Upstream and Growth

Ah, the good old days! Life used to be simple. Now everything seems more complicated.

 

2020 has been an awakening to the interlocking intricacies of systems. Climate Change; Systemic Racism. Trade Wars. and Global Supply Chains. Pandemics. None of these are new. But they’ve become salient this year, especially here in the U.S., with raging fires on the West Coast, George Floyd, worldwide economic ping-pong, and of course Covid-19. What seemed small has blown up into gargantuan proportions. A single falling domino has triggered the dropping of hundreds, thousands, millions more.

 

We’ve become more aware of how tightly things are interconnected. The whole is not just the sum of its parts. A complicated system might be reducible to the sum of its parts. A complex system, on the other hand, cannot be so simply reduced. New unforeseen, dynamic, non-linear, interactions arise in complex systems. If you’re in it, and we’re all embedded in various overlapping systems, it can be very difficult to extricate yourself. You might not want to. Like it or not, we’re all stuck in systems, especially technological ones.

 

In higher education, where the liberal arts have come under assault, one response has been to argue that the deep and wide (or T-shaped) liberal arts curriculum best prepares students for an increasingly complex world. Whether or not that’s true is a subject full of punditry. But there is a recognition that complexity has increased over time, and that we should learn how to deal with it. But how do you approach complex systemic problems? How will you solve them? That’s where the money is now that the low-hanging fruit has been picked clean.

 

Well, perhaps not all the low-hanging fruit. There’s still room for business-world-type self-help books to sell well. I have no doubt that Dan Heath’s Upstream, subtitled “the quest to solve problems before they happen”, will sell well in 2020 and perhaps for a few years hence. Here are some excerpts from the book jacket: “So often in life, we get stuck in a cycle of responses. We put out fires. We deal with emergencies. We stay downstream, handling one problem after another, but we never make our way upstream to fix the systems that caused the problems… Upstream delivers practical solutions for preventing problems rather than reacting to them… drawing on insights from hundreds of interviews with unconventional problem solvers.”

 

If you’ve read a book by the Heath brothers, you know it will be easy to read, with a clear narrative, memorable examples, and a distillation of core principles into practical and easy-to-remember self-help steps. (They use the principles in their first book Made to Stick in an effective tried-and-true formula.) Upstream has an iconic one-page summary you can print out and stick by your desk, so you can recognize barriers and ask yourself the right questions while moving upstream to solve a problem you or your organization might be facing. I suspect most readers will enjoy reading the book, feel like they have learned something, and possibly feel motivated to go make a difference in their world.

 

And yes, even an ivory tower academic like me who is suspicious of business fads and the consulting world, enjoyed reading the book. It’s light, quick, breezy, and feel-good. The part that resonated with me the most (as a former administrator solving thorny complex problems) was Heath’s articulating why people prefer to be downstream. It’s not just that the downstream problem seems simpler at first glance, if you don’t worry about what’s happening upstream, but there’s a feeling of accomplishment one gets from fire-fighting. You can easily list the problems you’ve solved. You can make simple elevator-pitch stories out of them. They’re visible to others, and therefore kudos to you for solving the problem.

 

On the other hand, upstream problems are by nature more complex and less visible. My motto as an administrator was that if folks downstream didn’t notice what I was doing, then I was doing my job well. Having been thrust into a whole range of firefights (visible problems where people are clamoring for a solution), my goal has been to get ahead of such situations. Prevention rather than cure. You don’t get kudos for prevention, especially if hardly anyone noticed a potential problem in the first place. Your boss might not even think there was one, and why are you wasting your time on it when there are so many other fires to fight. Heath’s book recognizes and articulates this challenge, and I hope bosses who read this will recognize their employees who work hard on less visible, but I would argue, more important systemic issues.

 

The trouble, though, with slick self-help books containing feel-good anecdotal stories, is that they turn a complex problem into a complicated problem. (If you’ve forgotten the difference, go back up several paragraphs.) There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but you should recognize this when it happens. Which is All The Time. My research is in complex chemical systems; and as a professor of chemistry who’s thought carefully about pedagogy, it’s a subject that’s not simple. Chemistry is inherently both complicated and complex. What do we do? We simplify things so they are a little easier to digest. We remove or ignore the complexity, and then reduce the complicated to the simple. That’s how we tell our chemistry stories, be it in the classroom or in a research seminar.

 

So you might read a memorable anecdote from Upstream, use the principle for a plan-of-attack and apply it to a problem at hand. It might work. It might partially work. It might partially fail. It might fail completely. You might be puzzled by this. But that’s the nature of complex systems, and until you really delve into its complexity (and hopefully don’t feel overwhelmed), you may not actually understand the intricacies of the system. That doesn’t mean you should stop and give up. Heath provides some examples of why progress might be very slow indeed. But his anecdotal stories will only highlight one or two aspects of a problem, reduced in complexity ahead of time.

 

Where does complexity arise? It’s inherent in growth of systems. This is the broad topic of Vaclav Smil’s tome, Growth. It’s over 500 pages of dense reading accompanied by many graphs. There are a hundred pages of footnotes and references. It’s the opposite of Upstream. Smil examines growth in a hierarchy of contexts, from microscopic bacteria to global interconnected human society. They’re all complex systems. But their growth, in both size and complexity, is fueled by how well they can capture Energy. As a chemist who studies the origin-of-life, I’d say that the transition from simple to complex is driven by energy transduction. There should be a strong correlation between energy cycling and growth, and one sees this across many systemic examples in Growth.

 

The challenge is that Energy is difficult to define. A very slippery concept it is. As Feynman said, you might not be able to figure out what it is exactly, but it can be quantified. You can count and keep track of energy, even as it shapeshifts elusively from one form to another. Smil uses a variety of proxies to track energy. Once again this helps reduce the complexity of the system, so as to allow the reader a fleeting glimpse at one or two aspects of the complex system. But Smil is careful when it comes to drawing conclusions or elucidating principles. This may infuriate the reader of Growth, but I think it’s because Smil recognizes the thorns of complex systems.

 

There’s a lot to learn from Growth. It’s a magisterial work that spans biology, history, philosophy, sociology, statistics, and technology. I appreciated the early discussion of how to interpret growth curves, how such curves are fitted, and how they are used or misused in predicting the future. The next time I teach P-Chem 2, I’ll be paying more attention to the various curve fitting procedures that we employ. I also appreciated the intertwining of history and technology related to energy use and terraforming of our planet, which was data-driven and without over-simplifying the issues. Smil does not provide any simple solutions to climate change and mankind’s continued energy-guzzling ways. He also discusses why upcoming pandemics might be global; Growth was published last year before the world knew of Covid-19, but he’s remarkably prescient.

 

This morning I attended a webinar on “Systems Thinking in Chemical Education” sponsored by the American Chemical Society. It was about preparing all our students, to see chemistry in a systemic context – an aid to learning the material, but maybe more importantly because we are all citizens of a global interconnected world-system. I think the words system and systemic are going to be used with increasing frequency thanks to 2020. Life used to be simple. Now everything is complex.