A Black Swan Moved My Cheese

 

My regular readers are probably aware of the extent I despise the tactic of introducing or advancing a theory or concept in a fictionalized setting, the so-called “business fable.” Think about it – how can we ever even refer to “management science” if any of its currently-adopted precepts come to us as stories, rather than legitimate experimentation or scholarship? Which famous scientists of old used this tactic? Imagine if Einstein had introduced the General Theory of Relativity with talking animals or other invented characters.  If he had, wouldn’t that automatically render his scholarship extremely dubious?

Not so with “management science,” no siree! Eliyahu Goldratt introduced the concept of Critical Chain in a novel of the same name. An instructor who’s also a new project manager introduces a (really, an old) twist to critical path analysis, tries it out on a difficult project, and – wouldn’t you just know it? – it works like a charm! B.F. Skinner did something similar in the field of psychology, when he published Walden Two. In this book, a commune of sorts is set up, the governance of which is based on the precepts of what would later become known as Behaviorism, and a reporter goes to see what’s going on at this place. All of the inhabitants are perfectly happy, with no crime or deviant behavior of any kind present, all thanks to the Behaviorism-based approach of the commune’s managers and directors. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, the book that actually laid out Behaviorism in a scholarly fashion,wouldn’t be published for another 23 years. Skinner may or may not have had real people or patients who benefitted from his theories, but he had hundreds of imagined ones who did!

Which brings us to Who Moved My Cheese? by Dr. Spencer Johnson (who, interestingly enough, has a degree in psychology). Who Moved My Cheese? is set in a maze, with two mice and two miniature people seeking out supplies of the only foodstuffs referenced, cheese. Ironically, mice running around in mazes provide a substantial part of the hard data Behaviorists use to support their hypotheses and theories, but Dr. Johnson’s maze is purely imagined. As the available supplies of cheese move about the maze, the two miniature humans discuss how they will respond to their changing environment, which provides many opportunities for fortune-cookie-style managerial axioms to be introduced (usually by writing them on the walls of the maze) and evaluated, again in a purely literary setting. Actually, can any hypotheses really be said to have been “evaluated” in an unreal setting?

Compare this approach to advancing managerial concepts to the one used by the genuinely brilliant Nassim Taleb in The Black Swan, The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Actually, don’t bother – there is no comparison. In fact, I would advise against reading these two books back-to-back, similar to the reason why one should never consume a ColdEze lozenge and then drink a diet Pepsi. However, I can’t help but to conflate these two works. Since Who Moved My Cheese is fiction, it cannot be translated into non-fiction; however, The Black Swan, being non-fiction, can­ be pushed into the other genre, so:

Spahk and Sarak are two miniature Vulcans who find themselves in an alien maze, co-occupied with two gophers, Spiff and Spurry. Using the mild-meld technique, Spahk learns from the gophers that caches of roots, bulbs, and grasses are deposited at certain locations within the maze, and exhorts Sarak to seek their necessary sustenance at those places.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to kill the gophers?” Sarak asks.

“Illogical. Vulcans are vegetarians. There is no reason to kill the gophers.”

“Except that they are competitors for the existing food supply. That, taken with the fact that gophers are considered pests and are rodents, should be enough reason.”

“What if the aliens who put us here maintain an emotional attachment to the gophers? If our treatment of them is part of the reason we are here – some sort of test, or experiment seems likely – then any hostile act may harm our chances of getting back to where we’re supposed to be.”

Sarak thinks about this briefly.

“Where, exactly, are we supposed to be?” he asks.

“I’m supposed to be on board the Starship Enterprise, and you are supposed to be at the Federation’s Diplomatic Compound on Earth.”

“But those places don’t exist outside of the science fiction genre. In fact, this, the miniature version of ourselves, do not exist outside of a blog on ProjectManagement.com. And, based on what I know of this particular blog’s author, we could fade away at any moment.”

“But wait!” Spahk exclaims. “I haven’t even passed along some jejune truism that really only has any applicability among human resource managers, or motivational speakers!”

Suddenly, two giant alien researchers appear above the maze, wearing white lab coats and holding clipboards. They begin arguing intensely, apparently about something to do with their marriage. One of them produces a weapon, activates it, and vaporizes the entire facility.

Soooo… I have to ask: if the preceding struck you as pretty silly, why, exactly? Because I used miniature Vulcans instead of humans, or gophers rather than mice? Was it the use of roots, bulbs, and grasses over cheese? Is it these stylistic differences that makes the whole narrative inherently silly – or is it not the whole business fable genre in and of itself? Better-written fiction is still fiction, after all.