I actually had my own term before I encountered Ra, which was “business creepy” (definitely should have been “business cheesy”, but creepy stuck). It was about all the empty words and discourses, the business-looking stock photographs , anytime anyone mentioned the term “excellence”. This was bullshit paramount for me, and yet very few people ever thought anything about it.
As I got professional experience, the term grew to encompass completely unjustified cheerleading beliefs of the “we’re the best and the other suck” variety.
If you try to challenge these narratives of excellence or false superiority, even using due diplomacy, you get the reaction that Sarah describe: confusion, incoherence, then anger.
For me these are beliefs held by individuals, but promoted by the institution, and they’re tribal in nature. To challenge them is to challenge a shared identity. A bit like “company culture”.
Vagueness and unspecificity are the only way these beliefs can possibly stay in place.
There’s a slew of perverse incentives against removing these beliefs. If you start counting what really matters, you might come to the conclusion that you don’t matter. Drastic improvement means you were doing things wrong all along, again a threat to identity and a sense of self-worth.
Bureaucracy is peak Ra for me. You’ve got completely screwed up beliefs, cult-like rituals that are their own justification. Anyone that (quite rightly) criticizes them is a hated heathen which must be ostracized for lack of respect to Ra’s priests. There is also a prevalence of premade opaque formulations (jargon) that makes your interaction with the bureaucracy even harder, yet employees treat these formulations as somewhat sacred.
Hmm, I still don’t completely understand. Is it the tendency of organisations to develop an ideological attachment to achieving vague goals that have become the purpose of the organisation such that they can no longer be questioned without this being seen as an attack on the organisation or, at best a flaw in your understanding?
So if I’m imagining how this could come about, the person or group of people who found an organisation (or who are otherwise early leadership before the culture crystallises), have certain opinions about how it should operate. These founding figures have reasons why they believe these principles to be important, but over time these principles are detached from these reasons and become free floating principles, just like traditions in broader society. Obviously, there are reasons given as to why these principles are important, but only in the same way that religion has apologetics. This is where vagueness helps. It is much easier to defend values like diversity, innovation or customer focus in the abstract, than any specific implementation or policy prescription that comes out of it.
Since the culture is now entrenched, those who dislike it tend to leave or even not apply in the first place, as opposed to the earlier stages when it might have been possible to change the mind of the founders. Any change to the values could disrupt entrenched interests, such as managers who want to keep their projects going or departments that want to maintain headcount. Further, individuals have invested time and effort in being good at talking the corporate language. Attempting to clarify any of the vagueness would be incredibly disruptive. So the stability of vagueness forms a Schelling point for the most established factions.
Further, the vagueness provides individual departments or groups more freedom to make themselves look good than if the goal was more locked down. For example, it is much easier to demonstrate progress on diversity or show off projects related to innovation, than to demonstrate progress along a specific axis.
Anyway, just using this comment to “think aloud”, as I’m still somewhat uncertain about this term.
To answer your first question: I’m not sure. First, I’m not sure goals are necessarily the focal point, although losing sights of the real goals is certainly a potent symptom of Ra.
I haven’t thought much about how these beliefs arise, but I haven’t felt very compelled to seek for a complicated explanation besides the usual biases. Saying we’re the best will usually be met with approval. And the more “reasonable doubt” that this might not be the case, the more it becomes necessary to affirm this truth not to break the narrative.
You seem to imagine pure founders and then a degradation of values, but very often the founders are not immune to this problem, or are in fact its very cause. Even when the goals are pretty clear—such as in a startup, where it could be to break even at first—people adopt false tribal beliefs. The bullshit can manifest itself in many places: what they say of their company culture, hiring practices, etc.
That being said, I’m not sure my own understanding of the matter matches that of the original author. But it certainly immediately pattern-matched to something I found to be a very salient characteristic of many organizations.
I actually had my own term before I encountered Ra, which was “business creepy” (definitely should have been “business cheesy”, but creepy stuck). It was about all the empty words and discourses, the business-looking stock photographs , anytime anyone mentioned the term “excellence”. This was bullshit paramount for me, and yet very few people ever thought anything about it.
As I got professional experience, the term grew to encompass completely unjustified cheerleading beliefs of the “we’re the best and the other suck” variety.
If you try to challenge these narratives of excellence or false superiority, even using due diplomacy, you get the reaction that Sarah describe: confusion, incoherence, then anger.
For me these are beliefs held by individuals, but promoted by the institution, and they’re tribal in nature. To challenge them is to challenge a shared identity. A bit like “company culture”.
Vagueness and unspecificity are the only way these beliefs can possibly stay in place.
There’s a slew of perverse incentives against removing these beliefs. If you start counting what really matters, you might come to the conclusion that you don’t matter. Drastic improvement means you were doing things wrong all along, again a threat to identity and a sense of self-worth.
Bureaucracy is peak Ra for me. You’ve got completely screwed up beliefs, cult-like rituals that are their own justification. Anyone that (quite rightly) criticizes them is a hated heathen which must be ostracized for lack of respect to Ra’s priests. There is also a prevalence of premade opaque formulations (jargon) that makes your interaction with the bureaucracy even harder, yet employees treat these formulations as somewhat sacred.
Hmm, I still don’t completely understand. Is it the tendency of organisations to develop an ideological attachment to achieving vague goals that have become the purpose of the organisation such that they can no longer be questioned without this being seen as an attack on the organisation or, at best a flaw in your understanding?
So if I’m imagining how this could come about, the person or group of people who found an organisation (or who are otherwise early leadership before the culture crystallises), have certain opinions about how it should operate. These founding figures have reasons why they believe these principles to be important, but over time these principles are detached from these reasons and become free floating principles, just like traditions in broader society. Obviously, there are reasons given as to why these principles are important, but only in the same way that religion has apologetics. This is where vagueness helps. It is much easier to defend values like diversity, innovation or customer focus in the abstract, than any specific implementation or policy prescription that comes out of it.
Since the culture is now entrenched, those who dislike it tend to leave or even not apply in the first place, as opposed to the earlier stages when it might have been possible to change the mind of the founders. Any change to the values could disrupt entrenched interests, such as managers who want to keep their projects going or departments that want to maintain headcount. Further, individuals have invested time and effort in being good at talking the corporate language. Attempting to clarify any of the vagueness would be incredibly disruptive. So the stability of vagueness forms a Schelling point for the most established factions.
Further, the vagueness provides individual departments or groups more freedom to make themselves look good than if the goal was more locked down. For example, it is much easier to demonstrate progress on diversity or show off projects related to innovation, than to demonstrate progress along a specific axis.
Anyway, just using this comment to “think aloud”, as I’m still somewhat uncertain about this term.
To answer your first question: I’m not sure. First, I’m not sure goals are necessarily the focal point, although losing sights of the real goals is certainly a potent symptom of Ra.
I haven’t thought much about how these beliefs arise, but I haven’t felt very compelled to seek for a complicated explanation besides the usual biases. Saying we’re the best will usually be met with approval. And the more “reasonable doubt” that this might not be the case, the more it becomes necessary to affirm this truth not to break the narrative.
You seem to imagine pure founders and then a degradation of values, but very often the founders are not immune to this problem, or are in fact its very cause. Even when the goals are pretty clear—such as in a startup, where it could be to break even at first—people adopt false tribal beliefs. The bullshit can manifest itself in many places: what they say of their company culture, hiring practices, etc.
That being said, I’m not sure my own understanding of the matter matches that of the original author. But it certainly immediately pattern-matched to something I found to be a very salient characteristic of many organizations.