Don't Compromise!

Though they differ in many other ways, fashion magazines and management education share a surprising tendency: an endless cavalcade of seductive models.  In the world of business, of course, the models tend to be a little older: our tastes are perhaps more conservative. If Twiggy was a management model, she might still be a star. 

Like fashion models, management models tend to spend their infancy and teenage years in obscurity. The fashionable concept of ‘memes’, for example, dates from work in biology nearly twenty years ago, and virtual communities and social networks were once merely ‘bulletin boards’ and ‘friends’. But while these types of model may lie about their age, they – like their fashion counterparts – can still tempt and seduce with the message that life can be fitter and leaner if only we would follow their example.

So are our models leading us astray? Our working lives are complex evolutionary arenas of development and change – sometimes not even incremental but radical.  Yet our models – as if scared of losing their looks – tempt us to follow them and adapt ourselves to their likeness. Is this just a human urge to simplify and classify? Everyone likes lists: they’re so easy to understand.

So do we recognise that life is rich and complex, and then codify it bit by bit to try to keep it under control? We scorn those who guess our star signs at parties, yet we might discuss our Myers Brigg Type Indicators as if we can slim away our complexities. Does our ultimate dilemma with models – whether we are creating them or they are creating us – reflect human nature or serve ultimately to corset it in? Well, of course, only an INTJ would say that …

William Golding once described Marxists as the last true optimists, as they believed human nature could be perfected. There is certainly a delightful irony in a novelist who was so given to musing on the contradictions of human nature making such a remark before the Soviet system collapsed at least partly under the weight of its attempts to force humanity into a mould.  But how might Golding feel faced with the Management section of a Western bookshop, brimming with sure-fire methods, models, formulae, tools and techniques. Would he be filled with irony or optimism? (As a Gemini, I’m in two minds on this one …)

But look at your workplace.  There are probably models everywhere you look (except the pinboard): organisational structures, process diagrams, individual profiles, and so on.  We even have models for handling the stresses that arise when different initiatives bring our models into collision. But if models arise from life, aren’t they implicitly a historic snapshot? We can only model from experience, after all.  Just as a Balance Sheet tells us where we’ve been – or, more accurately, tots up the costs of the journey – our models reflect where we’ve been, how we travelled and how we found the last trip.  Not so much off-the-shoulder as over-the-(last-)hill.

A financial analyst would accept that a Balance Sheet excludes the subjective and intangible aspects: the softer and – dare we say it? – more human elements.  (The subjective aspects of any issue are always the most difficult to teach or learn. Is it coincidence they are also the hardest to reduce to a set of ratios and formulae?) So is the problem with models that – without a little more thought and perception – it’s all too easy to see them as instructions rather than instructive.

Unless there are two Virgin Groups and you can make time stand still, for example, you can’t actually be the New Richard Branson. You can observe, reflect, learn and practise, but you’ll be the new you – in your organisation and your circumstances. Likewise, a business plan based simply on trend projection would be all too visibly a simplification – the world is not that linear, easily defined or predictable.

But isn’t any model inherently reductive? Like a newspaper picture with its screened filigree of dots, each model has only a limited palette with which to paint the world. How often do you hear that there are six types of team members, four types of culture, four scales of learning preference – while thinking quietly to yourself ‘actually, I feel like I’m a bit of both here’ or ‘actually this is A and B, isn’t it’?

Call me a Challenger if you like, but aren’t apparently incompatible models just different ways of looking at that one reality? Life is rarely ideal and it certainly lacks a certain neatness, but it can’t actually be – as different models might imply – ‘incompatible’. Incompatible with what, exactly? Of yes, of course – with the model. Silly me. And yet we sometimes seem to believe that the more models we can familiarise ourselves with, the better we will understand. (Presumably this belief counts as a ‘supermodel’.)

Scoring as an INFP using the Myers Brigg Type Indicator®, is not – for example – a lapel badge to be worn as a label from that point on to define your place in the world. It’s a model for looking at your behaviours at a given point in time that might be informative about aspects of yourself you might benefit from reviewing, might support different approaches you could try that might leave you less frustrated in your ambitions or objectives, and might even just let you work better with those around you.

It’s not a prescription: it’s just a means of looking at the here and now so that, next time you’re contemplating the future, you might have some productive ideas about there and then. The point of the model is to enable you to think ‘What If?’, not leave you thinking ‘If Only?’.

Couldn’t we learn something from astrologers? (Yes, I know. It would make a change.)  If you tell a ‘professional’ astrologer you’re a typical Piscean, they’ll tend to disagree. They’ll tell you that you need to know your whole birth chart, not just your sun sign. And even then, the fuller picture is only an indication.  You’re human: you have free will.  Maybe we don’t believe astrologers because their model’s just too complicated?

But is Russell Grant having the last laugh?  Are we all too eager to use models in order to inform our view of ‘human resources’ and their potential, but actually winding up overlooking what distinguishes them from the other resources to hand – their humanity? Can we find ways of improving the bathwater that doesn’t involve filtering out the baby? Life is situational, isn’t it? If we’re going to make sure that the words ‘human’ and ‘resources’ retain an equal stress, do we need new models – or just a new model for using them?

Models are invaluable in that they allow us to reflect on what is typical. But we need to accept that models are just as valuable when they raise questions as when they might appear to offer answers. There may be little truly new under the sun, but life isn’t always ‘typical’: text-book cases have their place, but real life goes on outside the covers of even the most comprehensive book. And we are as complex as the world we operate in: as social creatures, we have continually developing psyches. We will also often do whatever we can to disprove the norm: we might like labels, but we like them on each other, not ourselves.

So by all means, pin up this year’s model on your office wall. Just remember that models should remain a pin-up, not become a hang-up.

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