Are people good?

Is it possible to apply the scientific method in the field of management?

We have historically made progress in science when we are able to remove the idea of “intention” or “desire” from our explanations. For example, understanding that there are natural laws that can explain the motion of the planets was a revolution. Before that “agents” proliferated, each with independent will.

This mechanistic world view where in the words of Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg  “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” has been the dominating thought of science. Reducing the degrees of freedom that nature has by recognizing laws that act as constraints. The ultimate model is the billiard ball model of the universe where knowing the velocity and position of all the particles in the world we are able to predict the entire future trajectory. But this is not the entire truth: we live in a world with at least some “agents” namely us, the question then is how do we create effectively predictive models for systems that involve human beings?

In business situations there is a tendency to find causes relying on “agency” of people. In fact sometimes it appears that no analysis of a problem or situation is complete till the “full blame” has been assigned. Lessons learned become exercises in “blame storming“. Is it possible to truly understand business situations without relying on human “agency” or it’s opposite “lack of responsibility”?

Human behavior can be quite a predictable element of a business situation. People are generally found to behave in ways that align with their interests. For example, if a person is held responsible for a task that must be finished on time, they will estimate a very conservative time or add a buffer, in order to give themselves a good chance of meeting their commitment. This observation is the basis of Eli Goldratt’s solution for accelerating projects (Critical Chain). This buffer is then wasted because it is not visible and managed to help the goals and objectives of the project, instead it is used to protect the local deadline on a task. People are not malicious in wasting the buffer, they are acting in their interest and trying to be good team players by responding to what they see as expectations that they must meet.

Looking for such an explanation, that does not require “good” or “bad” actors, requires us to make a crucial assumption – people are good. In the absence of this assumption when a project is late the search is on to pin the blame on someone else who was late, not prepared or did not plan their work well enough. This is the contrast. An explanation based on the assumption that people are good has a lot more predictive power because even if the “explanatory arrows” do not point downwards, they do point away from human “agency”.  In this way the explanation satisfies one of the characteristics of scientific thinking.

So are people really “good”? That is just too controversial a question. Everyone has experience with all sorts of folks – good, bad, evil. Even our perspectives on what is good may be different. Does loyalty trump everything else – “you are either with us, or against us”? Is it good to be reliable, trustworthy? Is it good to be generous, forgiving, kind? Always? What about resisting evil? A kind person who “turns the other cheek”, do they make the world a better place or encourage worse behavior? Is being selfish and protecting one’s interest wrong?

These are all valid questions and perspectives. The point I want to make is not that these questions are not legitimate, or that they should be ignored, in fact they are the most important questions. Human agency is of overwhelming importance in establishing our values in the world. There is no explanatory arrow that can substitute for a person caring enough to make a difference. Even from that perspective “people are good” is close to the almost universal Golden Rule “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” or “What you wish upon others, you wish upon yourself”. Not all of management can be made agency free. At the end of the day everything that is good, positive and valuable relies on someone caring enough. But large parts of our organizations, our policies, our measurements and organizational behavior can be rendered to a scientific mode of inquiry.

PS. I do want to recommend the work of Stuart Kaufman who makes a compelling case for a non-reductionist world view

I also invite you to visit my blog on LinkedIn. Please also join me onFacebook and follow me on Twitter (@KapoorAjai)