Should We Use Electric Shocks On The Risk Managers?

 

We all have our own way of looking at the world, and this worldview is shaped by our experiences. Indeed, B.F. Skinner launched an entire school of psychological thought, known as “Behaviorism,” that essentially said that we are all products of our experiences, to the point of minimizing – or even eliminating – the concept of the autonomous, free-thinking person. These experiences he broke down into a stimulus-response-consequence sequence, a model that came to dominate Behaviorism for its time in the psychological world’s limelight.

It was hard to argue with them. When I did my undergraduate work, the university I attended had a psychology department dominated by Behaviorists.  My three semesters (required) on the subject were taught by them, and they had some pretty impressive stories. One of the ones that stand out for me was the one where Behaviorists were invited to manage a mental hospital, taking over from a group of Freudians. Instead of having the patients lie on couches and describe their dreams, the Behaviorists instituted a system where the inmates would be awarded with a white marble if they got up on-time, made their beds, and performed other basic functions without mishap. Should they help others, or go above and beyond their normal chores, they would receive a black marble. These marbles could be exchanged for extra desserts, or more television time, or extra time in the recreation area, or other desirable things. According to my professors, the Behaviorists would have virtually the entire institution’s population acting fairly normally in a brief period of time, previously unmatched by the adherents of any other school of thought. Skinner actually wrote a novel, “Walden Two,” in which a reporter is assigned to report on a commune that had been founded and maintained on the ideas of Behaviorism. And – wouldn’t you just know it? – the commune’s inhabitants were all so much more happy, prosperous, well-adjusted, and sophisticated than the rubes outside that the reporter ends up staying on in order to become a part of the society.

Behaviorism has fallen into disrepute since my undergrad days. One sure indicator had to be the redefinition of key terms by the pop culture (“negative reinforcement” came to be commonly associated with punishment, when it was actually the exact opposite). Another hint was in Walden Two itself: if you can only advance your theories in a fictional setting, you probably have precious little hard data supporting your position. Basically, the notion that we are little (or no) more than the sum of our experiences came to be viewed as sub-optimal (to hijack yet another psychological term).

So, as we shift gears to November’s theme of business analysis, I caught myself wondering if something similar to what happened to the Behaviorists might occur within the business analysis realm. Does anyone remember the quality craze of the 1980’s? Or, even closer to home within the PM world, the emphasis on “life-cycle cost” management?Or “critical chain scheduling”? In each of these cases an idea that had been around for years and years was assigned a new lexicon, trotted out as a new idea that had never (or only incidentally) been considered previously, and then laden down with story after story about how organizations went from struggling to succeeding wildly once they adopted the new, trendy theory set.  Eventually these organizations would run into difficulties that were outside the trendy theories’ purview, and management science’s buzz would return to its nominal dominance by the general ledger custodians’ ideas. In the case of critical chain management, its supporters went so far as to write a novel, advancing the well-known concept of crashing the schedule, as some kind of special insight.

And yet, to real business analysts, it’s all fake. Hooey. Alchemy. Smoke and mirrors. It’s the marketing of a narrative as a substitute for legitimate management science.  Behaviorism worked as long as its researchers could engineer the experiences of its subjects – hence their success at getting lab rats to run mazes faster via punishments, rewards, or a combination of both. But business analysts know that, with very few exceptions, they cannot engineer (or even quantify) the external parameters that lead to management success (at least not legally). The best they can do is to help prepare the organization to present the most robust response to whatever happens to (in our case) the project team as they pursue their target scope.

Unfortunately, there remains a plethora of “management insights” masquerading as legitimate business analysis, making claims to deliver success to their adherents, and there’s really no way of making them go away. Hey! Maybe we can borrow ideas from the Behaviorists, attach electrodes to some of these management narrative promoters, and…