Abstract: Dancing With Demons: Pathogenic Problem Solving Systems

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    • (No title) by Dr. Tena L. Wyndon, 9/5/98
      
      

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ABSTRACT

In what ways do human and organizational problem-solving systems develop symbiotic, pathogenic relationships with their client populations, which serve to maintain the problem-solving system at the expense of solving the ostensible problem?

This research explored the dynamics of pathogenic problem-solving systems and their client populations, as a property of coupled, entrained systems operating as a unity and presented a theoretical framework for examining and understanding the behavior of such systems. Departing from existing literature in three primary ways, this research:

*Examined synergy in human interaction as a separable, viable self-organizing system which interacts with other systems to create and cultivate problems via the act of attempting to solve them.

*Drew boundaries at the interface between service provider and consumer at all levels of recursion, rather than treating the problem-solving system as one system in an environment containing the consumer population

*Emphasized this system's structure, behavior, and phenomenology or experience as three facets of the unified whole in order to model its mechanics.

The study, extending over five years, concluded that certain human service agencies and law enforcement services designed to solve such problems as crime, illiteracy, child abuse, drug addiction, poverty and homelessness operate within a hidden inherent logic to perpetuate and exacerbate the very conditions they were designed to cure. The morbidity displayed in such systems was not found to be the result of incompetence or error, but rather, the predictable result of people behaving within a rational framework of laws, regulations and professional standards.

This interdisciplinary theoretical research, employing recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, cybernetics, linguistics, mathematics, and the behavioral sciences set forth a model of pathogenesis as nested triads extending from an individual to a society. The model revealed a self-referential, recursive and paradoxical structure and includes factors, that initiate, trigger, reinforce, escalate and perpetuate problems in individuals or social systems.

The results of this research have implications for the education and training of system designers, policy makers, managers and practitioners in the fields of physical and mental health, education, criminal justice and social welfare.

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