Your Ideas Are Fine In Practice, But Will They Work In Theory?


By Dr. Gary S. Goodman


One of the great philosophers of science quipped:

“There’s nothing quite as practical as a good THEORY.”

Theories are generalizations that apply to lots of circumstances.

For instance, at your hospital you notice a lot of post-op patients seem to be contracting infections. So, you have a look at the operations, and they seem okay.

You spend more time with the surgeons and lo and behold, you notice they scrub up a lot less before procedures that they reported. A visit to neighboring hospitals confirms that their lower rates of infection are coupled with more physician hand washing.

You have a theory: Hand scrubbing and infections are inversely correlated. This leads to a hypothesis.

If we scrub more, we’ll infect less, and it’s a testable proposition!

Wow!

If you think the example is far-fetched consider that recently the New York Times noted that physicians were scrubbing up less than they reported, leading to more infections.

Anyway, theories are really important because they EXPLAIN what could appear to be unrelated phenomena, and society advances based on the quality of theories we generate, test, and validate.

Theories are derided by people who claim to know more based on their practical experience, but they are the ones most desperately in need of theories while being the least likely to hatch them.

Peter F. Drucker pointed out that people have been shoveling sand and dirt for thousands of years and throughout that entire time no shoveler designed a more productive tool.

It was a task outsiders had to do, people with theoretical and observational skills.

They examined the process and found everything was wrong, especially the size of the scoop. It was way too large and even seemed guaranteed to make the work back-breaking and inefficient.

Drucker’s conclusion: If you give the task of redesigning a job to those closest to the work, they’ll probably fail. Theories are best created by people who think differently, abstractly. They need distance from the object of study to be dispassionate and to think clearly about it.

So, what does this mean?

If you want a breakthrough, don’t look to your $25 per hour workers to find it for you, or for that matter, to your senior managers.

Look for someone who knows the ins and outs of having his head in the clouds!

Best-selling author of 12 books and more than 950 articles, Dr. Gary S. Goodman is considered "The Gold Standard"--the foremost expert in sales development, customer service, and telephone effectiveness. Top-rated as a speaker, seminar leader, and consultant, his clients extend across the globe and the organizational spectrum, from the Fortune 1000 to small businesses. He can be reached at: gary@customersatisfaction.com.


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