INTEGRAL ANTI-CAPITALISM cont'd.

[Layman Pascal]

For an introduction to this expanding meta-thread see Integral Anti-Capitalism pt I. We continue here because we have, hilariously, exceeded this website's capacity...

LAYMAN PASCAL

I agree that holacracy should be singled out for special investigation. The provocative notion that we are dramatically over-emphasizing the need for "conscious leadership" pertains very pertinently to this discussion. Robertson, like ourselves, is pointing to the fact that business (organizations) which integrally improve the interiors and cultural
spirit of their participants are still predisposed to certain outcomes as a result of their actual structural habits of communication and their specific decision-making protocols.
His notion of a constantly self-correcting dynamic organization drawing upon the capacity of individuals to act as tension-sensors relative to the "evolutionary purpose" of the organization is compelling and admirable.

More important is simply that he is making a stand and making an attempt to construct a protocol (constitution). I am not fully versed in the 4.0 version of the holacracy constitution but we should get deeper into some of these proposals.  

Given the level of your current knowledge of their protocols, what would you want to change or add in order to ethically and functionally empower this approach even more?

THEURJ

First some housekeeping in providing links in part I to comments on holacracy: their website, comment 1, comment 2, comment 3 (and 3 more on p. 7), and the first 7 comments on p. 8. 

I’m not yet familiar enough with holacracy to know it might need. So for now I’ll ask questions.  From p. 8 there was a blog post on ownership and the model might (but not necessarily) include outside capital investors. I asked:

“One question immediately pops up on outside investors. Are there limits on the amount of outside capital investment? What if their investment is such that without it the company could not financially survive? And/or depends on it for start-up? Then such investment would control the company, like it or not. If you don't do what I say I'm taking my ball and going home. No ball, no ballgame. Not the same as a mortgage or loan company.”

Granted why such investors are included on the Board there are other stake-holders to balance their input. But are there rules about which outside individuals or companies can invest? Do they have to have similar values like triple bottom lines instead of just profit for their investors? Can a Goldman Sachs provide start-up capital? Or Romeny’s ex-firm, Bain? Just wondering, so perhaps it’s time for those out there more familiar with the system to engage us?

LAYMAN PASCAL

I appreciate your inquiry about the potential influence of outside investors in holacratic systems. Perhaps they have a good protocol for that. Or perhaps not. In general, all "smart groups" need to comprehend and anticipate the distortion influence that donors and enablers wield. The psychology of human nature shows that we may believe ourselves to be quite sturdy and impartial while we are really bending in the breeze.

One of the concerns I had while perusing the holacracy constitution was about the voting procedure for filling roles. There are many parts of their approach which impress. In particular I would like to make not of the necessity to place constraints upon discussion. When the mention of a concern is met with the mention of counter-concerns then the intelligence and practical efficacy of discussions drops dramatically. A highly suspicious mind might even supposed that the human hive is encouraged to engage in the constant casual usage of dysfunctional conversation. So their use of controlled phases in both operational and hiring decisions is admirable. However, their actual voting protocol seems (to my naive glance) to be based on a model of transparent majority. A sophisticated "show of hands".

So this may be an area in which holacratic principles can be expanded to include a more thorough use of "secret ballot" and "averaged ranking".

The former often seems like a show of bad faith and an invitation to covert dangers... but these are considerably outweighed by the liberation of individual intelligence from any conscious or unconscious concerns about the social consequences of their input.

The latter evades a primitive "first past the post" approach in which our intelligence is functionally limited to a yes/no determination about each candidate relative to other candidates.

Another thing I admire about holacracy is that it represents a functional procedure and culture in which participants would appear to become better participants by participating. Their capacity and ethical commitment to the good of the organization through its evolving protocols should be an increasing trend. Any smart group needs to be arranged so that even people who try to distort the results will find their capacity and will to do this reducing over time. Replaced by the inspirational efficacy of the group.

This brings me to another issue relative to voting, both in political and economic groups. That is the relative absence of specific instructions about how to translated ones feelings into a vote-mark. This is almost completely unaddressed in terms of popular elections. To discuss it even seems insidious to some people who fear coercion (and/or wish to maintain the current material power structures).

Protocols should have at least a clear suggestion about how to locate both "gut" and "intellectual" data within ourselves and convert that into a numerical value which can be contributed to a group decision. A lack of clarification at this critical junction may act as an invisible source of drag upon an otherwise very functional group organism.

It might even be possible to define an "integral-level organizational set up" for business or politics by simply compiling a list of areas in which intelligence and capacity are distorted. We might recall that most of Wilber's philosophy has emerged in levels correlated to his discovery of "fallacies" or "basic errors". Integral proposals about business and society could be all over the map unless there is a reasonable set of constraints that make sure they fall in the most lucrative zone.

So other than the potential influence of outside "helpers" and "donors" what other sources of distortion or inhibition do you see going mostly unaddressed in otherwise progressive groups?

THEURJ

My next question of holacracy is who came up with it? It seems to be the pet project of Brian Robertson, his own brainchild. I'm wondering if that is so of if it was a community or P2P project? I mean, the structure of holacracy itself calls for distributed decision-making but was the creation of holacracy itself derived from this process or mostly dictated by Robertson? I've yet to find an answer at the site so I posed this question to them via contact info. I'll provide the response if/when received. I think the answer is pivotal in determining if this thing called holacracy arose from its own medicine.

LAYMAN PASCAL

I look forward that answer if it is forthcoming. The notion of self-arising systems is something which haunts the periphery of these discussions. My fantasy is that we can devise a group protocol which so reliably and simply exceeds the cognitive capacity of the individual participants that it would be foolish to predetermine the purpose and nature of the group. Collectively we could a better job of determining what kind of a collective we should be. "Smartgroups" of this kind could then spread through the world in a very radical social uprising. How possible that is remains uncertain...

As I understand holacracy, the different companies making use of it are assumed to engage in their own mutational modifications of the "constitution". So even if Brian wrote the whole thing out in his bathtub it still retains an open source quality. The answer to whether its current forms are or are not the result of distributed decision-making is almost certainly: sort of.

One of the reasons the holacracy approach is so amenable to business organization is that it seems to depend upon the functional axis of a specified purpose. The aim is somewhat pregiven -- our job is to sell widgets or maximize share-holder profit, etc. His use of the metaphor of the sensors on an airplane derives from a mechanism that is assumed to be designed for a well-known purpose.

My question would be whether or not this "aim" is a necessarily functional element in generating enhanced organizational capacity? Or whether it is simply an artifact of the need to make these systems serve a relatively conventional marketplace task?

THEURJ

Your suggestion of a smart group that arises creatively from a continually evolving set of parameters seems to be the intent and practice of holacracy. As to the organizational purpose of Holacracy One, it seems to have multiple bottom lines including but not limited to profit. For example, see this post in the comments where I noted that the top to bottom pay ratio is 3 to 1, and quoted some of those multiple purposes:

"With Holacracy at play, the game is entirely different: with the decentralization of authority, the separation of people and role, and the dynamic evolution of those roles, we end up with a situation that looks more like free agents going about their work with no central planning. There might not even be a single person who knows about everything you do."

This sounds much more like the sort of emerging P2P organizational structure discussed throughout this thread. And also of significance in the post following this article where The Integral Center of Boulder has "voluntarily relinquished their rights to control their company as owners. Instead, they have ceded authority to a purpose-centered governance process called Holacracy, a model that distributes authority across the organization and gives primary power to the organization itself."

These are indeed advances over the kind of conscious capitalism promoted and AQALly packaged for sale at I-I.

LAYMAN PASCAL

(comment pending)

This is an interesting moment. Apparently Amazon.com is experimenting with a version of holacracy as well. It clearly represents a theoretical advance over the typical kind of conscious capitalism which combines advanced sentiments with a potentially dangerous and uninspected ideological allegiance to more primitive routines of social organization and wealth production. Yet we cannot know the results of the experiment in advance.

I have tremendous optimism about emergent p2p organizational structures. Experimentation is utterly necessary and should be strongly encouraged. I am also very hopeful that advances can be made in terms of quantification. This is very central in my thinking lately.

It seems that experimental protocols for advances social organization systems suffer from the lack of a quantifiable evaluation of their respective degrees of "collective intelligence". Most people are drawn to such possibilities by ethical and aesthetic criteria which do no necessarily persuade the world. So I would love to see experimentation supplemented by the attempt to devise a metric for estimating the intelligence of a social organization protocol.

Along similar lines, my "tetrabucks" type notions represent the possibility/necessity to structure our currency at a level that correlates to advanced P2P organizational structures and post-pluralistic consciousness.

The potential of an evil holacracy has hardly been broached. If it works -- it works. Other than simply the tendency of less complex people not to use more complex systems, and the tendency of more complex systems to complexify their participants, there needs to be some inter-organizational structures which incline all organizations int he direction of broad human well-being. It is my assertion that as long as primary areas of value remain outside monetization the actions of groups trying to utilize official social credits will constantly become unstable.

So I am imagining a line leading from pathological capitalism to standard capitalism to conscious capitalism to trans-capitalist network organizations to such organizations bound together by a integrated set of metrics for determining the intelligence of groups and splicing together (at least) four broad domains of human value.

Along these lines -- how will we decide whether holacratic integral business is working better?

THEURJ

As to how we determine whether alternative economic paradigms are 'working,' I'd suggest that even by the standards of typical business democratic workplaces like co-ops are successful. If by that we mean the organization runs smoothly, has low employee turnover, high employee satisfaction, makes a profit or surplus over operating costs, and other such typical measures. Plus they fulfill their stated purposes as expressed in theRochdale principles, like community education, cooperation, democratic control, etc.

I'd say the same applies to holacracy. They also have to accomplish the usual business parameters like above but also meet stated principles like in their constitution. Given Robertson's business acumen I'm sure at the site he has precise and measurable indices to track such progress, though I didn't try to find them as yet.

LAYMAN PASCAL

(comment pending)

[Edward theurj Berge]

Whole Foods is at it again. Mackey has long been anti-union because he is beyond unions due to his workforce being so happy. Turns out not so much. They are cutting 1500 jobs, mostly the higher-paid supervisors, due to lower than expected earnings. Previous supervisors must now do the same work at lower wages. Stores are being incentivized to reduce the full-time work force and increase part-time workers.

Why the lower earnings? Their reason: To lower prices and upgrade tech. Real reasons: The various scandals they've been involved in, like overcharging and using prison workers. Another is that 6% of its stock is owned by Goldman Sachs, a key player in the financial meltdown. What WF is doing is standard operating procedure for such capitalists. If the top isn't getting the big payoffs due to falling profits that is their fault then the bottom workers must be the ones to suffer. So much for their so-called conscious capitalism.

[DavidM58]

Conscious capitalism indeed. Very conscious. 

[Edward theurj Berge]

Sanders is sick and tired of being questioned about being a democratic socialist. He said in last weekend's Meet the Press:

"When one of your Republican colleagues gets on the show, do you say, 'Are you a capitalist?' Have you ever referred to them as capitalists?"

The answer is of course no, no one ever asks that question. It's taken for granted that capitalism is the accepted and normal thing for one to be, while socialism is somehow evil. It's an inherent societal and media bias that is never even questioned when it needs to be. And that question needs to be asked and have adherents defend it, for it is the main problem in our culture.

[Edward theurj Berge]

For all you evo/as, check out evonomics.

Economic thinking for the 21st century

We only share the best ideas on the planet that are revolutionizing how we think about the economy and ourselves.

A revolution in economics and business is taking place. Orthodox economics is quickly being replaced by the latest science of human behavior and how social systems work. Few are aware of these deep and profound changes underway that have power to transform the world.  Not anymore!  Evonomics is the home for thinkers who are applying the ground-breaking science to their lives and who want to see their ideas influence society.

We are a community of leaders from business and politics to non-profit organizations and universities. We share the goal to update economics and public policy with the latest scientific knowledge.

Our job is to increase the speed of the paradigm-shift so that the future arrives sooner. We welcome you to join, collaborate, and contribute.

Evonomics is a project of the Evolution Institute.

[Edward theurj Berge]

See Robert Reich's article for the details on this key difference between Sanders and Clinton. An edited excerpt:

"Giant Wall Street banks continue to threaten the wellbeing of millions of Americans, but what to do?
Bernie Sanders says break them up and resurrect the Glass-Steagall Act that once separated investment from commercial banking. Hillary Clinton says charge them a bit more and oversee them more carefully. [...] Wall Street is on the road to another crisis. [...] Hillary Clinton’s proposals would only invite more dilution and finagle. The only way to contain the Street’s excesses is with reforms so big, bold, and public they can’t be watered down – busting up the biggest banks and resurrecting Glass-Steagall."

[andrew]

The best of the pundits last night , " we are the West's cop and we can't have a fair and equitable society because of that." 

Oh yeah, Hilary is gonna corral Wall St.! Too bad she had no influence 6 years ago. And heaven forbid we tell the middle class that their party is over this century; they couldn't handle that truth ....

[Edward theurj Berge]

What middle class? Whatever there was of it in the past has been decimated. Now we have the ultra rich, the professional well off, the poor and the working poor. While I used to be professionally well off I'm now officially in the ranks of poverty since I live on social security.

[andrew]

You're making an incredibly important point on demographics in the west within the next 30 years , Ed . But first, yes, since about 1850 the 1% have bought the consent of 10% and that has trickled down to 20% of the population within our culture being well off . But this system is all premised on 1850 thinking and IMO is no longer applicable considering todays conditions and circumstances ( its interesting to note that it is still 1850 energy that fuels this society ). 

Anyway, what kind of society is going to let 80% of its elderly live on the streets in the next 30 years ? Oh, yes, we can play the right wing blame game but that isn't going to change the inevitability  of the coming situation . This is just another reason that i'm so vocal about creating new ways of thinking and new ways of solving problems . This issue alone is worth considering a two economy solution . But hey, there are those that still think murder is the solution to homelessness ( god bless their Nazi little hearts ) .

[DavidM58]

On a related note, Scott Preston posted today:

"The Earth has reached something of a milestone, today. Credit Suisse’s Global Wealth Report 2015 now reports that 1% of the Earth’s population now holds half of the world’s wealth.

This trend towards such gaping socioeconomic inequality can’t continue, so why are there so many who still want to preserve, uphold, and maintain the status quo?"

[andrew]

I hope no one takes my Soylent Green is people comment out of context . 

Some answers to your question David : 

- an over attachment to the enlightenment ideal of individualism . 

-an inability to see past systems of false choices set up by previous elites ( science /god ; communism/capitalism; etc.) 

- 100 years of the giant media squid advertising the status quo 24-7 

- the fact that life really does look good when one is wealthy living in a gated bubble ( I think Florida has a whole gated Island ). 

-my own pet theory that the earth has been contaminated with false religion for millennia . 

-the inability to take someone else's perspective  .

Anyway, those are a few off the top of my head .

[andrew]

The latest on the never ending drama as global entertainment by the misanthropic elite : 

http://www.ctvnews.ca/business/greece-s-pm-tsipras-win-austerity-vo...

I hope anyone with any kind of spiritual vision can see the symbolism in this charade and why Greece was used as the scapegoat for entertainment for this cabal . It's democracy that must embrace austerity as the 1% transfer the wealth of nations into their pockets via corporate welfare . 

[andrew]

Who woulda thunk it ? Cuba! 

http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/10/16/the-elephant-in-the-room-cap...

They talk initially about the meaningless of the word sustainability and I would add that the word stewardship has become meaningless under radical religion like Christian- Zionism . There is only one social-political theory that is compatible with scripture: co=operative stewardship and radical neoliberal capitalists should not to allowed to pervert the meaning .