(Roughly) Daily

Coleman McCormick on a framework that can help us understand change in systems– and build resiliance…

A forest is a complex ecosystem made up of thousands of organisms living, evolving, interacting with each other, and changing over time.

At the top of the hierarchy are the leaves, changing annually, growing, dying, and shedding in a year-long seasonal cycle. Next there are branches, fewer in number and slower in growth. Then the whole tree itself, changing over decades. The tree sits in a stand of dozens, and the stand in a forest of thousands of individual trees. The forest within a biome, the biome in a region with a particular climate.

You get the idea.

All natural ecosystems evolve in layers like this that connect to each other, but move at different speeds. You can imagine other systems with similar structures: your body is made up of proteins, DNA strands, organelles, cells, membranes, organs, a skeleton, and eventually, your whole body. Cells are being generated but also dying off at almost the same rate. Slower layers like the nervous system take a long time to heal (if ever) when subjected to injury.

Seeing complex systems this way — as layered collections of variable-speed elements — is a useful framework for understanding why we have a hard time changing them.

Stewart Brand [and here and here] noticed this recurring pattern in the anatomy of systems, which he called pace layering.

The concept builds on an observation made by architect Frank Duffy, who noticed a hierarchy in the components of buildings. In his book How Buildings Learn, Brand expanded this observation into a model he termed “shearing layers,” which describes how different parts of a structure change at varying speeds. Site → Structure → Skin → Services → Space plan → Stuff. Each must survive or adapt on different timelines. When architecture fails to account for the different rates at which users need to modify these layers, it results in rigid, non-functional design. Buildings where Services or the Space Plan are overly inflexible are difficult to adapt to users’ changing needs.

In his later book The Clock of the Long Now, Brand expanded the concept of shearing layers to a civilizational scale:

At the bottom, nature moves along on its own eons-level time scale. In the middle, governance and culture shift with generations. Infrastructure and commerce in the range of years. And on the surface, fashionable trends flare up and die out with sometimes daily regularity, like the turbulent wave tops in a stormy ocean. Each layer serves a function:

Fast learns, slow remembers.  Fast proposes, slow disposes.  Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous.  Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution.  Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy.  Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power...

… Seeing the world through this lens — not only of scale, but also of time — has distant reach to so many other domains. It’s a fundamental characteristic of how systems work and adapt to change.

The fast flurry of activity at the top of a pace layered system creates a testbed for new ideas. In the forest, each individual tree can try out different evolutionary adaptations. New survival strategies are tested in numbers not possible if entire ecosystems had to move together. If one tree tests a new trait that turns out not to work, only a single organism is at risk, not the whole forest.

Because upper layers move faster they can also rebound faster. A forest fire or a passing herd of elk causes some damage, but only at the surface level upper crust of our strata. The bark and branches and leaves may get eaten or burn off, but in a few weeks they bounce back.

Pace layering builds resiliency into complex systems. The fast layers shield the slower ones from shocks, while selectively transmitting changes down through the layers, allowing slower ones to incorporate those adaptations. But some changes propagate too fast.

Some of the worst cases of system shock happen when change shakes to lower levels too rapidly. Look at the collapse of the Soviet Union. A rapid change in the governance layer caused wreaked havoc in the layers above: massive instability on a national scale, rippling through the whole system for decades. In this case, a totalitarian government imposed rigidity on commerce, infrastructure, and even fashion, and didn’t allow for the necessary shifting and experimentation required for the system to maintain resilience.

Drawing sharp lines between layers actually draws an inaccurate picture of how a thriving system works. A more accurate diagram would show smoother gradients across the transitions between layers.

Resilience comes from allowing this gradient — this slippage — at the junctions between layers. Each layer, above and below, must allow for give and take from its neighbors. Slow layers must permit some influence at the edges, and fast layers must slow down to maintain a workable interface with the slower. The layers need to be able to negotiate with one another. If the fast ignores the constraints of the slow, you get discontinuous instability. If the slow never bends to the fast, you get stifling stagnation…

[McCormick explores the applicability of this framework to governance and to corporate activity…]

… With age, my mind seems to sink to lower levels in the hierarchy. “Current things” are more likely to hit me and bounce off. We come around to new ideas more slowly. Above us are the teenagers, trying new technologies, listening to new music, pushing new memes, on a weekly or daily basis. We parents underneath can’t keep up.

But “keeping up” isn’t our role! Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast tries things, slow preserves what works. Resilient, sustainable systems balance this learning and remembering.

Not every meme or new song or fashion trend has staying power, but some do. The ones with notable resonance absorb and influence the culture below. Youth play the role of experimenters, continuously throwing new ideas at the wall — some good, many terrible. The elders carry the torch of tradition, and provide the stable platform of time-tested solutions on top of which the innovators can explore.

Pace layering is one of those ideas with such broad reach that once you learn about it, you see it everywhere…

The hidden architecture of resilient systems: “Pace Layers,” from @colemanm.

For Stewart’s own essay on Pace Layers, see here; and for more, here.

* Stewart Brand

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As we take the long view, we might send connective birthday greetings to Alexander MacMillan; he was born on this date in 1818. MacMillan was cofounder (in 1843) with his brother Daniel, of Macmillan Publishers, one of the “Big Five” English language publishers.

Though not himself a professional scientist, MacMillan did much to promote science in the Victorian times– especially when he established the journal Nature (in 1869), enabling communication between men of science. The journal had the support of many influential contributors, including Thomas Huxley. Yet, it remained a financial challenge for Macmillan. Other scientific quarterlies had short lives, but Macmillan tolerated losses for three decades, committed to the journal’s mission “to place before the general public the grand results of scientific work and scientific discovery; and to urge the claims of science to move to a more general recognition in education and in daily life.” That mission continues to the present day.

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