Why we bullshit & why it might be important to try harder not to?

Trust thought for today - regarding trust and bullshit - thank you all for your valued contributions.

The data in this outline study were mined from a broad-spectrum multi-stakeholder action research consultation among change agents present on 3 online network platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter & my Bath Masters group. Due to limited input from stakeholders (perhaps because it posed a significant challenge to their mental health to confront the toxic nature of today’s workplace or a result of excessive workload resource allocation due to Covid) I have only undertaken a thought shower analysis to address the low hanging fruit as I need to put this to bed by close of play today.

I triangulated the excellent work (no BS!) of Ian McCarthy 'Confronting indifference toward truth: Dealing with workplace bullshit' and Prof Joe Moran 'The Scourge of Managerial Blah' with my own half-baked Friday afternoon thoughts to ideate a Bullshit Analysis Reflection Framework (B.A.R.F) to posit why we do this & why it's upsetting & potentially serious. EG:

1. We want to avoid dealing with difficult emotional things or obscure the real impact of our actions on people - rightsize, reduction in force.

2. To look good & belong - using new buzzwords makes us feel like we are part of the in-crowd & we think this will make us look good. It's when these perfectly good words get overused or used in tangential ways that they become bullshit - agile, ideation, ecosystem.

3. We exaggerate because we felt the truth is so boring we think over-emphasis or spicing it up will get more attention - zero tolerance policy, essential, iconic, passion, especially 'passion for sharing extraordinary sensory experiences' instead of 'we sell quite nice coffee!'

4. We are lazy & it's hard. So much easier to bundle up a few bits which sound fancy than do the hard work of thinking & articulating what we mean - on a journey, hit the ground running, it is what it is, working flat out and long stream of consciousness phrases with no discernible meaning at all.

Joe Moran: "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."

Bullshit seems at its most annoying when there is a blatant mismatch between the words & the reality - we have been working tirelessly, we are passionate about, we are agile, we want people to be flexible, dynamic, team players.

This becomes an integrity issue where unintelligible language is used deliberately to mislead, and, as in Reason 1, to try to distance yourself from the impact of your actions. Ian Maccarthy: "While the liar knows the truth and wittingly bends it to suit their purpose, the bullshitter simply does not care about the truth."

But this blizzard of non-language, whilst amusing, surely erodes trust because it replaces meaningful communication & human connection? We must try harder!