the wire

With our move-in date postponed until next week; I filled my vacation time with other pursuits. Watching the first season of the HBO series The Wire was a welcome distraction from the half-filled boxes scattered around our house.

Over the last couple years I've heard countless interviews and reviews about how great the show is, but just couldn't commit to another serial TV show that I knew would eat up 12 hours of my life. So the holiday break, in combination with feeling a little under the weather, provided the excuse I needed to blitz through the show.

The Wire is set in present day Baltimore and depicts the attempt of a small, assigned police task force to take down a major organized drug cartel in the city's projects. Part of the case is getting a listening device (wire) put on public telephones in the projects, hence the series name. The story has several side stories, but is essentially one detective's crusade that gets a lot of other reluctant people involved. But over the course of the case, many of them get inspired and care about the case in different ways.

I've never seen a better show at depicting urban street life and government politics at the same time. Aside from the great acting, gritty drama, and crude violence, it was interesting to view the show through an organizational theory perspective. From this perspective, it paints a great picture of two different organizational systems trying to counter one another. The drug system is a highly fluid and open system that protects itself with a series of norms and values. People are highly disposable and the system changes rapidly in response to threats. The government system is very hierarchical and functional and protects itself through a chain of command and control. Any attempt to circumvent that chain of command is met with fear and resentment. The show demonstrates the pitfalls and strengths offered by each of these organizational approaches. And, I think more importantly, how at every corner both systems, and their people, try to protect themselves. It is also interesting that in the end the more organic system adjusts to change more willingly and ultimately wins out in the end. The show really speaks to the differences in organizational culture as well.

On a local level, I think there are lessons in this show that transend the topic of the war on drugs and how pointless it is from many perspectives. The show also speaks to how government and the private sector interact and to how systems do or don't change. We can look at our local systems, like public schools, healthcare, police, etc., and see how incapable their structure is for dealing with root causes and systems associated with poverty, which are too fluid and cultural for a control and conquire style to make any difference. The hiararchical systems also tend to destroy innovation and swallow up anything that will make it uncomfortable. In Margrett Wheatley's terms, the best we can do is "purturb the system" enough, and in multiple places, so that it can no longer afford to remain the same. Then it will make incremental changes that may add up to a broader systems change.