Welcome to Dilbertville

    Everybody has them: examples of situations from their own workplace that resemble a Dilbert© cartoon more than what you expect from reality.  I can think of examples from nearly every major organization I have every been a part of,  in University, in the museums and government organizations I have worked for and in the commercial businesses I have worked for, not least of which is the one I currently work for.

    Dealing with managers who only vaguely understand how the business they run works is a phenomenon that is as old as human organizations.  It has gone by many different names and has been expressed in many different ways, depending on the nature and complexity of the particular organization under examination.  In recent history, two contributing phenomena have been identified under the names "The Peter Principle" (see, for example, the 1969 book of that name by Lawrence J Peter and Raymond Hull) and the "Dilbert Principle." (see, for example, the 1996 book of that name by Scott Adams).

    There are reams of analyses of these principles as they relate to the management of organizations, so I will not venture into any such now, in this forum.  I will simply re-state, for those not already familiar with the terms, what, in general terms, they refer to.  The Peter Principle refers to the phenomenon by which people in an organization tend to be promoted to their own 'level of incompetence'.  In other words, if a person was found to be competant in his position he would be promoted to a more demanding position and, if he did well at that position he would be promoted to a yet more demanding position.  Eventually this person would reach a position (perhaps middle management, perhaps upper management) at which he proved himself to be at best uninspired and at worst incompetant.  There he would stay, as people are only seldom demoted to a lower position on the command chain,  By this means the corporation would eventually become filled with uninspired or even incompetant managers, with understandably deleterious results.  In the 1970's it was suggested by many who study the functioning of organizations that this principle describes a very real, very common and very great danger to the successful operation of our various institutions.

    The Dilbert Principle is a somewhat satirical variation of the Peter Principle which observes that, in modern organizations, the least capable people tend to be promoted to management because companies need their smartest people to do the useful work.  In the humourist Scott Adams' words: "It's hard to design software, but relatively easy to run staff meetings.  This creates a situation where you have more geniuses reporting to morons than at any time in history." (see www.dilbert.com).

    Having studied organizational psychology at university and having lived my life, I can personally attest to the fact that these principles describe very real human situations; that, although similar, they are separate phenomena and that both can be in operation in any given organization at the same time.  To these, however, I would add one other simultaneously operating factor which is also well known to anyone who has studied the operation of organizations.  In any organization in which a manager's position is not absolutely secure, said manager will tend to surround himself with sycophants and will tend to actively avoid promoting more competent persons that himself to positions from which that competent underling can threaten his managerial position (through replacement).

    Let all three of these principles run rampant in a single mid-sized organization, and you get something resembling the company I currently work for.  In this company, the producers of profit are skilled and licensed professionals who, traditionally, required something of a mix of science and art in practicing their trade.  Much of the work requires reasoned selection of target persons to focus on, from a very large database of company files, and the ability to convince those target persons within a very short time frame, to deal financially with the company.  Skill also came to play in deciding precisely when and how to follow-up with customers in order to preserve or even expand their business with the company.   Individual employees tended to produce easily measurable profit in direct relation with their skill level and would be financially rewarded with salary and commission accordingly.

    The geniuses or idiots (you decide which) running my company have decided to modernize using a software program which randomly selects files to focus on and arbitrarily limits discussions with customers to no more than five minutes.  Even more disconcertingly, they now refuse to allow any of the afore mentioned professional employees to decide when or how to follow up with a customer to make sure they continue to pay the company or to convince the customer to expand their financial business with the company.  Once a customer is paying the company there is to be no more contact with the customer unless the customer calls in or they stop paying the company all together, at which point that customer's file would go back into the pool from which random selection for contact would be made by the software package.  Moreover, the software now running the show makes up-to-the-minute reports on each employee so that the CEO can tell at a glance how many minutes an employee has been working and how many contacts they have made, as well as how many minutes each has paused the program to go to the washroom, lunch or for any other reason. Additionally, compensation for producing employees, as opposed to support employees, will soon no longer be based on how much money we bring in.  Rather, it will be based on how many calls each producer completes.  In other words, the employee who brings in very little money to the company, but who completes many contacts with potential customers, will receive greater compensation that the employee who brings in more money with fewer contacts.

    The software package controlling all of this, and client support from the software-owning company in the United States, was purchased for our company at a cost of millions of dollars by two cronies of our relatively new CEO.  These two have been placed in controlling positions immediately below and answering only to the CEO.  These three, in February of this year, placed all of our branches across the country on this system simultaneously, without prior testing.  How much intelligence would it take, even if you thought all of this was a good idea, to try the system out first in one branch, or even in one department of one branch, to test its efficacy and to work out solutions to any problems that developed, before committing all sectors of the company nation-wide and irreversibly to its control.  And problems there have been.  For the first several months we had huge amounts of down-time because one portion or another of the software was simply not functioning properly.  Anyone at any managerial level who complained too much was labelled an obstacle rather than an enabler and has been threatened with being fired.  Anyone who placed greater importance on pride in their work, as opposed to fear of loss of their income, has either been fired or has chosen to leave the company voluntarily.  These include people at every level from support staff to executive vice-presidents.  Our production (profitability) has dropped considerably but all remaining managers are on-board with the explanation that this must be the fault, somehow, of the licensed producers at the bottom of the command structure.  No explanation for how we could be at fault is ever proffered.

    So why do I continue to work for this company?  For me it is just a retirement job, a continuing source of mortgage money.  The work has become, especially of late, exceedingly mindless and boring but leaves me lots of time, including holiday time, for more intellectually stimulating pursuits.  So long as my income and holiday time stay high enough to accomplish that, I will stay.  In truth, I see a distinctly humourous side to it all, as would Scott Adams and his readers.  Something compels me to stay, if only to see what will come next.  I do wonder constantly, however, if that is likely to be much longer.  The current management, it seems to me, is likely only to make things worse, not better.  Each day when I go to work, I am truly in Dilbertville.

Senate Reform: Deletion? Simple Election? or Modified Appointment.

    I have always been a staunch supporter of the Canadian Senate as an integral and important part of our system of government.  I have always felt that we do need a forum of 'sober second thought,' preferably consisting of appointed, not elected, persons who are carefully selected from among the most intelligent, educated, open-minded and respected of Canadian citizens.  Our elected Members of Parliament are too much in the limelight of, and under the thumb of, rapidly changing and often poorly informed public opinion.  Without the check of an intelligent and well educated Senate to slow down the process of lawmaking, to re-think what our parliamentarians put forward as new laws or modifications to our constitution, to recommend vital changes to those laws and constitutional modifications, we would be very much in danger of having what would amount to little more than 'mob rule by proxy.'

    Remember, the Senate cannot stop laws or constitutional changes that Parliament wants, it can only force them to slow down and reconsider the potential ramifications of those bills, if enacted, despite how popular they may be temporarily with the public at large, or because of how unpopular they may be with the public.  To be sure, very few Members of Parliament would ever want to have to function without the Senate there as a potential scapegoat.  It is frequently enough a valuable ploy for an elected Member of Parliament to be able to vote for a temporarily popular bill that he or she knows to be ill-advised or unworkable in some way and to blame the 'killing of the bill' on that nasty old Senate.  What those parliamentarians know, but never talk about publicly, is that the Senate cannot kill a bill.  It can send it back only three times for reconsideration.  Even if the bill had to wait until the next sitting of Parliament, our MP's could send it back to the Senate and force it through then.  The Senate of Canada can delay a bill but cannot stop it from being enacted.

    Although there are ill-advised calls heard now and then for elimination of the Senate, I believe most Canadians understand how vital a role the Senate plays in protecting us from our own impetuousness, or that of our elected representatives.  Laws and constitutional changes, after all, should function and function well, over long periods of time, in order to foster a stable, healthy society.  They are far too important to leave them subject to, or requiring, overly-frequent 'tweeking' in response to temporary changes in the public whim.

    In the last couple of decades, however, there have been increasing calls, especially in my native Alberta, to move to an elected Senate.  I have always been opposed to an elected Senate because I felt it would then become little more than a rubber-stamping extension of our elected Parliament.  Far from enabling better government, this would simply do away with the greatest value of the Senate which, as stated above, is to enable reconsideration of Parliamentary bills by worthy people who are not subject to necessarily impending re-election and, resultingly, rapidly fluctuating public whim.

    Of late I have had to rethink my position on this.  One example of why is the recent appointment of Mike Duffy to the Canadian Senate and his subsequent behaviour as an appointed Senator.  His boorishness, overbearing manner, ultra-partisanship and lack of transparency with regards to his immensely bloated expenditures out of the public purse make him an embarrassment to all well-meaning Canadians of any political stripe.  I hasten to add that, although Duffy is not the model of all of our Senators by any means, neither is he the only example of the depths to which our current system of appointment by the Prime Minister (who himself gains his position through a 'first past the post' party system that leaves huge sections of the Canadian population unrepresented or poorly represented in Parliament) has sunk the nature and manner of our governance.  In fact, in the last year alone Stephen Harper, the most authoritarian, controlling, secretive and ultra-Conservative Prime Minister that Canada has ever had, has appointed twenty-seven new Senators in an unprecedented orgy of partisanship.

    In order to function in a healthy manner for the benefit of all Canadians, Senators must be selected in a  more publicly structured and less partisan way.  After all, even ultra-Conservatives must realize that a time will come, as it has before, when the public psyche will swing to the left again and a more leftish Prime Minister will then be in a position to load up the Senate with patronage appointments of his favourite political hacks.  Elections and Senate appointments are not sporting events to be temporarily celebrated in terms of winners vs. losers and then forgotten (although I suspect many people, unthinkingly, tend to regard them this way).  This is how we are ruled and governed in every public aspect, and in a great many private aspects, of our lives.  IT IS IMPORTANT to every Canadian whether or not he thinks much about it.

    I too would now like to see the system for the selection of our Senators modified.  My preference would be to maintain the system of Prime Ministerial appointment, but to restrict his or her selection to a pool of elected possibles.  Elections within each Province and Territory could be held at set intervals and a group of several candidates elected by popular vote.  This would require that the candidates be able to convincingly support their own candidacy with public discussions of what their qualifications are, how they think on various issues, and why they feel they are better suited to a position of checking the power of Members of Parliament than to simply running for office as a potential Member of Parliament.  From this pool of elected candidates the Prime Minister would still have the serious input of selecting which of the candidates from each region actually become Senators.  This is not the forum in which to go into the fine details of how this system would work, but it may readily be seen that some such system would better function to satisfy the wishes and needs of the Canadian populace yet still conform to a large degree to the Prime Minister's inevitably partisan desire for wielding some controlling influence on the Senate.  At the same time, it would eliminate the worst excesses of our current system of rewarding unsuitable and even incompetent party hacks with patronage appointments on the public purse.

    I urge all Canadians to think about this seriously.  Don't be blasé about our governance and don't fall into the trap of letting our Senate become just a pack of elected 'Yes Men' (and women) for whatever major political party happens to hold sway at any given time.  I urge you further to talk openly about this with friends and colleagues.  Talk about it, e-mail and blog about it, and let's start pressing our politicians to get more serious, not just about reforming the Senate, but about reforming it in such a way that it becomes more valuable in its intended function, not less so.