[FRIAM] organizations

[Marcus Daniels]

Roger writes:

“I don't get it, is it detailed technical planning or dog fighting?  Or some kind of mixed martial art?”

Imagine you work in team made of up of unmotivated, uninterested or untalented individuals.  Assume it is impossible to fire or move them out of the way.   They mainly want predictability they can get out of the office by 5:00pm every day; they want a process for everything so that they can measure-up and continue to get steady raises.   The last thing these lemmings want are individuals running ahead with proposals they would have to work to understand.   That could have bad consequences like having their expertise or productivity questioned and them moving lower in the curve.

One that happens in this situation is that people don’t want to have deep technical conversations.   They want shallow, easily-digestible guidance and at a pace that isn’t going to cause them to miss their daughter’s soccer practice or forget to water their garden or whatever it is they do care about.   They want it put on their `agile feed’ so they can turn their crank and get their points for the day.   Other people may mainly care about their `emotional health’ and this will involve similar considerations about never feel condescended to, even if they aren’t be condescended to, but are simply experiencing ignorance.

The desire to enforce norms on group behavior invariably involves isolating the top performers.   Much of the prattle in that 18F markup file is about how to do that without looking like a total moron.   It’s the same kind of note-comparing social contagion where one Trump voter convinces the other that it is okay to engage in a bizarre act of national sabotage.

The question is, who makes the rules and for what purpose?   The lemmings will want the line between normal and abnormal behavior in one area, and the frontier-pushers will want it in another.  An organization that gives the lemmings what they want will have more stability, but they probably won’t be innovators.  They may even fail to be competitive.

Frontier-pushers aren’t going to like Trump-like behavior, because Trump-like behavior is stupid and leads to more dittohead lemmings.   So it is also in their interest to find a faster or bigger dog to take down uncivil (in their definition) behavior too.   Depending on their culture they may do this quietly or by making an example out of that individual in front of everyone.

Marcus

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