Fins-TD-03 Alexander N. Christakis, People Science (Dec 1996) This article appears in SYSTEMS, 1996, Vol. 1, No. 1. Official Journal of the Polish Systems Society. Republished online by permission of the author. A PEOPLE SCIENCE: THE CogniScope (tm) SYSTEM APPROACH By Alexander N. Christakis * Abstract An approach for enabling people from all walks of life to experience participative democracy is presented. The approach is founded on twenty years of research, development and testing in a variety of communities. The approach is applicable to designing social systems by encouraging the stakeholders in "focused and open dialogue". The dialogue, especially when complex issues are being addressed, is capable to merge language, cognition, and action, resulting in the practice of a "people science". A people science One way to reverse the dismal trends of decline and discontent prevalent in most societies and organizations today is to enable people from all walks of life to experience participative democracy in national, inter- national, organizational and inter-organizational settings. Communities of stakeholders are demanding the opportunity to voice their opinion on issues confronting them. An example of such an opportunity was offered by President Clinton when he invited a community of stakeholders to attend the Northwest forest conference held on April 2, 1993. The purpose of this conference was to search for a consensus in the economy-vs.- environment conflict. Without action by the government, timber harvesting in the coastal forests of Northern California, Oregon and Washington was about to come to a standstill; but any decision that resumes logging at high levels could drive the northern spotted owl and a number of other forest animals into extinction. The President convened the forest conference in order to hear the views of the stakeholders first hand. The day before the conference he told the Portland Oregonian newspaper: "The prospect that these meetings might actually be used as a method of governing--is quite exhilarating". Unfortunately, three months after President Clinton, Vice President Gore and the Administration's domestic cabinet officers convened the one-day Northwest forest conference, the situation got worse. At the conference the President predicted that he would probably make no one happy in the end. It is hard to believe that when the President of the United States personally moderates and listens to the different points of view of the stakeholders, the decisions made by the Administration would not please the majority. However, assuming that bringing the parties of interest to the table is sufficient for the resolution of a complex issue is erroneous. Twenty years o experience in the development and testing of the "science of complexity" (Warfield, 1994) has shown that unless the parties participate in a process of a dialogue, enabling them to collectively define the complex issue, the situation usually gets worse. The most profound statement at the forest summit was made by logger Buzz Eades. Sitting next to the President, he said at one point that he was not always convinced by biological science or economic science in the dispute between trees and jobs, but he told the President, "I am full of hope because I believe I am sitting beside a man who believes in people science". Over the last twenty years a people science has been developed on the premise that externalizing ---------- * International Management Consultants, 19 E. Central Avenue, PA 19301-1359, USA, Phone: 610-651-0414/Fax: 610-651-2717. 16 the knowledge and wisdom of the people affected by a complex issue is necessary for the definition and resolution of the issue. However, in order for the wisdom to surface, the stakeholders must be engaged in a "meaningful dialogue". While dialogue is the necessary and sufficient prerequisite to surfacing wisdom, it is not as easy to practice it, especially when dealing with complex issues. The definition of the word "dialogue" comes from the Greek dialogos, which is made up of the root words dia ("through") and logos (roughly translated as "the meaning"). Alex Pattakos, in a chapter published in Rediscovering the Soul of Business, addresses the definition of the word logos and says that the various interpretations of it reveal that it has deep spiritual roots. He writes (Pattakos, 1995): "Interpreting logos in this way, that is viewing it as a manifestation of spirit or soul, carries with it significant implications, both conceptual and practical. Dialogue, as a concept, takes on a new and deeper meaning when it is perceived as a group's accessing a "larger pool of common spirit" through a distinctly spiritual connection between the members. This suggests more than 'collective thinking', although dialogue certainly is a determinant of such a holistic process. Spirit flowing through the participants in dialogue leads to collective thinking which, in turn, facilitates a common understanding thereby resulting in 'common education,' or to use today's jargon, collective learning". A group of researchers discovered twenty years ago that a new scientific paradigm was required if people were to engage in dialogue when addressing complex issues. The new paradigm corresponds to a "people science". The DEMOSOPHIA paradigm The scientific revolution for the process of the dialogue started in the 1970s (Christakis, 1973). The new scientific paradigm has been called DEMOSOPHIA, which in Greek means the "wisdom of the people" (Christakis, 1993). The name implies a paradigm shift from "the power of the people", which is the Greek meaning of the word democracy, to the "wisdom of the people". The underlying premise of the new paradigm is that discovering the wisdom of the people is necessary if the people are expected to exercise their power. However, because of the escalating complexity of the contemporary societal situation, it is much more difficult today to uncover the wisdom of the people than it was two thousand and five hundred years ago during the golden era of the Athenian Republic. In the early 70s a group of researchers working in a prominent research institute realized the importance of applying science to the challenge of reinventing the process of the dialogue. After conducting several experiments on complex tasks, such as using a group of experts to design a new city, they realized that a new "scientific paradigm" was needed if the experts from diverse disciplines were to engage in productive "interdisciplinary dialogue". Dr. James Taylor, a social psychiatrist, was retained to observe the deliberations of the interdisciplinary team. Also, three other researchers, including the author, were asked to observe the team in order to determine whether any improvements could be made regarding interdisciplinary team effectiveness and communication. One of the major findings of the researchers observing the deliberations of the team was that the rate of progress of the team was extremely slow. Each member would come to the interdisciplinary team meeting with proposals drafted during meetings that he held with other members of his discipline. For example, the economist would come prepared to present the results of an employment projection and distribution model for the population of the city. These proposals were based on a scientific model, and were drafted in collaboration with other economists during meetings which they held among themselves. The meetings involving only economists were very productive and effective. They were capable of translating the "mental models" of every participant into "a team mental model" representing the knowledge of their discipline. The reason the dialogue among the team members belonging to any one specific discipline was very manageable and productive is that they used the scientific language of their particular discipline to communicate and agree on the recommendations to be submitted to the interdisciplinary team. The total breakdown in communications emerged during their efforts to engage in interdisciplinary dialogue in order to integrate the disciplinary contributions into a systemic design of the whole city. The level of frustration among the various representatives of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary team meetings began to escalate. Some team members started to decline to participate in team meetings, or found excuses not to attend and sent another person to represent their discipline. The leader of the interdisciplinary team was changed three times, because selected leaders would resign from the position. As psychiatrist James Taylor wrote, after observing the deliberations of the team for over a year (Taylor, 1976): "... there appears to be a pressing, well- recognized need for a kind of social intervention, the interdisciplinary team which synthesizes knowledge in order to clarify complex problems. The promise of this social invention is clear, yet in fact no workable model has emerged. The question becomes obvious: why not? That has gone wrong in existing efforts to develop 'meaningful synthesis' of 'pertinent fields of knowledge'?" 17 Dr. Taylor and the other researchers observing the interdisciplinary team working on the design of a hypothetical city in the early 1970s realized that many other acute problems - certainly those confronting contemporary societies and organizations - could not be solved without the integration of knowledge and expertise originating from the different disciplines. However, without empowering the members of the interdisciplinary team to use rigorous and understandable language to communicate among them, just as each member was capable of practicing in meetings with people from their own discipline, the prospects of designing the hypothetical city were not good. This observation prompted the researchers to launch a long-range Research and Development program leading to the discovery of the DEMOSOPHIA paradigm. It has been suggested that a shift to the new paradigm is inevitable (Christakis, 1993), because of the inability of organizations and the society as a whole to deal with the acute problems of today. It represents a paradigm shift from the democracy practiced over 2000 years ago in the Athenian Republic to the postmodern democracy advocated by leading scholars and management gurus today. Language and action The rationalistic tradition portrays language as a means of communication by which information is transferred from one person to another. However, as it has been suggested by a number of authors (Winograd, Flores, 1986), language is a form of human social interaction, directed towards the creation of what these authors call "mutual orientation". This orientation is not founded in a correspondence between language and the world, but exists as a consensual domain - as interlinked patterns of activity. The justification for the participation of the stakeholders in the designing of social systems should be obvious once we understand the linkage between language and commitment (Banathy, 1996). Problems always arise for human beings in situations where they live, i.e., as a consequence of "being-in-the-world". Problems should not be thought as having some kind of objective existence, but they arise for a particular community of stakeholders in relation to their particular contextual background. Different stakeholders will see and talk about different aspects of a problem situation recommending different approaches, potential actions, and design solutions. In some cases, what is a problem for one stakeholder won't be a problem at all for someone else. Problems, therefore, can be interpreted as opportunities for new designs through the active participation of the stakeholders in a domain of discourse and mutual concern. In that sense language has a fundamental role in creating our world through the participative design process. A design constitutes a collective interpretation of a problem situation and a committed attempt to resolve it and to anticipate future problems. Language, especially dialogue, is the only instrumentality for generating commitment for human action. The key to much of what we have been saying so far lies in recognizing the fundamental importance of the *shift* from an individual-centered conception of knowledge and understanding to one that is socially-based. Knowledge and understanding do not result from formal operations on mental representations of an objective existing world. Rather, they arise from the individual's committed participation in mutually-oriented patterns of behavior that are embedded in a socially-shared background of concerns, actions, and beliefs. This *shift* from an individual to a social perspective - from mental representations to patterned interaction in a consensual linguistic domain - permits language, cognition, and action to merge (Christakis, 1988). The CogniScope (tm) system The CogniScope (tm) system is a specialized process aimed at collaborative teamwork by a community of stakeholders leading to the design of an action plan for the resolution of a complex issue. The process enables stakeholders to merge language, cognition, and action. The "action plan" is the outcome of the integration of the pluralities of cognitive realities of the stakeholders. It emerges from "open and focused dialogue" as a consensual linguistic domain. Through dialogue the community generates and clarifies a large number of elementary ideas (sometimes over 300) and designs interactively an "action plan" which is co-owned by the stakeholders because it has been co-created (Christakis, 1996). The stakeholders employ the CogniScope (tm) system to perform three principle activities: * Generation and clarification of the meanings of ideas contributed by the stakeholders in response to properly-framed triggering questions. * Production of "ideas patterns" which result from exploring relationships among ideas in the context of carefully-framed generic questions. * Evaluation of idea patterns and action packages in response to agreed-upon criteria. These activities are embedded in four distinct but interrelated stages in the application of the CogniScope (tm) system: * Defining the design situation or "What should we do?" * Designing alternatives or "How can we implement the intent of the design?" * Choosing the preferred alternative or "Which alternative is the best for implementation and Why?" 18 * Planning for action or "When will we do what we can do?" The CogniScope (tm) system should, therefore, be conceptualized as a process for building patterned interactions among stakeholders in the context of a linguistic domain that is socially produced. An elaboration of the process by means of an example follows: For six days during the months of October and November of 1995, stakeholders representing a department within an organization thoughtfully addressed the question of "How should our department redesign itself so that it can work together with its clients in order to achieve the Organizational objectives?" This question represents the essence of the redesign effort. The stakeholders were able to define the vision and mission of the department, explore alternative means for implementing it, and finally converge on the design of a multifaceted Consensus Action Plan (CAP). The Action Plan for bringing the vision of a redesigned department from an "idealized stage" to an "implementation stage" represents the attempt of the stakeholders to manage the complexity of the situation. Each action of the CAP should be understood as being an occurrence that happens in a system constituted by other actions; and is connected to them by explicit or implicit linkages. Any system of action as complex as redesigning the department, is continuously trying to cope with the complexity intrinsic to the design situation. This necessity for coping, forces the stakeholders to confront two strongly coupled dimensions of the situation: (a) the substantive complexity of the design target, and (b) their weaknesses as stakeholders to come out from their self-referentiality and to capture their interactions with the other stakeholders. During the workshop the CogniScope (tm) system enabled the design team to partially transcend their self-referentiality and to embed themselves in the role of observers and "learners from each other" -- and as learners, to draw distinctions in their conversation. Every distinction for the understanding of an action is a choice made by the learner in a great number of possible opportunities for learning. The members of the redesign team were able to learn by their interactions with other learners within a linguistic domain. This splitting of the action domain from the linguistic one does not imply that action progresses independently of the learning which takes place in the linguistic domain. During the design conversation, distinctions and representations are generated as they are stipulated by action and, in turn, cause actions. The linguistic domain recursively generates communications explanations, linkages among representations of "idea patterns," new representations, amendments of earlier representations, etc., ultimately converging upon the CAP representation. Thus, by employing the CogniScope (tm) process for design dialogue, human beings are enabled to break the bonds of their "self-referentiality" precisely through the development of recursive communicable explanations and representations, in *harmony* with other human beings. References Banathy B., Designing Social Systems in a Changing World, Plenum, N.Y. 1996. Christakis A.N., A New Policy Science Paradigm, Futures, 5(6), 1973, pp. 543-558. Christakis A.N., The Club of Rome Revisited, [In:] General Systems, William J. Reckmeyer (ed.), Volume XXXI, New York, International Society for the Systems Sciences, 1988, pp. 35-38.. Christakis A.N., The Inevitability of Demosophia, [In:] A challenge for Systems Thinking: The Aegean Seminar, Loanna Tsivakou (ed.), University of the Aegean Press, Athens, Greece, 1993, pp. 187-197. Christakis A.N., Learning About the CogniScope (tm) System Approach, CWA Report prepared for the 1996 Asilomar Conversation on Designing Social Systems, Paoli, 1996. Pattakos A., Searching for the Soul in Government, [In:] Rediscovering the Soul of Business, Sterling and Stone, Inc., San Francisco, 1995, pp. 313-326. Taylor J.B., Building an interdisciplinary Team, [In:] Arnstein, S.R., and Christakis, A.N., (Ed.) Perspectives on Technology Assessment, Science and Technology Publishers, Jerusalem, Israel, 1976, pp. 45- 63. Warfield J.N., A Science of Generic Design: Managing Complexity Through Systems Design, Iowa State University Press, Ames, Iowa, 1995. Winograd T., Flores, ., Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design, Ablex Publishing Corporation, Norwood, 1986.