There’s a story about a Roman emperor, Caligula, who supposedly made his horse a consul. A consul was one of the highest offices in ancient Rome. Regardless of how much attention we were all paying in history class, a horse in government doesn’t seem like a good idea, and the story sounded too good not to check.
Luckily, the horse never got the job. A Roman historian writing decades later says Caligula planned to make him consul. Whether he actually meant it is another question. One interpretation is that he was insulting the Senate. If a horse can do your job, what exactly is your job worth?
Putting my leadership hat on, I’d say this was a very uncomfortable performance review, even by Roman standards.
Now imagine being one of those senators. What was in their head? Were they thinking, “Is this a joke, or maybe a threat? Are we supposed to laugh? Has anyone else noticed that we’re seriously discussing the horse?!?”
What happens when nobody feels they can question the person in charge?
I’ve been toying with the thought of “mad rulers” lately, and whether we’re seeing some version of this pattern again. By mad, I don’t mean mentally ill. It’s more ordinary than that. I’m interested in what happens when the person with the most power (formal or not) stops getting corrected by the people closest to them.
Gradually, the ruler’s version of events becomes far more important than everyone else’s. What they want must make sense. What they fear must be a threat… and the scariest: what they remember becomes what happened.
In the past there were courts around powerful people, while these days we have cabinets, boards, exec teams, or inner circles. At work, there might be small groups of people who somehow know about the new direction before the people responsible for delivering it do. Of course, these are all different structures in comparison to courts, but have the human dynamics really changed quite so much since the days of courts?
The modern version includes more clothing, but still…
When we picture a court, we tend to imagine people lying to the ruler how wise and wonderful they are, just to suck up, because this is what we see in the movies or read in the stories. But perhaps a court can also be full of reasonable people who have just learned what to say so they don’t lose their heads.
Remember the story The Emperor’s New Clothes? Two swindlers promise an emperor clothes made from fabric that’s invisible to anyone stupid or unfit for their job. Of course, there is no fabric, but nobody wants to admit they can’t see it. Duh.
We usually remember the child from the story who finally points out that the emperor is naked. Well, the adults in real life prefer to keep their jobs.
The swindlers have made a clever arrangement. The moment you question the clothes, you’ve given everyone a reason to question you.
The modern version of this story is PG-13. A little more clothing, still the same lesson.
You ask about an initiative, and somehow the conversation becomes about whether you are open to change. You point out that the number doesn’t match what you’re seeing, but since it came from the approved tool (the expensive one, mind you), the number must be correct.
Or a fresher one: someone calls every script an agent, every automation AI, every experiment a strategy, and this question nags at you: “What do those words mean here?” Then you look at the time. Is it worth asking? How much explaining will it need? Will we still be discussing the actual question by the end? Or will this become about me?
Most of us don’t need to learn from our own mistakes. We are happy to learn from someone else’s. If a colleague raises a concern and then spends the rest of the week explaining their attitude, well, the rest of us got the memo. No questions. Save them for later. Or never. Roger that. The emperor hears very watered-down questions and comments, if any at all.
Now imagine everyone doing this for long enough. What happens? You get a room that is 100% agreeable, but the emperor still has his butt out.
Oh no, did nobody tell you?
In a historical court, your official title was important, so was whether you were able to speak with the ruler. Who could explain a problem directly? Whose version did the ruler hear first? Who never got a chance to speak?
Feels familiar?
An organization can have a perfectly clear org chart, but important conversations can still happen somewhere else. A few people (often not the ones with the most context) discuss something that affects 20 others. Those 20, of course, find out later, after some of them have already made decisions and would have benefited from knowing before they made them.
Sure, some conversations need privacy, and we don’t need an invitation to every meeting. However, when information affects me, my work, and I am responsible for it, I don’t quite understand why this needs to stay small, especially if the information isn’t sensitive. Others have useful context, some are even responsible for carrying out the decision. Yet they all keep finding out afterward. Shame they couldn’t make it. Riiight.
Eventually, people start noticing who gets invited, who hears first, who knows why a decision was made, and who seems surprised that everyone else is surprised.
Mmmm, being in the loop, inside the inner circle? It feels so good. Someone trusts you. You can influence things. Perhaps you even stopped a bad decision or two.
But once you have this, you have something to lose.
Will you still disagree when this might affect your place in the room where decisions are made, or will you tell yourself that staying close lets you help? You might be right... but less likely to push back.
The people who push back are usually the ones with nothing to lose, or at least no seat at the table. See: John McClane, barefoot, in the first Die Hard movie.
Wait, you’re working on this too?
You get ownership of a problem. You’re happy. You speak to people, collect information, and start making a plan. Then, while talking to others, you discover that someone else has been asked to take ownership of what sounds suspiciously like the same problem you’re solving. Wait, what?
You realize that neither of you knew about the other, and now you have the original problem and several new ones. Are you supposed to work together? Are you being compared? Is one of you making a recommendation and the other one making the decision? Did “ownership” mean something different in your meeting?
There are good reasons to ask several people to think about a problem independently, because sometimes we want different ideas before everyone starts agreeing with the first person who speaks. In this case, it’s expected from the person asking to say, “I am asking three people to look at this separately, then we’ll compare the ideas.”
All clear. Everyone knows what the assignment is.
What if the the person assigning the problem isn’t saying anything and you discover the overlap by accident and then have to work out what was expected of us? Usually on the the person who handed both out can provide more clarity.
Of course with this they make themselves more necessary to the work, while the rest of us have become less sure of what we are responsible for. This goes against empowerment of team members, and it’s a perfect start of a chaos.
Eventually, we adapt. We might compare notes before starting. We save messages, and when someone names the project during lunch or some other opportunity, they get back “Wait, you’re working on that too?”
We fall into the vicious loop: the more information stays in private conversations, the more private conversations we need to understand what’s going on. Who owns this What was that actually decided? Who was there? Did you hear the same thing I did?
Oh boy, soon we’re communicating more while knowing less. And where’s the learning?
Next level: gossip becomes the brief and the requirements. We put together what different people half-remember from different meetings they were not all part of, because that’s the information available. Then we pass it on because, sadly enough, it is the best version we have.
To survive, we need to start studying the person who makes the rules, because we can no longer understand the game from the rules alone.
Can you imagine how different this looks like from the leader’s side? Several people are working on important problems. Check. Trusted team mates bring updates. Check. Almost no one objects. Perfect. When something is not clear, people come to me. Hero of the day!
Everything is going rather well, isn’t it?
Sadly, we don’t talk enough about how leader changes people’s behaviour around them and how the people change what the leader believes. Not for the better, though.
We see growing agreement and on the same time experiencing growing uncertainty.
Relax, it’s just a quick sync
Let’s not become suspicious of any three people booking a meeting room, because sometimes a small meeting is just a small meeting.
Leaders need people they can think with before an idea is ready to share. A trusted colleague can question an assumption, add missing information, or stop a rushed decision before anyone else has to deal with it.
We also forget things, or conversations naturally overlap, or a manager assumes two people have spoken when they haven’t.
One confusing situation isn’t much, but we need to be on the lookout for patterns.
Are we having the same conversation next week about a different project? When someone brings bad news the leader definitely didn’t want to hear, are they still invited to the meetings (and close to information) next time?
Don’t worry, I’ll have a word
By the way, I root for the child - a brave adviser in these kind of stories, and I’d like them to have better odds.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There are examples from the past that offer some hope. A Chinese emperor of the Tang Dynasty had an advisor known for repeatedly challenging him. His was courageous, but this is not about being the bravest person in the world. The government had a tradition of remonstrance, giving officials a recognized role in criticizing the ruler, and this emperor often listened. After the advisor died, he reportedly compared losing him to losing a mirror that helped him see his mistakes.
I like the idea of a mirror. I often use the mirror person myself. We all have things we can’t see from where we’re standing. It’s important to get a “reality" check” from people you trust. Btw. you don’t have to like them, just trust them they’ll tell the truth.
Now compare this to deliberately making a place for criticism with relying on one person who can “handle” the leader.
When Nero was ruling the Romans, he had two advisors to have helped restrain him and their influence depended on being close to him. When one died and the other lost influence, the restraint weakened too.
These days this might look like there is someone who can still get through, so they can explain what the leader meant, add some context, maybe even suggest a different approach and occasionally stop something worse from happening.
But what when they leave? Or get tired? Or.. when they start protecting their access and changing what they’re willing to say.
Which brings me to these less exciting forms of prevention: clear wonership, written decisions, context reaching the people affected, and the ways to challenge a decision independent of decision maker’s feelings that day. None of this is fit for a reality show drama, but I would still prefer them at work.
When the strange patterns are already happening, we better to look at concrete facts than arguments about motives.
“Why are these conversations happening in secret?”
Most likely this will get you into a discussion about your tone.
But…
“Both of us understood we’re accountable for this outcome. Can we clarify who owns it?”
No rocket science, just a specific problem that can actually be resolved.
Of course, there’s no guarantee for correction if the person at the top doesn’t want it.
Can we correct a bad decision without first getting the most powerful person in the rom to agree they need correcting?
Give everyone the benefit of the doubt
There is another possibility: we might have it wrong.
We notice things that don’t quite add up, but each has a plausible explanation. Some of them might be less reasonable than others, but still. Things happen. People forget. Sometimes a conversation about a problem becomes a conversation about us and our attitude, and neither one intended it to go there.
Misunderstandings happen more often than we like to think, especially when we’re sure we’ve been perfectly clear.
But when the same things keep happening, it seems fair to ask whether anyone else has noticed. Maybe we’re missing context… or maybe they’re wondering the same thing.
Giving everyone the benefit of the doubt should include ourselves, too, and giving ourselves enough credit to ask.
I’ve written before about the courage to speak up. I still believe it matters, but I’m getting a better understanding of how difficult it can be to work out what’s happening… and what to say about it.
Back to the horse
We’ll probably remember the Caligula story now, because the horse is absurd. But let’s go back to the senators for a moment.
We can laugh at the story today. Would we still find it funny if we were sitting among them?
Perhaps we would have objected or at least look around to see who else is concerned. I suspect many of us would have waited for someone with a little more influence to say something first.
What if that someone is waiting too? It’s quite possible. We’ve all let things pass because they weren’t the hill we were willing to die on. Next time, something a little more absurd gets proposed, and we’re still checking each other’s faces.
By the time we get to a horse being proposed as a consul, who knows how many smaller things we already learned to accept. So we’ll keep quiet. Or worse. Check out.