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Why Business isn’t Rocket Science…

Saying something isn’t ‘rocket science’ is supposed to be denigrating as it implies that whatever is being referred to it is less complex and therefore more easily explained or understood.

However nothing could be further from the truth. Rocket Science is perhaps one of the most simple things in the world to explain (and do the calculations for) since the personal computing revolution!  Solving the problem of launching something into the atmosphere* basically requires an understanding of mass, acceleration and gravity. The relationship between these variables is also reasonably fixed. In other words to achieve event A, you simply need to solve what combinations of B, C, D are required. The rules are fixed and everybody plays by the same ones.

If only business was so simple.

Imagine being able to get (and keep) profitable customers, by determining the appropriate ratio of value, experience, availability and communication (or whatever variables you decide to include in the equation) and launching your start up.

I wish!

Although this approach seems to be the one used by many (consultants and academics in particular), most people know no such model comes close to ensuring (or even explaining) success. One explanation could be that we just don’t know (or haven’t discovered) the appropriate variables and their relationships yet. Better science, more empirical investigations and smarter people is needed to identify the ‘parts’. After all, this has worked for all those other really difficult questions in disciplines like medicine, chemistry, quantum physics and rocket science!

I don’t want to deny the vast contribution this approach (and the disciplines mentioned above) has made to the development of knowledge and improvements for society BUT I’m not sure I’m happy to accept that this method of discovery is the only way to reveal ‘facts’ about our world.

What if the ‘truth’ about business, is that it is not possible to know or understand the elements of success because there is an infinite number of variables with contingent (and subjective) relationships between them, which are determined on an ad hoc basis? In business terms this translates to mean that each individual customer uses a personal set of attributes to make their decision to buy (or not), deciding which ones are relevant, important and the impact each has on each other based on their own life experience. This certainly sounds like a more realistic description of my customer experience (and managerial frustration!) than LOYALTY = (f)UTILITY*(SATISFACTION/TRUST).

Does this mean that we need to abandon hope in the quest to understand how to be successful in business? Personally, I don’t think so. However I will explore the consequences of accepting that business can’t be explained by a single model and how we might continue the search in a subsequent post.

How about for now we just concede that ‘Business isn’t rocket science; it’s much more complicated than that!’

* I will concede that rocket science involves more than launching something into the atmosphere, but give me some poetic license for the purposes of illustration – it’s not a Wikipedia entry!