The Organization That Mistakes Success for Proof
A business result can be real. The explanation attached to it may never have been tested.
In this week’s edition of THE HIDDEN ORGANIZATION, a successful model moves from one department to five, and somewhere along the way, adoption starts to look like evidence.
Evidence-Based Management starts with a simple question: what actually produced the result? It gets harder to ask once the model is already being implemented.
Have you seen a practice become policy before anyone knew why it worked?
THE HIDDEN ORGANIZATION | 017
THE ORGANIZATION THAT MISTAKES SUCCESS FOR PROOF
The hidden cost of confusing business performance with evidence of what actually works.
The second department is being asked to reproduce a success it did not create.
The presentation is halfway through. On the screen is a performance chart from another department, and the line has been green for three quarters. The explanation comes next: a new operating model, five management practices, a more disciplined approach to execution.
Someone from the second department mentions that the first one had a different customer mix that year. The presenter nods. It is a fair point, and the implementation plan is already up.
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The model has been approved for wider adoption. Owners are named, timelines agreed, measures defined. Nobody in the room is being asked to test a theory. They are being asked to implement a proven approach.
Over the next few months, more departments take it on. Managers are briefed, teams are trained, and the language of the model starts appearing in performance reviews. Progress is tracked against the five practices, and the first department’s results stay on the opening slide of every update.
In the following quarter’s review, one line on the summary page has changed. Where it used to say “Model adopted in three departments,” it now says “Model validated across five departments.”
“No new evidence has arrived between those two versions. Only more departments have adopted it.”
A practice that was once a plausible explanation for success has acquired the status of an established management method.
Nobody had established whether the explanation was right.
Related research:
Philip Rosenzweig, The Halo Effect (2007).
Jerker Denrell, “Vicarious Learning, Undersampling of Failure, and the Myths of Management,” Organization Science, 14(3), 227–243 (2003).
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