Seminar 1: Control
The first practical question is "How will this empower me? How will this help me get more control over the world around me?" This question leads automatically to the more fundamental question, "How do I control myself, my emotions and my behaviour?" The old answers do not work, they only make things worse. This question leads us into a serious exploration of systems theory.
This seminar will discuss the idea of Control, and look at some of its implications.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Control Systems Are Not All And Everything
What Use Is It Having A Model Of How Control Systems Work?
There Are Three Levels Of Control System: Unconscious, Sub-Conscious And Conscious
We are in the middle of a major shift in human thought. It is the most significant intellectual development since the Middle Ages. At the moment the old modernist paradigm still holds sway. It is coherent, organized and controls the school systems, the Universities and the world's elites. It goes under various names, but it prefers to call itself "Science." It sees the world as a collection of particles moving in space and time. It sees understanding as dividing everything up into smaller and smaller pieces. It believes that mathematics is sufficient to describe the world, and that anything that cannot be reduced to a mathematical formula is not real. It is materialist and actively denies the reality of spirit, wholeness, purpose and choice.
The Sea Change is a shift in our view of the world. In all sorts of unlikely places the old scientific materialism is being challenged. It is being found inadequate to describe reality. The radical distortions of our experience that it demands are no longer tolerable. The systematic destruction of the planet that it gives rise to is threatening our very existence. The new paradigm is a new way of looking at reality. It looks at the world not as a collection of isolated individuals, but as a variety of systems. We are all part of a larger whole. The ecosystem and the society are not something outside of us, but something of which we are a part, something to which we belong. The emphasis is not on the unique qualities of individuals, but on the unique quality of relationships. The viability of systems is determined not by force, but by communication. It is a view that emphasizes empowerment and choice. The old world view used to sneer at the "Organic Metaphor." What we have come to realize is that it is not a metaphor. It is reality. We are organic! We are alive! We are part of all living things. The things that we do are expressions of our life as organisms.
The new vision of freedom, belonging, responsibility, and aliveness is still struggling to establish itself. But the forces of the old Scientific World View are so devastating to our life and our planet, that they can no longer be tolerated.
How do you raise kids? How do you be a good parent? This is a basic human question. It was certainly the question that Joan and I asked. But there is no immediate answer to it. The responses tend to fall into two categories either 'the way my parents did,' or 'certainly not the way my parents did.' There ought to be a better answer than that, because what we were doing didn't seem to be working. To try to find a better answer, we started teaching parenting courses. You teach what you want to learn. We then found that parents had a basic question. "How do I control my kids?" But beneath that there was an even more profound question. "How do I control my own emotions, the anger, the fear, the depression?"
These questions lead to even simpler questions: "How do you get anything done? How do you make anything happen?" This is the basic practical question. This is the fundamental technological question. Science seeks to find out the nature of things and then technology applies them to work. Technology is the application of knowledge to work.
We live in the great age of science. Surely science would have something to say about this. But the old science lived within a very narrow world. It has certain beliefs that it holds to be self evident. These beliefs are always assumed and never questioned. It is worth taking some time to look at them.
What is the world like in the old Scientific view? It is made up of atoms. Everything in the world can be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces until you come down to the smallest thing you can break something down to. This is called an "atom." Atoms exist in time and space. Everything else is made up of atoms. The problem was that they smashed the atom and broke it down into pieces. These pieces they called sub-atomic particles. The theory was the same only the smallest element was now called a "particle." Particles make up atoms. Atoms make up molecules. Molecules make up all other things. The particle is the "individual," i.e. that thing which cannot be divided.
Things change because these particles, atoms and molecules are in motion. They move around. Change is the movement of atoms in time and space. So if you want things to change you have to move the atoms around. Atoms move around because of forces. Change happens because of certain forces are acting on the atoms. If you want something to change you simply have to apply force to it.
In order to apply force to something you have to understand how force works. The nature of force or "energy" as it later came to be called was governed by certain immutable and unchanging laws. The term law was a metaphor taken from human society. In society we have laws that govern how people behave. Now human laws are always being broken, but Scientific laws could never be broken. Thus there were certain laws that applied to motion. An object in motion tends to remain in motion. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Heat will not pass from a cooler to a hotter.
It was assumed that the best scientific laws were those that could be expressed as a mathematical formula. F=ma. E=mc2. P1V1=P2V2. If you understood these basic laws, and did the right mathematical calculations then you could make things happen.
So the scientist of the old view worked diligently at quantifying everything, i.e. turning it into something that could be counted, and then did experiments to see what formulas could be applied to these quantities.
What happens when you take these concepts and apply them to human relations? First you see everything as made up of individuals. "There is no society, there are only individuals." as Margaret Thatcher put it. These individuals can only be made to change by the application of force. This is, of course, not simple. You have to find out the laws that govern the use of force. These laws are the laws of stimulus and response. If you find the right stimulus, then you will get the right response. We don't know all these laws yet. But when we do, we will be able to force people to behave. This science is called behaviourism.
Three things are worth noting about this particular approach. First it assumes that the scientist is an outside observer, a kind of first mover, or god like figure that acts without being acted upon, that relates to reality as a kind of intellectual experiment. It has no place for the kinds of questions that parents were asking. How do I control my fear, anger and despair?
The second profoundly important thing is the assumption that other people are objects that can be manipulated. They are incapable of choice or judgement, they are completely determined by outside forces. The first thing you do notice about children, if you are a parent, is that they do make choices, they do make judgements. As one parent put it with profound exasperation, "That child has a mind of her own." Scientists were taught that to believe that something happens for a purpose was to commit the "intentional fallacy." To believe that there was choice was to be unscientific. How could you have immutable laws of nature if there was choice?
The third thing to note is that there is no communication. Everything is made up of atoms, and atoms only respond to force. There is no place for communication. The thing about parenting is that you can communicate with children, and communicating with them is not only possible, but can be a joy.
Throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries legions of scientists attempted diligently to force reality into the Procrustean bed of the Atomic Theory. In Greek myth, the bed of Procrustes was too short for people so Procrustes would chop of their feet so they would fit in the bed. When scientists were confronted with a reality that did not fit the Atomic theory, they did the traditional thing. They twisted and distorted things to fit them in, and those parts of reality that resisted the most vigorous attempts at distortion were simply ignored.
But there were other scientists that began to look at things in a different way. They gathered for a conference sponsored by the Josiah Macy Foundation in 1948, and they called their new way of looking at the world Cybernetics.
In an April 21, 1966 lecture, Gregory Bateson commented,
"I think that cybernetics is the biggest bite out of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge that mankind has taken in the last 2000 years."
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
, (1972) p. 484.The term "cybernetics" was coined in 1948 by the mathematician Norbert Wiener.
"We have decided to call the whole field of control and communication theory, whether in the machine or in the animal, by the name Cybernetics, which we form from the Greek "cybernete;" or steersman. In choosing this term, we wish to recognize that the first significant paper on feed-back mechanisms is an article on governors, which was published by Clerk Maxwell in 1868."
Cybernetics
, (1948) p.19The scientists that participated in the Josiah Macy, Jr. Conference on Cybernetics in 1948 knew that they were on to something big, and they knew why it was big. It was the first attempt in more than seven hundred years to try and change the basic assumptions of the scientific world view. They were bringing into the discussion three vital things that were omitted by the old scientific world view: information, communication and control. The major paper that Norbert Wiener published along with Arthuro Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow was entitled "Behaviour, Purpose and Teleology," (Philosophy of Science,1943. X. pp. 18-24.) It simply and succinctly overturned one of the traditional assumptions, the intentional fallacy.
Scientists in the materialist tradition had always argued that no event could have a purpose because that would imply that it was caused by something in the future. The three scholars pointed out that it was not the future event that was the cause, but the present goal or purpose. Feedback mechanisms assume a goal or purpose. Weiner had worked with feedback mechanisms in designing radar-guided anti-aircraft guns and Rosenblueth had worked with feedback mechanisms in human physiology. Their argument, in short, is that if we define teleological as "purpose controlled by feedback," then we can avoid the difficulties posed by "final causes," achieve a greater precision of usage, and preserve the concept of purposeful behaviour.
The Cyberneticists themselves had a hard time seeing how revolutionary their new understanding was. Wiener declared "Information is information, not matter or energy. No materialism which does not admit this can survive at the present day." (p.155). Unfortunately, showing that there is something that is not matter or energy does not revise materialism, it destroys it. Wiener wanted to remain a materialist even while he was in the process of refuting it. It is an extraordinarily common situation in Science. Similarly the title of Warren McCulloch's (1965) book was Embodiments of Mind, and the title of Bateson's (1979) major work was Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. They were eager to deny just how revolutionary their discoveries were.
In the popular mind a similar kind of distortion took place. The term Cyber became associated with Science Fiction monsters, or with computers. Instead of being seen as the revolution it was, it was absorbed into the old clockwork stereo-type. The idea of Cyber in the public mind had this element of truth to it: it was the invention by the cyberneticists of the digital, programmable computer that steadily and systematically began to change the way we look at information and control. It made the idea of information technology part of every day language, and made "program" an easily understood metaphor.
When Watson and Crick discovered the molecular structure of DNA they were concerned with finding out what molecules made up this acid and how they were connected. It was classic atomic science. Now the Genome project sees the DNA molecule as a form of code, a set of instructions for creating a living creature. They are concerned with sequencing the Genetic code. This way of looking at DNA would not have been possible without the pervasive influence of the computer. They view DNA not as a chemical, but as information.
The terms that are central to the new ecological paradigm are information, communication and control.
But it was not the computer that excited the Cyberneticists, it was the idea of control, and control systems.
What is control? What is a control system? What is purposeful behaviour?
A control system is a system that uses information to make choices about behaviour.
There is information. This is the most radical break with the old world view. The easiest way you can tell the difference between the old world view and the new is that the Scientists in the old world view talked about forces, reactions, laws, quantification and formulas and used the word "only" extensively. Scientists in the new world view talk about information, communication and control. The old Scientists talk about a "chemical reaction" in the brain. The new Scientists talk about sequencing the genetic "code."
Information is information. It is not matter/energy. Information is not matter. It is immaterial. Bateson used to define information as "the difference that makes a difference." Information does not exist in the x or the -x, but in the difference between them. Information is not energy. The commonest misunderstanding people have is to think that information is energy. To understand the difference consider the transistor which takes a signal (information) and amplifies its (increases its energy). This could not happen if information and energy were the same. Looking at atoms or molecules is looking at matter/energy. Looking at a wave is looking at information.
Information has some other very curious characteristics.
Information is choice. In introduces choice into our model of the world unlike the old world view that sees everything as either determined, or random. The Science of Form and information is Logic, and logic is based on the fundamental distinction: X or -X.
Information is contextual. We can only define something as X in contrast to something that is not x. The colour red only exist as information because there are other colours that are not red. This is radically different from the old world view where there is only one context space/time.
Information is hierarchical. To distinguish between red and not red is to create a boundary, a category. Once you have created one category, you can create other categories, even categories within categories. The logician uses Venn diagrams a series of circles each circle representing a different category. In the traditional atomic view there is only one unified category that contains all atoms: space/time. There are no hierarchies, no categories within categories.
Information is historical. The sentence "The dog chased the cat." is quite different from the sentence "The cat chased the dog." The difference in meaning depends on the order of the words. This is quite different from the formulas of the old world view where F=ma is the same as am=F.
(We will talk more about information in week three.)
The most vital thing about information, however, is that information can be transmitted. In other words communication is possible. This is the point of absolute distinction. In the old world view information is suspect, and communication is heresy. Talking to people is unthinkable. Talking to the animals is pure fantasy. Talking to the trees is superstitious priestcraft.
(We will talk more about communication next week.)
These two revolutionary ideas that there is information and that it can be communicated, form the basis for third revolutionary idea: the idea of control.
What is a control system? This is not as simple as it would at first appear. There is no accepted standard description. Each writer presents his own definitions and analysis. It is necessary therefore to look at a number of different descriptions and see if we can derive the basic elements of a control system, to formulate a General Theory of Control.
Norbert Weiner was the first to realize that control was a matter of information
In Norbert Wiener's (1948) book Cybernetics, we find the following diagram of a cybernetic system.
Norbert Wiener was a mathematician who worked on radar guidance systems for anti-aircraft guns.
In his work with guidance systems what he realized was that the guidance system was gathering information, and that information was then used to control the guns. Radar information about the location of the planes is fed into the system. This is information input. The Compensator then calculates the appropriate angle of the guns. The effector then fires the guns. The radar then feeds back the path of the bullets to the start of the system, so that the guns can adjust for error.
The model is very simple.
1. Decide what you want to do. I.e. hit airplanes with bullets.
2. Do something. I.e. shoot at the airplanes.
3. Examine the results. I.e. how close did the bullets come to the airplane.
4. Change your behaviour. I.e. Adjust your aim
5. Examine the results. I.e. keep adjusting until you hit the plane
The two keys to a control system are that you have to have a goal or purpose, and that you have to keep comparing your results to your goal, and changing your behaviour accordingly. The basic idea that excited people was the idea of feedback, using your results to change your actions. But the most revolutionary part of the model was that the system had a goal or purpose. Scientist for years had denounced the "intentional" fallacy. Here Wiener was building machines that were acting purposefully.
Electrical engineers still use a method of diagraming similar to Weiner's.
B. P. Lathi (1974) in his book Signals, Systems, and Controls presents this schematic.
In Lathi's diagram the feedback is not as clearly labeled, but it is still obvious. The labeling of the boxes is more obvious. Instead of calling it a "Compensator," Lathi calls it a "Controller." He also makes it clear that the input and feedback are combined by the Controller to generate the "Control input." The Control input is the information to The Plant that determines The Plant's output.
Changing the nature of the processors changes the whole system.
The Wiener/Lathi diagrams highlight the processors. The processors need to be highlighted because the process is determined by them. They are the limits of the system, and a change to the processors is a change to the operating characteristics of the system. This is an important point. It means that you can change the whole system by changing a part. Thus we can begin to talk about the system as a whole.
Diagraming transforms is diagraming processes.
It is useful if we just use one symbol for diagraming a process. We can diagram a process as follows:
PROCESS
FEEDBACK
Input Variable - Process Variable - Output Variable
This symbol allows us to indicate both variables and the processor, and thus separate out the four parts of the transformation process. But whether we uses boxes, arrows or wavy lines the same three part process is being symbolized.
If we look closely at the diagrams presented by Wiener and Lathi we see that in a cybernetic system there are basically three processors and three variables. The processors are 1.) the controller, 2.) the effector (or the plant), and 3.) the feedback take-off. The feedback take-off is not symbolized by a box, but by a small circle.
Von Bertalannffy was the first to try diagraming the control system as part of a stimulus response model.
Ludwig Von Bertalannffy (1968) diagrams a cybernetic system in a similar way.
It is similar to the diagrams of Wiener and Lathi, but there is a significant difference. The processors are the same with one slight change. The controller and the effector are still there but the feedback take-off is called a "receptor," and the terms for the variables have been changed to stimulus, message, message, and response. He makes a distinction between information (messages) and action (stimulus, response). .
Jay Forrester saw control systems as inventory control.
Now for something completely different. One of the problems that cybernetics has faced from the very beginning is the difficulty of expressing the cybernetic relationships in terms that would show the information transforms.
A diagram that indicates the information element more clearly is the diagram developed by Jay Forrester (1968) in Principles of Systems.
Forrester is remarkable for continuing the M.I.T. interest in systems and seeking to apply cybernetic theory to social phenomena.
In Forrester's diagram the two different levels of operation are clearly delineated. On the first level you have the materials flow, the world of particle movement, of material and efficient causes. This level is indicated by the solid lines. On the second level you have the world of information, of mind, of formal and final causes. This level is indicated by the dotted lines. (Not quite as solid as material flows.)
It is quite different from the diagrams we have been looking at. But we can recognize some of the familiar elements. The small circle on the edge of the box is the feedback take-off. The dotted line leading away from the take-off is the information variable. His diagram obscures the difference between the controller and the effector by combining them into one. But he does make clear what it is that they are doing.
His symbol for the controller/effector is a gate or valve. The effector takes material or energy from a "source." and directs it in specific ways towards a state, symbolized by the box. The symbol for the source is a blob with squiggly lines. This indicates that the source is the boundary of the system. It is the point at which materials enter the system. He uses the same symbol for a "sink," the point at which material or energy leaves the system. It is what Von Bertalanffy would call an "open" system. He thus stresses the importance of a collateral energy system. The other aspect that he adds is the time adjustment. The activity of the effector is a "rate," an activity over time.
Although he does not separate out the controller from this process, he does make clear what it is that the controller does. The controller takes the information about the state of the system and compares it to a goal. The goal is a specific value that is the desired value of the state. The dotted line connecting the goal to the Rate indicates that the "goal" is a form of information.
Although not entirely clear from the diagram the Inventory box also serves as a processor. It takes the product of the rate and combines it with the present situation. This is a fourth processor that is an essential element of a cybernetic system.
Forrester developed computer models of systems.
Forrester was the first to try to see the whole cybernetic process as a series of information transforms. He wanted to develop a computer model of a cybernetic system. A computer program is by definition a series of information transforms. He accomplished this with the world model in Limits to Growth.
The advantage of this method of modeling a cybernetic system is the ease with which it can be translated into computer programs.
A simple control system has four basic processes.
THE JOHANNSON MODEL
At this point we can identify the four basic processes of a control system:
1. SENSING: external changes are translated by a feedback take-off or receptor, or MODEL into internal information, or sense
2. EVALUATING: the feedback information or sense is compared to a VALUE or desired goal, and produces an evaluation.
3. DECIDING: the evaluation is transformed by an effector or plant or rate or OPTIONS into external material or energy or specific actions,
4. ACTING: the specific actions of the system are transformed by the SITUATION or environment into specific results or changes,
DIAGRAM OF A CONTROL SYSTEM
Simplified Control Diagram
The value of a general model of control
systems is that it can be used as a general model for discussing a great variety of control systems: corporations, people, eco-systems, nations, as well as governors, thermostats, cruise control. It then allows us to make the control operations of these systems explicit, and to identify the limits of the system.Thus if we apply this to an individual in any given situation, we can say that the action in response to any changes in the situation would be limited by that person's model of the world, their values, and the resources they had available. Are people predictable? If you know what their core values are, they are very predictable. If you know how they view the world and what they think their options are then you can either accurately predict their behaviour, or else you have made an error in defining their model of the world, their values, or their perceived options.
If we look at a corporation's response to a given situation we would look for the same limits. How do they collect and interpret information? Profit and Loss Statement. What is their core value? Ten percent growth in earnings per share. What resources do they have available to them? Increase prices, reduce expenses. To the extent that a group has a group decision making process, we can talk about it as a control system.
Our understanding of eco-systems has made a great leap forward, as we begin to look at the way that organic systems process information. DNA was first thought of as a long molecule. It is now seen as a large, but decipherable code book.
CONTROL SYSTEMS ARE NOT ALL AND EVERYTHING
Physics and chemistry are about all and everything. Everything is made up of atoms. Everything is made up of molecules. Everything follows the basic laws of physics and chemistry. Control Systems are not all and everything. Control systems are occasional things. Some things are control systems. Most aren't. Where you find a steady state, or values fluctuating around a specific value, then you are probably in the presence of a control system. Matter/energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Information is being created and destroyed all the time. Storing information is one of the key problems that control systems face.
WHAT USE IS IT HAVING A MODEL OF HOW CONTROL SYSTEMS WORK?
A model of control systems, allows us to make the unconscious conscious. Once a systems is conscious then we can make conscious decisions about it. Scientific laws are unconscious. When we make them conscious we can design technology that will take advantage of these laws. Natural control systems are unconscious, but once we become conscious of them we can work with them. Being unconscious of a control system is like living in a house with a thermostat, but not knowing there is a thermostat. The temperature seems to fluctuate within a small range, but you don't know why. You can bring in blocks of ice, but it doesn't seem to do anything. You can start smashing the walls, and you may or may not affect it. Once you discover the thermostat, you can change the mean temperature just by adjusting the thermostat.
THERE ARE THREE LEVELS OF CONTROL SYSTEM: UNCONSCIOUS, SUB-CONSCIOUS AND CONSCIOUS
We cannot control the unconscious. These are decisions that are have to a large extent been made. We often talk about the genetic code, or the "hard wired" parts, as ways of talking about the formal decisions that have already been made. The thermostat makes decisions about when to turn on the furnace. We may be able to adjust the temperature, but the method of measuring the temperature, and the options available are hard wired, built into the physical structure of the thermostat.
Most natural systems are also unconscious. People have a variety of eye colours, but that decision has already been made. The genetic code already contains a decision on that. What scares a lot of people about genetic research is the idea that it could lead to that decision becoming a conscious decision. People could specify the color of their children's eyes. That seems like too much responsibility for most people. You never know all the consequences. These kind of control systems also take a lot of study, research and experiment to see just how they work. They aren't immediately obvious.
Most of human behaviour is sub-conscious. It is usually automatic. The decisions have already been made, they have become habits and we do them automatically. Driving a car is the conventional example. When you are learning to drive a car, you think about what you are doing, but once you have learned you don't think about it any more. It becomes automatic. It is better that it be automatic. If you were always conscious of driving, you would be a very bad driver. Most skills are most effectively organized at the sub-conscious level.
Then there is the level that we normally think of as the level of decision, the conscious level. By the conscious level we mean the self-conscious level. You are conscious of your senses, your emotions, your values, your options, and your behaviour.
Part of developing more effective conscious decisions is understanding our limits. Our models of reality limit what we perceive, our values limit what we consider possible, our perceived options limit our responses. Developing better decision making usually involves, expanding our options, developing more sophisticated models of reality, and being clear about our value priorities. Usually developing new options is the simplest. Learning new models is next and changing our values is the last and hardest.
We would like to be able to predict the consequences of all of our actions. But the essence of a control system is that it is a way of dealing with the unpredictable, the constantly changing. But some decisions are massive decisions and have immense consequences. The decision that all of our institutions should have profit making as their highest value has unbelievably serious consequences.
Mechanical systems: a thermostat
A thermostat makes decisions. They may be purely automatic, mechanical decisions, but they are decisions. The automatic response of a control systems is radically different from the automatic responses of physics and chemistry. A control system can break down. The laws of physics never break down. They are always true. Matter/energy cannot be created or destroyed. Force is always equal to mass times acceleration. In contrast, information is being created and destroyed all the time. The bi-metal strip can crack, the setting of the tipping point can be changed, the furnace switch can fail, the furnace can fail. Control systems are subject to failure in a way that physical and chemical systems aren't.
Humans err. Machines fail, breakdown, crash.
Many people have a hard time understanding the idea of a thermostat. They think of it like the gas pedal on a car. If you feel cold, you turn up the thermostat.
What you can see from the outside, the part that traditional science looks at, does not tell you much about the inside of the control mechanism.
One of the uses of the control model is to show us what we don't know, and to give us some idea of the kind of things that we are looking for. We know a lot about the relationship between insulin and blood sugar. We know that rising blood sugar levels give rise to insulin production. We are very good at the part of the control system that is amenable to the old scientific model: stimulus - rising blood sugar, response - insulin production. We are not as effective in discovering how the body senses this change, how it evaluates it, and what various options the body has.
One of the issues that we have before us today is the surging population growth. It is putting more stress on the eco-system. When we put it inside the control model, some things become clearer. Where does the decision get made? It is made at the household level. China made some major attempts to limit population, but has, to a large extent, given up on this project. The current thinking on the matter is that the key to limiting population growth is educating women. Once women understand the options then population growth will be limited. The control model points out that it also depends on how population growth is viewed. It makes a difference whether you are looking at statistics or you own household. And it also depends on cultural values. Children may be valued or not depending on the society, and the individual.
Modern psychology has been dominated by Behaviourism. The basic premise of Behaviourism was that it was unscientific to study the mind or psyche. The Behaviorists were the first modern scientists to deny the existence of their subject matter. The only legitimate subject of psychological study was behaviour, in other words: stimulus and response. The problem with this approach to psychology is that in a control system any given stimulus can generate a variety of responses. The carrot and the stick work, so long as you understand that it is an imaginary carrot and an imaginary stick, and some people hate carrots and some people love sticks, and some people think that killing the stick holder is a serious option, and all of these are subject to change at any time.
The major advent in modern psychology has been the growing respectability of cognitive psychology. Jean Piaget demonstrated to most people's satisfaction that there is an intellectual development in children. Young children cannot understand things that older children can. Gestalt psychology and the psychology of perception have made the study of what happens in the mind marginally respectable. The core belief in psychology still remains that you can find out about people by experimenting on rats in laboratories.
Corporations are extremely complex, but at the core they are fairly simple control systems. They can be understood by looking at their reporting systems, their core values, their perceived options, and the environment in which they operate. Breakdowns usually occur in one of these areas. Many corporations say that they have a profound concern for the environment, that it is an important value. But do they have a reporting system that tells them what their ecological performance is? Do they have resources set aside to respond to ecological issues? How high is it on their value priorities?
The classic story of value priorities is the story of the Toronto Star. They were going to publish a serious story on environmental pollution, but it was pushed aside by a much more important story: one of the members of the Spice Girls was leaving the group.