Leadership has become a science fiction genre: How to critically engage with leadership books
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The pop-leadership book genre is booming. It feels like a colleague is recommending a new leadership book to me on a daily basis. While there are great books being written within this genre, I’m worried that leadership junkies, like myself, are not engaging with these texts with an appropriately critical eye.
The pop-leadership genre has stealthily become a sub-genre of science fiction. Thinking about leadership writing in this manner provides a useful lens to critically engage with it.
Science Fiction
A good science fiction story accomplishes two things: First, the story addresses an interesting phenomenon like time travel or using DNA to bring back the dinosaurs. Second, the story presents an explanation for how the phenomenon works that the reader can easily understand. This second phenomenon is an especially important one.
From Star Wars to Jurassic Park, the most loved science fiction stories explain how an unnatural phenomenon functions in a fictional world. They often present this idea so well that we walk away wondering if there could be some truth to their fictional science.
Understanding what makes the fictional science in some stories more believable than others is an interesting area of research. Researchers have studied fiction from various perspectives, from Neuroscience to Theory of Mind. A mechanism these researchers have uncovered is the psychological idea called cognitive bias.
Cognitive bias is a short cut that our brain uses to make the processing of information easier. The thing to watch out for is that these shortcuts can often cause us to inaccurately discern the truth. There are several categories that fall under the idea of cognitive bias — two that directly impact the topic of understanding real science from fiction are confirmation bias and heuristic bias.
Confirmation bias causes us to only look for evidence that confirms our preconceived beliefs. We are more naturally inclined to dismiss information that doesn’t fit into our schema of the world.
Heuristic bias explains our tendency to use the information we already know more than to look for things that we don’t already know, even if the information we don’t know could potentially be much more valuable. Instead of going outside of our sphere of biases to further our knowledge, we tend to use the information that is most available in our minds to make decisions. This, in turn, causes us to undervalue information that could potentially be much more valuable to us in the end.
Cognitive biases function together to lead us to believe things that aren’t grounded in facts or real research. In the absence of a deep understanding of the field of science presented within a sci-fi book, confirmation bias leads us to focus on examples, both within the text and from our real-life experiences, that confirm the theories presented within the fiction.
From Science Fiction to Leadership
What we have working in our favor is the fact that many science fiction stories contain plots that are so fantastic when compared to our life experiences that our minds can easily identify that we are reading fiction. However, when it comes to pop-leadership, this often isn’t the case.
Pop-leadership books, like good science fiction, present compelling frameworks for building a positive work culture, highly functioning teams, and strategic plans. They promise to help you develop your leadership bench, build consensus, improve productivity, and establish positive habits. Additionally, many also claim that their frameworks are grounded in science often citing research from psychology, sociology, neuroscience, and biology. They describe these ideas and the science that supports them in detail and give examples, often in the form of narrative case studies, to demonstrate them. However, the ideas they present are rarely rigorously studied and experimentally verified.
Readers, beware: the danger here is that pop-leadership often does not feel like fiction. On the contrary, it often feels like science-backed research.
Our cognitive biases start their work but this time our brains don’t have the contextual clues of spaceships and dinosaurs to alert us that what we are reading is fictional. On the contrary, our past experiences in leadership are much more likely to fuel confirmation and heuristic biases because these experiences are very mundane causing us to think, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that before.”
When you read a leadership book that presents a framework for building a strong organizational culture, it is very easy to bring past experiences to mind that will fit within the presented framework. Add some sciencey jargon and a couple of inline citations from academic journal articles and an unconsciously uncritical mind will be sold, hook-line-and-sinker.
Sometimes, we genuinely want to believe that a particular framework is real; maybe it confirms longheld beliefs that we’ve had for a while. Leadership books don’t often present frameworks that are surprisingly contrary to common sense which makes fallacies harder to spot.
Many pop-leadership books present unstudied and unverified frameworks to explain phenomena and claim that the framework is based in science. Many pop-leadership texts are actually works of science fiction.
But what about those that cite real research?
Citing robust scientific research does not make your own work and ideas robust or scientific. Anyone who has written a thesis or dissertation understands this principle. Citing good work conducted by others is essential to show that you have a deep and broad understanding of a particular field. It also shows that your ideas are grounded in other robust ideas.
Simply weaving the ideas of others together into a narrative is not a valid research methodology.
The closest valid research approach to this would be a literature review. But, even literature reviews have rigorous standards. Literature reviews limit themselves to studying the research surrounding a topic. They don’t attempt to use the literature to prove something new.
Well-designed studies are needed to validate a new leadership framework.
Few pop-leadership books present frameworks that have been exposed to appropriate scientific scrutiny.
How to critically engage with leadership books
Here are seven questions to ask as you critically engage with leadership books.
“Is this science or science fiction?”
“Why do I believe this?” If the answer is because it jives with your past experiences, intentionally try to think of some counterexamples. Don’t let confirmation bias trick you.
“What evidence are they drawing on? Could there be extremely relevant information that is missing or unaccounted for?” Try to stop heuristic bias from limiting your perspective.
“Do I already agree with the author’s thesis?”
“What would it cost me if this wasn’t true?”
“What scientific testing has the author done to prove the ideas they are presenting?” Identify the author’s methodology for empirically testing their framework. Do they present it? If not, you may be reading a work of science fiction. If they do, is it a good methodology? Do you believe that it does a good job of putting their ideas to the test?
“Are they just explaining others’ ideas or are they using these ideas to argue for their own untested one?” If the author is tying others’ research together to argue that their new idea is true then you may be reading a work of science fiction.
These are general guidelines. Here is an additional source on the topic.
Pop-leadership ideas still have value
Many pop-leadership ideas challenge us to think about the world in new and interesting ways just like quality science fiction does. It engages the imagination by sparking creativity, excitement, wonder, and innovation. It can problematize our understanding of what is normal and force us to think outside the box and engage with new perspectives. It can also create a deepened sense of empathy as it presents sciencey ideas in narrative formate often based on socially situated case studies.
Leaders can benefit from the vast number of ideas that are out there but must be willing to critically engage with them.
About the Newsletter
This newsletter provides resources for aspiring independent school leaders to accelerate their growth. It goes out a couple of times a month with content and Saturday mornings with short curated recommendations for books, articles, podcasts, etc. If you like this newsletter, forward it to friends!
About the Author
Hi, I’m Michael Lomuscio. I’m a career independent school educator and researcher. I utilize my background as an applied mathematician and data scientist to generate evidence-based insights for independent schools and the Ed research community. I believe that in order to stay relevant and find innovative solutions to the challenges facing independent schools, we need to internally develop leaders with excellence and intention. I’m a fierce advocate for aspiring independent school leaders and dedicate time to providing you with resources to accelerate your growth.
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