Woeful Banana Choices

Systems structures are at it again, driving behavior: lookout!  From a recent article from KUOW:

The Parks Department wants to sign a five–year agreement with Compass Foods USA. The contract states the company can only provide foods that fall within the category of healthier or healthiest.

The City Council voted on the contract this week. Councilmember Sally Clark cast the lone vote against it. She says she worries it takes away people’s choices.

So, Seattle’s vending machines are going nutritious.  And according to Sally Clark (no relation to myself), this takes away people’s choices.  I can understand the worry–it’s removing the option of dining on chocolate covered pretzels, creamy nougat bars, and gramma’s super chunk cookie dough cookies.  BUT!  Systems disciples, recall: structure drives behavior.

What this means is that stocking the vending machines with sugary foods is likely more restrictive in terms of choice than stocking healthy items.  Here’s my thinking:

In the case of snack options, choice is driven by proximity.  Anyone who has ever wrestled with their weight can tell you that having the ice cream in the fridge makes it a lot harder to choose to eat according to how we desire to eat.  Creating opportunity to splurge on junk food is going to sway behavior.

Contrast this with stocking the vending machine with healthy options.  Now, people find themselves given the option to choose to eat the foods that they would ideally choose to eat if proximity to junk food were limited.  If you’re hungry, you’re going to reach for that banana or those nuts.  Conversely, you may not be hungry, but you may be sorely tempted, by that Snickers bar in yonder machine.

So, I would argue that this is a clear case of a system structure offering better choices to consumers, rather than restricting them.

Global Calorie Intake

An interesting look at two variables that tell the global story.

http://www.foodservicewarehouse.com/calorie-viz/

Pretty amazing stuff.

This Fat Cat Wears Italian Leather

 

Wall Street should be shaking in their Italian leather loafers right now.  The 99% can back up their marches with facts.  When a system gives its “winners” the ability to win still further, we have fallen into a systems trap called “success to the successful.”  The “losers” in our economy will go on losing, while the rich keep getting richer.  Here’s why.

The only solution to this trap is to hit the reset button.

When I speak with my friends and family about this topic, none of whom have marched or stood out in the cold with Occupy Wall Street, they all adhere to the belief that the only way to accomplish this reset is by violent means.  ”Someone’s going to start throwing rocks at policemen, and then there will be riots, and then finally some action will take place.”  Theirs is a cynical view bred from the longstanding divide in our country between the ideologues who rule behind the curtain and the people.  It’s an understandable viewpoint.

Let’s hope it’s not prophetic.

Systems Prada: Designer Solutions

What do you want to be when you grow up?  Have you considered design lately?  We usually think of designers as artsy folks who are dedicated to the gods of the aesthetic or brands that capture the height of fashion, but Tim Brown would argue that the future will find us all involved in the design process.  In  his TED talk, Brown challenges designers to “think big,” to design for the future, and to prepare for design to make a major shift towards collaborative process, involving everyone.

“If human need is the place to start, and prototyping a vehicle for progress, then there are also some questions to ask about the destination.  Instead of seeing its primary objective as consumption, design thinking is beginning to explore the potential of participation: the shift from a passive relationship between consumer and producer, to the active engagement of everyone, in experiences that are meaningful, productive, and profitable.”

What Brown is proposing is a big shift in design thinking, from the micro to the macro.  ”Micro” design questions focus on small needs: what is the best way to position the buttons on this new phone to make it more user friendly?  ”Macro” questions focus on systems: how can we design a system that provides healthcare for the poor without the aid of specific technologies or resources?  In the former, we are converging our designs around previous choices about technology, funding, structure.  In the latter, we are creating new choices that are not limited by constraints.

Here’s an example:

“Safepoint founder Marc Koska was seeking to reduce the transmission of blood-born diseases through the reuse of syringes. He could have designed better packaging or communications to educate medical staff about the dangers of not properly disposing of used syringes. This approach might have helped in an incremental way. He chose instead to design an entirely new autodisabled syringe that breaks automatically after first use. This disruptive design has the potential to significantly reduce the more than 7 billion unsafe injections given every year.”

–Tim Brown on design thinking in social innovation.

Another example of design thinking on the macro scale, in which users are included and encouraged as designers:

“Teach a person to fish…. Sometimes the end solution is not the only benefit of design thinking. We have found that designing effective tools for others to design with can have significant impact. Not every nonprofit has access to designers; indeed, there are far too few designers focused on solving challenges in the social sector. To help mitigate this deficit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a project to create the Human-Centered Design Toolkit to act as a field guide for NGOs and non-profits looking to innovate. The toolkit has been downloaded well over 60,000 times and used to support projects such as the design of a maternal hospital in Nepal, a cooperative of weavers in Rwanda, water distribution management systems in Malawi, and hand washing stations in Vietnam.”

These ideas excite me.  I begin to see tangible ways to get the whole system designing itself.  We are fond of saying in systems thinking that structure drives behavior.  What our old paradigms have created in the past are system structures that drive behavior that no one wants; we see this in work places, where commands come down to the grunts from on high and are met with derision and pushback: “the suits have no idea what it’s like to work in the R&D department,” for example.  This new paradigm of design thinking gets everyone in on the solution.

 

Amygdala, Systems Signal?

Do you know your personality type?  I don’t mean the results from the “Which Harry Potter Character are You?” quiz you found on Facebook (I’m the Boy Who Lived, by the way).  I’m talking about more legitimate tests that measure things like meaning making, needs and actualization, means of information processing, etc.  Well, if you haven’t taken it yet, the Myers-Briggs type indicator is one of my personal favorites.  I have been thinking about this particular tool lately because it has come up in conversation with everyone, from OSR cohort members to students from past forays into ministry.  And of course, since I’m learning about them these days, I’ve been thinking of personality in terms of systems.

Even in 2011, the origins of personality are shrouded in mystery.  Does personality arise from genetics?  Or are we nurtured into extroverts and introverts?  Studies seem to indicate both.  In a recent study it was discovered that extroverts, the outgoing, party people among us, demonstrate a response in their amygdala, a tiny pea-sized portion of the brain, when shown a happy face.  This is opposed to the more reserved among us, who showed very little response.

In systems theory, we learn that structure drives behavior.  So is it genetic, this lack of introvert response?  Is the amygdala sending a signal that guides personality formation, or is it merely responding to another?

Either way, the interesting thing about personality is how it becomes reinforced by context.  Shy children have a harder time engaging with their peers; in turn, they may become less confident with social interactions, which contributes to shyness, etc.  This is a reinforcing loop in systems parlance.  The opposite might be true for an extrovert–the more outgoing, the more confident they grow in groups of peers, navigating society over time with greater ease and “charisma.”

And I wonder if the defense mechanisms we adopt along the way might be balancing feedback loops.  If our personalities “launch” us into the world with specific proclivities, do we “take over” at a certain point–realizing, perhaps, that we must overcome these proclivities in order to succeed?  My extroversion becomes magnified in social situations in which I become uncomfortable.  I get a little bit louder and a little bit out of control.  I “push” myself into a state of extroversion, believing that by becoming more outgoing, I will put myself in a better position to seize opportunity or speed up the formation of relationships.  The effort I put into extroversion, I reason, will pay me back later in the form of greater comfort in the future.

Hey, since you have that link handy, why don’t you take the test?  Then post your result below.

Farms, Families, Famine

It’s tempting to think that the system we are a part of has a mirror-like relationship to others.  This came to mind for me today, while cruising around google news, when I found an article highlighting the ties between low birth rates for US women and the recession.  It’s particularly timely because, a couple days ago on this blog, I briefly mentioned the need for foreign aid to impoverished African nations.  That aside drew a comment from a fellow blogger questioning the moral burden of Western nations to the impoverished.  It was questioned whether spening money to feed the poor in Africa was actually helpful, or if this was a case of “shifting the burden” (my words) from other leverage points in the system that might actually produce better results.

When we shift the burden in any system, we are addressing symptoms and not root causes.  By diverting resources in foreign aid towards food programs, it was asked, do we not perpetuate a reinforcing feedback loop in which a growing population continues to generate more mouths to feed at an ever-increasing rate?  The dependency on foreign aid increases, while the actual problem continues to worsen.

First, I find it hard to speak in these terms, as if it is a legitimate choice to allow human beings to starve in order to serve the common good.  The common good will always be intensely tied to the needs of individuals.  But the question does push us towards a confrontation with uncomfortable possibilities.  Are these efforts actually helping?  Do these resources make a dent?  Or is this current model hurting the very people the West is trying to help?

For better of for worse, when we are talking about “the poor in Africa,” we are tempted to do two things.  First, we assume that the same socioeconomic factors that govern the Western world share a 1:1 relationship with the African subcontinent.  Second, we assume that Africa exists as a homogeneous whole.  In fact, neither are true.

Here’s what it looks like in the West.  According to the AP article:

“The U.S. birth rate dropped for the third straight year, with declines for most ages and all races, according to a federal report released Thursday. Teens and women in their early 20s had the most dramatic dip to the lowest rates since record-keeping began in the 1940s.  Also, the rate of cesarean sections stopped going up for the first time since 1996. Experts suspected the economy drove down birth rates in 2008 and 2009 as women put off having children. With the 2010 figures, suspicion has turned into certainty.”

Systems can be tricky.  Working with this model and with this data, it makes perfect sense: the economy produces pressure on families to stop having kids.  We might even map the relationship between GDP and birth rate, and feel like we had discovered something we could then apply in other systems.  But systems resist this sort of 1:1 relationship, because the individual parts of each system do not exist by themselves.  The feedback loops that are in play here in this article are connected to economic systems that might bear very little resemblance to others.

Thus we have to be careful when we shift our viewpoint towards the situation in Africa.  With the above data in hand, we might infer that sustained foreign aid to African nations “softens” the pressure of poverty, to the extent that very little change is affected in family planning.  We are assuming that over population is a significant factor in poverty, and we are assuming a relationship between family size and economic burden.

The following is from a research paper on the effects of population on economic development in East Africa:

“In Europe [economic] decisions were related to 1) the initial improvement in economic conditions for young urban employees, followed be a declining age at marriage and 2) later economic constraints resulting in increased economic strains on the urban families, couples with a decline in the economic value of children as labourers (urban setting and labour laws) and the increase in the costs of raising them.  The urban families thus started practising family planning, limiting family size from around 5-6 children to 2-3 children.”

“In relation to Africa the pattern is different.  The majority of the population is in agriculture.  With increasing school enrollment, as is the case in Kenya, the costs of raising children are increasing, and this tends to affect the value of children.  Yet the children are still contributing valuable labour for the family production, even if they are attending school, and they are still responsible for the old age security. “

“Within the African continent, the relationships between population and land resources are so diverse that a uniform population theory or policy cannot be adequate as a framework for analysing them.”

–from A Demographic Analysis of East Africa: A Sociological Interpretation, By Mette Mønsted, Parveen Walji

So–are we contributing to hunger and poverty by feeding Africans?  The answer cannot be divined from studies of population alone.  In an agricultural society, children contribute to farm labor.  Large families are better able to work the land; they don’t need to hire workers to bring in harvest; the old and the very young receive care at the hands of able children, reducing the burden on working adults.  While in Europe, family size severely limited the options and income of earners, in Africa we see that the opposite can be true.

 

The Penn State Problem

It is difficult to wrap our heads around what happened at Penn State.  These are murky waters at best.  The deeper one gets,  the darker.  As I’ve listened to the story develop over the last several days, the hardest question to answer for myself is this: do I truly know how I would act, were I in the place of any of the number of others who witnessed or took report about what Jerry Sandusky was doing to those boys?  I would love to rush to an answer.  But this question is nested within another that won’t let me go.  How can it be that so many people throughout the Penn State ranks looked the other way?

David Brooks’  latest column in the New York Times addresses this question.

Unfortunately, none of us can safely make that assumption. Over the course of history — during the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide or the street beatings that happen in American neighborhoods — the same pattern has emerged. Many people do not intervene. Very often they see but they don’t see.

Some people simply can’t process the horror in front of them. Some people suffer from what the psychologists call Normalcy Bias. When they find themselves in some unsettling circumstance, they shut down and pretend everything is normal.

To me, the article speaks to a couple thoughts that have been rolling around in my head since all this happened.  I agree with Brooks that this isn’t *just* about Penn State, this is also a commentary on our culture.  But I disagree with Brooks’ assertion here, that it is a lack of “moral fiber” that prevented all those people from speaking out.  Morality is fluid.  As much as we may like to think that morality is a muscle, most of our decisions are negotiated by the mental models we form out of the context of our lives.  In Penn State, the magnitude of the investment required on the part of the whistle blower, and the incredibly strong social contracts to which we all adher, kept people from stepping up.  Both illuminate the mental models that invisibly guide our behavior.  Mental models that show up like “It is more vital to my survival that I maintain normalcy than it is for me to step up and act morally.”  Our models are installed in us by our context, which none of us can initially choose.

There are other cases that are  more and less visible.  I can’t help but think of all the horrendous crimes being committed on a very public stage around the globe, and how immobilized we are in the West in particular to bring our resources to bear.  Americans, for example, have more food than they can eat–remember the “starving children in Africa” line from when we were kids?  We throw away about 10% more than what we need.  The majority of African families, however, subsist on 70% of optimum caloric intake.  1 in 5 children under the age of 5 will die of malnutrition or water-borne illness.  We shouldn’t give anyone at Penn State a pass.  But maybe this gives us the opportunity to take a good hard look at our own mental models.