“Universal literacy was supposed to educate the 
common man to control his environment. Once he 
could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. 
So ran the democratic doctrine. 

But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him 
rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising 
slogans, with editorials, with published scientific 
data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the 
platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original 
thought. 

Each man's rubber stamps are the duplicates of millions 
of others, so that when those millions are exposed to the 
same stimuli, all receive identical imprints. It may seem 
an exaggeration to say that the American public gets most 
of its ideas in this wholesale fashion. The mechanism by 
which ideas are disseminated on a large scale is propaganda, 
in the broad sense of an organized effort to spread a 
particular belief or doctrine.”

  -Edward Bernays, Propaganda (1928)"

It’s amazing how much better people get along when they are on the same page.

The Problem

We used to have a consistent problem in my last job due to how the three parties at play interacted.

  1. There were clients who demanded the world, due tomorrow.
  2. There was a management group, who did what they could to make everyone happy.
  3. There were nerds who sought to solve problems with clever solutions.

The issue that we found when you got these people together was that the managers, trying to appease the clients, were so desperate for resolutions that they’d pitch unbaked solutions. The nerds would be working overtime to figure out what they could do to make the clients happy and their research would uncover a single nugget of wisdom. This was often an important step in the process, but not a perfect one. Ask any engineer, and he’ll tell you that most “golden ideas” are actually pyrite. The nerd would then tell the manager that he had a potential solution, but that he’d need time to pan it out and see if it did solve the problem.

Unfortunately for the nerd, the culture at the company was that the customer needs to be informed immediately of any positive progress made on any project and any bad news needs to be supressed until the nerds find an adequate band-aid to make the medicine go down smoother. As a result, EVERY single nugget of wisdom was shared with the client before it was panned for accuracy and sometimes that led to expensive rewrites, budget problems, and incensed clients.

Potential Solutions:

So what could really be done about this?

  • The nerds could just refuse to tell the managers what was going on, but then the managers would interrupt them every five minutes to ask them for a status update. At least when they had the nugget, they got some time to work on the nugget.

  • The managers could have been more vague about the potential solutions until they were better understood, or could have negotiated with the client to reduce scope so that the client’s solutions would come in on time and underbudget, with a few less features than initially predicted.

  • The clients could have realized the pattern emerging from the “fake positivity” and had a frank conversation with the team, but the sales’ team had lied about the capabilities of the team and made the customer pay for them, so they were going to get their money’s worth.

  • The culture could change. Most of this artifical “ASAP” mentality was artificially placed on the nerds and the managers by the company culture.

The Bernaysian Stamp:

At one point, Keenan, the lead nerd of one particularly frustrating project said the following phrase to me:

"You know what. Screw it. I'm not going to build the plane while I fly it anymore!".

There was something about that image that was really powerful. He had somehow managed to sum up the entire problem in 12 words, with a visual that implied that we were crashing and it was about to kill all the passengers. I later found out that this phrase was muttered by another nerd who was venting about her project, and she heard it from another nerd who was venting about her project. *Remember that detail, it’s going to be important later.

So when we walked into our next meeting with the manager and not the client, we had a frank heart to heart. Hey, we think this is the solution, and we want to get you the data you need to keep the client happy, but “we aren’t going to build the plane while we fly it”. The manager paused for a second.

“You know what, you guys are right. We don’t want this thing to crash. How much time do you actually need to get this off the ground.”

We were stunned. We let him know that everything was condition on if we had lift with one of the ideas. We would know we had lift if we could accomplish task A and B, and we needed about 3 days to check those two tasks out. If we were good after that, we likely needed a week to implement several other features that the client requested.

And just like that, we magically had the time we needed.

We had pitched ideas exactly the same way before, with measured responses, a timeline, and a gameplan. Yet, every time we asked for a week, we were denied. What was it about that phrase that changed our manager’s mind?

Bring In Bernays:

The quote at the top of the page comes from Edward Bernays, the most influencial psychologist that you’ve likely never heard of. Instead of using his understanding of the mind to help people with their problems, he used it to master the art of propagating ideas through the population. This man is the reason that:

  • We believe that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
  • Women are allowed to smoke.
  • Hospitals sell jello as their staple food item.
  • 4 out of 5 dentists recommend your toothpaste.
  • Why homes used to include a music room.
  • and his work is directly responsible for why social media focuses on emotion-trashing clickbait.

The above quote has always resonated with me because it’s true. Most arguments I’ve ever seen seem to devolve into talking points that are well established talking points of the large organizations that pitched them. But while the principle is there, I don’t think he took the time to explain how the mechanism works in his books. I’ve read both “Propaganda” and “Crystallizing Public Opinion” and there isn’t really a “How-To” for this in the way there is with some of his other ideas. As a result, I decided to formalize the idea.

What a Bernaysian Stamp is:

I define a Bernaysian Stamp as:

"Any short phrase that rewrites a rule in the social 
contract through a powerful visual. 
The use of such a phrase implies consent to the rewrite."

So when my friend used the phrase “Build the Plane while flying it”, the implied message is the following:

  1. Once an idea is in the air, it will fly or crash.
  2. Trying to save the idea after it’s in the air is uneccessarily risky.
  3. It’s better to develop an idea on the ground before flying it.
  4. If an idea crashes, it’s the fault of everyone who let it in the air in the first place.

Three more examples:

Now that you understand the initial concept, let’s turn our attention to three stamps that cover the same topic, but rewrite the social contract in very different ways:

  1. Working to Contract
  2. Quiet Quitting
  3. Acting your Wage

Working to Contract:

The implied social contract here is pretty easy to understand, but let’s lay it out.

  1. The contract is the ultimate authority on what work needs to be done.
  2. A person who is following the contract to the letter of the law is doing the right thing.
  3. Any requests for additional work need to be added to the contract for validity.
  4. Any requests for additional work not added to the contract are invalid.
  5. If you don’t like the work or don’t like the contractor, don’t sign the contract.

Side Note: Letter of the Law is another Bernaysian Stamp.

This means that anyone who uses the phrase “working to contract” has implicitly consented to only doing work if the contract says so, and anyone who tries to get you to do more is bullying you. As you can see, this stamp clearly came from a contractor. Let’s see the employers’ rebuttal.

Quiet Quitting:

In the 2020’s the narrative about work started changing when this Bernaysian Stamp was introduced. Quiet Quitting implies:

  1. Doing more than the contract requires is not only expected, but required.
  2. Failing to do more than the contract requires is a fireable offense.
  3. If you don’t want to do more than your contract requires, you are handing in a resignation.
  4. Employers should fire employees who don’t do more than the contract requires.

Obviously, this stamp rewrites the social contract as employers see the situation. It seems to say, “I’m the boss, you do what I say, even if we never talked about some of your responsibilities when you were hired. If you don’t like it, leave”. Of course, millenials have a different perspective from contract professionals and employers so they came up with the following:

Act Your Wage:

After the news started stamping “quiet quitting” onto the cultural zietgeist, millenials on Reddit fired back with, “I’m not quiet quitting, I’m acting my wage”

  1. Your pay is tied to the level of responsibility that you take on.
  2. If you take on more responsibility, you deserve greater pay.
  3. If you don’t get greater pay, you deserve less responsibility.
  4. Reducing one’s workload to one’s wages is the proper thing to do.

How to use Bernaysian Stamps:

So we’ve learned that the adoption of a Bernaysian Stamp can change the expectations of anyone who uses one and we’ve learned how those stamps compete in the social arena. Now we need to learn how to make them and how to judge their efficacy. I’ll share an example of one I deployed in my workplace.

First: start out with a social contract item that you’d like to change. In my case, I was tired of custom solutions when what we really needed was repeatable, automated solutions for certain consistent issues that we faced.

Second: Brainstorm a bunch of potential one-liners that explain your point.

* It's time to scale or fail
* Don't reinvented the wheel
* Have the customer order off the menu
* Let's keep it DRY; don't repeat yourself
* We ain't Etsy, stop handmaking stuff

Third: Whenever discussions on that topic occur, use those phrases whenever it feels natural to do so. Make sure everyone has a chance to hear each of them.

Fourth: Remember when I talked about my friend “building the plane while flying it”, and how it jumped from angry engineer to angry engineer? When one of your phrases catches on, it’ll start to spread. You will know you’ve found success when your boss, your coworkers, and you underlings all use the same phrase. Bonus points if you can get your boss’s boss to use it.

SUPER BONUS POINTS: Sometimes, you can get people to forget who came up with the stamp and others will take credit for it. LET THAT HAPPEN. People jump on an idea when they think it’s theirs.

In case you were curious, the Bernaysian Stamp that caught on was “Have the customer order off the menu”. When I pitched it, the idea was that we needed to be more like Mcdonald’s and have them order of the menu. Even if the drive through messed up, the client still knew the margin of error and weren’t too annoyed because, hey… they knew what they were getting at McDonalds. But then, we get to make the same thing a bunch and we can finally be good at it instead of improvising.

It wasn’t as popular as “building the plane while flying it,” but it was my first attempt, and certainly not my last.