Why allowing power to be concentrated in a clique produces the organizational equivalent of thrombosis

 
This article has been around for a little while, but it’s still worth reading, regardless of your political views. I found it made me think and helped me understand why even change that everyone can see is vital so often fails to happen in traditional, hierarchical organizations. Just mentally substitute “organization” for “society” as you read it.

Here’s a sample:

Centers of power are clots in a society’s circulatory system — inherently a non-adaptive reactionary element. The reason is simple. Our planet is a bio-system containing millions of species undergoing constant mutual adaptation. Every unit in a bio-system receives information, reacts to it adaptively, and this new learning is then transmitted to its neighbors. Social systems operate in the same way, except when power is concentrated. Then information is not transmitted on its merits but according to the power position of the transmitting unit. Therefore information necessary for successful adaptation to changing conditions is lost. Information coming from the periphery of the system — invariably the main source of new information about changing conditions — is ignored precisely because it comes from the periphery, a low-power position. [ . . . ] As power becomes more and more concentrated, more and more authoritarian, its circulatory system becomes more and more sclerotic — information is transmitted less and less according to its merits and more and more according to the position of the transmitter. Large, over-centralized systems become like organisms without senses. They are blind, deaf, and insensitive. . .

Stop and ask yourself this question: does the hierarchy of power have more effect of what is communicated in your organization than the truthfulness and importance of the information? Is the answer is “yes,” your organization is already sick with the corporate form of arterial sclerosis.

Now try this one: do I pay more attention to what I hear from powerful people than I do to information from other sources? If the answer to that one is “yes,” you’re helping to add to the clot that is forming.

Think about it.

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