Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  There’s a persistent myth in the United States that citizens should be free to do whatever they want, provided they don’t harm anyone else. On the surface, this seems like a logical extension of the Golden Rule: I’ll give you your freedom if you give me mine. After Obama was elected president on a platform of change, a widely distributed bumper sticker appeared: “I’ll keep my freedom, my guns, and my money—you can keep the change!” The underlying sentiment here is that our freedoms are under attack, including our inalienable rights to free speech, gun ownership, privacy, and so on. Unfortunately, there were no bumper stickers clamoring for inalienable responsibilities.

  In a systems view of democracy, responsibility and freedom are two sides of the same coin. “Freedom isn’t free,” say Liu and Hanauer. “It costs a little freedom.” Generally speaking, the further your personal responsibility stretches—out from yourself and into the future—the more freedom you should be accorded. The more parsimonious you are with responsibility, the less freedom you should get. History shows that giving broad freedoms to irresponsible people is a recipe for mayhem. This is especially true for rights that call for a high degree of responsibility, such as gun ownership. It’s also true for business ownership. Milton Friedman believed that the only responsibility of business is to increase profits without engaging in deception or fraud. Really? What about bullying, pollution, or depleting natural resources? A behavior can be legal and still be irresponsible.

  Economist Steven Landsburg, in The Big Questions, shares his own rule for good behavior: “Don’t leave the world worse off than you found it.” Unfortunately, simply living in the 21st century means you’re doing damage to the planet. If you drive a car, buy groceries, use a computer, wear manufactured clothing, have children, own a home, fly to meetings, or read a newspaper, you’re doing damage to the planet. While this may be the hand we were dealt by the Industrial Age, standing pat doesn’t count as responsibility. “Don’t tread on me” was a reasonable reaction to British rule during the War of Independence. But wrapping ourselves in the same flag, after dominating and polluting the planet for the last fifty years, is the behavior of a petulant child.

  The answer is to move to a new model that asks for responsibility in fair proportion to freedom. Even children (except the petulant kind) appreciate the values of sharing and fairness. They seem to understand intuitively that you create the society you want by how you behave. A few years ago, educational leader Stephanie Pace Marshall was working with a group of students from a new middle school, and together they defined a set of rules for “belonging together.” They came up with three: 1) Take care of yourself; 2) take care of each other; and 3) take care of this place. In fourteen simple words, they captured the credo of responsible autonomy.

  Responsible autonomy means more than staying out of trouble. It means generating lasting goodness. Apalled by the atrocities of World War II, German sociologist Dr. Robert S. Hartman set about creating a new “science of value,” which he hoped would organize goodness as efficiently as the Nazis had organized evil. He called his science axiology. Its goal was to study the values of ethics and aesthetics—ethics being the study of right and good, and aesthetics being the study of beauty and harmony—so they had a fighting chance against more fleeting values such as GDP and trade deficits. While axiology hasn’t caught on as a mainstream science, it might be worth a second look.

  We live in an “exaggerated present,” says Donella Meadows. In other words, we pay too much attention to the now, and too little to the before and the after, giving us a warped view of what’s important. Our preoccupation with measurement has taught us how to count, but not what to count, as if someone had changed the price tags while we weren’t looking. Plus and minus, it seems, have become the new right and wrong.

  The world is now too complex to be guided by ten simplistic commandments. We would need a thousand commandments to address all the decisions we face in modern life. “Thou shalt not create derivatives” might make sense in some situations but not in others, and also might spawn dozens of exceptions as we learn more about their effects in the real world. What we need instead are principles, meta-level guidelines that put the onus for specific actions where it belongs in the first instance—on the individual. By separating ethics from legality, we can start to see the bigger picture. We can embrace the kind of responsibility that increases autonomy, expands our choices, and creates lasting value.

  “Living successfully in a world of systems requires more of us than our ability to calculate,” says Meadows. “It requires our full humanity—our rationality, our ability to sort out truth from falsehood, our intuition, our compassion, our vision, and our morality.”

  The problem with solutions

  A small country wants affordable energy for its growing population. Since it has an abiding concern for the quality of the environment and the health of its people, it comes to believe that the answer lies not in dirty coal power but in clean, renewable nuclear energy. It receives a great deal of encouragement, expertise, and financial help from a larger nation to make this initiative possible. Soon, fresh new power plants spring up around the countryside, and the environment improves. Yet the energy generated by the plants turns out to be anything but clean. Live radioactive waste must be buried for up to ten thousand years before it’s safe, and additional nuclear material must be contained in cooling pools where it’s vulnerable to accidents. Eventually, a freak wave destroys a number of power plants, contaminating the environment and damaging the very health the country was trying to protect.

  A young woman dreams of becoming a lawyer so she can devote herself to social issues. Wanting the best possible education, she enrolls in a well-respected college. She’s not eligible for scholarships and takes out $150,000 in loans to cover the cost of tuition, books, housing, food, and transportation for six years of schooling. She graduates at the top of her class. However, due to a difficult job market, she’s unable to find a position that pays enough to cover her loan payments. She goes to work for a firm that defends socially irresponsible companies from class-action suits, thereby betraying her own dreams.

  A new CEO is hired to turn around a public company with eroding profit margins. He goes to work trimming any costs that are not likely to lead to immediate revenues. He offers “early out” retirement packages to highly paid managers and lays off a large percentage of employees who aren’t involved in sales. He then divides the company into separate businesses, giving each manager the autonomy to run his or her business in a manner that increases revenues. Profits improve. He soon forges a strong bond with analysts, who begin to trust his quarterly earnings guidance. After a few years of steady financial gains, however, the company finds that its brand is no longer coherent, and the products in its pipeline are less than exciting. Earnings decline. Shareholders become nervous, so the directors find a way to remove him. The new CEO inherits a company that’s worse off than before, and he’s unable to fix the deepening systemic problems.

  These are all true stories of how solutions can turn into problems. With complex systems such as companies, governments, and markets, the answers aren’t always obvious. The difficulty is that they can seem obvious. Even when decision makers find the right levers, they often pull them in the wrong direction. A driver whose car skids on an icy road is more likely to turn the wheel the wrong way than the right way, simply because the right way is counter-intuitive. A CEO whose company suffers from sagging profits is likely to focus on costcutting instead of innovation, simply because the rewards are more direct and immediate.

  There’s a Sufi parable that goes like this: You think that because you understand one that you also understand two, since one and one make two; but you forget that you must also understand and. When we encounter a system that’s complex enough to create multiple interactions, we need to beware of traps. Truly complex systems are not only riddled with traps, but can also be reactive, meaning that they fight back when we try to fix them. Thus was born
the concept of wicked problems. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a wicked problem, as is the global economic crisis. Every solution seems to make the problem worse.

  If we see that pulling a lever a short distance gives us a desirable response, we might think that pulling it twice as far will produce double the response. It certainly might, but if the system is complex enough, it might produce a much smaller response, or the response times ten, or an opposite response. For example, redesigning a supermarket package with a little more yellow might boost sales, but doubling the amount of yellow could kill sales. Nonlinear problems like packaging graphics can utterly confound the relationship between cause and effect.

  When complex systems meet simple measurement, the results can be perverse. In the 1930s we began measuring our welfare by the goods and services we produce each year. It wasn’t long before productivity became the Holy Grail for the entire society, replacing the previous goal of happiness with one that’s more easily measured. This is the cultural equivalent of the drunk who forgets his car keys in the bar, but searches for them under the street lamp because the light is better.

  Economist Victor Lebow introduced the term “conspicuous consumption” in the 1950s, complaining that we’d already begun to ritualize the purchase of goods in search of spiritual satisfaction. “We need things consumed, burned up, replaced, and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.” The result has not been happiness, nor spirituality, nor economic health, but a national shopping jones that’s turning our birthright into a landfill. Too harsh? We’ll see.

  Narrow measurement has also dogged educational reform, often producing exactly the opposite effect that we wanted. When we measured our progress in dollars spent per student, we got an increase in dollars spent per student. When we measured performance on standardized tests, we got improved performance on standardized tests. Meanwhile, the quality of education continued to sink. Football coach Vince Lombardi famously said, “If winning isn’t everything, why do they keep score?” It’s axiomatic in sports, education, business, and government that whatever gets measured gets better. So the lesson is this: Be careful what you measure; the scoreboard can easily become the game.

  Is there a way to ensure that our proposed solutions are actually solutions? Probably not. But when you understand that complex systems don’t behave in linear ways, you can often rule out linear solutions and measurements that produce nasty surprises. There’s no such thing as a foolproof system. Anyone who says otherwise is underestimating the ingenuity of fools. All you can do is adopt a humble attitude and look at the challenge from a number of perspectives. Here are some questions to ask before tinkering with a system:

  What will happen if I do nothing?

  What might be improved?

  What might be diminished?

  What will be replaced?

  Will it expand future options?

  What are the ethical considerations?

  Will it simplify or complicate the system?

  Are my basic assumptions correct?

  What has to be true to make this possible?

  Are events likely to unfold this way?

  If so, will the system really react this way?

  What are the factors behind the events?

  What are the long-term costs and benefits?

  We shouldn’t become too discouraged if at first we don’t succeed. It took nature 13 billion years to create the systems around us, and they still don’t always work perfectly.

  The art is in the framing

  The art of designing solutions starts with the frame. Where you draw the boundaries of an investigation will determine, in large part, what your conclusions will be and what kind of process you’ll use to get there.

  For example, if you decide to publish a business book, you could frame the principal problem like this: “How can I write a 60,000-word volume on my subject?” The solution would then become mostly one of quantity, and the process would be all about generating enough material to fill 300 pages.

  Or you could frame it like this: “Where can I find a company who’ll distribute my ideas to the world?” The solution then would be landing a publisher, and the process would include sending a manuscript to a large number of publishing houses or agents until it finds a home.

  Or you could frame the problem more broadly: “How can I contribute to the understanding of my audience using self-paced content?” The solution here might be a 300-page book—but it also might be a 100-page book, or a series of books. It might be an e-book, an audio book, an app, a video, a self-paced online course, or some combination of vehicles. It might include more than words, such as illustrations, animation, video, navigational devices, or social connectivity. The process would be whatever steps were necessary to achieve the solution.

  One way to conceive a frame is in two dimensions, one for scope and one for novelty. A solution can be big or small, and it can be conventional or unconventional. This model will produce four basic combinations: small and conventional, large and conventional, small and unconventional, and large and unconventional. Each of these subframes will produce a different solution.

  Let’s say, for example, we think clean drinking water will soon be in short supply, and we’d like to solve the problem before it becomes a global disaster. We could start by framing it four simple ways: 1) How can we create an affordable product that will purify water at the household level? (Small and conventional); 2) How can we build large water purification plants that can serve millions of households through existing plumbing systems? (Large and conventional); 3) How can we “manufacture” drinking water at the local level? (Small and unconventional); 4) How can we “manufacture” drinking water on a global scale? (Large and unconventional).

  The small-conventional solution might be something like the filtration products Brita already sells, but for less money or with smarter materials.

  The large-conventional solution might be similar to our existing water plants, but with better purification systems or better distribution methods.

  The small-unconventional solution might be something not yet invented, such as a household appliance that combines hydrogen and oxygen or a low-cost version of the Whisson Windmill, a device that uses wind power to collect water from the atmosphere.

  And the large-unconventional solution, to imagine one example, might be to use rising sea levels to flood coastal deserts, turning them into marshlands that remove salt and produce clean water, as the Seawater Foundation proposes. The type of frame you choose determines the type of solution you get.

  In 2005, MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte had a world-changing idea. He and product designer Yves Behar would design a computer so simple, so durable, and so portable that children in underdeveloped countries could have access to the same educational resources as children in advanced countries. They called their initiative One Laptop Per Child. They succeeded admirably within their frame, but eventually learned that they had drawn it too small. They had neglected to solve the problems outside the problem, such as how to build a barrier to competition, how to navigate government bureaucracies, and how to change entrenched views about education. It was one of the most heartrending bellyflops of the digital age, due to the wrong choice of frame.

  Of course, there are other possible dimensions to framing besides size and novelty. But what any kind of framing does is to protect us from accepting extreme opposites as the only alternatives. Whenever we become overwhelmed by complex problems, we’re susceptible to false dichotomies. Should the Internet be free, or should we let large media companies control what we can see? Should I go into debt to get a college degree, or should I resign myself to a lower income? Should our company invest in innovation, or should we make our shareholders happy? These are examples of options that make our decisions easy by reducing the question to which instead of what. In the face of complexity, our default mode is multiple choice—we prefer shopping to creating. We’ve been trained by Industrial Age marketers to believe anything go
od is already on the shelf.

  When Einstein was asked which part of the Theory of Relativity gave him the most fits, he said: “Figuring out how to think about the problem.” In another interview he said that if he knew a fiery comet was certain to destroy the earth in an hour, and it was his job to head it off, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes defining the problem and the last five minutes solving it. John Dewey had famously said that “a problem well defined is half solved.” Einstein apparently believed it was more than 90% solved.

  But what would Einstein’s fifty-five minutes look like in everyday circumstances? Are there any universal techniques for drawing the edges of a problem? Luckily, there are. Here’s a short course in the art of framing.

  1. View the problem from multiple angles. Like it or not, we all get stuck in our own belief systems. The easiest way to get free is to look at the problem from three positions: our own viewpoint (known as first position), other people’s viewpoints (known as second position), and the viewpoint from a higher-order system (known as a metaposition).

  Seeing a problem from your own viewpoint comes naturally, of course. Putting yourself in the shoes of other people is more difficult. And getting outside the system to view it objectively takes a conscious effort. The outside viewpoint, or metaposition, is more attainable when you climb up to a higher level and look down on the problem. For example, if your personal view of your company’s reorganization is that your job may be in danger, seeing it from a strategic viewpoint might reveal how it might unleash some opportunity for you as it makes the company stronger.

  Leonardo believed that unless you could see a problem from at least three vantage points, you’d have trouble understanding it. When he designed the world’s first bicycle, he looked at the problem first from his own point of view, from the rider’s point of view, from the investors’ point of view, and from the point of view of the communities where the bicycles might be used.