Ignorance Management System

Ignorance management systems are important and powerful technologies used by savvy organisations to ensure that staff and other stakeholders know only what they need to know – or, ideally, not even that because of the risk of not correctly identifying which people need to know what. The main requirement for such a system is to persist a particular set of deceptions and generate a culture of ignorance whereby those deceptions are maintained.

Information technology plays an important part in perpetrating the main deception in the first instance and in ensuring that it remains in place for the duration determined by corporate strategy. Checks and balances also need to be put and kept in place to ensure that the IMS can't be "rumbled" by knowledgeable people who are sometimes motivated to replace ignorance with knowledge.

There's a pattern here.

The deception

The main deception of ignorance management is to ensure that people believe that ignorance is knowledge. Hence it is found that organizations bent on persisting ignorance usually proclaim that they believe in knowledge, and spend considerable (though not excessive) sums on so-called knowledge management systems. It is important to note that such knowledge management systems never include wikis. This is the main giveaway, though we might soon expect – since the giveaway has just been given away – that a wiki-based ignorance management system will be released in the not-distant future.

Hierarchical knowledge is the surest way to promote ignorance. This is achieved by applying mushroom management techniques, usually led by marketing departments, which use fear of commercial failure to bolster their authority in communities of employees already made vulnerable by high levels of ignorance.

Asked by WikiNews what the difference is between ignorance and apathy, Mr. Hilliker replied, "I don't know and I don't care."

Motivators

Motivation is generally straightforward. Stakeholders wish to create a perception of quality before selling their enterprise. A coherent ignorance management system that keeps staff as well as clients and other investors ignorant of what is really going on pays major dividends when it comes to be time to sell. Following any sale of the organisation, of course, the nature of the set of deceptions becomes clear, but by that time it doesn't matter much because profit takers have been and gone.

The process

Ignorance management systems rely on a process of ignorance inculcation. This is generally achieved by ensuring that the trainers themselves are champions of ignorance, not knowing enough to realise that they don't know much. They usually have a smaller vocabulary in their native tongue than the average, and accuse people who use words they don't understand of being aliens. An ethos of ignorance is helped along by bolstering the authority of know-little teachers and dishing out punishments to anyone who questions that authority.

The basis

The substrate, or bedrock, of ignorance management is to keep people unaware of what it is they don't know. This is seldom very difficult because many people naturally aren't aware of what they're not aware of. Adopting the anti-vision statement "What they don't know they don't know" or a variation of it is generally considered good practice when devising an ignorance management system, though it's vital that such statements are never widely communicated because then they can become counter-productive.

Champions of ignorance

The Archbishop of Canterbury once said "ignoremi" during a sermon. Of course, anyone with a smattering of classical education will tell you that the plural of ignoremus is ignoremuses (not ignoremi). Therefore the worthy archbishop must qualify as a champion of ignorance and, in light of the evidence here, in a spectacularly serendipitous manner. Long live freedom from thought!

The culture

It is important when establishing an ignorance management system to identify "enemies", ensure that your minions are aware of who these enemies are, and can pillory and ostracise them in the most appropriate and effective manner. In general, the enemy is anyone who uses a word you don't understand. This includes all foreigners, the regionally-challenged. (Somewhat counter-intuitively, current ignorant thinking is to exclude people with thick regional accents.) Such initiatives help your minions to believe that they are in the top one percent of the intelligensia, which helps considerably in preserving the status quo of your community of ignoramuses.

Slavery to thought

Nobody quite knows for sure whether it was the Great Ignoramus in the Sky who said it, but if you don't use metrics you'll never know how effective your ignorance management system is. There are a number of measures used, though it is important to realise that data gathering, analysis and publication of results is the least troublesome if it can safely be delegated to ignoramuses in the organisation. The most common and least contentious tactic is to foreshadow your campaign to introduce metrics with an anti-discrimination crusade against victimisation and exploitation of the ignorant. Adam Hilliker is credited with having said "There are two types of people in the world: those who always get hold of the wrong end of the stick, and those who sometimes don't." This has been taken up by ignoramuses the world over as a rallying cry against discrimination against the ignorant. It's not their fault that some people are doomed to invariably get things "wrong". Attempts to change or "cure" them of this propensity must be resisted. Once this principle is established you will find more of a laissez faire attitude developing towards the most ignorant and potentially destructive people in your organisation.

What to do about destructiveness

Like all great forces, there's always going to be an equal and opposite reaction. In the case of a mature ignorance management system risks of serious and destructive reactions against the force of ignorance can be minimised, or at least mitigated, by operating orthogonally to obtain the necessary stabilisatory leverage. See Alexander and Newt, 1982. Or just pay attention.

A social gyroscope is the engineer, secretly appointed and personally trained by a marketing manager, who "works" in a human resources department such as "occupational psychiatry" using – again, pay attention – hypnosis.

• OP is the process of "treating" co-workers to "move" them in a certain direction emotionally, typically from a position of doubt and insecurity to one of ignorance and paranoia.
• Hypnosis is controlling people without their being aware how much control they've given away – an artful technique for rapidly getting someone to trust you.
• Power denial or "denial denial" is a means of silencing doubters in the ranks. It operates using strong body language – in particular, eyebrow movement and loud-voice heuristics.
• Colour Me Chameleon™ is a patented process of using make-up, tinted contact lenses and distinctive footwear to enable people to develop a dress sense that helps them overcome the resistance that people sometimes manifest to being processed precessed.

Social gyroscopes, unlike their physical counterparts, are not used merely to navigate, but to unbalance and "alter the orbits" of people in a social dimension. To this end, having a subtle costume with colours coordinated to have the maximum subliminal effect are all part of the patented process. The process also includes special elements of self-control, which have to be learnt and internalised early on in the process in order to prevent exponents unwittingly unhinging fellow co-workers in bizarre ways.