When I hear the term ‘organization’, I see a picture of a large enterprise, controlled by leaders at different ranks based on a traditional hierarchical pyramid structure. The leaders are the board, the CEO, and the set of managers throughout the organization. These leaders serve the purpose of controlling the inferior through a variety of sectors and middlemen, and eventually, it is the personnel on the ground that are disciplined. However, this reflection intends to perceive a geographical region and define society, the national country of Sweden, as an organization. The analysis can be applied to virtually any western democracy and will be based on the ‘Organizational Metaphors’ by Gareth Morgan. The leaders of Sweden corresponding to the board and CEO are the ruling administration and the prime minister, where public departments, agencies, and municipalities represent different sectors of a company – and rather than the floor personnel of a business, it is ultimately the Swedish people that are the subjects for discipline and control. A classical saying is ‘the fish don’t see the pawn of water’, and one thing everybody seems to take for granted in the context of any organization is that there is supposed to be a group of people superior to the rest, expected to judge, rule, and control the majority. We may just live in the water of organizing people this way, but is it really the most efficient approach in generating societies prepared to manage crises, prosper learning, and encourage human progression? 

To manage societal crises, there are two completely diverging points of view and approaches. Either you make sure the hierarchically superior section of the organization, like the governing administration in power, plans ahead of the crisis by preparing infrastructure, producing a stock of relevant goods, and allocating roles to people in the society with a top-down approach. The alternative approach is to distribute the responsibilities of the crises throughout society to achieve a more dynamic and adaptive organization, driven by local leaders acting according to their detailed knowledge of their own respective businesses in society. This organization is perhaps not as predictable and controllable as the former, but it would be more flexible and take advantage of all the information within all the people of the society. What also speaks for the decentralized approach is that crises tend to hit us by surprise, meaning we rarely have time to prepare pre-planned structures to address the crises, and it is better to have an adaptive organization going into the crises. The first crisis may be forest fires, the second a military conflict, and the third a pandemic. Due to the unpredictability of crises, the focus should be on creating a national organization that rather than planning and control is driven by flexibility and adaptivity. 

The history of Mike, the headless chicken that kept many of the functions of his body and managed to survive despite the absence of his head, illustrates the many advantages of a decentralized framework for decision-making. When all power is concentrated among a small group of politicians, the risks in situations of crises are greater compared to a decentralized system. If a single authority is responsible for controlling a function of society and makes a mistake, the entire nation would suffer the consequences. Had the chicken Mike’s body worked like that, he would have died when he lost his head. However, in a decentralized system, a mistake from one local leader of a function in society will only affect a part of the nation and may be compensated by other leaders pursuing other methods. It is like owning funds or a portfolio of stocks rather than just a single company, when one fails, the others may compensate. The same happened to Mike, when his remaining body was able to adapt and compensate for the missing work previously performed by the brain, meaning that his life could continue pretty much like normal. 

When local initiatives and strategies are allowed to be tested in a decentralized organization, the entire nation can learn from the successes and mistakes of everybody. If a nation is free from concentrated power above and a whole range of ideas are allowed, many alternatives will likely be tested before reaching a conclusion of what ideas are good and bad. Just like in the development of Artificial Intelligence robots, organizations can be self-learning and progress through the diversification of ideas, methods, and empirical data through experiments. The organization of Sweden, where people automatically follow homogenizing orders from the government in a straight top-down dynamic, can hardly be perceived as a self-learning organization. 

The system of representative democracy like that of Sweden is an intrinsic hindrance to sustainability and long-term development. Every politician has remarkable incentives to sacrifice sustainability to gain in the short term, since all of their work relies on winning the election every other year. A political party or president cannot win an election by saying that he/she is going to sacrifice solving current problems in order to focus on problems far into the future. I am not saying that politicians do not care about the future at all, but they clearly have greater incentives to perform results ahead of the elections than results decades later when they are well into retirement. The metaphor of a psychological prison, emphasizing the problems with the human tendency to get stuck in the status quo, is applicable here. It is an enormous political challenge to bring along all people, stuck in their respective routines and lifestyles, to not only change their behavior but voluntarily vote for a candidating to enforce it. It is not even sure the few leaders of the nation are capable of coming up with the unconventional ideas sometimes needed to solve crises in the first place – especially not in the power organ of the national government, where one could only imagine the degree of beauracracy and traditional obsolete ideas, methods, and solutions. 

If it truly would be the case that nations free of concentrated power to a few in the capital are able to more efficiently deal with societal issues, why does the world not work like that? The explanation may be found by perceiving nations as psychological prisons. Although the governments of the world have more efficient digital tools to rule the people with nowadays, central planning is not a new concept from the 21st century. For almost as long as we can imagine, stretching thousands of years back in history, humans have been the subject to concentrated power. The methods for a leader to achieve and maintain that concentrated power has varied throughout history from bloody violence to civilized democracy, but what has been constant is the presence of a leader with concentrated power. Napoleon ruled France in such a way, the Roman empire was ruled by kings and emperors, and who knows how many generations we have relied on the ruling authorities’ judgments. We are so indoctrinated with the concept of concentrated power among the superior authorities that it is hard to even imagine a world in which the common man is allowed to be free. It is as if we have been stuck within Plato’s cave and only watched one single movie about the delicate inferior majority dependent on the superior powerful leader.