The arc of history toward symmetry

Symmetry, power and the long view.

Much of this collection speaks the language of two-way, relational communication: listening, mutual adjustment, the relationship as the unit of value. The honest objection is immediate. Real companies are not symmetrical. They have interests they intend to win, resources their publics do not, and a marked preference for changing other people’s minds over changing their own. Set against that, the language of symmetry can sound like the flattering description a powerful actor gives of itself. The objection is strong, and it deserves a strong answer rather than a pious one. That answer is not to defend symmetry as an ideal. It is to ask where symmetry actually comes from – and to be honest that it comes from interest before it comes from virtue.

The model under attack

James Grunig’s well-known typology runs from one-way publicity, through one-way information, to two-way persuasion and finally two-way symmetry – the last presented as the normative model, in which both the organisation and its publics may be changed by the exchange. It is the symmetrical model that critics have spent thirty years attacking, and the central charge is fair: as a description of practice, pure symmetry is a fiction. Organisations advocate. They persuade. Dialogue between parties of unequal power is not made equal by being called dialogue. A communication function that described its daily work as selfless mutual adjustment would be misrepresenting it. If symmetry means an organisation holding its own interests exactly level with everyone else’s, no such organisation exists, and a framework that requires one is naive.

But asymmetry does not survive either

The mistake is to conclude from this that communication is therefore asymmetrical and be done with it. Pure asymmetry does not survive contact with reality either – at least not for long. An organisation that only pushes, that treats every public as an object to be moved and never as a party to be accommodated, is making a bet that it will not be found out and will not need anything back. In a democracy, that bet loses. A free press reports the gap between what was said and what was done. Capital can be withdrawn; talent can leave; regulators and courts respond to accumulated grievance; and the publics that confer legitimacy can withhold it as readily as they granted it. Asymmetry can win a transaction. It systematically loses relationships. It is a short-horizon strategy wearing the confidence of a long one.

It is worth being concrete about how that withholding happens, because the mechanism is what the abstraction hides. Consider a bank, which sits on exactly the kind of lock-in that tempts an organisation to push: customers held in place by inertia, switching costs and the friction of moving a financial life. A bank can lean on that inertia for years – opaque pricing, fees that punish the inattentive, products built to suit the seller. The resentment does not vanish because the customer cannot easily leave; it accumulates, stored as political capital, and the political system discharges it as conduct rules, fee caps, redress schemes and levies. That is consent withdrawn on a lag – not commercially, through an exit the customer cannot afford, but politically, through a regulator the customer can always reach. The lock-in that looked like a licence to push was a loan against future regulation all along.

The mixed-motive reality

What actually exists lies between the two poles, and the most honest account of it is the one Grunig and his colleagues themselves reached under criticism: the mixed-motive model. Every real relationship sits on a continuum between pure advocacy and pure accommodation and moves along it as circumstances change; the organisation presses its interest and seeks the other party’s cooperation at once, and the durable value lies in the band where both are served – the win-win zone. This is not symmetry as saintliness. It is symmetry as the point where self-interest and accommodation stop being opposites. So the practical question is never symmetric or asymmetric in the abstract. It is how far along that continuum a relationship should sit – and, decisively, over what span of time it is being judged.

Why time changes the answer

Time is the variable the cynical account leaves out, and it changes everything. Asymmetry wins the deal; symmetry wins the decade. The shorter the horizon, the more an organisation can extract by pressing its advantage and walking away. The longer the horizon – the more the same organisation must keep operating in front of the same publics, regulators, employees and markets – the more the arithmetic itself pushes toward accommodation, because the relationship it damages today is the one it depends on tomorrow. This is where Arthur Page’s claim becomes not a moral sentiment but an operating fact. A corporation exists by public permission. That permission is not granted once; it is renewed continuously, and it can be revoked. An entity that depends on continuing consent in an open society has a structural incentive to behave as though its relationships were symmetrical – because, over a long enough horizon, they effectively are. The public can take back what it conferred. Symmetry, on this reading, is not the moral luxury of a company that can afford it. It is the long-run equilibrium for any company that intends to last.

The conditions, and where the arc bends back

This is the point at which the argument must refuse to become naive, because the arc toward symmetry is conditional, not guaranteed. It bends toward symmetry only where four conditions hold: the horizon is genuinely long, the society is democratic and plural, information flows freely enough that conduct is eventually seen, and the organisation actually depends on consent it cannot simply coerce or replace. Remove any one of them and asymmetry persists and pays. A monopoly with captive customers can push. An executive measured over two years can extract and exit before the bill arrives. A company being prepared for sale has no long horizon to protect. And in a closed information environment, manipulation is not found out, so it is not punished. The honest version of the thesis is not that history bends toward symmetry of its own accord. It is that symmetry is what self-interest chooses when the horizon is long and the society is open – and that where those conditions fail, the arc bends back. Anyone who promises the arc without naming the conditions is selling the idealism this essay is trying to avoid.

The conditions are worth watching precisely because they move. A fragmenting, low-trust, algorithmically sorted information environment can lengthen the interval before asymmetry is seen for what it is, and a longer interval is exactly what tempts an organisation to behave as if it will never be seen at all. That temptation does not change the long-run equilibrium; it changes how long the short run can be made to last, and how much damage can be done inside it. Which is an argument for the discipline of symmetry, not against it: the organisations that hold the long view when the environment rewards the short one are the ones still standing when the interval closes.

The honest position

So the position this collection should hold is neither the idealist’s nor the cynic’s. Communication is mixed-motive in the moment and symmetrical over the horizon, and in a democracy, for an organisation that means to endure, the horizon is long enough that the rational posture and the legitimacy-preserving one converge. That convergence is the whole case. Symmetry is not recommended here because it is noble, though it often is. It is recommended because consent, in an open society, is never granted for good.

The arc bends toward symmetry not because history is kind, but because in an open society the public can always take back what it lent.

My thinking on corporate communications is laid out here: www.jorgenchristiansen.no/how