No Crisis

Alexandra Kleeman | The Need for Chaos | Women at Work: Part 2 | Elsewhere: Teal Ain't Real

Photo by Ignacio Amenábar on Unsplash

There is no crisis that takes over everyone’s life in the same way.

| Alexandra Kleeman, Authenticity and Apocalypse: An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman by Cornelia Channing

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I had read Kleeman’s Something New under the Sun before encountering her quote, above, from a 2021 interview. She was thinking about Covid, and today our thoughts turn to the current crisis, but her words hold true. It echoes Tolstoy’s line from Anna Karenina, ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. In this context, we form an unhappy family, though.

The larger quote is this:

There is no crisis that takes over everyone’s life in the same way. I think the pandemic has been a really clear example of this. Even something so widespread that has reshaped our lives over the past year and a half, seems almost not to have touched some people. The world is amazing and strange in that way.

Maybe she might have waited a few more years before asserting that Covid ‘seems not to have touched some people’. In my case, I was numb to the Covid disruption at first, while it was raging. But, now, years later, the impact on me has become stratigraphic — a disruption in the layering, in the sedimentary accretion of emotion, observations, and connections that make up a life, a self — deep below the surface now I actively feel disjointed, off-balance, like walking in the third floor of a canted building.

And now, Trump II, and anticipating the inevitability of an equally tectonic whiplash playing out over the next few years.

Another crisis, and new ways for us to not share an experience, new ways to be overtaken and divided by a collective grief. Rather than bringing us together, will we be fractured independently, like individual chunks of glacial ice calving, one by one, falling into the sea?

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The Need for Chaos

Michael Bang Petersen and colleagues published research in 2023 with some implication for politics, and I am extrapolating to the world of work. The abstract [emphasis mine]:

Why are some people motivated to circulate hostile political information? While prior studies have focused on partisan motivations, we demonstrate that some individuals circulate hostile rumors because they wish to unleash chaos to “burn down” the entire political order in the hope they gain status in the process. To understand this psychology, we theorize and measure a novel psychological state, the Need for Chaos, emerging in an interplay of social marginalization and status-oriented personalities. Across eight studies of individuals living in the United States, we show that this need is a strong predictor of motivations to share hostile political rumors, even after accounting for partisan motivations, and can help illuminate differences and commonalities in the frustrations of both historically privileged and marginalized groups. To stem the tide of hostility on social media, the present findings suggest that real-world policy solutions are needed to address social frustrations in the United States.

This need for chaos arises in a context of conflict and hostile political rumors (does it sound like your workplace?). It may be that individuals who are naturally inclined to use dominance-oriented strategies, and who may be generally supportive of organizational stability, can shift toward a particularly dangerous model, where destroying the system is seen as just another means of dominance, especially by individuals experiencing status loss. So, in the business context, someone being passed over for a promotion, or being replaced by someone in their role.

As the authors describe this:

Our aim is to measure the destructive mindset that emerges from the combination of dominance dispositions and social marginalization. We call this mindset the Need for Chaos and define it as a desire for a new beginning through the destruction of order and established structures. We chose the term “chaos” to reflect both the modern meaning of disorder and the original Greek meaning where it refers to a state from which order is produced. Need for Chaos is thus a mindset to gain status by disrupting the established order. We use the term “need” in the same way as it is used in studies of other psychological individual differences—that is, as something that “…directs behavior towards a goal and cause tension when this goal is not attained” (Cacioppo and Petty , 117). It is not a biological need in the sense of thirst or hunger. Rather, the underlying evolutionary problem that the desire for chaos expresses relates to status maintenance and acquisition. Furthermore, the Need for Chaos is not a stable personality trait, but is expected to emerge in the interplay of environments related to personal status loss and traits related to dominance. It is thus a “characteristic adaptation” (McAdams and Pals , 208–9) that matches behavioral tendencies in dispositions to a specific context.

We contend that individuals who are high in Need for Chaos share hostile rumors as a way to destabilize the established political system. As discussed above, these individuals may believe that sharing hostile rumors mobilizes like-minded others and creates confusion among those with the status they seek. In addition, the normative transgressions involved in the sharing of offensive and outrageous information may in itself be seen as attempts to assert the dominance that people high in Need for Chaos so strongly crave.

I have worked in several firms where these power dynamics came to dominate during times of difficulty, where active rumor mongering was intended to destabilize ongoing operations — such as organization transformation projects, or large-scale strategic decisions — and those involved were seemingly willing to blow things up rather than to come together positively.

In one such case, I was fired while on vacation, and — only minutes later — a board member called and asked me about the then-CEO: ‘Is he as crazy as we think he is?’ I said he was crazy as a shithouse rat. The next day — still on vacation — I was rehired by an acting CEO, and promoted.

This followed weeks of wild rumors spread by the CEO and several of his reports, implicating me and others in a plot. We were simply developing a software product which, in a beta form, had recently won an award for innovation, and led to discussions with a major software company about acquisition. Apparently, this set the CEO on a course that might have brought the company down.

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Women at Work: Part 2

Continuing the series started in The Struggle of Memory.

Because Men

In When a Male Boss Wants New Ideas, Employees Respond. A Female Boss? Not So Much., Lisa Ward reviews new research that shows workers feel safer to speak about issues when bosses have expressed curiosity about those issues, especially when the boss is a man.

Research by Phillip Thompson and Anthony Klotz (Led by curiosity and responding with voice) hinges on an apparent disparity in people's expectations about male bosses: that is, they display lower levels of curiosity in general and so when they do appear curious about some issue, workers respond positively, and that opens the topic to more frank discussions.

The situation is paradoxical, Ward points out [emphasis mine]:

A curious boss, as defined by the study’s two authors, is someone who is eager to learn, understand and challenge existing theories, develop new strategies, improve work processes and look for new solutions. The authors found that male bosses exhibiting these traits have a much bigger impact on employee behavior than female bosses do.

In the study, employees with curious male bosses were three to four times as likely as employees with curious female bosses to report that they felt comfortable making suggestions or giving opinions. Similarly, the former were two to three times as likely to speak their minds—recommending new projects or procedures—as their counterparts with curious female bosses.

So, because women are generally perceived to demonstrate the traits of a curious boss, men who show those signs have an inordinate impact on the behavior of their managees. At some primordial level, this seems unfair.

The authors suggest that these perceptions might be changed through bias training, but, has been demonstrated in other research, such training doesn't appear to work. So what companies might do is hard to figure, except perhaps to test potential managers for curiosity.

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Elsewhere

Teal Ain’t Real

A discussion about Teal organizations bubbled up on Bluesky this week, so I am lifting this out of the archives.

In Bursting The Bubble: Teal Ain’t Real, The Corporate Rebels gently caution the community about Frederic Laloux’s Teal organization thinking.

I wrote about Teal in Evolution of the Platform Organization: 2 The Era of Networks:

Laloux doesn’t seem to reflect on impact of technology on the social fabric of organizations and society. Laloux talks a great deal about the evolution of consciousness, but once an organization reaches the hypothetical Turquoise, the evolution seems to be done. This seems something like the organization equivalent of attaining enlightenment. However, in the social evolution of organization and society, people aren’t primarily motivated by the goal of achieving some level of spiritual attainment, but rather greater levels of self-determination (for the individual or groups at every scale) through increased innovation in meeting the needs of customers.

Laloux seems to have missed the trends tending toward the platform organization as a response to the fourth industrial revolution and overemphasized the ‘consciousness aspects’ of ideas derived from social business, and ultimately casting organizational change as a spiritual quest.

I never have suggested Teal to anyone, and I recommend Tom Nixon’s critique of Teal, in Resolving the awkward paradox in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations:

Over dinner earlier this year (2015), I confessed to Frederic Laloux that his best-selling book Reinventing Organisations was the very best business book I’d ever read that I couldn’t quite bring myself to recommend to others. There was something going on for me, where the stories in the book didn’t seem to match the conclusions.

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