The Reality Distortion Field

2006/07/11

How strange. It seems that a phrase I developed and started using in the early 1980s was independently generated elsewhere in a different context.

Any large organization of people is a big system. That means it's going to be victimized by the usual failings of big systems. As I began recognizing this back in the '80s, it occurred to me to wonder why this was so. Why were human institutions like political groups and corporations so often susceptible to systems-failure?

The answer I came up with was originally something of a joke, but it seems I'm not the only one laughing at it.

The way I described it was that the bigger an organization gets, the more likely the leaders of that organization are to be surrounded by other people. In the corporate world, for example, managers are surrounded by supervisors; directors are surrounded by senior managers; and presidents speak only to VPs.

In particular, the higher up you go in any organization's power structure, the less likely you become to have any unregulated contact with the end users of your system. Increasing power means increasing insulation from reality -- you only know as "real" whatever the layers of people surrounding you tell you is real. (This, I think, is related to the institutionalization of organizations as described by Carroll Quigley.)

The funny idea I had was that this effect wasn't simply a natural consequence of organizations being large systems, but was actually produced by organizational leaders themselves. As you go up the power ladder, you begin to generate a Reality Distortion Field. And the higher up you go and the larger the organization around you, the stronger the RDF becomes.

Furthermore, some people naturally generate a strong RDF on their own. Like the Rock Man in Harry Nilsson's The Point, these individuals see what they want to see, and hear what they want to hear. Any communication that doesn't fit their preferred reality is merely noise that can be dismissed.

Notionally, this is like a bullet spanging off a force field. When the project lead says, "we need another week to finish this task," that information hits the manager's Reality Distortion Field and ricochets off someplace where it can't do any damage.

So why do organizations fail? Because the magnitude of the RDF produced by leaders of large organizations is so intense that no reality whatsoever can intrude on decision-making.

That's the theory of the Reality Distortion Field that I've described for many years to other people, most of whom thought it was amusing. Now I find that there's another version of this phrase that's been around for about the same length of time.

Apparently when Steve Jobs was trying to motivate Apple into developing the Lisa and Macintosh, he was recognized as being so talented at persuading people that this crazy idea would work that it was said he generated a Reality Distortion Field. Just talking with him made it seem like anything he said could be possible. (This follows the Jargon File and Wikipedia entries for "Reality Distortion Field.")

What I find interesting is that although both versions describe the RDF as something that an individual produces, the purpose of the Steve Jobs-style RDF is the converse of the one I describe. Where the RDF I see is about shielding one from reality, the Jobs RDF is an effect imposed on other people to alter their perception of reality.

Either way, it can't hurt to try to be aware of this effect, to seek to always maintain some link with reality as it actually is. Reducing the strength of the Reality Distortion Fields around us may not be sufficient to guarantee good decision-making, but it's a necessary condition.

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