Organizational Metacognition ── When a Company Sees Itself

When the sickness went into remission, I thought I had recovered a single faculty: the power to watch my own thinking from a slight distance. The self that notices the angry self. The self that watches the self passing judgment. Without it, I would still be standing near the rules, cutting the world into black and white.
Now, from the seat of governance, I watch the company as if it were a living thing, and I stop. Does an organization have this faculty? Can a company see itself?

The personal mirror, the organizational mirror

When I was a reviewer, what cured me was a mirror. To stop just short of judgment and see what I was reacting to. It was only a small delay. But that delay produced gray. Snap decisions produce only black and white.

I came to think a company must have a similar mirror: some mechanism by which the organization watches its own judgment before the judgment lands. Then I noticed the difference. A personal mirror is complete inside one head, but an organizational mirror is made of thousands of eyes and countless silences. If someone sees and it never reaches the top, the organization has not "seen" anything. Seeing, and the seen thing arriving, are two separate functions.

The first thing visible from the seat of governance was that gap. The floor sees. Usually it sees before anyone. The trouble begins afterward: on its way up, what was seen is diluted, rounded off, and finally arrives on my desk as a single line, "no particular issues." The organization has eyes. But the nerve between those eyes and the brain is thin.

Seeing, yet not seeing

If the personal justice sickness was a disease of being unable to notice one's own bias, the organizational disease is its enlargement. The whole company leans in one direction, and no one names the lean. Each person half-knows. But there is no circuit to put it into words and send it up — or the wiring is such that whoever sends it up pays for it.

I came to call this the organization's blind spot. A personal blind spot comes from the structure of the retina; an organizational one comes from the wiring. So the cure differs too. It is not a matter of eyesight but of re-laying the nerves.

What the three share is the absence of malice. No one is hiding anything. The machinery of seeing is simply built this way. As the justice sickness was a disease of good intentions, the organizational disease too nests between good will and diligence.

First-floor learning and second-floor learning

A man named Argyris separated two kinds of learning. One adjusts the method toward a fixed goal — you missed the deadline, so you revise the process. The other questions the goal and the premise themselves — who set this deadline, and for what? — and climbs higher.

Most companies do only the former. The smoother the organization runs, the more it sharpens precision inside the given premises. But that very precision strips away the power to doubt the premise. The better it gets at first-floor learning, the harder it becomes to see the stairs to the second.

A problem cannot be solved by the same thinking that produced it. For an organization to see itself is to place its own thinking under observation.

I came to believe governance exists to secure that second floor as an institution. Left to individual good will, the second-floor question gets processed as "the difficult one," "the one who spoils the mood." So you make the re-questioning a scheduled fixture of the structure rather than a trait of someone's character. Once a year, you set, as a duty, a place where we lay our own premises on the shelf and check whether they still hold.

Three devices by which a company sees itself

I do not want this to end in abstraction, so let me set out the devices I actually handle from the seat of governance. None are dramatic. That they are plain is the proof that they work.

The third is closest to the personal mirror. At the moment of decision you write down "what am I assuming right now." Look back at those premises later and a lean invisible at the time rises to the surface. What an individual once did, externalized onto paper at the scale of an organization. Trusting memory, a company always rewrites the past to its own convenience.

From the seat of governance, my former self

While arranging these devices, I saw something strange. As I drew the map of the organization's blind spots, there, at its center, stood my younger self.

That reviewer was a product of the company's selective attention. He measured the violations that were easy to measure, and judging in black and white was what got rewarded. The organization made him sick with the justice sickness. His rigidity was not his own temperament alone. The wiring of rewards, the design of measurement, and the structure of silence crystallized at the single point that was him. For years I thought I had fallen ill as an individual and healed as an individual. No. I had developed, in my own body, the symptom of what the organization could not see.

If so, the cure was not my own doing either. Someone handed me a mirror, and so I could see myself. What I do now from the seat of governance is, I think, the work of rebuilding that handed-over mirror into the unit called a company. If a mirror could be handed to one person, it can be handed to a company. Only, one mirror is not enough for a company. Thousands of eyes must be re-joined into a single field of sight.

For a company to see itself is not to raise a fine charter. Bad news rises fast, dissent sits as a duty, the premises of a decision get checked later. Whether that plain wiring runs through — that alone is the question.

A single personal mirror sufficed because the one who sees and the one seen lived in the same head. In a company the two stand far apart. To stitch that distance back together is, I think, the work of the chair I now sit in. The same single structure that once made me ill is the one that now has me assembling the mirror.