SOCIOPATH REPELLENT FOR GOOD ORGANIZATIONS AND COMMUNITIES
The role of the Kegan 5 in a good organization:
1. Reinvent the rules and mission of the organization as the landscape changes, and frame them in a way that makes sense to the kegan 3 and 4s.
2. Notice when sociopaths are arbitraging the difference between the rules and the terminal goals, and shut it down.
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Sociopaths (in the Gervais principle sense) are powerful because they’re Kegan 4.5. They know how to take the realities of Kegan 4′s and 3′s and deftly manipulate them, forcing them into alignment with whatever is a good reality for the Sociopath.
The most effective norm I know to combat this behavior is Radical Transparency. Radical transparency is different from radical honesty. Radical honesty says that you should ignore consideration and consequences in favor of courage. Radical transparency doesn’t make any suggestions about what you should say, only that everyone in the organization should be privy to things everyone says. This makes it exceedingly hard for sociopaths to maintain multiple realities.
One way to implement radical honesty is to do what David Ogilvy used to do. If someone used BCC in their emails too much, he would fire them. That’s an effective Sociopath repellent.
Another way to implement radical honesty is to record all your conversations and make them available to everyone, like Bridgewater does. That’s an effective Sociopath repellent.
Once I was part of an organization that was trying to create a powerful culture. Someone had just told us about the recording all conversations thing, so me and another leader in the organization decided to try it in one of our conversations. We found we had to keep pausing the recording because the level of honesty we were having with each other would cause our carefully constructed narratives with everyone else to crumble. We were acting as sociopaths, and we had constructed an awful organization.
I left shortly after, but it would have been an exceedingly painful process to convert to a good organization at that time. Creating sociopath repellent organizations is painful because most of us act like sociopaths some of the time, and operating from a place of universal common knowledge means that we have to be prepared to bring our full selves to every situation, instead of crafting ourself to the person in front of us.
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The second most effective norm I know to act as sociopath repellent is that anyone should be able to apply the norms to anyone else. Here’s how I described that in a previous post:
Anyone should be able to apply the values to anyone else. If “Give critical feedback ASAP, and receive it well” is a value, then the CEO should be willing to take feedback from the new mail clerk. As soon as this stops being the case, the 3′s get look for their validation elsewhere, and the 4′s get disillusioned.
Besides selective realities, another way that sociopaths gain advantage is through selective application of the norms when it suits them. By creating norms that anyone can apply to anyone else (and making them clear by providing the opposites, as well as examples) you prevent this behavior from sociopaths and take away one of their main weapons.
Once, I was the leader of an organization (ok, I was actually the captain of a team in highschool, but same thing). I was elected leader because I exemplified the norms as good or better than most others, and had the skills to back it up. Once I became the leader, I eventually ran into challenges with sociopathic (again in the Gervais principle sense) behavior trying to undermine my authority. Instead of leaning back on the principles that had earned me the position, I leaned on my power to force people to do what I wanted, while ignoring the principles that got me there. This made others lose faith in the principles, and killed morale, leading to infighting and politics.
The lesson for me as a leader was to lead with influence based on moral authority, not power. But the lesson for me as an organization designer was to allow ANYBODY to enforce the norms, not just the leader, and to make this ability part of the norms themselves. This would have immediately prevented from ruining team morale when I descended into petty behavior.
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The final important behavior for sociopath repellent is to notice when the instrumental values of the organization aren’t serving the terminal goals, and relentlessly redefine the core values to make them closer to spirit, rather than the letter. This is important because Gervais Sociopaths ALSO have this ability to notice when the instrumental values aren’t serving the terminal goals, and will arbitrage this difference for their own gain. A good Kegan 5 leader will be able to point to the values, show how they’re meant to lead to the results, then lead the organization in redefining them so that sociopaths can’t get away with anything.
Occasionally, Kegan 5 leaders will have to take a look at the landscape, notice its’ changed, and make substantial changes to the values or mission of an organization to keep up with the current reality.
------
The next question becomes, if you want a long lasting organization, and a skilled Kegan 5 leader is necessary for a long running organization, how do you get a steady stream of Kegan 5 leaders? This is The Succession Problem. One answer is to create Deliberately Developmental organizations, that put substantial effort into helping their members become more developed humans. That will be the subject of the next post in the sequence.
It feels to me unwise to use the term Sociopaths in this way because it means that you lose the ability to distinguish clinical sociopaths from people who aren’t.
Distinguishing clinical sociopaths from people that aren’t is important because interaction with them is fundamentally different. Techniques for dealing with grief that were taught to prisoners helped reduce recidivism rates for the average prisoner but increased it for sociopaths.
I’m importing the term from Venkatash Rao, and his essays on the Gervais principle. I agree this is an instance of word inflation, which is generally bad. From now on I’ll start referring to this as “Gervais Sociopaths” in my writing.
Radical transparency doesn’t make any suggestions about what you should say, only that everyone in the organization should be privy to things everyone says. This makes it exceedingly hard for sociopaths to maintain multiple realities.
Seems like it could work, but I wonder what other effects it could have. For example, if someone makes a mistake, you can’t tell them discreetly; the only way to provide a feedback on a minor mistake is to announce it to the entire company.
By the way, are you going to enforce this rule after working hours? What prevents two bad actors from meeting in private and agreeing to pretend having some deniable bias in other to further their selfish goals? Like, some things are measurable, but some things are a matter of subjective judgment, and two people could agree to always have the subjective judgment colored in each other’s favor, and against their mutual enemy. In a way that even if other people notice, you could still insist that what X does simply feels right to you, and what Y does rubs you the wrong way even if you can’t explain why.
Also, people in the company would be exposed to each other, and perhaps the vulnerability would cancel out. But then someone leaves, is no longer part of the company, but still has all the info on the remaining members. Could this info be used against the former colleagues? The former colleagues still have info on the one that left, but not on his new colleagues. Also, if someone strategically joins only for a while, he could take care not to expose himself too much, while everything else would be exposed to him.
the CEO should be willing to take feedback from the new mail clerk.
This assumes the new mail clerk will be a reasonable person. Someone who doesn’t understand the CEO’s situation or loves to create drama could use this opportunity to give the CEO tons of useless feedback. And then complain about hypocrisy when others tell him to slow down.
Seems like it could work, but I wonder what other effects it could have. For example, if someone makes a mistake, you can’t tell them discreetly; the only way to provide a feedback on a minor mistake is to announce it to the entire company.By the way, are you going to enforce this rule after working hours?
What prevents two bad actors from meeting in private and agreeing to pretend having some deniable bias in other to further their selfish goals? Like, some things are measurable, but some things are a matter of subjective judgment, and two people could agree to always have the subjective judgment colored in each other’s favor, and against their mutual enemy. In a way that even if other people notice, you could still insist that what X does simply feels right to you, and what Y does rubs you the wrong way even if you can’t explain why.
Also, people in the company would be exposed to each other, and perhaps the vulnerability would cancel out. But then someone leaves, is no longer part of the company, but still has all the info on the remaining members. Could this info be used against the former colleagues? The former colleagues still have info on the one that left, but not on his new colleagues. Also, if someone strategically joins only for a while, he could take care not to expose himself too much, while everything else would be exposed to him.
I had already updated away from this particular tool, and this comment makes me update further. I still have the intuition that this can work well in a culture that has transcended things like blame and shame, but for 99% of organizations radical transparency might not be the best tool.
This assumes the new mail clerk will be a reasonable person. Someone who doesn’t understand the CEO’s situation or loves to create drama could use this opportunity to give the CEO tons of useless feedback. And then complain about hypocrisy when others tell him to slow down.
Yes, there are in fact areas where this can break down. Note that ANY rule can be gamed, and the proper thing to do is to refer back to values rather than trying to make ungameable rules. In this case, the others might in fact point out that the values of the organization are such that everyone should be open to feedback, including mail clerks. If this happened persistently with say 1 in every 4 people, then the organization would look at their hiring practices to see how to reduce that. If this happened consistently with new hires, the organization would look at their training practices, etc.
The sociopath repellent here only works in the context of the other things I’ve written about good organizations, like strongly teaching and ingraining the values and making sure decisions always point back to them, having strong vetting procedures, etc. Viewing this or other posts in the series as a list of tips risks taking them out of context.
This note won’t make sense to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the Sociopath framework in which you’re discussing this, but I did want to call out that Venkat Rao (at least when he wrote the Gervais Principle) explicitly stated that sociopaths are amoral and has fairly clearly (especially relative to his other opinions) stated that he thinks having more Sociopaths wouldn’t be a bad thing. Here are a few quotes from Morality, Compassion, and the Sociopath which talk about this:
So yes, this entire edifice I am constructing is a determinedly amoral one. Hitler would count as a sociopath in this sense, but so would Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
In all this, the source of the personality of this archetype is distrust of the group, so I am sticking to the word “sociopath” in this amoral sense. The fact that many readers have automatically conflated the word “sociopath” with “evil” in fact reflects the demonizing tendencies of loser/clueless group morality. The characteristic of these group moralities is automatic distrust of alternative individual moralities. The distrust directed at the sociopath though, is reactionary rather than informed.
Sociopaths can be compassionate because their distrust only extends to groups. They are capable of understanding and empathizing with individual pain and acting with compassion. A sociopath who sets out to be compassionate is strongly limited by two factors: the distrust of groups (and therefore skepticism and distrust of large-scale, organized compassion), and the firm grounding in reality. The second factor allows sociopaths to look unsentimentally at all aspects of reality, including the fact that apparently compassionate actions that make you “feel good” and assuage guilt today may have unintended consequences that actually create more evil in the long term. This is what makes even good sociopaths often seem callous to even those among the clueless and losers who trust the sociopath’s intentions. The apparent callousness is actually evidence that hard moral choices are being made.
When a sociopath has the resources for (and feels the imperative towards) larger scale do-gooding, you get something like Bill Gates’ behavior: a very careful, cautious, eyes-wide-open approach to compassion. Gates has taken on a world-hunger sized problem, but there is very little ceremony or posturing about it. It is sociopath compassion. Underlying the scale is a residual distrust of the group — especially the group inspired by oneself — that leads to the “reluctant messiah” effect. Nothing is as scary to the compassionate and powerful sociopath as the unthinking adulation and following inspired by their ideas. I suspect the best among these lie awake at night worrying that if they were to die, the headless group might mutate into a monster driven by a frozen, unexamined moral code. Which is why the smartest attempt to engineer institutionalized doubt, self-examination and formal checks and balances into any systems they design.
I hope my explanation of the amorality of the sociopath stance makes a response mostly unnecessary: I disagree with the premise that “more sociopaths is bad.” More people taking individual moral responsibility is a good thing. It is in a sense a different reading of Old Testament morality — eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and learning to tell good and evil apart is a good thing. An atheist view of the Bible must necessarily be allegorical, and at the risk of offending some of you, here’s my take on the Biblical tale of the Garden of Eden: Adam and Eve were clueless, having abdicated moral responsibility to a (putatively good) sociopath: God. Then they became sociopaths in their own right. And were forced to live in an ecosystem that included another sociopath — the archetypal evil one, Satan — that the good one could no longer shield them from. This makes the “descent” from the Garden of Eden an awakening into freedom rather than a descent into baseness. A good thing.
I apologize if this just seems like nitpicking your terminology, but I’m calling it out because I’m curious whether you agree with his abstract definition but disagree with his moral assessment of Sociopaths, vice versa, or something else entirely? As a concrete example, I think Venkat would argue that early EA was a form of Sociopath compassion and that for the sorts of world-denting things a lot LWers tend to be interested in, Sociopathy (again, as he defines it) is going to be the right stance to take.
Rao’s sociopaths are Kegan 4.5, they’re nihilistic and aren’t good for long lasting organizations because they view the notion of organizational goals as nonsensical. I agree that there’s no moral bent to them but if you’re trying to create an organization with a goal they’re not useful. Instead, you want an organization that can develop Kegan 5 leaders.
This doesn’t seem like it’s addressing Anlam’s question though. Gandhi doesn’t seem nihilist. I assume (from this quote, which was new to me), that in Kegan terms, Rao probably meant something ranging from 4.5 to 5.
I think Rao was at Kegan 4.5 when he wrote the sequence and didn’t realize Kegan 5 existed. Rao was saying “There’s no moral bent” to Kegan 4.5 because he was at the stage of realizing there was no such thing as morals.
At that level you can also view Kegan 4.5′s as obviously correct and the ones who end up moving society forward into interesting directions, they’re forces of creative destruction. There’s no view of Kegan 5 at that level, so you’ll mistake Kegan 5′s as either Kegan 3′s or other Kegan 4.5′s, which may be the cause of the confusion here.
SOCIOPATH REPELLENT FOR GOOD ORGANIZATIONS AND COMMUNITIES
The role of the Kegan 5 in a good organization:
1. Reinvent the rules and mission of the organization as the landscape changes, and frame them in a way that makes sense to the kegan 3 and 4s.
2. Notice when sociopaths are arbitraging the difference between the rules and the terminal goals, and shut it down.
----------
Sociopaths (in the Gervais principle sense) are powerful because they’re Kegan 4.5. They know how to take the realities of Kegan 4′s and 3′s and deftly manipulate them, forcing them into alignment with whatever is a good reality for the Sociopath.
The most effective norm I know to combat this behavior is Radical Transparency. Radical transparency is different from radical honesty. Radical honesty says that you should ignore consideration and consequences in favor of courage. Radical transparency doesn’t make any suggestions about what you should say, only that everyone in the organization should be privy to things everyone says. This makes it exceedingly hard for sociopaths to maintain multiple realities.
One way to implement radical honesty is to do what David Ogilvy used to do. If someone used BCC in their emails too much, he would fire them. That’s an effective Sociopath repellent.
Another way to implement radical honesty is to record all your conversations and make them available to everyone, like Bridgewater does. That’s an effective Sociopath repellent.
Once I was part of an organization that was trying to create a powerful culture. Someone had just told us about the recording all conversations thing, so me and another leader in the organization decided to try it in one of our conversations. We found we had to keep pausing the recording because the level of honesty we were having with each other would cause our carefully constructed narratives with everyone else to crumble. We were acting as sociopaths, and we had constructed an awful organization.
I left shortly after, but it would have been an exceedingly painful process to convert to a good organization at that time. Creating sociopath repellent organizations is painful because most of us act like sociopaths some of the time, and operating from a place of universal common knowledge means that we have to be prepared to bring our full selves to every situation, instead of crafting ourself to the person in front of us.
---------
The second most effective norm I know to act as sociopath repellent is that anyone should be able to apply the norms to anyone else. Here’s how I described that in a previous post:
Besides selective realities, another way that sociopaths gain advantage is through selective application of the norms when it suits them. By creating norms that anyone can apply to anyone else (and making them clear by providing the opposites, as well as examples) you prevent this behavior from sociopaths and take away one of their main weapons.
Once, I was the leader of an organization (ok, I was actually the captain of a team in highschool, but same thing). I was elected leader because I exemplified the norms as good or better than most others, and had the skills to back it up. Once I became the leader, I eventually ran into challenges with sociopathic (again in the Gervais principle sense) behavior trying to undermine my authority. Instead of leaning back on the principles that had earned me the position, I leaned on my power to force people to do what I wanted, while ignoring the principles that got me there. This made others lose faith in the principles, and killed morale, leading to infighting and politics.
The lesson for me as a leader was to lead with influence based on moral authority, not power. But the lesson for me as an organization designer was to allow ANYBODY to enforce the norms, not just the leader, and to make this ability part of the norms themselves. This would have immediately prevented from ruining team morale when I descended into petty behavior.
-------
The final important behavior for sociopath repellent is to notice when the instrumental values of the organization aren’t serving the terminal goals, and relentlessly redefine the core values to make them closer to spirit, rather than the letter. This is important because Gervais Sociopaths ALSO have this ability to notice when the instrumental values aren’t serving the terminal goals, and will arbitrage this difference for their own gain. A good Kegan 5 leader will be able to point to the values, show how they’re meant to lead to the results, then lead the organization in redefining them so that sociopaths can’t get away with anything.
Occasionally, Kegan 5 leaders will have to take a look at the landscape, notice its’ changed, and make substantial changes to the values or mission of an organization to keep up with the current reality.
------
The next question becomes, if you want a long lasting organization, and a skilled Kegan 5 leader is necessary for a long running organization, how do you get a steady stream of Kegan 5 leaders? This is The Succession Problem. One answer is to create Deliberately Developmental organizations, that put substantial effort into helping their members become more developed humans. That will be the subject of the next post in the sequence.
It feels to me unwise to use the term Sociopaths in this way because it means that you lose the ability to distinguish clinical sociopaths from people who aren’t.
Distinguishing clinical sociopaths from people that aren’t is important because interaction with them is fundamentally different. Techniques for dealing with grief that were taught to prisoners helped reduce recidivism rates for the average prisoner but increased it for sociopaths.
I’m importing the term from Venkatash Rao, and his essays on the Gervais principle. I agree this is an instance of word inflation, which is generally bad. From now on I’ll start referring to this as “Gervais Sociopaths” in my writing.
Seems like it could work, but I wonder what other effects it could have. For example, if someone makes a mistake, you can’t tell them discreetly; the only way to provide a feedback on a minor mistake is to announce it to the entire company.
By the way, are you going to enforce this rule after working hours? What prevents two bad actors from meeting in private and agreeing to pretend having some deniable bias in other to further their selfish goals? Like, some things are measurable, but some things are a matter of subjective judgment, and two people could agree to always have the subjective judgment colored in each other’s favor, and against their mutual enemy. In a way that even if other people notice, you could still insist that what X does simply feels right to you, and what Y does rubs you the wrong way even if you can’t explain why.
Also, people in the company would be exposed to each other, and perhaps the vulnerability would cancel out. But then someone leaves, is no longer part of the company, but still has all the info on the remaining members. Could this info be used against the former colleagues? The former colleagues still have info on the one that left, but not on his new colleagues. Also, if someone strategically joins only for a while, he could take care not to expose himself too much, while everything else would be exposed to him.
This assumes the new mail clerk will be a reasonable person. Someone who doesn’t understand the CEO’s situation or loves to create drama could use this opportunity to give the CEO tons of useless feedback. And then complain about hypocrisy when others tell him to slow down.
I had already updated away from this particular tool, and this comment makes me update further. I still have the intuition that this can work well in a culture that has transcended things like blame and shame, but for 99% of organizations radical transparency might not be the best tool.
Yes, there are in fact areas where this can break down. Note that ANY rule can be gamed, and the proper thing to do is to refer back to values rather than trying to make ungameable rules. In this case, the others might in fact point out that the values of the organization are such that everyone should be open to feedback, including mail clerks. If this happened persistently with say 1 in every 4 people, then the organization would look at their hiring practices to see how to reduce that. If this happened consistently with new hires, the organization would look at their training practices, etc.
The sociopath repellent here only works in the context of the other things I’ve written about good organizations, like strongly teaching and ingraining the values and making sure decisions always point back to them, having strong vetting procedures, etc. Viewing this or other posts in the series as a list of tips risks taking them out of context.
This note won’t make sense to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the Sociopath framework in which you’re discussing this, but I did want to call out that Venkat Rao (at least when he wrote the Gervais Principle) explicitly stated that sociopaths are amoral and has fairly clearly (especially relative to his other opinions) stated that he thinks having more Sociopaths wouldn’t be a bad thing. Here are a few quotes from Morality, Compassion, and the Sociopath which talk about this:
I apologize if this just seems like nitpicking your terminology, but I’m calling it out because I’m curious whether you agree with his abstract definition but disagree with his moral assessment of Sociopaths, vice versa, or something else entirely? As a concrete example, I think Venkat would argue that early EA was a form of Sociopath compassion and that for the sorts of world-denting things a lot LWers tend to be interested in, Sociopathy (again, as he defines it) is going to be the right stance to take.
Rao’s sociopaths are Kegan 4.5, they’re nihilistic and aren’t good for long lasting organizations because they view the notion of organizational goals as nonsensical. I agree that there’s no moral bent to them but if you’re trying to create an organization with a goal they’re not useful. Instead, you want an organization that can develop Kegan 5 leaders.
This doesn’t seem like it’s addressing Anlam’s question though. Gandhi doesn’t seem nihilist. I assume (from this quote, which was new to me), that in Kegan terms, Rao probably meant something ranging from 4.5 to 5.
I think Rao was at Kegan 4.5 when he wrote the sequence and didn’t realize Kegan 5 existed. Rao was saying “There’s no moral bent” to Kegan 4.5 because he was at the stage of realizing there was no such thing as morals.
At that level you can also view Kegan 4.5′s as obviously correct and the ones who end up moving society forward into interesting directions, they’re forces of creative destruction. There’s no view of Kegan 5 at that level, so you’ll mistake Kegan 5′s as either Kegan 3′s or other Kegan 4.5′s, which may be the cause of the confusion here.