Mission Impossible: Getting to the Truth

My steward and I were meeting for coffee. He was angry, and painted a dire picture of the workplace. Safety was being seriously neglected, morale was down to an all-time low, and management didn’t care.

Alarm bells were going off for me, and I knew I had to investigate because clearly my membership was in crisis. I visited the workplace shortly after, and started by checking in with the manager. I was surprised at how upbeat she was, making comments that indicated care for employees. 

Checking in with the workforce during a break, I asked both general and specific questions. By the end of the visit I was unable to say whether the picture painted by my steward was accurate or not. Was the workplace really in crisis, or wasn’t it?

So why is it so hard to find the truth? 

Malcolm Gladwell, in his podcast Revisionist History, takes a look at the Vietnam War to illustrate how our biases get in the way when we’re examining data. 

Vietnam had been a French colony until the end of the Second World War. With the departure of the French, the nation fractured. The autonomous government in South Vietnam came under attack from the Viet Cong, who were trying to unify South and North Vietnam, and were getting support from communists in North Vietnam. 

The Americans were determined to halt the spread of communism and launched a brutal bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese. In 1967, the US government hired the Rand Corporation to determine if the campaign was working. 

Gladwell says this was one of the most thorough intelligence operations ever undertaken. Thousands of hours were spent interviewing Viet Cong soldiers and prisoners, resulting in 61,000 pages of interview notes. 

Yet despite all the intelligence, the war was ultimately a failure for the US. Gladwell concludes that one influential player was instrumental in getting the intelligence wrong, while a more perceptive Rand analyst was ignored.

Leon Goure was an American whose parents had escaped the Soviet Union during one of Joseph Stalin’s purges. When he looked at the data from Rand’s analysis, he concluded that the bombing campaign was working and should continue. He had the ear of American decision makers and was counted on as providing a clear picture of the truth.

Konrad Kellen was another American who had escaped war; in his case, his Jewish family escaped Nazi Germany. Kellen read all the same Rand data that Goure read, but he determined that America couldn’t win the Vietnam War. In the end, he turned out to be right. 

Gladwell concludes that the difference between Kellen, who got it right, and Goure, who got it wrong, is that their lenses (biases) were very different. 

One other key difference: Kellen was the better listener. When he listened to the interviews, he listened deeper. Gladwell says: “Listening is hard because the more you listen, the more unsettling the world becomes.” 

He says Goure’s world view wouldn’t allow him to conclude that America’s efforts were wrong and ineffective. Unfortunately, it was Goure who had the ear of the decision makers and US troops remained in Vietnam until 1975. Who knows how many needless deaths could have been prevented if Kellen had prevailed. 

You can learn more about this by downloading the podcast Revisionist History, or by reading it on the BBC website. 

So what about my workplace investigation? What I can say for sure is that my steward was being honest about his perception. I can also assume the manager had a difficult time seeing the things that weren’t working due to management bias. I could see the membership didn’t feel as responsible as the steward did, and so they weren’t as eager to voice their concerns. Some of them might have been more comfortable putting up with inadequate safety than they were with speaking up. Puzzled by these conflicting perceptions, I needed to resist the temptation of jumping to an easy conclusion, and hunker down for the long haul.

In the world of labour relations, there are many reasons we’d like to come to a decisive conclusion. The problem is, it’s often complicated, and the more we listen, the more complicated the situation can become. Collaborative partnerships require good listening, and both partners have to be open to hearing contradicting information and even examining their own biases.