‘We’re running balls out’ — why the existing order is hard to change

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‘We’re running balls out’ — why the existing order is hard to change.

In 1788, James Watt, on a suggestion from Matthew Boulton, adapted a centrifugal governor — invented by Huygens to control millstones in 17th-century windmills — to control his steam engine.

The engine spins a shaft. As speed increases, centrifugal force pushes the balls out and moves a control lever to release steam — reducing engine pressure and velocity.

So you can automatically regulate the speed of a steam engine — a crucial #innovation in the industrial revolution.

In public services — and businesses under pressure — and communities like systems | cybernetics | complexity, there’s a familiar pattern:

• people see problems with the way things are done. Everyone knows it’s imperfect. They enjoy the inspiration and insight that there is a better way
• they put forward ideas for change, which are rebuffed. They become trenchant, and jaded.
• they find a space — a pilot, a new business unit, a case study, a self-help group (AKA Community of Practice). There are fellow travellers! Success stories! ENERGY
• the merry conspirators pour their energy into this counter-culture.

They look — more with pity than anger — on those doing things the old, bad way.

They build castles in the sky, or pilots that ABSOLUTELY PROVE their way is better.

Sometimes, this is enough. All the revolutionaries are now safe in their sandpit.

But sometimes, they campaign. Foment revolution. Become noticeable, a threat.

Two options:

1) expel them, pointing to their multiple transgressions of the rules

2) even better: the poisoned chalice. You give them what they want.

If it succeeds, everyone’s happy but you keep it walled safely off from the organisation.

If it fails — in any way — you crack down. It’s clear who’s to blame.

And the reformers leave anyway — they’ve moved beyond the organisation’s old ways — off to form a new organisation to spread the word, or for those for whom the breakthrough was the thing, to become life coaches or counsellors. They leave incomplete — they never worked through all the details to make it work — but sure of their righteousness.

‘Balls out’ — pressure release — things carry on as they were.

When I asked, Lynne Wardle set me this challenge — of #systemsthinking:

“(Critique of social problems) willingly emerges from its critical element to become a mere means at the disposal of an existing order, then despite itself it tends to convert the positive it elected to defend into something negative and destructive.” Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment.

(The story goes on… Wallace used governors as a metaphor for evolution in his 1858 paper which led Darwin to publish On the Origin of Species. Bateson picked up the analogy in Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity, and as cybernetics and control theory and dynamic systems interweave, the shadow of this core metaphor weaves in and out too).

Do you recognise (yourself in) this picture? What could change?