"She was a military officer in a large organization. If you’ve ever worked at a company or an organization that operates at that kind of global scale… it’s very hard to get permission to do anything, because you need to go up three or four levels in the hierarchy above your boss to get permission"
Can confirm. I have worked in the military and large corporations with draconian policies.
Any organization of that size tends to be bereaucratic in order to handle people at scale and therefore is resistant to change and out-of-the-box thinking even when it would greatly benefit the organization. Individuals and first-line managers are rarely empowered to make changes without several levels of approval.
Only after a new idea or process has been proven to be more effective will it be acknowledged as an option that the organization should consider for wider use throughout the organization. This is essentially part of the reason why larger organizations have more difficulty being innovative compared to smaller, more nimble organizations.
To put it shorter, with permission, liability stands with the organization; with forgiveness, liability stands with the individual. At worst, one or two levels up the hierarchy too.
This is why I love to be a consultant in a large corporation, because I can talk with a lot of people without the feeling that I have to obey the hierarchy. When I figure out the best common goal I can follow the hierarchy to get approval.
As a consultant I found that you don't even have to follow the hierarchy. You know you won't be at a company forever so just ignore those who are likely to obstruct and skip the hierarchy.
And once you have backing from higher up there is little lower levels can do to obstruct your invoices.
But my experience is from Sweden so maybe it only works in Scandinavia.
I think the difference is that you’d then be an outside consultant, meaning they are consulting you to get your professional recommendations on what they should do to serve their interests best. So inherently they already want your advice and are willing to put it in action.
Whereas an employee of any kind is not usually hired for their outside the box recommendations, but only to put into action decisions already made for them. Thus when one has an innovative idea, the company feels it is in their best interest to doubt your idea and conservatively err on the side of caution, since it’s not what they hired you for and they can’t trust your competence in innovating like that.
In other words, employees are hired to keep the status quo and consultants are hired to decide what the status quo should be for the company’s best interests.
At least, this is the best explanation I can come up with based on what people have said and mingling philosophy. I’ve never worked at a huge corporation so I could be all wrong.
Consultants are often also just hired to work on projects. Big organisations often have issues finding competent people to work on projects, and those they have are often overworked already. In such cases consultants are very useful. At the end of the projects, they are often let off. Of course, this presents other issues, and capable consultants are often kept around for far longer than the project they initially got onboard for.
The risk is being just one more step removed from the solution. It's hard for a consultant to punch though political problems because they are outsiders. So you can suggest a solution but the guy who needs to implement it still has to get permission from his boss's boss.
The guys I find I “fight” the most is often from OPS and in-house SW developers.
A lot of fancy terminology, web frameworks and looks beautiful but don’t get the real sh*t done that make the organization more effective or give them more money (compared to all the time used).
It is this way for good reason. When you let middle management change standard operating procedures you often find that they break systems that exist for audit purposes.
More often though, it's just the apocryphal story of the monkeys and the ladder that informs the organisation's behavior:
> This human behavior of not challenging assumptions reminds me of an experiment psychologists performed years ago. They started with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, they hung a banana on a string with a set of stairs placed under it. Before long, a monkey went to the stairs and started to climb towards the banana. As soon as he started up the stairs, the psychologists sprayed all of the other monkeys with ice cold water. After a while, another monkey made an attempt to obtain the banana. As soon as his foot touched the stairs, all of the other monkeys were sprayed with ice cold water. It's wasn't long before all of the other monkeys would physically prevent any monkey from climbing the stairs. Now, the psychologists shut off the cold water, removed one monkey from the cage and replaced it with a new one. The new monkey saw the banana and started to climb the stairs. To his surprise and horror, all of the other monkeys attacked him. After another attempt and attack, he discovered that if he tried to climb the stairs, he would be assaulted. Next they removed another of the original five monkeys and replaced it with a new one. The newcomer went to the stairs and was attacked. The previous newcomer took part in the punishment with enthusiasm! Likewise, they replaced a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth. Every time the newest monkey tried to climb the stairs, he was attacked. The monkeys had no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs or why they were beating any monkey that tried. After replacing all the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys had ever been sprayed with cold water. Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approached the stairs to try for the banana. Why not? Because as far as they know that's the way it's always been around here
I think the monkeys are being perfectly reasonable here. If it wasn’t for the experiment being deviously constructed in such a way as to mess with the monkeys for our own human amusement, it would be basically a fact of the environment that climbing that ladder is inherently dangerous. This is approximately the same way that indigenous cultures manage to “remember” which of the plants in their native environment are toxic and which are nutritious, and in which way to prepare them, even if none of them know all of this information cognitively. It might have been centuries since someone died from eating a particular poisonous mushroom, but if not eating that mushroom is how “it’s always been around here”, you can go centuries without anyone dying from eating that mushroom.
In other words, we simians can be stupid, but we aren’t that stupid.
It becomes stupid when circumstances change and the once-adaptive, now ritualized behavior pattern is not re-examined. Indeed, even suggesting that may have become a taboo in the society. If there exists a meme (in the original sense of the word) that a certain mushroom kills you or makes you very sick, it’s fairly easy to amend that meme once someone figures out that after boiling it twice and throwing away the water it’s actually harmless, delicious and nutrient-rich. On the other hand, if eating the mushroom is abomination in the eyes of Lord, your God, that meme may prove to be considerably more mutation-resistant.
Well, some people maintain a centuries-old religious tradition of not eating shellfish or pork under any circumstances, and aside from them missing out on shellfish and pork, it's not a big deal.
Where things get really interesting is when we honestly can't tell or don't remember which cultural traditions are still relevant and why. Cultural evolution is often smarter than we are:
> And then there’s manioc. This is a tuber native to the Americas. It contains cyanide, and if you eat too much of it, you get cyanide poisoning. From Henrich:
> > In the Americas, where manioc was first domesticated, societies who have relied on bitter varieties for thousands of years show no evidence of chronic cyanide poisoning. In the Colombian Amazon, for example, indigenous Tukanoans use a multistep, multiday processing technique that involves scraping, grating, and finally washing the roots in order to separate the fiber, starch, and liquid. Once separated, the liquid is boiled into a beverage, but the fiber and starch must then sit for two more days, when they can then be baked and eaten. Figure 7.1 shows the percentage of cyanogenic content in the liquid, fiber, and starch remaining through each major step in this processing.
> > Such processing techniques are crucial for living in many parts of Amazonia, where other crops are difficult to cultivate and often unproductive. However, despite their utility, one person would have a difficult time figuring out the detoxification technique. Consider the situation from the point of view of the children and adolescents who are learning the techniques. They would have rarely, if ever, seen anyone get cyanide poisoning, because the techniques work. And even if the processing was ineffective, such that cases of goiter (swollen necks) or neurological problems were common, it would still be hard to recognize the link between these chronic health issues and eating manioc. Most people would have eaten manioc for years with no apparent effects. Low cyanogenic varieties are typically boiled, but boiling alone is insufficient to prevent the chronic conditions for bitter varieties. Boiling does, however, remove or reduce the bitter taste and prevent the acute symptoms (e.g., diarrhea, stomach troubles, and vomiting).
> > So, if one did the common-sense thing and just boiled the high-cyanogenic manioc, everything would seem fine. Since the multistep task of processing manioc is long, arduous, and boring, sticking with it is certainly non-intuitive. Tukanoan women spend about a quarter of their day detoxifying manioc, so this is a costly technique in the short term. Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She’d find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning.
> > Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque—an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology.
> > Wait. Maybe I’m wrong about manioc processing. Perhaps it’s actually rather easy to individually figure out the detoxification steps for manioc? Fortunately, history has provided a test case. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Portuguese transported manioc from South America to West Africa for the first time. They did not, however, transport the age-old indigenous processing protocols or the underlying commitment to using those techniques. Because it is easy to plant and provides high yields in infertile or drought-prone areas, manioc spread rapidly across Africa and became a staple food for many populations. The processing techniques, however, were not readily or consistently regenerated. Even after hundreds of years, chronic cyanide poisoning remains a serious health problem in Africa. Detailed studies of local preparation techniques show that high levels of cyanide often remain and that many individuals carry low levels of cyanide in their blood or urine, which haven’t yet manifested in symptoms. In some places, there’s no processing at all, or sometimes the processing actually increases the cyanogenic content. On the positive side, some African groups have in fact culturally evolved effective processing techniques, but these techniques are spreading only slowly.
So yes, while it's cute to point out that you can easily gaslight a population of monkeys into behaving in a way that makes no sense, the mechanism that leads them to behave that way has an adaptive value that we misunderestimate at our peril.
Can confirm. I have worked in the military and large corporations with draconian policies.
Any organization of that size tends to be bereaucratic in order to handle people at scale and therefore is resistant to change and out-of-the-box thinking even when it would greatly benefit the organization. Individuals and first-line managers are rarely empowered to make changes without several levels of approval.
Only after a new idea or process has been proven to be more effective will it be acknowledged as an option that the organization should consider for wider use throughout the organization. This is essentially part of the reason why larger organizations have more difficulty being innovative compared to smaller, more nimble organizations.