My Pispective on Management and Dark Matter

(A pispective is when you write about something using only 314 words)

There is this thing that torments physicists called dark matter. It's not a trivial matter either. Apparently, dark matter and its room mate dark energy comprise 95.1% of the total mass-energy of the universe. In other words, most of everything.

The interesting thing about dark matter is that we can't detect it. We've figured out that something comprises most of everything, but can't observe it. Which is a curious situation to find ourselves in. The world we inhabit looks and feels solid, but is only 4.9% of what we actually inhabit.

The search for a means to observe dark matter continues to confound our best efforts. It's not as if we're not trying. A year long experiment called the Large Underground Xenon collaboration just came up with a big zero. It was designed to detect a 'weakly interacting massive particle', which was our best guess at what dark matter is comprised of.

I'm a management professional, not a scientist. All this is fairly interesting if you like science (which all management professionals should). What interests me is the parallel the search for dark matter has for the search for the next generation of business organizations.

Like the universe, most of what goes on in an organization is invisible to us. We manage according to a set of theories that can't reliably predict or explain our professional domain. We habitually rely on a set of instruments that capture a tiny portion of what an organization is.

We invest vast amounts of money into technology projects. Like the LUX we give these projects grandiose titles or profound buzzwords. I'm looking at you digital transformation and big data. And like LUX they are meant to help us explain what's actually going on.

Sometimes they tell us a bit more. Sometimes they just tell us what we want to hear. But most times they tell us absolutely nothing.

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