I.

Robert Jackall characterizes the world of corporate management as mazes. He gives a visceral account and analysis of how bureaucracy and the socially constructed reality within large organizations shape our moral consciousness in his 1988 book Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers. As organizations, or groups in general, grow larger, more and more layers of management emerge naturally, seemingly out of necessity. Once this very complex structure takes shape and solidifies, the various incentives and mechanisms that come with it begin to steer the thinking and behavior of the people inside it. It transforms the organization into an alternative-reality like micro-universe, like a maze, where people’s actions and moral frameworks change to navigate it, in ways that often wildly differ from the norms of everyday life. Because the incentives can become quite distorted, group level decisions for organizations that have become mazes can often seem indifferent to the general moral principles of the broader world (e.g. the controversial Pharma Bro), creating “immoral mazes”.

Organizations, depending on their scale and structure, exhibit different amounts of “maze-ness”, but the general characteristics of the “mazes” share a lot of commonalities. Many people in addition to Robert Jackall have tried to analyze them, such as John Gall in his famous The Systems Bible from 1975. One of the most well known properties of mazes is perhaps identified by Jerry Pournelle, named the Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself. The Iron law states that in all cases, the second type of person will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions.

Many other characteristics of mazes could potentially stem from this more fundamental property. The law offers a very clear narrative on how organization distorts incentives and turn into the stereotypical corporate management nightmares that we see in Office Space. Why has the higher education system become so terrible in recent decades? Of course it’s because the administrators have taken over, who are no longer concerned about the goal of education. Why is dealing with the government so ridiculously frustrating? It’s the bureaucrats inside, who don’t care about the efficiency of the system at all, and only want to climb the ranked hierarchy of the system.

We’ll come back to this point in a bit. But now let’s talk about games.

II.

The concepts of the finite vs. infinite game have become quite popular these days, in part due to the recent book by the popular self-help guru Simon Sinek. The original framing of the idea is from the decades-old Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. Originally published in 1986 (what’s up with all these systematic thinking in the ’70s and ’80s, by the way?), Carse describes two types of conceptual “games” that people engage in.

Finite games are rivalrous in nature, and are mostly zero-sum, or at least are perceived to be by the participants. The games have a finite duration, after which they end, and so the goal in these games is to win. One side winning consequently means the other side losing, hence the rivalrous nature of finite games.

Infinite games on the other hand, are cooperative in nature, and generally positive-sum. There is no definitive end to these games, and so the goal here is to keep the game going for as long as possible, with as many people as possible. There are no sides or factions in infinite games, as everyone can win by working to sustain the game itself.

The general idea about these types of games is that, broadly speaking, we should steer ourselves towards playing infinite games. Finite games, in the words of Vision the Avenger, “incite challenge, challenge incites conflict, and conflict breeds catastrophe.” Many of the biggest problems we have struggled with in society, the theory goes, is caused by people playing finite games. Racism, sexism, nationalism, or any tribalism in general, are finite games. If only we could all recognize that we all belong in a global, connected world on the same planet, the infinite game will become apparent, and we can all live more harmoniously.

III.

In some sense, Pournelle’s Iron Law sounds very much like it’s saying that organizations inevitably turn into the playgrounds of infinite games. Just as we aim (or at least want to aim) to play infinite games in the broader world, if we thought of organizations as mini-worlds of their own, then mazes are merely the results of people’s desires to create and sustain infinite games. These games may seem twisted, deformed, and undesirable from the outside, but they aspire to be infinite nonetheless. The goal of these games is not to win or lose (i.e. the goals of the organization), but rather to keep the game going (i.e. the organization itself). The corporate bureaucrats are simply doing what we want to do in the wider society.

However, none of this changes the fact that mazes are bad. So why does this type of pursuit of infinite games cause problems for organizations? One realization is that the micro-worlds of mazes are embedded in the larger universe of the real world, where higher levels of games are played (both finite and infinite). The infinite game of bureaucracy in an organization is just a small part of a greater game within a certain market segment, which is itself in turn part of an industry, nested ultimately as part of society overall. The disconnect between the objectives and rules of the inner, organizational infinite game and the outer, larger games is where the problems of mazes come from. In a world where many games are layered on top of and embedded within one another, this dissonance can happen anywhere. It is how mazes can become immoral: the inner game is moral when viewed from within, but immoral from the perspectives of bigger games.

Perhaps then, infinite games are not the end all be all of what we should aim for. Depending on the context and scope, some games should be finite and end. That is, some organizations should simply cease to exist when they have served their productive purposes. Immoral mazes should not be allowed to turn into truly infinite games. The free market is supposed to do this for commercial organizations, but for many reasons, it is not perfect at pruning pointless mazes. It is harder to do this for government organizations. There have been proposals to make all government departments have an expiration date (essentially forcing them to be finite games by design), at which point they must justify their value for their continued existence, or be disbanded. It’s a ridiculous idea, with no guarantee that it will even work, but it’s certainly one way to deal with the problem.

Zvi has written a long, multi-part series on immoral mazes; it is what got me to think more about this subject recently. In his analysis, he proposes several ways to deal with bad mazes (including not participating in them), which eventually culminates in the last, most drastic, most difficult, but also most effective solution: creating a Full Alternative Stack. He described it as a solution that in the ideal and ultimate case, simply “recreates civilization”, a civilization where immoral mazes cannot exist. Now with the concept of games in the picture, I think in a way, Zvi’s Full Alternative Stack is a world structured such that all games must be finite (with the exception of the top-most level game of society at large), and the dissonance between the different layers of games are minimized. A world like this is neigh impossible to sustain, because we must constantly fight our urge to transform finite games into infinite ones, and in the long term, I’m afraid it’ll always be a losing battle.

IV.

What about our biggest, outermost game, the game of the global society that we are trying so desperately to turn infinite? Is it a terrible maze from some external, larger game’s point of view? Some radical environmentalists certainly think so: for the infinite game of the natural ecology of Mother Earth to continue, we must turn the inner game of human industrial civilization into a finite one by putting an end to it. But these kinds of views are misguided, as we do not really possess a perspective that is external to our biggest game. Maybe when we gain a true, broader perspective (e.g. cosmic multi-civilization level view), we will realize that our society as an infinite game has turned into an “immoral maze” and must be changed. But until then, we should try to play the most meta-level game, the one that contains all the other games and mazes, as an infinite one.