Idea For SPA: The Red Thread of Propaganda

Written by Jamie Saturday, 29 January 2011 10:52

There is a wonderful expression in Dutch, ‘rode draad’, meaning red thread, but used to describe a continuing theme.

Last night I met my friend at Schiphol, at the small cafe opposite arrivals 1.  I was there to discuss an idea for SPA, a software conference that’s held in London, he was on his way to England.  My idea is simple, I want to discuss the red thread that passes through the following:

• Cognitive dissonance.
• The trilogy of propaganda.
• Political ideology.
• Power.
• Conservatism.

And, the question I am going to answer is this: where did our thinkers go?  And, as a subtext, I would argue that if you don’t have a handle on the above, you will fail as an engineer.  If, and I wouldn’t blame you, you thought I was quite mad, let me try to explain.

As the 1970s gave way to the 80s and the United Kingdom gave birth to Thatcher, I was running around a two bedroom house somewhere in North Hull.  When I was eight, my mother was ambivalent, we watched, in black and white, the miners striking over in Yorkshire.  (Hull is in East Yorkshire, so far east that we look at people in Leeds and Sheffield as if they are not really from the same place.  Yorkshire’s a big place.)  Around about this time, they started successfully extracting gas from the North Sea.  While Thatcher et al. were celebrating the success of their policies, others (silently) argued that what she did had nothing to do with anything; the money from the gas propped the economy up.  So, while they were spending the money my dad was earning it, rough necking it in the North Sea.  When he wasn’t doing that, he was playing rugby league, a variation of rugby union that was developed in rebellion to its conservative nature.  (The rugby union wouldn’t compensate players so only the rich could afford to play.  In a similar vein, teams like ‘Sheffield Wednesday’ were made up of shopkeepers who played in the Wednesday league.  The other sports divisions usually run along religious lines, with one team being Catholic and the other Protestant.)

Some of the mines had experimented successfully with cross functional teams.  However, these experiments often didn’t scale or, in some cases, the team didn’t promote their success for fear of being shut down.  In other cases, the management left them to it but never told anyone in case they got into trouble.  Decades before any of us were deceiving our bosses - process facade -  the miners were doing it.  And, I have do doubt, before that, so were the factory workers, the peasants, and the egyptians; there’s a doctrine and there’s what works.  Presenting a facade is a power play, something a person can do to control another.  On a larger scale, a facade could be elevated to an ideology.  Marx said that ideology was ‘a solution in the mind to contradictions which cannot be solved in practice’.  What does that mean?

All politicians, to solve any bad feelings they have, create a story about the success of their policies.  The English and the Americans span a wonderful story about how, if we invaded Iraq, it would better for us and for them.  A lot of us - English and American citizens - span our own story, or extended the governments’, in order to justify our superiors.  Therefore, decisions from the government forced us to form an opinion.  There is a quote from the Brothers Karamazov that goes something like, ‘I never used to mind that man, but I did something bad to him, now I hate him’.  Once we hurt someone - or do them a favour - we have to, it’s a human need, justify our actions.  So, a country most of us never cared about, Iraq, all of a sudden is something we’ve all got an opinion on.

The bad feeling we have when we do something that conflicts with how we view ourselves is called cognitive dissonance.  The stories, i.e. the bullshit, we tell ourselves is called self-justification.  If you elevate self-justification to some higher levels you get:

• Family myths; so-and-so, the black sheep.
• Tribalism; those Catholics/Protestants are scum.
• Ideology.

In each case, the self-justification is related to an enemy.  The enemy is not real, it only serves a purpose as part of the self-justification story.  Armed with this knowledge, how can we manipulate a load of people into doing what we want?  How about this:

I take a false enemy, and I slag it off, I build a wonderful piece of propaganda, and I use that, for example, as justification to fight a land war in, Vietnam, or Iraq, or I invade the ‘Holy’ land as part of a crusade.  (Please see the picture, below, of the van Eyck altarpiece in Ghent, Belgium.  The knights were never usually placed on altarpieces.  However, many people thought that raping and pillaging went against God and so the knights were taken into consideration as part of the propaganda, hence they got the bottom left quadrant.  Think ‘Rosie the Riveter’, not a communist, but a God fearing capitalist.)  But, I can be more prosaic than this, because a false-opposition works on many levels.  Taylorism, the waterfall methodology and traditional management have all become targets of authors writing about agile, or radical management, or lean techniques.  These same things were targets of other authors in the 80s (and I am guessing the 70s and 60s).  They are a false opposition, which is great for enthusing a crowd - think lynch mod - and great for selling books - think Hubbard’s Dianetics or the Bible.  When I ask, then, where did our thinkers go?, I am quite serious, because they seem to have been drowned in a incessant sea of bullshit and, shame on the rest of us, we’ve stood by and watched it happen.  Our response, more movements.  Dear me.

Finally, the one thing I didn’t talk about was conservatism.  Schon said that organisations dynamically become conservative.  That’s to say, they may be perfectly rational and staffed by perfectly rational people - I know that’s an oxymoron - but, when presented with change, they all of a sudden look to preserve the status quo.  This works from families right up to the top level where we find political parties called conservative.  That people can become conservative in the face of a threat helps us to think about where our problems lie.  The problem does not lie in a better process, we’ve known about iterations and risk management forever, but in the integration of people and process, the dismantling of power structures and the development of the strength to live with dissonance, to live without closure.  These are the topics we need to attack, and I don’t know of one person who’s having a go at these.  It’s people not process, and courage not cowardice, and finally it’s ideas not ideology.

This is where I am today, and these are the topics I will be putting together for any proposal to SPA.  There’s a red thread that runs through all of our lives and I think is time we started unpicking it.

Things to Consider

• How is Rosie different to her Russian counterpart?
• What have rationing and the consultant’s mantra, ‘it will get better before it gets worse’, got in common.
• Why do homosexuals care about miners?  Why would the agile community form alliances with, for example, the object community?
• What images, such as the knight in the altarpiece, accompany the agile movement?