Bullshit, Lies, or Improvisation?
Executives spout plenty of nonsense, but not all waffle is equal.
According to philosophers and empirical researchers, there are three distinct categories for when people appear to be making things up as they go along:
- Improvisation: genuine thinking-out-loud in search of the truth or at least a path towards it using experience as a guide.
- Lies: deliberate falsehoods that seek to conceal the real facts or motives behind statements or decisions.
- Bullshit: statements delivered with little regard for truth, aimed at projecting competence.
But how can you tell the difference? And why should you care?
Bullshit
Harry Frankfurt’s classic essay On Bullshit defines bullshit as any statement produced without regard for the truth, contrasting it sharply with lying, which still depends on the truth even though it subverts it. Bullshitting is therefore indifferent to the truth. It is also different from nonsense, for bullshit implies verisimilitude but ultimately does not contain it; nonsense attempts neither to make sense nor to impress. Bullshit arises when someone talks without knowing what they are talking about, yet refuses to acknowledge their limitations. Vague KPIs, punitive cultures, and pressure to appear visionary raise the bullshit quota. That is because leaders feel compelled to fill informational vacuums with confident yet empty rhetoric. The bullshitter’s primary aim is impression management, not deception per se.
Experimental work by Pennycook et al. shows that many people rate pseudo‑profound but vacuous statements (e.g. “We must leverage paradigm shifts to synergize efficiencies”) as meaningful unless they actively engage in analytic reflection. People who are more receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit tend to be less reflective, have lower cognitive abilities, and they are prone to ontological confusions. Ontological confusions arise when properties of one category (e.g. living beings) are incorrectly ascribed to another (e.g. inanimate objects), which leads to statements that are not grounded in facts. For instance, “The AI understands your question” or “The microwave cares about your diet” are ontological confusions. So is the seemingly innocuous, “The company believes this to be the right decision.” The company is a non-sentient entity without beliefs of its own.
Unfortunately, constant interruptions, which are common in most businesses, bias people to accept information to be true, as found by Gilbert et al., even when it is verifiably false. Focus time and respect for it are therefore essential to the “health” of an organization. That was a metaphor, not an ontological confusion.
Shane Littrell’s Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale demonstrates that employees who are taken in by corporate mission statements and perceptions of organizational leaders tend to be more receptive to corporate bullshit. Such receptivity comes with a tendency to bullshit others, too. Language that is steeped in jargon is common in organizations where both leaders and their willing followers are open to corporate bullshit. It is, however, counterproductive in attracting highly skilled talent, as they are turned off by it.
Perhaps the organizational IQ gradient can be explained by individual receptivity to corporate bullshit: people who are receptive to it tend to spread it too. They may in turn be seen to be "leadership material" by those who spew it due to a reduced ability to reflect analytically: after all, these sycophants are also more receptive to the corporate slogans their masters have come up with to inspire. The more bullshit is rewarded, the more it becomes formalized because it is a social practice, as André Spicer argues. Modern organizations often reward impression management more than results. And the people who are alienated by such industrialized business baloney mill forever around the base of the corporate totem pole.
Vagueness in corporate communication may be because of strategic ambiguity, social signalling, the halo effect in which minions mimic their (perceived) leaders to sound and look better, impreciseness in thinking, to repeat (questionable) information often enough until people believe it because of sheer exposure to it, or ontological confusion. Corporate communication is littered with buzzwords that are by definition vague and fashionable. According to Robert Cluly, managers use buzzwords to claim authority (i.e. signal they are knowledgeable rather than actually be so), to reduce resistance to and instil a sense of urgency for initiatives that sound complex, and to displace responsibility when decisions can be framed as inevitable consequences of the buzzword (e.g. “Efficiency from AI is behind layoffs”).
Lies are altogether different.
Lies
When people are motivated to seek monetary or material gains, it is easier to pick up on cues of deception, as found by DePaulo et al.. The same also applies to transgressions. That said, spotting lies is not easy. As Hauch et al. observe, training can improve lie detection, but verbal cues are more important than body language.
Ruthless behaviour is more common in dark-triad personalities who tend to occupy the upper levels of corporate hierarchies. The ability to lie is, however, not indicative of dark-triad personalities as Michels et al. uncovered. Neither is general intelligence associated with psychopaths, narcissists, and Machiavellians who constitute the dark triad.
Note that narcissistic personalities already emerge as leaders at an early age, not because of inherent ability but because they prefer to rule over groups of children with low self-esteem who willingly follow and admire them; narcissists love an audience. Later in life, such leaders create, unsurprisingly, toxic environments in the companies they run.
Liars leak more cognitive load (e.g. slower response time, pupil dilation) than people who tell the truth. Bullshitters, on the other hand, speak smoothly as they are not juggling facts. Pupil response is the most robust nonverbal signal of deception, though verbal cues are still best, though far from perfect. Lies are more concise and use simpler vocabulary. Liars often overcompensate with unnecessary detail.
To uncover deception, interrogators can rely on the increased cognitive load of liars and ask surprising questions: liars tend to increase pauses and lack sensory details, though the latter may be irrelevant in business contexts. Another possibility is to reverse the chronology of events leading up to decisions: it is hard to reverse the narration on a story, which is even harder if the causal flow is made up on the fly. Note that experienced deceivers can pre-empt such questions and therefore come prepared.
A technique validated in forensic psychology is the model statement approach. In (job) interviews, participants first tell their story, then they hear an example with sensory and temporal details, and finally they are asked to retell theirs with similar richness. Truth tellers can dip into their memory to add more particulars. Liars must fabricate extra details on the fly and tend to pad it with peripheral information (e.g. trivia unrelated to the events of their story) instead.
Rather than cover up uncertainty, improvisation embraces it.
Improvisation
Improvisation requires practice and discipline. What is also crucial beyond a repertoire of experience is each individual’s ability to improvise, which comes from their strength of character, as Dusya Vera and Mary Crossan discovered in their research on management in the pandemic. Many leaders mistake authority for strength of character, whereas it really has to do with humility, curiosity, reflection, self-awareness, empathy, and courage. Few executives are humble or empathetic: they love to boast about their achievements, jet-setting between podia, while they treat their employees in the way they treat the environment: as resources to extract value from, then discard. It is rare for there to be any accountability for layoffs to placate the stock market: “If everyone else does it too, what can you do about it?” Most leaders are also not as curious as they like to believe: a few expensive management seminars do not constitute curiosity. Skimming half a dozen business bestsellers a year also does not count, especially when they repeat the same Silicon Valley fables. Sorry.
Tourish and Robson argue that leaders can promote a culture that discourages dissent and then interpret silence as agreement. It often leads to problems created entirely by leaders’ own solutions. Such self-inflicted (iatrogenic) effects would be uncommon were leaders more open-minded and truly curious about the organizations they run. Proclamations of a “feedback culture” or “psychological safety” do not make it so. Leaders like that do not have what it takes to improvise.
Executives treat return-to-office mandates as manifestations of the Zeitgeist, as if cultural momentum alone justifies policy. Such cargo culting clearly shows a lack of independent thinking and therefore character, as much as leaders around the globe wish to disagree. Leaders that parrot other leaders are merely followers, incapable of improvisation and therefore they must rely on either lies or bullshit when they are winging it.
Bullshit, lies, and improvisation
Here is how the behaviour and motives diverge across five observable dimensions:
| Dimension | Bullshit | Lies | Improvisation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intent | Impress | Conceal truth | Solve problem in real-time |
| Concern for truth | Indifferent | High (yet inverse) | High |
| Cognitive load | Moderate | High | Variable (though typically high) |
| Verbal profile | Buzzwords, little detail, inflationary adjectives | More negations, few self‑references, guarded specifics | Hedging, iterative restatement |
| Dominant non‑verbal cues | Over‑confident posture, smooth delivery, relaxed tone | Micro‑hesitations, micro-expressions of fear/disgust, pupil dilation, asymmetric facial tension, asymmetric shoulder shrugs, elevated pitch | Collaborative gestures, pauses to verify numbers or take notes to check up later |
The differences between bullshit, lies, and improvisation are crucial in business: if we misread the cues, it leads to poor hires, bad strategy, and systemic rot of organizations. So, how do their words betray them? Fortunately, leaders who lie, bullshit, or improvise leave behind different fingerprints. Here is a simple diagnostic summary of the research:
| Verbal cue | Bullshit | Lies | Improvisation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Buzzword density | High | Low | Low |
| Concrete detail (e.g. metrics) | Low | Medium–High | Variable |
| Analytic‑thinking markers (e.g. complex syntax, qualifiers) | Low | Variable | High |
| Negations or distancing (e.g. “The team…”) | Low | High | Low |
| Exploratory hedges (e.g. “Let’s test…”) | Low | Low | High |
What to do when you are faced with a leader who clearly is making things up? Ask a high-specificity follow-up question (e.g. “Which metric moves first, by how much, and when?”) Liars stall, bullshitters double down on vagueness, and improvisers reason aloud or pull the data. In high-uncertainty R&D contexts, there needs to be room for genuine speculation, but we must penalize unfalsifiable waffle loaded with bullshit.