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I am a Behaviour Change and Sustainable Systems consultant, developing the idea of Compassionate Systems to address the frustration and failure of behaviour change. It is not just you–if you are not achieving the change you need, I may be able to help. Email me.

My work groups into three main streams. Sustainability is the biggest picture, though many of the posts look at tiny details of a way of living that may be able-to-be-sustained.

Working on Sustainability confronts Behaviour Change. The posts are heavily influenced by my work on garbage and recycling, but will also have rants on unhelpful ways of thinking about behaviour.

The Small and Delicious Life is the result. When all else fails, grow beans.

These three streams each have their own category, so follow the topic that interests you. Or, if you don't want to miss even a bit of goodness, all three streams are found in The Whole Ball of Wax, spiced with some uncategorized and random digressions.

when you seek honey

   

puzzle piecePiece of the Puzzle:
Joseph Tainter on Complexity

by on April 18, 2013

I developed my understanding of sustainability essentially by hyperlinking books. I would read a book, then go through the citations and find another interesting book. This led me through design and ecology and economics and psychology and business and so many other things. At some point a pattern started emerging, and new bits and pieces began to fit into the pattern—each Piece of the Puzzle is something that has really stuck in my mind.
Not in chronological, or any other, order—just as the whim strikes me.

Joseph Tainter came to me relatively recently, maybe just in the last four or five years, but I find his work on complexity to be shockingly important.

He is an academic, so he does not lack for detail, but here is my favourite part in a nutshell:

We tend to solve problems by adding a layer of complexity to the situation. That new layer creates its own problems, which we solve with another layer of complexity. Each layer suffers from diminishing returns, and—here is the kicker—adding complexity eventually generates negative returns.

So, adding complexity eventually sucks value out of life, your project, our planet—everything. Here is a chart of what that looks like—Level of Complexity on the bottom axis, and Benefits of Complexity up the side axis:

Tainter1

Tainter’s big book is the Collapse of Complex Societies, which I found to be a very enjoyable read with lots of great examples. Here is a 15 minute interview and a 90 minute YouTube. Ugo Bardi looked at the thermodynamics.

“A collapse is a rapid simplification of society. It is a rapid loss of complexity.” So Tainter asked, “One of the questions of history is why is this seemingly inexorable trend in human society towards innovation and complexity occasionally punctuated by collapse?”

Having worked as an industrial designer, I have had a front row seat to the manufacturing supply chain—a very visceral view of how complex and brittle the systems we have built our world out of truly are. When you look around the world, you can see the negative returns all around us:

  • build a highway to fix congestion—which doesn’t fix the congestion, but does drain the pothole budget, so all the other roads get worse.
  • require playgrounds to have soft surfaces to reduce injuries—which increases the costs and reduces the number of playgrounds.
  • agriculture is a big one—chemical agriculture is used to boost production, but eventually destroys the soil so nothing can grow there.

Tainter also takes on the most sacred of cows, Innovation. He points out that innovation is also subject to diminishing returns—the first flush toilet was seriously awesome, but figuring out how to put custom finishes on toilets is much less remarkable.

In fact, if we are to maintain the illusion that indefinite growth is possible, we need ever-faster innovation cycles. Product design cycles used to be a couple of years, then one year, then six months. Now in some industries the design cycle may be just a few weeks. But we must go faster if we are to stay in the same place—soon we will be conceiving of, designing, prototyping, manufacturing and releasing products, all in the blink of an eye.

Except, of course, that is clearly impossible. So Tainter, with his modest puzzle piece, manages to skewer bureaucracy, complexity, collapse, innovation and growth. Phew! Heavy hitter!

So what next? “Now that we can do anything, we must do less.” When we are solving problems, we must try to find simpler solutions, rather than complex ones. How can we strip away bureaucracy, technology and data? How can we build a system simple enough to be understood and operated by its users?

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puzzle piecePiece of the Puzzle:
Britain loses the potter’s wheel.

by on April 10, 2013

I developed my understanding of sustainability essentially by hyperlinking books. I would read a book, then go through the citations and find another interesting book. This led me through design and ecology and economics and psychology and business and so many other things. At some point a pattern started emerging, and new bits and pieces began to fit into the pattern—each Piece of the Puzzle is something that has really stuck in my mind.
Not in chronological, or any other, order—just as the whim strikes me.

 

“It may be initially hard to believe but post-Roman Britain in fact sank to a level of economic complexity well below that of the pre-Roman Iron Age.”

Writing about this in the Archdruid Report, John Michael Greer said:

Good pottery was so cheap and widely available that even rural farm families could afford elegant tableware, sturdy cooking pots, and watertight roof tiles.

Rome’s fall changed all this. When archeologists uncovered the grave of a sixth-century Saxon king at Sutton Hoo in eastern Britain, for example, the pottery found among the grave goods told an astonishing tale of technical collapse. Had it been made in fourth century Britain, the Sutton Hoo pottery would have been unusually crude for a peasant farmhouse; two centuries later, it sat on the table of a king. What’s more, much of it had to be imported, because so simple a tool as a potter’s wheel dropped entirely out of use in post-Roman Britain, as part of a cascading collapse that took Britain down to levels of economic and social complexity not seen there since the subsistence crises of the middle Bronze Age more than a thousand years before.

These shards of British pottery are an X-ray of Infinite Progress—the government, or scientists, or corporations or whatever will not always ‘figure it out’. Once you accept this notion, you can see decline all around us, despite the latest offerings of apps, home renovation shows and refractions of celebrity.

There is a habit of not-thinking that says if something is wonderful we will surely figure out how to keep it going—to which I like to point out the potter’s wheel has one moving part. This is not complex technology and the benefits of using it are very great—and yet despite the simplicity and reward, Britain lost the wheel for 300 years.

This not-thinking is obvious in discussions of the internet. Because at least 0.01% of internet traffic is ‘causing’ revolutions in countries without democracy, it therefore follows the internet must last forever. I like to say the Internet is Just a Fad, as I commented in another column by The Archdruid, The End of the Information Age. The internet is the sharp peak of a very large pyramid of mining, refining, manufacturing, research, marketing, and—in case we forget—stoking the hell-fires of coal-powered electrical generation.

Britannic calculatorPerhaps hand crank adding machines will be found in the burial mounds of future kings.

 

 

 

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