Cooperation And Coordination Quotes

In a permaculture economy, it's less about competition and more about collaboration, cooperation and coordination.

Cooperation, collaboration and coordination are together more powerful than competition.

At Mayflower-Plymouth, we place a lot of emphasis on cooperation, collaboration and coordination.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion - the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals - the technique of the market place.

Positive social change results mostly from connecting more deeply to the people around you than rising above them, from coordinated rather than solo action. Among the virtues that matter are those traditionally considered feminine rather than masculine, more nerd than jock: listening, respect, patience, negotiation, strategic planning, storytelling. But we like our lone and exceptional heroes, the drama of violence and virtue of muscle, or at least that's what we get, over and over, and from it we don't get much of a picture of how change actually happens and what our role in it might be, or how ordinary people matter. "Unhappy the land that needs heros" is a line of Bertolt Brecht's I've gone to dozens of times, but now I'm more inclined to think, pity the land that thinks it needs a hero, or doesn't know it has lots and what they look like.

Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rahter than anarchy within the comunal body.

My complaint is not against the work that the churches have done, but the work that they could have done through leadership that was based upon the principle of co-ordinated, co-operative effort which would have carried civilization at least a thousand years ahead of where it is today. It is not yet too late for such leadership.

An animal moves as a coordinated whole, as a unit. Subjectively I feel like a unit, not a colony. This is to be expected. Selection has favoured genes that cooperate with others. In the fierce competition for scarce resources, in the relentless struggle to eat other survival machines, and to avoid being eaten, there must have been a premium on central coordination rather than anarchy within the communal body.

[That] the driving force of the evolution of human intelligence was the coordination of multiple cognitive systems to pursue complex, shared goals [is called] the social brain hypothesis. It attributes the increase in intelligence to the increasing size and complexity of hominid social groups. Living in a group confers advantages, as we have seen with hunting, but it also demands certain cognitive abilities. It requires the ability to communicate in sophisticated ways, to understand and incorporate the perspectives of others, and to share common goals. The social brain hypothesis posits that the cognitive demands and adaptive advantages associated with living in a group created a snowball effect: As groups got larger and developed more complex joint behaviors, individuals developed new capabilities to support those behaviors. These new capabilities in turn allowed groups to get even larger and allowed group behavior to become even more complex.

neuroscientists monitored guitarists playing a short melody together, they found that patterns in the guitarists’ brain activity became synchronized. Similarly, studies of choir singers have shown that singing aligns performers’ heart rates. Music seems to create a sense of unity on a physiological level. Scientists call this phenomenon synchrony and have found that it can elicit some surprising behaviors. In studies where people sang or moved in a coordinated way with others, researchers found that subjects were significantly more likely to help out a partner with their workload or sacrifice their own gain for the benefit of the group. And when participants rocked in chairs at the same tempo, they performed better on a cooperative task than those who rocked at different rhythms. Synchrony shifts our focus away from our own needs toward the needs of the group. In large social gatherings, this can give rise to a euphoric feeling of oneness—dubbed “collective effervescence” by French sociologist Émile Durkheim—which elicits a blissful, selfless absorption within a community.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of goods and services leads to a division of labour in which people specialise in what they are good at doing. Second, this in turn leads to gains from trade for each party to a transaction, because everybody is doing what he is most productive at and has the chance to learn, practise and even mechanise his chosen task. Individuals can thus use and improve their own tacit and local knowledge in a way that no expert or ruler could. Third, gains from trade encourage more specialisation, which encourages more trade, in a virtuous circle. The greater the specialisation among producers, the greater is the diversification of consumption: in moving away from self-sufficiency people get to produce fewer things, but to consume more. Fourth, specialisation inevitably incentivises innovation, which is also a collaborative process driven by the exchange and combination of ideas. Indeed, most innovation comes about through the recombination of existing ideas for how to make or organise things. The more people trade and the more they divide labour, the more they are working for each other. The more they work for each other, the higher their living standards. The consequence of the division of labour is an immense web of cooperation among strangers: it turns potential enemies into honorary friends. A woollen coat, worn by a day labourer, was (said Smith) ‘the produce of a great multitude of workmen. The shepherd, the sorter of the wool, the wool-comber or carder, the dyer, the scribbler, the spinner, the weaver, the fuller, the dresser . . .’ In parting with money to buy a coat, the labourer was not reducing his wealth. Gains from trade are mutual; if they were not, people would not voluntarily engage in trade. The more open and free the market, the less opportunity there is for exploitation and predation, because the easier it is for consumers to boycott the predators and for competitors to whittle away their excess profits. In its ideal form, therefore, the free market is a device for creating networks of collaboration among people to raise each other’s living standards, a device for coordinating production and a device for communicating information about needs through the price mechanism. Also a device for encouraging innovation. It is the very opposite of the rampant and selfish individualism that so many churchmen and others seem to think it is. The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

Among DID individuals, the sharing of conscious awareness between alters exists in varying degrees. I have seen cases where there has appeared to be no amnestic barriers between individual alters, where the host and alters appeared to be fully cognizant of each other. On the other hand, I have seen cases where the host was absolutely unaware of any alters despite clear evidence of their presence. In those cases, while the host was not aware of the alters, there were alters with an awareness of the host as well as having some limited awareness of at least a few other alters. So, according to my experience, there is a spectrum of shared consciousness in DID patients. From a therapeutic point of view, while treatment of patients without amnestic barriers differs in some ways from treatment of those with such barriers, the fundamental goal of therapy is the same: to support the healing of the early childhood trauma that gave rise to the dissociation and its attendant alters. Good DID therapy involves promoting co­-consciousness. With co-­consciousness, it is possible to begin teaching the patient’s system the value of cooperation among the alters. Enjoin them to emulate the spirit of a champion football team, with each member utilizing their full potential and working together to achieve a common goal. Returning to the patients that seemed to lack amnestic barriers, it is important to understand that such co-consciousness did not mean that the host and alters were well-­coordinated or living in harmony. If they were all in harmony, there would be no “dis­ease.” There would be little likelihood of a need or even desire for psychiatric intervention. It is when there is conflict between the host and/or among alters that treatment is needed.

So who does run a company these days? Not the shareholders or the board. They largely find out after the fact that things have gone well or badly. Nor are firms cooperatives. Anybody who has tried to run a company by consensus will tell you how disastrously bad an idea that is. Interminable meetings follow hard upon each other’s heels as everybody tries to get everybody else to see his or her point of view. Nothing gets done, and tempers fray. The problem with consensus is that people are not allowed to be different. It’s like trying to drive a car in which the brake and the accelerator have to do similar jobs. No, what really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you’re good at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and we’ll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most companies, and good management means good coordination. The employees specialise and exchange, just like participants in a market, or citizens in a city. The

Tikkun olam. Repairing the world. Healing wastelands. Laboring to make a dying world livable again. This is the vision of the apostles and prophets. This is the prophetic paradigm the people of God are to coordinate their theology and lives with. We are not to be macabre Christians lusting for destruction and rejoicing at the latest rumor of war. It’s high time that a morbid fascination with a supposed unalterable script of God-sanctioned–end-time–hyperviolence be once and for all left behind. A secret (or not-so-secret) longing for the world’s violent destruction is grossly unbecoming to the followers of the Lamb. We are not hoping for Armageddon; we are helping build New Jerusalem. We will not complete it without the return of the King, but we will move in that direction all the same. We refuse to conspire with the beasts of empire who keep the world confined to the death culture of Babylon. There’s always another Armageddon looming on the horizon, threatening to perpetuate the bloody ways of Cain and throw more Abels in a mass grave. But we are not to cooperate with that vision. We are to resist it. We are to anticipate a future created by the Prince of Peace through the very lives we live. We are to work in concert with Jesus Christ

In a typical crash, for example, the weather is poor—not terrible, necessarily, but bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual. In an overwhelming number of crashes, the plane is behind schedule, so the pilots are hurrying. In 52 percent of crashes, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, meaning that he is tired and not thinking sharply. And 44 percent of the time, the two pilots have never flown together before, so they’re not comfortable with each other. Then the errors start—and it’s not just one error. The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors. One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another and another, and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster. These seven errors, furthermore, are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. It’s not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails. The kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication. One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps—and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them. “The whole flight-deck design is intended to be operated by two people, and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other, or both people willing to participate,” says Earl Weener, who was for many years chief engineer for safety at Boeing. “Airplanes are very unforgiving if you don’t do things right. And for a long time it’s been clear that if you have two people operating the airplane cooperatively, you will have a safer operation than if you have a single pilot flying the plane and another person who is simply there to take over if the pilot is incapacitated.

Here is my six step process for how we will first start with ISIS and then build an international force that will fight terrorism and corruption wherever it appears. “First, in dedication to Lieutenant Commander McKay, Operation Crapshoot commenced at six o’clock this morning. I’ve directed a handpicked team currently deployed in Iraq to coordinate a tenfold increase in aerial bombing and close air support. In addition to aerial support, fifteen civilian security companies, including delegations from our international allies, are flying special operations veterans into Iraq. Those forces will be tasked with finding and annihilating ISIS, wherever they walk, eat or sleep. I’ve been told that they can’t wait to get started. “Second, going forward, our military will be a major component in our battle against evil. Militaries need training. I’ve been assured by General McMillan and his staff that there is no better final training test than live combat. So without much more expenditure, we will do two things, train our troops of the future, and wipe out international threats. “Third, I have a message for our allies. If you need us, we will be there. If evil raises its ugly head, we will be with you, arm in arm, fighting for what is right. But that aid comes with a caveat. Our allies must be dedicated to the common global ideals of personal and religious freedom. Any supposed ally who ignores these terms will find themselves without impunity. A criminal is a criminal. A thief is a thief. Decide which side you’re on, because our side carries a big stick. “Fourth, to the religious leaders of the world, especially those of Islam, though we live with differing traditions, we are still one people on this Earth. What one person does always has the possibility of affecting others. If you want to be part of our community, it is time to do your part. Denounce the criminals who besmirch your faith. Tell your followers the true meaning of the Koran. Do not let the money and influence of hypocrites taint your religion or your people. We request that you do this now, respectfully, or face the scrutiny of America and our allies. “Fifth, starting today, an unprecedented coalition of three former American presidents, my predecessor included, will travel around the globe to strengthen our alliances. Much like our brave military leaders, we will lead from the front, go where we are needed. We will go toe to toe with any who would seek to undermine our good intentions, and who trample the freedoms of our citizens. In the coming days you will find out how great our resolve truly is. “Sixth, my staff is in the process of drafting a proposal for the members of the United Nations. The proposal will outline our recommendations for the formation of an international terrorism strike force along with an international tax that will fund ongoing anti-terrorism operations. Only the countries that contribute to this fund will be supported by the strike force. You pay to play.

Put another way, social physics is about how human behavior is driven by the exchange of ideas—how people cooperate to discover, select, and learn strategies and coordinate their actions—rather than how markets are driven by the exchange of money.

A free-market system is one in which economic production and consumption are determined by the free choices of individuals rather than governments, and this process is grounded in private ownership of the means of production. In very simple, practical terms, a free-market system means that people, not the government, own the farms, businesses, and properties in a nation (“the means of production”). “Fundamentally,” says Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, “there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion—the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals—the technique of the market place.”47

Every child at some point in time has been told that they must "behave" and when they do not, they are "misbehaving". What parents really intend when they scold their children for misbehaving is that they must learn how to control their thoughts and actions that conflict with the interests or expectations of others. Self-control is a feature of our developing frontal lobes of the brain and is central to our capacity to interact with others. Without self-control, we would never be able to coordinate and negotiate by suppressing the urges and impulses that could interfere with social cooperation. This capacity for self-control is critical when it comes to being accepted and without it we are likely to be rejected - labelled anti-social because we fall foul of the moral and legal codes that hold our societies together.

The ability of Neolithic peoples in Britain to coordinate the movement of stone into monumental tombs and circles by the fourth millennium BC, quite apart from the cultural and religious motivations to do so, shows that societies in Britain had already evolved into communities capable of sustained cooperative activity. The production and migration of pottery and stone axes is evidence

To cooperate, people must not only trust one another to do so, they also have to coordinate on a social norm that everyone understands. That is why it’s a lot easier to destroy a society than to build it.

Although each instinctual psychobehavioral process requires the concurrent arousal of numerous brain activities (Figure 2.2), our scientific work is greatly simplified by the fact that there are “command processes” at the core of each emotional operating system, as indicated by the ability of localized brain stimulation to activate coherent emotional behavior patterns.9 We can turn on rage, fear, separation distress, and generalized seeking patterns of behavior. Such central coordinating influences can provoke widespread cooperative activities by many brain systems, generating a variety of integrated psychobehavioral and physiological/hormonal response tendencies. These systems can generate internally experienced emotional feelings and promote behavioral flexibility via new learning.

but imagine for a moment that back in 1975, instead of facing a cash crisis Southwest had deep pockets filled with venture capital. Its leaders may have never discovered the innovative solution to quickly turning airplanes based on coordination and cooperation among every job function, from pilot to gate personnel. The company could easily be a footnote in aviation history, like People Express, Skybus, and scores of others. “Not enough” money was certainly the catalyst, the mother of Southwest Airlines’ first reinvention.

Controlling images were never just about the object of study—popular culture memes or characters from movies and television shows—but about the process of reproducing structural inequalities in our everyday lives. Social psychologists study how we acknowledge and reproduce status groups like “man,” “woman,” “black,” “white,” “Asian,” “poor,” “rich,” “novice,” and “expert” in routine interactions. These are statuses of people that we recognize as meaningful categories. When we interact with someone, a few things happen. We size up the person we are engaging with, scanning for any risks to our own social status. You don’t want to be the person who mistakes the company president for the janitor, for example. We also scan others’ perception of us. This is how all kinds of impromptu moments of cooperation make our day go smoothly. It’s the guy who sees you struggling to get something on the bus and coordinates the four people around you to help you get on. Or it’s the three women in a fast food line who all grab for a baby’s bottle just before it hits the floor. We cooperate in micromoments and in longer settings like the waiting room of a doctor’s office. And, when we are cooperating with strangers or near strangers, we are using all kinds of ideas about status to make the interaction work to our benefit.

A college student who wants to file a complaint of sexual assault within the campus disciplinary system informs a university employee such as an assistant dean for student life, or perhaps the Title IX coordinator. That person eventually forwards the complaint to a university disciplinary panel that may be composed of, for example, an associate dean with a master's degree in English literature, a professor of chemistry, and a senior majoring in anthropology. Unlike criminal prosecutors, members of the disciplinary panels do not have access to subpoena powers or to crime labs. They often have no experience in fact-finding, arbitration, conflict resolution, or any other relevant skill set. There is, to put it mildly, little reason to expect such panels to have the experience, expertise, and resources necessary to adjudicate a contested claim of sexual assault. Making matters worse, most campus tribunals ban attorneys for the parties (even in an advisory capacity), rules of procedure and evidence are typically ad hoc, and no one can consult precedents because records of previous disputes are sealed due to privacy considerations. Campus "courts" therefore have an inherently kangoorish nature. Even trained police officers and prosecutors too often mishandle sexual assault cases, so it's not surprising that the amateurs running the show at universities tend to have a poor record. And indeed, some victims' advocacy groups, such as the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), oppose having the government further encourage the campus judicial system to primarily handle campus sexual assault claims, because that means not treating rape as a serious crime. A logical solution, if federal intervention is indeed necessary, would be for OCR [US Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights] to mandate that universities encourage students who complain of sexual assault to report the assault immediately to the police, and that universities develop procedures to cooperate with police investigations. Concerns about victims' well-being when prosecutors decline to pursue a case could also be adjudicated in a real court, as a student could seek a civil protective order against her alleged assailant. OCR could have mandated or encouraged universities to cooperate with those civil proceedings, which in some cases might warrant excluding an alleged assailant from campus.

The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize utility which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have achieved. Here, then, is the place to seek the “principle of understanding”. The “utility function” Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation “altruistic”, but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon; one other in which I have long participated is science fiction fandom, which unlike hackerdom has long explicitly recognized “egoboo” (ego-boosting, or the enhancement of one’s reputation among other fans) as the basic drive behind volunteer activity. Linus, by successfully positioning himself as the gatekeeper of a project in which the development is mostly done by others, and nurturing interest in the project until it became self-sustaining, has shown an acute grasp of Kropotkin’s “principle of shared understanding”. This quasi-economic view of the Linux world enables us to see how that understanding is applied. We may view Linus’s method as a way to create an efficient market in “egoboo” — to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation. With the fetchmail project I have shown (albeit on a smaller scale) that his methods can be duplicated with good results. Perhaps I have even done it a bit more consciously and systematically than he. Many people (especially those who politically distrust free markets) would expect a culture of self-directed egoists to be fragmented, territorial, wasteful, secretive, and hostile. But this expectation is clearly falsified by (to give just one example) the stunning variety, quality, and depth of Linux documentation. It is a hallowed given that programmers hate documenting; how is it, then, that Linux hackers generate so much documentation? Evidently Linux’s free market in egoboo works better to produce virtuous, other-directed behavior than the massively-funded documentation shops of commercial software producers. Both the fetchmail and Linux kernel projects show that by properly rewarding the egos of many other hackers, a strong developer/coordinator can use the Internet to capture the benefits of having lots of co-developers without having a project collapse into a chaotic mess. So to Brooks’s Law I counter-propose the following: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Political divisiveness doesn’t lend itself to having a coordinated, cooperative, collaborative response against a common enemy. There is also this pushback in society against anything authoritative.

Even though we have a split brain with two distinct hemispheres, the corpus callosum ensures that the functions of each hemisphere of the cerebrum are closely interlinked and properly coordinated, so the brain generally functions as one. Still, largely either one hemisphere or the other controls higher brain functions

Management becomes more complex, too, because the staff has to reach across the organization at a level and consistency you never had to before: different departments, groups, and business units. For example, analytics and business intelligence teams never had to have the sheer levels of interaction with IT or engineering. The IT organization never had to explain the data format to the operations team. From both the technical and the management perspectives, teams didn’t have to work together before with as high of a bandwidth connection. There may have been some level of coordination before, but not this high. Other organizations face the complexity of data as a product instead of software or APIs as the product. They’ve never had to promote or evangelize the data available in the organization. With data pipelines, the data teams may not even know or control who has access to the data products. Some teams are very siloed. With small data, they’ve been able to get by. There wasn’t ever the need to reach out, coordinate, or cooperate. Trying to work with these maverick teams can be a challenge unto itself. This is really where management is more complicated.

We tend to underplay the significance of something when it is not significant to our immediate frame of reference. In the mid-1990s, Clifford Stoll said that the internet couldn’t survive in part because of a “wasteland of unfiltered data” where there was no way to search for information easily. Because Stoll was an early super-user, his vision was naturally limited to the Internet v1.0’s significant shortcomings. Robert Metcalfe was similarly biased by his own expertise. He was questioning capacity—How could the internet continue to grow without suffering outages? A lack of coordination and cooperation between the first Internet Service Providers had already led to big network problems. Without any changes in sight, Metcalfe saw outages rather than advancements

Our Mediterranean experiences had reaffirmed the truth that unity, co-ordination, and co-operation are the keys to successful operations. War is waged in three elements but there is no separate land, air, or naval war. Unless all assets in all elements are efficiently combined and co-ordinated against a properly selected, common objective, their maximum potential power cannot be realized. Physical targets may be separated by the breadth of a continent or an ocean, but their destruction must contribute in maximum degree to the furtherance of the combined plan of operation. That is what co-ordination means.

In the first place, Coase specified three crucial conditions for his conclusion to hold. These were: a legal framework establishing liability for actions, presumably supported by governmental authority; perfect information; and zero transaction costs (including organization costs and the costs of making side-payments). It is absolutely clear that none of these conditions is met in world politics. World government does not exist, making property rights and rules of legal liability fragile; information is extremely costly and often held unequally by different actors; transaction costs, including costs of organization and side-payments, are often very high. Thus an inversion of the Coase theorem would seem more appropriate to our subject. In the absence of the conditions that Coase specified, coordination will often be thwarted by dilemmas of collective action.

The medium through which this most often happens is cooperative, including linguistic, communication. Cooperative and linguistic communication are thus of crucial importance in children’s developing skills for jointly attending with others to external situations and to one another’s ideas—and for mentally coordinating within those shared realities. But cooperative and linguistic communication are interesting and important in their own right as well.

To say that the Open Society is one of ever-increasing diversity and complexity is not to say that all complexity is consistent with it. We need to inquire into the conditions that facilitate the sort of bottom-up self-organization we have been analyzing. Social morality is critical in this regard. The key of ultra-social life under conditions of disagreement is reconciliation on shared rules. It has never been the case that humans were able to live together because they simply shared common goals; we are primates, not ant, and so cooperation always needs to be reconciled with sharp differences and conflicts. Socially shared moral rules, it will be recalled, allow humans to develop both the common expectations and practices of accountability on which effective cooperation depends. The moral rules of a complex society serve to dampen its complexity with some firm expectations in the midst of constant adjustments. As Hayek insisted, without shared moral rules the highly diverse reflexive actors of the Open Society could not even begin to effectively coordinate their actions. Shared moral rules allow for significant prediction of what others will do - or, more accurately, not do. Yet, at the same time, while providing expectations on which to base planning, they must also leave individuals with great latitude to adjust their actions to the constant novelty which complexity generates. These two desiderata push in opposite directions: one toward stability of expectations, the other toward freedom to change them. Successfully securing both is the main challenge of the morality of an Open Society.

The price of anarchy measures the gap between cooperation (a centrally designed or coordinated solution) and competition (where each participant is independently trying to maximize the outcome for themselves). 236

Creating a constitution is itself primarily an act of coordination on one of many possible ways of ordering our lives together, not an act of cooperating in an exchange or prisoner’s dilemma.

Kennedy’s influence was cut short by the assassination, but he weighed in with a memo to LBJ. The problem, Kennedy explained on January 16, was that “most federal programs are directed at only a single aspect of the problem. They are sometimes competitive and frequently aimed at only a temporary solution or provide for only a minimum level of subsistence. These programs are always planned for the poor—not with the poor.” Kennedy’s solution was a new cabinet-level committee to coordinate comprehensive, local programs that “[involve] the cooperation of the poor” Kennedy listed six cities where local “coordinating mechanisms” were strong enough that pilot programs might be operational by fall. “In my judgment,” he added prophetically, “the anti-poverty program could actually retard the solution of these problems, unless we use the basic approach outlined above.” If there was such a thing as a “classical” vision of community action, Kennedy’s memo was its epitaph. On February 1, while Kennedy was in East Asia, Johnson appointed Sargent Shriver to head the war on poverty. It was an important signal that the president would be running the program his way, not Bobby’s. It was also a canny personal slap at RFK—who, according to Ted Sorensen, had “seriously consider[ed] heading” the antipoverty effort. Viewed in this light, Johnson’s choice of Shriver was particularly shrewd. Not only was Shriver hardworking and dynamic—a great salesman—but he was a Kennedy in-law, married to Bobby’s sister Eunice. In Kennedy family photos Shriver stood barrel-chested and beaming, a member of the inner circle, every bit as vigorous, handsome, Catholic, and aristocratic as the rest. By placing Shriver at the helm of the war on poverty, Johnson demonstrated his fealty to the dead president. But LBJ and Bobby both understood that Shriver was very much his own man. After the assassination Shriver signaled his independence from the Kennedys by slipping the new president a note card delineating “What Bobby Thinks.” In 1964, Shriver’s status as a quasi-Kennedy made him Bobby’s rival for the vice presidency, but even before then their relationship was hardly fraternal. Within the Kennedy family Shriver was gently mocked. His liberalism on civil rights earned him the monikers “Boy Scout,” “house Communist,” and “too-liberal in-law.” Bobby’s unease was returned in kind. “Believe me,” RFK’s Senate aide Adam Walinsky observed, “Sarge was no close pal brother-in-law and he wasn’t giving Robert Kennedy any extra breaks.” If Shriver’s loyalty was divided, it was split between Johnson and himself, not Johnson and Kennedy.

building a network—connecting people or institutions in specific ways for specific purposes—is a far better starting point than a strategy of deterrence, cooperation, or coordination with another government.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion—the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals—the technique of the market place. The possibility of co-ordination through voluntary co-operation rests on the elementary—yet frequently denied—proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the transaction is bi-laterally voluntary and informed. Exchange can therefore bring about co-ordination without coercion. A working model of a society organized through voluntary exchange is a free private enterprise exchange economy—what we have been calling competitive capitalism. In its simplest form, such a society consists of a number of independent households—a collection of Robinson Crusoes, as it were. Each household uses the resources it controls to produce goods and services that it exchanges for goods and services produced by other households, on terms mutually acceptable to the two parties to the bargain. It is thereby enabled to satisfy its wants indirectly by producing goods and services for others, rather than directly by producing goods for its own immediate use. The incentive for adopting this indirect route is, of course, the increased product made possible by division of labor and specialization of function. Since the household always has the alternative of producing directly for itself, it need not enter into any exchange unless it benefits from it. Hence, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit from it. Co-operation is thereby achieved without coercion. Specialization of function and division of labor would not go far if the ultimate productive unit were the household. In a modern society, we have gone much farther. We have introduced enterprises which are intermediaries between individuals in their capacities as suppliers of service and as purchasers of goods. And similarly, specialization of function and division of labor could not go very far if we had to continue to rely on the barter of product for product. In consequence, money has been introduced as a means of facilitating exchange, and

Mandelbrot's insights are reminiscent of the approach taken by the ancient formulators of the Yijing, the Chinese classic Book of Changes, who seem to be the first to arrive at an understanding of interlocking patterns of the human and natural worlds. Their insight was to imagine "a system of coordinates, a tabulation framework, a stratified matrix in which everything had its position, connected by the 'proper channels' with everything else." Chinese philosophers during the second and third centuries would also maintain that the seamless dimensionality in nature is the definitive characteristic of Dao-the way the world is formed and the way it behaves: "Way-making (dao) is the flowing together of all things (wanwu)," and "It is inherent in things that they are ties to each other, that one kind calls up another." Dao, or "way," is in many ways just life itself, the flowing of life, or even the changing world itself. "The flowing together of all things" in the quote above is wanwu, the totality of all that is happening in the world.

[That] the driving force of the evolution of human intelligence was the coordination of multiple cognitive systems to pursue complex, shared goal [is called] the social brain hypothesis. It attributes the increase in intelligence to the increasing size and complexity of hominid social groups. Living in a group confers advantages, as we have seen with hunting, but it also demands certain cognitive abilities. It requires the ability to communicate in sophisticated ways, to understand and incorporate the perspectives of others, and to share common goals. The social brain hypothesis posits that the cognitive demands and adaptive advantages associated with living in a group created a snowball effect: As groups got larger and developed more complex joint behaviors, individuals developed new capabilities to support those behaviors. These new capabilities in turn allowed groups to get even larger and allowed group behavior to become even more complex.

A Variation of Dr. Ayres’s “Four Levels of Sensory Integration” By the time a child is ready for preschool, the blocks for complex skill development should be in place. What are these blocks? • Ability to modulate touch sensations through the skin, especially unexpected, light touch, and to discriminate among the physical properties of objects by touching them (tactile sense), • Ability to adjust one’s body to changes in gravity, and to feel comfortable moving through space (vestibular sense), • Ability to be aware of one’s body parts (proprioceptive sense), • Ability to use the two sides of the body in a cooperative manner (bilateral coordination), and • Ability to interact successfully with the physical environment; to plan, organize, and carry out a sequence of unfamiliar actions; to do what one needs and wants to do (praxis).

The smooth coordination of cooperative labor requires managers to “command in the name of capitalists” Here we find a form of wage labor, but of a special kind

Bilateral (from the Latin for “both sides”) coordination means that we can use both sides of the body to cooperate as a team. A well-regulated vestibular system helps us to integrate sensory messages from both sides of our body. By the age of three or four, a child should be crossing the midline. For the child who avoids crossing the midline, coordinating both body sides may be difficult. When she paints at an easel, she may switch the brush from one hand to the other at the midway point separating her right and left sides. She may appear not to have established a hand preference, sometimes using her left and sometimes her right to eat, draw, write, or throw. It may also be hard to survey a scene or to track a moving object visually without stopping at the midline to blink and refocus. The child with poor bilateral coordination may have trouble using both feet together to jump from a ledge, or both hands together to catch a ball or play clapping games. She may have difficulty coordinating her hands to hold a paper while she cuts, or to stabilize the paper with one hand while she writes with the other. Poor bilateral coordination, a sensory-based motor disorder, is often misinterpreted as a learning disability such as dyslexia. In fact, this difficulty can lead to learning or behavior problems, but it does not ordinarily mean that a child is lacking in intelligence or academic ability.

All of this coordinating with sites all over the world might sound time-consuming, and it can be, but no one would ever suggest changing it. With so many space agencies cooperating, it’s important that everyone knows what everyone else is doing. Plans can change quickly, and a misunderstanding could be costly, or deadly. We do this whole circuit of control centers both morning and evening, five days a week.

The importance and value of order will grow with the variety of the elements, while greater order in turn enhances the value of variety, and thus the order of human cooperation becomes indefinitely extensible. If things were otherwise, if for example all men were alike and could not make themselves different from one another, there would be little point in division of labour (except perhaps among people in different localities), little advantage from coordinating efforts, and little prospect of creating order of any power or magnitude. Thus individuals had to become different before they could be free to combine into complex structures of cooperation. Moreover, they had to combine into entities of a distinct character: not merely a sum but a structure in some manner analogous to, and in some important respects differing from, an organism.

Have you adequately partitioned (modularized) the big problems on which you are working into smaller, more tractable pieces? Here’s a test: every time you want to develop or try something new, can it be done quickly, or do you spend so much time trying to schedule discussions and solicit cooperation and approvals, that nothing ever actually gets done? If you answered the latter, you have something that needs to be broken into smaller pieces so you’re not crushed by the burden of coordination costs.

Good stories trigger effort, cooperation, and coordination in modern corporations, too.