A structured set of multiple-choice questions to map how people understand today’s crises and their underlying causes
This is a first pass on creating a structured set of questions to get a sense of how someone sees our current civilizational situation: both the symptoms we’re facing and how they diagnose their root causes.
The questions are deliberately constrained to make it easier to see where people align, where they differ, and where the real cruxes are.
@rufuspollock I’m not able to answer all of the questions at the moment but I scanned through them, and just wanted to mention that I find the following question a bit confusing:
11. Locating the bottleneck
When you look at current failures (ecology, tech risk, governance), which of these feels like the hardest to shift in practice?
A. Formal institutions and laws
B. Economic incentives and markets
C. Technologies and infrastructures
D. Underlying values, norms, and worldviews
E. Human psychological capacities (attention, maturity, empathy)
Follow-up probe (if useful): when you say “hardest,” do you mean slowest, most resistant, or least directly addressable?
In my mind, a bottleneck is exactly the opposite: the easiest place to create change, the most directly addressable. If a chain has a weak link, and you know where it is, you know how to make the whole chain stronger. Addressing any other links will be ineffective.
Here are a couple contrasting views on constraints (i.e. bottlenecks) :
The Theory of Constraints model aims at finding the bottleneck to improve throughput. Of course, that assumes the throughput is desirable in the first place.
Cynefin is more subtle. Constraints in Cynefin can be very generative! Indeed Cynefin change management processes strategically impose constraints here and there to get organizations off their stuck points.
Imagine Brent crude at $200+ per barrel. For the current economy - that’s a disaster. For the long-term future of the world, it might be the very best thing.
Given that throughput is defined as measurable progress towards a goal, I’d say it’s desirable by definition!
But to the deeper point: a goal should be defined in a way that enables continual improvement - and adding a constraint can increase throughput in ToC terms too, just as reducing flow through a non-bottleneck decreases work-in-progress and increases flow through the real limiting constraint.
I sense there’s something very profound and generative in the Cynefin view of constraints that the ToC doesn’t quite get at, however. ToC is meant to be applied on complicated, not complex, systems. It doesn’t help us navigate in the deepest waters, where the goal we have chosen for ourselves might not be serving us.
That’s why I wanted to contrast the ToC and Cynefin approaches to bottlenecks. Current political discourse assumes high GDP is a desired throughput, for example, and high energy prices are a bottleneck constraining that throughput. This by Nate Hagens today suggests a very different process will soon be forced upon us. GDP is simply not a good target over the long haul, and energy prices (at least fossil energy prices) can only tighten from here. Per Hagens, probably the best way to manage the inevitable decline of fossil fuel reserves is to rethink what we are trying to accomplish in the first place.
The link you posted doesn’t mention bottlenecks. It doesn’t appear to be a Cynefin-native concept as far as I can tell. Bottleneck isn’t a synonym for constraint, it’s a specific type of constraint, directly responsible for limiting throughput, in a flow-dependent system. I believe it is closest to a governing constraint in Cynefin terms.
But trying to understand the spirit of the original question, maybe phrasing it this way would have been clearer:
*When you think about real-world change, which layer seems to be the deepest practical obstacle - the one that most tends to resist, delay, or deflect attempts at transformation?
*
I think that’s what’s being asked.
Skipping the “bottleneck” term, which either must be read widely metaphorically (such as a “constraint”), or simply does not apply to several of the question options in any literal way, the main focus of the question seems to be on resistance to change.
One observation on resistance to change is that any system persisting over time has self-replication or self-maintenance functions to keep it persisting. There is no obvious reason why “change” is the default setting and change resistance is some sort of annoying defect (from the change agent POV). Most stuff does not want to change and has specific anti-change mechanisms to prevent it! (That’s the “fitness” part of “survival of the fittest”.) Robust systems are not just clay waiting for some external change agent to shape them. Taleb distinguishes between fragile, robust, and anti-fragile systems. Of these, fragile systems are most changeable, but only in the direction of breaking apart. Robust systems can flexibly absorb change, yet in doing so remain fundamentally what they are. Anti-fragile systems thrive on change and even chaos, but they take advantage of those to grow in scope!
Just now the post WWII order is looking pretty fragile, because it was architected with a single point of failure. Distributed, redundant systems are more robust. The change opportunity is to build something new out of the now liberated components of that which fell apart. To me, current systems are “givens” or “independent variables” or in Cynefin terms, something like “enabling constraints” - the raw material one must work with. New systems are basically rearrangements of the most robust components that become available when fragile stuff breaks. But even then change is at best a new pattern conserving all sorts of persisting components it will be built from.
