Constraints, Context, Complexity, and Culture with Alicia Juarrero, PhD | Ep 52

At the heart of an organization is a web of interdependencies, with elements such as task interdependence, reward systems, and even the smallest artifacts influencing behavior. These interactions and relationships bring an organization to life, allowing it to adapt, evolve, and respond to changes. By understanding these dynamics, leaders can effectively navigate the complexities of their organizations, creating a more robust and adaptive structure.
 
 Complex systems are not bound by the second law of thermodynamics. Rather, they continue to evolve in ways that can seem perplexing at first. Through a detailed discussion of the theories of Heisenberg, Prigogine, Bejan, Collier and more, Juarrero provides insight into the purpose of the OODA loop, the mysteries of entropy, far-from-equilibrium systems, and the role of constraints in organizations. Understanding these concepts can empower individuals within organizations, endowing them with unique abilities they might not have otherwise possessed.

Observation and orientation play a crucial role in complex systems. Proprioception, or the sixth sense, forms the cornerstone of this discussion. This ability, often used by professional athletes to navigate space, is a crucial aspect of our interactions with complex systems. The interplay between culture, genetics, and experience, along with external environmental factors, can influence our orientation and decisions. By understanding these factors, we can better understand the OODA loop and navigate complex systems and adapt to changes.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD on LinkedIn
Alicia Juarrero, PhD on MIT Press
Alicia Juarrero, PhD on The Cynefin Company 

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Transcript

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 0:58

All right. Hey, I want to welcome Alicia Juarrero to our podcast today. She happens to be extremely brilliant in the context of complex adaptive systems, constraints, coherence, and I have no idea where this conversation is going to go today, because there's so much we can go into with her background, her experience, her knowledge about the world of complexity. However, I will talk about a few things. Maybe we can set a couple constraints and use things that are somewhat known on this podcast, something like maybe like the Kinevan framework and the Oodaloop and kind of anchor from there and really maybe target an audience that is in a social system, in a team or an organization, and then refer back to the biology and things like that as we go. But very excited that Alicia is here to have a conversation with us about maybe constraints, maybe coherence, maybe context a lot of things that are really important today. So welcome Alicia.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:58

Thank you, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to this.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 2:02

This is great. Okay, so I have your book here. Context changes everything how constraints create coherence. One of the things we talk about when we're engaging with organizational leaders is that the system drives behaviors right and that doesn't mean a lot to them right away, and hopefully you can help us make sense of that when we talk about constraints within an organization. So I like to hear from you on what, where you want to go today with this and kind of maybe talk about constraints a little bit in the context of teams and organizations.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 2:34

Well, I think what I'd like to start out with is by pointing out that an organization is a coherent dynamic. It is a coherent structure. It is not a bunch of people. They'll happen to be in the same place at the same time. That is an agglomeration, that is a clump of people, that is a mass of people, that might be a collection of people, but when I think of an organization, I think of a dynamic that is organized. That's where the term comes from, organization, and that, in turn, comes from the concept of an organism. So it's more like a living thing than it is like either a machine or a pile of debris, which is a clump or a mass of things. Why? What makes it hang together as a coherent dynamic?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 3:36

And when I say coherent, I don't mean a block, people acting in sync like a block, like you know, battalion of soldiers marching that's not what I mean. I mean people who are aligned, who are either aiming towards a common purpose or their behavior in fact embodies that directionality towards a common purpose, something to that effect. And so the question is what points coherence? And that's what I mean by coherence, and my answer is that it's easier for me to say what it is not. And causes in the sense of pushes and pulls, the way science tends to think of as causes, is not what makes for coherence.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 4:36

Okay it is a set of interdependencies among people, among their the way they think, among the way they act, such that the dynamic as a whole that we call the organization can act as a unit. As an intake, I like the word integrity to to as a metaphor not as a metaphor, in fact, I think it's very real about these real things, because when we talk about integrity of a piece of ceramic, it means that it holds its integrity, it holds itself together as that unit, and that's what organizations do. And, in fact, if I were a leader of an organization, that's certainly what I'd be looking for as the most significant part of my job to make sure that alignment, that coherent, continues, whole and in the purpose of the organization's mission.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 5:51

One of the things that we're seeing in organizations is that many leaders think that writing values down on a wall and placing them across the organization that drives that. That is like an a constraint for them. Just because you write something down doesn't mean that's what's actually driving your organization right. So it's not that the, the artifacts that you put around a room or the emails you push out or things like that. It's actually the way you act and the reward systems within your organization and the context, and I'll throw this out there as context as well. If you have a context where you have a low level of task interdependence and you tell everybody you need to work together as a high performing team, you lose.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 6:38

There's a gap between what it is you're trying to do and your actual context, right? So this is why I believe this conversation is so important is there's? There's the? The illusion that we try to project as leaders in an organization, to say our values, that we write on the wall, these you know my open door policy to come and see me and then these, these, these constraints, such as how we reward people in our system. There's some that drive the behaviors more than others. I just want to get your thoughts on that, to see how far I, how far off I am on on this type of thinking.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 7:13

I don't think you're far off at all. I think that we have to distinguish between the interactions that create that coherence and then how that coherence maintains the participants in that coherence aimed in the right direction keeps them going, keeps them. What I want to say is that the organization embodies values. What I mean by that is that the interdependencies that become manifest in behavior are the, are the values that that organization possesses, regardless of what anybody writes on the wall, and so the values are manifested, they're made, they're made visible by those interdependencies.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 8:25

Because one thing I want to make sure, I want to say is that an organization is not a thing. It is not a thing like a rock, it's not a thing like a machine. It is a set of interdependencies. It doesn't make it any less real, but we tend to think in terms of things. A machine, a car, an atom, we tend to think in terms of things. And when we use nouns like organization, it immediately disposes people to think in terms of things. But it isn't. It's a set of interdependent constraints that become manifest as collective behavior.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:24

Okay.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 9:25

And it is those interdependencies that I want to call oh I don't know the constitutive constraints of the organization. It's what constitutes the organization, or it's the governing constraints of an organization that that emerge as a result of certain kinds of interactions among people?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 9:57

Okay.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 9:58

I always give a stupid example that comes from Jean-Paul Sartre, which goes back, good god, 50 years or more, and he uses an example way back when, and he certainly didn't know about complexity theory. But people standing at a bus stop who've never seen each other before? Right, they're just a bunch of people. They're not an organization, they're not anything. They're just a bunch of people standing together and all of a sudden, the bus is late. The bus is late. The bus is late. The bus is late, the bus is late. People start looking at each other Hmm, what's good? And now, all of a sudden, what you have is an instability, it's a gradient, it's a disequilibrium, correct. And then people start asking each other questions Well, is the schedule right? Is this neon sign that says it's supposed to have been here 15 minutes ago? Is that correct? Where are they? Let me take my app.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 10:50

And all these interactions serve as what I would call enabling constraints. Okay, because what they do is they take people who were prior to those interactions. They were just independent agents, they were not part of a coherent ensemble, but as a result of these interactions that were constrained by the fact that they're all the same boat, that the bus didn't come all of a sudden, you get the coalescing of what I would call maybe an action group or a group. It's a proto-organization, but I call those constrained interactions enabling constraints or put them there. Put it differently they are affordances, they are the kinds of interactions that have the potential to generate a higher level of organization, a group. Okay, it's very serious because I think that often happens in a coalescing phase, transformation, when you have that. Now you've got a group and it's a group that has certain characteristics. They are willing to act as a collective, to go complain to the department of motor, to the metro department. So emergent characteristics appear.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 12:28

Here's another point Once that group proto-organization coalesces, it constrains in a different sense of constraint, not enabling constraint but as a constitutive governing constraints the people who are there. Meaning what? Once that group, that proto-group, has emerged, it's an awful lot harder to just walk away and say okay, guys, you're on your own, I'm leaving, I'm going to solve my own problem Becomes a lot harder. That group has governing constraints on the individuals. Now these constraints delimit the behavioral possibility space of the people who are suddenly that's a word we would use aligned or entrained or synchronized by that group dynamic or synchronized into that group dynamic.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 13:32

That, to me, is what organizations are. The fact that they happen to register as a corporation in the state of Delaware is irrelevant, or the fact that the leader puts a sign on the wall is irrelevant. It is a certain set of interdependent relationships that make for an organization. That's where the values are. The values are in the power of that group to make sure that this person doesn't walk away from the group and say you're on your own, guys. I think that's what cultures are, whether it's a culture of an ethnicity or the culture of an organization. You can change all the rules of the game, but that culture is stronger oftentimes than any kind of ad hoc rules that the CEO.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 14:32

Does that make sense? It does. There's so many questions here. As leaders, they should focus on the enabling and governing constraints and not the culture of the.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 14:47

No, what I'm saying is that the culture of the organization is the outcome of those enabling constraints, because the culture is a higher level phenomenon. I am not a culture. I may be synchronized into a culture, I may be entrained into a culture, but I'm not going to go. A culture is a higher level dynamic. Like an organization is correct.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 15:30

Right.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 15:32

If I'm a leader, I have to ask myself all right, what are the enabling constraints that got this organization going as a coherent dynamic? Now, what are the governing constraints of that organization such that they are able to regulate and reflect certain values? Although are the values that they are reflecting that it is reflecting that the culture is reflecting the values we want, or has something gone wrong somewhere along the way?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:11

Okay, so it's the leadership actions, it's the actions that are within the organization that determine the culture. Am I right?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 16:23

That enable, enable.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 16:24

Enable.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 16:26

I don't want to suggest that the leader can single-handedly determine the culture, because each one of the people entrained into that organization has brought their own history to this system. And one thing that complex dynamical systems are in opposition to Newtonian systems is that complex systems are eminently path dependent, to use a less fancy term. They are historical, so you can't change, you can't by fiat this, eliminate that history. So that's a very important lesson for a leader, because what that says is that that person has to be very careful because they're going to have to live with whatever they are in enabling, and they are going. I like to use the word cat-eye. This goes back a long way. I wrote a paper decades ago about leadership as cat-catalysis, as a catalyst, and it's interesting because that word is part of the ordinary language and we say, oh, so-and-so, oh, that person's really a catalyst for change, right, and what is meant by that? What that means is that the way they influence an organization is not through old time top down hierarchical commands, because I think, especially nowadays, people understand the complex organizations cannot be changed that way. They're just too complex and the military learned this before almost anybody else.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 18:30

The reason I've been interested in complexity theory. In part is because I live in DC and, interestingly enough, the Naval Academy had someone as chair of their history department many years ago named Robert Artigiani. Robert Artigiani was chairman of the history department at the Naval Academy for many, many years. He's a good friend and he invited Ilya Prigazin, who was one of the founders, nobel Prize winner in chemistry, for complex adaptive systems, those named called dissipative structures, and I heard Prigazin speak in the 80s at the Naval Academy. Why? Because the US military understood very, very early on. And there's another book that's fabulous, that talks about how, even though they might not have used the term, they were really embodying the notion of the distributed control that these complex dynamical systems exhibit, and that's the book by Trent Hone. I don't know if you know the work of Trent Hone.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 19:34

I do know Trent His book is called Learning War and it's fabulous, and then he's got the one on their medicine, son. But he points out how, between the wars, the US Navy realized it had to have a coordination mechanism rather than top-down fiat. And a coordination set of constraints is a set of governing constraints. So I prefer thinking of leaders in terms of the fact that they provide coordination mechanism, mechanisms to coordinate or mechanisms to enable, catalysts, that sort of thing. It's leadership by catalysis, in a sense.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:22

Okay. So there's more we can unpack here. And I think I want to go back to your point about your Naval Academy connection. In your book you talk about Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You look at second law of thermodynamics, entropy. You talk about far from equilibrium. You're talking our language that we talk about here on no Way Out, because the reason we have this podcast is John Boyd looked at these disparate ideas from complex adapted systems thinking early complex adapted systems thinking, heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 20:56

He looked at all these things and that's how we have the OODA loop, which we can really kind of boil down to something really simple-ish. I won't say simple, but it's a evolving, open-ended, far from equilibrium process of self-organization, emergence and natural selection. That's one way to kind of put a bow on the OODA loop. But within that little sentence there are so many things that you just covered and that we could cover and I do want to go into I need your help and understanding a few things, because we've had Jim Rudd on the show.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 21:28

We've had Adrian Bijon on the show, which you referenced his work in your new book. We've had Dave Snowden on the show, which you referenced in your book as well. We have a lot of mutual connections, what I want to know and there's a lot I want to get into orientation, which is going to connect back to genetics and epigenetics and culture, into previous experience and learned history and all these other things. There's feedforward loops, there's feedback loops we want to dive into, but I want to start with a bigger picture and start with entropy and the second law and persistence. And what does that mean to you when it comes to complex adaptive systems and flow systems?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 22:05

What is it? What's interesting to me is that when thermodynamics was developed in the 19th century as a theory, right, each classical thermodynamics showed that Nature tends towards thermal equilibrium. And return that's usually used is disorder. It goes from order to disorder. A classical example, as all your viewers I'm sure know, is if you show an egg cracking, you never see it going back the other, in the other direction. From a scrambled eggs to a whole egg, it goes from an organized entity to a disorganized mess on the floor. But then, more or less in that same period in the mid-19th century, darwin seemed to show that in the case of biological systems, the opposite was happening, and that was that systems went from very simple, differentiated, fertilized eggs to a complex organism and then a complex ecosystem and a complex dynamic. So the question was how do you explain the complexification of living things without violating the second law of thermodynamics? I can't remember who it was it said. Look, if your theory says the second law is wrong, give it up, because that's the one law that's not going to be wrong. And Priggyzine gets the Nobel Prize for precisely doing that with his theory of dissipative structures and the standard example of dissipative structures, by the way, I think the best introduction to this is a little book that I think has just been released it's very old called the Self-Organizing Universe by Eric Yanche the late Eric Yanche, j-a-n-t-s-c-h. Forget about the first chapter. The first chapter is kind of how I found myself at Berkeley. I can skip that one. But the second chapter is a beautiful example of is a beautiful, clean, simple explanation of complex dynamical systems theory. It's beautiful and he gives everybody and Priggyzine gets the Nobel Prize.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 24:38

Talking about the so-called Rayleigh-Benard cells, do you want me to go into those? Yeah, that'd be great. Okay, if you take a pan of water and you put it on a heat, it on a source of heat and you heat it uniformly from below you know Barbara DeGeneres from the Naval Academy, joe Earley from Georgetown University's Chemistry Department and I used to do a dog and pony show, traveled all over showing this happening, and Joe Earley would do it with a Petri dish you know it's a pan of water about and then he'd pour some chemicals in it and he'd just let the heat from the on an overhead projector all time overhead projector, heat from below. And what happens? First thing that happens is a gradient develops, correct. Okay, what's a gradient? A gradient is the appearance of a non-equilibrium conditions correct.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 25:41

Yes.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 25:43

The liquid in that Petri dish is not at thermal equilibrium, where you have random molecules of water bumping into each other and staying over all the same way, If you continue to heat that Petri dish that a certain temperature threshold, something happens, that is, you start getting these little bubbles of liquid. Now, if you don't continue to heat the water, the context, the boundary conditions of that Petri dish, literally the edges of the pan of water or the Petri dish and so on, the conditions surrounding each molecule of water will dampen those little weird, little bubbly fluctuations that are strings of molecules interacting with each other. Does this sound familiar with the?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 26:46

with the bus stop. Right, yeah, it's people who are first at equilibrium. All of a sudden conditions take them to a disequilibrium condition. You start getting these bubbling going on. But back to the binar cell. If you continue to heat that pan of liquid at a certain threshold condition, the environment can no longer damp those random perturbations and you get a phase transformation where the system reorganizes into rolling hexagonal cells of fluid whose direction cannot be predicted. It is the direction of each of those rolling cells, the size, the precise configuration cannot be predicted, but as a whole a binar cell lowers local entropy production. So this was a situation that Brigadier deservedly gets the Nobel for showing. Look, nobody saying that overall the second law of thermodynamics is being violated. Overall, that solid transformation to those rolling hexagonal cells of fluid release a burst of entropy. So overall the second law of thermodynamics definitely goes, but locally that newly emerged structure shows locally internal lowered entropy production which will persist.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 28:40

What do I mean by persisting? That's what you asked. It means, just as I said once, that group of people at the bus stop find it hard. It coalesces. A group find it hard, each individual finds it hard to leave. Now they're entrained in this dynamic. How do you leave these people in the large. That's the social version of it, the human version of it, the water molecule version of it is, once each of those billions of water molecules in each rolling hexagonal binar cell is entrained into that larger dynamic structure, the dynamic structure as a whole WHLE, constrains the component water molecules. They no longer have the degrees of freedom to do as they please If you will let me that out of the morphism to do as they please, the way they would have before that hexagonal binar cell structure formed.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 29:51

So persistence to me means or implies that an organization and I'm going to use it here too, even though this happens to be a physical organization, it's not a social organization that an organization has coalesced and has thereby restricted the degrees of freedom of its components. Therefore, once I am a member of an organization, a social organization, be it a military command unit, be it a corporation, I am not free to behave any way I choose. There is a. As a member of this organization, I am constrained by the values of that organization to which I belong, meaning what I am constrained by the interdependent constraint structure that is that organization. So if I'm that water molecule you allow me again, and the morphism. I am not free to do as I choose. I have to adhere to the emergent characteristics. In the case of human beings, those are values, and obviously I don't want to say that about binar cells, but it is a constraint dynamic that I am now constrained to embody because I am part of it now.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 31:36

It sounds to me like you were just describing the current global condition, with the war, the volatility, the tribalism, everything that's happening on social media. Even I'll give you an example in the military, I can't do what I want, right? I have to do what I'm constrained or allowed to do within the system. I can't speak up and say I don't agree with this because I know if I do I will lose my job, right? These constraints are happening in organizations too, and this kind of connects to what we call psychological safety with an organization where you can bring your full self to work. If you're constrained by the system, you can't act freely. This is kind of interesting how there might be a connection between what we learned from the second law when it was applied to Newtonian physics and we talk about it when applied to complex adaptive systems, thinking which is far from equilibrium, the idea of flow systems and things like that, and even Collier's work with a source of energy.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 32:38

Oh, I love that you mean John Collier. Yeah yeah, he was so wonderful. I do want to say one thing Complex systems are not monoliths, but they are not block entities. The individual components of a complex system do not dissolve into the complex system.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:10

Okay.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 33:11

Those water molecules are still H2O's. They're still water molecules, so it's not like like if I am a member of an organization, I lose my identity and I have to simply parrot.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 33:31

You still have a boundary right. It still has a boundary.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 33:35

You still have an integrity as an individual. Yeah, now you have innocence. Somebody once said to me think of a painting before you put a frame on it. You know, somehow a frame gets it a property that it wouldn't have had. Or let me give you another example Maybe it's better, and I'll use it from social systems.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 34:09

A poet who wants to write a sonnet or a haiku correct, has chosen to do what? To constrain himself or herself to the rules of the sonnet. They've got to be 14 lines long, they've got to rhyme in this or the other, the haiku has to be so mixed, so on and so forth. Correct, right, but in a sense, by doing that you become a poet. So what I want to say is what I think we have forgotten is that by voluntarily becoming a member of, say, the Armed Forces or an organization we have acquired that, we acquire other capacities. We acquire the capacity to be a soldier, we acquire properties we wouldn't have had otherwise.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 35:12

You should get Bob Ardegiannion to talk about the difference in the Iliad before and after the war, because his argument is Achilles goes into the Trojan War as a warrior. What is the character? And the old term notion of a warrior was pretty much a freelance operator. Okay, so it takes him that experience before he becomes a soldier. A soldier is a member of an organized, higher level of organization, and freelance independent warriors can't get much done Right, and that's the end analysis. So that, just as individual people, if each one of those folks at the bus stop tried to talk the Metro Department into being more punctual, they probably wouldn't get very far.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 36:15

But the value of a what's the one I'm looking for, an action group, a person, no, is that, because they are part of the system, there are mechanisms for maybe modifying the system Right, correct, and so I don't want to say I've got to keep my mouth shut. Well, I mean, that's one way to put it and another way of putting it is I don't want to give up my emergent properties as a citizen, as a philosopher, and all of these imply that I am a part of an organization, that's, I am part of the history of philosophy, whether I disagree with a lot of things that they've said in the last few years, and nonetheless I carry that history with me, in the same way that those molecules of water in the Red Archea carry their history with them. And so I can modify the process such that the organization as a whole can evolve. So those are emergent affordances that an individual, be it a person or an individual water molecule, can't do on its own Right.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 37:41

And we forget that. We're so interested in emphasizing our individuality that we forget that individual doesn't mean isolated, individual doesn't mean independent. Even in ethics, most people say a hermit in the middle of nowhere, there are no moral values that are flagged by that person. I mean even the notion of values, of moral values emerge and make us different from animals in virtue of the fact that we have those uniquely human, independent constraints that make us who we are as human beings. So and so leaders are a tricky situation and members of an organization are a tricky situation because they're both of neither. They are both individuals and also members of a whole larger than themselves, of a coherent whole larger than themselves, which they could only be in virtue of those constraints. Am I making sense?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 39:12

No, you are. So we covered a lot of this for I want to try to maybe capture a few things and move on to a few other questions here. If I think I've heard this in the past that enabling constraints and governing constraints, you can kind of think of them as an endoskeleton and exoskeleton. Is that kind of right?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 39:31

You know what that might work.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 39:33

I prefer always using dynamical ideas rather than static ideas like an literally an endoskeleton and an exoskeleton.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 39:48

I'd rather think of the dynamic interactions, for example, that those sensors on those new military exoskeletons afford and enable. What is it? It's the interdependence among all that information that makes it an enabling and a governing constraint. It's the information and the information only appears as a result of those interdependencies. I am fascinated, in part because of this start-up of involvement called electromagnetic government. I am fascinated by the affordances that the coordination and integration between the drone sensors, the satellite communications, the fact that the individual soldier on the battlefield in Ukraine has the capacity to interact dynamically with the sensor of the drone, with the actual firing mechanism of the drone, with the information that it sends back to headquarters If that's not the most quintessential example of what the distributive governing constraints of a complex dynamical system can enable. I mean, I don't know what enables this whole thing or all those separate, independent, an interdependent phenomena, and then top down what they are able to accomplish as a result is just mind-boggling that who would have thought that we were going to be fighting a drone war.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 41:48

Drone war is leading to attrition warfare, which is going back to second and third generation warfare. We have fourth generation, fifth generation warfare happening. It's amazing what's happening at the moment. It is mind-blowing. I do want to come back to affordances and your example. There we talk about an open system that has a relationship with an external environment, and that external environment provides affordances I think I'm using that correctly that allow the open system in this case we'll call it the Oodaloop, or part of the Oodaloop to update its orientation, update its mental model, update its map or take some type of action on the external environment, to change the external environment. Are we using affordances correctly there?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 42:37

I think so. Yes, I would again. When Gibson wrote about affordances, I don't think he had complex dynamical. I don't know. I've never read that he knew about complex dynamical systems. It's very tricky. What is an affordance and what is a constitutive governing structure? The problem is they're the same set of interdependencies. They're just acting as affordances on the way up, if you will, on the way that this thing gets set up. I have a question for you about the Oodaloop. The first O is observation, observe, correct. Correct From a philosopher's point of view. It's not that every signal is coming in with equal weight, it is you're observing relevant information.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 43:31

Yes.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 43:32

Then the question comes from a philosophical point of view what determines relevance? That's out of the Oodaloop, that's prior to the Oodaloop. No, this is great On prior to the next iteration of the Oodaloop I love it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 43:47

Okay, so remember, we're going through iterations of the Oodaloop. If you think about it from a neuroscience perspective, the information that comes in is only the information that mismatches or is not aligned to the prediction that's going out back to the senses. Your orientation makes prediction and says I think this is what we're seeing and it's only looking for the difference of the mismatches or surprises coming in from the external environment. You're spot on.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 44:17

Well, but there's also the top down part in observation from the more advanced cortical areas of the brain which says what you see is what you expect it to see.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:33

You nailed it, you got it yeah.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 44:34

Yeah, and that's not a mismatch, that is, on the contrary, it's a reinforcement that could be very dangerous.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 44:42

It is.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 44:43

I got hired a number of years ago and that was thanks to Dave Snowden and Kenevan to work in Singapore for a week or so with Dave, with the military in Singapore. It was something about horizon scanning and that was a few years after 9-11. The question was everybody after 9-11 says it was all there. Nobody saw it. Yeah, it's just that we didn't. So how do you notice what is not even in your cognitive framework to detect? And I think you put your finger on the answer.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 45:21

That is what we have to teach people is, in a sense, to observe, to think about what's wrong with this picture. Yeah, in other words, where is there something that should match but isn't? Or is matching but shouldn't? Because once you've got that, then you've got a very interesting possibility of detecting a truly novel phenomenon. Otherwise, if it's a true black swan, you wouldn't see it. No, but the true black swan. But yet you wonder if you know policemen tell people when they're giving workshops in neighborhoods that it might be. Look if something feels wrong. Trust your gut. The interceptive yeah, proprosception must not just include sensory data that can come in objectively through the five senses.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 46:42

It has to include something that we're not sure we understand, and Dalasio talks about proprioception. You know, proprioception in a sense is a sixth sense is to you know where your body is in space, correct?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 47:03

Yeah, proprioception, yeah, how I relate to everything.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 47:05

Yes, and clearly, professional athletes football players, basketball players you can see the way they orient their body vis-a-vis the goal lines or vis-a-vis the end of the quarter, the field. They know exactly where that goal line is, even though they're not looking at it. There's an orientation in space. Yes, now I would want to say that this comes as a result of the incredible amount of practice. When back to my notion of being entrained into a complex dynamic, if you let me rephrase that and say you're entrained into a particular attractor, the notion of dynamical attractor, and if you think about I don't know if your listeners may be familiar with the Waddington landscapes, those rugged landscapes, epigenetic landscapes, yeah, so feedback, гieur Economics, it's available where you are in an attractor will condition I don't want to go as far as to say determined but will condition your orientation.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 48:32

Yes.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 48:33

Correct, Absolutely Tell the orientation and therefore what you observed. They both go together and they are eminently context dependent.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 48:46

Absolutely 1000 percent.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 48:48

And people say well, how can you explain that? You can change what you observe and you can change your context without moving and doing anything. I say easy Imagine if I'm on the bottom of the Grand Canyon and all of a sudden there's an earthquake this is purely hypothetical and all of a sudden the sides of the canyon just collapse and become, you know, the cliffs on the side of the canyon collapse and now I'm at the top of a mess and those cliffs have become canyons below me. Well boy, my orientation, what I observe, what I can observe, my perception is completely changing. I haven't moved. It's the constraints around me that have all changed and therefore my orientation, my observation are completely different than they were before.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 49:47

Wow, so we could dive into so many metaphysical things, including psychedelic assisted therapies, and we get into a tractor states and DMT and compounds and all that. With this conversation We'll have that covered. We'll do that later.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 50:00

That new stuff, all that new work, is really that it's a resetting of, instead of modifying and adapting, an existing landscape. What you're doing is literally redoing the entire settings and resetting the whole landscape.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:23

It's like you're rebooting the system.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 50:25

Instead of just modifying the settings, you're rebooting the whole system, and you wonder how much of that is really something that had never occurred to people in the 60s, when they were dropping out yeah. Yeah, it's interesting.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 50:39

We're going to dive into more of different modalities and how PTSD and TBI and all that and looking at the Oodleoo We'll look at that down the road, we'll come back to that in a few months. But going back to what you pointed out, so going back to the basic understanding of Oodleoo, you have the orientation piece right In it. We have our culture, cultural heritage, our genetics, which can include epigenetics. We have our previous experience, which is that learned experience or whatever. We have that new information coming in. So it's that interplay between all of those that determine our Wait. I take that back. It's not just, it is the interplay of all those. That new information is the context from the external environment. So it's the interplay of all of that that determines how we sense, decide and act. And it's not just five senses. And I say this when.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 51:25

I talk about it because we know I don't know the exact research but when you're trading in the market, the number one skill in that profession is interoceptive skills. It's not technical skills, it's interoceptive. It's how you connect to the universe right and within the Oodleoo. We can call that fingers-fitting of fuel or fingertip feel. It's that feel you get, that you just sense right and you don't know where it's coming from in your body it's just happening. So you're connected to the external environment somehow and that's, I think.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 51:58

You're embedded. Use the word embedded.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 52:01

You're embedded in that context, you're embedded. Okay, okay, we're embedded into this. We're part of this. Right, we're part of this.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 52:08

If you were just dropped into that location, you wouldn't sense a thing. It's the fact that you're embedded in it that gives you that. And I love when you do that with your hands, because when I used to teach this in class, the only way I could do so was by pointing to. You know, you get a feel for the thing right, but that's what musicians say, that, and in fact I understand that. If you really want to mess somebody's tennis game up, all you have to tell them is start noticing, start focusing on what it is you're doing with your racket when you swing back and forth. That will really mess them up. Why? Because it becomes a muscle memory, and if you want to call that interception or it's everything, it's really it's very interesting.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 52:56

So how do we build that up? And that's I want to go back to. That question is how do you build that, that fingertip feel, that feeling, that embeddedness maybe? And you build that up through experience, right? So, going back to fighter aviation, the way we would get better with outgoing flying is we would chair fly, we would get in a simulator, we would go through the switches, we would have the communication, we would go through the different emergencies. We'd have these experiences before we go up and experience it, right.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 53:23

And the same thing is true with athletes. And I think there's a way of training athletes now and professionals now. I think it's called the constraint-led approach, or constraints-led approach. Right, yeah, you actually create an environment that they're going to experience in a game. And I can see this, I can see this with my kids, right, so when they shoot, just shoot a basketball kind of nonchalantly and just, that's not the way you're going to shoot in a game. Right, You're not going to just so, you need to practice like you're going to actually execute.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 53:55

And this is why what, when we talk about military execution and military work and things like that, the way we phrase it is we spend 99% of our time preparing for that 1%, right, and then, and in business, they spend 1% of the time preparing for the 99%. So what you put in that 1% matters and you don't have time to do nonsense in pseudoscience, Absolutely Right. So, but that's what they do is they hire these consultants that come in here and teach them nonsense and you know pseudoscience and they get excited about it and they follow values they okay ours and they do all this stuff. But at the end of the day, it really comes back down to what you pointed out earlier and that is the interdependence, those interactions within the system, and that's where we need to focus our effort. So so much to unpack here.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 54:41

And the embedding, and I think that's where what is your training doing? It is making, it is creating conditions where feedback is obvious, immediate, short term. You don't. I always, we always used to say, when people were teaching this stuff about, how long must it have taken human beings to realize that it was sex that caused babies? There's a nine month gap. The feedback is not very short and it's not very fast correct, and so to connect the two must have taken mankind a long time, way back when.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 55:25

I want to pause there because I never thought about that and I think people need to pause and go back and listen to that again. That is so true. I'm going to bring it up to my kids tonight when we're up.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 55:36

So the problem is that the advantage of feedback and the advantage of simulations is that by shortening the feedback loop, the possibility of observing the right things, of observing the relevant things, of having the correct orientation, increases dramatically without having to do the training with live munitions.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 56:04

So feedback embeds people in the environment in a way that it just doesn't plunk it into the environment. That's why I consider it a constraint. It's an enabling constraint, absolutely, especially if you feed forward, because you do this and it gets reinforced. But what you don't want is for the problem to spin away, out of control. Spin out of control like the positive feedback loops of a microphone where you end up with a horrible screech, correct. So the capacity to then test that feedback through another iteration of the process means you are combining feed forward. All right, this is what I did. I'm putting that out into the environment and now if I feed back into, if I feed that output back into the first step of my next iteration, then I can see if it worked, if it didn't work, and I can try to make sure that it doesn't spin out of control before I even know about it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 57:23

Okay, let me ask you this. This is interesting Counterfactual, as a simulation, as a rapid feedback loop that's internal to the system. Is that correct? Can I think like that?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 57:34

Philosophers think of counterfactuals as a big deal, because, to the best of our knowledge, the ability to reason about the consequences of what isn't there and or what wouldn't what would have happened if this hadn't happened is an extremely important, I think, human capacity. That's what philosophers mean by counterfactuals. Right, you're thinking what would have happened if this hadn't been in place? And so it's another form of training, because it would suppose you didn't implement that thing. That was there, and boy, we got lucky, it happened to be there, and look how well the thing worked out. Well, what if it hadn't been there? If the consequences have been the same? And oftentimes the answer is no, and that's because.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 58:39

But we don't think about that, because we only think of causes as kinetic, as if I fire a gun and the other person dies. That's very clear cause and effect, right, I could all a baller and add a window and the window breaks. That's a very clear example of a kinetic cause, and we tend to think of causes only in terms of kinetic causes. But by thinking in terms of what would have happened if it hadn't been there, we are really turning the conversation around, so that we're thinking now in terms of constraints. I think, at least I hope that that's.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 59:20

Here's another one for you, A prediction. So we know that the brain predicts. The idea is that the reality we construct is predicted top down, inside out. So there's a prediction that's happening about the sensory causes, right? So is that prediction a constraint?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 59:36

Oh, absolutely it's a constraint. It's exactly as much as a constraint as the whole Bernard cell. Hexagonal rolling cells are a constraint on the individual water molecules. Absolutely, because that prediction will limit what you see.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:00

Yeah, you're right, it limits what you see. You know what the word?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:00:04

limit. It will put a boundary at least on the possibility space of what you think is feasible.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:11

That's what we're saying the same.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:00:13

Thing.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:14

We've been looking a lot at the free energy principle, active inference and, of course, AJ and B John's work, and there's some overlap between all of this, have you looked at Carl Friston's work on the free energy principle?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:00:24

Yeah, he's good. He's very good.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:00:27

Yeah, so that's really helping us understand John Boyd's work a little bit more with the OODA loop and I think there's it's one of the reasons why we think there's a connection between not just warfare but conflict, competition and then mental health, please yeah.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:00:48

I think what that also tells you. Back to my point about complex systems are not block universes, they allow slack, and in this book I make a big deal about what I call multiple realizability Sorry about that term, it's what philosophers tend to use and that is in biology. It's called degeneracy. Degeneracy means the same function that one particular protein can carry out, maybe carried out by different pathways, in different pathways. Still, allowing enough slack Right To accomplish the overall mission of the corporation or the military unit is not sloppiness, it's not lucy-goosiness, it is to set up in a fitness landscape an adaptive space that has more likelihood of succeeding, given that you are assuming that things might not go the way you think. Early on I was using a lot the notion of safe fail. I got that from Buzz Holling, who was a very important complex ecologist who was very much into complex systems. Very early on he said, you know, he associated stability with the idea of fail and fail. What do I mean by that? Stability, by definition, is the system oscillates very little.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:02:53

It's in a boundary, it's in a small boundary.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:02:57

That's a stable system. Correct, and we try to emulate our human organizations to be stable. I have a big argument ongoing with a very good economist friend who I keep saying why do you guys, guys, until the Santa Fe Institute started doing non-equilibrium economics, why do you guys always so enamored of equilibrium economics? Nature does not select for equilibrium. Buzz Holling's point was nature selects for resilience, not for stability, and resilience means the capacity to modify and evolve despite internal fluctuations and external perturbations. Correct.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:03:54

Right. This is like the difference between homeostasis and allostasis, right.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:03:57

Absolutely. And I think, if there's a beauty, I use allostasis for the first time in this book, but I do think that the notions of homostasis and allostasis are beautiful examples of what I call a higher level constraint regime, because homeostasis is not in any one organ, it is not in any one tissue, correct. It is what? A coordination mechanism that sets the set points, if you will, that establishes the set points of where that system must be in order to be viable under these conditions, given that history. So it has to take history into account and it has to take the current embedding context into account, and it does that constantly. It's fascinating.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:04:54

Now this is amazing, it's really unbelievable, because I am very interested, because I've been seeing it more and more popping up the notion of inflammation in the biological system, and you guys can start thinking about what would be the social organization analog to inflammation. You know it's, something's going wrong, something's been injured, something's not working, the set point isn't where it's supposed to be, and we can know that why because maybe the system's response is too slow, too sluggish, it isn't fit for purpose, it doesn't do what it's supposed to do. There's something wrong and so people start running around like chickens with their heads cut off and maybe sort of a human version of inflammation. Right, it's just trying to put out local fires, but maybe the problem is more with the homeostatic set point, and I know you don't want to get into PTSD, but maybe that's.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:06:03

Oh, we'll get into Love to have you back to talk about that down in the road. We're going to dive more into that. So the inflammation I used an analogy of an aircraft where you have parasitic drag on it. You know that's normal drag and then sometimes you get ice on the wings and that's there's your inflammation, right there, right. So an organization still has things that are like that, or you have parasitic drag in your organization right now. So that actually brings me to flow.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:06:30

Space. Many years ago and it was a lot of fun because, boy, when those F16s took off, it stopped my lecture with these afterburners, absolutely.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:06:43

I want to. I kind of brought up flow there. You have flow within your book and I also want to bring up I'm going to get this wrong. You have spatial and temporal constraints and I want to start with the time constraints the likelihood that of one event that happened in the past could influence something in the future. Is that correct?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:07:02

Not only that, it's the fact that the sequence matters. That the sequence itself serves as a constraint over all. So it's not that each of these steps matter. It's the sequence in which it happens that matters.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:07:29

Okay, and the reason I'm asking this is there's patterns in the universe that people are trying to use to trade in the market and sacred geometry, geometry, things like that. You see these patterns and you can see time moves based on when something was released to today, whatever. I'm just curious Is that because we're humans and we're trying to make sense of these patterns, or is there actually a?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:07:53

pattern. Well, I think that, just like Prigazine got the Nobel Prize for talking about dissipative structures, dissipative structures, as I said, are path dependent. They have a history to it, and Prigazine would always say and I've never been able to find this written down, but he used to say it in person, I was lucky enough to meet him a couple of times He'd say complex systems carry their history on their back. Okay, in other words, they carry their trajectory and the sequence in which things happened in the past and related to that which is a form of temporal constraint, I think, is the notion of timing. People don't realize that timing. I mean, people say it but they don't really act on it.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:08:48

Timing is everything in the following sense, and the easiest example that I use in the book is kids learning to swing on a playground swing. You're only focused on the kinetics that cause the swing. Then you start kicking harder and harder and harder, because you figure the harder I kick, the more. No, it's when you kick that makes all the differences to whether that swings in a swing at all, correct?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:09:24

Yeah absolutely so. So it one has to be careful. Just because it happened in the past is a better reason for doing something now If you're dealing in a Markovian Newtonian dynamic, but if you're doing a complex dynamical system, you've got to be very careful because you don't know where you are in that trajectory. In other words, why? Because complex systems are nonlinear, because they can quickly flip to a new phase and transform into a new, entirely different landscape.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:10:02

An example that is perfect, I think, to use to explain non-linearity to people is people go oh, I took two aspirin, I got a little bad better. Okay, I'm going to do take two more and I take two more, maybe get a little bit better. And then maybe they take two more and they got a bad better than they take two more. They could end up in the emergency room that there's a point after which the system will not continue in a linear process and might end up being counterproductive. You might get sick as a result of what heretofore were perfectly reasonable constraints that were getting somewhere, but not anymore. So what do military people say? The problem is we end up fighting the last war correct.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:10:51

Beautiful example of where you've got to be careful, things like they were during the last war, so okay. So what are the new constraints in which I am now embedded that bring their whole dynamic, that affect that epigenetic, that whole landscape, and therefore they affect the track driving, they affect the separate tricks right the hill that I need to get over in order to get into a better attractor. How do I get over that, and so on. And again it becomes a question of integrating information from as many different, disparate sources as you possibly can in order to enable the emergent feature of this new dynamic, of this new landscape to appear and make it set of evidence so that you can act on it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:11:53

Well, I tell you this has been an amazing conversation. I do have a couple more questions for you if you have time. You talk about flow quite a bit in your book. I mean, you're pulling from, like I said, bijan's work and thermodynamics In your mind. How important is flow when it comes to dynamical systems?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:12:13

I tell me what exactly you mean about flow, because I use the word flow, but I don't mean the word flow in the sense of I'm in the flow, that everything's going smoothly the way a painter or an artist or a musician. So are you using it that?

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:12:30

sense you can, but I think you use it more as like energy flows.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:12:34

Like yeah, I think closed systems that do not exchange matter, energy and information with their environments devolve towards stasis and equilibrium and they die. That is the lesson of the old-time thermodynamics. Only conditions that allow for Renovation with new energy, with new information, can restructure themselves such that they can modify and evolve. In that sense, I think flow of energy and information are absolutely critical. I think you saw that in the former Soviet Union no information, no energy. Close systems devolve towards stasis and equilibrium and they cannot reconfigure themselves and survive and evolve and survive. I know we have a lot of problems in America, but maybe I say that as an immigrant.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:14:01

Immigrants are more optimistic oftentimes than people who were born here. I think America has an incredible capacity to change itself, to modify itself. That can only happen if we allow for free and open exchange of information and energy and within constraints of viability. Obviously, even the founding fathers would not have said that you can shout fire in a crowded theater. So when I say as a member of a society, I'm saying look, I don't want to allow people to be able to shout fire in a crowded theater, but within constraints of literal viability.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:15:06

I think the only way you can expect I mean it's the way nature works. Nature doesn't have energy such that it can reconfigure itself if the pollution is so awful, if the clean and free energy to keep going with the words right, if that's not available, an ecosystem will wither and die. It cannot handle the internal fluctuations and the perturbations. I mean we do produce entropy, we are thermodynamic systems, but we have to make sure that we have the wherewithal to create that internal structure, that internal dynamical set of interdependencies that allows us to continue as a species and a society and allows us to evolve and survive.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:16:05

So social media creates algorithms that can potentially funnel information that you're biased towards, right, While preventing information that flows to you. That is surprising to you, right? So you're going to hear things that and this is kind of dangerous. So we can start to think about social media platforms as having what kind of constraints we're dealing with Very dangerous.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:16:28

I think what they do sometimes is the fact that they prevent and they bias it in a way that is destructive, not constructed. It does not afford the generation of new, coherent dynamics, although, that said, I must say they certainly encourage an awful lot of dynamics that are noxious to the system. I would say that means are constraints, and we do not quite understand how those works, but they sure seem to work very, very quickly and very effectively. When I say effective, I don't mean it's certainly beneficially. They manage to get people to coalesce around stuff that you think how did that happen? Right, yeah, it's very scary, that's very scary, but we need to think in terms of how those constraints work, and I don't think anybody sat down to study how that works. And it's fascinating and it's dangerous. We better figure it out quickly.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:17:49

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think the global current events are absolutely mind blowing. Speaking of current events, I think about the time this podcast comes out, you will be in Washington DC with Dave Snowden, correct?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:18:02

I think so mid-November sometime.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:18:04

Okay, we'll try to get this out before then, but do you want to give us some background on that and, potentially, how our listeners can reach out to you and some of the work you're doing now that you want to convey to our listeners as well?

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:18:16

Thank you. The work I'm doing now is taking a look at, I'm doing a little bit of trying to figure out exactly where assembly theory is coming from and what it's involved in it, and I'm also very interested in certain aspects of the history of philosophy in the 20th century that every single time the history of philosophy had the opportunity to really bike the bullet on context and see what exactly does context mean for how it affects society, how it affects our thinking, how it frames our cognitive structures and so on, they shundered under the rug and sort of went with sort of the standard ontic and epistemic approach. And so I'm looking at that and how can you reach me? I can be reached at a jruareru a j u a r r e r o at vectoranalytica. That's v? E c? T is in tom o r a n a n c a l y t I c a dot com. Vectoranalyticacom. Perfect.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:19:33

Perfect. Thank you and, like I said, hopefully I'll see you in a few weeks. I know I'm going to be up at DC for a portion of your events I can't remember which day I'll be there, but I want to thank you for your time and I definitely want to have you come back because there's so much more we can go into.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:19:48

Thank you, we'd love to do part two. It would be a lot of fun.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:19:51

Yeah, it's just a conversation, right. I had no idea we'd go into all these places, and that's what makes us fun is we'll find out where it goes, right.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:19:59

Perfect, perfect, thank you everybody. Thank you so much, appreciate it.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:20:03

Appreciate your time.

Alicia Juarrero, PhD: 1:20:05

Bye-bye.

Brian "Ponch" Rivera: 1:20:06

Thank you.