Today’s leaders must learn to think like scientists
Amy Edmondson
Prof @ Harvard Business School; Author of "Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well"
Today’s leaders must learn to think like scientists.
This does not mean you pick up a pipette and stop being a manager, dedicated to creating value for customers. Instead, thinking like a scientist means understanding that your job is to navigate uncertainty with curiosity and passion – so as to engage others in the inherently collaborative process of progress and discovery through which today’s knowledge work gets done.
Most managers are unaware of the quiet hold that industrial-era logic has on their thinking. They’re unaware of, or spend little time reflecting on, the deeply-rooted belief that they’re supposed to have the answers, control what others do, and be intolerant of failure. They fail to recognize the role of creativity in solving the many problems that invariably come up. This mindset can make it seem that keeping people a little bit afraid of you will help ensure that they hit their targets. But unfortunately, fear mostly just means that managers will be kept in the dark, unaware of what’s really going on. They are more likely to find themselves in a state of happy ignorance than in a state of helping to make sense of what’s going on and helping people solve the problems that inevitably occur.
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When you actively shift your thinking to see your role as helping others find answers by conducting smart experiments and learning from what happens, other helpful leadership behaviors follow. These allow you build the psychological safety people need to team up, experiment, and solve problems.
The bottom line is this: In today’s complex, uncertain world, the traditional management logic that worked so well for top-down control of predictable processes is not only inadequate, it’s actually destructive to performance.
So pull up a chair alongside your favorite scientist and really take in the way she or he thinks. It's instructive, I promise. I do it every day.
PhD Researcher | UCL | Southampton Uni | Nonprofit Founder Helping Disadvantaged Students Access Education | LSE Alumni Association | Edtech Founder
1moThanks for sharing, Amy!
Change Manager at Ericsson
3moAgree, but
Change Manager at Ericsson
1yI very much like your angle, however feel the need to point out that it sketches a bit a of romantic picture of the science business and the academic world to which much of traditional management logic has crept in (asymmetry of power, politics, dependencies, etc. ...). But of course you referring to the ideal of science.
Simple things done well.
1yI like your new book and am sharing it with colleagues. How we tell stories about failure really makes an impact on what we learn from it. It can be emotionally simple to say, "I tried this thing and it didn't work, and that helped define the next iterative experiment."
Coach | Trainer | Keynote Speaker | Driving Performance & Growth with Profound Perspectives and Simple Strategies
1yThis connects in my mind with Liz Wiseman's book - Multipliers - her basic difference is in the belief of the leader: 'they can do it' vs. 'they can't do it without me' - it seems to me those leaders who cannot tolerate failure may be more prone to the 'diminisher' style as she puts it of micro managing etc, vs. the 'multiplier' leader who puts people where they can contribute most (which to my mind must necessarily imply they are failing often as they are growing fast.) The ability to tolerate failure and set it up so it becomes learning not falling back is critical for any modern organisation, as change is the one (perhaps the only) thing we can guarantee and change comes with failure as we adapt and learn. Look forward to reading your book.