Waiting In Vain For A Savior

Why Real Change Starts on the Ground

Not Long Ago in New York

Not long ago I was giving my Check Engine Light spiel to a group of firefighter and EMS leaders in New York City. I’d flown in the day before and had the chance to sit in on some of the sessions, including a meeting with Commissioner Robert Tucker. It was interesting to watch him patiently address the direct concerns of the people in his charge.

The problems facing Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs are no small matter. It was refreshing to see someone in a leadership role give real time and attention to the everyday concerns of the people whose boots are actually on the ground.

After getting a better sense of what those men and women are dealing with, it was my turn to speak. I did my best to connect the immense pressure of first responder work to the absolute need to maintain both body and mind. My usual two-and-a-half hour talk—with some actionable takeaways on breathing and sleep—was designed to tie in with the classes they’d have later in the week.

As the room cleared, a station chief stopped me. “Rob, I really enjoyed your talk,” he said. (I knew a “but” was coming.) “But how are we supposed to do this? We’ve got an insane call volume—six to eight thousand calls a year. Sometimes it’s not even worth going to bed between them. In NYC we’re required to stay for the duration of every call. We need administrative changes that take the pressure off firefighters.”

Fair enough. I told him maybe changes do need to happen at the administrative level. Then I asked him this: If leadership agreed with you today and promised to change everything, how long do you think it would take? Five years? Ten? And by then, what new problems would be waiting?

The reality is, if you want to better manage the problems of today, it has to be done at the local level—at each station, with the firefighters and EMS personnel themselves. They live with the problems, which means they’re the best positioned to solve them. Waiting on admin, even when they’re on board, is just too slow.

And that’s not unique to first responders. I’ve had the same conversations with military personnel looking up the chain of command, and with people pointing to government to solve public health issues like obesity. Looking to the top for solutions almost always ends up slow and clunky. By the time the wheels finally start turning, new problems have already emerged.

That’s not to say that top-down influence isn’t necessary—it is. But in complex, living systems, top-down approaches don’t serve us well in the ways we normally use them and often contribute to additional noise that prevents problems from being effectively managed.

Complexified

Machine logic is the kind that comes from working with stable, predictable systems. Top-down thinking and intervention work in stable, simple systems because things stay the same and there is far more certainty about the effects of our actions.

Once the human mess complexifies things, however, top-down solutions alone just won’t do. They change quickly and often in ways that can’t be anticipated. What works today may not work tomorrow, not because the original solution was wrong, but because the conditions around it have already shifted.

That’s why the identification of relevant leverage points almost always comes from local knowledge. The people closest to the issue are the ones who can see what is actually happening in real time.

Relying too much on top-down decision making to solve local problems can become an issue. Conditions shift quickly in complex adaptive systems, which means local actors need to know how to solve problems as long as they are within defined boundaries.

Bottom Up and Top Down

This doesn’t mean we altogether abandon top-down influence. Top-down influences, like leadership in an organization, provide resources, set direction, and create the playbook. While these boundary conditions are necessary, they are often too slow to respond to the dynamic needs of the complex social structures we inhabit. Bottom-up strategies allow for rapid adaptation to the demands of the environment as they occur.

So it’s not either/or, it’s both/and.

The key is to understand the roles that both play so that cooperative movement can drive the entire system in the chosen direction. Top-down should not micromanage every local choice. Bottom-up needs top-down to appropriately constrain the system so things move in the right general direction.

A good example of this idea in action is traffic laws. The government doesn’t tell you exactly what route to take to work. But stoplights, speed limits, and right-of-way rules make it possible for millions of drivers to self-organize without chaos.

Similarly, when I program strength and conditioning I don’t tell an athlete how to perform every rep. I often set the intent of the session—say, today is about “Flow” or “Force.” That boundary keeps them aimed in the right direction, but still leaves room for them to solve problems in their own way.

Seen this way, it’s not just about top-down or bottom-up in isolation it’s about how multiple centers of decision-making interact and shape each other. That’s where the ideas of polycentricity and circular causality come in.

Polycentricity and Circular Causality

Economists Elinor and Vincent Ostrom coined the term polycentricity or polycentric control—multiple centers of decision-making, working in parallel. Their work focused on economics in particular (with Elinor Ostrom winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009 for her work).

Those centers are connected through circular causality (Juarrero)—a loop, not a straight line. In governance, it’s federal, state, and local all shaping each other. In coaching, it’s the athlete’s feedback changing the coach’s plan, which changes the athlete’s response, and so on. In physiology, it’s breathing shifting vagal tone, which reshapes perception, which in turn changes breathing again.

Cause and effect don’t move in one direction, they spiral. And when you see systems this way, it becomes clear why waiting for one top-down solution almost never works. The action, the adaptation, has to happen in the loops.

From Theory to Action

If we zoom back out now and think in terms of how we operate in our everyday experience, what does all this top-down and bottom-up stuff actually amount to in terms of action?

1. Don’t wait around to be saved by anybody or anything “up there.” If you see a local problem, take action. By the time somebody swoops in to save you, the problem has likely changed.

2. If the rules of the game aren’t moving the game in the right direction, work to change the rules. Just know that is always slower than adapting the way you play.

Save Yourself

Top-down and bottom-up influence working together can be seen at every level of analysis, not just how an administration deals with first responders or how a set of executives deals with employees. I’m sure anybody reading this can think of examples from their own lives where these laws of complexity are not respected.

Start looking for places at different scales where there are opportunities for action that cooperate with these laws of complexity.

Let me know what you think in the comments.

Thanks for reading,
Rob

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If ya dig check out my book:

Check Engine Light: Tuning Mind and Body For Performance Longevity