The Corporate World’s Superficial Psychology

The Corporate World’s Superficial Psychology

Businesses Ignore Deming’s Call for Real Behavioural Insight

W. Edwards Deming, the pioneering management thinker, strongly advocated for businesses to develop a deeper understanding of psychology in order to optimise systems, drive improvement, and bring joy and pride in work to the workplace.

“Understanding psychology, the study of human behaviour, is the key to managing people.”

Deming wrote. Yet decades after Deming’s teachings, most businesses remain woefully ignorant about true human psychology and behavioural drivers.

The Superficial ‘Pop Psych’ Fixation

Instead of delving into substantive research from psychology, cognitive science, and behavioural economics, the corporate world tends to favour simplistic “pop psych” maxims and heuristics. Businesses love to tout the latest bestselling books promoting ideas like “positive thinking”, “grit”, “growth mindsets”, or “mindfulness” as the secrets to better employee engagement and productivity. Consultants peddle pseudoscientific personality assessments built on shaky Jungian foundations. Corporate training programmes regurgitate self-evident platitudes about “emotional intelligence.”

Human Behaviour Is Central to Everything

This cavalier dilettantism toward psychology is concerning because human behaviour is central to every aspect of an organisation – its culture, management practices, teamwork, decision-making processes, innovation, marketing, you name it. If companies fail to rigorously study and apply research-based behavioural insights, they are effectively driving blind.

Ignoring the Science of Human Behaviour

Psychology is a legitimate field of science that has produced a wealth of empirical findings on human cognition, motivation, bias, social dynamics, and more. And not just academic theories, but proven applications in areas like user experience design, behaviour change, survey methodology, and marketing. Ignoring this body of knowledge is akin to an engineer neglecting physics or materials science.

The System of Profound Knowledge

Deming admonished that businesses must take a fundamentally different view of work, one focused on understanding systems holistically – including the human dimensions and variation. Yet even today, businesses tend to fixate on simplistic notions like employee incentives, traditional hierarchies, coercion, and other regressive pop psych-led management dogma. They give short shrift to the scientific realities of how people actually think, feel and behave.

A True Commitment to Understanding People

Of course, as Deming taught, psychology alone does not automatically confer excellence in management. It requires a coherent philosophy, sustained practice, and an unwavering commitment to continual learning, all of which many businesses still lack. But grasping human behaviour remains a crucial foundational layer.

For companies to truly embrace people-centric management as Deming advocated, they might choose to move beyond gimmicky pop psych trends and selective, self-serving interpretations of research. They may, instead, choose to dive deep into the expansive knowledge base of rigorous behavioural science – including the inconvenient truths it reveals – and apply those insights in thoughtful, judicious ways. Only then can businesses hope to make substantive and lasting improvements. Of course, improvement of any kind seem decidedly out of favour at the moment.