Bullshit erodes trust - why we do it & how to stop!
This post is written by Hilary Sutcliffe, director of UK-based not-for-profit SocietyInside, and Ian McCarthy, W.J. VanDusen Professor of Innovation and Operations Management at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.
A workshop I did for Apolitical is also now available on the Bullsh*t section of my YouTube Channel. Excited that 550 attended and 1320 registered. We had fun and got good input into what the most annoying words are!
Some people are having trouble logging in to it here on the Apolitical site and so the article is also reproduced below:
The problem: Language is often designed to obscure meaning, aka bullshit.
Why it matters: Academic research has shown that its use obscures the truth, saps morale and erodes effectiveness.
The solution: A new approach developed by academics, the C.R.A.P. framework, has been designed to help Comprehend, Recognize, Act and Prevent bullshit in the workplace and in public life.
It’s fun to ridicule corporate nonsense like the multinational coffee company who tells you they have “a passion for sharing extraordinary sensory experiences” or to mentally tick the boxes on your bullshit bingo list as a manager exhorts you to “think outside the box and give 110% so you can pick the low hanging fruit and hit the ground running”!
But bullshit is a serious problem not just for business, but also for politics and the public service. As Professor Ian McCarthy and colleagues identify in their academic study, Confronting indifference toward truth: Dealing with workplace bullshit’, this pervasive form of misrepresentation obscures the truth, saps morale and erodes effectiveness. My own research on trust also shows that this blizzard of non-language, whilst amusing, contributes to an erosion of trust in each other and in organisations, including governments, because it subverts meaningful communication and allows us to mentally distance ourselves from the impact of our actions.
But what to do? As Professor McCarthy identifies, “despite its pervasiveness and impact on workplace morale and performance, there is a dearth of advice on how to deal with workplace bullshit”. So he has helpfully created the sardonically named C.R.A.P framework to help us Comprehend, Recognise, Act and Prevent bullshit.
Why we do it?
To assist us with this task, it’s also helpful to understand why we do it, as none of us are immune. Through my Bullshit Analysis Reflection Framework (B.A.R.F), I have concluded that there are four main reasons why people bullshit:
1. To distract from responsibility and avoid emotion
Bullshit is most damaging to trust when there is a blatant mismatch between the words and the reality, or where unintelligible language is used deliberately to obscure or mislead. As Ian McCarthy writes: “While the liar knows the truth and wittingly bends it to suit their purpose, the bullshitter simply does not care about the truth.”
Individuals and institutions, consciously and unconsciously, seek to obscure the real impact of their decisions and distance themselves from the emotional and personal consequences of their actions through bullshit. This is why terms such as ‘rightsize’ or ’downsize’ were invented and why strange, distant words are invented to replace perfectly understandable ones — like ‘Value Engineering’ to describe the stringent cost-cutting demands which ultimately led to the Grenfell Tower Fire.
2. To manipulate
McCarthy explores the distinctions between bullshit and lying, and demonstrates how bullshit is different because it is used deliberately to manipulate by obscuring meaning with complex or jargon-ridden language. This persuasive bullshit avoids or circumvents declaring a clear reality.
Dr Roger Miles, a specialist in human-factor risk, observes that “a speciality of certain politicians and abusive corporate bosses is the creation of a parallel language, an alternative set of words to describe what is happening. This is a form of ‘institutionalised gaslighting’ that allows the unscrupulous leader to manipulate the language so as to ‘own’ various successes whilst seeking to evade personal responsibility for any failures.” ‘Take Back Control’ and the Leave Campaign’s communications approach to Brexit are two textbook examples.
3. To look good and belong
Using new buzzwords makes us feel like we are part of the in-crowd and we think this will make us look and sound like we know what we are doing. Sometimes this works, but it’s when these perfectly good words get overused and become jargon or are used in tangential ways that they become bullshit — such as agile, ideation, ecosystem.
Or we exaggerate because we think we, or the truth, are so boring that over-emphasis or spicing it up will get us more attention or make what we say look more important — think about ‘zero tolerance policy’, ‘top splicing’, ‘upstream interventions’, ‘critical enablers’, anything ‘key’, all the boring things that ‘we are passionate’ about, or a recent favourite of mine the ‘public realm improvements’ used to explain the current building work in London’s Hanover Square!
4. Because we’re lazy and it’s hard
It’s so much easier to bundle up a few bits which sound fancy than do the hard work of thinking and articulating what we mean. English Professor Joe Moran, dissecting bullshit in his article ‘The Scourge of Managerial Blah’, concludes that “most people have no great facility with words. Tying nouns together with weak verbal and prepositional knots is the simplest and quickest way to rustle up a sentence and achieve a superficial fluency.”
How to stop
So what can we do about it? McCarthy’s excellent C.R.A.P. framework provides a useful guide. He encourages us all to be vigilant, to “develop a healthy cynicism about communications that suffer from abstract, over-complicated English, excess jargon, illogical connections, and lack of evidence.” He urges us to:
Comprehend:
Being alert to the purpose of bullshit is the starting point. “The essence of bullshit is that it involves a disregard for the truth. When an audience appraises bullshit, in addition to assessing its appeal, they will also reach their own conclusions about whether or not the message is grounded in the truth.”
Recognise:
“The cornerstone to recognising bullshit is knowing how it masquerades. This involves recognising how colleagues go about framing statements (in written, spoken, or graphical form) that are without regard for the truth. Typically, such statements are abstract and general in nature and come across as the opposite of plain English. The statements will lack details, sources, and logic, and they will be full of logical disconnects and gaps”.
Act:
When seeking to respond to bullshit we respond in one of four ways:
EXIT — escape from the BS
VOICE — confront the BS
LOYALTY — accept the BS
NEGLECT — disengage from the BS
There are many pressures facing individuals within corporations which make taking a stand against bullshit tough. But humour helps and a reputation for speaking clearly and concisely is, despite everything, still a valued skill.
Prevent:
Effective prevention will minimise the need for, and costs associated with, recognising and acting against bullshit. McCarthy proposes four practices to help prevent bullshit:
Encourage critical thinking
Value evidence over opinions
Prohibit excessive jargon and statistical trickery
Eliminate pointless meetings and committees.
We would also suggest compulsory reading of Prof Joe Moran’s enjoyable guide to clear writing ‘First You Write A Sentence’, and Apolitical’s Public Servants’ Guide to Effective Writing.
So, perhaps if we adopt the C.R.A.P. framework and replace bullshit with more authentic and clear communication, it might help citizens understand better what politicians and public servants actually do, what they care about and how they are going to deliver on their promises. Who knows, it might even help us all get on with each other better, help create organisations we all want to work in and restore some of the lost trust that bullshit has caused...
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