ChristopherBerry.ca

Clusterfucks will happen, and nobody ever really walks away from one a winner. A clusterfuck can be turned around by either boosting trust, hitting ‘reset’ when it comes to definitions, deliberately seeking out extra understanding, or, if there’s a hollow core of authority – electing a leviathan to run the group. Clusterfuck avoidance is going to be a major social technology as knowledge worker teams become increasingly interdisciplinary. More problems are bound to happen because the complexity in terms of communication and the specifics of professional norms scales. Just as an example, if a chemist tells the engineer that temperatures from the mix could trough at -200 c, and asks the engineer if the structure could be designed to handle[…]

Another key reason why clusterfucks appear is because somebody with the authority wants them to appear. Stalin is said to have purposely given his cabinet conflicting portfolios to paralyze them: essentially giving him a free hand to denounce them and go about doing what we wanted to anyway. We have all observed similar situations where very brilliant people will purposely ask a team of people, none of whom have the authority to make any lasting decisions, to execute some task. Even if communication is good and trust exists among the participants, the very nature of the power vacuum is bound to cause a clusterfuck unless the team anoints an interim leviathan. It’s exceedingly rare. It is entirely possible that some[…]

Sometimes even when people trust each other, information can still get garbled through faults in communication. Very frequently, professionals in a given field will begin using a very specific jargon. For instance, the term “unique” means something very different to a web analyst than it does to a fashion designer. These shortcuts in language serve a really important purpose within a profession, and the specificity and unity on that jargon is a key feature of any given culture. When two professions need to work together, in an inter-disciplenary way, it is very easy to miscommunicate important findings, purely through mistakes in language. Sometimes, something as simple as messing up the difference between ‘pageviews’, ‘visits’, ‘visitors’ and ‘unique visitors’ can have[…]

One of the core reasons for organizational clusterfucks is a lack of trust among the participants or groups of participants. Generally speaking, if there is no trust, there is limited communication (because, of course, refusing to talk to somebody can be a form of limited communication – right?). Even if two respective hierarchies mandate communication, if there is no trust, people on either side will be very crafty in interpreting rules so stringently so as to limit communication. Worse, distrust over years can become pervasive and infectious, like a plaque that builds up. We saw this in the years leading to Air India. Sometimes there is a legitimate incentivization for distrust. I won’t share competitive information with competitors out of[…]

I watched a wonderful Nature last night on PBS. It was about a bunch of baboons on the Serengeti. It was a pretty brutal hour and instructive. People in their own way are complex and they form complex systems with complex relationships and complex rituals. How hierarchies form and persist is something a few of us within the Toronto innovation community has been struggling with – especially around this relationship between ‘networks’ and ‘hierarchies’. Every so often – people can’t or won’t get a long, expectations aren’t communicated or registered, and our complex systems break down. The specific question is:  “What causes clusterfucks”? That’s the central question of the week.