Things I’d rather ignore and other stuff

And a thing we need to talk about

If Tomorrow Never Comes

I’m not really sure what to write about this week. I started writing this missive as a way to let of steam about what I’d come across in the week, so I could write about how AI is having a bad week (according to Bruce Daisley’s newsletter).

It seems disillusion is settling in as AI fails to live up to the ridiculous levels of hype we’ve seen around it over the past year. Microsoft’s CoPilot has come in for some scrutiny as a Gartner survey of IT leaders showed that less than 4% said it currently offered significant value to their companies.

What’s more, using it internally has caused problems as employees are able to see the CEOs emails or find out the salary levels of others. Microsoft say this is due to lax categorisation by administrators, which is a not the ‘get out of jail free’ card they think it is.

It points to the problem that another piece on AI spoke about, which is that the adoption of AI (or any technology) is actually determined by a whole range of factors that have nothing to do with the technology itself. These are things as diverse as process and procedures, reward and recognition systems, management attitudes, culture, legislation and so on. Yet another piece talked about the lack of take-up of these tools by employees who feared their bosses would think they were cheating or taking short-cuts.

A good example of this effect is the take up of remote/hybrid working. The technology has been around to enable people to work from anywhere for a long time but adoption was low, although growing steadily. It took the shock of the pandemic to move all of the other barriers to adoption and we got laptops in people’s hand and fired up the systems to enable them to work remotely in a couple of weeks. Now the benefits are obvious, some organisations have embraced this change and are building upon it. However, as a demonstration of the inertia in the system, another group are trying to push back time and drag people back to the office, to re-assert the prior status quo.

I read another piece making a cogent argument as to why AI will not deliver the economic boost promised, and no where near the scale of the boost provided by the past two decades of computers, smart phones and the internet. AI provides opportunities for niche applications or incremental improvements generally. It’s not going to shift the curve, though.

I’ve written before about my scepticism about AI and it seems to be that reality is starting to break through the hype. That doesn’t mean there won’t be impacts and shocks arising from it and it doesn’t mean it won’t take your job but it’s not going to unleash a new burst of growth as many have suggested. Not least because the finances don’t add up as generalised AI models (e.g. LLMs) are currently provided at a loss (and negative marginal cost) and there’s no ‘Moore’s Law’ in sight to dramatically reduce costs.

But I’ve written about AI a lot so I don’t fancy doing that again.

I Don’t Want To Talk About It

Or I could write about a report that showed that if you implement an RTO mandate you disproportionately lose your best people, women and employees who have problems accessing the office (due to disability, caring responsibilities etc.).

Except that this is entirely predictable (indeed, many did predict it, including me) and therefore not really news.

You would like to think that studies like this would lead to a change in attitudes and policies but past experience suggests that it will be ignored by those who think RTO is the way to go.

Indeed, it is part of a much wider phenomenon of leaders following their own prejudices and opinions and ignoring the evidence. I’m almost bored of pointing this out. It is so entrenched it has been lionised as a trait of ‘strong leadership’, and the reason that the ‘hero leader’ or the ‘maverick leader’ is successful. So much so that it is the dominant narrative of the incoming US administration (I’m also getting bored about talking about Captain Muskrat and the orange-hued Cowboy, marching hand-in-hand up the Yellow Brick Road).

Whilst I still believe reality will eventually intrude (hence my prediction that a big organisation will go down spectacularly, possible a few), it is clear that the ability to keep the balloon of improbability inflated is much enhanced these days by social media and the artful use of misinformation and disinformation. Whilst it remains in everyone’s interest to admire the Emperor’s new clothes, then the whole charade continues for an improbably long time.

No wonder I’m feeling gloomy. So I don’t want to write about that either.

I Don’t Believe You

Or maybe I could write about how the data scandal around Francesca Gino seems to run much deeper, according to this article in The Atlantic.

It’s a problem that seems to be mainly located around research in business schools, the sort of stuff that appears to offer insights into our behaviours and ways to ‘hack’ our responses to certain situations, for our betterment.

You know, the stuff that makes for a snappy Ted Talk, an article in HBR, a book deal, speaking gigs, a type of academic celebratory. And a lucrative one, that maybe you can parlay up into a course, a programme and other revenue streams.

I can’t think what would make people want to fiddle the data, can you?

When I started looking at the area of work and leadership, I thought ‘Wow, there’s all this research out there that tells us how we could do things better, and it’s getting ignored!’. I got addicted to Ted talks and podcast and bought the books, I drank it in.

And then I came across a few problems (apart from the fact that the books are mostly formulaic and badly written). When you look at the research, it suffers from small sample sizes, a very limited pool of subjects (mostly psych grads at Ivy League colleges) and some very convoluted experiments. I began to have my doubts about how solid some of these finding really were. I had studied economics, so I was well aware of the problems of modelling real world situations and how assumptions can be manipulated to skew the results (just read anything by Milton Friedmann).

I found out that some of the early experiments were questionable and openly debated, such as the Milligram experiment and Stanford Prison Experiment. However, these were frequently referred to without any qualification, they were deemed to be ‘truths’.

Then Amy Cuddy’s ‘Power Pose’ research came under question as other researchers found they couldn’t replicate her results. She claims to have refuted these criticisms but other researchers claim to have disproven her thesis, which is that ‘power poses’ can make you more successful in life. Despite this furore, her Ted Talk remains the second most popular of all time.

The Atlantic piece shows that, on top of all these problems, there seems to be actual fraud going on, with data being manipulated to fit the thesis and so ‘prove’ it.

So what exactly do we believe now? Is any of this stuff worth looking at? When top names like Gino and Dan Ariely have been implicated, who do we trust?

I could say that the answer is to read the original research, which is certainly helpful, but if the data has been rigged, how do you know? I can spot holes in an argument, I can see tenuous conclusions have been drawn, I can see where experiments are so artificial their validity is questionable, but I can’t see the original data (much less understand it).

It all so depressing, so I don’t want to write about that.

Working For The Man

Or I could write about how Gen Z attitudes to work are dramatically different from previous generations. Unfortunately, I can’t find the piece because I just thought “Well, der. Of course they are.” and didn’t bookmark it (my bad).

So, from memory, they do not share the belief that they should work hard. Or that they should put in extra effort to succeed in their career. You could say that they don’t have the ‘work ethic’ of previous generations. (rather more worrying, they don’t seem to think this will affect their ability to succeed, which may be a sign of naivety on their part).

Why should we be surprised at this? As someone who has come out the other end of their career, I have long suspected that the Protestant work ethic was a trick anyway, to get us to be willing cogs in the system. After all, that’s what the education system we’ve all been through was set to achieve. Sure, hard work does produce rewards but they don’t always accrue to the person doing the hard work.

What keeps this con going is the promise of riches at the end. The reason we toil away in our career is because we’ll get to have a family, a house, holidays, a good life style and, ultimately, a happy and comfortable retirement when we finally get to enjoy ourselves.

But that promise has evaporated. So why bother?

They’ve seen what their parents got out of that deal, what it did to them. How it got salami sliced away, leaving them with less than they expected.

It’s an entirely rational response. It’s not a problem with Gen Z, it’s a problem with society and with business and the future that we’re offering them.

I don’t know how it resolves but I fear it’s going to be disruptive. It could be the reason that incumbent governments around the world are getting a kicking and the extremes are gaining in popularity. Apparently over 60% of people surveyed in the US believe the system of government needs fundamental change, and even more that the economic system does too.

Bleak, isn’t it? So I don’t fancy writing about that either.

Don’t Blame Me

I’ve been clearing out my office this week, finally getting around to getting rid of stuff from way back (you know, back when we used to put things on paper and keep them in filing cabinets).

I came across a file on the work I did with a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist, when I felt I was stuck in a bad place. It was the second bit of CBT I’d done.

I remember his initial observation was that I lacked the ability to regulate my emotions, particularly my anger, so we worked in improving my emotional regulation.

It was a fair observation. I was either quite placid or very angry, with little in between. I also found it hard to identify my emotions, something I’d struggled with in my previous CBT.

So he asked my to write down all the times when I felt I had been mistreated, which were what was making me angry. Then I had to note what my ‘irrational response’ was and score each one. The next step was to identify what ‘rational response’ I was now able to reach, and score those. Finally, I had to identify what I could have done to get a better outcome in all these situations.

This will seem pretty familiar to anyone who’s done CBT. At the time, I found it helpful, as I had the previous time. However, that may just have been the effect of talking to someone about it and working on my self awareness. It was a pressure valve.

I’m also quite compliant at times (I know!! Who’d believe it!!) and so I went along with the process. I did my best to identify my emotions and score them. I was objective and rational and thought of how I could have behaved differently to get a different outcome. I did the work, or at least, as best as I could.

The thing that struck me looking back is the sheer volume of stuff I had to work through. There were so many instances where I felt I had been mistreated in the workplace. I was asked to write them out in some detail and the document I produced runs to several pages. Even now I am a bit shocked, and I wrote the bloody thing!

And the question I have is how, having read that litany of mistreatment and seeing the sheer volume of it, could you conclude that I was the problem? That it was how I was responding these situations that was the issue?

In this long list, there were none from my personal life. Indeed, the happiness of my family and personal life was what kept me afloat. I can’t recall a single occasion where I felt greatly wronged or mistreated outside of work. Surely that was noteworthy?

The problem here was the lens that the therapist was looking through. The implicit assumption of CBT is that your behaviour is the problem because you are responding irrationally to situation. All you need to do is learn how to respond rationally and you will be able to deal with the situation more effectively.

But what if my response was rational? What if the appropriate response to being wronged is to be angry? What is the logical response to repeated mistreatment is to fight back? What if the healthiest response to wrongdoing is to lose your shit?

Sometimes, you’re not playing the victim. Sometimes you just are the victim.

Sometimes, the ‘irrational response’ is actually the rational one.

We see this everywhere in the work of work today. The system is abusive to those in it and yet they are told that are at fault. They lack ‘resilience’, they need more ‘grit’, they don’t have the right attitude, they don’t have a sufficiently strong work ethic. Burnt out? You don’t manage your work effectively, you need to make time for wellbeing, you need to eat better, exercise more, maybe try some yoga?

It’s a neat way to duck responsibility. So much so that it’s become normalised. It’s gaslighting and it’s everywhere and most of the time we barely notice it. But every time we encounter is, trust decays a little bit more and we end up in a very transactional relationship. As much for our self-protection as anything.

To be fair to this therapist, the idea of being ‘trauma-aware’ wasn’t around back then. I wasn’t showing signs of going off the deep end, I wasn’t presenting as highly distressed. I’m sure he genuinely believed he could help me. I would hope today that my history would set off some alarm bells and deeper questioning.

It wasn’t until I spoke to someone who had been through trauma (and was also a coach) that I grasped the full extent of what had happened to me. We shared our stories with each other and her response to mine was ‘I think you’re suffering from PTSD’. It took me another 18 months and another trauma to accept the possibility and seek appropriate therapy.

That’s why I believe we need to talk about this stuff. My history was not ‘normal’ but it was not unusual either. Lots of us have been traumatised by our experiences at work and our ability to process that trauma has got a lot to do with not feeling we can talk about. So I’m talking you about and inviting others to share their stories.

You see, what I have realised on reflection is that most of the time I was disconnected from my feelings, as a defence mechanism. I had numbed myself. When I did connect with my feelings, I was fucking furious as, frankly, I had every right to be.

Looking back at the notes I was given, I see there is a distinction between unhelpful anger (irrational) and helpful anger (rational), which is a fair point. However, my problem was not that I had the wrong sort of anger, it was what was causing these uncharacteristic bursts of it.

The problem is not the volcano having the ‘wrong type of eruption’, the problem is the enormous build-up of pressure in the magma that is just under the surface. Except you can’t do anything about the magma, whereas you can do something about yourself, with the right help and support.

(In case you are wondering, looking back through all those forms and the things I could have done to get a better outcome, I have come to one simple conclusion. All my answers were wrong because the thing to do is not work with or for arseholes. If, by misfortune, you do, don’t put up with it for a second longer than you have to.)

It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Well, I hope that lot hasn’t depressed you but if it has, it’s your fault. You probably lack enough resilience, or grit, or something. Or you’ve misread the data. Or your response is irrational. Whatever.

I didn’t want to write it anyway.