Decoding ISIL’s dark culture of empowerment

ISIL grew out of local conflicts and stumbled on global resonance online, writes Greg Fantham

Psychologist Karl Weick noted that organisations such as ISIL exist mostly in our relationships and in our heads. AP Photo

It may come as a surprise that ISIL publishes glossy annual reports, but now even terror must speak in the universal language of business.

So what kind of business organisation is ISIL? How does its organisational structure motivate its barely post-adolescent workforce? And, crucially, for those battling it, can it now adapt to a changing environment?

Psychologist Karl Weick noted that organisations exist mostly in our relationships and in our heads. This is where organisational inertia comes from.

By looking closely at how individuals and groups relate to each other within organisations, research in business psychology has revealed a small number of basic organisational designs beneath the surface of most groups. ISIL may be a hybrid of two of these designs, described by organisational psychologist Henry Mintzberg as the machine form and the innovative form.

The “machine” form is characterised by formal relationships, hierarchy and lots of direct supervision of subordinates. A typical call centre, or an assembly line, for example. The commanders of ISIL like to do things the machine way, too. But a range of factors – such as constant air strikes – inhibit direct supervision of a dispersed workforce of fighters. Left to their own devices, the fighters tend to adopt Mintzberg’s “innovative” organisational design, in which hierarchy is much less evident, and improvised day-to-day collaborations enable them to adapt more readily in a volatile environment.

Typically, the organisational culture is the glue that holds an innovative form together. The fighters’ culture encompasses a distinctive style of brutality that confirms their alignment with the commanding elites. But it’s also a youth culture.

This is where ISIL’s social media propaganda came from. Not a sophisticated social media offensive orchestrated by the high command. No. It’s just that kids tweet to kids, and post on Facebook and Vimeo, and do online gaming. In 2010, Humera Khan set up Muflehun, which tracks online extremism. She has found that these posts are most likely to be picked up, in the West, by impressionable youngsters with the least religious backgrounds. It’s the engagement and identity that gets them. Real life Call of Duty, with benefits.

The fighters tweet on despite high fatality rates. Yet they are what organisational psychologist Oliver Williamson calls “additive”; dispensable and replaceable, like casual labour, and not normally associated with a culture of engagement and enthusiasm. So how does an organisation motivate the “additives” when high wages are not an option?

Williamson, a 2009 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics (there isn’t a Nobel Prize for psychology), identified three other occupational categories that he believes provide the basic templates for all occupations. There are those who come and go, being paid for specific services. Then there are the “idiosyncratic” types; no one knows quite what they do but they know they couldn’t do without them. The third category is the start-up team: relational, indispensable, highly motivated and maybe resembling a micro version of Mintzberg’s innovative design. Williamson calls this the “relational team”. The trick, of course, is to make the additives feel like they are the relational team. In ISIL’s case, circumstances conspired to create an innovative form in which there should have been only the bottom layer of a machine hierarchy. And the energy of youthful engagement is contagious.

ISIL grew out of local conflicts and stumbled on global resonance online.

The machine of the ISIL command structure may falter as the conflicts in Syria and Iraq move into their next tragic phases, but thanks to the new magic of the online marketplace, the chances are that the dark culture of empowerment through atrocity will be propagated by virtual communities for some time to come. A new and psychological battleground has emerged.

Greg Fantham is assistant professor of psychology at Heriot-Watt University Dubai