There was interesting news out of the annual meeting of the International Astronomical Union in  Rio De Janeiro this month.   No, not the discovery of a new exoplanet or red complex galaxies, but rather a growing concern that “managerialism” may kill the golden age of astronomical discovery.(http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14209662)  As telescopes become bigger and more expensive, management techniques have been introduced to more smoothly run large projects - and threaten the individual flair that has been the source of discovery for the past two centuries.  Robert Williams, the new president of the IAU and responsible for the discovery of the Hubble Deep Field was quoted as saying “High-risk, high-reward projects require hard decisions that are best made by individuals, not committees.” 

As if on cue, enter Norm Augustine, the former chair of Lockheed Martin, who reported Friday on the recommendations of the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee.  (This is the “committee” tasked by the current administration to evaluate the future of manned space flight.)  After 90 days and “reviewing 3000 options”,  they narrowed it down to 16 options and then 4 options with the basic conclusion that human missions to the moon by 2020 are unrealistic or “not executable.”   What a beautiful management process – and what a disappointing result!

So what’s the lesson?   Maybe EF Schumacher got it right in 1973 when he made the argument for human-scaled, decentralized technology, that is “cheap enough so that [it is] accessible to virtually everyone; suitable for small-scale application; and compatible with man’s need for creativity.”  While we might need the 25-metre giant Magellan Telescope, we also need a human organization of backyard scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs who refuse to be “mere machine minders.”  And we need new management processes that support and integrate the loose federation of discoverers without squashing them.   (The VC model here in Silicon Valley probably comes closest to what this  process looks like – giving those backyard scientists a sandbox of capital, networks and expertise to play with, investing in a lot of small-scale experiments and expecting a hit-rate not much greater than 20%.)  And if this is the architecture for innovation, social scientists could do more to identify the human processes that actually support and integrate loose federations of small-scale innovators.  Can we develop something more inspired than a “committee” as a human tool for collaboration?  This could be the most valuable discovery of this century!

Those of us engaged in organizational research are humble creatures.  We live in a world of probabilities, where achieving significant correlations of .4 or .5 delight us – where if we explain 25% of the variance, we’ve achieved something and where we try to do better than random prediction.  We ask people their observations (”To what extent does this leader exhibit empathy?”), their attitudes (”Indicate the extent to which you agree that the company reacts quickly to market opportunities.”) and their intentions (”I would recommend this company as an employer.”)  And we hope to see some pattern in their responses that might help the company’s leaders make better decisions or help us more deeply understand the complexities of how people behave when they work together.

The quixotic nature of our task was recently brought home to me when I heard an interview with V.S. Ramachandran, a neurologist at UC San Diego and head of their Center for Brain and Cognition. ( http://cbc.ucsd.edu/ramabio.html)  

He pointed out that the average brain has 100 billion nerve cells, each with anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 contacts with other nerve cells.  Those contacts can be inhibitory or excitory and can result in the “possible number of brain states exceed[ing] the number of particles in the universe.”  And he and his neuroscientist colleagues are just beginning to map the brain’s functioning to better understand how the mind operates and to solve basic  brain disease problems.

I don’t think I am jumping the gun to wonder when this research will help those of us engaged in more quotidien pursuits of increasing group performance and building better organizations.  Already the market researchers are grabbing hold of the new tools of cognitive science to unearth customer desires.  Gerald Zaltman’s book “How Customers Think” (http://www.amazon.com/How-Customers-Think-Essential-Insights/dp/1578518261) tells about research at the “Mind of the Market Laboratory” at Harvard Business School.  And other fields of psychology are not far behind.  Shelley Taylor, the director of  UCLA’s Social Neuroscience Lab   (http://taylorlab.psych.ucla.edu/index.htm), is doing creative and useful research  using neuroimaging to understand how social relationships protect us against stress.

So is organizational neuroscience next?  Will we see employee brain imaging instead of employee surveys?  Will we need to turn in our focus group recording devices for MRI equipment?  Or will we continue to poke about with questionnaires and hope employees know what they want and what they think?  In either case, however rapidly we adopt and learn from neurological research, I will marvel at the complexity of bringing together hundreds and even thousands of these masses of gray jelly, giving them goals to accomplish and tasks to perform and organizing them in functions to produce services and products and concepts.  That we can predict anything about such a system is truly remarkable.

I found a comment from George Schultz (recent interview with Charlie Rose – see video) particularly interesting:

Sometimes change happens simply because the leader thinks it can happen.

He was referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago and the impact of Reagan’s optimism and Gorbachev’s open-mindedness.  I often wonder if optimism is a vastly underrated leadership competency – or put another way, whether optimism – sometimes even unrealistic optimism – isn’t absolutely essential to running any organization.

Charlie rose Interview with Mikhail Gorbachev and George Schultz

The challenge to all of us who work with executives is that maybe they don’t matter so much.  Studies show the effect of CEOs on firm performance to range from 4.5-12.8%.  It’s as Napoleon said, “Luck is the most essential ingredient of good generalship.”

Read more:  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/steve-jobs