[Use browser backspace to return to Whole System Patterning Concept page]
Capacitance
As important from CST''s perspective are questions of Capacitance. Capacitance describes how much of the stuff of life (how much creative challenge, how much uncertainty, how much responsibility, how much real substance ... however we wish to frame it) a system can handle. It takes us beyond particular capacities to get at what makes abilities, present and future, possible.
Capacitance describes potential. It also describes limits—think of a balloon that if blown up too far could pop. The ecological notion of carrying capacity is a Capacitance concept for the biological sphere. Push a human system too far beyond its Capacitance and the result is either outright damage or the evoking of protective mechanisms.
From Hope and the Future:
"Man cannot handle very much reality."
—T.S. Eliot
Some Capacitance questions: How do you know if you are up to a task (beyond just having requisite skills). What is required for Whole-Person relationship of any sort (beyond just care and insight)? What will be demanded of us as nations if we are to avoid destroying each other and ourselves (beyond just right policy)?
It is amazing that we humans can handle as much reality as we do. But there are limits. And a critical piece of Cultural Maturity is learning to be newly conscious of those limits and the way they play out in our personal and collective lives. The concept of Capacitance describes how much of life, how much of creation's intensity, a system can handle. The volumes within the circles in the Creative Function represent evolving Capacitance.
Aliveness has to do with where a system's creative edge may lie. Capacitance concerns what it takes to be there. Pull back from that creative edge and experience goes dead. But push past it and the system risks being overwhelmed and damaged. The phrase "if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen" is a reference to Capacitance. Capacitance systemically circumscribes measures such as skill, intelligence, emotional maturity, power, adaptability, and sensitivity. It measures how much life we can take in. In the movie A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson, when asked at trial to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, responded, "You want the truth? You can't handle the truth." Capacitance is about how much truth a system can handle.
In times past, we didn't need notions like Capacitance. Moral dictates, social roles, and mythologized truths served to guide us in making Capacitance-appropriate (age-appropriate, skill-appropriate, cultural stage-appropriate) decisions and functioned as boundaries to protect us from experience that was yet more than we could take in. As today's questioning of such rules places these tasks of discernment and protection more in our personal hands, generic measures such as Capacitance become newly important.
A look to addressing Capacitance in our personal lives helps give a feel for its significance. Surrendering cultural dictates requires us to make a wide diversity of now more individualized choices (with love, with how we shape our work lives, with how we relate in community). Making good choices suddenly requires a keen attention to available Capacitance. We may accurately discern where right action most likely resides, but if we misevaluate what it will require of us, the needed Capacitance, we will have problems. This is so whatever way we misevaluate. Hold back out of fear that we might be overwhelmed and the moment will go dead. Push beyond what we are up to and the result is even more unhelpful—either outright harm or reactive protectiveness.
A new attentiveness to Capacitance is just as key when we move from personal to social decision-making, when our concern is the health—and Cultural Maturity—of communities, organizations, and nations. An essential ingredient when crafting culturally mature social policy is an appreciation for Capacitance limits. Making policy decisions on the basis of right or wrong ideology may have served adequately in the past. But it will prove less and less helpful in the future.
Think of the task of designing a safer world. One of the major causal factors in terrorism—and the risk of conflict today more generally—is how globalization pushes diverse peoples together in a way that stretches available Capacitance. Our vulnerability to polarization in the face of threat becomes dramatically amplified (and with newly powerful weaponry, most dangerously so). In this inescapably systemic picture, attention to Capacitance becomes key. Without it, it becomes very difficult to anticipate the effects of one's actions.
Ideology may be related to Capacitance, but as often it only serves to hide how things really work. Our guidance must come from measuring Capacitance directly. Culturally mature social policy helps support the growth of Capacitance while helping protect social systems from being pushed beyond the Capacitance they have available. (Note the subtle balance. Capacitance grows by being stretched. Stretch too much and not only does growth stop, the dangers of reactiveness increases dramatically.)
As with Aliveness, Capacitance as a measure is not new. At some level it is what we have always used to acknowledge potential. The mature stages of any formative process reveal limits to the possible—a sense of proportion is a key ingredient of wisdom. And even without such maturity, common phrases and figures of speech reflect that at some level we know this is how things work. We recognize that things can "get too much." In sports we refer to "playing within our game." We may talk of the modern phenomenon of "information overload."
Capacitance escapes logical definition and concrete pictorial representation, but we can speak of it quite precisely in terms of Aliveness (and thus also in the language of formative process). CST defines Capacitance as the amount of Aliveness—the amount of formative intensity—a system is capable of embracing and tolerating. (We must be satisfied with the conceptually questionable, but systemically necessary, practice of having ultimately indefinable ideas mutually frame one another.)
At any moment, individuals, relationships, communities, organizations, or states possess a certain capacity for experience. As a function of where each is in its development and how each has uniquely evolved, there is a specific "volume" of creation that the "vessel" that each has become can hold. Capacitance, like the space in a jar, bowl, or balloon, defines both possibilities and limits. Step beyond those limits and the container may break. It is like a computer's RAM, its available active memory. If the amount of RAM is sufficient, the computer will run smoothly. If it is not, the computer will run poorly or even crash.
Measuring Capacitance more consciously and directly is not necessary if mature systemic understanding is not required. Split mind and body and we can measure intelligence adequately with an IQ test and body with a physical exam. But Cultural Maturity's more integrative personal and social imperatives demand that we address all questions of possibility and capacity more systemically. If I wish to hire someone to fill a leadership position for which the job description could change dramatically—as is so often the case today—I don't want to base my decision purely on present skills. I am interested as much, if not more, in the person's ability to learn new skills, or even more generally, how successfully the person handles complex and changing circumstances.
What ultimately I want to measure is related to skills and intelligence, but more embracing, and less easily quantifiable. I am interested in how much of the "stuff of life" the person can effectively hold and manage—their overall capacity to learn, act, relate, and grow. (We could contrast Capacitance—that overall volume—capacities—available types of capacitance—and abilities—ways we've learned to manifest different kinds of capacitance.) With most all of today's new tasks, from the most personal to the global, we need to discern not just attributes, but what circumscribes them, how, and how generously and robustly, they are held. Our personal capacity for Whole-Person relationships—between friends, lovers, parents and children, leaders and followers—is ultimately a function of Capacitance. So is our ability as larger systems—communities, organizations, ethnicities, and countries—to relate with the new maturity our world increasingly demands.
When I choose participants for think-tank groups designed to address major social issues, I want all participants to have a certain minimum Capacitance. It matters not how skilled or clever I may be as a facilitator, if the group can't manage the needed level of engagement, the issue will not be effectively addressed.
The concept of Capacitance has easily unwelcome aspects. Most immediate is how directly it confronts us with limits. We like to believe that options are infinite and that people—and larger social systems—have unlimited potential. The concept of Capacitance reminds us that neither is the case. Our options are limited by how much our systemic "vessel" can hold before breaking. Sometimes the growth a challenge might demand is beyond what a system is currently capable of engaging.
At some level we understand the relationship of Capacitance and limits. A caring parent does not inflict responsibilities on a five-year-old that require a ten-year-old's maturity. A good teacher recognizes that while yes, "any child can learn," not all children can learn as well or at the same speed. But accepting all this implies, particularly when it comes to larger systems, requires—well, a lot of Capacitance.
And, increasing we have no choice. In exchange for surrendering this piece of the heroic story, our times offer that we might learn to manage Capacitance—and thus both possibility and safety—in much more subtle, particular, and creative ways.
Like Aliveness, Capacitance also confronts us with limits to what we can know and measure. No litmus paper test exists for capacitance. Higher Capacitance systems tend to share certain characteristics, but in the end, the only "device" capable of directly measuring the Capacitance of a human system is another human system. Further complicating the task of discerning Capacitance is that we are all highly vulnerable to bias in our determinations. Depending on our profession, ethnic background, and personality style, and more, we carry inherent prejudices with regard to what comprises "real" Capacitance. (Most people tend to over-estimate the Capacitances of individuals and groups with creative energetics similar to their own and underestimate capacitance when there is marked difference.) All this means that our measurements will never be cleanly objective nor totally precise in the sense that parts of ourselves might prefer.
Given the inherent uncertainty involved in making creative discernments and this vulnerability to bias, one might rightly ask why we should make the effort. The answer, of course, is that with increasing frequency Capacitance is what we need to measure—and all we have available to measure. And, the situation with regard to measuring Capacitance is not as dire as these observations might suggest. If what makes measurement uncertain is understanding's ultimately creative nature and we are creative systems, then we arrive in the world with the necessary equipment for measuring. (Though this systemic loop adds a further limitation. While we may not be conscious of the fact, we are all already pretty good discerners of Capacitance. Such has always been an essential ingredient in how we choose friends, mates, mentors, livelihoods, and beliefs.
Capacitance comes in many colors and flavors—reflecting how it situates in creative time and space. Like Aliveness, it is a single gesture concept whose gesture reaches over a broad terrain. Some aspects of personal Capacitance are more intellectual, others more interpersonal, practical and applied, athletic, or artistic. Different kinds of Capacitance are needed for different professions and different kinds of Capacitance manifest most at different times in a system's lifetime. We can apply the concept in specific and more encompassing ways. Keeping different kinds of Capacitance distinct in our thinking can sometimes most creatively serve us. But, with increasing frequency, we face challenges that require us also to address it more broadly—with regard to more general human capacity, or indeed our Capacitance as a species.
Capacitance exercises:
Identify four or five systems important in your life (individual people, interpersonal relationships, and at least one larger system). For each, how would you describe its Capacitance—high, about average, low? You might try discerning more precisely. Estimate the Capacitance of each system on a scale from one to 100. (Most people find this easier than they initially expect.) For each, also, say what you can about the "flavor" or "color" of Capacitance it most manifests.
Now take a moment to identify at least one challenge that each system will likely confront some time in the future. For each challenge ask yourself whether it can be met within the system's existing Capacitance. If it cannot, ask whether the stretching of Capacitance (growth) that addressing the challenge would demand seems possible, and, if so, what it would require. If it seems not possible, ask yourself the implications of this for your relationship with the system.
