Unity #6: Instincts

RATHER FIRST IN A VILLAGE THAN SECOND IN ROME

“We are told that, as he was crossing the Alps and passing by a barbarian village which had very few inhabitants and was a sorry sight, his companions asked with mirth and laughter, “Can it be that here too there are ambitious strifes for office, struggles for primacy, and mutual jealousies of powerful men?” Whereupon Caesar said to them in all seriousness, “I would rather be first here than second at Rome.””

— from Plutrach’s Parallel Lives, first century AD.

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THE TRUE DEFECTOR

“The true defector (as distinguished from the hostile agent in defector’s guise) is likely to have a history of opposition to authority. The sad fact is that defectors who left their homelands because they could not get along with their immediate or ultimate superiors are also likely to rebel against authorities in new environments (a fact which usually plays an important part in re-defection). Therefore defectors are likely to be found of the orderly-obstinate, the greedy and demanding, the schizoids, and the exceptions.”

— from the declassified CIA Manual Counterintelligence Interrogation, 1963

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TSR’S SERIES ON UNITY, ISSUE #6: INSTINCTS

For our series on Unity, there were three factors we set out to explore —

1. The factors promoting unity and disunity,
2. Who it’s possible to get into unity with, and,
3. The mechanics of unity.

With Structural Pressures, Unit Cohesion, Chaotic Evil, Selection Procedures, and Moral Authority in the books, we’ve covered almost all of what we need to cover about in the first two categories — the macro factors promoting unity and disunity, and who it’s possible to get into unity with.

For the remainder of this series, we can explore more tactical considerations on establishing and keeping unity up… well, after we cover one last key factor— Instincts.

All of us humans have slightly different default instincts about how to behave in a situation. In a new and unfamiliar situation, some people are more passive and some are more active. We have different amounts of risk tolerance, and different levels of worry and anxiety around risks. We have different default levels of trust and caution towards other people. We’re all a little more optimistic or a little more pessimistic in a variety of matters, a little more prone to being organized or disorganized, and a whole host of things.

Most of these default behaviors and instincts surface themselves in the course of a person’s life — certainly, someone who completes a difficult course of study, say in mathematics, has demonstrated some degree of persistence and enjoyment in engaging with abstract ideas.

But there are a few core instincts that often don’t surface for long periods of time, that mean the difference between a thriving team and a team shaken by internal strife and conflict.

A complete investigation of these default instincts would surely fill multiple volumes of books — it could be 10,000 pages long and would still be incomplete. But there are some patterns that emerge from history, and we should at least trace the lines of these if we would like to build thriving teams.

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RIVALROUS INSTINCTS

Often, personality traits are so deeply embedded in people that they become their default instincts and inclinations in any given situation. This can be adjusted somewhat with training and culture, but not entirely.

And just like how a higher VO2 Max makes a better endurance athlete, certain default instincts and inclinations — all else being equal — make for better or worse team members.

Julius Caesar’s famous remark is often paraphrased,

“I’d rather be first in a village than second in Rome.”

This seems significant — certainly, we can’t build a team with too many people who have that inclination or… well, you know what happened with Caesar et al.

For a long time, I didn’t have a word to describe that inclination of Caesar’s… and yet, it’s something we should be on the lookout for when recruiting and building teams.

Mathematics furnishes some useful terms for us —

The Cardinal Numbers run: One, two, three…
The Ordinal Numbers run: First, second, third…

Caesar’s remark, to my reckoning, is one of the most perfect examples of Ordinal Inclinations in history. Rome had so much wealth, so many treasures, so much art, so much glory, so many brilliant people to discuss interesting issues with, so many more infinitely varied and advanced ways to actualize your potential…

… and Caesar says, in dead seriousness, that he would rather be the first man in a deeply impoverished village in the mountains.

We explored this concept thoroughly at TSR back in the Dubious Battle series, in the issue Ordinal and Cardinal Inclinations. That’s part of the Machina compilation now and we don’t need to go into all the research and science about it, but it’s worth touching briefly on here.

Studies have consistently shown that the majority of people — but thankfully not all of us — are ordinalists. We traced a long line of studies, math, and historical examples in the full issue in Machina; here, we’ll just note that the majority of people prefer relative superiority (ordinalism) to their peers, than absolute well-being and mastery (cardinalism).

There’s been plenty of surveys run with questions along the lines of, “Would you rather make $50,000 in a city where the average income of $25,000, or would you rather make $100,000 in a city where the average income was $250,000 — if all the prices of goods and services were the same?”

Most people, sadly, chose the former — to be poorer so long as they’re “better off” than their neighbors.

The Ordinal/Cardinal divide is probably a spectrum — Caesar’s remark, if you take it at face value, is the most extreme version. He says he’d rather be in charge of an impoverished village in a sorry state than be the second man in the greatest city in the known world at the time.

Hardcore ordinalists wind up spending a lot of time fighting for relative power — including, as actually happened in the Roman Republic, doing everything possible to stymie rivals from making genuinely good and beneficial achievements. The thinking goes, “if I can’t get credit for it, I don’t want it to happen.” Ordinalism.

A highly-ordinal team will have lots of infighting, lots of failure to support initiatives and endeavors that one doesn’t get direct credit for, and less concern with growing the organization as a whole.

When I’ve brought this up in dialog, I’ve occasionally been asked, “But Sebastian, you’re incredibly competitive. You don’t get any pangs of wanting to do better than your friends?”

And my answer has always been, truly — “No, that’s insane to me. I always want to do as well as possible in my life, and I want my friends to do as well as possible.” I’ve — quite literally — never understood the emotions where someone feels troubled or feels jealousy that one of their friends is succeeding. I want my friends to succeed as much as possible. After all, they’re my friends. Why wouldn’t I want them to succeed? The whole thing seems like madness to me.

But apparently, it’s quite common madness — from my understanding and explorations, both on a large scale and in individual conversations, apparently a majority of people feel some degree of jealousy and pain when their friends succeed at large scale. Not rivals — not neutrals — but friends.

Again, I think this is madness — but that’s rather besides the point. Given the way status works, an organization can probably safely handle more than just one ordinalist as long as each is highly competent and, ideally, they’re in different domains. It’s difficult for a Chief Marketing Officer to fully compare themselves to a Chief Technology Officer; if both were inclined to ordinalism, it might not be the end of the world.

Nevertheless, teams do best when individual team members want to max out their individual performance and the team’s performance — where they celebrate all wins and look to get the best out of themselves, rather than be excessively concerned with what others are doing.

And in addition to all the downsides of internal rivalry and non-cooperation from ordinalists, they also tend to get depressed and feel malaise if someone on the team in a similar role is performing better than them — often becoming a net drag and negative on the team’s success.

Competitiveness is often a healthy trait that predicts high-performance — if it’s pointed in the right direction; that is, towards getting the most possible out of oneself and for the team.

But when competitiveness is sought and displayed in the form of internally rivalrous behavior with colleagues, it becomes very destructive to unity.

People with deeply-embedded inclinations towards ordinalist-type behavior often enter into great unhappiness and malaise if someone nearby is performing better than them, which is really the opposite of what you want in a high-functioning team. Cardinalists concerned with maximizing their gains and the team’s gains are infinitely easier and more pleasant to work with, and make better members of elite teams.

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SYSTEMS DEVISED FOR CATEGORIZING

Similar to rivalrous instincts, there’s a whole host of default inclinations and instincts that predict better or worse team performance.

The challenge is that all categorization systems are automatically simplifications of the complexity of the world.

This calls for a lot of study and exploration of different systems, and gradually getting a more thorough and nuanced understanding of human nature.

But that, too, is challenging — there’s a vastly larger market for non-controversial and watered-down versions of understanding, that often miss the downsides of human nature. Books like Malcolm Gladwell’s will always be more popular than direct explorations of the problems of human nature.

If Gladwell-esque writing doesn’t have the answers for us, where should we look for answers?

I think the best answer here is internal operations manuals from highly effective organizations engaging in high-stakes endeavors. Almost everything written for external consumption attempts to either have popular appeal, or at least to manage image and public relations — often at the expense of truth.

Ops manuals written for internal usage tend to be concerned more with effectiveness and less with public relations; they tend to be concerned with truth than image.

You often have to dig quite a bit to find good operations manuals, but with the advent of the internet, many internal documents have been released decades later by relevant organizations — and they often furnish more more understanding than whatever the bestseller-du-jour on human nature is selling you.

To that end, one of the documents I found with a very practical — though often dark — understanding of human nature is the declassified 1963 manual, Counterintelligence Interrogation.

An internal-only CIA operations manual classified for three decades after its writing, but made available publicly in the 1990s, it shows a keen understanding of human nature.

The manual was written for interrogators in high-stakes situations, dealing with defectors and double-agents and such. It very tersely explores correlated behaviors in human nature.

Before getting into those, the anonymous author shows a self-awareness of the flaws of all categorization systems —

“The number of systems devised for categorizing human beings is large, and most of them are of dubious validity. Various categorical schemes are outlined in treatises on interrogation. The two typologies most frequently advocated are psychologic-emotional and geographic-cultural. Those who urge the former argue that the basic emotional-psychological patterns do not vary significantly with time, place, or culture. The latter school maintains the existence of a national character and sub-national categories, and interrogation guides based on this principle recommend approaches tailored to geographical cultures.

It is plainly true that the interrogation source cannot be understood in a vacuum, isolated from social context. It is equally true that some of the most glaring blunders in interrogation (and other operational processes ) have resulted from ignoring the source’s background. Moreover, emotional-psychological schematizations sometimes present atypical extremes rather than the kinds of people commonly encountered by interrogators. Such typologies also cause disagreement even among professional psychiatrists and psychologists. Interrogators who adopt them and who note in an interrogatee one or two of the characteristics of “Type A” may mistakenly assign the source to Category A and assume the remaining traits.

[…]

The ideal solution would be to avoid all categorizing. Basically, all schemes for labelling people are wrong per se; applied arbitrarily, they always produce distortions. Every interrogator knows that a real understanding of the individual is worth far more than a thorough knowledge of this or that pigeon-hole to which he has been consigned. And for interrogation purposes the ways in which he differs from the abstract type may be more significant than the ways in which he conforms.

[…]

With all of these reservations, then, and with the further observation that those who find these psychological-emotional categories pragmatically valuable should use them and those who do not should let them alone, the following nine types are described. The categories are based upon the fact that a person’s past is always reflected, however dimly, in his present ethics and behavior. Old dogs can learn new tricks but not new ways of learning them. People do change, but what appears to be new behavior or a new psychological pattern is usually just a variant on the old theme.“

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CLASSIFICATION OF PERSONALITY, INSTINCTS, AND RELATED BEHAVIOR

Counterintelligent Interrogation does something rather remarkable that you’d never see in a modern bestseller. Note the first of their psychological-emotional classifications —

“1. The orderly-obstinate character. People in this category are characteristically frugal, orderly, and cold; frequently they are quite intellectual. They are not impulsive in behavior. They tend to think things through logically and to act deliberately. They often reach decisions very slowly. They are far less likely to make real personal sacrifices for a cause than to use them as a temporary means of obtaining a permanent personal gain. They are secretive and disinclined to confide in anyone else their plans and plots, which frequently concern the overthrow of some form of authority. They are also stubborn, although they may pretend cooperation or even believe that they are cooperating. They nurse grudges.

The orderly-obstinate character considers himself superior to other people. Sometimes his sense of superiority is interwoven with a kind of magical thinking that includes all sorts of superstitions and fantasies about controlling his environment. He may even have a system of morality that is all his own. He sometimes gratifies his feeling of secret superiority by provoking unjust treatment. He also tries, characteristically, to keep open a line of escape by avoiding any real commitment to anything. He is — and always has been — intensely concerned about his personal possessions. He is usually a tightwad who saves everything, has a strong sense of propriety, and is punctual and tidy. His money and other possessions have for him a personalized quality; they are parts of himself. He often carries around shiny coins, keepsakes, a bunch of keys, and other objects having for himself an actual or symbolic value.

Usually the orderly-obstinate character has a history of active rebellion in childhood, of persistently doing the exact opposite of what he is told to do. As an adult he may have learned to cloak his resistance and become passive-aggressive, but his determination to get his own way is unaltered. He has merely learned how to proceed indirectly if necessary. The profound fear and hatred of authority, persisting since childhood, is often well-concealed in adulthood. For example, such a person may confess easily and quickly under interrogation, even to acts that he did not commit, in order to throw the interrogator off the trail of a significant discovery (or, more rarely, because of feelings of guilt).

The interrogator who is dealing with an orderly-obstinate character should avoid the role of hostile authority. Threats and threatening gestures, table-pounding, pouncing on evasions or lies, and any similarly authoritative tactics will only awaken in such a subject his old anxieties and habitual defense mechanisms. To attain rapport, the interrogator should be friendly. It will probably prove rewarding if the room and the interrogator look exceptionally neat. Orderly-obstinate interrogatees often collect coins or other objects as a hobby; time spent in sharing their interests may thaw some of the ice. Establishing rapport is extremely important when dealing with this type.”

Isn’t that fascinating?

Frugality, orderliness, punctuality, and intellectualism — these all seem like good attributes we’d want with team members.

But if combined with that obstinate characteristic — like “sometimes gratifying feelings of secret superiority by provoking unjust treatment” — this is very bad; this we do not want on a high-functioning, high-unity team.

Then there’s a number of interesting correlations — passive aggressiveness makes sense in the context, but carrying a lot of keys or shiny lucky objects like coins? That’s downright surprising.

Let’s look at another category before deeper analysis —

“6. The character wrecked by success is closely related to the guilt-ridden character. This sort of person cannot tolerate success and goes through life failing at critical points. He is often accident-prone. Typically he has a long history of being promising and of almost completing a significant assignment or achievement but not bringing it off. The character who cannot stand success enjoys his ambitions as long as they remain fantasies but somehow ensures that they will not be fulfilled in reality. Acquaintances often feel that his success is just around the corner, but something always intervenes. In actuality this something is a sense of guilt, of the kind described above. The person who avoids success has a conscience which forbids the pleasures of accomplishment and recognition. He frequently projects his guilt feelings and feels that all of his failures were someone else’s fault. He may have a strong need to suffer and may seek danger or injury.

As interrogatees these people who “cannot stand prosperity” pose no special problem unless the interrogation impinges upon their feelings of guilt or the reasons for their past failures. Then subjective distortions, not facts, will result. The successful interrogator will isolate this area of unreliability. “

Again — is this not fascinating?

Do you know anyone like this type of person?

A couple people come to mind immediately when I read that description…

It’s worth remembering the context — an American interrogator would be assigned to debrief and interrogate a supposed, say, Russian KGB defector. Are they bringing genuine information, or disinformation? Have they genuinely become hostile to the Soviet Union or are they a double-agent?

With stakes like those, the Counterintelligence manual can’t dance around the dark aspects of human nature — and the corresponding behaviors and motivations of people.

While the stakes will often be much lower for our own life, we can see that taking on a team member who has elements of obstinacy as deeply embedded instincts, or who has that heavily guilt-wracked overbearing conscience that causes them to want to fail on some level — clearly, these attributes are not good building blocks for high-functioning unity on a team.

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THE BIG FIVE PERSONALITY TRAITS

There’s nearly an infinite number of ways to understand human behavior, all of them incomplete or flawed to some degree.

The “Big Five personality traits” model is probably the most commonly accepted in the social sciences right now — it includes Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

Wikipedia —

“Openness to experience (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience. Openness reflects the degree of intellectual curiosity, creativity and a preference for novelty and variety a person has. It is also described as the extent to which a person is imaginative or independent and depicts a personal preference for a variety of activities over a strict routine. High openness can be perceived as unpredictability or lack of focus, and more likely to engage in risky behaviour or drug taking. Also, individuals that have high openness tend to lean towards being artists or writers in regards to being creative and appreciate the significance of the intellectual and artistic pursuits. Moreover, individuals with high openness are said to pursue self-actualization specifically by seeking out intense, euphoric experiences. Conversely, those with low openness seek to gain fulfillment through perseverance and are characterized as pragmatic and data-driven — sometimes even perceived to be dogmatic and closed-minded. Some disagreement remains about how to interpret and contextualize the openness factor.

Conscientiousness (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to be organized and dependable, show self-discipline, act dutifully, aim for achievement, and prefer planned rather than spontaneous behavior. High conscientiousness is often perceived as stubbornness and obsession. Low conscientiousness is associated with flexibility and spontaneity, but can also appear as sloppiness and lack of reliability.

Extraversion (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, assertiveness, sociability and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others, and talkativeness. High extraversion is often perceived as attention-seeking, and domineering. Low extraversion causes a reserved, reflective personality, which can be perceived as aloof or self-absorbed. Extroverted people tend to be more dominant in social settings, opposed to introverted people who may act more shy and reserved in this setting.

Agreeableness (friendly/compassionate vs. challenging/detached). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others. It is also a measure of one’s trusting and helpful nature, and whether a person is generally well-tempered or not. High agreeableness is often seen as naive or submissive. Low agreeableness personalities are often competitive or challenging people, which can be seen as argumentativeness or untrustworthiness.

Neuroticism (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). Neuroticism identifies certain people who are more prone to psychological stress. The tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, and vulnerability. Neuroticism also refers to the degree of emotional stability and impulse control and is sometimes referred to by its low pole, “emotional stability”. A high stability manifests itself as a stable and calm personality, but can be seen as uninspiring and unconcerned. A low stability expresses as a reactive and excitable personality, often very dynamic individuals, but they can be perceived as unstable or insecure. It has also been researched that individuals with higher levels of tested neuroticism, tend to have worse psychological well being.”

Of all the Big Five, I think the only trait that’s universally better in high-unity teams is conscientiousness — there’s plenty of research that shows conscientiousness predicts just about every positive life, team, and performance outcome — and low conscientiousness predicts just about every negative life, team, and performance outcome.

The tradeoffs between openness, extraversion, and agreeableness make sense immediately — low openness might surface as less creativity but more consistency, being more outgoing or reserved has tradeoffs and teams can benefit from both, and higher agreeableness can make for easier cooperation but less challenging of difficult ideas.

Perhaps the one that’s been most surprising to me is that neuroticism — something you’d think you’d always want low amounts of — can actually be productive. People who are more neurotic, within reason, are often prompted more often to transform their environment to remove negative stimuli. A lot of terrific artists and inventors score higher on neuroticism.

But low conscientiousness seems to be just a straight bad thing in team contexts. The other four attributes have tradeoffs around them, but higher conscientiousness offers so much more consistent upside in the modern world than low conscientiousness that it seems almost always worth seeking out when doing selection.

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GUIDANCE

This is a rabbit hole that goes very deep indeed — certainly, we could cover 10,000 pages on this topic and not exhaust the subject matter.

But three points of guidance are in order.

The first — realize that everyone has default inclinations and instincts, and that those are very hard, sometimes impossible, to change.

It’s infinitely easier to build an elite high-unity team if you’re starting with people with instincts and inclinations towards productive teamwork. That means, certainly, avoiding or at least being very careful around people with rivalrous instincts, people who have inclinations towards obstinancy or being wrecked-by-success, and low conscientiousness.

The second point is taking into consideration what default inclinations and instincts are ideal for a given role on a team, defining that, and designing your Selection Procedures to filter for those. A team that’s entirely full of high-agreeableness people will have less surface area conflicts, but also are less likely to challenge each other’s ideas. Whether and to what degree you want agreeableness depends on the role and mission of the team.

The third point is taking this seriously as an area of study if you’re going to be involved in any leadership and selection roles. We’ve touched very lightly on some ways of seeing human nature, but there’s infinite possible ways to understand this domain, all of them limited and flawed to some degree.

This suggests that you should both study the subject matter gradually over a number of years, looking to build your knowledge and check your assumptions — and as a shortcut to faster results, you should look at what elite organizations are using for selection.

In my social circle, the Kolbe A Assessment has become rather popular — it costs $50 per assessment, but I found it to be very insightful when Kai and I both took it. (We were both very high in “fact-finder” on the Kolbe A score, but we were exactly flipped on the other three attributes — which seems like a good thing on an executive team, all else being equal.)

Kolbe A is a relatively “friendly” assessment — there’s no right or wrong answers on it; it just looks at what your default inclinations to problemsolving and challenges are. Different A-score mixes are better for different roles.

Some friends of ours have had good success having a workplace psychologist help understand what the ideal Kolbe A score would be for any job applicant, testing all applicants coming in on it, and hiring people whose default inclinations are well-suited to enjoying and thriving in the work they do.

While it was never designed explicitly for assessment, some top organizations like Bridgewater have applicants take a Myers-Briggs test as part of applying for a role. Some sales organizations have used the DISC assessment when assessing candidates.

The rabbit hole goes deep on this, but it’s worth gradually putting in some hours of understanding the different systems, learning about what successful organizations use for their selection procedures, and understanding what type of people would succeed in your roles.

Training, culture, and communication can greatly shape behavior, but deeply-embedded instincts and inclinations are notoriously hard to change — sometimes impossible. Recognizing that, gradually studying and understanding human nature, and really carefully understanding what the ideal instincts and inclinations of a team member to perform well in a role is one of the key factors in building a high-unity team.

As with everything else in Unity, it’s a lot of work — and most people won’t do it. But again, Unity leads to being able to do the seemingly impossible, and is such a beautiful, productive, and joyful thing to behold when it unfolds at the highest level.

Should it be surprising that we need to understand human nature to build high-unity teams? Should it be surprising that human nature is complex and takes a considerable amount of time to gain an understanding of?

No?

Then study human nature — if you want the joy and thriving that comes from when a team gets into great harmony and unity.

Until next time, yours,

Sebastian Marshall
Editor, TheStrategicReview.net