Range - David Epstein Page 0,104
safety is for people who don’t have the balls to live in the real world.” It is no wonder that organizations struggle to cultivate experts who are both proficient with their tools and prepared to drop them. But there is an organizational strategy that can help. The strategy, strange as it sounds, is to send a mixed message.
“Congruence” is a social science term for cultural “fit” among an institution’s components—values, goals, vision, self-concepts, and leadership styles. Since the 1980s, congruence has been a pillar of organizational theory. An effective culture is both consistent and strong. When all signals point clearly in the same direction, it promotes self-reinforcing consistency, and people like consistency.
Plenty of profiles of individual businesses were written in support of congruence. But in the first study that systematically examined a broad swath of organizations across an industry, researchers who studied cultural congruence at 334 institutions of higher education found that it had no influence on any measure of organizational success whatsoever. Administrators, department heads, and trustees in strongly congruent institutions did have an easier time classifying the culture when asked, but there was no impact at all on performance, from the academic and career development of students to the satisfaction of faculty and the financial health of the college. The researcher who led that work went on to study thousands of businesses. She found that the most effective leaders and organizations had range; they were, in effect, paradoxical. They could be demanding and nurturing, orderly and entrepreneurial, even hierarchical and individualistic all at once. A level of ambiguity, it seemed, was not harmful. In decision making, it can broaden an organization’s toolbox in a way that is uniquely valuable.
Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers showed that thinkers who tolerate ambiguity make the best forecasts; one of Tetlock’s former graduate students, University of Texas professor Shefali Patil, spearheaded a project with them to show that cultures can build in a form of ambiguity that forces decision makers to use more than one tool, and to become more flexible and learn more readily.
In one experiment, subjects played the role of corporate human resources managers who had to predict the performance of job applicants. The managers were presented with a standard evaluation process that showed them how a candidate’s skills were typically weighted, and then told that they would be evaluated (and paid) based on how they made decisions. In a sped-up simulation of real life, after each prediction they could see how the candidate actually performed according to company records. In some batches of applications, the candidates performed as the standard evaluation process predicted; in others, they weren’t even close. Yet, over and over, the individual managers conformed to standard procedure no matter what the results told them, even when it clearly was not working, and even when a better system was easily discoverable. They failed to learn with experience. Until a wrinkle was added. Conformist managers were given fake Harvard Business Review research proclaiming that successful groups prioritize independence and dissent. Miraculously, their minds were opened and they started learning. They began to see when the standard evaluation process clearly needed to be modified or discarded. They were learning with experience, and their predictions became more accurate. The managers were benefitting from incongruence. The formal, conformist company process rules were balanced out by an informal culture of individual autonomy in decision making and dissent from the typical way of doing things.
Incongruence worked in the other direction as well. HR managers who were given a standard evaluation process but told that only the accuracy of their predictions mattered began by ditching the process and making up their own rules. They never learned when the standard process did indeed work. In that case, the cure was fake Harvard Business Review research indicating that successful groups prioritize cohesion, loyalty, and finding common ground. Again, the HR managers became learning machines; they suddenly hewed closer to the traditional process when it had value, but continued to deviate readily when it didn’t, as NASA should have.
Business school students are widely taught to believe the congruence model, that a good manager can always align every element of work into a culture where all influences are mutually reinforcing—whether toward cohesion or individualism. But cultures can actually be too internally consistent. With incongruence, “you’re building in cross-checks,” Tetlock told me.
The experiments showed that an effective problem-solving culture was one that balanced standard practice—whatever it happened to be—with forces that pushed in the opposite direction. If managers were used