{"id":1006,"date":"2009-05-17T00:00:25","date_gmt":"2009-05-17T04:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.synapse9.com\/signals\/?p=1006"},"modified":"2009-05-17T00:00:25","modified_gmt":"2009-05-17T04:00:25","slug":"harvard-business-school-searches-its-soul","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/harvard-business-school-searches-its-soul\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvard Business School, searches its soul"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been a real \u201csoul searching\u201d\u00a0discussion within Harvard Business School<\/a> about it\u2019s responsibility in having trained many of the people whose business practices got the world into our present still worsening economic crisis. \u00a0It was\u00a0reported today on NPR<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It seems they have discovered they should teach business leaders to take some responsibility, not just make as much money as humanly possible and push the risks on others\u2026 That\u2019s great if you believe it. \u00a0 I wonder it is even possible for people making money not to want to push their risks on others, to not “optimize” the making of money? \u00a0That is not being asked yet as far as I can tell.<\/p>\n

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Another thing not being asked yet seems even more telling. Still clearly missing from the public eye, and the professional soul searching all around, is the question of why our economic system produces catastrophic systemic risk at all.<\/p>\n

missing from the professional “soul searching” is asking why\u00a0making money has always so regularly created\u00a0systemic risk<\/h3>\n

You simply can\u2019t pop a bubble that isn\u2019t under a lot of accumulated pressure, is the physics principle. There\u2019s got to be a pump, with pressures not being relieved.<\/p>\n

Ideally a cooperative self-regulation system should not create catastrophic risk at all, since all the parts are watching out to avoid risk, covering for each other, and being watched by regulators. That\u2019s “self-regulation” process itself, that should eliminate the problem, then becomes a suspect in creating it.<\/p>\n

Regulatory needs, that evidently no one sees apparently do in fact accumulate and cause the system to fail. What we\u2019re simply not yet asking is what keeps pumping up the strains, and then would require new kinds of regulation we don’t see a need for.<\/p>\n

That’s what allows our regulatory systems to fail. \u00a0Our cooperative plan somehow implies continually increasing regulation, of something we don’t see except as grand financial, regulatory, and business system failures.<\/p>\n

It really looks as if the common goal of the whole economy, driving finance, commerce and our natural resources to all perform exponentially on a continual basis, would seem to drive itself to become unmanageable, naturally.<\/p>\n

driving finance, commerce and our natural resources to all perform exponentially on a continual basis, would seem to drive itself to become unmanageable<\/h3>\n

I have been studying these systematically increasing pressures on our learning response systems as a source of natural unmanageability for 30 years. The growing pressure of complex learning tasks connect the burdens of regulation for troubled populations, uninformed governments and societies, new technologies, threatened environments, economic dislocations, unavailable science, and how all they interact.<\/p>\n

Call it the \u201cconnected manageability problem\u201d. What I identified is a common \u201cexpert error\u201d wrapped up in our shared concept that \u201cgood\u201d is, \u201cmore good\u201d. \u00a0\u201cMore good\u201d leads us to solve our problems, and measure progress, in %’s. \u00a0That unavoidably becomes a greater problem in itself.<\/p>\n

When \u201cmore good\u201d changes from \u201crelatively bigger\u201d to \u201cabsolutely big\u201d then\u00a0many<\/em><\/span> formerly trusted relationships between things change meaning. \u00a0 Not noticing when “improvement” turns into “distortion” hides the\u00a0points of\u00a0transition from view. \u00a0That’s what lets the way we’re solving our problems end up creating ever greater problems.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve detailed the economic issues, using a model dividing all money exchanges as going through three markets: finance, production, artifacts. \u00a0 How the money passes between them thus makes a \u201cthree bubble economy<\/a><\/strong><\/span>\u201d as the whole system is driven as an exponential bubble itself, all driven to burst as a hidden natural effect of our design for regulating its stability.<\/p>\n

driven to burst as a hidden natural effect of our design for regulating its stability.<\/h3>\n

The disarray that seems to point to “anything but” systemic causes, itself follows from having an economy made of independently growing parts, all coming into conflict.<\/p>\n

That our way of thinking naturally defines \u201cmore good\u201d\u00a0as unquestionable will be hard to change. \u00a0\u201cMore good\u201d now really means multiplying conflicting interests in a world of limits, though. \u00a0The cure is to be more open to questioning what has been “unquestionable”.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the last thing on the list people are prepared to or want to ask questions about, though.<\/h3>\n

Could it be due to our failing, so far, to discover some other monumental blind spot too? Is our being so ready to blame others for changes that are actually environmental a great failing, perhaps?<\/p>\n

Do we need to add our greater ignorance of life to the list of possible causes, and how the way people constantly trust their “information” as being complete? \u00a0 The first thing you find when looking honestly for causes is usually how very incomplete our both actual and potential information really are.<\/p>\n

The first thing you find is how very incomplete our\u00a0information really is.<\/h3>\n

Isn\u2019t having very well organized systems that end in grand calamity something that happens repeatedly to human economies? \u00a0Doesn’t that itself prove we don\u2019t know why it happens, and haven’t yet found a way to learn from the experience?<\/p>\n

I think the search needs to go further than to blame common failings, and find the true flaws in how we all behave cooperatively.<\/p>\n

don’t blame common failings, but the hidden flaws in how we behave cooperatively.<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s been a real \u201csoul searching\u201d\u00a0discussion within Harvard Business School about it\u2019s responsibility in having trained many of the people whose business practices got the world into our present still worsening economic crisis. \u00a0It was\u00a0reported today on NPR. It seems they have discovered they should teach business leaders to take some responsibility, not just make … Continue reading Harvard Business School, searches its soul<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mail","category-econn","category-theory"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1006"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1006\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/synapse9.com\/signals\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}