Jack Harich's Bio
Hi there! Here's my CV. Below is my story. I'd love to hear yours sometime.
The short story is I'm a systems engineer and business consultant who's now a sustainability researcher. Here's the long story:
In 2001, after a career in small business management and consulting, I decided to say goodbye to solving business problems and hello to solving the most important problem in the world: sustainability. As a typical "call me in to fix your big problem" business consultant, I'd been fooling myself into thinking all those terribly important life-or-death business problems really were important.
They are not, compared to the health of the only biosphere we have.
That is the exact thought upon which I awoke. After that it was all about making up for lost time.
Once I committed, from the moment I began work on the sustainability problem full time there was an odd feeling of unease, of imbalance. Something was wrong but exactly what was not obvious. So with some apprehension I studied what people had been doing to solve the problem, book after book, article after article, conversation after conversation, organization after organization. It was a long lonely anxious slog, because I had no idea what lay beneath the surface and was working alone to avoid the groupthink trap.
Finally a theory of what was wrong began to emerge.
That's about when inside my head I drew a Nuts-O-Meter so I wouldn't go nuts myself.
The foreboding sense of unease, almost a black gloom, came from the way activists were so sure they were taking the right approach to solving the problem, BUT IT WAS NOT WORKING! They would try to push a solution through. It would mostly fail, like the way the US Senate voted 95 to zero in 1999 against signing the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Then they would change something in the solution and try it again. It would fail too. From my point of view as a fresh outsider, five successive generations of solutions had now failed. ENVIRONMENTALISTS WERE TRYING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AND EXPECTING DIFFERENT RESULTS.
That's what was wrong. It was also Einstein's fabled (but misattributed) definition of insanity. On the Nuts-O-Meter, the world as a whole was perilously close to going insane. This is a bit of a problem, because political insanity equals environmental disaster!
But environmental scholars, grassroot activists, and politicians like Al Gore are not insane. They are as dedicated and rational as you and me. They consistently believed that success was just around the corner, if only they could get people to believe their solutions must be adopted now.
But it wasn't working. So what was going wrong?
About this time The Death of Environmentalism memo came out in 2004. It got right to the point. In clear language page 6 said:
Over the last 15 years environmental foundations and organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into combating global warming.
We have strikingly little to show for it.
From the battles over higher fuel efficiency for cars and trucks to the attempts to reduce carbon emissions through international treaties, environmental groups repeatedly have tried and failed to win national legislation that would reduce the threat of global warming. As a result, people in the environmental movement today find themselves politically less powerful than we were one and a half decades ago.
Yet in lengthy conversations, the vast majority of leaders from the largest environmental organizations and foundations in the country insisted to us that we are on the right track.
The authors, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, were seeing the same thing I was seeing: environmentalism is failing but it has its head in the sand. It insists all is well. We are doing the right thing.
Shellenberger and Nordhaus offered their blockbuster conclusion on page 10:
We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.
There it was, in black and white. Environmentalism has failed. Environmentalism in its present form must die so that something new can take its place.
What will that be?
The search for an answer just about drove me nuts. To avoid falling into the same ruts and groupthink as others, I was working alone in deliberate isolation. It was a lonely struggle. Eventually, out of that struggle was born this insight:
Environmentalism is failing because it's taking the wrong problem solving approach.
Science was not science until it invented and adopted the Scientific Method. Business could not become business as we know it today until it invented and adopted double entry accounting, a bookkeeping system for calculating profits and solving profitability problems. Likewise, environmentalism will not become environmentalism until it invents and adopts a problem solving process that can crack the sustainability problem.
Now I had a strategy. By good fortune in my previous lifetime (before environmentalism) I was a business consultant. One of my specialities was process design and improvement. Plus I'm a systems engineer from Georgia Tech. So I designed a process from scratch to solve difficult social problems, especially sustainability. This became the System Improvement Process. It's what drives all the work at Thwink.org.
The heart and soul of the System Improvement Process is root cause analysis. That's because of this one all important principle:
The only way to solve a difficult problem
is to resolve its root causes.
This leads to another insight:
The exact reason environmentalism is failing is because its solutions do not resolve root causes.
Instead, they resolve intermediate causes. For example, more renewable energy or a carbon tax fixes the problem of too much fossil fuel burning. But what's the deeper cause of industrial growth? And what's the cause of the very strong pushback from industry lobbyists to solving the climate change problem? In developed nations, why is consumption per person growing far beyond what's actually needed for basic quality of life?
Questions like these reveal there are deeper causes at play. If we start at the symptoms of the problem and trace the causal chain down, down, down, we will find the root causes.
So I concluded that environmentalism in its present form was myopically fixated on resolving intermediate causes with superficial solutions. Until the movement changed to resolving root causes with fundamental solutions, it would perpetually be unable to solve the sustainability problem. How all this works is explained in this diagram:
What to do next?
That's where I'm stuck and need your help.
Here's what I've tried:
1. The System Improvement Process has grown into maturity. It now has 23 steps. It's been applied to the sustainability problem in an exhausting series of steps, models, simulation runs, analysis conclusions (especially the root causes), and 12 sample solution elements. All this has been written up into a 478 page book: Common Property Rights: A Process Driven Approach to Solving the Complete Sustainability Problem.
2. Even though I'm not a PhD, with the help of a few other dedicated analytical activists I've been lucky enough to get a paper published in a peer reviewed journal. This was Change Resistance as the Crux of the Environmental Sustainability Problem. It modeled the two main root causes of the problem.
3. This website contains 150 carefully written pages and dozens of PDF files about how to solve the sustainability problem using an analytical approach.
4. Just recently I've tried issue specific articles like this one on A Little Story about Corporate Dominance and the Occupy Movement.
Surely, I thought, if I publish this material to help environmentalists educate themselves about a more productive approach, they will pick it up. A few innovators and early adopters will see the merits of a root cause resolution approach. They will study it, start using it, and spread it to others.
But it hasn't happened. A few people are very interested. But we haven't gotten any significant organization to take up the concept.
So I was troubled all over again, just like when I started. That same sense of dread, of unease, crept over me. Why, why, why were people not seeing this approach could work?
That's where I need your help. I'm not a salesman. I'm a quiet introvert, a craftsman, an engineering type. My strength lies in analysis, not selling the ideas that come out of analysis.
Can you take the ball the rest of the way?
There's got to be a way we can get the ball rolling.
Jack's Real Bio
Role: The lead systems engineer and sustainologist at Thwink.org.
Nationality: United States. Raised on a farm in Maryland.
Qualifications: 20 years of small business and dot.com startup consulting, 6 years small business management, BS in Industrial & Systems Engineering; proficient in process design and improvement, problem analysis, software engineering and architecture, system dynamics, outdoor digital photography, the bamboo flute, art furniture and woodworking, and ultralite hiking.
Role: Jack's role is to initiate the concepts and strategies necessary to help those working on the sustainability problem approach the problem from a much more effective angle of attack, one hopefully an order of magnitude more productive.
Comment: "I believe that once environmentalists start using the same problem solving tools that others have long been using, they will be able to make strides so great they will astonish themselves. The absence of these tools can be explained by one simple fact: a very different type of person, on the average, is attracted to altruistic causes. As a result, they tend to be long on motivation and optimism, and short on the powerful productivity techniques known to business, science, engineering, and academia. It is these techniques and the strategies behind them that will make the difference in solving the sustainability problem."
Jack's personal web page is here.
Jack's
Story -
Jack is a bit of a thinker, a tinker and a better candlestick
maker. In 1970 he dropped out of Georgia Tech to run two businesses
for six years. The first was a startup bust, and the second
a big turnaround success. Then he moved into consulting and
finished up at Georgia Tech in Industrial Systems Engineering.
Many years consulting with small businesses, cooperatives,
distributors, and retailers were followed by a few years as
a furniture
artist. Shown is a shellback
rocker.
On the side, he's been building The Tower since 1975. Here's what the tower looks like today. At the top of this page is what Jack looks like today, while below was long ago in the third grade. As both pictures show, he is forever young.
The life of an artist was followed by a return to consulting,
this time in the information technology industry during the
heady days of the dot com bubble. As they had been before,
Jack's specialties were a systematic analysis of a business's
or an industry's problems, formal process, and the crucial
role of information, communication, and collaboration in achieving
difficult objectives. Clients during this period included Delta
Airlines, the Center for Disease Control of Atlanta,
and Realm Technologies.
After finishing up with Realm Technologies (a high flying dot com startup), he looked around for the next challenging problem to solve, and decided that instead of solving more of the business world's problems, there was an infinitely more important problem that needed attention: the global environmental sustainability problem. If the problem is not solved then nothing else matters, so in mid 2001 he switched to working on it full time, and made it his life's work.
He immediately set up a six year plan. The first two years
were for becoming familiar with the problem in general. The
next two were for analysis and making an original contribution
that might make the difference. The last two years were for
starting to work elbow to elbow with others to help solve the
problem, while continuing his original work. There were two
top strategies: One was to deliberately work alone for the
first four years, so as to not fall into the same ruts and
group think of others, since 30 years of solution failure showed
that conventional wisdom was not working. The other strategy
was to create and follow a formal problem solving process that
fit the problem. The first version of this was created in a
few months and became the System Improvement Process. Amazingly
enough, the six year project plan came in on schedule. Now it's on to the fourth phase, which is continuing the analysis, publishing these concepts, and working with others.
The optimist view: So far it has been a very difficult project, but the results of the first iteration of the analysis, and the reactions of those who have taken the time to read and understand it, are looking very promising.
The realistic view: Due to what appears to be strong paradigm change resistance, these ideas are languishing. They are dying on the vine.
Sigh....
Photo at top of page by Martha Harich on May 1, 2012.
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Analysis is the breaking down of a problem into smaller easier to solve problems. Exactly how this is done determines the strength of your analysis.
You will see powerful techniques used in this analysis that are missing from what mainstream environmentalism has tried. This explains why a different outcome can be expected.
The key techniques are proper subproblem decomposition and root cause analysis.
The analysis was performed over a seven year period from 2003 to 2010. The results are summarized in the Summary of Analysis Results, the top of which is shown below:
Click on the table for the full table and a high level discussion of analysis results.
This is the solution causal chain present in all problems. Popular approaches to solving the sustainability problem see only what's obvious: the black arrows. This leads to using superficial solutions to push on low leverage points to resolve intermediate causes.
Popular solutions are superficial because they fail to see into the fundamental layer, where the complete causal chain runs to root causes. It's an easy trap to fall into because it intuitively seems that popular solutions like renewable energy and strong regulations should solve the sustainability problem. But they can't, because they don't resolve the root causes.
In the analytical approach, root cause analysis penetrates the fundamental layer to find the well hidden red arrow. Further analysis finds the blue arrow. Fundamental solution elements are then developed to create the green arrow which solves the problem. For more see Causal Chain in the glossary.
First the analysis divided the sustainability problem into four subproblems. Then each subproblem was individually analyzed. For an overview see The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.
This is no different from what the ancient Romans did. It’s a strategy of divide and conquer. Subproblems like these are several orders of magnitude easier to solve because you are no longer trying (in vain) to solve them simultaneously without realizing it. This strategy has changed millions of other problems from insolvable to solvable, so it should work here too.
For example, multiplying 222 times 222 in your head is for most of us impossible. But doing it on paper, decomposing the problem into nine cases of 2 times 2 and then adding up the results, changes the problem from insolvable to solvable.
Change resistance is the tendency for a system to resist change even when a surprisingly large amount of force is applied.
Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem, because if the system is resisting change then none of the other subproblems are solvable. Therefore this subproblem must be solved first. Until it is solved, effort to solve the other three subproblems is largely wasted effort.
The root cause of successful change resistance appears to be effective deception in the political powerplace. Too many voters and politicians are being deceived into thinking sustainability is a low priority and need not be solved now.
The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We need to inoculate people against deceptive false memes because once people are infected by falsehoods, it’s very hard to change their minds to see the truth.
Life form improper coupling occurs when two social life forms are not working together in harmony.
In the sustainability problem, large for-profit corporations are not cooperating smoothly with people. Instead, too many corporations are dominating political decision making to their own advantage, as shown by their strenuous opposition to solving the environmental sustainability problem.
The root cause appears to be mutually exclusive goals. The goal of the corporate life form is maximization of profits, while the goal of the human life form is optimization of quality of life, for those living and their descendents. These two goals cannot be both achieved in the same system. One side will win and the other side will lose. Guess which side is losing?
The high leverage point for resolving the root cause follows easily. If the root cause is corporations have the wrong goal, then the high leverage point is to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.
Solution model drift occurs when a problem evolves and its solution model doesn’t keep up. The model “drifts” away from what’s needed to keep the problem solved.
The world’s solution model for solving important problems like sustainability, recurring wars, recurring recessions, excessive economic inequality, and institutional poverty has drifted so far it’s unable to solve the problem.
The root cause appears to be low quality of governmental political decisions. Various steps in the decision making process are not working properly, resulting in inability to proactively solve many difficult problems.
This indicates low decision making process maturity. The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to raise the maturity of the political decision making process.
In the environmental proper coupling subproblem the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. Environmental impact from economic system growth has exceeded the capacity of the environment to recycle that impact.
This subproblem is what the world sees as the problem to solve. The analysis shows that to be a false assumption, however. The change resistance subproblem must be solved first.
The root cause appears to be high transaction costs for managing common property (like the air we breath). This means that presently there is no way to manage common property efficiently enough to do it sustainably.
The high leverage point for resolving the root cause is to allow new types of social agents (such as new types of corporations) to appear, in order to radically lower transaction costs.
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There must be a reason popular solutions are not working.
Given the principle that all causal problems arise from their root causes, the reason popular solutions are not working (after over 40 years of millions of people trying) is popular solutions do not resolve root causes.
This is Thwink.org’s most fundamental insight.
Using the results of the analysis as input, 12 solutions elements were developed. Each resolves a specific root cause and thus solves one of the four subproblems, as shown below:
Click on the table for a high level discussion of the solution elements and to learn how you can hit the bullseye.
The solutions you are about to see differ radically from popular solutions, because each resolves a specific root cause for a single subproblem. The right subproblems were found earlier in the analysis step, which decomposed the one big Gordian Knot of a problem into The Four Subproblems of the Sustainability Problem.
Everything changes with a root cause resolution approach. You are no longer firing away at a target you can’t see. Once the analysis builds a model of the problem and finds the root causes and their high leverage points, solutions are developed to push on the leverage points.
Because each solution is aimed at resolving a specific known root cause, you can't miss. You hit the bullseye every time. It's like shooting at a target ten feet away. The bullseye is the root cause. That's why Root Cause Analysis is so fantastically powerful.
The high leverage point for overcoming change resistance is to raise general ability to detect political deception. We have to somehow make people truth literate so they can’t be fooled so easily by deceptive politicians.
This will not be easy. Overcoming change resistance is the crux of the problem and must be solved first, so it takes nine solution elements to solve this subproblem. The first is the key to it all.
In this subproblem the analysis found that two social life forms, large for-profit corporations and people, have conflicting goals. The high leverage point is correctness of goals for artificial life forms. Since the one causing the problem right now is Corporatis profitis, this means we have to reengineer the modern corporation to have the right goal.
Corporations were never designed in a comprehensive manner to serve the people. They evolved. What we have today can be called Corporation 1.0. It serves itself. What we need instead is Corporation 2.0. This life form is designed to serve people rather than itself. Its new role will be that of a trusted servant whose goal is providing the goods and services needed to optimize quality of life for people in a sustainable manner.
Solution element: Corporation 2.0
What’s drifted too far is the decision making model that governments use to decide what to do. It’s incapable of solving the sustainability problem.
The high leverage point is to greatly improve the maturity of the political decision making process. Like Corporation 1.0, the process was never designed. It evolved. It’s thus not quite what we want.
The solution works like this: Imagine what it would be like if politicians were rated on the quality of their decisions. They would start competing to see who could improve quality of life and the common good the most. That would lead to the most pleasant Race to the Top the world has ever seen.
Solution element: Politician Decision Ratings
Presently the world’s economic system is improperly coupled to the environment. The high leverage point is allow new types of social agents to appear to radically reduce the cost of managing the sustainability problem.
This can be done with non-profit stewardship corporations. Each steward would have the goal of sustainably managing some portion of the sustainability problem. Like the way corporations charge prices for their goods and services, stewards would charge fees for ecosystem service use. The income goes to solving the problem.
Corporations gave us the Industrial Revolution. That revolution is incomplete until stewards give us the Sustainability Revolution.
Solution element: Common Property Rights
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This presents our research results, including SIP, analysis of the environmental sustainability problem, and twelve sample solution elements.
This analyzes the world’s standard political system and explains why it’s operating for the benefit of special interests instead of the common good. Several sample solutions are presented to help get you thwinking.
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The Democracy in Crisis Film Series
Introduction to the WorldChange Model, 27 min
Adding Change Resistance to IGMs, 29 min
Part 1. Introduction to Common Property Rights, 15 min
Part 2. The 7 Components of Common Property Rights, 23 min
Truth or Deception, 10 min
The Progressive Paradox Film, 123 min
Introduction to Analytical Activism, 48 min
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One way to get started is The Common Property Rights Project.
This can be done by switching to Root Cause Analysis, which will lead to Environmentalism 2.0.
