Mindfulness

In 21st Century society, we experience situations that make us feel like either running away or fighting.  Stress at work, with family, driving or with people we don’t even know can trigger a reaction and yet we do not have the option of fighting or fleeing. When the Fight or Flight syndrome is not able to function we each have a threshold before the stress begins to affect our our mind works.  We create the Dictator.

There is a Dictator in my mind and we are at war with each other.  The Dictator commands the Fight or Flight syndrome that controls my body chemistry that makes my head buzz, causes nausea, makes my leg muscles twitch and creates negative thoughts. The Dictator uses force and direct action to make my life miserable when I am anxious prior to an event or activity. The Dictator knows that once my system gets started in the wrong direction the feedback loops in my body and my mind will keep making things worse for me until I give up, close my eyes and lay down in a quiet place. Afterwards, I am exhausted and have to take a nap during the daytime and that interferes with my sleep at night.

The Dictator depends on me reacting to my own thoughts and feelings about the past and the future to increase his strength and maintain his control. The Dictator listens to all my conscious thoughts and feelings and my unconscious thoughts and feelings. So the Dictator has information about the secret life I live inside my mind that I do not have.

I will lose if I try a direct approach to stop the Dictator triggering his forces. I can not stop him by using positive affirmations, keeping busy all the time or staying home all the time. Medication works for a short period of time or I have to take them all the time and they have side effects. Medication only makes the Dictator go to sleep for awhile but he is still there.

I can not run away from myself, but I can hide in my house for the rest of my life.  I can not fight the Dictator directly but I can use medication to make him go to sleep, and me too. There are many strategies that people use to cope that do not get rid of the Dictator.

Mindfulness is a strategy that does work over time to defeat the Dictator or at least get him out of power so that he is not in direct control over my mind and body. Instead of a direct approach, mindfulness is non-action (not inactivity).  Instead of keeping busy with activities, mindfulness cultivates stillness. Mindfulness is a strategy that gets information over time from the conscious and unconscious mind that the Dictator could use to trigger an attack and instead practicing mindfulness opens me to experiencing those memories, thoughts, emotions and feelings in the moment to accept them and let go of them.

Non-action has a long and successful history. Non-action is engaging in activities to overthrow a Dictator like what Gene Sharp lists in his book “From Dictatorship to Democracy”. An example is a boycott. In my case, I want to boycott the Dictator forcefully hijacking my body and mind.  To do this, I have to train my body and my mind to not react. I have to cultivate non-action and stillness in my mind and my body.

My mind needs to be still and my body needs to not take action. My conscious and unconscious mind both need to not take action. My legs, arms and internal organs that control my body chemistry need to be still. 

Stillness is the renunciation of the stress-induced reaction of the mind and body to daily activities. Stillness is boycotting the Dictator that decides to release adrenaline and cortisol, to suppress the immune system and send excess energy to muscles.  Stillness is non-action, not inactivity. Each time my mind wanders, I am practicing mindfulness by bringing my mind back to the present moment and my breath.

The daily practice of mindfulness opens us up to experiencing our life in the present moment. The Dictator wants to remain in power and uses past and future thoughts to force the body to react. The practice of mindfulness cultivates stillness that grows over time until we are strong enough to use the power of non-action to defeat the Dictator.  When stressful events happen our response to the memory or anticipation is non-action.  The Dictator has no power over us when he is unable to get the mind and body to react.

Heroes

“Only when teamwork and civic trust is reborn in the dire heat of a Fourth Turning can a society again become capable of saving itself.  In that moment, the self becomes fused to the community and everybody becomes a hero.  This is the basic plotline of The Avengers.  It also a good shorthand description of the choices facing America today.”

http://blog.lifecourse.com/2012/05/avengers-assemble/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

By Neil Howe

Your Ground Hog Day

Just like in the movie Ground Hog Day, you wake up every morning in the same exact place, always repeating the same day. No matter what you do to try to change things, you can not get what you want.

In Ground Hog Day, he starts out just trying to fulfill his own desires. Then he begins to move toward fulfilling the needs of others.  Finally, he becomes more and more life-centered and lets go of his desires.

Most of our life is spent living strategies meant to cover up or avoid our own pain of not getting what we want. Our pain is the deep sense of basic alienation that takes the form of feelings we have about ourself.

You like influencing others and being in charge - that’s your personality. When your strategy is to be dominant, persuasive, and motivational at work, you have a structured environment where everyone’s behavior is guided by the organization’s ethical system. When your strategy remains the same even though you are not at work, then your desires take over and you feel the pain of unfulfilled desires.

What is the basic human problem? We live a substitute life. We believe our thoughts are our life. We substitute our believed thoughts for reality. 

Unfortunately, we act on our believed thoughts. We make mistakes because our believed thoughts are not how things actually work.

The practice life is not about expressing or suppressing our thoughts and feelings. The practice life is about experiencing our thoughts and feelings.  By sitting quietly for ten minutes, focusing on our natural breathing, we experience our thoughts and feelings.  We welcome them.  We let them come into our mind, release them and then the next one comes.

In the practice life, we do not express negative emotions and do not suppress emotions.  In the practice life, we experience our emotions.  For example, we sit quietly for ten minutes, focusing on our natural breathing and we welcome our anger.  We feel our anger coming, we experience rising anger, the peak of anger then the anger falls away and we release the anger.  We experienced anger and did no harm to anyone.

The goal is not enlightenment or perfection or never feeling angry or afraid.  The goal is to not live a substitute life of believed thoughts and instead experience our thoughts and emotions and realize that they are not us. Your thoughts and feelings, and your reactions to others are a substitute life. Practice experiencing your thoughts and feelings without expressing or suppressing them.

Every day, practice with thoughts and emotions while sitting quietly and focusing on the natural breath.

System Dynamics Question Leaders

I am confused about looking at historical events versus designing social systems for future consequences.  I am probably not going to get this exactly correct with the appropriate words but here is a possible response to what Chad Green wrote about. I would rather have system scientists influence public policy over the next 10 years in a way that gets America started on a different path so that future system scientists can use counterfactual questions to show how outcomes might have been worse if America had not taken action prior to 2020.

snip:
"What we need now is system thinkers who are more than willing and able
to ask the tough counterfactual "what if" questions that no one is
asking publicly.

I will call them Question Leaders."

From Wikipedia (edited):
"Counterfactual questions seek to explore history and historical incidents by means of extrapolating a timeline such that certain key historical events did not happen or had an outcome that was different from what did in fact occur. The purpose of this exercise is to ascertain the relative importance of the event, incident or person the counterfactual hypothesis is negating."

Here is what I'm thinking:

For example, a system scientist in the future will be able to explore historical records on global warming to show how America's outcome could have been different or records on fossil fuel resources to show how America fiddled while the resource collapse could have been predicted. Then the system scientist would ascertain the relative importance of key events not happening, such as what is described in the book "Merchants of Doubt" or how a different outcome could have occurred.

The counterfactual hypothesis for global warming might be that America did endorse the Kyoto Treaty and began reducing CO2 emissions, building renewable energy and growing the economy based on non-fossil fuel energy fast enough to avoid catastrophic consequences.

However, Dr. Forrester's message seems to focus on future system scientists designing social systems to mitigate future unintended consequences.  Chad seems to suggest present system scientists might use historical case studies as a learning tool to change the quality of people's mental models now. Maybe combining each into an overall strategy might help system scientists now and in the future.

Public Schools Blamed for Poverty

Poverty correlates directly with low test scores, poor academic performance and classroom management problems. Schools with high percentages of children receiving free or reduce lunch have low test scores and poor academic performance.

Teachers are being singled out as the cause of low test scores and poor academic performance. Reduced school budgets are being blamed as the cause of poor academic performance. Unions are labeled as a cause of teachers not being incentivized to improve test scores and academic performance.

Schools provide transportation, breakfast and lunch, health care services, special education services and counseling. The staff includes school nurses, librarians, school counselors, school psychologists, occupational therapists, speech pathologist, and special education services.

The services schools provide are overwhelmed by poverty.  Public schools can not perform their intended service to society when society delivers children living in poverty to the school.

The guardians of society are failing in their ethical obligations and allowing an unjust commercial system to leave millions of Americans in poverty.

Stop blaming schools for poverty. 

Poverty and Education in America

The growth of poverty in America impacts all of us, however public schools are being blamed for the consequences of poverty. 

No matter how you define poverty, the number of people in America in poverty has increased over time. Children in poverty have inadequate nutrition and lack access to health care. Over time, children in poverty become adults with health problems.  The consequences of poverty increase the cost of health care for everyone.

The growth of poverty in America impacts all of us. The standards movement, the charter movement, NCLB and all the other anti-pubic school initiatives all claim to want to improve the outcomes for the lowest performing students by holding schools and teachers accountable.  In fact their interventions in the system push change in the wrong direction.  Inequity is increasing as a few students are moved to private, charter and for-profit schools and the majority, the remaining students, get fewer education resources and live in the same poverty conditions.

The public schools are being blamed for the consequences of poverty.  Poverty is the primary reason why students do not do well in public school.  Why isn't there a change to the economic system to decrease the number of children in poverty?  That would decrease inequity in education outcomes, improve nutrition and improve health care for children.

Why System Dynamics?

All systems, everywhere have levels and flows. These are the only two concepts needed to understand why systems work the way they do (Forrester, 1996).

We were taught in school to accumulate knowledge and skills in order to get a job. We define learning as the accumulation of knowledge. We test every child at every grade level to measure their accumulated knowledge. We teach people how to do things so they have a skill in order to get a job.

Public education teaches people what is important to know. Students learn skills so that they know how to do things.  Students are tested on what they know and the skills for how to use what they know. System Dynamics (SD) enables us to understand why systems work they way they do.

Public education involves a way of thinking, learning and communicating that focuses on the past up to the present. Science, math, reading and writing are all focused on knowledge (what) and skills (how) that have been codified into a curriculum. In public education students learn about the past up to the present.

Life is moving fast. We need a way to think, learn and communicate about the future.  The current public school system does not meet that need.

Sustainability education and environmental literacy are focused on students learning more and more about how to do more things.  By conforming to the way the current public education system focuses on what and how, we are asking students to accumulate more and more knowledge about the recent past.  We are asking students to accumulate more and more skills about how things were done in the recent past.

System dynamics is a tool to think, learn and communicate about the future. (Richmond 2010)  With SD, learning is about why systems work they way they do.  What is needed to model a system is accumulated just in time to use in a model.  The knowledge needed about how the parts of a system are related is accumulated just in time to use them in a model.  The understanding needed about why feedback loops in systems tell a story is accumulated just in time to use them in a model.

SD enables us to understand why systems work they way they do.  Politicians and decision makers need to know why systems work the way they do so that they can craft policies that are successful in the future. Policy makers need informed citizens who know why systems work they way they do.

Why do policymakers choose policies that fail? A policy response is rational for decision makers who fail to account for the feedback structure of a system. Only by considering the full feedback structure is the ineffectiveness of a policy revealed. By learning why feedback affects system behavior, small system dynamics models have a crucial role to play in policy making. (Ghaffarzadegan, 2012)

Policy makers fall prey to the “Pull my finger” joke.  They develop a policy that responds to correlations, trends and events believing that they understand the cause like when the finger pull and the sound are close together in space and time. The irony of public policy making is that, without understanding system feedback, what happened in the past will be made worse by a policy response.

Without SD, public education is teaching students to look to the past to make decisions about the future.  The public school system is walking backwards into the future. 

The public school system is the primary obstacle to students using SD.  The entrenched paradigms are the foundation for education institutions that teach what and how from K12 through university doctorate programs.  Educators and students are evaluated based on what they know and how to use what they know.  SD enables us to understand why systems work they way they do.

System dynamics is a tool to think, learn and communicate in a new way so that educators engage student’s mental models. When mental models rely on “Pull my finger” thinking a person is not going to understand feedback. To use SD requires a new way of thinking: Think about levels and flows connected in feedback loops within a closed boundary.

To use SD requires a new definition of learning: Learning is improving the quality of our mental models.(Richmond 2010) The current public school system does not attempt to improve the quality of student’s mental models. 

To use SD requires a new way of communicating: Communicate about why your model works using feedback loops.  This is where qualitative tools like causal loop diagrams and behavior-over-time graphs are used and useful.

Jay Forrester is the founder of System Dynamics. He has said for many years that with the right guidance “students must create their own models and learn from trial and error.” In this way dynamic modeling is learning by doing. “I believe that immersion in such active learning can change mental models.” (Forrester 2009)

Why System Dynamics? System Dynamics enables us to understand why systems work they way they do in order to prepare for the future.

Bibliography

1. Forrester, Jay W. "System Dynamics and K-12 Teachers." Creative Learning Exchange. 30 May 1996. Web. 11 Feb. 2012. <http://clexchange.org/ftp/documents/Roadmaps/RM1/D-4665-5.pdf>.
2. Ghaffarzadegan, Navid, John Lyneis, and George P. Richardson. "Why and How Small System Dynamics Models Can Help Policymakers: A Review of Two Public Policy Models." System Dynamics Society. Web. 10 Feb. 2012. <http://www.systemdynamics.org/conferences/2009/proceed/papers/P1388.pdf>.
3. Richmond, Barry. "Introduction: The Thinking in Systems Thinking- Eight Critical Skills." Ed. Joy Richmond. Tracing Connections: Voices of Systems Thinkers. Lebanon, NH: ISEE Systems, 2010. 3-21. Print.
4. Forrester, Jay W. "Learning through System Dynamics as Preparation for the 21st Century." Creative Learning Exchange. 2009. Web. 11 Feb. 2012. <http://clexchange.org/ftp/documents/whyk12sd/Y_2009-02LearningThroughSD.pdf>.