Facing reality is the essential step to doing better

Despite all the books, articles and other media folk trying to prove otherwise, leadership is not a science. There are no ‘laws’ that apply in every circumstance — or even most of them. There are no approaches to leadership that will always be successful, and none that will always fail. Those writers who use anecdotes, rathe than evidence, to support their own preconceptions will always find situations in which every flavor of leadership has triumphed — just as every one has been a disaster at some point. As in anything that concerns human beings, the complexity of causes and effects that produce achievement or failure are so numerous and interlocking that they pretty much defy any kind of analysis.

It’s important for anyone interested in leadership to distinguish the nature of all the so-called ’social sciences’ and the difference from the ‘hard sciences’ like physics or chemistry. Sadly, in an attempt to gain greater status and respectability, social scientists have too often made the error of trying to ape the hard sciences. What they ought to have done is recognize their discipline is unlike physics or chemistry and has more in common with the arts than any kind of science.

Economics as an example of a social science going wrong

In a recent article in the comment section of the British newspaper, The Guardian, (“When the going gets tough, economists go very quiet”) Simon Jenkins lambasted economists for being “disciples of this false science.”

In a fine fury, he turns on the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, and all those who claim to know more than the rest of us about how the world works:

Economic managers have always claimed credit for the success of Brown’s Treasury regime. They have espoused quantifiable outputs, targets and delivery indicators. They invented the celebrity consultant and the maxim that only what measures matters. Above all, the economics profession (and its house journal, the Economist) was ecstatic when Brown delegated monetary control to the Bank of England. This was supposed to isolate the economy from political pressure, subcontracting the regulation of interest rates and markets.

Today we are older and wiser. Controlling the agencies of credit has proved beyond the finest professional minds in the game. Where now are the effortless pundits of the Treasury and the Bank? Where now the gilded ones of Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, credit raters to the mightiest in the land? They should have stuck to goose entrails.

The intractable nature of leadership

All this makes for fun journalism, but it doesn’t take us much further forward, until we grasp the essential problem: the social sciences have attempted to produce laws like the so-called laws of nature, and use them to predict the future. That’s what the hard sciences do. It’s what we expect of a science. So, to justify that title, the social sciences have tried to do the same.

Leadership isn’t even close to being a science, but it certainly draws heavily on ideas from the social sciences. You can also see continual attempts to derive ‘laws’ for leaders to follow, whether these come from statistical analysis, anecdotal evidence, or the erroneous belief that following what the ‘great men’ of the past did can produce success today.

All such attempts have this in common: they assume that analysis and categorization can produce laws or principles which, if followed faithfully, can more or less guarantee success in most circumstances. New and inexperienced leaders crave such guidance. Ineffective leaders are told to improve their leadership skills or face a doubtful future. There is a large industry of trainers, coaches and consultants, many of whom are dedicated to the notion that they both know what makes for successful leadership and can teach it to others.

It doesn’t work, any more than the legion of economists have been able to keep us from boom and bust. That much is plain. The interesting point is to ask why and see what we can learn from the answers.

Humankind cannot bear too much of reality

In an area of knowledge like physics or chemistry, people have studied the processes involved for many years, categorizing their findings and producing ‘laws’ which are often highly accurate in predicting future events. The law of gravity states that all objects will drop towards the surface of the earth. We don’t expect that to change. We can calculate future events based on that knowledge and we will usually be right.

Yet, even in the hard sciences, some common processes are simply too complex and variable to allow for accurate forecasting. The weather is a good example. While the ‘laws’ that drive the world’s weather are well known, it has proved impossible to make forecasts for more than few days ahead — and even those are sometimes wildly inaccurate. The weather is both too complex and too subject to random inputs.

Weather forecasting is a good analogy for leadership

We want to know what the weather will bring, so that we can plan ahead and avoid our picnic, vacation, sporting event or whatever being spoiled by a storm. Organizations want leaders to be able to do the same thing for the storms of business: to provide steady, predictable profits without nasty surprises or unexpected setbacks. In both cases, people step up to offer what is required, even though it isn’t possible to do much better than Simon Jenkins’ goose entrails.

In any situation that relies on human choices and actions (and which business situations do not?), the level of complexity is nearly infinite. Economists dealt with this by basing their ‘laws’ and theories on an artificial creature: homo economicus — a person who always and infallibly acts in his or her own best economic interests. Their basis for doing this — other than to make any kind of ’scientific’ process like mathematical analysis feasible in their disciple — is the assumption that all the complexities will somehow cancel one another out. More recently, so-called behavioral economists have delighted in showing this to be nonsense, but have yet to produce a viable alternative. Similarly, many leaders have tended to assume that people are simple creatures whose behaviors can be manipulated by some blend of carrot and stick; while more ’scientific’ leaders have relied on the theories of the social sciences to produce sets of leadership traits or behaviors they can follow.

The reality is this: we all know that people’s motives and actions depend on as many different causes as there are people — more, since we change our minds constantly and often respond one way on one day and quite another the day after. This makes people’s actions even harder to predict than the weather. Sure, there are some broad probabilities we can usually rely on — it snows in the north in winter and is usually hot in the tropics — but the detail inevitably escapes us.

Leadership in reality

Leadership is just like that. We can recognize that some broad approaches to leadership, like blatant tyranny, tend to produce characteristic problems, but that hasn’t prevented some tyrants from being extraordinarily successful. Yet, just as you cannot explain the greatness of a Shakespeare or a Beethoven by means of set ‘laws’, you cannot say exactly why some leaders have achieved greatness in people’s eyes, despite being often vain and tyrannical (Napoleon), cold and disdainful (The Duke of Wellington), egotistical and devious (Julius Caesar), emotional and lustful (Catherine the Great), or interfering and bellicose (Churchill).

Leadership is an art, not a science. It depends mostly on sensitivity to circumstances, courage to face reality and a continual willingness to do whatever it takes to bring others along. Until we all recognize that and face our options accordingly, we’ll stay as far away as we are today from solving the world’s leadership (and economic) problems.

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