The Procrustean Bed of the Hive Mind
Last week in a post I talked about the idea that organizations have a "hive mind". That is a corporate way of thinking together. And, that this hive mind works in a similar fashion as the fast and slow thinking revealed in Daniel Kahneman's work.
Organizations are in fact created, communities are created, in order to bring down the physical, fiscal, and spiritual/emotional cost of life. This means that spead and language all mix together in order to create efficiencies in communication. This works well in many cases. When it does not it creates a kind of Procrustean bed mentality. Nassim Taleb reminded me of the Greek myth in his book Antifragile.
Procrustes was one of many villains defeated by the Greek hero Theseus. According to Greek mythology, Procrustes was a robber who killed his victims in a most cruel and unusual way. He made them lie on an iron bed and would force them to fit the bed by cutting off the parts that hung off the ends or by stretching those people who were too short. Something Procrustean, therefore, takes no account of individual differences but cruelly and mercilessly makes everything the same. And a "procrustean bed" is a scheme or pattern into which someone or something is arbitrarily forced.
The nature of the hive mind is to press any new information into the already, and quickly available, vocabulary and systems of an organization. This takes place in the church when for instance people talk about mission - that is leaving the church building and going out into the world following Jesus. You can say it as much as you want but the hive mind will reinterpret that idea - that word mission- to mean getting people to come into church. So, it fits the notion of going out into a procrustean bed that cuts off the bits about going out and leaves the bits about church.
This is why organizations that spend their time in the world of transaction and down stream believe that more information form leaders will help to solve their dilemmas. The fact is that the only way to unmoor an organization, or a congregation, from its procrustean bed or fast thinking by the hive mind is to slow things down and actually take people out into the world. To break out of fast thinking people have to experience something that naturally slows them down.