THE BULLSHIT FACTOR

Many organizations are drowning in a flood of corporate bullshit, and this is particularly true of organisations whose leaders tend to deliberately use overcomplicated and perplexing language. Over inflated belief in capability, big ego’s and deceitful or deceptive practices add to the bullshit factor. Workplaces are awash with many forms of bullshit that manifest in many different ways, including misrepresentation, where leaders make statements without knowing the facts; meaningless job titles, deliberately confusing mission statements, incomprehensible buzz words and phrases like:

“Guided by relentless focus on our strategic principles, we will constantly strive to implement the critical initiatives required to achieve our vision. In doing this, we will deliver operational excellence in every corner of the organisation and meet or exceed our commitments to our any partners. All of our long-term strategies and short-term actions will be moulded by a set of core values that are shared by each and every employee”.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, bullshit is an informal vulgar term which means ‘to talk nonsense, especially with the intent of misleading or deceiving’. The Oxford English Dictionary defines bullshit as ‘to talk nonsense or rubbish’ and ‘to bluff one’s way through something by talking nonsense’. The word is rooted in ‘bull’ which has been used from the 17th century onwards to mean nonsense. This in turns derives from the Old French term bole which means fraud and deceit.

We’ve all experienced leaders and managers like this.

Bullshitting however, is different from lying. The American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who attempted to build a theory of bullshit, explains this clearly. He argues that whereas the liar cares about the truth – their aim is to prevent others from learning it – the bullshitter does not care about the difference between the truth and falsity of their assertions. They just pick ideas out, or make them up, to suit their purpose.

But bullshitting is hard work. It requires the capacity to continually come up with new, over-packed, ambiguous concepts. In fact, the creativity this requires is beyond the abilities of most organisational members to understand. To bullshit, most people need a continued supply of informal resources from external sources. Fortunately, there is a whole industry of consultants, gurus and other managerial idea workers who are charged with creating and circulating the supply.

Bullshit is not just used to impress other people. It can also be used as a kind of confidence trick to impress and convince oneself. Leaders and managers often use bullshit as a way of trying to build a convincing tale about who they are and their level of intelligence. Liberal doses of bullshit help anxious managers to perform a confidence trick on themselves and convince themselves that they are useful and worthwhile members of the organisation who actually have something to add. This can help them to firm up and believe their sense of self-worth and confidence within the workspace, yet dismiss the intelligence of their staff to see through their fog.

It never ceased to amaze me the number of people who made a career out of bullshitting. If you’re good at spouting appealing and convincing bullshit, this can take you places. One of the reasons so much of it flows in workplaces today is because it’s not challenged in the workplace, mostly because what comes out of the mouth sounds impressive, yet although incomprehensible it’s accepted by most to save face of the unknown. Bullshit then finds itself trickling down through an entire organisation and potentially into their culture.

In one example of classic bullshitting related to implementing a ‘resilience strategy’ into the workplace. The headquarters environment were highly adept users of the language of ‘resilience’ as were leaders, managers and government officials who could speak at length about resilience, but rarely could be specific about what they actually meant by it. The concept was therefore essentially ‘unclarifiable’ and could be applied to almost any aspects of the organisation’s activities. Operational staff were sceptical and indifferent about the concept of ‘resilience’ and what it meant for them because of this vagueness. However, when required the operational staff could parrot resilience terms as necessary when required (for instance, when a senior officer from HQ was present), but they didn’t seriously believe in it. One senior operational member described resilience talk as ‘toilet paper’ which he only used to ‘cover his arse’. They played ‘the game’ they were expected to play to get the ‘HQ geniuses’ off their back, especially as in their eyes only took infrequent interest in them and their work but were dismissive of the notion because they couldn’t understand what was being offered.

There’s so much bullshit circulating around organisations now that it is virtually impossible for anyone outside an organisation to understand this new language, but I was kind of glad this was the case as it confirmed to me, I wasn’t the only one. This new language led to a lot more unnecessary meetings and the sheer amount of time wasted embedding the newly confusing ‘foreign language’ meant that it seemed everything took twice as long to do. If only the energy devoted to this was reallocated to getting business done, many more positive outcomes would have been achieved.

Thank goodness mechanisms are now in place to address all this bullshit. The ‘bullshit asymmetry principle’ was formulated in January 2013 by a computer programmer named Alberto Brandolini, and hence is publicly referred to as ‘Brandolini's law; an internet adage that emphasizes the difficulty of debunking false, facetious, or otherwise misleading information where the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than is needed to produce it.

Similarly, the ‘Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale (OBPS)’ is also now in place. It’s a scale designed to gauge perceptions of the extent of organizational bullshit that exists in a workplace, where bullshit is operationalized as individuals within an organization making statements with no regard for the truth.

There’s hope that things might change in the workplace. Workplace bullshit needs to be called out. It’s very important that individuals feel empowered to ask questions in the workplace to ensure that decisions are made based on evidence and fact as opposed to a blatant disregard for information. So, the next time you find yourself thinking ‘well, that’s bullshit,’ speak up and call out decision-making that’s done without much regard for the truth, however I feel that for that to occur, it will take a great deal of effort to ensure this happens. Who, knows it might occur in my lifetime.