It is not done to call “bullshit”

Maxims and arrows Go Premium A hearty collection of the JC’s pithiest adages. Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Maxim Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

It is not done to call “bullshit”.

Is this the first principle, or the last word, in practical risk management?

The power of a purpose

The JC was once employed by a financial services firm whose new CEO, in a flush of new-broom exuberance, decided the bank needed an explicit purpose.

Working groups from around the organisation came together to settle on something pithy, memorable and meaningful. They invited a diverse cross-section of staff — it must have been, for they invited ne’er-do-wells like the JC — to workshop some suggestions formulated for our consideration by the executive board. You can just imagine, can’t you. One was something along the following lines: “Collaborating with our communities to eradicate global inequality”. Not exactly that, but not far off. In any case it aspired, without qualification, to vouchsafe global equality.

All around the room nodded in that thoughtful, non-committal manner one adopts in situations where you cannot rule out a trap — all, that is, except your correspondent who asked, gingerly, whether a bank whose most significant line of revenue accrued from its ultra-high net worth wealth management business — one which, by aspiring to make the super rich richer was really rather committed to increasing inequality — really ought to be saying such a thing?

The reaction was interesting: by turns horrified but acquiescent. The suggestion was dropped like a hot potato, but the JC was not invited to any more sessions.

No-one wants to hear your truths

Given that any commercial organisation is a self-perpetuating autocracy, we should expect a great deal less licence to the free expression by the rank-and-file of uncomfortable opinions than is virtue-signaled by the boss in his daily lectures on the telescreen.

Those who survive in an organisation are shaped and enculturated by it. They do not so much learn not to call “bullshit”, but rather are selected for the sort of sunny disposition from which it does not to occur to them to call “bullshit”.

Such “brand ambassadors” in turn, are a crucial part of the recruitment process — almost everyone is part of the recruitment process, somehow, these days — and so they select people who they think are a “good cultural fit” — that is, rather like them: similarly disinclined to call “bullshit”, or even notice it.

Now, “calling bullshit” might not be actively repressed in the organisation — to the contrary, the politburo may implore their people to do so at every opportunity, and may even mean it. For people are not punished for calling bullshit: they just don’t. It is bred out of them.

But for every well-intending manager who encourages the frank exchange of views, there will be three in HR who wish the world were a safe space were everyone was kind, all points of view respected, and those feeling fragile should free to lie down or have a cry.

Thus, organisations thrive and flourish despite, and not because of, their internal governance.

See also

• Call bullshit
• Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about
• Consultation
• Otto’s razor: don’t assume malice where incompetence is an equally good explanation.
• Thought leader