Workplace Geopolitics
During these strange times of conflicts arising around the world, and as we all try to understand—thanks to the myriad of threads in Twitter mansplaining everything—what the heck is going on in the minds of those in power causing such events, maybe it is relevant to remind us how much the pulsions at play in the current affairs—imperialism, spheres of influence, power, misinformation—are part of our very nature and, what is more, are present in our everyday lives if we work in an organization or we participate in anything collective. Without pretending to banalize the suffering of those involved in situations where real bullets are flying and many are forced to flee for safety, the thesis of this text is: our natural political instincts are the same whether we lead a department in a tech company or a country—it’s just that such instincts become more impactful as scale and complexity increase. I am aware of the potential psychological trap at play here making me want to compare something incredibly complex as world affairs with something comparatively simpler such as an organization. For the record: I am not comparing head-to-head war with a corporation. All I am saying is that world affairs are a scaled-up version of our daily affairs whenever we engage in collective endeavors. Complex adaptive systems such as teams or countries show similar dynamics and unpredictability, but scale plays an instrumental part to define an infinitely higher number of states and feedback loops. Here’s where I trust the reader will read the word “scale” the right way. Just in case: I’m obviously talking about superlinear scaling1.
Some might say: the logic is flawed, you can’t compare an armed conflict with the workplace, for the latter is a cooperative environment—everyone is on the same boat—whereas the former is not. Any armed conflict, at the right scale, eventually becomes cooperative, because we still are “on the same boat”—the same planet—and concepts such as the MAD doctrine show that destroying my enemy eventually ensures my own destruction. Therefore, the decision-making becomes strangely cooperative as well. Granted, an organization has a pyramidal hierarchy defined in a way that there will be one last, ultimate say by the person sitting at the very top of the pyramid who will decide for the best of the collective. We, as a world, don’t have that. At some point the world political hierarchy goes flat, unlike in Futurama where we had Nixon’s head as President of the Earth. Oh, the irony: a pyramidal hierarchy—which I have roasted here ad nauseam—is perhaps the only safeguard when hell breaks loose.
We are used to hearing military-originated terms thrown in the workplace. We hear about two people being “in the middle of a cold war at the moment”, to illustrate mutual distrust and tension kept silent but noticeable. We also hear about “that guy team’s is huge now, he’s building his own empire”, meaning that a manager is growing his team like there is no tomorrow. This is an interesting one, because it shows we somehow map team size to a sense of an “army” building up: for many, more headcount equates to more power.
We have witnessed someone being flagged as “power hungry”, meaning that he or she is only after concentrating decision-making relevance and expand their influence. We’ve seen hawks always doubling down upon conflict, as well as doves trying to find consensus and cool things down. We’ve seen “rogue states” (isolated departments or groups run by somewhat eccentric autocratic leaders). We have seen teams with the “nukes” (they own the technology or expertise that keeps the company afloat which provides them with great influence and status). We have seen oligarchies where a small, privileged few take decisions that affect many. And we have seen coup-d'etats of sorts, where a plot is made to overthrow someone in power who is believed not a legitimate bearer of such position and privilege.
And we have seen too many times escalation of commitment—ubiquitous in global politics—when an individual or group facing negative outcomes from a decision or action nevertheless continues the behavior instead of altering course, maintaining behaviors that are borderline irrational. Doomed projects, bad policies, awful strategies—all kept because of sunk costs.
Luckily, the corporate version of conflict almost never gets resolved by physical means. Although some of that might have happened in history, it largely remains the exception. Our political disagreements in the workplace are resolved by means of talking and negotiating: in other words, the art of shock absorption and diplomacy.
Something the leaders of our world could try to remember.
Almost any complex system typically scales nonlinearly. Nonlinear behavior can simply be thought of as meaning that measurable characteristics of a system generally do not simply double when its size is doubled.