The Time We Live In - A Question about Corruption
Part One of Where Did Trust Go?: Restoring Authority and Accountability in Organizations
Published August 2020
Part One
The Time We Live In
A Question about Corruption
In early 2020, I was speaking to a group of local business leaders in Nairobi, Kenya. During the question and answer portion of my presentation, I was asked this question. “What do we do about corruption in government and business?” The question was asked in such a way that it was clear to me that the topic had been discussed before by this group.
The question caught me off-guard. I had not thought much about corruption. I knew it was an issue in the United States. My thinking about leadership is not focused on repairing the worn-out models of 20th century leadership, but rather toward describing a new, more positive approach for the 21st century. I realized in that moment that I needed a better understanding of corruption. The following is not primarily focused on organizational corruption, but the organizational conditions that allow for its growth and prevalence.
At a basic level, corruption is a breakdown of order. A breakdown where the rules that are designed to create that order are abandoned or compromised to serve a purpose that available to everyone. Growing up in North Carolina, the not-so-funny joke was that you could tell it was an election year by whose driveway was being paved by the state’s Department of Transportation. It happens in the courts when the rule of law which is meant to apply to all citizens is ignored to favor persons of special interest grants them privileges that the rest of us do not have.
In the weeks and months since my encounter with these leaders, I’ve thought a lot about the conditions that lead to corruption. Corruption is like cancer in a body. Its uncontrollable growth can destroy families, businesses, governments, and even nations.
Corruption is a symptom of a specific kind of organizational brokenness. It is the result of what happens when authority and accountability are no longer aligned for impact. To illustrate this, I want to look at this relationship from several different perspectives with the hope that it might lead us to take initiative to restore a healthy practice of authority and accountability in organizations.
The Role of Transition
All of us are in transition. The markers of these changes are all around us. We feel it, see it, think about it, as well as experience it as a difference that matters. It is happening at work, in our homes, seen on our screens, and in our social media interactions.
In some cases, the difference is positive. However, my conversations with people show these transitions to be more disruptive and alienating. They can’t pinpoint the source of their sense of transition.
The transitions are hidden in the institutions and structures of society. These transitions are breakdowns where the three dimensions of the Circle of Impact – the dimensions of ideas, relationships, and structure occur. The fragmented nature of contemporary organizations is a result of the severing of authority and accountability. The Circle of Impact is a model that restores this relationship through the alignment of the three dimensions.
Two Global Crises
During the first months of the year 2020, two significant events occurred that illustrate a breakdown in the function of governmental institutions. They represent systemic failure of the relationship between governmental authority and public accountability.
The first of these events is the COVID-19 viral pandemic. It is an instance where those charged with protecting global public health failed in their duties. A global viral pandemic was declared by those charged with the managing the security of global public health. The result of the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus was the implementation of social orders sheltering-in-place, social distancing, and wearing a face mask by administrative fiat. The result was the shuttering of local businesses based upon arbitrary designations of what is essential and non-essential. These orders were not suggestions but became prosecutable offenses by states and local communities. In addition, public schools were closed, many only reopen as virtual classrooms.
The second series of events are the protests and accompanying riots triggered by the death of Minneapolis resident George Floyd. In a matter of days, a highly coordinated actions aimed at defunding municipal police departments, along with attacks on public buildings and local businesses swept across the country and around the world. In many cities, elected officials restricted their local police forces from quelling the actions of rioters. Cities burned as local mayors, city councils, and country commissions watched with approval.
Both these series of events point to a dramatic transition in the role of government in society. The effect is to de-legitimize the institutions of government as protectors of the peace and prosperity of their communities. Anarchy, chaos, and loss results from this severing of governmental authority from public accountability. The diminishment of governments’ relation to the public did not begin with these two events. They simply highlight in a dramatic fashion what many of us have seen transpire over the past several decades.
Trust between people and their governments is eroding rapidly. The actions of elected officials and government administrators in response to the coronavirus send the message that they do not trust the people to act in a responsible manner. In effect, authority is control, and accountability is compliance. It has revealed to the world that there is a significant difference between public health and medicine. Public health is a political function of government. Human or personal health we understand through medical science and the health of our bodies.
In a similar way, public officials in many cities have turned a blind eye to rioting. Looting and burning exploit the collective feelings of anger and grief of protesters. In restricting the ability of local police forces to protect public property and private businesses, local leaders are saying that we no longer have the capability to control criminality and ensure a peaceful, prosperous community. When authority and accountability are lost, anarchy grows.
As a global society, we have crossed a line over which we cannot return. We cannot see this line because we only see things in parts, not as a whole perspective. It has long been my contention that we are unable to see the structures that inhabit our lives because we are so enveloped by them, just like fish are with water.
We cannot see the break between authority and accountability because we do not even understand what these concepts mean. We throw these words around as if we do, but the condition of organizations and society on a global scale demonstrates that we don’t understand.
We have crossed a line that we cannot cross back over. I do not believe we can simply apply a tactical repair to what is taking place. The political and institutional forces of destructive have advanced too far to simply go back to a time when trust between political leaders and citizens was strong. We are at the point where we must reimagine the entire practice of leadership and how organizations are conceived and designed. As the focus of my work for the past thirty-five years, I anticipated what was coming, but did not expect to see the rapid collapse of institutional and societal authority and accountability that has occurred during this year of 2020.
To understand what to do, we need to understand the necessary relationship between authority and accountability.