I wish this quote were a little more explicit about what’s going wrong. On a literal reading it’s saying that some people who disagreed attended meetings and were made to feel comfortable. I think it’s super plausible that this leads to some kind of pernicious effect, but I wish it spelt out more what.
I guess the best thing I can infer is that the author thinks public resignations and dissent would have been somewhat effective and the domesticated dissenters were basically ineffective?
Or is the context of the piece just that he’s explaining the absence of prominent public dissent?
My understanding is that institutions can create an internal “game of telephone” while believing that they are listening to the opposing opinions.
Basically, information gets diluted at each step:
you tell someone that “X is a problem”, but they understand it merely as “we need to provide some verbal justification why we are going to do X anyway”, i.e. they don’t treat it as an actual problem, but as a mere bureaucratic obstacle to be navigated around;
your friend tells you that “X is a huge problem”, but your takeaway is merely that “X is a problem”, because on one hand you trust your friend, on the other hand you think your friend is too obsessed with X and exaggerates the impact;
your friend had an inside information (which is the reason you have actually decided to listen to him in the first place) that X will probably kill everyone, but he realizes that if he tells it this way, you will probably decide that he is insane, so he instead chooses to put it diplomatically as “X is a huge problem”.
Taken together… you hired someone as an expert to provide an important information (and you congratulate yourself for doing it), but ultimately you ignored everything he said. And everyone felt happy in the process… your friend felt happy that the people making the important decisions were listening to him… your organization felt happy for having an ISO-certified process to listen to outside critics… except that ultimately nothing happened.
I am not saying that in a parallel reality where your friend instead wrote a Facebook post “we are all going to die” (and was ignored by everyone who matters) had a better outcome. But it had less self-deception by everyone involved.
I wish this quote were a little more explicit about what’s going wrong. On a literal reading it’s saying that some people who disagreed attended meetings and were made to feel comfortable. I think it’s super plausible that this leads to some kind of pernicious effect, but I wish it spelt out more what.
I guess the best thing I can infer is that the author thinks public resignations and dissent would have been somewhat effective and the domesticated dissenters were basically ineffective?
Or is the context of the piece just that he’s explaining the absence of prominent public dissent?
My understanding is that institutions can create an internal “game of telephone” while believing that they are listening to the opposing opinions.
Basically, information gets diluted at each step:
you tell someone that “X is a problem”, but they understand it merely as “we need to provide some verbal justification why we are going to do X anyway”, i.e. they don’t treat it as an actual problem, but as a mere bureaucratic obstacle to be navigated around;
your friend tells you that “X is a huge problem”, but your takeaway is merely that “X is a problem”, because on one hand you trust your friend, on the other hand you think your friend is too obsessed with X and exaggerates the impact;
your friend had an inside information (which is the reason you have actually decided to listen to him in the first place) that X will probably kill everyone, but he realizes that if he tells it this way, you will probably decide that he is insane, so he instead chooses to put it diplomatically as “X is a huge problem”.
Taken together… you hired someone as an expert to provide an important information (and you congratulate yourself for doing it), but ultimately you ignored everything he said. And everyone felt happy in the process… your friend felt happy that the people making the important decisions were listening to him… your organization felt happy for having an ISO-certified process to listen to outside critics… except that ultimately nothing happened.
I am not saying that in a parallel reality where your friend instead wrote a Facebook post “we are all going to die” (and was ignored by everyone who matters) had a better outcome. But it had less self-deception by everyone involved.