Bullshit erodes trust — why we do it and how to stop

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 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. 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 moral 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 corporations, 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, Recognize, 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. Thought my Bullshit Analysis Reflection Framework (B.A.R.F) I have concluded that there are 4 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 & the reality or where unintelligible language is used deliberately to obscure or mislead. Ian McCarthy: “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 corporations, 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. Which is why terms such as ‘rightsize’, ’downsize’ or ‘reduction in force’ were invented.

2. To manipulate

McCarthy explores the distinctions between bullshit and lying and demonstrates how bullshit 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 abusive corporate bosses, politicians and dictators of nation-states is the creation 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.”

3. To look good & 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 — ‘zero tolerance policy’, ‘critical enablers’, anything ‘key’, all the boring things that ‘we are passionate’ about, or a recent favourite 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

So much easier to bundle up a few bits which sound fancy than do the hard work of thinking & 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 to 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 recognizing 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 4 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’

So, who knows, if we adopt the C.R.A.P. framework and replace bullshit with more authentic communication it might help us create organisations we all want to work in, get on with each other better, become more productive, and restore some of the lost trust that bullshit has caused!

Hilary Sutcliffe is the Director of UK-based not-for-profit SocietyInside, London, UK

Ian McCarthy is W.J. VanDusen Professor of Innovation and Operations Management at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada.