Even if they avoid the jargon trap, innovators and leaders find the temptation to talk crap strong
Andrew Hill
It is nigh impossible trying to stem the tide of guff swamping business © Getty
Bullshit is having a moment. From obfuscating jargon to the careless perpetration of untruths and exaggerations, the BS quotient seems to be rising.
Such is our expectation of being bullshitted that books now declare they are free from taint on their covers. David Rowan’s Non-Bullshit Innovation and Chris Hirst’s No Bullsh*t Leadership (some publishers are coyer than others about the B-word) are both out this month, and at least two new “no bullshit” guides will join the groaning self-help shelves this year.
Academia has also been having its say. Philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s famous 1986 essay “On Bullshit”, reprinted to bestselling effect in 2005, was an early example of academic interest in the phenomenon.
The most recent is a discussion paper from the Institute of Labor Economics with the irresistible title “Bullshitters. Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?”
John Jerrim, Phil Parker and Nikki Shure mined a 2012 survey of English-speaking 15-year-olds conducted as part of the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) to build one of the few empirical studies of bullshit.
The Pisa programme asked students how familiar they were with a list of 16 mathematical concepts. Three of them were fake, laying a perfect trap for bluff-prone youngsters.
By marrying these results with answers about the 15-year-olds’ self-belief, popularity, perseverance, and so on, the academics concluded the most likely bullshitters were Canadian and US teenagers from advantaged backgrounds. The people most likely to give you a straight answer, were, by some margin, young Scots.
The researchers’ “bullshit scale” now joins the annals of bullshit research, alongside the “bullshit receptivity scale” conceived for a 2015 paper that explored people’s likelihood to believe “pseudo-profound” BS. If you’re a sucker for the supernatural, you are more likely to be receptive, that paper concludes, unsurprisingly enough.
When a bullshitting, cavalier American can rise to become leader of the free world, and social media spreads wilful distortions far and wide, such findings, once classified as academic ephemera, start to take on geopolitical importance.
Yet they only go so far in identifying why business leaders and innovators are particularly prone to bullshit and bullshitting.
Jargon is just the start. David Rowan, founding editor of Wired UK, correctly identifies “innovation theatre — a box-ticking, public-relations-led, self-reassuring alternative to radical changes in mindset and culture” as the opposite of non-bullshit innovation. His book opens at a convention of “innovation professionals”, amid talk of “transactionalisation”, “abstractification” and “self-healing swarm behaviour” that would shatter the bullshit receptivity scale.
Chris Hirst, an executive at Havas, the marketing group, advises leaders to resist dressing up what they find at their organisations in “flowery language and management speak”. (It may be worth noting that, even three decades ago, Prof Frankfurt found the ad industry “replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept” — a slight Mr Hirst rejects.)
In a valedictory article in 2017, my former colleague Lucy Kellaway lamented that her two decades trying to stem the tide of guff swamping business had come to naught. Lampooning an entrepreneur’s hype-draped blog post, she wrote that “business bullshit has got a million per cent more bullshitty, and I’ve stopped predicting a correction in the marketplace”.
Even if they avoid the guff trap, though, innovators and leaders will find the temptation to bullshit strong. “Storytelling” is one of the vital attributes of a good entrepreneur, according to Mr Rowan. That can lead, via bluff, to white lies, and even fraud. BS is also encroaching on corporate boardrooms, he says, because there are not enough genuine innovators to satisfy directors’ panicky demands for ideas to see off disruptive start-ups.
A more basic reason why bullshit is so hard to beat, though, is its central paradox. Bullshitting can require reckless self-confidence and a lack of self-awareness. But it is also the chosen tool of leaders who are all too aware of their deficiencies, and exploit their position to get away with bluffing.
Far from using the licence of high office to ask for explanations, as they should do, such leaders feel forced to take a view, however poorly supported by evidence or facts. They “fear saying ‘I don’t know’ or ‘I don’t understand’”, explains Mr Hirst. And in that, they are, unfortunately, little different from a teenager winging it when faced with a tricky-sounding maths problem.
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