The great disruption: When progress means smashing things.

Lausanne, Switzerland, Rue Caroline, sometime in the year 1904. The young socialist agitator Benito Mussolini had just given a lecture to workers in the Maison du Peuple in which he argued that God would not exist. He is now discussing with an Italian evangelical pastor who provides some arguments in favor of the existence of the Lord. At one point of the conversation, the future Duce asked someone in the audience for a watch. Holding it in his hand, he announced, "if in three minutes I am not struck down by a lightening, it will prove that God does not exist." After three minutes, he silently walked away. Legend has it that he put the watch in his pocket and forgot to give it back.1 To build the new, you need to destroy the old. Not just replace it. You need to smash it, humiliate those who still believe in it and rub their noses in the debris of their convictions. This idea is at the core of Italian Fascism. In his Manifesto del Futurismo, the Manifest of Futurism, one of the central and defining inspirations of early Fascist ideology, the artist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote in 1909: "We want to glorify war - the only hygiene in the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of libertarians, the beautiful ideas for which we die. We want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of all kinds and fight against moralism, feminism and against any opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice."2 The experience of the First World War reinforced this contempt for the values and habits of modern society in the early 1920s. Thousands of young men returning disillusioned from the trenches to their old life, “determined that nothing was ever going to matter to them again” as philosopher Alasdair Macintyre wrote.3 Ezra Pounds, the poet who was much admired by Italian Fascists gave a voice to the returning angry front fighters in his poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley:

There died a myriad,

And of the best, among them,

For an old bitch gone in the teeth,

For a botched civilization.

While they despised the civilized, ordered, disciplined and Utilitarian version of the Enlightenment civilization, Fascists still shared a key belief with modernity: That we are progressing as a species into a brighter future and that this progress was driven by technology. Through technology, Marinetti and others imagined, nature could be bend to the will of man. Eventually, we would even get rid of nature altogether. “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”, Marinetti wrote in his manifesto. He fantasized about smashing a cyclist with his car and pushing him out of the way. The early Fascist vision was building on “aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.”4 The future should not be the linear continuation of the past into a somehow better version that builds on it – as it was imagined by the Enlightenment thinkers. For Fascists, the future was supposed to be radically different from the present and not it’s linear continuation. Whatever represented modernity had to be burned down to the ground so that the future could be born as a radical transformation of the world. A new version of homo sapiens would evolve in this process. Better, stronger, more beautiful. Whoever resisted the radical change had to be pushed out of the way.

Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, 1938

Silicon Valley couldn’t agree more. Speed is what counts there as well. As Stanford professor Adrian Daub writes in his analysis of this startup world near his campus, tech entrepreneurs engage in “accelerationism”, which “advocates a surrender to the forces of acceleration”.5 And that’s why they also love destruction. In the early 1990s, Harvard Business School professors Clayton Christensen and Joseph L. Bowers invented the concept of disruption. As they observed, companies rely too much on what their actual customers want. These customers, caught in their routines, do not see technological changes coming, are not able to properly evaluate the consequences or might even not be the right target group to pioneer those changes. As a result, such previously successful companies were able to well manage incremental technological change but often utterly fail to evaluate the potential of more disruptive changes. According to Bower and Christensen, “small, hungry organizations” are better positioned to reap the advantages of disruptive changes. These small organizations start by targeting a neglected market segment and move mainstream from there faster than mainstream competitors can react. They disrupt a market.6 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors embraced the concept enthusiastically and – as Christensen later wrote – profoundly misunderstood it. Mark Zuckerberg notoriously explained to his team that "unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough" and Trevor Kalanick, the Uber founder promised to his team and investors that Uber would “break the back of the evil taxi empire”. Silicon Valley understood disruption in the good old Fascist way: Smashing, humiliating, despising the existing order and its representatives. Rules do not count for those who advance new information technologies. “We are new economy”, they used to say at Enron and “the others are old economy”. If you are new economy, you do not follow established rules, you write new ones. After all, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are the destroyers of old and builder of new worlds. “Elon puts rockets into space, he’s not afraid of the FTC”.7 This is how Alex Spiro the lawyer of Elon Musk described the entrepreneur’s relationship with the Twitter regulator. Technology does not just change society, it dismantles the existing order, propelling us into a totally different future.

The Macho ethics of Fascists and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs

Sometimes, analysts of Fascism - be it the Italian or the German version - argue that its destructive and disruptive ideology had no normative foundation and would just be pure operational violence. What they forget, however, is that violence can play an important normative function in belief systems, and it has its roots in ancient Greek and Roman societies. Philosopher Hilary Putnam refers to the ancient ethics as “macho ethics”, the “ethics of courage and manly prowess”. His colleague Simone Weil describes how in the Ancient world, warfare was a source of powerful values. "In the purest triumph of love, the supreme grace of wars, is the friendship that rises to the hearts of mortal enemies. It makes disappear the hunger for vengeance for the son slain, for the friend killed, it erases by miracle even greater the distance between benefactor and supplicant, between victor and vanquished.”8 War, so the belief of warrior societies, brings out the best in man. “Rage and fury drove me. I felt it was a lovely thing to die in battle,” the Roman hero Aeneas explains to Dido, the queen of Carthage when she wants to hear about the fall of Troy. And: “I felt it was a lovely thing to die in battle”.9

When Macho ethics was superseded by new ethical role models proposed by Jesus, Confucius or Sokrates and later the emerging discourse of the Enlightenment about the dignity and rights of individuals, human rights replaced the ethics of the strong warrior. As Putnam writes, with the rise of early Christianism, people learned that there is “dignity in siding with the victims of plunder and conquest, with the poor and downtrodden, rather than with the heroic Roman general.”10 However, where Putnam sees dignity, Fascists who were driven by the idea of creating a new and stronger man, saw weakness. Their ideology is “a rebellion against the standard form of modern anthropocentrism… a turn against the values of the Enlightenment” as Charles Taylor writes.11 Fascists protested against “the levelling effects of the culture of equality and benevolence”, against the “levelling down of human beings to the bourgeois, utilitarian mean”12– the old bitch in Ezra Pounds’ poem.

Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s phantasy of the Übermensch who liberates himself from all moral chains and only enacts his own Will to Power, Fascism voted for “destruction and chaos, the infliction of suffering and exploitation, as a part of the life to be affirmed.”13 Charles Taylor reminds us of the enthusiasm with which many young people in Europe entered the first world war: “It still astonishes us when we catch a glimpse of the mental world of those who went to war in 1914… in a host of contemporary comments and letters. It’s not just the heightened language in which they talked of war: honor, valour, sacrifice, staunch and gallant. It was also the way they saw the conflict through images of a glorious national history, preserved in the greatest literature...”14 He continues, “what was needed was a new discipline, which would create order and hierarchy and would lead to a life of commitment. Faith against skepticisms and science, dedication to the nation against individualism, commitment and discipline against individual choice, hierarchy against equality, these were the lines of attraction for young people of this tendency… They would deserve and achieve the status of glorious dead, as understood in the archetypes of military valour which went back to the ancient.”15

Returning from war was a disappointing experience for many of those front fighters. “The spiritual hunger with which many entered the war remained unsatisfied.” Mussolini (and later Hitler) used the disappointment. “Fascism gives us the paradigm of a counter ideal of the modern order, one which extolled command, leadership, dedication, obedience over individualism, rights and democracy, but which did so out of a cult for greatness, will, action, life. There was no place left for the morality of Christianity, and certainly not of liberalism; the ultimate goal was to make something great out of one’s life. Greatness was measured partly in the impact of power, through domination, conquest, partly in the pitch of dedication.”16 Fascism gave people the opportunity to step out of the old order and to build something new – a world in which the strong would prevail (= they themselves) and the weak (= the others) could expect nothing but despise. Front fighters had returned from war, but in their minds, they were still fighting. Mussolini promised them new enemies, new meaning, a second chance to win. The new enemies, however, were not on the frontline. The next war had to be fought at home against ordinary life, the habits and the moral compass of modern liberal society.

Stepping out of the liberal obligations of modern society resonates well with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Many tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel, Mark Zukerberg or Travor Kalanick are fans of the writer libertarian Ayn Rand. Kalanick was especially inspired by her novel “The Fountainhead”. For a while, he used the cover of the book as his Twitter avatar.17 The book tells the story of Howard Roark, who rebels against the rules and norms of society. Born in Russia and deeply impacted by the absence of freedom in Communist regimes, Rand considered the unfettered self-interest of individuals as the most important characteristic of human nature and altruism as a destructive weakness. Through the protagonist of her novel, Ayn Rand praised selfishness as the central value of a free society. The hero of her novel does not follow the rules, he makes them. He demonstrates how the selfish individual drives the progress of a free society in which life is about winning against others. Whatever stands in the way of individual freedom – such as religious or political rules - needs to be removed.18 As the novel’s hero Howard Roark states in the novel: “I don’t make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. I’m an utter egotist.”19

The world of Silicon Valley is a world of the strong in which there is no place for the weak. It is ruled by zero-sum meritocracy. Employees are evaluated on a Gaussian distribution curve. They are either high, average or low performers. They are either weak or strong. And the weak must be removed from the company. They get fired. Zero-sum competition dominates the culture of Silicon Valley start-ups as it dominates their behavior on markets. Employees can only survive if some of their peers don’t and success on markets can only be achieved when competitors can be fully destroyed. “You have to kill the enemy”, as Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld told his team. They had to “rip out the throats of their enemies.”20 Libertarians like Kalanick or Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel share this believe in the strong Übermensch. As Thiel once famously stated, “competition is for losers.”21 If a company has competitors, it didn’t do its job right. Life is a war and only the strongest warriors will survive. Compassion with the weak is a luxury, which neither Fascists nor Libertarians can afford.

The Führerprinzip in Silicon Valley

The parallels between early Italian Fascism and Silicon Valley do not stop here. For both, strong humans live the life of warriors and warriors need strong leaders. The Führerprinzip is the idea of the absolute leader who demands absolute obedience from followers. It is a feature of the aggressive leadership style of Steve Jobs, Trevor Kalanick, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Elizabeth Holmes and others. Dissensus and criticism is perceived as a threat to the hierarchical order of things and dissenting voices will be punished, humiliated and kicked out – or even completely destroyed as Musk, Holmes and others have demonstrated in some cases. The Führerprinzip includes another important dimension that we can include in our list of parallels. The Italian historian Franco Venturi once defined fascism as the realm of words that are moved by ghosts and which are ultimately taken for reality.22 In Silicon Valley they are proud of the ability of some charismatic leaders to create a reality distortion field around them. They succeed in shifting the perception of reality of followers to shift reality itself in the end. Fake it till you make it. Enron CEO Ken Lay has been called the Messiah by The Economist. WeWork founder Adam Neumann by his wife. And everybody wants to be the next Steve Jobs. Elizabeth Holmes explained to her staff that Theranos was a religion. Neumann called WeWork a spiritual community. Mussolini also called Fascism a spiritual community and a religious concept of life. Fascist mythology represented a metareality, which followers had to accept.23 If you do not want to be part of our new religion, Holmes once explained in an all-hands meeting at Theranos, just leave. Her lover and COO Sunny Balwani added, in his own style, that they were expecting devotion and loyalty and those who were not prepared for it should “get the fuck out.”24 Scholars in entrepreneurship and leadership must do some soul searching and ask themselves, how they contributed to how we celebrate the ruthless, narcissistic and charismatic founders as role models to our students.

Man becomes God – the new religion of Longterminism

The violent disruption of the old world and the building of a new one does of course need some narrative direction. In Fascist Rome, Mussolini smashed to build. Here comes a final parallel I want to draw. The Uber-man is not sufficient to replace the Fascist Übermensch. The Uber-man is good in breaking stuff, but he has no vision. Fascists used nationalism as a powerful ingredient in their narrative. Mussolini promised a return to the golden Age of Augustus in which the Roman warriors subdued the world and Italy as the natural heir of the Roman empire would revive that powerful empire. Silicon Valley neither has a particular vision of the past, nor is it nationalistic. Their business model is planetary. They only believe that the future must be radically different, more exciting than the past. It must lift homo sapiens to a higher level as already Fascism had hallucinated. In Silicon Valley, they believe in Homo Deus, the reinvention of a new species, half human, half machine. Rising from the ashes of our modern world man will ultimately merge with the machine and connect his brain with the existing knowledge – the singularity moment as one of the high priests of Silico Valley, Ray Kurzweil calls it.25 Technodeterminism, is how Jonathan Taplin recently critically labeled this approach,26 which parallels the fervent belief of early Fascism in the power of technology: Cars, trains, machines of all kind that drive us at an accelerating speed into an entirely new world – one of our own creation. In Silicon Valley, rockets replace the cars.

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960), Il motociclista

The new narrative of Silicon Valley is called Longterminism. Toby Ord outlines the basic idea in his book The Precipice:27 None of the current risks to which humanity is exposed represents a runaway risk. That is, neither nuclear winters nor climate change nor any other risk threatens the existence of humanity as such. There will always be humans. Trillions of people can still be born until the sun goes out in 500 million years. An amazing potential if you imagine the technological progress, we already achieved in a few hundred years and compare it with the one we can achieve in millions of years! The consequences longterminists draw is that we must invest in technological progress with the goal to transforms these future people into a new species. Homo deus, as Yuval Harari calls that it in his book with the same titel.28 Two technologies are crucial to achieve this wonderful future: rockets to leave this eventually-dying planet and AI merger with the human brain. Longterminism has its own research institute in Oxford and is financially supported by Thiel, Bezos, Musk and other relevant libertarians. The race of the Silicon Valley trillionaires for the longest and thickest Mars rocket can be explained by precisely this new religion. As for the brain-machine fusion, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and others massively invest in developing the brain computer interface for homo deus. Transhumanism, as this element of the new religion has been called, is “the world’s most dangerous idea”, as Francis Fukuyama has warned.29

To destabilize the current society and accelerate the fall of liberalism, some Silicon Valley protagonists like Peter Thiel finance extreme rightwing media and actors.30 Others prepare for the collapse by investing like preppers in stockpiled food and ammunition like ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman.31 Still others buy hideouts in New Zealand.32 They all promote crypto as another element of the new that destabilizes and disrupts the old liberal market order. As fervent believers in Longterminism, the Silicon Valley elites are not interested in the current multiple crises of our societies. On the contrary, through their social media platforms, Zuckerberg and Musk even instigate further polarization. Climate change, inequality, erosion of democracy – who cares? What counts is the far away future, not the present. Their greatest fear is not the collapse of our climate or the mass extinction of animals – they are haunted by the nightmare of AI taking over control. This would spoil their homo deus party. AI in control doesn’t need humans anymore. It is an explicit element of this new religion that in any decision preference must be given to future not current human beings. Why care about the millions of today if you can help the trillions in the (admittedly far away) future. The radically free market and new information technologies are their leverage. While the Fascist movement only wanted to create the Übermensch, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs go one step further. They want to turn man into immortal Gods.

References

1 Cantini, Claude, 2015. Les tribulations de Mussolini en Suisse. Passé-Simple, vol 3, March. Accessed at: http://www.passesimple.ch/Extrait3.php

2 “9. Noi vogliamo glorificare la guerra – sola igiene del mondo – il militarismo, il patriottismo, il gesto distruttore dei libertarî7, le belle idee per cui si muore e il disprezzo della donna. 10. Noi vogliamo distruggere i musei, le biblioteche, le accademie d’ogni specie, e combattere contro il moralismo, il femminismo e contro ogni viltà opportunistica o utilitaria.” The Manifesto was published February 1909.

3 Macintyre, Alasdair, 1981. After Virtue. London: Bloomsbury, p. 49

4 Gherarducci, Isabella, 1976. Il Futurismo italiano: Materiali e testimonianze critiche. Roma; Editori Riuniti, page 27. My translation.

5 Daub, Adrian. 2020. What tech calls thinking. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux: New York. Page 125

6 Bower, J. L. and Christensen, C. M. 1995. Disruptive Technologies. Catching the Wave. Harvard Business Review, January–February. Accessed at: https://hbr.org/1995/01/disruptive-technologies-catching-the-wave

7 Weiss, Debra Cassens, 2022. Meet Alex Spiro, a lawyer 'in constant motion' who is helping Elon Musk change Twitter. ABA Journal, November 7. Accessed at: https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/meet-alex-spiro-a-lawyer-in-constant-motion-who-is-helping-elon-musk-change-twitter

8 Weil, Simone, 2014 [1941]. L’Iliade ou le poème de la force. Paris: L’éclat, p. 76. My translation.

9 Vergil, Aeneid, book 2, 316-17. New translation by Shadi Bartsch, 2021. New York, Random House, p. 36

10 Putnam, Hilary 2004. Ethics without ontology. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, p. 29-30

11 Taylor, Charles, 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, p. 369

12 Taylor, 2007: p. 372

13 Taylor, 2007: p. 373

14 Taylor, 2007: p. 410

15 Taylor, 2007: p. 417

16 Taylor, 2007: p. 418-9

17 Kosoff, M. 2015. Everything you need to know about 'The Fountainhead,' a book that inspires billionaire Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. Business Insider, June 1. Accessed at: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-ayn-rand-inspired-uber-ceo-travis-kalanick-2015-6?r=US&IR=T

18 Kosoff, 2015

19 Rand, A. 1971 [1943]. The Fountainhead. New York: Macmillan. page 518

20 Levin, Bess 2007. Dick Fuld’s “I’ll Fucking Kill You, Like Actually Put A Shotgun In Your Mouth And Pull The Trigger ‘Til It Goes Click” Style Of Management Has Kept Lehman Brothers Safe From Things Like $8.4 Billion Writedowns, So Far. But Is He Going Soft? Dealbreaker, Oct 29. Accessed at: https://dealbreaker.com/2007/10/dick-fulds-ill-fucking-kill-you-like-actually-put-a-shotgun-in-your-mouth-and-pull-the-trigger-til-it-goes-click-style-of-management-has-kept-lehman-broth

21 Daub, 2020, p. 86

22 “un regno della parola che si muove di fantasmi che finisce per credere reali”. Franco Venturi, Il regime fascista. In AA. VV., Trent’anni di storia italiana (1915-1945), Torino Einaudi, 1961: pp 186-7) cited in: Isnenghi, Mario, 1975. PER LA STORIA DELLE ISTITUZIONI CULTURALI FASCISTE. In: Belfagor, Vol. 30, No. 3 (31 MAGGIO 1975), pp. 249-275

23 Payne, Stanley G. 1996. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. London: Routledge, p. 215.

24 Carreyrou, John, 2018. Bad blood. London: Pikador, p. 173

25 Kurzweil, Ray, 2006. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Penguin.

26 Taplin, Jonathan, 2023. Zuckerberg, and Andreessen—Four Billionaire Techno-Oligarchs—Are Creating an Alternate, Autocratic Reality. Vanity Fair, August 22. Accessed at: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/08/musk-thiel-zuckerberg-andreessen-alternate-autocratic-reality?utm_source=nl&utm_brand=vf&utm_mailing=VF_CH_082223&utm_medium=email&bxid=5f2e3cccf6049e2d88777cf0&cndid=61823276&hasha=d993bde075fdc5eabef73159f5ae4ac1&hashb=efc30dc06bc94c39b62b3200e36265d87639fabc&hashc=6c1f86247cfa6861effe69f2f3727d2e65ddd6d3a52e5754c5803b3ba5b5e1b7&esrc=VERSO_NAVIGATION&mbid=mbid%3DCRMVYF012019&source=EDT_VYF_NEWSLETTER_0_COCKTAIL_HOUR_ZZ&utm_campaign=VF_CH_082223&utm_term=VYF_Cocktail_Hour

27 Ord, Toby, 2020. The Precipice. Existential risks and the future of humanity. London: Bloomsbury.

28 Harari, Yuval Noah, 2015. Homo Deus. A brief history of tomorrow. London: Harvill Secker.

29 Cited in: Taplin, 2023

30 Pogue, James, 2022. Free radicals. Inside the New Right, Where Peter Thiel Is Placing His Biggest Bets. Vanity Fair, April 20. Accessed at: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/inside-the-new-right-where-peter-thiel-is-placing-his-biggest-bets

31 Nguyen, Britney, 2023. Meet OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who learned to code at 8 and is a doomsday prepper with a stash of gold, guns, and gas masks. Business Insider, May 30. Accessed at: https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-chatgpt-openai-ceo-career-net-worth-ycombinator-prepper-2023-1?r=US&IR=T

32 O’Connell, Mark, 2018. Why Silicon Valley billionaires are prepping for the apocalypse in New Zealand. The Guardian, February 15. Accessed at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand

The world is not in a good shape. When Rockström and colleagues defined the ecological crisis along nine different planetary boundaries – from global warming to the extinction of species in 2009, they did not expect that six out of these nine boundaries would be transgressed just one decade later. Ecological problems increasingly destabilize societies, reinforcing existing and creating new social problems. Permacrisis, understood as an “extended period of insecurity and instability” was the word of the year in 2022 according to the Collins English Dictionary. Given the enormous and urgent challenges humanity is facing, there can be no doubt that academia has to play an essential role in providing solutions and answers.

While scientists might agree on the urgency of our multiple crises, it does not necessarily lead them to reorient their own energy toward them. While in natural sciences, scholars increasingly devote their interests and energy to the numerous aspects of grand challenges, skimming through the journals of scholars in management and economics, one does not get the impression that the urgency of the problems is translating into a shift in social sciences as well. Our system of knowledge production is increasingly dysfunctional from a societal perspective and one of the reasons might be the incentive mechanism of the academic world.

Problems with the traditional academic incentive structure

The traditional academic incentive structure makes it difficult to engage with grand challenges. Just to highlight some of the aspects of this problem:

1. Quantity over quality. Scholars are incentivized to publish as many articles in top journals as possible. One big research question is thus often split into several albeit smaller projects that zoom into ever smaller details. In a game that rewards quantity, more papers in top journals that lead to more citations is the strategy that first leads to tenure and then to reputation. It is self-referentially closed and not connected to problems in the world.

2. Facts over values. Operating from within a positivist epistemology, many scientists naively believe in a separation of facts and values, assuming that what they do is only “finding” those objective causal links that explain and predict phenomena. Normative evaluations are considered to be outside of their profession. In reality, however, any research is operating with a normative foundation (markets must be free, choices must maximize utility, property rights need to be protected, growth is good, etc). Grand challenges come with normative conclusions about the need for changes in the system. Many scientists do not want to engage in such discussions. They do not want to be seen as “activists”.

3. Analytical over holistic perspective. Grand challenges are complex and often require a holistic perspective that investigates how multiple phenomena relate. Social scientists prefer to clean the investigation of a phenomenon from as much “noise” as possible to find robust causal relations. This analytical approach stands in the century-old tradition of the enlightenment that builds on the assumption that we acquire knowledge by drilling into ever deeper details, deconstructing the whole and later aggregate the details to understand the whole.

4. Siloed fields over transdisciplinary discourses. Research on Grand Challenges is in large parts transdisciplinary. It might for instance require an analysis across discussions in biology, psychology  and management. Being trained in just one, maybe two scientific language games, this often feels overwhelming and can also be risky from a publication perspective. The world of scientific journals is mainly organized in clearly defined and often very narrow siloes. Transdisciplinary papers struggle to find a home in a top journal.

A a holistic approach to measuring impact

The above-mentioned challenges make it difficult to reorient research toward Grand Challenges. This, however, is not the only problem in the relationship between scientists and society.

The problem of over-focusing on citations leads to profound inefficiencies for society in a critical period. The constant pressure put on scholars to publish prevents them from investing time in activities other than purely scientific research. Even teaching often pays this cost despite being absolutely essential. Peers might even think negatively of their colleagues if they spend too much time on other activities (teaching, communication, etc.) as it represents potential missed opportunities to publish more.

To tackle this issue we suggest two main changes. First, we must go beyond citations to assess the job done by researchers and take into account the importance of the findings for society, as well as giving significantly more weight to outreach activities and teaching (cf. Figure above). Second, we should allow and encourage diverse profiles for academic positions. Each researcher would invest more or less time in different activities (research, outreach, and teaching) allowing each department in academic institutions to be strong on the three levels mentioned by aggregating the multiple strengths within.

A.  Alternative and richer metrics to measure impact

The current metrics used in academia remain useful proxies to assess the quality of the research. First, the number of citations is a relevant proxy for the impact on research per se. Second, journal ranking where the articles are published is also a good measure of the technical quality of the research. However, as discussed earlier these metrics are quite limited and problematic and hence should represent only part of a larger set of metrics with equal importance.

In addition to citations and journal names, the usefulness of the research results outside academia should be assessed as well. Qualitative evaluation could for instance identify how much the results help us reach the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).

Key results that remain within the walls of academia might have hardly any impact. Hence, it is necessary to also promote and evaluate outreach activities. Outreach activities include any activity outside academia aiming to exchange with policy-makers, firms, NGOs, or anyone directly concerned with the output. In addition, interventions in both traditional and social media, could be evaluated and encouraged as it enhance the reach of research and educational content.

Finally, teaching activities should be seriously taken into account. One of the main purposes of academia is to educate and share knowledge, yet who gets hired and promoted in academia doesn’t need to be a good teacher as long as they publish their work successfully. Education is key to fighting most of the main challenges we face today, from climate change to poverty, including discrimination. Hence, it is time to put education back as one of the driving forces of academia.

Reflecting on how to evaluate those criteria (research, outreach, and teaching) is essential to actively move forward with such an approach. Using quantitative metrics is mostly misleading and would poorly capture the quality of the work done. Hence, we suggest that applications for an academic position or grants, should emphasize the research impact on SDGs, and include an outreach statement (summary of past activities and the plan for future actions).

B.  Diversified profiles

Realistically, asking academics to be top researchers, excellent teachers, and to invest time in the communication of science might be heroic. It is almost as unrealistic as training and evaluating academic staff exclusively on research criteria and then expecting them to teach well.

Therefore, we should allow for a diversity of profiles within each department. Some members might devote most of their energy to research, while others might dedicate a significant amount of time and energy to knowledge sharing or outreach activities. While we should indeed encourage other academics to engage in all these essential activities, freedom of specialization would be beneficial. This diversity should allow each department to have strong profiles on each dimension and hence produce an impactful output.

Conclusion: A new academic world

To think about disrupting the status quo, we must first understand it. Currently, university rankings focus extensively on citations. For example, citations and research represent 60% of the score of The Times Higher Education World University Rankings. Furthermore, grant evaluation committees often rely heavily on citations and journal rankings of published research by applicants to decide who will receive funding. In the current system money follows citations (grants/students) and hence universities over-rely on citations when they hire and evaluate scholars. The novel evaluation criteria we suggest would reward professors who have a greater impact on society.

Good old Karl Popper knew it already: Scientists have a moral duty to engage in democracy. However, he still assumed that science must be value-free and the scientists had to separate their engagement from their role as a scholar and express it in their other role as citizens. The current crisis makes this separation of research and engagement, of facts and values, impossible and it forces us to pause and reflect on what we do and how we define our responsibility and value our different activities. Ultimately, the question of what kind of world we want to live in is always also a normative one and it is hopelessly entangled with the knowledge we produce. As scientists, we either contribute to a stabilization of the current order of things or we drive the change.

In the mid-1980s, NASA was in a deep crisis. While the moon landing of Apollo 11 had created a hype around their activities, their budget was painfully cut in the 70s and 80. American had somehow lost its interest in space flights. Space Shuttle Challenger flight STS-51-L scheduled for January 28 was of utmost importance for the future of the organization. They needed to win back the hearts and minds of the Americans to get the political support in Congress for a future investment in the space flight program. And they had a strategy for that: On board of this January flight were six professional astronauts and a schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe from New Hampshire. She was supposed to teach her students from space. McAuliffe had been selected to participate in the NASA Teacher in Space Program, making her the first private citizen to fly in space. The crew and mission were highly publicized, and the launch was watched live by millions of people, including many school children.

The problem of the O-Rings

The Challenger was a space transportation shuttle consisting of three different parts. The Orbiter at the top, in which the astronauts were sitting, the External Tank for the gas, and the Solid Rocket Booster. (SRB) The latter is the engine that propels the space ship into space for the first two minutes of the flight to an altitude of about 45 kilometres, then it disconnects and returns to be recovered and reused. The SRB has eleven different sections which are connected with joints – so-called O-Rings. These joints prevent gas from leaking out. The below photo shows the three parts of the space ship with the white SRBs left and right of the Orbiter. The engine was constructed by NASA supplier Morton Thiokol.

The night before the Challenger was supposed to be launched, the weather forecast predicted a temperature of 20 F/-6 C. On the next morning, the temperature had risen to 36 F/2 C. Such low temperatures created problems for the O-Rings. They were made of rubber and would shrink and become stiff when the temperature went down. This problem of the O-Rings was well known since 1977. When analyzing O-Rings from recovered SRB, engineers found that some of them had either partially or fully eroded. Only in 1985, this problem had occurred in six out of nine launches. The most severe erosion had been found in the O-Rings of a launch that had taken place at 53 F/11 C. Therefore, Morton Thiokol engineers had recommended to define this temperature as the minimal temperature for a space shuttle launch. The forecasted temperature for January 28 was clearly below that limit.

Pressure on NASA supplier Morton Thiokol

The launch of the Challenger had been postponed three times already because of bad weather conditions and the window of opportunity was closing fast with a drop in temperature expected for the days and weeks to come after the 28th of January. The night before the launch, NASA management met with Morton Thiokol managers and engineers in a telephone conference. Engineers at the supplier had raised doubts about the flight, arguing that the forecasted temperature was below the defined minimum. During the meeting, the Morton Thiokol team raised their concerns about the O-Rings. Lawrence Mulloy who was representing NASA in this meeting was not happy. He wanted green light for the flight. He asked the engineers to prove that the launch was unsafe, to prove with data that the risk was too high.

Morton Thiokol did not have systematic data that would provide the evidence of a link between cold temperatures and the erosions of the O-Rings. They only had observations from safely returned flights and there had been no official and written information on the problem. At NASA, such observations, based on informal data were categorized as a “weak signal.” However, only “strong signals” were considered important enough to cancel the flight. And since the erosions had become so frequent (6 out of 9 flights in 1985), the safe return of all those flights was considered a confirmation of the interpretation that the problem was not a serious one. The risk was acceptable. Inside NASA, such minor problems were considered a “level III issue”, which was even too irrelevant to be escalated and communicated to a higher level in the organization’s hierarchy.

The tragic meeting

Morton Thiokol engineers insisted that they would not recommend launching the Challenger the next day and Mulloy angrily told them that he was appalled by their position. Jerry Manson, the top executive of Morton Thiokol who oversaw the meeting asked Mulloy for a short break to speak with his engineers. For thirty minutes, Morton Thiokol managers and engineers discussed among themselves. The three engineers who participated in the meeting insisted on their risk evaluation. The O-Rings would be exposed to a too low temperature and thus might not properly function. NASA had clearly expressed their intention to launch, but they needed the green light from Morton Thiokol. At that time, the company was under pressure. They were in the process of negotiating a new contract and knew that NASA was internally discussing to switch to a different supplier for the SRM. Morton Thiokol did not want to lose this important contract. In the heated discussion with his engineers, Manson made clear that he did not agree with them, and he invited his colleagues "to take off their engineer hat and put on their management hat." The engineers gave up their resistance. Back in the teleconference with NASA, Morton Thiokol communicated their recommendation: The data on O-Rings was inconclusive and therefore, they gave green light, sending a fax to Houston that the Space Shuttle was “safe to fly.”

The ChalIenger was launched at 11.38 on January 28, 1986. 73 seconds after the launch, the Space Shuttle exploded in a white gaseous cloud. The accident was caused by the failure of an O-ring seal in the SRB, which allowed hot gases to escape and ignite the main fuel tank. The Morton Thiokol engineers had been right in their risk evaluation. Six astronauts and a schoolteacher lost their lives.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

The power of framing

Why did the meeting between Morton Thiokol and NASA take such a tragic turn? A catastrophe like the explosion of a Space Shuttle has of course many mutually reinforcing reasons. I would like to highlight one important aspect here: The power of framing.

When Jerry Manson was asking his colleagues to take off their engineering hat and to take on their management hat, he was imposing on them a change of perspective. They had to choose a different frame from the one they were using in the discussion. Frames are mental structures that simplify and guide our understanding of a complex reality. They focus our attention and force us to view the world from a particular and therefore limited, perspective. Take for example the below figure, which is called the “duck-rabbit illusion”.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

What do you see? Well, as the name of the illustration already indicates, it depends on the perspective that you chose. From left to right, you will see a rabbit, from right to left a duck. Most importantly, you cannot see both at the same time. When we frame, we focus on one set of information. The price we pay is that the other perspective becomes invisible. If you do not believe me and you are convinced that you can see both together, try to look at a window and through a window at the same time. It is not possible. You either see the window or the world outside. If you focus on the latter, the window becomes invisible and if you concentrate on the window itself, the world outside becomes blurry and unclear.

Inattentional blindness

Being blind for information sounds like a rather dysfunctional feature of our brain. It isn’t. Framing turns us into fast and efficient decision makers because we can rely on a particular expertise, a particular routine that we have developed to solve a very specific task. If you hunt a mammoth, you do not need to reflect about the nice flowers you could pick or the beautiful cloud you could observe in the sky. You focus on what it takes to kill the mammoth, because otherwise it will kill you. However, the price we pay is that frames blind us for some potentially important aspects and pieces of information.

Distorted frames and the Challenger explosion

Two framing processes contributed to the tragic explosion of the Challenger. First, by approaching risks along a very narrow definition of weak versus strong signals NASA had defined a process in which a problem like the O-Ring erosion could not be perceived as a serious issue and thus would not move up in the hierarchy of the organization. Second and more importantly, under the pressure of their client, Morton Thiokol managers imposed a management frame on their engineers, which meant that they were supposed to look at the launch of the Challenger as a business decision, not a technological decision. A risk calculation morphed into a decision on costs, schedules, marketing, supplier-customer relationship. The shift of frames silenced the engineers.

Why do good people sometimes make unethical decision with severe consequences? One answer to this question is that they are caught in a too narrow frame of their decision and become victims of unintentional blindness. They do not see what they need to see to make the right decision. Afterwards it might be obvious to them as it is obvious to us when we analyse past scandals and catastrophes. But in the heat of the moment, under the pressure of the situation and applying an inappropriate frame, they do not see it. Using a broader set of perspectives helps to avoid such framing risks. Imposing a too narrow frame on a team or worse, assembling a team of people who all think alike will increase the risk of unethical decision making.

References:
McDonald, A., & Hansen, J. (2009). Truth, lies, and o-rings: inside the Space Shuttle "Challenger" disaster. University Press of Florida.
Vaughan, D. (2016). The Challenger launch decision: Risky technology, culture, and deviance at NASA. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Roger Commission. (1986). Report to the President By the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION On the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (Rep.). Washington D.C, Washington.

Everybody has probably met more than once in their life the so-called Maslow pyramid. In 1943, psychologist Abraham Maslow had published the article "A Theory of Human Motivation" in which he proposed a typology of basic human needs. His theory was soon illustrated in a pyramid of human needs that gave the impression of a fixed sequence of need satisfaction (this was not done by Maslow himself). This pyramid insinuates a clear order of things. Only when we have sufficient food, we think about shelter and once we found shelter in the cave, psychological needs are activated: we want to belong to a group, and feel self-esteem. Finally, when all those basic and psychological needs are fulfilled, we become creative and devote our energy to self-actualization. Put differently, we first hunt, barricade the cave, and socialize and only afterwards we can become artists and storytellers. Such a sequence of needs is also expressed in playwright Bertolt Brecht’s saying, “Food comes first and then morality.” Higher needs are a kind of luxury. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

The little statue in the cave

In 1939, Robert Wetzel, a professor of anatomy at Tübingen University and geologist Otto Völzing discovered a little figurine in the Palaeolithic cave site Hohlenstein-Stadel in South Germany. The statue was broken in many pieces, and they put it in a box, where it was forgotten. Only 30 years later in 1969, archeologist Joachim Hahn opened it and put the pieces together like in a three-dimensional puzzle. The statue represents a human being with the head of a cave lion and was called Löwenmensch (Lionman). It is 30 cm high, made of ivory and is estimated to be about 40.000 years old.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND

Experts assume that homo sapiens arrived in Europe about 45.000 years ago under the hostile conditions of the Ice Age that lasted until roughly 19.000 years ago. Lionman was thus created during this rough and brutally cold period in which our ancestors were under the constant pressure to find sufficient food and shelter. Experimental archeologists who wanted to find out what it took to produce the statue, reproduced a copy of Lionman and realized that it would take an experienced artist about 400 hours to create it – this is nothing someone would do in the evening around the fire as a kind of “after-hunt hobby.” It required the impressive technical skills and the time investment of someone who devoted his or her energy to the creation of art, not the gathering of food. A professional artist.

History repeating itself

Lionman is the first known statue representing an imaginary creature. The figurine was found deep in the Hohlenstein-Stadel cave and close to a niche in the wall as if our ancestors had provided a special place to it. Lionman’s mouth was polished, it must have been touched very often. Probably in a ritual practice. It had seeds of flowers in its mouth – another indicator of some rituals. Archeologist are convinced that the cave represented a spiritual place in which these early hunters and gatherers venerated the Lionman. Was it meant to represent a human morphing into an animal? Transferring the power of the lion to a human being? A sacred entrance into a spiritual world? Did it maybe represent the Shaman him- or herself and their magic power to enter the non-human world? Was it meant to pacify and control nature? We will never know what Lionman was supposed to be or to do. What we do know, however is that this idea came up again in human history, remote in the time and place from where Lionman was found. Sekmeth was the Goddess of war, protection from diseases and of healing in Egypt around 1390 BC. Vishnu, one of the principal deities of Hinduism, is the God who brings order into chaos (around 400). Both are represented as half (wo)man, half lion.

The power of the story

Our ancestors who created and worshipped Lionman had a fully modern human mind. They were like us, and they were probably driven by the same questions our species has tried to answer over the Millenia that followed: Who are we? Where do we come from? Where do we go when we die? What shall we do? How should we live together? Most probably, Lionman and the story a community were sharing around this figurine in South Germany gave them some answers that reassured them, it provided orientation and social cohesion. They embedded their values and beliefs in a story as we do today and that story was obviously as important as the food they needed to find every day to survive. Homo sapiens is hardwired for stories. The need for a story came in parallel to the food and shelter, not afterwards.

Close to Hohlenstein-Stadel archeologists found three more caves from the same period: Geißenklösterle, Vogelherd and Hohle Fels. In all of those caves, they discovered some musical instruments, in particular some flutes, made of bird bones and also of ivory like Lionman. We must imagine the rituals around Lionman being accompanied by music, by singing and dancing. Members of the Lionman community were probably telling their stories as we know it from Ancient Greece: With the rhythm of their voice and their entire body and with the conviction that words are not just words. They were supposed to have magic power. “Abracadabra”, is an incantation which means “I create as I speak” in Aramaic. Speaking it or writing it on an amulet was supposed to do something in the real world. In Wilhelm Hauff’s fairy tale “Caliph Stork”, a wizard helps the powerful Caliph Chasid of Bagdad to morph into a stork and to understand the language of animals. “Mutabor” is the magic word, he needs to speak to morph into the animal and back into a human being. When he forgets this word, he is condemned to remain a stork.

Metamorphosis and the counterfactual imagination of homo sapiens

Metamorphosis understood as the power to transform has accompanied us as a species since then. Think about the book the famous Roman poet Ovid wrote with this very same title, in which Gods and humans move in and out of shapes of other creatures. Think about the dream of the Alchemist in the Renaissance who desperately tried to transform ordinary metals into gold. Or Franz Kafka’s novel Metamorphosis (“Die Verwandlung”), in which the poor salesman Gregor Samsa one morning wakes up as a huge insect. The transformation is a key element in our human imaginaries, a driving force of our creativity. The wings to fly first appear in myths, then in Da Vinci’s sketches before we eventually learned to build airplanes. Metamorphosis represents our amazing ability to imagine what is not there. To transcend the status quo, to dream of something we want to achieve. Counterfactual thinking is the magic of human progress. We make sense of the world in imaginaries.

Like the fire was warming up the bodies of our ancestors and made their food more digestible, so did stories warm them up from inside. Carving those stories in bones and stones and painting them on cave walls (and probably not only there but outside such closed environments, it hardly survived), they tried to bring those stories to life. With little oil lamps, the paintings on the wall turned into a movie. The swimming deer that can be found at the walls of the Lascaux cave and which date back about 15.000 years might just be one single animal. Moving the spotlight of their oil lamps in the dark cave from one to the other, the Shaman could create movement like children do with a flip book.

This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA

Narratives shape societies and conflicts between them

Over the Millenia, homo sapiens has constantly changed the answers they gave to the very same existential questions about our origin, future and the appropriate behavior. They did, however, always package those answers in stories. Stories, which formed complex narratives. Lionman does not speak to us anymore, but it had beyond any doubt the same impact on the group that used it as our belief in scientific progress or God or free markets have on us.

Samuel Huntington once argued that in the 20th century wars resulted from clashes of ideologies while in the future, we will fight along cultural fraction points. This might be the case or not, what is important to understand is that all those fights have something in common. They are narrative clashes. Homo sapiens has always fought for food, for scarce resources, but they also fought over narratives. Language is the interface between us and the world. It is the closest we can get to the real thing. The world changes, when the stories change and civilizations end, when the storyworlds they created disappear. At the beginning of the 21st century, our ecological crisis is in reality a storytelling crisis.

References:
Floss, Harald, 2015. The Oldest Portable Art: the Aurignacian Ivory Figurines from the Swabian Jura (Southwest Germany). Palethnologie, 7. Accessed at: https://journals.openedition.org/palethnologie/888#tocto1n8

Fu, Qiaomei et al. 2016. The genetic history of Ice Age Europe. Nature (534): 200–205.

Walter, Chip, 2015. First Artists. National Geographic Magazine, January issue. Accessed at https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/origins-of-art

In Zen Buddhism, the spiritual master often confronts the meditating student with a koan, a seemingly meaningless question, for which no reasonable answer exists. A koan is supposed to help the students to advance in their practice. A master might for instance show a stick to the student and tell them: "If you say this stick is real, I will beat you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will beat you with it. If you don't say anything, I will beat you with it." What might help to advance in meditation by breaking the rational thinking of the Zen student can create highly destructive situations in other social contexts, as the anthropologist and early system thinker Gregory Bateson already argued in the late 1950s. The Zen student might just take away the stick from the master and that would be a meaningful response. However, what happens outside such spiritual contexts when people are confronted with contradictory and unsolvable expectations where each option they can chose would be problematic not just metaphorically as for the Zen student but threatening to them in a much more material sense? What if taking away the stick is not possible, and the beating is unavoidable? According to Bateson, such a situation that can occur in any social system, from families to organizations, would trigger fear and despair and over time might lead to mental problems. He called this phenomenon a double-bind.

Double-binds in companies

Double-binds are one of the major drivers of unethical and illegal behavior in organizations. In the year 2000 my wife and I were invited to do an ethics training for a company. For me, this was the first time that I would teach ethics to managers. This globally operating company had developed a new code of ethics and we were invited to train a group of what they called their “young high potentials” – a group of young managers coming from around the world who were on a fast-track career. At that time, we both had just finished our PhDs and for the workshop we naively compiled some ideas about how to use ethical theories of Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill or Aristotle to make good decisions. During the workshop, in one of the breaks, three of these young managers approached us and told us bluntly that they had to pay bribes. Their managers would push them to do so by expecting results they would not be able to deliver without bribing. They also told us that from their perspective, this training was only meant to protect their own managers against them. If one day their illegal business practices would come out, the managers would argue that they knew nothing about it and that they had done everything to sensitize their teams for doing business with integrity. The situation felt very awkward, and we both did not really know what to say in this moment. Over the years, I forgot the episode. The conversation with these young managers came back to my mind many years later, when the same company was all over the news with a big corruption scandal. The three young managers who had approached my wife and me when we were naively lecturing them about how to be more Kantian in their daily decisions a few years earlier, had been suffering in a double-bind situation. They had desperately tried to avoid the stick of the master. And as they had predicted, their top management claimed total innocence.

The three dimensions of a double-bind

This is how Gregory Bateson explained the basic structure of a double-bind: Two people or groups of people communicate with each other. One of the two has power over the other, for instance a parent over a child or a manager in an organization over their team members. In a first step, the powerful actor formulates a negative injunction. It normally takes the form of “do not do x or I will punish you”. Then, in a second step, the powerful actors send a second message with a contradictory injunction: “Do x”. Both these injunctions if obeyed will potentially threaten the survival of the person or group in their respective social system.

While the first injunction is communicated directly, the second one is normally transmitted on a different level of communication. The power holders might even be different actors in the same social system, one demanding x and one demanding non-x from a person or a group of persons. There is a third element that concludes the double-bind situation: The person(s) exposed to the contradictory injunctions cannot escape the system or at least firmly believe that they cannot escape the system. There is no way out. Unlike the Zen student, they cannot take away the stick from their manager and the paradox is not just a thought experiment for their meditation.

What sounds abstract becomes clear if we go back to the story of the young managers who were sent to our ethics training. The powerful message communicated to them by the company was: “Do not pay bribes, do not violate our code of ethics, behave with integrity.” This is the first, negative injunction. Before and after the training, however, they were confronted with a second positive injunction. Their superior might tell them: “Bring me this contract until tomorrow and I do not want to know how you do it.” Very often, the second positive injunction is not even communicated directly but will be conveyed by the organizational context: Someone who is known for doubtful sales practices will be promoted or get the bonus. Someone who violated the code will not be punished, because they are too successful. The rule-breaking is tolerated. The manager will not say “great that x achieved her goals by bribing the client”. Rather they will say: “I don’t micromanage” or “I find the talent and then let them do their job”. This is, what Bateson means by communicating the second injunction on a different communicative level. In a double-bind, nobody will bluntly say “pay this bribe”. In fact, if one of these young managers from my example had directly asked their superior whether they were supposed to pay a bribe, the latter would have rejected this idea with indignation. “Of course not!” This represents the third element of the double-bind situation: It is impossible to meta-communicate about the perceived tensions with the power holder. Sometimes, the tension that creates the double-bind is already built into one simple statement that companies communicate to their employees. The company might for instance communicate: “We achieve our goals, no matter how unrealistic they are.” The negative and the positive injunction are fused into one statement. Or they might use one of the following two statements that are well known from numerous companies: “We follow rules, but not always.” and “We make mistakes, but not too often”.

What are the “real rules” to follow?

In all those cases, decision makers will start to wonder: Which rule am I supposed to violate? How many mistakes can I make before I get punished? How do I achieve this unrealistic goal? As Bateson has argued, in any normal and healthy relationship, everybody can switch to a metacommunicative level at any point in a conversation and ask for instance, “What do you mean?” or “Why did you do that?” or ”Are you kidding me?”. Such statements will help to signal a contradiction and helps to clarify what the power holder really means or really wants their teams to do. However, in a double bind, it is not possible to ask “what do you mean?” It is not possible to communicate about the contradictory injunctions.

Why not? First of all, in organizations with double-bind dynamics, the actor caught in contradictory orders will not be used to challenge the power holder. Speaking up is not considered a meaningful option. Actors cannot simply put the problem on the agenda of a meeting. Furthermore, they are repeatedly exposed to the double-bind, it is never just a single interaction. In a unique situation that differs from the norm, it would be comparably easier to point at the contradiction: “We don’t do these things here!”. In a double-bind the tensions are normalized.

In a double-bind, people will look left and right to figure out what others do, what the real rules and the real expectations are. Actors are under the pressure to make a decision and thus will have to make a choice. To be clear: Finding the (seemingly) appropriate interpretation does not mean that the double-bind is solved. It only means that the actor who is caught between two injunctions will pick one that seems more appropriate in their particular organizational context. They will imitate their peers. They will probably still feel miserable, because they will either lose the business or their moral innocence.

References:
Bateson, G. 1972. Steps to an ecology of the mind: A revolutionary approach to man's understanding of himself. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 215-16;
Bateson, G., Jackson, D. D., Haley, J. & Weakland, J., 1956, Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science, Vol. 1, 251–264.