THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT and OD!

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT and OD!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 30, 2012

Reference:

William L. Livingston III, author of “Design for Prevention” (2012), sent me an article written by Edward L. Bernays and Doris E. Fleischman © 1947, published sixty-five years ago. 

Livingston’s comment: “This essay is D4P in short form especially as it relates to the emphasis of front end design.”  He went on to say, “It is also the equivalent of "The Prince" by Machiavelli,” but for CEOs. 

Wow, I said to myself, that is some endorsement.  Edward Bernays, for those not familiar with the name, is the father of media “spin” and the creator of public relations or PR.  He also lived to be nearly 104 (1891-1995).

My interest, I must confess, is that I saw a remarkable connection between Bernays’s communications expose with organizational development (OD).

THE ENGINEERING OF CONSENT

Given that this piece was written sixty-five years ago, and is culture bound by that limitation, the reader might wonder what relevance it has.  As it turns out, the engineering of agreement that predisposes consensus is as relevant today as it was those many years ago.  Why?  Because with all our electronic tools being used essentially as toys we are the same hapless critters that we were then.

Bernays writes:

For only by mastering the techniques of communication can leadership be exercised fruitfully in the vast complex that is modern democracy in the United States.

He was writing of a much less formally educated society:

The average American adult has only six years of schooling behind him.

If that were not bad enough, he continues:

Today’s leaders have become more remote physically from the public; yet, at the same time, the public has much greater familiarity with these leaders through the system of modern communications.

Indeed, the President of the United States, if nothing else, is a media star, constantly on with his image appearing everywhere so that subliminally he is in the mind if not in one’s thoughts 24/7.

THE ENGINEERING APPROACH as PUBLIC RELATIONS

Bernays was not quite a contemporary of the French philosopher and psychologist Gustave Le Bon (see references to him in this blog), but he understood the mechanisms and motives, as did Le Bon of the group mind, and the impossibility of controlling and regimenting the masses according to an outside will without satisfying the crowd’s internal psychosocial needs. 

He is very pragmatic in his dictum.  You manage this process as assiduously as a civil engineer goes about analyzing the elements of the situation before he builds a bridge which entails:

(1)   Calculating resources, human and physical;

(2)   Developing as thorough a knowledge of the subject as possible;

(3)   Determining the objective, subject to possible change;

(4)   Researching the public to learn why and how it acts individually and as a group.

Public relations differ little with this formula today.  It is consistent with organizational development (OD) as well.  I say that because Bernays’s favorite technique was the manipulation of public opinion by the indirection of a “third party.”  OD is that third party in assaying the lay of the land and the problems that seem endemic to the system.  Bernays’s writes:

If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group, which they sway.

As Livingston implies in his remarks, CEOs could benefit from “the engineering of consent” because they don’t always pay that much attention to the front end, whereas Bernays’s engineer would know precisely where he was going and what he desired to accomplish.  He writes:

He may intensify already existing attitudes; he may induce those holding favorable attitudes to take constructive action; he may convert disbelievers; he may disrupt certain antagonistic points of view.

WHERE ARE WE RIGHT NOW?  STUDYING THE PUBLIC

It is not enough to have the objective clear in your mind, but this must be balanced with a clear understanding of the crowd, the group, the public or the organization.  Bernays asks:

These are people, but what do they know? 

In other words, what is the organic construction of their will?  How do we go forward without first asking ourselves:

What are their present attitudes towards the situation with which we are concerned?  What are the impulses, which govern these attitudes?  What ideas are the people ready to absorb?  What are the people ready to do?  Where do they get their ideas?

Again back to Livingston’s CEOs and front end attention.  Attitude is all about people’s predisposition to act.  If we don’t precisely know people’s beliefs, values, interests, attitudes and cultural proclivities, then we don’t know them at all, or how they will act. 

Given this set of circumstances, whatever we do is more or less like trying to pin the tail on the donkey blindfolded.  As absurd as this sounds, this is too often the case. 

One must try to find out what they (people) are in any situation in which one is working. 

That is to say, know the group formations with which one is to deal from every vantage point, that is, material, spiritual, economic, psychological and political.

STUDY THE LEADER

To function well, Bernays advises, select leaders who usually remain in a controlling position for stated intervals of time.  These leaders reflect their followers’ wishes and work to promote their interests.  In turn, they can only lead them as far as, and in the direction in which they want to go.

Study the leader to see if he has the make-up to realize that leadership, in the end, is complete followership, that is, if the leader understands the mind of the group that establishes a common denominator between the leader and the group. 

Once established, Bernays says, it provides a blueprint of action and clarifies the question of who does what, when, and why.  It will indicate the over-all strategy to be employed.

Study the leader to see if he has the flexibility and the integrity to modify planned goals and to change actions and methods that circumstances necessitate. 

This furnishes, Bernays says, the equivalent of the mariner’s chart, the architect’s blueprint, the traveler’s roadmap.  It is also happens to be excellent OD.

THEMES, STRATEGIES AND ORGANIZATION

Bernays sees the thematic brief as the story line, the strategic intervention as the structured overarching principle to be carried out by the tactics that flow in an ever modifying process to the completion of the task.  The mechanism is holistic, intelligent and organic.  In that sense, it has much in common with OD.

Too often the story line is assumed when no one has checked beforehand to see if everyone is on the same page.  The strategy then is reduced to tactics.  The tactics then go off the grid of the intended target due to unanticipated or unintended consequences.  The tartet is then changed to accommodate the new contingencies. 

What is actually accomplished, if anything, is far removed from the objective.  This can lead to dire consequences.  I saw this when organizations aspired to creating a culture of contribution but, instead, created a culture of complacency with passive behaviors dominating (see Six Silent Killers, 1998).    

This has been the fate of MBOs (Management By Objectives) and PAS (Performance Appraisal System), exercises meant to energize operations to excellence only to see them wandering far off the grid of intended purpose.  They became ends in themselves instead of means to any useful ends. 

An organization when there is a disconnect between purpose and performance can lead to unusual internal stress and strain that finds it unable to recognize much less cope with external demands.  Markets disappear, manpower needs shift, and the economics of survival too often gravitate to panic mode.

Here is how Bernays looks at themes, strategies and communications:

Do not think of tactics in terms of segmental approaches.  The problem is not to get articles into a newspaper or obtain radio time or arrange a motion picture newsreel; it is rather to set in motion a broad activity (strategy), the success of which depends on interlocking (complementary) phases and elements of the proposed strategy, implemented by tactics that are timed to the moment of maximum effectiveness.

Livingston is so right on when he insists this short document is a manifesto for CEOs alerting them as to how routine practices (e.g., MBOs and PAS) can cripple operations.  Bernays writes:

An action (or activity) held over but one day (that may no longer be relevant) may fall completely flat.  Skilled and imaginative timing has determined the success of many mass movements and campaigns.

Management is a dinosaur and it has been now for several generations, yet it operates with the hubris that it is irreplaceable (see Work Without Managers, 1991), which is not the case at all. 

We have had a revolution in what is considered “work,” and with the exception of a few high-tech companies, work is defined, scripted, implemented and performed as if most workers have those "six years of formal education" that Bernays speaks about. 

Moreover, we are in a machine age, but it is the second machine age, which finds that new machine too often the master and the worker too often the machine's willing slave. 

This need not be.  Bernays was a pioneer in media and a student of Freudian theory and the changing nature of the American culture.  He stepped outside his discipline to learn how social psychological and anthropological research was changing the conception of people as operatives. 

He recognized how cultures clashed and how events out of that collision change people; how these changes do not occur by accident but are driven by forces meant to accomplish some purpose, and that that purpose is influenced by the acceptance of certain ideas, which lead inevitably to certain actions.  In his words, he explains it thusly:

Events may set up a chain reaction.  By harnessing the energies of group leaders, the engineer of consent can stimulate them to set in motion activities of their own.  They will organize additional, specialized, subsidiary events, all of which will further dramatize the basic theme (the story line). 

This is Livingston’s “front end” attention, which he gives in his “Design for Prevention” (2012).  If the preparatory work is done comprehensively and completely, if everything that should go into the equation is properly understood and executed with precision, then the outcome is organic and flows naturally to its purpose. 

Bernays says:

Communication is the key to engineering consent for social action.

I couldn’t agree with him more.  He continues:

Words, sounds, and pictures accomplish little unless they are the tools of a soundly thought out plan and carefully organized method.  If the plans are well formulated and the proper use is made of them, the ideas conveyed by the words will become part and parcel of the people themselves.

An OD specialist can go into a workplace and can gain an understanding of that workplace without speaking to a single soul.  He does this by looking around, studying behavior, and absorbing the place.  He can tell in that obsevation whether or not the words are part and parcel of the people themselves, or if there is a great disconnect.  Bernays saw this in terms of public relations whereas I see it in terms of OD. 

With OD the language expressed is in behavior in which the word is, indeed, action:

The structure of work determines the function of work; the function of work creates the workplace culture; the workplace culture dictates organizational behavior; organizational behavior establishes whether the organization thrives or even survives.

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