# The Bullshit Game of Organizational Self-Critique By:: [[Brian Heath]] 2023-03-10 Self-awareness and understanding is a valuable behavior and skill. If you can identify your strengths, weaknesses, and natural tendencies, you know where to improve or what situations to avoid. It may be the most uniquely human thing we do. Being consciously aware of ourselves is something science has yet to come close to explaining and it forms the basis of all our philosophical and religious struggles. Perhaps to no one's surprise, modern organizations have found a way to turn this uniquely human ability of self-awareness into something to exploit. For example, during performance reviews, it is now commonly required for every employee to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses. So far, so good. It is valuable to do this as it's how we improve and progress. However, what the employee records on the form determine how much they will get paid. If they highlight how awesome they did but include no weaknesses, the organization has the opportunity to say that the employee lacks awareness of their weaknesses. No extra money for them, regardless of their actual performance and the validity of either party's argument. If the employee opines on all the things they could do better, the organization has the opportunity to strongly agree with them. Again, no extra money for them, regardless of actual performance. So, the table has been set for a game of half-truths, directionally correct statements, and bullshit self-critique. As an employee, your goal is to find just the right level of gloating combined with earnest self-loathing in hopes that this will minimize the chances that the organization and your manager will find a reason to not give you the baseline merit increase. Notice that this is not the same as trying to maximize your merit increase because when you try to maximize it, you risk being an outlier in your self-critique. Either you are too positive or negative. This is exactly what the organization wants and is incentivized to do. They want everyone to receive the baseline and no one to get extra. That's why we see endless surveys and studies that show the only way to make more money as an employee is to move organizations. Thus, improvement and progress are lost, which happens to be the entire point of self-critique and awareness. One of the things that make us human is substituted with an artificial sweetener that tastes the same but provides no real meaning or progress. To make matters worse, this game extends to teams and functions within the organization. All parties make their middling case with no intention of actually improving or even being aware of what to improve, other than how they play the game. Games will always exist in organizations, but why choose a game that pretends to be self-reflection and improvement but is just regression to the industrial mean? Can't we find better games to play and not hijack our baseline humanity for something trivial bullshit? The next time you fill out your performance review, reflect on how little you improved year to year. Be honest with yourself. You'll see you haven't improved other than how well you position the words on the paper. If you did happen to improve as an adult human, it wasn't because of your job and filling out the performance review template. It was because you decided improvement was something worth pursuing. #### Related Items [[Self-Improvement]] [[Performance]] [[Business]] [[Games]] [[Progress]]