Seeing the World Through Structuralism: Before Judging People, Look at the Structure
Recently, I was talking with some classmates about today’s job market: salaries are not especially high, yet workloads keep increasing. Many companies look substantial from the outside, but once you join them, you discover chaotic management and teams held together by improvisation.
One classmate suddenly joked:
What if the truly exceptional people no longer count as “Earthlings”?
It was only a joke.
But it made me wonder:
Are the “best people” we see in a particular environment really the best people in the world?
Or are they simply:
the people that this environment can retain—and is willing to show us?
That question brought me back to a way of observing the world that I increasingly rely on:
structuralism.
I do not mean structuralism in the strict textbook sense. I mean a practical way of looking at the world that borrows from it.
The idea is simple:
Do not look only at people and events. Look for the structures that produce them.
We Naturally Reduce Problems to People
The human mind loves stories, and stories naturally need characters.
So when a company has problems, we quickly say:
The boss is incompetent.
Management is foolish.
Employees lack responsibility.
The product manager is not capable enough.
The programmers are not skilled enough.
Likewise, when someone succeeds, we tend to say:
He is intelligent.
He works hard.
He is capable.
He has high emotional intelligence.
These judgments are not necessarily wrong.
But they often explain only the surface phenomenon.
A more important question remains unanswered:
Why is this particular kind of person in this particular position?
Why does a company repeatedly fail to retain capable people?
Why does an organization become increasingly bureaucratic?
Why do people repeat processes they know are meaningless?
Why do competent people become more exhausted, while people who excel at reporting upward are more likely to be promoted?
If the explanation is simply, “This leader is bad,” replacing that leader should solve the problem.
Yet we often find that after someone is replaced, a few years pass and things return to roughly the same state.
At that point, we should consider another possibility:
the problem may not be the person. It may be the structure.
What Do We Mean by “Structure”?
We can understand it very simply.
A structure consists of the relatively stable elements of a system:
- positions
- relationships
- rules
- power
- resources
- incentives
- patterns of information flow
Together, they determine one thing:
which behaviors are more likely to survive.
Suppose an organization says:
We encourage innovation.
But in practice:
people who fail are held responsible;
leaders take most of the reward when something succeeds;
people who do nothing make no mistakes;
and people who raise problems risk offending others.
What is the organization’s real rule?
It is not “encourage innovation.”
It is:
avoiding mistakes matters more than creating value.
Over time, fewer people will be willing to take risks, while more people will learn to avoid responsibility.
Eventually, management will notice that the organization lacks an innovative spirit and respond by holding “innovation culture training.”
If you look only at people, the world appears absurd.
If you look at the structure, everything makes sense.
The system is simply getting what it has consistently rewarded.
Structures Select People
This is one of the most important insights in a structuralist perspective.
We often assume:
A certain kind of group creates a certain kind of organization.
But the reverse is also true:
A certain kind of organization continuously selects for a certain kind of person.
If an organization rewards professional expertise, professionals are more likely to remain.
If it rewards political skill, people who navigate power relationships well will gradually occupy important positions.
If it rewards short-term performance, long-term development will steadily decline.
If a system depends on information opacity, people who control information gaps become increasingly valuable.
Given enough time, the population you observe is no longer random.
It is:
the result of selection by the structure.
So when we ask, “Why is everyone here like this?” we may have reversed the direction of causality.
It is not that so many people happened to become this way.
Rather:
people like this are more likely to remain here.
The “Best” in the Cave Are Only the Best in the Cave
This was the idea that occurred to me during that conversation.
Plato’s allegory of the cave describes people who have lived in a cave since birth. They can see only shadows on a wall, so they mistake those shadows for reality.
Suppose one person leaves the cave and sees the sun and the wider world.
For those who remain, something interesting happens:
that person disappears from their system of evaluation.
He may no longer participate in the cave’s rankings.
He no longer competes to identify shadows most accurately.
He no longer cares who wins “Cave Employee of the Year.”
The people inside can therefore develop an illusion:
Whoever reads the shadows most accurately must be the most capable person in the world.
But the problem is:
they can no longer see those who truly left.
The same thing happens in society.
The people a system can observe have already passed through that system’s selection process.
So we cannot simply ask, “Who is the most successful person in this industry?” and use the answer to decide what genuine ability looks like.
Sometimes what we observe is not a ranking of ability.
It is:
a ranking of adaptation to the system.
The two may overlap.
They may also be completely different.
More Dangerous Are Those Who Leave—and Return
The cave allegory contains another interesting possibility.
Someone leaves the cave and later returns.
One person may return to tell everyone:
There is a larger world outside.
But there is another possibility.
Someone already knows that the shadows are only shadows. He also understands how the cave works. Then he returns and begins studying:
how to control the shadows on the wall.
The first person tries to change how people understand reality.
The second exploits the gap in understanding.
He may even be better suited to managing the cave than someone who never left.
The ignorant merely believe the rules.
He has learned to use the rules.
This is why a dysfunctional system is not necessarily maintained by foolish people.
Quite the opposite.
Behind many persistent problems are highly intelligent people who understand the system’s loopholes very well.
They simply have no incentive to repair them, because:
the loophole itself is their competitive advantage.
A “Makeshift Team” May Not Be an Accident
This is why I am increasingly reluctant to dismiss an organization as merely a makeshift operation.
If a company remains chaotic for years yet continues to survive, the chaos itself deserves investigation.
Why has it not been eliminated?
Who benefits from the disorder?
Why has professionalization not occurred?
Why can processes never be established?
Why do genuine professionals leave so quickly?
When these questions are connected, we may discover that the makeshift organization is not an accidental condition.
It may be a structural equilibrium.
Real professionalization would require:
clear authority and responsibility;
transparent information;
measurable competence;
documented decisions;
and rule-based resource allocation.
Those changes may directly threaten someone’s established interests.
Everyone may appear to complain about the chaos, while the system itself continuously preserves it.
In that situation, hiring a few talented people usually changes very little.
The structure remains the same.
Newcomers eventually face three outcomes:
assimilation;
marginalization;
or departure.
Structuralism Reduces the Complexity of Understanding the World
Every day, reality presents us with countless stories, companies, people, and events.
If we analyze each one separately, the world appears extraordinarily chaotic.
Today, the problem is a particular leader.
Tomorrow, it is a badly managed company.
The next day, it is destructive competition in an industry.
Each event looks different.
But once we begin looking for structures, many phenomena turn out to be different outputs of the same underlying system.
For example:
1 | Resource Structure |
Many problems suddenly become compressed.
Instead of explaining ten separate phenomena, we need to identify:
the structure that keeps generating them.
This is a powerful form of cognitive compression.
A Few Questions for Seeing the World Structurally
The next time you encounter a confusing phenomenon, pause before judging it.
Ask:
Who occupies which position?
Who controls the resources?
Who has the power to evaluate others?
Who bears the costs?
Who receives the benefits?
Which behaviors are rewarded?
Which kinds of people are more likely to remain?
How does information flow?
If the person changed but the structure remained, would the same result return?
The last question is especially important.
If the answer is yes, you are probably not facing an individual problem.
You are facing a structural one.
From Judging the World to Understanding It
A structuralist perspective does not make the world more beautiful.
It may even make many things appear colder.
You begin to realize that problems do not always arise because someone suddenly became bad.
A position, a set of rules, and a network of interests can repeatedly push different people toward similar behavior.
But this perspective also offers an important kind of freedom.
It reduces a great deal of pointless anger.
Instead of obsessing over:
Why is this person so foolish?
you begin to ask:
Why does this system need this kind of person?
Instead of asking only:
Why did everything fail again?
you ask:
What structure keeps reproducing the same failure?
These questions operate at entirely different levels of understanding.
The first searches for explanations inside the phenomenon.
The second searches for:
the machine that produces the phenomenon.
Once you find that machine, many things that once seemed complicated, chaotic, or absurd suddenly become clear.
Perhaps this is the greatest value of a structuralist perspective:
It makes us less fascinated by appearances and more attentive to generative mechanisms.
When you see a person, look again at the position they occupy.
When you see an event, look again at the relationships that produced it.
When you see a problem, ask one more question:
If the structure changed, would this problem still occur?
Very often, what truly needs to change is hidden behind that question.
