Stop Trying to Engineer Success
by David K. Hurst | 11:00 AM October 2, 2013
Every organization that aspires to greatness has something to learn from relevant success stories of the past. But how should managers go about unlocking the lessons of those efforts? Many of their consultants advocate an engineering approach:
Find multiple examples of organizations that have coped with equivalent challenges successfully.
Reverse-engineer the reasons for their success, looking for features that they share in common.
Present these shared “success factors” as precepts, rules, and principles that should be implemented by all those who wish to achieve similar levels of success.
This approach sounds great, and the growth of the consultancies pushing it cannot be gainsaid. But it simply doesn’t work. The engineering approach can be described but not practiced. Start by considering an extreme and high-visibility case. At the outset of the Iraq War, President George W. Bush expressed the hope that Iraq would become a federal democracy and a beacon to all the totalitarian states in the Middle East. The Americans then set about creating facsimiles of various institutions – the critical success factors of its own democracy. But if these were necessary conditions then clearly they were not sufficient. Iraq is far from a viable democratic system. Similarly, in the management world, we constantly see the engineering approach being urged and falling short. As just one example, academics W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne examined the emergence of outrageously successful companies like Cirque du Soleil, and claim to have discovered the keys. While never claiming that their case organizations, with their idiosyncratic histories and unique contexts, had consciously implemented their “blue ocean” principles, Kim and Maubourgne argued that it was “as if” they had. How else could they have moved their businesses into positions that so thoroughly defied competition?
Unfortunately this approach has done no more for corporate strategic success than it has for nation states. Managers are presented with inspiring stories from the past that they quickly discover cannot be replicated, and with abstract principles that sound incontrovertible yet cannot be implemented. They might, at best, produce facsimiles of certain features of great organizations, or get learn to say all the right words about what it will take to succeed. But while they can talk the talk, their organizations can’t walk the walk. The fundamental problem with the engineering approach is that simple mechanics do not drive outcomes in complex systems. Where causes and effects are constantly subject to dynamic adaptation, as they are in ecosystems, societies, and organizations, conditions cannot be reproduced. Read more of this post
