I am the sceptical manager...

"If it looks like bullshit and smells like bullshit, then it probably is bullshit." (Anonymous) If there is one thing that I have learnt over the years, it is that the world of work is filled with people who claim that they have "the answer" to whatever problem (perceived or real) is currently flavour of the month. These people are easy to spot. They often have then word "quality" in their job title and prance around talking a language lifted straight out of a computer training manual. They usually have the ear of at least one gullible senior manager and can often be seen in the staff canteen, talking, to anyone who will listen, about compliance frameworks, exception reports and earned value. Often, these people have never had a real job (i.e. one that creates value for a customer); and are either completely insane or clinically depressed. Scepticism is a school of thought that can be traced back to the ancient Greeks - in particular Pyrrho and the delightfully named Sextus Empiricus. These two thinkers were very early bullshit spotters, preferring to suspend judgement and seek empirical evidence for the outlandish claims made by the ancestors of today's quality managers. Rather touchingly, Pyrrho claimed that scepticism enabled people to be free from worry. Personally I am still struggling with that one! Pyrrho's scepticism posed three basic questions: 1. What things are and how they appear. 2. How we are related to these things. 3. What our attitude to these things ought to be. The modern day quality manager, with his or her box of tools, tends to jump straight to the third question, ignoring the critical context provided by the other two. I once witnessed a local council waste thousands of pounds on Prince2 training following a negative national government assessment of the service. As the government official who signed off that assessment, I knew it was crap and never expected that council to do anything other than throw it in the bin. But instead they appointed a "project manager" and dived into an 18 month "change programme" - all based on a fantasy that a "project initiation document" would deliver "success" (not for the customer, but for the next government assessment). No one stopped to ask whether the original assessment had any valid basis. Nor did anyone try to explain what the council and its employees could have done differently or better. My scepticism was born. Scepticism often gets a very bad name, especially amongst senior "leaders" in an organisation. Often confused with disruptiveness or cynicism, the sceptic is seen as a threat to conventional wisdom and the complacent established world view of the "command and control" leader and his quality managers. The sceptic is seen as someone who is out to destroy, rather than create. However, all a sceptic seeks to do is to ask for the theory behind a particular action, and empirical evidence that it has some validity (or at least is not false). As someone who used to be a firm adherent to the idea of improving performance through setting targets and rewarding those who won the game, I have seen the dreadful harm that has often been done. After one of my service assessments, a manager was dismissed and marched out of the building. Plenty of others were reduced to tears. Needless to say I now take take a different view to the value of performance targets. Scepticism is an essential antidote to the self serving theories of those who seek to manage organisations through use of quality tools and financial reward. I still claim to be a manager - of people and projects. But I am now a sceptical manager, who appreciates that each and every theory I form and subsequent decision I take may have consequences that I never intended. I invite you to join me in the world of scepticism.