The reflective monkey

This is not a textbook. That’s the point, really. There are enough scholarly works about organizations to keep one busy for life. The purpose of this book is to bring into the light a fundamental yet largely invisible aspect of daily life: the defining, controlling, and omnipresent influence of the organization. In the Western view of the world, it is the individual that is respected, valued, and occasionally worshiped. There is a belief–especially in the United States–that rugged individualism and self-determination shape the world around us.

That belief is dead wrong.

Organizations define our world and our individual lives. From the global corporation to the church on the corner, our visible apparent independence and free will are bounded and determined by the norms, values, culture, and patterns inherent to the nearly transparent organizations surrounding us. Whether it is our workplaces, community service organizations, charities, softball teams, families, or governments of which we are constituents, organizations set the rules and boundaries in our lives. They are everywhere.

A little skepticism is probably in order here; after all, these are pretty bold claims. Something controls your life and yet you’re not aware of it? One could be excused for writing these assertions off as the rantings of a lunatic or a conspiracy theorist.

Hold that thought for a moment. Think back to the last time you heard someone say “that’s not the way things are done around here” or “it just isn’t done”. These are the merest symptoms of the pervasiveness of organizational culture and rules, and they are all the more powerful for being enforced almost without thought by the members of the organization. A subtle pressure to belong by conforming is an easy indicator of the underlying organization and its culture, a concept we’ll return to in Part II.

There were a series of experiments performed several years ago that demonstrated this concept. Five monkeys were placed in a cage together with a series of steps in the center. A cluster of bananas hung from the ceiling above the steps. Naturally, the monkeys would climb the steps to reach the bananas; unnaturally, the researchers conducting the experiments would spray them with a high-powered water hose when they reached the top step. Gradually, the monkeys learned not to pursue the bananas.

Then the plot thickened. The researchers began pulling one monkey out of the group and replacing it with another. The new monkey would immediately head for the bananas, and the other four, knowing what would happen, would pull the monkey down to the ground. The new monkey quickly learned not to pursue the bananas. The researchers continued to replace monkeys one at a time with similar results. Eventually, a group of monkeys that had never seen a water hose would pull a new member down from the steps. The norms of the group had transcended its members.

Am I saying that we are all just monkeys, helpless before the organizations to which we belong? Not at all. What I do claim is that as more complex individuals, we create more complex organizations. The relative simplicity of individual habits is insufficient to explain the organizational complexity of which we are both creators and subjects.

The ubiquity of the organization need not be an oppressive force. Organizations can be analyzed and understood, and their behavior predicted. With a few simple rules of thumb, knowledge of a handful of patterns, and a slender set of analytical tools, anyone can better understand and forecast the organizations they encounter. These analyses and predictions are bound to be imperfect and sometimes messy, as is life. Yet, with very little effort, a person can better understand and influence the most profound dynamics at play in society today.

Who wouldn’t want that?