Social Processes and Improvement
This summer, I had my arm twisted to read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn, a classic (early 60’s) view from a scientific historian on how major changes in scientific thought really occur. Kuhn provides example after example of how science doesn’t work according to the classic “hypothesize - experiment - validate/falsify” model. He believes that scientific revolutions are accepted much more through social processes than scientific ones. In fact, he suggests that sometimes an older generation of scientists needs to die out before newer theories will be accepted.
In case that worries, you, he doesn’t demean the importance of science and he’s hesitant to expand his conclusions to other fields. In fact, he explicitly makes a distinction between science and mathematics. That’s ironic, because years ago I was astonished by a paper from the 70’s, “Social Processes and Proofs of Theorems and Programs” by DeMillo, Lipton and Perlis, that applies similar arguments to mathematics (my first major in college). Ironically, it seems we can’t prove anything without getting a bunch of people to agree to it.
Management theories are typically fuzzy and not amenable to controlled experiments. So if proofs in math and science have a big social component, we shouldn’t be surprised that management theories sometimes seem like conga lines. (And let’s not start on politics or economics.)
How do you make a decision about what management approach to use, if you can’t “prove” that (say) something like critical chain is substantially better than critical path? That’s an especially important question in spaces like project management where many niche players are all trying to win converts. There are a few obvious things to recommend:
- Listen to the experts, read a lot, but never rely on “expert” opinions as a substitute for thinking.
- Don’t just look for successes and failures, try to understand them, and apply them to your world.
- Experiment.
Also remember that an inability to “prove” things can be great news: to the extent that we don’t artificially limit ourselves, we can always hope for improvement - personally and professionally. And companies can always hope to build competitive advantages.
At our recent ProChain conference, there were discussions on Critical Chain along with Lean, Six Sigma, Agile, and (!) Earned Value. I think the general consensus was that all these approaches, when thought through and applied intelligently, contain different facets of fundamental truths about good management.
If we think we grasp some of these fundamental truths, this “profound knowledge,” how do we test and enhance our understanding? And how do we communicate it?