I am currently working with a small community which is having a serious problem with drugs among their youth. In a meeting with community leaders the same solutions came forward, most notably that the police need to enforce laws better (they don’t), the local government needs to do more (it won’t) and the dealers need to be run out of town (but no one will do it).
I suggested that, in the face of the evidence, none of these solutions are the magic bullet. So far none of what NEEDS to happen is actually happening. So what is the answer?
I am increasingly thinking that this small community is facing what many have identified as the fundamental problem with the global “war on terror.” A small number of unorganized people are wrecking havoc on the community and the organized structures (police, local government) are basically so mired in structure that they are unable to respond.
So what I am thinking is that a self-organized response is what is needed. The drug problem is essentially a self-organizing issue, with an unrestricted economy, drug use spreading like a viral meme and nobody in charge. The only way to beat the scourge is to self-organize against this. And so to this end, we have been considering using Open Space Technology to create a self-organized response to this problem, and we are starting with the community leadership group I work with. We have already started a little with people thinking about neighbourhood watch and other citizen based initiatives. The leadership group has also been working on larger and more systemic solutions to make the community more youth friendly and supportive of healthy behaviour, but these take a long time and the drugs are killing people right now.
What I’m curious about is whether or not anyone out there has seen examples of communities self-organizing to meet a self-organized or chaotic issue like this?
My friend Thomas Hermann in Sweden combined two of my greatest passions…Open Space Technology and ice hockey.
From the most excellent pssst…:
After winning several archery contests, the young and rather boastful champion challenged a Zen master who was renowned for his skill as an archer. The young man demonstrated remarkable technical proficiency when he hit a distant bull’s eye on his first try, and then split that arrow with his second shot. “There,” he said to the old man, “see if you can match that!” Undisturbed, the master did not draw his bow, but rather motioned for the young archer to follow him up the mountain. Curious about the old fellow’s intentions, the champion followed him high into the mountain until they reached a deep chasm spanned by a rather flimsy and shaky log. Calmly stepping out onto the middle of the unsteady and certainly perilous bridge, the old master picked a far away tree as a target, drew his bow, and fired a clean, direct hit. “Now it is your turn,” he said as he gracefully stepped back onto the safe ground. Staring with terror into the seemingly bottomless and beckoning abyss, the young man could not force himself to step out onto the log, no less shoot at a target. “You have much skill with your bow,” the master said, sensing his challenger’s predicament, “but you have little skill with the mind that lets loose the shot.”
I’m going to bring a little more focus in form to this weblog, mixing short posts in a more traditional weblog format with longer essays divided up into parts so you don’t get big long chunks of text to wade through.
And we begin with a paper called Self Organizing Systems: a tutorial in Complexity
This is a tutorial on the processes and patterns of organization in complex natural systems. No technical details are included in describing the models or theories used. Instead, I focus on the concepts of self-organization, complexity, complex adaptive systems, criticality, the edge of chaos and evolution as they pertain to the formation of coherent pattern and structure in nature.
The paper looks at mechanisms of self-organization (thermodynamically open, many parts with local interaction, nonlinear dynamics, and emergence) and then moves into complexity, chaos and evolution. It’s a great introduction to complex adaptive systems and a rich source for metaphors.
In case you think that intuition is just some wacky new age concept with no place in a real world which demands reason and logic, consider the case of Stanislav Petrov who single handedly saved the world from nuclear devastation in 1983 on nothing more than a gut feeling:
It was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov’?s duty to use computers and satellites to warn the Soviet Union if there were ever a nuclear missile attack by the United States. In the event of such an attack, the Soviet Union�?s strategy was to launch an immediate all-out nuclear weapons counterattack against the United States.
On this particular day, something went wrong. Suddenly the computer alarms sounded, warning that an American missile was heading toward the Soviet Union. Lt. Col. Petrov reasoned that a computer error had occurred, since the United States was not likely to launch just one missile if it were attacking the Soviet Union �? it would launch many. Besides, there had been questions in the past about the reliability of the satellite system being used. So he dismissed the warning as a false alarm, concluding that no missile had actually been launched by the United States.
But then, just a short time later, the situation turned very serious. Now the computer system was indicating a second missile had been launched by the United States and was approaching the Soviet Union. Then it showed a third missile being launched, and then a fourth and a fifth. The sound of the alarms was deafening. In front of Lt. Col. Petrov the word �?Start�? was flashing in bright lettering, presumably the instruction indicating the Soviet Union must begin launching a massive counterstrike against the United States.
Even though Lt. Col. Petrov had a gnawing feeling the computer system was wrong, he had no way of knowing for sure. He had nothing else to go by. The Soviet Union�?s land radar was not capable of detecting any missiles beyond the horizon, information that by then would be too late to be useful. And worse, he had only a few minutes to decide what to tell the Soviet leadership. He made his final decision: He would trust his intuition and declare it a false alarm. If he were wrong, he realized nuclear missiles from the United States would soon begin raining down on the Soviet Union.
He waited. The minutes and seconds passed. Everything remained quiet �? no missiles and no destruction. His decision had been right. Stanislav Petrov had prevented a worldwide nuclear war. He was a hero. Those around him congratulated him for his superb judgment.
Thanks to Barista for the link