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Guest post by Bob– War on Reality

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There’s a war on reality.

The opening shots in this war weren’t fired by professional politicians, although professional politicians have certainly fired their share of its bullets.

But my professional experience suggests the war started decades ago, by the un-named villain whose efforts turned the word “Photoshop” from noun to verb. It was when an image could be Photoshopped that we could no longer believe what we saw.

The war escalated as the World Wide Web became popular and “virtual reality” became a thing, because virtual reality’s malleability compared to real reality led to visitor experiences convincing enough that we believed the virtual realities we experienced were … well, real.

No, this isn’t a “Golly gee whiz, look at how much better the world used to be back in the good-old-days” column. Well, maybe a little, but its lede, buried as it might be, is about your role as a business leader.

That’s because of the role all leaders have in shaping the cultures of the organizations they lead and influence. Culture is relevant to the war on reality because the war is being won or lost … increasingly, lost … not by technological innovation, although technical innovations certainly provide useful milestones for tracking the war’s progress.

But it’s the social culture, which cares decreasingly about the truthfulness of the content being bandied about, that’s where the war on reality’s battleground is being fought.

The next milestone in the war on reality is the perfection of deepfake technologies. But we could withstand the advent of deep-fake-driven counterfeit realities were it not for the collapse of something we used to take for granted – a culture of honest inquiry. Because it was the culture of honest inquiry that encouraged us to condemn casual falsehoods and whoever tossed them into our decision-making conversations.

I think it’s fair to say that the use of casual falsehoods to win arguments has become routine in our political discourse (as evidence check out Politifact), which has, through Confirmation-Bias-driven repetition, made it routine in our social conversations as well, and from there to business conversations.

This development certainly isn’t limited to business decision-making, but as business-decision-making falls inside KJR’s domain boundaries let’s stick to your business culture.

There’s no reason to expect business decision-making to impervious. And, in fact, technology-enabled dishonesty in business decision-making is at least as old as the electronic spreadsheet. Its use in ROI calculations to “solve for the number” became so expected that the process of calculating return on investment was, in most businesses, explicitly designed to counter this practice.

If you disagree, take a look at your company’s methods, where, I’d bet, preparing high, low, and middle cost/benefits estimates is, for project proposals, mandatory.

From the perspective of prudent decision-making I sure hope your company enforces some version of this practice. But let’s home in on what it says about business culture. Which is that falling for confirmation bias isn’t considered problematic, and in fact deliberate dishonesty in making a case isn’t just acceptable – it’s encouraged. With judicious job-hopping it can even be a useful career-management tactic.

The thing about real reality is that eventually it catches up. Not always on a convenient timetable to be sure, but it does eventually catch up. Managers who are in their job for the long haul know to be wary. Early in my management career I was lucky enough to report to one of this breed.

Call him Fred. He and I were talking about a project I was advocating. Fred had a knack for not provoking defensiveness. So when he told me, “The best thing you can do with this project is to loudly and publicly put a bullet in it,” I had the good sense to listen. Fred’s point was that my high/low/middle estimates relied on assumptions that were, shall we say, optimistic.

He wasn’t accusing me of being a morally inferior being, trying to pull a fast one. He and I both understood how the game was played. His complaint wasn’t that the project would fail. That was a given. But I did have a choice – not whether the project would fail, but when.

Fred advised that killing the proposal early and loudly would do more for my reputation than watching it fail miserably after the business had invested significant time and effort into it.

Fred did his best to instill his organization with a culture of honest inquiry. He chose his side in the war on reality long before it became a serious social battleground.

I suggest you do likewise – not as a moral concern, but because if you fail to do so reality will eventually make itself known. Our collective choice isn’t whether it does.

It’s when.

Comments (5)

  • Bravo. Of course they call it strategic misrepresentation, not dishonesty. Lol.

  • Excellent post. The best illustration of this in our lifetime is the Big Three and Japanese automakers.

  • Bob hasn’t the horse already left the barn on this? I know executives that consider Google to be the same as a encyclopedia. They pass around links that support their beliefs without even questioning the validity of information on the internet. When you question their “facts” they send more links.

    The Google culture is about searching on the web for answers. That isn’t a culture where intellectual debate occurs and people learn from others. Learning to me is using a variety of sources to try to find the best answer, not the convenient one.

    I agree 100% with what you wrote and you have added insights I hadn’t even considered. But – I can’t figure out how to fix it. It is much worse than optimistic spreadsheets now.

    • How to fix it? In the short term I doubt there’s a fix to be had. In the long term … well, that’s the whole point this week. The cure is culture change. I’m pretty sure it’s what’s needed. I am, though, far from optimistic that the forces available to change the culture have the steadfastness to engage in it.

  • There’s a lot to think about in your article, not much of it pleasant, but all of it necessary…

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