Obedience to Authority

While the influence of duty, discipline, and loyalty were long recognized as shaping factors of behavior, only recently was the supreme position of this social force (obedience to authority) fully appreciated. Putting it far at the head of the line where it belongs has been a show stopper. With this major "discovery," great swarms of complexity have evaporated. Social process is now, demonstrably, an open book. This is the place to begin putting your mental china about social systems in order. The ones you have are weak slaves to this Jabba the Hutt.

The prime mover of behavior

In order to deliberately engineer project success you must face the great puzzle , why the organization chooses to do a project and then proceeds to make it fail. The experience is so common and the scenarios so uniform, the situation is clearly "in control" by a primary human instinct. No one is sending messages about the complex telling people what to do to screw up the project. The instructions for such counterproductive behavior are everywhere, omnipresent, built-in.

An appreciation of the social factors which shape human choices for action is essential to understand how the project environment works. To deliberately avoid the resident pathogens of conventional practice, the operative factors need to be addressed. We all know that, off duty, a great many components shape individual behavior and that the significance of each one varies widely according to the individual. You are conditioned to transpose this trait of individual variety to social systems to hide the fact that only two forms are stable. Brainwashed, you deny this simple fact in the face of your own experience. Social process is a one-or-the-other proposition.

We all know that, in corporate settings, behavior is compressed to very narrow channels. The value system operating in a particular organization (the transfer function) to produce the compression is exhibited in the way the organization relates to project teams. The interest here is the difference between the drivers of ordinary organizational functioning and the requisites of problem solving. The text of history shows that they are incompatible. For a sampler of the corporate social supermarket read The Power and the Money, by F.X. Dealy, Jr. (1993). The exposed shenagigans of the Wall Street Journal cover the spectrum.

It is the wreckage of obedience to authority which plagues rational front end work. To treat them independently is to miss the point. When you follow the trail of obedience through the front end wilderness, you will be able to see the simple core value driving 99% of organizational process. This amalgam is the great eliminator of social system complexity. Because of its importance, the theme is repeated here several times in slightly different terms. Jim Fisher has brilliantly covered this issue in his 1996 book The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (Delta Group 1-800-814-4883). Get this one right and the big afterburner kicks in. It's like being born again!

Awakening

While the library on social behavior had long been consumed and many differences between success and failure noted, the collection was a big motley stew of particulars. The key for simplification was neither obvious nor suspected to exist. The literature abounds with works on various behavioral factors and the unstated assumption is that if you knew all the pieces relating to a case you should be able to figure out the grand total. While there is a master integrator somewhere which takes account of all the factors at once, there are no books on the integration.

With so many factors at play, the issue seemed hopelessly complex. Knowing that nature usually obtains ubiquity with simple laws, we thought, could the armies of sociologists researching in this field be deliberately avoiding the key issue? Codependency? We have learned to be very attentive to the specialist's reject pile. Sure enough, when attention was directed to the areas violently avoided in their research, the organizing principle was found. The dawn of that discovery marked a new era in understanding social behavior. Not only has the complexity evaporated, the key factor is readily demonstrable.

The single factor which, by itself, accounts for the entire affair observed is obedience to authority. While the vehement refusal of the Establishment to support studies in this area was noted in Have Fun at Work, our follow up was slow. When Stanley Milgram's pioneering work in this field (Yale University) was finally obtained and studied, the pieces of the jigsaw quickly fell into place. Strong, clear validation came so fast from so many places, the issue was promptly settled. With our blurred vision corrected, we engaged the operating reality with new insight. What a jolt!

The shaping factor of obedience has been around, in full command, for a long time. The Centurion in the gospels was sure that if Jesus merely spoke the word, his servant would be healed: "For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me; and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it" (Matthew 8:9). We all know what the commandment to "Honor thy father and thy mother" means. Historical references to obedience to authority are measured by the ton. "We who are about to die, salute you." And die they did.

Collision

The requisites defined by the generic problem solving paradigm, validated in many applications, depend completely upon the autonomy of the individual worker. The productive pathway to running a project is covered with inventions of many kinds and at many levels. To be creative is to be operating freely on all cranial cylinders in an intensely personal, closed and human experience. Robert Grudin has elucidated the master reference structure of creativity in The Grace of Great Things. This brilliant book can be used as a manual. Recommended reading about creativity one level down from Grudin is Joel Mokyr's Lever of Riches. Submission to the commands of others is transmuting to a robot - open to its master and morally barren. In social contexts, obedience is the primary determinant of behavior.

With obedience to authority the exact opposite of autonomy and autonomy the necessary setting for ingenuity, to feature one is to negate the other. Thereby, problem solving and hierarchy are antithetical. There is no compromise blend in operation. What may appear to be a part-way application in a corporation is actually the hierarchical form spotted with "pockets of excellence" (Tom Peters' description for Skunkworks autonomy). Knowing that its normal process was too slow to meet contract requirements, Lockheed established the Skunkworks as a separate entity from its notorious bureaucracy. In later years, Xerox and Kodak did the same thing.

Worker autonomy is not installed just because it seems like a nice thing to do for your associates. It is the only way the job gets done. Dealing with the obedience issue head on is evidence of intent to actually solve the problem. The Establishment icon, J. Attali, in his book Millennium makes it clear. "It has long been apparent that there could be no wealth without creativity, and no creativity without democracy." This aspect is too easy to demonstrate. For a splendid case study of a transformation from one form to another, read Maverick by Ricardo Semler (1993). For a collection of case studies along the same line, read What America Does Right by Robert Waterman, Jr. (1994). Every manager believes in fully autonomous work, as long as it stops at the level below him.

The great find is that by measuring the one factor of obedience, everything else falls into place. It works at every level of social interaction, anywhere, and always. With obedience entrenched, which is the usual case, problem solving enterprise is crippled. Even gathering knowledge will be construed as an act of disobedience. The pyramid of power thrives on narrow isolated viewpoints and there is no compromise position. At a snapshot in time you are either in one state or the other. You are either autonomous or obedient. No matter how important you are, for example, when Mother is about you will be an obedient child. Attempt any other relationship and Mother will straight away reduce you to guilt-ridden rubble.

Anti-Autonomy

An act carried out under "command" is profoundly different than the spontaneous actions of an individual. Behavior that is unthinkable in an individual acting on his own can be executed without question when carried out under orders. The scenes of every war replayed on daily TV are not acts by inmates loosened from the asylums. The combatants are ordinary citizens taken far from their homes to a foreign place, given guns, and instructed to shoot people they don't even know. In normal corporate working situations it is not what you do that counts, but who you do it for. This value system is immediately at odds with the basic requisites of solving problems. The supreme influence of obedience in corporate affairs is habitually and grossly underestimated. The story of Abraham should not be left at Sunday School.

Lionell Griffith connects obedience to authority to its first principles as follows:

The choice between force or freedom is the choice between failure or success. With force, reason is impossible. Without reason, there can be no success.

Lionell explains the dichotomy. "Authority fails because it denies the nature of the mind of man and the nature of reality. Authority asserts that a thing is true because it says so - thus denying that truth is the recognition and acceptance of the facts of reality by a man's mind - a mind that has processed a lifetime of experience, experiment and thought. A mind that has integrated each truth into a coherent and continuously validated body of knowledge. A mind that performed the process by free choice. Rejecting that process, authority requires that its 'truth' be accepted without context, process and choice. Even if the 'truth' aligned with the facts of reality, it could not and would not be integrated into a coherent body of knowledge. It floats as an assertion without a foundation. It cannot contribute to success."

"The dictator," explains Griffith, "is but a special case of authority which enforces its assertion of 'truth' by physical force. An authority is a dictator with his gun in the drawer, while a dictator is an authority with his gun drawn - demanding reality to deny its nature and bend to his orders. As always, reality says 'up yours.' The differences among authorities are inconsequential. Failure is inevitable." You can go to another level of detail on this in Lionell's S/C essay entitled "The Unexamined Premise." Lionell keeps the responsibility with the individual. He knows that behavior itself flows from an inner core of the person and that within the core, personal values are weighted, gratifications assessed, and the resulting decisions are translated into action.

You will do yourself a big favor by arranging your mental china to respect the powerful grip of obedience. We grossly underestimated the potency and extent of obedience conditioning. As a requirement of all communal living, it has no peer. The influence of obedience to authority is so pervasive and ubiquitous, the issue has become invisible to the participants. Obedience is the dispositional cement which binds workers to systems of authority. Men who are in everyday life responsible and decent are gripped by the trappings of authority, allow their perceptions to be controlled, and accept, without question, their supervisor's definition of the situation. The survey we made (twice) with Computer Aided Engineering was sobering. Not a single case in 500 responding corporations encouraged its staff to increase productivity. In most instances the application of electronic toolboxes to improve workflow was openly forbidden. This fact fits the sales records of the toolbox companies.

Obedience is the psychological mechanism that links individual action to executive purpose. The essence of obedience is when a person views himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes to the extent he no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical viewpoint shift has occurred, the person assumes all the essential features of an obedient drudge - a role as creative as a rock. When a person has given himself over to authority, he no longer considers himself as the efficient cause of his own actions. In some circumstances, obedience is colored by a cooperative mood. In others, obedience is compelled by fear of force and punishment. Robots in groups.

Obedience reinforcement by terror is the norm today. Job security is gone. The Poobahs know big change is in the air, beyond their control, and they are insecure. To get a temporary feeling of "power" over others, managers inflict punishment on their vassals and wallow in the screams of anguish which spew forth. To get a good idea of the scope of shenanigans the system can display without changing anything, read Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will by Tichy and Sherman (Doubleday, 1993). This tribute to Jack Welch and his GE playground, says it all about putting PR words on management by fear. Here is a mega corporation run from the top withWelch serving as the reference of work. Power city.

No action of itself has an unchangeable psychological quality. A person committed to obedience is unable to control his own behavior as a function of whether or not the situations he faces are of consequence to him. Even when he knows the act prescribed by an authority is a counterproductive one, he chooses to carry out the deed over wrenching at the structure of authority - an act certain to be detected and punished. He feels no personal sense of responsibility but assigns it all to the executive who orders the action. This is the opposite culture to any Skunkworks worthy of the name. The paradigm is based upon individual responsibility for individual action (self control). To solve a problem, nothing else works.

So what we have on the social stage is not the players themselves but the value systems of the "superiors" they are obedient to. And they are obedient to their superiors. Since the authority value system varies with the whims of circumstance and mood, there is nothing permanent or stable to work with. No wonder the social arena is filled with endless conflict. Since you usually are dealing with an individual, you usually count on that individual to act in accord with a human value similar to yours. What you fail to appreciate that corpoman is not human at all but representing his error-filled interpretation of what he thinks his superiors have instructed him to do - as a robot. The curse of obedience to authority is clearly seen during the corporate downsizing exercise. When job security is at stake, obedience is the only show in town. Productivity plummets as all activity is devoted to obedience displays of one kind or another. The emphasis is on following rules and killing anything which might threaten the status quo. The reconfiguration is almost instantaneous. With the survivors being the most obedient and therefore the least able to solve problems, the demise of the institution is only a matter of time.

Overview

Authority is derived from the belief of the subject in the legitimacy of the superior's commands - traditional, charismatic or legal. If you obey your superior's directive because you believe your superior has been given the right to require your obedience by virtue of his superior rank in the organization, does your superior's authority come from your belief (from below) or from his right (from above)? When you say "O.K., you're the boss" you mean that the responsibility to keep your boss on the right track has been discharged and the responsibility for the outcome is his; now you are merely obeying orders. You will hold your own critical faculties for choosing among alternatives in abeyance and accept the superior's choice without going behind it. If you do, don't get caught.

A sense of obligation to authority is a more powerful binding factor than anything else on the list and holds first place by a large amount. Society has a great many inhibitors against disobeying authority, which keep their members firmly in place. Allowing an act to be dominated by its context, while neglecting its human consequences, is very dangerous. In mergers and acquisitions (M&A), for instance, victims are devalued as a consequence of quietly accepting their fate. We habitually and grossly underestimated the obedience determinant by thinking that the strength of our case for getting rational about the project objective would override authority when the two were in conflict. While getting lots of talk about moral judgements and ethical responsibilities, when it got down to action we never had a chance. We failed to understand that the moral sense wasn't lost, it had locked in exclusively on how well he was living up to the expectations that the authority has of him , and we certainly weren't the authority.

The total grip and influence of obedience to authority is habitually and grossly underestimated by the autonomous. When you are dealing from a platform based upon autonomy (objective), your audience is not the obedient drudge. Even if he could see your point, the hierarch is unable to act accordingly (rationally). This means that the operational reality, for all practical purposes, is cognitively closed to the rich variety of the autonomous - including such objective things as problem-solving paradigms based upon natural law. The fundamental mismatch is on display in the trade literature. Take the injunctions to act and compare them to what is done. There is no audience.

As more than 99.9% of society is obedience-brainwashed, the herd follows the commands of the pyramid top. The current fad is downsizing and you can note how merger mania flourishes in the face of great evidence to the contrary. The audience shapes the literature made available to the audience. Material which supports the pyramid is popular and everything else is forbidden. The authors which confine their scope to minor housekeeping of the pyramid can become rich. All the rest will lose money and the audience. While the army of advisors to the herd contains a high ratio of the autonomous, commercial factors keep their influence near zero. This means that the great bulk of literature on operations is written by authors suffering from the same pathology as their audience. It is very difficult to find the few autonomous workers.

Specialization of work is a standard management tool for securing obedience. Narrow viewpoints caused by the division of labor prevent sighting the broader consequences of the whole program and engender a narrowing of moral concern. When the total human act is fragmented, people entrust the broad aspects to the authority being served and no one actually confronts the consequences (the organization chart is the device for apportioning blame). As a subject under management control, all initiative is attributed to the legitimate authority. When tensions build in subjects who retain a moral shred, they cannot escape the tension by disobedience. A solitary opposition to authority is weak. You should know.

A person shielded from the whole situation involving his work is unable to act without some kind of direction. Yielding to authority, he is alienated from his own deeds. It is psychologically easy to ignore responsibility when you are only one link in a long chain of action and far from the final consequences. Unlike tribal situations where everyone knows everyone else, at work we usually give our obedience to an impersonal authority. The hierarchical form of society and its Establishment is a significant, chronic contributing factor to the supreme role of obedience, authority and power in contemporary affairs. Too often we focus on the character of the autonomous individual rather than on the situation in which he finds himself. We usually think persons act they way they do because they have decided to do so. In business operations, seldom is that the case. Moral factors of the workers are easily shunted aside by manipulating the informational and social fields. Merger & Acquisition antics (M&A) illustrate the recipe in the daily newspaper.

To conform is not to obey

Don't confuse obedience with conformity. When you follow the behavioral patterns of your crowd, people of your own status who have no special right to direct your behavior, you are conforming. When you comply with authority, you are obedient. In other words, when you feel the person above you on the hierarchy (your supervisor) has the right to prescribe your actions, you are obedient. When you behave according to the norms of your peers, you are conforming. Conformity is imitation which leads to homogenized implicit behavior. In obedience, you bend to an explicit order without imitating the authority. In conforming you are responding to implicit directions and so you interpret your behavior as voluntary (which it ain't).

In obedience, you obey an explicit command while asserting no autonomy in the matter. In fact obedience even controls your perceptions of reality. When you uncritically accept the authority's definition of the situation, you are a hockey puck. These are working conditions hostile to the process of solving problems - and known to be so. Management knows full well how to set groups free (from obedience) when they really want to solve a problem. One example being Honeywell's Tiger Teams. Note also the minute the problem is solved, back into the mold of obedience they march.

Status quo enforcement

Middle and lower rank workers are more inclined than their managers to see executive decisions, departmental regulations and the like as equivalent to Holy Writ, utterly binding, unquestionable. Then, having invested over the years in administering and defending these scriptures against attack, they will resent an executive "change of mind." His right to give commands is counterbalanced by his duty to answer for the orders he gives. Those whose working capital consists of familiarity with the current rules and procedures feel devalued if the rules would no longer apply. Management will have spent much time, effort and ingenuity in defending the existing rules to clients and complainants and come to identify the rules they operate with their own reason for authority, the purposes of the organization, law and order, and the constitution. These investments are not given up lightly.

Developing along over time, the corporate combination disintegrates everything. The form scatters knowledge and information willy-nilly over the arena without keeping track of things. The granulation and dispersion process is not balanced by an integrative function. It's not just that the ability of the corporation to think system is flawed, the ability doesn't exist. Multidisciplined problems are butchered beyond recognition and it isn't until the physical system is constructed that the notion can reform in the startup crew. Where do I find the total, integrated systems department in your company?

Personal exchange minimizes the need for formal rules because of the reciprocity of dealings. In the Skunkworks, trust is the social glue while rules are procedural and toolbox-driven. In large groups personal exchange gives way to anonymous exchange. Formal rules replace trust and there are no manuals on the making of rules. Much grief will be caused when the new rules are incompatible with the existing rules - which is usually the case. Rules reduce the quality of individuality and it doesn't take long for status quo to lock in.

We are still amazed at the ubiquity of disintegrated knowledge in going business concerns. The chart of accountancy is a gross mismatch to the operational reality. Product costs are unknown. There is no informational basis for cost control. It is financial engineering which sets the stage for process reengineering navigation. Business process automation is the basis for strategic planning (alignment and integration of toolboxes). It is silly to start with reengineering without this platform of intelligence available first. Once we have a client up to speed, members are sent out as scouts to the interface organizations. They return in shock at how little their contact organizations know about their own business.

The silent tripwire for automatic doom is hit when the status quo cycle time of an organization exceeds that of the disturbance rate. When that crossover comes, there is absolutely nothing the organization can do to avoid extinction. It is the first thing to measure and it is never wrong. One example is provided by the systems science community as reflected in its A Science of Goal Formulation by Umpleby and Sadovsky (Hemisphere). The book consists of the proceedings of a conference held in May 1985 under the auspices of the American Council of Learned Societies and the International Research and Exchanges Board. The book was finally printed in late 1991 when every paper presented had been overrun by intervening events. It didn't matter that much anyway about the six year plus cycle time, because not a single topic in any of the chapters had anything to do whatsoever with formulating goals. Defunct.

Genetic endowment

We are all born with the obedience potential. The acknowledgement of one's place in the hierarchy stabilizes the form. Clear definitions of status on the pecking order reduce friction to a minimum. Challenges to authority, conversely, often provoke violence (Caine Mutiny, Mutiny on the Bounty). Disobedience is a disturbance which upsets every element in the organization. Jones, Koresh, and Manson knew their followers would obey. It takes an extraordinary amount of courage and mustering of inner resources to act on your conscience when the call is against authority. You should know.

In the organizational context, directions from "above" cannot be assessed against the internal standards of moral judgement. The psychology of obedience does not depend upon the particular levels within the hierarchy. Hierarchical structures can only function if they are coherent (stable) and coherence comes at the price of suppressing autonomy at the local level. The more variable the locals, the more variability must be suppressed. This inherent relationship has been quantified by Starkermann's work in multiple control theory. A hierarchy where the working levels have wide latitude is unstable. In a stable hierarchy of three levels (or more) the top can know nothing about the work at the working level.

Management's goal is to shape a bureaucracy so perfect it makes both time and the world stand still. Accordingly, the individual who enters a hierarchy signs a tacit agreement to modify his behavior. The critical shift in attitude is validated by no longer acting out of personal conscience but executing the wishes of somebody else. Thereby, obedience is very internal to an organization. Employees see themselves as agents for carrying out the wishes of superiors. They do not see themselves as acting on their own for customers. The issue of goal attainment (doing what's good for company clients) never enters the picture. This shift is not freely reversible even though the notion of agent displacing conscience is a state of mind. A person is different from himself in the obedient role with properties not easily traced to his autonomous personality. He has chosen to be a robot without a gun aimed at his head. The influence of obedience is measured as a byproduct of performing the Front End process.

Binary system

The conflict between the value system headed by obedience to authority and the value system required for productive problem solving is total. The systems are mutually incompatible. There is nothing in common which could be trusted so mutually exclusive applies to the comparison as well. The attributes which make one excel in a bureaucracy, for example, include loyalty, discipline and duty and exclude competency in solving problems. Conversely, the best conditions for problem-solving are completely alien to corporate norms of hierarchical power. It is essential to design for this juxtaposition, which is how Skunkworks came into the literature of management.

The influence of obedience is too strong to be ignored. For example, to please authority the creative act is denied even in the standard form of presentations required of an ordinary scientific paper. The order described is opposite to what was actually done. In reality, the overall concept is first posited and becomes the medium through which otherwise obscure facts, later to be collected in support of it, are first clearly seen. The account given in the paper is expected to give the impression that such facts pointed at the mother concept. Domain knowledge points nowhere.

Extensive experiments in social behavior have shown that the grip of obedience is an order of magnitude stronger than, for example, the instincts of aggression. While there is no physical gang switch on your anatomy that brings up Mr. Hyde in the place of Dr. Jekyll, the effect is just the same. It is a major alteration of the control logic system target in the individual. Internal controls are released to the larger systems of hierarchical control, placing the individual open to regulation by a person of higher status. Aggression is manifest only after the primary issue of obedience to authority is resolved. We all have personal experiences with individuals who were low-key in a subordinate position, turning into flaming tyrants when elevated to power. While an element of free choice is involved in the decision to flip the switch, which happens one individual at a time, there are known "releasers" to amplify the propensity to do so.

Social conditioning

Training about authority, the most basic rule of social life, begins in your infancy and continues right through your deathbed scene. We inherited a Sunday school teaching aid from the last century, an aolian harp in the shape of a bee, printed with twenty biblical bees (to be good). The first is "be obedient." Job situations are defined as ones in which you are to do actions prescribed by someone else. As you gain experience, you observe many instances where arrogance triggers a violent reaction from authority. You see where deference is the only comfortable posture to the higher-ranked authorities you don't even know. We routinely respond as acquiescent lackeys to insignia, uniform and title. Compliance on an impersonal basis is rewarded by bureaucracy. Disobedience is punished. When we are rewarded for total obedience with a "promotion," we buy into (internalize) the hierarchical form. We are not about to change a social system which saw fit to improve our rank.

When we set our controls to do what the man in charge says, the focus is inward all the way. We become an uncritical instrument for fulfilling the value system of another - a robot. The steps of coercion to get us to flip our switch from human to automaton are simple and well known. Begin by establishing what is generally perceived as a legitimate authority, such as a witch doctor. The power of an authority figure stems from his accepted position in a social structure, not from any particular personal characteristics. Then, find some purpose to the affair - an idealogy which is generally perceived as legitimate. While the commands given must be consistent with the role of the authority, orders go directly to compliance. Obedience must be self imposed. The person must see his behavior as serving a desirable end. That's all there is to it.

Once hooked, the former thinker sees the authority figure larger than the individual he is. The influence of the authority is to control the manner in which the robot interprets his world. That done, the robot will control himself. Robots accept definitions of action provided by legitimate authority (the emperor's new clothes are beautiful indeed). Define the meaning and the robots will perform the action. The robot feels responsibility only to the authority directing him and not for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Power words like loyalty, duty and discipline have nothing to do with the moral fiber of the individual but to the adequacy with which a subordinate fulfills his socially defined role. The archetypical corporation employee, who we call Corpoman, has been trained during this century to a state of perfect dependability. If you use obedience to authority as the behavior control target and examine the literature of management, you can find the handiwork of this prime directive everywhere. The corpoman rewards for loyalty are described by Barry Glassner in Career Crash(1994), Simon and Schuster.

References

Surveys, like the recent one on Corpoman "excuses," make good examples. The top ten are listed in Let's Get Results, Not Excuses by Bleech and Mutchier.

You can see for yourself that the survey finds the effects of obedience to authority (directions from rules and the boss) and the associated exclusive focus on internal values. The authors go on to say "When the system is set up in such a way that failure is inevitable, excuse-making is encouraged by that company." Of course, none of the proposed remedies deals with the cause. The new book should sell well.

The Conway Quality News (V5 No.1 1995) calls the ubiquitous pattern of the as-received corporate state the Natural Condition.... "The natural condition is filled with complexities, errors and wastes. An in-depth study of any work of people will quickly reveal these problems. We also find that the waste is chronic." The condition is clearly under control and the universal constant maintained by the control system is obedience to authority. Conway finds the obedient "are never trained and educated to use the organization's financial and operating data and information. They do not understand the P&L, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. They do not understand inventory and receivables. They see and know they have troubles in their work. Management is afraid that key information will leak and hurt them. They don't trust the people and believe that people will use the information against management rather than help the organization to improve." Comments like this are in the trade literature by the ton.

The long reign of authority and compliance is a testament to its supreme power. The literature of Establishment elements is clearly based on an assumption that the hierarchical form is the only possible social form. Individuals are always subsumed into one group or another representing yet another, larger group. Management or worker, you exert influence only through a hierarchy. The organizations which represent labor are indistinguishable from those formed by management. The form prevents solving problems and that fact is not discussable. The problems of building an enterprise which remains Darwinian can be reviewed in Searching for the Spirit of Enterprise by L. Farrell.

If management has the unmitigated gall to distrust their robots, which they trained, the robot has fallen for the parental relationship hook, line and sinker. Be obedient to the corporation, the social contract says, and your future is assured. Now that M&A carnage unwraps the illusions, the reality of corporate paternalism is in your face. This summer the U.S. Supreme Court ruled than any company can change or cancel health insurance benefits for retirees (Curtiss-Wright vs Schoonejongen). That's security for you. Have you tracked the huge personal fortunes being made by the CEOs in these M&A deals? That's the authority advantage for them.

The robot theme is not new. Sufi I. Shah wrote "Remember that the human being is so intensely standardized that an outside observer, noting his reactions to various stimuli, need not infer an individual controlling brain in each person. He would more likely to infer the existence of a separate outside brain and the people as mere manifesters of his will." When a robot is "caught" by society at large performing a heinous act under command of authority, he responds that he has simply done his duty. In asserting this defense, the robot is not concocting an alibi so much as he is reporting honestly on the psychological attitude induced by his submission to authority (e.g., the excuses survey). For a man to feel responsible for his deeds, he must believe he chose his actions solely from his own "self." Actions performed under command are guiltless to robots, however inhumane they may be. Robots look to authority to determine their worth. The evaluative mechanisms of personal conscience are wholly absent.

Collision

The role conflict between autonomy and blind obedience is inherent in man (as system). The control arrangement when man is serving as an element in a social system, assuming a guise, is quite different when man is the system. There is no middle ground. At any snapshot in time, the value system in control is either one or the other. In autonomy, there is personal responsibility for selecting action, which entails considerable and wide-ranging use of the brain over prolonged periods. Doing an ordered task, on the other hand, requires the cranium to be "off." There are many examples besides obedience to authority which show the strong general preference to minimize thinking effort. Once in the robotic state, it becomes increasingly difficult to get out. All the effort to do so must come from within. You certainly are never going to be criticized by the social system for doing your "duty" oblivious to circumstance. Besides, the media loves your shrinking attention span (more slots to sell). Overall, the deck is heavily stacked towards obedience and away from being responsible for your own actions. Blind loyalty soon locks in and exhibits all the attributes of an addiction.

Lionell K. Griffith generously offered a column he wrote, called The Source, on the corrosive influence of authority on creativity. He starts with a functioning creative person.

"Ah ha! That's it! I now know" An idea springs into awareness fully formed. It is experienced as actually accomplished. There is the conviction of correctness, of things as they should be, can be, will be. New ideas, solutions, inventions appear quietly -- explosively. They appear as if out of nothing.

Some individuals have floods of such experience. Others, once in awhile. Most experience only chaos, confusion and uncertainty. Why? What makes the difference?

Most respond to their first ah-ha experience as if it were outside of themselves. They fill their minds with irrelevant, random and disconnected notions - unanchored. Returning the favor, their mind's process delivers irrelevant, random and disconnected stuff. They have crippled their minds by a lifetime of evasion, denial, rejection of reality, and the pursuit of magic. Their creative experience degrades to chaos, confusion and uncertainty.

A few latch onto their first ah-ha experience as they would a new toy, rock, insect, leaf. It becomes a thing of interest, an object of study. They work to repeat the experience so it can serve their life. Slowly, their knowledge of things real expands. Their skill at repeating the experience improves. They fill their lives with search, discovery and accomplishment. Their mind respond with a flood of ah-ha experiences. Through this reinforcing process using the brain, they have made themselves creative.

The mind is partitioned into the conscious and the unconscious. The first ah-ha experience gives direct experiential evidence of the unconscious. The ability to be aware of experience gives direct evidence of the conscious. As a repository of the experiences, thoughts, processes, intents and expectations of the conscious, the unconscious processes accordingly. When conditions are right, it returns processing results to the conscious mind. It returns what it is given, GIGO, quality in - quality out. No magic. No Voice of God. No collective mind.

The operation of the mind is not completely automatic. An act of choice must initiate and sustain an increase of awareness. An act of choice must initiate and sustain the process of thinking. An act of choice must initiate and sustain a process that validates the content of that thinking. An act of choice must initiate and sustain the selection of the topic of thought. An act of choice must initiate and sustain the identification of the relevance of the topic of thought. An act of choice is SELF initiated and SELF sustained.

Any attempt to short circuit this process of self initiated and sustained thought will fail. Any attempt to substitute force for the self initiated and sustained act of choice will fail. Such attempts fail by breaking the creative process. It is broken by inserting isolated and unintegrated thoughts into the mind. The attempt to insert does not and cannot take into account the contents of that mind. It will not take into account the long, difficult and complex SELF directed process required to make that thought fully validated and integrated.

The unconscious is also "looking" at these forced thoughts. It cannot tell the difference between them and the self initiated, directed and integrated thoughts. The thought is "accepted" along with the sense of resignation and helplessness, outrage, or relief from associated responsibility. The contents of the unconscious becomes increasingly disintegrated. Ah-ha experiences become less frequent. Creativity becomes less effective. The mind produces less. Even if the forced thought is correct in content and context, the results are the same -- disintegration of the mind leading to degraded effectiveness and productivity. Without the free self-chosen and directed thought process, destruction of the mind occurs.

A life of obedience to authority, with the consequential abandonment of self responsibility gives rise to an impotent mind. It results in a life of evasion, denial, rejection of reality and the pursuit of magic. It is the dimming, damming and damning of creative, productive efforts. A life of reason, reality and logic gives rise to a creative mind and a flood of creative ah-ha experiences. A life of independent thought, self direction, and self directed activity gives rise to an effective mind. It results in mental clarity, certainty and a flood of productivity."

Controls for the herd

Corporations, of course, see any sign of autonomy as a threat to their stability and evidence of a failure of the system to transform the person to a dependable robotic state. Residues of selfhood carried into the job can lead to disobedience and usually do. One trick to confuse seeing the conflict so clearly is to increase the distance between cause and effect. Some commonly employed buffers include specialization, hierarchy and technology. When the CEO decides to cash in his power spot through M&A, for example, he widens the gulf between himself and the rest of his corporation by alignment with the stockholders. He takes an administrative, rather than a moral, outlook. He sells the immediate financial benefits of M&A to the stockholders at the same time he sells his staff down the river. The separation of cause from the wreckage keeps conscience from clouding the picture. The efficacy of this technique in M&A speaks for itself. The lesson is that the dehumanizing effect of buffers is more dangerous to humanity than the bomb. The abrogation of personal responsibility is the major psychological consequence of yielding to authority. It is not the authoritarian corporation which constitutes the danger, but authority itself.

Management is so efficient and sure-handed in the techniques of authority, it operates as if no mere individual would dare to commit an act of the imagination. Thereby disobedience becomes an act of psychological violence. It is not an act which comes easily. It implies more than refusal to obey a particular command, but a reformulation of the relationship between superior and subordinate. Sergeant Bilko handled the built-in dilemma in safety by manipulating Colonel Hall to issue the "right" orders. To break the obedience bond, you must pass through the stages of inner doubt, externalization of doubt, dissent, threat, and action of disobedience. Mutiny is so rare, the media marks the occasion. The act of disobedience requires a self-mobilization of inner resources and a translation into action. The psychic cost is considerable. It is painful to renege on a "promise" to play a role as a replaceable element in a social system in return for a wage. The price of disobedience is the gnawing sense that one has been faithless. If Archimedes had read Milgram's book, the Roman soldier challenge would have been just another day drawing in the sandbox.

The right of management to use corporate resources to reward and punish subordinates is the source of its influence. We have all witnessed the personality switches when that power changes hands during inaugural day. Since hierarchs usually establish formal rules that regulate rewards to small amounts, which it then cannot quickly change itself, management ends up in day-to-day practice controlling by punishment. The stable asymptote is that every problem the organization cannot ignore is seen in terms of a schedule of discipline for subordinates. For decades, Florida Light and Power Co. was the host of the best (St. Lucie) and the worst (Turkey Point) nuclear power plants as measured by the NRC every year. We happen to know the history of both installations. The impact of beancounter downsizing took its toll and St. Lucie's high standing with it. In effect, FP&L created another Turkey. With NRC spotlights on the "fallen" plant (more inspection, oversight and mandated actions), executive row, still making large staff cuts, assures the media that flogging will increase until the problems are fixed. The fact that the brains, knowledge and talent for excellence are long gone is never brought up.

The notion of punishment by management of the subordinates as the basic operating mechanism is so built-in, it is taken for granted. The assumption is that whatever the company needs, the workers can do. So that any problems in company performance are taken as due to the failure of management to beat what was needed out of their workers. This attitude is the theme of the 1996 super conference and expo for training - "Driving Your Organization to New Levels of Performance." Hear Colin Powell and John Naisbitt talk about their techniques.

Once you place obedience to authority in its proper Olympian place, you will grasp 99% of what happens in corporate life that has been eluding your understanding. You will be able to read the technical literature with new insight - seeing books on management, for example, as comedy. The 1995 course for Managing Multiple Projects covers the usual executive challenges in dealing with "tough" personalities (the competition for power) and ends up appropriately enough with a full section on handling stress "staying calm in the face of chaos." Not a hint that the practices being taught cause the stress will be found. You will be able to read The Corporate Survivors, by G. Harry Stein (1986) and see the temporary measures to autonomy taken by the "survivors" to avoid extinction.

The brochure for a Fred Pryor seminar (1995-96) on Self-Directed Work Teams carries on about the glories of teams at considerable length. The list includes innovation, empowerment, self-control, consensus, open and shared communication, cross-disciplinary skills, commitment, quality, and constant improvement. It says the seminar is expressly designed for managers and shows you "how it can revolutionize your organization." The folks up in Pryorville have confused earthlings with some of their alien accounts. You can save the price of admission.

A tribal horde cannot afford the luxury of holding its central myth or idealogy open to criticism, because such criticism would erode the cement of its social structure. The central myth, which contains any amount of errors, has to be dogmatized - immunized against criticism. With no alternative visible to the group members, criticism of the system is not possible. The injunction to obey covers everything. The tribal horde is collectivist, conformist and conservative. There is no room for independent action. Central authority imposes uniformity and ritualized subordination.

Playing along

Individual values of loyalty, discipline and duty derive from the technical needs of the hierarchy. You may consider them moral imperatives, but to the social system they are simply preconditions for stability. When the social system "feels" threatened, displays of loyalty are more necessary than in smoother times. The more an organization needs to change so it can address the problems which confront it, the more you must act the obedient drudge. In times of stress, the hierarchs will by nature impose conditions normal to a penal colony. Do not be fooled by a request for "truth." Deny any and all problems, while you proclaim confidence that the latest "adjustment" management came up with, given some time, is going to work. Scott Adams was "inspired" in his post at Pacific Bell's San Ramon, CA office to enter the cartoon business with "Dilbert." Obedient drudge by day and autonomous cartooneer by night, Adams continuously improved and got closer to the mark. The inevitable result of the conflict facing Pacific Bell's management in determining whether or not Mr. Adams was sufficiently obedient, was realized this summer when they fired his ass. You may have noted the step increase in "bite" of his strip since getting the boot.

The robotization of the workforce is so thorough, the workers even know when management is posturing with its orders and when it isn't , and management expects them to know. When John F. Welch, chairman of G.E., much ballyhooed as noted earlier as a management genius, developed his well-publicized speeches about giving employees freedom to innovate, he expected that no one under his authority would take him serious. As reported on the front page of the WSJ on April 14, 1995, out of zillions, only engineer John Lemire did. When Welch preached "boundaryless behavior opens up to ideas from anywhere. It ignores hierarchy and functional boundaries and cares about the value of an idea, rather than the title of its source," Lemire resonated out of his seat and into action. With reckless abandon, Lemire took his ideas everywhere on the G.E. organizational chart. In spite of many attempts by management to get Lemire to "understand," he persisted. When he finally realized the truth, he popped a sharp questionnaire on the G.E. Email system. One respondent properly called the inquiry "the act of an obvious malcontent and troublemaker." He was marched out of the plant by a security guard.

The sporadic efforts of presidential "blue ribbon" committees (e.g., the Packard Commission) to bring "business sense" to government operations always failed because the corporate way and the bureaucratic way are two versions of the same hierarchical system. Perot faces the same dilemma. If obedience to authority is in the operational value system, it masks out everything else. Status quo becomes sacred dogma. No executive was ever punished for failing to launch a project which would have taken the company into new territory. The poobah at Western Union who rejected Bell's telephone, for example, kept right on going in his job. When an executive loses markets once enjoyed by the firm, however, the punishment is usually swift and severe.

Authority is the mechanism by which management turns its possession of sanctions into control. When management orders call for a violation of personal values, language is modified to confuse the issue. Euphemisms take over verbal communications as a guard against moral implications of the order. Responsibility is tossed upwards as the damage proceeds. You do not find a crazo at the core of the dilemma but a functionary who has been given a job to do, striving to make an impression of competence in his work. What is revealed in all this is the ready capacity of man to abandon his humanity. You dare not count on human nature to rise to the occasions fostered by malevolent authority. Remain skeptical of the canons upon which power insists. Calling it "Protective Reaction" doesn't alter the mayhem.

High toolbox power radically reduces the asynchronies in relations to others and the stresses these asynchronies build up because few individuals are necessary to get the job done. Work autonomy makes it unnecessary to continuously rely on erratic channels of communication and the endless cultural steps of over-the-wall compilations. Highly simplified systems of Skunkworks organization do well. When spatial diversity and extreme division of labor are cut out, hierarchical central control becomes redundant. Social overhead plummets while productivity soars. To the human capital belongs creative talent, diligence and professional ethics working under the dome of honesty.

The effect of obedience to authority, oblivious to the basis (missing) for the orders issued, creates the front end mess. Starkermann has shown that even one level of hierarchy drastically limits what a level can know about what is going on at another. There is plenty of history, like McNarama and the Viet Nam decision-making process with "the best and the brightest," to show that obedience to authority dominates over objectivity at any level on the hierarchy. When knowledge deficits are ignored and orders cut anyway, the only possible survival route for the robot is to do what the boss says to do - and forget about what the boss preaches is to be achieved. The consequences are his, not yours (unless you get shot). It is the prescription for bankruptcy. This entire situation was correctly diagnosed by Mary Parker Follett by 1920. Her remedy called for "cross-functioning in which a horizontal rather than a vertical authority is operational." No doubt man was civilized against his will.

Sample

Donald Ruth contributed the following nine rules hierarchs use for killing ideas. The manager who doesn't want to encourage new ideas from employees doesn't have to.There are tried and true ways of discouraging people who think they have something worthwhile to contribute. The purpose is to suppress autonomy.

General Remarks

For the basic experimental measurement of subordination, read Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram (1974). His monumental work has fully explained the primary social system drivers. For an independent check on Milgram's conclusions, read Control in a Bureaucracy by Andrew Dunsire (1976). You can put this knowledge directly to use. Just like Starkermann's work, it is incapable of error.

The power of understanding social behavior is simply to match the kind of work to be done by the group to the presence or absence of the obedience to authority factor. Assembly line, rule-based type (nobrainer) work can be productive and stable in the superior/subordinate pryamid form. If there are problems to be solved, stable productivity requires that neither the obedience factor nor the hierarchy can be present. For the totally individual act of solving problems, the individual must be operating in reference to his own value system. He must be responsible for the consequences of his own actions (autonomy). Any mismatch is either unstable or unproductive. There are no other possible states because there is no such thing as a value system mixture.

The research done on individuals of high mental health by Abraham Maslow (Brandeis) and the hierarchy of emotional needs he formulated (culminating in self-actualization), is conspicuous by the lack of obedience to authority. The path to self actualization is a path of risk-taking, ingenuity, self reliance, autonomy and taking responsibility for consequences. Not one shred of hierarchical influence is cited as contributing to good health. The evidence contrarywise is overwhelming. The annual medical treatment bill for hierarchy-caused mental stress has estimated in the hundreds of billion$. Skunkworks are always happy places.

Since we have attached the right magnitude to the star of obedience to authority, as the brightest object in the social heavens, case examples have transformed into comedy. The blind spot of society about the destructive power of misplaced obedience is truly amazing and in the grand process some very proper people undress themselves in public (with no help from Gitlin). A sweeping case in point is The Pursuit of Innovation, by George Freedman. This book, published by AMACON (American Management Association), is praised by the litany of Establishment elements including the Harvard Business School, major US corporations, and others. The author ran the New Products Center for Raytheon. The book is about R&D in large companies and shows how to fight for budget, dictate the work, and control the workers. The policies described would get nods of approval from wardens.

The assumptions of innovation in corpoland are working with specializations, divisions of labor, and various jurisdictions arranged by chance. The form is hierarchical, of course, with the expressed goal of innovative products - defined as those wanted by executive management. Ignorant of the inherent process of creation and the built-in contention between autonomy and obedience, an array of controls is provided to "force" the trip from assignment to success to proceed in a smooth, linear flow. Convinced of the infallibility of his forcing functions, the author "left Raytheon and started my own business (with the help of a venture capital firm). I discovered that being the chief executive meant that for the first time in my life I could find no one to blame but myself. . . . the business failed, the dream turned to nightmare, and I went back to work for Raytheon (all was forgiven)." Comedy in pure form.

Subordinate compliance is a pillar of democratic government, business, and all social process in which the bureaucratic form is used. Subordinate non-compliance would shake academic organizational theory, cut the roots of management practice, and make armies impossible. The Skunkworks form is seen clearly as alien to bureaucratic stability, which is why a derogatory connotation like skunk is used to describe it. A "bad" name is the only way the existence of the alien form can be acknowledged by Corpoman. The label Skunkworks has several stories about its origin, most of them made up. The real source is from Al Capp's comic strip "Lil Abner." The Skunkworks was the place where the lowest form of humanity in Dogpatch could find employment. To be low man at the Skunkworks was to be at social bottom. The connotation, by Kelly, was and is deliberate. In order to avoid social controls from the hierarchs, problem solvers have to be painted as undesirables - and kept distinct from the herd. Corpoman sees problem solving as a threat to his status quo (it is) when in fact Darwinian adaptation is the only way he can retain a relative static position in times of change.

Solving a problem is an act certain to change things. The Establishment has sanctioned a vocabulary for individuals of potential threat to the status quo. Folks associated with the autonomy that problem-solving requires (innovators, inventors) are variously called mavericks, loose cannons, misfits, malcontents, and weirdos. They are troublemakers, not regulars. They break rules, not enforce them. They cannot be trusted. They are not us. They are strangers.

The idea that a bureaucracy is there to implement the decisions of the CEO, to carry out his policies and execute his instructions, is an abstract notion that is not manifest in the structure or processes of the bureaucracy. It is an illusion shaped to suit the eye of the beholder. Behold the endangered-species fate of the well-paid company man in a hierarchy where riches are only dispensed to an increasingly powerful corporate aristocracy.

Getting a wish fulfilled, an intention executed, a plan activated or an order completed depends upon aggregated fractional outputs of a number of people in a particular sequence so as to 'engineer' a desired final output. Institutional intervention increases the dysfunctions it mobilized to alleviate, providing choice examples of unintended consequences. And then the coverups ...

While compliance may not be compulsory in some absolute sense, it is a condition of the relationship. Likewise, the wielding of sanctions comes to depend upon the superior's judgement of whether or not individual retaliation or collective action will ensue and if the price is acceptable. As long as coercive authority is available, there can be no conflict of goals and coordination is merely a matter of telling people what to do. How does a coordinator know what to tell people to do - or even what is expected of them?

If an executive is essentially autonomous, the custodian of specialized knowledge, entitled to be consulted and to be listened to, entitled even to the right of decision within his sphere of comprehension and so on, what is left of his subordinate status? How can he be both autonomous and subject to authority? If a worker with a specialty is to be considered more expert than his superior in that function, regarded as knowing what to do spontaneously without being told, if his work operations are merely triggered by a command signal and not conveyed or specified by it, what becomes of the notion of a superior's instructions? How is it possible to be spontaneous in functioning and subject to prescription? A superior of senior rank is incompetent to supervise what is being done by those in his own command three grades of rank below himself. What is left of his responsibility for that work? When transmission and comprehension are discontinuous, but accountability is not, how can the superior ensure compliance?

This affliction causes insanity in organization hierarchies arranged for management as well as for labor. When William Hesketh Lever decided that an educated worker was in the best interest of his soap company, he proposed to the union in 1895 that the standard work day be reduced to six hours and he would set up an evening staff college of "self-improvement" classes for labor. The union hierarchs opposed the idea of "compulsory education" and that was that.

Fred Jansen independently arrived at the same platform by observing the difference between how people deal with reality in the "physical" world and how they handle affairs of tribal mythology. He noted the contrast between success in learning technical skills and the misery associated with organizational process - where fact finding is suspended and critical faculties silenced. He then identified the early training we get to discount our senses in favor of playing the socially-safe roles (dissembling). He has written extensively on the subject and how it has been received by the our institutions in charge of such matters.

[ Home ] [ Up ]

Send mail to davidc@bilbo.mv.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright © 1998 FES Ltd.
Last modified: September 01, 2002