Doctrine (from Latin: doctrina, meaning "teaching, instruction") is a codification of beliefs or a body of teachings or instructions, taught principles or positions, as the essence of teachings in a given branch of knowledge or in a belief system. The etymological Greek analogue is "catechism". Wikipedia.
As the rate of change accelerates, doctrine moves from being a useful codification to a damaging constraint. Those who practice it and are dependent on it for their authority cling to it in the hope that they can keep the world the way they know it best. Doctrine, unchallenged, gives us wilful blindness, sclerotic leadership and disengaged, dissatisfied teams whose lived experience becomes ever more removed from the doctrine espoused by senior management the younger and further away they are from them.
When it comes to making the far-reaching decisions needed by businesses to adapt to the changes we face, the reality is that the Friedman Doctrine still applies:
The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman, which holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.
Wikipedia
Although there have been skirmishes and half-hearted attempts to include more socially acceptable elements, the Friedman culture runs deep because, for shareholders, it works. When shareholders are so far removed, geographically, socially, politically and experientially from those who suffer the collateral damage of the doctrine, there is little appetite to change it, and it remains at the heart of business theory and strategy. It is not going to change anytime soon, and our attempts to do so are likely to remain painful and futile.
Organisations are comfortable promoting the myth that people are their biggest asset and referring to people as “colleagues," “family, " “community,” and other expressions of benign parenthood. It looks good in annual reports, presentations at Davos, and in the search for the feudal accolades of the honours system. It feels very different for those in the disposable ranks of Tata Steel, the NHS, The Post Office, or just about all technology companies as they shake off the excesses they indulged in during the pandemic and the cheap money it provided.
We need to consider alternative doctrines, more in keeping with the changes underway, that reflect the opportunities for us as individuals that are appearing because of them and which will scaffold the changes we need to make. This, in turn, requires a different way of framing the relationship.
Confrontation rarely works. It may make us feel better, but in a world measured in money, we do not have the resources, and those with the money are not moved to any appreciable extent by it. The same goes for negotiation, for much the same reason. When it comes to the deeply ingrained Friedman Doctrine, people are not an organisation's greatest asset; they rank, as Dilbert pointed out, just after carbon paper.
We cannot determine the character and nature of a system within itself, and efforts to do so will only generate confusion and disorder.
John Boyd.
Or, put more simply, we cannot read the label from inside the bottle.
Business doctrine, shaped over decades and reinforced by education, is that our careers will be fairly linear, even if a little wiggly, and determined by our qualifications, loyalty to the company (and maybe professional body), and how hard we work.
I think it warrants challenging. The correlation between progress, hard work and loyalty has already been comprehensively shredded, and the link with formal qualifications is in the process of being substantially dismantled by AI.
At the same time, the nature of most work, prioritising as it does productivity, efficiency and short-term performance, means that most of our abilities and potential get checked in at the moment we arrive at the office or log on. I’ve written before about the Procrustean nature of work - where we either get stretched or have parts of us lopped off in order to fit into a tightly specified role.
Procrustes: a villainous son of Poseidon in Greek mythology who forces travellers to fit into his bed by stretching their bodies or cutting off their legs.
And this, at a time when the impact of the changes we face will require, maybe as never before, the very human qualities of imagination, insight, curiosity and a love of beauty that are so absent in today’s workplace.
Reimagining our relationship with work requires a different framework and the space to play with alternate theories, from which we can shape individual strategies to recover our individual agency and overcome the degree to which the conventional workplace domesticates us.
Over the coming weeks, I’m going to look at different ways we might think about our relationship with work. None will be “right” - the days of generic solutions are far behind us. My intent is to stimulate and provoke in search of discussion and a sharing of ideas and experience.
In parallel, over at Outside the Walls, I’ll be looking at the emerging territory of work, which is becoming very different to the map we are given.
This Week - The Diplomat
Our workplace feels in transition from something we have thought of as somehow collegiate to something altogether more competitive, not just with each other but with technology- something more calculating and transactional.
Neither hostile nor friendly, it is a space of competing interests. Perhaps it is a place of diplomacy, something "tactful and adroit, skilled in negotiation or intercourse of any kind."
The art of diplomacy, and its more assertive sibling, war, have changed significantly in recent decades, from “might is right” and “trench warfare” to something altogether more subtle, strategic, and shaping. Altogether more mobile, selective and systemic as large countries have had to come to terms with the influence and power of smaller ones with resources, access, and other qualities that give them assymetric influence.
Businesses have not moved at the same pace. Our travel and healthcare sectors resemble trench warfare, and technology companies throw people into harm's way with the indifference of First World War generals. There is something feudal in our structures, comprising an aristocracy of shareholders, a nobility of CEOs, a squierarchy of senior managers, and increasing numbers of serfs and vassals. It feels distinctly unready for the seismic changes that technology, climate, and demographics will bring about, and those parts of us not required by the productivity paradigm become vital.
As algorithmic thinking and processes continue to lessen differentiation and increase homogenisation in our service sector, the need for those who can provide critical and original thinking, who can inspire and motivate, and spot the patterns and gaps that technology cannot, seems certain to increase and will be required where the action is, not in a staff role somewhere. In a world where human relationships will trump big data when it comes to brand engagement, they will command a premium, be less amenable to command and control and expect to have independence and authority to do their job.
They will, in other words, share many of the skills we expect of diplomats:
Informational skills - analysis, awareness, adaptability
Relational skills - communication, empathy, conflict resolution
Operational skills - critical thinking, problem solving, leadership
Self sufficiency - risk taking, accountability, commitment
When many of the management and professional routines that characterise current business models can be automated, those who can navigate and smooth the interstitial spaces within and between organisations and clients will become increasingly important.
How might we prepare to fill those spaces rather than find ourselves in the expanding ocean of the undifferentiated gig economy?
I think we have to get closer to the action. It is easy and convenient to delegate decision-making to processes, heuristics and algorithms, but they are based on an average of what we have learned from the past. They are valuable if we are dealing with risks - things to which we can assign probabilities, but much less so when we are dealing with uncertainty - where we can’t.
We have to get up close and personal with uncertainty - to sense it out, get a feel for it, and learn its language, rather like diplomats on new postings.
That is why I’m attracted to the idea of a transitional doctrine - not as truth or constraint but as an enabling challenge and catalyst, a means of seeing the label from the outside.
"We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side."
Perhaps, most of all, it’s about our relationship with ourselves and our sense of agency. Diplomats sit between competing interests as catalysts and are not cowed or disabled by working with those who have more notional power. I think we should learn from that.
Our relationship with those we work for is a continuous negotiation, and we are not helpless. Our human qualities will become more important as the cracks generated by AI become clear and the blind optimism of those chasing the money is displaced by inconvenient realities as the Friedman doctrine slowly (or maybe not so slowly) gives way to something more human.
The diplomat is just one of the qualities that the changes we are experiencing require of us. Over the next few weeks, I’m turning my attention to the generalist, the philosopher and the poet.
“Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.”
Octavio Paz, The Monkey Grammarian
Friedman was a prisoner of his time. It was when Edward Shils wrote about Center and Periphery. Both saw the world as homogeneous where the leaders of organizations where the leaders of society. They represented all of us. They believe that what was was true on the inside was true on the outside. As a result, business became fixated on preserving the interior structure of the organization. This became even more pronounced in the 1980s when Jack Welch turned GE inward as a generator of financial assets.
As an organizational consultant beginning my work in the mid-1990s, I saw many "leaders" sticking their heads in the ground so that they didn't have to deal with the reality that the world had already become heterogeneous. It ultimately brought the end of my practice after the Recession because these leaders thought the world was going to turn inward or in the language of the day, back to normal. We are still not and neve will be back to normal.
Without a real understanding of context, meaning the exterior world of the business, leaders are lost and seek sychophantic subordinates to maintain the illusion of normalcy. In the competitive landscape of today, people will leave and go where they have confidence that the company's leadership is living in the real world. Instead of following the money, we should follow the people.