Blog: The Work — Articles, Series & Ongoing Inquiry

National Article 3: Lands of ‘Princesses’ and ‘Prostitutes’!


This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Are the two worlds really that different or there is merely a thin line separating the two?

Are these two worlds defined by the women or by the men or by both or by persons beyond the couple?

I had a surreal experience yesterday.

I was on my way to an engagement party and I had my usual driver help me get to the venue which was an hour’s drive away.  My driver, in his late 30’s or early 40’s, over time has grown accustomed to using the time he has me in his car to share his concerns that he finds in his life and as a sounding board for his thoughts.  As the journey continued, the conversation turned to ‘what does a woman want from her man’?   He asked, “is it a roof over their heads or a box of chocolates from him?”  Well, I said, “while the box of chocolate may not be the same as a roof over their heads, but if she also receives a box of chocolate from him, it helps her see him as more than a provider for the family to also the lover in her life”, I said.

At soon as those words left my mouth, it felt like a cannon had suddenly been let loose within the car!  He became rattled and began by saying “such days have long gone”.  Well, I added, “you would not want her to see you as her father or brother, would we?”  He continued to disagree.  He then shares, that had I known better, I would know that “it is not unusual for the women in the country to “keep small houses by their side”.  While she may have the ‘main meal’ with her husband, she continues to enjoy ‘side dishes’ with other men”.  He adds that having come to know about that part of her life, it is making it difficult for him to relate towards her as her husband and as the only man in her life.  He then repeated several times that it is not easy for a man to give flowers and chocolate to “a prostitute”.  He for now is choosing to live a life separate from his wife, even choosing not to eat within the same house.  Deep in my heart, I knew “he was crying inside” and I ended that part of the conversation with “this may have been a chance for her to learn to turn into a woman, a chance another man may not do it for her, except you”.

Half an hour later, we arrive at the home where my hosts were hosting an engagement party for their twenty-something year old daughter.

And then, almost in an instant, it looked like I had walked from one world into another world – a world ‘fit for a princess”.  The place was teeming with men and women working side-by-side, putting together the venue for an evening of merriment and joy in celebration of exchanging and  accepting the dowry between the groom and the bride’s family an event which was held earlier in the morning.  I sat by the corner, watching and soaking in as much of the buzz of the evening and location.  It was all new to me here.  The women were washing plates and dishing food and drinks out to the guests who were arriving and laying tablecloths on the tables  The men were preparing the firewood that was going to part of the braai stands that would grill enough meat for an anticipated guests of 500 to 600 persons.  Perhaps even a 1000.  Elders were playing out their traditional roles receiving the bridal parties on both sides and observing the protocols of the day.  Meanwhile tiny tots scaled the length and breath of the venue adding colour and vibrancy to the occasion with their spanking new clothes and their chirping voices.  Nothing over the top.  Only sheer joy meandering all around in the togetherness.

Two hours later and when the venue, food and the guests were set, the bride walks in, in the arms of her fiance.  He was beaming from ear to ear eager to show his bride off to the world.  Both of them took the main stage and sat on their assigned seats (well, I actually want to mean ‘thrones’).  She sat on her side, glancing from the corner of her eyes and chatting at her fiance from time to time, while taking in the whole place and the evening and how it has been laid out in front of her.  She did not hold any airs about her but smiled sweetly knowing she was being treated like a princess from her groom to her father.

I sat at my chair within the audience enjoying how much the bride was enjoying the evening.

The next morning, that is today morning, something struck me.

How did I go from, in less than one hour and in a distance of less than 100 km apart, hearing the story of a ‘prostitute’ in the guise of a wife to seeing a princess about to become a wife?

Both assaulting my senses in the same evening.

How did the same land produce both princesses and ‘prostitutes’?  Which one is more?  Which side is growing?  And which side is seeing declining numbers?

Why does this happen?

Regional Article 2: What really caused the eurozone crisis? BBC News Dec 22, 2011


This slideshow requires JavaScript.

As you read the article. notice how many times we broke the laws of dynamic complexity.  These laws govern the nature of dynamic (recurrent problems) complexity.

I see three laws here.  They are laws 8, 6 and 4.   I have listed the laws against the text of the article below and the explanations at the end of the texts.

There are more.

Show us what you see.

“What really caused the euro zone crisis? Dec 22. 2011 BBC News”

World leaders probably spent more time worrying about the euro zone crisis than anything else in 2011.

And that was in the year that featured the Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami and the death of Osama Bin Laden. What’s more, 2012 looks set to be not much different. But as euro zone governments hammer out new rules to limit their borrowing, are they missing the point of the crisis?

Follow the path to find out.

Continue reading the main story

The euro zone has agreed a new “fiscal compact”

  • Euro zone leaders have agreed to a tough set of rules – insisted on by Germany – that will limit their governments’ borrowing each year to just 3% of their economies’ output. This is to stop them accumulating too much debt, and make sure we avoid we another financial crisis.

But didn’t they already agree to this back in the ’90s?

  • Hang on a minute. They agreed to exactly the same 3% borrowing limit back in 1997, when the euro was being set up.  It was the  German finance minister Theo Waigel who insisted on the “stability and growth pact”. What happened?

So who kept to the rules?

  • Italy was the worst offender. It regularly broke the 3% annual borrowing limit.  But actually Germany – along with Italy – was the first big country to break the 3% rule. After that, France followed. Of the big economies, only Spain kept its nose clear until the 2008 financial crisis; the Madrid government stayed within the 3% limit every year from the euro’s creation in 1999 until 2007. Not only that – of the four, Spain’s government also has the smallest debts to the size of its economy. Greece, by the way, is in a class of its own. It never stuck to the 3% target, but manipulated its borrowing statistics to look good, which allowed it to get into the euro in the first place.  Its waywardness was uncovered two years ago.
  • 3/9 Italy
    Worst offender
  • 5/9 Germany
    First to break rules
  • 6/9 France
    Offender
  • 9/9 Spain
    Top of the Class

But the markets have other ideas

  • So surely Germany, France and Italy should be in trouble with all that reckless borrowing, while Spain should be reaping the rewards of its virtue? Well, no.  Actually Germany is the “safe haven” – markets have been willing to lend to it at historically low interest rates since the crisis began.  Spain on the other hand is seen by markets as almost as risky as Italy.
  • So what gives?

So what really caused the crisis?

  • There was a big build-up of debts in Spain and Italy before 2008, but it had nothing to do with governments. Instead it was the private sector – companies and mortgage borrowers [@1  LAW #8] – who were taking out loans [@2 LAW #4] . Interest rates had fallen to unprecedented lows in southern European countries when they joined the euro. And that encouraged a debt-fuelled boom.
  • Good news for Germany…
  • All that debt helped finance more and more imports by Spain, Italy and even France. Meanwhile, Germany became an export power-house after the euro zone was set up in 1999, selling far more to the rest of the world (including southern Europeans) than it was buying as imports. That meant Germany was earning a lot of surplus cash on its exports. And guess what – most of that cash ended up being lent to southern Europe.
  • …bad news for southern Europe
  • But debts are only part of the problem in Italy and Spain. During the boom years, wages rose and rose in the south (and in France). But German unions agreed to hold their wages (and their personal spending) steady. So Italian and Spanish workers now face a huge competitive price disadvantage. Indeed, this loss of competitiveness  [@3 LAW #3]  is the main reason southern Europeans have found it so much harder to export than Germany.
  • …and a nasty dilemma
  • So to recap, government borrowing – which has ballooned since the 2008 global financial crisis – had very little to do with creating the current euro zone crisis in the first place, especially in Spain (Greece’s government is the big exception here). So even if governments don’t break the borrowing rules this time, that won’t necessarily stop a similar crisis from happening all over again.
  • Spain and Italy are now facing nasty recessions, because no-one wants to spend. Companies and mortgage borrowers are too busy repaying their debts to spend more.  Exports are uncompetitive.  And now governments – whose borrowing has exploded since the 2008 financial crisis savaged their economies – have agreed to drastically cut their spending back as well [@4 What Law is that?].  But…

Cut spending…

  • …and you are pretty sure to deepen the recession. That probably means even more unemployment (already over 20% in Spain), which may push wages down to more competitive levels – though history suggests this is very hard to do. Even so, lower wages will just make people’s debts even harder to repay, meaning they are likely to cut their own spending even more, or stop repaying their debts. And lower wages may not even lead to a quick rise in exports, if all of your European export markets are in recession too. In any case, you can probably expect more strikes and protests, and more nervousness in financial markets about whether you really will stay in the euro.

Don’t cut spending…

  • …and you risk a financial collapse. The amount you borrow each year has exploded since 2008 due to economic stagnation and high unemployment. But your economy looks to be chronically uncompetitive within the euro. So markets are liable to lose confidence in you – they may fear your economy is simply too weak to support your ballooning debt load. Meanwhile, other European governments may not have enough money to bail you out, and the European Central Bank says its mandate doesn’t allow it to. And if they won’t lend to you, why would anyone else?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16301630

@1    When we state country, the one that comes to mind (obviously), it is the government (and therefore) the public servants are spending (the Ministers must be corrupt , etc.).  But the areas of the highest leverage, the citizen, the family, the industries stayed hidden behind the ‘name of the country’.  Law #8 says, the areas of the highest leverage are often the least obvious.  We need to be understanding this about ourselves and use it to turn the situation around.

@2   Taking loans out, which is borrowing money and spending money we do not have, is easier than freezing wages (and choosing not to spend the money).  Notice what we are avoiding.  We usually do not watch what we are avoiding.  We need to be watching both should we expect to turn a situation around.

@3  Loss of competitiveness shows how things have got worse after some time of seeing things become easier or better.  This indicates that the two (when things got worse and the things that got better) are interconnected.  As we appreciate the interrelatedness of these issues, we now begin to have a handle on the situation.

@4  What law is broken here?  Why do you say that?  Do explore the reasonings with each other.

Regional Article 1: The Vegetation We Choose to Plant Can Cause Droughts. Are we our own worst enemies?


This slideshow requires JavaScript.

The Ministry of Agriculture is noticing the following situation (Case 1, Case 2, Case 3).

We pray for the rains to come.  And they do, eventually.  Often when we are at our most desperate.  Sometimes they do not.  It is possible someone out there is praying for rains not to come.  There are inconveniences the weather brings with it.  The floods, waters enter homes, the mud, the humidity, the sheer wetness, the leaking roofs, laundrys do not dry up, the house feels musty, lost businesses on the street, and so on. Of course, those who plant crops want to see rains.

What if it drizzled everyday?  What would we say?

The nature of water cycles is such that the less we rains we receive over time, the less the rains that come back to us with time and space.

We learned in school about the water cycle.  What we did not realize is, these cycles have a tendency to grow either positively or negatively with each iteration.  They do not remain the same over time.   This point was not made clear to us in our science and geography classrooms.

History and the reality today:

For the past forty years, the country finds it is not easy to meet its food production targets much less shake off its dependency on importing food from our neighbors.  This is particularly so in areas where raw materials produced in the country (e.g. milk, vegetables, grains, potatoes) for the processing of foods (e.g. for tomato sauce, cheese, pesto) continues to face production shortages.

Current Strategy:

Each year, the government assists the population gear up to produce so that farmers may place food on their tables (food security which included having enough food for guests at funerals and weddings when the village descended on the events) as well as cash money from the sales of their produce in their pockets.  Despite these efforts, we are not able to produce enough to meet the national consumption needs.  Consumption (the hands that eat) has been and continues to exceed the level of the country’s ability to produce (the hands that produce).  This story resonates for production of most raw materials across the country.

Seeing Complexity:

In my effort to understand the behaviour of agricultural production in the country, we examined historical annualized data that would allow us to see the behavior of production patterns of crops across the country.  To do so, the Ministry, collected a twelve-year data of typical variety of  crops produced  within the country.

When the data came through, we noticed a rather unusual behavior over time of the graphs.  This was something most people had not noticed previously.

There was a tendency for one type of crop to show a distinct increase in production levels over the years.  The graph showed the crop resisted droughts better and was increasingly successful over time at doing so.  Over time the peaks peaked higher.

This suggested that today compared to ten or thirty years ago, the levels of the crop produced had risen, sometimes by as much as six to ten folds high even if that included farmers finding alternative lands to produce the corps.  This meant the crop had found new lands and hands even as old lands and hands had become barren; often at commercial levels and driven and supported by research efforts to use seeds that had even higher levels of resistance to droughts.

Conversely, we noticed another type of crop  produced in the country showed a steady decline.  It required more water for its survival.  It was becoming less successful over time.  The troughs in the pattern digged deeper troughs each time.

So which one in your view was rising and which one was declining?

The one that was rising was sorghum and the one that was declining was maize.

I was concurrently observing data on rainfall levels recorded for the past fifty years for the country.  In general, rainfall levels declined steadily across many parts of the country, particularly in the western, central, northern and southern parts of the country.  Where the pattern showed a distinct difference was in the extreme eastern parts of the country.

Do the results surprise you?  We say in this work, statistics may lie.  But trends do not know how to lie.

Which archetype do you think created the pattern that we saw above:  http://www.lopn.net/System_Archetypes.html?

Understanding Complexity: What is causing it?

As these trends were unfolding, the Ministry was also resorting to choosing variants of maize that were hardier and more resistant to survive bouts of lower rainfall.  This would mean, the seeds were able to grow into plants in the likes of sorghum, wheat, oats, barley and hybrid versions of maize without requiring a lot of water for its survival and at a shorter maturing period.

Are these patterns and outcomes a coincident?  Is there a reason behind the behaviour of these graphs?

Think cactus.  Cactus is the ultimate form of a drought-resistant plant.  Yet, when we crack open a cactus what do you see?  Water.  Right?  The nature of water is to flow rather than stagnate.

The more there are deserts, the more there are cacti.  This is what strikes us when we first drive past a desert.  Seeing cactus survive in a desert is a part of the story.  They are sometimes held up as stories of our triumphs against odds.  The reverse is also true.  The more the cacti survive (just like when we as humans believe that we can beat the odds and overcome the challenges of desert living and that gives us a sense of achievement in) the deserts, the more the deserts are likely to also grow further.

Eventually the cacti (and us) may not survive the desert.   At first the deserts would look like they are semi-arid.  Over time, they become a true desert.  And then ravines and canyons.  How did that change happen?

So what could happen next should we continue to increase sorghum production?

What’s leading that thinking?

Think the word ‘food security’.  Is the thought based on a sense of belief in oneself (as a farmer) and the land or is a thought or belief based on our fears of failure and survival of the self?  Can a farmer who fears his hands may not grow enough food for all, be able to grow them in abundance?  Or is he likely to produce just enough for himself?

What should the nation do?

Which nations in the world share a similar story to this?   Where are they located?  What percentage of the world do they make up across the globe?  In what ways, do you think they may have an impact on the behavior of the weather over time?  So are our efforts at agriculture production really thwarted by global warming or is it the making of our own actions in our own backyards?

Harsh Landscape
Lush landscape

 


Do these patterns occur by accident or could they be systemic?  Given they have remained persistent for the past thirty years over wide spans of land, they assume a systemic nature!

Question:

  1. What do these patterns mean? What is causing such patterns to behave the way they do? The peaks to peak higher and the troughs to dig deeper?
  2. What are the implications should these patterns continue the way they do ten, twenty, thirty years into the future?
  3. What would need to happen to reverse the situation?  The choice depends on you!

Course Work:

  1. If we could use the above to understand the story of poverty, what would we see?
  2. How would one draw that systemic archetype?
  3. What continues to happen or build for the long-term should the archetype not be healed and continued to persist?
  4. What would need to happen to reverse the situation?

More notes here: http://www.lopn.net/ST_Casestudy_Growing_A_Nation3_Loop2_EnvironmentSystem.html

Leave your reactions and comments here.  Will be greatly appreciated.

Related articles

Hello World! The grass can be greener on your side.


One day my neighbor as he passed by my garden, noticed how the grass in my garden appeared greener than the ones in his garden.  The next day he approaches his gardener and asks, “Tell me my man, why is the grass in Sheila’s garden greener than the one in mine?”

In all humility, the gardener turned and faced his boss, and said, “That’s because, Sir, Sheila feeds her grass with fertilizers (food) that then waters (water) them to allow them to turn greener (health)”.

The boss, my neighbour, realized at once what he had to do.

He turns to his gardener, “Come on my man, let’s go to the nursery.  We need to get those fertilizers to feed the garden so that the grass on this side too will be green!”