…& yet, the more ice cream we consume, the more shark attacks we tend to see.
The two rise together…but, of course, ice cream isn’t the cause.
The missing link is temperature.
When it gets hotter, we eat more ice cream. We also spend more time swimming in the sea. More people in the sea means more opportunities for shark attacks. Nothing to do with the magnetic draw of a Mr Whippy.
That’s the difference between correlation & causation & we make the same mistake in organisations all the time.
Take these:
More meetings lead to better team performance.
Maybe. But high-performing teams often face greater complexity, so they need to coordinate more. The meetings may be a consequence of effective teamwork, rather than the cause of it & we’ve probably all worked in a team where an overly controlling leader used meetings to spend too much time in the weeds, doing everyone else’s job except their own.
Senior leaders who work long hours achieve greater business success.
Again, there may be a correlation as senior roles often carry greater workloads, & they also tend to attract highly ambitious people. But we have another problem here: we tend to study the winners – the people who succeeded while tolerating those hours.
We hear far less about those who burned out, made increasingly poor decisions through fatigue or simply couldn’t sustain it.
I’ll wager most of us have a story about plenty of those too.
Leaders who give people more autonomy have happier teams.
Not necessarily.
Autonomy is often given to people who have already demonstrated competence, so competence itself may be doing some of the heavy lifting. While we rightly celebrate leaders who empower their people, we talk far less about leaders who operate completely “hands-free” through apathy or complacency – their teams are rarely thriving.
That’s the point.
We’re naturally drawn to simple correlations because they offer simple answers:
Do more of ‘X’ & you’ll get more of ‘Y’.
But organisations & human beings rarely work that neatly.
So before reaching for the next silver bullet, look beyond the correlation.
Ask what else might be driving the outcome. Look for the hidden variables. Go deeper into the causation.
That’s where the useful insight usually sits.
If you’d like some support doing that in your organisation, message me at rupert@strongerhumans.com to talk about how I can help strengthen your leaders & your teams.
Now we know it’s safe – I’ll bring the ice creams.
#strongerhumans
