NAVIGATING CLEAR-EYED THROUGH
UNCOMFORTABLE TIMES
CONTENTS
Three stories, six words that get mixed up, one city that must learn to see itself as an organism, five travel tips.
The stories
THREE — THE BLACKBIRD
The language
The city
The questions
The navigation
Introduction
Imagine you are a Gopher. A strictly vegetarian "Thomomys talpoides"—also known by the American name "pocket gopher" (or Northern pocket gopher)—or simply "gopher."
How fun is it to kick off a symposium with a flash mob, a funny video, and a wacky opening line about a gopher? I’ve been dreaming of this for 67 years. And now, it’s finally happening. Simply because I can—and because you’ll likely put up with me.
At the same time, this is the first and last moment in my entire working life where I’m facing a large hall full of people—and actually know everyone in the room. How wonderful is that? And how wonderful to have you all here with me.
I stand here as a bundle of mixed emotions and feelings. In truth, it has always been that way. I am simultaneously that little boy in primary school about to give his first class presentation and the 67-year-old man simply overflowing with life experience. Angry, sad, excited, joyful, happy and unhappy, grieving, deeply moved. All at once. If I occasionally get a bit teary-eyed or come across as a little scattered, please forgive me.
This mini-symposium is my way of saying "thank you" to all of you. Each of you has taught me something—or given me something—at some point over the past 67 years, something that has brought me joy and a sense of warmth as I moved forward. I hope I’ve been able to give enough back in return.
I’ve placed an empty chair on the stage. That represents the empty space I am leaving behind here. I would have happily filled that spot for years to come. Never a dull moment in Rotterdam. There is so much to do here, and I still have so much to give.
But there are also times when you’re ready for something new—you have to make choices. And this is the day!
And naturally, even as I say goodbye to my work here, I will remain that same passionate man who can’t sit still. To use Goffer terminology: I never stop digging. "I never stop flying" would have worked too, but well, I’m kind of stuck on that Goffer theme right now.
As a biologist through and through, I’m going to test your powers of imagination with three stories—all with a distinctly biological angle, something I actually didn't get to explore nearly enough in my professional life. Afterward, I’ll try to make sense of it all and leave you with some food for thought and a practical task regarding clear navigation.
Let’s go. So, I’m just going to kick things off with that quirky opening sentence again and put your imagination to the test.
ONE — THE GOPHER
Imagine you are a Gopher. You dig tunnels and feed on plant roots, bulbs, and tubers. You enjoy your little underground world of burrowing. You create what, in organizational theory, would be described as a "highly siloed system." You live a completely solitary life within a tunnel network of your own making; you are a loner. Yet, naturally, you also need to reproduce. So, for that single purpose, you dig a connecting tunnel to the private burrow of a gopher of the opposite sex. You do your thing, and then each of you retreats back into your own separate world of tunnels.
Perhaps you embody—or recognize—gopher-like traits in yourself or in the people and organizations around you...
Anyway, to recap: you are a Gopher. It is 1980, and you live near a mountain. On May 18th of that year, an event occurs—what is now known as a "black swan" event—that almost no one saw coming and that turns everything upside down. Mount St. Helens—for that is the mountain's name—blows off its own flank in a massive explosion (with the force of 1,600 Hiroshima atomic bombs). An area of 600 square kilometers—twice the size of the city of Rotterdam—is transformed in an instant into a lunar landscape of completely scorched, barren, dead pumice. Everything, right out to the horizon, is gray.
You, along with a fair number of other gophers, are initially virtually the only living creature to survive: after all, you are safe in your own little world of underground tunnels, and the explosion and heat have swept over you. But it soon becomes apparent that all the plants—your strict and beloved diet—have been scorched, and you, too, eventually perish. The entire landscape is left completely devoid of life.
In a completely different sphere of life and work, ecologists are assigned the task of studying how recovery unfolds following such a disaster. Their expectation is clear: life will steadily creep back inward from the green fringes. Three years after the explosion—in 1983, once the landscape has cooled sufficiently—a few of these ecologists, in what is almost an incidental experiment, release a handful of gophers onto a barren stretch of slope for a single day. They let the gophers dig for that one day, then remove them. After all, no matter how industriously the gophers have dug, there is still not a single plant to eat.
1983
The aim is to see whether these burrowing rodents can kick-start ecological recovery in the short term. Covered by a thick layer of volcanic ash and pumice, the landscape remains completely barren, and nothing can grow there.
The brief experiment—involving just one day of burrowing by gophers—has a stunning effect. When scientists return six years later, they find over 40,000 flowering plants on the plots where the gophers had burrowed. The surrounding, undisturbed areas remain largely devoid of vegetation.
The gophers' digging brought ancient, nutrient-rich soil and vital mycorrhizal fungi to the surface. Wind-blown seeds suddenly found symbiotic fungal partners—essential for nutrient uptake in infertile soil.
Recent research (published in the scientific journal *Frontiers in Microbiomes*) shows that the impact of that single day of digging remains visible even after more than forty years. In that churned-up underworld, everything began anew. A tiny, seemingly insignificant difference—a burrowing rodent—proved to be the pivot point for an entire system. It was not part of any script.
These burrowing gophers (rodents often labeled as "pests") turn out to be crucial ecosystem engineers capable of advancing the biological clock by decades following a natural disaster.
Allen & McMahon, experiment 1983; Maltz et al., Frontiers in Microbiomes, 2024; UC Riverside News, 5 nov 2024.
TWO — ASHBY
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Imagine it is 1947 and you happen to be walking around Barnwood House.
Barnwood House is a psychiatric hospital in Gloucester, United Kingdom. There is a good chance that if you walk into the main building and knock on the door of the laboratory located there, you might find yourself shaking hands with a Mr. W. Ross Ashby. He works there seeking to understand how people suffering from chronic mental illness or trauma—such as that resulting from the war—can be helped. What makes Ashby unusual is that his fascination is not so much psychological as it is physical, biological, and mechanical.
He asks very simple yet fundamental questions: what *is* adaptation (or, in other words, how do people stay healthy) and what *is* a breakdown (or, in other words, how do people become ill or even die?) in physical terms? His answer turned the prevailing view on its head. In his own words...
"To the biologist the brain is not a thinking machine,
it is an acting machine."
This acting is not just any kind of action; it has a clear, permanent goal: maintaining the conditions under which the organism can remain alive. For me, as a human system, this means ensuring that my internal temperature stays between 30 and 42 degrees and that my blood sugar level remains within strict limits.
Essential internal conditions in humans
Nine variables, nine organ systems that monitor them. Ashby called them essential variables: anything that goes beyond their limits puts the entire system at risk. Here is what is maintained within strict limits every second, without you even noticing:
Chemical balances (lungs, kidneys, blood buffer systems, pancreas, liver, urinary tract, endocrine system)
Blood pH (acidity): between 7.35 and 7.45
Blood sugar level: between 4 and 6 mmol/L (fasting)
Electrolyte balance: sodium, potassium, calcium, and magnesium within narrow concentration ranges
Basic physical states (skin, muscles, nervous system, cardiovascular system, urinary tract, hypothalamus and pituitary gland)
Core body temperature: between 30 and 42 degrees for survival; normally between 36 and 38
Blood pressure: systolic pressure between 90 and 180 mmHg
Fluid balance: between 275 and 300 mOsm/kg
Continuous intake and output (respiration, cardiovascular system, nervous system, urinary tract, digestion)
Oxygen saturation: below 94% triggers an alert
CO2 elimination: between 35 and 45 mmHg
Waste processing (kidney filtration): below 60 mL/min triggers an alert
The brain is in essence not an organ of thought but an organ of stability—its task is to keep the organism's "essential variables" (see above) within viable limits. His definition, stark and clinical, is: "a form of behaviour is adaptive if it maintains the essential variables within physiological limits." This represents a direct extension of Cannon’s concept of homeostasis—which, in 1926, described the body’s ability to maintain a stable internal environment despite external changes—from the physiological realm to that of behavior. Significantly, Ashby published this idea as early as 1940 in a psychiatry journal, under the title "Adaptiveness and equilibrium."
In the lab mentioned earlier, Ashby—together with his future son-in-law Denis Bannister—built a machine he called the Homeostat.
Ross Ashby and Alan Turing were contemporaries. They knew each other. Alan Turing built the ACE (the Automatic Computing Machine—popularly known as the Turing Machine). In 1946, Turing offered to simulate the Homeostat on the ACE, the computer he was building at the time. Ashby declined the offer; he wanted to use the Homeostat to demonstrate something other than mere computing power.
He did this by using four discarded Royal Air Force bomb-aiming units. These electromechanical switching systems (Bomb Control Units) were designed to process sensory input and convert it into physical outputs—for instance, to correct an aircraft's heading or a bomb's release angle. Ashby interconnected four of these systems so that each served as the input and output for the others. A magnetic needle sat atop each unit. When he disturbed one needle, the other three units registered the change, triggering a process of mutual influence: all four needles began to move. Together, the four units sought a new stable configuration—and found one. In January 1949, *Time* magazine reported that Ashby considered the device "the closest thing to a synthetic human brain so far designed by man"; Norbert Wiener described Ashby's work as one of the great philosophical contributions of his time. The principle governing the Homeostat was formally articulated eight years later.
The principle Ashby was aiming for—and for which he did not need the Turing machine (viewed primarily as a machine for raw computing power)—was given a name:
the Law of Requisite Variety.
It was formulated by W. Ross Ashby in 1956 in *An Introduction to Cybernetics*. In English: only variety can absorb variety. It is mathematically watertight, has never been refuted, and over the past seventy years has been applied in psychology, organizational science, ecology, neuroscience, and the design of viable companies and even entire economies.
So, while you were walking around Barnwood House, you happened to encounter one of the most important laws of life:
If your internal variety (of possible actions) does not match
the external variety
of stimuli coming your way,
you will collapse and/or perish.
Fast foward van 1949 naar 1973. Je zit in een radiostudio in Toronto. Tegenover je een Engelsman met een enorme baard, Stafford Beer, en hij houdt de Massey Lectures, zes lezingen die heel Canada op de radio hoort. Beer is de man die de wet van Ashby uit het laboratorium heeft gehaald en op organisaties heeft losgelaten. Op bedrijven, op ministeries, zelfs op een heel land: hij heeft net twee jaar in Chili gewerkt om de economie van Allende als levend systeem te besturen, en hij is vertrokken toen Pinochet binnenkwam.
En in die studio zegt hij iets waar ik al een tijdje steeds meer gefascineerd door ben.
Hij zegt: de wet van Ashby laat je twee wegen open. Jouw variëteit moet die van de wereld om je heen evenaren, en dat kan op twee manieren. De eerste weg: je eigen variëteit vergroten. Meer manieren van kijken, meer manieren van beslissen, meer antwoorden, dichter bij de plek waar het gebeurt. Voor bestuurders van organisaties is dat duur, en best lastig, en vooral: het vraagt dat je mensen vertrouwt (je legt immers een deel van je sturing bij anderen neer). Dit gebeurd in de praktijk "dus" bijna nooit.
De tweede weg is goedkoper en voor "bestuurders" (en zeker voor de subcategorie bestuurders met een pre-occupatie met macht) makkelijker en aantrekkelijker. Je verkleint de variëteit van de wereld. Je perst de mensen die bij je aankloppen in categorieën. Je laat een formulier bepalen wat ze mogen zeggen. Wat er niet in past, noem je een fout. En dan klopt de wet weer: jouw kleine variëteit past precies bij een wereld die je eerst zelf klein hebt gemaakt.
Belangrijke notie: met deze bestuurders actie is de echte variëteit van de wereld natuurlijk niet verminderd, maar de bestuurder heeft de eigen interpretatie van die variëteit verkleind. Plat gezegd: de bestuurder heeft zichzelf oogkleppen aangemeten.
Beer zegt het zo, tegen jou, luisteraar: "your variety must be attenuated, cut down so that your case fits a more general case." Jouw variëteit wordt gedempt, teruggesnoeid, tot jouw geval past in een algemener geval.
Beer tekende het. Links zoals de wet het wil: de wereld groot, de bestuurder klein, een demper op de weg naar binnen, een versterker op de weg naar buiten. Allebei nodig. Rechts zoals hij het bij instituties aantrof: de computer versterkt wat van buiten komt nog eens, de bestuurder verdrinkt, en zijn eigen variëteit wordt gedempt. Demper en versterker in de verkeerde lus. Onthoud dat plaatje.
En dan de zin waar het om gaat...
"We verliezen de vrijheden die we hebben
wanneer onze variëteit wordt ingeperkt,
omdat ons niet wordt gevraagd hoe die inperking moet plaatsvinden."
"We lose the freedoms we have, when our variety is attenuated, because we are not asked how the attenuation should be done."
Stafford Beer
1973, the Massey Lectures, Toronto
Niet het dempen is het probleem. Dat moet elke organisatie. Het probleem is dat de mensen in en buiten de organisatie niet gevraagd wordt "hoe".
Dat was 1974. Nu even naar Nederland, 2020.
Dit rapport heet Ongekend onrecht. Het gaat over een uitvoeringsorganisatie die haar variëteit tot één had teruggebracht. Eén regel: alles of niets. Eén risicomodel, dat nationaliteit als signaal gebruikte. Eén antwoord op elke afwijking: terugvorderen. Tienduizenden gezinnen pasten niet in het model. En het model had geen enkele manier om dat te zien, want het was ontworpen om dat niet te hoeven zien. Kijk nog één keer naar het plaatje van Beer: het risicomodel versterkte wat van buiten kwam, een nationaliteit werd een signaal, en de mensen die moesten beslissen waren gedempt tot één antwoord. De verkeerde lus. Niemand had die gezinnen gevraagd hoe de demping moest gebeuren. Beer had het bijna vijftig jaar eerder getekend.
Ik vertel dit niet om de Belastingdienst te pakken. Ik vertel het omdat het de tweede weg is in haar zuiverste vorm, en omdat de tweede weg de standaard is. Elk protocol, elk loket, elk algoritme kiest hem, tenzij iemand bewust de eerste kiest. En de algoritmes zijn het probleem niet omdat ze slecht zijn. Ze zijn variëteitsdempers van een precisie die geen ambtenaar ooit kon halen, en de mensen die ermee werken hebben meestal geen idee dat ze dat zijn. De demping heeft geen gezicht meer.
Dus als je straks naar de stad kijkt, naar al die witte en zwarte zwanen, en jezelf de vraag stelt van Ashby, heb ik genoeg variëteit, stel dan meteen de vraag van Beer erachteraan: en hoe kom ik eraan? Door mezelf groter te maken, of door de ander kleiner te maken?
Want buiten het model valt altijd een mens.
Goed. Terug naar de biologie.
THREE — THE BLACKBIRD
Imagine you are a blackbird— foraging hungrily across a lawn for food for the chicks in your nest. Their breakfast lies before you: a worm, an insect—animal protein hidden among hundreds of blades of grass and particles of soil. To avoid starving, you must seize that specific worm the moment it appears and ignore everything else. That requires a narrow, sharp, grasping focus: a single, locked-on target, with the rest filtered out as noise.
But while your head is down, something is happening above you that no worm or insect warns you about. A shadow. A cat in the grass. A hawk circling in. To avoid becoming breakfast yourself, you must maintain a second kind of attention at that exact same moment: broad, vigilant, unfocused on any specific thing, and precisely for that reason, ready for anything. Ready for—in the words of psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist—"whatever else it may be, whether it is a mate or fate, a friend or an enemy."
That is the challenge every bird lives with every second:
needing two mutually exclusive types of attention at the same time.
The narrow gaze that grasps, and the wide gaze that watches. As a blackbird, can you track the head of a worm and simultaneously keep watch over the entire sky? McGilchrist calls it
"Quite a feat: two types of consciousness at once in the same brain."
Nature resolved this in a manner that was as remarkable as it was inventive. And that solution is something we all carry—you and I, sitting here as a temporary waystation in evolution—right inside our skulls. The brains of every animal that possesses them are bipartite. In the tiger mosquito and the worm, they consist of paired ganglia—left and right, mirror images, yet already asymmetrical: a honeybee remembers scents better with its right antenna, and even a roundworm just a millimeter long tastes something different on the left than on the right. Vertebrates (blackbirds, gophers, hippos, bats, gorillas, and us) have expanded upon that ancient, asymmetrical, dual-part building block to create two fully developed hemispheres separated by a deep cleft, linked by only a relatively insignificant number of connections.
Why?
Yet connections are precisely the *raison d'être* of the brain: billions of neurons striving to forge as many meaningful connections as possible. Why, then, this contradictory "move" to slice the whole thing in two? The answer has already been given: to survive, we need two types of attention. The sharp, narrow, grasping, precise gaze, and the broad, panoramic, comprehending gaze. And the division of labor observed in chicks—right eye for pecking, left eye for the hawk—has been found in fish, toads, birds, and mammals alike. It is likely a legacy inherited from the common ancestor of all vertebrates, dating back some five hundred million years.
And the quiet point—one no bird articulates aloud—is that things only go wrong when one of the two gazes drowns out the other. A bird that does nothing but peck eats splendidly, right up to the very moment it gets eaten itself. The question is never *which* gaze you choose. The question is which of the two, when it comes down to it, gets the final word.
Attentional qualities of both brain hemispheres
FOUR — THE WORDS
Three stories – and what do they have to do with navigating clear-eyed?
As you listened to me, each story impressed one or more words upon your mind: difference, variation, variety, diversity, complexity, inequality, attention.
In everyday English—and certainly in the language used by public organizations—these concepts are frequently jumbled together. That constantly grates on my ears. But worse still: it hinders clear-eyed navigation. Anyone who fails to distinguish between them misses the very heart of the matter. Particularly in organizations and cities striving for resilience and vitality, such sloppiness regarding language and concepts undermines what we are trying to build. Let us slow down for a moment and explore these words and how they relate to one another.
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Difference: two things are not the same.
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Inequality: how are differences distributed?
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Variation: the extent to which values differ from one another within a population, system, or measurement.
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Diversity: the number of different species present in an ecosystem, and their relative proportions.
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Complexity: many different elements interacting in non-linear ways.
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Variety: a capacity. Not what *is*, but what *can be*. That which is needed to handle complexity. Variety determines the scope for action and the chances of survival.
And all these concepts take on even greater depth when you consciously focus on them using the modes of both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. In the *Vital Systems* program, we have given this approach a simple framework: zooming out and zooming in.
Zooming out means putting your right brain to work: what do you see when you try to view the big picture from above? What meaning do you attribute to what you see? Do you actually have a sufficient understanding of what you are seeing? How do all the components relate to one another?
Zooming in means putting your left brain hemisphere to work: how can I use what I see? Can I create a map of it to facilitate navigation? What underlying logics are present? How exactly does it work technically? Can I identify any standardization within it?
The answers you find then prompt you to switch hemispheres and work through the questions again. This switching back and forth—zooming in and out—is the essential tool for grasping complexity.
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FIVE — THE CITY
Now, as an unsuspecting non-Rotterdammer, you might be wondering: what is this all about? Let’s try an empathy experiment here too.
Something every civil servant should really start each day with at breakfast:
Like any other city, Rotterdam can be viewed as a system—as a living organism. A vast, hyper-complex living system. And that system has to contend with an immense number of external stimuli. These are things over which the organism of Rotterdam has little control; Rotterdam simply has to deal with them. And if it fails to do so, it immediately faces serious trouble.
So, view what you are about to see through the lens of Ashby’s Law: consider the sheer variety of external circumstances coming your way. Then ask yourself immediately: do I possess the variety of possible actions needed to handle all of this?
A word of warning: this isn't even the whole story.
These are the white swans we can see.
Somewhere, deeply hidden, black swans are also lurking.
Hold on tight.
As a city, does Rotterdam possess enough internal variety to handle this array of complexities?
What do you think? Any suggestions? Protocols, rules, exercises, stronger governance?
My simple answer to that question, after sixteen years of working in Rotterdam, is no. We are nowhere near having enough internal variety. We lack the capacity to handle a multitude of crises and tipping points simultaneously.
Is Rotterdam moving towards greater capacity? Yes. Programs focused on vital systems, robustness, and resilience are striving to build that capacity. But the road ahead is long and arduous. These are still just "programs"—initiatives that, by definition, have an end date. Variety has no end date. It is an essential capability that must always be present—or else we risk large-scale failure. There is a very real danger of slipping back into old patterns (fragmenting the approach, simply forgetting, or pretending the issue doesn't exist).
The problem is that hardly anyone realizes this is happening.
So, while "we" may be on the path toward navigating clearly, "we" are still a long way from reaching the destination.
SIX — THE QUESTIONS
Five crucial questions, themes, and heartfelt appeals to take with you on the path to clear-eyed navigation.
Imagine you are the captain of a ship sailing into the future...
And you ask yourself: how do I ensure clear-eyed navigation in these uncomfortable times?
For the moment, that ship symbolizes your city (though the same applies, of course, to your street, neighborhood, province, country, continent, and the world at large).
I have five crucial questions—themes, or heartfelt appeals—for you. They represent areas of action that demand significant attention; after all, without it, you risk capsizing or springing a leak at the first sign of a storm.
At the same time, in my view, these are questions rarely put explicitly to today’s captains and helmsmen—nor do they ask themselves these questions. Consider this, too, a plea for restructuring how government work is organized.
To my mind, these questions transcend partisan politics; they can be viewed as fundamental responsibilities inherent to public service.
Question 1
Do you know what needs to be on board?
What are the essential variables of a thriving city? What must a city never lose? Within what parameters must it operate to continue functioning? What keeps a city—and its people—robust, resilient, capable of learning, and able to adapt? Try to create a comprehensive overview of this. Through the 'Vital Systems' program, we have made a start on this in Rotterdam (and now also in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Nijmegen), but we are far from finished. What is the state of the vitality and diversity of the entire network of vital systems? What, in fact, are the urban equivalents of blood pressure, body temperature, and oxygen levels?
Question 2
Do you know the entire weather system?
What is the true nature of the city’s interconnectedness, and what is the ultimate purpose of that interconnectedness? What constitutes the set of vital systems that creates a meaningful environment for all Rotterdammers? Anyone who contributes to creating meaning—and experiences that contribution coming from others as well—naturally becomes more resilient. What are the overarching, fundamental goals you aim to achieve with the system as a whole? Hint: how about planetary and humanitarian health?
Question 3
How large is your variety?
Anyone content with a single course of action—one plan, one protocol, one rule, one policy—is ill-equipped for the turbulent reality we face. And no, this cannot be solved by adding yet another plan, protocol, rule, or policy (which is not to say that having plans, protocols, rules, and policies is bad—it simply isn't enough). It’s the variety that matters. Those who lack a rich repertoire of options and reserves—who lack a Plan B or C—will never make progress and will quickly find themselves in dire straits.
Question 4
Who steers what, and for what purpose?
Surviving, living, and journeying into tomorrow is something you do together, in essence—even though today’s societal culture constantly tries to convince you that you should primarily look out for yourself. The question that always arises is: Who is steering, and what are they steering? It is absurd to assume there is a single point of contact where everyone can—or must—turn when a storm hits and all formal communication channels collapse. Yet, you cannot share the helm simply by chopping it up into pieces. That is merely optimization—an illusion we have clung to for far too long. How do we truly ensure cohesion? How do we ensure that every part of the ship steers, senses, and acts in a way that contributes to a stronger, greater whole? What does genuine collective resilience look like? And at the same time: how do we ensure it becomes self-evident where the boundaries of distributed steering lie?
Question 5
How do I keep today and tomorrow in the picture at the same time?
On your ship, it is never a choice between "today" or "tomorrow." Never a narrow focus versus a broad, watchful gaze. Never zooming in or zooming out. It is always "and," "and," "and." Develop a balance—and an effective sequence—in how you use your brain's hemispheres (zooming out and zooming in). Resilience hinges on four capabilities that you must possess simultaneously: anticipating, recovering, learning, and changing. Stay upright—and keep evolving. How do you ensure that everyone on board takes ownership of and nurtures these four capabilities? How do you ensure that everyone in Rotterdam takes ownership of and nurtures these capabilities?
SEVEN — THE APPS
Play, practice, learn (repeat)
Here are two apps for you—to play with, to practice with, and to help you get comfortable with the new vocabulary I’ve tried to share with you.
They are first version try-outs, to be developed.
If you have any ideas, let me know...
Have fun playing!