We Are Already Political

On the day the Tamil Nadu¹ election results came in, I wasn't following the news. I hadn't read a single article about the campaign, the candidates, or the predictions. But my WhatsApp told me everything I needed to know, not about the result, but about the people in my contact list.

Within hours, the statuses had divided cleanly into two camps. One side was celebrating. The other was vehement, even furious, about this untested dark horse who had somehow come to power. What struck me was not the division itself. It was the certainty. Nobody hedged. Nobody said "I'm not sure what to make of this yet." Everyone had a position, a reason, a conviction, sourced from Instagram, ShareChat, WhatsApp forwards, and they wore it as though they had reasoned their way there independently. I did not speak to a single person who did not have a clear opinion. Except my mentor. When I spoke to her, she said: "This is interesting. We will have to wait and watch to see what he does."

We are, all of us, very comfortable with politics when it is happening at a sufficient distance.

The Principled Position

We say we don't do politics. Office politics, specifically. That is beneath us. It is one of the more common things I hear from people who are otherwise extraordinarily capable. They don't want to get involved in office politics. They would rather focus on their work and let the results speak.

But look at what we actually do.

We follow world affairs. We read about elections, trade wars, political shifts in countries far from us and sometimes close to home. What happens in Washington or Beijing does ripple into our lives, and we know it. But the opinions we form are almost entirely borrowed. We are not gathering first-hand information. We are consuming news that has been filtered, framed, and shaped by journalists, news organisations, and politicians with their own agendas. And yet we hold those borrowed views with remarkable certainty. Certain enough to argue with close friends and family. Certain enough to write people off because they see it differently.

That is politics. Not a special category of behaviour that belongs to politicians or to people who are comfortable with power. The ordinary human activity of following what is happening, forming a view, and trying to bring others around to it. We have been doing it all our lives. At the dinner table, in the group chat, in every meeting where we have a perspective and want it to land.

When we say we don't do office politics, we are not saying we don't influence. We do. What we don't want is to be seen as someone who is manipulative, selfish, and crooked.

Because when office politics becomes visible, when it comes out into the open, that is almost always what it looks like. The person actively moving pieces, managing agendas, engineering outcomes for personal gain. That is the version we have all witnessed. And none of us want to be that person. The discomfort is real. But it has been dressed up as a principled position when it is, in fact, a specific aversion. What that aversion costs over time is worth understanding.

There is no correspondent for your organisation

Part of what makes macro politics seem manageable is that someone else has already done the reading for you. The journalist, the analyst, the commentator on your feed have processed the raw material, applied a frame, and handed you a conclusion. And even when you do your own research, reading across multiple sources, it is quite likely that you pre-selected the ones that most align with your existing view. The certainty that comes with that is borrowed. It passes as your own opinion because the effort was real. But the conclusion was already decided.

In your organisation, there is no correspondent. Nobody is going to send you a briefing on why that decision was made without you, or what the restructuring actually signals, or whose influence is quietly growing on the floor above yours. You have to develop the capacity to read it yourself, in real time, with incomplete information, while you are also a participant in the system you are trying to understand. That is a genuinely difficult skill, and it is one that nobody teaches you, or tells you that you need, or even names as a skill at all.

It is far more comfortable to say you don't engage in office politics than to sit with the possibility that you haven't yet learned how.

Merit when it works for us, politics when it doesn't

There is something sharper underneath the "I don't do politics" position, and it shows up most clearly in the language we use.

When someone else gets promoted over you, the explanation assembles itself quickly. They are close to the boss. They said the right things to the right people. It was political. But when you are the one who gets promoted, the explanation is different. The results you delivered. The project you led. The value you demonstrably brought. And even if you do acknowledge that someone spoke for you in the room where the decision was made, you tell yourself it is because they recognised your competence. The advocacy folds back into merit. The informal system disappears from the story.

We rarely sit with the other possibility. That someone said our name in a room we were not in, in a way that mattered. That the informal system, the one we claim not to participate in, worked in our favour quietly, without our knowledge or consent. And that it has been doing so, in ways large and small, for most of our careers.

Here is what I have come to believe, and what the evidence from thousands of careers supports: if you have gotten anywhere, the informal system has worked for you at some point. Whether you are comfortable with that or not, it is how organisations move. The question is not whether you are part of the system. You already are. The question is whether you are going to read it clearly enough to navigate it deliberately.

Becoming your own correspondent

Political literacy is not learning to play the game. It is not becoming someone you don't recognise. It is the discipline of becoming your own correspondent, learning to read your own environment with the same seriousness and attention you already bring to everything else.

It is about learning to read the room. To see what is happening there clearly enough that you can respond rather than react. To look beyond your immediate situation to what is moving around you, what might affect you and your team, not just today but in the months ahead.

The news will always have someone to interpret it for you. Your organisation will not. That gap is where political literacy lives.

If you want to start closing that gap, this is where we begin.