Hierarchy is a funny thing

Hierarchy is a funny thing. I remember years ago my elder son, now 35, saying to me “Dad, when you’re at work does someone tell you what to do and then do you tell other people what to do?” He had this wonderful idea that the operation of an enterprise happens by the passing of orders down a chain. It’s a quaint notion which ignores certain practicalities but is at least in line with The Siphonaptera (which I always thought was due to a fellow called Augustus de Morgan who I believe to have been Secretary of the Royal Astronomical Society in the mid 19^th Century) which says:

Big fleas have little fleas,
Upon their backs to bite 'em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas,
and so, ad infinitum.

And it goes on:

And the great fleas, themselves, in turn
Have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still,
And greater still, and so on.

Anyway, I was reminded of this just the other day. I am working on a couple of projects for an organisation that suffers from the hierarchy disease. It’s true it’s trying to change itself but change comes from the top and if the top won’t change then nothing else will. A meeting of the great and the good took place to discuss some work I had done but because as a humble contractor I am way down the pecking order I was not permitted to speak to the work. This pleasure I passed – by way of a 10-minute conversation – to my client who discharged himself with credit.

I am too old now to give a shit about exposure to senior executives, none of whom is any more or less flawed than I am. But I do wonder about how, in an organisation of a hierarchical mindset, the senior executive finds out what is going on. Of course they don’t. They are flying by instruments but the instruments are not really quite visible because the glass is fogged up. The particular project I am working on is not insignificant and its failure would not go unnoticed by swathes of the public and press. Yet its senior responsible executive has never once visited the team doing the work.

I suppose this is top of mind in some way because we are off to India at the end of the week and one of the few things I know about India is that it has or had a thing called the caste system.

This system had two concepts. The first is “varna” which classifies people into classes. There were or are four: the Brahmins (priestly people), the Kshatriyas (also called Rajanyas, who were rulers, administrators and warriors), the Vaishyas (artisans, merchants, tradesmen and farmers), and Shudras (labouring classes). There was implicitly a fifth class, who were those people deemed to be entirely outside its scope, such as tribal people and the untouchables. The second concept is “jāti” which means birth. The names of jātis are usually derived from occupations. From a sociological standpoint this is fascinating but far too hard for me to cope with though I should put it all on my reading bucket list (which is already almost infinite).

Everyone I talk to who has been to India tells me that my mind will be opened. I cannot say whether I am ready to have my mind opened or not. I will find out. I find with some idle research that India has 1,650 languages, 30 of which are spoken by more than a million speakers and 122 of which are spoken by more than 10,000. I am sure there are more amazing facts to be uncovered.