Now, don’t be scared, but I want to talk about ghosts, even though I don’t believe in their existence. After all, how is it possible that a dead medieval knight, for example, can be seen riding his horse in full armour, when he probably died in bed from an infection? And presumably his horse had to die simultaneously. Bonkers.
Millions of people, though, maybe you included, claim they have seen ghosts. Indeed, the horror movie The Exorcist is based on a supposedly true story in which a ghost inhabited a teenager’s body. And this week, the NHS in Norwich called in an exorcist to rid a hospice of the ghost of a child.
From a psychological perspective, several ideas relate to the visions people have. One is that stress or trauma triggers the notion of an apparition. Growing up in a family that believes in ghosts also makes it more likely that an individual will become a believer. It is classic social constructionism at work, which brings me to your office.
At work, your brain starts to construct a reality based upon the ideas discussed by you and your colleagues. Eventually, everyone has the same belief about what is right. Part of this is because if we do not believe in what our colleagues say, we become “out group”, which is where we are seen as a maverick, an outsider. That doesn’t feel good to us, so we conform to prevailing beliefs. Eventually, we believe in the common truth in the office. This is an essential component of social psychology. If this did not happen, every group of people would be in constant conflict.
The problem, though, is that this normal psychological process creates ghosts. These are illusions from your past thinking that have become established and keep reappearing when you want to change something. Change triggers stress and, in turn, that brings up recollections of the past – those apparitions that get in your way.
Take British higher education as an example, the area in which I work. It is undergoing a major upheaval at the moment because the Government has changed the funding process. Instead of students being able to get a loan, they will get a “Lifelong Learning Entitlement”. That’s a fund they can use for all kinds of education, including degrees and short courses. The problem for universities is that the LLE system requires all teaching to be broken up into 30 units. Most courses across the UK are 10, 15 or 20 units. That means that almost every module taught in UK universities has to be completely rewritten to accommodate the new funding model. Oh, and the Government has given us the handy deadline of June this year. Six months to rewrite the entire undergraduate higher education system of the UK.
This is causing stress and trauma at universities across the country. Even though this is a major opportunity to radically overhaul tired old courses and make them fit for the AI future, there is plenty of chatter about the past. Those ghostly apparitions are appearing.
I witnessed this in a discussion with colleagues this week. One asked how we fit in tutorials to the grand scheme of things. My response was, “Who said we had to have tutorials?” Tutorials are more than 800 years old. Could it be that we now have the opportunity to switch to something more useful for students and better suited to the modern age, such as using Google’s NotebookLM? But that ghost from the past is entrenched in people’s minds through social construction. Indeed, a group of European business school researchers published a paper using ghost stories as a metaphor to show how the concept of capitalism remains unquestioned in business schools.
I have worked in organisations where I have been told that “this is the way we do it because it has always worked”. That’s even happened after I have demonstrated a better way. The ghost in their office is more powerful because it is embedded in the collective minds of everyone who works there.
Yet we are in a time in human development where we need to exorcise those ghosts of the past. Stressful change is coming rapidly. The Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton has predicted this week that ALL jobs will be wiped out in 20 years. The boss of the AI company Anthropic is similarly gloomy, suggesting half of all entry-level jobs will disappear within five years.
This is stressful and traumatic for office workers. The ghosts of the past will make their presence felt, and the necessary changes in many offices will be delayed or not occur at all. Those ghosts need exorcising.
To do that, you need to use social constructionism. This exorcism process starts by deconstructing the current ideas in your business. Encourage more questioning of existing ideas. Once you have done that, change the language you use. For example, in education, we could rename “tutorials” as “clarification sessions”. That then reframes what you might do. After changing the language, create some “champions”. These are the initial small groups that see the new idea and start to spread it around the organisation, initiating the process of establishing it. This is exorcism in the office, and you need to use it now if you are not to become a victim of the changes about to rain down on us.
