“Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary — the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing at the edge of the rudder called a trimtab.

It’s a miniature rudder. Just moving the little trim tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trimtab. Society thinks it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go.
So I said, call me Trimtab.” – R. Buckminster Fuller

To launch today’s conversation, Doug Jacobs (writer and director of our upcoming studio show R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE started talking about ships and ended up talking about the future of the economic markets. Such is the mysterious webs we weave in Buckyworld.

Doug started by noting that he has been thinking in rehearsal about Bucky’s fascination with ships and the shipwright’s art. A ship, to Bucky, had a variety of ideal elements, as a structure and as a metaphor for other structures. A ship must have a self contained structural integrity- it cannot rely on the ground to secure it. It can’t lean or push down too hard and still function. In fact, it moves by definition, and must be able to react to constantly changing circumstances with integrity. It has unlimited freedom of movement upon the surface of its medium (the water). And, as the quote above reveals, it is designed to be supremely maneuverable, with very small adjustments to key components able to dramatically change the direction and speed of the structure itself. In Bucky’s mind, all structures- from the financial to the organizational- should have that combination of maneuverability and integrity.

Doug spent some time thinking about this ship metaphor as he was building the play, and he has found himself thinking about it again in rehearsal as he asks his actor and crew to take this journey with him.

The question he asks himself is “How do you build a structure that other people will want to step into?” It must have integrity (no actor wants to step into a leaky boat of a play) but it must also be maneuverable, since where you begin (around a table script in hand) is far from where you will end up (with lights, sound, and physical experience unavailable to the person skimming the printed page).

It’s an intriguing way to look at running any group or organization- how do you structure it to invite the participants to maximize their effectiveness? How do you build a structure that will keep the right elements in and sieve the right elements out? This struck me particularly as I am in the middle of organizing a city-wide festival of new work for January in Portland, and much of my work has consisted of designing the appropriate organizational structures so that the volunteers and theater companies who participate will feel empowered but not burdened and our “ship”, as it were, will stay light but effective.

Doug points out that Bucky’s concept applies equally well to the super large organizations… companies like AIG (the giant multinational organization that the US Government just bailed out to the tune of several billion dollars). AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the other giant creators of complex “financial instruments” were doomed to fail because they gave up the qualities that made them like a ship. Instead of being self contained and self-supporting, they became so entertwined with multiple layers of business practices, sub-industries and conglomerations that they became like a ship lashed to every other ship around them, hoping that the ties would keep them afloat, but utterly unable to maneuver into clear water when the storm hit. Their fundamental integrity was never very strong, but because they could keep lashing new complex financial instruments that no one really understood to the sides to cover the leaks, it was hard to tell from a distance how they were doing.

Then you throw those structures into the unpredictable typhoon of the Stock Market and its only a matter of time before they come apart at the seams. In this case, it evidently took about 50 years.

Bucky was never a big fan of Wall Street. He considered it a global casino, designed more for the thrill of the buy/sell adreneline rush than for safeguarding the fundamentals of our core industries and systems. Divorce the gain or loss of an individual participating in a game from the overall success or failure of the core elements of the game, he argues, and you have created a weird fantasy world where we all pretend we are playing one game when in fact we are playing another.

Translate that to the current Wall Street situation and you can say that the whole “game” of Wall Street is a kind of shell game: You are told that the rules are to invest in strong companies and receive the reward of steady long term dividends (keep your eye on the shell with the marble in it), but you are more likely to win win by gambling on a sudden boost or decline in the short term fortunes of the companies,usually instigated by a series of sleights of hand by analysts, publicists, accountants and lawyers.

Accountants and lawyers, Bucky argued, were busy creating the rules that were going to define our success or failure in the “World Game.” But they were cheating, deliberately issuing a false set of rules designed to pull your eye away from the hand that’s slipping the marble beneath a different shell.

Or, to bring it back into the language of the shipwright (a word, Doug notes, with a similar antecedent to playwright): in order make a real difference in the world you must first uncover the real rules- the fundamental physics of wave and wind that are determining the direction of your boat. Only then can you determine where to place your own “trimtab” to most efficiently maneuver to your ultimate destination.

Read Part III of Conversations with Doug: I Seem to Be a Verb
Go Back to Part I of Conversations with Doug: Housing the Heart in Bucky World

R.Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE will dock in the Ellyn Bye Studio starting on October 14th. Between now and then I will continue to post the outcome of my conversations with Doug, the writer and director of the show.

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