The Many Perspectives Contained in a Single Ecosystem

I teach a class called Quantitative Tools for Consulting.  The phrase "quantitative tools" is literally in the title of the class, and it's what I do for a living, so you'd think I'd hold high regard for quantitative analysis.  And I do.

But I know that in most things that my work gets deployed for - whether seeking funding, advocating for an issue, evaluating a policy - the analysis itself doesn't have primacy.  It's not like all the decision-makers are waiting around a table for me to plop my report in the middle so they can say "ah, the coefficient is 0.4," "the aggregate number is $3.7 billion," or "the ROI is 127%," followed by "now we all know what to do!"




Rather, the analysis supports a narrative, the narrative enters an arena full of narratives, and the decisions are made based on those competing narratives in a political process ("politically" meaning either literally, if we are talking about government, or metaphorically, if we are talking about any other setting where decisions aren't made in a democratic process involving elected officials but resemble such a process in that competing agendas are worked out through deliberation and action). And, up until a few years ago, I would've stopped there.

What I now realize is that there's more to it than that.  For any political setting, whether within the construct of government or not, consists of human beings.  Which means that decisions are not made primarily based on analysis, or narratives, or politics.  They're based on baser things, like personalities and egos and alliances and pettiness.  Whether you wish it were so or not, it is how people operate, and therefore how decisions get made.

Much is made of the metaphor of "ecosystem."  We have social ecosystems, innovation ecosystems, civic ecosystems, and political ecosystems.  I like this analogy, because it properly captures the messiness and unpredictably of life.  We think the world behaves in neatly drawn flow charts that organize from left to right, when in actuality, as with natural ecosystems, interconnections and directionalities are all over the place.  I think most people, when the invoke the notion of "ecosystem," understand this.

But here's another, less well understood aspect of this analogue to nature.  While individual participants in an ecosystem may have enough sentience to step back and say, "this is ecosystem works for me," ultimately their strongest impulse and highest allegiance is not that.  It is survival in the form of safety, sustenance, and reproduction.

We humans are a little more sophisticated than that.  Yet it is helpful, if you want to build a healthy ecosystem and see progress made, to understand what it is that represents "survival" to individual participants in an ecosystem.  What a governor wants, versus a legislative body, versus a university president, versus a small business advocate, versus a corporate titan, versus a non-profit icon, versus a philanthropist, are all different.

Sounds logical, and yet how lazy we are in assuming that what we want out of a situation is what everyone else wants, and how quick we are to judge others for not seeing things our way.  I suppose that if your goal is to express yourself and look good in the eyes of others like you, this sort of behavior makes perfect sense.  But if you actually want to create a functioning ecosystem in which all thrive, you have to put in the hard work to understand what makes every participant tick, and then appeal to those motivations in your messaging (backed, of course, by the very best quantitative analysis that can be provided by a certain firm that does just that).

In the messy things that make up the interesting topics in our lives - how to get that project approved, that reform policy passed, or that funding secured - progress happens (or doesn't) in the messiness of an ecosystem.  It is the height of arrogance to think that you have "the right answer" and to get frustrated when others can't see that and let you get your way.  Nobody else in the ecosystem sees things like you do or wants the exact same things you want.  If it were so, it would cease to be an ecosystem.  In a thriving ecosystem, everyone "survives," even if the path to survival looks different for everyone.  How can we move towards that in the ecosystems we are a part of?