Ignorance
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Office anthropology™
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Ignore
/ɪɡˈnɔː/ (v.)
We learned at our mothers’ aprons:
If you ignore something for long enough it will go away.
Dear old Grandma Contrarian demonstrated the sense in this adage countless times on 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.
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 on day one, and if the deal is such that customers cannot 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 and then expect — even hope for — no product or service in return? Well, there is one broad category: insurance contracts. Product warranties, travel insurance, fire and general.
We all buy insurance against remote contingencies hoping we do not need it. The insurer’s business is to mutualise those remote contingencies across a large group of people. We are happy to overpay, marginally, for our share of the mutualised risk: this is how an insurer makes money. If it provides a million people with fire insurance at £300 per annum and, actuarially, expects five hundred of them to suffer an average fire damage of £200,000 then 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.
From the insurer’s perspective the return is perfectly asymmetric: In any year, 999,500 customers expect nothing in return for their outlay. But 500 expect enormous payouts. averaging £200,000. And a person who has a claim in one year is highly unlikely to have another claim the next year.
It is possible to treat 99.95% of your customers fabulously by doing nothing. They will be happy as long as signing up is easy and you have a jaunty marketing campaign with meerkats or comedy opera-singers. For the unaffected 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. Actually, 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. But they represent 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 claim process confusing, slow, laborious and prone to error? Indeed, the harder you make their process, the better for your business it will be. There it is again: form over substance.
Of those valid 500 claimants, 450 will have open-and-shut cases. Fifty will be somewhat arguable but, ultimately — if it ever went to court — the insurer will have to pay. Nonetheless a rational but unempathetic 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 the moment these agencies get involved. The option it is exercising is seeing whether the customers will invoke those mechanisms. Statistically, some portion of these valid claimants won’t: they 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.