Cancer and Institutional Immune Systems
The larger and older an animal is, the more susceptible it is to cancer. Only one cell need become “selfish,” replicating in a way that benefits only itself and not the wider organism, in order for cancer to take hold. The more cells there are in an organism and the longer they stick around, the higher the probability that any one of them “turns selfish.” Governances function in a similar fashion: The larger and older a governance structure becomes, the more likely it becomes to develop cancerous departments and functions that exist more to justify their continuation than to benefit the organization as a whole.
Think of a governance structure as a substrate on and within which parasites can evolve. Parasites that are better at staying alive are more likely to continue to exist and those which are better at redirecting resources to themselves are more likely to grow.
I write this sitting in New York—I would not be surprised if the city created at least ten temporary projects dedicated to road maintenance a year. Likely the vast majority of those projects function as intended, self-destructing after a few years, but every now and then one is structured in just such a way that it does not self-destruct. The city governance has something of an immune system that hunts for these inefficiencies and shuts them down, but given the size and age of the city, some persist beyond their utility, undetected. Worse, some projects come to amass power by redirecting resources to themselves in the same way a cancer can hijack the blood vessels around it to get a disproportionate amount of resources while others regularly fracture and spread throughout the wider organization, taking root in new departments in the same way a cancer metastasizes.
If you have two governance structures designed to fulfill the same task, but one contains some additional “code” that redirects resources to promote its continued existence while the other does not, the governance structure with the “selfish code” will intrinsically have a higher probability of existing in the future (outside of institutional immune systems designed to target and kill branches with this type of code). Governance structures that have it in their “code” to self-replicate also have a higher probability of persisting—in some format or another.
What makes these cancerous polyps particularly dangerous is that they often still serve something of a purpose. The best way for them to counteract an organizational immune system is to appear useful or critical to an organization’s function—siphoning organizational resources to more loudly promote the anemic value they do provide.
In animals, cancer can sometimes evolve to become contagious. A famous example comes in the form of Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor (CTVT) which is a transmissible dog cancer.
Cool side note: The cancer originally developed in a native American dog. Almost all Native American dog breeds are now extinct (the few that claim to be are not, for example, the Chihuahua and Xoloitzcuintli (Peruvian hairless) retain 4% and 3% of their pre-colonial ancestry respectively). This means that while native American dogs are now functionally extinct, they live inside many other dogs.
Cancerous governing dynamics can spread between organizations just like CTVT if they are effective enough at self-replication and self-preservation, often using organizational resources to exaggerate a problem they claim to be solving. In worst-case scenarios, entire industries can spring up promoting these diseases. Just like real diseases, they can compete with each other for resources, with one more effective disease sometimes driving another to near extinction—consider the effect the anti-racism training industry has had on the workplace sexual harassment training industry.
This is not to say that racism and sexual harassment are not problems worthy of attention but rather that the [insert-bad-behavior-here] training industries hide from organizational immune systems so effectively because the problems they claim to address are real. If the problems were not real, it would be much easier to identify and expel the disease. It is the acute nature of problems like racism and sexual harassment that makes them such effective forms of camouflage for cancerous entities.
It is the fact that those perpetuating the cancer can justifiably exclaim: “How dare you question spending on X issue?” that makes it so easy for self-perpetuating inefficiencies that hide from organizational immune systems to exist in these industries. Anyone who cares about the issues more than the industry will be interested in pointing out their susceptibility to inefficiency. (We say this as things like diversity training exercises have shown to only be remembered for a day or two.)[[65]](#_ftn65)
As with real cancer, these cancerous governing bodies cannot be entirely evaded. With enough time and institutional size, toxic governing bodies will always appear and after enough iterations will always overpower an organization’s immune system, slowly weighing down the governance structure like a hulking behemoth struggling to lumber—struggling even to breathe—under a mass of cancerous polyps. In nature, cancer is overcome when species regularly wipe the slate clean through reproduction. We see something similar happen as governances with empires that seem to have every advantage in the world over barbarian invaders collapse under their own weight and large companies with trillions of dollars in assets find themselves outcompeted by small startups. Fortunately, the reproductive cycle that addresses cancerous growths in nature can be simulated within human governance systems (more on that later).
One could also strengthen an organization’s immune system. Animals like elephants have some of the best anti-cancer systems of all species to handle being so large and long-lived (humans have one copy of P53—a tumor suppressor—while elephants have as many as 20), but such systems are not without cost. While allergies represent a fairly manageable cost of overzealous immune systems, autoimmune disease—in which immune systems rip out important functions in the search for threats—can render people barely functional. We will discuss tactics for managing this delicate balance later in the book; however, we view organizational cancer as such a critically intractable problem in governance that it must be laid out up front.