1: A Midlevel Tyranny

A brief clip of a Q&A session at the end of a talk by the psychologist and professor Jordan Peterson caught my attention last week. Here’s the clip of the question and Peterson’s answer.

Peterson mentions a few things to look for to tell if pathological things are happening.

1. Being required to do things that make you weak or ashamed.
2. Systems go terribly out of control when people don’t stop them when they are going mildly out of control.
3. So much foolishness going on in the midlevel bureaucratic world. The tyranny is there.
4. It multiplies because sensible people say nothing when they should say something. But the thing is there are so many more sensible people; they are just not as noisy.

How does this happen even when we don’t intend it?

As organizations grow larger and more complex and additional hierarchies are put in place the leaders of the organization move farther and farther from the point of work. That opens an opportunity for disfunction if not activly managed by the leadership of the organization.