Why Politics Appear

Ancient Athens did not solve uncertainty with better communication. They solved it by removing people. Once a year, citizens gathered to vote on exile. Not for crimes. Not for failures. For influence. Some people became too visible, too connected. They were deemed likely to become dangerous later, so they had to go. The mechanism was called ostracism. In essence, it was risk management. Because in unstable systems, you cannot always tell the difference between leadership and threat until it is too late. So you act early. 

It was brutal. And it was politics, not as ideology, but as coordination under uncertainty. 

When reality becomes unclear, humans do not become calmer. We become defensive. We stop optimizing for what is correct, and start optimizing for what keeps us safe. It shows up when truth becomes hard to measure, and outcomes start depending on who feels safe with whom.

Now zoom forward 2,400 years. Modern orgs do not exile people the same way. They exile them with performance reviews, quiet reorgs, and reputation decay. Different times. Different tools. Same story.

And reading this, your first thought might be, I hate politics.

I hear you. Same. But hatred is not a strategy. It keeps you morally pure and operationally exposed. Understanding what the heck is going on is the only thing that helps.

This post is about that switch: what triggers it, how it rewires behavior, and why the same patterns repeat in every high-uncertainty workplace.

Uncertainty Creates Threat

People love to say they want transparency. What they really want is predictability. Because uncertainty in an organization is not an intellectual problem. It is a survival problem. What are we most afraid of in project management? Unknown unknowns. So the same applies to our brain. There’s an inherent risk when we don’t know. 

Risk to what? Your status. Your income. Your identity. Your future. Your belonging.

That is why uncertainty feels personal even when no one is talking about you. Because it might affect you. The system might be just figuring things out, but your nervous system does not care. You feel something changing, and you are not in control of it. You don’t like that.

And once that threat response turns on, the questions change. You start looking for protection, what to say, who to align with. This is the first step in the chain. Politics begins the moment uncertainty becomes chronic, and the organization fails to contain it with clarity. People are not dramatic. We are wired to treat unclear hierarchies as danger.

The Information Vacuum 

Where does uncertainty then come from? It comes from lack of information. When leadership withholds context, delays communication, contradicts itself, or enforces decisions without explanation, it creates an information vacuum. It’s just a gap between you and the truth. 

Leaders misread this. They assume less information means less panic. It does the opposite, it creates a vacuum people fill to regain control. In calm times, silence can look like humility. Under stress, it almost always looks like concealment. During layoffs, people calmed down the moment leadership explained the logic. Even bad news feels safer when it is clear. That is why rumor markets form, and why gossip platforms accelerate them.

The irony is brutal. The very attempt to control the narrative by withholding information destroys narrative control entirely. Once trust collapses, every silence becomes suspicious, every reassurance becomes hollow. 

The Nervous System Takeover

Politics is often not cognitive at first. That’s the part we miss. It is biological first. Unclear hierarchies and non-deterministic decisions come as a status threat. And the body responds accordingly. We get into fight, flight, freeze mode.

That is why it feels visceral. Hands shake before meetings. Your stomach drops when an invite appears with no context. You reread messages for subtext. A delayed reply feels loaded.  That’s why I almost always acknowledge messages. 

All organizational politics feel toxic because the body experiences it as danger. When leaders fail to provide clarity, people do not become calmer. They become defensive. When clarity collapses, cause and effect collapses too. And when truth can no longer determines outcomes, people use power instead.

Why Power Replaces Truth

In a healthy system, truth works because cause and effect are working. You do good work, it gets seen, it gets rewarded. In an information vacuum, that causal chain breaks. People can no longer tell what drives outcomes. Hence, they stop asking “What is correct?” and start asking “What is best for me?”

It’s practical power. Access. Proximity. Who gets private context. Who can bypass the process? Who can kill or revive a decision with one conversation. And once that happens, values stop being reliable signals. Your principles stop being a referee. Policies become optional, applied selectively, or rewritten after the fact. Truth becomes “nice to have,” not “how things move.” Everyone becomes overly defensive.

So people adapt. They invest in relationships more than arguments. They manage perception more than performance. They keep track of everything not because they are paranoid, but because the system no longer guarantees reality will hold. That’s why documentation becomes self-defense. Write things down for yourself. Take self reviews seriously.

This is also where the loyalty premium appears. Under uncertainty, leaders often reward the people who feel safe and aligned, not the people who are right. You see this often in rotten orgs. The guy who’s calling out explicit problems somehow becomes the bad guy because he kills the momentum. High performers become politically risky simply by existing.

In unstable systems, truth is fragile. Power is durable. And the real scarcity is not just promotions or budget. It is access. Airtime. Decision rights. Safety. People want to do things and have things. To get those things, they need influence.

Once influence becomes the bottleneck, people stop acting as individuals. They form groups. Because you do not win scarcity fights alone.

In most workplaces, you also cannot settle it with force. So competition turns into alliances, narratives, meeting control, and backchannels. An engineering org stops coordinating around what is true and starts coordinating around what is rewarded, who is protected, who is close, who is untouchable. In the end, it is survival math. And once you see politics as survival, you can see why it is often rational.

Political is Often Rational

Politics is what happens when the org’s reward function becomes unreadable. From the outside, political behavior looks ugly: excessive deference, loyalty signaling, nodding along in meetings where nothing makes sense. It looks like a moral failure.

It is actually constraint optimization.

So people adapt rationally. They mirror the language of power and attach themselves to safe actors. They invest in relationships that outlive any single decision. Because in uncertain environments, decisions change fast. Relationships do not. 

This isn’t manipulation. It is situational intelligence. Employees are simply reading hidden dependencies in a system where performance no longer guarantees safety.

In stable environments, principles scale. In unstable ones, relationships do. This isn’t to say relationships aren’t important in a stable environment. They are important for right reasons, not wrong ones.

The question, then, is not “Why are people political?” It is “What conditions made this happen?” In systems like this, politics is not chosen. It is selected for.

How politics becomes self-reinforcing

Once politics appears, it reshapes the system that created it. The information vacuum doesn’t just hide the truth; it inverts incentives. In the absence of clarity, the wrong signals get rewarded. Confidence is mistaken for competence. Speed is mistaken for certainty. Speculation travels faster than verification. 

This is basically the Prisoner’s Dilemma in real life. If you cannot rely on shared rules or consistent consequences, cooperation stops being the best strategy, even for good people. You do what keeps you safe, and that is where politics grows.

This is how rumor turns into intelligence. Informal networks start outperforming official channels. Side conversations carry more weight than documentation. Alliances become protection. Paper trails become armor.

Unfortunately, those who play this game survive. Those who refuse are exposed.

Ultimately, the organization ends up reinforcing the exact behavior it claims to hate. Political skill becomes the primary competency; everything else is secondary. By the time leadership notices the toxicity, the system has already adapted.

And it will not go back on its own. Because once incentives shift away from outcomes and toward protection, merit stops being the organizing principle.

Why Meritocracy Collapses Under Uncertainty

Meritocracy depends on legibility. It only works when people can see how effort turns into outcomes when performance maps cleanly to reward. The moment that mapping breaks, merit stops functioning as a coordinating principle.

Under uncertainty, organizations still claim to reward performance. But what they actually reward shifts quietly. Loyalty. Proximity. Narrative alignment. Predictability.

In this environment, high performers become risky. In a stable system, their competence is an asset. In an unstable one, it is a liability. I still remember the time I suggested using object storage to store files and got a response back as if it was a crazy idea: “It will slow us down.” It wasn’t true. But in that system, the appearance of control mattered more than architectural correctness. A known inefficiency was safer than an unknown improvement.

So the incentives flip.

Those who challenge the status quo stall. Those who outperform get managed. Those who ask hard questions become difficult. Neutrality becomes unsafe because it signals independence. The safest position is no longer excellence; it is alignment .

This is where cynicism is born.

People do not stop believing in merit because they are lazy or bitter. They stop believing because the system teaches them, repeatedly, that merit no longer maps to survival. And when belief collapses, behavior follows. The question is not why people adapt. The question is why leadership allowed the conditions that forced them to. And what can you do? If you are a foot soldier, not much. If you’re a manager, you can try to protect your team.

Why This is A Leadership Failure

Politics does not emerge because people are flawed. It emerges because leadership creates unsafe conditions. When leaders go silent, tolerate contradictions, or disappear during moments of stress, they force the organization to adapt without guidance. People are left to infer rules, anticipate blame, and protect themselves.

The core failure is this. You cannot ask people to be less political while making the system unsafe. That’s why values are important. Living them even more so.

Leaders often condemn political behavior while continuing to produce the conditions that are selected for it. They demand trust without clarity. They demand alignment without explanation. They demand calm without stability. But safety is not created by intentions. It is created by consistency, transparency, and presence, especially under pressure.

When those are missing, people do what humans have always done in uncertain hierarchies: they coordinate socially instead of procedurally. Politics is not rebellion against leadership. It is a replacement for it.

What to Do About It

If you are not in a position of power, optimize for reduced exposure and increased optionality, not for winning politics. Anchor yourself in what is observable and durable: capture decisions, constraints, owners, and timelines, because in unstable systems memory becomes negotiable and retrospective narratives become a weapon. Ask clarifying questions in writing, calmly and consistently, so ambiguity cannot silently convert into blame. Maintain a private separation between facts and interpretations, and resist becoming a rumor distribution node, because information traded for safety eventually turns into liability when incentives shift.

If you manage people, your role is to contain uncertainty locally when the organization fails to contain it globally. Create regular communication rhythms, publish decision logs, and repeat context until it becomes boring, boredom is a sign of stability. Make tradeoffs explicit, including what is being deprioritized and why, since hidden tradeoffs are the fastest route to distrust. Protect question-askers and standardize how questions are handled, because once questions become unsafe, truth production collapses and the system defaults to proximity, signaling, and coalition behavior. You may not be able to repair the underlying incentives, but you can prevent your immediate environment from degrading into fear-driven coordination.

Remember: you rule in your kingdom. Stop the nonsense. Other teams may run a mess, hire poorly, or create noise, and your directs will notice it. Acknowledge it without turning it into speculation. If asked, state the boundary: you cannot speak for their incentives or constraints. You can speak for how this team operates and how you work. We are responsible for our scope, our standards, and our outcomes. We do not import dysfunction, and we do not use external dysfunction to excuse internal slippage. Clarity, ownership, and execution are non-negotiable here.

The Core Truth

Politics is not a moral failure. It is a coordination mechanism. When people do not know who decides, what matters, or what is coming next, they do not stop coordinating. They simply switch methods. They stop using the process and start using the network.

They watch people. They trade information. They protect themselves through proximity rather than performance. They do this not because they are power-hungry, but because they are starving for consistent cause and effect. If you want less politics, the solution is not to ask for “better behavior.” It is to build better systems.

Fill the vacuum. Make decisions transparently. Restore the link between cause and effect. Until you do, politics will continue doing the job leadership left undone.