A Sketch of a Minimal Structure of Human Judgement

How to Read This (Statement of Intent)

This site (fundamentalperspective.com) explores a sketch‑proposal about how humans act purposefully and with effect, both individually and in concert within their societies. It is written in support of existing social systems, not in opposition to them. The intention is not to prescribe behaviour or replace established models, but to examine whether commonly experienced complexity may rest on a small number of fundamental determinants, repeated across scale.

Readers are not asked for agreement or compliance. The material is offered as a set of working propositions, presumed incomplete and open to challenge. You may choose to read on, to pause, or to disengage entirely. Any of these responses is adequate. What follows aims only to open doors, not to direct which ones should be entered nor to direct action, should one do so.

The following is a review-summary of the ideas on this site at the end of 2025

Orientation: Complexity, Scale, and Society

Much of what we experience as social and organisational complexity arises not from the number of factors involved, but from the interaction of but a few core, fundamental determinants, repeated across scale. Societies, like organisations, are coordinated expressions of their members’ capabilities and limitations.   Because individuals are inherently variable, complete alignment is impossible, and stability therefore requires shared standards, incentives, including, at times, enforced compliance.

These mechanisms are not failures of design but necessary responses to scale. The work that follows does not seek to challenge such systems, but to explore how their underlying assumptions perform under conditions of increasing change, and whether alternative framings might both better preserve stability and enhance adaptive capacity.

Fundamentals, Theories, and Provisionality

Fundamental determinants can only be proposed. Unlike theories, they cannot be validated by supporting evidence without circularity, since the interpretation of evidence already depends upon them. Their value lies not in confirmation, but in their continued ability to withstand challenge and remain useful across changing circumstances.

Nothing here argues against evidence, measurement, or refinement. On the contrary, the proposal rests on the assumption that all models, including this one, must remain inadequate and provisional.   The current system works.   It has enabled extraordinary coordination, productivity, and stability.   The question addressed here is not whether it should be discarded, but whether its strengths are being applied where conditions still justify them.

Prescriptive instruction works because it rests on shared starting assumptions. These starting points are rarely examined precisely because, when conditions are stable, they do not need to be.

Authority, Certainty, and Instruction

The intention here is not to weaken existing systems of instruction or coordination.   Their success depends on precisely the dynamics explored below.   Prescriptive guidance can reduce uncertainty and align behaviour around shared assumptions.

What follows asks only whether, under changing conditions, those assumptions continue to serve us as well as they once did.

Understanding rarely arrives fully formed.   It emerges through iterative exchange, where assumptions are made explicit, challenged, and refined.   Shared meaning depends less on agreement at the outset than on willingness to remain engaged as understanding develops.

Key insight (for orientation): authority is treated here not as possession of certainty or control of prescription, but as the capacity to sustain productive inquiry under uncertainty.

The Question of Irreducibility

If humans act purposefully, learn from experience, and make choices under conditions of uncertainty, then some form of judgment is unavoidable.   Whether acting alone or in concert with others, we must continually assess situations, distinguish what matters from what does not, and decide, in what direction, when and how to react.   These processes may be implicit or explicit, formal or informal, but they cannot be eliminated.

The question that follows is therefore not whether structure exists, but how much structure is minimally required for judgment to function at all.   Not the most complete or refined account, but the fewest distinct perspectives without which assessment collapses into confusion, rigidity, or indecision.

This question matters because complexity scales faster than our capacity to manage it.   As circumstances change more rapidly, reliance on detailed prescription becomes increasingly brittle.   At the same time, abandoning shared structure entirely, would undermine coordination and stability.   Somewhere between these extremes lies a minimum set of reference perspectives from which can emerge both individual adaptability and collective coherence.

The work that follows proposes one possible sketch of such a minimum.   It is not offered as definitive, exclusive, or exhaustive.   It is presented only as an attempt to identify a small number of irreducible viewpoints that appear to be present whenever humans navigate uncertainty with effect – whether consciously acknowledged or not.

The reader is not asked to accept this proposal, only to consider whether ignoring any one of these aspects still permits adequate judgment.

The proposal follows a shifting perspective from those of highly authoritative and prescriptive management strategies (some of which, have been accused of ”mere fire-fighting approaches”) through ‘management by exception’ to more sophisticated and focussed approaches such as TOC and beyond, in an attempt to identify a core of the fewest and most powerful determinants and explore their implications and potential.

Basically the model proposed operates iteratively in a recuring three stage cycle pursuing ‘purpose’ – in a process seen manageable solely via four, inter-dependant and interacting skills.

Simple Rules, Vast Outcomes (Illustrative Analogy)

Complex human outcomes often appear unmanageable because of their apparent scale.   Yet many natural systems achieve extraordinary diversity and adaptability through the repeated application of but a small number of simple elements, applied in stages and regulated by context.

DNA provides a clear example. All biological complexity arises from just four chemical bases, arranged in sequences and expressed through staged processes of encoding, expression, and regulation. Complexity emerges not from the number of components, but from how they are managed over time.

This simple structure supports up to 4³’²⁰⁰’⁰⁰⁰’⁰⁰⁰ variants.

The nervous system operates in a similar way. Billions of individual neurons follow simple local rules: forming connections, strengthening or weakening them through activation, and stabilising useful patterns. Ideas and skills emerge as distributed patterns that persist only while they remain relevant.

Leading to the ability to encode an number many times greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

The number, In the model proposed later, appears more than adequate for any practical human lifetime”

Such numbers, for all practical purpose, might, reasonably be regarded as ‘infinite’

These examples are illustrative, not explanatory. They suggest that effective management may depend less on increasing complexity than on exploiting a small number of fundamentals well.

Purpose, Choice, and Iteration

This site proposes that humans can be seen to act purposefully.   Purpose is treated here not as a claim about origin or essence, but as an observed pattern: without which there would be no basis for continuity or direction beyond random change.

Individuals appear to pursue purposes in iterative stages.   At each stage, assessing the situation within their current awareness and making the best choice they can.   Responses may differ yet remain adequate to circumstance.

Societies do much the same, though with greater inertia and pre-commitment to strategy.   As numbers increase, so does inertia and response lag, along with increased requirements for alignment and further reductions in degrees of freedom.

They also, make the best choices they can.

Learning, Adequacy, and the Spiral

Learning is used here not as a theory of mechanism, but as a label for an observed process: the ability to assign and compare values between iterations thus allowing subsequent choices to be modulated by ‘experience’.   Please note that not all ‘learnings’ are appropriate and often, labelled as ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’.

‘Purpose’ is seen as directing the chosen goal of highest value and is perhaps the prime driver of the system, for without it, what but chaos.   ‘Learning’ is seen as  the adjustment (positive or negative) made to those terms of reference that guide ‘choice’ and causes an otherwise inherently circular process to become ‘spiral”.   It is not seen as a ‘good’ or ’bad’ thing but merely as a process.

Please note that ‘Purpose’ and ‘Learning’ are amongst ‘labels of convenience’ used here.

Adequacy replaces absolutes.   Choices need only be good enough for the moment. This principle underpins both individual action and social coordination.   Pursuit beyond this point is non-optimum.

The Illusion of Certainty as a Convenience: The 1×1 Illustration

In order that we can communicate without unnecessary hinderance, we are taught that:

“1” can be any number >”0.5” or <”1.5”

And that:

 “1 × 1 = 1”.                 As an absolute claim, this is untrue; it hides imprecision (>0.25 & <2.25)

. “1.0 × 1.0 = 1.0”     Though more precise, is still untrue (>0.9025 & <1.1025).

“1.0 × 1.0 = 1”                    However, is adequate to purpose, acknowledging rounding and context.

The distinction here is not mathematical correctness, but contextual adequacy for coordination.

The issue illustrated here is not mathematical precision but functional adequacy. Coordination becomes possible when participants treat certain approximations as sufficiently stable for the purposes at hand. The model proposed throughout this site relies on this principle of adequacy rather than on claims of absolute certainty.

Such, essential assumptions, though technically flawed, enable communication and coordination.   When quantities are so large that variation is insignificant, they are treated, for practical purposes, as ‘absolutely true’.   The model proposed here rests on this kind of pragmatic adequacy rather than on claims of final certainty.   Other than that ‘uncertainty’ seems to be universally present.   Leading to this, rather than certainty being the resource.

The difference is merely of perspective.   That social endeavour requires that ‘purpose’ is beyond reasonable question, in order that individuals can act in concert.   Whereas individuals must decide “what is the best thing to do next” at each point of ‘choice’, including following pre-agreed communal ‘purpose’.   This leads to inversion of priority logic at each polarity of the relationship for it to prosper.

Individuals and Society

A society’s efforts, being derived from the sum of those of its members, are thus constrained by the same fundamentals that constrain those individuals.   Alignment reduces freedom but enables coordination.   In stable conditions, high alignment is efficient.   In times of change, novelty once seen as disruptive, may become valuable.   Conversely, established ‘prescriptions’ can become barriers to progress.

Information technology increasingly provides requisite data and performs routine, rule‑based tasks with great efficiency. This shifts emphasis from an individual’s competence in detail and toward an increased focus towards their capability of judgment, selection, and adaptation.

What This Is — and Is Not

The ideas presented are working propositions.   They are not and never can be, finished answers.   They are offered to be engaged with, challenged, or ignored.   Meaning is expected to emerge through iteration rather than instruction.

Different sections serve different purposes: some orient, some illustrate, some explore implications, and some test resistance.   No uniform intent should be assumed throughout.

It does not say ‘what-to’, why’ or ‘how’ and never will (or ‘the wheels will have dropped off’!)

From Prescription towards Ownership

From this point onward, I will attempt to present a model that has developed over roughly thirty-five years through workshops, dialogue, and repeated practical use.   What follows is not an invention in the proprietary sense, but a summary of what emerged from those exchanges.   I take responsibility for its framing and for its limitations.

I have long been drawn to identifying causality in human and organisational behaviour.   More than fifty years ago, during a management diploma course, I was particularly influenced by ideas such as ‘managing by exception’ and ‘critical path analysis’ – approaches concerned less with total control than with focusing attention where it matters most.   Only later did I recognise that the way I had interpreted and employed ‘critical path’ closely resembled what Goldratt would subsequently formalise as ‘Critical Chain’.

Around thirty-five years ago, in conversation with a psychologist colleague, we sketched a simple functional block diagram – sometimes referred to as the Woodrow/Collins model – describing how a person might process a predicament.   The initial sketch suggested that three core skills should be sufficient to account for human responses.

Presenting this model in workshops, it quickly was seen deficient.   It was acknowledged that amongst things to be regarded, were simple solid objects and that to fully evaluate such objects a minimum of four (non-co-planar) viewing points was required.   This observation was not treated as proof but as a guiding analogy: if human judgement must evaluate situations at least as complex as physical objects, a comparable minimum of perspectives might reasonably be expected.

   The fourth determinant was identified and as situations more complex were envisaged, provision was made for a further at each validation of a new core determinant.   That the model should always be presumed inadequate.

For if a model of purposeful action cannot accommodate even the evaluation of solid objects, then it is insufficient as a general account of human judgment.

Since that time, many suggestions for additional core elements have been proposed by participants.   In each case, when examined closely through discussion, the proponents themselves concluded that their suggestions could not be sustained as independent fundamentals, but could instead be understood as combinations or expressions of the existing four.   No alternative has yet been offered that its own proponent has been able to sustain as irreducible.

As a result, the role of the open position has shifted.   It no longer, solely, anticipates a specific missing element, but instead functions with an over-arching requirement that the model be presumed incomplete from any perspective.   Without continuous challenge, any such structure risks being treated as correct rather than merely useful (and in doing so, it would lose the very value it was intended to provide).

The Outline

The development of this model rests, solely, on observation of process rather than on explanation of mechanism.

A prime observation is that human endeavour seems purposeful and capable of creating structures of increasing value over time.   As if driven by purpose and capable of making choice and ‘learning’ from accumulated ‘experience, so that an otherwise ‘circular’ recursive system, emerges as a ‘spiral’.   Whether these observations reflect underlying causes, emergent properties, or convenient descriptions is not addressed here.

What matters for the present inquiry is that such a process, whatever its ultimate explanation, appears sufficiently stable and repeatable to be navigated.   If human action were entirely chaotic, no learning, coordination, or sustained achievement would be possible.   The fact that individuals and societies routinely act with effect suggests that some degree of manageability is inherent in the process.

This exercise therefore does not address why human endeavour takes this form, nor how it is realised at a neurological or psychological level.   Instead, it asks a more limited and pragmatic question: what are the simplest aspects of this process that appear to determine outcomes.   The assumption is that these aspects, if they exist, because they are unavoidable, seem to offer the greatest leverage.

The following explores whether this unavoidable structure can be sketched without recourse to prescription, explanation, or claims of completeness.

A Minimal Iterative Process?

In the following, some terms are used as functional ‘labels of convenience’ rather than as precise technical definitions. They are intended to remain adequate to purpose, not exhaustive. Where ‘emphasis’ is applied, it indicates functional importance rather than definitional precision.

This is the simplest model, I’ve yet seen proposed, by which recursiveness could become spiral:

In order to survive, an individual needs to be aware of the circumstances currently facing them, the implications arising from them and be able to distinguish and rank these by nature and magnitude.   Let’s call this ‘awareness’.

The greater the scope of ‘awareness’, The greater the range of options available (degrees of freedom) from which to make ‘choice’ and formulate ‘response’.

In subsequent iterations of this process, each current ‘awareness’ incorporates the outcomes of previous ‘responses’ and their evaluation.   In this way, an otherwise circular sequence becomes spiral.   This accumulating modification of subsequent choice is what we label ‘learning’.   Over time, this process may so strongly influence ‘choice’, that ‘responses’ appear almost instinctive or reflexive.

This simple structure appears sufficient to account for the purposeful continuity and progressive pattern observed in human endeavour.

Closer observation shows that some ‘choices’ yield ‘responses’ of higher value than others, some, however, appearing as ‘regressions’.    Such ‘choices’ could reasonably be called ‘unwise’, while sustained patterns of higher-value outcomes might be described as ‘wise’.   On this basis the observed pursuit of ‘purpose’, could be regarded as guided – however imperfectly – by ‘wisdom’, which is suggested as the lowest-level functional property at which purposeful human action remains coherent over time.   Attempts to reduce it further do not yield simpler determinants, but fragment the function it performs.

From this perspective, human action can be seen as unfolding through a simple three-stage recursive process:

Awareness → Choice → Response → Awareness …etc.

Similarly societies, aware of common need, choose future policy and respond by committing to projects,   However, because collective action requires compromise and alignment around common purpose, societies operate with fewer degrees of freedom, greater inertia, and longer response lags (‘learning’).

Individuals entering such collective commitments must therefore accept that ‘purpose’, strategy, and modes of execution are pre-agreed.    In doing so, they necessarily relinquish certain freedoms of individual ‘choice’, since the ‘purpose’ toward which action is directed has already been selected.

However, when not constrained by the prescriptions of communal engagement, an individual must assume full ownership and ‘chose’ and be guided to their own ‘purpose’ at each stage of progress towards it.   In this sense, responsibility and freedom converge.

If this progression of ‘purpose’ is, indeed manageable, The next phase is to attempt to unravel a mechanism at the level of underpinning fundamentals.

From Iteration to Function

When we observe the pursuit of ‘purpose’, guided by ‘wisdom’, and the recursion of the ‘awareness’/’choice’/’response’ process.   We see it advancing from ‘current reality’ to an envisioned, superior, ‘future reality’:-

From ‘awareness’,  one first needs to be able to recognise ‘things’ (whether material or conceptual) – for which, in order to classify and quantify, one needs to have some standards of reference.   In addition, one needs to be able to make comparative judgement in order to justify and prioritise selections.   Further, one needs to focus so that redundancy is minimised and one does not do the unnecessary.   And finally, the outcome needs to be relevant to prevailing circumstances.   Normally, one operates in relationships with others and this final aspect becomes perhaps dominant.

These requirements are not however separate elements but inter-acting and interdependent aspects of the ‘wisdom’ process, arising effectively from four perspectives observing the process.   Observing from each of these perspectives, four similarly associated developable skills emerge.   ,They are, for convenience, labelled as:-

1. An ability to ‘Believe’ or have adequate confidence to regard as ‘good-enough’.

Within this framing of believing something is ‘good-enough’ to function rather than ‘true’, it may be helpful to regard ‘beliefs’ as metaphors?

• An ability to be ‘Curious’ and explore ‘uncertainty’ as a resource until. ‘good-enough’
• An ability to ‘Concentrate’ or to minimise redundancy and not do the unnecessary
• An ability to be ‘Timely’ so that ‘responses’ are both relevant and of the moment.

For a society

1. “Its ability to ‘Believe’ or have adequate confidence to regard as ‘good-enough’.”

Has got to be an adequate alignment of the ability of its members to ‘Believe’.   Without such alignment, collective action cannot be adequately ‘concentrated’, to withstand any degree of ‘curiosity’ adequate to it’s being relevant in any degree approaching ‘timeliness’

• Its ability to be ‘Curious’ and explore ‘uncertainty’ as a resource until. ‘good-enough’

Has got to be an adequate alignment of ‘the ability of its members to be ‘Curious’, however since, at the individual level, this is essentially unconstrained, it needs to be ‘concentrated’ into a ‘quality-control like’ function, ensuring that alignment of aligned ‘Beliefs’ remains adequate, and that ‘timeliness’ is not compromised.

• Its ability to ‘Concentrate’ or to minimise redundancy and not do the unnecessary

Has got to be an adequate alignment of ‘the ability to ‘Concentrate’ beyond the individual level and necessarily constrained by required alignment of sharing ‘Beliefs’, to providing guidance via customs, traditions, conventions and formal legality, such that being too ‘Curious’ does not prejudice ‘timeliness’.   At the social level this ability enables clear statements of ‘purpose’.

• Its ability to be ‘Timely’ so that ‘responses’ are both relevant and of the moment.

Has got to be an adequate alignment of ‘the ability to be ‘Timely’ so that ‘responses’ are both relevant and of the moment.   Without alignment and constraint of members’ abilities to ‘believe’, ‘concentrate’, and to be ‘curious’, this ability is compromised.

It may be noted that ‘timeliness’, insofar as it extends relevance beyond that of the individual to that of society, forms a shared perspective through which individuals and their societies can coordinate and communicate.

.

For an individual

1. Their ability to ‘Believe’ or have adequate confidence to regard as ‘good-enough’.

This is one of relative capability, enhanced and tested by their ability to be ‘Curious’, focussed by their ability to ‘Concentrate’ and to be ‘Timely’.   This last ability modulates the relationship with their society, constraining their other three abilities, though leaving a door cracked open that, occasionally welcomes novelty.

The ‘spiral of learning’ encourages this skill to be dynamic.

• Their ability to be ‘Curious’ and explore ‘uncertainty’ as a resource until. ‘good-enough’

This ability to endlessly ask and interrogate would be random and meaningless without a base of ‘beliefs’ as a point of reference from which to enquire, of no avail without an ability to ‘concentrate’.   Finally in order that ‘responses’ remain relevant it must also be constrained by ‘timeliness’, at least to ensure that ‘good-enough’ prevails

The ‘spiral of learning’ also encourages this skill to be dynamic -.which does not necessarily cause enhancement.

• Their ability to ‘Concentrate’ or to minimise redundancy and not do the unnecessary

This ability is perhaps the most mechanistic of the four skills in that it may be possible to enhance performance by learning “not to do the unnecessary” aided by each of the other three, which would otherwise be undirected.   At the personal level, “not to do the unnecessary” leads perhaps to “less is more”.   It does aid the “good-enough” requirements of ‘belief’, curiosity’, and ‘timeliness’.

• Their ability to be ‘Timely’ so that ‘responses’ are both relevant and of the moment.

This skill, accommodates a shared perspective with society, frames the ‘awareness – choice – response’ procedure, in doing so influencing ‘beliefs’, restraining ‘curiosity’ and directing ‘concentration’.

Throughout this process, relevance requires conformity with prevailing social requirements; without such conformity, one’s ‘responses’ cease to have any relevance.   However, what must be conformed to changes, and the nature of required conformity varies with changing social conditions.   Where those changes are slow, inherited structures of belief, concentration, curiosity, and timeliness may remain largely adequate.   As the rate of change accelerates, adequacy becomes situational and can no longer be assumed.   Under these conditions, fixed alignment increasingly fails to sustain relevance.   Individuals are therefore required to exercise their judgments more frequently and with less reference to external guidance.   It is at this point that a transition from function to application is necessary.

From Function to Application – and the ‘Expiot’

The application of these functions to maximise ‘wisdom’, in order to satisfy ‘timeliness’, must respect the current social dynamic.   The table below illustrates appropriate response at the two, purely hypothetical, extremes of social change – from zero to infinite

The terms ‘EXPERT’ and ‘IDIOT’ are used here deliberately and provocatively.   They do not describe intelligence, competence, or personal worth.   They merely denote functional postures that emerge at two purely hypothetical extremes of social rate of change.

At one extreme, where conditions are effectively static, optimal performance depends upon high alignment, shared frames of reference, and conformity to received structures. In such circumstances, divergence, exploration, and continual reframing are inefficient and destabilising.

At the opposite extreme, where conditions change faster than prescriptive structures can adapt, the same behaviours invert in value. Rigid adherence to received models becomes impossible, since hitherto stable frames of reference have collapsed.  Provisional belief, exploration of uncertainty, and personal ownership of judgment become essential elements of conformity.

Throughout this process, in order to maintain relevance, conformity with social requirements remains mandatory or one’s ‘responses’ cease to have relevance.   As the nature of  what one conforms to changes, so does the nature of the conformity required

The table that follows is prescriptive only at its unreal hypothetical extremes. It is not offered as guidance for lived reality. Actual human realities lie between these poles and require continual modulation and compromise. An individual’s task is to negotiate positions between them as conditions vary.   Though it was drawn up in the context of a management school, is not ‘life’ the ultimate management project?

.From ‘EXPERT’ to ‘IDIOT’?

Please note that whilst the table above IS prescriptive, it is ONLY so in the unreal hypothetical extremes proposed and that optimising ‘wisdom’, constantly requires modulations appropriate to the varying situations presented in daily life.

‘Expert’ & ‘Idiot’ are hypothetical extremes.  Current reality requires flexibility & freedom, modulated by obedience to changing conditions – an ‘EXPIOT’ perhaps?

An Ilustrative Context – A Lifetime of Accellerating Change

The only real context I can offer is my account of my own lifetime.

From 1940 to 2026 there have been many, technical changes leading to changes in social attitude.

I can only relate these in my own terms and with my own (varying) biases.   I do not ask that you accept any opinions implicit.

My earliest memories (1943 to 1950) are of horse-drawn deliveries of milk, bread , vegetables and coal and being driven around the Hampshire at the end of the war (very few people had cars or petrol allowances) to scenes of a countryside little changed for hundreds of years.   The lamplighter came on a bike at dawn and dusk and people listened to the radio (in the few hours it was available, marvelling at the improvement over the crystal-set.

Social strata were clearly accepted “the rich man in his castle – the  poor man at his gate” being commonly repeated and my first memory of racial prejudice – the horror when a local lad returning from France after the war, married a ‘French’ girl.

In the 1950s, when I was at school, some people had television sets (the first I saw had a screen about six inches across and needed a darkened room for viewing).   We had slide-rules and “log table” books for mathematics.   My mother was a “Comptometer operator” (a mechanical arithmetic machine).

I remember an article on the front page of a national daily newspaper claiming proof of superior intelligence of ‘white Europeans’ over ‘Africans’ from the results of ‘intelligence tests’

In the late 1950s to middle 1960s many more had cars and television sets – some even displaying full-colour images.   Mechanical adding machines and ‘golf-ball typewriters were common and ‘electronics’ and (large) computers were novelties.   The jet-plane became commercial as the modern ‘Airliner’ It was, perhaps,  the beginning of ‘The Space Age’.   The availability of the contraceptive pill clearly changed several attitudes.

It was a time of social change –  ‘Teddy Boys”, “Mods and Rockers”, “Mini-skirts”.   The “Swinging sixties”.   Men started to cease wearing hats and having shirts with detachable collars and cuffs.   At this time I moved to London and my horizons widened.   I think I was not alone in this.   An almost universal  adoption    of TV had shrunk horizons.

In the late 1960s to middle 1970s there was a move from vacuum tube  to solid-state electronics – the ‘transistor-age’ and early integrated circuits so that “electronic” became a common descriptor.   A time of ‘miniaturisation’ with pocket calculators replacing slide-rules.   There was even a pocket TV (that never caught-on).   For the first time the idea of saturating a market (taught as a distant probability 10years before) became a reality.

Socially, Life seemed less parochial.   Many took foreign holidays and the space programme perhaps contributed to this.   The piano ceased to be almost universal in public bars.  

In the late 1970s to middle 1980s, electronic technology advanced beyond medium-scale integration to the micro-computer and the era of electronic engineering from discrete component level was coming to an end.   The motor car, which till then had been a purely mechanical device, started increasingly, to absorb electronic technology and become no longer repairable in the way it once had been.   Colour television sets were almost universal and video-tape recorders also a norm.   Small personal computers like the ‘BBC–B’ were a common novelty.

It was perhaps, the beginning of the end of an era, where one would have a single job for life and a time of social change.   Independent shops were now clearly in decline, replaced by national chains.

In the late 1980s to middle 1990s personal computers became more common and miniaturisation of electronics saw more and more domestic products incorporating micro-chip technology.   By this time circuit reliability was such that the idea of repairing became a policy of replacement, of modules, if not the whole product.   A (very) few people had ‘portable phones’ – enormous and cumbersome contraptions – though still only for verbal communication. The CD began replacing vinyl records and magnetic tape recording technology.

The late 1990s to middle 2010s saw the mobile phone reduced to pocket size and the internet, moving beyond ’dial-up’ and commonly adopted.   Solid state memory for computers became, high-street-commercial.

At the turn of the century, when I came to France, people in England were becoming slaves to their  mobiles.   This already a degree of noticeable social behaviour, yet to come  in France.   Also many were using the internet to retrieve information.   Within 5 years, advances in the net and the phone were shifting habits and further shrinking horizons.   Technology facilitated centralisation.

From the late 2010s to date the ‘smartphone’ (Nortel’s phone at the turn of the century was rejected – “who wants a camera on their phone”?) blossomed.   Together with the webs maturity, there was a new order of social communicating, individuals’ phones provided global news on public TV.   The social media industry exploded.   The ‘new thing’ was Artificial Intelligence.   It was talked about– the potential for distributing mis-information xas demonstrated at/after Trump’s first election.   By 2024 we were living in a post-truth age.

The Covid pandemic accelerated change and promoted modern communication capabilities so that new working practices were adopted and the ‘high-street’ suffered further.

Just four years ago ChatGPT arrived.   The spread and speed of progress has outstripped previous such innovations

Overall

In this period world population has increased over three and a half times (2.32 to 8.19 billion) and other technical advances with clear social consequences have included:- The nuclear programme, Antibiotics, Petro-chemicals, Plastics and composites, photovoltaics and DNA.

This has been an accelerating process, starting with mechanisation, leading to automation, which, previously restricted to the manipulation of physical matter and affecting the working classes, has now progressed to manipulating information and undermining the foundations of primary professions.   A positive aspect of this is that it now offers enhanced management opportunity, freed from the burden of accumulating and sorting detail knowledge, via a dynamic and self-organising encyclopedia.

Closing Summary:-

I

If the process is ‘Awareness’ – ‘Choice’ – ‘Response’

IsGuided by Wisdom, oriented by Purpose

Then ‘Choice’ is bounded by “Response-ability”.

And satisfied by ‘Adequacy’.

Which is bounded by the capability of ‘Wisdom’.

This, recursive ‘loop’ process, in including ‘awareness’ of previous iterations becomes a a dynamic spiral of ‘learning’.

In times of change, societies struggle to define ‘Adequacy’ in supporting their  individuals.   The burden of “Response-ability”; then shifts towards individuals – upon whom society then depends.   Such shift of  ownership, requires a more fully inclusive perspective, from a more internally-referenced stance.

The capacity to respond appears to require several interacting skills. These skills are not independent components, but expressions of judgement, each derived from viewing the same circumstance from several distinct perspectives. Each perspective reveals a dimension of adequacy that the others cannot fully capture. Together they constitute what may be called ‘response-ability’: the practical capacity to act coherently under conditions of unavoidable uncertainty.   Current technology facilitates such capability and offers new opportunity.