The Cornfield and the Meeting Room

As a corporate trainer, in the 1980s, I delivered or “facilitated” (a word I found particularly irksome) seminars on participatory management, which is the organizational theory that holds, with touching optimism, that people do better work when they feel genuinely consulted.

This is true. It is also, as I discovered, a theory whose implementation creates such fertile ground for its own corruption that one almost wonders whether it was designed as a trap.

I used a story in those seminars that I called The Can of Paint:

The president of a company has attended a participatory management seminar — much like the one I was currently delivering (for which I had developed a particular quality of philosophical unease that I had learned to suppress) — and returns to the office keen to try it out. He needs to choose a paint colour for the meeting room.

He assigns the task to his staff: research the psychological and aesthetic implications of various colours, and come prepared to present your findings at the next meeting.

The staff take this seriously. Mary investigates red: dynamic, energizing, associated with action. Bob champions yellow: warm, optimistic, stimulating to creativity. Others do similar work, with similar care. They had been asked for their genuine opinion. They will give it.

In the interval between assignment and meeting, the president runs into a business associate who has a large quantity of leftover paint he wants to be rid of. It is green. It is free. The president takes it, stores it offsite, and says nothing.

The meeting begins.

Mary presents red. The president listens, nods, and says: “Thank you. Very interesting.” The words are warm. The temperature in the room is not.

Bob presents yellow. Same response. Same finality. The word “interesting” is doing considerable work it was never designed to do.

Then Sylvia presents green.

The president leans forward. His face does something it has not done for the previous twenty minutes. “Really?” he says. “Green? How interesting — tell us more.”

The staff are not stupid. No staff ever is, which is something management theory acknowledges abstractly, yet organizational practice routinely forgets.

They hear the lean. They see the face.

Rallying around green, they evince particular conviction of people who have correctly identified the answer and are now constructing the rationale to support it. The decision is made for green: The meeting room will be painted green. The president walks away satisfied that participatory management works exactly as advertised.

And for a long time afterwards, colleagues seek out Sylvia before important meetings, because Sylvia, they have learned, knows which way the wind blows.

I have been thinking about this story again lately — not because corporate culture has changed since the 1980s, but because it hasn't. If anything, the mechanisms are more refined. We have simply had four additional decades to practice.

Jerome Bixby published a short story in 1953 entitled It’s a Good Life. It appeared in an anthology entitled Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2, which is the kind of publication title that suggests someone was not overthinking the branding. The Twilight Zone adapted it in 1961, and a cigarette-smoking Rod Serling introduced it with the precise, measured gravity he brought to everything — including, one suspects, his dry-cleaning.

The story concerns Anthony Fremont (played by Billy Mumy), a six-year-old boy with omnipotent psychic powers who holds an entire community in a state of absolute subjugation. He can read minds. He can wish people — and things, and concepts — into the cornfield, from which nothing returns. The adults have learned, with the focused desperation of the genuinely terrified, to perform happiness at all times. They praise everything he does and suppress all negative thought. Repeatedly, and with apparent sincerity, they tell him that it’s a good life. That everything is fine. That they are glad he is here.

They do this because the alternative is the cornfield.

The horror of the story is not Anthony’s power. It is the quality of the compliance it produces. The adults in Bixby’s Peaksville are not broken people. They are intelligent, feeling human beings who have made a rational calculation: the performance of contentment is the price of survival, and survival is worth it. Having become expert readers of Anthony’s moods, his preferences, and his trigger points, they anticipate; they preempt. They offer the required response before it is demanded.

They have, in other words, mastered everything that Sylvia mastered in the meeting room.

Without the seminar.

What The Can of Paint and Bixby’s cornfield share — what makes them, I think, versions of the same story told with differing intensity — is not the obvious element of power. Power asymmetry is everywhere; it is the permanent condition of organizational life and a great deal of personal life besides. What they share is something more specific: the compulsory performance of agreement, and the system of incentives that makes that performance not just rational but, over time, instinctive.

In Peaksville, the performance is total, and the stakes are absolute. The cost of a genuine feeling, honestly expressed, is annihilation. Nobody in that town tells Anthony that his finger paintings are mediocre, or that the three-headed animals he has wished into existence are repellent. No one points out that it is, objectively, not a good life.

In the meeting room, the stakes are lower. Nobody is wished into the cornfield for presenting the case for red. Mary goes home. Bob goes home. The consequences are subtler — a cooling, a sense of having been gently noted as someone who doesn't read the room, a career that moves somewhat less smoothly than it might. The cornfield is metaphorical.

But the behaviour it produces is not, in any meaningful way, different.

The staff rally around green. The community rallies around Anthony. The mechanism is identical: identify what the powerful party wants, produce it, and frame the production as independent judgment. The sophistication of the framing varies. The underlying structure does not.

What I found, training in the 1980s, was that the people in the room always understood The Can of Paint immediately. There was no moment of puzzled re-calibration, no need to explain the organizational dynamics at work. The recognition was instant and, in some faces, quite rueful. They had been Sylvia. They had been Mary. Some of them, I suspected, had been the president — which is a more uncomfortable position to occupy than it first appears, and one they were perhaps not eager to examine at length.

We moved on.

What I did not anticipate then, and what strikes me now with some force, is that the story’s lesson did not change organizational behaviour. Not in any lasting way. Not collectively. The people in those seminars went back to their offices and their meeting rooms and their presidents with their surplus paint, and the dynamic reasserted itself with the comfortable ease of something returning to its natural state.

Four decades later, the vocabulary has been updated. We have psychological safety frameworks and 360-degree feedback tools and engagement surveys administered by third parties to ensure honest responses — the very existence of which tells you something about the credibility and safety of honest responses given directly. We have a great deal of language about bringing your whole authentic self to work, which is an invitation that employees quite sensibly and privately evaluate at three in the morning.

The available evidence, in most organizations, does not support full acceptance of this invitation.

What has changed since the 1980s is not the dynamic, but the infrastructure. The meeting room is more sophisticated. The seminar the president attends is probably more expensive. The theory of participatory management has been through several additional iterations, each with a new name and a new consultant. Sylvia now has a professional coach and possibly a podcast.

The paint is still green.

Bixby’s story ends without resolution. Anthony is not defeated. The community does not rebel. No one is saved. Rod Serling walks out to deliver his closing monologue in that careful, slightly funereal way of his, and what he says is essentially: this is happening, it will continue to happen, and the most honest thing I can offer you is the acknowledgement that it is happening.

There is something I find more useful in that ending than in the optimistic conclusions of most management literature. The participatory management seminar I was delivering/facilitating in the 1980s ended with action plans. “SMART” goals. Commitments to specific behavioural changes, written in binders that people took home. Very few of those binders changed anything, which I say not to disparage the people who wrote in them, but to note that individual intention is a modest force against structural incentive.

The president in The Can of Paint did not intend to undermine his staff’s autonomy. He intended to exercise his new management philosophy. He also wanted green paint, and the paint was free, and those two things turned out to be irreconcilable without his quite realizing it. He walked out of that meeting genuinely pleased. Genuinely believing. The binder notes of his self-improvement, metaphorically speaking, were fully enacted.

At six years old, Anthony wants what he wants. He has not attended a seminar. He has no language for what he is doing or why it produces the results it does. He simply knows that the world bends toward him, that people tell him it’s a good life, and that this is satisfying in ways he cannot examine because examination would require a kind of distance from himself that his power makes impossible.

Anthony is, in other words, structurally incapable of the self-awareness that might change anything.

As, it turns out, so is the president. The President of the company, and also the leaders of various political parties, and countries.

This is not a comfortable conclusion. I held it at arm’s length for a long time, in the years I was delivering those seminars, because the alternative — the position that organizational systems tend to reassert their hierarchical logic regardless of the good intentions of the individuals within them — does not sell well on a Tuesday afternoon in a hotel conference room in Toronto.

Though it has the advantage of being true. And of explaining, rather neatly, why the paint is still green.

Anthony Fremont is still out there. He is in every room where someone has the power to wish things into the cornfield and the inclination to call the resulting silence participation. He is not a monster, particularly. Just a child who was never taught — could not be taught, given the circumstances — that other people’s genuine responses are more valuable than performed ones.

He is also, when you look at him clearly, quite alone. Surrounded at all times by people who are telling him what he wants to hear. Cut off, permanently and completely, from anything real.

The community is alone too, in its way — performing contentment that forecloses the possibility of the genuine article.

Nobody in the meeting room went home and told their spouse that they’d had a fascinating discussion about colour theory. Nobody in Peaksville sits down to an evening that resembles anything a human being would freely choose.

The meeting room gets painted green. The community keeps smiling. The binders go in the drawer.

It’s a good life. It’s a very good life.

It’s a good job. It’s a very good job.