I'm Sorry You're An Asshole, Part 2

There are no wrong answers, except there are.

I’m on a business trip in SC with a consulting client, a utility company for two counties that my colleague has worked with for several years and has brought me in on as a junior-partner-in-training. This will be the first time we’ll be seeing them in person since COVID, and my first time being in-person with them ever.

Earlier this year, while running a Zoom leadership training thing with the directors, my colleague asked the group, “what’s a question you’ve always had and still have about leadership?” or something like that. It was more productive than it sounds. Anyway, after going around the table, he asked me the same question to invite me to stir the pot, which is generally my role when we have a two-person dynamic on workshops.

I asked, “Why is it so hard for leaders to publicly and openly admit when they’ve made a mistake? I can count on one hand the number of times in my entire life I’ve seen the senior leadership of an organization acknowledge a bad judgment call or a factual inaccuracy. Why can’t we seem to do that?”

I was greeted with an uncomfortable silence. (Very uncommon. I’m not bad at this.) Nobody had any insights to offer, and a lot of them looked at each other in interesting ways. My colleague let them stew in this for a little while, because that’s his thing, and we moved on.

But my question remained. It’s been an object of fascination for me for a long time, but even moreso since I got a part-time job two years ago spending roughly half of each day being angry about global COVID policy. (The pay is terrible and my co-workers are mostly complete nut cutlets.)

This one is filed under I’m Sorry You’re An Asshole because it’s an exploration of admitting fault, which is the essential element of a genuine apology. Specifically, this is about POWER (whether manifest in a leader or a dominant entity) admitting fault.

Anthropology is about social evolution as much as biological- why have we ended up with the norms we have? Why is it normal for nearly all cultures to want to cover genitalia, but relatively rare to (under normal circumstances) cover faces- one of the main reasons mask mandates were such an assault on our sense of dignity and humanity? Why do so many world religions have similar themes and mythology not directly explained by cultural transmission? These are rhetorical questions, but their answers have something in common: these things evolved because they won the natural selection game against a near-infinite number of other things that could have been cultural and behavioral norms: they led to greater survivability and reproduction in the communities that tried them, and they stuck.

This is important to remember- aggravating things about typical human behavior exist for a reason, either as an adaptation or a maladaptation to something, and have become “sticky.”

The reasons why we want (generally) people to admit when they’re wrong is at cross purposes to the reasons why people don’t do it. One has to do with reality testing and trust. The other has to do with social credit. (Social credit is not solely about trust, and depending on who you ask, trust is far less important than other factors.)

The reasons we want people to admit fault are mostly obvious, because we’ve all felt them pretty clearly: we want to know our understanding of reality is correct. We want a sense that the “guilty” party has insight that will make a repeat offense (hopefully) less likely. If the fault hurt us, we want our emotional response to be vindicated: we were RIGHT to be angry, hurt, or whatever, because the guilty party shouldn’t have done that. There are a lot of personal and social benefits to be on the receiving end of a mea culpa.

On the other hand, there’s very little to be gained by giving one. An admission of fault can be evidence of incompetence, leading to loss of position or power. Even when it doesn’t lead to a structured “punishment,” the confessor loses all-important social credit: an admission of fault, even an accurate one, is a defeat, a humiliation, and a sustained injury to their personal power. Think in terms of other primates with social structures: the specific “right” and “wrong” of behavior is irrelevant: there’s just dominance and submission- the ability to maintain one’s position in a hierarchy, or to topple others to claim theirs. Fortunately, we’re more complicated than chimps, but that wiring is still foundational to who we are, and all those complications that make us human have to interface with it.

By the way, the framing of this makes the social dynamics of admitting fault sound like a very masculine affair, with silverback gorillas brawling with younger challengers and so forth, but this is universal: social credit is at LEAST as important in feminine and gender-neutral contexts, and girls learn these sorts of complex social mechanics earlier, faster, and more fully than most boys (all else being equal).

So, we can understand why things are the way they are- but they can’t remain this way. We live in a more democratic and information-centered civilization than ever before, which is to say that power is much more commonly accumulated and maintained through social maneuvering (this includes the accumulation of wealth) than by brute force, and the governed are more privy to the reasons and systems by which the powerful achieve their position and the mechanisms by which they are governed. It isn’t sustainable for a leader to be at fault, say “so what?” and to be forgiven by sheer dint of their charisma or by the impregnability of their power base. Eventually, the consequences of unaddressed errors compound, impunity leads to more errors, and the whole thing falls apart.

They can tell us to our face that the vaccines work great, have no side effects, and destroy you for saying otherwise. They can muzzle you and tell you that it works and we’ve always known it works and we never said otherwise. They can tell you that inflation isn’t happening and that modern monetary policy has no downsides.

They can use force, threats, intimidation, propaganda, and lies to keep their positions unchallenged. But if they’re wrong, they’re wrong, and as Fathermouth’s favorite expression goes, ‘the chickens will fall.’ (I’ve never been exactly clear about where the chickens are falling from, what’s making them fall, or why they don’t just fly. I’ve asked Fathermouth if he actually means ‘the chickens are coming home to roost,’ and the surprising answer is, ‘I know what I fucking mean.’)

There are two ways to address this as a social mechanism in need of evolution: they’re both straightforward, but neither are simple or easy to implement in an organization or community of any size. They require concerted, consistent effort towards cultural change, and don’t pay off right away because the social economics discussed above will continue to hold until the moment they don’t. This means they require courage and a willingness to take hits with the promise of organizational payoff later.

The first is the responsibility of those impacted by fault- the ‘confessees’: they must establish a cost for failure to admit fault commensurate with the fault itself. This will mean consciously discounting the social cost for fault while increasing the costs for dissembling. The criminal justice system makes an attempt at doing this: pleading guilty ostensibly leads to a lower sentence for the same crime than being found guilty at trial. Depending on the circumstances, withholding should carry a greater cost than the deed itself (a dynamic parents of young children usually understand very well).

The second is the responsibility of the ‘confessor’- to change the dynamic of social cost incurred with admitting fault. The confessor should take ownership of the fault BEFORE being confronted by it. This competes with the normal defense mechanisms of power: to deflect responsibility (“Putin did it,”), to deny or dissemble (“that’s not happening, it’s misinformation,”) or to conceal the error. Ethics aside, smart leadership should never assume that errors can be indefinitely concealed or deflected: the level of information control needed to permanently maintain control of a false narrative is costly (a cost that compounds) and exhausts the system by destroying trust. One should always assume that the truth of a fault will eventually out, and (again, ethics aside) delaying confrontation should only ever be to buy the time needed to organize an effective confrontation. In the end, though, the first person to point out the fault of leadership should be leadership itself.

This flows into another responsibility of the social structure governed by leadership: to select for leaders that behave this way.

Can we- individually and as social entities-make such a behavioral shift? If we have ever seen the selective benefit and motivation for doing so, we have seen it in the past two years.

If you’re a leader, model it. If you’re part of a power structure, vote for it, demand it, and make it the deciding factor for who you work for and serve.

Effective power must evolve or perish.