Dictating

In order to unstick a stuck problem peace -fully, the people involved in the problem have to talk with and listen to one another. But there is more than one way of talking and listening, and some ways hardly help at all.

I observed such hardly helpful communication in the problem-ridden context of Paraguay. Paraguayans seem to enjoy telling awful and bizarre stories about their country. The first evening I was there, in 2001, a presidential candidate boasted to me about the suicidal War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Paraguay battled its three much larger neighbors, Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, and lost half of its people. Men had to be imported to re-grow the population. "We are," he concluded with a flourish, "a fierce and crazy people."

Their recent history has been similarly awful. General Alfredo Stroessner was elected president in 1954 and stayed in power for thirty-five years through siege, harassment , murder, political purges, and bogus elections . His overthrow in 1989 released a wave of excitement and optimism . Then resignation set in again. Many of the country's institutions are corrupt. A Paraguayan CEO told me that the majority of his law school class did not study because they had purchased their degrees in advance. At the time, he was fighting a trumped-up fraud case in the Supreme Court in which his opponent had paid off several of the judges. A journalist told me that the president of Paraguay drives a stolen car and that the president of Uruguay had his watch stolen off the lectern when he gave a speech to the Paraguayan Congress. "An optimist in Paraguay," someone quipped, "is someone who says, 'Things are good! We are better off today than we will be tomorrow!'"

I went to Paraguay to work with forty-five of the country's most open -minded and public-spirited politicians , activists, businesspeople, generals, judges, journalists , intellectuals, peasants, and students. They had agreed to talk together, but I was puzzled by how slowly our work progressed. Most of them seemed to be exceptionally suspicious, cynical , and pessimistic, and hesitant about speaking openly. They deferred to me even on questions for which I had no good answers. Conversations went in circles; understandings came unraveled; commitments were not kept.

I spoke about these patterns with Milda Rivarola, a member of the team and a respected historian . "You have to understand the impact that the dictatorship had on people," she explained. "We needed approvals and permissions for everything. No criticism of the government was allowed. The only way to have influence was to be a part of the government, the military, or the governing party. And by and large people acquiesced. Stroessner had a network of spies and informers (many of them had volunteered!) who set people against each other. Just like in other totalitarian and post-totalitarian societies , social fragmentation was and is severe. What you are seeing in this group the low levels of trust and initiativeare the after-effects of this repression ."

The director of our project was a civic leader named Jorge Talavera, who had worked for decades in adult education and leadership development. He was sanguine about the situation and patient with our slow progress. "Paraguayans aren't used to managing themselves ," he explained. "They are always asking 'Who's the boss?' People say that President Wasmosy, our first civilian president after Stroessner, used to assert his authority by asking, 'Who's the penis here?' In this project we are asking people to value their own experiences and to have confidence that they can influence the future. So we are asking them to make a fundamental shift in their way of being. This will take time."

In a dictatorship, the dictator does not listen, and the people are afraid to talk. The results are pessimism and cynicism; lack of self-confidence and self-management ; hesitation to speak up and stand up; and painfully slow innovation.

Now that I have seen this pattern of behavior in Paraguay, where it was painted in bright colors, I am able to recognize it elsewhere. Today I see it in most organizations, where bosses give orders and employees are afraid to say what they think. Just compare what people say in meetings with their bosses to what they say outside the meetings, in the HERD (a corporate colloquialism for hallways, elevators, restrooms, and while driving). A long-suffering civil servant in Mexico told me a joke about a government minister who asks one of his officials if crocodiles can fly. "No minister," the official replies. The minister then says, "I think that they can." "You're right, minister," the official quickly replies, "but very close to the ground." This joke could be told about the bosses and subordinates in most of the organizations I have worked with.

The root of not listening is knowing. If I already know the truth, why do I need to listen to you? Perhaps out of politeness or guile I should pretend to listen, but what I really need to do is to tell you what I know, and if you don't listen, to tell you again, more forcefully . All authoritarian systems rest on the assumption that the boss can and does know the one right answer.

I had never noticed the parallel between political dictatorship and organizational authoritarianism because authoritarianism was the water I had always swum in. When I joined Pacific Gas and Electric, it never occurred to me to question the strict reporting lines. Until I attended the Management Committee's retreat, I had assumed that the bosses at the top were smarter and so rightfully at the top. Furthermore, I had always had elite jobs, close to the bosses, and the degenerative consequences of authoritarianism are hard to see from the top. It was only later, when as a consultant I interviewed both bosses and their employees, that I realized how much more oppressive these systems look and feel from below.

Another reason I had not seen the parallel between dictatorship and authoritarianism is that I had always assumed that dictators had to brutalize people in order to shut them up. Then I read an essay by Tina Rosenberg about Chile under General Augusto Pinochet:

Chileans had never been submissive and sycophantic, but it was not hard to learn. If a man lost his job for refusing to attend a Pinochet rally, the next month his neighbor went to the rally and even brought along a banner to wave. If silence was required to keep a job, stay out of jail and maybe even receive a bag of toys at Christmas, Chileans were silent.

But there were in Chile, as there are everywhere, always, people who are not easily silenced. For such people, other means of intimidation were employed: torture and death. Pinochet used fear surgically, applying it in just the degree necessary for the task at hand, taking care not to rouse from their sleep those Chileans who preferred not to know what was going on...

A shrewd dictator does not crush everyone. How much better to simply seduce: provide people with quiet streets , imported autos, or the luxury of having someone else do their thinking for them, in exchange for their silence and subservience. Dictatorship did not just coerce Chileans; it also corrupted them.

Organizational authoritarianism also produces silence and subservience, through coercion, seduction, and corruption. I once worked on an innovation project with the management team of a successful Fortune 100 communications company. Its founder and CEO was a brilliant man, and a bully. His very highly paid senior managers admired and feared him. They spent a lot of their time looking over their shoulders, worrying about how to keep him happy and panicking when they heard that he wasn't. They would second-guess themselves, skirting areas where they knew he had strong views, start down one path , and then suddenly change course if he frowned on it.

This is the corporate version of the apartheid syndrome: management of a complex system by force and fear. Business writer Harriet Rubin once said to me that it surprised her that people were willing to accept being free citizens on the street but serfs at work.

The communications company's managers replicated the CEO's style with their subordinates. And I was shocked to realize how easily I slipped into doing the same, ratcheting up my cagy politicking and authoritative expertness, which only served to reinforce the patterns of behavior that were holding back the innovation that our project was intended to stimulate. The company continued to be successful only because its business system was highly centralized and because the CEO continued to dictate excellent , systemwide strategies. One employee, who had worked with these senior managers for decades, said, "They have no energy; they have turned into turnips. They don't want to do anything. They like having excuses. They are all making big salaries and feeling no pain. They have the perfect cover for anything: 'Our bosses won't let us do anything.' There was a time when they had spirit, but they have been emasculated. Their spirit has been sucked out of them."

This description of the communications company managers echoes Rosenberg's description of the Chileans. I have noticed that many of the people in many of the systems I have worked withincluding the presidents , CEOs, and generalssay these same words: "The people above me won't let me do anything." This is a symptom of the pervasiveness and internalization of authoritarianism.

The authoritarian approach to solving problems is that the boss, with his smart expert advisors and consultants , dictates solutions. For simple problems, this works wonderfully. Unilateral decision making is fine for a police officer directing traffic at a busy intersection. This problem has low dynamic complexity (cause and effect in the intersection traffic are nearby, immediate, and obvious), low generative complexity (traffic rules from the past apply perfectly well), and low social complexity (all the drivers share the same objective of smoothly running traffic and willingly defer to the officer's authority).

But the authoritarian approach does not work for solving complex problems. Consider a global computer company trying to sell into Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, just after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The CEO cannot successfully dictate the company's sales strategy. The development of the computer market is affected by decisions that are being taken far away (in Silicon Valley) and long ago (by Communist industrial planners), and so the sales "problem" has high dynamic complexity that can only be grasped as a wholefor which the CEO needs to think together with the company's front-line staff who are directly in touch with different parts of the system. The problem situation, in the midst of both political and technological revolutions, also has high generative complexity, which means that there is not one right answer that can be created in advance; the situation can only be addressed by working with it as it unfolds. And the problem has high social complexity because it can only be solved with the participation of the people who are part of the problem: global and local staff, customers, suppliers, government officials, and so on.

Unfortunately, the authoritarian approach, with its severe limitations, is the foundation of practically all private and public sector strategic planning. Strategists direct, and others follow. Kees van der Heijden, my former boss at Shell, noted that most of the literature on strategic planning

falls into "the rationalist school," which codifies thought and action separately. The tacit underlying assumption is that there is one best solution, and the job of the strategist is to get as close to this as possible, within the limited resources available. The strategist thinks on behalf of the entire organization, and works out an optimal strategy as a process of searching for maximum utility among a number of options. Having decided the optimal way forward, the question of action (known as the "implementation issue") is addressed. ... The (somewhat unlikely ?) assumptions underlying the rationalist school are: predictability, no interference from outside; clear intentions; implementation follows formulation (thought independent of action); full understanding throughout the organization; and reasonable people will do reasonable things.

This emperor-has-no-clothes description of the rationalist school accurately summarizes the approach I learned at Berkeley and applied at PG&E. My training at Berkeley was to use pure reason to come up with the one right answer, as I did on Canadian and Brazilian energy policies. My job as a PG&E planner was to come up with the optimal strategy for the company, convince my boss and the Management Committee to approve it, and then somebody else would implement it.

The authoritarian pattern of talking is that bosses and experts talk downdictating and tellingand everyone else talks cautiously. This is the closed way. To solve complex problems, we have to find a more open way.