Leadership & Work in the Post-Truth Society

According to Wikipedia, "post-truth politics is a political culture in which debate is framed largely by appeals to emotion disconnected from the details of policy and by the repeated assertion of talking points, to which factual rebuttals are ignored... [It is] ascendant in American, Australian, British and Indian politics, as well as in other areas of debate, driven by a combination of the 24-hour news cycle, false balance in news reporting, and the increasing ubiquity of social media."

One such other area of debate is the field or leadership, management, and organisation. Which has been suffering from the impact of post-truth for over a century! Ever since the first management theory, which was pseudo-science made real by rhetorical embellishment, business schools desperate for academic recognition, and public enthusiasm for the new technological advances and ideas of the industrial age. 

For those who know their management history, little has changed. It's just got faster and more complex. Instead of one management theory, we have a range of competing trends and traditions spinning around under some wider pseudo-scientific orthodoxy. Business schools still don't get taken seriously by the pure sciences. And public enthusiasm for digital advances, at least for the younger generation, is massive. 

Through no fault of their own, this fast-paced complexity of truths, half-truths and lies leaves leaders and managers with little to stand on. No theories they can trust. No evidence to follow. And an ever-present demand for performance. Is it surprising that data on the state of work is so dismal? 

• 86% of employees believe there is a leadership crisis
• 85% of employees are disengaged
• 75% of employees say their boss is the worst part of their job
• 70% of day-to-day activity provides no added value
• 66% of change fails

Management is not a field, but a minefield. There are post-truth fads and fashions everywhere. If you make a wrong step, things can blow up in your face. But the safe pathways are mislabeled and complex. So a survival tactic is to do as little as possible. And hope beyond hope nothing goes wrong. 

There are far too many post-truth, post-factual aspects of modern management and leadership to capture in a blog. Perhaps even in a book. But I'm not willing to do nothing. So, here are five big 'truths' of our contemporary organisational world. 

1: The Good Culture Fallacy

Most people connect organisational performance with its culture. Good culture equals good performance. Bad culture equals bad performance. But what if it's wrong?

The assumption that good culture equals good performance started in the 1970s. US executives, struggling with post-Vietnam industrial unrest and fearing Japanese impact in their traditionally dominant markets, looked at what was giving Japan such a competitive advantage.

The answer? Strong culture! Japanese employees lived and breathed their companies. You've all seen pictures of Japanese employees exercising together on the roof. Moving in unison at the company's direction. That was what the US tried to recreate through the designed strong culture programs. 

This assumption was backed up by some case studies of "excellent" companies in the US that were already thinking "culturally". The problem? Most of these companies were performing no more than averagely within a few years of the studies. A few even performed dismally. 

So, we had snapshot data suggesting that something worked briefly for a few companies. That became an informing philosophy across entire industries! Despite increasing amounts of evidence that strong culture in American corporations didn't produce hard-working, committed and loyal employees. But people who were anxious, fearful, ambivalent, stressed, burnt out, cynical and ironic. Who acted out cultural expectations without believing in them. 

There is no definitive data proving that good culture equals good performance. But we've been told it has for 35 plus years. To support this trained bias, we employ the Halo Effect. If we like a company's brand and products, we assume this means it has a good culture. People earn millions selling such "great" cultural models without there being any evidence that this adds value.

The idea that culture is the be all and end all has eaten itself. We now see bastardised echoes of the strong culture movement in the hipster aestetics of start-ups and hi-techs. We get measured for cultural fit. Designer culture is an expensive, complex mess that often prevents companies adapting to new challenges. 

It's time for a change. 

2: Management Science is Well-Marketed Nonsense

Scientific management. Organisational psychology. Strategic management. Organisational culture. Change management. The big five schools of management thought. But what if they weren't scientific at all?

The big assumption of these sciences is that non-managers don't want to work. That the non-managerial classes are fundamentally lazy. Need to be cajoled and bullied into doing stuff. 

Scientific management laid down the markers. Owners and business schools were sold the idea that a scientific approach to management would increase profits, motivate workers and build a better society. 

But the data was massaged. Stories of its success were devised and embellished. Consequently, worker motivation plummeted. Unrest increased. Society began to fracture.

Enter Elton Mayo, the founder of organisational psychology. The most feckless, work-shy, manipulative, self-serving charlatan in organisational history. 

Dr Mayo (never a doctor, but happy for people to assume he was) sold a simple idea. That all management thought was good and right. But the feeble-minded blue-collar worker was struggling to cope with the demands of industrial society.

The answer was not to think again about management and leadership. But to correct the workers' psychology. Make them happy doing what they were doing. Through the "science" of environmental manipulation!

His data, conclusions, and methods are the worst sort of quackery. If anybody mentions Mayo or his ideas to you, run. As fast as you can.

We've seen little new over the years either. 

• Strategic management is little more than scientific management reimagined for knowledge work. Instead of lists and stopwatches, charts and spreadsheets.
• Organisational culture is Mayo on steroids. His ideas on environmental design positively impacting worker attitude amplified a thousand-fold. 
• Change management is built on an ethereal side-note in a minor sub-section in a 300+ page book. Extrapolated into complex theories of step-based change that all reference a non-existent origin. 

We have been sold dud after dud after dud. Is it any wonder that after a century of this we have record levels of disengagement, a crisis of leadership, and little idea how to add meaningful value? 

3: Leadership Theory is Bullshit

In a Forbes interview about his bestselling book, Leadership BS, Jeffrey Pfeffer explains exactly why leadership theories suck. 

1. The huge disconnect between how most companies evaluate leadership development efforts and the dimensions along which they are seeking improvement. Consequently, companies cannot know what is working and wind up encouraging unproductive activities and behaviors.
2. The neglect of evidence-based research, which distinguishes management from any field that has made progress over the years.
3. The disconnect between the leaders and companies on the most admired lists and the companies with healthy workplaces. That admired leaders run companies with truly toxic workplaces is a major reason why so many people are in abusive, bullying, stressful work environments.

I don't have much to add to that. What else can there be?

4: The Weird Impact of Management Research

There's an awful lot of bad management research that impacts practice. By bad management research, I mean case studies of what worked once somewhere. Which then gets sold under the assumption it will work just as well again in completely different companies doing completely different things with completely different people. That's crazy!

Or hard scientific theories that become watered down, populist nonsense when translated into management speak.

The deep irony of this? That management theories themselves have caused the death of good management theory. 

Academia has become managerialised. The production of new knowledge incentivised. Researchers get rewarded and recognised for developing a theory and a pilot test case.

But nobody gets rewarded for providing the secondary level testing that replicates the results. There's no money or competitive advantage in doing that. So, we have a lot of theories flung around the management atmosphere underpinned by very little data. 

It gets worse. If a theory is trendy, the press jumps all over it. A dumbed down, media-friendly version gets disseminated. It often bears very little resemblance to the actual theory. It's a cherry-picked mess of misinterpreted ideas and half-understood data. But that's what sticks. And what becomes common knowledge. 

Good research is limited by its academic complexity. To make it as a "serious" management academic, you need to illustrate your intellectual capacity by writing obtuse theory and complex, jargon-filled papers. I know. I've done it.

Surprisingly, nobody understands what you mean, why it's relevant, or how it can be applied. I know. I've experienced it.

And they think you're going to be a pompous academic telling you how to work. Ditto on the experience stakes. 

As a result of the above, we get populist theories underpinned by very little data spreading like wildfire, while meaningful ideas supported by a wealth of evidence get squashed under their own self-importance. 

The result is bad theory spreading and becoming commonplace practice. Which is horrible for everybody. 

5: The Digital Realm Screws It Up for Everybody

Writing in Granta, Peter Pomerantsev states, "the information age allows lies to spread in what techies call ‘digital wildfires’. By the time a fact-checker has caught a lie, thousands more have been created, and the sheer volume of ‘disinformation cascades’ make unreality unstoppable. All that matters is that the lie is clickable, and what determines that is how it feeds into people’s existing prejudices. Algorithms developed by companies such as Google and Facebook are based around your previous searches and clicks, so with every search and every click you find your own biases confirmed. Social media, now the primary news source for most Americans, leads us into echo chambers of similar-minded people, feeding us only the things that make us feel better, whether they are true or not."

The rate at which lies can spread is disconcerting. The quality of rhetoric is everything. It doesn't matter what you say. Only how you can make it stick. Wrap something up in tinsel and glitter, or doom and gloom, and let it loose. If enough people buy into it, you can create your own reality. 

An interest in truth isn't much better. We are all trapped in this gilded cage, myself included. How can we remain open-minded when our very technologies impose close-minded thinking upon us?

It becomes increasingly difficult to understand, or even find, conflicting points of view. And even if we do, we are out of practice in dealing with them. Ready at a moment's notice to defend ourselves against vicious trolls attacking the man or woman. Never the ball.

Leaving us prickly and defensive. On edge and uptight. Unable to promote ideas without looking angry, defensive and illegitimate. 

This is worse when management and leadership are involved. Because there's gold in them thar hills, baby. Get people buying into your ideas and untold riches are yours.

Which is why we see so many self-help style management gurus around. And why magical thinking like The Secret gains traction. Just be happy and positive and all this can be yours!

It doesn't matter if it works. And, let's face it, it doesn't. Else everyone who's seen Tony Robbins would be a millionaire. And those who've listened to Tom Peters would all be CEOs. Sugar rushes of self-help maintained by forever relighting digital wildfires. 

As a consequence, much serious management and leadership thought gets drowned. Even if you can uncover it among all the noise, it takes effort and time to understand and apply. No sugar rush. Just hard work and hard reflection. 

The Way Out of the Woods

Despite all this, there is away out of the post-truth woods. It's foggy and we are struggling to see the wood for the trees. But with a bit of care and some nimble steps, we'll get there. 

Embrace the evidence, not the theory: The theory that good culture produces committed, loyal and hard-working employees has never been backed up by the data. The data suggests it produces a mix of zealous, fearful, confused, emotionally stressed and ironic people. Rather than frantically redesigning the organisation and/or its hiring policies to find people who fit the culture, we should perhaps abandon the notion that a designed or pre-imagined culture is the answer at all. 

We know that high performing organisations tap into nonconformist thinking. Bridgewater encourages authentic dissent. Google has teams working in psychological safety. A wealth of research illustrates how sarcasm and irony manifest when a culture inhibits nonconformist thought. Research on organisational environments illustrates exactly the same thing. Working out how to let employees tell it like it is going to be the big competitive advantage of the future. 

Embrace new ways of thinking: We are currently in the early stages of new ways of thinking about work. We have a new science - complexity theory. A new way of leading and managing - systems leadership. A new way of conceptualising valuable employees - catalysing networkers.  New ways of thinking - critical, creative, design and synthetic. All of which are gaining great traction. But all of which run the risk of becoming fads and fashions if not treated seriously enough. 

These new ways of thinking and working offer a viable alternative to what we have right now. A way in which bottom-up data is analysed through various perspectives, gets turned into effective systems of work, then spreads via enthused word of mouth into multiple networks. The role of the leader and manager is to facilitate such a process to the best of their ability. 

Take change, transformation, and flux seriously: My sometime collaborator and I recently ran a presentation/workshop in which we critically examined different ways of thinking about organisation. While many of our metaphoric frames had great resonance, the one concerning flux, change and transformation had everyone so enthused we had to forcibly limit the conversation to get finished in time.

People are highly motivated to change and to deliver change if the practice interrogates what is really happening in their world. When it is yet another top-down driven initiative that doesn't fundamentally address relevant conditions, then disengagement, grief, and resistance might follow. But when it touches on how creative thought and purposeful action generate good change, people get excited and enthusiastic. 

Learn to trust motivated purpose: Today's workforce is highly skilled. Often equally highly specialised. People are motivated to develop their skillsets and demotivated when such opportunities are lacking. Today's managers must trust that their employees are developing themselves with purpose and support such development wholeheartedly. 

Why? Because if self-development is limited, the employee will never become value-adding. Somebody who strives to be the best they can be will leave organisations that don't enable that journey. As a consequence, such organisations end up in a constant hunt for talent. Far better to enable one's own employees' journeys even if you can't fully understand why they want to do certain courses of learn certain skills. 

Develop transparent organisations: Purpose is the new black. Everybody is own their own purposeful journey. What is often unclear is the purpose of one's organisational role. Or even the purpose of one's department. Perhaps the whole organisation. 

The answer? Let purpose and meaning transparently spread throughout the company. Let everybody see everybody else's expense claims. Experiment with better budgeting. Try self-organising. Communicate reasons for decisions clearly and accurately. Make people accountable for these decisions. Debate ideas. Experiment and fail fast. 

Will all the above solve the post-truth problem? No, because it is bigger than the capacity of one organisation or leader to solve. But it will create internal dialogues about what is the best way for the organisation to act. Dialogues that emerge from all quarters. Management theory. Leadership intuition. Evidence-based practice. Bottom-up data. Critical and creative thought. 

With many perspectives contributing to the active dialogue, it becomes less easy for post-truth rhetorics to thrive. Leaders are far less likely to make bad decisions or invest in poorly designed theories and models. Because everything gets evaluated by very different people having very different views, very little nonsense can get through the gaps. 

Of course, saying this doesn't make me popular with many people. It challenges so many assumptions. But it is the future of work. If we want to take it seriously, that is. 

In my work and research, I look for gaps or absurdities in popular or academic thought about leadership, management and organisation. Things that can harm the organisation or individuals involved. I help people move beyond blind faith in these supposed 'best practices' and develop ideas and models that fully suit the unique requirements of their company. 

If you are as passionate and serious about rethinking organisations as I am, please send a connection request Thanks.

I fully appreciate any likes, shares or comments. I always do my very best to reply to any comments posted