[Music]
I’m a mapmaker I’m mapping out an Advent
for 47 years so it’s more than 40
mapping the dynamics and structure of
adaptive power and intelligence and
human systems that’s kind of highfalutin
basically what it means is that we’re
trying to understand how individuals
learn how primary groups learn or people
who know each other well and can support
each other and speak frankly to each
other and tolerate each other’s
idiosyncrasies how how they learn
together how organizations learn how
communities learn how societies learn
how civil ization learns and how our
species learns one of the hugely
limiting ways we approach learning is to
focus only on individuals reality is you
can’t understand what individuals can
learn without understanding what a
civilization has learned and how that
learning has been encoded and embodied
in the cultural resources and assets
that are then made available to
individuals to access and of course what
kind of cultural resource and access
capacities have been developed in human
beings so that they’re able to search
out and discern those cultural resources
and assets that are worth paying
attention to and learning from now the
only way that human beings or any
life-form can learn is by attending to
signals or to feedback that indicate
that there’s something important to be
attended to here there’s a lesson
embedded in your being in a particular
place in the circumstance and the path
that you’ve been on and the challenges
that are coming at you now the there are
so many different aspects to the
challenge of separating out signals from
noise and understanding that it’s not so
much the separating out of signals it’s
the capacity for understanding what
something
and then we talk about signals and noise
essentially what we’re talking about is
the difference between things that are
meaningful and things that are not yet
meaningful that’s the noise part there
are mathematical and physical ways
amplifying signals so that you can
discern signals that would otherwise be
very dim noise through a very simple
process of signal averaging the noise if
it is really random cancels itself out
whereas the signal will amplify itself
becomes visible within a simple physical
way all it takes is about 12 passes and
you can see this signal really clearly
but that’s not the kind of signal I
think that is really important for human
learning that’s really important for
some technical aspects of learning but
more importantly is that we need to
understand what makes something
meaningful and how do we identify that
meaning and how do we search it out and
what’s the difference between things
that are meaningful or full of meaning
and things that are meaningless or
simply have less meaning attached to
them and that story takes some
investigation but essentially the story
of meaning and meaning making is the
same for all life and that is it’s
fundamentally connected to what life
does and that is to match capacities to
the challenges that exist in the nature
habitat so that learning which is
fundamentally this process of matching
capacity to the challenges in the
environment is characteristic of all
life and things will be more or less
meaningful depending on whether or not
the match that is being created by the
species by the individual by the
civilization by the organization it
doesn’t match the most significant
adaptive challenges in the environment
that’s the critical task that word
adaptive comes from compound Latin words
add which means to and have para which
means to fit when something is adapting
your
matching something to something capacity
to challenge and you could spend a long
time investigating how that process
unfolds and the difference between
genetic processes that create and match
between not just genes but the whole
gene scape that is to say the whole
species and the action scape or the
lesion habitat in which that species is
making its way so life is a lot more
complicated in terms of genetic learning
and programming than we typically make
out then there’s the kind of learning
that happens for animals with enough
sophistication that can support
individual learning where as a result of
your life experience your drawing
lessons out as best you can and then
trying to apply those lessons in your
life situation and that can work well or
it can work really badly because that’s
the source of a great many neuroses and
psychoses and poor behavior learning
from experience isn’t necessarily an
adaptive thing you’re adapting to
something but what we’re adapting to can
often be very narrow and not
well-founded and there’s a kind of
learning that happens just by virtue of
living in a culture and environment
where were programmed unconsciously as a
result of engaging with a civilization
or a society most learning happens
subconsciously we’re not aware that it’s
happening but it’s there and it isn’t
necessarily adaptive either in fact one
of the great lessons of history is that
most civilizations have failed they
collapse at some point our civilization
is getting very close to collapsing
we’re on to breakdown paths and we
cannot maintain our existing
civilization on its current trajectory
it will collapse there’s no other way
for unless we change course that’s a
subject for another TED talk but it’s a
really important aspect of signals and
noise if you cannot discern a
potentially fatal signal in the context
and your capacity for intelligent
decision-making in action
is obviously very constrained I just
want to share a couple of aspects of the
learning process that makes the business
of learning a bit more noisy than one
might assume that could be that is to
say makes it difficult for us to develop
the feedback loops that are essential
for understanding what to pay attention
to one of the things that is very
fundamentally important you’ve all heard
the expression line I’m sure knowledge
is power and this is something you’re
asking especially in a school context
when we’re trying to get kids to acquire
more knowledge we can test them on and
then they can forget it move on to other
things before but I work for the County
Board of Education running a research
and development team from 1970 to 1983
where my hunting license was to figure
out how do we equip kids with a capacity
for a responsible autonomy to equip them
for the ability to direct their own life
learning beyond the boundaries of
Convention where you couldn’t rely on
routine to tell you what to do and how
to do it and in order to begin that
process of designing pilot programs and
collect the research we need to
understand more about how human beings
develop the capacity to do things that
had never been done before where they
cannot rely on external direction of
control that led to a search across
different fields of endeavor we started
with a military strategy and field
command and with civil engineering
difference between military engineering
and civil engineering is that civil
engineering happens in a non-military
context we’ve got military or
non-military that’s essentially but when
you’re building something that is brand
new and you can’t go on precedent you
don’t know what the failure dynamics is
going to be for that bridge or that
pillar or that strut how do you know how
do you figure out how it’s likely to
fail and how do you keep it from failing
so there’s if you if you line up
military strategy with engineering and
then with entrepreneurial business and
then with epidemiology and disease
prevention and then a variety of other
fields in endeavor you can start to see
the patterns consistency across the
fields of endeavor you can see the
characteristics of adaptive power
intelligence coming to be very clearly
unfortunately the story isn’t simple
because the structure of adaptive
foreign intelligence looks something
like that there’s at least six
dimensions to it or five dimensions and
an integrative process but I’ll list
them off just basically and then explain
a simple implication of this one of the
dimensions is of course the intelligence
dimension your capacity for sensing
detecting interpreting projecting
external context and internal context
and environment and where things make
might be head the intelligence dimension
is where we have the community our
knowledge so sense detect interpret and
project so it’s not just about detecting
that there’s a signal there the
important thing is how do you interpret
the signal and the reality is that the
signal interpretation is going to be a
product of how much you’ve accumulated
to that point in your capacity to
interpret whatever is you’ve seen you
can’t separate out the interpretive
capacities of individuals and the
signals that they’re surrounded with the
reality is that our civilization is
awash with signals that there are very
few people who are prepared to actually
interpret and this is a huge problem and
it always also created a society where
the disciplines required for accurate
interpretation of signals are
undervalued and we’re living in a time
when there’s a kind of rampant
subjectivity or postmodern approach to
development of understanding where
everyone gets to choose to their own
realities so the alternative facts
you’ve seen a lot but that intelligence
dimension is critically important but
it’s not the only dimension you have to
have an operational dimension having all
the intelligence in the world doesn’t do
any good if you can’t do anything with
it then you have to have an intention
dimension intention dimension is your
capacity to create situational purposes
and objectives based on your
intelligence and your operational
capability but that has to be then tied
to an authorization ‘old amend where
your situational and tensions are part
of the bigger picture all of you have to
have some high level of oversight to be
able to figure out how to get home
tonight as you have an immediate
situation that you’re in here that is
you’re taking in and you’re operating on
the basis of an intention to be here but
that that intention is part of the whole
constellation of intentions that make up
your life journey at this point and that
that’s part of your authorization but
there’s one dimension above that and
that’s the transcendent dimension which
doesn’t necessarily mean religion
although religion is reaching for this
dimension that transcendent dimension is
the dimension of autonomous power that
connects the entity or the agency to the
broader context of creation and cosmos
whatever it is out there in the universe
that made it possible for us to be here
I’m often asked in our programs do you
believe in God and my answer is always
the same
if you mean God the Creator No if you
mean God the creating yes God the
creating is different because I don’t
have to completely eliminate my critical
thinking capacity to believe that
there’s something about the universe
that makes life and intelligence
possible that’s empirical we’re here we
can see that
our challenge might challenge our
challenge is to try to figure out what
this god that creating is up to and how
can we be helpful and less destructive
that’s our challenge and that you meet
then a adaptive learning capacity to be
able to integrate these different
dimensions together effectively now
here’s a simple application if you
provide for young people all the
necessary direction to do something all
the necessary skill culture discipline
all the necessary resources to do
something and all of the necessary
motivation to do it what’s left for them
what’s left for them nothing but the
doing and having done they will not have
learned how to do so this is what we
focused on for the 13 years I was
engaged with the county board trying to
figure out the core of agency what is it
that equips your own beings to take
responsibility for their own life
learning and for their own processes of
becoming as a human being it’s more
appropriately to think of ourselves as
not just human being but human becoming
x’ because humanity is not a finished
product we are work in progress and
we’re a long way from being anything
like a finished product but it’s
critically important that we understand
something about how we have been
searching and reaching for our potential
as a species and to learn the lessons
what’s worked what hasn’t worked very
well I want to just offer one more quick
perspective consciousness is like the
beam of a flashlight it’s focused we
can’t take in everything at once we have
to swing our attention around to
different parts that can burn and
there’s always more going on inside and
outside then we could possibly pay
attention to this should raise some
immediate questions in your mind how do
we know that we’re paying attention to
the most significant things the answer
is because our culture and programming
tells us what we should be paying
attention to in different circumstances
and that we all have this operational
level of attention sort of a first-order
oversight and control but there is a
higher-order oversight and control
that’s attending to our first-order
oversight and control that tells us that
this is what we should be paying
attention to this is how long we should
be paying attention to this is how much
of our life resources we should be
putting into it
this is why it’s important here’s who
you should take into account when you’re
doing these things and here’s who you
can forget and here’s who you might
think about having to kill or that they
might have you know want to be killing
you all of that is kind of tied up in
this level of oversight and control now
when you start actually digging into the
structure of these higher levels of
oversight and control it’s our lack of
understanding of how to structure these
higher levels of oversight and control
that creates most of the problems that
we encounter in the world this is what’s
behind the Manchester bombings is
abominable Isis it’s been beyond
President Donald Trump it’s it’s behind
our climate denial or inability to
acknowledge that we are changing the
climate it’s the way we construct and
verify that we are attending to the
right things and the logic that we’re
using to determine whether or not we’re
doing that well is all tied up and the
disciplines in the process is here we
can investigate those and we’ve been
doing that now for us about 47 years
what does this actually look like and
then we realize that we actually need
one higher order of oversight and
control it’s not an infinite regress
it’s not like a Hall of Mirrors
where it just keeps going because each
order is doing something different and
it’s informed by different disciplines
so that what we need to be attending to
in terms of the signals is to ask the
questions we roar with searching for
something that’s meaningful the most
meaningful thing in my view from a human
learning ecology perspective is how to
construct this third order oversight and
control in such a way that it provides
us with a capacity for detection and
Prevention or detection correction
anticipation prevention of ignorance and
error that causes most of the way
suffering and injustice
in the world this is doable but only if
we look you will not find the signals if
you’re not looking you will not
understand them if you’re not equipped
to understand and I’m seven six five
four three two I see the signal
[Applause]
I’m a mapmaker I’m mapping out an Advent
for 47 years so it’s more than 40
mapping the dynamics and structure of
adaptive power and intelligence and
human systems that’s kind of highfalutin
basically what it means is that we’re
trying to understand how individuals
learn how primary groups learn or people
who know each other well and can support
each other and speak frankly to each
other and tolerate each other’s
idiosyncrasies how how they learn
together how organizations learn how
communities learn how societies learn
how civil ization learns and how our
species learns one of the hugely
limiting ways we approach learning is to
focus only on individuals reality is you
can’t understand what individuals can
learn without understanding what a
civilization has learned and how that
learning has been encoded and embodied
in the cultural resources and assets
that are then made available to
individuals to access and of course what
kind of cultural resource and access
capacities have been developed in human
beings so that they’re able to search
out and discern those cultural resources
and assets that are worth paying
attention to and learning from now the
only way that human beings or any
life-form can learn is by attending to
signals or to feedback that indicate
that there’s something important to be
attended to here there’s a lesson
embedded in your being in a particular
place in the circumstance and the path
that you’ve been on and the challenges
that are coming at you now the there are
so many different aspects to the
challenge of separating out signals from
noise and understanding that it’s not so
much the separating out of signals it’s
the capacity for understanding what
something
and then we talk about signals and noise
essentially what we’re talking about is
the difference between things that are
meaningful and things that are not yet
meaningful that’s the noise part there
are mathematical and physical ways
amplifying signals so that you can
discern signals that would otherwise be
very dim noise through a very simple
process of signal averaging the noise if
it is really random cancels itself out
whereas the signal will amplify itself
becomes visible within a simple physical
way all it takes is about 12 passes and
you can see this signal really clearly
but that’s not the kind of signal I
think that is really important for human
learning that’s really important for
some technical aspects of learning but
more importantly is that we need to
understand what makes something
meaningful and how do we identify that
meaning and how do we search it out and
what’s the difference between things
that are meaningful or full of meaning
and things that are meaningless or
simply have less meaning attached to
them and that story takes some
investigation but essentially the story
of meaning and meaning making is the
same for all life and that is it’s
fundamentally connected to what life
does and that is to match capacities to
the challenges that exist in the nature
habitat so that learning which is
fundamentally this process of matching
capacity to the challenges in the
environment is characteristic of all
life and things will be more or less
meaningful depending on whether or not
the match that is being created by the
species by the individual by the
civilization by the organization it
doesn’t match the most significant
adaptive challenges in the environment
that’s the critical task that word
adaptive comes from compound Latin words
add which means to and have para which
means to fit when something is adapting
your
matching something to something capacity
to challenge and you could spend a long
time investigating how that process
unfolds and the difference between
genetic processes that create and match
between not just genes but the whole
gene scape that is to say the whole
species and the action scape or the
lesion habitat in which that species is
making its way so life is a lot more
complicated in terms of genetic learning
and programming than we typically make
out then there’s the kind of learning
that happens for animals with enough
sophistication that can support
individual learning where as a result of
your life experience your drawing
lessons out as best you can and then
trying to apply those lessons in your
life situation and that can work well or
it can work really badly because that’s
the source of a great many neuroses and
psychoses and poor behavior learning
from experience isn’t necessarily an
adaptive thing you’re adapting to
something but what we’re adapting to can
often be very narrow and not
well-founded and there’s a kind of
learning that happens just by virtue of
living in a culture and environment
where were programmed unconsciously as a
result of engaging with a civilization
or a society most learning happens
subconsciously we’re not aware that it’s
happening but it’s there and it isn’t
necessarily adaptive either in fact one
of the great lessons of history is that
most civilizations have failed they
collapse at some point our civilization
is getting very close to collapsing
we’re on to breakdown paths and we
cannot maintain our existing
civilization on its current trajectory
it will collapse there’s no other way
for unless we change course that’s a
subject for another TED talk but it’s a
really important aspect of signals and
noise if you cannot discern a
potentially fatal signal in the context
and your capacity for intelligent
decision-making in action
is obviously very constrained I just
want to share a couple of aspects of the
learning process that makes the business
of learning a bit more noisy than one
might assume that could be that is to
say makes it difficult for us to develop
the feedback loops that are essential
for understanding what to pay attention
to one of the things that is very
fundamentally important you’ve all heard
the expression line I’m sure knowledge
is power and this is something you’re
asking especially in a school context
when we’re trying to get kids to acquire
more knowledge we can test them on and
then they can forget it move on to other
things before but I work for the County
Board of Education running a research
and development team from 1970 to 1983
where my hunting license was to figure
out how do we equip kids with a capacity
for a responsible autonomy to equip them
for the ability to direct their own life
learning beyond the boundaries of
Convention where you couldn’t rely on
routine to tell you what to do and how
to do it and in order to begin that
process of designing pilot programs and
collect the research we need to
understand more about how human beings
develop the capacity to do things that
had never been done before where they
cannot rely on external direction of
control that led to a search across
different fields of endeavor we started
with a military strategy and field
command and with civil engineering
difference between military engineering
and civil engineering is that civil
engineering happens in a non-military
context we’ve got military or
non-military that’s essentially but when
you’re building something that is brand
new and you can’t go on precedent you
don’t know what the failure dynamics is
going to be for that bridge or that
pillar or that strut how do you know how
do you figure out how it’s likely to
fail and how do you keep it from failing
so there’s if you if you line up
military strategy with engineering and
then with entrepreneurial business and
then with epidemiology and disease
prevention and then a variety of other
fields in endeavor you can start to see
the patterns consistency across the
fields of endeavor you can see the
characteristics of adaptive power
intelligence coming to be very clearly
unfortunately the story isn’t simple
because the structure of adaptive
foreign intelligence looks something
like that there’s at least six
dimensions to it or five dimensions and
an integrative process but I’ll list
them off just basically and then explain
a simple implication of this one of the
dimensions is of course the intelligence
dimension your capacity for sensing
detecting interpreting projecting
external context and internal context
and environment and where things make
might be head the intelligence dimension
is where we have the community our
knowledge so sense detect interpret and
project so it’s not just about detecting
that there’s a signal there the
important thing is how do you interpret
the signal and the reality is that the
signal interpretation is going to be a
product of how much you’ve accumulated
to that point in your capacity to
interpret whatever is you’ve seen you
can’t separate out the interpretive
capacities of individuals and the
signals that they’re surrounded with the
reality is that our civilization is
awash with signals that there are very
few people who are prepared to actually
interpret and this is a huge problem and
it always also created a society where
the disciplines required for accurate
interpretation of signals are
undervalued and we’re living in a time
when there’s a kind of rampant
subjectivity or postmodern approach to
development of understanding where
everyone gets to choose to their own
realities so the alternative facts
you’ve seen a lot but that intelligence
dimension is critically important but
it’s not the only dimension you have to
have an operational dimension having all
the intelligence in the world doesn’t do
any good if you can’t do anything with
it then you have to have an intention
dimension intention dimension is your
capacity to create situational purposes
and objectives based on your
intelligence and your operational
capability but that has to be then tied
to an authorization ‘old amend where
your situational and tensions are part
of the bigger picture all of you have to
have some high level of oversight to be
able to figure out how to get home
tonight as you have an immediate
situation that you’re in here that is
you’re taking in and you’re operating on
the basis of an intention to be here but
that that intention is part of the whole
constellation of intentions that make up
your life journey at this point and that
that’s part of your authorization but
there’s one dimension above that and
that’s the transcendent dimension which
doesn’t necessarily mean religion
although religion is reaching for this
dimension that transcendent dimension is
the dimension of autonomous power that
connects the entity or the agency to the
broader context of creation and cosmos
whatever it is out there in the universe
that made it possible for us to be here
I’m often asked in our programs do you
believe in God and my answer is always
the same
if you mean God the Creator No if you
mean God the creating yes God the
creating is different because I don’t
have to completely eliminate my critical
thinking capacity to believe that
there’s something about the universe
that makes life and intelligence
possible that’s empirical we’re here we
can see that
our challenge might challenge our
challenge is to try to figure out what
this god that creating is up to and how
can we be helpful and less destructive
that’s our challenge and that you meet
then a adaptive learning capacity to be
able to integrate these different
dimensions together effectively now
here’s a simple application if you
provide for young people all the
necessary direction to do something all
the necessary skill culture discipline
all the necessary resources to do
something and all of the necessary
motivation to do it what’s left for them
what’s left for them nothing but the
doing and having done they will not have
learned how to do so this is what we
focused on for the 13 years I was
engaged with the county board trying to
figure out the core of agency what is it
that equips your own beings to take
responsibility for their own life
learning and for their own processes of
becoming as a human being it’s more
appropriately to think of ourselves as
not just human being but human becoming
x’ because humanity is not a finished
product we are work in progress and
we’re a long way from being anything
like a finished product but it’s
critically important that we understand
something about how we have been
searching and reaching for our potential
as a species and to learn the lessons
what’s worked what hasn’t worked very
well I want to just offer one more quick
perspective consciousness is like the
beam of a flashlight it’s focused we
can’t take in everything at once we have
to swing our attention around to
different parts that can burn and
there’s always more going on inside and
outside then we could possibly pay
attention to this should raise some
immediate questions in your mind how do
we know that we’re paying attention to
the most significant things the answer
is because our culture and programming
tells us what we should be paying
attention to in different circumstances
and that we all have this operational
level of attention sort of a first-order
oversight and control but there is a
higher-order oversight and control
that’s attending to our first-order
oversight and control that tells us that
this is what we should be paying
attention to this is how long we should
be paying attention to this is how much
of our life resources we should be
putting into it
this is why it’s important here’s who
you should take into account when you’re
doing these things and here’s who you
can forget and here’s who you might
think about having to kill or that they
might have you know want to be killing
you all of that is kind of tied up in
this level of oversight and control now
when you start actually digging into the
structure of these higher levels of
oversight and control it’s our lack of
understanding of how to structure these
higher levels of oversight and control
that creates most of the problems that
we encounter in the world this is what’s
behind the Manchester bombings is
abominable Isis it’s been beyond
President Donald Trump it’s it’s behind
our climate denial or inability to
acknowledge that we are changing the
climate it’s the way we construct and
verify that we are attending to the
right things and the logic that we’re
using to determine whether or not we’re
doing that well is all tied up and the
disciplines in the process is here we
can investigate those and we’ve been
doing that now for us about 47 years
what does this actually look like and
then we realize that we actually need
one higher order of oversight and
control it’s not an infinite regress
it’s not like a Hall of Mirrors
where it just keeps going because each
order is doing something different and
it’s informed by different disciplines
so that what we need to be attending to
in terms of the signals is to ask the
questions we roar with searching for
something that’s meaningful the most
meaningful thing in my view from a human
learning ecology perspective is how to
construct this third order oversight and
control in such a way that it provides
us with a capacity for detection and
Prevention or detection correction
anticipation prevention of ignorance and
error that causes most of the way
suffering and injustice
in the world this is doable but only if
we look you will not find the signals if
you’re not looking you will not
understand them if you’re not equipped
to understand and I’m seven six five
four three two I see the signal
[Applause]
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