Power and organisation
Albert O. Hirschman
Voice
Albert O. Hirschman (United States · 1915-2012) — Voice.
What actually happened?
Marseille, summer 1940. Hirschman is twenty-five, working out of hotel rooms on forged papers, mountain routes and black-market francs. Varian Fry, an American, has arrived in France with a rescue list; Hirschman is the one who runs the errands, scouts the passes and changes the money, and Fry gives him the code name Beamish. Hannah Arendt and Marc Chagall got out along that line. By the end of the year he crossed the Pyrenees himself and reached the United States by way of Spain and Portugal. Thirty years later, when he wrote down the word exit, he knew what it weighed.
Dissatisfaction has two ways out
Something is getting worse and you can do one of two things. Exit: switch, resign, stop buying. Voice: stay and say what is wrong. Economics studies the first, politics the second, and you meet both in one week.
The food got worse. You can find another place, or call the owner over. Most people quietly find another place.
The easier the exit, the fewer the complaints
The two doors compete for the same people, and the first to leave are the fussiest. Once they are gone nobody left behind complains, and the thing declining has lost its one signal that it is declining.
Your most demanding customers stop renewing and stop complaining. On the report it is a few missing names.
Loyalty buys the time voice needs
Loyalty is not obedience. It raises the cost of leaving so you stay while there is still time to change something. Where you cannot leave and nobody listens, what is left is not loyalty but capture.
Whoever has been there eight years is least willing to go and most likely to speak, if speaking is taken seriously.
A no comes in three shapes
The Rhetoric of Reaction counts them: perversity, your remedy will worsen the very thing; futility, nothing will shift either way; jeopardy, the cost is something we already hold. The first two contradict each other and one mouth says both.
When a plan is refused, name the shape first, then ask how much. Two of the three stop there.
The hiding hand
Watching development projects in 1967 he saw two errors cancelling: people underrate the difficulties and equally underrate the solutions they will later invent. Not seeing how hard it was is what let the thing get started at all.
The job you had no idea would be that hard is the one you finished. The one whose costs you knew fully has not begun.
How do I use it today?
Take something you are weighing up as stay or go and put the leaving sum aside. Write three lines: the one time you genuinely raised it, who you raised it with, and what came back. If any line is blank, the choice in front of you is not exit against voice, it is exit against putting up with it. Then add a fourth line — if I said it tomorrow, what is the worst that happens — and make it concrete. Written out, it is usually smaller than it was in your head.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
Creativity always comes as a surprise to us.