Can Businesses and Organizations be "Autistic?"

I've long believed (and I'm sure it's not original) now that neuroscience offers many lessons for businesses. Further, I believe that autism research in particular offers us a valuable metaphor to examine the functioning of an organization.

Using autism as a metaphor for understanding things rather than individuals is not minimizing the significance of autism, whether you believe it to be a blessing or a curse, or a mix of both. We routinely use things that we don't understand completely to understand other things we don't completely understand, and respectfully done, we shed light on both.

Salience Landscape Theory is one of the more important developments in autism research; in brief it attempts to explain why certain sensory input elicits a seemingly inappropriate or out-of-scale emotional response.

"In an attempt to determine how these secondary symptoms might arise, our lab group (in collaboration with William Hirstein of Elmhurst College and Portia Iversen of Cure Autism Now, a nonprofitt foundation based in Los Angeles) has developed what we call the salience landscape theory.

"When a person looks at the world, he or she is confronted with an overwhelming amount of sensory information— sights, sounds, smells, and so on. ... Using input from the individual’s stored knowledge, the amygdala determines how the person should respond emotionally ... If the person is confronting a burglar, for example, his heart rate will rise and his body will sweat to dissipate the heat from muscular exertion. ... Over time, the amygdala creates a salience landscape, a map that details the emotional significance of everything in the individual’s environment.

"Our group decided to explore the possibility that children with autism have a distorted salience landscape, perhaps because of altered connections ... that regulate the resulting behavior. As a result of these abnormal connections, any trivial event or object could set off an extreme emotional response—-an autonomic storm—-in the child’s mind. ... The distorted perceptions of emotional significance might also explain why many children with autism become intensely preoccupied with trifles such as train schedules while expressing no interest at all in things that most children find fascinating."

from "Broken Mirrors - A Theory of Autism"

Can an organization be "autistic?" In the sense that it may have poor or non-existent communication between disciplines, or that it perceives the world not as it is but in a distorted or idiosyncratic way, or that it obsesses on details that are not meaningful to its clients/customers, then yes.

These "distortions" or idiosyncrasies are very often also the source of an organization's strengths: they allow a unique view or focus which has been successfully translated into income or growth.

What I find myself doing in effect with many organizations is identifying an appropriate salience landscape, and helping cultivate, connect, or re-connect the functional areas that will create an appropriate response to changing market input.

For me, it emphasizes the artificial difference between perceptions and details and structures: which details are significant; which perceptions are correct; which structures are necessary or appropriately formed? I think it is an idea worth developing, and I hope to post more along these lines soon.

Discriminating Importance: Meaningful Organization of Search Results and the Democratization of Knowledge Management

Recent years have seen a proliferation of tools to organize and visualize various data sets (search results, lists, databases) into meaningful topic areas or hierarchies. For example, there's Grokker, an online tool which can reorder a simple linear list of search engine results into topic groups of probably-related pages. TouchGraph is a graphic browser for already-linked information such as Wikis or immediately-interpret-able links such as search results from the Google API. FreeMind, an open-source mind-mapping project, provides an extremely focused and simple interface for tree-oriented organization of data, and the formatting and linking of that data in meaningful ways. It also allows convenient import and export of data to standard formats.While metadata and XML are truly maturing in both specification and implementation, more "democratic" methods of classification and relation (folksonomy) are developing, most notably, the "tags" used at sites such as del.icio.us and flickr, where the highly individual, idiosyncratic and radically open system of tagging images or links with one's own system of meaning have congealed into surprisingly meaningful (to an audience of >1), and surprisingly self-organizing topic groups.

The Internet public, if such a beast can be defined, seems to be growing ever more comfortable with community software development (FireFox is a notable example) and community knowledge management (democratic or unmediated presentation of knowledge, of which the Wikipedia, and Wiki software in general, are perhaps the most dramatic examples). We are becoming participants more and more.

The surprise to me is the persistence of some unnecessary and non-productive dichotomies:

• meritocracy vs. academic credentials

-or-

• meritocracy vs. participatory or consensus-driven democracy

...and...

• hierarchical & peer-reviewed vs. dynamically re-centering data-sets & rhizome-like, recursive structures,

-or-

• metadata and trees vs. tags and dynamic maps

It seems obvious that these systems benefit from each other: the formalized standard learns what is truly needed & used from observing the larger community, while the larger community can save time and "stand on the shoulders of giants" by exploiting as needed proven and vetted expert and organizational knowledge.

It seems obvious that the formal and hierarchical serves well as the entry point and high-level structure, while the more democratic and dynamic forms (if they can be called that!) of knowledge management such as wikis, tags, and dynamic information mapping/clustering serve the searcher better at the chaotic edge of the formal classification, where the proliferation of singular items is so vast as to render static classification absurd.

It seems obvious that both machines and humans can contribute, both a priori and on-the-fly, to the meaningful organization of information. One simple example would be a system allowing for both the user and his machine agent (or chosen information portal) to deposit tags with appropriate "decay" rates allowing for the meaningful analysis and evaluation, by human or machine, of the relevance of a particular search path or segment. A kind of "search phosphorescence" if you will, from which intelligence could further manipulate and modify searches as they are still happening, forecasting relevance.

Federated searches exist, but we are still a long, long way from a kind of Unified Field Theory of search and research results--like sands through the hourglass, we sift, we sift, we sift...

The Genius of the Autistic Mind, or, There's No Such Thing as "Details"

In virtually all educational experiences, there's a pervasive idea that there is the surface that we see and apprehend, and then something else "behind" - hidden structure, meaning, emotion - that must be teased or coaxed out into the light. This approach does damage to both the cultivation of our perceptions and indeed the notion of intuition as well.

How do we parse the (strictly speaking) undifferentiated field of sense-data which bombards our perception at every single waking & sleeping moment? Were this barrage of information unfiltered and unlimited by any kind of internal mechanism I believe it could drive us to a kind of madness. Instead, through education, culture, genetic predisposition, and circumstance we gate and constrain this incoming data into manageable blocks and networks of meaning and reference.

Recent insights into the autistic mind, for example through the writings of the extraordinary Tito Mukhopadhya (who by most measures would otherwise be classified as a "low-functioning" person with autism) provide us with a useful means to understand the false dichotomy of detail/structure. An example: a person with autism such as Tito, may clap his hands, then hear a dog bark outside--he may then persist in clapping his hands for a long, long time in order to elicit the dogs bark again, highlighting two assumptions made by "neurotypical" people, namely, that we assume the dog's bark is unrelated to the hand clapping, and that repetition will not likely bring it about.

A linear, time-dominated view of cause/effect and structure/detail, while useful in navigating through life and social interactions, is only one of the many assumptions and conditions we accept which limit our ability to perceive, and attenuate our ability to analyze and imagine. While no-one would wish autism upon themselves or others, some of the characteristics of autism have often been compared to those of genius. At the border of both of these worlds are some individuals with Asperger's Syndrome. While many would be classified as of "average" intelligence, many exhibit brilliance in areas which particularly interest them, even to a savant-like degree. It may be too facile to say that the person with Asperger's "benefits" from a touch of autism through an ability to absorb a tremendous amount of observable phenomena (noumena?) which permits what appear to be sudden or discontinuous leaps of logic or insight, or startlingly rapid problem solving - it may be too facile, but it is illuminating.

David Prall, a Harvard professor who influenced a whole generation of artists and thinkers (Robert Motherwell, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Delmore Schwarz among others), said "Ideal aesthetic knowledge, absolutely ready response, would bury the whole system of discriminations in our nerves and habits." Not to say that a system of discrimination is bad, but we're operating half-blind if we don't know when our "systems of discriminations" come to bear.

So any experience is known through it's surface--and it isn't reductive or limiting to say that there isn't anything beyond the surface. Rather, to understand that the patterns, signs, structures meaning which we attribute to an experience of something are born of the very detail, the very surface--are indeed inherent in it. Delight in experience of the world or in art frequently arises out of the gaps (similar in aesthetic experiences to the rhetorical enthymeme of Aristotle) resulting from our attempts to attribute patterns & meaning, providing the individual a direct opportunity to insert themselves via their own understanding, to become part of the experience or art, providing opportunity for us all to delight in the fact that we can look at the same thing and react differently.

An exhortation without voice, a lighted window, an empty chair

April is the cruelest month.

"No peace without justice, no justice without forgiveness: this is what in this Message I wish to say to believers and non-believers alike, to all men and women of good will who are concerned for the good of the human family and for its future.

No peace without justice, no justice without forgiveness: this is what I wish to say to those responsible for the future of the human community, entreating them to be guided in their weighty and difficult decisions by the light of man's true good, always with a view to the common good.

No peace without justice, no justice without forgiveness: I shall not tire of repeating this warning to those who, for one reason or another, nourish feelings of hatred, a desire for revenge or the will to destroy."

- Pope John Paul II, World Day of Peace, Assisi, Italy, 2002

Quoted often by those who wished to end war, he was ignored by the same when it came to his stance on abortion and euthanasia. Quoted often by those who wished to end abortion, too many of the same refused to listen to his passionate and reasoned attack on the death penalty and military solutions to political problems. Cited as an example by champions of human rights, his words on the violence of poverty were too often a footnote lost in the complacency of consumerism.

History will confirm his position as one of the most consistent defenders of the integrity of life and the human person among our world leaders. May the rest hear him clearly, and soon.

No time for serendipity?

Recently, while speaking to one of my brothers, I heard him say the following: "I don't have time for real serendipity. I prefer guided serendipity." This, in reference to the few blogs and newsfeeds that he follows by way of strolling through the less-noticed nooks and crannies of the Internet (less-noticed until they get blogged, that is).

While I was still sputtering from the lexical implications, he pointed me to a directory that I was embarrassed not to know (I prefer to think I'd forgotten it: I suppose that means mental frailty in myself is preferable to ignorance? George Washington: "There is no restraining men's tongues or pens when charged with a little vanity." Blogger, heal thyself.)

The Librarian's Index to the Internet has, among many other valuable nooks and crannies of its own, two good starting points for the "Hidden Internet."

Unresolved, however, remains the question of whether these things should remain hidden. Things and ideas which would, in a pre-Internet world, (properly?) remain the hidden manias and obsessions of those seeking more (too much?) from an otherwise mundane life, now coalesce into communities so specialized they can only exist thanks to the obliteration of time and geographic constraints offered by the "connected" life. Darwin never imagined such an evolution. In the bosom of one's like-minded fellows, it's easy to imagine that such obsessions are normal, desirable, and gosh darn it, everyone should know about it! I'll end with one case-in-point to speak for itself:

Airlinemeals.net

You know who you are. Send me a photo to publish here, the world deserves to understand this art form.

Cheese Gives me Hope in Humanity

Well, at least artisan-made, raw-milk cheese does. In the midst of violence- and disaster-inspired despair, in the face of anaesthetic, industrial food, I wonder that some humans still take care to husband cows, sheep, and goats, and, using both skill and knowledge received from generations before, turn it into an ephemeral expression of the land and the cultures (both macro and micro) that live there. In a well-made cheese, like well-made wine, you can discern not only the things that define it's type (milk, pasturage, region, season), but the things that define the true ephemerals: the differences from one year to the next, from one artisan cheese maker to another. I even find beauty in the advanced entropy of a really mature cheese - multiple life forms coexisting peacefully (and deliciously) on a complex, colorful surface...

Is it silly to wax poetic about cheese? Perhaps, but I prefer a world where humans still view each work of their hands as important, however ephemeral, however quotidian.

Where to start learning about cheese? Some areas are lucky enough to have artisan cheese makers, or markets that carry a good variety. One of the best books I've found is French Cheeses: The Visual Guide to More Than 350 Cheeses from Every Region of France by Joel Robuchon. You could probably find it in, or request it from, your library. Exhaustive illustrations and very accurate, useful descriptions, symbols and classifications. Online I've found Fromages.com, who present a truly wonderful variety of cheese types and a lot of good educational material as well.

In the US, we're usually only presented with sterile (i.e., dead), sealed "cheese" packages (i.e., body bags) which we maintain sealed up and stored in the fridge (i.e., morgue). With most American cheese, this is probably a good and wise idea. Colder temperatures can mask undesireable flavors. And given that all industrial cheese is pasteurized, the sterile lack of a plurality of healthy microbes invites an agressive germ such as listeria to establish a dominant and deadly monoculture.

Overcome your fears of that runny, moldy thing and begin a sublime culinary obsession!

Dilettant Idea Cluster #1

Complete the cluster for hours of library amusement:

[George Herriman's Krazy Kat] + [Rube Goldberg] + [Pogo] + [...]
=
[Tintin?], [Calvin & Hobbs?], ...

Japanese Stories by a Greek-American

Written by Lafcadio Hearn in the late 19th century, Kwaidan collects his re-told and "invented" Japanese ghost stories. I discovered them through a movie (from my local library naturally) directed by Masaki Kobayashi.

Through these multiple filters the film strikes one as a highly distilled and stylized stage play with the advantage of special effects (though more of a Cocteau sort - very low-tech but magical). The pacing is slower than that to which modern audiences are accustomed, but allows the natural strengh of the stories and images to unfold fully.

Think of it as accessible Noh drama. The extended opening credits should serve as an indicator if you'll enjoy what's to follow: names and titles superimposed over images of primary-colored ink dissolving in water - much more interesting than the Kubrik light shows in 2001. A nice visual attenuation of one's temporal senses while delivering extremely potent images and stories. Of the four stories presented, "Lady of the Snow" and "Hoichi the Earless" (pictured on the DVD cover) were the strongest. "The Black Hair" was less strong in both story and visual style.

Kwaidan will possibly redefine for you what a ghost story is: more Homer and Virgil than (Stephen) King.