LAST WORD: Shake your karass

by Marzena Czarnecka

“I do my best thinking while eating sushi.” Clifford A. Pickford

I don’t know about you, but if I see a book on a store, library or friend’s bookshelf with a title like, say, Sex, Drugs, Einstein & Elves: Sushi, Psychedelics, Parallel Universes, and the Quest for Transcendence, I need to read it. Right now. Transcendence, I don’t really care about—I’m too grounded already and/or lazy. But put Einstein and Elves in a sentence, and you’ve hooked me, and Clifford Pickford did.

But I never get to Einstein and the Elves, because the author distracts by throwing in Kurt Vonnegut. Do you worship Vonnegut? I do. And you should too. When he created the religion of Bokonism in Cat’s Cradle, he didn’t know it, but he was also explaining to all and sundry how law firms work (and don’t work).

It all comes down to granfalloon and karass, perhaps his two most brilliant concepts and creations. If you haven’t read or don’t remember Cat’s Cradle, play the game with me. Say granfalloon and imagine its definition. Repeat with karass. Done? Now compare with the real deal: Vonnegut defines a karass as a group of people who work together to, in the context of the book and Bokonism, “do God’s will.” Pickford modernizes and secularizes the definition and makes karass (karasses?) ”those social networks that actually get work done.” Contrast with a granfalloon, which Vonnegut simply calls a false karass. Pickford deems it a bureaucratic structure, or “a group of people united or organized by decree or official structure.”

(Brief return to book review: In case you were wondering, Sex, Drugs etc. clearly fails as a book, because as soon as Pickford introduces Vonnegut into the flow, I abandon the quest for Einstein and the Elves and go rummaging for old Vonnegut paperbacks. So this reader’s recommendation is—skip this title, and reread Cat’s Cradle and Slaughter House 5).

Back to the game. Now think of your law firm, and if you’re in-house, your corporation. That would be your granfalloon. It’s got some official leaders of course—department heads, managing partners, c-suite suits, and their chains of command, channels of communication, checks and balances, processes and policies. And, each granfalloon has some particularly stalwart adherents who make it particularly granfalloonish—perpetuating the status quo, slowing progress, and ensuring the simplest of tasks and the most urgent of decisions require arduous hoop-jumping and political maneuvering.

OK, I know you’re dying to do this, and this is just between you and me, baby, and whoever’s following you on Twitter if you choose to tweet it, so let’s identify the ‘looners that ensure your granfalloon stays a granfalloon. Yeah, that department head’s an obvious choice, but really? Think about it. Is he a stalwart adherent, or is he handicapped by the structure? Does he have to granfalloon (I think one of the beauties of the word is that it can be both a noun and a verb) because that’s what he needed to do to climb to the top, and now needs to do to maintain his position? Does he granfalloon because that’s the only way he can get the rest of the granfallooners to do something, anything? In other words, does he granfalloon because he wants to… or because he must?

Now, there are probably some feelings of shame starting to rise in your own breast as you ponder your own complicity in the granfalloon. Let’s dispel them. Few of us would participate in granfalloons out of conscious choice: we get trapped in them by circumstance, habit, and the necessity to earn a living and ply our trade. We survive them by creating, often unconsciously, a karass—or a bunch of overlapping ones. The parallel to social networks, online and otherwise, is obvious, but we won’t go there—Vonnegut didn’t know about them back in the day. We succeed through our karass. Our karass makes functioning within the granfalloon bearable.

Our karass also enables the granfalloon. With members of our karass, we laugh at the particularly absurd idiocies and idiosyncracies of the granfalloon. We work together to subvert them, sure, but we also give them validity and recognize them.

So here’s the last part of the game. Imagine, just imagine, what would happen if your law firm karass stopped enabling the granfalloon. If you all decided that the hoops were ridiculous, the policies outmoded, the conventions counter-productive, and the entire thing on a collision course with extinction.

Imagine if your karass stopped playing the game.

Ah, fluxidoodle. You lose. I didn’t say take your karass to another granfalloon. Better luck next time. But before you try again—read some Vonnegut, okay? Or if Pickford does more for you than he did for me, go eat some sushi.

Marzena Czarnecka is a Calgary-based, sushi-loving, elf-bashing freelance writer, occasionally a granfalloon enabler, who can spot an organization’s karass in a Cowtown minute.

• Thomson Reuters article record