Ethan Mollick on Twitter: “This paper shows that learning about how your firm works is equivalent to gaining Lovecraftian Secret Knowledge. Promising managers asked to do process redesign at their firm learn how messed up it all is, so they give up rising careers & become hermits at the edges of the firm “

This paper shows that learning about how your firm works is equivalent to gaining Lovecraftian Secret Knowledge. Promising managers asked to do process redesign at their firm learn how messed up it all is, so they give up rising careers & become hermits at the edges of the firm pic.twitter.com/1SneEF86hQ
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) August 12, 2020

What causes people to make a sanity check is when they learn that the features of their organization are not, in fact, part of a Grand Plan, but rather socially constructed, random, & in flux. The highlighted quote says it all.

Official link (paywalled): https://t.co/U1fWrz2Fv4 pic.twitter.com/LZKCN9dvYe
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) August 12, 2020

For those interested in the details (or frustrated by the paywall), there is a great summary of the research and implications in HBR, as @ellahafermalz found! https://t.co/xf204nPmuC
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) August 13, 2020

https://hbr.org/2019/12/can-you-know-too-much-about-your-organization

antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 2:20 pm on March 22, 2021

paper: https://pubsonline.informs.org.sci-hub.se/doi/abs/10.1287/orsc.2018.1277?journalCode=orsc&

and the HBR article explains why so many consultants are so broken by insight: https://t.co/xf204nPmuC?amp=1

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