What is a sick system?

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 — the participants intentionally or inadvertently create a culture of mistrust, fear and extreme loyalty. This is created through a variety of tactics, such as moving goalposts, creating and enforcing unspoken expectations, making unreasonable demands and fostering psychological (or physical) danger. These are all ways to keep employees or partners close, without doing the hard work of giving them worthy reasons for your loyalty.

First introduced in 2010 by blogger issendai on LiveJournal, they defined four basic rules of a sick system:

1. Keep people too busy to think - Thinking is dangerous and you don't want people stopping to notice how bad it really is.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Reward intermittently - this fosters addiction and dependency, which is exactly what you need to keep the system going.

The following list are some ways to meet these four criteria; here is a more complete list

• 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.

• 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.

For more insight on this, see blog articles with the tag: Sick Systems