Abstract
In "The Problem Space of Organizational Ideology," Lee Stadler interrogates the genesis of our collective beliefs, asking: Why do we construct these rigid frameworks of thought, and what is the existential price of the "ease" they provide? Stadler posits that organizational ideology functions as a cognitive shortcut—a "memory's lapdog"—designed for social and mental weight reduction. By adopting formulas of "how to be" rather than engaging in the arduous labor of actually being, individuals and organizations insulate themselves from the "shivers our souls make" when meeting with dissonance. He argues that this process is inherently "lossy"; just as digital files degrade through compression, our identities and histories are threshed by the winds of time. Each act of retrieval reshapes memory into a more convenient, yet less accurate, version of the past, rendering "truth" a comparative mechanism rather than a grounded reality.
The key takeaways emphasize that the human pursuit of a frictionless existence through technology or ideological absolution often masks a deeper enslavement to the idea of freedom itself. Because memory is an aerobic, deteriorating process where our biases frequently emerge victorious, the formulas we rely on to reduce our cognitive load ultimately uproot us from the grounding of life. We are left with vivid but faulty snapshots of reality—reminders that true understanding cannot exist in individual isolation, but requires the formative contributions of others to see the full picture.
The Problem Space of Organizational Ideology
Genesis. Beginnings. Origins. We arrive with them not at them, by chance but through inevitability. It is a mistake to think that humanity has arrived at a “now” point without first having traveled through others that were just as mistaken in their hindsight as the last. They are, in a sense, still occurring just as the “now” is still occurring. It is a mistake to act as if these travels bore no effect of consequence or cast less than a short shadow upon their once tomorrows. We are in the past as much as we allow it to remain. (van der Kolk, 2014) This remaining is a simple concept of memory, easily referenced and easily deteriorated by the act of referencing. This is how memory may work less directionally or more diffusely depending upon our own sort of gravity or intent, (Podolskiy, Lanza, 2016) and how, over time, our identities as individuals or organizations via those intentions become ever more distantly offset and set aside as the things we might eventually get around to considering again. For those disposed to the creation of conscious deterioration of these offsets or ideologies, or whom we may call malcontents or manipulators, the dispositional acts are mere tasks required by their existence. What they do becomes who they are. They themselves are precursors to corrupted ideologies but they are not necessarily the first beads in the causal chain of their existence. They too exist within the same ecology of pressures for survival or prestige or legacy or change as those around them. Yet, something has gone awry that would encourage the need to create suffering. Inasmuch as we might seek through time to find a first cause or starting point for any woe that might exist or that might have been caused, we are quickly met with the reality of an impossibly intertwined existence that predates our species. After all, we did not simply “become” one fateful day. We are an iterative process, physically, emotionally and spiritually, bringing with us the long years of brilliance and baggage of our ancestors.
Here we might find grace in the consideration of the effect of ideologies, knowing that they are of us all, in a way.
What is an ideology?
A set or collection of held beliefs, impressions and biases. Ideologies are a mind’s shortcut and a memory’s lapdog. Individually, the beliefs and impressions we hold act as a warm blanket for the shivers our souls make when they meet with dissonance.
“…the cognitive system has very effective ways to deal with information processing, especially given its limited resources; however, such effective shortcut mechanisms can also bring about vulnerability to bias and error.”
– Maclean & Itiel, 2016
Why are ideologies made?
Quite clearly, weight reduction, cognitively and socially, in the same manner that we might exclude details from a thought or memory to enable a better fit with our own ethical adoptions or moral prescriptions. As they concern identity, it is much less work over time to follow a formula of how to be than it is to actually think about being. If we are able to reduce the resources required to exist we have more to spend contemplating our mortality or staring at bare walls to ask ourselves why they are so. In theory, at least. Even this idyllic consideration has not withstood the test of time or circumstance as much as we have craved for it to do so. Energizing our own belief in the belief that being free from toil through the absolution of technology or wisdom or any other thing has long been a pursuit absent a consideration of the cost of being. It seems that, for any one person to be “free” requires many others to be enslaved to their idea of freedom. In his novel, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair approached the matter through his character Nicholas Schliemann. This champion of revolution and the proletariat posited a very old human effort: … “after the abolition of privilege and exploitation, any one would be able to support himself by an hour's work a day”. (Sinclair, The Jungle, chpt 31, 1904) More than one-hundred years post publication, through an endless stream of human conflict, chaos and self-determinism, it would seem our wars to end all wars have not done so. Our calls for revolution are quickly subsumed for our clamor towards validity in a very loud world. We’re fine with capitalism as it suits us (and maybe even more so when it doesn’t suit our neighbor). No, the call for salvation through ease of living made possible by wonderous invention carries with it the same seed of destruction as did our establishment of cities and states. I do love a well-paved street. I greatly value indoor plumbing. But, not as much as might those who have not yet experienced their benefit. It is an impossibility without the context provided by the opposite. Perhaps this was Sinclair’s hope in his believing. What we have made though, through our innovations is an ease that has created more demand for ease and uprooted us from the grounding of life. The cost of processing one’s existence is also an important consideration and is manifest in how much difficulty we have in explaining our “selves” versus how easy it is to say what we do from day to day or where we live. Accessing our memories is a lossy concept even if, over time, we become more assured about the accuracy of those memories. (In a way, our biases become victorious in the writing of our personal perspectives of history). Borrowing the term from digital file storage, lossy means that something is lost, either upon retrieval or storage or through compressing and excluding portions of the original idea. Never is the entire memory intact. Why? Because each individual memory lacks the formative contributions of identity formation made by other humans. Together we have a more full view of reality. Individually, memories are faulty snapshots, however vivid they may be.
Storage – a function of memory, organizationally or otherwise, is a process that degrades over time. It occurs as an aerobic function, subjected to the continual threshing warp and weft of the winds of time. Either internally or externally, what “was” in memory is not what is ultimately retained. Information leaves through the very processes that retrieve and re-shelve it. Moreover, both retrieval and storage create a new thing, a sort of resonant bump in the fabric of self and identity, as the detail of a memory degrades by the simple matter of the ecology of temporal references. Memories referenced in time are subject to time. These references are then conditional and they bring with them the foibles of the time, place and space of the retrieval and re-storage of a memory as metainformation. In a sense, we remember when we remembered something, and in doing so we create something new while losing some of the integrity of the original as individuals.
If we evaluate memory within the confines of whether something is “true”, we see clearly the basis for perception and the ecological premises that have shaped these perceptions over time. Interpersonally, familially, socially, culturally, these spheres of influence, each part of the identity formation process and dependent upon the force of their influence, prompt psychological and physiological responses that aid in the formation of the perceptions we wield. Yet, truths have no baseline, no ground upon which to stand. They may, by happenstance, touch upon reality and reference it from time to time as might a cloud pass over a mountain’s peek or cast a shadow as it blocks the sun. The point being, truths are their own formed baseline for the perception of what is. They are comparative mechanisms as are good and evil. As mentioned in the prior chapter however, without a baseline for what it means to be human in general, an abundance of perceptions and truths shall remain.
If we consider ideologies, these bundles of truths, within the metaphor of memory once again, we might find that the often extrapolated “working model” serves as a passable substrate upon which to build. The executive function within the working memory model serves as the closest thing we humans might have to an attention center. It is dependent upon several functions: the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the episodic buffer. (Baddely, Hitch, 1974) Each of these functions takes in turn the role of narrator of a explanatory tale of how we store and retrieve memories using neurophysiological means. However, because memory itself is referenced as a composite of multiple areas within the brain and mind distinctly, each of these functions is further dependent upon sense registers – our physical input mechanisms like optic nerves – in order to retrieve components of a memory that would form a wholly intact memory. Here, memory itself is a series of transfers along reference pathways. (Robbins, 1996) The phonological loop calibrating our language centers. The visuospatial sketchpad dealing in visual semantics. The episodic buffer doing its best to maintain some memory reference as a short-term access point that, (if not continually referenced) will fade. Each of these facets informs the executive function. The executive function informs each of these facets. Each shapes the perception or truth of memory regardless of reality.
It's a bit of a damn mess.
An executive function. What a marvel of a way to ascribe to memory what we have ascribed to a similar function within organizations. Perceived as the higher-functioning elements inside of an organization with their visionary foresight and their rigorously held standards for competency and self awareness. They sound off and let the lower-order functionaries carry out their whims. Tongue and cheek aside, both serve as metaphors for how things really get done, either in memory or in organization. To draw the parallel more clearly we could say that an “executive” is responsible for letting other functionaries know what to do. They order the retrieval, compositing and reasoning surrounding organizational well-being. Yet this would be a mythical and contrived statement as, it should be fairly easy to understand that, like most titles and descriptions, they effect very little compared to their cost. Yes, executives are more expensive than their counterparts. The mail clerk (if those exist anymore) the desktop publisher (a stupid title birthed in the 1980s) the public relations expert (something close in kind to a leaky balloon with a face, filled with helium and let loose in a small room where it dive-bombs the innocent and unfortunate). Each are titles that describe very little about their role in general. We hope they have some sort of function but instead of looking closely at what that function really is we find it easier to assume that the label accurately matches the output. Just, as it is, that we assume an executive function for memory is the paragon of what it means to remember.
Why draw this awkward correlation? Two reasons. First, to point at the absurdity and inaccuracy with which we conduct ourselves ideologically within organizations. Second, to serve as a cautionary tale regarding describing complex things like memory. May it be that we are striving to do our best just as we would hope for our executives to do. May we realize and understand that, like the working memory model, they are simply models of functions, and to ascribe to them any deference beyond their function or competency is to play make-believe with life. So, let’s turn once again to the reality of what the working model describes. This executive function, evolutionarily speaking, is relatively recent and rare in occurrence within the animal kingdom especially as it is paired with such a large brain in the case of humans. This large brain, the working memory model, the prefrontal cortex, none of them are required for survival in its most basic form. We do, after all, share a progressive series of gray matter evolutions with mammals and reptiles, all of whom have survived in some form or another alongside us. Memory does seem to be a requirement for progress though. Moving from one day to the next while being able to understand what exactly that might entail. In this way it is a distributed function within our species and, supposedly, we’re all quite capable of using this function. We all have executive function. The question might then be asked, “if we all exhibit the capacity and capability, why do we prefer for someone else to do it for us?” Either from time-to-time, situationally or entirely. (DeRue, Ashford, 2010) If this important human trait is so damn important, why do we wish so desperately that someone else take the burden, individually or organizationally?
The answer is to offset the burden.
Consider the idea of an economy. We say they may be “weak” or “strong” as a means of distancing ourselves from our place within them. Clearly they would not exist without us. Bears and bulls may currently be very pissed for us having used their species to describe our very human institutions. If they cared, that is. What would a human really know about being a bear or a bull anyhow? We observe a series of traits that we taxonomize and name in order to relate abstractly to the things we invent. What makes for a weak economy? Is it poor living conditions and low employment and low gross domestic product? If so, why? Why depersonalize the state of ourselves? The answer is to remove ourselves from considering our place in the state of burden in which we find ourselves just as we might call upon a technology to save use from ourselves and our decisions.
To make life and living a little bit lighter we make a trade. We trade our accountability for comfort without considering how that accountability has prodded us for millions of years into being moderately special creatures. The very act becomes a new thing within us, taking an energy all its own to do so. Just as we would offset our accountability to executives within an organization, thereby degrading our personal ability to be our own executive functions, we do the same with memories when we assign the model more credence than is due its metaphor. It is less that the metaphor is unreliable. It is more that it is partial. Time interferes through no fault of its own, wearing away the edges of our memories. They are altered by environment. After all, who someone is when a memory is made may be vastly different than when the memory is retrieved.
Where is Memory?
An aside. Memory is. There are certainly sense registers within the physical construct of the brain that might become injured or precluded in some other manner thereby inhibiting the formation or retrieval of memories. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk (2014) contributes many good questions to this discussion as he grapples with the ways in which our physiology might react to psychological trauma. The answer may be neither the body nor the mind but the substrate in which those two sides of existence operate. That substrate is time. Memory is in time and identity is no single individual’s property. Our identities are shared, and in shared identity are the nuances of shared experiences and memory, however attainable those might really be. To clarify, we do not share single experiences as if by some hive-mind. We do though tend to behave as easily swayed groups in response to stimuli depending upon how fiercely held a belief that stimuli butts up against is in the moment. It is how a village together defends itself from intruders. Yet, a single experience may be shared by many, each with their memories of that experience firmly pegged within their brains and minds and, in service to identity formation, contribution to one another. The conversation might be: “Do you remember when…”, “Ah, yes. And I remember that we also…” This is shared identity prompted by group narrative. How might this be applied to organizations? As many parts of a whole (Memory as a model here is both “working” to form an executive response but partial as it pertains to a more complete picture that might be made more complete through the perspectives of others.
And When We’re Alone?
In a hypothetical solitude, are our memories our own? Are we our selves? From the standpoint of understanding self, yes, but a self that has not had the benefit or detriment of interacting with other selves. It is no more or less complete. Some would find this notion enthralling. Some would find it the thing of nightmares. But, they could only posit their enthralling or nightmarish approaches through a foreknowledge of relating and communing with others in identity’s dance. And hypotheticals are just that. They are the bean sí of saying we want to know an answer without putting in the work to find one.
The correlation here is clear. If memories are metaphors for ideologies then their formations are dependent upon perceptions of experience rather than reality. They are dependent upon the tenuous nature of detail retrieval and constant short-term reference. They are dependent upon accessible language structures and the ability to parse one’s visual semantics and interpret one’s semiotics. These dependencies continually interact with other memory dependencies residing within other dependent individuals in order to feel and be perceived as relevant. (Edwards, Cable, 2009) And, when these individuals group they may form a composite approach to memory, sharing between individuals components of a greater whole that, without the presence of one of the individuals, may lose clarity and effect. We find this is in our human history prior to writing in our ability to share narrative orally and with great degrees of accuracy in reflecting what it means to be human. Our shared tales of creation and destruction, of gods and service and demons and subservience, of life and death and struggle. Each theme carried throughout time in order to rest with us as hope and harbinger. We would be hard-pressed to claim that oral traditions were replete with perfectly accurate details regarding places and spaces, something we argue ad nauseum to prove someone else wrong so that our dissonance might be reduced. We would be absent rational thought, however, if we claimed that they must be entirely so, if that was not the intent of the story. There is a time and a place, to argue, but when that time is, now seems a long-forgotten construct.
Some sort of empirical pursuit is a fool's errand when erroneously applied to narrative structures that are meant to aid us in the metaphysics of existence. We cannot test the voracity of Homer's character Paris - his height or weight or any such thing. We must ask then if we tell representative stories that speak to the empirical nature of being human. Or, like we might argue about the Iliad, would we treat our own stories with such gross lack of evaluation while claiming others must abide and endure our double standards. Our stories are "more" accurate because they are of us and we wish to be valid in them. So, we make Homer a liar, Paris a whore and Achilles some insurrectionist who should have stretched for 20 minutes prior to attacking. All of these, these human things are attempts to assign and re-assign meaning without understanding why a narrative would exist in the first place.
Troy exists today. Not in the manner or splendor that it once did. We might say the same of ourselves.
We should ask, then, what is the purpose of storing memories? What is the purpose of remembering? If it is a means of wayfinding and navigating towards tomorrow, then we may have part of the answer. If it is to maintain one’s place in the narrative of existence, then we may have another part of the answer. If it is to offset the cognitive burden of recalling the grand detail pinpointed by a single memory, or to exclude some additional person or group to create our own little island then we have clues to the intention of ideological offsetting and, more importantly, a point at which we might evaluate our intentions.
They are corruptible.
References
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Sinclair, U., & Castronovo, R. (2010). The jungle. New ed. Oxford University Press.
Edwards, J. R., & Cable, D. M. (2009). The value of value congruence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(3), 654–677. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014891
About the author
Lee Stadler is a designer who links multiple disciplines to deliver value to a variety of contexts and industries. Humanity is at the core of my practice and history anchors its origins.
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