My latest round of corporate culture experience centers around some exercises in last week's open enrollment Mastering Projects Workshop. I saw again what inhuman behaviors are justified within the rubric of culture. Otherwise sweet people insisted, for instance, that they could read another's mind by observing behavior. "Of course I know what they are thinking," one might say, "It's obvious by looking at how they're acting." "Behavior-based Performance Appraisals" were discussed as a means of encouraging "right" behaviors and discouraging and so eliminating "bad" ones. I quaked!

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I was thrown back to a time, nearly ten years ago, when I worked within a corporation that was growing into a "more professional" place. It was dabbling in the deliberate engineering of its own culture. The objective was to create a more customer-centered culture, an organization where everyone considered everyone else their customer and, consequently, where everyone was also everyone else's service-provider. The concept seemed to me self-referential, Mobius strip-like, with a single, curiously curled edge masquerading as two. I guess others' were less confused by the concept. We were all enrolled in a series of classes, taught by fellow employees who had been trained by a company specializing in helping organizations engineer new cultures, to teach us how to provide good service to this budding new class of customers.

We were instructed to engage in certain behaviors. I remember that one class taught us to begin every conversation- every interaction- with a few (not too many) minutes of personal small talk. I think the term was "enter as a human." We are all humans, the instructors reminded us, and we should acknowledge this at the start of every interaction. The most interesting result of this training was that people began to automatically ascribe motives to those who, for whatever reason, failed to "enter as a human." These miscreants, and their behavior was clearly observable as "counter cultural," were pecked into line or out of the company with a creeping series of innuendoes, suggestions, and, if the aberrant behavior persisted, stern supervisory intervention.

The place became a police state, where everyone was everyone else's informer as well as their customer and service provider. As a supervisor in an Information Systems department, my introverted techies were not infrequently tattled on for one interactional indiscretion or another. I was expected to help reform them. If one was thoughtful or another shy, I would get a well-intended phone call with an expectation that I had some wood shedding to do. Sometimes it would expand into the silly, as when a customer, insulted at being told that their perspective was not, counter to the old adage, "right," would call insisting that I help this otherwise fully qualified technician see the error of their ways.

The effect of this training in being more human created a "culture" which justified treating some of their numbers in the most insidiously inhuman ways. Suddenly, everyone was everyone else's behavioral judge, jury, and hangman. Each knew the meaning of the others' behaviors- each could read the others' mind. The company changed almost overnight from a reasonably diverse community to a gated one, with armed guards patrolling the streets treating inhumanely anyone observed behaving in a less than fully human way. I remember asking myself why "we" had started punishing diversity. But I no longer really felt a part of "us."

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We fast forward to the recent past and watch as similar mind reading begins in the workshop's final simulation. People acculturated to interpret certain behaviors in very certain ways act as if they knew what another intends by their innocent actions. How many of these mind reading "as ifs" does it take in the "real" world to sidetrack a team's ability to develop a project idea? Probably only one. How many of these "as ifs" is a well cultured team member in the "real" world likely to unconsciously deploy? Many!

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Jerry Weinberg once defined culture as what we do that we are unaware that we do. Those mind reading members of the inquisition who sprouted under the customer-centered initiative at my old company never seemed to feel anything but that they were doing "God's work" as they punished their fellows. The effect was terrible on those of us who could not so easily go unconscious. I remember literally getting up in the morning and crawling under my bed to curl up in the fetal position and wonder if I could stand having my mind read for another day.

Certain inevitable results occur once a person believes they can read another's mind. Yesterday I attended a meeting called to evaluate a project's charter. The Sponsor exhorted the designer to hurry the development of the project's primary product. "I know you already have a good enough design for it in your head," he pushed. No argument from this hassled designer could convince the sponsor otherwise. I left the meeting as frustrated as the designer, who was now firmly bound by the Sponsor's erroneous conviction.

Knowing better than another what's in their own head is never wisdom. It is quite inevitably the most insidious kind of insanity. The conviction that what's outside reveals what's inside violates more than the old adage about books and their covers, it undermines the whole premise for relationship and community. We see the world as we are. What we see in every obvious behavior is something about us, not about them. The meaning we ascribe to them is the meaning we might ascribe to our own behavior if we were by some magic able to observe ourselves as we observe them. We are not them. I am not you. Judging your behavior as if it were mine is certain to complicate even the most casual relationship.

Perhaps those who insist upon reading others' minds are just trying to avoid reading their own mind. When I understand what's going on inside myself, I find that I don't feel so much like I need to second guess what's going on inside of you. When I'm in touch with myself, I can ask when you mystify me. If you disclose then, I can accept. When I'm out of touch with myself, however, I catch myself trying more desperately to connect with you but I'm not now nor will I ever be the amazing Kreskin. These shenanigans keep you disqualified while keeping me clueless.

My own mind ends up being the only one really worth reading.