Bulldozer00's Blog

One simple (simplistic?) way of looking at how orgs of people operate is by classifying them into three abstract types:

1. The Malevolent Patriarchy
2. The Benevolent Patriarchy
3. The Meritocracy

Since it’s so uncommon and rare to find a non-patriarchically run org (which is so pervasive that the genre includes small, husband-wife-children, families like yours and mine), I struggled with concocting the name of the third type. Got a better name?

The figure below shows a highly unscientific family of maturation trajectories that an org can take after “startup”. The ubiquitous, well worn path that is tread as an org grows in size is the Meritocracy->Benevolent Patriarchy->Malevolent Patriarchy sojourn. Note that there are no reverse transitions in any of the trajectories. That’s because reverse state changes, like a Benevolent Patriarchy-to-Meritocracy transformation, are as rare as a company remaining in the Meritocracy state throughout its lifetime.

The state versus time graph below communicates the same information as the state machine family above, but from a time-centric viewpoint. Since “all models are wrong, but some are useful” (George Box), the instantaneous transition points, T1 and T2, are wrong. These insidious transitions occur so gradually and so slooowly that no one, not even the So-Called Org Leadership (SCOL), notices a state change. Bummer, no?