Philosophy and Work (4) Can you manufacture consent in a company?

A rather wonderful image by Alfredo Garzon, often quoted when writing about this concept.

In Generation X, Douglas Coupland talks about “power mist” , the “tendency of hierarchies in office environments to be diffuse and preclude crisp articulation”. Or, that feeling when you walk into an open plan office or floor of cubicles that there is a definite hierarchy here, just one that you can’t see. You can get clues by the position of the desks relative to windows, or one bank relative to another, or where the edge offices are. But for the rest, it’s pretty much opaque until you’re in it, at which point it’s blindingly obvious.

It’s one of the pleasures and joys of being a consultant sometimes — you have the privilege of walking these floors where you know there’s something profound going on, but you just can’t quite grasp it — it takes many, many interviews, chance conversations and observations to fully make sense of it. And even then, what you make sense of cannot often be said out loud to those whom you are trying to advise…. Conversely, it’s one of the frustrations of those within organisations — they become extremely acquainted with “how things are done” and either succeed in navigating it or find themselves increasingly marginalised.

When I first became acquainted with linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, I was in awe of his clear-headed statements on how the world actually works, all based on close analysis of various workings, decisions, justifications that were a matter of public record, but which were either obfuscated or just never openly talked about. Chomsky and Herman in their 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media were trying to articulate a framework to give more meaning to a phenomenon that Walter Lippmann had observed back in 1922 in what would become a seminal text in media studies — Public Opinion:

“People construct a pseudo-environment that is a subjective, biased, and necessarily abridged mental image of the world, and to a degree, everyone’s pseudo-environment is a fiction. People ‘live in the same world, but they think and feel in different ones’”

In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman lay out five clear filters to explain just how public opinion is generally manipulated by the media in order to give effective guard-rails to public behaviour, to create support for the agendas of those in power, and to stop everyone from simply doing and thinking whatever they want.

1. Ownership of the media — most mass media organisations are for-profit and so can never be “unbiased”.
2. Advertising —since media costs more than consumers will pay, advertisers fill the gap, a pattern which shows no sign of ceasing. Advertisers pay for eyeballs, i.e. you and I. The media isn’t just selling a product; they’re selling us as a product to their advertisers.
3. Official sources —media exists within a complex web of power and influence — Governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to influence and openly lobby. As such, they make themselves crucial to the process of journalism.
4. Flak — we all recognise when a story is inconvenient, as it’ll be discredited and trashed elsewhere — it’s remarkably easy to divert a story or to create an alternative reality instead.
5. The Common Enemy — the media is also fantastic at creating a sense of the common enemy — the people who “aren’t like us” or who “threaten our way of life”.

So far, so 1984, but it’s not hard to see the same dynamics at play everywhere today and in almost every country, in varying levels of balance. Social media operates in a very similar way, with different levels of tribalism to add to the mix.

All this is just as relevant in business. Companies have principles, values, systems of belief that they expect you as an employee to follow and to embody. I’ve been told more than once that I’m the “ambassador” of my company before. Of course, there are at least four sound reasons for this:

• Operating within the law — it’s very important for a company’s employees to follow some form of code of ethical behaviour to mitigate the risk of improper or illegal actions.
• Operating within the social mores of modern business — we all need to work together with a high degree of respect for each other, recognising the value of diversity in all its forms.
• Maintaining competitive differentiation — if we all operated in the same ways then there’d be no real competition between companies.
• Most obviously: we’re being paid. Our organisations are giving us money in return for our time and our contribution. Few of us are doing this out of pure altruism.

But these accepted norms aside, is working in a company so very different to the manufactured consent of public opinion, where we as citizens have opinions that are manufactured by the media around us through the five filters enumerated earlier? Is there something we might call “corporate manufactured consent”?

We all know what it’s like to be at a conference where we hear the mouthpieces of different companies proclaiming the benefits of their employer’s products and services, or even culture. Or social media where we read and see more or less cringeworthy updates praising an employer’s actions. Or the phone hold announcements and boilerplate statements that millions of people are paid to read out before they can fully engage in a conversation with a customer.

The company mantra and the way of doing things is just as manufactured as any public opinion and indeed is much more obviously constructed—and in extreme cases can lead to all manner of unintended consequences and corporate arrogance. One of the best-known international consulting firms was the best of the best and hired the absolute best people. Until it all went too far. So “corporate manufactured consent” cuts many ways. It can inflate your own ego as an employee beyond your own actual abilities, to the point where you look down on all around you. It can stifle your own creativity and lead you to behave in ways that you never thought possible just because “that’s how things are around here”. And on a very micro level, employees soon find themselves doing very petty things, passing the buck, following the process as they try to fit in, rather than the bring the true value they could if they brought who they actually are and how they want to act.

Throughout my career to date, I’ve observed a pattern in myself — I seem to be able to bring the very best of who I am for a reasonably fixed period of time, and then the essence of the company I’m in can build up and build up around me, like sediment, until I’m not sure quite who I am anymore. I experience it as if my “consent” towards acting in my company’s interests is complete — I have — to a degree — been “manufactured”. And I can no longer see quite as clearly as I once could. I’ve never fully been able to reconcile myself to it.

What antidotes? These are some of the things I’ve found that really help to counteract corporate manufactured consent:

• Keeping a good network of smart people elsewhere, and connecting regularly.
• Meeting new people from other companies, being open to random new connections.
• Mentoring other people who ask you for help along the way.
• Hearing about how other companies do things from real people, and not just from the business books.
• Reading very widely, and keeping a healthy eye on how all manner of fictional and factual sources can bring inspiration.
• Striving to look at the world more intentionally and notice things (thanks to Helen Le Voi for this one — it changed me when she helped me see it)

A note on business books. There are some amazing ones, I’ll say that up front, and they come along regularly, but sometimes the business publishing world does feel like a whole extra level of meta-corporate manufactured consent. We don’t all have to listen to the latest guru, or quote from the latest book in every meeting — that can very quickly come off as intellectualised societal one-upmanship and leads to a different form of manufactured consent — that of imposing your will over others because you’ve taken the time to “better” yourself. Beware! That author’s book was published by a company, which is run by a group of investors, one of whom is on the Board of your company. Accident? Probably not….

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Bonus share of one of my favourite manifestos. Back in 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger published The Cluetrain Manifesto, a series of 95 theses (echoing Martin Luther) which captured the spirit of what the burgeoning new World Wide Web seemed to portend: “A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter — and getting smarter faster than most companies”.

Read it — you won’t regret it. After all, “We know some people from your company. They’re pretty cool online. Do you have any more like that you’re hiding? Can they come out and play?”