How Social Systems Breathe

This is an excerpt from a Patreon project in which I am writing a series of chapters (not a book). It was Chapter 2, but now I'm writing a different Chapter 2 for this month's installment, so it has been downgraded to Chapter 2 (beta), and is thus being made available to non-patrons.

“How do you tell if something's alive? You check for breathing.”

― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

When I was a ?child, I remember learning that Harry Houdini could hold his breath for longer than 5 minutes, and I found that fact exhilarating. I started practicing holding my breath and learned that I could go longer and longer without breathing. It was a skill I found very satisfying to develop because it seemed like almost every time I practiced, I would break my previous record. We used to play this game in a friend's swimming pool called "sharks and minnows" where the goal was to swim underwater from one end to the other without being dragged to the surface by the sharks team and tagged (after which you became one of the sharks), and I found I could simply outlast all the other kids at the bottom of the deep end, making myself a problematic target and often the last minnow standing. At one point, I believe my record while sitting still was two minutes and forty five seconds without breathing. Not breathing is like a magic trick. It's also a feat of significant physical control. At a certain point, the muscles in your abdomen will start to spasm, and you are fighting your own body to keep the air out.

We don't breathe because we choose to. Breathing just happens, like our heartbeat happens, like our bodies digest food. These are processes of the autonomic nervous system; they require no conscious activation and their functions are modulated by sympathetic and parasympathetic divisions working nonstop to adjust operating parameters based on current conditions. In a stressful or emergency situation, the sympathetic division increases heart rate and dilates airways to make breathing easier. Digestion and excretory functions are suppressed and energy is made available for fighting or flighting. It's like those presets on high-end vehicles--sport mode or comfort mode--adjusting the shocks, steering, engine performance... probably doing other things to parts of cars that I can't name...

I find the function of breathing really interesting, both literally and as a metaphor for the behaviors of systems. In this chapter, I'll explore respiration as a metaphor for those social systems that I described in the previous chapter as "sentient socks". I think there are some interesting implications of applying this analogy and asking ourselves what it means to be breathing or not breathing, at different cadences and amplitudes, intentionally or otherwise.

Do you ever notice that thing that happens in a room full of people carrying on different conversations? You ever notice how the volume increases? It's like this never-ending crescendo, louder and louder and louder, until people are shouting at one another in close proximity. I imagine this effect as a relentless exhale--more and more and more breath pushing outward. I think about what relief there would be if we could only inhale for a second and start the breath over. Have you ever tried to manage this effect? Perhaps you've seen a teacher intervene when their classroom hits a threshold of noise. They shout or clap or blow a whistle and the noise resets. There is a brief, blessed pause, and then from a whispered pianissimo, the slow crescendo starts again. It turns out the behaviors of each individual increasing volume might be involuntary. It's a reflexive tendency called the Lombard effect, and in addition to affecting loudness, it changes the speakers' pitch, rate of speech, and pronunciation-- a seemingly autonomic response to environmental factors. The cocktail effect describes our surprising capacity for selective attention in loud environments. We can hone in on a single voice and isolate it from the noisy background, which is what makes conversation possible amidst the rising cacophony.

Oddly enough... I think my cocktail effect might be broken, because I have a hard time hearing words when there are other sounds going on. My poor wife has to repeat herself constantly because hearing words in a noisy environment is extremely effortful for me. Even a single speaker in the background can throw me off. I often find myself disengaging from conversation in crowded settings and just listening to the gradual crescendo... Wishing there was a teacher nearby to force this system to stop breathing out and take a moment to reset.

If we think of that increasing noise and energy as an exhale, and a brief pause as an inhale, I wonder what rate and amplitude of respiration would make a room healthy. I wonder about people like me, who close off and retreat into their shell the second background noise reaches a certain threshold. Thinking of the dynamics of social systems like this can lead us to some interesting questions.

In the previous chapter, I made a case for order emerging rather than breaking down in social systems. I said that I wanted to offer you something other than unwieldy theories. I wanted to offer something more accessible and actionable--swords rather than anvils. I believe that metaphor can serve that purpose, so in this chapter, I’ll be sharing a few ways of employing the metaphor of breathing to social systems that are both grounded in theories about social emergence as well as offering quicker routes to diagnostic and therapeutic approaches to improving their function and operating strategically within them.

The In and Exhale of Facilitation

I first encountered the metaphor of breathing applied to social systems in Adam Kahane's excellent book Facilitating Breakthrough, which I read as part of a book club organized by the author/facilitator/community-convener Daniel Stillman. Kahane opens by describing two types of facilitation, which he calls horizontal facilitation and vertical facilitation. Vertical centers the needs of the group as a coherent whole--a top-down push for what the component parts can coordinate together to meet their collective needs or the needs of the larger system that they occupy. Horizontal facilitation focuses on the needs of each component of that whole. It centers the desires and needs of the participants themselves, with priority given to equality of voice and autonomy of the component parts. Here is a table that lays out some of the characteristics of these facilitative approaches.

If you're going to facilitate a staff meeting for an organization, you're probably not going to center the desires of the individuals at the table because the focus is on what the institution is doing, so the facilitation is likely vertical. You are successful if the needs of the institution are met.

If what you're facilitating is a negotiation, the needs of the individuals on both sides are centered. They may not belong to a shared collective identity or have shared goals and thus vertical facilitation is likely the wrong approach. You are logically best served by employing horizontal facilitation. You are only successful if everyone's needs are at least partially satisfied.

Following the introduction of these two methods, Kahane describes how they aren't just alternatives to choose from for a particular engagement. They can complement one another when employed in sequence. Kahane goes so far as to say that each approach is incomplete without the other and only employing one or the other is bound to encounter downsides (described in the table above) that can only be mitigated by employment of the alternative approach. For example, rigidity and domination (downsides of vertical facilitation) are ameliorated by focusing on the good of each participant (focus of horizontal facilitation), and fragmentation (downside of horizontal) is mended by focusing on the collective good (focus of vertical). At this point, he describes vertical and horizontal facilitation as inhaling and exhaling. By employing the metaphor of breathing, he makes it apparent that one can't choose between them. In his words, "Nobody ever argues about whether it is better to inhale or exhale... if we only inhaled, we would die of too much carbon dioxide, and if we only exhaled, we would die of too little oxygen." Kahane goes on to describe how cadence plays into this. The timing of the transition from horizontal to vertical is dictated by whether and to what extent those downsides are present. The facilitator's role is to watch for when the shift is required based on what's happening during the current phase. Too much carbon dioxide? Time to breathe out...

The metaphor stuck in my head and has been rattling around in there for a little over a year now. Fairly regularly, something in the world hits the resonant frequency of the metaphor and I'm reminded of it. It's like the first few notes from the hook to a song, and I keep finding those notes pop up in the oddest of places, putting that song right back in my head, making me feel like the social systems around me might actually be breathing.

No Wait...

Let me back up a minute... I've realized that in actuality, the concept of respiration as a metaphor more generally had been a thorn in my brain for a few years, placed there by the amazing book that introduced me to complex systems theory: Scale by Geoffrey West, subtitled The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. It is difficult to describe what Scale encompasses very briefly, but I can say that it changed how I view the world, describing with intricate and vivid detail the way that complex systems behave based on laws and emergent properties at various scales. In the course of describing how biological systems scale, West introduced me to the basis for respiration at the cellular level:

All biological systems require energy, and that energy comes from metabolic processes within cells called respiratory complexes. To put it very simply, within these cells, a molecule called ATP is broken down into ADP, which releases energy in the transition. That energy is the source of all our metabolic energy and what keeps us alive. In mammals, ADP is then converted back into ATP using energy from food and oxidative respiration, which is why we have to breathe in oxygen. Plants, which don't breathe, use photosynthesis to convert ADP back to ATP. It's like a battery being depleted and then recharged over and over, with energy being released as ATP is broken down and then recaptured in the creation of ATP. West says that our bodies contain only about a half a pound of ATP, but every day we typically make about two hundred trillion trillion ATP molecules, producing and recycling the equivalent of our own body weight in ATP. The back and forth, up and down, in and out of oxidative respiration is tethered to a metronome clicking at a much smaller scale, on the cellular level--the transition from ATP to ADP and back again--a pendulum swinging at a particular rate that larger biological systems evolved to keep time with. The need for coherence between large, complex systems and their component sub-systems explains the patterns and laws of scaling that West uncovers in his book. He states, "If you tell me the size of a mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, the length and radius of its aorta, its life span, how many offspring it will have, and so on. Given the extraordinary complexity and diversity of life, this is pretty amazing."

I personally found this mind-boggling, because it depicts a degree of coherence and systemic consistency that hadn't ever occurred to me. The patterns of life and interaction, from biological to social to organizational, emerge from systemic properties starting at the smallest scale. You can't build a system to hold patterns that are incoherent with the constraints imposed by component subsystems because incoherence creates dysfunction rendering the system unscalable.

Scale introduced me to the logic of nested respiratory demands--respiration at the organism level meets the demands of metabolic cellular respiration that provides all our energy. The rate of respiration reflects the overall metabolic rate of the organism. It also helped me understand surface-level, visible effects as emergent phenomena potentiated by systemic conditions.

Applying this logic to the respiratory pattern of Kahane's vertical and horizontal facilitation, we are left with some interesting questions: What nested systems might give rise to the need for this type of respiration? Do those systems have nested sub-systems that constrain their patterns? ?Is the respirating system of the facilitated gathering nested within a larger system and does its rate of respiration say something about the constraints of that larger system?

One element that begs to be explored here is this idea of the "metabolic rate" of social systems: the source of energy for everything a social system does. It's a concept that Austin Wiggins and I stumbled across in our exploration and experimentation in the realm of meeting design, something I may address in a later chapter. But for now we can ask ourselves if the organism-level basis for physical respiration is the need for oxygen to charge up more ATP "batteries", then what are we "breathing in" when we metaphorically respirate in social systems, and how does that enable energy to be created or made available for work by nested metabolizers within the system? As a facilitator, I have a lot of experience feeling the available energy of a room get used up, and there are certain maneuvers, configurations, and manipulations that will get participants to bring more of their energy to the activities we're doing.

Another concept that we need to reflect on here is cadence and tempo. The oscillations at an individual level constrain and enable the cadence, tempo, and amplitude of our social interactions, which constrain and enable the cadence, tempo, and amplitude of our effects at the level of social systems.

How often do you gather for a particular purpose? What fluctuations occur during that gathering? What are their cadence, tempo, and amplitude? How well does that cadence align with the cadence at the level of nested systems? How well does it align with the cadence of the systems within which it is nested?

We need to eat and excrete as well, but at a much lower rate than we breathe, thank goodness. I spent some time imagining a world in which respiration and digestion were reversed in their rates and what played out in my head was someone running up to an unconscious person, examining them briefly and screaming "She's not eating!" between mouthfuls of whatever it was they were eating (because in this world we have to eat at an almost constant rate). The rescue attempt then involves some form of trying to force the person to chew and swallow mouthfuls of whatever balanced birdseed we're probably carrying around in shoulder-slung feed bags...

Cognitive-Emotional Currents

The second time I thought about social systems breathing, I was doing research for Sociology homework at American Military University. I encountered an article titled “Channeling Hearts and Minds: Advocacy Organizations, Cognitive-Emotional Currents, and Public Conversation” by Christopher Bail, Taylor Brown, and Marcus Mann. The paper explored the impacts of advocacy organizations' communication on public perception and engagement on social problems, specifically within social media platforms. Their question was what draws people into public discourse about social issues, arguably an important aspect of a healthy democracy. In this case, two particular approaches were identified, those that employ "cognitive appeals" through rational arguments and those that appeal to emotion, which they label as "emotional conversational style".

What they found was that the spread of social discourse in what they termed "social contagion" isn't optimally driven by one or the other of these styles of messaging (cognitive appeals versus emotional appeals), but the employment of both at the right cadence... and what I saw in their description of how that cadence works was, once again... the metaphor of breathing.

From the abstract:

"We argue that rational and emotional styles of communication ebb and flow within public discussions about social problems due to the alternating influence of social contagion and saturation effects. These "cognitive-emotional currents" create an opportunity structure whereby advocacy organizations stimulate more conversation if they produce emotional messages after prolonged rational debate or vice versa."

I've copied the following visual from the research paper, which depicts emotional messaging increasing in saturation towards a point of overload, at which point we enter a period of phase shift, during which "cognitive" messaging is going to be most impactful. Any messaging that contributes to the phase shift was determined by the researchers to stimulate more public conversation.

?It spun my head a bit to think about social contagion this way. I would have assumed that different types of messaging would have a consistent effect and depend primarily on the type of person receiving it. Certain individuals must resonate most strongly with logical messaging and others the more emotional. But the generalized effect discovered by the researchers validated their hypothesis that across all types of people, cognitive and emotional conversational styles ebbed and flowed because of saturation effects in the communication space. Even those who prefer cognitive styles will reach a saturation point of cognitive overload, at which point they are more susceptible to emotional messaging. Even those whose preferred messaging style is emotional will find themselves experiencing emotional overload, facilitating a phase shift to cognitive messaging.

Too little oxygen? Just breathe in...

The parallels to what Kahane described with alternating currents of vertical and horizontal facilitation struck me, and made me wonder what other elements within social systems might ebb and flow in this manner. I already had a few ideas based on my own facilitation practice, but before I get to that, I want to introduce you to a third example of social systems breathing at an exponentially larger scale.

My house breathes too, in the Summer months. During the cool nights, we open its windows and turn on fans so our rooms can take a deep breath of cold air in. In the late morning, as the day heats up, we shut the windows and blinds to try and slow the rate of its exhale and inhale. This is only the logical approach because it keeps tempo with the way that the local climate breathes in and out, in cadence with the rising and setting of the sun. It is interesting also to note that the rate of thermal transfer is modulated by the difference in temperature inside and outside.

At the Scale of Civilizations

Another time I imagined social systems breathing in and out was inspired by the mind-altering book The Dawn of Everything by David Wengrow and David Graeber. This exceptional work offers a retelling of the shape, structure, and progression of prehistoric human societies, as learned from modern archeological discoveries, and it diverges significantly from the narratives we're probably all used to. I have long been a fan of the version of prehistoric social evolution championed by writers like Yuval Noah Harari, which describes the march of civilization moving from a blissful, egalitarian hunter-gatherer band and tribe-based lifestyle to one in which we are held captive by the maintenance needs of institutional systems of agriculture and society that enabled us to scale into cities and states. Harari's framing can be summed up in the following quote from Sapiens, "“This is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions.”

On the other hand, some subscribe to a more Hobbesian view of prehistory that depicts pre-agrarian societies as violent and brutish--a view propagated by works such as Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, which posits that social evolution has made us safer and more stable at every scale.

In one view, our "state of nature" is peaceful and egalitarian, and the trappings of civilization brought with them competition, bureaucracy, wealth disparity, and authoritarianism.

In another view, our default state is warlike and animalistic, and civilization brings with it a much needed element of control.

Wengrow and Graeber offer a refreshingly nuanced account of prehistory in their book--one that is significantly more complex, non-linear, and exposes some of the cartoonishness of the aforementioned models. From Chapter 3 of their book:

"Almost all the Ice Age sites with extraordinary burials and monumental architecture were created by societies that lived a little like Levi-Strauss's Nambikwara, dispersing into foraging bands at one time of year, gathering together in concentrated settlements at another."

"Meanwhile, as we've seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them--all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states."

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow describe societies that were highly reflective on the appropriate, bounded applications of both hierarchical and broadly egalitarian structures, with clarity about the downsides of these modes of social organization, who were therefore very deliberate about ensuring a seasonality to their employment, one that kept in cadence with rituals keeping tempo with natural, contextual rhythms of abundance and scarcity. They argue that what differentiates modern social organization from prehistoric isn't that we are so much more advanced, because they were certainly capable of ?experimenting with a spectrum of different approaches. The difference is that in the modern era, we are stuck in a particular configuration, whereas by their account, human beings have spent "most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again..."

Immediately what I thought of when I read this was the respiratory ebb and flow of Kahane's facilitation styles, focusing on autonomy in one phase and then collective good in another, with neither being the dominant mode and both being employed equally in a two-phase social system. ?I imagined human societies breathing in and out like this, a pendulum swinging from flatness to hierarchy, from democratic to authoritarian, and I wondered if there wasn't an inherent healthiness to that level of intentional adaptiveness. I wondered about our own political system in the United States and how entrenched everybody seems to be in their own parties, and I wondered if that didn't all stem from the popular assumption that there is such thing as an ideal political configuration for all seasons... a silly proposition in a context as complex as this now that I think about it. The most democratic of societies surely must need to have the capacity for immediate draconian measures when it slips into crisis, if we are to believe the decision-making heuristics for "chaotic" systems from the Cynefin framework (more on that in another chapter.

Now I wonder about how societies, states, communities, teams, families, and relationships breathe. There is seasonality to even our closest relationships, and it can be damaging to expect even a marriage to remain the same thing from one year to the next. Everything changes, and if we don't change with it, we fall out of sync with the world around us, out of phase with one-another.

Seasonality is natural. The world and the environments we live in, physical and social, are always in flux, settling into patterns that we can keep cadence with in a continuous dance. To do so requires awareness of their cadences as well as our own.

Breathing on Purpose

I have thought about conscious, intentional, measured breathing a great deal since reading Brene Brown's book Dare to Lead, which introduced me to the practice of square breathing--a simple rhythmic breathing exercise that can be very effective for reducing stress and anxiety. It's called square breathing (also box breathing and 4x4 breathing) because it involves a simple pattern of 4 counts inhaling, 4 counts holding, 4 counts exhaling, and 4 holding again, to be repeated indefinitely. As one breathes, they can imagine each count of 4 is one side of a square, and you travel around it in a continuous loop. The combination of visualization, counting, and focus on breathing I have found very effective for reducing anxiety.

When I can't sleep, I often employ 4-7-8 breathing, in which I inhale for 4 counts, hold for 7, and then exhale for 8 counts. I'm unsure where I first learned about this, but research indicates it is derived from an ancient Yogic practice called Pranayama. I use the method really frequently, just about every night, and I find it strangely effective.

The mere act of paying attention to your breath changes it. Focusing on it reduces the noise of the outside world. We can alter our breath to enable us when we concentrate, when we exercise, when we go to sleep, when we play various instruments, when we fire a gun, when we swim in different strokes. We augment and train breathing to become excellent at various tasks. Peak performers don't just breathe. They breathe on purpose. They focus on breath.

How might we make our social systems breathe on purpose?

Reflection, Questions, Actions

As I've shared, I think of facilitation in respiratory phases in a number of different ways. The cadence of activities considers the entire arc of what we're attempting to accomplish and where (external context) as well as the social needs and available social energy of the participants (internal context). We alternate between divergent and convergent phases as described by the Design Council's Double Diamond framework. We alternate between reflective and expressive, between group thinking and solo reflection, ?I plot out every session visually on a whiteboard so I can see how it ebbs and flows, how downsides, impacts, or side-effects of one activity might require the relief and recovery of a subsequent activity with inverse effects. Considering the dynamics and cadence of those dynamics always causes me to take steps to balance the session, to consider the outputs and inputs and bring the social system into coherence with its internal and external context. I think about how an extrovert might experience things differently from an introvert, how power and positionality might impact things, and balancing between modes also balances between who has how much power and for how long. In this phase, a particular type will play well, so in the next phase they are reduced and another type is given the advantage. The social system is breathing but also within it each individual is breathing, like little respiratory complexes, sub-systems of a larger respiratory system.

Teams and organizations need to breathe on purpose, in different ways in response to different contexts. They need to think about their existing social technologies and how they enable (or fail to enable) the exchange and processing of information and insight.

Ask: Who is monitoring the breathing of your social systems? How do they know the quality and cadence of your social systems' various respiratory processes, when and for what reason to adjust them?

Act: Designate an individual to concern themselves with the social technologies employed in gathering people together for a particular purpose, or the asynchronous means with which your organization gathers and makes sense of internal and external information. Try and anticipate what dynamics you would like: energy, engagement-level, competition, collaboration, reflectiveness, and others, and how they should modulate throughout the engagement. Monitor whether the desired dynamics are being created, and adjust your approach as necessary in real-time. Reflect afterwards on what actually happened and what that means about what you attempted, what it means you should do next or the next time.

Social systems metabolize energy brought into them from outside, and as facilitators and leaders we need to think about how that energy is being put to work within the system. Is it feeding patterns that work for us? Can it be redirected to negentropic purposes that are in better alignment with our goals, needs, and values? In the previous chapter, I talked about how order is likely emerging, not declining, in these open social systems that we occupy. I can't help but recall the organization I worked for where a group of us would every day flee to lunch early and come back late, bonding and finding mutual respite from the struggle we all faced in that repressive environment. The energy being metabolized by social processes is feeding and perpetuating patterns that are already coherent with the internal and external context. We could perhaps use some of that energy. We could perhaps use those patterns, or nudge them, or at the very least bring ourselves into alignment with the realities that they reflect. Remember that we respirate because of the nested respirating systems inside us, and it is worth considering that the systems we occupy respirate because of us, as we are nested respiratory systems inside them.

Ask: Where does social energy enter your organization? What ordered patterns does it perpetuate? What adjacent-possible patterns could be created or nudged using that energy?

Act: Bring a diverse group together from across your team to consider and conduct discovery work into where social energy is being expended within your organization or unit, either planned or unplanned. Take stock of the portfolio of gatherings and be intentional about managing its scope, goals, cadence, and the range of dynamics it creates to achieve particular goal-oriented effects.

Every unit in the Air Force breathes in and out leadership on a regular cadence, like clockwork. Many nested systems within the unit ought to respirate at a cadence coherent with that rate of turnover. But we often fail to make our cadences of creation and destruction, update, refresh, training, inspection, assignment, strategizing, team-building, and many other processes coherent with the systems they occupy, and with one another. It often seems like our going-away ceremonies and hails and farewells are rote recitations, not designed to have any kind of social systemic effect.

Ask: What rituals do we engage in that modulate based on the arrival and departure of individuals or leaders? How purposeful are they? How much do they affect the social patterns of the organization?

Act: Be more purposeful about considering how your social patterns might need to change based on changing conditions.

Have you ever hyperventilated? It's pretty weird how it happens. By breathing more rapidly and deeply than normal, for example due to a panic attack, you push out more carbon dioxide than your body can produce, so the concentration of carbon dioxide in your blood falls below a healthy level. This causes you to feel out of breath, so you reflexively breathe faster and deeper to try and compensate. It becomes a self-perpetuating problem. I wonder if we couldn't understand the problem of ever-increasing meetings with this analogy.

Ask: How and how often does your team meet? What respiratory patterns exist in those meetings? What dynamics do you swing between? Is anybody monitoring the health of those meetings? The quality of breaths in and out? Are meetings reactive or proactive? Are they horizontal or vertical? What would be signals that your social systems aren't getting what they need? What social systems of ours are operating on nothing more than a clock? Are there other patterns we could be organizing our social systems around that might be more logical?

Act: Take stock of the social technologies you employ. Consider the purpose of each one of them... all of the possible goals that can be met by synchronous and asynchronous social mechanisms. Examine gatherings with a critical eye about whether they achieve the intended goals and any benefits you hadn’t planned for. When a new unmet need is identified, integrate it into your system in a way that considers the necessary cadence, and how the respiration of each of these must be coherent with the patterns of the others.

Just like prehistoric societies adapted rhythmically to the changing seasons, taking on different shapes, structures, and characteristics, consider how an organization might cycle between seasons, and what transformations could occur to adapt to each cycling context. In my studies I have learned of the bounded applicability of a number of methods and modes, but each of them has their zealots, who claim that their particular approach would cure all ills if only it were implemented properly. There is a time and a season and a context for scientific management (aka Taylorism) and a time, season, and context for holacracy.

Ask: What dynamics do we shift between? Do we intentionally move between modes that maximize adaptiveness and those that maximize control? Or are we always over-correcting in response to the downsides accumulated in the previous regime?

Act: Minimize, adapt to, or exploit social systemic modulation by understanding the dynamical waves that occur, at what cadence, and the underlying potentiation that gives rise to phase shifts. Strategically execute actions in a coherent cadence with those modulations. The creation of ordered patterns requires constraints that take up available energy to maintain, and creating coherence with emerging patterns is much more efficient than attempting to compete with them.

I could continue thusly for quite a ways, but I'm not really here to prescriptively dictate everything that you should do with the social systems that you occupy and affect. How could I possibly know such a thing? My goal here is to offer you different ways of thinking about those systems and the patterns they fall into. At this point, I have offered you a few thousand words on the topic of thinking about these systems employing just one metaphor, albeit one with a significant degree of depth and possible permutations, and then demonstrated how this particular lens can lead to questions that lead to actions. Many of the things I've said here could be disputed, and within various contexts they probably should be. The methods I'm employing in applying a metaphorical lens are more useful in offering you ways of questioning the world you face and the ways that social systems fall into ordered patterns, not telling you the answers to those questions. The appropriateness of those questions and usefulness of their answers depend entirely on your context.