The Evil Office: Mission, Motivation and the Moral Imperative

Say it quickly and you might mix it up with something more presidential...but the evil office is something we've been pondering in our own little office on the fourth floor since last Friday. 

Following a meandering discussion and brainstorm of the possible re-uses of spent Bic pens (placemats, insect hotels etc. - please add any further suggestions in the comments box below), Friday afternoon in the LG/SO office ended with a discussion on the nature of Evil (with a capital 'E').  This was prompted by some wild speculation on my behalf on the motives of people in the public eye for their actions and from the suggestion that adopting Google's famously simple (and possibly ironic, although that's another discussion) 'Don't be Evil' mission was something that I believe could have a profound effect on people.

Within a few minutes we had knocked up and hung our own 'Don't be Evil' poster on the office wall, with a view to running a pseudo experiment to gauge the reactions of those who encounter it in our office.  The first person to walk into the office noticed it straight away and commented on it.  I can confirm that they were in no way evil whilst in the office (so far so good).

Measuring evil is, however, quite a difficult thing to do.  First you have to define it.  This is not easy.  What's morally wrong to me may seem perfectly acceptable behaviour to you (e.g. entering box junctions when your exit is not clear).  Evil is subjective, but there are probably a few basic tenets on which we could agree: evil as malicious behaviour, with the intention of wrongdoing or harm.  So, let's take that as our basic definition for now.

Measuring this is the next step - and seemingly even more difficult.  We tried Googling it (!), and came up with several highly amusing 'How evil are you?' style quizzes, which seemed to involve lots of questions about saving cats from burning buildings and stealing from your grandmother.  Clearly, these are not questions we can ask everyone who steps into the office, so we're going for a combination of  more subjective techniques (personal views on the general evilness of behaviour in our office) and a 'saliency' measure (i.e. do people notice the poster? do they comment on it?  or do they just glance at it shiftily while they speak...yes we've had that already).

Obviously this experiment will not stand up to academic scrutiny, but it's fun to see the reactions.  One interesting aspect of the phrase 'Don't Be Evil' is the negative imperative it uses.  My old boss used to tell a story about the power of negative language; I don't know if it's true or modern myth, but apparently just before Chris Waddle took his penalty at the 1990 World Cup, England manager Bobby Robson said to him 'don't miss!'.  Waddle promptly sent the ball into row Z and England's world cup hopes were history.  My ex-boss believed that negatives in language are sometimes filtered out by our brains, and that we hear, and do, the opposite when told not to do something.  With this theory in mind, we would perhaps expect to see an increase in evil behaviour in our office, and the logical next step might be to suggest that Google's mission may actually be encouraging its employees to 'Be Evil'.

Ok, enough of the conspiracy theories - I'm not totally convinced by this argument, but I have an open mind and will keep you posted on the results of our little experiment (if I've not gone over to the dark side of course). 

Oh, and Google - how about positively re-framing your mission statement?

Be good?

The next office experiment beckons...