Structural Cynicism

Earlier this fall, I read a dissertation by Matthias Hjelm at the Stockholm School of Economics. With a title borrowed from a Leonard Cohen song: "That's how it goes, everybody knows."

Matthias' research is a bit different to what most people would assume is done at a business school. But he has been studying something that might explain a lot about the moment we are in: cynicism.

Not the kind of cynicism that belongs to any one person, but to systems.

Reading his work and thinking about the findings, I'm starting to think this is more challenging to many organisations and society at large than the usual suspects of toxic leadership or narcissistic executives we tend to blame when things go wrong.

His core argument is simple: cynicism is not an individual trait. It is a structural one, baked into the systems we operate in. And we all participate in it — often while knowing better.

The classic definition of cynicism is acting in your own self-interest even when you know it conflicts with something more important: Buying fast fashion in the middle of a climate crisis or nodding along to a strategy presentation you've already decided not to act on. Celebrating innovation while quietly defunding the teams that make it possible.

And most of us think of cynicism as something other people have. The executive who says, "People are our greatest asset," while approving the layoffs. But Hjelm's point is more uncomfortable than that: cynicism is not an attitude. It is a condition — one that the system produces and that all of us, to varying degrees, reproduce.

I think about this a lot. Earlier this week, Stockholm’s flagship tech conference released its programme. Not a single session addressed the climate emergency. Not one of the big speakers was a woman. Thank you, Frida Berry Eklund and Camilla Bergman, for pointing it out.)

Now, I don't think the organisers sat in a room and decided to exclude women or ignore the planet. That would be individual cynicism, and that explanation is quite unlikely. The more interesting - and more troubling - explanation is that no one had enough reason to change it. We follow the path of least resistance. Stay in default mode. And the default, as always, tells us exactly what the system actually values, regardless of what it says it values.

That is structural cynicism. That's how it goes, everybody knows.

What makes this more challenging than toxicity or narcissism is that those pathologies are, in a sense, easy to identify and change. You can fire the toxic leader. You can coach the narcissist out or around. Individual dysfunction has individual solutions.

Structural cynicism doesn't work that way. There is no single person to blame, so no single individual feels responsible. Everyone is just doing their job. Everyone is just following the incentives. Systems don’t need villains to produce bad outcomes. Everyone knows something is off, and everyone has quietly decided that the cost of saying so is higher than the cost of going along.

Cynicism may be harder to address than many other leadership failures we spend so much time diagnosing. You cannot fix a culture of knowing-and-not-acting with a workshop or a values refresh. It requires something much more uncomfortable: the willingness to name the elephant in the room, even when naming it has a cost.

Most organisations are extraordinarily good at producing elegant reasons for why now is not the right moment, why this hill is not the right hill, and why the system is too complex to change from the inside.

But organisations can also say, "we know this is right, and we're doing it even if it has a cost" — and they have a lot to gain in terms of respect by doing so.

So, what do you already know that you're not acting on?

Not because you don't care. But because the system has made it easier not to.

That gap between what we know and what we do is where structural cynicism lives. Closing it may be the most important - and most ignored - leadership challenge of our time.

Look up.

Anna

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