"Business As Usual" Is Destroying Us
How Elon Musk’s Antics At Twitter Point To Much Larger Problems In The Way We View Businesses And Work.
You know when you just simply, very literally, absolutely cannot?
That’s how I felt about Elon’s antics at Twitter as I watched them unfold: alternating between sputtering with rage and a numb, aching sadness that we’re still “here.”
Elon Musk is the current poster child for everything that is systemically fucked up about Corporate America.
And not just Corporate America - I think the correct term would be Working America.
The actions that Musk has been allowed to take (though, the legality of these actions is in question based on California employment laws, according to this Reuters article describing the class action lawsuit that’s been filed,) are not only detrimental to Twitter as an organization, but to the thousands of suddenly-jobless former employees, their families and their communities.
On top of which, Musk’s actions uphold and perpetuate some of the most painfully harmful aspects of white supremacy culture, burnout culture, the concept of industry over humanity and gaslighting present in our work cultures today.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be exploring the recent happenings at Twitter, what they show about the way we do business, what we can take away and how we can do better ourselves as we build our own businesses.
Solopreneurs and microbusinesses are currently building the future of this economy, and it’s our responsibility (and an opportunity I’m THRILLED that we even have) to fix what people like Elon have gone and ruined for everyone over the last 250 years (and beyond.)
Let’s start by talking about how colonialism is still fucking us over today.
And when I say “us,” I do mean ALL of us: though marginalized groups are undoubtedly hurt the worst, the harmful practices that have just become part of the doing-business-furniture are also hurting the people who perpetuate them. (They just don’t ever suffer the most.)
Many of the practices we’ve come to consider as standard are rooted in colonialism and chattel slavery.
Gruelingly long work hours, sacrificing your humanity for the “good of the company,” little to no room for mistakes, being treated like an object that can be discarded when it is no longer deemed useful or valuable, the benchmarks of success being based solely on how much and how fast one can produce -
It all stems from an economy that was built on the downright disgusting basis that some humans are more human than others.
So how do these practices become the standard in the first place if they’re so fucked up?
Let’s examine a fun little phenomenon called indoctrination.
The dictionary definition of indoctrination is: the process of teaching a person or group to accept a set of beliefs uncritically.
Here’s how this plays out on a larger scale:
People in powerful positions have beliefs. They then build systems around these beliefs. They teach their apprentices and mentees these beliefs while the larger systems help to teach the rest of society how to behave.
As more and more people learn the “ways of being” based on these beliefs, more and more of our societal systems are built not only to accommodate those foundational beliefs, but to support, complement and uphold them.
Then, before you know it, we’re all stuck in a “way of being” whether or not we actually, truly believe in them or not - simply because the problem becomes so huge and impossible to change with ease.*
*Please note: That doesn’t mean they’re impossible to change-full-stop. It just means that changing them will take collective intention and effort. More on this in just a minute!
Maggie Patterson of Small Business Boss has an excellent illustration of indoctrination as it works in the online small business space. In this post, she talks about circles of indoctrination, how shady practices spread so easily and why they can seem “normal” when it’s all that you see around you:
Maggie Patterson (@SmallBusinessBoss) illustrates how the concept of indoctrination affects the online small business space.
For example, one person teaches five people. Those five people go on to teach five more people each. The understanding of “the way it’s done” starts spreading exponentially. As you can see, all it takes is a few powerful people to start a snowball effect of “one of us” thinking and behavior.
The other part of this equation is that we humans are susceptible to a (maybe, maybe not) surprisingly large variety of cognitive biases.
This VeryWell Mind article describes cognitive bias as follows:
“A cognitive bias is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments that they make.”
Why these cognitive biases occur in the first place can happen for a number of reasons: how we’re feeling, the presence of social pressure on us to think or act a certain way, our capacity to pay attention or mentally process something and built-in mental shortcuts called heuristics.
“Because of the sheer complexity of the world around you and the amount of information in the environment, it is necessary sometimes to rely on some mental shortcuts that allow you to act quickly.”
The reason we evolved to use heuristics in the first place is to allow us to make decisions super-fast in the face of high-pressure, dangerous or life-threatening situations.
The fun part about this is that we often don’t get a chance to consciously or logically decide what is actually a life-threatening situation and what isn’t. There is such a huge amount of information coming at us every day that our nervous systems end up on constant alert. It can become even harder in that state for our brains to differentiate between “minor inconvenience” and “tiger coming to eat me.”
When you think about this in the scope of building a small business online, ESPECIALLY if you’re a solopreneur, the number of decisions you have to make day in and day out are absolutely going to cause the kind of fatigue and potential nervous-system overload that would lead to your brain relying more and more on heuristics and cognitive biases in order to process information and move forward.
This isn’t always a bad thing. But what happens when our cognitive biases end up replacing critical thinking and overriding our better sense that something might be off with doing “business as usual?”
When it comes to shady, harmful and downright unethical business practices becoming the norm, one of these cognitive biases (or “psychological traps” as this article from the Graziado Business Review refers to them) really, really stands out.
It’s called The False Consensus Effect.
“When people do something unethical, they appease their guilt by falsely assuming that it is something everyone does, and thereby minimize their transgressions “It’s not that bad; it’s something that happens all the time!” The insidious thing about the false consensus effect (as with most other traps) is that the person actually believes his or her own self-deception.”
In other words: “everybody does it this way, so it’s ok.”
The combination of an industry being indoctrinated with certain ideas and ways of doing things PLUS people doing those things because they think that’s just “how it’s done” creates a perfect shitstorm of an environment where problematic behavior continues without question.
So how can anything change if Working America is simply swept away in a tidal wave of “this is what my mentor taught me” and “everyone does it this way so it’s fine”?
While I don’t know the answer to solving all of these problems on a global scale, I do think there are a few practical ways that we as solopreneurs, startups and microbusiness owners are uniquely positioned to start affecting positive change.
We are just beginning to build the systems and culture of a business environment and we have the opportunity to build with intention and humanity at the core of what we do.
First, understand your own resistance.
We all have invisible scripts running that dictate our decisions. They’re beliefs that we’ve learned over time and because these beliefs are often cornerstones of societal behavior, they’re also constantly reinforced.
The problem is, these beliefs aren’t always helpful. And when it comes to the way we’ve been socialized to think about work and our worth in relation to it, those invisible scripts become downright harmful.
The resistance to changing our own behavior around the way we relate to our work can oh-so-quickly lead to self-talk and criticism that grates on our sense of worth and self esteem. And beyond our sense of self, the things we’ve learned about how to work and what it all means creates the perfect environment for burnout and exhaustion to take hold.
If you’re not sure where to start with examining your own resistance to changing the way you work, try starting with some of the following questions:
What are the parts of you that think clocking out at 5pm means you’re lazy or uncommitted? Where do you feel guilt for taking time off or doing something just for the sake of joy rather than productivity? When do you consider mistakes to be failures to be avoided rather than human error and a natural part of the iterative process required for creativity and problem-solving?
Make Time For Rest And Space To Slow The Pace Of Business
If there is any way to stem the tide of overwhelm, adrenal fatigue and burnout, it is rest.
We. Need. Blank. Space.
We need to be able to unplug and nourish ourselves - mind, body and soul.
That means rest outside of our businesses AND space created intentionally within our businesses to allow for mistakes to be made, new solutions to be found and for people to do work at a pace that humans can actually keep without making themselves ill.
The less we are chronically fried, the more we can recover from the mental and physical exhaustion that leads us to rely on mental shortcuts when we need to make more active decisions or follow other people’s opinions when we really need to form our own.
When it comes to the critical thinking required to decide whether or not something is right for your business (let alone an entire industry,) we need brains that have the space to explore and ask questions without the overload and overwhelm that come from being under constant pressure to perform and produce.
Ultimately, none of this can be fixed in an instant. It’s true that changing “business as usual” is messy, often painful work. BUT - I also believe we have a responsibility to change the way we do things.
We spend so much of our lives working - why are we ok with spending that time in misery? Why are we ok with making ourselves seriously ill? Why are we ok with the degree of inequity perpetuated by continuing to work this way?
And why - WHY - are we ok with someone like Elon Musk holding so much power that he can basically do whatever the eff he wants with the careers and lives of thousands of humans in the name of the almighty dollar?
As a business owner yourself, remember that you have your own power. What’s considered a “small” business now has the ability to grow into something huge. Your buying power, your hiring power, your power to give back - having even a tiny amount of control over those things is a privilege.
It’s also an opportunity. If we want things to change, we have to change things.
While watching what’s been happening at Twitter has been painful, enraging and saddening to say the least, it also gives me hope: I hope that other people watching are as pissed off as I am, and that they’re finally pissed off enough to start doing business differently.
Coming soon: we’ll be looking at the real consequences of burnout, manufactured urgency and the concept of “human resources.”