Clusterfug

Have you noticed we get lots more profanities these days from movies, including streaming video, in English, Filipino, Spanish, French, Chinese, and more, in the original language as well as in subtitles?

Last week, I kept hearing an English profanity from “The Night Agent,” an American action-thriller on Netflix, which I had never heard before, although I figured out its meaning as it kept getting repeated throughout its 10 episodes.

The actual word is clusterf—k but when Stanford business professor Bob Sutton wrote up an extended discussion of the word in a book, his publisher insisted that it be sanitized to “clusterfug,” which I’m doing, too, since the Inquirer is a family paper, or at least section A is.

What is this clusterfug? The American Heritage Dictionary describes it as a “chaotic situation where everything seems to go wrong caused by incompetence, communication failure, or a complex environment.”

The term comes from the Vietnam War and the US military, which has produced many of the most colorful swear words in the world. Not surprising given the stress the soldiers and officers go through … and the many disasters that do happen in military operations.

The “fug” in clusterfug is self-explanatory while “cluster” was supposed to refer to the oak leaf insignia on the uniforms of military officials but when you look at the way clusterfugs involve a series of events that create the super-disaster, I did wonder if the word is related to “cluster bombs,” which refers to munitions that are dropped by planes and which then release tens or hundreds of other submunitions (sub-bombs) to saturate a large target area.

A clusterfug isn’t so much the disaster itself as the many catastrophic decisions that lead to the disaster. And although it was coined in the US military, it’s a term that can apply to government agencies (up to the highest office of the land), corporations, educational institutions, even hospitals, and religious organizations, or should I say especially religious organizations. At my age, I’ve seen all too many clusterfugs in all those organizations I named and as an educator, I would push for including this concept, with many case studies, in business schools as well as leadership courses.

Clusterfugs happen even to the best of organizations. Sutton proposes that the clusterfugs are precipitated by three monumental flaws among decision-makers: illusion, impatience, and incompetence. Imagine the three working together like several cluster bombs.

The risks for clusterfugs would be expected to be highest among authoritarian decision-makers but I’ve seen clusterfugs even in the most democratic of organizations, and the best of people, when they lose touch with realities, too busy or not caring enough to know what’s going on at the ground level.

It happens when leaders rely on a small group of “experts” who create a cordon sanitaire around executives. The advisers may include good people but who are themselves unable to give the real situation, or if they do know what’s going on, have self interest to protect, or are unwilling to tell their bosses what’s happening, even as problems begin to accumulate.

What we have then is the emperor’s new clothes syndrome, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale about the emperor strutting down the streets stark naked with the illusion that he (or for an empress, she) is wearing the finest clothing.

As the illusion grows, so, too, does the impatience, leaders ramming through a project even without adequate study and evaluation. Bring in the chorus of sycophants (sip-sip) and it’s only a matter of time before, if I may use another American expression, the shit hits the fan.

Besides Sutton’s perspectives from business, I thought about work from political psychology around hubris or exaggerated pride and self-confidence, especially well-documented among political leaders. In or out of politics, these leaders assume office with a surplus of popular support, which is quickly wasted by illusion, impatience, incompetence … and hubris.

In the end, the clusterfug decision-makers lose support, sometimes without even knowing what hit them, or how they’ve self-destructed.

Preventing clusterfugs needs effort: humility (hard when you’ve reached the top), willingness to listen, and being out in the field where the action is.

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