He lamented at first.
Followed with a provocation.
"Why are there no universal theories in social science and psychology or the interdisciplines overlapping one or more of them?"
Sometime back, i was listening to Herbert Gintis' comment above. Herbert Gintis is an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism, cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture coevolution, efficiency wages, strong reciprocity, and human capital theory.
Herbert was voicing for social science and psychology what Clayton Christensen was voicing for management or companies... when he mentioned in several of his talks... "Where are the theories?".
By theory, he meant specifically "what causes what and why-how?"
Imagine a company.
It has some product or service.
It assumes certain things about consumer. (((recall conversations with marketing and sales and boardroom, people are constantly talking about some assumption about their target group behavior/emotions/goals)))
It assumes certain labor-ation and collaboration of employees with some current and future skills. (((recall the assumptions about humans again in the role of employees)))
And creates stepwise functions towards serving an experience to the consumer. (((recall process or quality or IT conversations for defining various policy-process-review)))
Thereby projecting non-financial outcomes and financial profitability or gains of some kind. (((recall the selective and unquestioned financial metrics that aggregates human beings into statistics....)))
If we closely observe the above, every abstract statement (last four above) when filled with content or real case, is actually a testable hypothesis...falsifiable hypothesis. "What works and what doesn't work?"
As the company continues to work, it can dynamically and agile-fully keep testing its experiments and adjusting its scientific statements.
Some of the statements turn out to be true when done repetitively.
Some of the statements have to be revised.
Some of the statements are proved to be wrong.
In some cases, a finer granular statement come up as a valid statement.
Most of the times, all the statements cannot be backed by resource for implementation or pursuit or testing, and some of them have to be prioritized and results to be reviewed.
In some sense, failure of any statement or change exercise or complete company, is actually a step towards falsifying some assumptions or theories.
So, what is happening today and what ought to happen tomorrow?
The intention and the culture of the company has to become one that of scientific temper.
The way people interact with each other essentially should be in spirit of peer-review-scientific theories.
There can be Annual Report and Analyst Calls that could have a segment of these scientific approaches and findings.
Some of you might think that management research is already in that direction. Our answer is a big yes. But it the functioning of organization like a scientific experiment company that is at the core of our provocation. Where companies dont look at some small set of their functions as scientific...product design or AI or something...but the whole of company as a science lab...the internal interaction dynamics, the interaction with and prediction of consumer dynamics...the financial outcomes...and so on.
It is not an option anymore.
The success of organizations in times to come with be to adopt scientific rigor in their internal and external interactions. Those who are able to do this successfully over and over again, would keep winning the game.
It is not to say that organizations won't focus on being humane.
Actually in The Great Paradox of our times (prosperity and advancement on one side ...and glaring challenges on the other), a Dual Tranformation approach is necessary....one that makes us more scientific and at the same time more humane.
One is not a substitute for the other. More work has to be done to ensure both work in tandem and collaboration and contextually.
...write back in the comment section with your email id and we shall write back to discuss more.
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