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Tricks that Sociopaths Pull Part 2 — The Fata Morgana and the Hiding Hand

31 Days in May — Day Nine

A Shiny Image in the Distance, a Fata Morgana

In order for a project to get going at all, there has to be a reason to get going. The truth of the matter is that venturing out into the unknown is a risky business, in terms of time, money and reputation. It’s the job of the sociopaths to hide those risks and to overstate the potential benefits of the goal. What’s interesting is that he or she will get lots of help from other people in hiding the risks. Albert Hirschmann — whom some think of as the greatest economist who never won a Nobel prize — had some special terms that he used when discussing projects and the way that people — especially the leaders — collaborated to make sure that they happened, even though their success was far from likely and the risks involved were huge.

Hirschmann called the vision that everyone was working towards, the Fata Morgana. This is Italian for deceiving fairy — and refers to a mirage, specifically a mirage on the sea that leads sailors to think that they are near land when they are in fact nowhere near land. The other concept that Hirschmann talks about is the hiding hand. This is a reference to, or perhaps dig at the concept championed by the Scottish Economist Adam Smith who referred to the mysterious way that markets settled on a price for goods and arranged supply in response to demand as the guiding hand. Hirschmann’s idea was that on large project, many people who are involved conspire to hide the risks that are involved in a project and to overstate and over-simplify the benefits.

Benefits of the Fata Morgana and the Hiding Hand

The Fata Morgana is a big, clear, simple goal that a large number of people of all types in the organization can respond to. It can energize a team and an organization. Following a dream is an extremely important part of getting stuff done. Hiding the risks and costs involved (or the uncertainty of the costs and risks) is also important. Once you start to think like this, it becomes easier to understand why the sociopath leaders in an organization are totally ambivalent to an iterative, learning loop like the OODA loop.

The sociopaths don’t want to learn too much too soon.

They don’t want everybody to realize that the Wizard of Oz is just a man behind a curtain until everybody has gone a long, long way down the yellow brick road. In iterative approaches to software development this leads to extremely ambivalence on the part of leaders at the beginning of a project. In the early sprints (the early trips around the OODA loop) will throw up a huge number of issues which are threatening to the gleaming image of the Fata Morgana.

But one important thing to understand is how much of human action is guided by the kind of pursuit of a vague, abstract ideal such as a fata morgana. It’s also important to understand that thinking through all the possible consequences of an action is physically impossible — we simply don’t have the time to list all of the possible consequences of our actions. According to chaos theory, even if we did have the time and resources to review all of the consequences of our actions, we still wouldn’t be able to be absolutely certain what those consequences were.

This is why, as an organisation, as a community, as a species, we make space for people who are willing to soft-pedal the risks and sing the praises of the shiny, simplified fata morgana, the deceiving fairy, the mirage in the desert.

Risks of the Fata Morgana and the Hiding Hand the loss has been disclosed, the Secret Service say:

It must have been Macavity!’ — but he’s a mile away. T S Eliot

Of course, there’s a downside to hiding risks and over-stating benefits. Sooner or later the real costs and real risks will come to light, or it will become obvious that the payoff for a project is nowhere near as fabulous as the picture of the shiny fata morgana on a hill that was painted. At that point blame will be distributed. And of course when that happens, the leader/sociopath, like Macavity won’t be there.

A good leader can create such a shining vision, bristling with gleaming benefits, whilst at the same time using the hiding hand to cover up any risks, costs and downsides. A leader can do this so well that he marches a team, an army, or even a country off a cliff. Of course, when it comes to software development, the cliff is only metaphorical, but there are certainly ways of a leader leading a team or an organization into areas that are far more interesting and exciting than they would probably like.

But there are are other ways that the actual effort and risks involved in a project can cause real pain and suffering and risk to health, even to people involved in what might seem a gentile pursuit like software development.

One way that the sociopath leader can deflect attention from the scant analysis of potential costs and risks that a project received at its beginning is by pretending that the problem is that the team is simply not working hard enough, not working long enough, not putting their health and their relationships under enough strain for the good of the project.

What is doubly cruel about this kind of death march, trench warfare approach to managing projects is that, not only do the people working on these project end up paying for the hidden risks and costs of the leaders in broken relationships, trips to the doctor, added weight and hangovers, this kind of strategy is at least neutral in helping a project get through its risks and is possibly counter-productive.

Even worse, from the point of view of the OODA loop, this kind of working late, working weekends, everybody pulling together trench warfare completely prevents movement around the loop. This kind of trench warfare is rather getting stuck in the A phase, and avoiding the observation phase — and the orientation phase where the cracks in the leaders fata morgana might become a little too obvious.