Following up on Learning Organizations

Elkus argues that the strengths attributed to crowdsourcing and other “wisdom of the crowd” phenomena are potentially strong on the tactical level but fail to scale to higher levels on the CPSOT stack. The higher layers on the stack, when compared to tactics:

• Have OODA loops that operate over longer time-frames, larger space-frames, and involve fewer people per loop and fewer people overall across all groups of loops.
• Have loops that are, to varying degrees, more removed from direct interaction with external forces. This places them in a worse position and under less pressure to observe and adapt to “unfolding interaction” with the environment since that interaction has to be transmitted through tactics and other intermediate layers (producing a higher “signal-to-noise” ratio, as Zen points out).
• Have (increasingly) fewer loops.

Concepts from Howard Bloom’s Global Brain are useful here to demonstrate the elements the higher layers of the CPSOT stack need to align in order to steal some of that vim and vigor from tactics:

1. diversity generators: agents that generate new hypotheses.
2. conformity enforcers: agents that ensure that agents have enough in common to exchange hypotheses.
3. inner-judges: systems that decide if an individual hypothesis is true (it other words, that it survives) or if something is untrue (if it fails).
4. intergroup tournaments: competitions between groups that test the hypotheses produced by one group against hypotheses produced by other groups. Victory produces truth and defeat is the father of lies.
5. resource shifters: systems that do the dirty work for inner judges and intergroup tournaments. They heavily reward winning hypotheses and heavily punish hypotheses that perform poorly. Bloom summarizes this by quoting the Lord: For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath.

Tactics have more of each of these elements than higher layers on the stack which involve fewer and fewer people. This means fewer hypotheses to loop through and more conformity enforcing gatekeepers. A great deal of what the higher layers do is filter out the multiple hypotheses produced by tactics and its direct interaction with the unfolding environment and use conformity enforcement to pare down the number of hypotheses and make them more consistent. This is similar to how Jeff Hawkins hypothesizes that the human brain works in his memory-prediction framework:

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