I have recently been given a higher role at work. My first big challenge seems silly, but it’s causing anger in my team, and I’m finding it difficult to navigate. My partner often talks about math at work. For other colleagues, this is fun. But some colleagues think it is offensive pseudoscience. Now I think I need to get involved, but I’m struggling to figure out what to do. Any ideas?
Not so often: what at first appears to be a small matter at work ends up being a situation that threatens to tear the team apart.
The first thing to say – and recent events have made this matter even more important – is that, however you approach this, don’t do it in public. For anyone in your position who wants to solve an office problem as fairly as you can, there is no need to embarrass someone in front of their colleagues.
Even a gentle verbal rebuke takes on a completely different color — and can sometimes be humiliating — when it’s done outside the privacy of a meeting room.
That’s what not to do. Let’s move on to what you are you can do solve this problem. I think at some point you need to talk to someone who practices math.
What should you say in this discussion? Well, what makes this whole situation so difficult is the specifics of your partner’s actions. I won’t say exactly what they do, but I will say they sit in a difficult middle ground – neither disgusting nor completely innocent.
As you gain a greater understanding of the intentions of this mystical reading, you will gain a better understanding of what tone your discussion needs to take.
I can easily see how some of my colleagues might be offended when this practice moves from an entertaining magic trick to pseudoscience dressed up as real insight.
To be clear, there is no scientific basis for the calculation. But many mystical practices, if done skillfully enough, can be seen as ‘real’ intuitive ways of classifying people or even predicting the future.
Whether your numerologist is a true believer, a joker, or an outright fraud, chances are they rely on a number of factors to make their predictions seem like miraculous knowledge.
Great is the tendency of the human brain to recognize patterns. This helps us with all kinds of things, from playing a game to having a friendly conversation. But it is a cognitive process that can lead us astray in an environment where there is no consistent relationship between the data we get and the results we predict (or have predicted).
In this more difficult environment, and when compared to The Barnum effect and confirmation biaspattern recognition can catch us off guard.
If we are given the opportunity to do so by a “reader” of average ability, we can begin to see confirmation of what we have been told everywhere. We may begin to think, yes, the universe is sending me “five energy changes” in relation to my work, even when most of the evidence available to us suggests nothing of the sort.
I mention all that not because I think you should confront this person with a severe scientific rebuke, but so that you have the basics close at hand if they try to cite the truth as their defense.
I hope it doesn’t come to that, but it is likely that any attempt to moderate this activity will be met with the charge that you are mocking your colleague’s deeply held beliefs.
If that happens, don’t get involved in a messy argument where subtlety has a chance of winning. Make it very simple and use the principle of harm: your partner is perfectly within his rights to understand the world in any way he likes, whether that involves numerology or belief in the universe of clocks. That right does not extend to imposing a completely personal system, completely unrelated to work, on others.
Although the details are quite mundane, at the heart of it all is the story of an old workplace: an unwanted raid has taken place. Part of your job is to determine whether the intrusion is motivated by something less benevolent or well-intentioned (perhaps over-enthusiasm) or something more dangerous (say, a desire to “prove” the work performance or moral worth of your colleagues).
As you become more aware of the motivation behind and direction of this mystical reading, you will gain a better understanding of what tone your discussion needs to take.
Jonathan Rivett is a writer based in Melbourne. He has written about workplace culture and work for over a decade.
