Something that has puzzled me for years, decades, is that big organizations, full of the smartest people, still act like they're run by idiots. I wrote about the first part of my theory on this a couple of weeks ago.
The very short version comes down to an extension or reformulation of the SNAFU Principle proposed by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. Their version was "communication is only possible between equals," but I proposed, on the basis of information theory, that the channels of communication between people are increasingly noisy and inefficient in proportion to the perceived differences in status.
The effect of that is that information flowing up and down a hierarchy is increasingly degraded so that the people at the top are working with information that is at best incomplete and often flat-out wrong.
Related: Why Governments and Other Big Organizations Act Like Idiots
This in itself is a pretty good explanation: the bosses don't actually know what's happening, so they make bad decisions.
But it's really not enough to explain some of the really face-slappingly dumb things that big organizations, especially government organizations, but big companies and big charities as well, end up doing.
That's where a second issue comes in. Again, it's something that has been described by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull in their book "The Peter Principle": "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence."
As with the SNAFU Principle, it's a good first attempt, but it needs some further expansion. In any real hierarchy, the people involved have many different kinds of competence. One person is a marvelous typist, another understands the ins and outs of tax law, and a third one knows how to get a potential customer to "yes" and get him to sign the contract.
But a neglected area of competence that is often ignored is competence at rising in a hierarchy.
I propose that the Peter Principle is better restated as "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of their incompetence at rising in a hierarchy."
Now, this shows up all over: people who get promoted to manage others while not having been really good at their previous job, and people like brilliant engineers who are promoted to management, where they fail — and fail miserably because it makes them miserable. Smart companies see this and send the engineers back to being engineers and send craftsmen "back to the tools." And of course, it also happens that people get promoted into positions where they have the skills and natural inclinations that suit them to the new position, so they succeed and rise further.
One of the places that this becomes most glaring is in government. In a private company, someone who actually actively fails at a job is let go, one way or another. (At least in this country. Famously, in Japan, people who fail are given a "window seat," where they maintain their salary and title but have no responsibilities. This approach is also used in the New York City Public Schools, where teachers who have been sufficiently and obviously failures are given special assignments with no classes and no teaching responsibilities.)
I think the most glaring example of this in recent political history, maybe in all of American political history, is the recent vice president and presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.
I'm sure she would argue, but when I look at her record, it's hard to find much to her credit. But she moved from deputy district attorney in Alameda County, to assistant district attorney in San Francisco, and up through district attorney and then attorney general. That led to her election to the Senate, followed by her abortive campaign for president, her selection as Biden's vice president, and then her elevation to presidential candidate.
To my eyes, and I think a lot of others, her rise was not on the basis of major accomplishments, but in her willingness to change her stated positions whenever it became advantageous. Was Joe Biden a racist? Hey, it was an election. Was she tough on marijuana? Hey, she smoked marijuana.
I'm sure readers can come up with their own lists — now, be nice — but it really seems like a repeated pattern. There are many people whose most visible skill is the skill of rising in a hierarchy, and they sometimes far outpace their competence in any other area.
Call it the Climber Competence Paradox: people who rise to their level of incompetence at climbing the ladder, while far outpacing their competence in any other skills needed for a role.
Add to that the extended SNAFU Principle, and you have a situation in which incompetent people unsuited for their role are operating on unreliable information.
But now let's look at the new Trump administration, especially by comparison to Donald Trump's first term. This time, Trump purposely brought in people from outside the hierarchy — a senator whose previous claim to fame had been as a writer of a memoir; a television commentator who had extensive military experience, but as a soldier in the field, not in the Pentagon; an entrepreneur who became the richest man in the world by refusing to do anything in the normal fashion.
The eventual result remains to be seen, but so far, it looks like Trump, by instinct and by recognizing the problems inside the traditional hierarchy, has placed himself outside the hierarchy. It's not an easy position to be in, but if you think things aren't working as they stand, any solution will have to mean change.
