BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION
NOTE:
William L. Livingston IV’s take on dystopia may surprise those of you who have never thought of this phenomenon in such naked terms or with such disturbing depths. Chances are you are not aware that dystopia invades virtually every aspect of our existence: from how we see ourselves as individuals to how we process the information that dictates how we think and behave to what we value and believe to be true.
Dystopia crushes our liberty, fraternity, and freedom. Should we follow Livingston in his analysis, we see that dystopia is palpably demonstrated in everyday life by those who control the education of our children, program our social and personal existence, manage our work, and invade our belief systems, alas, dictate our collective lives as members of society. With dystopia what once was thought of as independence and self-reliance in a democratic republic is now but a memory. Livingston is not an alarmist but a man of integrity, wisdom, courage, and character who tells it like it unfortunately is.
The pioneer researchers listed in this Part Three represent my teachers in the field of social psychology and organizational development, which is my field of endeavor. What they theorized in the decades that followed WWII still applies today in the 21st Century.
The corporate management class is essentially an invention of the past century. Management, having excelled in productivity and logistical support of that war, became heady with its contribution exploiting that public relations presumed advantage meteorically expanding its modest hierarchy of four levels of management to twelve levels concomitantly elevating its pay structure at the top from five to ten times that of the hourly worker to fifty and as much as one hundred times without a noticeable complaint from the workers in the trenches of the organization. Corporate management successfully convinced the public that it needed managers to get the work done, clearly a dystopian concept.
The dystopia of management’s position power was aptly described by the German publication, Wirtschaft Woche (Economy Week, January 16, 1987), as Amerikas Krankheit (“America’s Disease”):
Management is insensitive to workers; it supports company politics at the expense of productivity; secrecy is the measure of management’s communication; the principal product of work is paperwork; while endless perfunctory meetings are the way; an internal focus is a consuming organizational fixation only to translate into ignoring potential markets; short term planning is preferred to avoid the challenges; initiative of the individual is discouraged as you don’t know where it might lead; management isolates itself from workers by retreating behind a wall of mahogany; covert hostility to innovation is maintained while overtly being praised.
Whereas this is a reference to thirty-four years ago, Livingston's references to dystopia update the continuing failure of the complex organization to move naturally from position power to knowledge power, now enjoyed primarily by professionals as management fails to loosen the screws by a single turn. I desire here only to make Livingston’s work more accessible to a wider audience as I see it that important.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
Transition
It is tempting to rant on about dystopia. It’s the bulk of history itself. There’s so much newsworthy dystopia material constantly gushing out of the media. Discussing dystopia doings is as popular and safe as the weather. If you’re upset about organizational dysfunction, you have hundreds of groups to join that will take you in with open arms. In the first phase of our grind on the P2U (i.e., Pilgrimage to Utopia), we were in many of those clubs and surrounded by friendly, supportive comrades. Several books we published on our work during that phase, including “Have Fun at Work” (1988), and “Friends in High Places” (1990) are available on Amazon.
As we became more expert in dystopia criticism, it became more obvious that collective expertise in dystopia wasn’t making a dent in the consequences of dystopia. The criticism groups went on year after year and nothing changed. One can assume it is the powerlessness of these anti-dystopia groups that binds them together. Validation of that assumption arrived when the P2U succeeded and all our memberships were immediately canceled, en masse.
Expertise in dystopia has value only to the extent it serves as a benchmark for detecting developing issues in Utopia. As you have learned, functionality of dystopia taking root in Utopia signals collapse. As any functionality of Utopia in dystopia is immediately destroyed, like whistleblowers, Utopia must exercise due vigilance in catching the symptoms of dystopia early.
This point in the derivation of P2U has provided sufficient material on the mechanisms of action of dystopia. It is time to transition out of dystopia and start designing and building the pilgrimage to Utopia. To that end, there are objective concepts and toolsmith to be learned and used.
The importance of concepts and tools to P2U is such that you should be aware of their names and applications. When you use them in design, you will become friends. The following section begins the transition process. Utopia is prosperous and immortal because it prevents and solves whatever fate slings at it. Poor dystopia, mired in unreality and fiction, is defenseless against the operational reality.
Corollaries and derivatives of Natural Law for P2U
To begin, the concepts and such will be introduced in short narrative form. This run will give you an overview of the design tools provided for the P2U. The first batch:
Gödel
· Turing
· Ashby
· Responsibility/autonomy
· GIGO
· Optimality
Kurt Friedrich Gödel (1905 – 1978): The Most Important Logician of the 20th Century
Kurt Gödel collaborated with Einstein about his cause-effect-level theorem and worked up the mathematical proof while both were at Princeton. It is one of the most important laws impinging on the process of solving problems.
The Gödel theorem states that the efficient cause (Aristotle) of the problem is never at the same level where the damage caused by the activity is manifested. The efficient cause is at least one level up in abstraction from the level where the cries of anguish emanate. Causes sink to manifest effects. There are corollaries of Gödel to the effect that a dysfunctional social system cannot be the instrument of its cure.
Dystopias make it a rule that you can only discuss the cause of a publicly odious problem at the same level in which the problem is perceived. Thus when Wall Street runs off with your retirement savings, it’s OK to blame it on the perpetrators’ greed. Just don’t blame it on a rigged financial system that goes from forming an economic bubble that bursts only to form another such bubble.
Since Gödel’s logistics are consistent with natural law, attempts at defiance of this fact are “naturally” punished. An example of such folly is the insolence with which “regulatory” agencies of the Establishment’s ignore such irregularities. Every social system established to force another social system(s) to obey its rules (controls) is attempting to defy Gödel and Turing at the same time. Does anyone notice that since Hammurabi (the sixth king of the First Babylonian dynasty, 1792 BC to c. 1750 BC) invented the regulatory “fix,” no other regulatory agency has ever attained its chartered purpose? Did anyone announce to the Establishment there must be a common failure mode? Well, there is.
Regulatory agencies attempt to control outcomes by imposing a set of rules of action (Turning) at the level where damage from past actions is manifested (Gödel). Held infallible, the rule set is attacked by the 2nd Law at several fronts. As events unfold and regulatory failure accumulates, the rules are incrementally “clarified” in a decades-long legal procedure. Never getting up to the level of cause, the engines of damage control that begat the regulatory agency in the first place continue to exert their influence, unimpeded. The only thing that prevents a regulatory institution from the noble quest of damage control and instead turns it into a public menace is time.
As the record of effectiveness worsens, regulatory agencies migrate from simple tyranny to arrogance. Protected by the civil laws that shield them from liability for ruled compliance, the regulated are left to absorb the damage for their obedience. No artifact of the Establishment wreaks more havoc on the citizenry than constructing a regulatory agency that assures the damage will continue. Facts of the “safety” record, straight lines over time, attest to the futility of regulation and regulatory-based “training.”
That is why transforming from dystopia to Utopia is accompanied by a block change in the loss and accident record. Organizations with a decade of conventional safety programs will record more than a 50% step reduction in losses. The technology of safety only registers improvements when the sociology of productivity is established. It is never the other way around.
Utopia lives by Gödel because true initiators of the bumps of life are the only way the bumps get smoothed out. In dystopia, those working on solving problems are rarely equipped with knowledge of the cause. The solvers have to collide with the cause by trial and error and that takes forever. In dystopia, even searching for the true cause of the wreckage is considered disloyal.
One of the steep hills in the pilgrimage is learning how to catch yourself from looking for the cause near the crime. It pays to switch to Gödel mode, with the onset of any problem, as a habit. The herd can go over the cliff of ignorance without you.
Alan Turing (1912 – 1954, mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist whose machine broke the German Code in WWII).
Alan Turing worked out the mathematical proof of his theorem in 1945 and presented it to the scientific community in 1946. The fact that his theorem is central to organizational functioning and still ignored in practice, speaks volumes about the power of attractor dystopia. Like Gödel, Turing is central to Utopian husbandry.
Turing’s theorem states that for any system you can have obedience to rules or you can have intelligent, effective problem-solving. The system cannot have both. Rule-based behavior permits no feedback of results obtained from following the rules. To have obedience, you sacrifice accomplishment. To achieve results irrespective of the problem at hand, do whatever works and screw the rules. In dystopia, neither good nor bad results matter. In dystopia, telling the truth of Turing to power will get you flogged. In Utopia, discussing the truth about power is an expression of faithfulness to the conditions of membership.
Allegiance to the rules is in a joint restriction to responsibility to fix and fit the outcomes. When management drives for conformance to the rules, it automatically assumes full responsibility for the results that obediently conform to the rules. When management delegates outcome responsibility while driving for compliance to corporate doctrine, it is defying Natural Law. The punishment Nature applies to this transgression is the withholding of efficiency by the workforce. To act contrary to what you know to be best is a crushing loss of freedom. For this treacherous to appropriate action, management becomes a caricature of reality that renders it impotent. Things rapidly degrade to a zero-sum game. The workforce loses. The head its shed loses in what is tantamount to a cover-up.
Dystopias go to extremes in trying to defy Turing. They insist on conformance to policies that discourage the intelligent pursuit of problem-solving. That’s why the Establishment can’t solve the problems that require actionable-quality information and intelligent, Gödel-centered creativity.
In Utopia, the signs of Turing-think are everywhere. “Rules” of action are rewritten daily as feedback is intelligently applied to redesigning tasks. Keep the stuff that works; throw away the stuff that doesn’t; synthesize other versions of the task; repeat as necessary to attain effective outcomes. You know what working the process will get you in dystopia – fired!
W. Ross Ashby (1903 – 1972), English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics
Ashby was a stalwart member of the General Systems Research community and took his turn as President. He was a member of England’s Ratio Club with Alan Turing. Ashby’s Law of Requisite Variety (1932) is a derivative of Control Theory. It states that to control a system you must have as much variety in your control responses as the system to be controlled exhibits. As a familiar reference, it is the law of competitive sports.
Requisite variety is ignored as a natural law in a dystopia as it requires quality and quantity of information, local and particular, which is impossible to obtain in a useful time frame. Without full knowledge of system dynamics, e.g., the actual motives of labor, no control system can be devised that can guarantee full control, e.g., morale.
Ashby’s “The Purpose of the System Is What It Does” (POSIWID) also derives from control theory. It was featured and promoted by an Ashby cohort, Stafford Beer (1926 – 2002, best known for his work in the fields of operational research and management cybernetics). The principle underlying POSIWID is that all systems self-regulate towards a goal. They just don’t advertise this fact.
Implemented by an appropriate control system, process systems can be given your choice of a control target. Should the control system falter, for any reason, the system will spontaneously resort to a different target. Consequently, when process performance centers fail to coincide with the stated target and nothing is done to change the deviation, system performance becomes the purpose of the system – because that is what it does.
POSIWID has frequent use in Dystopia. It sees right through camouflage and cover-ups. Invariably, the efforts of the perpetrators to explain the discrepancy serve to confirm the stated goal is bogus. There is nothing tougher on morale than to find out you’ve been wasting your time striving towards the “wrong” goal. In project operations, it is rare when the stated goal turns out to be the “right” goal to address the real problem (Gödel).
This derivative of Natural Law combines mathematical physics with the dogma of psychology. Attempts to defy this principle, the pursuit of the impossible in dystopia are quite common. Utopia is very sensitive to the responsibility-for-outcomes canon. It is an essential factor in entropy extraction that appears in the design. For anyone to freely and legitimately take responsibility for a fit outcome performance, he must be the system designer. For goal-based design to succeed, the designer must have the leeway and discretion to learn about and do whatever it takes to attain the specified functionalities. Responsibility for performance is the soul of design. Cross-discipline lines? Of course.
The welded relationship of autonomy and fitness responsibility established by Natural Law, through Turing and Gödel, attains its significance in modern society because attempts to defy this fundamental principle of right living are so common. The fact this lawful marriage is never discussed does not mean people are unaware of the bond. Everyone is jolted when the authority demands that you follow the rules and mitigate the disturbance – “Or we’ll get somebody who can!” The contradiction here is that if rule-based behavior could deal with the novelty and complexity of the intrusion, it wouldn’t even be on the worklist.
Emulating a previous “solution” is not design. It is protocol-based behavior. An example is the shift of the medical empire from concern about outcomes to a focus on its duty for professional services – “Do no harm.” In society, following the protocols protect you from litigation. All the risks of outcomes, good or bad, are borne by the patient.
In contrast to the fields of medicine and education, civil engineering is fitness for application. The designer of that which is to be constructed by law is held responsible for fitness. Beginning with the Codes of Hammurabi, 1780 BCE, whatever damage occurred by building failure was forcibly inflicted on its designer, including death. Design engineer takes fitness responsibility as totally appropriate and rational. The autonomy associated with that responsibility is so ingrained in our culture that the term “to engineer something” is used pejoratively to mean doing whatever it takes, legal or not, to attain the goal which in simple language is cheating.
Compare the engineering design buyer protection plan to a regulatory agency charter. Having the authority to impose its codes, rules, and specifications by the force of law, the regulator takes zero responsibility for any damages that occur because its rules were followed. You will be fined if you don’t comply with the rules. But, if you do abide by the rules and doing so is the cause of the damage, you cannot sue the regulator. And it takes ten years to change the rules. In Utopia husbandry, the duty of service is a second-tier obligation that follows responsibility for fitness and performance. There is no other way to sustain Utopian prosperity.
The designer’s iron law: “Whoever picks the parts, owns the system’s behavior,” was the theme of Ayn Rand’s (1905 – 1982) novel, “The Fountainhead” (1943). Rand, a Russian-American writer and philosopher developed the philosophical system known as “Objectivism.” It follows that it is a condition of the professional license of the system designer that should anyone pull rank and meddle with his part selection or configuration, automatically transfers the full outcome responsibility from him over to the meddler.
In Sweden, the throne meddled with the design of its dreadnaught warship, “Vasa.” The king commanded that another deck of cannons be added to the top of the warship making it top-heavy and unstable. When launched, the Vasa immediately capsized and sank, killing everyone aboard. Centuries later, Sweden raised the Vasa out of the mud for its museum. When you visit the Vasa, you will find no mention of regal interference. In our time we have had the fate of the Challenger and Columbia.
[The Space Shuttle Columbia disaster was a fatal incident in the United States space program that occurred on February 1, 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated as it reentered the atmosphere, killing all seven crew members. The disaster was the second fatal accident in the Space Shuttle program, after the 1986 breakup of Challenger soon after liftoff.]
If the responsibility for attaining specified system performance is not authentic, it doesn’t exist in the real world at all. To be genuine, responsibility can rest only with the system designer and only when he has knowingly and freely taken responsibility for delivering the desired dynamics. Attempts to defy this law trigger CYA efforts and display in the rampant finger-pointing and buck-passing that attends denial of responsibility for stakeholder damage. Wall St. may claim ignorance of this responsibility/autonomy law, but when its manufactured bubble bursts, it knows how to use the law to deny responsibility in Congressional hearings. The bottom claims obedience to authority. The top claims it’s impossible to know what’s going on in an empire too big to fail. OK, got it. We lose our retirement savings.
The no-one’s responsible factor is handled in civil law by requiring a designer-of-record seal for every construction project. In the event of damage, the court simply notes who applied the professional seal to the design. In litigation, this responsibility is non-transferrable and irrevocable. After $100M was spent in legal fees, the presiding judge of the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. On July 17, 1981, two walkways collapsed at the Hyatt Regency Kansas City hotel in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, one directly above the other. They crashed onto a tea dance being held in the hotel's lobby, killing 114 and injuring 216. Litigators ended the ordeal by declaring the engineer-of-record (EOR) responsible for the carnage – no excuses.
In Utopia, any designer of a more productive system who takes responsibility for delivering on his promise is perforce in fair exchange given a bandwidth of discretion that encompasses the challenge and tolerance for trials and errors. Feeding on the instinct for workmanship, the record of success of this arrangement in practice is close to 100%. Participants who fear failing on the deal will invariably remove themselves early on.
Prequalification
By now you know that every qualified pilgrim is a responsibility-taking task designer. Every pilgrim is a man-in-the-middle custodian of the Franceschi Fitting, a key intermediate level generalized functions that pupate into physical functions. The expression “pupate” is derived from an intermediate usually quiescent stage of a metamorphosis similar to the insect (such as a bee, moth, or beetle) that occurs between the larva and the imago, usually enclosed in a cocoon or protective covering, and undergoes internal changes by which larval structures are replaced by those typical of the imago.
At this level, every pilgrim is legitimately, functionally, and authentically responsible for viability husbandry – increasing productivity. The pilgrim’s role on the organizational chart (Starkermann) acts as a productivity gatekeeper, as the protagonist, within the 2½ rule.
Where there is no equivalent level on the framework that supports the organization, it is necessary to create one before the pilgrimage can begin. There are two empires in society today that have arranged their affairs so that no level in the hierarchy has responsibility for fit outcomes – education and medicine. Iatrogenic is a top cause of death in the USA where medicine and pharmaceuticals can flaunt their ambiguous sanctions without regress (e.g., The Center for Disease Control and the World Health Organization in the Covid–19 pandemic) and where education has been known to act notoriously and irresponsibly in schooling your children where teachers’ unions summarily exploit their political advantage without notable regret.
This responsibility gap issue is never discussed and all attempts to close the gap have been attempts to defy Gödel. While there is no doubt the pilgrimage would deliver the benefits package, the fuss that has to be made to establish a productivity-protagonist level triggers organizational trauma. The responsibility criterion is a stopping rule for the pilgrimage. No outcome responsibility, no dice.
The fact of the matter is that education and medicine, criticized for centuries on this account, avoid change by having no level in its hierarchy outcome-responsible. This stand, easy to test, amounts to double insulation against correcting the cause of outrageous performance. The pilgrimage paradigm is truly generic, universal. Given the requisites, it can’t miss. Try to defeat it.
GIGO (Garbage In-Garbage Out)
The mathematical physics of GIGO doesn’t even require long division. Everyone knows what happens to the soup when sewer juice is added to the pot. Garbage in produces garbage out (GIGO). Any amount of garbage in produces all garbage out. The reason garbage is always getting into dystopia is that no proper benchmarks are set up for distinguishing trustworthy information from fiction. Even software for debugging codes has to be debugged.
In Utopia, the price of avoiding GIGO failure, trustworthy benchmarks, and eternal vigilance, is considered an unavoidable tax. It is paid as routine. Keeping GIGO in check is why responsibility is focused on the system designer. There are no half scores for keeping half of the garbage out. When you see fellow members tossing in the garbage, you have no incentive to clean up your information.
Attempts to defy GIGO are too habitual and routine to get much notice when they are executed. Getting at the truth is reserved for litigation over damages.
Law of Optimality
The mathematical physics of this law plays a big role in designing for productivity. A good chunk of the energy in dystopia is spent to cover up attempts to defy optimality law. Another example of common-sense reality, the law of optimality states that whatever resources have been wasted in errors and ineffective strategies cannot be recovered by future efficiencies. When management fails to support productivity improvements, keeping the suboptimum degrading system in service, the money lost during the lag in remedial action is unrecoverable. Globally, the unjustifiable delay in boosting productivity costs $8T/annum.
Canons of Psychology that play leading roles
Of course, human psychology is a big hitter in how people choose to animate their social systems. No one can doubt that man is a social animal, one who places his “standing” in his collectives at or close to paramount in his totem-pole of values.
When you consider the extreme actions and sacrifices man has taken to secure public esteem, the damage from operating a dystopia pales in comparison. To gain social esteem in one society, members will inflict without remorse genocide on a rival society. The tipoff of this proclivity is depersonalization. When one cabal gives rival cabals numbers or abstractions in place of names, you can be certain the vector going forward is towards genocide. Depersonalization is the prelude to zero-sum combat. The equation of behavior we use for the pilgrimage is:
Argyris on dystopia
The scholarship of Chris Argyris (1923 - 2013) centered on his Maturity/Immaturity Theory to explain the relationship of Personality & Organization Development in terms of human nature and organizational behavior. According to this theory, a person’s development is a process along with a continuous break of an immature situation to a maturity situation, which was seminal work on the learning organization. His resourceful and original work on organizational dysfunction, which went on for over 50 years, and was unmatched during his tenure. Living amid various organizations, he observed and ran tests to discredit his theories. He summarized the mechanisms of action that define dystopia in his Theory-in-use Model I:
Be in unilateral control over others and remain so
· Win, do not lose
· Suppress negative feelings
· Act rationally
To defend ideological infallibility, he codified the actions encouraged by Model I as follows:
(1) Avoid defining clear objectives and evaluating behavior in terms of achievement of the goal.
(2) Discourage inquiry and testing.
(3) Send mixed messages (act as if messages were not mixed; make topic undiscussable; act as if not doing any of the above)
(4) Be skillfully incompetent and oblivious to consequences
(5) Intercept and contaminate feedback
Argyris on Utopia
Professor Argyris set the standard by which attainment of the pilgrimage goal could be measured. He called it Theory of Use II. The toughest criterion, by far, is for Utopia to be self-sustaining. That means Utopia must have a self-regulating apparatus that does not need outside resources.
In 1960, Argyris, then a professor of Industrial Administration at Yale University, published “Understanding Organizational Behavior.” In his book, available on Amazon, Argyris proclaimed his goal and enumerated the criteria by which he will celebrate its attainment. In the 56 years since his manifesto for productive action was published, no scholar or practitioner in the field ever quarreled with or detracted from his lucid and logically-impeccable specification of the outcome. We adopted the Argyris declaration of goal and benchmark of Utopia attainment as the measure of mission realization. When the signals of paradigm success first appeared, our perceptual frameworks were ready to recognize them.
The paradigm is:
Actionable
2. Falsifiable
3. Unconditional
4. Tractable
5. Efficacious
6. Self-sustaining
7. Teachable
It will satisfy the following requisites:
· Upfront, causally transparent specification of objectives, prediction of outcomes, and the sequence of actions to produce them.
· Explicit premises, individually falsifiable.
· Structured in the form of concise causal statements of conditions under which the paradigm will hold.
· Falsifiable in whole and parts. Provisions for error detecting and error-correcting. Unconditional auditing.
· Effectiveness measurable by observable data.
· Robust ground-truth feedback process for continuous improvement.
· Final validation of effective application is measured productivity profile in the application, in situ.
Attributes:
This leads to the consequences it predicts. Delivers promises in the operational reality.
· Proactively humanitarian. Responsible steward of the quality of life.
· Foresighted, preventative, creative.
· Propagation and amplification of effectiveness by reciprocity – the supreme validation.
· Congruent with reality. No magic, intuition, faith.
· Establishes and fosters a learning context.
· Unrestrained truth-seeking. A lack of defensive routines.
· Risk-taking tolerant. No change panic.
· Implementation protocols are teachable.
· High sensitivity to disturbances and highly effective in neutralizing disturbances.
· Causes no harm in implementation. (Warfield’s dictum). Rational demands of its elements.
· There is only pass/fail on productivity benchmarking. Partial scores count as zero.
· High explanatory power, with minimal concepts and premises.
· Authentic, genuine, trust, instinctive, happy, intimate, collaborative. In other words, natural.
· Fast delivery of benefits.
All actionable knowledge developed has the traceable pedigree to natural-law fundamentals and primitives.
· Aligned with and compelled by genetically endowed instincts.
· Provides tools for rapid, reliable status assessment.
· Incontrovertible from any perspective.
Paradox accumulating as angst
Dystopia is a social system drowning in the paradoxes it brings on itself by deliberate, willful ignorance. Living with contradictions brings cognitive dissonance and when no relief is forthcoming for that well-studied malady, contradictions accumulate in the form of angst. Individuals emotionally suffocating on angst are easy to spot and dystopias (and roadways) are filled with them. Untrustworthy, anglers cannot be productive and they are unsafe on the job.
Since internal energy is a zero-sum affair, the dilemma with angst overload is that no internal energy is available to do anything constructive. Most resources are consumed in supporting angst. This “lost” energy supply is made available to the pilgrim by angst blowdown to the interventionist’s sump during the early phases of the P2U. As one of the services of the interventionist, it can be witnessed in real-time and its positive effect is dramatic.
Maslow Abraham Harold Maslow (1908 – 1970) was an American psychologist who was best known for creating Maslow's “Hierarchy of Needs,” a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization.
The work of Abraham Maslow on human psychological needs and their ranking, first published in 1945, does not age. He objectified the definition of entelechy (i.e., the realization of potential) – what the pilgrimage is about. It is the roadmap to psychological closure, the most elusive condition in the universe. You only get signals that you’ve made closure when you arrive there.
Using the Maslow laws of self to evaluate dystopia is a sobering experience. Victims of zero-sum played with loaded dice, the working force is stuck in level one or two, to a man. The head shed never gets near the upper levels of self-actualization. They may have economic success, but psychological success eludes everyone but the sociopaths.
The contrast to Utopia could hardly be greater. The interventionists are Maslow's grade “self-transcendent,” otherwise they couldn’t do the work of skilled intervention. Most of the pilgrims eventually reach self-actualized rank – psychological success.
The trick at any Maslow tier is to husband what you have and strive upward. Transforming dystopia to Utopia is a rapid buildup of self-confidence. Angst accumulations dissipate along with self-doubts by steady tangible advances from self-implementing the concepts and using the tools. Success is a spur to more success, with entelechy remaining elusive.
The social needs of the pilgrims are very different than the rest of the hierarchy. Their self-confidence derives from success in applied knowledge more than public acclaim. The block improvements in productivity and morale speak for themselves.
The laws of motivation are structured and ordered by the Maslow scale. Motivators vary greatly by position on Maslow’s hierarchy and by organizational hierarchy. At the upper tiers, you are above the mentor line, motivation is all from within. The social systems of dystopia are helpless to assist positively. Their advice is to accept your fate and be thankful that things are not worse.
Zero-sum
There are many intelligent applications of zero-sum engagements, for sure. None exist in the humanitarian scope. Zero-sum, the hallmark of dystopia, is proof positive that workforce morale is going to hell. What could be the advantage of having the producer of your wealth furious at you? Welcome to labor-capital relations.
Carl Ransom Rogers (1902 - 1987) was an American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (and client-centered approach) in psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research.
Carl Rogers is a hero of the pilgrimage. His famous triad: empathy, congruence, and unconditional positive regard is the universal lubricant for the machinery of Utopia. Its tenets, genuineness: open, spontaneous, authentic, and agenda-free support provide the highest benefit/cost ratio of any tool ever devised by man. It is so easy and so effective, it begs the question: Why doesn’t everyone embrace the Rogerian triad? Why indeed.
The pilgrims are exposed to the Rogerian triad by the interventionist, which is the quintessential prelude to angst blowdown, and then instructed in deployment techniques for their use. The payoffs are shockingly high. Why do social systems leave those big payoffs on the table? Why indeed.
Perhaps it is because no one loaded down with angst can engage the Rogerian triad. It is impossible to fake genuineness. How can you uptake the woes of another individual when you have a surplus of your own? No member of a dystopia can be trusted as a blowdown tank. This dependency may explain why Rogers is underutilized, but no way is available to prove it.
Trust
Trust is a word, like safety and intelligence, in common use that has no universal, workplace definition. One of the official definitions: “Firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something,” uses words that have no common, measurable understanding either. Does the word “truth” have any utility at all in today’s social milieu?
The sorry fact of the matter is that, by definition, any member of a dystopia is untrustworthy. How can you trust anyone on Noah’s Ark that spends his day drilling holes in its bottom? You can’t trust management deliberately and routinely committing felonies and you can’t trust a workforce committing the crimes of obedience that implement management’s felony. No wonder dystopias are socially toxic. OK, so you can trust them to do bad things.
For pilgrimage purposes, trust is established by a series of measurements, after the fact, that unconditional trust extended in initialization was justified by the performance. Trust has to be extended, first. You must be vulnerable to betrayal. We use a talisman to warrant to the recipient that he is trusted – until performance proves otherwise. Everything you do has to reflect total trust to detect any payoff of your trust. You can only influence the equations of trust in a positive direction by one-on-one contact. Trust cannot be established across a gap.
While destroying trust is instantaneous, because it’s brittle, building trust is tricky even under the best of circumstances. The law of optimality applies. If you don’t start right, building trust is hopeless. You can’t back fit trust. These stipulations also mean that trust, if it is to happen at all, will be attained quickly. Slow means no.
No doubt about it, trust is the paramount factor in moving the paradigm along. Trust is the first milestone and checkpoint. If trust in the interventionist is not established by then, he can take things no further until he earns his wings. The time constraints on establishing trust inbound make it essential that the interventionist be a Rogerian-Triad virtuoso. This is done, cheek by jowl, one on one, at the pilgrim’s workstation. There is never a time limit. Angst blowdown comes after trust is established when it comes.
The second boost in trust-building comes when the pilgrims test out the paradigm concepts and tools in their work scene and find out that they perform – straight out of the box. Interestingly, the interventionist is unconcerned about distributing his unconditional trust to the pilgrims. The enabling factor, validated by his experience, is his confidence in the paradigm.
In Utopia, trust is the prime mover behind productivity increase, of efficient viability husbandry. Trust has no overhead cost. In dystopia, the overhead costs to produce without trust are so high that management doesn’t want them tallied. It is as easy to detect operations based on trust as it is for production under distrust. The ambiance between the two conditions could hardly be more different.
Unexamined choice and reflex action
A major factor in building and running a dystopia is the standard practice of letting business as usual choose and act without going to the bother of consciously engaging and evaluating the facts. In dystopia, task action decisions are made by reading a subconscious brain-driven teleprompter. Background brain’s decisions made way in advance, have a record worse than random chance. The issue with impulse decision-making is that it is counterproductive to viability husbandry. Subliminal decision-making does not work.
In Utopia, the decision-makers are expected to intercept their impulses and hold them until an examination and evaluation of the relevant information have taken place. There are tools for intelligent decision-making that keep the reflexes in check. They invariably save you embarrassment. Serious blunders can often be averted by calling a recess for knee-jerk reactions until the intellect is brought into service. The success of this policy leads to a good habit of catching the produce of reflexes, cognitive bias, phobias, predispositions, impulses, paranoia, penchants, obsessions, proclivities, and manias before much damage is done.
Most of the cultivated reflexes of management, unimpaired by an intervening intellect and actionable-quality information, encourage the management of the very consequences says it seeks to avoid. The response to reflex-caused failure is to trigger another impulsive decision. It is the primal scream of progressive degeneration.
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THE BLACK HOLE OF ORGANIZATIONAL DYSFUNCTION – PART FOUR - TOOLSMITHING
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