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On Sat, Oct 10, 2015 at 4:40 PM, Bruce Nevin bnhpct@gmail.com wrote:
RM: I’ve attached my review to the end of this post in case you haven’t seen it.Â
BN: I’ve read it. That’s why I felt moved to write a review. A review is a rejoinder in a kind of conversation among participants in a field. A book opens a conversation, a review responds to it, other conversational moves can follow. Your review seemed to say to Mr. Madden “You’re not worth talking to”, terminating the conversation.
RM: I see a review as an evaluation of a person’s ideas, not of the person. But I know that it’s hard to separate the two. But maybe making that separation doesn’t really matter all that much. The fact that many people who oppose gun control are otherwise “worthwhile” people (maybe they are great artists or parents or whatever) doesn’t lessen the fact that their terrible ideas are destroying our society (of course, that’s just relative to my reference for how societies should be; if you like societies with mass murders happening nearly on a daily basis these people are doing great). Bart is certainly a nice, worthwhile guy but the ideas in his book create quite a large error signal in me, not only because they misrepresent PCT and its implications but also because the “free market” (anti-regulation) ideas that are the leitmotif of the book, are creating a society that again deviates considerably from my reference for how a society should be and PCT is presented in a way that gives the impression that it supports these ideas.Â
RM: If “past experiences” are taken to be equivalent to PCT references, then they don’t shape anything; rather they specify what we should perceive, not what we will assume.Â
BN: Yes. But references controlled in imagination can interfere with recognition and control of perceptual input from the environment.
RM: Sure. But this is just an observation, not an important derivation from PCT. Who doesn’t know that you are likely to bump into things if you walk down the street daydreaming.
BN: Â This is not a PCT book about business processes and problems, it is a book about resolving business problems that includes a chapter about PCT. To insist that it be consistent with PCT throughout is to review an imagined book. The question is not, has he got there, but rather, is he headed in the right direction, and how can we help him along.
RM: I don’t think a book review is the proper place to help someone along. And even if it was, I don’t think it helps someone along to try to see their ideas as being consistent with PCT (as you did in your re-statement of the “core beliefs”) when they are not. I think a book review is like a “heads up” to potential readers regarding what the book is about and how well it achieves those aims.Â
RM: I think this is a mistake many people make about PCT and Madden seems to have made it in spades. Many people take “behavior is the control of perception” to mean “behavior is the control of an illusion”. And they take PCT to be about helping people get past that illusion and seeing things “as they are” – that is, as I see them;-). Such people become very disappointed when they find out that that’s not what PCT is about at all.
BN: It’s not what I intended. I don’t think it’s what Madden intended. In Madden’s chapter on PCT I don’t see any support for that speculation about his views.
RM: It may not be found in his chapter on PCT but it’s prominent throughout the rest of the book. Heck, the title of the book is “Reconstructing your worldview”. the book is all about figuring out how to reconstruct your worldview so that it is “right”, where “right” is what has worked to make people a lot of money.Â
RM: This is a great example of what I would call a “pseudo-application” of PCT. There is a conflict described on pp. 51-53 but it only exists if one has the two goals described in boxes B and C of Figure 4.1. The two goals are wanting to 1) “avoid front running” (avoid people using info about your intended large stock sale to profit from it) and 2) have “fast execution” (sell a large set of stocks all at once). This is a conflict because one can’t achieve both goals at the same time. Achieving goal 1 requires slow sale of small bundles of stock and achieving goal 2 requires fast sale of all stocks at the same time. Â
RM: This is a real conflict because it is impossible to achieve both goals at the same time. You can both trade slow and fast at the same time. There is no “faulty assumption” that is creating this conflict. […] What he came up with was a way to achieve goal 1 without having to slow the speed of stock sale so that it was possible to achieve goal 2 at the same time as one achieved goal 1.Â
BN: Yes. He came up with this by going up a level from the locus of the conflict.Â
RM: Possibly. But saying that the problem exists because of a “faulty assumption” misses the point completely. There is no faulty assumption. If you have both goals 1 and 2 then you have a conflict; assumptions have nothing to do with it. You cannot achieve both goals at the same time, period. Of course, if you don’t have both goals there is no conflict. But faulty assumptions has nothing to do with it.Â
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RM: This is a solution to a conflict that does not depend on understanding PCT.Â
BN: Right. The method of levels does not depend on understanding PCT, although without that understanding it’s evidently difficult to employ it consistently.
RM: The only aspect of the MOL that could possibly be seen in this example is Bart seeing that there is a conflict; that you can’t achieve both goals 1 and 2 in the context of the current trading environment. The solution to the conflict had nothing to do with going up a level; it had to do with changing the environment so that both goals could be achieved simultaneously,Â
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RM: The change is to the environment, not to the person in conflict (which is what MOL does).Â
BN: That is correct. As I said,
BN review: "It is challenging to review from [the PCT] perspective because Mr. Madden is concerned with problems of business organizations and processes, and PCT is for the most part concerned with behavior of individuals. (Nascent work in collective control is the major exception.)"Â
BN: But it is no less a conflict for the individual trader.Â
 RM: There is no conflict at all after the “yellow light” system was implemented.Â
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BN: When a person in conflict resolves that conflict, it can be by various means, and can be surprisingly creative. The person does not always disclose how the conflict was resolved, and of course MoL does not require that. I think there are clinical examples in works by Carey, Mansell, Tai, and others in which the means of resolving an intrapersonal conflict involve a change to the environment. I bet they can provide examples. I hope you recognize that this is a possibility within ‘the MOL approach’. In interpersonal conflict, and especially in conflict that is due to organizational structure, resolution by a change in the environment is far more likely, precisely because the conflict is inflicted by the organizational arrangement.
RM: I am not familiar with any example of this from Tim’s (and the others’, but I’m most familiar with Tim’s) work but I suppose it is possible.Â
BN review: “Competition is a rather more complex matter than mere conflict.”
RM: It’s complicated.Â
BN: Glad we agree
RM: Actually I don’t know why I said that but I’m afraid we don’t agree. I think competition and conflict are words that refer to the same phenomenon – an attempt to bring the same variable to two different reference states simultaneously. I don’t understand the distinction you are trying to make. Maybe if you could provide a diagram to show the difference between control systems in competition and control systems in conflict that would help.Â
RM: Otherwise I think that’s enough with Bart’s book, for now. How about you write a review of my “Doing Research on Purpose” book?Â
Best
Rick
Â
.
RM: I think conflict can be good in some cases and bad in others. Some conflict (such as a conflict between producers over market share), when done fairly, seems to be good for the development of better and better consumer products (like smart phones). But conflict in the provision of a commonly needed product, like water and power, health care or communications, can be quite bad for consumers.
BN: I agree on all points, but I would substitute the word ‘competition’ for ‘conflict’. All competition involves conflict, but not all conflict is competition. Note that you have introduced three important qualifiers: good vs. bad, fair vs. unfair, and common good vs. (implicitly) individual or selfish benefit. In your review, you said that conflict is always bad for control and therefore conflict is bad. So when it’s good, fair, and/or for the common good, maybe we’re talking about competition instead of conflict? (I’m teasing you here, of course.)
BN: All competition involves conflict at some level, but not all conflict is competition. Examples of competition are a subset of examples of conflict. A distinction can be seen in legal discussions of what is anticompetitive, monopolistic, etc. It is a distinction between those forms of conflict, such as a sprint, in which the capacity to compete is not impeded, and the outcome is determined by ability to perform on a ‘level playing field’, and those forms of conflict in which the ‘playing field’ is not ‘level’–where an extrinsic bias favors one side of the conflict over the other.Â
BN review: But is competition the same as conflict?
RM: Yes.Â
BN review: Consider two sprinters in a race. Does the faster speed of racer A restrict the ability of racer B to control his speed?
RM: No, but he or she doesn’t need to (besides the fact that they shouldn’t). The conflict in a race is over who gets past the finish line first. If we both want to get past the finish line first then we have a conflict because we can’t both be first. You are achieving your goal (and preventing me from achieving mine) when you run faster than me and are ahead in the race; and I am achieving my goal (and preventing you from achieving yours) when I run faster than you and am ahead in the race. So a race is a conflict that prevents us from both achieving the goal of being first; but as a side effect of our efforts to beat each other is to produce strong muscles and good endurance, probably better than if we were each just running sans competition. That is, because conflict requires a lot of strength to try to outdo the other, it builds up the “output functions” that achieve the competitors conflicting goals.
BN: “Competition is a rather more complex matter than mere conflict.” Strengthening output functions, input functions too, gaining and improving skills, and more, are worthy side effects for the individual competitor and for organizations. But they are not merely side effects, they are themselves controlled perceptions, whether or not they are controlled in the service of better competing.
BN: Apologists for capitalism often couch their discussions in rather idealized terms. If all competition were fair, if markets are in fact fair with no one seeking special advantage, no gummint regulation, etc., all would be well in the world. This is true of all religions. If human nature were only universally reformed to this standard the world would be a paradise. I include in this the naivete of so-called libertarians and Ayn Rand acolytes. I’ve been reading Braudel’s 3-volume History of capitalism in the 15th-18th centuries. It has always been inherent in capitalism to seek advantage over others. Yes, business dealings depend on trust–that is, trust among peers. But there are more than enough people who exploit advantage wherever they find it, and in their view if you get exploited to your harm you deserve it. A ‘freier’, a mark, a sucker, one whose condition is perceived to be disposed by another. I’m glad I’m not stuck in that sad system of assumptions and imaginings, but many people are.
BN: Competition does not always have salutary effects, unless you adopt the tunnel vision of the apologist and see benefit only in market terms. A relatively benign example is the Flip video camera. During the Egyptian uprising and later this was described as 'beloved by reporters. My former employer, Cisco, bought the company in 2009 for its technology, its patents, and the smarts of its people. It was perceived as “the future of journalism video.” But then they worried that the Flip camera could not compete adequately with the growing video capabilities of smartphones. Why would someone buy a video camera that didn’t include phone functions? Their consumer product division, venturing away from their core business of enterprise routers and switches, had expanded onto shaky ground. In 2011, after 2 years, they killed the Flip. The Kodak Bloggie and the Sony Zi8 and Playfull now occupy that niche for those who want the compactness with higher quality video than Android and iPhone cameras can provide. In narrow market terms, all is right in the world except for taxes and regulations.
BN: A core problem with capitalism is the distance between the making of decisions and the consequences of those decisions. In microcosm, it’s sort of reflected in the divide between ‘individual contributors’ and managers. Managers live in a perceptual universe of resources, budgets, turf, and other managers, at a remove from the production needs and processes of the ‘worker bees’. Jim Soldano’s application of PCT as a manager at Intel opened this up. Every day began with a meeting of the whole department in which reference perceptions were clarified and made mutually compatible by those controlling the perceptions. In worker-owned companies many or most the controlled perceptions may be the same, but the reference values are established differently. Notably, at a high organizational level, profit need not be maximized, but rather maintained at a level optimum for meeting payroll and sustaining the business, a change that has many ramified consequences. This is ripe ground for PCT.
BN: In all of nature, I doubt one can find a value such that more of it is better. Always there is an optimum level, which of course may vary somewhat. Only with money is there the delusion that more is better. Partly, this is due to the abstractness of money, that very property that makes it fungible. A great invention. We humans just haven’t learned how to control our perceptions of it in the healthiest way. The love of money is the root of all evil.Â
BN: What does it mean to say that a person is competitive? A ‘competitive’ person increases the gain on control, typically at a fairly high level. Working out rather than kneecapping the opponent. Testing themselves by entering into deliberated conflict situations, e.g. arm wrestling, playing tennis; then going away between times to improve their skills and strengths. More could be said about this. I’m not a particularly competitive person. Maybe someone who is could provide some insight.
/Bruce Nevin
–
Richard S. MarkenÂ
www.mindreadings.com
Author of  Doing Research on Purpose.Â
Now available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble
On Thu, Oct 8, 2015 at 7:28 PM, Richard Marken rsmarken@gmail.com wrote:
[From Rick Marken (2015.10.08.1630)]
Bruce Nevin (20151001.21:57 ET)–
BN: Review of Bartley J. Madden (2014),
Reconstructing your worldview: The four core beliefs you need to
solve complex business problems. Naperville, IL:
LearningWhatWorks.
BN: This book is of particular interest
because of the author’s engagement with Perceptual Control Theory.
RM: I reviewed this book myself almost exactly a year ago and came to almost exactly the opposite conclusion about its merits. I’ve attached my review to the end of this post in case you haven’t seen it. I’ll just comment on a couple points in your review that I find particularly problematic.Â
BN: Madden’s four
“core beliefs” (propositions, hypotheses) are not difficult
to restate in PCT terms:
- ** 1. Past experiences shape
assumptions.** Reference values and collectively controlled
perceptions that were established in prior circumstances may make it
difficult to perceive present circumstances accurately.
RM: This restatement isn’t in terms of PCT as I understand it. There is nothing in PCT about references (or perceptions) making it difficult to perceive present circumstances accurately. Indeed, there is nothing in PCT about some perceptions being more accurate than others. If “past experiences” are taken to be equivalent to PCT references, then they don’t shape anything; rather they specify what we should perceive, not what we will assume. My own interpretation of this “core belief” from a PCT perspective would be that memories of past experiences (perceptions) are stored as reference specifications (assumptions) for the state of currently experienced perceptual variables (see Figure 15.2 in B:CP).Â
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- ** 2. Language is perception’s silent
partner.** Collectively controlled expressions in language can
substitute for observation, and “the uniqueness
of something meriting a name fosters the erroneous thought that the
thing has an independent existence
—independent
of context and purposeful behavior—as well as the false idea that
there’s no need to think further about any assumptions behind the
name." (p. 36) Dag
Forssell calls these ‘word pictures’ in
the subtitle of the collected
correspondence between Bill Powers and Phil Runkel [1].
RM: How can language substitute for observation (perception) when language is itself something we observe (perceive)? Perhaps you mean that language can be used to evoke imaginations (which are not observations/perceptions). This is what happens when we read books or listen to people tell stories. But it also happens when we hear music or see a dance; so language is not the only way to evoke imaginations. Also, this “core belief” – that “language is perception’s silent partner” – betrays a lack of understanding of a fundamental assumption of PCT: that “it’s all perception”. Language is as much a perception as anything else. So how can a perception be a “silent partner” of a perception? It seems to me that there is no way to “restate” this “core belief” in PCT terms.Â
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- ** 3. Improve performance by
identifying and fixing a system’s key constraints.** Objects,
events, and processes are systemically interrelated. Trying to solve
a problem isolated at its point of manifestation creates more
difficulty. One must go up a level to the larger systemic context.
Madden sharpens this to focus on choke points, reminiscent of
critical path analysis.
RM: This “core belief” is so vague that I can’t tell whether your PCT restatement of it makes sense or not. The best I can make of your restatement is that you take “constraints” to refer to conflicts that must be identified and then solved by going up a level. But constraints could also refer to characteristics of the environment that impede performance, such as a rule against banks investing in securities. While this rule existed in the environment of the bankers their economic performance (profit margin) was impeded. So they were able to improve their performance substantially (for a few years at least) by getting that pesky constraint (Glass-Steagall) eliminated.
- ** 4. Behavior is control of
perception**.
RM: That one certainly needs no restatement in PCT terms.
BN: He quotes a
number of writers in neuroscience and economics expressing views much
like those reached by Bill Powers and others on the basis of PCT. We
live in a world of perceptual constructs, many of them imagined, yet
creating the illusion of direct contact with objects in the physical
world.
RM: I’m with you up to the last phrase. PCT does say we live in a world of perceptual constructs but the idea that this “creates the illusion of direct contact with objects in the physical world” is not part of the PCT epistemology. I think this is a mistake many people make about PCT and Madden seems to have made it in spades. Many people take “behavior is the control of perception” to mean “behavior is the control of an illusion”. And they take PCT to be about helping people get past that illusion and seeing things “as they are” – that is, as I see them;-). Such people become very disappointed when they find out that that’s not what PCT is about at all. Â
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BN: He cites John Dewey’s later philosophy and its influence on
Adelbert Ames’ stunning experiments with perception, which in turn
affected Bill Powers strongly. (Some of them may be experienced today
in the Exploratorium in San Francisco.) But this is not the empty
philosophical musing of an intellectual tourist visiting the
marvelous world of perceptual illusions. His aim is to show these
principles at work in business decisions that have had significant
economic consequences in the lives of a great many people, and to
show how to apply them for the amelioration of business processes and
other social arrangements.
RM: So Madden shows how the principles at work in illusions like the Ames room are at work in business decisions? This is an example of what I described above: the idea that people can get past the “illusion” of their perception and see things as they really are. This not only has nothing to do with PCT but is ridiculous on the face of it. If perception is an illusion then how do you know what’s illusion and what’s not; it’s all illusion.Â
RM: Even if you know the “principle” behind the Ames room illusoin - that the perceived change in a person’s size results from removing distance information which is what compensates for the change in retinal size with change in distance – you still see the illusion. You treat this perception as an illusion, not because you understand the principles that result in the illusion but because you have other knowledge – that people remain the same size when they walk across rooms – that makes it likely that the apparent change in size is not happening.Â
RM: You can’t improve business decisions by learning to perceive better; you can only improve them by getting more knowledge relevant to the variables to are making decisions about, knowledge that I think is demonstrably best obtained using the scientific method.Â
BN:Â Madden’s ‘evaporating cloud’
example (pp. 51-53) shows “how a conflict situation can
evaporate once a faulty assumption is revealed� by going up a
level, in a remarkable parallel to the Method of Levels.
RM: This is a great example of what I would call a “pseudo-application” of PCT. There is a conflict described on pp. 51-53 but it only exists if one has the two goals described in boxes B and C of Figure 4.1. The two goals are wanting to 1) “avoid front running” (avoid people using info about your intended large stock sale to profit from it) and 2) have “fast execution” (sell a large set of stocks all at once). This is a conflict because one can’t achieve both goals at the same time. Achieving goal 1 requires slow sale of small bundles of stock and achieving goal 2 requires fast sale of all stocks at the same time. Â
RM: This is a real conflict because it is impossible to achieve both goals at the same time. You can both trade slow and fast at the same time. There is no “faulty assumption” that is creating this conflict. It’s the incompatible goals that result in the conflict. If a person didn’t care about avoiding front running there would be no conflict; the person would just make the fast bulk sale and be done with it. Similarly, if the person didn’t care about making the fast bulk sale then there would no problem avoiding front running with a slow sale.
RM: So it’s incompatible goals, not “faulty assumptions” that create conflict. So how did Madden make the conflict disappear by finding the “faulty assumption”? The “faulty assumption” that Madden “discovered through analysis” was just recognition that it was possible to redesign the trading system so that there would be no conflict for people people who had both goals 1 and 2. What he came up with was a way to achieve goal 1 without having to slow the speed of stock sale so that it was possible to achieve goal 2 at the same time as one achieved goal 1. Madden’s “fix” based on finding the “faulty assumption” was alerting traders (using yellow highlighting of the stock’s sticker symbol) that a large trade of the stock was imminent but not saying whether it was a buy or sell so the “front runners” wouldn’t know whether to go long or short. This meant traders could achieve the “fast execution” by making a big, bulk trade without creating an error in the system controlling for avoiding front running.Â
RM: This is a solution to a conflict that does not depend on understanding PCT. All you have to know is the possible consequences of a big trade (front running) and that traders might want to avoid that. The change is to the environment, not to the person in conflict (which is what MOL does). It’s like solving a person’s eating conflict (wanting to eat cake and wanting to stay thin) by inventing a cake with exactly the taste and texture of the real thing but with no calories at all (unfortunately such a cake does not yet exist). In MOL, conflicts are solved by changing the goals creating the conflict; the “faulty assumptions” approach solves the problem through invention of new ways of controlling the perceptions you want to control. And in most cases of real conflict the inventions that would “solve” the conflict don’t exist yet (or will never exist) so the MOL approach is really the only way to go.
BN: Â Chapter 5 gives a very succinct summary of PCT.
RM: I agree. Succinct and mostly pretty good. Which makes his failure to actually use the theory so intriguing.Â
BN: “Society benefits from
business firms competing,� he says. (p. 94). “Those of us
old enough will remember the AT&T phone monopoly that gave us
clunky rotary-dial telephones.� (p. 79) Our world of cell phones
and smart phones would have been much delayed and perhaps could not
have emerged without the break-up of that monopoly. But competition
sounds like conflict, and conflict is inherently bad for control. How
could this be? Madden and countless other businesspeople must be
wrong about the virtues of competition.
RM: It’s complicated. I think conflict can be good in some cases and bad in others. Some conflict (such as a conflict between producers over market share), when done fairly, seems to be good for the development of better and better consumer products (like smart phones). But conflict in the provision of a commonly needed product, like water and power, health care or communications, can be quite bad for consumers.
BN: But is competition the
same as conflict?
RM: Yes.Â
BN: Consider two sprinters in a race. Does the faster
speed of racer A restrict the ability of racer B to control his
speed?
RM: No, but he or she doesn’t need to (besides the fact that they shouldn’t). The conflict in a race is over who gets past the finish line first. If we both want to get past the finish line first then we have a conflict because we can’t both be first. You are achieving your goal (and preventing me from achieving mine) when you run faster than me and are ahead in the race; and I am achieving my goal (and preventing you from achieving yours) when I run faster than you and am ahead in the race. So a race is a conflict that prevents us from both achieving the goal of being first; but as a side effect of our efforts to beat each other is to produce strong muscles and good endurance, probably better than if we were each just running sans competition. That is, because conflict requires a lot of strength to try to outdo the other, it builds up the “output functions” that achieve the competitors conflicting goals.
RM: So after all that I’m sure you can hardly wait to read my review of Bart’s book. So here it is:
=============================================================Â
[From Rick Marken (2014.10.16.1220)]
Â
“Reconstructing Your World View� introduces Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) as one of four “core beliefs� that can help people solve their business problems. While there is a brief but adequate description of PCT in Chapter 5 it was never clear to me how PCT was relevant to all the proposed solutions to the business problems described in the book. Indeed, many of these proposals seemed to have little to do with an understanding of humans in terms of PCT. One example of this is the basic premise of the book: that you can solve your problems by “reconstructing your worldview�. This is presented as a matter of disabusing oneself of “faulty assumptions� so that one can perceive things correctly.
One example given in the book of the benefits of disabusing oneself of “faulty assumptionsâ€? is Walmart’s success due to Sam Walton’s ability to see that the perception “big stores in small townsâ€? was correct while Kmart’s failure resulted from its inability to get past the idea that “big stores in big townsâ€? is correct. But there is nothing in PCT that says that one way of perceiving the world is more correct than another. The “correctnessâ€? of a perception makes sense only in terms of whether controlling it achieves the controller’s higher order goals – all of them. So controlling for “big stores in small townsâ€? may have been “correctâ€? for Walton inasmuch as it achieved all of his higher level goals but controlling that perception may not have been correct for Kmart because it would not have achieved all of Kmart’s higher level goals.
How you solve problems (from a PCT perspective) depends on the type of problem you have. A problem, in PCT, is simply an inability to control a perception you want to control. There are basically two kinds of problems from a PCT perspective: lack of control due to lack of skill (such as inability to solve a math problem due to lack of knowledge of the rules of algebra) and lack of control due to conflict (such as lack of control of eating due to a conflict between wanting nourishment and wanting to be thin). Tim Carey and I discuss the difference between these two types of problems and how to solve them in our recent paper Understanding the Change Process Involved in Solving Psychological Problems: A Model-Based Approach to Understanding How Psychotherapy Works (2014). The solution to both of these types of problems involves what could be called “reconstructing your worldviewâ€?; but the reconstructing is quite different in each case. If the problem results from lack of skill then the solution is education; teaching the person the perceptions to control to achieve the desired result. If it’s a conflict-based problem then the solution can only be achieved through reorganization; there is no way to teach the person the perceptions to control that will achieve the desired result. If the â€?complex business problemsâ€? addressed in the book are lack of skill problems then they can be readily solved by simply teaching the correct way to achieve the desired results. If, however, these problems are conflict-based – as theyy seem to be since they are described as involving resistance to change of “worldviewâ€? – then the only solution is random reorrganization, perhaps assisted by MOL; an outsider cannot tell the person with the problem what the correct solution to their problem is.
PCT is simply a model of how purposeful behavior (control) works; it supports no particular political point of view or value system. But it does show what a properly functioning living system is: it’s a system that is in control. So if one’s idea of a “goodâ€? society is one where everyone is in control of their lives – that is, if one is controlling for the perception of a society made up of individuals who are able to control the perceptions they need and want to control (as mine is) – then “Reconstructing Your World View ? is particularly disappointing forum for “promulgating PCTâ€?. This is because the book seems to accept the idea that competition is a good thing; that  "society benefits from business firms competingâ€?. Competition is just another word for conflict and if PCT teaches us anything it’s that conflict is the enemy of control. So I think that an understanding of PCT leads to a very different conclusion about the merits of competition in society, more like the conclusion so beautifully articulated by Powers in his paper “Degrees of freedom in social interaction”( reprinted in LCS I). In particular, see the section on “Freedom in Social Interactions” (starting on p. 229) for the PCT view of the supposed benefits of competition in a society.Â
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Complementing the lack of understanding of the debilitating effects of conflict is a lack of understanding of the nature of cooperation. One of the “Key points� at the end of the chapter on PCT is the following: “When people working together have sharply different high-level goals, conflict is to be expected. When their high-level goals are similar, expect cooperation.� What is being described is not necessarily cooperation. If the simultaneous control of the same perception is simply coincidental then there was no cooperation involved; it’s just two systems that happen to be controlling the same variable at the same time. Either system could have controlled the variable on its own; there was no need for the other system to be controlling as well. The only benefit of simultaneous control of the variable is that each system needs to produce less output to produce the desired result than it would have if it were on its own. This would be an example of cooperation if the two systems had agreed in advance to control the same perception so that each would have to expend less effort at controlling it individually. Cooperation involves two or more control systems achieving a result that could not be achieved by either system acting on its own. Real cooperation requires that each system give up some control (give up some “personal freedom�) in order to achieve control of some variable that the systems involved could not achieve individually (so that they are all “freer�). Cooperation does not “just happen� when people adopt (coincidentally) similar goals (although adopting similar goals can be part of what is agreed to as part of being cooperative).
Cooperation is the basis of civilized human society. And I think it is the failure to understand the nature of cooperation from a PCT perspective that I find most problematic about this book. A business is a cooperative venture between employees and employers. So any problems in the business are control problems for both employees and employers. But this book presents PCT as a solution to the problems the employer only (with even the small nod toward improving “worker satisfactionâ€? being aimed at making business better for the employer). I find this focus on solving business problems only from the employers perspective to be almost obscene in the context of an economy where over the last 30 years CEO remuneration has gone from 50 to over 300 times that of the average employee while employee wages have remained stagnant or actually declined in real terms. Since money is what gives people a great deal of their ability to control (in a society based on specialized production) it’s pretty clear that over the last 30 years the problems of employers have declined considerably while those of their employees have increased substantially. It seems to me that what we need are more books on how employers can better cooperate with employees to give employees better control of their lives. Â
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Ultimately I think this book suffers from a “worldview� that is well described in these quotes from two of my favorite economists:
This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition…[is] the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments… We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. We see frequently the vices and follies of the powerful much less despised than the poverty and weakness of the innocent. (Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments I.III.28).
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith
I look forward to someday seeing a truly PCT-based book on economics and business. I think it would describe an economy organized a lot more like those of the the Nordic countries than that of the US.Â
RSM
Richard S. MarkenÂ
www.mindreadings.com
Author of  Doing Research on Purpose.Â
Now available from Amazon or Barnes & Noble
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