Blinded Fools — No More

When people are blindfolded, they have no option other than following whatever guidelines they get

Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

The idea of sharing information on a “need-to-know” basis in the organization is very convenient for those who are appointed leaders — because, when being blindfolded, and left without any information, their employees have no other option than to just (blindly) follow orders.

Maybe a military thing

Many ideas used in business life and other management situations have been taken in from the military.

I don’t think that people always consider if such ideas are actually suitable for the situation, suitable for civilian leadership situations, as there has been an overstated faith in the value of the military principles of all kinds — after all, they do work when directing hundreds of thousands of soldiers into war all over the globe, so they must be good?

No.

My (military) courses

in a previous job, I was taking part in a series of leadership/management courses, and they were partly led by some instructors from a military organization.

I guess that this had its reasons, partly, in that these people had decided to offer courses, and they seemed to be good at it, so they were simply considered along with all others in that business. But another reason may have sneaked in — the same one that led another company, I had worked for some years before that, into hiring mostly former military officers: the belief that these were the best leaders.

Well, I have to say, honestly, that they were good at what they did. I appreciate their style and skills, and I find that I learned valuable lessons from them. But not because they were militarians; instead, it is because of their great skills in reading people and giving appropriate guidance to each individual.

Blindfolded

An element that was part of two of the courses was a practical activity, kind of a game, where everybody apart from one was blindfolded. The blindfolded had a connection to each other through a long rope that they were all holding. The seeing person then had, by voice only, to direct them into shaping a figure with the rope.

While that may sound simple, it isn’t.

And even though some teams managed to do it quite well, the actual shape wasn’t the intended outcome of the activity — the learning was.

And the learning was, as we all experienced, that whenever you are blindfolded, you have no clue of what everybody else is doing — and then you cannot adjust your own activities accordingly. You simply have to trust that the one who sees will guide you appropriately.

What to learn from this

The intentions were never explained. But there are two angles to it:

Angle 1: You could, as a collaborative and knowledge-sharing kind of person, decide that what you learned was the importance of ensuring that everybody would be well informed — that everybody would be able to see for themselves what was happening in the company so that they could adapt and act in a reasonable way.

Angle 2: Knowing that people will follow you without any questions if you keep them in the unknown. You, as their leader, will get to know various details about the company, people in it or outside of it, etc., but you will carefully select what to share with your people and how to shape it. The goal is to prevent them from doing anything on their own initiative — so that you personally will maintain absolute control.

Relating to real life

Even though the course activity was only a game, it does reveal or at least hint at something, I guess most people with experience from large companies have seen: that there is no transparency, no knowledge-sharing, and that nobody wants you to contribute with your views if you are only a person on the floor.

Many leaders and managers over time have deliberately failed to share important details or they have even fabricated false information in order to control their position and gain personal advantages.

In the game with the rope, the seeing person could do whatever they wanted with the blindfolded ones — they had full control; total power.

How modern leaders look at it

As modern leaders are in reality collaborators, and only for an individual situation taking the lead, while at other times trusting that their colleagues will do that well, they seek to maintain full transparency and make it possible for everybody else to get engaged and bring in all their knowledge, their intellectual capacity, and their practical participation in dealing with the matter.

The aim of a modern leader is not to maintain full control, not to be in power, but to actually reach good results for everybody. It is a team effort, the team needs to be involved, needs to be trusted.

Conclusion

So how are modern leaders considering a course activity like the one described?

Well, we are all individuals, as Brian claims in the Monty Python movie “Life of Brian” — and even though that doesn’t ring a bell for his audience, I am quite certain that most modern people do understand what that means.

We may have very different views on the value of such things, and we are mostly interested in talking about it, and learning from each other’s thoughts. This means, as a matter of fact, that my best guess is that the exercise would become quite popular with modern leaders, as it would be seen as a philosophical kick to develop views on.

But the idea of accepting blindfoldedness in the company is out — it left together with the last organizational dinosaurs.