We Live In A Democracy, Right?

I've been thinking a lot about democracy, monarchy, and their impact on organizations, our jobs, and our lives. Maybe you too? Some of the reasons why might be obvious. Others I will explain in a minute. It brought me back to thinking about the origins of democracy and the origins of monarchy. What problems were they each intending to solve? How effective have they each been as a solution? Is one better than the other? And what should we do next? This has led me to a definition of Democracy 3.0 but I'll share in future editions of this newsletter.

Spoiler Alert: I'm going to jump directly to the punchline. Democracy Beats Monarchy, hands down, any day. It's leaps and bounds more effective than monarchy. And I don’t mean just a little better. Not even twice as good. I’m talking five to ten times more productive. Monarchy is like the Death Star in Star Wars. Oh yes, it is powerful. It is frightening how much power monarchy can yield. But it also has major flaws. Flaws in its design. Flaws in its construction. Flaws in its management. Flaws in its workforce. Flaws that eventually lead to its demise, just like the destruction of the Death Star and the eventual fall of the Empire. Monarchy can hold on to power for a while, but it can and will eventually be defeated and replaced.

"Democracy Beats Monarchy, hands down, any day."

Now here’s the bad news: We don’t live in democracies. Yes, you might live in a big-D Democracy, but the vast majority of the world for 364 days out of the year formally or informally lives and works in monarchies. And then in the United States, one day out of the year, on the first Tuesday in November, we go participate in a representative democracy where we elect someone else to participate in a democracy for us.

Why Should We Care?

My personal journey into this exploration really kicked off shortly after 2010. At that time I had zero interest in politics. Up to that point I had held management jobs but was completely uninterested in the power struggles for promotions and climbing the corporate ladder. I figured that I would let other people play the politics game. In typical (former) engineer fashion, I was more focused on solving cool, interesting problems. 

Then I was asked by my boss to accomplish something. Come to find out, my boss didn't have the authority, and it crossed the line in a major turf battle. So he denied any knowledge of it and before I knew it, I was being accused of insubordination and being a rogue agent. My boss was trying to save his own job and completely threw me under the bus. I told them the facts, I shared evidence, and let them know that I was not interested in politics and I would follow whatever direction they wanted to go...so I became the scapegoat and I was fired a couple weeks before Christmas. 

That was my wakeup call that everyone is always involved in politics. The choice is only whether or not you choose to participate. If you don't, someone else will decide your life for you. So to help me understand organizational politics, I spent decades studying national and international politics. As I dug in more, it was amazing how much corporations act like mini sovereign nations. Everything that has happened in national politics has also happened in corporate politics. And everything that happens in the corporate world also has an equivalent in national politics.

"Everyone is always involved in politics."

That said, my goal was not to learn how to play the political game, but to prevent politics from ruining people's lives. I still had little interest in being a politician, but I knew there had to be a better way. Over the years I've found and created many techniques for how to solve tough problems, build coalitions, please customers, build resilient organizations, and make people's lives happier.

Lately, what I’ve been doing is taking everything I learned about politics inside large multi-national organizations and testing it in local politics… and so far it’s working. it's not easy, but it's working.

Origins of Monarchy

To know how to escape a doom loop, it's important to know why monarchy was first invented, and why it was succeeded for so long.

When the topic of monarchy comes up, one of the most popular objections that I hear is, “We need leaders. Most people don’t know what the heck they’re doing!” And this nugget of wisdom is always delivered with the raw emotional passion of someone who obviously has been forced to live with the consequences of bad decisions. So let me address this objection. Yes, many people absolutely do not know what the heck they are doing. And many of those people (not all, but many) also know that they have no idea what they’re doing. 

“We need leaders. Most people don’t know what the heck they’re doing!”

Historically speaking, this is why we developed monarchies in the first place. The origin of the word “law” actually comes directly from monarchy thinking. “Law” translates to “lei”, which literally means the “tongue” as in “from the tongue of the king”, also known as the “word” of the monarch. Whatever the king says becomes the word, the lei, the law of the land. 

Historically-speaking, when people didn’t know how to solve their own problems – like how to deal with raiders, attacking nations, drought, famine – they looked for someone who appeared to have the solution and then followed that person’s lead. It was natural. It was smart. If you didn’t know what you were doing, if you did the wrong thing, you could really make things worse. We developed laws and monarchies for very good reasons. Monarchies were actually an important part of our world history, our learning process as a species, and our growth as societies and communities.

Now imagine that there were two people in that community, both with grand visions. And let’s say they’re dealing with raiders. But these two didn’t agree on a path forward. Some people followed one leader. Some people followed the other. Maybe for a while they were able to avoid getting in each other’s way, but eventually both groups would need the same resources. When this happened, the work of one leader undid the work of the other, adding unnecessary delays, causing work to be redone, and frustrating the workers and the leaders. Eventually they started fighting amongst themselves. 

So the leaders decided to settle their differences once and for all. Since they were fighting raiders, they decided that whoever won a fight between the two leaders obviously had the better strategy and the superior strength, and so would be more likely to lead them to victory over the raiders. 

When the battle between the two leaders was done and won, they declared a single (“mono” = single) leader to rule over them (“arch” = over), the “monarch”. The single decider to rule over them all. From that point on, whenever there was a dispute they would bring the conflict to the monarch who would consider the matter and then pronounce their decision. From that point on, whatever they said would be the “lei”, the law of the land.

“Law” translates to “lei”, which literally means the “tongue” as in “from the tongue of the king”, also known as the “word” of the monarch.

But we are at a point now where we know enough and have the technology necessary that we don’t need to use the monarchy process anymore. The invention of democracy has brought us better options and new choices.

What's Next?

Next up I plan to cover the second major objection to democracy, the misused practice of voting.

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