Here I attempt to share my efforts to understand and make use of a particular kind of complexity--a vertical, emergent, nesting, recursive, hierarchical complexity. The talk is 18 minutes long. A discussion follows.
VIMEO 688233734 Emergent Meta, a talk by Marc Pierson, March 2022.
Video with active transcript done with this Descript 
# Here is the transcript of the 18 minute talk. **INTRODUCTORY REMARKS** Pille tricked me into getting my thoughts organized about meta and meta systems. So it's been about a week. I'm thinking about this to make a 15 minute presentation. I finally had to circle around to say, why do I even care about this? Why would I take anyone's time talking about this? I came to the metaphor I often come to the drunk under the lamppost. And to be clear, I'm the drunk. Okay. And I I'm always at risk of trying to solve problems in the space that I'm comfortable with, that I know. Instead of where the problem actually exists. My thesis, my belief, is that the understanding of meta that I have developed in the last three or four years helps me either make the lamplight bigger or I can use it as a pocket torch go out and look where the problems are because so many of the problems that I personally care about can't be approached without this understanding that I'm going to try to talk about here. That's the introduction.
**SLIDE ONE:** META-SYSTEMS, NESTING-RECURSIVE-EMERGING The idea is that a meta systems, the way I look at them, have attributes of nesting, recursion, and emergence. I think that they are indeed a critical dimension for understanding and managing complexity.
**SLIDE TWO:** Your stories of going meta? So if we have time at the end, I'd love to have you guys think and talk about your own stories of going meta. Once you understand this meta I'd love to hear how you how you think about that.
**SLIDE THREE:** Meadows' System Leverage Points My journey toward meta really started when I read the Donella Meadows, leverage Points paper, a long long, time ago. I knew it was important and I'd read it every year or so. I couldn't keep 12 things in mind. But I knew it was important. And after about 10-15 years, it occurred to me that there's more to it than she says in the paper. It occurred to me that there are actually four kinds of properties of systems. It isn't just that Some are demonstrably more powerful than others, but they're actually of completely different types. Those for me got the labels out at the side. The one she was so upset about in the global economic arena, was that everyone seemed to be messing around with the parameters, the numbers, the weakest thing, by her telling and. She wanted them to try to find more powerful levers than just changing the numbers in a budget or the number of aircraft, they have, whatever. And so she in, anger really extemporaneously listed nine things in order. And she went back and thought about it. And a bit later wrote this paper with twelve things in it. The things she was complaining about are basically linear, rather intuitive, parts of the systems. And then the one above that, that she was professional in she got her PhD from the Jay Forrester, were nonlinear dynamic systems. I think that's about as far as a lot of her friends go,. They make a good living doing system dynamics modeling. Eventually you realize ,as she did that there things beyond modeling complex systems, or dynamic systems, that are basically the structure-- political structure, who gets to make decisions. And so I call that Who .So the first one is What are you going to do? And then How are you going to do and understanding how is often non-linear. Then Who-- the politics of it, which is always complex and has always social. Then she says, and above that, there's the often the unquestioned goal of the system and unquestioned mindset, and even the ability to change mindsets or change your paradigm. I call that the Why question or the existential paradigmatic. What I realized as I was playing with this is that these are nested and it took me a long time to understand in what way are they nested? And that they're nested contextually. In other words, the context of the Why creates the context for the other three below it. Each one has a context that, in essence, limits, determines, and influences the level below. For the record, because I may forget to say it later, in the last two years I've increased this from four to six. I think the next level above Why is Where. Which is sort of David Snowden's attempt with using the word Cynefin the place you are from actually probably has more to do with your paradigm than you think. Again, in a problem solving sense, if you can't solve it with goals and paradigms, you might think about moving, you might go to a different place. The sixth one is time. I think time is a more encompassing context than even place. If Putin knocks off a global war, some of the things we aspire to may need to be done a century or two from now. So time is a bigger problem solving context even than place. So, this is how I got into this, idea of meta. I didn't use the word meta.
**SLIDE FOUR:** A new can of worms: Then I got into an entirely new can of worms and that can was opened by Stafford beer and. Ross Ashby. Here's a link down at the bottom. I'll send you this PowerPoint presentation. You can go open it where I talk about some of this and a little more detail. Stanford in particular started using weird words like meta concepts and meta languages and meta systems. And that was quite different than. than the way I was thinking about meta before. And Ross Ashby prior to the Stafford added this idea of requisite variety which ends up leading you and led Stafford to the idea of nested recursions for problem-solving. So I just want to say it was reading for two years, reading Stafford beer and Ross Ashby, that pushed me down this path.
**SLIDE FIVE:** Why I think this is Important: So why do I think this is important? I'm going to read this to you. Unmanaged complexity is an existential challenge to humanity and, to the planet. Managing complex social systems is different from managing simple and complicated systems. Healthy social systems, in my opinion, are not top down. They are emergent-- until they're not, of course, until they become bureaucratic and then they stall and die. That's the S-curve or the growth curve, which is probably just as well known as the death curve. As problem solvers we are no better than our models and our tools. I believe that we're frequently using inadequate models and tools. Dave Snowden is set about creating tools for social complexity. When you talked to Dave, that's really what his mission is. He thinks there are plenty tools for complicated and simple problems and not enough usable tools, social complexity. I agree with him. I think even more tools than Dave's are needed. I think metacognition and it's children will lead to those tools.
**SLIDE SIX:** Two Big Questions, in order: For me the two big questions. How can we get along with each other across scales, and how can we get along with the rest of the planet across scales?
**SLIDE SEVEN:** A Conception of Metasystems: This is a particular conception of meta systems. It's mine. I don't mean it in that way. It's only mine, but I haven't read anyone who actually talks about it the way I do. Allenna Leonard's definition in her glossary gets a chunk of it, but it doesn't get all of it. She's on this call, so maybe we'll get her opinion at the end. The parent, when in the role of the parent, doesn't push children around like kids fighting in the bedroom . They have to do things that they couldn't have done as a child. They basically have to do things that children couldn't understand. Of course they can play games with children and under stress, they can become a child again, but that's really not what parenting is. It's like deciding what schools kids are going to go to, where are you going to live, other things that kids couldn't do. A meta a system are systems that emerged from the interactions with systems, which are fundamentally different than the systems from whose interactions they emerged. So it's this emergence thing that we hear over and over again when talking about systems. The system is greater than the sum of the parts and it's due to the interactions. So the interactions between system and meta system, this is when things started getting interesting. These are unlike interactions within any of the systems. They require a new and different understandings. To understand the level above is different than what you had to understand at the level below; therefore, they require meta concepts and Beer's meta language. They also functional at longer wavelengths. Their processes cover longer times. They have larger context. The interactions between meta systems and their subsystems necessarily have an indirectness about them. You can puzzle over that for a long time, but the more you do, the more you realize why they have to be indirect.
**SLIDE EIGHT:** What words can reveal this insight? What words can reveal this insight? I think there are five words that have to be used in particular ways to paint the picture that I have in my head for you. One is nesting and I think sets, sets of sets, is a better concept than Russian dolls because each Russian doll is a single doll, but it's that idea, but it sets instead of dolls. Recursion, the feedback cycling with a prior self, the ouroborus, is the idea that over time things come back and create a different snake, if you will. Emerging, which is the key idea, it's the results, the things that result from interactions over time. And then meta typically simply means after or above, which obviously doesn't contain any of these other four ideas . And then system which is interacting parts, producing effects, unlike any of the parts. Those are the five ideas that have to be held in your mind or melded together to appreciate what I'm finding so useful.
**SLIDE NINE:** Rough examples So some rough examples are: Quarks, subatomic physics, atomic physics, chemistry, biochemistry, biology, physiology, sociology ecology. Each of those has to be present for the next one to emerge from it over billions of years. And then the individual, the household, the neighborhood, the municipality. We get confused once these are all in place and think that the world or the, state exists and the citizen is just a creation of the state. That's crazy. Biologically, ecologically, emergently they came up from the individual and they continue to, and when they don't, they die or cause a lot of pain and suffering. And then the sort of day-to-day worker, team, department, division, company, conglomerate, economy. Those are things that can be better understood, at least for me, with the idea I'm trying to share.
**SLIDE TEN:** Forms of blindness I think there are a couple of major forms of blindness that I fall into. One is silo thinking my head in the sand. And then the other one, which I wasn't really aware of and now am, which is layer thinking. I am lost or trapped in a layer. I just am blind to the layer above or the layer below. And of course you can get a lot done blind to the ones above, but some problems can't be solved unless you're aware of the adjacent layers.
**SLIDE ELEVEN:** Strategy Knowing this, for me, has implied kind of a strategy, which is recognizing when going meta may pay off as opposed to working at the level I'm familiar with. The way to know that meta may pay off is that you realize you're dealing with things that have longer durations than you know how to deal with. The wavelength is dramatically longer. And the other one is realizing that pushing harder ain't going to help. You need some more indirect intervention. And then the other one is that the, situation seems paradoxical, unresolvable. There are a lot of wonderful theories about this, Gödel's theorem, etc. These are hints that, you might want to play with this idea of meta. I kind of wonder if king Herod's offer to divide the baby wasn't the provocation to these two mothers to go meta. They wanted to fight over the baby. He's saying yeah, I can do that for you. In that model we'll just cut it in two. And so they're going to have to think about love or relationships with people they don't really... They're going to have to go meta. That's just a guess.
**SLIDE TWELVE:** Interactions across levels: So what about the interaction across levels? Meta levels. I try to be a practical problem solver. These are suggestions. When you're going to cross, traverse meta systemic, dynamic levels you're going to need interpreters and maybe you become the interpreter if you give it enough thought. But the people on both levels are going to need interpretation because of the level above often loses track with a level below. The parent sometimes wants to act like a kid. So you're going to need an interpreter. You're going to need to deal with issues of wavelength, different durations of action and results. You're gonna have to draw that out and make it explicit. And you're probably gonna have strange dimensions, odd dimensions, beyond the usual ones of usefulness and productivity. And I got to tell you these last two bullet points came to me preparing the talk. They're not well thought out, but they're the kinds of things you find yourself dealing with when you try to learn to deal with meta, crossing meta. And so I think there's a lot of other dimensions that I find myself thinking about: awareness, learning, growth, flexibility, resilience, aesthetics. Things that don't enter your day to day life when you're working in a level you're really familiar. And then I think, like you have all these odd dimensions, you're going to have a bunch of odd assessments. In other words, the way we measure and keep track of what's going on across levels is not going to be particularly like the way we measure what's going on within a level.
**SLIDE THIRTEEN** Hierarchy Theory Hierarchy theory comes as close as anything to what, the insight that I've gained from the people I've read and run into. Here's some links that you can go. I'm not going to give a talk on hierarchy theory, but it did, it does come fairly close.
**SLIDE FOURTEEN:** A Summary of the Principles of Hierarchy Theory And then here's some, websites and this guy, I really liked reading his papers. So he helps me understand this a little bit.
**SLIDE FIFTEEN:** Ad hoc systems: This is the last slide And this is where I am stuck, personally. This is where I'm trying to use meta to understand. Elinor Ostrom gave us an incredibly important idea of polycentric governance. That is, that instead of aggregating everything up to the highest possible level of government, you might use resources from different levels, different meta systems. She doesn't talk about it this way. That's the metasystemic problems are what you run into when you try to think about and implement polycentric governance. Christopher Alexander and his wonderful paper, A City Is Not a Tree, he means a strict hierarchy. He says it's a semi lattice. Which is, I think precisely the same concept that Ostrom was talking about. But he's obviously talking about it in the built environment. I think that the biggest problem that this ad hoc systems thing, the upper two bullets, is talking about is how do we match problems and solutions? And once we have solutions and a new problem comes along, we try to force the solution. The problem into a solution. We, we put the wrong size foot in an old shoe, right? We just keep doing that. You should have listened to the Ostrom's Nobel Laureate speech, because this is the big point and why she talks about polycentric governance. So what we really require is a way to look at the problem and find the right solution for every single problem. Sure, some of them will be repeating and that's good. Use something we already have. But you should always, at least think about is this problem really fit in that old wine bottle. Problem solving is not walking into an office building with a bunch of mail slots and just putting your problem in the right slots. That doesn't work anymore, if it ever did. So the problem we have is understanding meta systems. Learning how to cross the boundaries. That's it. I think that's the, that's basically the end of the talk.