The Global SoS Network

Streamlining Collective Intelligence Towards Sustainable Development [Beta version]  






Are They Human-Behaviour Challenges?

...or Are They Structural Problems?  

      For a long time, the civil, human rights and international development communities have been focusing on a multitude of grievances and intractable situations that in most countries impede the improvement of wellbeing and the sustainable growth of labour productivity. However, most of the money spent on the improvement of civil and human rights, on the reduction of conflict and alleviation of poverty, and on the protection of the environment appears to be wasted because there has been no agreement on what is the best thing to do.


Examples of the precarious state of affairs abound both in developed and underdeveloped countries. Whilst issues like discrimination, criminality, terrorism, wage stagnation and climate change are mainstays of the media in industrialized nations, UNICEF reports that every day around 20,000 children die on account of poverty, and the World Health Organization indicates that 2.5 billion people lack basic sanitation facilities.

Donor countries also illustrate the difficulty of the situation by having funneled US$ 142.6 billion in 2016 through Official Development Assistance (ODA), for what management scientists could call a decades-long firefighting mission in their quest to eliminate global poverty.

Perhaps because people favour convenience, or maybe as a result of frustration out of feelings of impotence, or of lack of trust towards institutions, they may at times manage social stress by showing concern for those or other difficulties, grievances and challenges in emotional ways. But lasting conditions like subconscious frustration have ways of inducing chronic stress, notably when it originates from lack of control over unresolved current issues affecting one's daily life.

Stress plays a usefull role when accumulated, and then released. It pushes and pulls people towards getting things done. But if stress accumulates over time without release, it becomes chronic and triggers what Psychology Today magazine calls Public Health Enemy No. 1: the release of excess cortisol into the bloodstream. In turn, pumped-up chronic stress may go on a subtle but heinous warpath either by killing 7 persons every 2 seconds , or perhaps by embedding dysfunctional and polarizing thoughts that motivate humans to become alienated or impulsive, tribal, sectarian or factional, or to express other adrenaline-driven "fight or flight" behaviour.

Methods may range from expressions of anxiety, despondency or distress to feuds, public disputes or civic unrest, mass rumours or hatemongering, discrimination, criminality, organized protest or riots to protracted insurgencies, looting, displacement of refugees, mass economic migration, diasporas, ethnic cleansing, vendettas, mass murder, pogroms, guerrilla or open strife, or in kind.

Granted that most people cope by trying to ignore unresolved civic issues, as they withdraw into their family and work lives those unresolved issues keep taking their toll. Some people do rise above the issues and channel those same emotions into support and action for the common good. And there are those that have the uncanny ability to channel the same public trends for their personal benefit, at the expense of their own society.


Too often human beings try to resolve their differences or disagreements by blowing themselves up, or by causing bodily harm to others either informally, or very formally through national agencies whose sole purpose is standing ready for unleashing death and destruction by way of national protection. In a May 2016 lecture at the Oxford Martin School, The Hon. Baroness Valerie Amos indicated that the economic cost of conflict and violence was US$ 14.3 trillion in 2014, constituting 13.4% of the global economy for that year.

Mural of War (1896), by Mural artist Gari Melchers (1862–1932). Photographed in 2007 by Carol Highsmith (1946–), who explicitly placed the photograph in the public domain.

The first proposition that arises from such a scenario indicates that there must be a global disconnect, or a giant invisible barrier or logjam blocking citizens from using a friendlier and more practical, convenient and effective way to both express and realize their expectations on how civic life should be like.

The proposition can arise from proverbial situations where cultural imperatives may create official indifference or civic restrictions or instances of oppression, or when political priorities create corruption, or where citizen requests or petitions may fall on deaf ears, or are perhaps appeased with empty promises on the part of elected public officials.

The reply is yes. There certainly seems to be a worldwide sense of powerlessness, disillusionment and of distrust in the capacity of society to satisfy the expectations of individual citizens. It is a disconnect in the form of an overbearing global constraint. Much of the time the constraint also appears to complicate social stress by inhibiting the forementioned fight-or-flight release of intractable emotional tension and frustration, or seems to create emotional and/or social deprivation -even hopelessness- while citizens, as Adam Smith would have said, strive to improve themselves and their lot in their daily lives.

For instance, Robert Wright´s August 28, 1995 TIME article The Evolution of Despair  points out how up to that time, rates of depression had been doubling every 10 years in some developed nations, and that suicide was the third most common cause of death among young adults in North America, after car wrecks and homicides. In May 2013, the BBC published a qualitative vs. quantitative indicator of sorts. It reported that since 2009, suicide has claimed more Americans than land-wheeled-vehicle crashes.

The constraint also seems to carry over its effect on to the factory floor, resulting in a labor-management gap of trust, with the consequent sluggish growth in productivity and the high cost of quality underlined by stagnant wages.


Yet, in addition to the spectre of billions of humans either not having enough to eat, or not having proper living accommodations or healthcare, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) points out that human activities are rapidly damaging the ecosphere to the no-return point, just as the NASA Global Climate Change website informs that Antarctica is suffering an irreversible meltdown.


The Engineering of Systematic Resolution to Global Issues

Typically, the various fields of the engineering sciences deal with the design and improvement of objects, machines and systems like locomotives, roads, bridges, the software and hardware of computers of all types, rockets, tanks, bombs, machine guns, land mines, EKG machines, heart valves, prosthetic arteries and limbs, satellites, automobiles, airplanes, buildings, chemical processes for making from medicines to shampoos to petrol, also roller coasters, and electrical generation and distribution systems.

The list goes on with telephone systems and telephones, industrial mass production, factory-farming and food-mass production systems, the machines that make the books people read and the clothes they wear, etc. Just about every mechanism, human-designed process or structure is designed or improved upon by engineers.

On the other hand, socioeconomic issues have usually been dealt with by professionals of the social and economic sciences, but industrial engineering, which has popularly been identified with the mass-production line, concerns itself with the human-machine or human-operating system interface. Human-factors engineering or ergonomics is one of the industrial engineering techniques used for designing or improving stress-creating and stress-release methods the individual worker or the work group must carry out in order to operate and control machinery, production equipment, and/or the overall production system, in an efficient manner.

Taking into account the famous conclusions Elton Mayo came to at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company between 1924 and 1927, industrial engineers consider the work group a social group. Mayo´s findings have helped industrial engineering practitioners hone the macroergonomic functions work groups, and whole organizations, must satisfy while operating complex sociotechnical systems such as an assembly line or a factory, a nuclear submarine, a cruise ship or an airliner, a supermarket-counter system, a transportation system or a call centre, etc.

In the case of sustainability, industrial engineering contends with the methods large social groups, such as whole societies, must carry out in order to influence the machinery of their own governments -MoG, as it were, in a macroergonomically effective manner. It is at this point that industrial and systems engineering practitioners unfold their Global CASoS Engineering capabilities in order to handle the optimization of complex socio-technical processes. So it is within the scope of the discipline to help raise global productivity as it identifies the factors and variables human society must modify in order to optimize its activities vis-â-vis the needs of the ecosphere as a closed ecological system.

As a starting point, it might be useful to look at probably one of the most visible characteristics of the global condition at the beginning of the 21st. Century: shantytowns. Extrapolating from the actual situation in the South American nation of Venezuela, every day humans build around fifty thousand shanties. In this UN Habitat Video, Professor Edgar Pieterse suggests the name "slum urbanism" for the phenomenon...


So, Are Underdevelopment and Sustainability Essentially Engineering Problems?

By employing its repertoire of industrial engineering skills to carry out operations research in the domain of industrial underdevelopment, The Global SoS Network has determined that most, if not all, of the major social, economical and environmental difficulties and challenges facing human society at the beginning of the 21st. Century are a direct or indirect result of one and the same global constraint . The constraint could be classified as technological because it impedes individuals from using information about stress-creating cognitive, emotional or other types of conflict, and from initiating the communication processes required for the resolution of such constituent conflict, and for the release of its coexistent stress.

More specifically, the information revolution makes knowledge about all types of social, economic and environmental challenges readily available to citizens. As humans live their daily lives, they gather information and converse and debate with their families, peers and coworkers regarding civic challenges, and of the perceived incapacity of government to address such issues.

Citizens own the information that can bring about the ending of alienation, privation, poverty and inequality, injustice, corruption, racism, criminality of all types, of simmering radicalism, anti-business sentiment and corporate greed, terrorism, civic turmoil, open conflict and international aggression, and of environmental degradation. But it looks like the pervasive sense of discontent Robert Wright writes about emerges, the world over, because humans are unaware of how to put all that  collective brainpower to effective use -hence the technological constraint.
Consequently, other key questions emerge from this scenario...

What are humans to do with that information?

Whom do they communicate it to? 

How can human society exploit its major technological constraint?



Best Practice: Local Tools for Global Transcendence

The Global SoS Network has found that sustainable growth of wellbeing and productivity is a sociotechnical issue best approached by first looking at the complexities and dynamics of human society on one side, and then -on the other side, analyzing how human society employs democracy, which is the sociotechnical system human society has created in order to govern itself.

The network has also found that sustainability ultimately depends upon best practice; the application of the right techniques through the technological interface that some sectors, that is, some residents of successful countries use nowadays for exercising their democratic power. The correct use of this technological interface needs to be optimized, scaled up and then systematized globally so that human society can streamline its collective intelligence towards sustainable development.

The only countries in which citizens employ best practice today are developed countries, precisely one of the key factors that makes them rich and developed. Once that sociotechnical platform becomes scaled up to the rest of the globe, such communication processes will allow the synergistic interaction between the constituent and legislative functions of the state, or in SoS parlance, Legislative System of Systems. Of course, rich countries are more advanced in this aspect than poor countries.

In practical terms, constituent-legislator communication, or the lack of it, is an issue that can create situations akin to the virtual representation scenario that brought about revolutionary acrimony two centuries ago between the British Empire and its American colonies. It´s also a matter of correcting the situation of representation without constituent-legislator communication in the Global South, and of some but not enough -and not systematic enough, communication between constituents and their legislators in developed countries.

Because constituents own the decisions made by their legislators, they should all exact effective ownership by eliminating their  technological constraint. Each constituent can do this by carrying out the sociotechnical task of articulating the conflict-relevant information he or she owns, and communicating it to the relevant legislator through the teledemocratic infrastructure.



Under those circumstances, postal services are inadequate for improving tax revenues that would help in the process of financing basic public services, the upgrading of the nowadays crumbling public infrastructure in the Global South, including the construction of affordable housing.


          • Win-Win Resolution of Constituent and Emergent Conflict
          • Unravelling of Industrial Underdevelopment
          • Eradication of Global Poverty



An Engineering Design Process for Meeting the SDGs On Time, Under Budget

Further operations research The Global SoS Network has carried out indicates that the streamlining of collective intelligence, that is, systematic constituent-legislator communication, is Best Democratic Practice (BDP) because it helps create a solid sociotechnical platform for meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

The sociotechnical platform is solid because it ensures broad public participation in decision making. By promoting strong institutions, BDP is intrinsically embedded within SDG 16. Thus it is to great avail that Inter-Parliamentary Union Secretary-General, Martin Chungong, said "Goal 16 is the powerhouse from which all other action will follow".

Theory of Change (strategy) the Global SoS Network is developing, aligns the projected results of the teledemocratic processes that will emerge around the world, with appropiate entry-level goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. By pursuing the strategy, practically any underdeveloped or developed nation can leverage these short-term results towards meeting all of the other SDGs at a fraction of the projected cost, on time or before the 2030 deadline. Happily, the cost will be so low there will be no need to meet SDG Target 17.2, which calls for developed countries to commit a minimum of 0.7 % of their GNP for Official Development Assistance.

On the other hand, temperature records were broken in the years 2014, 2015 and 2016. Moreover, Dr. James Hansen, who is a Columbia University Adjunt Professor, and was NASA's top climate scientist, has stated that a tipping point was reached in April 2008. And although Dr. Hansen has managed to somehow modify his worrisome landmark, the jury is still out as to whether the unprecedented continuous increase of global temperature constitutes the first manifestation of catastrophic climate change, or just a fluke.

Either way, it could be said that were BDP not to be given priority, it is highly likely that the SDGs will run the same luck as the Millennium Development Goals, which offered less than stellar results. The eventual outcome could be the end of the capacity of the ecosphere to sustain human civilization as we know it.

MIT Professor Thomas Malone does state that in the end, we will probably make choices that save the Earth. This means that focusing the collective intelligence towards the meeting of habitat SDGs 13 and 14, should be given the highest priority. And considering that the UN weather agency found 2016 to be the hottest year ever, the Affordable and Clean Energy-seeking SDG 7 should pioneer the way towards sustainability.


The Human Factor of Democracy

The conceptual framework contained in this website helps visualize that if the Machinery of Government is to deliver satisfactory results, the voting-age national population should know how to 'operate' it correctly, something that brings importance to know-what, know-why and know-who. Thus macroergonomically speaking, citizens should acquire tacit and explicit knowledge of the task at hand, as they meet the stress-releasing operational needs of the mechanisms that make the overall democratic system work in their behalf.

Consequently,  teledemocratic collective-intelligence techniques are preludes to complex-adaptive sociotechnical processes, through which citizens can exact accountable and transparent governance by first acting upon their permanent role as stakeholders, and then interacting with the legislative function of their Legislative System of Systems. And in spite of the scarily complicated, hi-tech and expensive-sounding names, the streamlining of collective intelligence is refreshingly simple, very convenient, and surprisingly economic.


In order to streamline the collective intelligence and meet the SDGs in a cost effective way and on time, CASoS methods engineering prescribes that constituents around the globe must use at least four tools to initiate a simple three-step communication method. The tools are a pen, a sheet of paper, an envelope, and a postage stamp. The method consists of writing periodic letters to the pertinent legislators, having them delivered, and obtaining feedback through the subsequent replies.

Best Democratic Practice represents a global paradigm shift that is usually promoted under 'Write to Your Legislator' and 'Write to Your MP' motifs. By opening a conduit through which each citizen can channel civic stress, the streamlining of collective intelligence creates teledemocratic communication processes that, with the proper arrangements, allow all adult cognizant -literate or illiterate- residents of a country or nation to influence, and ultimately establish, the outcome of public policy for the good of all stakeholders, and of the environment.

Once constituents have established such processes, then the same constituents, now in their role as workers, will feel more empowered on the job, at work. This will translate in more meaningful tasks thus more horizontal organizations accompanied by more quality and productivity. From then on, increased trust in the objectives of management will cause the emergence of unity of purpose at work, the resulting boost in quality and productivity will also boost wages and eventually, the global standard of living.



...gets smaller each time a postal worker delivers a formal reply from a legislator to a constituent.


Image: © Trinidad & Tobago Post




This would take the form of more efficient machinery and methods that will help make small gains in labor productivity and wellbeing. The complex-adaptive result is that improved government performance begets the emergence of improved quality of life as the standard of living improves, meaning that everyone involved, and the environment, win. 





Using either type of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), postal services or the Internet, when social groups such as constituents use teledemocratic methods, then the collective intelligence has the capacity to regulate the activities of the Public Sector System in benefit of the common good, and of the environment, while steadily increasing the level of productivity.


Accountability and Virtual Democracies






Streamlining for the Future

Thus for human sustainability, SoS Engineering (CASoS Engineering) identifies teledemocratic activities, such as those ones being researched at the International Teledemocracy Centre as best democratic practice. Dealing with legislative Systems of Systems themselves is bound to help donor nations because in addition to bringing much lower costs to development endeavours, the effectiveness of constituent-legislator communication will create giant markets that did not exist before. From that perspective, CASoS Engineering can predict, as the Global Marshall Plan puts it, a global economic miracle.

And the Business Sustainable Development Commission agrees that sustainability makes good business sense. In its website, the BSDC says that sustainability can unlock at least US$12 trillion in New Market Value, while repairing the economic system.

The savings resulting from less conflict and violence will double that amount, and there are more savings available from less ODA, so it all looks like a good return for motivating workers to contact their legislators, and for rolling out adequate postal services wherever needed.



Image: © World Business Council for Sustainable Development

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