Shale Gas, Innovation and Behaviour Change

I'm all about innovation. 

Innovation is the fuel that's drives the engine of civilization. I've spoken about this before so I won't go into excruciating detail. Needless to say innovation is what keeps us going. In the abstract innovation is a highly complex thing. It involves essentially rearranging already existing knowledge - or inducing new knowledge - and then applying it in a way that affects lasting change, either on the individual level or the group level. 

Mobile phones (and now smart phones), the internal combustion engine, fuel cells, airplanes, the water-wheel; all of these are innovations. Facts of reality are first discovered, then applies to a problem - if they solve the problem effectively they become innovations. 

On the flip side of this we have human behaviour. Innovation drives behaviour change but - and this is important - it also requires it. 

Let me explain; using the example of mobile phones. The advent of the mobile phone opened a new range of behaviours to people. Things that were quite unreinforcing (and quite pointlessly punishing) like talking into a piece of glass and plastic whilst walking down the street suddenly became quite plausible - and indeed highly reinforcing. Mobile phone behaviour was quite unprovoked - people discovered it by themselves, but interestingly out of it came a number of norms. People started... agreeing... about what was appropriate behaviour. Voluntary mobile phone bans cropped up in places it was inappropriate. A quite decentralised etiquette arose. Apart from anything it provides a wonderful example of Adam Smith's (much derided) invisible hand. Yet this isn't an exposition on economics. It's a discussion of behaviour change.

So what does it tell us? It tells us that innovation creates new behaviours, which in turn solves problems no one really knew we had. Some argue that we are more alienated because of mobile phones - I argue we are closer together. I can, at any time, ring any number of people, from any location, and get through to them. I can even see them with 3G/4G video. When once I had to be at a hardline to talk to someone now, five minutes from a meeting, stuck in traffic, I can call them to tell them I'm late thus saving myself the necessity of an unhappy bunch of staff, and an awkward conversation on my arrival. 

This, however, is only half the story. Sadly it's the only side of the story we discuss. Yet as a behaviourist I have another interest, a side of the story we don't often here told. What leads up to the innovation? 

 Now don't get me wrong. The western world is abuzz with how to "encourage" or "nudge" innovation. It's all the rage; the latest fad. Yet we think of it in terms of systems. We think in terms of political machinations and big, shiny ad campaigns that do little to actually drive innovation, but certainly look good on the score card. The token effort. The "seen to be doing something" tick box. 

So let's get serious. One of things you learn as a behaviourist is that there is no "group mind". There is no collective will, no "greater than the sum of it's parts" entity. All there is, is people. Individuals. Each with their own learning history. Each with their own set of unique contingencies. No two people act the same, even to identical stimuli. This is both a blessing and a curse. A curse because it means there is nothing specific we can do. We can't teach "innovation" in schools and expect it to appear. A blessing, because we can teach people to create contingencies to give rise to innovation on an individual level.

Let me enumerate; innovation never looks the same. It's a different process each time. Yet there are similarities. First; a person must have the ability to learn and synthesize a vast amount of knowledge. Second; a person must be able to apply said knowledge to physical problems (and must in turn recognise that problems can indeed be solved with facts, not wishful thinking), thirdly; they must be free to apply that knowledge. 

First; education. Our education is good - but it's not great. Skinner said it himself: 

We shouldn't teach great books; we should teach a love of reading. Knowing the contents of a few works of literature is a trivial achievement. Being inclined to go on reading is a great achievement.

 We make great pains to teach our children a wealth of knowledge, and yet we do little to instill a love of learning itself. Behaviour Analysis has gone to great pains to show a child can be taught, systematically, to love the process of learning. Yet it is not applied because we believe (and this is just my speculation but i have reason to think so) that we value the factual knowledge itself, over the process involved. Facts are divorced from reality. We learn history - but never teach the reason for learning history. We teach science - but never teach the reason for learning science... we teach a child how to deconstruct the themes of a novel - but never teach them why it matters, or what the themes mean in any kind of context. 

 This leads on to our second problem; application. If you're like me you probably heard, time and time again in school that you should "apply yourself more". Yet, again if you're like me, then you probably went away a little nonplussed. What did "apply yourself" mean, anyway? was it some application of will? Some special process you didn't understand? What? 

 Herein lies the problem, as I alluded to earlier there is a bizarre trend in education that essentially teaches the divorce between fact and value. This is an old philosophical problem that essentially draws a line in the sand between a fact (some referent of reality) and a value (some moral proclamation). we teach for the sake of teaching. History, as I mentioned earlier, is taught with no reference to the value behind it. So we learn about WWII and the rise of Hitler - we learn WHAT happened, but we don't learn WHY it happened. The why is seen as either self-evident or worse; irrelevant. This, in part, goes back to the progressive education movement of the early 20th century where John Dewey redefined the purpose of education to a socialising end. The educational philosophy of Dewey was conceptualised by John Dumphy as follows; 

"I am convinced that the battle for humankind's future must be waged and won in the public school classroom by teachers that correctly perceive their role as proselytizers of a new faith: a religion of humanity that recognizes and respects the spark of what theologians call divinity in every human being...The classroom must and will become an arena of conflict between the old and new — the rotting corpse of Christianity, together with all its adjacent evils and misery, and the new faith of humanism, resplendent with the promise of a world in which the never-realized Christian ideal of 'love thy neighbor' will finally be achieved." — excerpt from an article by John Dunphy titled "A Religion for a New Age," appearing in the January/February 1983 issue of The Humanist Magazine.

Now few educators in Britain would consider this an appropriate explanation of what they do. Indeed philosophical proselytizing is more common across the ocean, but the influence has nonetheless seeped in. For the purposes of innovation we need to stop teaching facts divorced from reality, and instead we need to teach facts as they are in reality. This means, in the context. Something every behaviour analyst understands quite intimately. Context is what gives us meaning. Without context we cannot understand why a behaviour occurred or whether it will occur again. 

Now for our third, and final, problem; are the appropriate contingencies available to allow innovation in the first place? Let's assume that we all have a self-interested desire to see innovation happen on a large scale. No one wants some genius locked up and unable to communicate or practice his new ideas. 

Yet this can be quite a controversial point. I want to use the recent interest in Shale Oil (controversial in its own right) to help me make my point. Shale Oil is in and of itself, innovative. It offers a way to expand our energy supply and can potentially act as a bridge to a cleaner, cheaper form of energy such as advanced nuclear reactors and so on. How does this innovation come to light? freedom. Freedom to experiment. Freedom to apply. There is a reason North Korea doesn't have a booming energy (or any) industry. 

So there are my three pre-conditions to innovation; knowledge (and the ability acquire it), an ability to apply the knowledge to real world problems, and finally the freedom to apply those problems. 

 There are no easy answers, and I can only offer my opinion (and I am always open to counter argument). The problems we face in society are not insurmountable, but they will need tackling eventually. If we want to succeed as a culture we need to start thinking more seriously about what we are doing - stop planning society based on ideology and start basing it on reason. I believe we can create a society where people are naturally innovative - as a norm, not an exception. Where the question of whether something should be allowed to be tried is never even asked. Where people take personal responsibility for improving their lives (and the lives of everyone else along with it). 

 Shale gas may prove to be dangerous, or useless, or simply too expensive. But imagine a world where we could never even try and find out?