Recently Noticed News

Like a lot of people, I am a regular reader of The New York Times. In fact, I break out in a rash when I don't get to read it on a daily basis. I love the on-line site which has innumerable features, but I am an abiding fan of the print version as well. I like being able to underline information as I read it and write in the margins of the paper. I clip photos because I find there to be quality of color that occurs when ink meets newsprint to be, occasionally, quite beautiful.

Of course, it is a time consuming occupation, this Times reading, but it is certainly rich in discovery and information. I wanted to share a few items that have captured my attention.

1. Jonathan Ruach's review of Judge Richard Posner's The Failure of Capitalism is deeply sobering. Posner is a federal judge who has written on a range of topics, including the power low-probability, high impact events (e.g., an asteroid hitting the Earth) in Catastrophe: Risk and Response. Unfortunately, these darned low-probability, high impact things keep happening. (Remember Condaleezza Rice' "Who could imagine that someone would crash an airplane into the World Trade Center?!") In the futures business, we call these sorts of possibilities critical uncertainties or wild cards, depending on how incredibly far out, yet still plausible, they seem.

I felt a little sheepish when Rauch, a guest scholar at Brookings, asserted that the reader "knows that story" when reciting the set of interlocking drivers that have created the current Great Recession/Minor League Depression, since I certainly hadn't seen it put together so succinctly. And, just in case you're as shell shocked and uninformed about the systemic picture as me, here it is: "Cheap money and an inrush of foreign capital fueled a lending boom, which poured credit into the housing market. As prices went up, up,up, even risky mortgages seemed safe and everyone piled in, including banks. Financiers relied on securitization and complicated financial instruments to dilute the attendant risk, but the result was to spread that risk through the financial system, making it impossible to locate. When the housing bubble popped, everyone was holding bad debt, but no one was sure how bad or even how much. With banks suddenly looking undercapitalized, lenders stopped lending and started selling assets to raise cash. The faster everyone ran for the exits, the faster asset prices fell, dragging banks' balance sheets down with them. Credit markets seized up, depressing the economy, causing more mortgage defaults and asset-price deflation, further weakening banks, further paralyzing credit, depressing the economy still more...repeat ad nauseam."

Posner's assertion is that this crisis "came about precisely because intelligent businesses and consumers follow market signals." In other words, the capitalist system, which believes in market driven self-regulation doesn't function in that way at all. In fact, the market of "an interrelated system of financial intermediaries is inherently unstable...[it is] a kind of epileptic, subject to unpredictable, strange seizures." Put a bunch of bankers in a low interest rate environment without a lot of regulation and economic depression will be the product. Ouch! It's not about irresponsible people. People made very rational and responsible choices under these conditions resulting in the fact that the overall world and US economies are going to be screwed for at least a couple of years.

Posner presents us with a very troubling dilemma: On the one hand, conditions of easy money and light regulation ought to be just what's needed to promote innovation in a capitalist economy. You should be able to get that without the credit system seizing up, but that's not what happened. And, to make matters worse, there aren't any easy answers: Socialism, too bureaucratic; Communism, death; Fascism, bad history. If liberal capitalism is the "end of history," I sure hope it doesn't have another heart attack anytime soon.

2. Here's a story that didn't come from The Times but is worth knowing about. The Russians Are Coming (to Facebook)! Art of the Future's principals have been using for the last few months with tremendous pleasure and with positive consequences in terms of making new friends and establishing new professional relationships. Facebook is a creative revelation. It is very easy to post material to one's sign, including video, and there are a virtually infinite number of groups of prospective interest.

Facebook is great fun, and it is also a big business. For example, in 2007 Microsoft announced that it had purchased a 1.6% share of Facebook for $240 million, giving Facebook a total implied value of around $15 billion at that time. Today, a Russian firm, Digital Sky Technologies, announced that it is seeking to purchase employee owned shares for between $100-150 million. This development strikes me as noteworthy, not only because it's indicative of the dynamic power of globalization--I mean, seriously, Russia, the supposedly re-emerging autocratic society becoming a stakeholder in Facebook, the sine qua non of open boundaries--but also because Russia has been so dismissed by authorities such as Parang Khanna, whose Second World is one of several books postulating the dismemberment of the Russian Federation. Maybe there's more to Russia than Putin and his natural resources strategy. We hope so.

3. Get ready for either a really, really long weekend or complete servitude and irrelevance as The Singularity approaches. The Singularity is a concept coined by science fiction writer, Vernon Vinge, that asserts that supersmart computers will outstrip human intelligence sometime soon. The Big Bang was the original singularity, as far as I know. There was absolutely nothing and then--poof--there was suddenly something from which everything else has unfolded! So, this singularity business is a very big deal. The acceleration of technical innovation has placed us at "the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth." Some futurists, such as James John Bell, lay out the possibility that, beginning somewhere around 2025, everything that humanity has ever imagined may, in fact, be achievable virtually instantaneously via the advances that occurring in technology. The unique and beautiful film, Waking Life (which lays out something like thirty alternative philosophies reviewed and comprehended in the last minutes of a young man's life) includes a presentation of what this sort of hyper-telescopic evolution might look like, i.e., where something is envisioned and can, therefore, be subject to experimentation and experience immediately.

The Singularity is the epitome of what people mean when they say, "This is the stuff of science fiction." However, there is considerable reason to believe that what never seemed possible previously, e.g., the prospect that we could transcend mortality and never have to "work," in the way that we presently conceive of that process, or that we are inventing technologies that will come to rule us (and not necessarily in a nice way; reference: The Matrix), has to be taken increasingly seriously. Even if the human prospect isn't about to be reset in its entirety, it's completely clear that phenomenal change is afoot in technologically assisted expansion of life expectancy, for example.

The point for Art of the Future is that these sorts of considerations are virtually off the radar screen when it comes to typical strategic planning processes. Very real and indescribably huge forces shaping the future are often met with such a sense of powerlessness that they are not included in an organization's strategic conversations. The more that is true, the more the overall direction and meaning of all of the technological innovation that is occurring will be left to the very few people who do actually think about "Big Issues." Therefore, the perspectives enunciated by elites, the Best and the Brightest of whatever generation, will demarcate the terms of the conversation.Often , that is not a good thing. It means millions of intelligent and concerned people and organizations around the world won't be thinking together about where our technologies are taking us. So, if the Singularity (or any of its near relatives) breaks into reality, the highest probability is that most people will be completely paralyzed in shock, fear and awe by its effects. They'll have never thought about it, let alone have discussed its organizational consequences. This is a recipe for a lot of distressed people and broken, useless organizations.

Art of the Future's mission is to support the evolution of life sustaining work environments that support creativity and the ability of organizations to survive and thrive in many different social-economic contexts. We are not necessarily adherents to the Singularity hypothesis, but we definitely believe that organizations that want to build powerfully compelling work environments need to incorporate logically presented, unconventional views into their strategic analyses to do justice to the full scope of possibilities that are shaping what work will be, how it will be done and where it will occur.

Geopolitics and Structuralism

The US Navy is the key driving force that will determine the destiny of the world over the course of the 21st century. That is the assertion of George Friedman in his current best seller, The Next 100 Years.

A talented structural thinker, Friedman explores the way in which the elements of a situation affect, shape and sometimes even determine the choices we make. His firm, Stratfor, operates within the world of geopolitics, which he describes as: "a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road.

Friedman's point of view ought to be very refreshing to those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about organization and leadership theory. Organizational studies concentrate extensively on the actions of individuals, teams, particular organizations, and, occasionally, industries. Economists talk about an invisible hand, in which the self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to ‘the wealth of nations’ (ala Adam Smith). Here are a few quotes from Friedman explicating his views on Geopolitics:

• "Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors. The pursuit of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders work result, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable behavior and, therefore, to the ability to forecast the shape of the future international system."

• "Geopolitics and economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense of knowing their own short-term self-interest. As rational actors, reality provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole, people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly, then at least not randomly…in chess you do not have limitless moves. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see your options, and the fewer moves there actually are.

• "For the most part, the act of governance in foreign policy is simply executing the necessary and logical next step. Political leaders know how to be leaders or they wouldn’t have emerged as such. Geopolitics does not take the individual leader very seriously, and more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously.

• "The core of the method I have used in this book has been to look at the constraints placed on individuals and nations, to see how they are generally forced to behave because of these constraints, and then to try to understand the unintended consequences those actions will have

• "Geopolitics assumes two things...

1. First, it assumes that humans organize themselves into units larger than families, and that by doing this, they must engage in politics. It also assumes that humans have natural loyalty to the things they were born into, the people and the places. Loyalty to a tribe, a city, or a nation is natural to people. In our time, national identity matters a great deal. Geopolitics teaches that the relationship between these nations is a vital dimension of human life, and that means that war is ubiquitous.
2. Second, geopolitics assumes that the character of a nation is determined to a great extent by geography, as is the relationship between nations. That includes the physical characteristics of a location and the effect of a place on individuals and communities. Sparta was a landlocked city and Athens was a maritime empire. Athens was wealthy and cosmopolitan, while Sparta was poor, provincial and very tough. A Spartan was very different from an Athenian in both culture and politics."

Organizational interventionists put great stock in micro theories: change individuals or small units and you’ll alter the dynamics of the situation in some overarching fashion. Concentrate on the workings of the organization as an entity. Sometimes this is true. Apple runs a hell of a lot better under Steve Jobs than it does under anyone else. He mobilizes the company's design masters and the customer analysts in a way that no one else has. However, is it not also the case that someone like Jobs do a much better job of bringing the forces shaping the future more generally, including Friedman’s geopolitics, inside the firm than most others do? Most executives and managers treat the big picture as exogenous, something that “greater minds” should pay attention to, at least in their official personae. But great organizational leaders--we call them Anticipatory Leaders--are not afraid of the big picture; in fact, they recognize how important it is to embrace the full range of forces confronting their organizations.

Friedman's analysis begins with “the permanent: the persistence of the human condition, suspended between heaven and hell….[Therefore,] the 21st century will be like all other centuries. There will be wars, there will be poverty, there will be triumphs and defeats. There will be tragedy and good luck. People will go to work, make money, have children, fall in love, and come to hate. The permanent human condition is not cyclical."

In fact, Friedman's analysis assumes that war will be ubiquitous and inevitable. This is where we part company. We believe that humanity not only has the possibility of resolving powerful conflict through some other method besides war, but we feel that it must. We are of the view that human evolution is seeking to transcend warfare. Optimists and people who hold that there is some sort of progress in humanity away from violence have long held this view. In fact, the people who invented the Tarot have a card that is meant to convey this forward motion, The Wheel of Fortune which shows the ears of the red Hermanubis protruding into a new realm of human consciousness. (Unfortunately, the data indicate that the decline in conflicts around the world, which had characterized the 80's and 90's seems to have plateaued at about 30; so, hold the champagne.)

What Friedman's thoughtful, rational analysis does demonstrate is that those of us who long for a world without war must realize that such a condition is not going to inevitably occur. There is no New Age that will bring this about. In fact, the geopolitical deck is stacked against peace and for war. Can we strategically position our organizations, our societies, ourselves in a way that make peace more rather than less possible? The answer is "Yes!" and achieving it entails a lot of clear analysis and good decision making at every level of human life. The nature of the weapons that humanity has developed makes it unacceptable for the anwer to this question to be "No."

Life Sustaining Work Environments: A Book in Progress

Anika and Michael are hard at work on their newest publication, a manual devoted to the challenge of creating of work environments that will attract, house, support and retain key talent that organizations can rely upon to lead them forward into whatever future the next twenty years may bring. A life sustaining work environments welcomes the full range of human potential that people can bring to their work knowing that positive human energy promotes economic viability.

We're writing this book because we've both had really excellent working experiences and we've both had and observed many work environments that were deeply unsatisfying. A wide range of factors that contribute to the quality of an organization's life sustaining qualities, including, for example: Are people encouraged to be creative? Do they get to see the effect of the efforts? Does the workplace acknowledge our needs as social animals? Is there a conscious and continuous consideration of the relationship between the organization and the natural environment. Architectural considerations are important, as captured in the compendium of illustrations you can link to on the left.

As we've considered in several previous articles, the quality of the work environment all too frequently falls between the cracks. It's everybody's concern, but usually it's nobody's job. Yet, as we've tried to capture in graphic below, the work environment has powerful strategic implications for all sorts of organizational outcome measures, such as productivity and employee engagement. A lot of people complain about the work environment, but, unlike the weather, it is something that one can actually do a lot about!


Of course, this is an extraordinarily exciting endeavor that is putting us in contact with a great deal of stimulating information, such as this set of videos on IDEO's very innovative workplace or via the brilliant thinking of the scientist and architect, Christopher Alexander, who has written on The Timeless Way of Building in such exquisite terms. (The picture to your right links to an in-depth presentation of Alexander's thinking.)

A particular way of considering alternative futures and articulating strategy is at the heart of this book. We have found that, in general, organizations don't do a very good job of thinking broadly about the environment that they are in and that they, therefore, miss potent driving forces that shape the general political and economic destiny of societies and industries. Not seeing factors that seem completely obvious in hindsight represents a powerful strategic error. The leaders of many organizations and communities spend truckloads of time considering their values and the vision and/or piling through veritable encyclopedias full of spread sheets and charts without having the ability or willingness to look outward at the critical uncertainties that will determine what the profile of the workforce will be and what incentives will appeal to it.

We've developed a three step process for investigating life sustaining work environments through the integration of systems thinking and scenario planning in the service of strategic leadership. We call it Structural Dynamics. The approach is sort of like participatory theater, where the structure of the drama--the movement from pre-production to staging to rehearsal to performance to post-production--is mapped out in some detail, but the actual content of the play itself will be generated by the members of the specific organization working within a particular industry (or set of industries) that is seeking to design a life sustaining work environment. The process is designed to yield discoveries at each step along the way, creating a sort of flow state of new thinking, which as Charlie Keifer and Robin Charbit have discussed, is a constant companion of insight.

We'll be writing more about developments related to our book periodically. So, stay tuned!

Exploring Environmental Futures

Using Scenarios to Improve
Environmental Decision Making

A 90-Minute Experiential Workshop

We have described this workshop previously, and we continue to be very pleased with its reception and utility. We are pleased to announce that the Society for Organizational Learning will be offering this program to members as part of its Conversations with Global Citizens program on December 10th from 3:15 to 5:30PM. Participation may be available to non-members. Chris Doyon (617-300-9515) at the SoL office if you wish to attend.

Overview: There are multiple, conflicting perspectives on the threat posed by the aggregation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the strategic implications of climate dynamics remains a hotly debated topic. Instead of imposing any one point of view, this experiential learning approach uses the thoughts, feelings and impressions of a group of participants to explore the implications of four archetypal scenarios for organizational choices and strategy development. It encourages robust conversations regarding the facts associated with greenhouse gases while legitimating a range of differing opinions. Better strategic decisions emerge when a group engages a controversial subject using a process based on mutual respect. This program has been piloted to positive reviews in 2009 at the University of Hawaii’s Research Center for Futures Studies and the Association for Strategic Planning’s national conference.

Elaboration: Despite an enormous body of scientific evidence emphasizes its dire consequences, global warming remains a virtually invisible, low priority issue to the vast majority of people and organizations in the world. Discussions of global warming and climate change often take place among people who already agree with each other. And, as captured in Jared Diamond's of the environmental debates that are raging in Montana and elsewhere, when people don’t agree about ecological matters, their conversations and their actions quickly polarize. What is needed is a method that gets people to listen to each other, consider possibilities and arrive at decisions together.

We believe that it is not necessary for participants to fully embrace the reality of global warming in order to support cleaner, healthier environments and sustainable practices. No one wants to live in a waste dump. And, there is no disagreement that CO2 is accumulating in the atmosphere and that temperatures are rising. What these facts mean and how much they should concern us is, however, a source of intense contention.

This workshop uses the impact of the rising level of atmospheric CO2 as a “critical uncertainty” upon which to focus. It is critical because greenhouse gases have tremendous actual and potential impact. While most people accept as fact the rising level of CO2, the impact is uncertain; there is wide spread divergence over what can be done and when to take action.

Using Art of the Future’s Scenario Game Board, participants position themselves according to their beliefs regarding two dimensions of change:

• The speed with which greenhouse gases will exert an impact on human life -- one person may feel that New York City will be under water in the foreseeable future while another might contend that climate change is a complete hoax.

• The nature of the response to these impacts -- paralyzing fear or engaged action?

Divergent perspectives spark the process; they are woven into alternative scenarios for the group’s consideration.

Our own research indicates that these dimensions (gradual vs. abrupt impact and reactive vs. creative response) are fundamental to understanding the images of the future held by people across a wide-range of cultures. The future will always be different than what we expect, and our expectations are frequently way off the mark. However, learning to see and accept a range of possible future conditions is a powerful step forward in the expansion of thought and resulting action.

The dimensions create a two-by-two matrix that provides the basis for four archetypal scenarios crafted by Jim Dator and his colleagues that can be applied to many critical uncertainties. Briefly stated, these scenarios are:

1. Discipline: Making forward movement through mature, disciplined choices.
2. Status Quo: Preserving current or idealized values and life-styles
3. Transformation: Finding a breakthrough pathway to a dramatically improved set of conditions
4. Collapse: A breakdown of social, economic and/or political systems

The participants in this workshop, based on their position along these dimensions, discover that they are aligned with one of these archetypal scenarios. They are then asked to elaborate the conditions of life in that scenario, exchanging information and insights that everyone finds useful, surprising and provocative.

The workshop concludes with the search for robust and contingent strategies. The group arrives at its own conclusions regarding strategies that would be effective in all scenarios (robust) and those that work in one or several (contingent).

Art of the Future offers versions of this stimulating workshop to any organization, institution or community that would like to explore the range of perspectives held on environmental issues. Please contact us via email by writing michael@artofthefuture.com or by phone at 617-335-9776.

Sharing Workplace Approaches Across the Atlantic

Art of the Future received a visit from the executive team of the VC Business Company located in the Netherlands. They were on a mission to talk directly with thought-leaders in the field of workplace strategy. On a learning expedition organized by principals Carolien de Heer and Michael Kloprogge, VC closed their offices for several days, boarded a plane to New York and drove to Cornell to talk with Professor Franklin Becker, author of Offices at Work: Uncommon Workspace Strategies that Add Value and Improve Performance (2004) and the classic Workplace by Design: Mapping the High-Performance Workscape (with Fritz Steele, 1995). Although Becker has now turned his attention to healthcare, the VC team garnered insights from their discussion. The next day, they again fit their group of seven into a minivan and set out on a 250 mile journey to Art of the Future, located north of Boston. We were pleased to have this opportunity to share our research, experience and perspectives with this thoughtful, energetic and dedicated group.

The VC Business Company is a consulting organization specializing in the optimization of workplaces for corporate and public organizations dealing with changes induced by market dynamics. VC has a workplace concept which focuses on activity-based working; meaning that the types and number of spaces are tailored to the needs of the user. They start with an investigation of the customer needs, utilizing online surveys, interviews, occupation measurements and technical information about the building. Their workplace concept consists of modular blocks that are combined into a lay-out. VC also takes part in strategic discussions regarding the future of the workspaces, the workplace and the use of real estate. They take qualitative aspects into account along with the quantitative, building a business case for the customer, so that they can make a well-reasoned decision.

VC is seeking to strengthen and further think through this workplace concept. Hence, their learning journey to the U.S.. They report that they found their interview with Art of the Future very inspiring, giving them new views on workplace dynamics. We noted that the Art of the Future approach begins further "upstream," working with clients to integrate their strategic context with their workplace plans in order to engage employees and improve productivity, which translates into better customer relations and business performance. Once the client organization has identified the right mix of places, technologies, policies and processes to optimize their workplace solution, Art of the Futures works with a firm such as VC to translate these insights into design solutions.

The team from VC says “It was surely a good idea to share experiences. We also hope that we have more discussions on the various topics that we reviewed...” Lunching together after the interview, we all gained a better understanding of our respective American and Dutch views on culture, politics and society. Following their intensive interviews with Becker and Art of the Future, they took a day or two for sight-seeing in New York City and were soon hard at work back in the Netherlands.

The Structural Dynamics of Patient Safety

For the last fourteen months, Art of the Future principal, Michael Sales, has been working on a mammoth patient safety initiative at the Massachusetts General Hospital. This program, entitled Engaging Leadership in Patient Safety, is sponsored by the Hospital and by the Donaghue Foundation. It has provided participants with in-depth insight into the structural dynamics underlying hospital systems in relation to patient safety issues. Structural dynamics identifies and connects the driving forces comprising the elements of a system. Intervening one or more of those factors impacts the entire system. Virtually every single feature of a hospital system is related to patient safety, and the importance of this issue is truly enormous. Every year, there are thousands of fatalities and serious injuries that result from preventable lapses in patient safety within hospitals. Unfortunately, hospitals can be very dangerous environments. In addition to the heart-wrenching human costs of patient safety problems, the social costs are very high. Think of skyrocketing malpractice insurance rates and their impact on health care costs.

This research initiative focuses on the role of leadership as a driving force in hospital systems impacting the quality of both clinical and non-clinical group's patient safety performance. The effort has been led by Dr. Sara Singer, a professor of Health Care Management and Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health. Sara's research on the construction of patient safety culture is extensive, involving a national consortium of 135 hospitals prior to her work at MGH. Building on her previous research and the work of others as well, Sara's model for hospital leadership in support of patient safety emphasizes seven interrelated elements:

1. The unquestionable demonstration that hospital leadership really cares about patient safety.
2. Hospital leadership displays a welcoming response to the expression of patient safety concerns by any staff member
3. Leadership acts in a way that encourages the discussion of patient safety
4. Leadership is skilled at facilitating communication and teamwork about patient safety
5. Leadership takes visible action directly related to patient safety
6. Leadership mobilizes the information needed to support patient safety initiatives
7. Leadership seeks input from relevant stakeholders before and after taking actions related to patient safety.

Singer's hypothesis is that hospitals where leaders focus on these seven factors will become learning systems in which everyone will be active protectors and protagonists of patient safety.

The research project has been testing this thinking by running multiple groups through an intensive training program called Healthcare Adventures based at the Center for Medical Simulation, a collaborative effort of Harvard, MIT and a number of other players. Michael has been one of the chief designers and trainers associated with Healtcare Adventures, along with our close colleague, Jay Vogt of Peoplesworth, Sara, and members of the staff of the Center. In this particular version of Healthcare Adventures, Singer will compare and contrast the performance of these groups on a number of measures with those of others who have not been exposed to the training after the passage of one year and the results will be the subject of a variety of planned reports.

Among the components of the training, the leadership groups going through the training are exposed to an intense teambuilding experience in the form of a simulation that challenges them to act as leaders confronting a complicated patient safety situation. They also spend time reflecting on their own practices as patient safety leaders and planning a significant intervention in support of patient safety that will be monitored and measured over a period of time. All of this is accomplished over the course of a full day of training.

Additionally, each participating group gets a two hour follow up session in the form of a structured Booster Shot that looks in on their successes and learnings since the completion of the one day training and reviews their activities related to their intervention project. The preliminary results of these Booster Shots have been quite encouraging. Not only have the teams made significant progress in their specific patient safety activity, but they have also come out of the follow up training session charged up to function together more effectively as a leadership team. It is striking to see how powerful a brief structured follow up can be to a training session. It is so often the case that a training experience is treated as a "one off" activity that might have resulted in learnings for the day but recedes quickly into the drift of life. Periodic reviews of what was learned and what results were accomplished are very much worth the investment. Many times groups will discover they got a lot more out of a training than they thought they did when they look back upon it through the lens of subsequent action.

The impact of this research project is just beginning to be appreciated. It may become one of those rare, high leverage activities occurring at the right time and in the right institutional context to have far reaching effects on the delivery of health care in hospital settings. If so, it will to a great extent due to the focused attention of the project's champion, Sara Singer, and two well-connected sponsors, Prof. Jeff Cooper, Executive Director of the the Center for Medical Simulation, and Dr. Gregg Myers, MGH's SVP for Quality and Patient Safety. The positive connection of project champion and sponsor is one of the important factors contributing to this effort's success.

What could be more relevant to Art of the Future's focus on Life Sustaining Environments than patient safety in hospitals? Stay tuned for more progress reports!

Structural Dynamics Applied to the Credit Crisis

Thank God that the Nobel Prize for Economics has been awarded to Paul Krugman!

Krugman is a professor at Princeton who won the Nobel for his work on global trade patterns, specifically challenging the classical theory of competitive advantage, which asserts that countries should concentrate on producing something that is distinctively particular to a regions, with facts that seem to demonstrate that trade is dominated by a few countries who all produce somewhat different versions of the same thing and do that well.

That is not, however, why his receipt of the award is being celebrated here. It is his work as a columnist for the New York Times that makes him special to us because he's had so much practice writing for the general public that one can actually understand what he has to say without having to earn another graduate degree! (To emphasize the importance of this point, let us note that we are also currently reading "Causal Layered Analysis: poststructuralism as method" in Metafuture.org, which--while it promises to be an important article--has more challenging words in its title than have ever been spoken to our current American President!)

Krugman's writings in The Times has severe critics, mostly because his work frequently reflect the perspective enunciated by the Democratic Party. However, as noted by his many fans like fellow Nobel laureate, Paul Samuelson, Krugman may be opinionated but, he sure has been right recently. He has been beating the drum to take the economic perils that have been unfolding in the US and worldwide over the course of the last year plus much more seriously than mainstream politicians and policy makers were willing to do. Even today Henry Paulson was describing the step of the "government owning a stake" in US banks, the quasi-nationalization that Krugman has been calling for, as "objectionable to most Americans, me included," but it certainly seems to be one of the steps that is needed to keep America, and the world as a totality, working.

Krugman has the ability to reduce complex conditions to their simplest terms, as he did in the column published on the day that he was awarded his Nobel laureate:

"What is the nature of the crisis? The details can be insanely complex, but the basics are fairly simple. The bursting of the housing bubble has led to large losses for anyone who bought assets backed by mortgage payments; these losses have left many financial institutions with too much debt and too little capital to provide the credit the economy needs; troubled financial institutions have tried to meet their debts and increase their capital by selling assets, but this has driven asset prices down, reducing their capital even further. What can be done to stem the crisis?... The natural thing to do, then — and the solution adopted in many previous financial crises — is to deal with the problem of inadequate financial capital by having governments provide financial institutions with more capital in return for a share of ownership. "

Here's our Structural Dynamic way of capturing that description:

This is a troubling time when the policy makers who have been responsible for steering the American economy and, therefore, exerting tremendous influence over the world economy have been profoundly wrong. If Krugman doesn't claim to understand what the precise solutions are, there is certainly no way that we do either. But, we certainly seem to need more transparency and conversation about options and less screaming by people who claim to know something that they do not. It is difficult to reflect and analyze when worry demands action. Yet, wisdom requires us to understand what has happened to us before we rush off with too many fixes.

Me, I hate this way of thinking. I'm losing money every day. Like a bad dream, I want it to be over. But, unfortunately, I guess I get to be one of the grownups in this situation, just like Krugman. This is an era in which we all have a chance to be grownups, people who resist the blandishments and anxieties of the moment to make good choices for the long term.