By Matt Paese, Ph.D.
I’ve never met a quantum physicist who switched careers to go into HR. My guess, although I have no evidence of this, is that once you become a quantum physicist you don’t spend a lot of time thinking about career changes, and if you do, you don’t think about leadership development. But on the slim chance that one did, I bet he or she would have a thing or two to say about how we’re going about cultivating great leaders.
In Tuesday’s New York Times, an article in the Health section encouraged: “Forget what you know about good study habits”. Forget using a favorite study space, or creating a consistent routine. Mix it up, the research suggests. Switch locations. Space out the sessions. Study at different times of the day. Give your mind some different background stimuli, and you’ll learn more, and remember longer. Makes sense to me.
But the article also highlighted a point that many have rejected: The more you’re tested, the better. Sorry students. Turns out testing is a valuable learning tool, beyond the mere assessment of knowledge or aptitude. Practice tests and pop quizzes, because of their repetition and the interval between them, facilitate better recall and longer retention, and a significant body of control-group-based research bears out the findings.
This prompted one researcher to invoke an axiom of quantum mechanics: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which is not a first aid technique. The principle holds that the mere act of measuring something alters its very nature.
Now, I’ve never been a quantum physicist, and I’m not preparing for a career switch, but I got curious about this one. So I did what so many leadership development professionals recommend every day: I looked it up. My own miniature action learning project.
Turns out there’s a bit more to the HUP, as I’m now calling it (I’ve coined the acronym myself in an ego-preserving attempt to demonstrate one thing that HR professionals clearly do better than quantum physicists: come up with acronyms). The HUP is actually quite fundamental to quantum mechanics. And if you haven’t been paying attention to the latest in physics, quantum theory has pretty well stomped on classical theory as the best candidate for explaining all the mysteries of the physical world, birds and bees included.
Why? Classical theory has proven inadequate in its presumption that particles in the world hold, for example, constant positions. Among other problems, sometimes classical theory just can’t find things (e.g., electrons), because they’re constantly in motion. Quantum theory, however, recognizes that sometimes particles or organisms must be understood not by where they are, but rather by the trajectory they are taking – where they are going and have been.
In a similar vein, study and testing that occurs across a series of events and measures better suits the manner in which our minds naturally acquire and retain new wisdom. Once again, movement and trajectory better suit and describe nature. Location and position oversimplify.
So what would the quantum physicist have to say about developing great leaders? My guess is that we would be encouraged to examine leadership over time, and to gather multiple observations, to learn the trajectory of growth, or lack there of. Quantum wisdom would recommend that we assess routinely, and check for patterns.
Heisenberg might remind us that simply conducting a leadership assessment affects leadership, so while we would be wise not to over-assess and create paralysis, we would do well to adopt a consistent means of taking stock of where we are in our quantum world.Of course, a real quantum physicist would certainly have much more to say about the HUP and my conclusions, if one ever comes to HR.
Matt Paese is the Vice President of Executive Solutions for Development Dimensions International (DDI)
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