Quantum Leadership

It seems like more than a lifetime ago that I completed my first degree which was in Physics. An area of knowledge that I spent 10 years teaching and which still excites me. In the last act of my last lecture in my undergraduate degree, my lecturer wrote in letters filling the whole board:

This was a reference to Einstein’s disagreement with Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg over the validity of Quantum Mechanics at the fifth Solvay Conference in 1927. By this time, Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was well known in the Physics world. On the other hand Bohr and Heisenberg’s Quantum Mechanics was very new. Central to Quantum Mechanics is the probabilistic nature of the universe. That is that objects behave according to a well defined probability but their individual actions are completely unpredictable. An electron, for example, could spend most of its time close to an atom on the page on which you are reading this. However, there is a small, but not zero, probability that in one moment it will be on the other side of the universe without ever having been anywhere in between here and there. We cannot predict when an electron might choose to jump such a great distance just that there is a chance it will.

In 1927 Einstein could not bring himself to believe this disorderly behaviour and made his famous statement “I cannot believe that God plays dice.” Although he appears to have eventually come to an accommodation with Quantum Mechanics, many commentators believe he wasted the second half of his life attempting to develop a theory that unified Relativity and Quantum Physics. Today there are about as many physicists who reject quantum theory as the number who believe in a flat earth.

You may or may not find this interesting. The point I want to make though is the implications this has for management and leadership. When we lead and manage, is it possible, at least in theory, to analyse every problem or are we, like God, merely playing dice.

Many people I talk to find this concept quite discomfiting. We have, most of us, been brought up with the notion of Scientific Management. That is, with appropriate analytical tools and a sufficient level of application, we can design the optimum organisation with the best possible processes to meet the challenges that face us. We can design instruments that measure our performance, measure potential employees skill sets, aptitude and psychological suitability for the tasks we know need doing. Finally we can determine the market requirements and design products and services that perfectly dovetail with them. That we don’t is due to our own failings rather than the failure of theory.

This view of the world has served us well for several centuries – as classical physics did up to the nuclear age. But in the same way that classical physics is inadequate to describe and predict the complex interactions of sub-atomic particles that have led to a revolution in technology, management and leadership based on that same classical science is inadequate to deal with a world where information and capital can travel at the speed of light.

The failures of traditional (think bureaucratic) organisations didn’t matter when the pace of change was so much slower. But, as Margaret Wheatley points out:

Our seventeenth century organisations are crumbling. We have prided ourselves , in all these centuries since Newton and Descartes, on the triumph of reason, on the absence of magic. Yet we, like the best magicians of old, have been hooked on manipulation. For three centuries, we’ve been planning, predicting, and analyzing the world. We’ve held on to an intense belief in cause and effect. We’ve raised planning to highest of priestcrafts and imbued numbers with absolute power. We look to numbers to describe our economic health, our productivity, our physical well-being. We’ve developed graphs and charts and plans to take us into the future, revering them as ancient mariners did their chart books. Without them, we’d be lost, adrift among the dragons. We have been, after all, no more than sorcerers, the master magicians of our time.” Leadership and the New Science 1999.

Similarly Clegg and Hardy observe:

David Silverman’s (1971) The Theory of Organizations ... interpretative emphasis countered the functionalist view. It opened a Pandora’s box, releasing actors as opposed to systems, social construction as opposed to social determinism; interpretative understanding as opposed to a logic of causal explanation; plural definitions of situations rather than the singular definition articulated around organizational goals. Studying Organization 1999

In the same way the Quantum Physics has required scientists to learn and adopt a whole raft of new thinking, so must leaders, managers and participants in organisations.

We can no longer think of our organisations as machines reducible to their component parts. We must think of them as networks of relationships. No longer is it adequate to dream that, like the great Watchmaker, we can control all the levers a dials and set the precise course our organisation will take. Rather, like a gardener, we can cultivate, water and fertilize.

Perhaps more importantly, we can no longer believe that one person determines the destiny of an organisation. Perhaps this is the remaining, yet most enduring vestige of the industrial age. A belief rather than dying out as its usefulness diminishes has paradoxically become the supreme article of faith of modern commerce.

The central lessons from modern science though are:

• not only do we not know how our plans will turn out, we cannot know
• the greatest untapped creative ability in our organisations is their ability to self-organise - if only we have the courage to let them, and
• it is far more important to look at a problem as a whole rather as a series of separately solvable parts.