How to spot a sick system
If you're feeling stressed, confused, burned out or worse with a employer or partner, it's possible you're in a sick system.
What is a sick system?
First introduced in 2010 by blogger issendai on LiveJournal, a sick system is any relationship between two or more people where instead of promoting values of competence, kindness, growth and balance — all of which demand empathy and effort — those who wield power may choose an easier path, resulting in a mistrustful, confining hellscape of moving goalposts, unspoken expectations, unreasonable demands and psychological (or physical) danger. This is a shortcut for keeping employees or partners close, without doing the hard work of giving them worthy reasons for your loyalty.
Creating a sick system
The four basic rules of creating a sick system are summarised here:
Keep people too busy to think - Thinking is dangerous and you don't want people stopping to notice how bad it really is.
Keep people tired - Tired people don't think clearly. Everything gets to stay the same if nobody has the energy or effort to fix the system, much less see what's really going on.
Keep people emotionally involved - Create an extreme loyalty culture — make sure loyalty is tied to personal worthiness, create dependencies between participants around successes and failures, and create seniority hierarchies.
Reward intermittently - this fosters addiction and dependency, which is exactly what you need to keep the system going.
There are numerous ways to meet these four criteria. I've expanded on issendai’s original list:
Keep the crises coming!
Always dismiss the present, paint the rosy future. "Things will be better when…"
Keep real rewards distant. “We'll review your pay after we [launch the project | do the reorganisation | get through the pandemic]”
Chop up people's time. Non-stop meetings and last-minute requests are a fantastic way to do this.
Establish a small, semi-occasional success, to keep dopamine flowing.
Interrupt routines, move goalposts, redefine tasks, keep things vague.
Make everything scarce. If there's never enough time, money or resource, people will constantly scramble and compete to claim what they need.
Enmesh success. If my win is tied to your win, and my loss to your loss, then I can't do it without you and leaving is letting people down.
Sow chaos, confusion and uncertainty.
Is my workplace a sick system?
In her book Daring Greatly, Brené Brown highlights 10 questions to understand if you are part of a wholehearted culture (in your workplace, family, etc.) or a sick system:
What behaviours are rewarded or punished?
Where and how are people actually spending their resources: their time, money and attention?
What rules and expectations are followed, enforced and ignored?
Do people feel safe and supported talking about how they feel and asking for what they need?
What are the sacred cows? Who's most likely to tip them, and who stands the cows back up?
What stories are legend, and what values do they convey?
What happens when someone fails, disappoints, or makes a mistake?
How is vulnerability, uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure perceived?
How prevalent are shame and blame, and how are they showing up?
What's the collective tolerance for discomfort? Is the discomfort of learning, trying new things, giving and receiving feedback - is it normalised, or is there a high premium put on comfort, and how does that look?
The answers to these should give you a clearer picture of what kind of environment you’re in.
If you feel you’re suffering in a sick system, there are several coping strategies you can try and other things you can do to build your resilience and plan for your future. Get in touch with me to see how we might start working on this together.
