Unfortunately, for people who are not members of the inner circle this kind of optimization may be indistinguishable from mere incompetence, or malice. Do we produce sloppy code? Maybe delivering the code fast is more important than the code quality. Do we have an incompetent person on the team? Maybe he or she is a relative of someone important, and it is very important to gain a favor from that person. Did we actually deliver the sloppy code late? Maybe the delay way strategic somehow; maybe the company is paid by hour so delivering the product late was used as an excuse to extract more money from the customer; or maybe it made them more dependent for us; or maybe it was somehow strategically important to deliver it on Thursday. Is the company financially in loss? Maybe the key people are actually transferring company money to their private accounts, so everything goes according to the plan.
I don’t know where is the balance between understanding that there may be some higher strategy that I am not aware of, and simply blindly trusting the authorities (it is easy to rationalize the latter as the former). I guess it is important to notice that the “higher strategy” is not necessarily optimizing in my favor, so in some sense from my point of view there sometimes needs not to be a difference between “it is all going to hell” and “it all goes according to the plan, but a part of the plan is sacrificing me”. That means that unless I trust the secret wisdom and benevolence of the people behind the wheel, I should treat all apparent dysfunction as potentially bad news.
As you say, the inner circle certainly may have reason to do non-obvious things. But while withholding information from people can be occasionally politically helpful, it seems usually best for the company to have the employees on the same page and working toward a goal they see reason for. Because of this, I would usually assume that seemingly poor decisions in upper management are the result of actual incompetence or a deceitful actor in the information flow on the way down.
Broadly agreed—this is one of the main reasons I consider internal transparency to be so important in building effective organizations. in some cases, secrets must exist—but when they do, their existence should itself be common knowledge unless even that must be secret.
In other words, it is usually best to tell your teammates the true reason for something, and failing that you should ideally be able to tell them that you can’t tell them. Giving fake reasons is poisonous.
Unfortunately, for people who are not members of the inner circle this kind of optimization may be indistinguishable from mere incompetence, or malice. Do we produce sloppy code? Maybe delivering the code fast is more important than the code quality. Do we have an incompetent person on the team? Maybe he or she is a relative of someone important, and it is very important to gain a favor from that person. Did we actually deliver the sloppy code late? Maybe the delay way strategic somehow; maybe the company is paid by hour so delivering the product late was used as an excuse to extract more money from the customer; or maybe it made them more dependent for us; or maybe it was somehow strategically important to deliver it on Thursday. Is the company financially in loss? Maybe the key people are actually transferring company money to their private accounts, so everything goes according to the plan.
I don’t know where is the balance between understanding that there may be some higher strategy that I am not aware of, and simply blindly trusting the authorities (it is easy to rationalize the latter as the former). I guess it is important to notice that the “higher strategy” is not necessarily optimizing in my favor, so in some sense from my point of view there sometimes needs not to be a difference between “it is all going to hell” and “it all goes according to the plan, but a part of the plan is sacrificing me”. That means that unless I trust the secret wisdom and benevolence of the people behind the wheel, I should treat all apparent dysfunction as potentially bad news.
As you say, the inner circle certainly may have reason to do non-obvious things. But while withholding information from people can be occasionally politically helpful, it seems usually best for the company to have the employees on the same page and working toward a goal they see reason for. Because of this, I would usually assume that seemingly poor decisions in upper management are the result of actual incompetence or a deceitful actor in the information flow on the way down.
Broadly agreed—this is one of the main reasons I consider internal transparency to be so important in building effective organizations. in some cases, secrets must exist—but when they do, their existence should itself be common knowledge unless even that must be secret.
In other words, it is usually best to tell your teammates the true reason for something, and failing that you should ideally be able to tell them that you can’t tell them. Giving fake reasons is poisonous.