Ockham's Razor

The Managing Director of Centurion Enterprise Management Services in Victoria, Dr Ron Harper, wonders what might have been if he had chosen a career as a scientist. However, he chose a career in management and today tells us what makes a good and efficient manager.

Robyn Williams: Whatever your feelings about George W. Bush, there is a case to be made that his successes or failures could be put down to matters of management. If you do insist on invading Iraq, why not work out what happens when you get there? If you are keen on the free market, why not check that it knows what it's up to?

If you are determined to be a firm leader, why not have one or two lieutenants who are bold enough to tell you, you might, just might, be wrong.

Management you see, is a skill, an art, not just an appointment or a charmed path to upgrading. And some managers, like Dr Ron Harper in Melbourne, where he runs an outfit providing management services, like to compare the job to science.

Ron Harper: Whenever I'm contemplating the 'what ifs' of my life, I often think I would have liked to become a scientist. As a scientist I could have had the chance to win a Nobel Prize, if I were lucky enough. I could have carried out work that would have been praised as advancing humanity's wellbeing. I could have developed improvements to people's health. I could have devised ways of reaching for the stars. I could have confounded my friends and stroked my ego with the Latin codes of my discipline. I could have been praised by Robyn Williams on The Science Show.

But none of this will happen now, for as fate would have it, I became a manager, first as a business practitioner and then as an academic teaching the theory of management. And while science gets the bouquets, management gets the bricks. Management is the bit that gets blamed when science goes wrong. Let me give you some examples of what I mean. Take the Challenger disaster in the NASA space shuttle program. We all know it was a technical error that caused the shuttle to explode just 73 seconds into its flight. It was a faulty 'O' ring seal in the solid rocket booster. But the commission of inquiry found the problem to be more one of management. NASA personnel had known for years that the 'O' ring was faulty. The NASA engineers warned that launching on such a cold morning was not a good idea. But the organisation rolled onto the launch-pad with disastrous inevitability. The scientific flaw of the 'O' ring has been almost lost as blame was directed at workplace ethics, managerial culture, workplace structures, occupational health and safety procedures and ultimately communication breakdown, all elements of bad management.

The 'Columbia' disaster happened in 2003, nineteen years after Challenger, but again most of the blame was directed at managers and management issues. In the words of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, most of the blame was put down to, 'organisational barriers that prevented effective communication of critical safety information and stifled professional differences of opinion; lack of integrated management across program element; and the evolution of an informal chain of command and decision-making processes that operated outside the organisation's rules.' Same old bad management problems.

The space industry has lots of examples of heroic science coupled with bad management. It hasn't always meant loss of life but it has meant loss of money. The 1998 Mars surveyor program lost its orbiter because the NASA sub-contractor Lockheed Martin used Imperial units instead of the metric units as specified by NASA. This caused the Mars Climate Orbiter to drift off course and enter the Mars atmosphere in a lower orbit than planned, causing it to burn up from the atmospheric friction. The report of the Mishap Investigation Board recommended changes to address management shortcomings in organisation, emphasising the need to combat the defensive mechanisms amongst staff, opening up communication lines, and adequately staffing projects.

We don't have to limit ourselves to the space industry. Medicine likes to think of itself as more science than craft. Start investigating the mishaps in our hospital systems and you soon begin to discover that management issues are at the base of most problems, from poor surgical decisions to accusations of over-servicing. In this regard, it will be interesting to watch the Bundaberg Hospital case that is in the process of coming to court. It frequently appears to be the case that organisations have a way of rolling on, with deathly consequences, despite people within the system having knowledge of the problems, but just not knowing how to manage them.

Why do we find management so difficult? After all, it's pretty straightforward; it's not rocket science. And you don't have to be a brain surgeon to do it. People do it in all sorts of circumstances and all kinds of industries and organisations. You can even study management at secondary school. And I believe it's quite popular. After all, who wouldn't want to boss other people about? Our salary structures are largely based on bossing up other people. the more people you have to boss about, the more money you earn. But all of this is simply to misunderstand management. Yet I suspect that the students who graduate at 17 or 18 from a management studies course still go out into the world looking for a job where they can be the boss of other people.

Part of the problem is that our appreciation of the study of management is several centuries behind that of the physical and natural sciences. Before the 17th century, interpretations of how the world works were based on a mixture of suppositions, religious faith, and belief in alchemy. It wasn't until Galileo and others insisted that the proof of experiment displaced mystical faith that science emerged as a discipline that could deliver the riches of knowledge and technology. And then it was not clean-cut; even Isaac Newton continued to pursue alchemy after he had already published his epic scientific work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. See how much more high-minded that title sounds compared with Introduction to Management.

Our appreciation of management appears to be in a similar epoch to that which science was in, in its early establishment days, caught between snake-oil alchemists and serious discoverers of an academic body of management theory proven by laborious, methodical research. In the lead-up to the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the comedian John Clarke and his team produced a very clever series about management called The Games. In one episode, the management team that is responsible for mounting the 2000 Olympics go to a management retreat, where they pretend in a workshop to be animals or insects. John Clarke's character spends the afternoon as an 'aphid'. This brilliant piece of ridicule should have put an end to these sorts of sham workshops that companies sometimes buy to solve their management problems. Unfortunately it didn't. Workshops in which people are encouraged to pretend they are animals in the hope that this will reveal some deep management insight are still hawked around. I find it difficult to see any well-researched management theory underpinning some of these products. In my view, such gimmicks are a waste of money as much as the notion of the 'one-minute manager', which is the title of a well-known popular management book. Would we expect that a first-class physicist could be educated in one minute?

I have an acquaintance who trained as a biochemist, spent a large slab of her career working in a laboratory before moving into the commercial side of the pharmaceutical industry and becoming a director of marketing. She commented to me once on the differences she perceived between the worlds of the scientist and the manager. 'When I was a research scientist,' she said, 'my day was fairly predictable. I would come to work, go through the post, or by the end of my research career, go through my emails. Then I would check the results of the previous day's experiments. Then having recorded this I would set up that night's experiments to run, and go home. But in this management role, every day is different. I never know what to expect.' That's why management is about internalisation and not just about following a set of rote-learned techniques.

I once knew of a company managed by someone who had done a short basic management course and seemed to practice the technique I like to describe as 'management by numbers'. He ticked all the boxes; he established a staff comment box, which quickly filled with anonymous notes of dubious quality, but which did provide some humour for the staff, he held long consultative staff meetings in which people drifted off, but he spent most days sitting on the top floor of the building in a very, very large office behind a very, very large desk, possibly wondering why the company was stagnating. The whole thing seemed at times like cargo-cult management. All of the material trimmings were in place but there was no connection with reality, and that lack of connection meant that the crucial ingredient of good management was missing - leadership.

The world of people is as complex as the world of physics, so does it not deserve as careful and dedicated approaches to learning about it as scientists give to the rest of nature? We need to avoid the notion of the quick fix and recognise that mastering an understanding of management is no different to mastering an understanding of the physical universe. It's methodical and long-term.

But it is also important to understand the difference between the disciplines. Fundamentally, one of the distinguishing characteristics of management is that mastering it often requires us to attempt to change our behaviours in ways that the discipline of physics or biology does not. Making those changes is painful. And yet we must endure in order to master the discipline of good management. It is a lifetime study, like any other serious engagement with a discipline.

However, on this program, Ockham's Razor, we seek to reduce to the simplest understanding. Having discarded the quick fixes of the short workshops, what simple reduction of management can I make? I propose four principles: firstly, accept the difficulty of management. Just because it is practiced in plain language doesn't mean that it's not rocket science. As we have seen in the NASA examples, it is the 'art of successful rocketry'. And it must be difficult - even rocket scientists and brain surgeons don't seem to be much good at it.

Second, develop a commitment to honesty. That's a characteristic of good science, and it's a characteristic of good management, though I could argue that the temptation to be dishonest is greater in management than in science. But that's for another time. Thirdly, develop the behaviour of reflection. This last is founded among some others on the work of Donald Schoen, a leading management theorist, although educationalists and philosophers could also claim him. You can read his book, The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. The first of many management texts you should want to read.

Finally, stay connected with reality. I believe the best managers know the business they are in. So chin up, scientists, you already have one of the most important ingredients for managing a scientific organisation well. But remember to stay connected to reality. Too often getting into management is seen as an escape from the nitty-gritty end of the business. So if you are managing a scientific organisation, keep up a role in the lab, even as a junior. If you are running a university, make sure you teach at least one course a year. And don't just do guest lectures, really run a course.

So there it is, my views on why the discipline of management is as difficult as brain surgery or rocket science, and my four principles on how to get started on the road to learning and practising good management. And if I still have not convinced you of the integral nature of management and science, then take a look at the authorship on contemporary scientific research papers. For example, a recent article on 'The Trichoplax genome and the nature of placozoans' in the journal Nature had 21 authors. Science no longer belongs to the heroes; it's become a team pursuit and think of the management issues in that. Perhaps the real hero will be the good manager.

So as we reach for the stars, remember this. We might be clever enough to build the most marvellous star ship, but wouldn't it be a waste and a pity if we destroyed it just a few years into the journey of a lifetime.

Robyn Williams: It would indeed.

Dr Ron Harper, who runs a management systems firm in Melbourne. And he avoided management jargon there for an entire 12 minutes.

Next week: The flight of another kind, that of the osprey trying to survive against the terrible odds in Scotland. The story of how some dedicated folk, some from Tasmania, made all the difference for this magnificent bird.

I'm Robyn Williams.

Guests

Dr Ron Harper
Managing Director
Centurion Enterprise Management Services
Camberwell
Victoria

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

Brigitte Seega