Jun 19

Jun 19 44 Assume You're Wrong

HUMANS CAN’T DO COMPLEXITY

Holistic Management is premised on the idea that humans aren’t good at handling complexity. Brian our trainer asserted, and then proved this with a few activities. He showed us a video with people divided by different coloured clothes and asked us to count how many times the ball moved between the dark-clothed group as they moved in tight choreography in a small space. That was doable. Then we watched another video with a similar instruction with increasing complexity. Harder. But I felt got the right answer, until he asked ‘how many of you saw the gorilla?

There was no gorilla. Except that astonishingly and obviously, there was a gorilla and it strolled across the screen amongst all the players while we all focusing on counting ball movements.

And did the same to us the following week. This time it was the old-object-under-the-moving-cups trick. Started with three cups and then the next video added more cups and more moves, and I might have followed the object, but completely missed that by the end of the second videos, one of the sets of cups had been switched to cups of a different colour and there was a plastic duck that spent a reasonable amount of time on the screen. Missed all of that – AND didn’t see where the object ended up.

MANIPULATING THE MOB

The video’s main revelation was about the human inability to handle complexity. I get that. It was also a good indication of the human propensity to blindly follow instructions from a trusted leader. I can’t believe I let slip another gorilla! The same trick, dressed up in different clothes, and I fell for it again in the interests of keeping up with the mob in a task presented to us as a challenging test. Not only can’t I handle complexity, I tend to do what I am told if working in a group of people where I want to be seen as amenable and clever. Brian’s intentions are benign, but I learn again that I would be putty in the hands of a skilful manipulator. Good to know.

I know my mum always feared for me: knew in her heart that if anyone of her children was going to be sucked into a cult, it would be me. But I reckon she would approves of me being one of the happy band of neo-peasants currently bathing in the holy waters of Land and Ecosystem Redemption.

COMPLEX VS COMPLICATED

So complexity versus complicated seems to be a thing at the moments. Humans aren’t good at complexity, but are excellent at complicated.

What is the difference? In the arena of transport: a car engine is complicated; a horse is complex. Traffic lights are complicated, a roundabout is complex. The computing part of a computer in a self- driving car must needs to be monstrous to handle the amount of micro-decisions human drivers make automatically as they head into a roundabout. Imagine the mass of hard-working zeros and ones running red hot under the bonnet or wherever the engine used to be. By comparison, a stop sign could be negotiated by a self-driving car on something as brain-small as an iPad.

What about binary and dyad? Binary expresses mutually exclusive parts: on/off, true/false. Complicated? A dyad, a word and an action I came to know from doing consciousness work with teacher Peter Ralston is also a binary but it focuses on the flow of connectivity of two, rather than the division. The ‘flow of connectivity’ is what ecosystems (the byword for complexity) are all about. And the connections are vast – how many millions of microbes known and unknown to humans live in a teaspoon of healthy soil? We cannot possibly control natural ecosystems. What we can do is allow it to find its own balance and encourage and partake of the resulting abundance.

LINEAR VS COMPLEX QUESTIONS

I started to look for examples that demonstrate what is complicated or complex in terms of human behaviour. And came to communication. Humans talk to each other in ways that close-down or open-up conversation.

Recently a friend started a conversation with me with the words: I know you’ll find this boring, but I am going to tell you anyway….and launched into a story about something she was involved with. I struggled to come back from this. All avenues of communication died as I was wrong-footed in so many ways that I could do nothing but sit that storyline out.

My point is that there are ways of closing down or opening-up conversations in the language used.

Example. Imagine walking along a river and coming across someone fishing.

Usual question? Have you caught anything? Yeah/Nah.

How about? What brings you to fish this part of the river? Monosyllabic answer tougher here, so you might get: I had an argument with my spouse and I came here to cool down. If you are lucky, you might get an insight into seasonal, ecological realities – here is one such sequence from Tyson Yunkaporta. At a certain time of year he is drawn to eat catfish, knowing that the liver of the catfish is particularly high in medicinal value. The conditions are such that he could be eaten alive by mosquitoes while fishing. At the same time the native grasses near the waters he wants to fish are starting to drop their seed. Perfect for burning. The burning both stimulates new growth and knocks out the mosquitoes so he can catch catfish at a time when it is both plentiful and nutritious.

FROM BLACKBERRIES TO SUPER - BLACKBERRIES

In previous podcasts I have given examples of efforts to manage or ‘control’ (in inverted commas) plant growth on common land that led to unexpected consequences.

An example of linear thinking that didn’t just lead to monosyllabic answers, but also monosyllabic paddocks, is from Daylesford, a town just North-west of Melbourne. The thinking was that the blackberries that grew thickly over the streams and gullies in the area needed to be removed. The blackberries were clear-felled, and the bare land quickly covered itself with thistles. They then clear-felled the thistles and the soil responded quickly, covering itself with gorse – one of the prickliest, meanest and toughest of covers. Nature’s last stand. The only way to win this kind of escalating war against natures propensity to maintain plant cover at all costs is to completely strip the soil of nutrients so it becomes toxic dirt. What Tyson would call: ‘undoing creation’. That’s serious shit.

YIELD VS ECOSYTEM FUNCTION

Thinking of agriculture as being about yield is an example of linear thinking. The unintended consequences – or we could think of them as ‘side effects’ - have been catastrophic in terms of soil health, biodiversity, animal and human health.

Thinking of agriculture as being about managing ecosystems, thinking ‘regeneratively ’ in the broadest sense of the word, requires us to employ language that makes it harder to maintain monocultures of culture and thought.

GRAZING ANIMALS

Animals can either build landscapes up or knock them down – its all about management. By the third session, it is becoming clear that Holistic Management is predicated on the ancient co-creational relationship of herds of grazing beasts, the animals that prey of them and perennial and annual pasture plants.

There is certain leeway on the subject, but cows and other ruminants, with their big moist stomachs are big depositors and enablers of microbial life in our dry environments, and therefore, provide a huge and naturally obtainable boost to soil health. They can achieve a lot of the heavy lifting in a complex agricultural ecosystem.

FEED IN THE PADDOCKS

By the third session of Holistic Management, we got stuck into some details around how a farmer can judge the feed levels in their paddocks so as to predict how a season would go. Whether you have enough feed to get you through - or if you might have to make decisions beforehand, to offload stock or buy in hay before conditions force your hand.

WHAT DOES A KANGAROO EAT IN A DAY?

Luckily, someone has done the research and we can take on the estimates of what a cow (averaging 435 kgs) or a sheep (averaging 35kgs) would eat – or any other grazer you can think of - domestic or wild, that will impact your paddocks. I’ll stick to the domesticated animals - a cow eats a chaff bag full of green pick, a sheep requires a plastic shopping bag full.

This was one of my favourite moments in Part 3 of the HM course. We trooped outside and assembled in groups on different parts of some verge style vegetated spots - and acted like sheep. This involved nipping at the available food – mainly capeweed with the odd semi-perennial grass – using our fingers to simulate sheep bunched in a dense group and biting and trampling plants. We gathered what we could to achieve a bag.

Each group achieved their bag or part thereof of green feed and then judged how much more land was needed to fill a bag. In our case it was about 2 x 2 metres. Others estimated they needed about 5 x 5 metres.

From this simple, hands on activity, a Standard Animal Unit is created and upon this calculation a whole grazing chart for a growing or a non-growing season is constructed for the acreage of the farm.

I got the theory, and it is breath-takingly powerful. I won’t go any further because the maths based on the formulas did my head in. But the farmer sitting next to me had a calculator out. As well as the paddocks and animal numbers he had to map out all the factors he could think of that would influence the coming season: the weather, personal time off, days allotted to machinery work or neighbourly concerns. Basically, all relevant events he could think of that might impact the coming season and enable him to take some of the guesswork out of his farming system. The clarity achieved by this forward thinking would give him much more headspace to play and experiment.

ASSUME YOU ARE WRONG

Here is one of the HM takeaway gems: once you start trying to work with a whole ecosystem – the water and mineral cycles, the flow of energy and all the communities of living creatures, human and more-than-human, assume whatever you do will be wrong.

Now there’s a humbling instruction.

By assuming you are wrong, you understand that you are intervening in a system of such staggering complexity when it comes to the infinite flow of connections, that you must pay close attention to what happens next. You need to give yourself a chance to re-adjust your actions if things start heading south. By monitoring the situation, negative consequences can be picked up early and set to rights, depending on the direction you are nurturing in your soil or your land.

Our instructor called this kind of experimental action, ‘probing’. Work out something you think might be effective to get your farm heading in the direction you envisage and probe gently. You have the plan, the monitoring, the correction and then the re-plan, giving you a fast feedback loop to the information needed to go forward. That’s the Holistic management tip of the week.

WHAT WOULD TYSON DO?

But what would Tyson (Yunkaporta) do? He comes at the idea of complexity from another angle. He suggests that in any action you take when working with complex natural systems it is best to work out a way to let complexity do the heavy lifting. Reminds me of an account I read in a diary written in the early days of colonisation where a man observes a local man fishing.

The Aboriginal fella lounges at ease by the river and flicks fish out of the water using a simple noose arrangement mounted on a few sticks. The observer writes with admiration that the man tosses a steady flow of fish onto the riverbank, behind him, resetting the noose with practised ease and maintaining an extremely relaxed pose throughout. In his account, the diarist writes that the fishing technique was extremely effective, graceful even, but ends the description by deploring the ‘laziness’ of the young man doing the fishing. Huh?

The ‘heavy lifting’ in this story is the Aboriginal man’s knowledge of the habits of this particular fish, and his ability to employ a simple tool suited to the situation, at the right time, with minimum deployment of energy and intervention on his part.

I love stories like this. They remind us that life can really be this easy and enjoyable. Pushing shit uphill is the preserve of the try-hards. We forget that we too are nature and part of something much bigger than our tiny little industrialised lives.

IMAGE: Flat out like a lizard, Edah Station, Southern Rangelands 2016 .