On lying, part 4

The topic of truthfulness-vs-lying is just endlessly fascinating, or at any rate there are many different sides to it. Already, just a day after publishing "On lying, part 3" I have gotten some very interesting feedback in the comments. And here is yet another view on the subject. I can't claim that I have synthesized all these perspectives, or that I really understand the issue. But somehow I think that all of them have a bearing.

These thoughts are based on something that happened at work -- not in my personal life, for a change -- along about the middle of March, just before (and overlapping) the business travel that ended up allowing D and me to have a Fourth Date. I wrote the whole thing to D at the time as an e-mail, but I won't present it that way here because the interchange between us on the subject was inconsequential. What was interesting and significant was the story itself. Here is how it went: ...

The president of the company is coming out to our office from the Home Office just about the time I'm going to the Home Office. He has lots of things to squeeze into a couple of days, as usual. But I have gotten a hint from one of my Home Office colleagues that an issue which might be on his agenda is, .... Well, let me back up. We report various metrics once a month which are supposed to give an idea of how well we are doing our jobs, and how well the business is faring. For a variety of reasons, some of these metrics aren't very informative when applied to the work we in particular do in our office: they will fluctuate wildly in and out of acceptable values without those changes meaning anything very significant about how things are going for us. Now, one of these metrics was red (as opposed to "green") pretty consistently last year, and our president wanted some action. That's how he understands the job of top management, apparently: look at everybody's metrics, and then demand an action plan to correct the problem if one of those metrics turns red. So he did. And the guy in charge of the relevant department told him, "Oh that's no problem. Our corrective action is XYZ. And in fact we have already implemented it." I should add that XYZ was a preposterous suggestion; if somebody had told me that he was going to solve a problem by doing this, I would have rolled my eyes and said, "Right, tell me another." It was the kind of action about which you could tell -- just by looking at it -- (a) that nobody would ever follow through on doing it, and (b) that it wouldn't help anything if they did. But this statement had the desired effect of making our president go away and stop interfering. After all, the responsible guy had given him an action plan, so he knew the problem was being handled. His work was therefore done. That's decisive management for you.

A year goes by. During that time this metric bounces around with apparently no connection to the reality of what we are doing, because it is (for our line of work) almost meaningless. The manager in question takes another job in the company, and is replaced. And suddenly an issue comes up -- this is about 2 weeks ago now -- where we are getting yelled at because something isn't in place. When we object that it looks like it's not possible to set it up the way we have been asked to, the answer is "Why are you only discovering this today? If you really had been doing XYZ, like we were told you were, you would have discovered this problem a year ago. Have you guys been lying to senior management?"

Maybe this isn't on his mind, but -- knowing him -- I wouldn't be surprised if it is. So how are we going to answer it? Or rather, ... since I'll be in the Home Office, ... how are my colleagues going to answer it? There are several possible answers. One is to say, "That guy told you what? He never told us we were supposed to be doing that ... all he ever mentioned was this other thing." That's not very kind, because this guy is still with the company only in another role. Or else we can say, ... well, what, really? I think the best option may be to change the subject by slyly pointing out that as of last month our metric is suddenly about as green as it has ever been. Yay for us! (It's still meaningless, but never mind that.)

The truth, though, is a little more complicated. It is not that we simply lied to this man. It is rather that this manager reported an idea he had had as if it were already actualized, without any concern for whether it could become real or not and without any concern for whether it could achieve the goal or not; then the rest of us failed to contradict him out of a mixture of motives -- partly because we wanted to keep a unified front with him (since after all he ran interference for us an awful lot, and often prevented senior management from bringing productive work to a halt); partly because it wasn't our place to speak out; partly because nobody wanted to raise a subject with our top management if we didn't have to (because such conversations always and only turned out badly); partly for other reasons as well, I suppose. Behind all this was the tacit agreement that the reason we were all willing to treat the company's president with such manipulative disrespect was that what he was asking us for was stupid: the metrics don't apply to us in any useful way, and therefore overreacting to a red metric (or demanding a corrective action) is simply proof that you don't know what you are talking about. What is more, anybody who would have accepted XYZ as a proposal can't be too clever in the first place. And finally, nobody was willing simply to tell this man the truth about these things because he has a history of punishing people who make him feel or look a fool.

I haven't come to any profound conclusions, but it has been on my mind.