Tech Corporate Culture
aka The perpetual, useless, motion machine
We have at least 20/30 years of literature explaining how culture is the secret behind the success of the best performing teams and, therefore, companies.
People have talked about their positive experiences, and also analysed the failing cases, to develop practices that would support the idea that a good culture is THE pillar on which any company should build its identity.
Unfortunately a lot of companies still struggle to adapt their culture and internal organisation to modern standards, mainly because they are focused on the least effective internal changes.
Disclaimer
As most of the things in life there isn’t a single approach that works for everyone or everywhere, it really depends on the situation. This is my romanticised opinion on what’s wrong with Corporate Culture in a fast paced environment like the Tech Industry. I am sure there are people that love and find very useful processes and hierarchy. I respect your opinion.
A bit of Psychology
It is important to introduce a couple of studies that analysed the effect of authority and social status on people to understand what makes people behave in certain ways.
The Milgram Experiment
In 1961 Stanley Milgram run an interesting experiment at Yale university to study the human willingness to obey an authority figure, even when going against their conscience.
The experiment involved:
An Experimenter, who would run the session
A Teacher, a volunteer and the subject of the experiment
A Learner, a confederate of the experimenter that would pretend to be a volunteer as well. Without going too much in detail on the process (but please read further), during the experiment the Teacher was given the power to send electric shocks to the Learner as a punishment for a wrong answer.
Every shock would increase the voltage by a certain amount.
The experimenter would act as the authority figure and, if at any time the teacher expressed the desire to stop the experiment, insist by giving verbal prods.
The Learner would be in another room and, obviously, not plugged to the electricity, but answering to the shocks with several predefined sentences asking to stop and screams of pain (depending on the intensity of the shock).
One would think that most people would either completely refuse or stop very soon, but the results were very different.
Even if everyone complained and asked to stop several times, more than 60% of the Teachers ended up following the Experimenter orders and gave deadly shocks to the Learner, even after he stopped producing any sound.
The experiment had proved that people in power can control the behaviour of their subordinates even when this goes against their moral conscience.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
In 1971 Philip Zimbardo wanted to investigate the psychological effects of role, social status and, therefore, power on people so he run this experiment in the basement of the Stanford University, which was setup on purpose as a mock prison.
Zimbardo took 24 volunteers with no criminal records, healthy, and with a stable psychology and divided them in 2 teams (the guards and the prisoners) and designed the experiment in a way that would induce disorientation, depersonalisation, and deindividuation in the participants.
During the experiment Zimbardo would encourage the police to behave in a disrespectful way to induce the prisoners into accepting their roles as less important human beings.
The local Palo Alto police assisted Zimbardo and his team and trained them to make their performance as realistic as possible.
For example the prisoners were actually arrested in their home and brought in the jail where they took their fingerprints and mug shots and were put in very uncomfortable cells, while the guards were given batons and real uniforms to establish their status and sunglasses to avoid eye contact.
The experiment was supposed to run for 2 weeks, but on the 2nd day the prisoners blocked their cells with their beds in revolt and the guards eventually attacked them with fire extinguishers and punished them.
After that the guards started abusing their power and maltreating the prisoners by putting them in confinement (a dark closet) or using psychological abuse techniques, like calling them with their inmate number for a while, a statement of their new identity.
Eventually the experiment was aborted on the 6th day when one of the researchers complained about the morality of the experiment.
Zimbardo conclusion was that people embraced their roles and social status so deeply that became immoral guards that torture their prisoners, going against their inner nature or morality.
To quote Zimbardo himself in a later interview :
(The) human behavior is more influenced by things outside of us than inside. […] There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you’re not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Breadth First or Depth First Hierarchy
These days the H word makes people defensive and has started to get a very negative connotation in the startup world.
I don’t think there’s anything inherently bad about hierarchical structures (we can talk about Frederic Laloux and Brian J. Robertson another day), and they are kind of natural as the company scales up and becomes bigger, but they can definitely support and encourage bad behaviours.
If you look at the state of things today and focus on the decision making process, it’s pretty clear that the 2 extremes are represented by lean companies (I don’t want to include startups as they face too different problems) and hierarchical corporations.
When lean companies scale, they tend to leave the decisional power as low in the hierarchy as possible increasing the responsibilities of teams while keeping their autonomy intact (ideally), eventually adding managers that have more of a team/individual support role than a real decisional power. The result of this approach is what I call a Breadth First Hierarchy (BFH) structure. I’ll talk more about this in another post.
Corporations behave differently. They believe that to ensure quality and avoid mistakes the best thing to do is to limit the uncertainty that every decision making process have in the beginning. This means having a user manual/guideline for every possible activity, process, and scenario, which translates in a never ending quest to standardise every process and most likely to write a Methodology, usually written by people very far from the field experts that summarised experiences read on reports from colleagues they have never met.
Because of this structure, teams don’t need to be able to take decisions, instead they need Hierarchy and Process Experts that can tell them what to do and guide them into growing, one day, into their position.
They will also be responsible for the performance of their team, normally measured only in terms of business ROI, regardless of growth, happiness, effectiveness, output quality, velocity etc.
When the team becomes too big or new functions are added, a new Process Experts will be hired or promoted, and they will have their own Process Expert Manager on top, and so on…it’s Process Experts (turtles) all the way up.
While the hierarchy takes shape and the company scales, each team keeps the same level of autonomy, decisions are always approved or supervised by the superior, especially when money is involved.
Because of this these companies have, what I like to call, a Depth First Hierarchy (DFH) structure.
The Problem with DFH
In one of my jobs (for a strong DFH organisation) one of the Process Experts, talking about the hierarchy, mentioned that he had started from the lower level in the company and always looked at the people at the top of the hierarchy as if they were Greek Gods, illuminated beings that knew and could do everything. Eventually he made it almost to the top and realised that at every level, he looked at the ones on top of him wanting to have their power because they were exercising it on him and he wanted their freedom to take decisions or even just the ability to call them into doubt. He also realised that there was no end to that feeling, until the top of the mountain was reached.
It reminded me of a psychology study I did when I was younger on how the Army, Governments or Religious Organisations works.
The immediate realisation I had is that people, in these companies, focus their careers in mastering the Processes and Methodology and crawling the ladder to be able to exercise their power, more than doing their job at their best and doing what’s best for the people they are supposed to manage.
This is the most fertile ground for bad politics, micromanagement and exploitation.
People would embrace their roles of Subject or Master depending on whom they’d be talking to, just as the Guards and Prisoners of the Stanford Prison Experiment.
When the boss walks by, they stop doing what they are doing and do EVERYTHING they can to impress, to show appreciation for the benignity. When someone who is not at their level walks by, they are busy, maybe if the subject really insist then they’ll be graced with 2 minutes of time or the redirected to someone else (a lower level).
Meanwhile everyone have to exercise their power on their subjects, enforce the process on them, make them feel the same pain you felt before, not because they want to, but their boss requires them to, the hierarchy requires them to.
After all, what manager are you if you can’t control your team…right?
If someone want to change the way a process works, without being given the explicit task of doing it, or without the right position in the hierarchy, then they are denying the very nature of the DFH.
The only way to enforce the chain of command is to give them the shock as punishment, like the guards of the Milgram Experiment, or block them in any possible way.
Their managers couldn’t change things, so why should them?
The Endless Immovable Motion Machine
When crawling the career ladder becomes the main driver for the employees to do better and the hierarchy supports and encourages that behaviour, your company has become a monster that feeds on itself.
Like a giant treadmill that looks like it’s evolving, but practically (at best) it’s only upgrading to the latest model.
People waste time creating tools that will allow the machine to keep doing things the old way, while trying to understand the new ways and how to fit them in their current processes, or partially adopting new methodologies hoping their magic touch will fix all their problems.
They do workshops, classes, change the internal structure to show that they are doing something to be up to speed with the rest of the world and solve their problems, but don’t actually change the fundamental structure of their hierarchy.
There is no short term solution to this, unfortunately, as the Process Experts are there to keep their status, their feuds, their power, and justify their presence in the organisation, without ever changing.
Eventually these companies will have too much of a hard time finding or retaining talents and will be forced in the new era or disappear.
Hopefully.
Since this has already got a lot longer than expected, I will expand on some of the topics and ideas introduced here in future articles.
Thanks for having got this far :)
