Peter Cochrane: A tragedy of management hubris?

A proliferation of MBAs can hinder more than help

AI needs to become as much of a team member as the human expert

I was recently questioned about the UK Post Office scandal, where postmasters (en-masse) falsely accused of fraud have been prosecuted. Their innocence has only recently been admitted, along with the associated software, system, and gross management failures.

The obvious question was: how could this happen with so many reputable industrial and government players? The detailed facts are still emerging, but it appears to be predominantly a management failure!

Sadly, this type of problem is not unique to any one country, company or government, and it seems unreasonably common on large system contracts. Cited causes are often the complexity and scale of the management challenge, pressing time and cost targets, and political imperatives. Individuals not living up to the required professional and ethical standards are often in evidence, too. However, at the core, we might assume a degree of multi-disciplinary ignorance and misunderstandings - compounded by commercial and political pressure.

With a lifetime in industry, academia and government, I have witnessed the accentuation of these forces by self-interest and hubris. However, perhaps the most damaging attitude has been the MBA/self-induced ethos:

‘I am a professional manager, empowered to manage all forms of business without any of knowledge of the technologies and complexities involved.'

This is one dangerous fallacy!

Bluntly, things go badly wrong when people do not fully understand, and I have been in so many ‘acronym-speak meetings' where ignorance has been masked by confident utterances based on false assumptions. Only careful examination can determine the full extent of ongoing management misunderstandings. All too often, no one in the room fully comprehends, and I have often observed that:

"If there are 'N' people in a meeting, there tends to be 'N' different meetings in progress."

In my experience, this situation is not exceptional, and no one can be absolved of the resulting culpability. From the oft poor communication skills of engineers and technologists, to the numbers-only focus of accountants, through to those politicians who cannot read a graph or understand basic concepts like ‘exponentiation', they all contribute to failures.

I've often pondered: how did we get here, given all our educational efforts? I can only observe that we are increasingly educating people down soda straws!

Without exception; degree courses are continually refocussing and narrowing their scope, and are critically short on experiential time. The continual ‘narrowing' has been driven by an exponential widening and speciation of science, for over 50 years.

Typical first degrees are now a short three years, with reductions in complexity and detail. For example, many engineering courses do not include mathematics. We also have physics courses that involve very little experimentation. And likewise, Masters, and PhDs have become thinner, whilst MBA courses are increasingly disconnected from practice.

In the '70s, most academics had some real world experience to fall back on when tempering their teachings. This is no longer the norm in universities, colleges and schools, where teaching has been reduced to repeating academic messages without the enrichment of practical experience.

So, what can be done? I see a regression to the Greek Model of ‘Master and Student,' with customised ‘one-on-one teaching and mentoring' powered by AI - fed by our most talented. There are many hidden advantages, including the mentoring and sharing by human tutors and students. But more importantly, AI needs to become as much a member of the academic, engineering and management teams as the human expert!

"Management, Engineering, Science and Education are never in stasis like belief systems. There is no status quo; only unexpected errors and surprises that demand effective correction to advance our knowledge and capability."

Peter Cochrane OBE, DSc, University of Hertfordshire