Time: friend, foe or casual observer?
Post #12 in a series seeking to answer "What is Understanding made of?"
“Time is making fools of us again.”
- JK Rowling
If anybody thinks their understanding is perfect, that the “original intent” of any country’s or religion’s founder is all that need be known to address the dilemmas of today, that people who have different understanding are evil and should therefore be destroyed, I would like to introduce them to a Time Machine. The historian that runs it could show them how time changes everything, even our understanding.
In this post I explore how the way a model addresses time adds a critical dimension to the understanding that flows from it.
The Stationary Model. Those that build a model that is meant to just be looked at and admired for its beauty, simplicity or intricacies are models that risk looking old as they gather dust. To be kept relevant for future generations, it will eventually require delicate handling by specialists with a desire to examine and preach about its attributes. Understanding that derives from such stationary models is mostly static, i.e. it changes only as the tools and needs of the specialists and protectors of it change. Whether time is a friend or foe to the stationary model depends greatly on the love that the specialists have for it. And when the specialists use their access to promote a different agenda, like gaining and maintaining power, then the stationary model risks being slimed and devalued from the abuse of those specialists.
The Living Model. These are models that account for time by changing with the new environments that mark time’s passage. Such models have built-in mechanisms for awareness, evaluation, self-correction and renewal. They reside in physical or biological structures only for a short time period, and take residence in new structures that become available over time. Thus there is an element of death and rebirth that deterimines how well living models thrive, or if they can even survive. Living models are characterized more by their spirit, the energy that drives them, than by a single manifestation of it from a single point in time.
The Change Model. Finally, there are models that describe how things work and that can be used to exact a change in the way things are. Anytime there is change, time plays a role. To understand that role we first must describe an engineering concept called “lag time.” It describes how long it takes after you put something new into a system before you can detect a change from it. Associated with lag time is another concept called “control.” It turns out that unless your lag time is less than 5% of a typical cycle time in any process, you won’t be able to get feedback quick enough to control the outcome of the change. What does this have to do with understanding? First, if anybody is applying a model to make a change, like trying to arrest a recession and begin job growth again by pumping money into an economy, then unless you do something bold enough to get a quick and easily detectable feedback signal, you may not be able to convince enough people that your model is valid or that you can use it to affect the change they need.
In the end it seems to me that those afraid of calling the US Constitution a “Living Document” (like the Texas School Board which is changing their text books to imply it is more a stationary model) and those who believe that change must be detected immediately for it to be real like the self-proclaimed tea baggers, are people whose understanding accounts poorly for the impact and power of time.
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Tags: models, time, unemployment dictionary
Understanding | Stan Kaczmarek | 17 February 2010 |
