BACKGROUNDER

For new readers and subscribers, I've briefly summarized the Balance the Triangle project here. This will help contextualize why I post certain LinkedIn material that I do. Which means why you see the Monthly Wrap that YOU do. For existing followers, this will serve as a refresher - and perhaps be new for many of them as well.

So, what triangle?

From the biologist and thinker E.O. Wilson's well-known quote - "The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall." That triangle - or triad if you prefer.

Balance the Triangle?

Socially - that human behavior and its social institutions come into parity with its technology.

Individually - that individuals have the abilities to function within digital environments with at least the minimal level of parity they've achieved through hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary interaction with their physical environments. As human wiring cannot at present be easily changed, it has to be managed.

Background Ideation?

An overview article appears in Uncertainty: Making Sense of the World for Better, Bolder Outcomes, paperback, Cygnus Publishing, ISBN-13: 979-8988277521 · Jun 7, 2023.

Published by the Grey Swan Guild , it is part of an excellent playbook around the topic of uncertainty and how to deal with it. Well worth a read. I've added a version of that article below. It briefly reviews certain salient points about "Human 1.0."

Hunter-Gatherer Sensemaking in a Super-CAFFEINATED Digital World

(copyright 2023, Chuck Metz, Jr.)

Sensemaking. It’s what life does to survive. Bees. Birds. Gazelles. People. Seeking certainty in an uncertain world. Pragmatic decisions regarding food and shelter. Speculative conclusions around the “whys” of things. Predictions. Verdicts. Philosophical musings. People dislike uncertainty, and they’ve sought to manage their anxieties since humanity’s first tentative steps across savannah and forest.

The brain can be considered a sensemaking prediction machine. 1 It takes in cues from its environment, evaluates and stores them as memories, then makes predictions combining past experiences with current events. Successful evaluation and prediction lead to success…and survival.

Underlying the nuanced complexities of culture, personality, cognitive style, emotional makeup, and the multitude of other measurable human traits, lie key human certainties. Evolutionary behaviors common to diverse societies across the globe. Hundreds of thousands of years of survival have hardwired these basic human behaviors through sensemaking survival successes. Like the folkloric fish in their unperceived water, behaviors un-sensed, but not unfelt, that influence people today.

A tenet of evolutionary psychology states: “You can take the person out of the Stone Age, not the Stone Age out of the person.” 2 Business strategies today tacitly acknowledge this rubric, pervasively building managerial training and organizational development practices upon it. 3 Successful strategies in this escalating super-CAFFEINATED 4 digital era will expand upon that pragmatism in ways yet to be conceived.

Human History as Sensemaking Quest for Certainty

While humanity has existed as recognizably human for some 2.5 million years, those years have been neither static nor homogenous. Four distinct periods of change and challenge define them. Four differing economies determining how people meet basic needs. Four defining technologies supplying those needs. Four well-defined social and cultural eras molding human identities. Which also means four uncertain transitions challenging previously hard-won certainties. Each era introduced new uncertainties with distressing demands to adapt. And adaptation was hard—is hard. Risk is tough. Evolution is a ruthless winnower. Genes don’t feel compassion—they merely drive survival. Dawson’s insight reveals one element of a larger truth. “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” 5 We can think of these four periods as worlds 1.0 through 4.0 since that language has become so familiar in our digital era. World 1.0 hunter-gatherer economies and technologies lasted for hundreds of thousands of years, and its hardwired behaviors drive people—and sensemaking— still. The subsequent and shorter Agricultural World 2.0 spread humanity far and wide. Increasing their numbers and forming a broader collaborative base that bent natural and social landscapes into increasingly human-centric environments. An even briefer Industrial World 3.0 expanded human technological impact. And now, shaped by those earlier worlds, people are experiencing transition into a new Digital 4.0 era. Individuals. Communities. Nations. A digital world whose parameters are still being defined amidst global uncertainty.

Our 1.0 Long Infancy

Early humans were environmental and social sense makers. They read the world’s clues and adapted. Larger predators sought to make them meals. They developed spears to ensure those predators didn't. Wilderness plants promised food. They learned to distinguish between edible and poisonous. An exquisite and brutal dance played out as survival of their fittest enabled those who best made sense of their world to pass their genes across time and geography…to us. Simple survival was humanity’s first great lesson and test. Hunting game and foraging landscapes were its practical answers for at least 90% of human existence. 6

People learned a second great evolutionary lesson–survival of the collaborative. Families, clans, tribes. They lived in small groups of a few dozen for those innumerable millennia. With kin. With people they personally knew. And that close-knit cooperative social wiring became the foundation of humanity’s genetic flowering. Hardwired into human identity and passed down through millennia. Those cooperative strategies evolved a broad cultures-wide morality of their own. Distinct Stone Age certainties by which humanity evaluated the world. Certainties that people today carry into incredibly diverse social environments.

Agriculture, Herding and being Herded: 2.0 Noble and Serf

Humans made what would seem a natural transition to a sedentary farming and herding lifestyle only 10,000 years ago. Herding is merely a more controlled hunting. Farming a more certain gathering. They sought pastures rather than game and gathered from fields rather than forests. Followed the seasons. Tracked the sun and watched for rain. Seeking new certainty as agriculture complicated their ancient hunter-gatherer accommodation in a cultivated new world.

Simple tribes grew to villages. To towns. Nations. Civilizations. Family remained central. Groups flourished. Stratified. Bringing new kinds of leaders demanding new types of deference. Overseeing new manners of reciprocity, fairness, and property arrangements. An environment increasingly human-created as populations grew.

And as settled numbers flourished, with proximity came strangers. Uncertain strangers, nearby rather than in tribes safely away. Body language cues made sense of interactions. Social cues layered meaning onto the world. Identity markers, those human characteristics distinguishing one person from another, became more complex. Identifiers broadened from gender, appearance, and tribal custom to new socially defined constructs. Serf. Lord. Peasant. Nobility. New class clues to make sense of it all. New markers to spot members of new social tribes. Clothes, languages, belief systems—greater variety now identified members and marked outsiders.

With growing numbers, like many species, people grouped for certainty—herd behavior with its programmed tendency to conform individuals to group actions and decisions—even when those actions are not in the individual’s own best interests. People accustomed themselves to being herded, looking to leaders for guidance in the face of doubt.

Growing numbers and sedentary lifestyles brought problems familiar to us today. 9 But the 1.0 social accommodations remained in these new social cultures. Kin and group. Reciprocity. Leadership generosity. Deferential behavior to leaders. Fairness. Respect for property. All now ensconced in class social structures bringing stratified certainty to their expanding social worlds.

The Factory Grind: An Industrial 3.0 World

The 2.0 world lasted a mere 10,000 or so years. A blink in evolutionary terms. A fresh 3.0 order assumed ascendancy in the 1800s with an “industrial revolution.” Human labor drove industry in prior cultures. Machine labor became the defining force of 3.0. Economies and technologies followed suit. And with it went the hard-won certainties of the previous agricultural world.

Humans 1.0 hunted employment in factories and businesses. Gathered life’s basics from shops and merchants. For their kin. While living in yet new social groups. Following managerial and business tycoon leaders. Paying deference within classes, professions, geographies, and an expanding and bewildering array of social structures built around the machine.

They sought fairness amid new identities. Manager. Factory worker. They pursued reciprocity as businessmen. Financiers. Laborers. They struggled for property certainty as servants and housewives.

And the ancient collaborative morality held through social cue and body language glue, certitude within the change.

Analog World and its Digital Mirror: Super-CAFFEINATED 4.0 Whirled

And today a growing 4.0 world. A VUCA world. Volatile. Uncertain. Complex. Ambiguous. A Fourth Industrial Revolution world. A super-CAFFEINATED world. With challenging twin 4.0 worlds. Unlike previous transitions, the world is transitioning to a frantic dual analog and digital complexity after a mere three hundred years. 10 A physical world overlaid with a developing digital twin mirror. New economics driven by new technologies. New identities. And new anxieties as the certainties around 3.0 industry fade as swiftly as its rusting machinery. A new and different sensemaking required...yet again.

The same challenges remain. Human 1.0 behaviors persist and continue to drive individuals and societies. Kin must be supported. Groups expect loyalty and reciprocity. Leaders must be shown deference. Fairness and respect for property must be ensured. But this time it is complicated by the emergence of a 4.0 digital mirror in which 1.0 behaviors struggle in a simultaneous search for certainty. A world in which social cues morph as mist and body language no longer applies. Too often presenting a funhouse mirror reflecting distorted views no longer tied to human evolutionary wiring.

This juxtaposition of two realities is unnerving. Analog world sensemaking skills won at hard cost over millions of years still work. Body language. Social cues. And 1.0 collaborative morality behaviors still drive social accommodation. Hardly perfectly, any of it, as conflicts at all levels rage across groups today.

But the digital mirror brings radical and different sorts of challenges. If body language cues are missing and social collaboration behaviors suspect, what can be trusted? It might seem logical that digital technologies and platforms could facilitate sensemaking by providing access to vast amounts of information. Making it easier to connect with others and enable collaboration and knowledge-sharing. But the volume of online information makes it more challenging to sift through and interpret what is most relevant and reliable. How, then, is sensemaking to bring certainty?

This failure of body language, social cues, and collaborative behaviors and cooperative morality—coupled with information overload—has become a perfect storm of uncertainty.

Add 4.0 Failing Global Village Media Uncertainties

In 1964, Marshall McLuhan, the prescient Canadian philosopher and communications media theorist, released the book "Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man." In it he famously introduced the idea of “the global village,” which refers to the way in which advances in communication technology have brought people from different parts of the world closer together, creating a sense of global interconnectedness. 11 He also stated with equal aplomb, “All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical.” 12

People living in today’s dual physical and digital 4.0 global village have their senses “worked over” by media gone viral. And as compromised viral media messengers insert misinformation and “fake news” messages, people have become unwitting hosts transmitting an untrustworthy, lifeless, and dehumanized DNA. They’ve become wanderers in a failed technological village, starved for the body language and social cues by which they once made sense of the world. The biologist E. O. Wilson summarized this quandary as evolutionary. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.” 13

Some Final Thoughts—with Hope

Human 1.0 survival behaviors and collaborative morality drivers will continue their guidance of sensemaking efforts in people’s quest for certainty. As in previous eras, successfully recognizing and addressing these needs will play a significant role in resolving the anxieties and uncertainties of a crisis 4.0 world.

Given that, what might be inferred?

1. People will retain their early Paleolithic evolutionary survival hardwiring. Evolving forms of retail will remain fundamental to survival and provision efforts in the near term in both worlds. 14
2. People will also continue evolutionary collaborative social behaviors with their attendant cooperative morality.

• Cooperative moral injury will remain relevant and challenging in both worlds. 15
• People will continue to tribalize into smaller groups.

People will be part of a group. They will continue sensemaking informed by mental models fed by cognition and emotion. In the physical world, identity marker social cues and body language will continue their sensemaking roles. Collaborative values around kin, leadership, fairness, reciprocity, and property will impact group formation and participation.

Group behaviors will be challenged and different in the digital world. Digital versions of analog cues have yet to be effectively created. Body language doesn’t exist. Digital versions will be open to manipulation. Social identity markers similarly. The lack of face-to-face social interaction will continue to be challenging. This is currently true within social media interactions today and will become larger issues within VR and metaverse world creations. Trustworthy sensemaking cues have yet to be developed.

Collaborative values in digital worlds will function as in the analog world with challenges as noted above.

• People will expect reciprocity from members of their groups in both analog and digital worlds–individual and organization. Reciprocal behaviors around offering help and support, feedback, returning favors, providing resources, and other activities will continue challenging. Reciprocity in the digital world will continue to be nuanced. Current systems of “likes,” notifications and other prompts demand more time than is humanly healthy. Current systems are gamed for individual time and attention. Whether metaverse, AR, VR, or as yet undefined technology, human uncertainties around reciprocity will be a factor in managing human sensemaking and uncertainty.
• People will expect leaders to show digital versions of analog virtues. Bravery. Strength. Generosity. Digital cowardice and miserliness will have consequences. Lack of face-to-face interactions will continue to be challenging. Accountability and misinformation will continue as issues. Peer pressures for favor by followers will assume new forms, positive and negative, even as old analog behaviors continue digital versions.
• People will continue to show respect and deference for digital leaders. Disrespect and hubris will have digital consequences. The lack of nonverbal cues and facial expressions; anonymity; lack of privacy; and a host of other issues and needs will make it more difficult to show deference. Controlling hubris behaviors such as disregarding of rules, attention-seeking, excessive criticism, and many others will remain essential in creating individual and group certainties.
• People will expect fairness extended to digital group members. Unfairness and favoritism will remain wrong. In the analog world, understanding basic, “moral violation” expectations such as fairness will be fine tuned through new and existing profiling tools. 16

Certainties will develop from addressing issues such as equality, merit, inclusiveness, opportunity, and similar in the digital world.

• People will expect respect for digital property. Theft and trespass will be as wrong there as in the analog world.

Certainties will come from resolution of threats in areas such as cybersecurity, intellectual and digital property theft, data breaches, and others.

How governments, businesses and other social organizations address these fundamental human wirings will determine part of their success in building digital enterprises that work. Just as people created certainty in prior worlds, certainties will evolve from the current 4.0 transition, in part, when foundational human evolutionary behaviors and expectations are satisfied. How those will work and what ends they will promote have no constraints but our own.

REFERENCES

1 Hawkins, Jeff, and Sandra Blakeslee. On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines. Times Books/Henry Holt, 2008.

2 Nicholson, Nigel. “How Hardwired Is Human Behavior?” Harvard Business Review, February 3, 2022. https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior .

3 Nicholson, ibid.

4 Guild, Grey Swan, and Sean Moffett. “The World Is Super-Caffeinated.” Medium. Medium, June 21, 2022. https://greyswanguild.medium.com/the-world-is-super-caffeinated-2aeefff50ba2 .

5 Dawkins, Clinton Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 2016.

6 Widlok, Thomas. “Hunting and Gathering.” Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology, May 5, 2022. https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/hunting-and-gathering .

7 Curry, Oliver Scott, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse. “Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies.” Current Anthropology 60, no. 1 (2019): 47–69. https://doi.org/10.1086/701478 .

8 Curry, ibid.

9 Larsen, C. S. (2023). The past 12,000 years of behavior, adaptation, population, and evolution shaped who we are today. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(4). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2209613120

10 Schwab, Klaus. “The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What It Means and How to Respond.” World Economic Forum, January 14, 2016.

11 McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-mea ns-and-how-to-respond/.

12 McLuhan, ibid.

13 Wilson, Edward O., and James D. Watson. “Looking Back Looking Forward: A Conversation with James D Watson and Edward O Wilson (09/09/09).” Harvard Museum of Natural History, 2009. https://hmnh.harvard.edu/file/284861 .

14 Guild, Grey Swan, Chuck Metz, Jr., and Rob Tyrie. “The Future of Retail. Where Are the Shoppers Going?” Medium. Medium, July 24, 2022. https://medium.com/@greyswanguild/the-future-of-retail-where-are-the-shoppers-going -5df75ba3f21.

15 Carruchi, Ron, and Ludmila Praslova. “Employees Are Sick of Being Asked to Make Moral Compromises.” Harvard Business Review, February 21, 2022. https://hbr.org/2022/02/employees-are-sick-of-being-asked-to-make-moral-compromises .

16 Chuck Metz, Jr. “MAC and Moral Violation: Examples from Standard Personality Metrics.” Unpublished. “MAC suggests that certain evolutionarily wired basic human moral attributes arise from cooperative behaviors and operate across cultures. For example, fairness is considered a universal human moral trait with unfairness its broadly felt moral injury. Personality, emotional intelligence, thinking style, and other profiles assist in identifying complexities around that basic moral injury. Someone with a Myers-Briggs personality profile of ISTJ would tend to view fairness as a matter of following established rules and procedures—with “fairness violation” moral injury arising from breaking rules. Add MSCEIT emotional intelligence assessment results from this same person scoring high on “using emotions,” and they may experience fairness as balancing their own needs and those of others. Their “fairness violation” can morph into breaking a rule to facilitate unfairness in a manner that fails to balance their emotional needs with the needs of others on the team. Finally, adding thinking style indicator results such as the HBDI, this same ISTJ who uses emotions and is a holistic thinker may perceive “fairness violation” as a moral injury when fairness is non-inclusive and doesn’t consider big pictures and long-term impacts. Combining the three with MAC, a possible “unfairness violation” can be further assessed to include facilitating unfairness by being forced to break a rule that balances their emotional needs with the needs of team members in a non-inclusive manner that ignores holistic concerns.

Conclusion

Within the realms of your own work, think about Wilson's triad and what it might mean or take to bring it into better balance for all of us.