Fixing the TVA - A 'Loki' perspective

How to protect our timeline with the power of org design

"Are we aligned on this?"

"HR neEdS tO aLiGN iTSeLf to tHe bUsiNEsS sTrAteGy" - every HR manager is tired of hearing this beaten down sentence about how they need to ensure that people initiatives are 'strategically aligned'. This sounds obvious but its importance can often get lost in the simplicity of the idea. Today we will explore a systematic way to evaluate this alignment and demonstrate the same using the Time Variance Authority (TVA) from the Disney+ series Loki. Needless to say, there will be spoilers from the show. So strap on because there’s a lot of fixing for us to do here. The analysis is based on the widely accepted premise that successful organisations emerge when work, people, organisational structure and culture 'fit' together or are congruent. (Refer the Nadler-Tushman Congruence Model). This model is commonly used to identify root causes of organisational performance gaps.

A brief history of the TVA

The story: The TVA claims that long ago, countless timelines battled each other for dominance in a multiversal war that caused widespread death and destruction. To put an end to this and to prevent such events in the future, certain powerful beings called the 'Time Keepers' emerged and organised the entire multiverse into a single 'sacred timeline'. They then created the Time Variance Authority to monitor and police 'variants' who create branching timelines that could potentially lead to another multiversal event. Quite a reasonable proposition given we are talking about the MCU here.

The real story: Eons ago, a mysterious being referred to as 'He who remains' discovers that there are other universes stacked upon his own. He initially interacts with other variants of himself to exchange scientific expertise across the multiverse but later finds out not all of his variants are particularly nice. Some are just after the simple things in life, like multiversal dominance. 'He who remains' then ends the war by weaponizing a powerful creature know as Alioth. He then proceeds to isolate his timeline and create the TVA to manage the entire business.

Keeping the discussion of free will vs destiny aside, the founder has done a good job of instilling a 'glorious purpose' to the TVA employees, albeit through a fake origin story. Like all good CEOs, he distances himself from the business-as-usual activities of the TVA to focus on more important things.

The organisation chart above briefly describes the functions of each of these major units. It takes us little effort to see the TVA's strong resemblance (both structurally and culturally) to banks and government organisations. Control and efficiency are seen to be success metrics in such cultures and employees with competencies like timeliness, consistency, process excellence etc., ultimately tend to become the leaders. This is illustrated neatly through Judge Ravonna's tendency to stick to the rules even after she finds out the whole thing was a lie. Both the time keepers and Miss Minutes are depicted as strong tools that reinforce the culture of compliance across the TVA (even though all employees are just brainwashed variants). One thing that is not exactly clear is how all these employees are rewarded. I mean what are they all working towards?

Evaluating congruence

The congruence model can be applied with a few easy steps without having to depend on consultants or other external resources. Once we decide on the unit of analysis, the first step is to identify the strategy / problem we would like to solve for. In this case, that would be to maintain the flow of the sacred timeline and to avoid any risk of deviations resulting from 'nexus' events. The next step would be to identify critical tasks and work processes required to implement this strategy. Given the TVA's strategy, the critical success factors are compliance and process excellence. With this preliminary understanding, it is time to deep dive into each of the 4 elements (work, people, structure and culture) and finally analyse the relationship between these elements.

• Work - What are the tasks that need to be carried out regularly? What are the steps being taken to maximise task efficiency? What are the barriers to completing these tasks and is the work meaningful? These are some of the questions to ponder upon. The critical task for the TVA is clearly identifying and stopping nexus events. Even tough the TVA works like a machine, rogue variants like Sylvie are the main barriers to their mission.

• People - Do all the employees possess the requisite knowledge and skills? Are they suitably compensated? The only glimpse of training activity we get from the show is Miss Minutes taking Loki through the SOPs of handling Nexus events. The problem is that though the employees are brainwashed into working for the TVA, it is hard to change their original personalities. Mobius' high degree of openness to new experience is what gets him to trust Loki and be open to the fact that all the employees could be variants. This is something the TVA needs to consider incorporating in their subsequent 'talent acquisition' efforts - to use variants that would not question the process.

• Structure - How many layers of decision making are there? How standardised are the procedures? Is the decision making centralised or decentralised? The TVA is doing pretty good on this element. There is a high degree of standardisation when it comes to handling nexus events. The analysts and hunters exercise a good amount of autonomy and do not have to go through multiple layers of approvals for critical decisions like pruning a variant.

• Culture - What is the dominant culture type of the organisation? How much do employees trust the organisation? Do the employees believe in the ethics of the organisation? The TVA clearly needs a hierarchy / control oriented culture which they have already perfected. It can get problematic if the employees start to question the TVA's decision to curb free will in the name of multiversal harmony.

The next step is to analyse the relationship between these elements, which can be summarised as follows:

Clearly the root cause lies in the work-people fit and people-culture fit. The final step of this process is to build and sustain congruence. Whatever the solution might be, has to keep the current congruence intact and re-configure the emerging incompatibilities. The model does not get into potential solutions for the identified misalignments. What is more important is the process and how comprehensively this analysis is performed on the unit in question.

For all time. Always

After the death of 'he who remains', we are led to believe that a more dangerous variant of the character takes over the TVA. Interestingly, his first move is to wipe out Mobius and Hunter B-15's memory of Loki and Sylvie. This new villain really understands the importance of culture fit and organisational congruence.

"Beliefs that survive aren't necessarily true, rules that survive aren't necessarily fair and rituals that survive aren't necessarily necessary. Things that survive do so because they are good at surviving."

— Los Angeles Times, 20 Mar. 1999

This to me is the most powerful take-away from the show and org design seems to be the only magic that can work inside the TVA. It is easy to dismiss this as another Marvel story but it does a really good job in getting us to think about those little cultural nuggets at our own workplace that we take for granted and accept as reality.