What Reality TV Shows Tell Us About Reality

There is one myth that I, and I suspect a lot of people, have found hard to shake off.  It is the idea that leaders are somehow special and have unique insight and skills.  I suppose it goes back to childhood when your parents were your expert guides to life and whose opinions you weren't in a position to question.  This mindset gets transferred onto teachers and then managers as you grow up.  You are hardly aware of it.


I think the event that did most to destroy this delusion for me was when I was working in R and D in a pharmaceutical company.  We made a pilot batch that was out of specification.  This was a big deal.  There was a lot of money at stake and we had a schedule to meet.  But also we were on a learning curve.  The old joke has it that if we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research.  We were also fairly short on supplies - another typical situation when working in development.

The correct decision was obvious.  The problem needed to be investigated and solved before the project could continue.  There simply wasn't any other course of action open.  So when senior management simply ordered the batch to be repeated immediately, I was stunned.  It was so obviously stupid I remember it took me a while to believe it.  (If you are curious, the second batch came out wrong as well leaving us to pick up the problem and have to solve it a week or so later than we should have done.)

We did eventually solve the problem, though only despite not because of the leadership of the section.  My faith in management in general never returned.

The idea behind a lot of reality shows on TV is that there are experts out there whose judgement is so good they can assess the efforts of mere mortals.  The entertainment value comes from seeing just how useless the contestants are, and hoping secretly to see them slapped down by the experts.  The show that exemplifies this most is Gordon Ramsay's.  The hapless restauranteurs he helps are pathetically clueless and unable to see the way out of their predicament until the potty mouthed Apollo enlightens them.  Typically the initial antagonism melts away as they comply with his wisdom and his wishes.

The trouble is that although it is called reality TV there is precious little that is realistic about the premise.  Somebody recently took the trouble to check on how well businesses that had been helped by Gordon Ramsay were doing.  All but one of them had closed down.  It is a similar story in other franchises.  Only a handful of winners of talent contests go on to have successful careers in show business.  Business shows like Dragon's Den haven't created many household name companies.  Basically, the experts don't seem to have that much of a clue about how to create real world success at all.

The truth is harsh, but in some way comforting.  Success comes from a dash of good luck and a great deal of hard work.  People aren't born with talents that mark them out from the crowd to any great extent.  If you want to achieve something there isn't going to be anyone out there who has all the answers.  We are all humans and we are all in the same boat and whatever we want to achieve we are going to have to do it ourselves.