Introduction
Communications in modern society have reached a breaking point. The primary cause of this breakdown is the inability of human brains, refined by evolution for survival in a primitive natural environment, to deal with the complexity of modern technological culture. Humans essentially still have Stone Age Brains.

The breakdown is far more serious than most people recognize. When addressing complex issues, modern society’s ability to investigate and resolve issues has essentially come to a standstill. In world government, for example, it is often referred to as Gridlock. Yet we still see complex issues “debated” all the time on TV and the internet. The major online problem is the use of time-based “stream of consciousness”, post and comment formats. Most people take these formats for granted. They think they are the only way it can be done. But they are the Internet’s major disasters.

A pdf document titled A3 Structured Discussion outlines the depth of the problem and introduces needed elements that have been shown to greatly improve discussion outcomes. Clicking the bold “A3 Structured Discussion” above will download the pdf document.

Why do “stream of consciousness”, post and comment discussions fail? To deal with a complex issue, all of the
following communication interaction elements are typically needed:

1. Many subtopics and details need to be included and addressed at the same time.
2. The subtopics and details often interrelate in complex, overlapping ways.
3. It takes a lot of time to review all the details.
4. Understanding the details requires involved thinking.
5. Understanding and interpreting the details requires specialized backgrounds.
6. Verifying the accuracy of details often requires references to external sources.
7. Recognizing novel interrelationships among many details requires creative skills.
8. Judging the logical interrelationships of details requires philosophical skills.
9. Recognizing hidden questions or mistakes requires critical thinking skills.
10. Organizing the flow of discussion information requires system skills.
11. Organizing the process of discussion requires management skills.

What tools does the internet provide for communications? Current formats include: email, chat sites, articles and blogs with comments, forum discussions, and bulletin boards. In short, none of these formats address all of the elements listed above. Instead, all of the current formats are designed to provide time-oriented, stream-of-consciousness response interactions, which perform poorly for all of the elements listed.
Now, add into the process the wide range of human variability. The internet is aimed at a very wide audience. That brings many different personalities and logistics issues into the discussion. Because of the large audience, all of these issues can be expected to be present, simultaneously, most the time.
The link provided above will download a pdf formatted paper by Bruce Nappi giving an indepth discussion of a new process that could go a long way to solving this internet failure.