Micro-Management and the Ruse of Superiority

I had a “eureka moment” today.  Here’s what I realized:  The more detailed our organizational objectives and task lists become, the less our members – and especially our leaders – are able to communicate intelligently and effectively.

This eureka moment was inspired by a high-level, very experienced leader in the bureaucracy of a major government organization.  He talked with me for ten minutes about a topic of great concern.  He tossed out names and acronyms, demonstrated in-depth understanding, even insight about the topic of the moment.  His intensity was obvious.  This listener did, albeit with some difficulty, follow his points. 

But at the end, the boss walked away obviously expecting the listener to get to work on some aspect of the topic at hand.  Although he intuitively understood something of the leader’s concerns, the listener had absolutely no idea what the leader expected him to do.  Unfortunately, he knew from experience - both firsthand and secondhand - that any inquiry was most likely to unleash a string of profanity but no enlightenment.  Apparently the leader was so bound up in his own mental bureaucracy, locked in by buzzwords, acronyms, mental constructs of organizational operations – that he was unable to communicate in depth with anyone beyond the bounds of his own limited sphere of concern.

What makes this more intriguing is that the topic of the angst-inspiring soliloquy was the organization “task list."  The "task list" is a list of millions of essential things each organization must be able to do.  To quote some experts in the field, “A task… is a specific action that enables a function to be accomplished,” and, “All must ensure that no function is forgotten.”  That’s fairly comprehensive.  The fact is, the task list explains every little thing in such intimate detail it is practically useless in implementation.  Real people don't think about the thousands of component actions they must accomplish in order to get through every day.  They just do them.

Returning to this morning's conversation...  The boss wanted something that he was incapable of describing - and that something involved the list that intimately describes every single micromanaged task in the entire organization.  Yet although the leader could talk all morning about issues surrounding his area of concern, he was incapable of a coherent explanation of what he wanted.  He had  become so intimately involved with the intimate details of the job that he was unable to communicate person-to-person with ordinary people.  

In all fairness, I believe the boss might agree with some of what I'm writing here.  His concern this morning was, at least in part, the inadequacy of the “task list” as a guide for professional action.  The trouble is, I’m not sure whether he thinks the solution is to think more like real human people, or to make a more thorough task list.  I’m not about to ask him.  I did hear him say recently that no one had any business being here if not "thoroughly conversant" in every aspect of the enterprise.  There is irony here.

To expand the scope of the topic somewhat, I'd like to point out that the government “essential tasks” are the equivalent of the school system’s “essential learning requirements.”  Same idea, different functional part of society.  Both purport to improve the output of their respective organizations.  Both involve extreme micromanagement.  Both seem to detract from the ability of members of the respective professions actually to communicate with other people.  Perhaps this diminishing ability to communicate on the part of micromanagers is due to intense pressure to perform to impossibly detailed and specific standards.  Perhaps it is due to a the stress of a pervasive focus on matters that are extremely - but uneccessarily - complex.  Or maybe it's that part of the brain of the organization leader is always busy complying with the organizational expectation that every discrete function be overtly stated and set forth to digital standards of specificity. 

Humans just weren’t meant to work like that, to think like that.   We naturally comprehend the world around us not as a series of distinct points, not only as black-or-white, on-or-off, one-or-zero.  No, just as our eyes are able to see shades of color our minds perceive a gradiated universe of infinitely fine variation.  We do not naturally think of the world as a group of distinct points, but as an undifferentiated spectrum of points along an endless range.  Our current preoccupation with "digital" analysis is a product of training.  It is an artificial demand imposed by leaders who insist that we all align our performance, our learning and teaching, all our individual actions and behaviors, with certain predetermined “expectations."

I'm sorry that sounded so complex.  Even thinking about these things can get convoluted.

Sidebar: when I was a teacher, I once had an administrator who insisted that, at the beginning of every single lesson in my eighth grade class, I state to students exactly what they would be learning.  Like most of the other teachers in the school, I knew that was a silly requirement.  The difference was, they didn’t want to deal with the fallout of saying so, and they pretended to go along with it.  I, on the other hand, responded to his directive by telling him that it was a ridiculous requirement.  Certainly it might be a good idea for some lessons - but a very bad idea for others.  I told him that some of my most effective lessons involved “surprise” discoveries, and that stating the conclusions up front would short-circuit the learning process, would tend to increase boredom in a class that had become completely predictable.  His response was priceless.  His eyes got bigger, his jaw fell open.  He laughed, truly at first, then nervously as he realized I was serious.  He had never been confronted with his own absurdity before, I suspect.  Apparently he was unable to comprehend that I, an experienced professional teacher, could disagree with him.  In the end, he did force his point.  Because he was my boss and I needed to keep my job, I complied with the letter of his law.  For about two months.  That was the amount of time it took me to arrange other employment.  I did not leave because of that one incident or that one individual.  I left because that administrator was typical of the educational leadership in that school district;  I did not know of even one administrator of good sense, good will, and courage that I could go to with this problem.  So, weighing all my options, I left the profession.  And that was too bad, because I was a good teacher and I loved teaching.  To this day I resent being forced out after 16 years by arrogant people who believed that they were smarter than they really were.  I hope one day sanity will return to our educational system.  If and when that happens, I would love to return to the classroom.  Until then, I’ll make my way elsewhere.

Now back to the main topic…

As we learn throughout a lifetime, we retain much of the information and skills we’ve learned in our subconscious mind.  The current troubles are because organization gurus have been trying for decades to short-circuit our normal thinking process, trying to make every single thought and movement and process a conscious act (at least on paper).  Maybe this is due to the inordinate influence of lawyers with their emphasis on the letter-of-the-law, their us-versus-them, win-lose mentality.  Maybe it is due to the influence of a computer culture in which every thought is conceptualized as a series of electronic switch positions as in an electronic “brain.”  Maybe it is because we are beginning to think of our organizations as living entities and our defined processes as their brain functions.  Don't laugh... there's some validity to the allegation. 

In any case, the attempt to force digital thought processes and behavior onto our fuzzy-logic analog selves seems to clutter our brains so much that we can no longer think clearly.  Maybe the parts of our mind that routinely manage trifling details for us atrophy when they are forcibly excluded from the thought process for long periods of time.  Maybe that is why the professional educator or “mission-essential task-master” forgets how normal human beings think and communicate.  Maybe the extreme “organization man” (or woman) is already halfway to becoming the digital robotic entity he (or she) seems to admires so much.

For those of you out there who haven’t been as polluted as I have by all this micromanagement of your every action and thought, I just insulted the intelligence of people who think they are better than the rest of us, and who try to control us through the tyranny of institutionalized micromanagement.

Dang, I did it again.  Let me try to put this in ordinary language one more time.

People who think they are smarter than the rest of us are really stupid, because they don’t understand the basics of how to communicate with other people.

That was better.

I conclude with a reflection on a children’s story I’m sure most of you know well.  It is a parable about people who think they are smarter than they are.  More specifically, it is about a man who is really not that smart, and who desperately wants to prevent anyone else from discovering that fact.

Do you know the story of "The Emperor’s New Clothes," by Hans Christian Andersen?   [In case you haven’t, here’s a link to a version of the story adapted by children’s author Stephen Corrin: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Emperors-New-Clothes.htm]   Well, it’s like that.  By attempting to appear smarter than everyone else, the Emperor demonstrated his undeniable ignorance for all to see.  Instead of a wonderful new suit, he really had no clothes.  It’s okay to be amused with him, because he brought the embarrassing situation on himself with his own arrogance.

The Emperor really has no clothes.  It’s okay – go ahead and say so.  Go ahead and call him on it  After all, in the story it was the honest comment of an innocent child that led to the Emperor finally gaining a degree of wisdom in the end.

Likewise with the education professionals and the professional bureaucrats who demand that we comply with extraordinarily detailed “task lists” or “learning requirements.”  The fact is, they are engaged in an arrogant attempt to micromanage the behavior (and sometimes even the thoughts) of the poor slobs under their control.  They do so because they believe those poor slobs are not smart enough to do their jobs otherwise.  They believe they alone are smart enough to get the job done, that in order for the rest of us to accomplish anything of value, we must be told what to do every step of the way.  They certainly believe that they are smarter than the rest of us.  That is why they try so hard to micromanage others' behavior, and to police others' thoughts.

You are allowed to laugh at their superiority complex.  By means of their inflexible, intolerant, “my-way-or-the-highway” attitudes, they display their shortcomings, insecurities, lack of faith, inability to communicate, and lack of understanding of people and of how the world works.  Their arrogance earns our derision. 

Of course, after we have laughed at the arrogance, we must be kind and extend a hand of friendship.  The misbehavior of the micromanager is no excuse for us to be mean.  Once the controlling leaders realize how foolishly they have behaved, they are going to feel kind of bad about themselves.  It will be up to us to build them up, just as we wish they had done for us.  So expose the arrogance, but then reach out in compassion.

Bottom lines: 

• People are more important than checklists.
• No one is smarter than everyone.
• Treat other people with respect and kindness.

That's what I think.  Of course, your opinion may differ.  I respect your intelligence so please draw your own conclusions, and feel free to share them here.  Thanks for reading.

Gryphem