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Translator: Rik Delaet
Reviewer: Ivana Krivokuća
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I both love and hate
the business of human resources
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and you will soon understand why.
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This vivacious young girl was diagnosed
with schizophrenia at the age of 21.
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Like so many patients
diagnosed with schizophrenia,
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she did not want to accept her disease
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and she often refused
to take her medication.
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She became so desperate
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that she decided to put her fate
into the hands of a charlatan.
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Very soon he had convinced her
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that it was the medication
that made her feel ill.
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So he urged her
to abandon that medication,
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and he convinced her to take
his Bach flower remedies instead.
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Now, her condition soon deteriorated.
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And one late afternoon in 1996,
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I received a phone call from her boyfriend
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because she was standing
on the escape ladder
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of the apartment building
where they lived.
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And she was threatening
to throw herself off.
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So I rushed over,
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and we somehow managed to save her
by recklessly storming down the ladder
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and grabbing her tightly.
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And with the help
of her family and a lawyer,
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she was rid of the charlatan.
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But the damage had already been done.
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She tried to commit suicide
on several occasions.
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And this was, of course,
a turning point in my life and my career
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because I realized,
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because I personally witnessed
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how dangerous pseudoscience
and quackery could be,
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so I realized how dangerous it could be.
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And what has this got to do
with human resources?
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Well, at the start of my career,
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I had to attend training
in Transactional Analysis,
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and this theory states that during
the first three years of our lives
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we make our life script,
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including the diseases
we will have and try to conquer.
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And this sounded so very strange to me
that I decided to challenge the trainer
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and I asked her,
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"Is schizophrenia a choice too?"
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And she confirmed that it was!
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Now, in fact, the woman
I've been talking about
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was my sister-in-law.
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And we had been well informed
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by the doctors and specialized
patients organizations
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that this was total nonsense.
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She finally killed herself
at the age of only 36.
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And yes, I realized
how dangerous it could be,
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but I also - with a shock - realized
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that HR could be dangerous too.
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And I have experienced many examples.
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Take for example the case of Pete
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who had been a successful
manager for many years
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until the point
where he had to take a test
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based on an entirely crazy theory
called "Spiral Dynamics".
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It offers an alternative explanation
for human evolution.
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And he lost his position as a manager
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and even got fired after a few months.
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And still today, five years later,
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he hasn't been able to find a new job
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mainly because he often felt
too depressed.
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And he and his wife
had to sell their house
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and they now live in a small apartment.
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This made me very angry
and still makes me very angry
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if I see that desperate
or vulnerable people are lured in.
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So I decided to join the skeptic community
and like a Don Quixote,
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I set out on a mission to reveal the truth
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about the many HR models
and questionnaires.
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I consulted the scientific literature
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to see whether these models
were theoretically sound
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and what was the available evidence,
be it positive or negative.
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So of course I started looking
at the practices
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we used at the bank first, where I worked.
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There was the practice
of employee performance scores,
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giving people a score every year,
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and we even applied
a forced ranking on that.
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And we also created big pay gaps
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and paid individual bonuses,
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and we imposed top-down
performance goals on people.
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And in coaching I had to attend a training
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based on John Whitmore’s GROW model,
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and of course, Transactional Analysis.
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And I was led to believe in training
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that people have
four distinct learning styles.
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I learned about Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs.
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I learned about the so-called
Communication Rule by Albert Mehrabian.
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And our leaders had to follow a course
in Situational Leadership by Ken Blanchard
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or a training based
on the Stages of Grief model
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by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross,
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and they applied this
as a guidance for change.
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I even had to follow a training
in speed reading.
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Now what did I find out
about all of these models
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when I applied these criteria?
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Well, all of these models
were quite simply wrong.
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Now this left me very confused
and sometimes angry.
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I felt confronted.
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And maybe by now some of you have
recognized some of these models
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and have the same feelings already.
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Because indeed,
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changing our deeply held convictions
can be very challenging.
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This reminds me of this famous quote;
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("The truth will set you free,
but first it will piss you off.")
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But I decided to search
for the truth, so I continued.
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In recruitment I came across
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practices such as graphology
or brain scans,
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allegedly predicting
your future performance or your honesty.
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And I found out
that a lot of the questionnaires
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used the ipsative format
or the forced choice format,
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basically making you choose
between apples and pears
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even if you like them both.
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And in development I found out
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that Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
or MBTI was very popular -
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it's a fad that never dies.
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And there's also the ever-increasingly
popular Insights Discovery.
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There was the Herrmann
Brain Dominance Instrument,
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making us believe that we have
four distinct thinking styles
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and they're located
in nice areas in our brain.
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And there's the Enneagram,
and there's the Belbin Team Roles.
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And in coaching I found out
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that Neuro-linguistic Programming
was very popular, or NLP.
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But also Alpha training,
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making you believe
that you can become more creative
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or be ever more intelligent
by plugging into the universe.
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And believe it or not,
but some people actually believe
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that you can become
a better leader of people
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(Audio: horse whinnies)
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by getting feedback from a horse.
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(Laughter)
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And what is it with human resources
that they so often follow the latest myth?
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Take for example the 70:20:10 model
by Charles Jennings.
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He is an Australian engineer
who claims to be an expert at learning.
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But the research sucks,
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and the true experts
in the field of learning
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say it's total nonsense
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and some of them
even call it an urban myth.
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So maybe by now you can raise your hands
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if you have ever been subjected
to any of these models.
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(Indistinct chatter in the audience)
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Why doesn't it surprise me?
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(Laughter)
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So I continued, and there's many more,
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and the list behind me
is really very long,
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and this is evidence of the fact
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that human resources
and management thinking
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is really very problematic.
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Let me give some examples.
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In HR systems for example,
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there's the practice
of giving people an annual score
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and applying a forced ranking.
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Some organizations even follow
the advice of Jack Welch,
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who was the former CEO
of General Electric,
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to fire, every year, the bottom 10%.
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Fire or yank - that's why
they called it "rank and yank".
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This is very strange,
because already in 1996,
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Kluger and DeNisi had conducted
a meta-analysis demonstrating
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that giving people a score
has a zero effect on performance.
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But only in the last few years
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have some organizations
started to abandon this practice.
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And take, for example, the big pay gaps
created by Rank Order Tournament Theory.
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It was a theory
invented by two economists.
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But this led to less information sharing,
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more fraud,
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lowered group performance,
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the best people actually leaving first,
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and a lot of people perceiving
the payment policy as highly unfair.
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This theory, in the US,
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led to the CEO to worker
average pay ratio explosion.
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In 1983, the average CEO
gained 46 times more.
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By 2013, it had already increased
to 331 times more.
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But if you compare it to the minimum wage,
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it's even a staggering 774 times more.
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And it doesn't need to be like this,
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because we know in HR systems
there are good frameworks and tools.
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Take for example
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the Productivity Measurement
and Enhancement System - ProMES:
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a meta-analysis has demonstrated
that it increases productivity
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whilst people keep their autonomy.
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And they can participate
in their goal setting
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and in the decision
about their performance indicators.
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And sometimes theories are really absurd
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and it doesn't require
a lot of intelligence to understand.
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Take for example the Enneagram.
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It's very old,
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it goes back several thousands
of years ago to a Sufi sect,
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but the most important
proponent was Gurdjieff.
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And he believed that we are
three-brained beings,
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here on this Earth to serve the Moon.
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Because we are forever in debt
towards the Moon,
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because the Moon was split from the Earth.
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Can you believe that?
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Or take Organizational Constellations
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where they put people in a room,
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and through a kind
of paranormal or quantum process,
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they solve their problems.
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The only problem is,
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quantum mechanics simply cannot operate
in a warm environment like our brain.
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And some believe in the paranormal.
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Few people realize that Carl Gustav Jung
believed in the paranormal
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and that tests like MBTI
or Insights Discovery are based on it.
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They prefer me to call it
a questionnaire but…
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He believed that in a far away
parallel universe information is stored.
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And this information contains
pre-existent psychological archetypes.
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And you can get access to them
through a paranormal process.
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Very absurd.
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Some theories are just dead wrong.
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Take for example LIFO,
Enneagram, or MBTI,
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that make us believe
that the distribution in the population
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looks a little bit like this:
a dichotomous distribution.
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If you compare it to other features
of humans like physical height,
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this would mean that we would
almost have noone
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between 1.60m and 1.80m.
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And that is, of course, simply impossible.
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And indeed, we know
that most human features
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and also our personality traits
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follow a nice continuous distribution.
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Like this.
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And this is something
that already Charles Darwin had told us.
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Because he explained
that evolutionary processes
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lead to variation, resulting
in this nice Gaussian distribution.
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And take the myth of NLP
or the learning styles.
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They are both based on the false premise
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that some people are more visual,
others are more auditory,
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and yet others are more kinesthetic.
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And this is entirely wrong,
it's entirely false,
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because just like all other primates,
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our visual sense is the most dominant
in literally everyone,
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as extensive research has demonstrated.
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Sometimes theories are wrong
in other respects like,
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they offer wrong measurements.
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Take again these forced
choice questionnaires:
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they often lead to entirely
opposite selection advice,
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compared to normative tests for example.
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Or take the MBTI again: it has many flaws,
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and the US National Research Council
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has calculated that if people
take the test a second time
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after only four weeks,
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then the median of people having
an entirely different personality type
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is a staggering 60%.
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Imagine what it would do
to your family life…
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(Laughter)
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if you had to wonder every four weeks
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what personality type
will your family members have?
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And again, it doesn’t need
to be like this,
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because in recruitment and selection,
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we know what kind of tools
are good predictors,
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like intelligence
and some aspects of personality.
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And indeed if you look at personality,
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there are theories based on that,
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like the five-factor model
or the six-factor model.
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And we have good tests like the NEO-PI-R,
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measuring the five-factor
model of personality
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or the HEXACO, measuring
the six-factor model of personality.
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And if you look at the real research data,
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then we indeed see that these traits
follow a nice distribution,
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like this in extraversion.
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So there is no such thing,
there are not four types like in LIFO
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or nine as in Enneagram or 16 as in MBTI.
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There are literally more combinations
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than the number of people
living on this Earth.
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Finally I also found out
that many people lie,
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not only about the so-called
scientific status of their theories,
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but also about their own degrees.
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I contacted several universities
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and they told me that a lot of people lie
about their PhD for example.
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So the problem
with all of this is, of course,
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if you put in garbage,
then inevitably garbage must come out.
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Nobody has ever been able to prove
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that you can take right decisions
based on entirely false information.
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And the burden of proof, of course,
is on them, not on us.
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And I know some people say
it's only a tool,
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or only a discussion starter.
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Let’s consider this:
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imagine you are on a city trip in Paris
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and you're lost and you ask
someone for directions
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and that person says,
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"Well you can have my map
because I'm going home."
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And you gratefully unfold that map,
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only to realize it's a map of New York.
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So you ask that generous
person what it means,
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and that person says,
"Well, it's only a navigation starter."
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(Laughter)
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Of course that's silly.
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Like that city map - that wrong city map -
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won't get you anywhere in the city,
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a wrong personality test
or intelligence test
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won't get you anywhere,
for example, for your career decisions.
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So the best option we really have
is science and reason.
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And we don't have to be
so negative about science
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because after all, it's only a method
we have invented ourselves
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to overcome our biases
and thinking errors.
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It has allowed us to abandon practices
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like magic healing or witch burning,
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and it has given us many benefits
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like purified drinking water
and lately, the internet.
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So we don't have to be scientists
ourselves but we can enjoy science.
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Would you accept having surgery
by a surgeon who never updates her skills?
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Would you accept taking a drug
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that doesn't help,
but has a lot of side effects?
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Would you accept it if an engineer
lies about his degree as an engineer
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and builds an unstable bridge?
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Would you dare to fly with somebody
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who has never been trained as a pilot
and fly on this plane?
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I think the answer is a clear no.
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So if you don't accept
a flawed blood test,
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you should not accept
a flawed personality test,
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and if you don't accept
a bogus cancer therapy,
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you should not accept bogus coaching.
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Think of the damage it can do
if you use pseudoscience.
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So if we don't accept bad practices
and lies in other fields of our lives,
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we should not accept them in HR.
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Especially not since there are
so many valid alternatives
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that often are cheaper,
easier to understand, and more accurate.
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And we have them in training,
and we have them in coaching.
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And we also have good explanations
like psychology based on biology,
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explaining things like why we both compete
and collaborate for example.
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So the list of valid alternatives
and approaches is very long too.
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So there's really no excuse
not to use them.
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It's high time to abandon
these bad practices,
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it's high time we abandon
the gurus like NLP guru Emile Ratelband
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and Richard Bandler,
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and turn towards the Champions League
of biologists and psychologists instead,
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like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.
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I have made a choice to abandon the bad,
the wrong, and the pseudo models
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because they can do
possible harm to people.
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And I embraced the science-based instead,
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because they're much more reliable
and they allow me to act morally.
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And that is, of course,
a choice we all can make.
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Because with knowledge
comes responsibility.
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I urge all the leaders
to critically question your HR practices.
00:19:12
Thank you.
