Seeing Below The Surface of Things

Part One of Seeing Below The Surface of Things: The Brokenness of Modern Organizations

Published August 2020

None of us see below the surface of things. We fool ourselves into believing that we understand what is going on, when we only see the shiny surface of things. As Paul Simon wrote in his great 1960s pop hit, The Boxer, “People believe what they want to believe, and disregard this rest.” If seeing is believing, then we only believe in the appearance of what we see, not the substance of it.

My former wife and I bought a house. At the time, it was almost a half century old. It sat on a beautiful piece of rural land in the middle of a suburban development. The house began as a vacation home. The owner before us was an architect who was more of a tinkerer, than a builder. He had done strange things to the house. We bought it because it was surrounded by woods, water, and land where our children could play.

What we didn’t know was that the house was falling apart in places that you could not see. The place looked great, but the concrete cinderblocks that were the original superstructure of the house were disintegrating. Not only that, but the blocks were leeching moisture up into the walls so that mold infected parts of the house. After I moved out, and our marriage ended, she tore the house down, and replaced it. It was then that she discovered that the house was close to collapsing on top of her.

The world of organizations is in a similar state. Looks great on the outside. Leaders exude confidence and authority. While on the inside, their control is disintegrating.

The structure of the modern organization is collapsing. It is crumbling from within. The structure is no longer adequate for the fast-paced world of change that we live in. In many respects, its persistence is an act of denying reality.

Professor Joseph Tainter describes collapse as “a rapid simplification of an overly complex system.” It happens because societies become good at solving problems. As a result, greater complexity occurs. What does this complexity look like?

For the past three months, I have been trying solve an error with a company where I have an investment. They needed specific documentation. Four times I sent the requested form by mail, by email and by fax. The document has yet to show up in my account. No one that I have talked to at any level has taken charge of my problem. The last time I talked to them, one of the agents told me that maybe I should just give up and not worry about it.

Complexity creates distance between a problem and its solution. We lose direct connection, immediacy, and the accountability of the system to its purpose. We increasingly feel powerless over the circumstances of our lives.

When the cost of problem solving exceeds the benefit, maintaining the status quo becomes harder and harder.  The solution for organizations is to simplify. However, as Tainter’s research reveals, no society in human history has ever voluntarily decided to simplify.

Over the course of my life time, I have watched as people have increasingly become more and more disillusioned with the institutions and organizations of society. We talk about it as a loss of trust. This is especially true of the large, complex, highly centralized global organizations. The pattern is that of increasing complexity through the growth of administrative capacity. The more this happens, the more disconnected these institutions become to the people they serve. They turn inward so that there is no longer any accountability to society, but only to their internal systems of control.

The global viral pandemic is a product of this growing complexity. As the global system of centralized institutions has grown over the past century, its relevance to people has diminished. The pandemic response, as I have written previously in All Crises Are Local, is a systems failure. Treating a global public health crisis in isolation from every other aspect of peoples’ and communities’ lives is a clear example of the failure of those institutions to adapt to the transitions in organizations taking place world-wide.

If we could look below the surface, we would see organizations fragmented and broken, unable to hold things together. We would see dis-connection between organizational leaders and their people. We would see a break down between authority and accountability. We would see a breakdown in the operations of large, centralized global institutions. If Tainter is correct, then a significant transition is taking place that is historic in significance.

Modern organizations are broken, not by intention, but by design. The layers of bureaucracy and the silos of management are a constant complaint of people. Every layer and silo is an obstacle to face in order to get things done. It creates isolation that concentrates power. Where power is concentrated, corruption grows. Where corruption occurs, problems increase, and complexity spreads as solutions are developed to avoid responsibility.  People lose a sense of who they are and where they fit into the social system of the business or society.

People cope by segmenting the various aspects of their jobs. The unwelcomed, uncomfortable parts they lock away in some corner of their mind so that they don’t have deal with them. As a result, workers’ experience a kind of alienation from the full experience of life.

In order to understand the changes taking place in the world we need to understand the transitions that organizations are going through. We need to look below the surface.

This is the purpose of this short book. I want to help you see what is taking place so that you may make wise and practical decisions for the future of your family, your businesses, and your community.

Part One

Understanding Culture

We can’t understand the transitions taking place in organizations or in society at large, without understanding what our individual relationship to the world is. We partially understand personal relationships, and our relationships to the company where we work. We need to better see what the underlying conditions that affect the functioning of organizations each day. Whether we are the CEO or a lowly clerk, we need to understand that these transition are disrupting every aspect of organizations, and the larger society.

We need to begin by understanding that our relation to the world is a relationship through the culture of the society that surrounds us like water to fish.

Think of culture as a set of beliefs or values that get organized as ways of living and working. In our homes, we have responsibilities for who does the laundry, fixes the meals, takes out the trash, pays the bills, and plans the family vacation. Over time, over many generations, a culture which defines the family grows up. We can talk about our families being a certain way.

For example, in my family, we’ve always valued our history. My father used to joke that as a family, we practiced “ancestry worship.” We all laughed because the culture of our family was one where we shared stories about past generations. This is our family culture.

Over the past several hundred years, an organizational culture has developed which defines the way the modern world works. If three hundred years ago, your family, like mine, were people who lived in small communities in the rural areas of the British colonies, you had little connection to the growing industrial culture of the modern world. Understanding this culture is important for understanding why organizations today are at a transition point.

The Consumer Culture Hegemony

French writer Jean Baudrillard, in one of his last pieces before his death, described the transitions in culture of society that are mirrored in the structures of organizations. It is a transition from domination to hegemony.

“Domination is characterized by the master/slave relation … a relationship of force and conflicts … There are the dominators and the dominated … Everything changes with the emancipation of the slave and the internalization of the master by the emancipated slave. Hegemony begins here … (and) brings domination to an end. We, emancipated workers, internalize the Global Order and its operational setup of which we are the hostages far more than the slaves. Consensus, be it voluntary or involuntary, replaces traditional servitude … “HEGEMON” means the one who commands, orders, leads and governs … Contrary to domination, a hegemony of world power is no longer a dual, personal, or real form of domination, but the domination of networks, of calculation and integral exchange.”

In order to make sense of the English translation of Baudrillard’s complex French, let’s try to understand the difference between these two ideas of domination and hegemon.

Until the recently, most people were subjects of a governing power. Power was not subject to the people but to a king, a queen or an emperor. The popular series Game of Thrones is a good illustration of the master/slave culture. Then later the factory owner or corporation became our masters. People were cogs in a machine. There was little freedom, little personal autonomy, only accountability to the authority of the institution. As the old mountain folk song rhymed it, “I owed my soul to the company store.” There are very few instances in human history where this was not true. During the past century, we entered into a transition where prosperity spread beyond ownership of factories to people owning their own small businesses and entrepreneurial enterprises.  In this transition, most of us witnessed the growth of the middle class, the driving social force of the post-World War II world.

As technology advanced, economies grew, the social dimensions of working for a company changed. No more master/slave relation. We became consumers, no longer workers. We became masters of our lives. We worked to consume. For to consume is to define who we see ourselves to be. In our consuming, we joined a culture of consumers. We participated as brand ambassadors for the products and ideas that define us.  This is the hegemon we joined.

We cannot see that we have been captured by this hegemon. We are not personally dominated by it. Instead, all the places where we interact with people, places and institutions are controlled by this culture. We are held hostage to it.  We cannot see that it is a mono-culture. It is a culture of consumption, period, end of sentence. We join it because there is nothing else to join. It is the entire culture of the world. As hostages to it, it is very difficult to say that we will not participate. We join by the simplest acts of having to make choices at the market between brands, types of products (organic or non-organic), and how we pay for our selections, cash, check or debit card.

This global mono-culture is what we see on our screens. It is also how it sees us through our screens. It is a culture of identification that is constantly appealing to us. Not just to buy, but to believe in the messages that are presented to us through our screens.

Organizational titles are vital in the marketing of products, services, and the narratives of belief. A title defines our role in the hegemonic culture. With that title, we are identified in our relation to the larger culture of organizations.

This identification, however, marginalizes us. This marginalization is reflected in our most fundamental human need, which is to compare ourselves to others. Beyond our titles, our identity is formed by our comparison to other people. A consumer culture is constructed to create a constant lack satisfaction in life. The result is that we live in conflict with ourselves and the rest of the world.

Historian Rene Girard refers to this human phenomenon as mimetic desire. It is the desire to imitate, to be like others. The closer we are to someone the greater conflict we have. This desire brings us to a point of violence as we must destroy those with whom we compete to be alike. Girard sees the implication this way.

“Competition is the desire to imitate the other in order to obtain the same thing he or she has, by violence if need be. … America indeed embodies these mimetic relations of rivalry. The ideology of free enterprise makes of them an absolute solution. Effective, but explosive. These competitive relations are excellent if you come out of it as the winner, but if the winners are always the same then, one day or the other, the losers overturn the game table. This mimetic rivalry, when it turns out badly, always results eventually in some form of violence.”

The power of this culture is a chief obstacle to living a fulfilled, satisfied life. If we wish to be persons of impact then must address this mimetic desire. Without awareness, our desire to imitate those we wish to be a like takes away our unique voice and perspective. The hegemonic culture is a mimetic culture. It tells us how we are to fit into society. As a result, we become victims of our own desire to be like everyone else.

The transition that Jean Baudrillard identifies is from a world dominated by economics to social influence. The worst thing to happen to a person today is to be socially ostracized online, to be cancelled. The power of the hegemon is the power of inclusion and exclusion in a global social consumer culture. We feel it in the fear of alienation, of being alone in a world of people. The key word here is fear. For it is not just a fear of rejection, but a fear of the loss of identity. As long as our identity is external to us, this fear will dominate our lives.

If we were able to look under the surface, we would see is the actor without make-up, the Wizard behind the curtain, the house collapsing, and institutions operationally lost in the complexity of a rapidly changing world. If we could see below the surface of our lives, what would we see?

The Transition in Identity

A real shift in self-understanding came after the Second World War. The culture shifted from a focus on industrial production to the consumer. My father returned from military service in the war and became the first in his family to earn a college diploma thanks to the G.I. Bill. It meant that he, unlike his father, who was a clerk in a factory, became a corporate executive. Our family transitioned from a being office workers into being middle class consumers.

Over time, as the middle class grew, we began to define ourselves by what we could purchase. Brand names became important to us. We took pride in the labels that we wore. They defined us as people in relation to our neighbors and co-workers.

As a child, the kind of car you drove said something about you. There were Ford people, Chevy people, and Plymouth/Dodge people. Where I grew up in the South, stock car racing grew to be so popular because we followed the drivers who drove our cars. The transition was one of self-perception. We aligned ourselves with products that we felt represented the values of who we were, even if that connection was nothing more than clever marketing.  As a result, we no longer worked to produce. We worked to consume, to buy, and to move up in status as we bought.

Consumer products became status objects. The status was in the name, not in the quality of the product. I remember when luxury brands began to show up in outlet malls to sell lower priced, knock-off versions of their more expensive clothing or consumer products. We could not see what this change in society was doing to us. Products represented social advancement. We had become subjects of the brands that became the source of our identity.

In our consuming, we join a culture of consumers. We participated as brand ambassadors for the products and ideas that define us.  This is the hegemon we joined.

We cannot see that we have been captured as hostages to this consumer hegemon. We have freely assimilated the brand idea into our own self-understanding. With the emergence of social media, we now developed our own brand identity.

The Next Transition In Consumer Culture

However, nothing remains as it is. We are always in transition. This is also true of modern consumer culture.

There came a moment when commercial products began to lose their appeal.

Products and labels became boring. We owned more stuff that we could store at home. A shift in culture happened.  We became consumers of social interaction. The emergence of the internet and social media platforms led to us becoming a culture of influencers. We follow people who we want to be like. We become consumers of opinions. We talk about their Instagram pictures, their YouTube videos, podcasts, and Facebook posts. We buy products now, not because of the label, but because of the social influencer who is associated with the product.

This is the hegemon that Jean Baudrillard describes. This is the mono-culture of social media. Now, we decide who we are to be, not because our family history or some community group, but because of what we see on our screens. We have replaced relationships with connections.

A Simulated Consumer World

In another place, Jean Baudrillard writes about this as world of simulation. Instead of purchasing a real product, like an expresso machine or electric bicycle, we buy into a simulated world of ideas. Today, we consume social expectations. Through social media, we are taught who to believe, who to vote for, and, even more importantly who to hate and resist. We are purchasing a simulated reality. How do we know this? Because there is no direct relationship or outcome from our participation. It all remains on the screen and in the cloud as data which defines who we are. These simulations are designed to attract us the same way a sports shirt or the latest craft beer does. They are representations of persons that we have been led to believe are us. Baudrillard describes this simulated world this way.

To dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign (fake) to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms" (Littré). Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."

Baudrillard is not a simple writer. To make sense of this, he is making a distinction about the difference between pretending and simulating. We dress up at Halloween to pretend to be a superhero or some character that we know we are not. To simulate on the other hand is to believe we are something that we are not. The culture of the hegemon is a simulation. It is not a place where we are our real selves. We portray ourselves in a manner that simulates something attractive to us. We are actors where the character we play becomes more real and attractive than we believe ourselves to actually be.

This global mono-culture is the culture of our screens. It is a culture of simulated identification. It is a celebrity influenced culture. Their opinions and endorsements matter because … because … they are celebrities. And they are celebrities because … they are marketed that way. Their online and onstage persona may or may not be real. We don’t know. I’m not sure we really care. WE like the image. This celebrity consumer culture follows the insight that Umberto Eco, the Italian novelist gave that, "... the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake."

This world of simulated reality is primarily acquired through images on our screens. French writer, Guy Debord, writing before the advent of social media, described this culture of simulation as a spectacle. He wrote,

“…all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. … The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

This is why we may feel at the same time a strong draw to participate in culture of social media and feel a strange alienation in the connection to all those people and topics.

Welcome to The Borg

A constant process of change has been with us for a long time. We have moved from being industrial producers to purchasers of consumer products. The next stage emerged as social media turned us into brand ambassadors for social media memes which may or may not have any direct connection to our lives.

It is why organizational titles matter so much in the marketing of products and services. A title defines our role in the hegemonic culture. It subjects us to the role we play (simulate) at home and at work. It marginalizes our own distinct voice. We become agents of a hegemonic culture where we are held hostage.

Where we are today in our social media saturated world reminds me of Alice Krige’s portrayal of the Borg Queen in Star Trek: First Contact. This is a film, produced in the mid-1990’s, that illustrates the hegemon that Baudrillard describes. In the film, the purpose of the Borg is to assimilate every being into a collective consciousness. It requires the elimination of individuality. As the dominate personality of the hive, Krige, the Queen, converses with Data, the cyborg from the Enterprise. The end game is to assimilate Data into the Borg. She tells him, “I am the beginning, the end, the one who is many… I bring order to chaos. I am the Borg. I am the collective.” As she speaks to Data about the importance of evolving, he says, “The Borg does not evolve. It conquers.” She responds, “I am assimilating other beings into our collective. We are bringing them closer to perfection.” She would be the perfect politician for our world today.

Our hegemonic consumer culture is very similar. In the chaos and complexity of the world we live in, we long for safety and order. Social media platforms serve to assimilate us into a global collective mind. Free speech is not safe speech, and safe speech is not free speech. The hegemonic nature of social media provides a simulated order of safety. It only requires our assimilation into its simulated reality.

But it is not safe. It requires each of us to constantly self-monitor, self-sensor, and self-correct what we think and wish to say. It is not safe because the violence is with us. We are in conflict between our imitated selves and our real selves. Both want the same thing, an authentic life, but both cannot have it at the same time. As a result, we have to make decisions about whether to accept the simulation or to reject it for a more alienated, yet authentic life, away from the screen. We are not allowed to be honest about this conflict. The pull of social media is to conform, to assimilate, and to become who the culture demands that we become. We must do violence to ourselves in order to assimilate to the hegemon of the consumer society of social media. The choice is to assimilate or be cancelled.

Organizations in Transition

This is how we have lost the capacity to see below the surface of things.

If we could, we would see that those who lead global organizations are subjects of their own hegemonic reality. They are held hostage to a belief that their world stands apart from time. Yet, time has caught up with them as the capacity for globally centralized institutions to control the course of human history is slipping through their fingers.

The world of organizations is in transition. It is being played out in the response to the COVID-19 viral pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests world-wide. The inadequacy and inconsistency of their response demonstrates that there is no absolute solution that can be applied to everyone, everywhere, all the time. It is not a solution at all. Instead, it is simulated reality. They operate like the Wizard of The Wizard of Oz creating a simulated reality of fear and assimilation. As these events have unfolded, we see that they do not have absolute control over global public health or civic safety. They cannot promise or guarantee safe streets in our cities, nor a viral pandemic free world. They promise, but cannot deliver. We are witnessing the breaking of organizations as indicators of the transitions our world is experiencing.

Paraphrasing the words of Baudrillard, they have created a simulation of control, feigning to be capable of giving us what they cannot provide. How can we know this to be a simulation? There is no accountability for their performance. The simulation remains, just like the hegemonic culture remains.

Evidence that the world of organizations is in transition can also be seen in how state and local governments have managed the COVID-19 pandemic. First, they imposed social orders of sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and the wearing of facemasks. It was a clear statement that they did not trust their constituents to act responsibly. Second, in many municipalities, local governments treat these social orders as legal prosecutable offenses worthy of heavy fines and imprisonment. A choice was made to exert control rather than collaboration with the effect being the loss of trust and economic hardship or closure to many small businesses.

The time when people would automatically trust institutions and their leaders is over. Even cracks in the edifice of social media are showing. For many people, it is not a happy, safe place. Its hegemonic nature means that it is not an open place for interaction. Rather, it is a Borg-like culture formed to assimilate people into a common mono-culture.

Restoring the master/slave relationship is an act of desperation. It tells us that there remains a belief that populations are to be controlled instead of led. It is a troubling realization. A signal to us that we need to look below the surface, and beyond the horizon of the present time to understand what kind of future we want for ourselves, our families, our businesses, and our communities.

Russian novelist Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, the foremost chronicler of the master/slave relationship in the 20^th century, gave voice to what this means through one of his characters.

“You only have power over people as long as you don’t take everything away from them. But when you’ve robbed a man of everything, he’s no longer in your power–he’s free again.”

These leaders, who reflect this master/slave mindset, are mistaken. They believe that they are immune to criticism and are beyond accountability for their actions. When leadership is a titled role in an organizational structure, domination is a logical response in a time of crisis. For a crisis is symbolic of a loss of control, a loss of order, and a loss of credibility. If their role is to establish world order, and I’m not convinced that it is, they have failed to do so. If they are truly in control, then they are responsible for creating the chaos which justifies the implementation of social orders. In the end, this old structural design of control has become a broken and fragmented.

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