Learning From the Octopus

by Rafe Sagarin

  CONCLUSION: THE END AND THE BEGINNING

  AT THE BEGINNING of this book I said that adaptation arises from leaving (or being forced from) one’s comfort zone. Accordingly, it’s understandable that we might be a little resistant to dive into this strange world where reacting to the previous crisis is no longer good enough and making vague predictions of the future no longer counts as “doing something.” It’s natural that we’d come up with all sorts of excuses for why we can’t be more adaptable. But one of the results of using nature—with its relentless ability to solve problems and neutralize unpredictable threats—as a template for adaptability is that it weakens almost every excuse we have for not becoming more adaptable. The overwhelming success of adaptation in nature practically shames us into at least trying. And everything that seems like a barrier to change has already been crossed in nature. We complain that our bureaucracies are too institutionalized to change, but even organisms whose outer appearance has remained steadfastly unchanged for millions of years can be highly adaptable by farming out that adaptable capacity to semi-independent parts, like immune cells and skin color pigment cells. We argue that there are people we just can’t work with or who will never come to peace with one another, but in nature the meekest organisms form beneficial symbiotic relationships with the most terrifying. We argue that we can’t have guns and butter, but every successful living thing already knows how to balance a way to defend itself, a way to nourish itself, and a way to reproduce itself. Perhaps the last remaining excuse is that we are just different altogether from every other living thing. At a mechanical, biochemical level, this can’t be true. Under our hoods is the same DNA engine that powers most life forms. We may have neat flame decals and a clever dashboard GPS system, but we’re essentially the same type of vehicle weaving through traffic (and occasionally driving right over it) on the road of life.

  Nevertheless, when we take a broader naturalist’s view of how different we appear from all other organisms, several contradictions arise. We often seem to be removed from the relentless force of natural selection. After all, an overweight nearsighted weakling can still successfully procreate. But at the same time, we can’t deny that right now billions of people in fact do face a daily struggle to survive. We also seem to be controllers of our own evolution. We have essentially turned ourselves into the highest flying, deepest diving, fastest moving animals on Earth. Yet, the forces of nature—be they shrieking hurricanes or microscopic microbes—can still exert enormous influence on where and how we live.

  The contradictory nature of these observations reveals both why an evolutionary approach to security is so important and why it is more attainable than we might think. We have in effect insulated ourselves from the forces of natural selection that in nature provide for the longevity of adaptable organisms, and this may have ironically weakened us in some ways. Yet, we are fortunate in that given the right information we can actively, deliberately, and quickly adapt our responses to threats in our environment, a luxury that few other organisms possess.

  But this, then, brings us back to the ultimate contradiction. That is, how can we be so wonderfully adaptable as individuals—whether living among the beasts in ancient African savannahs or turning the tables on airline hijackers who made it through dozens of layers of homeland security—and yet create organizations and institutions that seem so nonadaptable? Moreover, on a daily basis we abide by (voluntarily or through various forms of coercion) these institutions—obediently removing our shoes for airport security, loyally paying taxes to a system that seems vastly overinvested in far-off security threats rather than the ones right here in our communities, and dutifully showing up to work for agencies and corporations that we know are highly resistant to change. We are well aware that in emergencies, and in intense survival situations like warfare and in trauma centers, our adaptive capacities come out and shine—they break through the institutional straight-jackets we’ve allowed ourselves to wear. What we seem much less sure of is how to actually harness the power of adaptability and use it at will. How can we, unlike nature, deliberately design systems and ways of dealing with security problems that, like nature, have the ongoing organic capacity to automatically respond to and overcome problems as they arise?

  The key is creating an adaptable cascade, in which some small adaptable actions set off other adaptable actions that ultimately lead to a system that generates its own momentum toward ever more adaptability. You won’t find a nicely branded “adaptable cascade” in nature—where one adaptation naturally cascades into another. But in human society, where we’ve continually put up barriers to adaptation, we need a process to help our adaptive capacities flow again. An adaptable cascade brings with it all of the components of natural adaptive systems that I’ve discussed in this book. It creates a decentralized organization of multiple semi-independent problem solvers. It accelerates learning by selecting for success. It creates useful redundancy, which it then uses to take control of uncertainty. It helps facilitate symbiotic partnerships. And it provides a better pathway for protecting the natural ecosystem services that protect us.

  It’s lovely if you can create an innovative organism powered by adaptive cascades as a complete unit. The founders of Google did their best to design adaptability into their business model, and even as a multi-billion-dollar company that serves billions, they’ve managed to keep the company infused in adaptability. The vast majority of us don’t have the luxury of creating a whole new organism, though. Fortunately, the deluge of an adaptable cascade can be unleashed safely in any business, any bureaucracy, any police precinct or fire department, any household. Moreover, we are not jumping off this cascade into the void inside a barrel. We have incredible support systems at our disposal. First, nature itself is a powerful security system that works even better when paired with adaptable approaches to human problems. Second, keep in mind that we are products of evolution and adaptation ourselves. Our natural state is one of adaptability. Sometimes we need to let nature take its course, and we’ll be much more able to do this if we ourselves are heading down an adaptable path.

  The first step for creating an adaptable cascade isn’t to create a new report on how to make the organization more adaptable or to hang “Be Adaptable!” banners or to give out “Just Do Good Enough!” lapel pins. It is to transform whatever sounds like an order now into a challenge and to create whole new challenges. An order is anything created by a small elite group (or powerful individual) that is forced upon anyone else in the group under the expectation that it will be followed to the letter. A challenge, by contrast, is an open solicitation for help to solve an identified problem. Issuing a challenge is not about relinquishing control or completely overturning an existing hierarchy. The person or group issuing the challenge still has the power to design it, shape the incentives that will attract people to it, set the rules, and determine who will get to participate in the challenge. In other words, switching to a mode of issuing challenges doesn’t have to radically alter the structure or power dynamics of a given organization. At the same time, it can radically alter how problems are solved.

  Challenges work because they emulate the natural adaptive organization of nature, where multiple semi-independent agents are solving problems where they occur. In more human terms, they give ownership of a problem to the people who have to work on solving it. Encouraging a higher degree of autonomy in problem solving is particularly important in human organizations where power dynamics may constrain the space for problem solving—the well-known problem of having too many “Yes Men” who feel compelled to agree with the boss.

  As a challenge is initiated and multiple independent problem solvers take part in it, the need to issue advice and orders begins to fall away naturally. For example, I could directly advise in this book something pithy like “don’t build wall-like security systems,” but I strongly suspect that agencies and organizations in the midst of an adaptive cascade will quickly dispense with static security systems as
multiple problem solvers look at them and say, “Wait a second, I could figure out an easy way to get around that.”

  Indeed, as individuals work on the challenge and share their results, learning outcomes as a whole will improve as an adaptive cascade takes its course. Like learning in nature, learning will happen automatically as an organization becomes more adaptable. Too many business books and corporate seminars and consultants try to institutionalize learning, but if your organization isn’t learning, it’s not because it hasn’t discovered some playbook on how to learn. Any plan for learning will become redundant as an organization becomes adaptable.

  At a university, that learning plan is called a syllabus, and it’s what every instructor is expected to hand out to students on the first day of class. It wasn’t until I thought about setting off an adaptable cascade in my own classroom that I recognized how much the syllabus, the stalwart learning plan edified into university life, was constraining learning. For years, as a university instructor, I became increasingly frustrated about how little effort students put into participating in classes I taught. Even when I did things like have a student lead class sessions, I found that all the rest of the students tuned out to the student as much as they did to me. So, after thinking about how the lessons of adaptability might apply to teaching, I started running my classes based on challenges.

  The first thing I did when I entered class for the first time in the semester was have the students rip up the syllabus I was required to give them. Then I asked them to respond on 4x6 index cards to two challenge questions: (1) “What do you want to learn in this class?” and (2) “What can you share from your experiences that will help us learn about these topics?” By combining their responses to the two challenges, we were able to create a whole new syllabus, but one that everyone had participated in, rather than one handed down from a single professor. The challenge wasn’t a complete free-for-all: all of their responses needed to have something to do with the course topic, marine conservation. And the challenge didn’t stop with making the syllabus. By midnight on the night before every class period each student had to contribute something related to the class topic to an online Wikipedia-style website. When class came, I found I never had to pull teeth to get the students to talk; because they owned not only the course but also a little piece of every class meeting, they were eager to share their contributions and to draw out connections.

  And another surprising thing happened. I learned far more during the semester than I had in preparing and running any previous course. Had I not challenged all the students to make the class their own, I would never have seen the firsthand view of one student who grew up in the canal zone in Panama and shared with us how international trade, global politics, and massive-scale ecological transformation interacted there. I would have never really understood the difficulty of trying to run a closed-cycle sustainable fish farm as one student’s father struggled to do in her home country of Venezuela. I would never have learned, as I did from a very environmentally conscious Chinese student, the difficulty of staging a wedding there that did not include shark fin soup on the menu, as his own wedding had scandalously omitted.

  The only real requirement for learning that may need to be deliberately institutionalized is a commitment to learn from success. Many business consultants continue to peddle the cheap wisdom of “learning from failure” as some sort of innovation, but most learning from failure will become merely, and at best, a single solution to a problem that’s already occurred. In nature, innovation comes first, and learning accrues from successful innovations, which in turn allows an organism to survive and continue to innovate. For us to replicate this natural process, we must amplify, reward, and replicate successes small and large, as they occur.

  But even this artifice can be kept fairly minimalist. Example after example shows that if an adaptable problem-solving system is in place, the incentives to bring out and replicate success are almost laughably immaterial. Employees who help green 3M as part of its Pollution Prevention Pays program, which has reduced over a billion tons of pollution since its inception in the late 1970s and has saved the company over $3 billion, get little more than a statement of recognition from corporate headquarters. Yet, to date over 8,100 employee-directed pollution reduction projects have been recognized by 3M.1 The Stanford engineers who created Stanley received bragging rights and a cash prize that was likely less money than they spent on the project. When people are given the power to create a more adaptable system, their participation and sense of ownership in that system that is working well is often all the motivation they need to keep on innovating.

  When learning is taking its natural course among multiple semi-independent problem solvers, multiple opportunities for creative redundancy are created. Stanford’s Stanley won DARPA’s Grand Challenge, but if Stanley didn’t run that day, there were a number of other entries that each solved the challenge in a different way and were ready to take the prize. In the early 1700s, the English Parliament set up a challenge to solve the pernicious problem of identifying the correct longitude while at sea. While the conventional wisdom said that astronomers would develop the solution based on celestial navigation, it was fortunate that Parliament didn’t just assemble a group of the world’s best astronomers to try to solve the problem behind closed doors. In the end, while astronomers and sailors made some important contributions, the winning solution came from a watchmaker who designed a time piece that could keep extremely accurate time even during the rigors of an ocean voyage.2

  Embracing creative redundancy increases diversity, which is one way to get control of uncertainty, and even to turn uncertainty into an advantage. Consider what Phil Jackson, one of the most successful basketball coaches of all time, did with Dennis Rodman, one of the most unpredictable basketball players of all time. Rodman might show up to a game with his hair dyed bright green and his nails painted to match, and to a press conference in an evening gown. While most coaches and sportswriters considered Rodman a massive liability, a distraction that threatened to destabilize the tightly wound system of a successful team, Jackson embraced Rodman’s personality and made it part of a Chicago Bulls franchise that won three straight championships. He publicly affirmed the value of Rodman’s idiosyncrasies, bestowing upon him the role of a Heyoka, a Lakota Indian trickster spirit who cross-dressed and did things backwards to expand the consciousness of his fellow people and help them understand their own place in the world.3 Lost to many observers in the distraction of Rodman’s hair color and odd lifestyle was the fact that he was an unmatchable defensive force who took the little-heralded job of rebounding loose basketballs to a whole new level. Ultimately, although Jackson coached some of the game’s most predictable superstars—Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, and Kobe Bryant—he still considers Rodman the greatest player he ever coached.4

  In this light, one of the biggest concerns about issuing open challenges—that there is a lot of uncertainty about what will come back in response—can be seen as an asset. The uncertainty that multiple problem solvers bring with them is its own form of naturally emerging diversity, which provides rich ground for adaptation. Although Rodman was impossible to hide in the Bull’s lineup, there very well may be a Heyoka hiding in your world that hasn’t been given the right challenge yet.

  Invariably, new symbiotic partnerships will be borne out of the adaptive cascade. Symbiotic partnerships are essential to adaptation, and they extend any adaptive capacity. Yet creating these partnerships is also something that is not done well as a mandate from the top down. The government has mandated many “interagency task forces” and the like that were designed to create partnerships between agencies that rarely talked to one another. But with a narrow set of allowable tasks and a required number of annual meetings, these task forces tend to become exercises in which representatives from each member agency who have little power to make decisions come to check off a box. Real symbiosis arises automatically when different entities find out that
they can solve imminent problems better together than they could on their own. As in nature, these symbioses can grow out of competition. For example, University of Washington professor David Baker created an online game to help solve a longstanding challenge to understand the structure of a protein related to HIV. After the winning team solved this 10-year-old mystery in just 10 days, Baker noted, “Competitive social interaction is a very strong driving force.”5

  Symbiotic relationships may end as quickly as they were formed, or they may become long-term partnerships, if both parties find at least some additional benefit from staying together. Accordingly, Baker’s team has now issued additional challenges to the online gaming community, just as DARPA maintained communities of problem solvers by issuing ever more complex challenges. In this sense the central challenge of the adaptive cascade becomes the catalyst that new symbiotic partnerships are built around. The more perspectives that are brought in to address the challenge, the more opportunities to develop new symbiotic relationships emerge.

  Finally, even the natural security services provided by nature are likely to be better protected under an adaptable cascade. Environmental protection in the future is unlikely to come about from yet another fundraising campaign from World Wildlife Fund or through sales of Sierra Club calendars. As Paul Hawken documented, small localized groups around the world have been far more effective at protecting the ecosystem services in their regions than the huge multinational environmental groups. This is great for protecting a local mangrove forest, but can this localized power deal with global climate change? It can if it’s linked to larger-scale information and resources, and this is the nature of adaptable cascades—they merge the power of localized problem solvers with a centralized organization that is better able to see the big picture and has the resources needed to solve problems.