Jerry was one of our best salespeople, even if he was a little strange.

Before he went in to a customer's office he went through an elaborate ritual that involved rolling his shoulders, touching his toes and wiggling his fingers. "It looks weird," he would say, "but it helps me sell."

Jerry was doing what lots of people do. He was connecting some practice, routine, or ritual to his success even though there was no actual, causal connection between them. Some scientists, such as Pascal Boyer, a professor of psychology and anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, think that our brains may actually be wired to make connections like this.

It's called magical thinking. Magical thinking is non-scientific causal reasoning. Magical thinking connects the dots between action and result without worrying overmuch if the action and result are actually connected in some kind of causal way.

That's not always a bad thing. The confidence that Jerry got from doing his ritual probably contributed to his stellar sales record. The high school coach who won't change his clothes while his team is winning probably feels that he's doing absolutely everything he can for them.

But in management, magical thinking can be dangerous. Making decisions and committing resources without checking the facts can put you on the slippery slope to failure. Here are three kinds of magical thinking that are especially common.

Cargo Cult Management

During World War II, US forces took over islands in the Pacific where the residents had never see airplanes, or canned food, or any of the tons of material that a military force needs. The islanders were careful observers, though, and they figured out what the military did to cause the goods to show up.

This is what they saw. The soldiers would go up into towers they'd built and talk into a box. Soon the material, or "cargo," would arrive.

When the war ended, the military went away and the cargo stopped coming. But some of the islanders figured that they could make the cargo come back. All they had to do was exactly what the US military people had done.

So they went up in the abandoned towers and talked into the dead radios that were there. Sometimes they "built" radios from wood or other available materials. They did everything just like the military and they waited for cargo to arrive, but it never did.

Those islanders were members of something we call "cargo cults." They were bright, observant people who copied a behavior they believed would bring back the cargo. It seems silly to us, because we understand what airplanes and control towers and radios are.

Cargo cult management is adopting the practices of another person or organization uncritically, without understanding the context and why those practices work. A recent example involves the companies who have enthusiastically adopted the "get rid of the bottom ten percent" performance management system initiated by General Electric (GE).

To understand why that system worked you need to understand GE's culture. You need to understand why the practices were instituted in the first place. And you need to examine how they've changed at GE over the years.

As Bob Sutton likes to point out, adopting a business practice without analysis is like adopting Herb Kelleher's habit of drinking a quart of Wild Turkey whiskey a day and expecting your company to have the same success as Southwest Airlines.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

That's a corruption of a line written by Alexander Pope. It's also a description of a very common way of getting things wrong. Consider what happened when businesses adopted the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Taylor is known as the "Father of Scientific Management." In his book, Scientific Management, he laid out his beliefs and principles. One principle was that adopting scientific management would increase profits.

That was the idea behind studying how workers shoveled coal. If you studied the work, you could figure out the optimum design for the shovel, the best place to put the pile of coal, and the most efficient work methods. That would be good for the employer.

But Taylor also thought his scientific management would benefit workers. Here's how he put it in his book. "The task is always so regulated that the man who is well suited to his job will thrive while working at this rate during a long term of years and grow happier and more prosperous, instead of being overworked." That's why his recommendations included breaks for the workers and changes in the workday.

So what did most companies do? They took the parts about designing the shovel and placing the pile of coal. They left out the parts they didn't want to practice, like changing the workday and giving the workers breaks.

Look at the work of Taylor or Deming or Drucker or Peters or any other management thinker of note and you find that their work has lots of interconnected parts. If you only adopt one part, you won't get the results.

Microwaveable Wisdom

We live in age where we want everything quick and easy. Forget about skill-building, carefully choosing ingredients and time-consuming preparation. We want to buy our wisdom ready-made and pop it in the mental microwave so that, "Presto!" it's ready in an instant.

One of my coaching clients has worked for a large company for seven years. In that time, the company has had at least one management fad per year. They have found their cheese, learned about the fish market, discovered their strengths, and tried to master the carrot principle. They aspired to develop into Level 5 Leaders but only got to level 1 before they moved on to something else.

It would be nice if you could read book or take a course or listen to an audio program and suddenly achieve wisdom. But that doesn't happen. Wisdom takes time and attention.

It would be nice if you could learn leadership and management from a book. But you can't. Leadership and management aren't academic studies like history. They're practical arts. You don't learn them from books and classes, you learn them the way an apprentice learns a trade. And they take time, a lifetime even, to master.

The biggest problem with magical thinking in all its forms is that we come by it naturally. Without special effort we'll take the easy way out. Here are four ways to fight the natural, human tendency to magical thinking.

Fight Magical Thinking with the Best Available Evidence

This is one Evidence-Based Management (EBM) approach. The idea is to find good, solid studies about management and leadership topics and use the findings to improve performance. EBM favors academic-like studies in peer-reviewed journals.

This works best if the studies are recent and relevant and you have the skills and time to sort out the good ones from the rest. That's why I like another Evidence-Based Management technique better.

Fight Magical Thinking with Questions

Many people, including, the Evidence-Based Management people, advocate asking lots of questions. Why do we do things this way? Who will be affected if we change? What's our current situation? What's our goal? Has anyone else done this? What's the first step? You can add you own questions.

For more on using EBM methods for selecting evidence or asking questions, read Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton or The Halo Effect: ... and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers by Phil Rosenzweig.

Fight Magical Thinking with Models

Mark Twain is quoted as saying that "History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme." Many of the problems we face in management are like other problems we and others have faced.

Fortunately some of those "others" have written down what they've learned so we can use it. There are books and parts of books that offer you ways to analyze specific kinds of problems. Here are two good ones.

Richard Neustadt and Ernest May wrote a wonderful, helpful book called Thinking in Time. It's filled with marvelous tools for analyzing the historical precedents of your decisions.

Peter Senge's book, The Fifth Discipline, is filled with wisdom. But Appendix 2 is especially valuable. It contains a brief description of "Systems Archetypes" that will help you solve problems in a system, which is where you'll find most management problems.

Fight Magical Thinking with Experimentation

My final way to fight magical thinking is with the scientific method. Here's how I understand the method to work.

You spot a situation where you want things to be different. You think through what you need to do to change the situation. You try something based on your analysis. You review your results. And you keep the cycle going until you're satisfied or you abandon your efforts.

This is a very much underused way to both improve operations and avoid magical thinking. It's the method that the world's largest private company, Koch Industries, was built with. That's why you can find out more about it in Charles G. Koch's book, The Science of Success: How Market-Based Management Built the World's Largest Private Company.

Magical thinking is natural. While it can be helpful at times, it can cause disasters when you make management decisions and commit resources based on it. That's why you need to develop specific ways to short-circuit the magical thinking process and improve your decision making.

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