Monocultured Man

I heard someone describe our current condition as “monocultured” last year, and the phrase has stuck with me. The systems we live in and create have become overspecialized over time. This makes sense in some aspects—the world is growing in information and complexity at a startling rate; it’s hard to be a generalist anymore. But while it’s impossible to absorb all of the changes, this increasing specialization has a price. To quote Gregor Macdonald, who writes on energy, “But as we have seen, highly optimized systems carry a latent fragility that is nearly certain to collapse, eventually.” Thus, there seems to be a trade-off between specialization and stability. If you relentlessly optimize each part with no awareness of the whole, the sum can never be greater than the parts. In fact, not only do you achieve the unintended effect of the component parts never coalescing into a greater whole, but you actually create a dangerous scenario where a small part can take down the whole. This leads to a key question: While our systems may be efficient, are they effective? It is surprising just how often this issue arises, even across a wide variety of disciplines.

You see it in economics in a variety of forms. When a country’s economy is based solely on commodities, it becomes particularly unstable, an economic phenomenon referred to as the Dutch disease (named after a crisis in the Netherlands in the 1960s wherein the discovery of vast natural gas deposits in the North Sea caused the value of the Dutch currency to rise but made exports of non-oil-related products far less competitive worldwide, leading to overall economic decline). In effect, a lack of industrial diversity leaves an economy vulnerable to collapse. Likewise, when a society’s distribution of income becomes too polarized, that society becomes unstable. Economists use an index called the Gini coefficient to measure income distribution. When the Gini for a country is 0, all wealth is divided evenly, and when it’s 100, one person has all the wealth. For the US, the Gini hit a high of 45 in 1929 and then surpassed that in 2006 when it reached 47. So the two highest Gini coefficients were followed by economic collapse. And the financial crisis was spurred by a distinct lack of diversity—banks, homeowners, and insurance companies all owned the same assets; portfolios weren’t diversified; and everyone was overleveraged.

It’s not just economics though; the Gini concept has been applied to biodiversity as well. Below a certain threshold of biodiversity, land ecosystems collapse. E.O. Wilson discusses this fragility in much of his work, explaining how the strength of our ecosystems is proportional to the strength of biodiversity. You see this in the positive ripple effects on vegetation and other animals when an endangered species is reintroduced to an area, such as when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone. It applies to our crops as well; we’re seeing larger and larger crop failures around the world due to disease and insects. We’ve engineered an overly specialized system based largely on a single crop, optimized with chemicals, that provides the majority of calories to the world. So now our diet is monocultured as well, which is evident in the abundance of calories we get from corn. Nutritional research shows that diversity in diet reduces cancer risk, meaning, inversely, that fragility of diet, or overspecialization, contributes to cancer.

We see the problem in the organizations we build. When companies cannibalize a market, it can leave them vulnerable. When organizations become large, specialized structures, they tend to lose their innovation. In politics, the lack of a stable middle class contributes to the fall of governments, while a strong, diverse middle class leads to stronger democracies. When our political discourse is severely polarized, there is little debate, and our government becomes unstable. Writing on future predictions in The Economist World in 2011, Nassim Taleb had this to say:

Connectivity and operational leverage are making cultural and economic events cascade faster and deeper. Anything fragile today will be broken by then.

The great top-down nation states will only be cosmetically alive, weakened by deficits, politicians misalignment of interests and the magnification of errors by centralized systems. The pre-modernist robust model of city-states and statelings will prevail, with obsessive fiscal prudence.

The mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, most famous for his work on fractals and their relevance to many disciplines, had a term for this type of diversity—roughness. When the systems we build become specialized and ultraefficient—to continue Mandelbrot’s theme, when they become smooth—they tend to collapse. To counter this, we need to think in systems more generally and to introduce a little more roughness into them. Nature does this automatically—random mutations coupled with selection have built beautiful structures, from the simplicity of the fruit fly to the biocomplexity of man.

There’s a movement for more “design thinking” and a call for more designers. Tim Brown calls these people “T-shaped people” for their breadth of knowledge (the horizontal top of the T) and their depth of skill and ability to “drill deep” (the long, vertical stem of the T). Seth Godin speaks of the need to be an artist, and Malcolm Gladwell talks of mavens, who educate themselves in diverse areas of interest and share that information with others. Aristotle talked about the superiority of the “mastery sciences”—the highest disciplines that put all the pieces together—and Isiah Berlin famously illustrated the difference between the foxes and hedgehogs of the world, the first being all-seeing generalists while the latter are tunnel-visioned specialists.

It seems then that some of the brightest minds are calling for a step back from specialization. What we need is more complexity, more polymaths, jacks of all trades, and systems thinkers. In financial terms, a little more beta and a little less alpha would do the world good. To quote Paola Antonelli, writing in The Economist World in 2011:

Theoretical designers will be exquisite generalists—a bit like French philosophers, but ready to roll up their sleeves. Applied designers will visualize complex infrastructures and systems so that scientists, policy makers, and the general public can manage and influence them; they will bring economy and common sense to the production of consumer goods.

So let’s step back and embrace the complexity. Let’s think about platforms, not just products, and systems, not just individual solutions. We have the tools, technology, and infrastructure to connect the dots like never before. Though it is true that it’s easier to put the pieces together than ever before, it is simultaneously potentially overwhelming—however, the imperative is clear. Let’s make the choice to solve the big problems, to introduce diversity, to be, in effect, polycultured.

Over the course of this year, I hope to write more routinely. In the coming weeks I’ll outline a handful of trends that I see and post related topics on Twitter (#mono for this theme).

Tagged as: #mono, biodiversity, design, ecosystems, gini, Innovation, monocultured, systems