Poly = Startup, Traditional = Corporate?

[Aaron]

Perhaps I’m too entrenched in business, but as I research this space, I can’t help but see this analogy in its core dynamic.

If you’ve worked a typical office job in a medium to large corporation, you know it comes with many pros and cons when compared to a small “startup” company.

The corporate job tends to have many commonalities with other corporate jobs- because compliance often keeps these companies similar to each other in how they manage their employees. Startups often don’t need to meet as many large company compliance laws, and thus can define a wider range of unique culture for themselves.

There’s a comfort and security for the big corp compared to startups, a sense that the paycheck is fairly secured and it’s probably not going to disappear overnight from going out of business, comparatively speaking. But it’s also easier to feel stagnated, and that your upward mobility is fairly fixed along specific, predictable career tracks.

The startup feels volatile. The best ones can adapt and remain agile, but they also can be tripped up and go out of business in an instant if they don’t play their cards right.

In the big corporation, people are typically connected to a specific job description, which can be great if they fit it well. In a start up, it’s more common for people to wear multiple hats, and depending on how well they can find who does what the best, it can make for a magical mix. But it can also result in rapid marginalizing of people if they aren’t careful.

Communication is certainly important to all businesses, but I think it could be safely argued that it’s the most important in a startup. Expectations are rapidly changing and evolving, but because the startup is flatter, everyone top to bottom can be involved more in the decision making process. This works if everybody understands how to communicate and how to listen.

The startup gets romanticized a lot more than the big corporation, but that’s usually because we hold up the successful ones we know made it big quickly, often unaware of the many that have failed.

Me personally, I’m more of a startup guy. It’s a beautiful chaos with a lot more intense up and downs, but I contend the biggest secret is keeping yourself and everyone you work with as honest and clear-eyed as possible. And that’s actually hard to pull off in a big corporate structure.

 

[Skadi]

Love the analogy, and I had this kind of conversation with someone before.

I think I partially agree with it. In my opinion Opening Up and Transition would be Startup, and Corporate (maybe Organization/Company is a better word?) would be Final Poly Dynamic Structure. While communication and decision making process are important for all organizations and relationships, with Startups you go through many stages, attract capital and seek other funding etc where high flexibility is a must with risk as a failure (Poly Hell), and not knowing if it will take off or not.

When you found your footing and achieved scale (Compersion? Compatible partner(s)?) Company deals with stabillity, comfort, (fixed) schedules with here and there some new departments/employees (other Partners). Especially when you say startup gets romanticized a lot, I would probably call that NRE until the Startup Phase has passed and it's a flourishing company/relationship like any other.

Just my thoughts, and correct me if I'm wrong.

 

[Evie]

To me, the whole point of a corporation is that it takes on a life of it's own, the employees, all the way from the now mostly defunct "mailroom" all the way up to the chief executives, can be replaced. Something doesn't even need to be very large for that to happen. I'm a teacher; staff come and go all the time but the school continues, even with a change of principal or board of trustees. There is a culture and set of values in such places that are very slow to adapt to external factors.

Start ups come straight in with "insert year of establishment" values. Company culture is developed as they go, hopefully with some understanding of best practices.

I suppose with polyamory, we are often creating as we go, more so than monogamy. There's a deeply established culture and set of values around monogamy. You "know the rules" when starting a relationship. You can switch countries, certainly around the Westen world, and there are still a bunch of underlying assumptions in monogamy that are recognisable no matter where you are. ENM and polyamory take those assumptions, dismantle and examine them, and then build something more tailored to the desires of the participants.

I've noticed that shit happens in my polycule when the underlying assumptions are insufficiently deconstructed, and examined, even when the default is polyamory. There are still issues around expectation management because every dyad is unique and has different needs. Not all match. Some people are more flexible.

I think there certainly needs to be flexibility in a start up, as has been mentioned.

 

[Bobbi]

Loving this thread! Great comparisons

 

[kdt26417]

Hi Aaron,

I suppose my polycule is like a startup company, if for no other reason simply because there are only a few of us in this polycule. I don't know what applies to monogamy, as there you just have two people, in a dyad. Maybe it has more to do with your number of supporters. Monogamy is much more widely supported than polyamory.

Just some thoughts,
Kevin T.

 

[Aaron]

Monogamy is much more widely supported than polyamory.

That was more of where I was coming from.

The cultural playbook of a hetero-normative girlfriend/boyfriend to engagement to marriage to child rearing can have plenty of differences, but are more alike and predictable in their general tracks than poly, operationally.

An office job in a big corporation will often come with a hierarchical structure, benefits packages, HR departments and common navigation within for a career trajectory that can definitely have some differences from one to the next, but are more predictable than a startup, which is often very transitory and self-organizational, for better and for worse.

Having worked a lot in and with both, there's definitely a great deal of variety with the startups that can be wonderful to maddening. Moreover, startups can change from one to the other and back at a faster rate; again, for better or for worse.

 

[Magdlyn]

We could flip this on its head and think of monogamy as a start-up concept that has failed. (If you read the book Sex at Dawn you'll understand.)

Humans have been around for about one million years, give or take. Monogamy has only been around as a legal concept for about... 2000 years? In some cultures polygyny is still quite legal. It's not based on how humans actually mate and love. Humans are well capable of desiring more than one sex partner at a time. And many are well capable of loving more than one. Our culture is slowly coming to accept that women, as well as men, can desire multiple partners. In Victorian times women and men were trained to think that "good women" didn't have sex drives at all! And they certainly couldn't make legal decisions about the uses of their bodies.

The concept of monogamy (or polygyny) was instituted by extreme force. One reason I love to read the Bible (from a secular POV, as cultural history) is to see the screamingly obvious way the patriarchy (with men owning their women) took great disgusting force and violence to "succeed" and be made the norm. The patriarchy is an economic structure made to benefit the few (wealthier males) over the many (lower status males, women and slaves). If you pay attention at all, you can see that Christianity has become far less popular in the past 100 years, and with it, the patriarchal structure it was written to impose.

Polygamy is of much longer standing in human history and comes with many benefits to the majority of human beings on the planet (women, children, traditionally enslaved peoples, etc.). Pagan cultures even had popular holidays that included orgiastic revels to benefit lower-status people, or women with infertile husbands, etc., etc. These matings were made to seem disgusting and an abomination by the early patriarchal enforcers.

If you doubt Christianity is losing its grip, just take a look at all the abandoned churches that are either moldering away, or being converted to different uses. The French watched Notre Dame burn, not as distraught Christians, but as secular people loving the building for its beauty and landmark status. The more Christianity weakens, the more power women will have, and the more ability to choose their sexual partners, be financially independent, control their reproduction, etc.