Lying Encourages Us To Hope That Everything Is True, Including Good Governance

Just how important is the Truth? In a period when fake news rules, in which we increasingly attempt to subjugate reality to suit our own ends, we may feel justified in thinking that the Truth is overrated. This is because each and every one of us has his/her own Truth which we are usually unlikely to question.

However, whether in the Family or in Business, the issue of authenticity, of the Truth as worthy of achievement, with all of the limitations that subjectivity may impose, has become a question requiring greater attention on our part.

The lack of Truth, in fact, compels each of us to daily create a long drawn out fiction which not only harms family relationships but also clouds even the most brilliant minds. This is because, in the long term, no one can wear many masks or act simultaneously in a private and public role, without getting miserably confused as to the real Truth and stumbling at the first hurdle.

What we generally fail to consider is how lies and fictions influence the decisional process. Confused minds, undecided as to the role they are playing, come up with bad decisions, poorly elaborate the information in their possession and make biased choices as to the data on which their strategies are based.

There are, of course, white lies which, since this is hardly a lesson in morals, I shall not take into consideration. What I wish to analyse, instead, are those lies which do harm, especially when they penetrate the dynamics of business governance.

What I mean is in the control room: where important decisions are made and which can bear heavily on people’s lives. Where, too, it’s possible to observe a distinct non-awareness of the consequences of a harmful “non-truth”, whether unuttered or expressed.

In this time of fake news, we don’t consider how lies influence business governance.

Anna Zanardi

Healthy governance is threatened each and every time those who represent decision-making bodies (members of the board, administrators, chair persons), relate to the world through dual identities, lack of transparency and a distorted vision of what is happening outside their own consciences. Such behaviour may be perceived as advisable in order to guarantee efficient functioning of the structure.

After all, by now, there are hundreds of volumes demonstrating how reticence is the best way to preserve family ties; anyone revealing skeletons in the closet, secrets and hypocrisies is sure to be driven away and persecuted, certainly not praised because they wish to clean up and bring order. The hypocrisy deriving from such behaviour, that is to say the failure to be honest even with oneself, is, in my opinion, a kind of pathological arrogance, showing a defiant disregard for others, deriding the love, patience, good faith and generosity of all those who, being educated to promote the common good, find themselves in the minority. Because the majority, both in families and business, are driven by double or triple logic, one even so changeable as to be totally fluid and lacking any kind of stability and balance. This fact, which apparently would seem to apply only to the moral sphere, is rather, in its pragmatic connotation, a problem of governance relating to the social group in which it occurs. And it is important to be able to defend oneself against it. But how? The only way to defend oneself from hypocrites and serial liars is by silence because dialogue cannot serve to budge those who make fun of others’ feelings. We have to admit, though, that the blame for the dysfunction lies not only with the hypocrites but also with those who underestimate their ability to manipulate, who take their declarations seriously, rather than turn aside and carry on along the straight and narrow. Those who, instead of trying to improve governance processes, are content to follow the leading opinion (or often, merely the persuasive force of the individual).

There is an urgent need for organisations to find an antidote for these represent a social and common good, which impacts on the lives of many, indeed, on entire countries, which make of their own capacity for good governance a pivotal element for the success of the nation as a whole. Only if a country has a sound internal system can it look elsewhere, outside its own borders, which still exist, to create new pieces of the world, in common with others, and find a renewed ability to dialogue, so often mortified by those who have forgotten how to listen.

In these days, we have witnessed the clamorous outcome of the experimentation of ChatGBT, Microsoft’s new chatbox which works thanks to an Artificial Intelligence open source and which makes available, to all, efficacious and extremely fast elaborations of quantities of data that no human being would be able to create. Optimal answers, almost as if there were a conscience inherent in A.I. When healthy dialogue fails between people, who should have a conscience, it is almost comforting to think that it is possible to chat with “someone other than ourselves”, without any personal interest, hypocrisies and deeply rooted jealousies, arbitrary and avid expectations which generate nothing but bitterness in those who still believe in the value of Truth. However, comforting this may be, it is not the solution.

We all know, even with limited personal experience, that the economic dimension is the one which releases often uncontrollable instincts. Money reveals the hidden side of people, aspects invisible to most, even to the subjects themselves. It affects family dynamics but my concern, here, is of a collective nature: do instruments exist which can protect organizations from these mechanisms? Can good governance, generated by precise and unbiased criteria, protect from destructive human deviations? So much has been written on ESG while comparatively very little has been written on Governance.

Émile Zola wrote, with great foresight, “When truth is buried, such an explosive force grows, suffocates and accumulates that, when it explodes one day, it takes everything with it”. In the course of time, we have witnessed companies being swept away by truths hidden from boards of Directors, or from shareholders: the best known cases are Enron and Lehman Brothers, but we also know of scandals associated with the disastrous performances of auditing companies which failed to monitor thoroughly, willingly and superficially contenting themselves with the lies of certain managements. These examples show us how hidden lies and their hypocrisies, when they become visible, will degenerate and rot, leaving us with problems to solve and environments to clean up.

The positive side is that, when lies are revealed, managerial changes may ensue, certain mechanisms may be dismantled and, though damaged and suffering, the system can be restructured with better levels of awareness and learning. Falsities and lies will always exist, as will behaviour likely to undermine human relationships from the inside, thus capable of harming the function of both families and organisations. However, I should like to think that organisations could find a way of escaping such dynamics, for the sake of their collective function, aimed at the common good.

Without letting themselves be caged in by claustrophobic interest determined by some chromosomic right. It is to be hoped, moreover, that the hypocritical metaphor of the “good family” will be forgotten when referring to organisations: the CEO is not the head of the family, s/he is the head of a company, and as such must be concerned with many and various interests: those of shareholders, employees, the market and much else, without, if possible, becoming confused by manipulation of affections and double-edged ties typical of the family environment. The family is not an environment only to be criticized but it cannot be a model for companies wishing to perform in a sustainable way on the market.

So, please, let’s leave family logic to personal and private spheres, and let’s get back to organisations with greater transparency, courage and authenticity.