Seeing in New Colours

Photo by The New York Public Library / Unsplash

An exploration of terms and ideas in The Journal

There are some words I use that don't mean quite what they usually mean. There are ideas I've been carrying around for years that eventually acquired names. There are things I learned from other people and incorporated into how I see the world. And, of course, there are a few words and terms I apparently made up.

This is where I explain what I mean.

Map

I use 'map' as mental shorthand to describe how a person is oriented within their world – mentally and emotionally, based on what they've discovered, proven for themselves, observed and inherited in the ways of 'how to perceive what is real'...

A map can explain how a person becomes radicalized regardless of their earlier life, and how a person becomes moderated after growing up in a dogmatic culture or home... as new information becomes available, the person naturally and automatically compares and sorts input against knowledge and experience.

Sometimes a map can change radically in an instant, when a new perspective explains something well that was previously unexplained, confusing, or unknown.

When we see another person's behaviour or attitude as 'inexplicable' it is often simply that their map is not the same as our own.

In general, people respond logically and sensibly to their own maps.

Coming Alongside

This is a term adapted from nautical use, where a ship very carefully maneuvers to come close to another ship, in order to share supplies or to help with an emergency. This necessary maneuver is extremely dangerous, as the wash from one ship can pull the other too close, with disastrous consequences.

When we seek to intervene in another's map, it is vital that we first understand what their map looks like to them, and the points of conflict with how we see reality. This is a delicate operation, as it is also vital to understand that we are not Right and they are not Wrong, and any suggestion of those concepts can create conflict and resistance which is unhelpful and unnecessary. We don't need to agree that their map is accurate, but we need to respect that it is their best, current, understanding of reality.

When we acknowledge that our own map of reality is also imperfect and incomplete, we approach another person's map with respect and care, without provoking argument or shame, so we can show them the part of our map that might help them navigate reality more effectively.

The goal isn't to replace their map with ours.

It is to make another map available to them.

Swimming in Soup

In this article, I talked about how fish don't know that they're wet: the reality they live in carries information they perceive (salinity, oxygenation, temperature, vibrations that indicate food or predators) but they aren't aware of the water itself.

Much like that, people are often largely unaware of the culture or system they're existing within – the environment continuously supplies information, but much of that information is so thoroughly embedded in the environment that we don't experience it as information at all: swimming in soup without any awareness of the soup...

This results in people assembling incomplete maps of reality... or maps that only really apply to one environment, but not others. In some places, that map is required for success while in other places it guarantees mistakes, sometimes major ones.

This can be seen most easily with novices to a culture: kids or travelers, who don't know what they are expected to know, and have yet to discover. Some of the more interesting travelogues are written by people who are more than usually aware of 'here' being different from 'there' and fascinated by the variations. Whereas 4-year-old kids get into trouble by merely stating what they see and hear, when our culture says, 'that's not knowledge you're allowed to notice.'

Noticing the soup is challenging, but it is also extraordinarily useful.

Once we recognize that the soup is not simply universal reality, but one particular environment carrying its own information, we become less likely to hot-react to ways of thinking or doing that differ from our own. This also lowers the shame-factor for the novices.

When we become curious about what environmental soup produced another person's map, we can come alongside them with deeper respect and more helpfulness.

We can ask, 'what kind of soup produced this map' instead of 'what is wrong with them?'

Upstream Intervention Creates Downstream Change

This is fundamental to the entire Adaptive Architecture. You can read more about this in Behaviour as Hypothesis, Behaviour is the Last Piece of the Chain, Behaviour is Information, and The Results are Inevitable... but briefly:

If we can see how people live as a watershed, rather than as a story that explains behaviour, we have a couple of core ideas:

Many streams make up a watershed, some of them tributaries to a major river, others never join up and still make their way to a lake or ocean. If we stand in the estuary, we have very limited power to alter the course of the river or stream: it's here, emptying out into the ocean (or lake...) and to alter its course now takes big equipment and a lot of effort, time and energy – and the change is unlikely to be lasting, because the river is often part of a much larger water system that includes the landscape of the hills, underground rivers and the water table, out of sight and far more difficult to alter.

Changing the course of a stream up near the peak of the mountain where it originates only takes a small shovel, or a relatively small boulder. One person can shift a stream into a completely different river, if they make effective change high enough upstream.

If we see behaviour and results (outcomes) as the outlet of the river delta, and the lay of the land the streams flow down to be the many factors 'upstream' that affect where the river ends, we can see that trying to 'move the delta' is a fruitless and guaranteed-frustrating activity.

A large part of the frustration and ineffectiveness is that we're often trying to shift only what we can see: not the water table, not the underground river system, and not all the upstream factors that influenced where the water flowed from and where mouth of the river formed.

Intervening upstream creates lasting, and sometimes massive, change to where the river joins the sea.

Intervene Where the Problem is Caused, Not Where It Becomes Visible

As above, the metaphor extends to direct action in problem solving.

So often, people look at disengaged employee behaviour (looking busy, and the rest of the list here) and want to create metrics which will demonstrate employee engagement: timing computer use, timing customer calls, timing order picking... and other things that are measured simply because they are measurable (as opposed to because they're valuable or insightful measurements.) While any reasonably savvy staff can point and laugh at the latest 'that will prove we're engaged' metric, and think up 11 loopholes that will enable them to, metaphorically, 'bunk off for a smoke' just as often as before...

Timing customer calls is going to forever be my favourite: hang up on the customer while you're talking (not while they're talking) and the system will think 'oh, look, shorter calls!' while the customer will think 'oh, weird, the line dropped' and call back (ooh, look, how to double your incoming calls in one easy step: success!) The results are inevitable: The metrics are measuring the wrong things (behaviour and outcomes) and are astonishingly easy to game.

Genuinely, a company culture (school system culture, family atmosphere, any kind of Soup – see above) is always (inadvertently) creating a lot of the downstream 'problems' without any awareness of the factors that create things like employee disengagement.

As Einstein supposedly said: We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

If we want a different result downstream, we have to change something upstream.

Measuring for the Sake of Measurements Creates Mayhem

Every now and then, I opine, 'gee, I do wish doctors had never thought up weighing babies...'

If the convenient, brainless, charted weight was simply not available (like, say, how 'the baby's current intercellular pH' is not available) as a measurement in a routine visit, what would healthcare professionals and parents use to assess the health and growth of their baby?

Because weight is available, it has become a brainless marker for 'health and growth' that isn't rational anymore.

For example: a child who eats weird things (like nuts and bolts – the metal ones) could gain three pounds in a week or two, which would not indicate true growth or health.

A child who doesn't eat weird, heavy things, who is busy growing taller, or increasing their head circumference, may have all the visible, objective markers of health and well-being (growth in any vector, plus sleeping, eating, and eliminating well, and being active and alert) but not gaining weight may have a professional pressing parents into a tizzy about failure-to-thrive and the sudden need to fatten the child up (as if additional adipose tissue was suddenly 'better' health...) by any means available (hey... serving up a few steel bolts?)

In the real world, there are so many instances of metrics being used in place of facts to evaluate things, it's turning into a Monty Python skit.

'Oh, Maev, your garden is looking ... different...'
'Oh, yes, Gabby, I've discovered that I can measure the plant's health by the length of the roots...'
'Oh, yes?'
'Yes, so I just pull them all up every morning to measure them to see if they're longer, dear.'
'Oh, yes? And how are they doing?'
'Nothing is growing anymore at all. I don't know what I've done wrong...'

Do Not Mistake the Thing for the Thing

This is bigger than measurement. This is bigger than the Map. The Zen proverb says, The Finger Pointing to the Moon is Not the Moon.

Weight isn't growth.

Call length isn't customer satisfaction, or employee engagement.

Cholesterol numbers aren't health.

Compliance isn't learning.

Attendance isn't engagement.

A test score isn't knowledge.

A quiet classroom isn't necessarily a learning space.

'Are kids sitting still and facing forward?' results in very different learning experience from 'are the kids engaged with the material, cooperating with each other, and discovering things?' One of them is unlikely to have neat rows sorted by height with no fidgeting, and the other is unlikely to have the engagement of the child's curiosity or even their mind. Especially a classroom with the normal incidence of ADHD.

Noisy is not necessarily chaos, and silence is not necessarily concentration on the task assigned.

There is a trap built into the idea that 'what we treasure, we measure' and even 'what you can measure you can manage.' Any metric is information about something, not the thing itself.

That trap is this: mistaking the measurement for the thing being measured. Often, what ends up being managed is the measurement, not the thing.

Which creates this Sir Terry Pratchett joke:

"How's the patient?"
"Stable."
"Dead is stable."

People are Not Problems

People have problems.

Problems have solutions.

People cannot be solved.

The Problem is Often Not the Problem

The visible problem might be:

A teen who won't eat
A toddler who won't sleep
A student who won't study
An employee who mindlessly follows orders as a form of rebellion

Those are, as noted above downstream evidence of the system or environment in which those problems arise.

As above, only problems can be solved, and you can tell the difference between problems and reality in one step: is there a solution?

Reality doesn't have a solution. There is no solution for it being Tuesday, or for atmospheric pressure.

A carefully-worded, clear problem holds within it its own solution. If you cannot identify what would constitute a solution, you may not yet have identified the problem. So, part of the problem is shorthand (mental or otherwise.)

Take the teen who won't eat. That's a brief description of some of what is happening now, and by no means a complete description of how this arose, or everything else around it.

For example: a friend of mine couldn't eat during family dinners. No appetite, couldn't swallow at all. Now, is this 'a teen who won't eat'? Or is this a child whose experience of Family Dinner was rage, tantrums, shame, conflict and blame?

Rest and digest is the natural state of a body not under stress. No appetite at all is the natural state of a body that feels unsafe or under attack.

This is not a refusal to eat. This is not rebellion or attitude or hormones.

So, what is the real problem? Without that context and texture and information, the 'problem' is highly unlikely to be 'solvable' in any meaningful sense of the word.

If you've been trying to solve the visible problem in your own family and not getting very far, parent coaching can give you somewhere to look at what is happening underneath it.

Understanding Before Intervention

The popular imagery is a group of concerned family and friends ambushing an addict and coercing them into a treatment program.

This is backwards.

So often, the armchair experts in the room already know exactly what the problem is, and how to solve it — generally in a sentence that starts with, “You just…”

You just have to quit.
You just have to decide.
You just have to stick it out.
You just have to...

Trite and simplistic bandaid treatments applied to complex, deep, and often diffuse problems.

No one is only a problem drinker, or only an opioid addict. Research into Vancouver's Downtown Eastside has repeatedly pointed toward something much more complicated than a simple problem with drugs: profound trauma, poverty, abuse, pain and disconnection.

As Gabor Maté puts it, the more interesting question isn't why the addiction? but why the pain?

From that perspective, “just pull yourself out of it” is a remarkably inadequate prescription for someone whose life experience has left them profoundly damaged.

On a somewhat less dire subject, anorexia nervosa may be associated with medical trauma or childhood sexual abuse. From inside that experience, controlling what goes into one's own body can begin to make a certain kind of sense when so much else has felt outside one's control.

So “make them eat” not only doesn't address the problem. It doesn't even understand the problem.

When we have no understanding of the upstream circumstances, we simply have no context in which to create a workable solution.

It's like solving the problem of a tension headache with a machete: it might address the tail-end symptom, but it has frighteningly little to do with understanding the issue.

So, Why Adaptive Architecture?

As I began to develop a deeper understanding of the framework I had long been standing on, I realized that it isn't only the map; it isn't only the watershed; it isn't only coming alongside.

It's the entire cohesive, recursive interplay between an adaptive system and reality.

This recursive architecture is a repeating loop that circles back on itself, referring to itself even as it expresses itself. An adaptive system responds to reality, changes as a result, encounters the changed reality, responds again, and in doing so becomes something slightly different from what it was before.

Adaptive architecture is how adaptive systems become.

That looks like an incomplete sentence, but it isn't. Here is where the foundation philosophy of the Western colonized post-industrial world clashes with many traditional societies and especially Eastern philosophy. We are accustomed to thinking in binary terms: it is or it isn't. It is correct or it is incorrect. It is a tree or it is an apple.

There is nothing fundamentally wrong with this way of viewing the world. It is much less useful when we apply it to things that exist in gradients, transitions and processes.

Like childhood.

Or seeds.

An apple is not an apple tree.

But it has within it everything that is needed, in the right environment, to become an apple tree.

Even if you're just sitting there eating the apple, the potential is within the seeds. And being eaten is actually part of the seed-spreading process that evolved in many different species to their advantage: it keeps the offspring from competing for the parent plant's close-in resources.

Like sending your child to another country for university: they make their own connections over there, so they're not competing with your network.

Anyhow... back to my point.

A three-year-old is not ten percent of a thirty-year-old. They don't have any reason at all to be able to do or understand ten percent of what a thirty-year-old does. The child has within them all that is necessary, given the environmental conditions surrounding them, to become a complete thirty-year-old in approximately twenty-seven years.

But they are not on their way to becoming a thirty-year-old in some simple, linear sense.

They are themselves already, whole and complete, and becoming.

All the time. At the same time.

The same way they will be when they are thirty, sixty, even ninety.

A child is not a This or That. A child is becoming — more themselves, older, more mature (hopefully), and more and more adapted to the reality that surrounds them.

Architecture doesn't determine how the child will be at thirty. It constrains, enables and channels what becomes possible. Adaptive Architecture isn't a machine for producing “well-adjusted people.” Sometimes it is solely the adaptation to an environment that produces dysfunction — a person can become extraordinarily well adapted to a terrible environment.

Within reality — including all the forces and influences, both internal and external — the child responds: grows, develops, makes mistakes, compiles evidence, records experiences, alters directions, experiments, and comes to conclusions.

The child (family, neighbourhood, culture, government, medical system, education system, religious community) continually adapts to the reality it encounters — including realities created by its own previous adaptations.

This begins before they are born.

And it never stops.

Eric

While uncovering the probable causes and complications of a sudden increase in histamine responses (sometimes being post-menopausal is fun, and sometimes so is being 60... but here we are anyhow...) I realized that it wasn't a matter of identifying the trigger foods, as much as it was understanding that a body has a tolerance level before hives appear...

I made a joke about 'an accountant' harumphing about the situation I'd created... and the image developed: some fusty and prim late-middle aged man in a beige cardigan with brown suede elbow patches, and two really nice Parker 51 fountain pens, one with blue-black ink, the other a deep blood red for debits. Too much histamine results in a page full of red:

sitting for too long
overheated
standing for too long
typing for too long (laptop edge irritating the inner wrist)
foods high in histamine (aged cheese, aged meat, leftover meats, bone broth)
foods that release histamine (citrus, including bergamont – in my favourite Earl Grey tea)
stress from not enough fresh air, too many strata issues, not enough sleep, not enough water

And a matching page filled with his neat little script, enumerating the relief:

an afternoon in a lake
a day at the painting studio
a chat with a friend
a daytime nap in the shade
an early bedtime
waking up naturally instead of with an alarm
moving around more regularly, even if sitting or standing for the same length of time in total

So now 'Eric isn't happy' describes when there is too much stress on the system without enough relief, and 'Eric smiled and put away his red pen' when the days have been free from hives... Eric doesn't tally whether something is good or bad. He tallies whether the system has the capacity to absorb it right now.

And the situation is tallied up before committing to a potentially problematic option: if I stay up late to go dancing with friends, will that tip me over, or has it been a low-cost day? A glass of red wine after a relaxing weekend? Or a bad day to add a steak to the ledger?

And, how general this Eric can be:

does the staff have the morale budget for a cutback in company parties?
can the toddler withstand another errand this far away from lunch?
how much will it cost to get ready to travel with three kids, and is it going to be a debit or a credit, overall?
is the stress on this system already too high to place another demand on it?

How Many Cookies?

Adjacent to Eric is the Cookie Metric, which is related to Spoons, both of which are explained here. Essentially, cookies are the retrieval (preferably forever) of future energy used in stressful ways... and spoons are a metric for how much energy is available, or used up, in a day.

Unexamined Assumptions

In the soup we form our map of reality which is inevitably, by necessity, as personal as it is incomplete. It is built on incomplete information, because we never have access to all the information. We can't.

We are limited. Our sensory awareness is limited by our sensory capacity, which (Thank you, Eric) varies with a vast array of factors: our alertness, our distraction, our focus on specific information (it's near impossible to look for all the blue things in a room while also looking for all the pink, grey, textured and round things in the room, especially when we're trying to remember the lyrics to a song we're learning) and our hunger level or any other urgent or powerful internal, physical experience... our imagined future, our memory of what has past, and our imagination about what might happen if we choose this or that, the thoughts that arise unbidden in any moment of inner silence... reminding us of this moment of embarrassment, or that feeling of rejection.

And this is all the time. From the beginning of our awareness before we're born, we are immersed, surrounded, embedded within the sensory input from internal and external sources. Even inside a 'sensory deprivation tank' the input is continuous.

We do not have the capacity to take it all in, use it all, or compile it all. We don't need to, of course, but it's important to recognize that we cannot.

And our brains aren't passive recording devices. We don't simply collect information and store it in an ever-expanding database of reality. We notice some things and miss others. We pay attention to some information and ignore other information. We look for patterns, make predictions, compare what we're experiencing with what we already know, and use what we've learned to decide what deserves our attention next.

Which is enormously useful.

It is also one of the reasons our maps can become remarkably resistant to information that doesn't fit them.

I've said most of this before, but right now it's the backdrop necessary to keep the next statement from sounding critical instead of simply true:

Our maps are founded on unexamined assumptions, many of which are completely inaccurate.

We get tangled up when we forget that the thing isn't the thing. Our map isn't reality. It is a flawed, incomplete, vague representation of reality that we're changing, redrawing, and reinforcing all the time.

When we mistake the map for reality, disagreement feels like a threat to reality itself. Then we handle correction with even less grace.

Parenting as a Lens for Seeing Humaning

Over the past months, I've been discovering that parenting isn't my core work, it's just the place where my work can be seen in realtime.

There is nothing fundamentally different between the adaptive architecture of how a school system reflects changing reality and how a toddler adapts to a change of address, but school systems are larger, have more factors involved, and spread across a much broader field, so changes in reality take longer to show across the system.

I think I coined the term humaning, with the meaning 'the process of being human' – another one of those soup / map things that we take for granted and don't often think or talk about. It's another place where 'this is just normal' in, as Sir Terry Pratchett said, a universe where there are galaxies colliding, destroying thousands of stars and planets... where in most of it, people would freeze or fry instantly, and we walk around with a whole world in our heads where a bed is a normal thing.

Humaning: A human being as a living process, not a state. It's not different for kids than adults, although that is a common assumption:

child = unfinished human; adult = finished human

Nope.

We're all humans being and becoming.

The toddler is figuring out what “later” means. The adult is figuring out what retirement means. The child is discovering that the rules change depending on who's in the room. The adult discovers that the rules change depending on which institution, culture, relationship, decade or country they're in.

Nobody graduates from humaning.

Adults just have much more accumulated map — and therefore much more accumulated assumption that the map is obvious.

We aren't born knowing how to human. We arrive with an astonishing collection of capacities, tendencies, needs and potential, and then spend our entire lives discovering what to do with them to succeed (or cope) with the particular reality in which we find ourselves.

We learn what a family is. What a home is. What a friend is. What food is. What “mine” means. What is expected. What is possible. What is normal, here.

Most of it happens without anyone sitting us down to explain it.

This is one of the things that makes parenting such an extraordinary microscope into humaning: We get to watch a person figuring out things that the rest of us have forgotten ever had to figure out.

A toddler encounters a new social rule and has no idea that it is a rule, much less where it applies, when it applies, or when it mysteriously stops applying. Our rules are rarely universal. They're more often conditional, contextual, contradictory, and dependent on details that adults barely notice anymore and would struggle to explain to anyone.

We expect children to either 'already know' or somehow infer all of this from watching us — and then act as though the resulting knowledge is intuitive or obvious.

It isn't.

Kids are doing the enormous cognitive work of discovering the operating conditions of their particular reality.

And because we have already forgotten that we had to do this, we can mistake their confusion for defiance, their questions for argument, their repetition for stubbornness, and their apparently inexplicable choices for bad behaviour.

But they're humaning.

So are we.

A child learns what happens when they cry, or when someone else cries. A teenager discovers that the family architecture no longer fits the person they're becoming. A parent changes the environment and suddenly a “behaviour problem” disappears. A school system encounters a change in standard working hours and, eventually, begins to reorganize around it.

The same process is happening at every scale. The systems are different in size and complexity, but the underlying architecture is not.

Parenting simply gives us a close-up view.

Independence is Not Free of Dependence

This one shocks people.

In spite of everything from the Me Generation onward in the Western world that highlights the vital nature of the solitary, self-made, independent, strong, and 'don't need anyone' person (with a great deal of obviously necessary privacy, of course) independence is not a human trait, and it's not a strength. It's a fiction.

We are, body and mind, social animals no matter what pressures or beliefs might lead us to believe that is frivolous, optional, or dispensable.

This means that, in addition to being incapable of personally making the vast majority of the 'normal' day-to-day objects we use (from a computer mouse to a pencil, a manual transmission to a bus passenger seat, a bridge for our commute or even our own gas stove) we are not capable of living for any length of time without the continuous, invisible, essential support of the communities we live in.

Even if we live in the basement and hate people.

What we call independence is actually dependency that has become invisible.

The food delivery people make basement living possible. That's a dependency. The food delivery people manufacture none of it, farm none of it, preserve and prepare none of it. They also manufacture none of the fuel, vehicles, or packaging involved. And that's only the food.

Dependency is in the computer parts, the electricity supply (or the parts that bring it to the outlet behind the desk,) the servers that run the internet, email, private message platform – each of which is dependent on thousands of jobs for money, done by people who are also dependent on the individuals in the basement consuming the goods and services, supplying the views and likes on every platform collecting data, or playing the games... who are dependent on tech companies improving displays and CPUs and multitasking and spam filtering and legal and HR and warehousing and logistics and...

That basement hermit is quietly living on the top of a very broad and diverse stack of other people's labour, attention, genius, and production.

Like the map and the soup, this is an area of modern life where What We Say It's Like has virtually no contact or relationship with What Reality Is Like.

More than that, though, in order to be human we need social and emotional companionship. It's the same level of need as autonomy. Connection is not the opposite of autonomy, any more than water is the opposite of food – we need both.

Facts: no person has ever raised themselves in solitude, without dependency on others (see above: food.) No person learned language in solitude, without dependency on others (even people who have invented languages, like Klingon and Westron have experience of linguistics – a field they did not invent nor develop.) No person connected to the internet in solitude, without dependency on others. No person living inside cities or rurally, including in caves in Alaska, live independent of human civilization – tools, garments, global food supply, and commerce all touch even the Doomsday Preppers.

When we think of history, we often imagine people independently living, making everything they needed for themselves, by themselves. This has never been true.

A fun fact from a friend who grew up within a community who enjoyed Medieval reenactments and historic technologies: to supply a family of six with the fabric needed (then, not in the current 14 pairs of jeans for one person reality of today) to be dressed, have bedding, and towels, required the spinning and weaving of 15 full-time workers for more than a year.

Imagine if a pair of pants, a shirt, a coat, underwear, and night clothes each, plus one bed of sheets and one towel cost 15 full-time skilled workers for a year. That's more than it would cost to staff a house full-time with a cook, cleaner, valet and chauffeur, which most people think is only possible in the realm of the super-rich.

We don't spend our childhoods making our trousseau for our hope chest anymore than we spend it learning to become independent.

We spend our childhoods learning how to participate in the vast web of dependencies that makes being human possible... and with a magic trick attached: not noticing, while believing we're doing something exactly the opposite.

The Environment is Part of the Behaviour

As the US participation in the Vietnam War was wrapping up, addiction specialists had a fresh and terrifying concern: the vast majority of soldiers deployed in Southeast Asia were heroin users, many of them addicted. They envisioned the influx of thousands and thousands of druggies, chaos and mayhem included.

Then a funny thing happened: chaos and mayhem did not occur. The vast majority of users went home, and back to their families and normal lives. No massive jump in drug-related crime.

The first question all the experts faced was 'what just happened?'

One researcher was particularly curious, and he had noticed something about rats in labs: they were all in individual cages, having things happen to them, but with nothing at all to do. Rats, as you know, are social animals the same way people are, so he thought 'this isn't a normal rat environment.'

So this researcher (hang on, I'll go find out who he was in a minute – Bruce Alexander and colleagues at Simon Fraser University, hey, that's in my neighbourhood!) thought, 'well, if this environment is very stressful and unnatural for rats, how would rats react to the availability of morphine [research is fun!] in a more rat-friendly situation?'

Individual rats in cages quickly habituate to water with morphine, and will do all kinds of stupid lab tricks to get more, all in perfect alignment with the prevailing belief: opiates are super-addictive with any exposure.

He made Rat Park: an interactive, complicated, populated amusement park for rats, with mazes and puzzles and gathering spaces and all manner of toys and rats to interact with.

In Rat Park, he couldn't get the rats (some of whom had nothing but morphine water to drink for over 50 days straight) to drink the morphine water when plain water was available, with few signs of withdrawal in any of them. The only way they'd drink morphine water was if it was so sweetened and so diluted that it didn't affect their behaviour.

Explaining both the use of heroin in the warzone (super stressful environment) and the lack of use when the soldiers returned to an environment that was more socially appropriate for human beings.

While this is an extreme example, it sometimes takes those to make a point: human (and other social animals') behaviour is directly and inextricably linked to the reality of the environment it arises in.

Defiance cannot arise in an environment free of commands and demands.

Stupid arguments between adults and toddlers over Arrowsmith being girls because they have long hair cannot happen with an adult who refuses to argue.

Sibling fighting cannot escalate to physical violence in a family that steps in before it escalates, rather than ignoring it or inadvertently reinforcing it.

Dogs are more likely to be obese in households with at least one obese adult than dogs in homes with no obese adults.

Neighbourhoods with safe sidewalks and comfortable front porches feel more like safe and welcoming communities than neighbourhoods with many remote-controlled garage door openers and large, fully-fenced backyards.

Homes that are child-friendly, with fragile or unsafe objects safely stored out of sight and out of reach have children who are more creative and curious, and more relaxed, than homes with many 'don't touch that' items within reach.

Behaviour is what an adaptive system does in the environment it is adapting to.

Behaviour doesn't happen in a vacuum. Change the environment, and you change the behaviour that environment produces.

If you're looking at a behaviour in your own family and wondering what might be happening upstream, that's exactly the kind of question we can explore in parent coaching.

Normal is Not a Synonym of Healthy

To expand on Measuring for the Sake of Measurements Creates Mayhem, I'd like to take you into an exploration of percentiles.

Doctors are required to pass a Statistics course, and that suggests that anyone qualified as an MD should understand basics of the percentiles they talk about all the time, but here's how I keep hearing it from parents:

'My doctor is concerned because my child is in the 106th percentile.'
'My daughter's in the 3rd percentile for weight, so I have to feed her ice cream and more butter.'

Okay, I didn't have to suffer through any Statistics courses, so I am blissfully unaware of the differences between mean, median and average... but I do know that on a scale of 1-100 there is no 106. It's ridiculous to suggest, but here we are.

More importantly, I know that percentiles describe populations, not individuals.

In a group of 100 people born on the same day as you — and the same sex, because growth patterns differ — one of them will be the lightest, even if the difference between the lightest and heaviest is measured in nanograms.

One will be the heaviest. One will be the shortest. One will be the tallest. There is no failure involved. The 50th percentile isn't the pass mark. Children below it aren't failing, and children above the 90th percentile don't get an A+.

A percentile tells us where an individual measurement falls within a reference population. It does not tell us whether that individual is healthy.

And yet, from this wild misunderstanding of how population studies are supposed to be used to assess an individual child, we end up with parents in fear, children subjected to bizarre dietary restrictions or additions, and medical interventions on healthy children.

Because normal is not a synonym for healthy.

The six-pound baby of parents who are fine-boned and under five feet tall is highly unlikely to be in the 98th percentile for height or weight. This is not failure-to-thrive. It's genetics.

The eleven-pound child whose parents are both well over six feet tall, broadly built, muscular and thick-boned is unlikely to be in the 10th percentile for anything.

Put these two children together and divide their measurements by two, and you've created a “norm.”

But neither child has to resemble the norm.

Because norms are about populations, not individuals.

And when we look at that giant bulge of the population around the middle, too many of us — and far too many professionals — start thinking:

"There. That's where most of the real people I see should be."

Which is how we get into trouble:

Information about a population gets transposed onto an individual.
That individual is compared to the norm as if that is what a person should be.
That comparison declares if this person is healthy.
That comparison prescribes what to do to the child.

A norm describes how common something is. It is not a measure of health.

If 67% of healthy children had purple bedrooms, purple bedrooms would be “normal.” That wouldn't make orange bedrooms unhealthy.

Britain once looked for the Average British Person. She turns out to be 37½ years old, with two children, 5'7", divorced once, with an undergraduate degree, living in a semi-detached house in a mid-sized city, and a bunch of other characteristics I can't remember.

She also turns out not to exist. Researchers couldn't find a person who matched all the characteristics of the Average British Person. In Britain.

So the lesson for today is: Normal is a dryer setting, not a person.

Performative Adequacy

Nearly everyone in the modern world will recognize this one, and the strain it causes, although it's never had a term before that I know of.

Here are some of the signs:

binge drinking among serving staff who are required to 'smile' throughout their shifts regardless of how the management or customers are actually treating them
elevated heart attack risks among 'positive attitude' sales staff, and the concomitant lower sales performance of the ones who are 'putting it on' rather than genuinely being people with positive attitudes
rehab that 'works' most effectively at giving subjects new vocabulary for their cynicism as they revert to using their drug of choice, or shift to a different kind of dysfunctional coping mechanism with the same enthusiasm as they had for their self-medication (swapping a cult for a drug, or shopping, or gambling, or ... you name it!)
'inexplicably' high suicide rates (climbing) in the 50-70 age group
emotional burnout, anxiety, and depression in younger and younger kids

All the quiet desperation people are living: coping, seeking healing, wellness, health optimization in an environment that seems to be optimized against people.

All the stress created by compensating for poor systems, with this hilarious example that matches (identically) a company I know very well:

Corporate America™ is (by no means alone in being) extraordinarily good at measuring the performative adequacy:

Did employee attend?
Did the task get moved to the Complete bucket on the kanban board?
Did a swift response occur?
Did employee / department hit the target?
Did employee (or student) produce the report?
Did employee (or student) demonstrate the competency?
Did employee say the Support Management Words in the meeting?
Did the dashboard turn green?

And all of those can be true while the actual system is quietly going:

“Nope. This is held together with frayed string and pre-chewed bubble gum.”

An observer might discover that the highest-performing department is actually wildly fragile because everybody is spending enormous amounts of energy maintaining the appearance that everything is fine: containment and compensation for deeply-embedded flaws. Performative adequacy.

A supposedly “under-performing” department might contain people who are doing something much more interesting: noticing that the assumptions built into the system are wrong, and looking for actual adequacy.

Can the system allow people to notice a problem before it is catastrophic?

Can people report information that contradicts the current model without being punished for it?

Can the organisation change its direction without requiring someone to be thrown under the bus for the previous model?

Does the system train and retain enough capable people that knowledge isn't walking out the door faster than it's being acquired?

When a failure can no longer be covered up, does the response increase future capacity or merely improve the appearance of compliance?

How much of the organisation's apparent adequacy is being produced by people privately compensating for or containing its inadequacy?

If one employee spends three hours every week quietly repairing a broken process so that the dashboard says everything is fine, the dashboard is measuring one employee's compensatory capacity, not the adequacy of the system.

That employee takes a three week holiday and suddenly...

Uh oh. Chaos.

The employee's absence didn't create the chaos, the organisation's missing cog displayed the dysfunction in its process.