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Got a cool newsletter this morning about misinformation. If you are the type of person that reads thought pieces and watches documentaries, you will know and recognize 99.9% of the content in here. You can also hit up this 2017 New Yorker article on “why facts don’t change our minds,” which has a lot of the same major points in a longer format.
When we talk about this stuff, we mostly discuss it from a politics standpoint or a social media standpoint. Those are certainly two valid framings for these issues, but misinformation is a big work concept too. Years ago, I was working at this firm and a partner named Mark got pushed out. My friend Vadim and I had a text thread about it, and I wrote this article about “the bystander effect in organizations,”meaning a lot of times everyone knows what’s happening but no one says or does anything about it. (I wrote something similar once about bad management.) About 2.5 years after I wrote that bystander article, by the way, that Mark guy is my boss on a different project. Weird world we live in.
When you talk about misinformation in a work context, I think these are the buckets:
- Top levels hoarding information
- Lies
- Office gossip
- Things we know and do not say
