Why Management Concepts are Incoherent
- David Creelman
- 9月2日
- 読了時間: 3分
If you are developing your expertise on a management topic like “teams” or “trust”, you will find an endless number of frameworks, models, and theories. At first, it might feel like you are learning more and more about the field. However, at a certain point, you will get frustrated. You will find that “new” ideas are often just rehashes of old ones. You’ll find that the frameworks don’t fit together in a coherent way. Overall, you’ll just find that there are too many ideas to keep in mind when you are facing a situation where you are dealing with the topic of interest.
Let’s explore why this happens and what to do about it.
Why it happens
When you study a hard science like chemistry or physics, everything seems to fit together. That’s because we are dealing with concrete things we can measure like atoms, molecular bonds, and temperature. In the world of management, everything is fuzzy and rarely has satisfactory measures.
A concept such as “trust” includes actions like sharing a secret, delegating a task, or giving someone the benefit of the doubt. These actions have a family resemblance but differ substantially. If we try to use them as a foundation for a coherent science of management, we will run into trouble.
Due to the fuzziness and complexity of the things we care about in management, everyone can come up with their own way of describing them, just like children can look at a cloud and each come up with their own opinion of what it looks like.
There isn’t any solid ground, no fundamental “atoms”, that allow us to tie things together. A degree of frustration with concepts like “trust”, “engagement”, or “teamwork” is unavoidable.
What to do about it
The scientific approach: If you are a scientist or engineer and hope to tie things together into a unified theory of teams, trust, or whatever, then you are probably wasting your time. Sure, you can come up with your own framework, but it will probably just add to the existing pile of frameworks, rather than bring coherence to the field. I recommend not trying.
The practical approach: Most practical managers learn a few frameworks on relevant management topics and just use those. They don’t worry if the literature on a topic like “delegation” is vast and inconsistent; they just want some useful tips.
A new approach: Don’t worry about memorising frameworks. Simply describe the situation in detail to a large language model like ChatGPT and ask something like “Which frameworks about teams [assuming that’s your issue] are relevant to my situation. Compare and contrast the insights these frameworks have.”
Another way of looking at it
Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of “The Black Swan,” warns against big, vague ideas that are not grounded in the local context. He calls these ideas “abstract universalism”. The ideas you read about in management are almost always examples of abstract universalism because they are talking about the subject in general, not your specific case.
If faced with a problem of lack of trust, for example, perhaps you shouldn’t rely too much on the abstract universal frameworks you’ve been taught. Perhaps you should just pay very close attention to the personalities, incentives, conflicts, incidents, information flow, history, and so on of your situation. You may find your own unique answers to your situation work better than anything you have learned in a textbook.
Conclusion
Anyone with training in a rigorous field like science or engineering will likely get frustrated with the lack of coherent ideas about management. That incoherence is, at the moment, unavoidable. The topic is too complex and too fuzzy to result in the kind of solid science we get in other fields.
So, rather than trying to create a grand set of ideas about management, take the practical route of learning a few helpful frameworks. Ask a large language model to suggest other relevant frameworks. More than anything, pay very close attention to your unique situation and base your actions on that.