Bind Us Together

Madeline Ashby | Allostasis | Factoids | Elsewhere

Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Quote of the Moment

Stories surround and penetrate us; they bind us together.

| Madeline Ashby

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Meme of the Moment: Allostasis

Brad Stulberg excerpts his book, Master of Change: How to Excel When Everything Is Changing — Including You, published this week. He suggests that change is inevitable, but the concept of allostasis can help. I excerpted his excerpt:

Developed in the late 1980s by a neuroscientist, Peter Sterling, and a biologist, Joseph Eyer, allostasis is based on the idea that rather than being rigid, our healthy baseline is a moving target. I see it as parallel to the concept conceived by Richard Rohr of order, disorder and reorder. Allostasis runs counter to a more widespread but older and outdated model for change, homeostasis. Essentially, homeostasis says healthy systems return to the same starting point following a change: X to Y to X. By contrast, in allostasis, healthy systems also crave stability after a change, but the baseline of that stability can be somewhere new: X to Y to Z.

Allostasis is defined as “stability through change,” elegantly capturing the concept’s double meaning: The way to stay stable through the process of change is by changing, at least to some extent. If you want to hold your footing, you’ve got to keep moving.

From neuroscience to pain science to psychology, allostasis has become the predominant model for understanding change in the scientific community.

No better time to absorb this thinking and to put aside the homeostatic model. He offers up the model of ‘order, disorder, reorder’ as the basis of a mature approach to an accelerating world [emphasis mine]:

Adopting an allostatic outlook acknowledges that the goal of mature adulthood is not to avoid, fight or try to control change, but rather to skillfully engage with it. It recognizes that after disorder, there is often no going back to the way things were — no one form of order, but many forms of reorder. Via this shift, you come to view change and disorder not as something that happens to you but as something that you are working with, an ongoing dance between you and your environment. You stop fearing change, which is to say you stop fearing life.

We need to emulate a gritty endurance, or perhaps an adaptive resiliency:

Navigating this gulf requires equal parts ruggedness and flexibility. To be rugged is to be tough, determined and durable, to know your core values, what you stand for. To be flexible is to consciously respond to altered circumstances or conditions, to adapt and bend easily without breaking, to evolve, grow and even change your mind.

This bears a resemblance to the maxim ‘strong opinions, weakly held’ attributed to Paul Saffo, or the idea of constructive uncertainty from Howard Ross that I wrote about at length on the Sunsama blog in February:

The world is more complex that ever, more ambiguous, less predictable. As Margaret Wheatley points out in Willing to Be Disturbed, "We live in a complex world, we often don’t know what’s going on, and we won’t be able to understand its complexity unless we spend more time in not knowing."

Wheatley's formulation, that we need to spend more time in not knowing, is a first step in deconstructing uncertainty. One aspect of contemporary emotional maturity is to accept the state of not knowing. Not having a quick answer for complex questions. Being willing to admit being confused by new situations, or rapid changes in the context we are living and working in. Remaining open to spending more time listening to alternative viewpoints before shutting down gathering inputs. These are all aspects of constructive uncertainty, a term I learned from Howard Ross: "Learning to slow down decision-making".

The poet John Keats commented in a letter to his brothers that Shakespeare was able to accept uncertainty in his characters and their context, and coining the term negative capability to capture what he described as "being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason".

So, too, we need to cultivate a negative capability in our approach to an uncertain world. All too often we approach decision making or strategy formulation in an overly positive manner, which may have serious downsides. JP Castlin argues that "instead of explicitly stating what one might do, and thereby implicitly what one might not do, one does the opposite (explicitly stating what one might not do, and implicitly what one might do)." He believes this leads to a more open-minded approach, spending more time in Wheatley's not-knowing, and avoiding the pitfall of closing off Keat's uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts.

Sterling and Eyer’s allostasis is another mind tool, like not knowing and constructive uncertainty, that can help us make sense of and ground ourselves in this chaotic world.

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Factoids

The public right of way can occupy as much as one-third of the land in big U.S. cities.

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The United Nations estimates that humans produce 400 million tons of plastic waste every year. More than a third of the world’s plastic is used for packaging. And many of the largest makers of consumer goods have promised their packaging will be 100 percent recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2025. | Susan Shain

They better get on it because they aren’t on a course to meet that pledge.

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Coffee is the world’s second most widely traded commodity, following only petroleum. | Chemistry for Majors

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The number of dockless bike trips across Europe has grown by 33% in Q1 2023. Bike-sharing in European cities maintained its status as the fastest-growing mode of shared transportation. There are now 35,000 more dockless e-bikes than a year ago and overall fleet sizes are fluctuating less than before. | Dense Discovery

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Cooling is the fastest-growing single source of energy use in buildings. Following a business-as-usual scenario, the IEA projects that worldwide annual energy demand from cooling will more than triple by 2050. That’s an increase of more than 4,000 terawatt-hours, which is about how much energy the entire U.S. uses in a year. | Lauren Leffer

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57 percent of adults carry often-devastating medical debt or have faced it in the past five years. | Sohrab Ahmari

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Elsewhere

Getting Diversity Right: Start At The Beginning | Stowe Boyd

Many organizations seek to build a more diverse workforce since diversity has been shown to have many tangible benefits. And that needs to start with changing how hiring is done. [First in a three-part series]

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More than a Soft Landing: a Turning Point in Business | Stowe Boyd

The U.S. economy has sidestepped a recession. How? Is this a major shift in the global economy, and if so, what will be the outcome for business?

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Employee Experience Is Under Threat. Here's Where to Focus Your Efforts | Stowe Boyd

Layoffs and stress, quiet everything, radical flexibility, processes and systems.

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