Theory To Practice

To Boldly go

What can science fiction accomplish that management books cannot?

May / June 2009 by Michael E. Raynor

Few people would admit to being averse to learning. But what’s selling at the bookstores these days suggests many of us are. Many of the most successful books seem to fly off the shelves precisely because they are stentorian affirmations of readers’ already firmly held beliefs rather than good-faith explorations of something new. In short, rather than seeking out contrary or little-understood points of view, many of us need so badly to be told we’re right that we’ll pay people to do it.

Consider, for instance, Arianna Huffington’s 2008 effort, Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. If your political views are on the conservative end of the spectrum, you’re unlikely to put that on your bedside table. You’ll buy it only if you already agree with Huffington’s take on the world and are willing to hand over $24.95 to give eloquent and humorous expression to your existing views. Its mirror image is Ann Coulter’s latest polemic, Guilty: Liberal “Victims” and Their Assault on America, a title that gives you little confidence the message will be crafted in a way that might open your mind to ideas you don’t already embrace.

Religious writing of late has followed a similar path. Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is unlikely to inspire many deists to consider the merits of atheism, while Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism will similarly be eschewed by Hitchens’ fan club. These books are more likely to give rise among their readerships to self-satisfied smirks than to encourage or support people in questioning the limits and limitations of their current beliefs.

You might be willing chalk up this fruitless polarization to the subject matter. I mean, politics and religion . . . come on. But therein lies a paradox: The intensity of our desire to avoid cognitive dissonance is proportional to how important the ideas are to us. We seem to learn well enough when the subject is of interest but no (direct) importance to our lives: Most of us would abandon quarks for string theory in a heartbeat. But if it affects how we think of ourselves and our place in the world, it becomes almost impossible to leave dry land. The implication is that the more meaningful learning might be, the more difficult it is to achieve.

And if the resistance of many managers to new ideas about management is any indication, organizational theory belongs right up there with politics and religion as a defining axis of psychological space. I can’t count how many times people will, when pressed, ultimately admit that a management book worked for them because it expressed and substantiated ideas about commercial success that they have long felt are true. Rarely have I met those who liked a book because it forced them to question—and maybe even change—their own beliefs.

Ironically, the smarter you are, the more susceptible you may be to avoiding learning something new. It’s tough trying to learn something new about things in which we feel ourselves expert. Doing so demands that we admit that what we know now is at least incomplete and some of what we think we know is very likely wrong. When faced with evidence that something we think is true isn’t, we very often reduce the dissonance by re-interpreting new information so that it conforms to our existing beliefs. And the more intellectual horsepower you bring to a problem, the better able you are to do this.

This is the phenomenon quite possibly at work when executives parachute into radically new circumstances and are quickly convinced that the principles that have served them well so far are just the ticket in their new surroundings. What they learn from those around them only serves to confirm their initial intuition, even when the intent of their advisers is to make clear what is different.

It’s important to note that rarely is any of this conscious. The psychological mechanisms at work are so subtle as to be invisible to almost all concerned. That’s why managers need to read more science fiction. Robert Sawyer, an accomplished sci-fi author, gave a lecture at the University of Waterloo in Ontario in which he explained how the unique tools of science fiction are singularly suited to leading people to question some of their most basic beliefs. When a story is placed in a radically different context—beyond time and place to different species, dimensions, you name it—a reader (or movie or TV viewer) develops affection or asperity for the characters, only to find that those with whom one sympathizes have very different views on issues of moment. Or, even more disquieting, one discovers that the villains of the piece are motivated by beliefs eerily similar to one’s own.

For example, in the original Planet of the Apes, one of the movie’s opening scenes features a chimpanzee, the least sympathetic and dominant of three species of simian that co-exist uneasily on the planet, complaining about the quota system that’s keeping him down. When the film was released in 1968, affirmative action was being hotly debated, and by using an objectionable character to voice opposition to that policy, viewers could consider anew their own views on the topic. And of course, the movie’s ending depicts astronaut Charlton Heston cursing humanity’s stupidity upon realizing that the planet on which he has landed is an Earth ruled by apes in the aftermath of a nuclear war. This was trenchant social commentary at a time when nuclear stockpiles were increasing even in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis less than six years earlier.

More recently, consider the new Battlestar Galactica. Various arcs in the series explore the tension between safeguarding individual freedoms and the survival of civilized society when faced with an undetectable and lethal foe. Everything from abortion to torture to the legitimacy of elected office has come under scrutiny. Shorn of the baggage these debates carry in the real world, it takes a supreme act of self-inflicted benightedness to avoid questioning the foundational assumptions of one’s own belief system. Wrapped up in a context where you just don’t know whom to believe and have no pragmatic considerations to limit your imagination, you’re given the opportunity to make up your mind all over again in the universe you actually inhabit.

Can there be an analog to the sci-fi sucker punch in management books? Is it possible to draw readers into a situation and then reveal that the tale has been about them all along?

There have been a number of attempts to write plot-driven stories that explain key management principles, but few have pulled it off in a way that stretches our palette rather than devolving into intellectual comfort food. Eli Goldratt’s The Goal comes as close as anything I’ve seen, and is perhaps unique in having made progress toward a new genre of management writing while still achieving commercial success. The protagonist, Alex Rogo, is a plant manager and someone with whom we immediately sympathize. As the story unfolds he is forced to abandon a number of principles that had guided his management practices. This sets up the cognitive dissonance that makes learning possible: If Alex is a nice guy, and you identify with him, then you either have to change your opinion of Alex or learn what he learns.

So where does this get us? I’ve found that the best I can do is to treat every new book and every set of examples as if they were science fiction, so removed from my own experience that there is no direct connection to anything that matters to me. I make a conscious effort to approach new ideas with an open mind and work hard to take the ideas of others first on their own terms, and then worry about what their conclusions say about my view of how the world works.

This is often a struggle, primarily because business writers beat you over the head with how what they’re saying applies to you. But when I succeed in defeating those efforts, in divorcing my world from the one they are describing, then I can buy into their parallel universe. That allows me to take seriously the notion that execution matters more than strategy (apostasy!), successful innovation requires frequent failure (sacrilege!), or shareholder value is the ultimate corporate objective (blasphemy!). And only then can I succeed in challenging what I already believe to be true—and actually learn something.

 

MICHAEL E. RAYNOR Michael E. Raynor is with Deloitte Consulting LLP. In addition to applying theory, he occasionally tries to create some; BusinessWeek named his most recent book, The Strategy Paradox, one of the top 10 books of 2007. He can be reached via www.michaelraynor.com.