Archive for the ‘Organizational Performance’ Category
Trust in Organizations
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Losing our Humanity
The pictures coming out of Bucha are horrendous. They speak of unspeakable acts. And it is likely that similar horrors or worse will become evident in other Ukrainian towns and cities as the Russians are pushed back. What is the purpose of such atrocities and what risks are we running by not doing everything we can to stop these atrocities from continuing?
What is happening is of course nothing new. It is not new to the Russians, as it mirrors their actions in Syria and Chechnya. But it is also not a new military tactic in a multitude of other countries and ancient kingdoms. In addition to the Holocaust, relatively recent history includes genocides in Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Cambodia. Huge numbers also died in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Stalin’s purges. The American Indians were mercilessly decimated. There is literally an endless supply of atrocities that can be cited. And after each one we say that it won’t happen again, we say that we have grown as a civilization, as a species and we have become better than our history, until it does happen again and much of the world’s population looks away, or makes excuses about how their hands are tied. As we look away or make excuses each of us loses a little piece of our humanity. It is eating me alive.
In Congo, approximately 10 million people were killed when Leopold II, the king of Belgium whose reign began in 1865, sought to plunder the Congo’s resources and enslave the population. And going back further between 1206 CE and 1227 CE, it is estimated that Genghis Khan killed about 40 million people, 10% of the world’s population at the time. Attila the Hun about 800 years earlier killed similar numbers. The atrocities committed then were as brutal as any that can be caused by today’s modern weapons. And more recently in Congo rebels kidnap children from their villages and force them to perform unspeakable acts as a way of increasing loyalty to the rebels, for the acts are so unspeakable that these children feel that they can’t return to “normal” society. They feel that the only place they will be accepted is among the rebels. Similar psychology plays out wherever these acts are carried out.
Many times these atrocities are committed by countries or organizations that have become dominated by strongmen, autocrats, dictators, or kleptocrats who want to line their own pockets with stolen wealth. And by vilifying either groups external to the country (such as Ukrainians) or internal groups and dehumanizing them the attempt is made to blame these “others” for the failures of the leaders and to gather support for atrocities committed in purging them. Not everyone falls for this psychological warfare, hence the brain drain currently underway in Russia, but enough do that we repeat the cycle over and over.
It may be that Russia, knowing that they were going to commit atrocities in Ukraine, even before they invaded, immediately threatened nuclear annihilation for any country that dared to stand in their way. They act like a bully to the rest of the world. And the rest of the world, while helping Ukraine with some weaponry, and accepting refugees, has not yet dared to punch the Russian bully in the nose, making them stop. Our feud is not with the Russian people themselves, for we have to let the majority of the people know that they, under the right circumstances, can find a place back into society. Otherwise, they will simply increase their beliefs in and commitment to the Russian propaganda, for they driven by cognitive dissonance, will feel that they have no choice. Don’t get me wrong, those who committed these atrocities need to face justice, and the WW2 excuse of “I was just following orders” can’t be allowed.
I have no interest in a nuclear exchange with Russia. But when intolerable actions occur, we must take a forceful stand if we are ever going to, in fact, grow as a civilization and make the next autocrat who rises realize that their behavior won’t be tolerated. In this way we may be able to head off the next atrocity before it happens. I am old enough to remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. I am old enough to remember how in school, we practiced rapidly moving to the basement and going behind piles of gravel, as though those stones were somehow going to protect us from a nuclear blast. While I have no interest in a nuclear exchange, I also have no interest in standing by and letting others be massacred.
There have been a number of recent leaders who have risen, around the planet, who can best be described as psychopaths. Among their traits are glibness/superficial charm, grandiose sense of self-worth, need for stimulation/proneness to boredom, pathological lying, conning/manipulative, lack of remorse or guilt, shallow affect (i.e., reduced emotional responses), and callous/lack of empathy. A detailed checklist that can be scored can be found at https://psychology-tools.com/test/pcl-22. Pick a leader who you think may be a psychopath and rate their behaviors on the checklist. See how they score.
Unlike many mental illnesses, psychopaths will cause harm not just to themselves, but to others. When they get to positions of power it can be very dangerous. We are now in a dangerous moment. The vast majority of Russians are not psychopaths, even if they have a leader who is. The vast majority of Russians, including senior military commanders want as little to do with a nuclear war as any of us. We have to take stronger actions than we have to date to protect those who need help in protecting themselves, if we are to keep our humanity. It is time to punch the bully in the nose.
Murder for the Common Good
From the rise and fall of civilizations to the rise and fall of corporations, humans have long studied what makes us great and from the heights of greatness what makes us stumble and fall, it turns out it may have all started with a murder.
What was it that started humans down a path of forming civilizations? What moved us from small bands of hunter gatherers roving the savannah, looking for our next meal to putting down roots, establishing settlements, with the division of labor, which turned into cities and grew into nations? What caused us to start cooperating collectively which enabled the rise of these cities and nations? And when civilizations decline are there any common explanations? Do parallels to these events, the rise of fall of civilizations carry over to the modern day? What if any are the parallels to the rise of fall of corporations and other economic enterprises? Though the answers to these questions are multifaceted and complex, and no one cause can be clearly pointed to, the way humans treated each other from our very beginnings had a role to play. And while that treatment was certainly not uniform, how we treated each other, showing respect and enabling dignity had an impact.
Let me tell you an apocryphal story. Travel back with me to a time period deep into the mist of humanity’s distant past. A small group of hunters were gathered together, somewhat apart from the others of the larger group. They were nervous, for they were plotting, their eyes darted back and forth as they ascertained that they were not yet spotted. They were plotting something that none of them had ever considered before. Over time one of the younger members of the larger group had matured, growing big and strong, but something was amiss with this young hunter gatherer. Increasingly he had shown through his actions a tendency to most severely bully others, the men, women and even the children, and it got worse and worse until his actions and demands could only be described as terrorizing the larger group. Because he was a big and strong person, he sought to lead the group, and even though he was many times wrong about important things that were critical to the survival of the group, he demanded that his path be the one that the group always followed. Anyone else who tried to get the group to do things differently was bullied by this person or his immediate kin, sometimes to the point where they were at risk for an injury. And any injury during this time period had the potential of being a death sentence.
The other hunter gatherers at first tolerated the bad and often bizarre behavior for each knew that their survival, and the survival of their offspring, depended on staying with the group for if anyone were forced out on their own death was sure to follow. This insistent leader had some supporters, mostly his close kin, so he did not stand completely alone. And yet the other hunter gatherers of the group felt threatened day-to-day until they decided as a group to take collective action, for none of them was strong enough on their own. The insistent leader lay in the best spot by the edge of the fire sleeping deeply, for he had eaten his full from that day’s hunt, putting his own needs first, above all the others. And even though there was some hesitation on their part, the hunter gatherers, all ten of them felt that they had no choice, they grabbed their spears and together as a group thrust them into the sleeping leader, wounding and then killing him. No one knew which one of them had delivered the killing blow. They retrieved their spears and formed a circle protecting each other for they were unsure if the man’s kin would set upon them. But no counter-attack occurred for the kin also knew that their relative was troubled and further they knew they could not survive without the support of the larger tribe. As a group the tribe breathed a sigh of relief.
Today we look back in horror at how those with mental illness were treated by society not all that long ago. In past times, mental health problems meant incarceration in state hospitals which provided little treatment and were like prisons. In severe cases brutal lobotomies with icepicks shoved under the eye and into the brain were not uncommon. State hospitals were often run by anatomists – people looking for the physical causes of mental illness. When a patient in a state hospital died their body became the property of the state and was dissected, as a specimen, with the anatomist researcher looking for physical causes of their symptoms.
With the advent of psychotropic drug treatments many state hospitals were emptied out and today most people with serious mental health issues are treated in community hospitals and half-way houses with psychotherapy and medication. Unfortunately, today our prisons contain many people with mental health problems who receive little or no treatment. The 3 largest providers of mental health services in the USA are all prisons in three of the largest metropolitan areas, New York (Rikers Island), Chicago’s Cook Country Jail and the Los Angeles Jail. While the state hospitals have been largely emptied, there are not sufficient community services for those with mental issues in the community. As a result, many remain homeless, impoverished and have little opportunities to receive the treatment they need. While many but not all of the most serious psychoses are amenable to treatment, and with proper treatment people afflicted can often lead productive and satisfying lives, our track record in terms of treating those with mental illnesses is not great, but in our distant past the options were even more limited.
As told in the story above, before the rise of city-states, nation-states or the collection of taxes enabling public works for the common good, the ability of a society to deal with severe mental illness was very limited. With early humans surviving as hunter gatherers or doing limited farming, there were of course no psychologists, no medical doctors, no medical institutions into which a mentally ill person could be committed. Those who committed acts that the majority viewed as out-of-bounds could not be remanded to a court system, sent to prison, or attempts made at rehabilitation. While the notion of not murdering others has been around for a very long time, well before the rise of organized religions and nation-states, it is clear that in certain circumstances murder was utilized by the group to deal with problematic individuals. If we go back far enough, if a tribal group was faced with a dangerous deviant, and among the worst would be a psychopath, a person willing to bully others, a seeker of risk, with no empathy or morality and hence no limit on their negative behaviors, among the few actions that could be taken was capital punishment. And that is what appeared to have happened when you look at the fossil records and cave paintings is that more social tribal members, those willing to work cooperatively with others, would as a group attack the social deviant and eliminate that person. It was murder for the common good. Psychopathy is still largely a non-treatable condition.
Even today hunter gatherer tribes still use capital punishment as a method to eliminate bullies and Christopher Boehm, based on his research states that humans have been picking out certain types of deviants, such as psychopaths and eliminating them over thousands of generations. Over time this elimination of bullies, psychopaths and others who are socially unacceptable members of the tribe from the gene pool is hypothesized to have created a kind of self-domestication among humans with traits such as cooperative social interactions coming to the fore and leading to more breeding success and hence more prevalence among humans.
He writes, “Near the Altamira district of Spain we have several unique paintings with groups obviously killing individuals. The best one shows, to the right, ten men evocatively holding their bows over their heads; the impression is one of assertive jubilation. A moderate distance behind and to the left lies a man on the ground with exactly ten arrows sticking out of his body or on the ground. A few other paintings are similar, but with fewer executioners and fewer matching arrows.” (Boehm, Christopher. Prehistoric Capital Punishment and Parallel Evolutionary Effects, Minding Nature 10.2 – pp23-29.)
This tendency to select for socially acceptable characteristics among your tribe members may go back much further than even the cave art would suggest. A 430,000-year-old skull of a likely 20-year old male, that predates homo sapiens and even Neanderthals has been found in a cave in northern Spain, which when reconstructed had two holes on the left side of the forehead. The injury when examined forensically suggests that the injury was intentional, made by blows of some kind of weapon, occurred prior to death and was a mortal injury. (Quam, Rolf. PLOS One, 2015) This suggests that murder, carried out for whatever purpose, is not a new characteristic found only in modern humans but goes back into the deepest evolutionary roots from which we sprang.
Self-Domestication
Self-domestication among humans is the notion that by self-selecting for desirable qualities that over time we shaped our own evolution. This evolution not only changed our behaviors it changed our physiology.
In 1959 Dmitry K. Belyaev, began a long-term attempt to domesticate wild foxes (Vulpes vulpes). Each generation of foxes born was selected for tameness, in terms of how they interacted with human. After almost 50 generations, a relatively short time span in evolutionary terms, just about all of the foxes born now seem enjoy human contact. The foxes have taken on some dog-like characteristics both behaviorally and physically. The experiment showed just show powerful selection for certain characteristics and how quickly changes of behavior in a population driven by domestication can occur.
Jeffrey Saltzman's Blog 