Pick mine, pick theirs, but pick a tool and stick with it!

The utilization of management tools, ideas and frameworks has a strange cyclicality to it. The boss reads another book and suddenly we’re all required to calculate Net Promoter Scores! It’s worth taking a critical eye to the tools that we use to increase performance.

The development of new management practices

My former advisor, Ned Bowman, often said that theories move through four stages. The first is the description — when something is very new (hello, ChatGPT), the best we can do is try to describe it. That’s why so many genuinely new ideas are articulated in the form of narratives and stories — we don’t have hard data about new and emergent things.

Next, once we understand a phenomenon a little better, is the explanation. For instance, when Kathy Philips did her groundbreaking work on the performance differences between diverse teams and homogenous ones, it took research into neuroscience to explain why homogenous teams perform worse than diverse ones on tasks involving creative problem-solving. It turns out that when we are among familiar people, our brains just coast along — when we are confronted with diversity, they have to wake up! The dilemma is that while performance is objectively better with a diverse team, it’s harder work, so ironically, we perform…