Weave Problems

One can't help but be creeped out when reading the works of renowned futurist Alvin Toffler. Writing in the 70s and 80s, he accurately predicted many societal trends that were laughable to imagine at that time. He foresaw meteoric technological shifts (like cable television and the internet), the upending of the nuclear family, the rise of genetic engineering, and other transformations that have become the fabric of modern society. He even coined the phrase "information overload"  way back in 1970.

Further, Toffler called out risks like the potential release of bio-engineered viruses and other microorganisms, increased political extremism, and more. I doubt I've ever gasped out loud or declared "holy shit" more than when reading Toffler. As I read "The Third Wave," I felt like the target of a prank  —  like someone wrote a book in 2022 and backdated it to 1980 — that's how prophetic Toffler was. 

His accurate predictions and many misses are widely reported, but there's more to his writing than his prognostications. Toffler synthesizes information better than anyone I've ever read. In a society that rewards breaking information into the smallest bits possible, Toffler recombines them, finds patterns in heaps of noise, and thinks beyond "blips." He’s the anti-specialist, a man who amalgamates science and religion, philosophy and sociology. His grand thinking when everyone else is going microscopic helps him avoid the trap of "knowing more and more about less and less." 

Toffler's mental models can be used to zig while everyone else zags. When we want to determine why an event happens, we turn to "cause and effect analysis." Toffler, borrowing from Peter Ritner, warns that we'll increasingly face challenges that require "mutual dependence analysis," a mode of thinking most of us aren't taught to or equipped to do. These complicated problems are called "weave problems." 

Weave problems are challenging because there is no single causality. But being a science-based society, we're determined to point the finger at one variable. To do so, we employ the scientific method, isolating one variable after another and measuring the results. But weave problems are too complex. They can contain thousands of interrelated, overlapping, and co-occurring components that have varying and intermittent impacts on tough-to-measure outcomes. We have to think differently.

To solve these problems, we need to synthesize, not distill. Instead, we turn to "experts," who, Toffler warns, "typically insists on the primal importance of its own causes, to the exclusion of others." 

To paint the picture of expertise bias, Toffler examined the problem of urban decay: 

“The Housing Expert traces it to the congestion and a declining housing stock; the Transportation Expert points to a lack of mass transit; the Welfare Expert shows the inadequacy of budgets for day-care centers or social work; the Crime Expert points a finger at the infrequency of police patrol; the Economics Expert shows that high taxes are discouraging business investment; and so on.”

To each of these framers, armed with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. As Warren Buffet famously quipped, "Don't ask the barber whether you need a haircut." In Toffler's example, it's clear that the issues are interrelated and part of a more significant "self-reinforcing system." But few can untangle the knotted ball of thread . That's the challenge of weave problems. Large-scale synthesis requires simplifications, generalizations, and information  compression —  the opposite of the over-complication, specialization, and extraction we're used to.

How do we deal with weave problems?

Toffler doesn't provide a step-by-step prescription for solving weave problems, but from his example, we can learn how to think about inter-woven challenges.

Ask questions. 

Toffler believed "the right question is usually more important than the right answer to the wrong question." Original thinking produces more questions than answers. Yes, it's frustrating to be faced with an ever-growing list of questions, but it's a critical component of learning. As critic George Steiner wrote, "to ask larger questions is to risk getting things wrong. Not to ask them at all is to constrain the life of understanding." 

As your universe of questions expands, so does your comfort with unknowing. Start asking big questions now so that tomorrow you can feel good, not uneasy, about not knowing. Be relentlessly curious. 

Don't ignore the unquantifiable.

For thousands of years, we've accepted the atomic model of reality based on reductionism. Democritus first popularized atomist philosophy, saying, "the first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist." 

His atomos concept has since infiltrated every part of human existence and is part of our immense desire to break reality down into smaller and smaller, more organized bits. While useful in many domains, our fondness for organization and quantification stifles imaginative spirit and leads us to treat individual symptoms rather than greater causes. 

Data, information, metrics  - these tools help us solve problems, but they cannot be the end all be all, else we become blind to both big problems and big solutions. 

Experience alertly.

Firsthand experience teaches more than any book, journal, newspaper, or article. Toffler credited "an alert eye and ear" with shedding a "revealing light on abstraction." Seeking experiences to write about, Toffler and his wife, Heidi, got their hands dirty as blue-collar assembly line workers. In the factories, Toffler learned about industrialism and technological trajectories — a welder by day and writer by night. 

We don't all need to take to the seas like Jack London or harvest grapes like Steinbeck to gain perspective, but intently using our senses helps us collect clues about the world around us. 

Take responsibility. 

I'm responsible for fostering extreme curiosity, maintaining an open mind (even to seemingly radical ideas), asking big questions, and seeking truth. 

I can't blame my doctor for my poor health, my teachers for my ignorance, or "the system" for my unhappiness. I'm solely responsible for fighting off "idea-assassins who rush forward to kill any new suggestions on grounds of its impracticality while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd, oppressive, or unworkable it may be." 

We don't know what the future holds, but we're in control of our values, beliefs, thoughts, and actions — take responsibility for them.

Remember the past carefully. 

The myth of the good-ole-days is compelling. We can’t control the future, so we’re apt to favorably reconstruct the past by donning rose-colored glasses. Maybe it's a defense mechanism to help us overcome trauma and avoid mental health issues; rosy retrospection leads to unsupported conclusions of societal decline. 

Toffler warned of over-glamorizing the past, declaring, "the way into the future is not through reversion to an even more miserable past." That's not to say we live in a fault-free present; we don't. But the past featured its own massive shortcomings that shouldn't be omitted from careful evaluation. 

The Third Wave

Weave problems, despite their scope and complexity, are part of a larger pattern still. In "The Third Wave," Toffler argues that we're in the midst of a collision of societal waves. The first wave was the agricultural revolution, a relatively slow transition from our hunter-gathering roots that is still ongoing in some regions. The second wave, a product of industrialization, transformed societies worldwide via standardization, specialization, synchronization, concentration, maximization, and centralization. 

The third wave, whose energy reverberates around the globe today, is breaking second-wave codes, and "nothing will remain unchanged." The destruction and creation are hidden in real-time to most because instead of appearing like parts of a whole, they masquerade as dozens of unrelated, random developments (value system confusion, gender role shifts, new geo-political relationships, political turmoil, energy transition, etc.). 

Toffler's synthesis can sound like a cause for despair  -  it's not. Contrarily, he presents reasons to "challenge the chic pessimism that is so prevalent today." The beauty in his work isn't his predictions ; it’s his thought process. Whether examining our own health, or worldly problems, it's helpful to not only break information down but to build it back up. Only by thinking bigger can we genuinely understand the connectedness of our existence and solve old problems and the new ones we'll inevitably face.