Is management common sense?

In my early years of my career as a life-sciences techie, I attended an interview for a "managerial" role. I was told by one of the interviewing panel members, in a dismissive tone: "after all, management is common sense". Those words ring in my memory even today. 

 Is management a concept that can be tackled on-the-fly by a "seat of your pants" approach? By the look and feel of it at first glance, especially to a highly intellectual gathering of technical subject-matter specialist gurus, management could appear to be a prosaic or perhaps even a trivial endeavor. To budding entrepreneurs, "manage-as-you-go" plays out as the operating mantra, and understandably so. A phrase that is heard ever so often is the classic "Management is an art"!

Common sense is often assumed to be a heuristic. If management is common sense, we are admitting that managers manage mostly with heuristics, which to a large extent is true! Heuristics, or mental shortcuts, work well in many situations but sometimes, they can derail us or lead us up the garden path (especially on roads less travelled!) if we are not diligent enough. Wannabe entrepreneurs may benefit from this piece of advice.

In a world where chaos sometimes reigns supreme, the entropy of thought can clutter the mind with random ideas, unfiltered information bolts and sparks with constant stimuli at a dazzling pace. In this scenario, reflection is often compromised. The Webster dictionary defines common sense as "the unreflective opinions of ordinary people". What would this definition imply for organizations? Can leaders and managers craft their business or operational strategies based on un-reflected opinions or un-analyzed experience? Is it possible that contrary to popular belief, there isn't too little commonsense in business, there is too much?

I would like to explore the idea (in a "semi-scientific" manner) that the alternative to the common sense-based management paradigm is one based on scientific knowledge. I came across some useful nuggets from a stray article that I accidentally happened to read in a paper that couldn't be traced thereafter. Hence, I must humbly admit that I do not have the exact reference of this article.

Commonsense knowledge is acquired in ordinary living and business situations, while scientific knowledge must be pursued deliberately and systematically. Common sense is ubiquitous, scientific approaches are relatively rare in daily living.

Commonsense knowledge is individual, scientific knowledge is universal. The fact is that when you use your common sense, you always do what makes sense to you, which implies that it may or may not necessarily make sense to someone else. Scientific knowledge goes beyond the individual to look for those elements that can be applied across multiple situations.

Commonsense accepts the obvious, scientific knowledge questions it. A commonsensical person tends to say "of course!" while a scientifically inclined individual would begin his or her search for the root of the truth with the commonsense answer by asking "why?" or "what makes it so?" 

Commonsense knowledge is vague, whereas scientific knowledge is precise. Generalizations abound in the commonsense paradigm, but drilling down to specifics through scientific analysis and rigor requires deliberate cognitive effort. The devil, as we often learn the hard way, lies in the details.

Commonsense cannot be absolutely relied upon to produce consistent outcomes; application of scientific knowledge is more likely to yield similar results in a sustainable manner. If a one-time cause and effect instance cannot be established for an outcome repeatedly using the commonsense approach, the credibility of the approach gets eroded.

  6. Commonsense is gained through uncontrolled or unplanned experience; scientific knowledge is gained through controlled and systematic studies or experiments. Since many business and daily-life situations often arise unanticipated, we deal with them using our wits and on-the-spot smart adaptation, also popularly known as "jugaad" in the Indian context. Luck or good-fortune may play a role in these clever manipulations, but can we trust luck every time? "Jugaad" may also be a function of the context and available resources, in the absence of ideal conditions. 

A disclaimer that I would like to invoke here is that we may tend to imagine a scientific approach as an intense esoteric intellectual pursuit, where "nerdy-looking" individuals are deeply absorbed in conducting experiments and generating data, wearing sparking-white lab-coats in hi-tech laboratories, while appearing engrossed and contemplative at the same time. Quite the contrary! Any rational human being with an average IQ can practice scientific approaches with a measure of self-discipline.

Common-sense is more common that I had estimated. "Uncommon-sense" is probably what we need, if not a scientific approach to life's issues.

To sum up, I would like to echo the words of George Bernard Shaw:"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."