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Recommended Innovation Articles (and Commentary) 13: ‘The Origin and Meaning of Miles’ Law’ by Rufus Miles [JSTOR access for PDF]
by : Ben ZweibelsonOriginal post can be found here: https://benzweibelson.medium.com/recommended-innovation-articles-and-commentary-13-the-origin-and-meaning-of-miles-law-by-1a834dd31a1f
Ever hear the phrase: “Where you stand depends on where you sit?” That saying is called “Miles’ Law” and comes from Rufus Miles. While the notion is as old as ancient Greek philosophy, the specific saying comes from when Miles was a director in 1948–1949 for the U.S. Bureau of the Budget, which oversaw the Federal Security Agency, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Labor, and several lesser agencies. The article is available through JSTOR, so there is an academic paywall in effect at the link below. Like other article recommendations, I urge military readers to go to their base or post library, or reach out to any PME program as their library should be able to help you. For academics and researchers, you all should be able to get this PDF easily. For everyone else, try a lifeline to someone you know that might have JSTOR access, or consider purchasing the PDF direct. Link to article is here:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/975497
Miles, writing as a senior fellow for Princeton University in 1978, provides a narrative about where this concept came from and also how it is important for an organization to consider when evaluating priorities that shift with the times as well as promotion or movement of key leadership across a broader enterprise (much as how the DoD functions). He first encounters a subordinate who, while working at the Bureau of Budget, got offered a higher salary position at one of the agencies he was charged with reviewing from the budgetary side. The man also did not like that agency, and asked Miles for a raise so that he could remain there, and not take a job with an agency he disliked.
Miles explained it was impossible to give him a raise for that reason, and he would need to decide if he wished to work at a higher paying job in an agency he disliked, or work at the same salary with the bureau. The man stated he would sacrifice his happiness for his family and the raise, and departed the bureau. Miles explains what happened next:
A day or two after he departed, I said to one of my associates, “Just watch! Within three or four months he will be as critical of the Bureau of the Budget and as defensive of his agency as he has been the opposite within the Bureau.” My associate was astonished at me. “Oh no!” he said, “he is much too objective and fair minded for that kind of a turnabout.” My rejoinder was, “You should not dispute whether this will happen, but how long it will take.” It took about two months longer than I estimated, as I recall it. When it did happen, I said to my associate, “You see, it depends on where you sit, how you stand.” Wide-eyed, he said, “That deserves to be given the status of a law. You should call it “Miles’ Law.” And from then on, Miles’ Law, later shortened to, “Where you stand depends on where you sit,” spread by word of mouth among Washington’s administrative cognoscenti. (p.399)
Miles then recounts other examples of how Miles’ Law explains the pattern of human behaviors, biases, and beliefs that structure around the community or group one defines as “us” over “them.” It also raises the paradoxes of organizational vs personal loyalties; and especially a tension between systematic and systemic thinking. Systematic is ‘reducing things down, focusing inward into one’s unit or group/missions’, whereas systemic is ‘up and out, holistic, abstract and broader’- often a shift from systematic to systemic does occur when someone moves from a subordinate section of an organization up to a senior or high-level field of view.
While the first lesson of Miles’ Law is that when a person changes positions organizationally, he or she changes both perspective and responsibility and for both reasons changes his or her position on issues, there is a second, less well understood significance to this principle of human behavior. No person can totally rise above his or her institutional perspectives and responsibilities by being temporarily detached from an organizational position and being asked to perform as a member of a task force that is expected to exhibit the most statesmanlike conduct of which it is capable, looking only at the long-range public good. Oddly enough, even experienced, high level officials of government fail to take full account of this manifestation of Miles’ Law (p. 401).
This is an important consideration on how military services tend to compete among one another for defense budgets, future strategic utilization and missions in national defense, identify and distinguish themselves from one another, and also ensure the core identity and belief systems of their service remain central to how the service functions. Carl Builder’s “The Masks of War”, his 1989 RAND study that focused on how and why the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force are as they appear also helps address this organizational pattern of perpetual behavior. RAND would repeat this study and include the U.S. Marine Corps and USSOCOM in 2019, and also update the three primary branches since much has changed in 30 years (but many things had not). Builder’s book is a nice parallel to Miles’ Law in that the Army, Air Force, and Navy reach back to World War II specific identities and belief systems, rituals, and myths to define who they are now. It stands that Miles’ Law, in conjunction with Builder’s organizational studies of military culture and identity suggests that even in Joint organizations or task forces that feature temporary detached groups working together, it will be tough to get around institutionalized beliefs and biases. The intersection of Miles’ Law and Builder’s organizational studies suggests that “Joint” is not as easy as declaring a wire chart, authorities, and assigning billets.
A third implication of Miles’ Law is its meaning for high officials in respect to the vital subject of lines of communication, reporting, and problem-solving. It says to every administrator, “Never trust any single line of communication to give you the truth about what is going on, or to give you ‘unbiased’ counsel as to what should be done about a serious problem. Any single line of communication is bound to be influenced by the strong desire of the communicators to make themselves look good, and especially to avoid looking bad; their desire to influence the administrator’s decisions in a manner favorable to them; and their desire to increase their power vis-a-vis other competitive components of the organization, or at least not lose any” (p. 402).
This is a profound issue that is often considered off limits or poor manners to bring up within the DoD. How often has a senior leader experienced what we call “Stove Piped” information, carried by one entity or group and bypassing the rest of the organization (often intentionally) so that the leader make a decision that one part, but not necessarily all parts of the organization want. Again, much of this is well understood in societies and dates back to ancient Greek and also Chinese philosophy. This is where emperors lose their clothing, and many might not want to tell him he is naked as that status plays to their advantage (or they fear reprisals for not just being honest, but potentially for admitting individual or organizational failure).
Unlike the law of gravity, but like Gresham’s Law of Public Administration (“Day to day operations drive out long range planning”) and the Peter Principle, Miles’ Law is not properly a law but the statement of a general tendency. It is a tendency to which administrators must be constantly alert, since one of their major roles is, as just stated, to try in various ways to counteract its extreme manifestations and even the deadweight of its ordinary manifestations. In discharging this duty of leadership, administrators need the help of more flexible personnel policies than are authorized under current federal law. The proposal to establish a system of “rank-in-person” for upper level career executives and discontinue their “ownership” of their positions, facilitating personnel transfers without threat to their status or salaries (as in the military and foreign services), is an obvious step in the right direction. The effect should be to refocus the loyalties of many such career executives from excessive concern with the defense of their empires to a stronger commitment to the achievement of the administration’s program goals. As we have observed, a career executive may sit too securely atop a bureaucratic hierarchy. Sitting a little less securely in one spot can do much to clarify and sharpen what may have become a confused set of loyalties. Where you stand depends not only on where you sit, but on how firmly planted you are in the seat (p.402).
The Miles’ Law article is pretty short, and an easy-to-read style without dense academic terms. The author provides multiple detailed vignettes to explain the aspects of this law, and offers some maxims at the end for readers to consider. I like to use this as a secondary reading source in PME education when I am teaching a module on organizational culture, theory, social paradigms, and paradigmatic interplay. This also is a useful article for those teaching leadership, coaching, mentoring in organizations, and how narratives are constructed. Organizations tend to become more bureaucratic over time versus less, but often we are unwittingly carried along, often for reasons the institution wants us to play ball in the rules it defines for individual advantage nested in institutional preservation. Sometimes, this works entirely against what we need to do, and how we ought to change. Miles’ Law is a nice example of how each of us tend to run only within the fenced pastures of our organizations, despite us imagining that we are wandering free in the wild.
Thanks for reading, and if you like articles on innovation, design, strategy, leadership, change, and similar topics- check out this series and follow me on Medium, Twitter, and LinkedIn for more. I aim to put one of these out each week, and since I have thousands of articles in my binders, I may not run out for quite some time! Article suggestion #12 is below in case you missed it-