Saturated expectations
It is not my habbit to come up with new year’s resolutions, but early in 2018 I did: to disarm verbally.
What brought me to this statement was the following observation: Like many of us, even in science and usually with best intentions, I try to speak about my own findings and convictions in the most appealing way possible. That is, I use marketing techniques to market my ideas, results and opinions in the marketplace of thoughts, trying to get a precious moment of attention from those I deem to be relevant stakeholders. In doing so, I sometimes overdo: Use terms that encompass more than I could rightfulyl claim, exaggerate the meaning of a result, or overemphasize my own influence.
The problem transcends the individual situation: As I and others are doing marketing, the world becomes “louder” and louder still. Nuances vanish as everybody is trying to broadcast as radically as possible what he or she thinks the world’s gonna hear. Our words have become weapons of mass broadcasting, and the result is that the audience is becoming increasingly numb to any valuable address.
Since a while, our means of communication have saturated the degree of excitement and force that can be conveyed. This lead to maxed-out expectations on the recipient’s end as well: As consumers of news, we don’t even look at non-exaggerated headlines any more, and from the exaggerated ones we don’t expect anything special besides some pastime. Greta Thunberg is confronting the United Nations? Interesting news for a day or week, but not enough to make us question our current way of living. “Thanks, Greta, but that’s enough” seems to be the Tenor of the debate.
I lament this development because I perceive it to have a toxic influence on the societal level at large: We loose our ability to tell important from less important, from getting alarmed or excited, from showing any meaningful spectrum of reactions. The saturated expectations lead to saturated responses, parallizing our flexibility to those news that actually call for action. For us as a society, the constant marketing broadcast is deafining our resilience.
Paradoxically, in my professional role as scientific director of ZHAW digital with its mission to secure ZHAW a leading postion in the area of digital transformation, I am convinced a key element to success is to better tell in public what great stuff is happing inside our labs and classrooms. I believe we do excellent research with tons of useful applications, and relevant teaching as well, which is too little known publicly compared to other universities. So I’d like to increase our “marketing” efforts in hiring science writers and multimedia storytellers to make our breakthroughs and exploits known.
The logic of the marketplace demands from me as a leader to do the very thing that has the described bad consequences on the societal level. For the sake of my organization, I cannot disarm verbally lest other players do the same. Or can I?