The Cost of Ignorance in Management

Given enough time and interest, every practice will begin as an experience-based art form and end as a knowledge-based science. In the beginning, the practice is a mountain of uncertainty and there are risk-taking pioneers who are exploring cause and effect relationships and discovering the influence of variables. The transformation from an art form to a science lies in the elimination of uncertainties through the identification, understanding and control of the variables and conditions involved in a given event. Weather, Medicine and Engineering are perhaps our most common and therefore obvious examples.

There was a time in medicine, not to long ago, that we guessed at cause and effect relationships. Someone developed a theory of cause and effect and then attempted to prove it right or wrong; blood letting is a good example. In time, it was proven wrong and abandoned by the practice.

The closer our practice is to an art form, the greater the need for experimentation and discovery. Discoveries are documented and proven, then become part of the basic professional development. The closer our practice is to a science, the greater the need for learning the discoveries of the past.

As the numbers of uncertainties are reduced in a practice, the practice becomes a science and the need for risk-taking experimentation is reduced, but not eliminated. In the light of established knowledge, to continue to experiment becomes highly questionable and perhaps criminal. For example, if someone experimented with blood letting to treat a hemophiliac. Surly the community would beg to prosecute the individual for gross incompetence.

Given this cultural value to learn from our past; is the practice of management (primarily in English speaking countries) exempt from this cultural belief?

Management has long been established as a science, yet we still want to experiment with it. We want to combine management with leadership or supervision in order to reduce costs. By doing so, we blend people-based directional responsibilities of a leader or the skill responsibilities of a supervisor with the process-based responsibilities of a manager. The manager must now focus on their primary duty of process control, as well as skill execution and directional motivation. As the manager becomes overwhelmed and the quality of their work fails to meet acceptable levels, we begin to strip away or abandon the process responsibilities of planning, budgeting and controlling, all the reaons the science was created.

The question is why do we treat it differently?