Ignorance

Office anthropology™ →Go uptown If You Ignore It Long Enough, It Will Go Away (von Sachsen-Rampton, 1941) The JC puts on his pith-helmet, grabs his butterfly net and a rucksack full of marmalade sandwiches, and heads into the concrete jungleIndex: Click ᐅ to expand: Work anthropology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Ignorance
ˈɪɡnᵊrᵊns (n.)
2. Not in the sense of being uninformed; rather the deliberate act of ignoring things about which you have been informed — especially people, evidence or facts that would, were you to pay them any mind, sit uncomfortably with, or upon, your dearly held beliefs.

Hence, the eternal wisdom we learned at our mothers’ aprons:

If you ignore something for long enough it will go away.

Dear, batty old Grandma Contrarian demonstrated the sense in this adage countless times by ignoring the rambunctious young JC. To be sure, he could be — still can — quite the exasperating toe-rag, but pay his antics no mind and eventually he will go and bother someone else.

Ignoring as confirmation bias

Ignoring information you don’t particularly like in favour of better facts that you do is a basic form of confirmation bias that apparently informs much of contemporary social science, some rather egregious miscarriages of justice, and is the foundational principle of evolution by natural selection, which perhaps explains why we are so fond of it.

Performative consultation

The modern customer services industry has perfected the art of studied ignorance by means of what we call “performative consultation”. Firms will tell you how much they value your feedback; they will badger you to provide it, usually from an unmonitored account to which you cannot reply, but then steer you to some fatuous net promoter score survey or customer questionnaire that seeks multi-choice answers to loaded questions designed to validate the company’s already-chosen strategy.

Your complaint may be, “the coffee machine you sold me has singularly failed to work as promised, leaked and then exploded, putting my mother-in-law in hospital and your warranty department is not answering the phone” but your questionnaire will ask you “how did we do today? Was your call centre operator polite? Was the information you received clear and easy-to-follow?”

So much is well understood: this is the grim reality of consumer life in the networked economy.

Ignorance-as-a-service

But there is another kind of ignorance, which counts as a business strategy for those whose enterprises depend on scaling the value of mutualised upfront payments.

If your business is one where customers pay everything you can expect them to pay up front, and especially where the product is a “contingency service” such that customers do not necessarily expect you do do anything in return, there is logic to ignoring those who do ask, even fairly, for you to perform your end of the bargain.

Now, under what kind of contract do customers routinely pay for and then expect — even want — no service in return? Insurance contracts. Product warranties, travel insurance, fire & general.

We buy insurance against remote contingencies hoping we never need it. The insurer’s business is to mutualise remote contingencies across a large group. We are happy to overpay, marginally, for our share of the mutualised risk: this overpayment is the insurer’s margin. Optimising that margin has a direct benefit to the insurer: if it provides a million customers with fire insurance at £300 per annum and, actuarially, expects five hundred to suffer an average loss of £200,000, the insurer can pay out for each fire in full and still return a healthy profit: for an outlay of just £100m it earns £300m. That is already a good return.

The insurer’s return is asymmetric: in any year, 999,500 customers expect nothing in return for their outlay. But 500 expect enormous payouts. A person who has a claim in one year is highly unlikely to have another claim the next year.

You can treat 99.95% of your customers fabulously by doing nothing. As long as signing up is easy and you have a jaunty marketing campaign — maybe give them a cuddly toy meerkat when they sign up — they will be happy. What they are buying is their own peace of mind. You don’t have to do anything.

The other 0.05% are far more expensive to keep happy, but here is the thing: you don’t really have to keep them happy. You can’t: in their best case scenario, their house burned down. Even if you pay them out, they will lose their no-claims bonus and find you have altered their situation of risk and jacked up their premiums. They are going to be annoyed.

But they represent just half of one percent of your customers. So what if they don’t renew their policies? So what if you are late in replying to their claims? So what if you make the claims process confusing, slow, laborious and prone to error? Indeed, the harder you make the claims process, generally, the better for your business it will be.

And there are good grounds for making it specifically hard for edge cases. Of the 500 valid claims in a year, 450 will be open-and-shut cases. Fifty will be somewhat arguable but, ultimately — if it ever went to court — the insurer would be found liable. Nonetheless a heartless but rational insurer should, at first, decline those claims.

Now, insurers are bound by obligations of utmost good faith, and there are deterrents to acting unconscionably — regulations, consumer watchdogs, ombudspeople and ultimately legal action — but, basically, so what: the insurer can settle if and when these agencies get involved. But that will only happen if disgruntled customers persist for long enough with their claim. Statistically, some valid claimants won’t: some will be put off by the rejection, or just the insurer’s silence, and never make any complaint. If a customer doesn’t press its claim, the insurer will not have to pay.

Any such cases represent pure profit for the insurer.

Ignorance as a data-defeat device

Then there is run-of-the-mill organisational ignorance, as a strategy for forcing one’s own agenda whilst giving the impression of consultation and collaboration. In a world where every communication is tracked, kept, logged, stored and discoverable, where “what you see is all there is” and on-record communications are an indelible, implicating record, do not underestimate the perfidious power of saying nothing. Of not rising to it. Of ignoring things you wish had not been said.

There is no better example of this that Post Office Horizon IT scandal, wherein countless smoking guns were levelled at implicated personnel in the executive who, through the simple expedient of ignoring them on the record, were able, in ensuing years, to plead ignorance to them. The cloak of plausible deniability — “I did not see it”, “I did not read it that way”, “I just don’t recall” — could fill volumes.

Daniel Kahneman’s “What you see is all there is” owes a debt to Terry the chef, from Fawlty Towers, for it was originally Terry’s law: “What the eye don’t see the chef gets away with”. There is a real premium for the executive who knows how to “leave a ball outside off stump”.

Here, the misbehaver — the one who ought to be our hero — sows the seeds for her own downfall. For communications that do not comply with the unspoken guidelines for performative politeness — that are blunt, candid, uppity; that exhibit frustration or justified anger — offer an excuse to ignore them. No One Would Listen to Harry Markopolos as he laid out, in painstaking detail, to precise method of Bernie Madoff’s crimes, because he was an awkward Bostonian outsider with a penchant for hyperbole — though of course it wasn’t hyperbole. Paula Vennells could disregard Tim McCormack’s repeated, blunt, predictions of her future because they were aggressive and rude, notwithstanding that they were spot on.

The other kind of ignorance is the through demurral and compliance with the requirements of unhealthy peace in a dysfunctional organisation. Here discontented misbehavers discouraged, on pain of censure, from even raising their objections, so they don’t, whereupon there is no need for ignorance as a strategy because no complaint even arises.

The plausible deniability afforded by silence therefore informs a culture of silence. It becomes an attribute of advancement — knowing where your off stump is; mastering the art of the judicious leave.

The “Williams leave”

There was one classic moment, of many, in the Post Office Horizon IT scandal inquiry, when poor old Rodric Williams was on the stand, and confronted with a communication sent to him by external firm Bond Dickinson

Am I a man, or am I a muppet?

This is a horrorshow of an email to get from anyone, let alone your own external counsel. It is staggering that anyone at Bond Dickinson could have thought this wise to send — a partner apparently approved it, so we can only suppose they thought the cloak of litigation privilege would ensure it stayed private until the end of eternity — but note Williams’ classic response, as encapsulated in his examination by Jason Beer KC:

Jason Beer: They made a proposal that was essentially summarising threefold: firstly, that the Post Office should, through its lawyers, suppress disclosure for as long as possible; do you agree?

Williams: That’s what it says, yes.

Beer: Secondly, that suppression should be done in a way that looked legitimate to the outside world, agree?

Williams: Yeah, that’s what it says, yes.

Beer: And, third, that you were to say if you disagreed that disclosure should be suppressed but, at the same time, be made to look legitimate to the outside world?

Williams: Quite – I don’t think it quite says that but that’s certainly the gist, yes.

Beer: There’s no record of you saying that you did disagree, saying, “Don’t do that, it’s wrong”, is there?

Williams: There’s no record – as I say, I think say this in my statement, I did not recall – I have no recollection of this email, which is regrettable, because I was –

Beer: Are you used to getting emails from other lawyers saying, “We should suppress documents”?

Williams: I’m used to getting a lot of emails. As I say, I don’t recall reading this at the time. It was clearly sent to me, it was clearly addressed to me but I do not recall and the reason why I mention the date is, when the Inquiry provided this to me, I’ll be frank and say it’s a concerning email. I –

Beer: You searched your emails like frantic, no doubt, didn’t you?

Williams: I did and I couldn’t find anything around it until the dates were swapped and I looked around October and I did, indeed, receive it. It was in my inbox.

Beer: And you didn’t reply to it?

Williams: No, I –

Beer: You didn’t say, “no, don’t do that”?

Williams: I did not reply to it but I do not recall reading it carefully. I don’t recall it in any size, shape or colour.

Beer: Your actions are the more important thing rather than your present recollection?

Williams: That’s true, mm-hm.

Beer: What we can say is that you didn’t reply –

Williams: Correct.

Beer: – saying “No, lawyers shouldn’t suppress relevant documents, they shouldn’t do so in a way that is made to look legitimate, and they certainly shouldn’t do so because the content of the document is concerning and might be used by our opponent to make a good argument against us”. You didn’t do any of those things, did you?

Williams: No, it’s – I certainly didn’t reply in writing. I – as I say, I don’t recall. I don’t recall calling, either, which is the invitation there. I don’t recall any action on this so, no, I did not take any action in response to this.

As long as you do not acknowledge that email at all you have plausible deniability.

See also

• Financialisation
• Terry’s law
• Iatrogenic
• Software-as-a-service
• Insurance
• Confirmation bias