Enemies and Opponents
Enemies and Opponents
A completely non-technical article about organisational psychology based on a joke.
Introduction
This article will attempt to expand on the truths embedded in a joke from the 1980s.
The Joke
Willie Whitelaw
To understand the joke it helps to know a little about the political personalities here in the UK at the time. Our prime-minister was the Conservative Margaret Thatcher. Her deputy was Willie Whitelaw, who was renowned for his political good sense1.
The Joke Itself
A few years into the parliament, Willie approached a young Conservative MP who had first been elected to the House of Commons in the previous election and had this conversation with them:-
Willie: “You’ve been in the House for a few years, you should have had time to work out who your enemies are.”
MP: “That’s easy; I’m a Conservative, my enemies are the Labour MPs over there on the opposition benches.”
Willie: “No, no, no. Those are your opponents. Your enemies are on your side!”
Reaction to the Joke
In the 90s I told the joke to someone from Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL). Their reaction was “That’s so true. Those Russian weapons designers do a good job with very few resources, whereas those b*****s at Los Alamos are always trying to steal our funding.”
Why are Your Enemies on Your Side?
The joke captures the idea that your enemies are the people with whom you are directly competing for resources. Thus, for the MP, their enemies are the other MPs in their party who may get the job in government that they wanted, or be allocated the funding from their party that they needed to support their re-election campaign. The opposition MPs are not competing for either of those items, so are not enemies, rather they are opponents.
The LLNL reaction captures this explicitly. The Russian weapon designers have their own source of funding, whereas LLNL and Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) are competing for the same pot of money, so will squabble over it2.
Where Does This Show Up?
We can see this tension both in centrally funded organisations such as the weapons labs or universities, but also in companies, where the enemies are other departments or teams.
Does it Matter?
That depends on your point of view! If you take a local view and are fighting for better funding for your team, then recognising who your enemies are so that you can fight them more effectively seems a good thing.
However, if you are a funding agency that is funding research at a university, having each department spend a lot of time arguing over how to use the money is counter-productive (they could have been doing research!)
Similarly in companies it is better for the company as a whole if teams are not fighting each other, but collaborating. It also helps to explain tension between a central research lab and product teams. The product teams feel that they could make better use of resources than the central research lab does.3
This is therefore a case of locally optimal behaviour (fighting hard for money for my team) being far from a global optimum (achieving the most positive outcome from the available funds).
What Can we Do?
Probably very little. This behaviour fits into the logic expounded in Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene4, in that we fight for those close to us (admittedly the people in our team are not genetically related, but historically, those in our local tribe were, so this "fighting for friends" behaviour is deeply embedded).
Perhaps all we can do is to make sure that the people showing this behaviour are aware of it, and to try to educate them to think at a higher level, so not just “What is best for my team?”, but “What is best for the whole {department, university, funding agency, country, progress of science} ?”. At least thinking about those questions is worthwhile even if doing so doesn’t change people’s behaviour.
A, possibly apocryphal, quotation from Thatcher showing that she valued his advice is “Every prime-minister needs a Willie.”
It seems that the “tension” between the US weapons labs still exists, for instance here we can see them downplaying each other’s work.
There is also the issue of egotistical managers who want “their” organisation to employ more people than some other manager’s organisation just for the bragging rights, whether or not the resulting organisational chart makes any sense! However, that is a somewhat different issue.