The Kafkaesque nightmare spectrum. Freely flowing information and the human need for autonomy
Delving into the importance of having a feeling of being informed to help optimise our autonomy, a necessary component of being motivated at work and in any personal endeavor.
The Kafkaesque nightmare
Franz Kafka was a philosophical novelist whose name has become eponymously connected with a genre of writing which captures a feeling we have all experienced when struggling against a bureaucratic system where we have no empowerment, filling out a poorly designed government form, or that hopeless situation where we’re expected to do something, but lack the information, authority, or autonomy to act. The term ‘Kafkaesque’ refers to that nauseous and belittling sinking feeling that leaves us diminished, lost and hopeless when dealing with an unseen malevolent bureaucracy.
Kafka despised his day job in a bureaucratic insurance office but managed to find a way to indulge his passion for writing novels on the side. Several years ago I read Kafka’s “The Trial”, possibly the most frustrating and sickening of novels I’ve encountered. Kafka immerses the reader into the hellish experience of Josef K, a man arrested and forced through a series of tortuously bureaucratic interrogations for a crime that is never revealed to him or the reader. Kafka torments the reader, just as Josef K. is tormented by some hidden and manipulative authority, his futile efforts to understand his predicament confounded by his total lack of autonomy in the situation.
Josef K. simply has no access to any reliable source of information. He is tormented by his ignorance of what is really going on. He cannot make any sense of his circumstances so he cannot act, cannot make an informed decision.
We have all felt this to some degree. Being left out of gossip circles; discovering that you’ve deliberately been left out when a decision has been made which will have an impact on you; Trying to make sense of a world where lies, cover-ups, and bullshit are the norm — just look out at our current political environment and the lack of trust in democracy…
Kafkaesque antonym
The opposite of the Kafkaesque nightmare is freely flowing information and the absence of interrogations and blame.
I would have formerly used the word ‘transparency’ to describe this feeling of being fully informed, but have found that people have different perspectives on transparency. For some, it has very negative connotations and implies a level of openness and vulnerability that a substantial number of humans would be uncomfortable with.
By freely flowing information I’m referring to an information eco-system and a culture that makes the right information available to the people who need it, and avoids polluting the eco-system with lies, bullshit, gossip, bias, secrecy, politics, obfuscations, omittance, and conspiracies.
We are human, we are messy and complex. Avoiding Kafkaresque tendencies in our personal lives or an organisation is no easy task.
What is Autonomy?
Autonomy means that we are able to make informed decisions by ourselves. It’s the feeling of being in control, self-directed and self-governed.
In the work environment, you feel able to make your own decisions on what you should be working on and how you are working. You feel trusted to do invest your time and energies into the things which are in the best interests of your team or the goals of the organisation you work for because you can tap into the stream of information necessary to make wise decisions.
Nothing is deliberately concealed from you, communications are fluid and you have easy access to the resources you need. You are working in a culture of psychological safety where you know that you won’t be unduly interrogated and blamed for making the wrong decision with the best intentions.
Autonomy and motivation
As described by the Self-Determination Theory of motivation (Edward Deci and Richard Ryan) there are 3 constituents to intrinsic motivation, that inner desire to act as opposed to extrinsic motivation, acting in response to the promise of a carrot or the threat of the stick.
- Autonomy: Self-governed, as described above
- Relatedness: Feeling connected to an environment, situation or meaningful purpose
- Competency: The appropriate skills and ability to act
So autonomy is a necessary but not sufficient ingredient for personal motivation, we also need a sense of relatedness and the appropriate level of competency.
If we’re working in Kafkaresque environment, our motivation and therefore the value we can provide is severely diminished.
The Kafkaesque nightmare as a continuum
In everyday situations and especially in the work environment we will rarely achieve that sense of total autonomy. Equally, thanks to improvements in corporate culture as well as the safety net of the legal framework, we are unlikely to encounter the absurdly horrific nightmares portrayed by Kafka, although anyone having their strings pulled by a mendaciously malicious manager may disagree — remember the warning of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Gulag Archipelago:
“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being”.
When you delve into the fractal sub-hierarchies in any organisation, you’ll find varying degrees of behaviour along the entire Kafkareseque spectrum.
We are likely to find our everyday experience places us on a continuum, somewhere between autonomous freedom and the Kafkaesque nightmare. By being aware of where we lie between the two extremes in any given situation, we should find opportunities to improve autonomy for ourselves and our work colleagues.
What is optimal autonomy, and can you have too much autonomy?
Autonomy will undoubtedly be more important to some people than others. For example, given the Big 5 Model of Personalities traits, the widely accepted methodology to assess people for Conscientiousness; Agreeableness; Neuroticism; Openness; and Extroversion one might conclude that those who score highly in the trait Openness and low in Agreeableness would have a high need for autonomy.
Johnathan Haidt in his recent book ‘The Righteous Mind’ talks about the differences in people’s moral tastebuds, how their instinctive temperaments will lead them to assess their world through their own unique value filter. People’s tastebuds have sensitivities along the following spectra:
- Care — Harm
- Fairness — Cheating
- Loyalty — Betrayal
- Authority — Subversion
- Sanctity — Degradation
- Liberty — Oppression
Haidt observes that our moral tastebuds explain our political leanings but they will also indicate our tolerance of a Kafkaesque environment and our drive towards autonomy. Someone placing a high value on liberty over oppression, and fairness over cheating will have their radars tuned to dis-information or having their strings pulled.
Conditions for autonomy, therefore, differ from person to person
The set of conditions that will make one person feel in full autonomy, such as having complete ownership and responsibility for a task, could make another person fearful of screwing up, they may not be ready for the responsibility. While a sense of autonomy is important for everyone, the conditions for autonomy will differ vastly from person to person.
Thoughts on how to increase people’s autonomy
- Awareness, make it a ‘thing’ which gets talked about. Can people in your organisation describe what autonomy is?
- Step up and take ownership. If you want more personal autonomy then prove that you’re responsible and can be trusted. Be consistent over time.
- Communicate and share. People need good information to make good autonomous decisions, but some people get a sense of power by being information hoarders. Deal with the underlying insecurities which make people hoard information and create a culture where sharing info is a virtue.
- Define boundaries within which decisions can be made. If the person can prove they’ve sought the right advice, and informed anyone who could be impacted, then why not give them the space to make their own decisions? Decisions come in different flavours, some are reversible, some are irreversible, some have a large impact, some small. Co-create principles and guidelines for decision spaces and let people be masters of their own destiny.
- Emphasise a culture of psychological safety and blame-free trust. Let people question things, and pick them up if they fail.
- Ensure people have the right tools for the job, the time, the space and access to information.
- Implement monitoring and feedback loops. Regularly take the temperature of people on whether they feel autonomous, measure what you want to manage.
How to broach this subject with a corporate audience?
As stated in my introductory blog post, Intro: A Partially Understood Life, my aim is to use this blogging platform as a sketchpad for ideas that one day could form the basis for packaged offerings to corporates — workshops, courses, perhaps an app.
But how on earth can you sell the idea that their employees will be asked to think about their organisation through the lens of a Kafkaesque spectrum?
I need to carefully describe the Kafakaresque nightmare as an analogy. The absurdity of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’ was a deliberately extreme horror story, taking malevolence, disempowerment, and disorientation to the extreme. While I’m a proponent of healthy feedback loops and corporate introspection, I fear that such matters will be rejected higher up the corporate hierarchy to avoid the risk of stirring up discontent. The pain of awkward introspection in the short term often outweighs the long term pain of not being aware— this is an example of temporal discounting, prioritising short-term pain/gain over the long-term, it’s a human bias. I would need to lay the ground carefully before charging in with Franz Kafka.
Unleashing one’s dormant creative potential…
Kafka’s genre creating works never actually saw the light of day during his lifetime. He died with tuberculosis in 1924 at the age of 40 with a deathbed wish for his manuscripts to be burnt, fortunately, his wishes were denied. His diaries reveal a self-doubting Kafka over his works that would bring him such posthumous accolades and fame.
Drawing from the work of Franz Kafka, Anne Rice advises “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly” — I’ll be keeping this advice in mind when publishing my notes here.
I wonder how much potential creativity remains unborn behind the furrowed brows of the modern stressed-out office-worker, frozen by self-doubt, an unwillingness to arrange their affairs around serving their inner genius, or that they’re just paralysed by their very own Kafkaesque nightmare?
Considering that Kafka’s works could have so easily perished with him, I’m reminded of the lyrics of the song “Perfect” by Matt Johnson of the band THE THE.
Passing by a cemetery
I think of all the little hopes and dreams
That lie lifeless and unfulfilled beneath the soil…Oh what a perfect day…