Got a cool newsletter this morning about misinformation. If you are the type of person that reads thought pieces and watches documentaries, you will know and recognize 99.9% of the content in here. You can also hit up this 2017 New Yorker article on “why facts don’t change our minds,” which has a lot of the same major points in a longer format.
When we talk about this stuff, we mostly discuss it from a politics standpoint or a social media standpoint. Those are certainly two valid framings for these issues, but misinformation is a big work concept too. Years ago, I was working at this firm and a partner named Mark got pushed out. My friend Vadim and I had a text thread about it, and I wrote this article about “the bystander effect in organizations,” meaning a lot of times everyone knows what’s happening but no one says or does anything about it. (I wrote something similar once about bad management.) About 2.5 years after I wrote that bystander article, by the way, that Mark guy is my boss on a different project. Weird world we live in.
When you talk about misinformation in a work context, I think these are the buckets:
- Top levels hoarding information
- Lies
- Office gossip
- Things we know and do not say
- Unclear priorities
- Misplaced intent
- Sense of urgency bullshit
These are all very real in a work context. Think about COVID, even. Previously, if you sat in an office, you saw the executives. You may not have ever spoken to them, but you saw them. Then you went a year basically not seeing them except for a few “Zoom All-Hands.” So you have no idea what they’re meeting about or discussing. How’s revenue? Is the axe going to fall? Into that lack of information comes misinformation, i.e. gossip, rumors, “I heard that…,” “layoffs are imminent,” etc. I worked at this shit box called Virtuoso when I first moved to North Texas. Every 2-3 months, someone would talk about layoffs coming, and then there’d be fear from misinformed gossip, and then people would paradoxically be less productive, and then 1-2 people would get laid off, and then three months later the cycle would repeat. That’s part of why I just called it a “shit box.”
Point being: we want misinformation to be a predominantly political and “That Zuckerberg bastard!” element of our lives, but it deeply applies to work too.
Can we improve misinformation at work?
Absolutely not, because it’s deeply tied to power and control, and in reality, what is work about aside from power and control? Short answer: not much.
Years ago, before I “got the hang” of blogging, I wrote this thing on the different ways that people lie to each other. At the time, the only notable thing about this blog post was that a former Editor-in-Chief of ESPN The Magazine shared it on Facebook, and I got a chubby over that. If you look at the “piece” (I hate it when people say “piece” about blogs), here’s the net-net:
“Why does this happen?” Rucker asks. “Those high is social class, by definition, have more wealth and resources. They feel more empowered, and this psychological sense of empowerment leads them down the path of cheating to help themselves. Those who are low in social class do not feel empowered. They feel more communal and more dependent on others, which produces a willingness to help others, even when it involves behaving unethically.”
So basically, if you believe this quote even somewhat, the top ranks of a company will always lie (misinformation) to help themselves, and lower ranks may lie to protect colleagues and community, since that’s where more of their connection to work resides (i.e. work friendships).
As a result, no, work misinformation isn’t going anywhere. Even in very well-adjusted companies with strong leadership, the incentives are there to hide information, outright lie about stuff, ignore realities, etc.
Could you see a path out of this?
