The Mediocrity Downspiral
El Gato Malo

A walking tour of emergent institutional submergence

How do whole agencies, companies, and cultures that were once high function succumb to mediocrity and then collapse into incompetence and nepotism?

It seems like poison or like plan, but mostly, i suspect it’s not. it’s just self-assembling self-disassembly.

It’s actually perilously easy to set in motion. the whole thing is just a simple emergent property that spreads like slime mold from the simple mistake of putting non-competent people at or near the top. middle and upper middle management is often the early beachhead. and that’s all it takes. this is why DEI so successfully and so inevitably colonizes and destroys everyhting it touches. it’s just human nature and let’s face it, a lot of you hairless apes are kinda problematic in that regard.

Let’s look:

Emergent properties are amazing things. they are also badly misunderstood. incredibly complex and sophisticated outcomes can arise from a few small, simple rules repeated over and over again. it looks like intelligence or intention, but it’s not. from termite nests to bird flocking behavior, we see this all over nature. (in fact, the way birds flock was “solved” by craig reynolds in 1986, seeking to model them for animation.) the model, BOIDS is very simple:

But it models bird flocks near perfectly. add in some obstacle avoidance and the wind direction and you’re basically there.

In the end, a lot of such behavior is highly predictable, much more so than people realize. the flock itself is not, but the basics of its structure are. the same is true of organizational structure. small simple rules can drive rich, complex outcomes.

So how does even a little DEI lead to full incompetence contagion? i would like to posit a very simple emergent algorithm rooted in a simple and longstanding organizational idea:

A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s. (and you seriously do not want to meet the people C’s hire)

That’s it. that’s all we need to extrapolate and plot it.

This pattern emerges in response to two simple drives affecting all those who lack ability to compete:

The essence of this is simple: the highly competent (A’s) wish to be surrounded by other highly competent people. an organization of mostly A’s (or at least A’s in management) thrives and gets lots done. it innovates. it rewards achievement and ability. it’s a meritocracy. because that’s what A’s want.

And B’s hate this. they cannot get ahead and they live in fear of A’s beneath them coming for their jobs and hatred of A’s above them who prevent advancement and who make demands for performance. 

They do not want their jobs taken, so they respond to this by hiring only those less competent than themselves to work under them (C’s). this is how they hold position and avoid challenge and threat. 

Ideally, they’d also like to clear any A’s above them out of the way so they can generate some upward mobility. they cannot do this on a meritocratic axis, so they seek another one to supplant it.

They seek to move hiring and promotion to some other quality than ability then reinforce it with doctrine.

The pretext itself is incidental to this process. it does not really matter what it is. 

It just has to be “something other than competence” and you land in this self-referential recursive trap.

DEI/woke/ESG is not some new thing. it’s just the same set of anti-meritocracy pigs that thrive in communist and other authoritarian systems dressed up with different lipstick. the pretexts change but the praxis is timeless.

This is a wonderfully poignant excerpt from hungarian immigrant and refugee from the 1956 hungarian uprising, balint vazsonyi’s, book “america’s 30 years war” (1998)

His notions of an “upside down” society find close consonance with the yowlings of certain internet felines about DEI/woke society fetishizing marginalization and elevating the marginal and maladapted to power and prestige at the expense of virtue and capability.

It’s inversion into anti-meritocracy that inherently emerges from having chosen another axis than merit because in the end, this is binary: 

You hire for merit (ability to do the job) or you hire for “something else.” 

Choosing “something else” always and inevitably evolves to “anti-merit” structures.

Contrary to the claims of adherents about “diversity being strength” or whatever other non-functional based metric they want to substitute for inclusion criteria, this is not and cannot be a neutral matter. instead, it’s a slippery slope to self-sabotaging structures because once one adopts some metric other than “good at job/suited to task” for hiring, one inevitably gets B’s and not A’s in positions of power. (if you were looking for A’s, you’d just use merit and forget race and gender and sexual orientation or physical infirmity or tribal loyalty as selectors) they then go looking for C’s to hire because that’s what B’s do. the rest is just an emergent cascade.

If you put a B in charge of a high function place like, say, harvard, the wreckage is universal and rapid. you get actual purges of merit, struggle sessions, and loyalty oaths to affirm pledges to non and anti-merit. no one is allowed to outshine the dim star atop the tree and kaka inevitably flows down grade.

But even letting this into middle management is enough and letting it anywhere near HR is instant metastatic cancer.

The B’s hire C’s, the C’s hire D’s and pretty soon, you have rotted a whole org from middle or even upper middle management down. then they start looking upward in envy and dislike for those above them and seek to target those who know how to do things and accomplish goals. 

These B’s and C’s cannot compete on merit, so they force the new axis of advancement that they have concocted upward with talk of “privilege” and “needing people like me at the top” and any upper echelon not ready to wholesale fire this gang and start over (or too frightened to do so because of cancelation) will inevitably be toppled by either mutiny from below or by getting the hook from above because the board and shareholders (or voters) see what an awful job this organization is now doing and want “change.”

This also often drives all the A’s out of the top as simple incentive set. no one wants to preside over an organization that has rotted in the middle. it does not work, cannot work, and the demands become every more baroque and damaging. so you beat feet and GTFO before this millstone is hung around your neck. the flight of talent from the tops of DEI orgs has been amazing.

Then some clever boots from team mediocrity puts forward the idea that “we need a leader we can relate to.” and this is death.

Of what use is an “average joe” or “general issue jill” in a role that requires someone exceptional?

None at all. 

They just serve to protect the mediocre and stagnate enterprise and drive it further into the ground.

They actively oppose the emergence of competence.

It’s a choice of envy and of desire for cosseting. 

It’s the destruction (and perhaps worse the degradation and defilement) of “better” to avoid the labor of being called to be better yourself.

 

 

El Gato Malo

You like to pretend that you don't like bad cats, but deep down, you know you do. Prolonged exposure is likely to give you toxoplasmosis.

 

 

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