How Organizations Drift Into Politics – Daeus Jorento

How Organizations Drift Into Politics

Career

A zoomed-out follow-up to Game Theory Patterns at Work.

Introduction: Trending Towards Disorder

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature.<br>– Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

An organization is like a living, breathing board game. The game is a complex exercise in applied social logic and strategy. It needs clear structure and enough buy-in to navigate cross-functional dependencies, align departmental incentives, and build coalitions to get projects greenlit.

Without clear rules, like any board game, it devolves into chaotic bickering or just hanging out.

Now, I love a good hangout. What bothers me is the impact on real customers. When people are just hanging out, shit breaks. Feature improvements don’t ship. The vacuum gets filled with politics, favoritism, and performative busywork. If it goes on long enough, the game can even get taken over by another organization that actually solves customer problems. But in the short term, real people suffer.

For human organizations, disorder is always waiting. If a teacher stops showing up for class, what happens? Gossiping, goofing off, maybe eventually arguments or fights. The students start creating their own rules. Politics, in that sense, is the default state. Shared direction has to be intentionally cultivated.

If the game devolves, people who care about structure often leave to play somewhere else. Those who remain are often not paying attention to the overall drift; they are just doing their jobs. And those who benefit from the disorder start to rise.

Why Politics Exists

You do not follow me because I am the strongest. Pax is. You do not follow me because I am the brightest. Mustang is. You follow me because you do not know where you are going. I do.<br>– Pierce Brown (Red Rising)

Organizations are coordination machines. Coordination is expensive. When clarity is high, politics is low. When clarity drops, politics rises.

Ambiguity is gasoline for politics. Like many recurring game theory patterns, the problem is not that people are irrational. The problem is that they are adapting to the incentives and information available to them. Politics is often what rational actors do when clarity disappears.

As organizations grow, people naturally lose visibility into the whole system. Companies increasingly rely on trusted intermediaries to translate strategy and maintain alignment across teams. Without regular leadership rituals around strategic direction, communication, and feedback, people start to look around and realize they have no idea what is going on. A journey consists of many small corrections. If those corrections stop happening, we gradually deviate from the mission and eventually become profoundly lost.

When people lose shared context, they naturally optimize for local context. Teams develop their own priorities and narratives.

It’s not that anyone is evil, though some may be more politically inclined. It’s hard not to care and try to influence outcomes when your livelihood is on the line.

Ironically, temporary order in the absence of leadership is evidence of good leadership. Strong cultures can continue functioning well without constant guidance. But after a year or two without clear direction, people naturally start asking:

What are we doing?

Do the old rules still apply?

Am I growing anymore?

When formal structure fails, informal power takes over. That’s culture, largely driven by consequences.

At scale, this makes accountability crucial. People need to know what they own and who answers when something breaks. If everyone owns it, eventually no one owns the consequences. Someone has to decide, prioritize, and answer for the outcome.

Successful businesses are often especially vulnerable because the damage is easier to ignore while times are good. Standards slip, ownership gets fuzzier, and companies often only start asking what happened once they stop winning.

With true accountability, people sometimes lose status, influence, or even their jobs when things go wrong. Unsurprisingly, they fight to protect those things. Accountability requires consequences.

Political power is not just measured by accomplishment or claiming credit, but by the ability to avoid consequences or shift blame.

Politics is partly all the small meetings before the big meeting. Disagreement is expensive in large forums, so the real negotiation moves upstream. By the time everyone enters the room, the decision is often already made. Power belongs to the people with access to the rooms before the room.

Politics is also the maintenance of ownership boundaries. Every organization runs on a division of labor no one can verify end to end, so teams manage the seams through trust and relationships. Tended well, this is good citizenship: the heads-up before a surprising change, the quiet agreement about who owns...