Reprised from an internal blog . . . .

I have a friend who used to work in Organisational Design and reckons that executives, managers (call them what you will), senior or otherwise are like frogs in boiling water.

If you haven’t heard the story before, read on. I first heard in a book by Charles Handy but it may be older than that. I have found a reference here.

The story goes that if you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water it, not unreasonably, jumps out. However, if you drop the frog in a pot of cold water and gradually heat it up, the frog sits in the gradually warming water until it is eventually boiled to death before it thinks to jump out. I have no idea of the validity of the experiment and even less inclination to try it.

However, my OD friend reckons that it can be used to describe managers who are gradually pressurised into more and more unacceptable behaviour.

If, when they first began, they were asked to do some of the things they eventually do, or demand some of the things they eventually demand, or behave in a way the eventually behave, they would see it for the totally unreasonable behaviour that it truly is. But because the screw is only gently turned, the frog gradually gets inured to the demands made upon it and does not realise just how far they have travelled from “reasonableness“.

One an see an extreme example of this in the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment of the 1970’s carried out by Philip Zimbardo & the similar Milgram experiment carried out ten years previously at Yale. You can find more details about both of these on the ‘tinternet but Wikipedia is a good place to start.

In both of them, you could generalise to say that authority was abused and / or that there appears to be a natural human inclination to conform to authority without question.

I believe the original Milgram experiment was, in part, designed to explore whether the behaviour seen in Nazi Germany was an aberration or not. More recent examples have been explored with reference to what was seen to take place at Abu Graib prison in Iraq.

It takes a lot of courage to stand up against your peers and “superiors” and it can result in personal misfortune as various “whistle blowers” have found to their cost. The most recent example being the Risk Manager from RBS who lost his job for noting that some of the corporate behaviours there were out of control.

So if you think that your bosses are behaving like boiling frogs in these difficult corporate times, what should you do?

If you believe that there “norm” has been skewed out of all relation to reality, how do you challenge that. Safely?

I don’t know, but I feel I ought to find out.