musings of an itinerant lover

According to wikipedia “conceptual frameworks are a type of intermediate theory that have the potential to connect to all aspects of inquiry (e.g., problem definition, purpose, literature review, methodology, data collection and analysis). Conceptual frameworks act like maps that give coherence to inquiry.” I view it as an explicitly stated understanding of what you know to be true. So we go through life making tons of assumptions: people are bad, people are good, that’s just the way it is, business is business, don’t mix business and friends, businesses are supposed to make money, organizations are supposed care for the well-being of their members, reality is integrated, etc. Of course some of our assumptions are accurate and others are not. The purpose of writing a conceptual framework is to hang these assumptions in front of you so that you can examine them critically and hopefully, over time, you will be able to discard some of the erroneous assumptions and more deeply develop some of the more accurate ones.

In my first undergraduate economics course, a rather self-assured professor of mine stood in front of the classroom and confidently declared that humans are “selfish, greedy, have unlimited wants and the world has limited needs and thus the field of economics.” What he really meant to say was that “we have a conceptual framework that has evolved throughout the history of civilization and this framework has underlying assumptions about human nature, the purpose of governance, the distribution of wealth and other things. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate and sometimes they’re a bit inaccurate and what the field of economics is based on today is the assumption that human nature is exclusively selfish, greedy and has unlimited wants”….that’s what he really meant to say I think…it just came out wrong.

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For the last 8 years I have been informally investigating some of the underlying organizational principles of the human body and using some of those “truths” to inform my consulting work within a business environment. Though I have been mostly a lurker on the economics forum I mentioned in a previous post (and here is to show that lurker learning is one of the value propositions of an online forum) I have been greatly inspired by the dialogue to formalize and systematize this personal exploration. Last week I reached out to a former medical school colleague of mine (whom I used to compete vigorously with mind you) and we have begun meeting on a regular basis to discuss elements of biology, physiology, embryology, etc and to attempt to use some of these principles to help us understand the dynamics of our societal systems much like a physician would use his knowledge of these fields to understand the state of a patient. We are capturing our musings on what is, for the time being, a private wiki. I wanted to share a few minutes of the conversation we had this last week while we were discussing the functioning of the cell.

As I’m sure all of you are aware, the most commonly held view of the functioning of the cell is that the nucleus, floating within a nuclear membrane within the cytoplasmic matrix full of marvelous cellular machinery, operates much like a military HQ base wherein DNA (or some other mysterious force) will issue commands and, within the confines of this relatively isolated, buffered and protected environment, will determine the course of the future of the cell (i.e. what proteins are produced, how fast the cell grows, etc). Over the course of the last few years there has been an increasingly compelling body of evidence that seems to be hinting at what both of us had felt for a long time…that much of the executive functioning of the cell happens not at the level of the nucleus, but rather at the periphery and in the membrane of the cell. Furthermore, that the ability for the membrane to become conscious of the reality of its environment (through the production of channels, receptors, etc.) is directly proportional to its ability to survive within a changing environment. That is to say, that if the environment outside the cell changes, the nucleus won’t necessarily know. Rather it is to the extent that the membrane has gained awareness of the change in environment that it is able to issue, through cascading chains of protein modification and such, commands to the nucleus to produce the structural changes necessary for progress and survival. If, indeed, many of the executive functions of the cell are held at the periphery and not, as was once thought, at the core, this could have profound implications on the way we structure organizations and systems.

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I’m thinking I should start every blog post from here on out with a pitiful guilt-laden apologetic opening bemoaning my failure to consistently blog YET AGAIN (notwithstanding yesterday’s post).  It can kind of be a theme of sorts.  I may have actually found my blog title.  The failing blogger…another non-blog…ya…maybe I’ll just raise my head stoically, march on and try to do this first thing in the morning from here on out.

So I’ve been thinking a little about how we are often expected to trace the origin of an idea…especially in academic thinking.  This idea seems umm….ridiculous perhaps?  insane maybe?  Its as if an idea were a pillar of a number of neatly stacked bricks creating a nicely defined, clean cut, very traceable origin where each brick built upon the previous.  That seems totally delusional to me.  What makes up my ideas?  Pieces of conversations, the memory of something I read long ago that shaped my thinking whose origin is now long forgotten, an eavesdropped coffee shop comment by the overly pierced leather wearing dude to my left…and that’s only what I am AWARE of!  We are constantly being informed by sources we’re not even consciously aware of that our mental models sift and order.  Yet despite all we have this notion of property…intellectual property.

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I have recently had the opportunity to participate in a forum wherein the participants have been exploring the foundation of the current global economic system and challenging some of the basic assumptions that may not represent our current understanding of reality.  Though I think virtually everybody on that forum is far more qualified and capable of providing meaningful input to the discussion, I wanted to share some thoughts that I posted on my blog.

My own formal training in economics was only at the undergraduate level, most of the time of which I was fairly intellectually comatose. My interface with our economic system has instead been mainly as an entrepreneur. In doing so I feel and daily taste the fruit of our system but I find that I rarely take the time or energy to think deeply and penetrate the assumptions underlying such a system. As such I feel it is helpful for me to start from the most fundamental assumptions that I believe to be true, state those assumptions explicitly, and work my way from there. I unfortunately don’t have much of a toolkit for this type of thinking, so unless I start from the absolute basic underlying assumptions of what we know to be true I find time and again my thinking gets hijacked by largely unexamined patterns of thinking that, because I have been thinking this way for so long, become my go-to default modus operandi. I hope that the following provides some useful and relevant content for the ongoing discussion surrounding the current global economic situation and that it is not too basic or elementary. If so I hope you bear with my attempt and I very much welcome any assistance in ways that I can improve my approach or thinking on these topics.

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So over the course of the last two years or so I’ve been working with a remarkable team of individuals, both formally as well as informally, on attempting to revisit the basic assumptions of the role of business and commerce in society.

Watching everything go down with the financial industry has had me very agitated at times. It seems we often end up trying to blame a bad CEO or a few greedy people at the top or even an entire industry while we completely ignore the fact that the entire cultural context within which ALL corporate decisions are made is rooted firmly in a pervasive materialist ideology that explicitly states that human prosperity will follow material prosperity as a matter of course. (Though I wonder if the series of failed social experiments that we refer to as the 20th century might provide a bit of evidence to the contrary)

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