Month: December 2021

How the Dark Triad Corrupts Support and Advocacy Systems

The dark triad of Machiavellianism, Psychopathy, and Narcissism arise in complex adaptive systems (and our specimen support and advocacy organizations) as threads of meaning in the evolution of the system. They are not separate paths, but can express themselves varyingly, and perhaps are best seen as a coherent interactive bundle of meaning that shifts in impact with change in the context.

They can be consciously fostered by leadership and governance ideologies, or can operate as system attractors without seeming to have any coherent conscious awareness.

I will use a meme as a placeholder for the meaning of each thread:

  • Machiavellianism: The meme is “gaslighting”. This thread is the use of strategic deceit to secure advantage for the system.
  • Psychopathy: The meme is “hyperrational self-interest”. This thread is the ignoring (to the point of obliviousness) of the consequences for people, animals, plants, and artifacts of actions to achieve system advantage.
  • Narcissism: The meme is “arrogant self-interest”. This thread sees the meaning of the contextual incentives narrowly in terms of the system’s advantage.

As you can see, these threads are deeply connected to one another. While there may be value in parsing the distinctions between them for the diagnosis of personality disorders, it makes more sense here to view them as available interactive heuristics that the support and advocacy organizations (or any complex adaptive system) may use to privilege system advantage over The Mission. This use of these tools is a dramatic step in the corruption of any organization and often entirely unnoticed until its impact is deeply embedded in the dynamic of the system. In effect, the system being considered no longer has a meaningful Mission.

I tend to imagine systems drifting (purposely or otherwise) into the realm of dark triad decision-making as zombies. In fact, the mythos of zombies in the arts and media is vivified (if that is the word) by corruption as its core characteristic. Instead of brains, the single-minded driver of such organizations is system advantage.

This overview needs to be fleshed out (those zombie tropes just keep surfacing) through a specimen example of the path followed in the Dark Triad evolution of the system, and system examples of how the Dark Triad corrodes the ability of a system to authentically pursue its Mission.

Next: Evolving toward the Abyss: How We Blunder into Inauthentic Purpose

 

The Dark Triad of Evolving Bureaucratic Systems

In addition to what I described as the typical bureaucratization of support and advocacy systems in my last post, there is a darker path that any system development can take in a facilitating context. We can understand this path by using a metaphor borrowed from a social media trope about personality characteristics called the Dark Triad:

  • Machiavellianism
  • Psychopathy
  • Narcissism

We aren’t going to view these as part of some continuum of personality disorders. Instead, we will look at them as corrupting forces driven by larger socio-political environments that aren’t necessarily connected to the personalities of people in the system. Rather, the forces are incentive-driven contexts for decision-making by actors in the system, actors who wouldn’t qualify under the criteria of the DSM as persons with these disorders.

In a word, the forces create “functional” versions of the disorders, guiding and enforcing decisions that mimic the kinds of decisions persons with these disorders might make. Because these are not medical concepts, but enabling and governing constraints in systems, we will use simple abstractions to define them. We don’t need to meet the DSM criteria to understand how such decision-making affects the evolution of support and advocacy organizations.

Next: How the Dark Triad Corrupts Support and Advocacy Systems

The Corruption of System Purpose

As many people have noted, the purpose of a complex adaptive system is what it does (its dynamic process of evolution), not what it says it does (its marketing). Over time, what a system does changes in many ways.

All support and rights systems have two missions:

  • Why the system was created (usually called The Mission).
  • Survival (keeping the “doors open”, if that metaphor still means something during a pandemic).

The evolution of the system over the near-term tracks the evolving relationship between these two forces:

  • In the early part of that evolution, especially in small nonprofits, there is a hard learning curve about why you have to pay attention to money when you become part of the organization because of that attractive advocacy mission. The “shock of funding realities” causes the system to be shy of making financial mistakes and gradually erodes the place of The Mission as the foremost force in system evolution.
  • Ways of buffering the system begin to be developed, largely driven by this anxiety about resources. Resources, that might have been used for mission-critical activities, are used (or invested) in protection of the system from dissolution. For a benign example, the creation of a reserve, to deal with the reality of slow funders and grant based support, is a common way to buffer the system.
  • Because it is the managers of the system who are anxious about being blamed for financial failures, keeping the doors open gradually replaces The Mission as the field within which managers create their plans and cognitive/emotional priorities.
  • Along with this dominance of focus on resources, there is inevitably some external cycle of funding gain and loss which creates pressure to have ongoing administrative controls to preserve funds by reducing the cost of The Mission. The usual rubric for this is “efficiency”. Thus, the expansion of administrative/managerial control over the priorities of The Mission gradually leads to expanding the scope and detail of administrative actions as a proportion of the total activities of the system. In other words, bureaucracy expands over time, and is justified by the highest priority of being “efficient”.  This is interesting moral choice since bureaucracy keeps expanding and costing more as this process evolves. In and of itself, bureaucracy contributes nothing to the direct fulfillment of The Mission. The justification for this expansion is always the protection of The Mission as the outward marketing face of the system’s self- protection.
  • It is important to note that the resources used to preserve the system are taken directly from funds that could have been used for The Mission. This process of removing resources from direct support of The Mission to preservation of the system is an example of the  classic “moral hazard” found as part of economic activity. In this case, the risk taken by the managers is to The Mission. As time goes on, all governance aspects of the system face this moral hazard. Though not universal, it is common for the management and governance processes of the system to stop thinking about the Mission and assume that their decisions are automatically supportive of The Mission.
  • I call this process corrupting. This is not simple criminal or moral corruption, like bribery or embezzlement. The corrupting force is in the head of every person who makes decisions about the use of resources, which is everyone, including employees. How far the corruption evolves is unique to the system dynamic over time, and is fractal.
  • Fractal simply means that all decisions regardless of level in the system support or impede the corruption. Notably, this includes decisions made for political gain.
  • There need not be a high level of corruption for this evolution to profoundly affect the system. My observation of small nonprofits over the last half-century, suggests to me that a level of 5% in corrupt transactions means that all transactions in the system are tainted, even though the 95% are not corrupt, or not done by people who are behaving corruptly. Typically, if both explicit and implicit bureaucracy are included, the minimum of such corruption can be estimated at 15%.
  • Note that there is no simple, easy solution to this corruption process. Instead, reflection on the impact of financial bureaucratization on The Mission must be embraced as the highest priority for governance and management. It almost never is. Even when it is embraced, bureaucracy is tuned to prevent meaningful impact by such reform.

The reality of corruption of Purpose has powerful lessons for the practice of advocacy, as I suspect most readers already know. But there is another layer to this corruption that evolves in large systems of support for people with disabilities and we need to understand how it evolves to truly understand the implications for our advocacy in the face of such corruption.

Next Time: The Dark Triad of System Evolution

Long Term Advocacy Engagement and SOF Affordances

The power of advocacy arises from engaging the anomalies in the SOF’s evolution. These anomalies are affordances for effective change. Anomalies means weak signals from the SOF that are not in alignment with its stated purpose or mission. Anomalies are not just hypocrisy about mission values.  They are programs, funding sources, political connections-anything in the SOF ecosystem that doesn’t support its mission. There are always a large number of anomalies in any complex adaptive system, including our advocacy organizations. If we wish to make use of them, we have to be able to perceive them.

The nature of weak signals makes them easy to ignore if they make us uncomfortable, or if recognizing them requires us to make unpleasant or difficult changes.  Also, we are taught almost from birth, to believe that strong signals, and only strong signals, are worth our time or effort. (Note that common signals are viewed as strong whether they are or not.) Strong signals are viewed the way they are because there is an assumption that the power of a signal to, say, punish or force change, is related to its strength.

There is just enough truth to this assumption that we believe we can safely ignore weak signals. We can’t-at least if we want to have an impact on our common future.

The other problem with focusing on the processes associated with strong signals in an SOF is that they are the ones best defended. If we try to use strong signals and those internal processes that support the reproduction and expansion of the SOF that those signals represent, the system will have no trouble mobilizing resources to oppose our change efforts.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t confront the underlying processes of an oppressive or discriminatory SOF. I’m saying that changing those core processes will require a long term effort and a lot of resources.

We can also think of going after weak processes by identifying them in weak signals as a way to force the SOF to use resources to counter our change work that the SOF would prefer to use in support of its core strong processes. The tendency for the SOF will be to try to minimize the use of these core resources which will, in turn, slow an effective response to our advocacy. In fact, there are advocacy techniques which disguise the real potential impact of our advocacy to exploit this SOF tendency.

In the context of our engagement with an SOF over the long term is the potential for corruption of the SOF purpose and, frankly, for the corruption of our advocacy purpose.  We need to understand how this corruption works in order to not lose the thread of our advocacy purpose.

Next: Corruption of System Purpose