Bureaucracy and the Pursuit of Truth

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I used to teach a cognitive psychology segment, and as part of the curriculum would use an ‘Overhead Projector’ to display the spotty, multi-colour images used to detect colour-blindness.

And here's the funny thing: quite often a student would learn, for the first time, that they were colour-blind.

You might wonder how a person could live to their late teens without realising that they were, in fact, colour-blind. Or you might wonder if – as you read this – you are colour-blind. It’s an odd thought: that we can go through our lives experiencing the world differently, feeling and seeing different things, and that somehow language covers it all up.

Something similar happened to me. Some years ago I joined a big organisation as part of the learning leadership team. The thing that struck me as odd right from the outset is that nobody wanted to talk about learning. In fact, if I tried to talk about learning they would look at me blankly – and then the conversation would move on. Instead, they talked about (what to my ears sounded like) politics: who wanted what, personal ambitions, expansion plans, budgets and career moves.

At the time, I thought it was just that I was terribly naïve. I now know that this is a common phenomenon – the bureaucratisation of life. Bureaucratisation is a process where a world of activity springs up that has no connection to any set of values outside of itself. It is self-sustaining. Instagram is a bit like this: it is an economy of likes, where all that matters is how many likes one gets, and who likes what.

Because our industry has no deep connection to learning – to the truth of learning (put simply: people can’t even tell you what learning is) we have fallen victim to this process of bureaucratisation. We have created a world where people shuffle paper, make careers, win awards, live and die – with almost no connection to learning itself, or even just more prosaic matters like performance. This bureaucracy is called ‘education’.

A lot of ‘learning’ conversations in organisations are really just ‘education’ conversations: discussions about budgets and certificates, Academies and activity, systems and suppliers. They are often merely political – this person wants this stuff put into a module; another person wants to deliver more digital stuff.

Bureaucracy grows in place of meaning. In recent years, our world has seen an exponential rise in bureaucracy, which provides a sort of surrogate sense of purpose. A ‘bubble’ of meaning: such as certificates, or likes on Instagram.

Over 100 years ago Nietzsche remarked on this same phenomenon, writing:

 the great majority of people does not consider it contemptible to believe this or that and to live accordingly, without first having given themselves an account of the final and most certain reasons pro and con, and without even troubling themselves about such reasons afterward.”

So perhaps, after all, this is something like colour-blindness: though we use the same language, we see different things. It perseveres throughout history.