Title: I. R. G. Solution
Description: The IRG Solution – David Andrews, Souvenir Press, 1984

This book written in 1984 attempted an information based approach to analyzing why things often went wrong ( ie inadequate policy responses with counter productive unintended consequences) in centrally governed societies equipped with hierarchic bureaucratic organizations and  what the book  called “central media” – ie print, and broadcast media, and predicted that a general environmental / energy / pollution / food catastrophe would inevitably ensue from these features alone, unless the mechanisms at work were recognized and appropriate information based solutions devised (as defined in the book) and implemented..

Lateral Communication

One of the central ideas in the book was that for millennia, all life had been organized and responded to itself, and environmental issues on a lateral communication basis – communication and signaling between individual cells, amoebae and species – all created a self sustaining, self regulating ecosystem. Examples cited included “primitive” cultures with no king or power structure, slime moulds which are communities of individual amoeba, but which can come together to form a single purposeful organism, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds, the human body,. all these indicated a high degree of organization and co-ordination without central control by lateral communication between the cells or individuals in the community.

The book argued that environmental damage began to occur as soon as centralized control emerged, initially dynasties and monarchies using the tools of warfare, and then further centralization with the advent of the printing press.

The book argued that only by using technology to develop mass lateral media - sending messages between individuals, could we hope to recognize and solve our problems. This would be widespread use of computers in individuals hands to mediate person to person communication on a mass scale, using modems and telephony – a pretty radical and unheard of idea at that time.

Inherent problems of hierarchies and central media 

The book first described the claimed  inherent deficiencies of hierarchies and central media and their inability to recognize and deal with complex issues. and secondly  to suggest the urgent development of what the book termed called “lateral media” which he described in some detail and were what we would recognized today as “the internet”.  The book proposed that we should develop a system where a pc in every home, would be linked by modems and the telephone network and be equipped with software to enable messages, news and enquiries to be forwarded selectively to create a cloud of lateral communications hopping from computer to computer – we would recognize this as social networking / email and many other features of the internet but at the time this was a virtually unheard of concept.

 The book cited the so called Small World problem as proof that such messages would diffuse to the appropriate people anywhere in the world between hierarchies without any central cataloguing using informal networks and the book’s central argument that just as the technology of the printing press had amplified central communication, with many disastrous social and environmental side effects, so too should we apply technology (computers and email) to amplify the already existing but informal lateral communications.

Such a network of interlocked “Information Routing Groups” the book claimed would be able to discuss and process information much more effectively than highly centralized media and hierarchies, which inevitably produced non-sustainable solutions to almost any problem for intrinsic and inherent reasons the book went into some detail to describe why this was the case.

The book claimed that by diffusing information laterally between individuals knowledge of the true problems facing us and their solutions would automatically become apparent, which the book claimed were due to a lack of integrated thinking between organizations and individual leading to narrow, partial world views and hence decisions.

The book also cited the crucial role of “tacit knowledge” in enabling organizations to work properly, and scientists to construct such things as lasers and nuclear bombs.  The book pointed out that informal information exchanges networks were already capable of transmitting vital tacit knowledge, compensating for official news and organizational failure and argued that “Information Rouging Groups could amplify existing informal lateral communications, assisting the spread of tacit knowledge, in the same way that the printing press and broadcasting, central media, had over amplified central communications with disastrous results.

A handicap at the time was that the notion of people owning computers in the way imagined and using them to communicate was an almost totally unknown concept and the book went to some lengths to explain why people would in fact purchase computers and use them to communicate – things we take for granted today.

Central media

The book claimed that central media ( ie one to many – newspapers, tv, specialist journals)  either dealt with highly specialized subsets of information in specialist journals only  read by specialists, stifling inter specialist group (lateral) communications, or if wide circulation like newspapers and television, inevitably had to simplify, trivialize and distort issues.  Thus no form of central media could deal adequately with the complex world, leading to all the problems we are faced with today ie energy, water, food, pollution etc  and issues we face, whereas lateral media could it was argued.


Bureaucratic hierarchies

The book cited a number of fundamental and inherent reasons why hierarchies could not process information adequately, and tended to produce solutions with unintended undesirable consequences.  These were a tendency to simplify information as it went up the hierarchy, a tendency for each level to second guess what the next level wanted and to distort information accordingly, and for members of such hierarchies to develop a closed mentality which inhibited cooperation with other (competing)  hierarchies with an overall negative effect – a prime example the book cited was the lack of integrating in UK between power generation and housing, leading to huge energy waste. (there were many other examples)

Origins of the Book

Andrews was a researcher at the Open University Energy Research Group in the 1980s and interested in Combined Heat and Power – the use of power station’s waste heat to heat buildings, and thought that the fact that power stations wasted as much energy as was extracted in the for, of natural gas and then  used to heat buildings was an astonishing example of the “relevance paradox” where by people remain in ignorance of important information because people making decisions do not see the relevance  of information which would make the information relevant. 

He also cited the examples of civil engineers building irrigation schemes unaware that they were building in disastrous features that were causing water borne diseases, which could easily have been ameliorated had they been aware of crucial readily published information.  He claimed that information networks of the type he advocated would alleviates this problem – he claimed that such a network of dialogues would actively inform people of information they needed to know, whereas passive information systems, ie where users simply asked for what they  thought they needed to know ( picking a journal, consulting a library, reading a newspaper) couldn’t.

He went on to generalize his view that essentially the problems associated with modern societies were in many cases caused by lack of lateral communications between individuals of  large organizations and organized a number of seminars  looking at the potential integration of the Agriculture,. Water, Waste and Energy Industries as examples showing how such integration, and the implied lateral communication would cause a massive cut in waste, water use, and energy wastage.

These seminars at the Open University led to a number of papers looking at these issues primarily integrating the Agriculture, Water, Waste and Energy sectors, and specifically Combined Heat and Power.  He wrote an article for the Guardian Newspaper in 1983 setting out these ideas and  was subsequently invited to write the book by Souvenir Press.
Subjects: Organizational sociology, Hierarchies, Communication in organizations, Communication in management