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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

That we’re living in a post-factual world isn’t in serious doubt. What remains to be resolved is the recursive question as to whether evidence that the world is post-factual should be allowed into debates as to whether the world is post-factual.

If you need evidence, (don’t worry — in spite of immense provocation I’m going to make no mention of Donald Trump, on the grounds that hitting the side of a barn does not demonstrate marksmanship) … I say, if you need evidence:

  • When “proving” the horrors of authoritarian government, which are you more likely to cite — a list of Joseph Stalin’s atrocities, or George Orwell’s 1984?
  • When attempting to demonstrate the nightmarish consequences of a social welfare state, do opponents find a social welfare hellhole to make their point, or do they bring up Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World?
  • The Republican party’s most influential economic policy wonk, Paul Ryan, has ideas so deeply rooted in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, that for years he gave copies to his interns to get them on board with his thinking.
  • While political liberals have no obvious equivalent work of fiction to cite, there is Harry Potter and the Millennials (Anthony Gierzynski and Kathryn Eddy, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013). Its authors persuasively demonstrate that J.K. Rowling’s series had a strong liberalizing influence: Her audience embraced her protagonists’ widely tolerant pluralism, skepticism of authority and the press, and aversion to violence and torture as acceptable means to even worthwhile ends … not because of any social theory, but because of how the good guys, bad guys, and bumblers in between behaved in the books.
  • Closer to home, it’s pretty clear that Spencer Johnson’s Who Moved My Cheese has had far more impact on how business executives think about organizational change than any formulation that actually, for example, works.
  • And closer yet to home, Gene Kim’s and Kevin Behr’s The Phoenix Project did more to persuade most industry thinkers that DevOps is real, practical, and important than any real-world DevOps projects.

Not that this is a new phenomenon. If you think otherwise, a title: Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Fiction as proof has inestimable value for the persuader. As characters, events, and, in some fantasy and science fiction, the laws of physics must all bow down and behave according to the author’s whims, in fiction it’s possible to “prove” whatever the author wants to prove. As an example: in The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris, Dave Kaiser and I proved that hiring only seriously ugly employees is a winning business strategy. Nothing to it. All we had to do was … oh, wait, maybe if I don’t tell you you’ll buy a copy.

It isn’t that fiction has no valid role to play in shaping opinion. Because of the way we humans go about the business of thinking, fiction is often the best way to illustrate an idea, especially in an era of limited attention spans. But illustration and demonstration are two very different matters. What makes fiction dangerous is how easily it can nudge an unwary reader across the line that separates the two.

Persuasion through fiction is, to be fair, nowhere near as nasty as persuasion through the utterly vicious disregard for decency shown by the trolls, fake news sites, unrepentant and repeated lies, and conspiracy theories amplified and bounced around the Twitter-verse by Tweet ‘bots.

But given what’s been published on the subject of post-factualism, you might think it’s limited to audiences that read this crap and accept it uncritically because, if its members have even heard the phrase “confirmation bias,” they think it’s something that only the idiots who disagree with them are afflicted with.

While that might be what we’re descending into, I don’t think it’s where post-factualism starts. I think it starts with conflating fact and fiction.

And if you think this is just one of Bob’s occasional social commentary rants, it’s worth pointing out that the world of business is far from immune. Google “Comet Ping Pong pizzeria” if you don’t believe me.

Consider: If a pizza joint with ping pong tables can be the target today, your company could just as easily be in the crosshairs tomorrow.

Which leads to a suggestion: If you don’t already have a social media listening post set up, set one up. Make sure it’s set to monitor darker sources and detect darker material than your average “Your product sucks!” Facebook post.

Meanwhile, don’t wait until a bunch of crazed conspiracy theorists start accusing your organization of violating the Don’t Be Creepy rule.

The time to plan is before you need to respond, not when you’re under attack.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

With the election over, the world’s opinionators have switched their opining from comparing candidates’ horse-race strategies and tactics to pointless post mortems on the same subject.

Pointless because the correct analysis is, what was Clinton thinking, setting up her own email server instead of using Gmail like everyone else?

Last week I promised to get back to business. I am. Because if you filter out all the noise, the Clinton Email Fiasco provides plenty of guidance for the world of organizational dynamics.

Start with an excellent long-form piece by Politico’s Garret Graff titled “What the FBI Files Reveal About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server” (9/30/2016). According to Graff, the FBI’s investigation documents “… depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age.”

In broad brush if not detail, the story should sound familiar. Start with Clinton’s technical illiteracy. She apparently doesn’t even know how to use a personal computer. For email, she once learned to use a Blackberry and that was the beginning and end of her tech savviness. Even her staff’s attempts to move her to an iPad or iPhone died on the vine.

Couple that with the sheer volume of emails she had to contend with — you’ll recall they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Next mix in that the State Department’s secure email facilities were clumsy and antiquated. And that in addition to her Blackberry, Clinton managed much of her email traffic by having aides print out messages for her to read and hand-write responses. But outside the State Department’s facilities this couldn’t be done, so her staff forwarded emails to her private server as a workaround so they could be printed.

The punchline: Substitute your own company’s less-than-tech-savvy executives for Hillary Clinton. Substitute inconvenient or hard-to-use information technology for the State Department’s secure email system. Substitute Gmail and Dropbox for a privately managed email server.

And finally, substitute your technology-use policies for the State Department’s technology-use policies, and your insufficient technology refresh budget for the State Department’s insufficient technology refresh budget.

Get the picture?

Outrage is easy when someone in authority violates the policies everyone else is expected to follow. Empathy is harder.

But as any good business analyst will tell you, empathy is the essential ingredient in information technology design. “Documenting requirements” only gets you so far, as anyone knows who has documented the requirements for secure passwords will tell you. Those requirements are precisely what cause employees to write down their passwords on easily-found Post-It notes.

People have work to do. Executives are people too, often with bigger piles of work than anyone else. And character flaws notwithstanding, your typical executive mostly gets it done.

Executives are, if anything, even more impatient than anyone else regarding obstacles that keep them from doing it.

Regrettably, in my experience at least, at a personal level more executives see information technology as obstacle than see it as an assist, so while they might not be so extreme as to not know how to use a PC, there are plenty who won’t take the time to learn (for example) how to track changes in Word; to use SharePoint in its usual IT-friendly/user-unfriendly configuration; or to use the company’s web conferencing system’s whiteboard feature to facilitate mixed in-person/remote participant meetings.

Not to mention … it’s a whiteboard. How many employees at any level have PCs that let them use a stylus to draw on the whiteboard?

Answer: Very few, because of the rarely recognized chicken/egg nature of so many IT requirements: Few people ask for something because they don’t know it exists; IT doesn’t offer it because nobody asks for it.

So … where does the Clinton Email Fiasco take us?

It’s past time for businesses of all kinds to recognize that inconvenient IT, especially when coupled with a lack of technology savviness, constitutes a significant risk to the business.

Even more, it’s long past time to recognize that dealing with most risks by establishing policies are little more than CYA strategies. They’re pretty much worthless when it comes to preventing or mitigating the risks themselves.

While in your case the fiasco will be less obvious and visible, the lesson is nonetheless just as consequential when profits and brand are at stake as for more minor matters like appealing to voters.

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