The Eton Rifles
“It’s not their fault, it’s the fault of the system” is a phrase I remember from the 1960s and 70s, offered as mitigation for the delinquent behaviour of some sections of society (mostly the poor and working class) and castigated by many of my parents’ generation as an excuse by ‘do-gooders’ to let them off the hook.
To put this in context, it was not long after National Service and the death penalty were ended (in the UK) and corporal punishment in schools was normal (yes, the ritualised beating of children was seen as necessary and ‘character building’).
There was, in fact, merit on both sides of this argument. People DO have personal responsibility for their actions BUT those actions are a product of the system they are in and pressures that it places upon them.
It is typically couched in terms of crime carried out by people of, shall we say, lower stations in life. In a cost of living crisis, such as we have now, crime increases as people resort to theft and illegal activities to put food on the table. The system does not provide enough for them to make ends meet so they have to turn to desperate measures.
We also see a cycle of abuse and of crime in those who have been through the care system, as a direct consequence of their experience of that system and the poor treatment they get.
What we don’t talk about is the systems that people of means are in, and how that also causes them to behave. There is a lot of evidence that the UK private school system has produced a cohort of psychologically damaged individuals who currently hold positions of power in politics, law, business and the media. The traits this has produced is a sense of entitlement, denial of responsibility, emotional detachment (some might say callousness), propensity to lying, delusions of grandeur and a high degree of narcissism.
The absolute embodiment of these traits is our former Prime Minister, Mr. Johnson, who demonstrated them fully in his appearance before the Parliamentary Standards committee this week. He succeeded in unmasking himself before the country as a compulsive liar and narcissist. He is, however, just an extreme product of the system he was raised in.
So systems matter. We need to understand them and how they impact us and others. I’m going to look at the systems that are impacting us in the workplace, and how they influence our behaviours in both subtle and not-so-subtle ways.
Chain Reaction
I’m not an expert in systems or systems thinking, so I am winging it a bit here. However, I did study Economics for my degree, so I had an early understanding that everything is connected to everything else and that gave me an appreciation that there are multiple systems at play that cause the things we observe to happen. The economics I studied was about trying to understand the interrelationships and feedback loops and get a holistic picture of what is going on (not the neoliberal fairy tales that people get fed today).
It’s a bit like chaos theory, where the flapping of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world can cause a tsunami on the other side of the world. Finding the possible linkages delivers new insights on the world (I should confess here that I know even less about chaos theory than I do about systems thinking. In fact, pretty much all I know comes from the Jeff Goldblum character in Jurassic Park!).
I also have a personal maxim that whatever anyone does, they do it for a reason. It might look stupid to you, and they might not even be aware of their motivations, but there is always a logical explanation for their actions and behaviour. The behaviour of people like Mr. Johnson is often due to a lack of love and affection in their childhood, a direct product of being sent away to a brutal boarding school environment and separation from their parents.
When we look at the workplace, we need to understand the economic and social systems that we are operating in. There’s an awful lot of bad behaviour in the workplace but I don’t believe that’s because there are a lot of bad people (though there are definitely some!). I believe it’s because the system they find themselves in causes good people to do bad things.
The system in most organisations is focused in delivering certain metrics, mostly financial. If you hit your KPIs, and especially your financials, you are deemed to be doing a good job and rewarded with pay and promotions. This is the dominant driver of behaviour, almost everything is subordinated to delivering the numbers. This is particularly acute in the US system due to quarterly reporting and the need to drive shareholder returns.
So the system pressures people to hit numbers at any cost. Taking short-cuts, over-working employees, gaming the system, even resorting to dishonesty and corruption. Ethics and values are seen as optional, ‘nice-to-haves’, and are only referred to in retrospect if someone gets caught doing wrong and questions start to be asked (Ahem, Enron, anyone?). Most CEOs are only around for two or three years at the most, they won’t be around to clear up the mess or be held accountable. All down the organisation, the message goes that you can cover your tracks and dance away from the consequences. Just hit the numbers.
But only a few people are actual sociopaths and narcissists, the rest do wrestle with their consciences to some degree. So the system lessens the chances of them confronting their consciences by depersonalising the employees. It’s easier to cut people when they are just a cell in a spreadsheet, just another ‘resource’, rather than a human being with hopes and aspirations, with feelings and emotions, with a family to support and responsibilities to fulfil.
The system focuses on process and the machine metaphor, characterising people as interchangeable cogs, lacking in differentiation, just components in the greater whole. Decisions are couched in ‘compelling business logic’, that presents them as ‘inevitable’ and ‘the only realistic options’, so absolving managers of the responsibility for the choices they make. The orthodoxy (often framed by financiers and the stock markets) demands that they make those decisions, so they persuade themselves they have no choice (whilst amply rewarding themselves for the ‘responsibility’ of exercising those choices).
Of course, you just want to earn enough for a decent life, to look after yourself and your family, meet your obligations. So you need to get on in the organisation, to succeed in the system. When you feel pressured by the system to act in ways that do not align with your values and ethics, that cause you discomfort and cognitive dissonance, you rationalise it. “It is what it is, that’s how things work”. “Everyone else is doing it, it’s normal”. “I don’t really have a choice, I have to pay the bills”. “Why be a martyr, that won’t help anyone?”
And so we end up with good people doing bad things.
But it’s not without cost. You are incurring moral injury and that catches up with you eventually. Stress, burnout, self-loathing, breakdown. It’s what causes ill-health and many a mid-life crisis. You have to ask if this is a system you can survive in, let alone thrive. I meet many who come to the realisation that the answer is no and bail out in mid-career. Lots of kids today aren’t even willing to enter that system at all, seeing what it’s done to their parents.
Comfortably Numb
Another part of the system that we find ourselves in at work is culture. I’ve written before about the problems I have with the idea of culture, and especially the idea that the culture can be set by the leadership team. But let’s look at how ‘organisational culture’ itself has become a system.
To me, culture is an emergent property. It’s what arises from the interactions and behaviours of the collection of unique individuals that make up the organisation. You can influence it to some degree, you can mitigate the worse aspects of culture, but the idea that you can determine it is, to my mind, absurd. However, that’s exactly what the system sets out to do.
Firstly, it defines what the culture is, normally in a set of value statements and a set of desirable personal traits. Then it seeks to align everyone with these, regardless of the fact that they are often open to multiple interpretations and subjective. This leads to the idea of ‘cultural fit’, that people in the organisation should match this idealised mould of a good corporate citizen, and this is used a yardstick for recruiting people.
This is weaponising culture as a means of enforcing comformity and compliance. It is using culture, as my friend Geoff Marlow puts it, as a normative behaviour control methodology. It is verging on the cultish. Being accused on ‘not be a good cultural fit’ is akin to be labelled a heretic by the Spanish Inquisition. (Noooooooobody expected the Spanish Inquisition!).
What if you don’t share the professed values? What is your personality traits don’t match the model? You have two choices, you can rebel and take the consequences, or you can pretend in order to fit in. Most people will choose the latter, for all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons. (I know I did, to some degree. Trouble is, I wasn’t very good at pretending and was prone to lapses when I let my contempt and incredulity poke through, which were deemed as ‘Career Limiting Acts’).
So you have been forced by the system to practice deception, to lie about yourself (and sometimes more worrying, to lie TO yourself), and to betray your own values. What sort of culture is likely to emerge when everyone is doing that, do you think? Not the one the Leadership Team dreamt up on their awayday, I can guarantee.
Little Lies
Systems not only force us to behave and act in ways that harm us (and others), they also become prisons for our thinking. It is hard to see a system as it is when you are in it.
I referred earlier to the ‘compelling business logic’ that is often employed as a reason for actions like the mass sackings we are seeing in tech at the moment, or for damaging re-organisations that uproot factories and offices from one part of the world to another. If you are so immersed in the system that you accept without questions the underlying premise of shareholder supremacy and the absolute need for growth, efficiency and profit, then there is a logic - but it’s a false one based on a false reality. Go back and re-examine those underlying assumptions and you can find many alternative approaches and different systems that would be equally (I’d argue MORE) valid.
Not only that but the architects of the system often wish to obscure the underlying premise and motivations and put a lot of effort in creating a false justification for it. The current system of neoliberal capitalism is often presented as enabling greater choice, unlocking efficiency and releasing wealth for the benefit of all. However, what we see is the establishment of more monopolies and monopsomies that reduce choice and a concentration of wealth at the top leading to an alarming increase in inequality and reduced wealth for the majority.
It is useful, therefore, to remember the rule of thumb coined by the British theorist Stafford Beer - POSIWID, or the Purpose Of The System Is What It Does. This is quite likely to be different to that proclaimed by the designers and operators of the system. This may be due to deliberate deceit or simply to unintended consequences (systems are complex and hard to predict, after all).
Whatever the stated purpose of FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 companies, what they actually do is enrich the C-Suite and deliver returns to the markets (the idea of shareholders is a convenient fiction, given how stocks and shares are actually held) by constantly garnering a greater and greater share of the pie, at the expense of employees, societies and the planet. If you work for one of them, that’s the system you work in. Are things starting to make sense now?
Stumblin’ In
This is very much me ‘thinking out loud’ again, so apologies to those who actually know about this stuff and who have been tearing their hair out as I have mangled the concepts, misapplied the terms and drawn all the wrong conclusions (probably). And And I know I’ve missed some obvious ones, like the partiarchy. So please get in touch and put me right!
I’d love to hear from anyone else who has something to say on this, too. Actually, it’s just good to have a chat with readers, so hit me up (as the young people say).
And don’t forget to catch Episode 3 of Work Punks, where we talk about Squeezed Middle Managers and I am surprisingly sympathetic (and empathetic, having been there myself in the past).
You can watch it here.
And here’s one I made earlier, which deserves another outing.
I enjoyed this, it captures the tension between who we are as an individual, our values and aspirations, and how we end up acting do to the need to conform and be accepted in the external ecosystems we depend upon. This tension should be explored and talked about in organisational contexts, but asides from the conversations I initiate with the teams of Software Engineers I work with (smart people who are interested in the dynamics or real life systems) I rarely see it being addressed.
As Deming observed, 90% to 95% of the performance of an individual is attributable to the system, yet we still put all our focus (praise and blame) on the individual, often ignoring all of the relational aspects.
Love this Colin! I may have also had some 'career limiting' moments when my mask slipped too.