Posting Date: February 11, 2003

Malicious Compliance

Direct harm to another person requires some sort of attack. If I don't like you, I strike at you. Perhaps I will use a physical weapon, perhaps words, perhaps something else. Such an attack is often easy to understand. The action and reaction are fairly obvious, and the motive is usually clear to both parties involved.

Indirect harm is quite a bit different. For example, if I want to hurt you, I could hurt your family and friends. This is an insidious type of attack and it is highly effective. It is also harder to detect than a direct attack. It can be veiled in secrecy and obscurity.

The most serious type of assault is malicious compliance. It is a wicked and bitter form of attack. The idea is that you agree to go along with another person while having full knowledge that such action will do damage to the other person. Malicious compliance can be extremely hard to detect, and the damage can be especially harmful due to the surprise (or lack thereof).

While I am being a bit melodramatic with my language, there are lessons here for your projects (and your life). If you are working on a team and you or your ideas are attacked directly, count yourself lucky. In this situation, you see what is happening, you can analyze the situation, and adjust as needed. You have excellent information and you know what is going on. You can work in this environment. If you are on a project where there are indirect attacks, often in the form of backstabbing and ridiculous politics, you should again count yourself lucky. While indirect attacks are stressful and childish, they are usually manageable.

Assuming you are in a situation where there is malicious compliance, I wish you good luck. Only by having a critical eye, with a real effort on analysis and open communication, can you hope to survive. For example, a project can easily die if a programmer does exactly what they are told by a designer, usability specialist, or project manager. This is a good "canary in the mine" idea: If someone does exactly what you say, and there is absolutely no friction, start thinking about malicious compliance. If there is no friction at all in a large project, you probably have a malicious compliance problem on your hands, or a team of worthless slugs.

The moral of the story is pretty simple. Hope and expect for open confrontation and attack, be aware of indirect attacks, and hunt down people who maliciously comply with you. Open friction is healthy, hidden friction is unhealthy, malicious lack of friction is wicked.

Reader Comments...

what the fuck does this have to do with usability

Posted by: on February 11, 2003 10:05 PM

Nothing. We simply want to drive you away so we can return to a civil discussion.

I'm guilty of John's definition of "malicious compliance," although I'm not malicious. Sometimes it is easier to watch a project go bad, if the stain of failure will not touch you... because the alternative is to raise objections, thus making waves and marking yourself as not being a team player. The end result may be a bad project, but the bad person's bad ideas eventually allow him to string his own noose. Problem solved.

Posted by: Flaming Drag Qyeen on February 11, 2003 10:52 PM

Did something in particular prompt this post John?

Just curious,
Sherlock

Posted by: sherlock_yoda on February 12, 2003 03:51 AM

Flaming Queen, you took the words right out of my mouth...
I came here to say that sometimes you are forced to malicious compliance. If you say something you're going to be really bad because nobody is willing to give in on your efforts to explain why something should be done differently than how the majority wants. Especially in big corporations you really dont want to get into that kind of situation.

Say if you were able to convince the team to follow along your path (Path B). Say that Path B resulted in 30% less ROI than expected, you'll be blamed until the day you die, because everybody will keep saying that if they'd gone down Path A (their original path) they would have been able to meet the ROI. You will have a very very slim chance of arguing that Path A would have prevented any kind of ROI whatsoever. And then you get into real Malicious Compliance situations because everybody wants to see you leave the team.

I'd say the best "corporate politics" is silence... (at least 85% of the time). Oh, and yes, you DO have to watch out for people who are in the game just for these purposes. But they can usually be picked out rather easily.

Posted by: Hoping for a Non-Malicious Environment on February 12, 2003 09:49 AM

Malicious Compliance is often partnered with Unintended Ignorance. Working in the UI Design/Usability world, it's too easy to find developers who don't know that their shoddy UI's are causing damage. As part of their ego-assertion, it's common to see developers use a sniping behavior. They fight the issues they have a high probability of winning (sometimes, rarely, usability folks make mistakes) and then sit back and watch the rest. If any of the remaining issues fail, they can criticize those - even if the majority of usability issues were successes.

I don't know how everyone else is dealing with this, but I've found that design reviews are very helpful. Everyone gets to air their concerns at one time; mandated Direct-Harm-Time. Any secret stockpiles of ammunition are invalidated.

Posted by: SittingDuck on February 12, 2003 03:51 PM

Our human resources personnel are guilty of malicious compliance. They adhere to an extremely literal, conservative reading of policies and union contracts. Rather than advocating for employees, they are adversaries.

Ahh, how does that translate to malicious compliance? Because they present themselves as being advocates. It is only a well informed person who understands that a literal interpretation is really just a minimum. A union contract is a list of minimum rights. The company holds all other rights. They can do more than a contract states anytime they want. Employees too often brush bad things off because "those are the rules." No. No one is forced to be evil. They *choose* to be evil.

Posted by: Catbert on February 12, 2003 05:37 PM

I have been considering malicious compliance lately. Call me crazy, but I don't like being attacked, and I especially don't like it when the attack is based on an unfounded/unprovable assumption. For instance, my emotions are very easy to read, and are therefore constantly misinterpreted. Where one person might secretly be thinking "users are so frustrating, why do they want bad design?" but have a completely neutral face, I'm thinking the same thing but I'm frowning. Guess who always gets called out (and usually for something much worse than what I was thinking)?

When people start to second guess what you are saying because they think you are actually feeling something else, sometimes silence is the only option. When one person in your team is routinely guilty of the same thing that they turn around and call you out for, silence is better than insubordination.

In an ideal world, everyone supports each other and listens to what they have to say without pre-judging or attributing personal bias. When someone finds this plane of (un)reality, let me know - I'm switching over.

Posted by: Lydia on February 12, 2003 06:47 PM

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