my problem with hierarchy
one of the sites i regularly read is "the archdruid report", by john michael greer. a major subject of john's blog are the narratives we tell ourselves. his thesis is that the stories we have in our head about ourselves constrains our thinking and actions. that if we want to change ourselves and our culture we need to change our story.


ran prieur was recently talking about this as well:

September 26. A reader asks:

I was reading your about me page and noticed that you say that you don't plan on living on your land unless you are forced to. I've been reading your site for a while and I always thought your plan was to move there once it became more habitable. Is this a new plan?

No. But this seems to be a universal misconception. I thought it would be enough that I never said I planned to live there full time, and that I occasionally said the opposite, that I plan to divide my time between the land and the city for my whole life, unless an emergency forces me to hole up there.

Clearly I underestimated the power of Myth, specifically the American myth of the rugged solo homesteader, the "mountain man." In this culture, if you say you're buying land, everyone fills in the background with that pre-made Grizzly Adams tapestry. Sometimes even I forget that I'm not planning to live that way. The truth is, few or none of my ancestors were independent homesteaders. The vast majority lived close to the land, but they did so as members of tribes or extended families. When I visit people who have gone "back to the land" in the isolated American fashion, almost without exception they are bored or depressed, and most of my city friends are happy.

I'm an introvert: I recharge my energy when I'm alone and drain it when I'm around other people. But I still enjoy being around other people, as long as they're not dumping negativity on me or talking about their latest medical procedure. I love walking down a city street and seeing hundreds of new faces. I veer off into madness if I have no contact with other people at all. Only the most extreme introverts are exceptions to the rule: it's even more important for us to be around other people, than it is for us to be in nature.

So my land is a place to keep a connection to nature, to learn valuable low-tech skills, and to grow fruit trees, something I really love that I can't afford space to do in the city. Also it's a source of good drinking water, which may be priceless in a few years. And I'm building a hut that will be cozy in the winter so that if I need to bug out there, or I just want to visit for a few days, I won't be out of luck five months a year.

On the same subject, here's a great Bill McKibben essay that I've linked to before: Old MacDonald Had A Farmers’ Market - total self-sufficiency is a noble, misguided ideal.

i've recently found myself in the grips of one of my own narratives, and it's causing a problem.

i have an emotional, visceral, negative response to hierarchy. hierarchy is such a broad concept that i'd like to try to get narrow it down a bit, heavily colored by my current situation. i respond poorly to taking orders, particularly when they are handed down with no explanation or seem otherwise arbitrary.

i don't think that hierarchical organizations work, save for the extreme amount of non-hierarchical activity that occurs within them. david pollard has pointed this out countless times, comparing traditional organizations to social networks, "natural" enterprises, and the wisdom of crowds to traditional western organization (or at least our conception of them). he's spend a lot of time research how people actually work in organizations and discovered that org charts are a pathetic way to actually convey how a company functions. the best article on the subject is The Psychology of Information, or Why We Don't Share Stuff.

a huge part of my job at prediction company was working around the hierarchy. we would get instructions from our bosses and figure out how to do what they wanted by working around all of the imposed limits of the organization. my problem solving network looking nothing like the org chart, and i actively cultivated and manipulated relationships (both my own and other people's) to both avoid problems and get things done.

one of the policies that i have cultivated at inicom is permission to fail. before my getting here, my future partners in crime would see a person heading in a direction that they knew, positively, to be unproductive. they would immediately work to correct the problem. that specific problem would be avoided, but the underlying issue remained unsolved.

i've worked since getting here on letting mistakes happen. often i see them from a mile away, but instead of dealing with it directly i manipulate conditions (like test cases) to make the mistake obvious, eventually. this strategy has resulted in our new graduate being fully productive in 3 months (i usually give 3-6) and another person with a reputation for needing everything spelled out in exact detail being my star programmer/designer. (he does things with ajax and php that make me weep they're so beautiful, after i get done jumping up and down and showing them to everyone.)

more generally, my full time job is pushing responsibility away from me and toward the edges. my basic approach is to do everything in my power to make my (current) job obsolete and to give as much decision making authority as possible to the people "below" me on the org chart. it is basic, applied wirearchy.

this is not a small part of my life. it's fairly fundamental to a lot of how i look at and interact with the world.

i'm part of an organization (not inicom, another organization) that doesn't approach the world this way. i really enjoy being a part of this organization. most of the time things work fine, but every now and again the specter of hierarchical acting creeps in. when this happens i tend to get really angry, and more than a little snotty.

recently a decision was handed down from on high. i thought the decision was a bad idea, but i thought the way the decision was made to be a fantastically stupid idea. our fearless leaders saw an issue, discussed amongst themselves a solution, and handed it down. it affected all of us, but we weren't part of the decision making process. the decision itself clearly reflected the bias and selfsame thinking of said fearless leaders. there were other, better, solutions available; possessed variously by other people affected by the decision. opening the discussion would have lent a lot more problem solving ability. (in the manner of the wisdom of crowds.) not to mention a broader understanding of all the surrounding issues.

i think also it would have been more honest. people (myself definitely included) are afraid to show weakness, and opening decision making often brings weakness up. you can't just say "i solved this problem." you have to say "i have this problem, can we fix it." often the problem solved isn't the same as the problem being experienced. it's a convenient, safe, proxy for it.

all of this is a long way to get to my point, which is that i handle hierarchical acting poorly. when i see the situation, i really want to sit the people in question down and impart my understanding of the decision making process. i really want the people involved to fundamentally think differently, to not be locked into hierarchical decision making. since that is a long discussion with no clear resolution, i usually respond instead with nasty quips, angry retorts, and a significant lack of patience.

more specifically, when i feel labeled as a peon in a hierarchy (i.e., my decision making authority is revoked or non-existent), i have a really low tolerance for solving that organization's problems. i adopt a basic attitude of shutting up, doing exactly, literally, what i'm asked, and further being as subversive as possible in my non-support. i don't lend energy one-way.

my participation in this organization is threatened because of this.

i want to continue to be part of this organization, but i really can't handle the way decisions are being made. i've cooked up several options:

change my narrative: i could be telling myself the wrong story. the story i'm telling myself now makes me angry, but maybe that's not what is going on. what kind of story would i tell myself instead?

reframe my narrative: maybe i am telling myself the right story, it's just my emotional reaction to it that needs adjustment. this is a learning experience and there is some better version of me on the other side if i just get over myself. since this is such a strong part of my identity, how do i approach dealing with this baggage?

change the organization: i'm not trying to change you, i'm trying to make you better. i have no idea what my chance of success would be. the first time i tried it i was ignored enough to be subversion, the second time i had decision making authority and just did it. neither apply here.

quit: life is too short to play by someone else's rules. fuck you, you, and you. twice. deal with the fact that people will tell me i need to grow up. and also, of course, happily refuse to "grow up." i'll say, as an aside, this strategy has a 100% success rate so far. (which is to say, i'm still alive and still a jerk.)

i'd like a head-check on the way i've told this story. i have a hard time believing i'm a beautiful and unique snowflake (i.e. i can't be the only one who thinks this way), but i encounter a lot of people that seem trapped in bureaucratic thinking. how big is this battle?


please tell me your first reaction to this post, particularly if it is negative. i'd like some perspective outside my own head.

meme-style, i'll tag royal_spice, aviatrix, and grumpygranpa. because i'd like to hear what you have to say. here or by e-mail, im. not that this should discourage anyone else.

[i'm sorry i'm not naming names in this story. i know it would make it easier to understand. you can im me for details, as always.]