Following management ideas downstream, upstream—and occasionally back again
As a consultant, I spent much of my career downstream.
Global organizations had often already decided what they wanted to do. A leadership model was being rolled out. A competency framework had been adopted. Engagement scores had triggered concern. Intercultural friction had produced an intervention.
My role was usually not to determine whether the intervention was the right one. It was to make sure a predetermined solution did not become a complete waste of time and energy for people it had never been designed for.
That required a lot of questions. What assumptions about leadership were embedded in the model? Which behaviors were being treated as universal? What would this mean in Japan? Could the prescribed behavior even work inside the local organization?
Over time, I developed something of a reputation for rescuing global initiatives from themselves. The sponsor got the reporting and outcomes required by the global mandate. Within those boundaries, I could sometimes redesign the work substantially so that it better suited what the local organization actually needed.
That made me hyperaware of the logic inside management prescriptions.
“When you have to make an idea work somewhere new, you start noticing exactly what the idea is made of.”
What I usually could not ask was the question one step further upstream:
Why is this the solution in the first place?
That question has stayed with me.
Donald Clark starts pulling at the threads
This may explain why Donald Clark’s work caught my attention.
Clark did not set out to become a professional interrogator of learning theory. His work in learning technology increasingly required him to adapt existing learning principles and content to new forms of digital and automated delivery.
And adaptation creates a practical problem: you have to decide what to accept, reject, or modify.
A shared practitioner reflex
I was adapting global management and development interventions to Japanese organizations and hybrid Japanese-Western business cultures. Clark was adapting learning constructs to new delivery systems. Different work, same pause: What does this idea assume, and what deserves to be carried forward?
Clark has described Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as one of his own wake-up moments. Maslow was everywhere in training and management education. Then Clark stopped and looked more closely: What had Maslow actually claimed? How strong was the evidence? Where had the familiar pyramid come from? Why had it become so deeply embedded in professional practice?
He did not stop with Maslow. Once the habit of inspection took hold, his work created an ongoing need to examine what he was being asked to carry forward.
What makes the results interesting is that the problem is not always a bad original theory. Sometimes the original work is careful, qualified, even useful.
What can happen in transit
A tentative proposition becomes a hierarchy.
A descriptive framework becomes a prescription.
A nuanced idea acquires a brightly colored pyramid.
Something designed for one purpose becomes a universal explanation.
The artifact eventually circulating in professional practice can bear only a family resemblance to its supposed ancestor.
The question is no longer simply “Is this theory right?” but “What happened to it?”
My own “wait a minute” moments
Emotional intelligence was one of mine.
During my years at PDI, the Goleman model was not merely absent from the professional vocabulary I encountered. The position repeatedly communicated within the firm was that it did not meet the validity standard required for our assessment and leadership-development work.
Then the institutional landscape changed. Korn Ferry acquired PDI Ninth House in 2013 and later acquired Hay Group, which brought a different intellectual lineage and an established emotional-and-social-competency portfolio.
Wait a minute #1 — Emotional intelligence
What changed? The evidence? The construct? The evidentiary standard? Or simply the institutional context?
I don’t pose that as a gotcha. Acquisitions combine intellectual traditions as well as businesses. That is precisely what makes the example interesting.
Coaching culture gave me another wait-a-minute moment.
I had understood it rather prosaically: coaching used systematically as one part of a broader development architecture. Then the term began expanding. It could mean a management philosophy, a set of behaviors, an organizational aspiration—sometimes seemingly all of these at once.
Wait a minute #2 — Coaching culture
How many coaching-culture ships have been launched toward a destination nobody has defined particularly well?
“Widespread adoption is not the same thing as validation.”
Swimming upstream
Following Clark backward eventually raises another question: if ideas can arrive downstream in these forms, what is happening upstream?
Eric Abrahamson’s work on management fashion offers a fascinating place to begin.
Abrahamson described an ecosystem of management “fashion setters”—consultants, gurus, business media and business schools—competing to sense emerging managerial concerns, develop rhetoric around promising techniques, and disseminate those ideas before competitors do.
That creates pressure for pace. The consultant who waits ten years for certainty may discover that somebody else owns the category. Publishers need the important new idea while it is still new. Business schools do not want to appear behind practice. L&D functions want to know what progressive organizations are doing now.
None of this requires dishonesty. It requires incentives.
Abrahamson’s argument was not simply that management fashions are foolish. His more interesting point is that diffusion and merit are not the same process—and that the knowledge system itself deserves scrutiny.
Upstream / downstream
Abrahamson helps us understand how ideas acquire momentum upstream.
Clark examines what some of them look like after the journey downstream.
I’m interested in the water between them.
Did anybody keep the receipts?
There is one more question I want to make central: What did it cost?
Not simply the consultant’s invoice. What did implementation consume in management attention and employee time? What problem remained unsolved while the organization addressed this one? What opportunity was displaced? Were there unintended costs— cynicism, distorted behavior, lost trust? And did anybody measure any of this?
The receipt
Purchase cost — What did we buy?
Implementation cost — What time and attention did it consume?
Opportunity cost — What did we not do instead?
Misdiagnosis cost — What problem remained unsolved?
Unintended cost — What else did the intervention create?
Measurement — Did anybody actually track any of this?
That is where I think professional stewardship enters the picture. Researchers, universities, authors, associations, vendors, corporate buyers and practitioners occupy different positions in this knowledge chain. Their responsibilities are not identical. But each makes choices about what gets created, legitimized, purchased, translated—or ultimately done to people.
“At every handoff, leave the idea no more certain than the evidence permits—and no more precise than its definition permits.”
How we’ll investigate the ideas
This essay is an introduction, not a verdict. As I work through different management and people-development constructs, I want to ask roughly the same questions.
- Where did it come from?
- What did the original claim actually say?
- What happened to it as it travelled?
- When—and why—did organizations start buying it?
- What problem was it supposed to solve?
- What happened when people actually tried it?
- Was there a feedback loop?
- What did it cost?
- Did anybody measure that?
- And, after all that, what remains useful?
We won’t know the answer before we investigate. Some much-maligned ideas may turn out to be better supported than their critics suggest. Others may have begun as good ideas and suffered badly in transit. Some may work beautifully under much narrower conditions than their marketing implies.
And occasionally we may discover that nobody kept the receipts.
What were we thinking?
The title is deliberately inclusive. I’m not standing outside this system. I’ve administered assessments, designed programs, coached against competencies and helped organizations turn global prescriptions into something people could actually use.
Sometimes I asked enough questions. Sometimes I probably didn’t.
Donald Clark has made a rather entertaining vocation of examining what washes up downstream. Abrahamson gives us a way of understanding some of the machinery that sets it moving.
If you’ve ever sat through a presentation, looked at the model on slide 17 and quietly wondered—
Where on earth did this come from?
—you are very much my intended reader.
Let’s find out.
Sources & Further Reading
- Eric Abrahamson, “Management Fashion,” Academy of Management Review, 21(1), 1996.
- Eric Abrahamson, “Management Fashion, Academic Fashion, and Enduring Truths,” Academy of Management Review, 1996.
- Donald Clark, “Maslow — who needs him?” (2007).
- Donald Clark, “Maslow (1908–1970) Hierarchy of Needs” (2012).
- Ken Masters, “Edgar Dale’s Pyramid of Learning in Medical Education: A Literature Review,” Medical Teacher, 2013.
- Harold Pashler, Mark McDaniel, Doug Rohrer & Robert Bjork, “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest.
