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If throwing the elephant off buildings to make an audience laugh is a system, and this system has a sweet spot where it delivers as much as this system can possibly deliver, we're looking at something like this:
From 0 Stories - From 3 Stories - From 7 Stories - From 11 Stories - From 14 Stories
No laughter - A Few Chuckles -Laughing Out Loud - A Few Chuckles - No laughter
In this example, you have to bear in mind that the elephant will start to splat seriously once the building gets too high - and a bloody splatted broken mess of a baby elephant just isn't funny, in quite a different way as an elephant who doesn't even trip or fall and just stands there, basically, on the other end of the scale isn't particularly funny, either.
Suffice to say that you can't increase the amount of laughter in the audience either linearly, nor exponentially (!), by raising the height of the building the elephant is thrown from.
Now it so happens that people are entrained, just like the clowns, to think that anything bigger must be better. Bigger, faster, longer, higher. If there's a problem and "the audience doesn't laugh hard enough", then we must make the building higher - in a direct cause and effect relationship.
This also happens in all forms of interpersonal and intrapersonal systemics, for example, "If I am not performing well enough after 10 hours of practice, I'll do 16 hours of practice to perform better."
So what tends to happen with human built systems A LOT is that they are WAY, WAY PAST their sweet spot, where the thing would work beautifully, the audience would laugh and clap and be delighted with the performance and everybody was happy with the results, the profits AND THE REPERCUSSIONS of running the system repeatedly.
People go past that point of excellence and keep tightening the screw, making the building taller, the strategy more complicated, the road longer (or wider), the training longer and harder, and in so doing, pushing further, and further away from the sweet spot of perfection that any system does possess.
This is fairly obvious, and with NEW systems, you can soon test this and find the sweet spot where it all works as well as this system as it stands, CAN EVER WORK.
With old systems, we have a different scenario.
If you are a troubleshooter for old systems, and some call that a remedial engineer, and others a psychologist, you will pretty much constantly be dealing with systems that have ALREADY gone waaaaaay past their sweet spot.
When you get too far away from the sweet spot of performance in any system, a threshold shift occurs and something peculiar happens - we seem to forget what the purpose of the original system was all about, and instead are looking for different purposes and different challenges, namely the ones that have arisen from the old system when it became ever more unstable.
Our clowns, who are now chucking elephants off of buildings as high as 130 stories, have long forgotten that the original purpose was to make people laugh.
People have stopped laughing so long ago, that isn't even on their radar anymore.
Now, the clowns are deeply involved in the logistics of sourcing ever more elephants, the engineering challenges of keeping a building stable at such heights, and how to pay the bills for all that energy required to lift the elephants that high in order to chuck them off in the end.
The clowns have formed committees, each one responsible for an aspect of this undertaking that no-one remembers what it was all about in the first place, entitled "Department of Elephant Acquisition", "Department of High Rise Bricklayer Welfare", "Department of Cranes & Lifts", "Research Department" and "Clown Resources" as well.
As you can imagine, the potential for problems in this system are legion; you could send an army of system fixers into this and really, you would never succeed to fix this because the system is irreparably past its own sweet spot now.
It might be possible to RE-DEFINE this system altogether - but it is very important to make the note to history that even though some kind of clown building network and university came out of this mess, the question as to how you make people laugh by chucking elephants of buildings was not successfully resolved, and remains unanswered.
Now, and as much fun as this is, let's get practical here.
Let us contemplate how we can use this insight into how systems can break down because they go past their sweet spot for practical reasons, in practical ways, and before the buildings we construct get ever higher, and our clown committees totally out of control.
What helps is to try and remember a time when the audience was still laughing - when the system was still working.
It is only there that the purpose and the reason for the system can be discovered, and it is only THAT you can try and bring this system BACK TO *if you want what THAT system had to offer*.
Many body builders for example, go way past the point of either health, strength or good looks into freakism; anorexics go past good looks and fitness into skeletal starvation; people who have had experiences of superior mental activity and results go on into outright craziness and madness.
If you look for this pattern, you start to see it EVERYWHERE.
And to really learn it, and understand it not just in the brain, but properly, from the inside, and have it become an experience that is of use to your incarnation from hereon in, you need to see it in yourself.
WHERE have YOU gone waaay past the sweet spot in your drive to get more benefits from something?
WHERE does the tell tale clown pattern happen in your life where in spite of ever increasing effort, the results are ever more disappointing?
Look carefully at your work, your personal development targets, your achievements, your personal life.
If you can identify a clown system, stop and ask, "Where was the sweet spot? When is the last time this really worked, when the audience really laughed and applauded, and we got paid well?"
If you can find a time and an example, you can start to extract the parameters.
You can put that last occurrence when it really worked side by side with what's going on today, and find the components that have gone already past the sweet spot and are now on the other side, in an INFINITY SPACE OF FAILURE THAT GETS WORSE THE FURTHER IT TRAVELS AWAY from the sweet spot.
This is a very interesting mental movement and problem solving pattern that should be applied routinely to ANY incidence, any system you are dealing with, anything you are trying to improve, or evolve.
Please note that I am not trying to encourage "stuckness" here or am advising that things should remain unchanged; clearly this is not the case.
- The Clown pattern is very much about bringing a system back into alignment with ITS OWN PURPOSE, that which caused the system to come into being in the first place, and then to make sure that this system works as well as it can possibly work.
This pattern is about learning to look for the "sweet spots" in systems and NOT to get side tracked into the wrongful idea that bigger is always better, or that you can scale everything in a linear or even exponential fashion, and EXPECT linear or exponential increases in performance.
This is a meta pattern that teaches you a lot about how things work "in the real world" and is systemically applicable all and any kind of system; this is a "universal law" that, if observed, can be used to alleviate endless chaos, confusion, and most of all, so much WASTED EFFORT, wasted time, wasted resources, it is quite breathtaking.
You can even take this pattern to RE-DEFINE a system altogether and give it a new target or meaning, a new outcome that could potentially create something different, something new, something that has never been before and could be even more useful or interesting than making people laugh for money.
The Clown Pattern © Silvia Hartmann 2003/2009
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