For those old enough to remember, or with a passion for early twenty-first century history, you may recall Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf (محمد سعيد الصحاف)—better known in the Western Hemisphere as 'Baghdad Bob'. He shot to prominence during the 2003 invasion of Iraq for saying things such as 'Baghdad is safe. The battle is still going on.', despite scenes of Iraqi troops running for cover and US tanks rumbling through the streets outside his impromptu press briefing. This farce is a case study in cognitive capture: leaders and their communications teams persisting with high-gloss messaging in the face of visibly collapsing operational realities.
Recent weeks have offered a depressing reminder of this approach, particularly if you are invested in—well, anything really. A sharp stock market downturn—the worst since the early weeks of the COVID pandemic—has stripped the varnish off attempts at political optimism. Economic indicators are blaring red, from earnings downgrades to ballooning volatility indices, and yet the commentary from pro-Trump leadership, and even financial columnists who should cynically be knowing better, remains doggedly optimistic about market upsides. Missives about bold futures and indomitable cultures fill social feeds like ticker tape from a different universe. To borrow from John Magee's soaring sonnet High Flight, leaders have 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth'. Sadly, they have not the face of God, but a narrative with no basis in reality.
When Symbolism Tries to Become Substance
There is a charitable reading of this phenomenon: leaders need to reassure. They are, at least in part, custodians of morale. But the ethical boundary is crossed when messaging stops masking an unpalatable but unavoidable reality, for instance that people will die in an attempt to capture a key strategic position, and when messaging seeks to displace reality—"everyone will be better off". When this occurs, it is more than just spin; it is what Blake Ashforth and Barrie Gibbs termed symbolic management—the tendency for organisations to increase their reliance on symbolic gestures and rhetoric when legitimacy is under threat.
People that chase too hard after the appearance of virtue risk the theatrical tragedy of overplaying their part. As Shakespeare's Queen Gertrude would have it, their insistence betrays too much. What was meant to assure begins to unsettle. Those who determinedly stay on message, despite all around them belying the truth, fall into three familiar archetypes.
- The clumsy actor: oblivious, tone-deaf, and lurching through scripts with all the grace of a forklift at a ballet.
- The nervous actor: obsessed with optics, but brittle under scrutiny, their performances reek of evasion, not conviction.
- The overacting actor: who drowns the audience in declarations of purpose so ardent that even the most credulous stakeholder begins to suspect the show is a cover for deeper dysfunction.
The result is a Potemkin strategy: glossy façades, polished slogans, but no accompanying grip on the levers of reality.
The psychological and organisational consequences are significant. Elizabeth Wolfe Morrison and Frances Milliken defined the term 'organisational silence' to describe the phenomenon whereby employees, observing the growing gulf between reality and rhetoric, simply stop speaking up. The costs of candour become too high; the rewards too opaque. And so, performance signals are muted, feedback loops break, and decisions are made in an echo chamber of agreeable fictions.
The people most likely to propagate these fictions are not external stakeholders or even C-suite fantasists, but middle managers—the acolytes of purpose. What emerges from this process is a rhetoric-reality disjunction, where employees internalise a corporate mission so deeply that they cannot see when it ceases to describe reality. The greater the disjunction, the greater the existential distress. Meaning becomes a performance art.
It is here that leaders must confront a core ethical challenge: not merely to align messaging with reality but to interrogate why that alignment matters. According to Caleb Bernacchio, who drew from Pope Francis's (1936–2025) Amoris Laetitia, the task of ethics is not to provide convenient rules but to steward a process of discernment. Anyone within an organisation must be able to say, "this is no longer working" and have leaders ask, "are they right?"
How Messaging Escapes Orbit
Those of a more Pollyanna disposition might argue that such disjunctions are occasional malfunctions or that bad things only happen in other organisations. But in many organisations, misalignment is engineered. Consider the implementation of strategic change. John Kotter's eight-step model speaks to urgency, vision, and communication. But implementation of a change process often devolves into what might be called vision theatre: elaborate rebranding campaigns, communication blitzes, and top-down declarations of transformation—actual change never makes it past the messaging phase.
The deeper problem is that these narratives are not only believed internally but are designed to be believed externally. When this happens, they are not just misstatements; they create information asymmetry in which stakeholders lack key data to make a considered decision. The Volkswagen emissions scandal is one of the more egregious examples.
Deirdre McCloskey reminds us in The Rhetoric of Economics that all markets are driven by stories, but she also warns against storytelling unmoored from empirical fidelity. When narrative is allowed to drift from observable reality, it becomes myth. And while myths are useful for founding empires, they are terrible for strategic planning.
This is all compounded by the incentives that structure corporate life. When the reward system is calibrated for the performance of message, it will always trend toward abstraction. The deck becomes a talisman, the slogan a spell. As John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) noted in a different context: 'worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally'.
What begins as optimism can become denial. And what starts as a message of hope can become a justification for inertia. Employees, stakeholders, and customers are not fooled indefinitely. They become disengaged, and worse, disillusioned. When reality inevitably reasserts itself, trust is the first casualty.
Return to Earth: Towards Ethical Communication
How then to correct the course and return to reality? The solution is not a cynical rejection of the corporate narrative—unless you are very keen on limiting your career options—rather, it is a more responsible use of messaging. Leaders should treat messaging not as a mechanism of insulation or indoctrination, but as an instrument of insight. In short, leaders need to exercise discernment and reflect on their actions, the corporate culture their actions creates, and the broader social ecosystem in which the organisation operates. To return to the words of Pope Francis:
[discernment] involves striving untrammelled for all that is great, better and more beautiful, while at the same time being concerned for the little things, for each day's responsibilities and commitments.
Put less prosaically, it is the difference between messaging that inspires and messaging that silences. There are five practical steps that leaders can take to avoid their messaging becoming indoctrination:
- Reconnect messaging with metrics: when key performance indicators flatline but messaging crescendos, the organisation enters a hazard zone. Messaging should never obscure operational truths.
- Create mechanisms for structured dissent: this is more than an anonymous suggestions box. It means regular, facilitated forums where assumptions are questioned and dissonance aired without retaliation. Such rituals act as organisational grounding wires.
- Promote narrative coherence, not narrative consistency: consistency is about saying the same thing repeatedly. Coherence is about saying what is true in light of what has changed. The former is rhetorical rigour mortis; the latter is ethical practice.
- Recover the lost art of the partial admission: Saying "we don't know yet" is not a mark of weakness but of credibility. In a complex, rapidly shifting environment, the pretence of omniscience is laughable and counterproductive.
- Invest in education that exposes future leaders to the limitations of communication-as-control: the best business schools provide students with a thorough grounding in ethics, critical discourse, and organisational dissent. These are not academic luxuries, they are prerequisites for stewarding organisations where truth has not been traded for tranquillity.
What Magee's poem gestures to is not just the thrill of transcendence, but the peril of staying aloft too long. 'Touched the face of God' may sound glorious, but in an organisational context, it often precedes the fall. There is a virtue in descent. The leader who can return to Earth, admit reality, and realign messaging with facts is not weak. They are wise.
Because when the tanks are rolling through the streets, it does no good to announce that all is well in Baghdad.
Good night, and good luck.
Andrzej Kozera presenting Dziennik Telewizyjny by PAP is licensed under Public Domain.
