Isegoria

Michael O. Church believes that people are localistic:

We are altruistic to people we consider near to us in genetic, tribal, cultural, or emotional terms. We’re generally indifferent to those we regard at the periphery, favoring the needs of our tribe. Good and evil don’t escape from this localism; they just handle it differently. Good attempts to transcend this localism and (perhaps cautiously) grow the neighborhood of concern: expanding it to all citizens of a polity, then all humans, then all living beings. Evil, not always being egoistic, turns this localism into militancy. Both involve an outside-the-system comprehension of localism that is somewhat rare, leaving most people in an alignment considered neutral. Morally neutral people are best described as weakly good. Assuming they have a strong sense of what good and evil are, they’d prefer to be good, but this preference is not strong and they do not have a burning desire to seek good at personal or localistic risk.

The civility spectrum, between law and chaos, reflects peoples’ biases toward organizations and those who lead them. While lawful good people will oppose an evil society and chaotic good will support a good one, the truth about most societies and organizations is that they are themselves morally neutral, so a person’s civility (bias in favor or against establishment) will influence her tendency to oppose or support power more than the sign-comparison of her and its moral alignments. Lawful people think organizations tend to be better than the people who comprise them; chaotic people think they tend to be worse than the people who make them up. For my part, I’m chaotic, but just slightly. I think that individual people average a C+ on the moral scale (A being good, F being evil) and organizations tend to average a C-. Chaotic bias makes it natural to see corporations as “evil”; in reality, most of them are indifferent profit maximizers.

Interesting enough, software engineering is intrinsically chaotic. Because software requires exact precision, while human communication is inherently ambiguous, large software teams do not perform well. The per-person productivity of a large development team is substantially lower than that of an individual engineer. A team of 10 might be 2-2.5 times as productive as a single engineer. This leads us, as technologists, toward the (chaotic, possibly faulty) assumption that organizations are inherently less than the sum of their parts, because that is clearly true of software engineering teams.

Management theorists have questioned human nature, generating two opposite sets of assumptions about the typical employee of a corporation.

Theory X (presumed egoism): employees are intrinsically lazy, selfish, and amoral. If they are not watched, they will steal. If they are not prodded, they will slack. They are not to be trusted. The manager’s job is to intimidate people into getting their work done and not doing things that hurt the company.

Theory Y (presumed altruism): employees are intrinsically motivated and inclined to help the organization. If they are given appropriate work, they’ll do well. The manager’s job is to nurture talent and then get out of people’s way, so they can get work done.

Theory X is socially unacceptable, but a better representative than Y of how business executives actually think. Theory Y is how executives and organizations present their mentality, because it’s more socially acceptable. So which is right? Neither entirely. Theory X is ugly, but it has some virtues. First, it can be, perversely, more egalitarian than Theory Y. Theory X distrusts everyone, including the most talented and best positioned. Executives are no better than worker bees; everyone must be monitored and a bit scared. Theory Y, which is focused on talent and development, requires (non-egalitarian) decisions about whom to develop. Second, Theory X is more tolerant of scaling, because large-scale societies run (by necessity) on X-ish assumptions. To keep a Theory-Y organization intact, you cannot hire before you trust. Only in the technological era (where small groups can deliver massive returns) has it been possible for growth-oriented organizations to hire so selectively as to make Theory-Y organizational policies tenable.

My ideology (e.g. open allocation) might be seen as “extreme Theory Y”, but that’s not because I believe Theory Y is inerrant. It’s not. Reality is somewhere between X and Y. I believe that organizations ought to take the Y-ward direction largely (on this spectrum) for the same reason that archers aim slightly above their targets. With the actual leadership of most organizations tending toward egoism and X-ness, an organization that doesn’t set inflexible, constitutional Theory-Y pillars (for some concerns) is going to suffer a severe X-ward bias. X-ism is tolerable for concave industrial work, but in the convex world, organizations need to be somewhat Theory Y. How X (or Y) should an organization be? There’s actually a very simple and absolutely correct answer here: trust employees with their own time and energy, distrust those who want to control others’. It really is that simple — a rarity in human affairs — and to continue with anything else is moronic. Employees who volunteer to use their own energies toward something they believe will benefit the organization should be trusted to do so; those who exhibit a desire for dominance over others should be deeply distrusted.

(Hat tip to Clerestorian.)

In his 1960 book, The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor made the distinction between Theory X and Theory Y, two competing theories about human nature that dominate managerial thought:

Theory X says that the average human being is lazy and self-centered, lacks ambition, dislikes change, and longs to be told what to do. The corresponding managerial approach emphasizes total control. Employee motivation, it says, is all about the fear and the pain. Theory Y maintains that human beings are active rather than passive shapers of themselves and of their environment. They long to grow and assume responsibility. The best way to manage them, then, is to manage as little as possible. Give them water and let them bloom, say the Y-types.

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We are all Theory Y people now — at least when it comes to delivering or receiving motivational talks — and yet, truth be told, we all have our doubts that the world has caught up with our wisdom about it. It will have already occurred to many people, for example, that quite a few of those companies are great places to work because they are successful, rather than the other way around. (I mean, any old company can offer free haircuts and on-site medical care if it has a market capitalization of US$200 billion and a fast-growing market.) There is also plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that firms change their assumptions about human nature after their fortunes change, rather than before. The dot-coms, for example, were all exuberantly convinced about the merits of self-realization in the workplace as long as the market-valuation bubbly was pouring. In the gloomy aftermath, many of the surviving firms transformed themselves with impressive speed into gulag archipelagoes, imposing harsh, X-style discipline on employees who were doing all those jobs that the dot-coms did not outsource.

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In the story as McGregor tells it, and more especially as his successors resell it, the world of X is in a state of conflict. Workers and managers eye one another across the ragged front lines of suspicion and mistrust. The world of Y is in a state of peace. Workers and managers embrace one another as partners on the journey to personal fulfillment. And all that is required to change from one state to the next is making a simple change in one’s assumptions about human nature. But is this really true? Does all conflict dissolve in a higher state of consciousness?

Rather than Theory X and Theory Y, about human nature, Matthew Stewart suggests we examine Theory U and Theory T, about human relations:

Theory U, for Utopian, says that conflicts among human beings always originate in misunderstanding. Eliminate the false assumptions that individuals carry around in their heads, the theory says, and a human community will return to the natural state of peace. McGregor — like just about every management guru you’ve ever heard of — is a U-man at heart.

Theory T, for Tragic, says that conflict is endemic to human relations and arises from real divergences of interest. Peace is therefore a temporary state, and its endurance depends primarily not on the attitudes of individuals but on the system of their relations. Shakespeare and the framers of the U.S. Constitution are classic T-types.

Both theories put crucial emphasis on the concept of “trust,” but in strikingly different ways. Theory U says that you build trust by relaxing your control over people — by showing them that you trust them. Theory T says you build trust by demonstrating that things are under control — by creating a system in which good deeds regularly receive due rewards and bad deeds are appropriately punished.

The two pairs of management theories naturally make a two-by-two matrix:

In order to grasp why some large organisations (but not others) spend so much money on something as ethereal as “strategy,” Matthew Stewart explains, one must dispose of the naïve idea that consulting involves the transfer of knowledge:

The savvier consultants and their clients understand that the basis of the business is not technological but anthropological — and that this is not always a bad thing. Among human beings, it turns out, the perception of expertise, however unfounded, can sometimes be used to good purpose. As the shamans who poison chickens and the soothsayers who read entrails have long demonstrated, sometimes it is more important to build a consensus around a good decision than to make the best possible decision; sometimes it is more useful to believe that a decision is sanctioned by a higher authority than to acknowledge that it rests on mere conjecture; and sometimes it is better to make a truly random choice than to continue to follow the predictable inclinations of one’s established prejudices. Consultants, following in the footsteps of their pagan forebears, understand that they must adopt the holy mien of a priestly caste.

So, cuff links matter; flying first class and ritual feasting, too, are part of the job. But consultants also know that an outrageously unjustified level of self-confidence can add several points to one’s perceived expertise quotient.

The most important of the all-too-human functions of shaman-consultants is to sanctify and communicate opinion. Like ministers of information, consultants condense the message, smooth out the dissonances, unify the rhetoric, and then repeat and amplify it ad nauseam through the client’s rank and file. The chief message to be communicated is that you will be expected to work much harder than you ever have before and your chances of losing your job are infinitely greater than you ever imagined.

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When you stipulate that management is the province of experts, you lose sight of the fact that organising fruitful co-operation among human beings is principally a matter of building trust. And you forget the most elemental truth of political philosophy, that in any system that does not have the features of transparency and accountability, no one trusts anyone.

Management fads come and go, Matthew Stewart notes — and come back again, in an endless cycle:

Why does every new management theorist seem to want to outdo Chairman Mao in calling for perpetual havoc on the old order? Very simply, because all economic organizations involve at least some degree of power, and power always pisses people off. That is the human condition. At the end of the day, it isn’t a new world order that the management theorists are after; it’s the sensation of the revolutionary moment. They long for that exhilarating instant when they’re fighting the good fight and imagining a future utopia. What happens after the revolution — civil war and Stalinism being good bets — could not be of less concern.

Between them, Taylor and Mayo carved up the world of management theory. According to my scientific sampling, you can save yourself from reading about 99 percent of all the management literature once you master this dialectic between rationalists and humanists. The Taylorite rationalist says: Be efficient! The Mayo-ist humanist replies: Hey, these are people we’re talking about! And the debate goes on. Ultimately, it’s just another installment in the ongoing saga of reason and passion, of the individual and the group.