy-in” to justify to yourself why you lack the discipline and initiative to change, innovate, or evolve.

“It could have been so much worse, but it should have been better”

– Five Finger Death Punch

You are stuck in old models of business and outdated practices despite the fact you would be a very late adopter of thoroughly proven best practices, no matter how many employees have attempted to convince you.

You fail to challenge me, heaping busy work on me instead.

You see my attempts to improve myself and my peers – in my pursuit of mastery in my craft and love of investment in my tribe – as a distraction that needs to be controlled rather than an opportunity to harness.

You assume my youth (and open-minded millennialism) generally decreases the value of my knowledge – despite the fact that the tech industry and its ever-evolving best demonstrated practices make my youth in advantage when

It’s not you, it’s me.

In light of these problems and a clear and consistent history of leadership anti-patterns, I can see that you will absolutely not change and will definitely make no effort to meaningfully address my concerns in any way. Unfortunately I have outgrown you. I am different and better than I was – smarter, stronger, more passionate and more creative than the day we met. I really do appreciate the rare moments of effort to invest in me as two humans at work, building something together. I have interesting stories tell. Some of my worst days and your worst behavior rank among the most beneficial insights I have gained – of who I will not be, of who I am, of what I will fight for.

It is time for me to move on.

This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill
Fifteen percent concentrated power of will
Five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain
And a hundred percent reason to remember the name!  – Fort Minor

 

Millennial Relativism vs Straight-Up Haters

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I’m a philosopher. Feel free to stop reading.

As a Millennial philosopher, I find myself rejected for the words I use – almost anywhere I go. This is not a lack of professionalism or knowledge. I have grown an incredibly strong professional filter and dampener, and the ability to show immense respect.  My words are precisely selected as I consult to Boomers who may never understand the depth or breadth my soul has – and will – reach.

And I, despite genius, despite my creative demon, find another scenario all-to-often.  My intricate ideas, in a moment of enthusiasm, come out in a moment of conversation with a complete hater.  They take a whiz on my cheerios, frankly.  But the joke is on them.  I’m invincible to being misunderstood in the complexity of my ideas, I practically opted in!

To be great, is to be misunderstood.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance

So really, I am completely at peace with the straight-up haters; and you should be too.

Because, cultural, there is a big difference between my philosophical relativisim and whatever it is that makes people commit to one view and reject every word that fails to serve their affirmation bias.

I probably lost another 3% of readers at “affirmation bias” – have a good day though, really.

Blessed are the shallow, for the depths they’ll never find.

Now I don’t mean a blanket moral approval of everything I see, especially misconduct that is counter to established social contracts (and don’t challenge needed half-truths). I’m not talking about The Purge in real life, gone wild.

I’m talking about the kind of cultural relativism that has to take place when someone from one generation and industry and function and corporate culture meets someone from a vastly different generation and industry and function and corporate culture. I’m talking about the conversations a Boomer manufacturing operations manager has with a Millennial lean-agile mobile architect.

It is so much easier to give up, and I admit that I’m not always sure, when I’m already a disruptive influence, what to do in that grey area between psychological safety and a meaningful challenge. That’s the nature of telling people 30 years older than me how they should change the way they do their job in order to stay relevant in the information age.

The haters, on the other hand, are diametrically opposed to all relativism.

It really isn’t about morality or politics if you really watch them (and I, as a philosopher, dutifully watch them no matter what ludicrous things they dish out) – if you really watch them, there is no “stance” they are taking. No ability to excuse them for what they believe in with total nobility.

The hater engages you in deconstructionism by default. They undermine your understanding of your own words, they play stump-the-chump, they make sure – however more intelligent, educated, or experienced on a topic – that they can make you feel like shit.

These haters don’t really believe in something and offend your beliefs because the two belief systems disagree. These are the people who start with saying they don’t share your beliefs, then tell you that you’re actually terrible at your beliefs, or education, or profession.

These haters are the people who will mess with you just to see if they can, who are incapable of understanding anyone above their level. You could feel a great deal of pity for them, in fact. They are pathetic, constantly happy people. But don’t do that. Hilariously enough, if you stick around a few weeks, with the strength to show them patience they’ll never accomplish – they’ll start spouting off your words! and not even now they ought thank you. What sad state of continuous dependency to be in. But – As Nietzsche said, “There’s enough pity in the world to choke anyone that feels it all.” Shake it off. Cuz haters gonna hate. They’re absolutely jealous – and terrified – of us.

Frankly, my mother was right.

You have to just ignore them.

On the other hand, empathy, dialogue, and an open mind will get you a long way – despite the culture shock – when you’re grappling ideas with people who care deeply about their craft and simply don’t understand the nuances of your craft. If you are like me, whether it’s just a postmodern millennial trait, or part of the tech industry in the digital age, you’ll see this quite a bit for the next few decade. Retirement age is going up, and most people aren’t keeping up.

They built their careers – their lives – around being taken seriously about just one thing. For them, a challenge to that one thing will be a disaster. They feel terrified they’ll never be taken seriously again.

Unfortunately, they’re right.

You don’t need to carry them as a free rider, but if you’re like me you probably weren’t sticking around long enough to let them do it anyway. Most companies, from my experience, aren’t changing much of anything – certainly not enough to hurt those out of touch Boomers, but – sadly – definitely not enough to make work meaningful for Millennials like us, who just want to leave the world better than it the way it is getting handed to us.

So you and I, as the vibrant, multifaceted, postmodern, global and digital millennial innovators – we must give them our care and patience, and truly listen. They may benefit while we gain nothing in the short term (at times), but we gain enormous insight in the process of we will do differently with the future.

Do Project Tasks go in a Scrum Product Backlog?

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I get this question frequently when training agile and scrum teams:

Do Project Tasks Belong in a Scrum Product Backlog?

YES.

Since answers to this question I have seen in chatrooms are typically insufficiently argued as part of a crazed political debate full of comments taken out of context, this very pragmatic question deserves a bigger picture answer – because the need to ask the question is a symptom of a stagnating transformation.

A successful shift from stage-gate or waterfall development processes to agile, Scrum, or Kanban requires a fundamental change organization-wide: from maximizing ROI and shareholder value to maximizing Economic Value Creation and sustainable competitive advantage. If this shift does not occur, the improvements gained from agile practices will inevitably stagnate.

Jez Humble refers to this state as Water-Scrum-Fall, that unfortunate state where most agile and DevOps initiatives plateau.

Most often when I talk to development teams, Product Owners, and ScrumMasters, this is often blamed on a lack of executive buy-in.

I completely disagree.  

I have also blamed a manager or two for the imperfections in the agility of a company, so I can relate to this view. To show you why you might not even want executive sponsorship, let’s revisit the view of a corporation as a minimum viable superorganism.

Complex Adaptive Systems Leadership

A corporation is not a machine with various parts to replace or maintain in isolation, it is a superorganism. It is a biological phenomenon that is not sufficiently explained by social contract theory or through monetary theories of motivation. Judgments about this reality are very easily clouded. Unfortunately, once measurement and monetary incentives change the natural behavior of the superorganism, it is difficult to change back – making it easy to fallaciously claim this as proof of their effectiveness.

Quantum physicists have suggested that undisturbed systems in the universe naturally stay in multiple states simultaneously, unless someone intervenes with a measurement device. Then all states collapse, except the one being measured. Perhaps what you measure is what you get. More likely, what you measure is all you get. What you don’t (or can’t) measure is lost.  – H. T. Johnson, “Lean Dilemma”

So when you hear “We need more buy-in from management” this is absolutely incorrect.  It is even counter-productive!  Adaptations by a complex system, that disruptive creativity and innovation agile champions desire, can only occur through organic, emergent leadership – a tribal, heretical rebellion. Adaption to a new stimulus may have a focal point, a “leader” who organically builds up energy in a new direction – but this leadership is an emergent property the complex system. In contrast, formal leadership (“management”) is a crystallization of a complex system, an attempt to reinforce a desired “normal state” – a force that exists counter to emergent leadership and adaptation. By default, formal leaders at all levels of an organism are incented (through power, money, and Agency Dilemma) to maintain homeostasis – i.e. the status quo. Even if a formal leader becomes the emergent leader of adaptation, this will be odds with her formal leadership. Unless she is willing to risk the loss of formal leadership, she will dissolve her capacity for emergent leadership and resume promotion of homeostasis – no matter how much it dampens creativity, innovation, and sustainable competitive advantage.

Evolution of a superorganism through disruption – whether a lean or digital or agile “transformation” – cannot occur if any one piece of the system is optimized in isolation from the whole because any superorganism, as a complex adaptive system, will exert tremendous energy to maintain homeostasis. The larger the superorganism, the more likely that optimization of one function or team will result in a net loss of desired adaptation (whether the desirable “adaptation” is called innovation, process improvement, or “growth”).

So, when a formal leader blesses a piloting of lean and agile practices by a completely isolated team, this is the superorganism equivalent of a mother’s amniotic sac – the team can establish itself as a unique complex adaptive system while in isolation, fed by the resources of the maternal superorganism but shielded from the homeostatic processes of the parent system. The moment this new team is re-integrated into the larger system, continued adaptation is unlikely. The company attempts to spread the innovation and creativity culture they achieved but instead can only formalize a shift in a subset of practices.  These practice, outside the context of psychological safety, a well-formed collaborative team, flop. No single activity of the pilot team will have the same value implemented outside the context of the pilot team’s “bubble” that safeguarded it against the homeostatic forces of the superorganism!

But wait – what about that “net loss” in innovation, creativity, and efficiency I claimed?

In practice, a company that adopts an agile process (let’s say Scrum) as a change in behaviors isolated to the teams developing software causes the rest of the system to expend energy maintaining homeostasis, and even more energy wasted by agents accommodating these homeostatic forces so that the development teams can preserve their no-longer organic place in the system.

I think you know exactly what that looks like:

  1. Updating documentation processes without seeing them as “artifacts” that emerge from an adaptive process rather than social contracts that require formal sign-off.
  2. Replacing one tool with another, causing a new set of employee workarounds to occur.
  3. Increasing frequency of software releases without changing the size of organization commitments.
  4. New meeting names that don’t change communication patterns or the homeostatic, status quo, “normal” flow of information.
  5. Continuous backlog decomposition as a manual transfer of a large-batch investment into small-batch development items.
  6. Oops! Another manual transfer at the end –  of small batch engineering back into large-batch approval processes.
  7. Changing job titles without addressing diffusion of responsibility and the lack of psychological safety inherent in the culture of the system.
  8. More overhead and forced “transparency” than if nothing had changed, through extra meetings, reports, metrics, and analysis, due to the natural distrust between formal leadership and emergent leadership, and the lack of trust in information flow between the homeostatic processes and the aberrant nomenclature of the development teams.

In the middle of all this, a large organization grabs their Project Managers and their Business Analysts, or anyone cheap who is around and doesn’t have the “status” a Product Manager, Director, or VP, and switches around their responsibilities to call them “Product Owners” and “Scrum Masters”.

What a debacle.

The newly-minted Product Owner receives Project Plans full of important tasks and milestones and big nasty Use Case document and an even bigger, unapproachable set of Technical Specifications – and is told to manage what the team delivers with User Stories.

Now in the midst of all this, should the Product Owner include Project Tasks in the Product Backlog?  Or to get down to brass tacks, could a task ever be a Product Backlog Items?

Absolutely!

But not all of them.

Some “Technical” Tasks (specifically not User Stories) are still Product Backlog Items

Technical tasks that create demonstrable economic value that the organization can capture, a known cost of delay, but are completely invisible to the user STILL NEED TO BE PRIORITIZED relative to other potential Product Backlog Items.

This, of course, is why the question of if these belong in the backlog is sign that a systemic shift in thinking has not occurred. If you are optimizing for project ROI, then these tasks just don’t have the marketable, monetizable potential of each Use Case. If you have a systems view of optimizing the flow of economic value creation, these tasks are judged relative to any other potential investment. Economic investment is continuous, the economic value created can be judged continuously, delivery and value capture is continuous, and you can prioritize based Weighted Shortest Job First or another collaborative decision making process about the of Cost of Delay.

“Artifact” Tasks are an Agile Anti-Pattern

There is, however, another kind of project task in Water-Scrum-Fall that SHOULD NOT be in any development team’s backlog: artifact tasks. These are things like “Complete wireframe for new home page” and “Document Social Integration for PokemonGo”. No matter how you small-batch these tasks, these are not Product Backlog Items. These are not even artifacts. Artifacts are the tangible leftovers of the creativity and innovation of a strong agile software team. A documentation, design, or planning task is antithetical to economic value flow. It is a trap. A box you put your money in and bury. It takes all the value-add, throws it in a pile, and lets it sit there, unused, as it become gradually less valuable.

This mini-waterfall process – this outrageous, lean-agile anti-pattern – surfaces in three ways, all of which I whole-heartedly reject and will actively undermine the capacity of others to pursue it in hopes that my heretical tribal rebelliousness will gain emergent leadership support:

  1. Business Kanban and Program Increment Planning tasks that lock up all creativity and innovation prior to the development team passively receiving instructions (as you see in shoddy implementations of the Scaled Agile Framework)? FAIL! TRY AGAIN!
  2. Tasks for non-developer “members” of the development teams completed as Sprint Backlog Items separate from the User Stories, thereby formally dividing cross-functional collaboration and preserving us-them Guilds (whether in dual-track Scrum or within even the shortest sprint)? FAIL! TRY AGAIN!
  3. Sub-tasks that formally divide up User Stories into function-specific tasks to complete? FAIL! TRY AGAIN!

These are all agile anti-patterns that prioritize tools, social contracts, and “process” over collaboration, communication, relationships, and creativity. You will never disrupt your organization, and your organization will never disrupt your industry, sorry.

“Milestone” Tasks are a Continuous Delivery Anti-Pattern

Since we started this asking if the BA / PM as PO ought to put Project Plan tasks into the Scrum Product Backlog, I’d hate to leave out “milestones”. Now you may say, “Andrew, that’s ridiculous, no one would treat a dependency as Product Backlog Item!” Indeed, ridiculous. But that’s the ultimate sign of your Continuous Delivery anti-pattern. Truly optimizing the flow of economic value creation across the entire complex adaptive system would completely remove “milestones” and “dependencies”. If you can’t get rid of Project Plans completely, and continuously deliver and validate Finished Story Benefits for ALL work that the organization takes from identified pain to economic value capture, whatever you started pursuing in your agile, or digital, or lean, or devops transformation, you’ve plateaued as a company.

And this is the really the paradox that made the lengthy description of complex adaptive systems leadership necessary. This hurdle is NOT something that “Needs executive buy-in.” This is something that is accomplished through outright insurgency, tribal heresy, and fait accompli rebellion.

That’s because Continuous Delivery takes more than agile ceremonies and user stories. It takes developers who are proud of knowing business context. It takes refactoring that no one approved. It takes a team move to Git from Subversion without telling anyone. It takes a handful of people setting up a Continuous Integration server no matter how often the nay-sayers tell them it’s useless. Continuous Delivery is a change in engineering practices and development culture that tend to happen without formal leaders needing to approve anything.

It just takes the right people having enough pride in being BETTER that they draw a line in the sand and defiantly announce “THIS IS OUR CRAFT!”

A Heartfelt Epilogue: Real Creativity, Innovation, and Disruption is MESSY

Now listen, human-to-human, if all you know about “agile” comes from that one book you read, YouTube, or a two-day certification, I won’t be surprised you’re thinking, “Wait, Andrew, that’s nothing like agile! How do I report you! How do I get you stripped of all your certifications?” That’s great. That reaction means I hit a nerve. Fantastic! Contact me and let’s talk about taking agility to the next level.

Truth is, I don’t look to my four certifications, five training course, three conference, my blog, OR EVEN my five years of attending, speaking at, and hosting MeetUp’s on agile as the proof of my legitimacy on these topics. I measure my expertise in the number of experiments, including the major failures I have been through with my development teams. The reason is simple: complex adaptive system leadership is an emergent property that require deep entanglement and shared experiences in the trenches. And, as it turns out, I’ve been in the thick of every kind of good or bad lean or agile possibility, trained people in that context, debated ferociously about it in multiple companies, and I have compromised my values or experimented with teams to directly challenge every single principle your little YouTube summary glossed over.

If at this point you think some teacher let me down and it’s a real shame, I’ll be happy to give you a recommended reading list and YouTube list and introduce you personally to other thought leaders that dive, like I just did, into the MUD of how you actually achieve: creative innovation, strategic and operational agility, and lean, continuous delivery of disruptive economic value.

Either way, reach out so real dialogue can get started.