The 13 Insanities of Modern Organizations

By Lee Thayer

Some of this book’s readers will (astutely) see some parallels between this book and Thayer’s How Executives Fail. They both identify the kinds of weaknesses in an organization or its managers that will inevitably lead to its demise (or its mediocrity, which amounts to the same thing).

That is inevitable. In his pioneering work of helping CEOs to transform their organizations for high-performance, Dr. Thayer has been developing a successful conceptual framework for understanding organization-making and life-making in general for 60+ years. His mantra for all of those years in his many books, his many consulting assignments here and abroad, and his many, many seminars with CEOs and other top executives, from Australia to Finland, from Greece to China, from Mexico to Canada, and major points in between. Although he started his career as a consultant to the leaders of the Fortune 500, he prefers working with small to medium-sized organizations where, as he says, “it is easier to see the impact being made.” He was more recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who’s Who, to add to his many awards over the years of his illustrious career as a consultant, author, and mentor. To date, he has published twenty-six books on his experiences and his research, and he is known worldwide for his perspective on the human condition, both at work and at home.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796059670

Lee Thayer

Lee Thayer is a scholar and writer known around the world for his many years of research and publications on the human condition. He has taught or lectured at many of the most prestigious universities in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. He has been a Fulbright professor in Finland, a Ford Foundation Fellow at Harvard, and was twice awarded a Danforth Foundation Teacher Award for excellence in his teaching. His background is in music (composing and arranging), the humanities, engineering, and social and clinical psychology. He was one of the founders of the field of communication as a university discipline, and is a Past President of what was at that time the largest association of human communication scholars in the world. He was also the founding editor of the influential journal Communication, which was devoted to pragmatic insights into the human condition by the top thinkers in the world. His early work consisted of 14 books of research on the connection between communication and the human condition. More recently, he has summarized his long life of research into all matters human and social in such books as Communication: A Radically New Approach to Lifes Most Perplexing Problem, two collections of essays, On Communication and Pieces: Toward a Revisioning of Communication/Life. The present Doing Life; A Pragmatist Manifesto is a summary of his innovative perspectives on this subject for past 60 years. There is also his proposed alternative to the reach of biological evolution into the social sciences, Explaining Things: Inventing Ourselves and our Worlds. He lives in Western North Carolina with his artist/wife Kate Thayer. He is also renowned for his current work as a CEO coach of choice.

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Copyright © 2019 by Lee Thayer.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2019914129

ISBN:                Hardcover               978-1-7960-5969-4

                          Softcover                978-1-7960-5968-7

                          eBook                     978-1-7960-5967-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 10/01/2019

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CONTENTS

About the Author & This Book

Introduction

1     How Else?

2     Casting & Miscasting

3     It Isn’t the Leader Who Makes the Organization Successful…

4     Knowing and Telling

5     The Logic of Organizational Insanities

6     What Causes What?

7     What’s On Your Mind?

8     Influence…or Be Influenced

9     Justification/Rationalization

10   The Bureaucracies People Hide In

11   Need to Know

12   Conceiving the Story of Your Own Organization

13   The Most Universal Thinking/Doing Tool There Is

Afterword

About the Author & This Book

Some of this book’s readers will (astutely) see some parallels between this book and Thayer’s How Executives Fail. They both identify the kinds of weaknesses in an organization or its managers that will inevitably lead to its demise (or its mediocrity, which amounts to the same thing).

That is inevitable. In his pioneering work of helping CEOs to transform their organizations for high-performance, Dr. Thayer has been developing a successful conceptual framework for understanding organization-making and life-making in general for 60+ years. His mantra for all of those years in his many books, his many consulting assignments here and abroad, and his many, many seminars with CEOs and other top executives, from Australia to Finland, from Greece to China, from Mexico to Canada, and major points in between. Although he started his career as a consultant to the leaders of the Fortune 500, he prefers working with small to medium-sized organizations where, as he says, it is easier to see the impact being made. He was more recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from Marquis Who’s Who, to add to his many awards over the years of his illustrious career as a consultant, author, and mentor. To date, he has published twenty-six books on his experiences and his research, and he is known worldwide for his perspective on the human condition, both at work and at home.

He likes to think of his legacy as being those rare individuals who asked questions rather than made statements. They are the people who are not merely going to carry on his work, but surpass him. His legacy will be the leaders of the future who have learned from him in all walks of life – including life itself.

Thayer’s comprehensive approach is very unique. Typically, the top executive of a company or an institution would ask Dr. Thayer to help him or her to deal efficaciously with recalcitrant or recurring problems in the organization, or to help them fulfill the dreams they had for the future of their organizations. His extraordinary talents for doing so came from his initial work, which was solving problems in organizations of all types. He became creatively masterful at doing so. From there, it was a logical step to help those qualified top executives transform their organizations from mediocrity to fully-functioning and sustainably high-performance organizations.

What remains unique to Dr. Thayer’s approach is that he did not presume to solve his clients’ problems for them on paper and then depart. He partnered with them to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish, as long as it took. So he rattled their cages – that is, he helped them to see that how they were thinking about what needed thinking about (usually conventional and drawn from the pop culture and the pop psych magic of the day) was not going to get them where they wanted to go. They needed to be able to think about what needed thinking about in such a way that they could get to where they wanted to go. And they needed an organization that was designed and that functioned throughout in a way that provided the competencies needed to get there. And he wanted that to be sustainable. He did not solve their problems for them. He enabled them to own their problems and to deal with them in this unique, unconventional way. They – not he – became the authors of their own organization’s story, and he left them able to do that. He taught them how to do that today…and into every tomorrow. That was his aim.

To pioneer this approach to making great and fully capable organizations, Dr. Thayer was an early bricoleur – a person who solves problems and optimizes performance with the tools and resources at hand. He made his clients and their people into bricoleurs – to be accomplish-minded rather than routine-driven. His view: a process or a habit that is not going to get you where you want to go in life is not a process or a habit you want to harbor.

This book, The Thirteen Insanities of Modern Organizations, comes from his experience in 60+ years of research and collaboration in making fully-functioning (high-performance) organizations led by leaders who were determined to make it happen. There are, he has been reminded, more than thirteen such insanities. Yes, he admitted, he knew that going in. He just thought he would let his readers do the counting…As if knowing exactly how the many insanities identified are actually practiced by modern organizations has helped the people in them to eliminate them. This book reveals why and what to do about them.

Over time, we become indifferent to our insanities (and we all have them) because they are the habitat – the context – we live in at work and in life. They become embedded as our habitual ways of seeing and doing.

In this book, Dr. Thayer wanted to rattle your cage, as he has also done as lecturer or Distinguished Visiting Professor at many world-renowned universities. How could anyone resist such an insightful portrait of the condition of modern American organizations?

Introduction

There is an ancient but very prescient saying about people. It is, simply, thus:

Insanity is doing the same thing in the same way yet expecting a different outcome.

If there is a more cogent observation about humans and their human institutions, it has not yet made its appearance.

There are two problems with folk wisdom such as this:

1. One is that if it has survived over such a long period of time, it was likely wiser than any of the thousands of people who had heard of it. People consume what they understand for their own purposes. What they don’t fully understand, they pass along to others.

2. The other is that we cannot contact the originator and ask what he or she meant by their aphorism. There may not have been a single originator. More likely, it was challenging enough that the people who heard it spoken modified it to fit their understanding of it and what we have is the product of their meddling with that idea.

Folk wisdom is like that. It has been honed or rephrased by many people – maybe hundreds or thousands. It either gets truer by this cascading process, or it simply drops out of use. The sticking power of this particular piece of folk wisdom would suggest that all of those people who have repeated it over all of those years thought it rang true to their perspectives on life. It is of course still undergoing such transformations as people give it (or any other cliché).

What insanity meant to people in distant past generations is not what we modern people might mean by the term. But that’s not the point. The point is that it seems a truism to people even today: we see people doing the same thing in the same way over and over but hoping for a different (probably better) outcome. Spouses may complain that their marriages did not turn out the way they envisioned them. But they both keep on being who they are and being channeled by their habits. In other words, they may try harder to fix what they think is the problem, but that rarely turns out to be who they are. They cannot fix a problem that they created by who they are…by remaining who they are – no matter how hard they try. The desperate need we have to be who we always were is usually far more potent than the need to change – even if we are fully aware of the need to change who we are.

Is this insanity? Yes, it could be seen that way. Einstein said you can’t solve a problem with the same mentality with which you created the problem. Doing what we have always done makes sense – to us. That’s why we typically don’t even see what part of the problem we are. Changing who we are (and thus why we do things the way we do) is what seems insane. That’s the same problem we have with being rational. We assume that rationality is the path to truth. So whatever we pick up on the rationality road is true and other perspectives are by definition faulty. So we don’t change the source of the problem. We fiddle with its symptoms.

But let’s go back to the quotation. We assume the problem is external – out there in the real world. That’s what makes sense to us. That we are the problem doesn’t make sense to us. So we do pretty much the same thing in pretty much the same way and yet we expect a different outcome because that’s who we are. You’ve seen people trying to start a car that can’t start. You’ve seen (or been) one of those people who really get frustrated because the world is not what it is supposed to be…for them.

In the movie The War of the Roses, the two spouses whose last name is Rose try to kill one another in ferocious and creative ways. Is that a sane reaction to their frustration?

####

In one study, the patients in a cardiology ward were told that if they didn’t change their lifestyles, they were sure to die early. Rational creatures that we purport to be, you might think that most of those people would be quick to change their ways. Not so: Most of them seem to have been victims of their habits; 95% of them chose death over any change in their lifestyles.

What this tells us is not that people can’t change. It tells us that older adults have become so used to their routines and habits – their ways of being and doing – that they can’t make even relatively simple changes to their lifestyles – to who they had become over the years. We know that living creatures like us are always in the process of becoming who we are. Our habits may be so small as to be insignificant. They are habits of walking, of talking, of public and private identity, of how we use our forks at the dinner table. Nicotine may be in some small way addictive.

What’s really addictive about smoking is how we imagine others see us. Most of those smokers referred to above started when they were young, when they wanted to be seen as cool. Being seen by others as cool and self-possessed is the addictive part of smoking. It became a part of who they were – of their identity. Women started smoking as a sign of their independence, of their self-assuredness, of their courage to put themselves out there in what was to become fashionable. Being seen as in rather than out of fad or fashion channels more people’s posing and posturing and identity (as if on camera) than does their genes or their consciences or their biological addictions.

So when we contemplate insanity in others, it has more to do with their habits and everyday routines than it does, apparently, with life or death. Women wore corsets, which restricted their breathing and normal digestion and led to health problems. Men wore ties and over-elasticized socks, which impeded blood flow to their brains and their feet. People are not addicted to poor health. They are addicted to what is faddish or fashionable and what has become their modus operandi. People are not addicted to ill health or dying. They are addicted to whatever has become their customary habits and routines – especially to how they imagine they are seen by others, which often becomes their self-image…which must be upheld at any cost or detriment to them personally.

This is easy to see in people we know. It is not so easy to see in ourselves. We assume that who we are is natural, a given. But it is not. We may have something to say about it when we talk endlessly to ourselves about it. But it is largely a psychosocial thing. From the culture and subcultures we belong to we derive what may be possible in the way of fabricating ourselves that our epistemic communities and our peers may corroborate. What is necessary comes from how we interpret the crucible of our personal experiences, which are always colored by our own interpretations. Our identities in this world we live in may be fragile. But what we believe is that they must be maintained. It may seem strange even to consider it: but how we imagine others see us is sometimes more consequential than how we see ourselves. A smoker is expected by other people to be a smoker. A victim is expected by other people to behave like a victim. A lover is expected by other people to behave like a lover. A bad person is expected by other people to behave like a bad person. The constraints and the possibilities are given by others. We usually acquiesce, but sometimes feel guilty about doing so. We may want to call our own shots. But sometimes we can’t…or won’t. The consequences are the same either way.

####

An extended example or two may be helpful:

• CEOs who have been deemed successful in their prior assignment often fail when they take on that position elsewhere.

Why? Typically for two reasons: one is that luck (like timing) could have played a major role in their success. But that was not acknowledged. So it was not a criterion in his or her selection for the post. (We’ll come back to that later, because it does smack of the kind of insanity this book is about). The other reason is that the status quo at his or her next post was not taken into account. It would be sheer luck if any CEO’s modus operandi turned out to be synergistic with the status quo at their next post. This seems to hold true whether that is military, business, higher education, or government. The ability to change the status quo from what it was to what it needs to be is usually not a primary consideration when hiring a new CEO. As with every position in every organization, it is the candidate’s past achievements and credentials that are highest priority. But there is plenty of research evidence which shows that prior success (or failure) does not predict well to future performance in any new role. (Again, we will see more about this later – for it is, indeed, one of the insanities we will be exploring.)

• Then there is this old saw:

Most people prefer a problem they can’t solve to a solution they don’t like.

Right out of the box, what this means is that some people may like some of the solutions they might consider for their problems. But they will dislike other solutions – and may not even see those they would dislike if they considered them. People are fairly blind to ideas and solutions to their problems that are not consistent with what they already know.

They might not see certain possibilities for solving their problems because they look like too much work – or are simply beyond their view of their capabilities. Any potential solution has to fit them – not the problem. And what this often leads them to do is to name the problem so it appears to be a problem they have solved before. That’s why, in so many organizations, they work feverishly at trying to solve a problem the have solved before but has persisted. That is an example of doing the same thing in the same way but still expecting a different (better?) outcome.

• Organizations persist in handling the hiring process in the same way they have handled it before, in spite of the fact that the process they use and are accustomed to has not been very effective. In other words, their procedures are more likely based on what they have done in the past rather than on what they would really need to do to make them more effective in the future. (Once again, we will delve into this as one of the insanities of modern organizations. If Attila had a warrior in his army who was not a successful warrior, he knew he had to change the process of adding such persons to his army. Why did he learn what modern organizations don’t seem to be capable of learning?)

• One more example, if needed. When the decision-makers are designing their organizations, they are far more likely to design their organizations to look like the typical and conventional organization rather than the one they actually need. They design their organizations to have silos, and then complain about the fact that the silos are part of the problem of the functioning of their organizations. They would rather look like conventional organizations look in structure. Then they invariably have the problems that conventional organizations have.

• If that doesn’t strike you as some kind of insanity, you missed the opportunity of thinking so. And you missed the opportunity of structuring your organization the way it needed to be structured to function as it should. The powers that be seem to be more concerned with having an organization that is structured like other organizations rather than being structured as it should be. If you have an IT department, you will have IT problems, in the same way that if you have an HR department, you will have HR problems. People bring their customary ways of thinking with them, not the thinking that may be uniquely required. Are there ways of being mentally more hygienic? There are, and that’s why this book exists. Imitation may be the subtlest way of reinforcing conventional ways of trying but failing to accomplish unconventional things. But it is not a very intelligent way of putting a sane organization together. Is it sane to create silos and then complain about having them?

####

These are just examples of the insanities of modern organizations. Those seem to be endless, just as they are in modern life. There is the apocryphal story of the (obviously affluent) student who was making a poor grade in a course that required him to write. So he hired an expert upper-class student to write an essay for him. It came back with the worst grade he had received so far in that class. In organizations, consultants often turn out to be the kind of people who borrow your watch to tell you what time it is. There have been more than 10,000 books and surely more than 100,000 seminars to tell you how to make your organization more successful. Has the ROI been what you might have expected it would be? (I.e., all of those perennial problems that haunt every organization would be gone.) Are they? To be fair, that may not be fully the fault of the celebrities who wrote those books or conducted those seminars. Still, there has been precious little gain from those sizeable investments. The people suckered in have a tendency to be enthusiastic about changing things for the better. But those same people have more of a tendency to get over the temporary scintillation and revert in a day or two to the way they had always done things. People who have co-habited before they got married are more likely to get divorced than those who didn’t. Does that make sense to you? It is far, far easier to talk about change than it is to change oneself as required. Ask any perpetual dieter. There is a satirical piece of theater that made the rounds not so long ago: I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. Do you see the humorous insanity in that?

CEOs typically assume that the path to success is getting their people to change, when the CEO may be the problem. Is that any kind of insanity worth reflecting on?

Organizations like