> As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations Absolutely.

> As far as I am concerned, pretending that bad actors simply do not exist has allowed some of the greatest problems I've seen plague organizations Absolutely. In my experience there are vicious cycles at play. Political people (that's my name for bad actors) seem on average better at identifying whether somebody is political or not. They are also better at reinforcing each other. Political people will tend to hire and promote political people since that's the game they understand. Non-political people might tend to promote more of their own kind, but they will probably be worse at spotting the political kind, hence they will make more mistakes wrt promoting competence. Come to think of it this whole thing seems quite amenable to some sort of evolutionary game theory. Maybe in conjunction with social network theory. I'm curious if anybody studied this already.