Governance and Strange Loops

I remember a retrospective on the 90's asserting that the two least read books of the 80's were Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" and Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, and Bach" (Hawking's "Brief History of Time" is a 3rd candidate).

Although I disagree with some of the basic assumptions in each book, their books are interesting explorations of key issues. Bloom helped catalyze my interest in various understandings of basic questions in philosophy. And, Hofstadter remains the only person I've run across to explore the epistemological implications of recursion.

Since I've never finished GEB (unlike Bloom's book), I'm not familiar with all the nuances Hofstadter explores. However, the basic theme of the intertwining of what might be called "sensemaking of a context" and "the governance of that sensemaking" is a profound one.

It recognizes an aspect of sensemaking that we constantly juggle, but rarely think about. Both Boyd's OODA loop and Klein's Data-Frame model recognize that sensemaking is perhaps most distinguished by the pervasiveness of a GEB-style "strange loop" of Orientation (Boyd) or Questioning/Reframing (Klein).

Since engineers are grounded in the "sensemaking execution" thread that is basically analytical, the orientation challenge of "governance" is often ignored or assumed to be static...which may be why I've found few engineers who really latch on to frameworks that place equal (or more) emphasis on the "strange loop" that makes all sensemaking adaptable, agile, and real-world.

And, it may be yet another reason why engineers seem to have a difficult time grasping why sensemaking governance must be distributed/decentralized, limited in scope to a specific type of context, as informal as possible, and an 80/20 solution (i.e., not optimized).