Addiction to power and wealth underpins all civilisations. Faith in so-called “leadership” is the Archilles’ heel of human societies. People are waking up to the fact that faith in leaders is what is likely to lead to the end of our species and countless other species (Maté 2012).

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

A good start to learning about the creation of healthy cultures is to replace the toxic language of management. Managers need to become aware of the extent to which the old language they use is a language that encourages competitive social gaming.

Language frames people’s thoughts and emotional response.

It is time to start consistently talking about concepts that can improve our lives:

1. ​​Niche construction and symbiosis rather than competition – to create organisations and services that are fit for purpose and valued by the wider community ​
2. Company rather than business – to focus on the people and things we care about rather than what is simply keeping us busy
3. ​​Values rather than value – to avoid continuously discounting what is priceless
4. Physical waste rather than wealth – to focus us on the metrics that do matter
5. ​​Human scale and individual agency rather than large scale and growth – to create structures and systems that are understandable and relatable
6. ​​Competency networks rather than leadership – to get things done and distribute decision making to where the knowledge resides ​
7. Coordination rather than management – to address all the stuff that can increasingly be automated, management is often the biggest obstacle to automation ​
8. Creativity and divergent thinking rather than best practices – when facing the need to innovate and improve

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

I have banned the language of competitive busyness from my active vocabulary many years ago, and this has created a very effective social filter for developing eye level relationships based on mutual trust, and for minimising the time wasted on interactions with those who are still committed to the toxic ideology of exponential growth of the industrial era.

It would be a terrific step for an organisation to replace all manager job titles with coordinator job titles etc. This could go a long way to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration at eye level. Somewhere along the line however, the often astronomical hierarchical pay differentials would also have to be reduced quite significantly, to avoid the change from deteriorating into a window dressing exercise.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Deceptive use of language is essential for ladder climbing and “leadership” roles in the ultra-large human primate dominance hierarchies that we refer to as organisations, corporations, and government institutions. The tools of the trade for “success” at the “social game” are: ​

• persuasive storytelling,
• the strategic use of plausibly deniable lies – which some celebrate as the “valuable” capacity for flexible deception,
• and the art of bullying – to the limits of what is deemed socially acceptable in specific contexts.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Our education system has a big gaping hole when it comes to teaching people how to coordinate complex activities without resorting to so-called leadership and management skills, which are effectively the same skills that other primates (baboons, chimpanzees, etc.) use to establish and maintain dominance hierarchies. Humans would not have become so successful on this planet just by focusing on these skills.

Humans became more successful than other primates by recognising the limitations and social learning disabilities induced by maintaining dominance hierarchies. It is no surprise that for hundreds of thousands of years humans lived in small and highly egalitarian groups. That’s what has made them more successful than other primates. Things started to go downhill with humans with the invention of “civilisation” around 10,000 years ago.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

The social game of “successful management” and “leadership” is all about pushing the boundaries of what can still be interpreted as acceptable application of the culturally defined rules.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Our organisations work not because of good leadership and management, but in spite of it – because there are always a few people who don’t play the social game and who don’t care about social status. There is a lot that society could learn from these people.

Typical people have the capability to behave much like typical primates if their culture does not have strong social norms that condemn typical primate behaviour. In our culture we celebrate people “who get ahead”, this is a social disease that W Edwards Deming (1984a) correctly identified and described very eloquently nearly 40 years ago. People who enjoy “managing” people are rather unlikely to be autistic. Instead, the social game playing opportunities offered by top management positions attract and reward psychopaths.

The challenge with management culture is that managers have been indoctrinated by our culture and see management by fear as essential and valuable. Notions like servant leadership don’t go far enough to address the root causes of bullying. Managers need to unlearn a lot of what they have been led to believe.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

The notions of management and leadership are entangled with the anthropocentric conception of civilisation. In a hierarchical structure most people abandon their sense of agency and the need to think critically on a daily basis.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

We will have to get used to the fact that super-human scale structures are the products of bio/cultural ecosystem evolution rather than the imagined products of individual human ingenuity or human “leadership”. Remember, on this planet no-one is in control.

The Beauty of Collaboration at Human Scale: Timeless patterns of human limitations

Further Reading