They did an experiment but I know the result

Trust me, only saying things that are nice and necessary is bound to end in failure, writes Rob Long

A friend of mine who works for a large financial institution told me that he and his team are conducting a social experiment.

They’ve noticed that the casual chit-chat they engage in, as conference calls got underway or over a sandwich in the office canteen, has become, thanks to a few bad financial years and some major corporate restructuring, kind of negative. Pessimistic. Sharply critical of others. Maybe even a little snippy. Gossipy. Personal.

I’m not sure how they noticed that. I certainly wouldn’t be able to. I write comedy scripts for a living, and all of those adjectives – pessimistic, gossipy, critical, snippy – are pretty much the definition of being a comedy writer in a room with other comedy writers in a business like the entertainment industry in a city like Los Angeles. And it’s not just comedy writers. At any given moment in any office in Hollywood, half of the work day is spent hashing and rehashing other people’s failures. And “failure” is often an elastic term. In Hollywood, when we’re talking about our own products, we can sell anything as a triumph. But when we’re talking about someone else, we can put a negative spin on almost anything, even a moderately successful event. A movie that earned its money back, a television show that delivers a serviceable audience in the ratings, a project that got far but didn’t quite get produced – all of these can be trashed over a latté and a gluten-free scone.

The recent Tom Cruise film Edge of Tomorrow was the number-one picture worldwide the week it premiered, but people in Los Angeles insisted on referring to it as a “disappointment” because its American box office numbers were smaller than expected. Despite its almost US$100 million (Dh367m) opening weekend haul, people in Los Angeles chuckled malevolently about Tom Cruise’s latest “failure”.

I assumed, until I talked to my friend in finance, that this kind of thing was specific to the entertainment industry. But apparently it’s widespread, and his team, at least, thought it was hurting productivity.

So they decided to try something. Before making a comment or a digging observation – no matter how casual or breezy – they agreed to ask themselves three questions: Is what I’m about to say true? Is it kind? And is it necessary?

So far, my friend reports, the results have been interesting.

These days, when they gather for lunch, they mostly eat together in complete silence. Conference calls last a few minutes at the most. In encounters over a coffee or a morning pastry, no one says much of anything. They’ll start, stop themselves, look pensively into the middle distance as they work their way through the three big questions, and then fall silent. There’s a lot of this:

“Hey, did you hear about –”

“Hear about what?”

“Um, forget it.”

Since the beginning of the experiment, no one, it seems, can think of anything to say that is true, kind and necessary. The true and kind criteria, he told me, aren’t really the problem. It’s easy to think of something both true and kind – or, at least, true and not unkind – to say about a colleague or a new business strategy from company HQ. What’s harder – what, in fact, is almost impossible – is to say something that is necessary. Because, he told me, in the world of finance, not much really needs to be said. Most of what people say in the financial world is so obvious to everyone that it doesn’t need to be said aloud.

“It’s different in your business, I guess,” he said to me.

I would have told him he was wrong, but that wouldn’t be necessary. I mean, of course he was wrong.

“I absolutely need to give this note about the second act of this script needing a little more character development,” I can hear a young executive think to him or herself during what should be a very short story meeting.

“It’s imperative that I tell everyone within earshot why I think the recent X Men movie didn’t match expectations at the box office,” someone unconnected to that picture says loudly at the local hipster coffee shop.

“Here is why, I feel it’s necessary to say, this or that actor did not get an Oscar,” is a frequent lunch conversation between people who really have zero idea why that happened or why it didn’t.

We tell each other all sorts of unnecessary things in pretty much every business. If we try hard, we can be more truthful and more kind, but there’s no way we can limit ourselves to the necessary. In other words, we can be nice but we cannot shut up.

There’s an old maths problem from my schooldays that goes like this: if it takes one student an hour to solve a maths problem and another student half an hour to solve it, how long will it take them to solve it together?

I don’t remember the official and “correct” answer to that problem, but I do know what the real answer is. It’s three and a half hours, because the two students spend so much time talking to each other.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl