=============
obfuscate
This is the word to use when evasion is achieved by clouding the issue.
Creating a smoke-screen.
prevaricate, evade, dodge
==================
“When shrouded meanings and grim intentions are nicely polished up and pokerfaced personae are generously palming off their fantasy constructs, caution is the watchword, since rimpling water on the well of truth swiftly obscures our vision and perception.
(“Trompe le pied/wrong foot.”)”
Erik Pevernagie
===============
So. There is possibly nothing more aggravating in business than someone not 
answering “the” question. To be clear on what I am speaking about. The person answers a question just not the one you asked.
I am not going to argue that some questions are not easy to answer. I won’t even argue that we get asked questions we don’t know the answers to, but the situation dictates we make something up <yes … that happens in business>. But abandoning the question completely is complete bullshit.
But you know what?
I think the main reason it is so aggravating is because it is truly a reflection of intentions. There is even a book called The Anthropology of Intentions by a professor, Alessandro Duranti, who kind of tackles this whole discussion of intentions and words. He offers us the thought of ‘intentional discourse’ wherein an individual filters words through their beliefs & desires and their plans & goals to guide the discourse <regardless of whether the rest of the people want it guided that way>. In other words, using another phrase he offers us, by engaging in an intentional continuum people ponder their use of words through self-interest motivations <some good & some bad>.
By the way I am fairly sure I mangled his academic masterpiece, but you get the point.
Ah. “You get the point.” I share that again because while we sit there aggravated at someone who completely avoided answering the question asked we almost always also sit there wanting to invest a little of our own energy trying to assess why they did it. Because, in our aggravated minds, in its most simplistic viewing, avoiding the question is solely about shifting attention – away from something and toward something else.
…………… question deflection …………
Sure. It could be something as simple as steering you away from their lack of knowledge and steering you toward something they may actually know. But, in most cases, a full abandonment of a specific question is complete & utter deflection.
In the intelligence community they call this effort to shift attention as deflection or misdirection. Magicians do something similar getting people to focus on one thing and away from the trick itself. Completely avoiding the question is the business version of a distract-the-audience approach. It is this weird moment in which someone pretends to answer the question by actually answering some other question that magically appeared to replace the question really asked. It’s almost like entering an alternative universe for a while.
Sadly, aggravated or not, the more practiced the deception <the more practiced the business magician is> the more likely you hesitate to step in <and the more you get aggravated as you hesitate> and correspondingly … the more many of these people actually believe deception works.
It is maddening.
Worse? If they are good at it, when someone responds to a question by not addressing the points of the question, thereby avoiding the issue itself, it doesn’t create unrelated discussion to the issue … it simply avoids the issue in totality.
Well. I am fairly sure we have all sat there in a meeting and watched something like this unfolding right before our eyes. The visceral response, the aggravation, we have to this ‘answer evasion’ situation is most likely found in the revelation it is occurring (watching it unfold before our eyes). Philosophically, we can see that through some internal conviction to retain something they feel like they should own <their reputation, their title, their perceived intelligence, their whatever> they justify evading the question.
Conviction. Yeah. I just used ‘internal conviction.’ This means their intentions reflect they are more important than not only the question itself … but you. You are not even dignified with an answer.
It is irksome <at its least worst>.
It is loathsome <at its most worst>.
Look. I give a partial pass to the asshats you can see who have some answer they want to give everyone, regardless of what question is asked, and blurt it out when given the opportunity. They haven’t deflected the question they just ignored it as unimportant to what they want to say and have been planning to say no matter what has been said up to that point. It’s the ones you know heard the question and just ignored it. Or avoided it. Or just didn’t answer it despite the fact they heard every word, every syllable and every intention from the question giver. In other words, they intentionally do not answer the question.
<envision a deep sigh here>
I want people to face questions head on. And what makes this even more aggravating is that you know these people are quite capable of taking things head on.
How do I know that? These are the same people who will attack, or ‘aggressively question’, the intentions of the question giver themselves. It is a common tactic for the answer avoiders. The natural instinct is to ‘defend’; to answer the attack. Fuck that. I want to say “just answer the fucking question asked.”
How else do I know these people are quite capable of taking questions head on? These are the same people who will attack, or ‘aggressively question’, the question itself. This is not a deflection tactic. This is a ‘turn the question back on itself’ tactic. And, once again, your natural instinct is to defend or, well, answer the question you are asked. Aggravating. I want to say “just answer the fucking question asked, you shithead.”
And maybe what makes this ‘not answering the question asked’ so maddening is that we, most sane pragmatic business people, tend to sit back <after saying “WTF”> and try and unravel why it happened and what the hell just happened. Unless you are in an interview scenario <in which you always have an opportunity, one-to-one, to hunker down and hammer out a clear answer> you are most likely in a room with other people and the non-answer has sent at least some of the people careening down a completely different road.
That makes it even MORE aggravating.
One intentional non answer to a question can completely derail a meeting or a 
discussion. That is intentional discourse. Or how about the other phrase from that academic’s book: engaging in an intentional continuum.
Oh. One last way you know these asshats are intentionally not answering the question is when they cleverly decline to answer the question with the infamous head fake answer: “I don’t know the answer to that question. I’ll work on finding the information for you and then get back to you with an answer” <and they have no intention of ever getting back to you>.
Yeah. You know … sure as shit … they have no plans to work on it and will never ‘get back to you’ unless you call them on it. They are intentionally refusing to answer the question assuming the conversation will move on and, in a laundry list of other shit to do, that this one will either never make the list or be so low on the list they can stiff arm you on answering based on “working on things more important.”
Its bullshit. You know its bullshit. They know its bullshit.
Well.
Fuck you.
Fuck you and the non-answering horse you rode in on.
In my mind a good well-articulated question demands some accountability. The one given the question is now accountable for the answer. They may try and deflect and they may just answer a completely different question, but a question asked exists, it does not disappear. You cannot get away from it.
Let me share a graphic example of why accountability remains whether the question dodger likes it or not.
You open your front door in the morning and there is a nice pile of dog shit squarely in the middle of your front door opening. You either clean it up or you avoid it. The question dodger never acknowledges the pile and steps over it moving on to something else. The shit stays at the front door and over time the smell increases and the flies crowd around. A good question unanswered is just like that. And a question dodger cannot avoid the smell in the end.
All that said. My message to the asshats who completely do not answer the question asked: You will be accountable to the question and to cleaning up the mess … now … or later <and quit aggravating me by not answering the question, you shithead>.
====
Author note:
When I reread this, which took me less than a ½ hour to write, I was a little 
surprised by how … well … aggravated the tone was.
Some ‘fucks’ and ‘asshats’.
I left it as is because as a 50something business guy who has always attempted to take on what needs to be taken on regardless of how painful it may have been <and career wise possibly less than prudent> I get a little angry about how the business world has become incredibly unkind to the risk takers & truth tellers and seems to reward the less-than-competent and ‘political maneuverers’ more often than it should. That’s my excuse for why I let this one stand as it does.
=======================
To be clear. Other people who think winning is all that matters will think he was full of shit and I am full of shit. It doesn’t really matter because, well, that’s my point.
result” or “it’s not the journey it is the destination” or “winning is everything.” It is empty because the person runs a very large risk that how you actually got to the win is ignored and everything gets measured <in their personal character measurement> on a scorecard.
way that your competition can just look afterwards and say … “wow … that was smart.” Heck. It doesn’t even have to be innovative. It could simply be effective navigation of a complex system and dynamic situation. This is as good as a physical <ability> win, but unfortunately many people do not evaluate it that way.
Do I give Sugar Ray credit for figuring out how to win by avoiding the Hands of Stone? Sure.
When you go through shit as we all do we all also have the choice how that ‘hand you were dealt’ is played … and inevitably you will do what you believe is best.
us.
Figure it out?
Uh oh. Unfortunately fate or destiny … well … they tend to be quiet fellows <or women>.
Kairos.
Fate & destiny.
conquer me! Oh, how beautiful it is to live – and live a thousand times over!
If you do that, fate or destiny, as they struggle for some air, will tell you if you are being stupid with what you are thinking or if you are on the right path.
beyond the fishing grounds we have always used and lead us to new lands that maybe we had only heard of before.
culture is not anything persons do, but anything they do with each other we may say a culture comes into being whenever persons choose to be a people. It is as a people that they arrange their rules with each other, their moralities, their modes of communication.” While I (slightly) hesitate to suggest people, technology (software) and information, each by themselves, are simply discernible bits of something that are actually nothings, I will suggest in a Conceptual Age frame of mind those things are nothing until they actually “do with each other” and collectively create progress. a culture forges them all together into something worthwhile.
whatever they do (and how they think), there is continuous improvement, progress is achieved (for the individual and the business), quests are pursued and everyone feels a sense of meaning in having contributed. That is possibly the best summary of what I envision a Conceptual Age Organization is.
While the cloud represents an almost limitless pool of ever-growing knowledge and data, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that the cloud, in and of itself, can be just as stupid, if not stupider, than any one individual. More knowledge, used poorly, simply makes one stupider rather than smarter. The collective knowledge is only as good as who uses it.
individual(s) collaboration to command the highest order of value against emergent opportunities. And, in general, technology creates organizational stupidity when the culture does not embrace it’s thinking potential and simply use it as tools to ‘do’. The smartest organizations will be the ones in which there is a strong culture attracted to the benefits of technology and, specifically, an Intelligence Based Software system constantly feeding them predictive and emergent knowledge to assist them thinking conceptually about the business at hand.
First. I bet 80%, maybe 90%, of everything you would like an employee to improve upon & learn is within their comfort zone. Let’s stop telling people they have to be uncomfortable. They can be comfortable AND learn shit.
Institutional debt has obvious problems but the one least discussed is how they create a version of “wicked problems.” This is grounded in the truth the more you ignore it, the more it builds up and becomes impossible to ignore. More and more a business which is less focused on emergent opportunities will build debt in outdated ideas, misguided thinking on what’s important and processes which have seen better days (once worked but are having diminishing positive returns).
augmenting existing wisdom and thinking is a matter of organization. I hesitate to call this “culture” because I believe it is more attitude and intentions. If an organization clearly states its intentions, and attitudinally believe the organization should be continuously making progress against those intentions, conceptual thinking is the pathway forward for a Conceptual Age Organization seeking to insure it sheds its Institutional debt.
Let me begin where I will end … there is beauty in imperfections.
Authentic is complex in its make up of its largeness and multitude.