We Need to Free Organizations of Bullshit

Preamble

I have to admit that I am a little surprised to find myself writing a series of articles on ‘organizational bullshit.’ At first glance, this is not my area of specialist expertise. But the more I have reflected on this topic, the more I have realized that I am at least partially qualified to contribute an opinion, as I believe any person is who has spent 30 years working deep in organizations. ‘Organizational bullshit’ is a systemic issue that touches all corners of business, meaning most people who’ve built a career are consciously or unconsciously fluent in its dynamics.

Before you dive into the main content, let me address a few elephants in the room:

Firstly, as you read through these articles you’re going to see the word ‘bullshit.’ A lot. But, this is not mere vulgarity. As you will see, ‘Organizational bullshit’ is a credible and growing topic of academic research. To examine it, understand it and address it, we need to call it by its name.

Secondly, by writing these opinion pieces, I am in no way pointing fingers and suggesting that I am immune to bullshitting. Despite a naturally low tolerance for bullshit, I have also played the corporate game. I have been relatively successful in business, partly because I learned how to balance competence and bullshitability. So, my aim in these articles is not just to shine a light on the phenomenon of organizational bullshit and hopefully help improve the business environment; it’s also to keep myself honest and accountable so that I can constantly get better at this stuff.

As for my motives in writing these pieces: for most of my career, I have received feedback that I can be too direct, even ‘blunt’ or ‘lacking in tact.’ I don’t dispute these comments – I know that I have usually not been particularly diplomatic when I suspect I’m encountering bullshit. As a leader, this has been a struggle sometimes, because while I recognize the need for sensitivity in people management (and have worked at developing this capacity), I’m also careful not to lose the essence of who I am, something that is central to the embodiment of ‘authentic leadership.’ Appreciating corporate bullshit for what it is has not only helped me become better at catching my own bullshit – something I believe every responsible leader should aim to do – but also enabled me to depersonalize it. Hopefully that allows me to be more effective in helping my peers de-prioritize their team members’ bullshitting abilities in performance reviews and promotion cases.

Before focusing on cyber-kinetic security, I was in law enforcement and counterintelligence. For 20+ years, I also ran a non-profit that fought against sexual exploitation of children, and child slavery. So, the well-being of others has always been close to my work and has helped me laser in on what’s ultimately most important. With that clear in my mind, I’ve never had too much time or patience for corporate bullshit, but now it has become even more urgent for me to find a healthy way to reduce bullshit in the teams I lead and work in. As I mention in Part 1, in my area of work – cyber-physical systems security (CPSSEC) / Operational Technology (OT) security / cyber-kinetic security world, previously disconnected specialisms like IT, engineering and management consulting are required to work together. This becomes difficult due to cultural differences, one of which is a varying tolerance for bullshit. So, in trying to make OT / cyber-kinetic security experts out of IT people and management consultants, I need to train them to focus more on objective, measurable, life-saving benefits. We all have to learn to cut the bullshit.

Finally, I recently took a more active role in making PwC Canada an employer of choice for neurodiverse people, and one of the things I’ve learned is that some of the best neurodiverse performers often have a very low tolerance for bullshit and are willing to call it out very directly. I’ve been inspired by this. It has confirmed for me that organizational bullshit needs to be dealt with if we are all to deliver the positive impact we hope to through our work. But it has also made it very clear to me that organizations, and those in leadership, need to learn how to better listen to truth-tellers.

Part 1: Why?

In the 1990 black comedy, Crazy People, Dudley Moore plays an advertising executive named Emery Leeson who, in the middle of a nervous breakdown, starts designing blunt, frank ads with slogans like “Buy Volvos – they’re boxy, but they’re good” and “Forget France. The French can be annoying. Come to Greece. We’re nicer.” This drift into truthfulness earns Leeson a stay in a psychiatric facility, but when his ads are accidentally printed and lead to record sales, Leeson and his fellow patients at the sanatorium are hired to be the creative force behind a new brand of “honest” or “no-nonsense” advertising. From thereon, the plot follows a predictable course as Leeson and his crew become the heroes in a battle against the mercenary owner of the advertising firm. However, the filmmaker’s point is still clearly made: advertising is full of bullshit.

There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking about this view, of course. Industries like advertising, sales, and marketing are routinely accused of being built on bullshit, but what the film represents is an intention to call that out; an intention that has, until recently, been mainly missing from broader public discourse; an intention that I passionately share.

Because it’s not just the commercial areas of business that have become infected with bullshit, it’s the whole operation. If you’ve ever sat through a 100-slide PowerPoint presentation, or read a corporate mission statement and wanted to wretch a little, or paged through a case study that had no relationship with reality, or been in a meeting where you felt like you were drowning in jargon and corporate acronyms, or felt confused and bewildered as your CEO “moved to align all stakeholders” during a Town Hall, you’ll know what I mean. It’s painful. It’s wrong. And it has to change.

Not just swearing, I swear

As tempting as it may be, I have not written this article as an excuse to say “bullshit” over and over and thereby vent some of my frustration at the state of the world (although there might be a bit of that too). “Organizational bullshit” is not an expletive; it is an academically referenced term at the center of a broadening body of serious and legitimate research. In his 1986 essay, “On Bullshit,” which later developed into a book by the same name, Princeton philosopher, Harry G. Frankfurt, was the first to look at the phenomenon through a more analytical lens, making it something that can be identified and, therefore, addressed.

Frankfurt proposed that bullshit and lying, for example, are not the same thing. This is not immediately obvious when looking at accepted definitions: the Merriam-Webster dictionary recognizes bullshit as an informal vulgar term meaning “to talk nonsense, especially with the intent of misleading or deceiving,” while a lie is “an assertion of something known or believed by the speaker or writer to be untrue with intent to deceive.“

In both cases, it seems deception is the ultimate goal, but Frankfurt points out the subtle but important difference between the liar and the bullshitter:

“The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values,” says the scholar. “In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true.”

In other words, the liar is defined by having some sort of relationship to the truth, even if what comes out of his mouth is the total opposite. In some perverse way, he respects the truth, at least enough to recognize it as something real and worth subverting.

The bullshitter, however, has no such regard for the truth – in fact, he is not interested in it at all. According to André Spicer, who literally wrote the book on business bullshit:

“Bullshitters do not lie. They don’t try to cover up the gap between what they are saying and how things really are. Bullshitters are indifferent to how things really are. They don’t care about whether their claims conflict with reality. All they care about is whether people will listen.”

The guiding line for this type of person is not truth (honesty) or the corruption of truth (lying), but rather whatever needs to be said to further his own interests (bullshit). This disconnection from truth makes a bullshitter more challenging to spot and more difficult to hold accountable because, in effect, what are they actually doing wrong? Unlike lying, which can be measured against some standard of truth, bullshitting is mostly a mix of exaggeration, inflation, misinformation, misdirection, and (often spectacular) invention.

Upon encountering bullshit, you may have an intuitive feeling that something is untrue, but that does not make it a lie, at least not in any black and white sense. And, to challenge the dictionary definition listed above, bullshitting is not the same as talking nonsense. Nonsense is just, well, nonsense, but bullshit pretends to offer some degree of meaning or truth that is non-existent. This is what makes bullshit so uncomfortable and exasperating to deal with – we know that something is not right, but we can’t quite put our finger on why.

As a result, we usually don’t deal with bullshit; we ignore it or tolerate it, often with a mixture of frustration and resignation. We shake our heads at the politician on TV, grit our teeth at the dinner party guest who knows everything, or inwardly roll our eyes when the boss makes another grandiose claim about the future of the business. This tolerance may be understandable, but it’s not healthy and, in my opinion, makes a bad problem worse, especially in the workplace.

There is a global pandemic of business bullshit, except, for this pandemic, there is no vaccine rollout, and self-isolation is not a solution (no matter how tempting it may sometimes be). Tolerance needs to be replaced with action. Bullshit is not harmless; it needs to be dealt with directly, and the conditions that encourage it need to be addressed.

What is organizational bullshit, where does it come from, and why is there so damn much of it?

Bullshit can be confusing – that’s partly why it’s so difficult to deal with – but as the subject is studied more and more, we are learning ways to recognize it more easily. Analyses by McCarthy et al suggest that there are three components to organizational bullshit:

1. Regard for truth
2. Bullshit language
3. The boss

1.     Regard for truth

In his 2006 book, On Bullshit, Harry Frankfurt declares that a bullshitter has “a lack of connection or concern for the truth” and a remarkable “indifference to how things really are.” This type of character is not, however, bullshitting for the sake of it (even though some career bullshitters seem to enjoy the game itself) – there is always something at stake. For those looking to climb the management ladder, bullshit – with its hollow language, denial of facts and data, and vague references to unquantifiable phenomena – is often a helpful tool in establishing an aura of authority. Bullshit makes you sound smarter, more knowledgeable and more qualified than you actually are, making you more likely to be promoted.

Even for those less Machiavellian in their motivations, bullshit can provide people with a sense of self-confidence, something to help them cover the gaps between what they do know and what they don’t. It’s easier to feel empathy for this person than for the one who bullshits purely for raw personal gain, but in both cases, the truth is still subverted to personal interest.

Let’s not be too judgemental here, though. Most people have had to ‘fake it till they make it’ at some point in their career, especially when they find themselves in a new role. There is clearly an element of bullshitting involved in such cases. So, it probably has value if it’s short-term and helps create a bridge to a place where the person can operate from genuine experience and understanding. Bullshit can also have a cultural role to play. Banter and exchanges of general nonsense – none of which have much regard for the truth – are often crucial to keeping a team connected and cohesive. But culture is where things start to get sticky.

Different teams and different organizations have different cultural attitudes to bullshit. In my focus area, the biggest challenge is that we sit between traditional engineers (electrical, mechanical, automation, process etc.), IT, and management consultants. These groups never had to work together before the explosion of cyber-physical systems / Industry 4.0. Now they are forced to collaborate, but they keep failing because of cultural differences, one of them being a much lower bullshit tolerance among engineers when compared to e.g. management consultants.

2.     Bullshit language

Business is flooded with bullshit language, and its coziest home is in the painful but ubiquitous jargon that makes up so much of the talk in organizations. McCarthy and his fellow researchers argue that “if a statement is riddled with meaningless language, acronyms, buzzwords, and jargon, then it is likely to be bullshit.” You know the feeling: a meeting in which everyone shares what’s ‘on their radar’, the team tries to ‘align’ or ‘sense check’ before ‘drilling down’ into how to ‘leverage’ a new ‘strategy’ in order to achieve ‘synergies’ (for a head-nodding dig into these terms and other forms of unbearable office jargon check out Steven Poole’s excellent ‘Who Touched Base in My Thought Shower?’).

Of course, there are appropriate and credible ways to use all of these words. But more often than not, in the world of everyday business, they become placeholders for real language. They don’t say what they mean. They are like linguistic balloons of hot air, and they are the main reason people regularly walk out of meetings feeling unclear about what was discussed and what’s expected of them going forward.

Perhaps bullshit language is addictive because it gives people a false sense of security. It helps provide them with a feeling of belonging – if you know what the bizarre mix of jargon and acronyms in your industry or organization means, you’re part of the in-crowd; if not, you’re out. André Spicer maintains this is especially true among managers: “Management jargon can help nurture a sense of self-confidence in the chronically insecure world of middle management.” More than that, Spicer says, managers who wholeheartedly embrace this language and become fluent in it appear more capable and are more likely to rise through the ranks faster. That takes us on to our third point.

3.     The boss

Petrocelli argues that people are especially likely to engage in bullshit when they feel knowledgeable about a subject, as many leaders do, and when they are socially and professionally expected to have an opinion, as most leaders are. Finally, bullshit is more common when people sense that they can get away with it, which the authority of leadership helps to ensure. As a result, bullshit in leadership is widespread, and even if the leader is unaware of it, research by McCarthy et al suggests that it does not go unnoticed by their subordinates:

“… employees believe that their superiors are key players in the dissemination of bullshit. Further, employees are likely to have to take action based on any bullshit communicated by their bosses. As a result, employees are likely to be acutely aware when their superiors use bullshit to advance their own self-interests.”

The impact of this pattern is far-reaching and can be profoundly damaging to organizational culture and outcomes. When employees are given bullshit jobs or tasks to perform, they inevitably reach a point where they feel lost and uncertain of their performance. That’s because, by its very nature, bullshit is vague and unclear, so it’s difficult to measure with performance indicators or connect to objectives and results. This is demoralizing for employees who are unable to point to any progress or development, but it also triggers a vicious cycle: without necessary checks in place (see Part 2 in this series), employees have no way of clarifying what is required of them, so they pass the buck further down the chain, usually by adding some extra bullshit to the mix. In the end, the only work that gets done is the work of bullshit, while the central operations of the business, project or team are increasingly neglected.

As a leader of cross-functional teams, I take this aspect of my job seriously –perhaps too seriously if you were to ask some of my colleagues. Quite simply, I know that the level of tolerance for bullshit in my team is set by me. If we are to deliver on what is expected of us, I need to draw a clear line and call bullshit when necessary. That’s not always easy to do, and it’s not always well-received, but it has to be done.

Why this matters

We are living through the Age of Purpose. Gone are the days of businesses having mission statements plastered across their boardroom walls – that’s ‘so nineties’ – nowadays, the fashion is to have a corporate purpose, a defining mantra that describes why the organization exists. In principle, I like this idea. I believe that being clear on why you are doing something can be incredibly valuable, whether you are an individual, a team, or an entire corporation. Or even a mayonnaise.

Unfortunately, corporate mission and purpose statements are a magnet for bullshit. They invite the creation of grand, abstract declarations of celestial intent, full of generic and contextually meaningless terms like ‘impact,’ ‘stakeholders’, ‘people,’ ‘change’, and ‘the future.’ More often than not, these statements bear little resemblance to the genuine operations of the business, fostering cynicism among employees and customers. But that’s not moderating the tendency towards inflationary bullshit. If anything, the trend is getting worse.

As consumers and top talent increasingly consider a company’s values before making buying decisions or deciding where to work, organizations are feeling the pressure to be seen as socially-minded corporate citizens who are committed to making the world a better place for all. Sometimes there is genuine intent behind this, often coming from a maverick CEO, but in the end, it’s the shareholders who’ll have the final say and, since most investors see profit as a business’ primary purpose, high-minded ideas usually stay just that: ideas. As a result, by the time the message reaches the market, it amounts to little more than ‘purpose washing.’ The older cousin of this bent is ‘greenwashing,’ which similarly tries to position the company as having better green credentials than it really does in the hope of attracting ESG investment and improving its brand image among ecologically-minded customers.

It’s easy enough to wave these trends aside as examples of corporate nonsense we just have to live with, but, just like other forms of bullshit, ‘purpose washing’ and ‘greenwashing’ are not harmless. Business will be crucial to solving the wickedly complex problems we face as a species, and bullshit undermines those players who are sincerely trying to help solve these challenges, steering investment in the wrong direction and damaging public trust.

Bullshit also has a debilitating effect at a more micro level. McCarthy et al. suggest organizational bullshit “can result in lower job satisfaction among the organization’s members, increased distrust in leadership, a reduction in productivity, and ultimately a negative impact on overall performance.” André Spicer argues that business bullshit hampers good decision-making, leading to judgment calls separated from facts and data. He also maintains that corporate bullshit, especially when it becomes culturally established, reduces diversity of thinking as those with differing perspectives and opinions are marginalized when their views compete with the interests of the most influential bullshitter(s) in the group. It’s important to note that these conclusions are based on existing research but that there is still not enough empirical data to make these arguments conclusive.

From my experience, the points listed above are all valid considerations, but at its essence, this is a moral issue. In the projects and teams I lead and work in, bullshit threatens our ability to do the job properly. It slows things down, muddies the waters, and lowers the quality of the final product delivered to the client. This is quite simply unacceptable. It’s not right, and I believe organizations should take more deliberate steps to reduce bullshit in the workplace.

How?

Part 2: How

One day, sitting in the shed he called home, the journalist, Oobah Butler, had an idea: he would turn his shed into a fake restaurant and make it the top-rated eatery in London. This audacious thought wasn’t random, though. Before becoming a feature writer for VICE.com, one of Butler’s part-time jobs had been as a review writer. But not just any reviews – these were fake reviews on TripAdvisor paid for by establishments who wanted to improve their business ratings. As he became more entrenched in this work and watched his reviews have real-world effects on restaurant rankings, Butler began to doubt the reality of the whole system, believing that it was all fake, from the reviews to the food, even the restaurants themselves. But surely that couldn’t be possible? Surely one couldn’t fake a physical place? And, if it were possible, wouldn’t that prove that the entire construct was an illusion?

Butler would later acknowledge that the vast majority of restaurants and reviews in the industry are legitimate, but not before he put his suspicions to the test. Over the course of just six months, he managed to get The Shed at Dulwich – a restaurant that didn’t exist – to rise from a ranking of 18,149 on TripAdvisor, perhaps the internet’s most trusted reviews site, to become the number one place to eat in London, one of the world’s biggest cities. How he did this is amusing, impressive, and appalling in equal measure, but he ultimately proved his point: it’s all bullshit.

I introduced bullshit as something that has crept into every corner of society, including business. Especially business. I showed how the word has evolved from vulgar language to an academically-credible term used to describe a growing body of research. In that article, we explored the nature of bullshit, its impact on business, and why it needs to be eliminated. We concluded that corporate bullshit is essentially a moral challenge that requires us to stand up for what’s right. Some of the negative consequences of bullshit include a decrease in job satisfaction, decline in productivity and job performance, ineffective decision-making, growing mistrust in leadership, and a reduction in the authenticity needed for strong interpersonal relationships.

Even if an organization and the careers of those therein are built on bullshit, and everyone is happy with the arrangement, the value generated by that system is significantly sub-optimal. The client, the customer, or society or the environment inevitably suffers.

If you operate from the moral premise that your role at work is to deliver the most value you can – that is, if you believe that providing value is the right thing to do – then bullshit is wrong. It is a hindrance at a time when the world has some major problems to solve. The stakes are even higher in my particular area of focus, cyber-kinetic security. If the work delivered is not up to scratch, cyber-physical systems become vulnerable to attack, and lives are put at risk. In Part 1 of this series, then, we looked at WHY organizational bullshit needs to be done away with; in this article, we look at HOW.

Fighting bullshit with C.R.A.P

In their February 2020 paper, Confronting indifference toward truth: Dealing with workplace bullshit, McCarthy, Hannah, Pitt, and McCarthy propose a step-by-step approach to dealing with workplace bullshit. Appropriately titled C.R.A.P, the framework is more serious than it sounds, mapping out the four basic steps to neutralizing an overabundance of organizational bullshit:

1. Comprehend
2. Recognize
3. Act
4. Prevent

1.    Comprehend

The first step to dealing with bullshit is to understand it. For most people, business bullshit makes perfect sense because everyone has a reference point for it, but few people think of it as an objective phenomenon. So, simply raising awareness of business bullshit – what it is, what it isn’t, how it works, and its adverse effects – can be a simple but accessible entry point for most teams and organizations. As pointed out in Part 1 of this series, there is some unexpected subtlety and nuance in this subject – distinguishing lying from bullshit, for example – and these distinctions can be very useful for individuals to understand.

2.    Recognize

Once someone understands what bullshit is, the next step is to spot it in action. Here the Boy Scouts’ motto holds true: be prepared. Look out for abstract, general language, full of jargon, or unnecessarily convoluted English. Of course, some people develop reputations for bullshit. They are expected to talk a lot of it so it’s easier to spot. More generally, though, a mindset of healthy cynicism keeps one vigilant to baseless claims, avoidance of facts and data, sloppy justification for decisions, and behavior driven by personal agendas. In my work, where cross-functional teams share different expertise, this point translates further into recognizing when people are experts in their particular area and giving that specialist knowledge weight over general opinions. Later in 2020, the same researchers who created the C.R.A.P framework also devised an Organizational Bullshit Perception Scale that measures the volume of bullshit in an organization and the degree to which it is comprehended and recognized.

3.    Act

Even if someone can spot bullshit-in-action, what can they do about it? Typical responses fall into one of four categories:

• Exit: The employee has had enough and leaves the team or organization to get away from the bullshit/bullshitter. For businesses trying to retain top talent, this could be one of the costliest consequences of organizational bullshit.
• Voice: Voicing occurs when employees speak up to confront bullshit, and this is where leaders have a particularly significant impact, for good and for bad. From a negative standpoint, the natural authority of leadership can make bullshitting bosses difficult to challenge. But from a positive standpoint, leaders have an outsized potential to create an environment of psychological safety where people feel comfortable questioning decisions, requesting clarification, asking for data, and holding each other accountable to agreed outcomes – all healthy ways to challenge perceived bullshit.
• Loyalty: This is a typical response to bullshit, especially when the bullshitter holds cultural or organizational power. Employees see the bullshit for what it is but still choose to accept it, often because it is the easiest route or because it serves them somehow. Effectively, though, they become accomplices to the bullshit.
• Neglect: Many people will recognize this reaction in themselves or those around them; it’s a state of willful ignorance or resignation. Employees disengage from the bullshit, the work related to the bullshit (or the bullshitter), and often the organization too; leaving (Exit) would be too costly, so the employee stays, demoralized and negative. Given how often I’ve seen this attitude in businesses, it’s no surprise that global employee engagement levels are still only at about 20%.

4.    Prevent

The final piece of the C.R.A.P framework is to prevent the creation and spread of bullshit in the workplace. This is by far the most effective way to reduce bullshit over the long term, and there are several ways to approach this:

Create environments of trust

As mentioned above, creating psychologically-safe spaces where employees can speak up is crucial to calling out and reducing bullshit. This does not even have to involve calling out bullshit; it can be as simple as a team member feeling okay to say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you’re saying – please could you explain.’ Most people are afraid of looking ignorant, but in a supportive culture, people feel able to ask for clarification. If the person who’s doing the speaking is bullshitting, this simple question is usually enough to make that clear. Creating environments of trust is not a ‘woo-woo’ notion, nor is trust itself an intangible concept. Edelman’s Trust Barometer is a solid example of how trust can be a quantitatively measured factor in an organization, but by showing leaders how trusted (or distrusted) they are and augmenting this type of analysis with group contributions and dialogue, trust can begin to displace bullshit.

Encourage critical thinking

Despite what they like to believe, many organizations do not promote critical thinking, even though most people would agree it’s a vital skill for a successful business. Critical thinking takes time and consideration; it asks you to weigh up facts and evidence, look at alternative viewpoints, and question not only the thinking of those around you but also your own thinking. As such, it is the anthesis of the superficial, often eloquent but ultimately dressed-up thinking that drives bullshit. Unfortunately, the operational pressures in most businesses mean people are inclined to cut corners in thinking and skip the time required for critical assessment; this is one of the reasons bullshit thrives.

Prize evidence and expertise

A dangerous trap for any leader or manager is to begin to assume that, simply because they have experience, they know intuitively what the right decision is in any particular situation. Intuition and instinct based on experience are an essential part of leadership, but every person has blind spots, so to avoid cognitive biases (wellsprings for bullshit), it is better to rely on evidence. And, to the point above, this is necessary to create a culture of trust where people have the right to ask how a decision was made if they suspect bullshit. Also, while group input or crowdsourcing can be valuable ways to gain broad insight, they can equally muddy the waters and result in decisions based on little substance. Those with the relevant expertise in a decision area should be given a stronger voice. In my line of work, this is less of an issue – engineers, for example, seldom have problems pointing out when people are making incorrect assumptions about their area of specialism – but it is something that needs to be borne in mind, especially as more workplaces move towards cultures of democratized decision-making.

Ban bullshit

This is easier said than done and relies on a strong culture where the first three steps of this process (comprehension, recognition, and action) are already underway. Banning jargon and acronyms, for example, relies on mutual agreement and enforcement. Prohibiting bullshit-generating behavior like unnecessary meetings can be powerful. Still, again, it requires the buy-in of everyone in the team or organization. More than anything, this needs to be modeled from the top, so leaders have to embrace a bullshit-free mindset – a challenging prospect for many organizations.

Stop rewarding bullshit

As I described in the first article of this series, business bullshit is rewarded in various ways. In general, jargon, buzzwords, and bullshit language have such lasting appeal because it lends those who use it a sense of confidence and, often, status. The natural tendency for bullshitters to speak in abstract or ungrounded and aspirational terms fits well in a modern business climate that favors leaders who can talk about ‘vision’ and ‘purpose.’ Spicer suggests that one way to counter these trends is to provide alternative sources of rewards and confidence. By banning or limiting the use of buzzwords and jargon, the legitimacy of bullshit language is decreased, forcing people to seek status from actually doing their jobs well. And importantly, those jobs that receive focus and acknowledgement should include the more modest ones that ensure the business runs well, not just the ‘sexier’ jobs that tend to attract bullshit behavior. Finally, and I agree with Spicer again, organizations need to make ‘stupid’ decisions more costly by tying people to the long-term consequences of their decisions and deferring rewards/bonuses for more extended periods.

Conclusion

One thing I have learned as a leader is that there is no growth without humility – the willingness to admit that you don’t know. In putting together these pieces on organizational bullshit, I have tried to share some of the perspectives gained from my own experience, tempered by the growing research in this area. I certainly don’t have all the answers to fixing what I feel is a potentially toxic trend in organizations, but if we (I, my colleagues, and all of us in business) try to remain curious and committed, it will be harder for bullshit to take root, and we will be more likely have the positive impact we seek.