Consciousness of Degraded Symbols

by Aidan Ward and Philip Hellyer

Degraded Symbols

Think about some institutions and their meanings, what they stand for. Maybe think of the police, or the BBC, or parliament, or the National Trust. How they are regarded by people, what anyone thinks of them, their ethos, and effectiveness, none of that is in their own gift. They cannot tell people what to think of them, even though they will often try. What they symbolise, what symbolic values animate them, is largely down to other people’ consciousness.

Consciousness feels like a seventies, new age, or leftie term that no-one would use now.[1] False consciousness for example: it exists but it doesn’t communicate much beyond the dated origins of the term. But peoples’ individual consciousness changes and grows, and the general level of consciousness changes too. People might have thought that the police kept them safe and with an evolved consciousness might think that they were prone to provoking riots and culturally attuned to the far right.

The reputation and meaning of an institution cannot be static, no matter how stable or stuck it is. As peoples’ consciousness moves on, how they regard such institutions will change, often dramatically. The institutions can either move with this changing field of consciousness or get left behind as yet another anachronism, unable to do real work.[2] From inside an institution this can feel grossly unfair: one minute you are doing a great and necessary job and without anything changing in the way you do your job, the next minute you are betraying society. This is supremely important to recognise: in this sense, consciousness and the recognition of it is everything.

Short cuts

There is a theme, in Gregory Bateson and some people who extended his work, about short-cuts. In medicine, for example, there are interventions that get quickly to a desired outcome and there are interventions that allow the bodymind to rebuild itself. Pain relief is the classic short-cut. This can be fatal, of course, if it masks something that needs to be paid attention to, that being the biological function of pain. Without wishing anyone to be in pain for a second longer than necessary, there is also pain relief that allows deeper healing. There is a huge storm of controversy raging at present about the use of anti-depressants and for how many people they create more problems than they solve.

A forest is not a garden. In a garden the space is to some extent manicured and artificial: pests are suppressed, plants replaced when they die back, bushes pruned and grass mowed. In a forest the natural ecosystem sorts itself out. The plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, insects, etc. all play subtle roles in stabilising the environment and servicing each other’s niches. The work of a gardener is never finished, whereas a forest will do its forest things with no intervention at all. There is of course a continuum of gardening approaches from almost complete laissez-faire to obsessive control. Which sort of garden do you like and why?

It turns out that almost every intervention that agricultural farmers make is a short-cut. Ploughing, fertilising, irrigating, spraying etc. are all interventions to give the outcomes the farmers want without the underlying ecosystem being able to do its stuff. The result is that the required inputs become greater and greater: more ploughing, more weedkiller, more fertiliser, more pesticide, more irrigation. And the degradation of the ecosystem results in soil loss, water runoff, fertilisers leaching into rivers, animal diseases, etc. Ask yourself how many of these absolutely standard agricultural interventions you recognise as short-cuts.

The symbolic life of an organisation fits into these same patterns. How many HR interventions have you seen to change the culture, to modify behaviours, to improve perceived efficiency? How many PR interventions have you seen to change the public’s perception of an organisation or to limit the damage done by an adverse event? They are almost without exception short-cuts, “designed” to get the desired outcome without letting the system produce it from its own resources and its own complexity. They follow the same path of degrading the ecosystemic life of the organisation and ultimately of the symbolic life that depends on it.

One of my favourite consultancy stories is of some mature engineering workers from the London Underground on a workshop to improve the levels of their collaboration across functions. One of these gentlemen when questioned said “Look, this is the fourth time I have been collaborated and if I don’t go along with it I will lose my job”. He was not wrong. The corporate HR force in the background belonged to Bechtel at the time.

Design approaches

We wrote in a recent blog about asymmetric design. If a gardener does not want to intervene too strongly in his garden, is there an equivalent approach? Remember that if the gardener takes a short-cut she will likely add to her future workload, for ever.

We could go to one of my heroes, Prince Charles’ favourite architect, Christopher Alexander. One of Alexander’s rules of thumb is to keep 10% of a budget to one side, for use after the building has been occupied. A new building affects the people who work in it and their working practices. That is both an opportunity for good design and a pitfall if the working practices are not understood. Even with a brilliant and well-informed architect, there will be unexpected outcomes. The forest doesn’t grow the same way each time it regenerates: there is no one way. So, when a building is occupied and in operation, there is work to do and observation needed to understand the new shape of the work landscape and how the building needs to change to accommodate and enhance it. Hence the remaining budget and the importance of seeing this as a crowning glory of success and not as a failing of the initial design.

Alexander has another example of the same asymmetric approach. In developing low cost housing in various parts of the world, standardisation of components has a major role to play in bringing costs down. But unlike the highly prescribed housing of your typical UK high rise flats or the communist workers’ housing of East Berlin, Alexander produced a template approach to low cost housing that allowed the future residents to adapt their dwelling in many idiosyncratic ways to their own needs and desires. The result is both individual and community sense of ownership and fit.

There’s a story about Henry Ford and the regulation of water quality. The desired outcome is tolerably clean water and the standard bureaucratic approach is to specify and legislate the necessary water quality and then inspect. There is a different approach which is simply to require that waste discharge pipes are upstream of water intake pipes, so that people suffer their own waste before anyone else does. There is a design principle in this that can seriously cut down the need for expensive interventions.

Try a financial example. It seems that the corruption of Wall Street (and other) banks partly consists of multiple hypothecation. Really. Say you have an asset, maybe a Treasury bond. And you can lend it to you customer for a fee to use as security in some other transaction. But if you keep all your assets in a general pool then you can easily lend the same asset to many clients, even though if any of them needed to call on the security only one of them could have it. The regulator is unable to say how multiple this hypothecation is but apparently the London Whale involved infinite hypothecation, something surely invented by Douglas Adams.

Now, as applied to Bitcoin holdings, it seems that the multiple hypothecation of Bitcoin assets is the major factor in the decline of the price of Bitcoin. In reality, the number of Bitcoins in circulation has been artificially magnified so that their price declines. This is clearly unfair to people who really own their Bitcoins privately and who are not diluting their value in the same way. It really ought to be possible to devise a Bitcoin mechanism where only the people indulging in multiple hypothecation suffered the decline in value, just like the waste outfall upstream of the intake.

Symbol dilution and consciousness

Let’s take this one step further. We are all very aware of brands that rely on former glory to sell increasingly poor products.[3] The symbols of an organisation and a brand are effectively milked in an exploitative way. This can merge into morally deplorable action: oil companies subverting the science of climate change and food and beverage companies subverting the science of nutrition. Often this amounts to predatory delay: cashing in while you can.

I am sure that the folks at Coca-Cola think that their brand is really worth however many billions they put it in their accounts as. But if they are undermining the health of their customers and undermining the people who would otherwise advise those customers to stay away, then the chance of consciousness catching up at some point is about 100%. In the end the tide swung against tobacco, and more than 1000 financial institutions worldwide have now divested their holding of shares in big oil. How can it be otherwise in the end?

Cynical HR, cynical PR, strategies involving predatory delay — in fact most capitalistic excesses such as regulatory capture ­– all these will get overtaken by advancing general consciousness of the way the world works. There was a surge in consciousness following the crash of 2008 that gradually ebbed away. The coming crash will be broader, involve more asset classes, have less-obvious villains. It will be more apparent that the system is broken and needs reinventing not mending. Once people don’t want anything to do with the cynicism and predation, the supremacy of the customer with reassert itself.

The big oil case is instructive. Some frighteningly large percentage of the value of stocks and shares worldwide consists of big oil companies. In turn the value of those stocks and shares depends on the value of their oil reserves in the ground. Everyone knows that the oil already discovered cannot all be burnt without totally wrecking the planet. So that oil in the ground is not (all) an asset because it cannot (all) be accessed. Something hugely valuable now (like Coca-Cola’s brand) will not be valuable at some near future point. All that is missing is the timing of the transition. Divestment of oil shares indicates people jumping off the sinking ship and concentrates share ownership in more exploitative hands, until the whole thing blows. We now have the phrase toxic assets well established in the lexicon.

Put this way, once a company and its symbols are on the wrong side of the line, they can hardly help defending their assets in a way that is fundamentally dishonest and damaging. To promote their products they have to swallow known harms and spin smoking (or whatever) in whatever way they can. But this becomes an existential crisis. A street drug dealer sells debilitation and disease but doesn’t pretend otherwise. Legitimate trades have to lie and deceive. The old supermarket war cry of “we only sell what our customers want to buy” is neither acceptable nor viable.

I was challenged by a colleague for how I would communicate with supermarket store managers. Off the cuff I said I would get them to mingle with their customers at the checkout, to look at the customers’ visible health and what they were buying. And to get the managers to come up with strategies that would change that association, even at the margins. Of course, they might need to twist the arm of Public Health England to amend their dietary advice as part of a working strategy! I didn’t articulate it that way at the time, but this would be to challenge a supermarket chain to step back across the line to make their symbols honest and less likely to be overtaken by evolving consciousness.

[1] Mindfulness, on the other hand, has captured the contemporary imagination and turns up in everything from housework to relationships… Having said that, consciousness seems to be pretty constant in its interest level. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=%2Fm%2F04csl7,%2Fm%2F01q73

[2] Failure to notice and move with changing consciousness can make you unfit to serve, particularly in roles that demand a long view to accommodate future changes. Supreme court judges come to mind.

[3] Dare we mention Brexit and the unlikely notion that the current state of the UK will be able to negotiate terms that rely in part on the memory of Empire? Former glory, indeed.