Don’t #8 — Don’t bullshit a bullshitter
A delightful variety of word salad from people who should know better.
Before working in comms, I would describe my role as ‘comms-adjacent’. I would need to sit in meetings with people at various levels, and discuss our potential plans, campaigns and strategy.
There are concepts I understand. There are concepts I may not fully understand, or may disagree with, but can see why one might choose to adopt them. Then there are ideas and approaches which I can clearly see are being misinterpreted — or are actually complete bollocks.
In those situations, I sometimes find myself wondering — do these people actually believe this shit? Or are they pretending to believe it because they think I’ll fall for it? Even while working in Higher Education I met enough highly-qualified idiots that I can see it might be a reasonable approach. The problem is that when you realise you’re being lied to — or even worse, being bullshitted by someone who doesn’t care if you believe them or not — you’re immediately disinclined to go along with whatever the bullshitters are offering.
Anyone who has seen Season 5 of The Wire knows exactly the kind of language I mean. The teams are constantly being told they need to do More with Less — leading to one of the more experienced members responding “You don’t do More with Less, you do Less with Less, that’s why it’s called ‘Less’”.
Which brings me to Goldsmiths.
Goldsmiths, for the unaware, is a constituent college of the University of London. Established in either 1891 or 1904 depending on how you measure it, it provides teaching and research in the arts, design, humanities and social sciences. Think of the most irritating, pretentious, arty-farty kid you went to school with. That, as an institution.
Bear in mind, I’m saying that as someone who LOVES arty-farty pretentious kids. I was a little more STEM focused before university, but some of the people I knew ended up at Goldsmiths, so I always had some admiration for the place. Then I went to interview for a couple of posts and was so appalled by their process that I realised they were trading on past glories, and maybe weren’t as progressive and radical as they thought they were.
Last month, the Goldsmiths branch of UCU, the University and Colleges Union, were engaged in a battle with management. Goldsmiths SMT (senior management team) were in the process of trying to fire 80–100 staff members. 125 staff members who were identified as being at risk of redundancy, were directed to an internal web-page.
You might think that this was a mistake — that the 125 staff members were not, in fact, meant to be sent a presentation about ‘Change Management’. SMT denied this. Kinda.
Read through the text above. Let’s say part A is everything up to ‘navigate our recovery’, part B is the rest of the paragraph, and part C is the second paragraph.
How, exactly, do parts A and C not state the exact opposite of part B? ‘We directed non-managers to a webpage containing information meant only for managers, but it wasn’t a mistake to do that’. So…they meant it?
Anyone working in HE has encountered this kind of nonsense. Joe Moran wrote a decent piece for THE on the scourge of ‘managerial blah’. It’s a generally good piece — my only issue is that it describes behaviour that exists outside of HE as well. As I’ve hinted above, not everyone who works at a university is a genius — I’ve known plenty of professors who are world leading experts in their field who I wouldn’t trust to tie their own shoelaces outside of a lab. The curse of highly qualified people is the number of them who think that having a PhD in one field qualifies them to speak about others. For example, TO PICK SUBJECTS COMPLETELY AT RANDOM, just because you’re an expert in evolutionary biology or clinical psychology doesn’t mean you’re qualified to talk about issues of religion or gender.
But Goldsmiths? Goldsmiths is full of sociologists, psychologists…people who actually understand some of the shit the SMT are trying to pull. So let’s try this — let’s go through the slides which were released, and try to work out: Do Goldsmiths SMT actually believe this shit? Do they think the union will fall for it? Or are they deliberately pushing bullshit, knowing that the union are aware it’s nonsense, because they really are that shitty?
LET’S FIND OUT!
You need to keep in mind that these are being presented to push back against people who are at risk of redundancy. I can almost ignore the terrible ‘graph’ with no labels on the axes (can anyone explain what that bump around ‘Denial’ is meant to be?) but the text is a perfect example of deliberately missing the point. The automatic assumption is that this change — whatever it is — will be a good thing for all involved, and if you can just persuade the employees to work with you, everyone will be better off. Let’s ignore the somewhat randomised spacing, the fact that half the paragraphs have different indentations, and the clear evidence that this was either created by an idiot, or thrown together in 2 minutes with no time for proof-reading. Doesn’t it just seem ignorant? Are you going to tell people who know that they’re at risk of redundancy that they only ‘feel’ threatened?
The reference to ‘The Neuroscience of Leadership’ by Rock and Schwartz? Have a read of that if you like. Make sure you have a soft surface to throw your laptop or phone at first. Don’t worry if you can’t bring yourself to read it all, here’s a quick summary:
Change is hard, so people don’t like it. Some irrelevant bullshit about brain imaging techniques. Punishing and rewarding people doesn’t work. Neither does compassion or humanity. Some equally unrelated shit about quantum physics. An attempt to use the phrase ‘Quantum Zeno Effect’ to explain a placebo. The best way to make change happen is to get employees to have a moment of insight wherein they realise that they are, actually, wrong.
I know, it sounds like I’m being harsh doesn’t it? Go read for yourself if you like. I’ll wait.
Now, there were a couple of sentences in that piece that caught my eye.
On the subject of using a person-centred approach:
In theory, an effective solution might well emerge from the person-centered approach. But there is rarely time to go through this process with employees, and no guarantee that it will produce the desired results. True self-actualization might simply lead someone to quit his or her job.
OMG really? Someone might quit their job? How on earth would their manager cope with such change? Will the Quantum Zeno Effect help? It’s clear, isn’t it, that this views employees simply as a source of labour and profit for the company. Workers are there to be managed effectively, not treated like human beings — otherwise they might leave!
On the concept of using an employees insight to get them to go along with change:
Perhaps you are thinking, “This all sounds too easy. Is the answer to all the challenges of change just to focus people on solutions instead of problems, let them come to their own answers, and keep them focused on their insights?” Apparently, that’s what the brain wants.
Oh great. So, the employee who is made redundant should focus on the solution rather than the problem! Sounds good, but apparently stealing the online banking details for this management consultant and making away with all of his money in order to fund your new lifestyle isn’t the kind of solution they’re interested in. Neither is firing the entire layer of middle managers responsible for this. I don’t know, sounds like SMT maybe aren’t as solution focused as they claim to be.
But that’s just the first slide. Let’s look at what comes next.
So, to clarify, a Vocal Resistor — as opposed to a good little compliant worker — will do the following:
Actively resists or questions the change (how dare they think they know better than us?)
Attends every forum and repeats same issues over and over (how dare they insist that the problems aren’t fixed even though we’ve told them they are?)
Does not change behaviours, even after repeated explanation or guidance (how dare they keep pointing out issues that we’ve told them we don’t care about? Why don’t they respond to our threats?)
Seems to blow the change out of proportion (how dare they make such a fuss about losing their job. It’s not like I’M losing MY job is it?)
Retains consistently resistance, doesn’t progress or develop opinions (how dare they…wait, ‘retains consistently resistance’? Is this another Grammarly user?)
Publicly voices and spreads negative opinion about change (how dare someone speak openly about what’s going on? Don’t they know they should do what their betters tell them?)
Emails project team frequently using confrontational tone (how dare these mere mortals try to communicate with us!)
Please note — if someone is vocally resisting, none of the pointers above suggest that management need to change their approach. It’s almost as if this acceptance of change only needs to go in one direction. Note that continuing in old patterns, voicing your opinion and attending fora are all absolutely fine if management approve of what you’re doing.
Next slide:
Buy-in to change is, ultimately, a choice. So, in fact, one can choose not to go along with change. If I’m fired, I can just choose not to be, right? What exactly do management think are the choices and consequences of redundancy? What’s In It For Me if I get fired?
I had to get that out of the way before I focused on the real meat of this slide. That little line at the bottom — Carrot vs Stick. Why?
Remember Rock and Schwarz, mentioned above? Here’s a little line from that piece:
Behaviorism doesn’t work. Change efforts based on incentive and threat (the carrot and the stick) rarely succeed in the long run.
IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY HAVEN’T READ THE PIECES THEY’RE REFERENCING. IT’S ALMOST LIKE THEY KNOW IT’S ALL IRRELEVANT BULLSHIT. IT’S ALMOST LIKE PEOPLE NEED TO TAKE ACTION AGAINST THESE CHARLATANS.
Deep breaths, move on.
Plenty of Goldsmiths staff (and others) have suggested that actual neuroscientists attack this slide properly, but why bother? No actual academic would take this seriously, it’s just bullshit designed to provide some semblance of an excuse. Personally, I’m more interested in whatever is hiding behind that brain. There’s something there, isn’t there?
Also, notice how neither side of the brain is presented as ‘good’ here. You get disengagement or avoidance, those are the only two options. What if your method of control is building barriers? What then?
There’s no suggestion of compromise, or of finding agreement. The possibility that the dissenters may have a point isn’t even on the table — they’re just another hurdle to be cleared. I’d also LOVE to know what they consider a ‘special intervention’. It’s got a faint air of ‘ending up with a horse’s head under your duvet’ doesn’t it?
I’m sure there are additional slides and explanations that weren’t included in the UCU thread. There may be further explanations — and frankly, it’s not the job of Goldsmiths UCU to pain the SMT in a good light. What’s striking about this — and a lot of the wider discussions around HE management and marketing — is that a lot of the people involved don’t seem to actually understand or value education itself.
Look back over these slides. Do you think the creator of them has ever attempted to learn anything about using Powerpoint or designing things well? Have they taken the time to learn about how their different schools and courses operate? If they had, would they not understand the logical flaws in what they’re arguing? Would they not realise that the academics they’re putting at risk can see right through their paper-thin arguments?
Goldsmiths are not the only institution that suffers from this. Joe Moran’s piece linked above gives a good summary, and just this week I read a truly awful piece from Alison Watson on the concept of ‘Netflix and Skill’ (I’ll be writing more on that piece, it’s really that bad). The point is that none of these pieces, none of these attempts to persuade you, last beyond the page they’re written on. Goldsmiths will talk at length about working to boost employment at the same time as telling staff that ‘their posts may be deleted’. They have chosen to put a huge number of black academics at risk of redundancy during black history month while at the same time promoting these courses on their main twitter.
So — having read the above, do you think Goldsmiths SMT are arguing in good faith? Do you think they actually believe the nonsense they’re putting out?
And if not — if the institution are believed to not be arguing in good faith, how exactly can employees fight back? How do Goldsmiths expect to employ good staff in the future, or to maintain student numbers, when their word is shown to be lacking? Universities rely on their students for so much. What kind of effect will it have if the institution no longer has the support of the students it’s supposed to be there for?
If you wish to help fight back, you can sign an open letter to Goldsmiths SMT here.
Don’t is a semi-regular series where I tilt my head, squint slightly, and try to work out exactly what fabric the Emperor’s new uniform is made from.