I have recently been given a more senior role at work. My first big challenge seems silly on the surface, but it is causing some angst in my team, and I am finding it difficult to navigate. My colleague regularly talks about numerology at work. For some colleagues, this is fun. But other colleagues think it is offensive pseudoscience. I now think I need to get involved, but I am struggling to know what to do. Any thoughts?
Isn’t it so often the case: what seems at first blush to be a trivial matter at work ends up being the situation that threatens to pull a team apart.
The first thing to say – and recent events have made this point only more salient – is that, however you approach this, don’t make it public. For any person in your position seeking to sort out an office problem as fairly as you can, there is simply no need to embarrass someone in front of their peers.
Even a mild verbal reprimand takes on an entirely different hue – and can sometimes be humiliating – when it’s done outside the privacy of a meeting room.
That’s what not to do. Let’s move on to what you can do to resolve this problem. I think at some stage you need to speak with the person practising numerology.
What should you say in this discussion? Well, what makes this whole situation particularly challenging is the specifics of your colleague’s actions. I won’t mention precisely what they’re doing, but I will say they sit in a tricky in-between state – neither wantonly obnoxious nor completely innocuous.
When you get a stronger understanding of the motives behind these mystical readings, you’ll get a better sense of what tone your discussion needs to take.
I can easily see how some colleagues might be insulted when this practice moves from entertaining magic trick to pseudoscience dressed as genuine insight.
To be clear, there is no scientific basis for numerology. But numerous mystical practices, if performed with enough deftness, can seem like intuitively ‘real’ mechanisms for categorising people or even divining the future.
Whether your numerologist is a true believer, just having a laugh, or an outright charlatan, chances are they’re relying on several things to make their prognostications seem like miraculous insights.
The big one is the human brain’s tendency to recognise patterns. This helps us with all manner of things, from playing sport to having a friendly conversation. But it’s a cognitive process that can lead us astray in environments where there is no consistent relationship between the data we come across and the outcomes we predict (or have predicted for us).
In these more difficult contexts, and when matched with the Barnum Effect and confirmation bias, pattern recognition can let us down spectacularly.
If we are primed to do so by an even-moderately competent “reader”, we can start to see validations of what we’ve been told everywhere. We might start to think, yes, the universe is sending me “a five-energy shift” related to my career, even when the vast, vast majority of the evidence available to us suggests nothing of the sort.
I mention all that not because I think you should necessarily confront this person with a blunt, scientific rebuke, but so that you have the basic facts at hand if they try to cite truth as their vindicator.
I hope it doesn’t get to that, but there is a chance that any attempt you make to rein in this activity will be met with an accusation that you’re deriding your colleague’s genuinely held beliefs.
If that happens, don’t get bogged in a jumbled argument where sophistry has a chance to prevail. Keep it super simple and invoke the harm principle: your colleague is entirely within their rights to make sense of the world in any way they like, whether that involves numerology or belief in a clockwork universe. That right simply doesn’t extend to imposing an entirely subjective framework, completely unrelated to work, on others.
Although the particulars are quite unusual, at the heart of it all is a workplace tale as old as time: an unwanted encroachment has taken place. Part of your job is to work out whether that encroachment is a product of something benign or well-intentioned (perhaps over-enthusiasm) or of something more dangerous (say, a desire to “validate” the work performance or moral value of teammates).
When you get a stronger understanding of the motives behind and tenor of these mystical readings, you’ll get a better sense of what tone your discussion needs to take.
Jonathan Rivett is a writer based in Melbourne. He’s written about workplace culture and careers for more than a decade.
