skip to content
fdbck lps

Inverted orgs

/ 9 min read

updated:
View more blogs with the tag systems
table of contents

Images of organization

While writing my recent post on water metaphors (opens in new tab), having decided to take an essentially Lakoffian approach to the topic, I did some research on different conceptual metaphors for the organization. My main goals were to see whether applying fūkeiron to the corporate setting was at all new or innovative, and whether anyone had written about the water metaphor in the workplace. During my research I skimmed through a few books, including Henry Mintzberg’s The Structuring of Organizations, Stafford Beer’s Diagnosing the System, and Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization. This last entry was particularly relevant because it traffics extensively in metaphor; in fact, Morgan basically argues that the entire domain of org theory is extended metaphor. He presents eight ways of seeing organizations: as machines, brains, political systems, and so on, toward less mainstream views as prisons or instruments of domination. The most relevant part for my blog post was in the chapter on “organization as flux and transformation”, but it didn’t end up treating the water metaphor or anything adjacent to fūkeiron, so I was home free.

Metaphors are great, although much like models they’re all wrong in some way, and you can only hope to squeeze some usefulness out of them without overindexing on their failure modes. Morgan recognizes this in Images of Organization, pointing out that different conceptual metaphors highlight key parts of the organization’s functioning but distort others. So the way you see things limits what you can see. I also found that Stafford Beer was particularly pessimistic about the side effects of such thinking, writing the following in Decision and Control:

… the methodology seems to depend on the examination of similes, which is well known to be dangerous and highly suspect. It is all very well to say that the control system of an industrial company is ‘like’ the central nervous system in the human body: but what does this mean? At the worst, this is a glib literary metaphor; at the best, perhaps, the analogy will hold a certain amount of water, but even then it may be of no real use. Everyone knows, in particular, that even when a comparison is basically sound, it is all too easy to employ it illegitimately…

So Beer sees these kinds of metaphors as dangerous tools of limited application that the masses will wield recklessly. On the other hand, Morgan strikes a more optimistic tone:

Metaphors lead to new metaphors, creating a mosaic of competing and complementary insights… When you recognize that your theories and insights are metaphorical, you have to approach the process in an open-ended way. You have to recognize your limitations and find ways of going beyond them.

I like Morgan’s pragmatic take here, but it’s of course true that metaphors can go off the rails quickly.1 So is there any value to the organizational metaphor? If there is, it would need to recognize the inherent limitation of metaphor, but also encourage us to think creatively about our situation to transcend our constraints.

The inverted metaphor

Luckily there’s a really specific kind of metaphor that virtually nobody’s tempted to read too much into or uncritically adopt as the lynchpin of their PR platform. But it’s also creative enough to get you to think differently about your context. The idea is to imagine the conditions under which an object might be its own logical inverse:2

  1. Describe the current state of your organization’s systems or established practices: its governance, the way it runs meetings, its onboarding processes or performance review scheme, and so on
  2. Imagine the exact opposite of that state. How would it operate? What nonsensical, ridiculous, or illogical results might you expect? What failure modes do you foresee?
  3. Use these insights to refine your current state

We use this approach not to make a trite contrarian point, but rather to poke at the limitations of our metaphors, therefore creating the conditions of possibility for new metaphors — and new ways of seeing the organization itself. It’s a bit like a pre-mortem for your org’s design, except that pre-mortems focus on specific known or deducible problems, whereas the inverted metaphor reveals hidden assumptions. It’s also different from dialectical approaches in that we’re not necessarily interested in the inversion for its own sake, or in synthesizing the opposing points of view.

Inversion also helps resolve the tension between Morgan’s and Beer’s competing views on metaphor: since we use a pure hypothetical as our starting point, we’re less likely to accept it uncritically or to end up reciting meaningless similes, as Beer fears. And since the inverted metaphor helps expose ideas that aren’t always surfaced by direct analysis — for example, seeing what the original metaphor was designed to achieve, or perhaps what it should have been designed to prevent or impede — it’s the kind of open-ended approach that Morgan prefers. Even if you discard most of your findings about the inverted org, the thinking process acts as a Chesterton’s fence around your original metaphors.

I planted a seed of this metaphor at the end of my last post, where I suggested building a room where the minimum volume had to be 70 dB. On its face, this is a pretty silly idea; it’s either unenforceable (imagine pitching such a policy to your peers) or annoying to operationalize. But I think there’s something sticky about the sounds we sanction, tolerate, and encourage in the workplace. For example, lunch rooms are places with no formal noise threshold rules, and yet they’re always pleasantly loud, what with microwaves beeping and dishes being washed and multiple lunchtime conversations. In this sense, a lunch room is an emergent — even if accidental — way of disrupting the fixed metaphor of “quiet room” office culture, and that’s thrown into relief very clearly once you start thinking about the inverse of a quiet room. It also hints at what a “quiet room” is actually doing: enforcing a particular mode of working through environmental design.

Now I don’t want to push this specific example too far; lunch rooms are usually pretty bland spaces that recreate the communal environment but fail to capture any of the intangibles that make a night out at a nice restaurant, well, nice. But even if lunch rooms don’t carry any special organizational-reshaping power, they help reveal why quiet rooms exist in the first place, and they illustrate how we might invert metaphor-space in search of new ways to conceptualize our workplaces.

Antigovernance

Where can we work toward more elegant organizational metaphors with the inverted approach? The first example that comes to mind is antigovernance. If governance is about concentrating oversight or decision-making, then antigovernance would distribute them in emergent ways. It would probably prioritize actions that flatten the network topology. Decisions would be made by consensus, or at the very least by some flavour of supermajority. Spending authority would flow downward, and instead of imposing additional controls on employees, we’d probably worry more about how much hard power is accreting to managers. The gap between doer and decider would tend to zero.

You might be thinking that antigovernance sounds like a chaotic mess in the corporate context. And it might well be! But that’s not germane here; we don’t care if flat org charts actually work more effectively than command-and-control hierarchies, or however else you choose to distinguish between governance and its inverse. What we care about is establishing the sine qua non of governance by looking at what it isn’t.

Antigovernance indeed gets pretty messy at some points. First, consensus-building is challenging.3 Generally speaking, a lack of consensus can be a symptom of unclear responsibility for decision-making and hidden or unconsulted domain expertise. So if we wanted to build an organization founded on antigovernance, we’d need to find ways to keep decision-making from derailing and to set clear expectations of participants. But if we phrase this differently, we get a completely new insight: governance is only useful if it’s fast and crystal-clear about problem ownership. Otherwise it’s no better than the alternative!

Next, it’s not clear how to make effective strategic decisions in an antigoverned organization when you’re used to a centrally planned model. Maybe everyone spends a bit too much money, leading to collectively irrational budget decisions, or maybe there are tragedy of the commons effects spurred on by misaligned personal incentives. The consensus challenge I described earlier can also lead to contradictory decision-making over time, especially if the composition of the consensus body evolves. But if these are entirely predictable failure modes of antigovernance, then good governance must necessarily process information effectively to differentiate itself from its inverse. In this mode, governance should be the voice of your organization’s memory.

Third, in decentralized structures, keeping things moving tends to be particularly challenging when there are lots of participants. You know this if you’ve been in a meeting with more than 10 participants or on an email chain with forty names in CC. But conversely this reveals governance’s key role as a scaling accelerator; when you exceed Dunbar’s number, you need governance not because it imposes control, but rather because it’s the most effective way to scale decision-making.

So the inverted metaphor helps surface a new conception of good governance: an efficient, context-rich decision-scaling accelerator. This is radically different from a first-principles definition, and it offers a middle path between Morgan’s embrace of metaphor and Beer’s skepticism by safeguarding against metaphor misuse and by uncovering hidden assumptions through binary opposition. In this sense, the method treats organizational metaphors as provisional tools, just as Morgan suggests.

What if we applied the inverted metaphor to organizational design theory itself, as an experimental critique of management consulting techniques? This is what I plan to explore in my next post; stay tuned!

Footnotes

  1. The corporation as “family” is probably the best example; it grabs the baton from the idea of legal personhood, then runs in the wrong direction entirely. ↩

  2. In math we have involutory functions (opens in new tab) that are their own inverse. This is the idea I originally wanted to use here, although technically we aren’t actually going to imagine how an organization could be both itself and its inverse at the same time. So it felt too much like equivocation to use that terminology, even if expecting perfect correspondence between signifiers in a piece on metaphor is a bit much. ↩

  3. If you’ve spent much time on Wikipedia, you’ll know that RFCs (opens in new tab), CENT (opens in new tab), and the like can be drawn-out affairs. ↩