A parable about the fundamental, inescapable horror of internal politics in large organizations.
[abt][abu]The internals of an organization are best understood by the word kayfabe.
Organizations exist to cause some positive impact in the outer world.
A little bit of kayfabe is not bad–it's healthy, even.
[abw]Imagine if in every team meeting when the boss proposed a new goal someone raised their hand and said "here's ten reasons I think this will definitely not work."
In that case, the plan definitely doesn't work, because no one on the team will even try.
But if everyone entertains the idea that it might work, maybe as we work together we find a way to make it work.
But kayfabe tends to only ever grow.
Imagine that you are responsible for grading progress on an objective that will be rolled up multiple layers of the chain to the CEO.
One of your projects is objectively in a "yellow" state, but by the time the final roll-up is presented to the CEO next week, you'll have gotten it to a "green" state.
If you mark it a "yellow" now, you'll be more likely to attract scrutiny that could randomize you and create extra meta-work, and it will be solved by the time of the report anyway.
What do you mark it down as? Yellow or green?
What most people would do is mark it green.
The problem is that this same logic plays out in multiple ply up the org chart.
Each person has an incentive to greenshift
[abx][aby] just a little.
But if you greenshift on top of a thing that's already been greenshifted, the greenshifting multiplies together.
That means that up multiple ply it could be off from the ground truth by many orders of magnitude.
The organization exists to achieve a real outcome in the world, which requires it to understand the ground truth to effectively navigate it.
But the kayfabe has decohered from reality.
Imagine you notice the discrepancy–what do you do?
If you walk over to the ground truth bell and threaten to ring it, someone more senior than you will pull you aside.
"You're right, we're dangerously far from the ground truth. But if you ring that bell, it will cause chaos–all of the plans will be shattered in an instant and everything will decohere. Instead of ringing it, why not help fix it?"
This seems reasonable, and so you agree.
But as time goes on you realize that the kayfabe is not only stronger than you, it is stronger than any assemblage of individuals and is getting stronger every day: an emergent, compounding force.
As it goes on, it is destroying value for your customers, for your employees, for the company, and for society.
Resolute, you decide to go ring the bell, no matter the consequences.
But right before you do, an anonymous zombie tackles you to the ground and stabs you in the dark before you destroy the organization.
As a leader in an organization like that (and every organization is like this, at least a little): you have a hard decision to make.
Do you go along with the kayfabe or try to understand the ground truth to create good outcomes in the world?
As a leader, you have to hold both in your head at the same time–enough kayfabe to not get stabbed, but enough ground truth to actually achieve good outcomes.
But the kayfabe will win over time.
If you let go of the kayfabe, you'll get stabbed.
If you let go of the ground truth, the outcome won't happen… but the social complexity makes it extremely indirect to attribute outcomes to actions anyway so you'll likely be safe as long as everyone thinks you're working hard.
So the kayfabe tends to ratchet up and up.
As you lose the grip on the ground truth you become a zombie.
Once you have let go of the ground truth, all you have is the kayfabe, and defending the kayfabe becomes the end.
If someone threatens it, they are threatening your infinity, and they must be stopped no matter what.
So you stab them.
So the question in this story is: in its fullest manifestation of kayfabe in an organization, there are only two options:
Which will you choose?
[abz]