The metaphor of the organization as body
…and why we should liberate ourselves from a stagnant practice of subordination
Metaphors are not just the stuff of poetry. They are important for thoughts. Our very common sense usually relies on them so we should study them carefully. One metaphor in particular that I think has produced tremendous damage in human society is the human organization as a body with a head that makes decisions and body parts that follow.
This idea is typically applied to large organizations like countries and companies — it is encoded in the word “chief” used in CEO, or “head” when used in positions like “Head of Product”, or even in “President”. These are common-place examples, but the confusion goes deep in the culture. It is present in classics of social theory such as Leviathan by Hobbes (whose cover is depicted above) and Rousseau’s The Social Contract. And yet, this way of thinking should be avoided because it tends to produce subservience, to elevate a few people into positions of power they do not deserve and often exploit, and generally suppresses creativity and initiative. I am convinced that re-conceptualizing organizations as constellations of humans, equivalent in their potential, but differing in their passions and preferences, is a much better way to live and work together in society and in our private work.
A few practical implications:
- If you find yourself in a role that is typically classed as “operational”, don’t let this lull you into putting your creativity and initiative to sleep. On the contrary, resist the culture with its muzzles. You have a mind just like any other person. You see things which the distant deciders can’t see. This gives you a different vantage point from which to generate different and probably valuable ideas. Take initiative.
- And if you find yourself in a role connected to the “head” of an organization, don’t fall into patterns of work that cut others out from understanding the context and the vision. Get closer to the actual work, the actual parts of the operation that are the heart for the organization. There is untapped value in integrating the initiative and insights of others. It will also give you better ideas if you experience the gritty hands-on work directly, rather than to speculate from the distance.
Below I explain in greater detail the problem of seeing an organization like a body, how it is counterproductive, and expand more about how businesses and political organizations should work to develop new models that view human organizations as a network of capable equals with diverse talents, rather than a body commanded by a head.
The organization as a body and its state of decline
Broadly, people imagine that organizations are like a human body. They attribute to different functions to different parts of an organization. For example, they imagine that the eyes are for seeing, and similarly may stretch the metaphor to suggest that news organizations exist to see what is going on and transmit it to the rest of the body. Further, they imagine that the same way that a human body has a head and a brain to make all the decisions, that a few people or maybe just one person should act as the brain, entrusted to process the information, integrate all the options, and choose wisely. Typically, this is the role of the President, or in the lingo of former US President George W. Bush, the “decider”.
The results of the metaphor are everywhere. For example, notice how many organizations have “Heads of” something or other, as in “Head of Product”, or “Head of Design”. But not only those titles, even the title of CEO, or “Chief Executive Officer”, derives from the metaphor of the head. The dictionary tells us that chief is derived from the latin caput for head, passed on to the French in chef and finally was adopted into the English as chief. So the idea is that those who are associated with the metaphorical head have faculties based in decision making, reflection, and integration of information.
And conversely, most people who are not chiefs or heads are instead, by implication, some parts of the body — whether the corporate body in the case of a private company, or the body politic in the case of a country or nation. The general category for these people in companies is “worker”, but it gets expressed with different titles depending on the job type. For instance, the “operator” is conceived as a worker, or mere body. The same is true of people whose job is related to a specific action: such as a truck driver, a plumber, a construction worker. In all these cases, the decision as to the routes to drive, the design of the water pipes, the architecture of a building — all these get decided by those who are associated with the head. The workers merely carry out their instruction, like a long disperse chain-gang swinging their hammers. And many people see this way of organizing humans and think that things are as they should be, that the brilliant are deservingly elevated and those who are mere muscle are in their place. This mapping corresponds to the old class split between white-collar and blue-collar. At heart is an idea of whether your value is in thinking or in manual labor alone. The framework cannot understand that perhaps the same people can be good at both things.
So nothing could be further from the truth. I have written elsewhere (click below to read) why I don’t personally use the title CEO.
But it is worth reiterating how dis-empowering it is to be conceived as mere muscle in an organization where other people are thought of as the brainpower entrusted to make decisions and direct efforts. This metaphor itself is a tool that helps subordinate the great majority to the whims of the minority. The result is a sleepy society in decline. The talents of many people languish on the vine, and a group of elitist incompetents make decisions to benefit themselves while assuming the pretense of far-seeing competence. Yet most pretenses end up exposed by their own failure eventually. And yet, the society is usually adept enough at covering up the disasters and keeping the same old non-sensical model going for another generation.
Far from the era of progress and excellence that this industrial model of social organization was expected to have, we are living through a period of general stagnation. True, there are a few stand-out areas, especially in software and information technology where there has been significant innovation. And yet, people exaggerate the success of the information technology industry, and fail to recognize that most other fundamental elements in society have seen declines rather than advances.
Don’t take my word for it. See what tech billionaire Peter Thiel has to say about it in this discussion. Simply put, an iPhone in your hand is not comparable to the technological progress of railroads, or of aviation, or indoor plumbing, or antibiotics, or radios and telephones of the previous era. Far from general improvement in the level of social development, in the ability for society to set ambitious goals, and in the general progress of society — we are caught in stagnation.
Perhaps one reason for the stagnation is simply that industries such as aviation, such as transportation with cars, consumer products and so on have reached a state of maturity. As such, they are no longer as interested in forging ahead and creating space for themselves. Rather, they are incumbents. As incumbents, they are presided by executives who concentrate decision power. Instead of benefiting from the wave of transformative innovation and change, established industries and companies benefit by keeping things fundamentally unchanged, perhaps improving gradually enough to keep their position compared to the others. Given that they are interested in maximizing their gains, they decide to profit and extract from their position rather than reinvest to build a better future. They simply direct all their employees to sit in their place and do what they are told, like the cells of a body, shut off any ideas that would lead to changes, and simply keep rinsing and repeating day in and day out. This is the culture of stagnation brought about by suppressing the thinking of others. As anyone who has ever had to call their telephone company knows — interacting with these incumbent companies shows just how little they care.
So far from an economy and society of excellence brought about by the wonderful luminaries who sit in board rooms and monopolize power — we instead have a culture in decline where most people are told to do menial tasks while the organized companies of the day are content to retain market share and phone it in. Meanwhile the tragedy is that so many people who could have otherwise made an impact are cooled-off, their years wasted in some holding pattern.
Breaking through — a culture of initiative
I have argued how a culture of obedience may have been behind both the progress of the 20th century and the stagnation of the 21st century. In both cases, people accepted the organization as body metaphor. However, whereas society in the 19th century had ample space for new technologies and innovations, society in the 21st century is crowded out with incumbents who resist change. Oil companies, for example, hold tremendous political influence and resist the shift towards renewables. But certainly society needs changes and ever more urgently. I believe that one important key is to shift our mental model of working with other people, both leaders, peers, and people who are less experienced. Rather than seek to follow orders and hand them down, we need to exercise our own judgment and critical thinking. We need to learn to question leaders who are morally bankrupt or who are incapable, and we need to learn how to cultivate initiative, questions, and new ideas.
This produces a very different mental model of a human organization. Rather than a body with a head and body parts, we have a collection of other people with perceptions, judgments, ideas, and an ability to get their hands dirty. This constellation of individuals means that we can parallel-process an idea across many people — like a neural network — rather than centralize it into one individual and dictate an answer. It also means that we can all pitch-in and help out with the manual work, rather than consolidate this type of work into a class of rough hands. Instead of aloof decision drinking champagne in smoky rooms, and a group of people who get their hands dirty but make no decisions — we can aspire to be a collective of multi-talented people, each of which makes judgments, and can pitch-in together to raise the community barn.
For a small company, this culture of initiative is the very lifeblood. A small company’s success will depend on doing certain things right and avoiding some key mistakes. To the extent the culture is able to cultivate a way of work that maximizes good things happening and minimizes problems, the company is more likely to survive and be successful. So at this scale, a culture of initiative is perfectly adaptive and is an easy place to encourage a different way of work. It is when companies grow larger, when survival is less in question, that standard ways of work start creeping in as companies hire “experts” from the outside. These standards threaten the culture of initiative and tend to produce stagnation everywhere they go. That is why companies should resist the so-called expertise of those who would build functional silos, who would want to create a culture of order-taking, and where initiative and questioning would be suppressed.
Conclusion
The observation that an organization is made of people, each with cognitive capacities, may seem like an obvious and minor point. And yet it is not. It is of monumental significance. This means that there is no head and simple body parts. Everyone has a head, everyone has perceptions and judgments and a brain. If they are not bringing it to bear in the organization’s initiatives, creativity and future, this is a tremendous waste that deprives the organization and society of many ideas and talents, but also robs those people of an opportunity to grow and develop their faculties and participate in an organization that takes them seriously as people. This observation is a reason why vertical and static hierarchies in organizations should be countered. It is also a reason why rigid bureaucracies and the whole idea of representative government, far from the state of the art in government, should be actively questioned and purposefully de-emphasized towards models that allow for more dynamic rotation of leadership responsibilities, more direct democracy, and less trust in representatives who have shown a tendency towards corruption.
What’s next
In this piece I have generally avoided talking about the political organization of the United States. However, the critique of the body politic as a key exemplar of the body metaphor calls to be written. I will develop those ideas in a separate piece and link here to explain why political representation is so prone to corruption, and how we can try to reinvigorate politics with a culture of initiative rather than stagnation and capture.
