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|In: Cognitive Enterprise|Last Updated:

I always liked Mr. Spock.

This was in spite of his profoundly stupid ongoing arguments with Dr. McCoy about the value of emotions in daily life.

[If you’re lost, you never watched Star Trek. I can’t help you. You’ll just have to pick it up from context.]

It’s our emotions that cause us to want. Decisions are about people getting what they want. If Mr. Spock has no emotions he doesn’t want. No wants, no decisions.

And not only people: A flatworm in a T-maze has to decide whether to turn left or right. It does so based on whether, in past trials, it encountered food or electric shocks in one or the other direction. It “wants” food and also wants to not experience another electric shock, and it makes its decision based on those wants, although, as we haven’t yet achieved telepathic rapport with planaria, of necessity we’re using “want” fairly loosely.

One could, were one an argumentative sort, counter that we haven’t yet achieved telepathic rapport with each other, either. We each might know what we want, and, for that matter, that we want, but we can only infer the same about each other.

When Scott Lee and I wrote The Cognitive Enterprise we wrestled with the challenge of building organizations that act with purpose — that make similar or complementary sorts of decisions no matter where in the organization each decision is made.

Or, avoiding the passive voice, no matter who in the organization makes each decision.

One of the challenges: Comparing humans to planarians, while we’re undoubtedly more sophisticated than flatworms in understanding what we want, we’re alike in the fundamentals, like wanting food when we’re hungry and wanting to avoid pain when something might hurt.

Organizations? Not so much, and in fact the more we stare at an organization the more our heads hurt trying to infer what “want” might mean.

The naïve among us might imagine that, narrowing our focus to for-profit businesses, what they want is more profits.

That view lasts only as long as it takes to recognize that business decisions are made by individuals and committees.

Imagine you’re one of those individuals. Now imagine you’re in the organizational equivalent of a T-maze. Turn left and the business makes more profits, but, it does so in part by defenestrating you. Turn right and profits diminish but you survive the experience and get a bonus.

Multiply by the number of decision-makers and you realize, there’s no reason to think the aggregate of all business decisions will be to increase profits. It will be to maximize the personal survival rates and compensation of those in a position to influence them.

But we’re straying from our focus, which isn’t the nature of the decisions made by an organization. Our focus is on whether an organization can and does “want” the way humans (and flatworms) want.

The answer, I think, is a resounding no. Humans and all other biological decision-makers want in the sense of an emotional need. Emotions are what set the targets for our decisions, which is why Mr. Spock’s emphasis on logic was misplaced: Without emotion, we can’t want anything and neither could he.

Logic is how some people (and most Vulcans) sometimes go about making decisions that get us what we want.

So ignore phrases like “corporate greed” and similarly meaningless formulations. There’s nothing about how an organization is constructed that would let us imagine it experiences anything that corresponds to greed or any other emotion.

The closest counterparts are its governance and its culture.

Its governance is the set of rules, guidelines, and organizational sub-structures … committees and councils … that its board of directors and management establish to encourage consistency in an organization’s decision-making.

Governance starts by assigning the authority to make decisions, typically includes prescriptions for how those authorities are supposed to make them, and somewhere along the way also defines what want means: The organization might want more profits, mission achievement, or the recently demoted increase in shareholder value.

In a cognitive enterprise, as you know if you read the book, culture is the new governance. Culture is how we do things around here. It’s the sum, substance, and consequence of the assumptions — conscious and unconscious — and other mental habits shared throughout the organization.

A cognitive enterprise — one where culture is the primary form of governance — might not want in the human sense.

But it has at least a chance of acting as if it did.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Can you win?

When I was growing up (or at least older), many conversations fell into the category of Battle o’ Wits, although in the cruel light of accurate remembrance, Battle o’ Half-wits was probably the more accurate description.

Which is why, asked which threesome was funniest, my kindred spirits and I would unhesitatingly choose the Marx Brothers over the Three Stooges. Given a choice between becoming the next Groucho and the next Chuck Morris, we’d have chosen Groucho in a heartbeat.

But … Marx and Morris had this in common: It was always, for them and for us, about winning. Groucho’s “The next time I see you, remind not to talk to you,” was, psychologically, exactly equivalent to Chuck breaking an opponent’s nose.

What brought this to mind was an interchange in the Comments to last week’s column in response to my having said, “Bigots who aren’t violent and don’t incite violence aren’t dangerous. They’re merely annoying.”

The commenter’s points are that (1) verbal bigotry can do direct damage to its targets and (2) it can encourage discrimination even when it falls well short of incitement.

They’re points that deserve attention.

And so …

First and foremost, before anything else, in case this wasn’t entirely clear last week, the workplace has no place for any expression of bigotry of any kind. If you think this represents a triumph of political correctness, go ahead and think it.

But if you want to gripe about it … in the workplace … all you’re doing is announcing that you want to say something bigoted and would if you were allowed to. Which isn’t very different from saying the bigoted thing in the first place, except that you’re making us guess who you’re bigoted against.

This includes, by the way, bias against White Supremacists, a group I personally find detestable, but whose perspectives are just as legitimate and important to its devotees as my own are to me. In the workplace I’m just as responsible for keeping my views about them to myself as they are for keeping their views to themselves about … well, statistically speaking, most of this planet’s inhabitants.

Outside the workplace is another matter, where, faced with someone spouting off about one or more of the usual targets, we each have to decide how to deal with the situation.

If I’m the target, I maintain now what I maintained last week: Non-violent bigotry, and I include all bigotry that doesn’t incite, is a mere annoyance. It has to be, because if I give it any more significance than that, I’m giving the bigot power over me.

The bigot wins, and as a Groucho-ist in good standing, that would be just plain unacceptable.

That leads to the next, more uncomfortable question: Does the bigot have to lose the encounter, or is their not winning a satisfactory outcome?

Here’s where it gets complicated.

If it’s just the two of us, a Groucho-grade put-down might be personally satisfying, but it isn’t likely to cause the bigot to break down and beg me not to nail him with another one.

Quite the opposite, all I’d have accomplished is to escalate the situation. Worse, the less-verbally-skilled my opponent might be, the more likely escalation to physical violence would be, and I have nothing in common with Chuck Norris.

If the two of us have an audience, I have to weigh the possibility that humiliating my opponent could win the audience over to my side against the equally likely possibility that they’re already on my opponent’s side, at which point escalation would likely be quite unfortunate.

Here’s where I am, personally. Your mileage may vary:

Neither you nor I will persuade a single white supremacist to change his or her worldview, any more than you’ll persuade a dedicated Waterfall-oriented project manager that really, anyone who hasn’t gone full DevOps is a dinosaur who should be put out to pasture … a herbivorous dinosaur, that is, because as any Jurassic Park-goer knows, Tyrannosaurs and velociraptors don’t remain pasture-bound.

Persuasion won’t get us anywhere. Lecturing won’t get us anywhere. Neither will self-righteous indignation. What will?

Opinion: The Blues Brothers and Blazing Saddles did more to combat bigotry than all the speeches in the world. They did so by ridiculing the whole system of beliefs and its vocal proponents, making the whole business socially unacceptable.

Ridicule. We need more ridicule.

Groucho, where are you when we need you?

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