🔎 How I Discovered My Inner Dictator 🗣️. What About Yours…?

How our blind spots & desire for control limit the value we can create together & what to do about it.

In this article, I describe a journey of self-discovery to meet my own “Inner Dictator”—the part of myself that craves control and believes I know best. By shining a light on this shadow aspect, I reveal how our internalisation of hierarchies and desire for control can limit the value we create, both individually and as teams. The article explores the concept of a team’s “Control System” as an expression of these inner dynamics. It offers the first of our Experiments Beyond Hierarchy, to assess whether your team’s control mechanisms are fit for purpose in our complex, fast-changing world. Ultimately, the goal is to transform our relationship with control, moving from attempts to dominate to approaches that enable us to thrive in our increasingly complex, fast-changing, unstable world.

Make Your Mess Your Mission

One of my friends once said to me, “Make your mess your mission,” and I think it captures part of the essence of being human. Somehow, we are drawn to the things that we most need to learn. I think we have Carl Jung to thank for the insight that there’s something about those entities which lurk in our psychological shadows that we are attracted to, in an attempt to become more whole.

I once worked with a group of conflict resolution professionals, and one of them said to me, “You’ll never find a group of more angry people than conflict resolution professionals.”. Likewise, I always had a fantasy that psychotherapists must be really ‘sorted’, because of all their training. But I know several psychotherapists who, although they present very well on the front-end, are far from being ‘sorted’ and who are very much ‘making their mess their mission’! Likewise with Couples Therapists—they may be great at helping other people with their relationships, but … I could go on…

So I’ve been going about my business quite happily, rather smugly making judgments about the messes that must be in other people’s shadows, depending on how they present their mission and work in the world. Until the uncomfortable realisation gradually dawned on me that it would be surprising and exceptional if that principle didn’t also apply to me. I then went through a process, guided by the inevitability of clear logic, that led me to discover a character who has been lurking in my shadows —whom I call my Inner Dictator.

My work in the world is about helping people work better together. I have expertise in new ways of working beyond traditional hierarchies; developing self-managing teams; various methods of collaboration; building psychological safety; giving and receiving feedback; conflict resolution; creating working agreements among team members; and building resilience and adaptability in groups. As far as I have a personal ‘Mission’, I think it is about how all this stuff can improve our collective responses to the meta/polycrisis.

My Excruciating Conclusion

So, applying “make your mess your mission” to myself, I am forced to the excruciating conclusion that I am attracted to that work because there are things I need to learn about it myself. So I must have stuff in my shadows regarding ‘working well with people’. Ouch. That’s not a comfortable realisation, but it does align with some feedback I have had from some people—not everybody, I hasten to add! By far the majority of people I have good working relationships with, and… okay, okay… stop with the justification.

This conclusion led me to undertake some serious internal investigation. Shining the light of awareness on the shadowy edges of my consciousness and admitting some brutal, uncomfortable truths about myself put me in contact with a part of myself that I mostly keep hidden. I mostly don’t even admit those thoughts, feelings, impulses, and reactions to myself, let alone to anybody else, but I have to admit that sometimes they come out in my less guarded moments.

Welcome to my Inner Dictator.

Gulp. It doesn’t feel very cool to admit it, but okay, so here we go. There’s a part of me that thinks, feels, and believes like a dictator. I often find myself thinking/feeling some version of:

For God’s sake, if everyone in the world would just listen to me and do what I said, then the world would be a much better place. Why don’t people get it? Obviously, the way I see the world is the right way to see the world, andthose people who don’t see the world in that way just don’t get it. They see it wrong, and they’re all making a mistake by not seeing it as I do, by not listening to me, and by not doing what I say should be done. So I think I’m right, they’re wrong, and everyone should listen to me and do what I say.

This ‘coming out’ of my internal dictator brought another surprising revelation about my inner world, one I could no longer hide from myself. A good amount of my conscious effort, energy, and attention is spent tempering my inner dictatort o prevent him from taking over me, and attempting to take over my marriage, my family, my friends... and the rest of the world.

My Public Apology

So, with this coming out, I need to apologise to all the people I have/do work with and in my life who have been/are still impacted by this part of myself. I’m sorry, I will try to do less of it. Promise.

I want to say in my defence, ‘It wasn’t my fault, I was hijacked,’ which, in a sense, is true. But because I was being hijacked by a part of myself, it’s something I need to take responsibility for. This awareness is now enabling me to form a relationship with and make friends with that part of myself, find out what needs it is trying to meet, or how it is serving me, and hopefully become a little bit more whole and less likely to be hijacked by it in the future. As in the meeting yesterday, which I describe below. Also, when combined with my inner ‘Justice Warrior’, the part of me that gets outraged when things don’t feel fair, this becomes a formidable combination- but that’s another article!

Our Internalisation of Hierarchy & the Desire for Control

As Charles Eisenstein wrote much more eloquently than I could: given that most of us grow up surrounded by power-over relationships of dominator hierarchies in various forms (parents, education, government, workplace), there’s some way in which we somehow ‘internalise’ them, and many of us have some version of replicating such structures inside of us. So maybe my Inner Dictator is an expression of this. And I’m not the only one, too.

Also, of course, there are many other influences, such as growing up in a culture that’s all about control. I did an MSc in Management Development and learnt that conventional management and leadership theory promise many ways to try to achieve control. Spiritual teachers tell us that our egos crave control. Plant medicine guides promise they can help us let go (of control)…

The desire for control is one theme we’ll return to again and again in this project of shifting beyond hierarchy, as it is central to the concept of hierarchy and to humans developing a different relationship with that desire. Because many people are realising that in such a complex and interconnected world, control is not possible, and other approaches are needed.

I was telling a friend about my attempts to ‘temper my Inner Dictator,’ and he reminded me that, in the alchemical traditions, ‘tempering’ has a transformative quality of refinement and purification. I hope that my tempering may sometimes transform my ‘attempts to control’ into something more appropriate for our VUCA world. And that’s also one of my broader hopes for The Beyond Hierarchy Project- that we learn together how to transform our desire for control into something that is a better fit for our changing world and uncertain future.

So What?

With that insight, what difference does it actually make to me and how I show up in my work, my interactions, collaboration, leadership, and life? Since becoming aware of it, it’s as if I can now see/hear/feel that part of myself and its desire for control in a way that I couldn’t before. Whereas before it was lurking around the edges of my awareness in the shadows, controlling me to try to control others and what happens in the world. It means that I have more choice about the influence that part has over me.

This insight alone hasn’t led to this increased capacity for choice. I also have a daily (insight) meditation practice and go once a year for 10-day silent meditation retreats; and this practice creates more inner space between my impulses and actions. I can feel the impulse to say/do something before I actually do it, catch myself, and then make a choice before I act. So, it’s the combination of this internal space and the increased awareness of my Inner Dictator that gives me this capacity.

Insight from a Meeting Yesterday- Oops, How We So Easily Miss Potential Value!

There was a conversation about a detail that I thought was neither interesting nor important. I didn’t feel that it was adding value to the agenda item that we were on. I felt the impulse to say it and to suggest moving on. Previously, I may have jumped in to do that, being pushed by my unknown friend from the shadows. But this time I sensed the impulse, and caught it, and managed a moment of internal reflection. If I were to put words to that internal process, it would go something like:

Ah, there’s my Inner Dictator again trying to control things! Do I really need to try to exert this control/influence in this situation? Is it in service of the group in this moment to say this? Well, if I were in the Facilitator role here, I would ask the agenda item owner if this conversation is helping them get what they need, since that would be in my role to do that. But I’m not in the Facilitator role, and someone else is, whose facilitation skills I trust. However, the fact that others are investing energy in discussing it must mean that it’s important to them. I’ll give it a few more minutes, and if it still doesn’t seem like it is being useful, then I may consider suggesting to the Facilitator to check if this is still helping the owner of the agenda item.

As it turned out, the conversation ended with a useful outcome that I hadn’t foreseen, because I wasn’t in contact with the tensions that the people having the conversation were sensing. If I had closed down the conversation earlier, this useful output would probably not have been achieved, and we would have lost an opportunity together. This is a good illustration to me of how my blind spots can limit the potential value that can be created by the groups I am part of. And how these limitations are amplified when I am in positions of leadership, since my influence and ability to control (and close such things down) is that much stronger.

The Control Systems in Our Teams & Their Relationship With Our Inner Worlds

Each group/team/organisation could be said to have a ‘Control System‘. This is a collection of components/features related to attempts to exert internal control within a team and external control over its environment. It includes topics such as how things work around formal authority and informal power, decision-making, unspoken rules, how to keep things from going wrong, who needs to be checked with, and so on. It may be ambiguous, implicit, assumed, even unconscious, and become cultural norms that mostly remain unspoken, but everyone kind of knows what it is. However, each person may have their own version/interpretation. Or it may be clear, explicit, documented, with transparent processes and protocols for inclusion, and for how it gets updated to adapt to our changing world.

Using the psychological lens I am trying on in this article, a team’s Control System could be said to be an expression of the characters in our inner worlds related to the issue of control. These inner characters of the leaders have the most influence. Still, team members’ characters are important, and the interactions between them are a factor—for example, whether two people have Inner Dictators who align into a powerful coalition. Or whether someone’s Inner Dictator is in a power struggle with another person’s Freedom Fighter, and a third person’s Peacemaker gets stuck in the middle.

A team’s Control System consists of several components. These components include team clarity, ownership and initiative, decision-making, clearing roadblocks/bottlenecks, leadership patterns, operational safety, and psychological safety. They are described in more detail and can be tested by your team in this week’s experiment to assess the extent to which the control system in your team is fit for purpose —or not —in our complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable world.

The science of complex adaptive systems tells us that in such a complex, fast-changing and unpredictable world composed of multiple intersecting complex adaptive systems, the attempt to exert control is itself a mistake (as in the book ‘The Paradox of Control in Organizations by Philip Streatfield, one of the 5-part Complexity & Emergence in Organizations series). And that alternative approaches of decentralised influence and systemic leverage are needed. Part of the problem with hierarchies is that the nature of the top-down hierarchical power-over structure is founded on outdated assumptions about a stable and predictable environment that teams and organisations can navigate with a ‘predict and control’ approach. The centralisation of authority in a hierarchical structure makes it very difficult for that structure to sense, respond and adapt to a complex, fast-changing and unpredictable environment.

Run this Week’s Experiment: Discover Whether Your Teams’ Control System is Fit for Purpose.

So, now I’ve done that piece of work, and put the effort into sharing it with you, my attention then goes to: how about you? I imagine I’m not the only person with stuff like this. Do you recognise any of this in yourself, your team leader, or other team members? Something different? What role does it play in your life and work? In The Beyond Hierarchy Project, we are looking for patterns in such things and the best ways to work with them, to include in our crowd-sourced book.

This week is the first of our experiments that we invite you to do in these articles. This one is to investigate the various components of your team’s Control System and assess whether it is fit for purpose or needs to be upgraded.

So you can discover whether you need to optimise your team’s ability to sense, respond, and adapt to our fast-changing world.

It involves filling out a 5-10-minute survey, reviewing the results, then maybe inviting your team to take the survey too, and maybe holding a team session to discuss and assess your team’s Control System.

After the experiment, you’ll know whether your team’s Control System is fit for purpose or needs upgrading, and you’ll have the option to get a roadmap for the upgrade.

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