Creating Collaborative Law, Part II

Part I of this latest series on creating opportunity through collaboration and cooperation referred to the process of coevolution among the Federalists, Anti-Federalists and a public interested in the governance of America in 1787 and beyond. Coevolution involves multiple interacting entities, typically organic when thought of in biological terms, and the behavior that results from these interactions is typically described in the concept of emergence.

In his 2002 deeply insightful review[1] of the principles of emergence, FAPITCA contributor Harold Morowitz pointed toward some of the arguments we are making in this blog. Perhaps the most important was in his chapter on “Science and Religion” where he noted, “We have to give up on the simplistic approaches. The world is far more complicated than was envisioned by earlier philosophers.” How true this is in the Connected Age!

While the entire first chapter of The Emergence of Everything is dedicated to defining emergence, we’ll sum it up here with the contrast provided by Harold: “Emergence is then the opposite of reduction. The latter tries to move from the whole to the parts… The former tries to generate the properties of the whole from an understanding of the parts.”[2]

We want to propose that almost all law and policy in our current times has been approached from the reductionist perspective. The two parties, more or less, each have their own starting assumptions as to what law and policy must be in order for our nation to succeed. This drives them to visualize the “finished” law or policy first and then reduce it through the political process to derive the components of the law. Unfortunately, in this era of our nation’s governing history, this visualization process seems to be consistent with a polarized political process that motivates party positions.

This assumption that there is only one approach, particularly when driven by the arrogance of political dogma, is akin to a scientist establishing a hypothesis and then in the experiments that follow only accepting evidence that supports the original hypothesis. This is not how our nation’s science and technology research has achieved so much…it’s also not how our nation’s best laws and policies were produced, including our Constitution. We had differences in 1787 to be sure, but a desire to collaborate and achieve on behalf the nation drove the process and the emergent result…the edges did not control our politics in that time.

Anyone suggesting today that edge-driven policies are somehow more in alignment with our historical political processes either seeks to deceive or is not fully informed of our nation’s history. In either event, such an approach hurts our nation and rejects the value of science and reasoning in leadership.

If there is a science of emergence (and there’s good evidence there is from reading Harold’s book) this science can also inform how politics in our nation can work more effectively. Emergence is a product of interactions of constituent parts that produce a higher level behavior that works…the fact that it works demonstrates emergence’s special relationship with coevolution. The two go hand-in-hand to produce a process or product that is competitive for survival and gets the job of life done. That’s what we want for good law and policy in this nation: get the job done.

We want law and policy that is collaboratively created through the interactions of competitive parties…loyal oppositions, if you will.[3] We want law and policy that starts with assumptions about what’s needed to make our nation work better and become even greater. Then we want to test assumptions in a fair, representative and collaborative way. We want to grow success through emergence, just like life has.

We do not want law and policy that starts from a dogmatic position, informed by the strict rules imposed by the edges of a political party that is incapable of or unwilling to collaborate to emerge law and policy that offers maximum access to opportunity for everyone. We do not want to reject the diversity that our new generations of Americans have to offer in this Connected Age and marginalize them from the process before they even get a chance to enjoy the quality of life we boomers inherited.

One final note on the value of thinking about law and policy as an emergent process and product: Harold Morowitz proposes that emergence is nature’s pruning function, “which extracts the actual from the possible.” If we can somehow harness the process of emergence in our nation’s development of law and policy, we are actually making the political process far more natural and adaptive (and even infused with a meaningful dose of humility). This may help us overcome the arrogance of political dogma. We may be able to prune the best from the rest and facilitate more Americans feeling included, empowered and part of our political process.

In Part III of this series, we’ll demonstrate the convergence of some of these scientifically-derived processes with the tools of the Connected Age to show how better law and policy may emerge. With the world around us becoming ever more complex and the behaviors of many interacting forces descending upon us (including both social and environmental forces), we need to be far more collaborative and yes, science-based, in developing a political culture that brings us together rather than tears us apart. That’s for next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 4/11/2014.

 

[1] Morowitz, H. J., The Emergence of Everything, Oxford Press, NY, 2002.

[2] Ibid., p. 14., It’s also worth noting that the remainder of the book provides rich examples of many types of emergences that greatly inform a broad understanding of emergence as a scientific concept (even its own discipline, in some ways).

[3] At this point, most in the American Center would accept modest respect and civility if loyalty is a bridge too far for the edges.

Creating Collaborative Law, Part I

In her 1999 commentary on her very successful Outlander series, Diana Gabaldon wrote in The Outlandish Companion how she discovered and explored the world of collaborative authorship. She describes how in the mid-1980s she started using CompuServe bulletin board forums to bounce around ideas about her first book, test passages and eventually discover the agent that signed her to a contract with Delacorte Press that launched the series so successfully.

While Galbadon rightly takes credit for the ultimate success she’s enjoyed with Outlander, she also acknowledges how important it was for her to be able to leverage existing technologies to find the right environment for success with her writings.

As you may recall from last time, we introduced Wattpad. Wattpad offers an interesting way to collaborate in a very social way to write new stories and even books. The creators claim that “Wattpad is a place to discover and share stories: a social platform that connects people through words. It is a community that spans borders, interests, languages. With Wattpad, anyone can read or write on any device: phone, tablet, or computer.” This means that people who don’t even know each other can read, write and review in a social, collaborative manner.

In a top-level sense, the “final” version our nation’s constitution benefited from a similar approach. A group led by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (the Federalists) sparred in a very open and public way with an opposing group (the Anti-Federalists) led by Patrick Henry, John Hancock and others. The two groups were using social media of the day in the form of newspaper essays, pamphlets and letters to debate in public their positions. In some cases (e.g., Massachusetts and Virginia), the public debates using published letters and essays informed state-level ratification of the original Constitution.[1]

While the Framers of our Constitution did not seek public comments on their initial “signed” creation in Philadelphia in 1787, they did in effect solicit input for what was truly a dynamic document in those early months of ratification. One could easily claim that the Bill of Rights, introduced for ratification in 1789, was an addition to the original Constitution that emerged as a result of public interactions, including a great deal of debate and disagreement!

Together, the Federalists, the Anti-Federalists and their publically-inclusive debate of both documents pointed toward a socially interactive collaboration that produced our amazingly resilient Constitution. In a non-biological way, the Federalists, Anti-Federalists and their public audiences interacted in the contemporary social networks to coevolve our Constitution and Bill of Rights, if you will.

The results were that we ended up with both the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights, setting the stage for what became the framework for an adaptive form for governance that’s lasted over 225 years. While it’s not really correct to call our nation a democratic republic, that is in effect the process that guided the early evolution of the Constitution…anyone and everyone could impact its development until it was ratified by the necessary nine states in 1788 (per Article VII).[2] Through the amendment process, accommodated by the Constitution, we could continue to interact at all levels of government through existing social networks to produce more adaptations!

How might similar socially-based techniques like this work in the development of lesser law and policy today? Imagine that some of today’s most contentious laws such as health care had been developed in an inclusive, publically debated forum rather than one party essentially “ramming” it through based simply on a sufficient majority in both houses. We don’t suggest that health care reform was unnecessary but rather that it was not developed as collaboratively as it could have been. Possibly, politics could have been mitigated with a more knowledgeable public involvement and interaction.[3]

In our next piece, we’ll describe some of the mechanics involved in how such an approach could have been applied. For the time being, we wanted to draw some meaningful comparisons to the technologies of two periods (today and the late 18^th Century) and show how good things can happen when people want to get along for good reasons. Make no mistake: there was a significant distance between the two factions debating the development of the Constitution and its eventual ratification. We have to ask why we can’t apply similar philosophies of willingness to eventually agree on things that aren’t as critical as the ratification of our Constitution.

Bottom line: there is a great deal of debate ongoing in our nation about better collaboration between the two “ruling” parties to create law and policy that better reflect the Center of America. Such collaboration is at the heart of the American Promise of equal access to opportunity. In keeping with Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age, we intend to explore how new, socially-networked technologies can help get us back on the road to the same kind of collaboration that produced the marvelous Constitution that has served us since our foundations. Until next time…

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 4/4/2014.

NOTES:

[1] Beeman, R., Plain, Honest Men: The Making of the American Constitution. Random House, NY, 2009.

[2] The authors acknowledge using a slight amount of literary license in titling the last post, dated 3/25/2014, “A More ‘Democratic’ Democratic Republic’”…we understand the United States is by most definitions a federal republic. Throughout our history, the function of democracy has played a limited but important role in our existence as a nation, but in the end the United States is republic form of government, with the states federated under our great Constitution.

[3] We don’t seek to dismiss blame from the “loyal opposition” – the health care law was rammed through partially because the other side wouldn’t engage, even though both parties clearly recognized that the status quo was unacceptable. Would the opposition have contributed to the process under “normal” non-polarized circumstances? Perhaps not. Should the majority have sought to put pressure on the minority until it came to the table given the sweeping universal impacts of the law? Perhaps so. History will tell us if the President’s party was right to ram healthcare legislation in any event.

Compliments to the Complements

Connecting to the Principles, Part 4

Millennials have sought to build a social life that is more visible, more networked and more transparent than any generation before them. To be sure, Gen Y’ers and even Boomers have used online social networks in numbers that would likely have surprised anyone 20 years ago…some might say “everybody’s doing it!” Millennials have grown up connected, however – that’s why they’re also called digital natives. The effects of all that connectivity compose the basis for one of our main premises in Fulfilling the American Promise in the Connected Age.

There are some important questions to ponder about all this though. What are the effects of an online social life? Are we over-connected? What are the consequences of the new forms of connectivity in terms of the future of collaboration? How do we make collaboration work better in the connected age?

These are some of the questions we posed to ourselves as we articulated the Principles last month. We thought long and hard about collaboration when postulating that competition and compromise are key complementary components of our political process. We also thought about collaboration’s effects on capitalism the way it’s practiced in America. We were driven to think about this because our current Congress seems to have forgotten how collaboration works, even though we see business succeeding more and more through collaboration in the connected age.

So with this post we’re looking a little more closely at the complementary relationship of compromise and competition and the resulting outcome of improved collaboration in the connected age. We’re also examining how this improved collaboration is exploited by Millennials. Focusing on connectivity, a look at collaboration through this lens helps us better understand why competition is good, and so is compromise. If we learn how to balance the two, in collaboration, we can rebuild the American Center and perhaps even draw more from the extreme edges back to the Center.

Just to review, a complement is “something that completes something else or makes it better…or makes perfect.” While we’re not describing a perfect relationship in our thinking, we are proposing that competition and compromise work together…complete each other…to make it more likely for collaboration to succeed. If we only rely on competition of ideas or ideology to improve our ability to lead, and in the process avoid compromise altogether, we are destroying the potential for collaboration to work…that’s not leadership.

Since we’re all human, none of us can get it right all the time, no matter how strong the ideology behind our beliefs. There aren’t even two sides to most arguments in Congress so how is it even possible to be right all the time? How is it possible to think only in terms of the “other side is wrong” and has nothing to contribute? How did the concept of compromise become a negative? If we could answer these questions collaboratively we might find a way forward. Fortunately, at least two US Senators are trying to address these issues…that is leadership.

The “normal” way of doing business in Congress in recent years appears to be built on only competition, spurning compromise because that is allegedly some sort of sign of weakness, or failure to be responsive to a particular voting base. But that’s not how our nation came to be. In 1775-1776, ideas competed but the Continental Congress recognized that compromise made those competing ideas stronger when effectively blended. The Founders inherently understood that successful collaboration requires that compromise and competition work together to improve the chances of achieving good policy and valuable outcomes.

This isn’t just the case in government, either. In the FAPITCA Principles, we proposed as an objective that “American capitalism is largely based on the complementary functions of competition and compromise between buyers and sellers in the market.” This means that one party, sellers, provide value to the other party, buyers, through a complementary relationship that brings together a market that might not otherwise exist. This happens in the normally collegial world of academics, as well. Value is added through the synergy of compromise and competition.

The Millennial generation leverages their digital native nature through their online social life and has benefitted from the effects the synergy of competition and compromise has on collaboration. At any early age, they began to play online games together and discovered the power of cooperation and compromise to overcome the big “Boss” adversary in each level of the virtual world in which they played and interacted. Typically, they never even met their playing partners.

Millennials have friends, by their definition, on Facebook that they’ve also never met and yet still share ideas and learn from each other. The same is true to a considerably lesser degree to the older generations but it was tougher since it was like learning a new language at an older age. Millennials grew up with speaking this language!

Competition and compromise are the effects of the digital age that the digital natives have accepted and in which they now thrive. The consequences of this life (the life of the generation from which we’ve borrowed the Boomer and Gen Y environments, as we discussed in the last post) are leading to fascinating findings that will soon be informing the growth of the American Center.

An appreciation of this change is happening everywhere but the halls of Congress, apparently. The Boomers squatting on the edges of that hallowed venue have just not sufficiently learned enough of the lessons of connecting in this age. They have not learned the value of compromise as a complement to competition to make it possible to collaborate on issues like healthcare, employment, immigration, the environment, redistricting, campaign finance, military missions and expenditures, social welfare and almost anything else we could imagine. What collaborative tools they have at their disposal if only they could truly immigrate to the connected age!

Unfortunately, we’re not prepared to say that any effects or consequences the digital natives are experiencing in the connected age will flow into the halls of Congress and State Houses anytime soon. They all think they are connected and doing the peoples’ business using the tools of social media like the Millennials. The problem is they’re primarily using these tools to get reelected, and all too rarely to take care of the nation and their constituents. That’s the biggest difference between those so-called political-digital immigrants and the digital natives of the Millennial generation. That’s where leadership will come in, but that’s for another post – we’ll get to that soon!

Next time, we’ll be publishing our first guest blog post…from a real Millennial! We’re delighted to highlight the perspectives of the real future of America, and hope it opens the door to more posts from the generations younger than the Boomers who are currently the “caretakers” of America. It’s time that the learning and sharing flow both ways.

Originally posted by Carl and Chuck Hunt, 3/11/2014.