Management’s problem is not what you think it is.
What’s the most important problem in management? Is it how to develop great leaders? How to motivate people? How to drive innovation?
No.
The most important problem in management is why the field has failed to make significant progress over the past 50 years. Think about what cars were like 50 years ago or cargo shipping or even something like Olympic running. In all these areas, there is ongoing improvement; it’s not at all clear that we can say the same thing about management.
Why hasn’t management advanced like other fields? I explore this topic in my new book Management for Scientists and Engineers.
An unusual book
Admittedly, it’s an unusual book. I’ve read over 100 management books, even written a few myself, and all but one contained tips on how to be a better manager. Instead of sharing yet another set of tips, my book attempts to lay out the groundwork so we can understand why management hasn’t made progress. Once we understand what’s wrong, then we will be in a position to make things better.
I call the book Management for Scientists and Engineers because these are the kinds of inquisitive people who are interested in getting to first principles. They are used to dealing with complex, difficult topics and I think they are the ones who will take the insights in the book and build on them. If you like grappling with big ideas, then you’ll like this book.
Need for unifying theories
The first insight from the book derives from my own experience as a consultant. As I said, I’ve read many, many books on management in an attempt to master the field. However, after a certain point, with every new idea I learned, I’d simply forget an old one. There are only so many models or frameworks or five-step processes you can keep in your head. Each one seems good in itself, but collectively they are full of overlapping ideas, inconsistent terminology, and sometimes conflicting advice.
Imagine if, every time you picked up a book on chemistry, the author had invented their own periodic table with their own way of naming and organizing the elements. Any one of these books would be fine on its own, but the field of chemistry would never make any progress.
If we are going to make progress in management science, we need to unify the theories. In fact, leading academics in the field tried to do that way back in 1962 but everyone preferred to do their own little disconnected research. That was a lost opportunity.
Today’s academics will tell you that they do try to connect their research to other theories. Yes, it’s true they do try, it’s just not working very well. Stanford’s Jeff Pfeffer says the world of research is more like a field of weeds than a well-tended garden. Until we learn how to tend this garden, most academic research on management will be irrelevant. Improving how academic work on management is done will be essential to creating a reliable science of management.
Confronting the problem of people
One of the reasons doing research on management, not to mention actually being a manager, is so hard is that organizations are full of people. People make all kinds of bad decisions. People are often uncooperative. People can be hard to motivate. I’m sure there is many an engineer who wishes they could run the whole organization with robots.
We tend to underestimate just how difficult it is to understand, predict and improve on human behaviour in the workplace. I’d go so far as to say that we don’t currently have the tools to do so effectively.
What would it take to understand the individual humans in an organization well enough that we could reliably improve their collective performance? Perhaps the answer lies in gathering much more data. Perhaps the answer lies in AI that can analyse that data. Whatever your conclusion, it’s clear that we have been spinning our wheels when it comes to methods for managing people and we won’t begin to make consistent progress until we find new ways to understand people and how they interact in groups.
Complexity theory and systems thinking
The father of systems modelling, the great MIT engineer Jay Forrester, said some time ago that it might take 50 years for the world to embrace systems modelling. While that is not entirely encouraging, it does give you a sense of the scale of the challenge we are facing.
Systems modelling, where you create a model of some key processes in an organization, provides a glimmer of hope because it is a scientific approach to improving organizational performance. A model is mathematics, not just some words on a PowerPoint slide. A model can be tested. A model can be improved.
The reason systems modelling hasn’t taken off is that it’s hard to do. Managers would rather listen to an inspiring thirty-minute speech from a management guru than spend weeks or months building a computer model that might – or might not – provide key insights.
However, if you accept my original thesis, which is that the biggest problem in management is that the discipline hasn’t progressed much in the past 50 years, then maybe we should be ready to invest in approaches even if they are slow and difficult.
Implications for companies
Better management will improve life for everyone in the workplace. We know that better management is hard to achieve. If academics, consultants and managers face up to the fact that our approach to improving management hasn’t got much traction; then perhaps collectively they will work together to raise the bar. We need to stop being satisfied with the way we’ve been approaching management theories. We need to start taking evidence-based management more seriously.
P.S. You may be wondering what the one management book that didn’t contain tips was called. It was “Understanding Computers and Cognition” by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. From the title, you wouldn’t think it was a management book at all, but Winograd and Flores were interested in deep questions about humanity, and to my mind that makes it a book about management.
David Creelman is CEO of Creelman Research, in Canada. He helps to elevate the analytics and business savvy of HRBPs, and is best known for his workshops on Agile Analytics, Evidence-base Management and the Future of Work. His new book with Peter Navin is The CMO of People.
