The best books to understand organizational life

Deming showed me how to think about organizational performance improvement. I was moving from a clinical psychologist in private practice to an organizational psychologist helping companies develop change strategies. I had studied and loved statistical variation in the context of scientific research, but not in the context of addressing real-world challenges. 

But Deming does something very surprising. He starts by understanding variation and then moves on to understanding organizational culture. Not the theoretical frameworks we all know, but the work world from the view of the front-line employee. Deming’s insight is that the central challenge of culture change is understanding the view of people closest to the work, the ones who perform operations.

They are not motivated by slogans and lofty ideas but by producing great products and services. Taking pride in the work they are doing is central to performance; lost by management fads and enhanced by doing it right. 

Simple statistical procedures, rightly understood, enable the worker to produce great performance outcomes and love doing it.

I love the development of knowledge, especially practical knowledge that can be applied directly to real-world challenges. It's rare in a lifetime to see something new and valuable, in familiar territory, but providing novel insights that apply directly to known challenges. Kahneman started a cognitive revolution with this book. 

He showed that estimation of probabilities are most often for most people; irrational. This flies in the face of previous economic theory, which holds that the economic actor behaves rationally. In actuality, the human mind does a poor job of estimating probabilities, and this is not limited to uneducated or low-functioning humans; it applies to scientists, professionals, and engineers. The particular ways this shows up are in the day-to-day decisions we all make, and our biases distort accurate estimation of probable outcomes. 

Thanks to Kahneman, the heuristics (cognitive shortcuts humans are likely to take) are in the day-to-day language of organizational leaders. Confirmation, anchoring, and availability bias were all learned by Kahneman and passed on to whoever is willing to learn about them. 

The effect of cognitive bias is to undermine decision-making. The likelihood you make good decisions is directly related to the degree to which you avoid cognitive biases. 

How do you know if a medication is effective, or if a training method does what you want it to do, or if a change in the employee selection process results in improving the hit rate? This amounts to understanding the relationship between variables. This is the domain of experimental methods, an area that experimental psychology excels in. 

I read this book as an undergraduate. It made me love the precision, the elegance, and the utility of the experimental method. Oh, if the journalists who write about polls, likely outcomes from legislation, public health problems, oh, if they had just read this book! The amount of confusion and misinformation still flying around about COVID, the effect of policy changes on economic variables, the increases or decreases in crime, suicide, and homicide rates, none of this can be understood properly without knowledge of experimental methods. 

And this is a book written for undergraduates. Engineers should be required to read it as well. It could be taught in high school. But it is essential reading for any organizational leader, When I started doing organizational consulting I thought what I had learned in graduate level clinical psychology would be my strongest resource. That was wrong. The strongest resource I had from three degrees in psychology was in methodology. The engineers who run organizations sometimes have this understanding, but often don’t. The post-Deming emphasis on quality pointed to it, and many leaders learned it partially, but many did not. 

I loved having this knowledge and being able to use it to help organizational leaders solve problems.  

Psychology is easy to misunderstand. When I decided it was going to be my undergraduate major, it was because I wanted to understand how the mind worked, broadly, what makes people tick, and how they can be guided or helped when they get stuck or have problems. I assumed this knowledge existed and that majoring in psychology would reveal it to me. 

I was more than surprised when I attended my first psychology class. The professor sat cross-legged on top of a desk. He had long hair and a beard (unusual in 1963), and he spoke as if he had just taken a drug, which he likely had. He used profane language, the first time I had heard that word in a public place. He blathered for about 30 minutes, saying nothing of importance to the subject I was interested in. 

I stayed in the class and continued the major anyway, then a Masters degree and then a Ph.D., but none of it ever answered the questions I was expecting to learn about. Along the way some things became interesting; experimental design and statistics, psychophysiology, organizational psychology. Clinical psychology was a complete bust; no science and no sense, lost minds talking to lost minds. 

Reading Daniel Robinson, which came along much later in my career, would have helped enormously. It provides a context for how and why psychology developed the way it did, starting with philosophy and moving through stages to the present state. The misadventures of the ’60s and ’70s that I saw were corrected, but the dominant paradigm of empiricism stuck. Neuroscience flourished and may have saved the day, but the underlying philosophical assumptions kept a tight lid on what could and couldn’t be learned. 

Reading Robinson gave a context for all of this. 

Humor is often overlooked in organizational life, but it shouldn’t be, especially when the leader can laugh at themselves. Often, a genuine insight is facilitated by the realization of a failing or missed opportunity that is actually funny, if you can see it from the right perspective. It might be ‘OMG I just did it again’, or ‘did I really say that’, or ‘I didn’t see the funny part until later’. 

This little book is a classic in philosophy. It gives deep psychological insight into the nature of humor, what it is, and what purpose it serves. I love it for several reasons: it sheds light on a part of the human experience that is crucially important, but most often overlooked; it offers a different way of looking at leadership shortcomings, and it gives insight that applies to organizational life as well as human relationships in general. 

Appropriate humor in organizational life is a sign of healthy relationships, it helps to create authenticity, and it makes the day-to-day life fun.