This episode is hosted by Boundaryless Conversation Podcast host Simone Cicero with co-host Stina Heikkila.

The following is a semi-automatically generated transcript which has not been thoroughly revised by the podcast host or by the guest. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.

Simone Cicero:
Hello everyone. Tonight we are here with my usual co-host Stina Heikkila.

Stina Heikkila:
Good evening, everyone.

Simone Cicero:
With us we have Joe Norman. Hello Joe, nice to have you on the podcast. We’re really looking forward to explore some of the very interesting topics you have been exploring and investigating in the last year. So the first thing that I would love to start discussing and exploring with you, based on your deep knowledge on complex systems is to what extent an organization can be considered as a living organism? And in case yes or no, why it shouldn’t? And maybe also, what is the difference in your point of view between a living system and more generally a complex system? That could be our starting point.

Joe Norman:
First of all, thank you so much for inviting me and having me and thanks for the hospitality. So to start with maybe just worth kind of noting my perspective on complex systems and the kind of questions that you ask when you look at things in terms of a certain complexity lens, and that is when you think about the difference between kinds of systems, you think about their organization or their structure or the set of interactions that they embody, more than maybe what they’re composed of. So for instance, we know all organizations like the ones that you’re discussing are composed of people, people and maybe technical systems as well. Nevertheless, to organizations that are composed of people can be very different kinds of systems. So, for me, I wouldn’t so much ask “are organizations living systems are they not living systems”, it really depends on the kind of system, the structure and the processes that the organization embodies. Some systems are going to look much more mechanistic, and that’s actually coming out of the Industrial Revolution. A lot of our metaphors about human systems are mechanical in nature. So we often think of human organizations that’s kind of embodying large machines, cranks, turning and whatnot. You can almost imagine a sort of Ford factory assembly line where the people are kind of interchangeable to one degree or another, there’s a high degree of specialization. So the people kind of become part of machine. Whereas other organizations might look much more like living systems. So you asked what is the difference between a living system? Maybe that’s just a complex system or maybe a simple system? That’s one of the most difficult questions in all of science and all of biology is what is it about a system that makes it a living one versus other kinds of systems? So some promising themes around that question. I would say we used to think like autopoiesis, which is comes from the servant activist line of cybernetics. Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana. So autopoiesis is an attempt to define a system that sort of meets the minimal requires for living this, that is it’s not just a system that does things, that does processes, that has structure, but the processes that the system unfolds refreshes the structure of that same system. So the heart and the lungs work in tandem with the rest of the body to distribute nutrients to get around the world, collect energy. And, in turn, that all ultimately manifests is the continuation of that very system, the rebuilding, the refreshing of the structure that made that activity possible in the first place. So, there’s a kind of attempt at a minimal definition of a living system. Now I’m not sure if it’s efficient. But it’s a good try and there’s some related kinds of models from for exemple Robert Rosen, who looks at the problem in a slightly different way, but comes to a similar conclusion, looking at the way there’s so much sort of causal structure within the living system that it has enough causal richness to generate itself and to maintain itself. So in a human organization, what makes a living organization is even harder to say, because we exist within these systems, so there’s no sort of vantage point from which to get outside of it and look at it the way we can say what kind of individual animal as an organism. Nevertheless, some of the same principles about how the system unfolds in time could be present and have a living pattern. For instance, sort of bottom up development of structure and communication, pathways and information flows. You know, does a person come in and say, “Hey, I’m going to design all of these information flows through the system. Here’s who should be talking to who”, that’s sort of a top down design scheme. Or do those kinds of interactions unfold from individuals or small teams sending out signals in some way or another getting those signals and choosing to coordinate, choosing to link up, communicate things like that. So, I think it’s a very big question. So I’ll stop here with that as at least an introduction to how I might start thinking about that. But the big question, I think what’s important, the key takeaway, from my perspective is that whether an organization is a living system or not depends on what you allow it to do and how its treated by the participants in that system. And it’s not so much it’s either one or the other.

Simone Cicero:
There is a lot of talking about organizations made of cellular structures. So for example, we are now working with this Chinese company called Haier that is made of 4000 micro enterprises. There’s another company in the Netherlands, which is very famous in terms of how they structured it. It’s an organization that provides care services called Buurtzorg, that is organized in teams of 12 people that replicated the same processes but are very much adaptive to the local context. But at the same time we are witnessing an emerging pattern in successful organizations that are more adaptive to the world that we’re living, which is this pattern of architecting. So, there are often some leaders in the organization that to some extent, provide an architectural direction to the system’s organization. I was curious to see how this resonates with your consideration that you often make about this idea of architecting the whole system.

Joe Norman:
Well, that’s an interesting term, to speak directly to what you’re talking about, I think I need to know more about what the architect is supposed to do and how they actually interact with the system. But as a general point, I think architecture is actually a really fertile place to think about the intersection of what we usually consider as kind of top down design processes and more living bottom up evolutionary processes. So when we design things, we tend to have an intention about what we want, what we want to achieve, how it might look. And when we think about nature, how it evolves, the general idea is there’s no one deciding those things. They’re just kind of happening in the world and the forces that are already present within the world or that those systems generate, kind of weed through possible spaces of possibilities. And things that have some kind of properties that make them persistent, go on in time and things that don’t indeed don’t. So, I’m digressing a little bit, but architecture is such an interesting, fertile ground because of that intersection. And you know, I’m a really big fan of Christopher Alexander, who is by specialty an architect. And beyond that his practices and writings on his practices, and the kind of conceptual frameworks that they’re using go along with that, span into sort of systems design philosophy broadly and even sort of complex systems theory broadly. So I think one of the things that we’re trying collectively to kind of grapple with right now is what does it mean to grow a system intentionally? How do I structure the environment, structure the constraints, set conditions such that a living or a sort of organic system can grow and develop in a direction that we as people with values deem as useful, helpful, value adding etc. So, the challenge now is to not see that when there’s issues, human agents or even architects so called in the systems, that the role of that person and those people is still to facilitate the organic unfolding of the system and not to impose too many directives on it. And how do we set those constraints who set them at what level? Why those constraints and not others and it’s important to think on constraints because the possibility speces is so large that we’re really stealing from possible “Aha” moments and “Eureka” moments among individuals, among groups, if we don’t allow the system to move into configurations that no single person imagined. So what the architect does to me is of the utmost importance in any system that asks for an architect or certain architectural process.

Stina Heikkila:
I know that you have been talking quite a lot about this precautionary principle. And I was listening to what you were saying now, the conditions that reset for growing the system’s intention fully. I was wondering if maybe you can talk a little bit about that. And also, if you see that there are other principles that could facilitate this kind of work.

Simone Cicero:
And also in relationship with the role of the architect, what are the principles that the architects should keep in mind when they design these organic systems?

Joe Norman:
So the precautionary principle, that’s an interesting place to go from here? The precautionary principle is about large scale and systemic risk. So, what I was mentioning was the need to place only constraints and rather than directives as much as possible, so the system can explore the possibility space. One of the places that in large scale systems we need to place constraints are in places and in ways that prevent cascading systemic risk from invading the entirety of the system, whatever the system of interest might be. So, the balance for allowing a system to persist and explore and evolve exists in cutting the biggest, most ruinous downside risks, making those where your constraints are placed, and then allowing the system to explore otherwise. So you kind of want to be aggressive in terms of local risk taking and local experimentation while being paranoid, essentially, if you want to use the term att for the most systemic, the most widespread and ruinous type of risks for the whole system. So a lot of times discussion of the precautionary principle gets mired down in that sort of accusation that “oh, well, if we don’t take any risks, we can’t make any progress. We can’t do anything new”. And no, that’s actually not the case at all. It has to do with the manner in which you take risks of doing new things, of trying new spaces out of organizing things differently. And this connects to the other theme that I know that you were wanting to discuss about localism. There’s a cross rate principle and then there are principles around structuring things in a local manner, having a preference essentially for connections that are local in nature, whether that’s in physical space, which, as we talked about it often that’s a discussion because physical space sort of precedes so many other types of interactions and sets the conditions for a high density of high fidelity interactions or sometimes localism could be in a more abstract space like you see in Twitter. You know, we interact on Twitter, we follow each other, and there’s all these little sort of cliques and sub tribes and kind of topic groups that have emerged, that are kind of localist in nature, not in space but in a sort of conversation space. A localist principle or for instance a very relevant principle of subsidiarity says whatever the function of an organization, whether it’s a governing body or part of an organization or function of organization, the best scale at which to serve some function is the smallest scale at which it’s possible to do so. And so then you end up with kind of a redundancy of function, some variety on the forms and the functional consequences of those forms. Precautionary principle sort of cut your systemic downside. An approach to cutting the systemic downside without eliminating the evolutionary and exploratory upside is by bounding things essentially locally and allowing a lot of variety and exploration at those local smaller scales. And so that when failure happens, which of course it does, you’re learning from that failure or you’re at least surviving it system wide. That is another sort of intersection of many themes, precautionary principle and localism, subsidiarity and how you think about system structure.

Simone Cicero:
That is interesting Joe, definitely a reflection that I would like to offer. There is a lot of talking about organizations that are optimized for resilience in changing times, for example, a lot of people say, if your organization is placing a lot of bets, or maybe if your organization is structured, a little bit like a network of loosely coupled units, it’s going to respond to the changes and be more adaptive in the 21st century. That is characterized by, I would say, a much higher level of uncertainty. We didn’t speak about the Corona virus yet, but it is in the background of the conversation. My point is, coming back to the question of localism that I find really important, is there some kind of difference in just applying these principles of being loosely coupled and networked nature, and doing the extra mile of saying that these loosely coupled unit also need to be embedded in the landscape and in the community?

Joe Norman:
Well, for me, this question goes beyond organizational considerations that most modern day organizations are thinking about. Nevertheless, when you look at the multiple crises we face all across the globe, and the similar and different challenges that people are facing, there’s clearly a disconnect for most people. I think I’ll venture to say, between their sort of career self and the communities that they either are or not a part of. This really goes back to some of the core themes of complexity, you know, what are those : emergence, more is different or bigger is different. So the importance of scale, how changes of scale are almost necessarily changes of quality, not merely quantity. So when you look at how organizations have scaled over the past, let’s say since the Industrial Revolution, where we’ve gone since then, there’s been a sort of increasing disconnect between human communities and the organizations that we participate in. So this goes in many ways back to our values. This is not just necessarily a business question. The question is, do we value human community? And if we do, is there a resolution to the tension that we’re seeing now between business organizations and life lived in a context? I know for myself, I can say that you can certainly see in the US, in many places, the lack of community and how the sort of raw economic variables that we think about, and we look at, in sort of the context of business. They are not good indicators of how people are doing. You know, if people if they’re doing really bad that people might be doing really bad, the economy is hurting and all that of course, but just because the economic metrics are rosy is not a good indicator of sort of the health human communities. These things are not completely disconnected because as we scale organizations there’s more and more negative externalities that manifests that aren’t represented in market prices, the causes become diffused and hard to track down, long causal chain supply chains, etc, etc. So we have all these externalities that we’re facing now. And I think one of those major externalities that has been underappreciated is the way that business organizations can kind of undercut their foundation, which is sort of the soil that is community and sort of humans thriving. So I don’t know if that’s that’s the direction you were imagining going in.

Simone Cicero:
Totally. The question that we are searching for a while now, which is try to understand the connection between a feeling that we have — which is not just intuitive but also through the conversations that we had — this intuitive feeling, that we are witnessing a transition between an age of completed decent tangled organizations, and organizational theory that is just focusing on producing customer experiences without taking into account any externality of the business, and the new age of organizational thinking, that seems like to be much more about health. So with this idea of health as a driving principle of our organizational efforts, we feel that in this transition we’re going to see new constituents coming up, and we’re going to see different priorities. But maybe the missing point that we have so far is the idea of how this institution is going to happen as organizations end up undercutting the system that they are embedded in? In another podcast that we recorded a few weeks ago with another guest Indy Johar, he made this point that to some extent, at a global level, we are now witnessing and experiencing this idea of small world dynamics like every people now feel like they are interconnected. Not just the Corona virus for example, has created this feeling that we are all in the same context, and to some extent also pushing a power shift from the traditional organization more into the household and the community. So my question for you would be, how do you feel, in terms of dynamics of complex systems, that this complex system that is humanity and the human society may adapt to these new ideas? How this transition could happen?

Joe Norman:
Okay. So I mean, I think this transition is happening, you know, under our feet right now. The broad theme that’s defining our transition right now is that of decentralization. So you’re mentioning that small world network, this is the idea that, as you take a spatial system, imagine a grid of little nodes that are connected to their neighbors and those neighbors pick the neighbors. So it’s like the globe before you could fly in a plane. It took a lot of hops to get from one side of the globe to the other, you couldn’t just jump to the other side. Well, it turns out that when you start adding long range connections in that system, not just the short range local ones, very quickly, every node in that system becomes only a handful hops away from any other node. So effectively, it shrinks the space in a very literal way. So when you think of topology of the space, everything becomes very close together. These are indeed the conditions that make pandemics, for instance, so lightly, not just this one more to occur. And, you know, pandemics occurred even before we had this kind of interconnection. So that’s not to say that they’re normal, or that we should allow them to unfold. But we should expect them as long as we want to be interconnected like this and expect them to be very rapid and very severe. And frankly, if we don’t get our act together on that, that’s gonna turn out really bad because the situation is ugly enough and a virus could be much worse and travel much faster. We need to figure that out. Returning to the point, the theme that we’re experiencing is decentralization and we’re not experiencing because it’s a medic trend that happens to be happening, sort of fad or a trend or something like that, it’s not a fashion. The fact that we have become so interconnected has given rise to many very large scale forces that are cascading around the globe all the time in different media, different ways with different interactions. We don’t have any means and nor hope of having means of being able to observe all of those cascades and track them and sort of respond to them in some sort of control theoretic manner or something, there’s just too much. What’s happening in response to that is that systems are naturally decentralizing in order to sustain themselves because there’s too much happening at large scales to respond to. So two things happen once this was decentralized : one, because we are the source of those large scale forces as we decentralize, the forces themselves start scaling down and become more manageable. Moreover, when the sort of control unit of any given societal unit or something like that the control mechanisms of a unit become able to be tuned into what’s locally relevant and tuned out everything that’s not relevant, whereas if you had some broad policy making schemes and widespread scheme, these are necessarily insensitive to the local variations of things. So decentralization is the theme. One of the things we can count on with all of this is that there are surprises left always ahead. So much of looking at things in terms of complex systems is really developing a humility around what can we really predict? What can we really see coming in the future? And given that we know actually, we can’t say much about where a system is headed, so large, so complex, so many interactions, what are the strategies and tactics we can adopt to do the best we can under those conditions. And just so happens that as the scale of forces scale up, as the complexity of the challenges rise, that decentralized systems are just faring better. So we’ll keep going that way for a while I’ve no idea to what degree it will persist. But I think that it’s really rising awareness and interest in this word that’s being tossed around localism is really a sign of a lot of people starting to come more aware of that kind of dynamic, the dynamic is not necessarily in sort of philosophy or a particular political system left or right, liberal, conservative, it’s really this variable that’s been missing from all of those conversations for a while, and that is the scale of the system and degree of centralization and decentralization in the system.

Simone Cicero:
To try to put together pieces for our listeners, as I understand basically the decentralization that we have been witnessing is introducing so many risk factors, that as an answer we will need to decentralize, which will deflate these forces that generate these risks, and on the other hand they will completely transform the salience landscape for the communities and for the organizations themselves. So the relevance will change and we’re going to reprioritize as an effect of this decentralization. Did I capture more or less a couple of the most important ideas?

Joe Norman:
Yeah, absolutely. And I like that metaphor of deflation, right. There’re these large scale cascades that are going on all the time now, and decentralization is one of the means of building those down of it, making them not so severe, not so large scale.

Simone Cicero:
That’s a very powerful insight. Thank you very much, Joe. Stina?

Stina Heikkila:
Thank you. I just wanted to jump in with a small question or provocation. When you talk about localism, to some ears, it can also sound as a risk in the current political system. What you are not referring to and what we don’t want is local politicians who might have a short term thinking in terms of voting cycles and so on. How do you see that decentralization in the existing institutions that we have interplaying with this type of decentralization, which is, from what I understand, much more organic and much more coming from the bottom up, because at some time, at some point, in the local scale, they will meet each other.

Joe Norman:
How does a system that is centralized today become less centralized in the future? You know the unfortunate truth is that one of the ways is by the big system breaking and it can never be considered a good thing in itself because of all the human suffering that entails. But maybe there’s another way. In the US, we were formed to be really a federal system. So the federated states, the 50 states acting semi autonomously making a lot of decisions locally on their own. Here in the US and in lower scale as well, counties and cities, over the years we’ve become more centralized, which is one of the sort of dynamics we see is that kind of left to their own devices without any mechanisms in place to to prevent over centralization. It can and does happen. But can we devolve back into some of our smaller units, a lot of the powers without a complete collapse of the system? I hope so. I really hope so. But it’s not clear. And I don’t think it’s really truly clear to anyone. You mentioned localism as potentially a risk. Could you say more on that?

Stina Heikkila;
We know that we have these huge systemic risks hanging over our heads, and I just ask myself what would be the risk if people start to close themselves in gated communities. We would see other types of externalities, like social exclusions, particularly. If the privileged classes are able to profit from localism in that sense, or if political leaders at local level might also profit from that we need to go back to local and you don’t look further than your really local constituency in terms of voters.

Joe Norman:
Right. A couple thoughts on that. One is that you indeed, at the local scales still have risk of someone with a dictatorial attitude coming into power, and then all of a sudden your town is run by some jerk who thinks that he should control every detail of everything or something like that. And that is a risk. The difference with something like that is today we bear those risks on very, very large scales. So think of China, scale of a billion people, one person making a decision for all of them. So with respect to that, yes, there are risks, but the more you can make risks localized, the fewer people they will affect and also we’re discussing these cascade potentials, when some local system is pathological. What are the scale of the forces that generates the external side of the system? Something like a billion person country or even 500 or 300 million like the US whatever it is, those risks of bad decisions become very much exacerbated when the systems are that large. So it’s not a way of eliminating risk. It’s a way of chicks changing, in terms of probability, the tail behavior of the risks. So you thin out the tails. There are indeed bad events, a bad outcome still, but they are more independently distributed and scale up less pathologically. That’s good on that for now. There were there’s something else that I was going to say, but I lost it there.

Stina Heikkila:
Thanks.

Simone Cicero:
I want to piggyback on this conversation very quickly, before moving to another topic that I would like to explore with you. I was listening to a podcast a few days ago from Balaji Srinivasan, and he was talking about these two ideas, rationalism and nationalism, and making a more general point between a more general, let’s say, scientific understanding and a more tribal and to some extent not national. He wasn’t talking about nationalism just from a geographic perspective, but was more about local truths and all local points of view versus more universal points of view. I think one of the interesting questions that we are debating is really about this idea that it looks like the age of universal, scientifical, technological understanding of things is showing its limits. But from another point of view, we are also aware that certain level of coherence, it’s still needed. You also mentioned a few minutes before “I don’t know to what extent this pure localist alternative can grant to the coherence that is needed in dissertation, not between the traditional industrial complex and what was coming up in the post Industrial Age”. So, do you have an idea of how this two epistemic approach, these two layers of the conversation can coexist? Or maybe they’re going to clash one with each other.

Joe Norman:
Well, of course we do witness them clash and that is clear. How can they potentially synergize? How can they be part of a hole that’s not sort of at odds with itself? Well, I think for one, there’s a clear self evident truth that the more people that you need to agree on something, then the fewer things that you must have them be forced into agreeing on. So as we talk about coherence, it’s coherence of what, of what variables, of what parameters? So I think that the place that we’re able to go here at large scales are things like founding values or sort of axiomatic values. So that’s why you see that that, for instance, a large nation like the US has been able to kind of hang together as a unit for so long because we had a core set of foundational values that we returned to despite the other differences that we had. I like the Talos critique on the idea of nationalism. And there’s a lot of conflation of terms here and what do we mean by this term and that term, that person means one thing that person means something else. But I like his critique of nationalism when nationalism is used in the sense of a single scale that absorbs all the others. So one important scale of the system and all the other scales below and above exist to serve that scale, like the nation is the important scale. But when we’re talking about localism, we’re really talking about multi scale structure. So localism respects the individual because that is the most local unit of the social system. And then you have the family and the local community, town or city and then you have larger scale structures, regional structures, coherence in some variables and not others. And so, once again, in return to this idea of subsidiarity, the idea is that everyone needs to do everything at the village scale, the village scale only, but what is local depends on the kind of challenge you’re facing. And this can scale up to to global scale issues, like climate change. So what are the appropriate scales at which to govern for climate change? Well, I think one of these running assumptions that you see a lot is that for global scale you need a global governing body, but maybe it’s not the case. Maybe we just need but 20 kind of geographic units that come together and find consensus and there’s no one single kind of head over something. But be that as it may the problem that the system faces should dictate the scale at which it’s confronted. So I wouldn’t want to suggest and I think this does get lost in conversation sometimes that localism means that only my neighborhood. No. It means that your neighborhood can probably make a lot of decisions that it’s not making now that are getting me at skills, much larger than are necessary, much more centralized that are necessary to deal with the challenges. So it’s not only that, it’s not necessary to do them at a larger scale, but you start getting, we might call it diseconomies of scale, we’re missing the ability to respond locally to the local relevant variations.

Simone Cicero:
Great points. I think you also handed me the necessary direction for the next topic of conversation that I wanted to discuss with you. So you spoke about this idea of multi scale variety in complex systems and you ended talking about these overgrown, hierarchical systems that we have been growing in the last century. The question I would like to explore with you is the following. We have developed our organizational theory and a business model on the idea of creating value in society, especially in the last 10, 15, 20 years, that is largely based on this idea of centralizing everything. Because you can achieve the network effects, this idea that you need to create a decentralized system so you can scale up instead of this idea that only centralized systems can achieve. A certain kind of performance can achieve a certain kind of efficacy in generating value or generating services or generating whatever we need as societies evolves. So my question for you is how do we develop a new theory of systems that scale through different lenses? And can you, for example, explore how multi scale variety complex systems can still provide these kind of benefits that are related normally with sharing the same language or sharing the same protocols, and generating at the end of the day network effects without centralization.

Joe Norman:
We were talking about coherence before and it’s clear that there’s at least maybe absolutely two routes to coherence. So when we think of coherence as a lot of differentiating, differentiable, not not in the calculus sense, but that you can differentiate multiple units doing the same thing. That’s a coherent system or they’re all doing the same thing. This could be generated by a system being centralized. So there’s some command center that sends out “go left go right”, “up down”, and all of the units follow that command then you achieve coherence. Another way is by cascades through a system achieving some coherence. So, you imagine all of the magnetic poles of particular molecules and atoms, co align in the same direction by virtue of the interactions among them locally. So you also achieve coherence but in a much different route, sort of local bottom up route. So multiscale variety, how does that fit into this? When you’re facing a complex environment, as human organizations are, as living systems are, and the setting of ecologies, you have to respond to forces at different scales. A nice way of thinking about this is to think about a single human body, we have a skeletal muscular system with which we can generate and respond to forces at a Newtonian macroscopic scale, you know, you can climb the tree or throw the stone, things like that with with your muscles and your skeleton. We have other systems though, too. We have the immune system. Now this is operating a much different scale, this is dealing with complex molecular perturbations and challenges. So that’s kind of way of starting to think about the prototype of a model multi scale variety in a system and what it does for a system that’s trying to achieve something. Returning to the example the human body, if you don’t have the immune system, then you can’t respond to the molecular environment, the microbiological environment. If you don’t have a musculoskeletal system, then you can’t respond to the kind of Newtonian environment. So, indeed, any organization that seeks to persist has to, by mathematical necessity, something called the law of requisite variety, must respond to these different challenges at different scales. So the question is, how do we enable a system to discover those natural scales of behavior that it needs to operate on? And to have enough redundancy and Independence of behavior on one hand to deal with small scale, fine grained complexity, things that change rapidly in a local environment has to be responded to, and the kind of large scale forces that the system needs. And how can we make as many of those large scale forces of the variety that emerged at a bottom of coherence. So a lot of consensus among the players in the system, the agents of the system, as opposed to a direct or directive from a top down central commander, because even in the case where we need large scale coherence, there’s many reasons that you would prefer for those forces to come and have sort of a bottom up cascade as opposed to a top down directive. Not least of which because of the long term health of the system. You mentioned health before in behaviors that are consistent at both of those scales. So behaviors at the micro component system are comfortable with and happy to perform. And that benefit the larger scale collective system generally returned to centralize directives when we feel we don’t have a good way of achieving things, coherence otherwise.

Simone Cicero:
Coming back to the question of organizing, do you see that the current organizing maybe should be more ambitious in terms of trying to achieve this consent, this bottom up consensus at higher scales? I’m thinking about, for example, collaboration, integration between organizations that now we see them as competitive. So this idea that maybe to really achieve more resilient and more sustainable, more organic organizing, arrived at the time where we start to go beyond this idea of competitive organizations and think more about organizations that can find a coherence, bottom up of coherence between each other at the highest scale.

Joe Norman:
I think we have to just start thinking about competition and cooperation as things that work in tandem, that are dynamic, that vary over time vary over scale. From permaculture there’s this term, a little clunky, Co-opetition, which is intended to capture this kind of dynamic. So competition does indeed allow systems to evolve, discover points of uniqueness, and sharpen those points and find niches and develop and exploit those niches, and in turn becomes new niches for other systems. So I do think there is a proper and appropriate role for competition. But I do think that we also need to be thinking in these terms where it’s not a sort of all versus all, sort of Last Man Standing dynamic that we want, we want something where both the cooperation and the competition among the participants generates healthy ecosystems for which the game can go on and beyond, play more and new possibilities can be explored. So I think probably in either direction, both cooperation and competition, could be a vice or virtue if it becomes ideological on either pole. But I think we need to think about that interplay and how we enable new cooperative forms to emerge and what our current policy and regulatory structures are that might make that difficult to happen. And how can we foster that? Because certainly, organizations compete within the variables that they seek to produce value on and can benefit from various kinds of partnerships and relationships with things that are complimentary, organizations that are complimentary in what they do.

Simone Cicero:
It may be this new risk factors and this drive for health that is generating the opportunity for us to rethink competition into co-opetition at new scales and maybe this is the opportunity. So, Joe, as we enter the last part of the conversation, I would like to ask you to explore our final point. They’re all putting modernity into question to some extent. And I know that you are a big proponent of Wendell Berry’s work and I thank you for pointing me out to his work and it was amazing for me to discover it. So, I would like to ask you a reflection, as we close this conversation, a little bit on the role of culture and the clash between culture and modernity and specialization, that I think we are finally living through as we encounter problems such as this pandemic or also the technological disruptions that they generate, these existential risks that we are leaving including climate change or environmental degradation. What is your perception or your point of view on overcoming modernity? What kind of insights can we find in Berry’ work or their proponents of a different relationship between technology expectations from the society, our role as active producers, active stewards of culture not just of resources or technologies.

Joe Norman:
Modernity, big word that we throw a lot into, or at least I do, generally is a punching bag. What is the theme of modernity, it’s generally this triumph of top down design and control. What we really should and can do is imagine the world as it ought to be, essentially as a perfect machine. And then go out and structure the world such that it conforms to that, to what we imagined, to the model we built. Something that you see over and over is this term blueprint, where people talk about genetics and DNA. It’s a great example of the way we think about things in the sort of way modernity conceptualizes things. Anybody thinks of DNA is a blueprint. Now blueprint is a drawing, it’s a set of technical drawings, where you try to bring some kind of structure, say a house into into being by making reality fit that original representation as closely as possible. Moving the pieces into the place. So modernity is sort of that vision of the world that way and you know, you end up with a lot of phrases like Euclidean geometry and architecture. So you know, big box is the celebrated architectural feat or a strange triangle pointing in a arbitrary direction. And you lose that multiscale fractal richness that, for instance, used to come with architecture like, Where did that go and why don’t we see it in modern buildings? So modernity is sort of that dynamic writ large from my perspective. Wendell Berry is is is a wonderful author. I’m also very thankful for having run into him. So I’m glad that you enjoyed what you read. One of the things that he writes a lot about is the way that farming didn’t just change when it became mechanized. There was an entire class of Americans, but it’s of course a global phenomenon, an entire class of Americans whose way of life disappeared along with the mechanization of farming. So there’s all these problems with overly mechanized farming, the way it depletes resources rather than enriching them, and all these things that many people discuss. But there’s also the cultural aspect of, okay, a way of life is disappearing and people are having to adapt. So, if there’s all of a sudden 90% fewer farm jobs, okay, well, I’m going to move to the city and change what I’m doing. That’s not necessarily a good thing or bad thing. But we need to recognize that triggers a cascade that sort of continues and continues and rolls and rolls. When you make decisions like that, and if they are, indeed, decisions that were based on bad assumptions about the conditions under which agriculture can be a productive enterprise with even positive externality never mind without negative externalities, something that could benefit the systems that it’s embedded in. It becomes hard to reverse decisions like that. Modernity has done a lot of that to all kinds of culture and culture is really the buildup in the accretion of this collective know how. And it’s not a process that can really be reversed all that much. There’s some lingering memory that happens. After a couple generations, it’s gone. And I think that we’ve overestimated the amount to which we could deal with the world in a purely rational way and underestimated the amount that we rely on practices and know how that we’ve been served many times without even realizing that we’ve done it. It’s sort of the way you get up and walk around. You don’t think about how you do it. And in fact, if you thought about how you do it, it would make it awkward and less functional. So we’ve done a bit of that modernity, we forced ourselves to forget what we’ve been doing, what we’ve known how to do. If the thesis that I’m proposing is correct that these things that we’ve lost actually had a lot of functional value that in the long run we’ll need to regain. How do we start approaching that consciously? I think that one of the virtues of localism is that in a systems economy and a governance system that prioritizes and favors the local interactions, the local producers, you get this very high density of connections and even circular flows inside these dense networks that can manifest and you have some hope at human scale of detecting what’s actually going on in that system and responding, adapting to it, learning from it over time, accruing experience that might be particular to a very local context. But it’s nonetheless very valuable in that context. And so, that this goes back to where we really began our discussion. Talking about the way organization has scaled up to the greed where it’s being disconnect from community where you become these very distinct kinds of things and where the community might be lost altogether. So, from my perspective the real hope of a localist mindset is the return and the regrowth and the evolution of novel cultures and with respect this idea of multi scale variety. If there’s two relevant scales, sort of the individual and in the global human system, there’s no place in that vision for a richness of a variety of cultures. Culture is a collective phenomenon, but for those patterns to be rich at the scale of the collective proper, there needs to be this kind of intermediate scales and not this globalized flows of all information and for lack of a better term, frankly, cultural practice. And you mentioned the idea of becoming producers and, you know, at the global scale, we’ve started going into the direction where we have these global centralized producers like China. And we stopped producing in the West, we start just consuming. And I think that the Coronavirus situation that we’re living through right now is waking a lot of people up to that fact, as we look at the fragility of some of the global supply chains, and the way they get entangled into geopolitics and all sorts of nasty stuff like that. It’s becoming more conscious that when we gave up mindsets as producers, as human small scale system, human agents, we lost something with that, we turned it to pure consumers.

Simone Cicero:
And just to close, how’s your experience of looking at how our societies are transforming? What is your learning from the perspective of your own staff? And how do you look at organizing from where you are embedded now, from your home strategy? What do you think about how do we organize in this future?

Joe Norman:
You know, what I’ve been doing is trying to build relationships around me. There’s some people who do small scale farming in my small town, in the town surrounding there’s quite a few more. It’s really been to take those initial steps. I didn’t grow up in an environment that valued highly the local aspects of living. It was indeed a very modernistic way I grew up. And so for me a lot of those initial steps have been the very simple ones of going and talking to people who have been in place here for a while, helping them out, getting help from them. Just literally engaging folks and remaining acutely aware of those opportunities as they come up for the value of the local to assert itself. I know around me, the small scale producers have in the recent months experienced like a huge surge in demand. And it’s not only because folks or supply chains are brutal or something, it’s that folks are really waking up to the fact that I don’t want to necessarily go to the centralized store and buy the thing that’s from miles away, thousands of miles away and shipped here. I can go to my local farm store, direct to my farmer, no middle man, no intermediary, and spent the same amount of money, get a product with quality of you know, I wouldn’t even want to try to quantify because it’s not really 10 times, 100 times, it’s qualitatively different. I just see that people are waking up around to that right now. So I’m trying to stay a part of that, stay part of that as far as the marketplace here on our homestead, we’ve really focused on starting to get our own needs subsidized, I would say: chickens and vegetable garden. And we’ll be moving into meat birds, hopefully this year, have gone to local farms and participated in processing of birds, processing is a polite word for slaughter. And so we’re gaining experiences that we know we need in order to be able to not only be more self sufficient, but also more helpful to our local community. So it’s really nothing glamourous , nothing sort of global and scale, but very much localized and your relationships here.

Simone Cicero :
It’s great. It was an amazing conversation for us. I think I’m going to relisten to this two or three times and take notes, because there are so many insights that I want to integrate. Stina, I don’t know if you have something to add. Otherwise, I think we can close the conversation.

Stina Heikkila:
No, thank you so much. I think, again, it was very eye opening. I think I also learned many things and especially on devolving back into smaller units that are both bottom up and going back from something that has somehow been centralized. I think that was a really key takeaway for me. Thank you very much.

Simone Cicero:
Joe. Where can our listeners keep up with your work?

Joe Norman:
First, thank you both for that really nice conversation, I really appreciate it. I know I was a bit hard to get hold of, I had a crazy time lately, but I thank you for your patience and I really enjoyed it. So probably the best place to get a hold of me is on Twitter. That’s certainly where I’m the most active. The Twitter handle is Normonics. Can also email me at Joe.w.norman@gmail.com. Or I have a website up to that I update infrequently, but I do update at jwnorman.com.

Simone Cicero:
Joe, thanks very much. It was great conversation.

Joe Norman:
Thank you Simone.