Federal executives and senior managers are notorious for

• buying last year's management fad from consultancies
• believing in magic bullets for solving organizational problems, and
• attributing failures to employees and success to their insight.

Phil Rosenzweig's The Halo Effect should be required reading for every member of the Senior Executive Service and senior management cadre. Basically, there are nine managerial delusions:

• The Halo Effect: attributing "success" on prior performance (also known as the post-hoc fallacy)
• The Delusion of Correlation and Causality: a correlation between A and B doesn't mean A caused B, or vice versa.
• The Delusion of Single Explanations: focusing on a single factor as the explanation of "success" and ignoring anything else.
• The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots: looking only at "winners" in a cross-sectional design and disregarding losers over time.
• The Delusion of Rigorous Research: fancy statistics (think structural equations modeling), cross-sectional design, and self-report questionnaire data don't prove squat.
• The Delusion of Lasting Success: things change, and what succeeds now may or may not work in the future.
• The Delusion of Absolute Performance: all things are relative, and context is always important. Only the paranoid truly do survive.
• The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick: corollary to the correlational delusion. Successful companies may do X or Y, but that doesn't mean if another company does X or Y that they will succeed.
• The Delusion of Organizational Physics: no simple "law" will summarize the complexities and uncertainties of human behavior in complex organizations.

Federal managers fall prey to these nine delusions every bit as hard as managers and executives in the private sector. Federal execs and managers buy into "business" or the "private sector" as the model to be followed, and if we just adopt "more business-like" practices, values, attitudes, reward schemes, etc., then we will be more efficient, better performing, more responsive.

The prescriptions from business research, as so artfully summarized by Rosenzweig, simply guarantee another failed organizational redesign, another failed initiative, another business process re-engineering effort sputtering to stop. Employees, as always, will be left to continue doing the jobs required by law and regulation in spite of executive and managerial stupidity and gullibility. I've seen this play out in the FAA many times over my 20 year career as an I/O psychologist. TQM, BPR, COTS, P4P, ISO-9000, SMS (a variation on systems thinking), EI (Employee Involvement), and most recently, PBO (performance-based organization). Successful companies are pointed to as the example to follow (the halo effect), based on recent research showing a correlation between, say stock price and employee engagement (the correlation and single factor delusions), so let's have Gallup survey the employees (rigorous research) and improve our EE score (absolute performance and wrong end of the stick delusions), and our aviation safety inspector workforce will adopt SMS and aviation safety will thereby increase (the delusion of organizational physics).

To bad reality in the bowels of bureaucracy isn't so neat as the consultants portray.

But then, maybe I should join one of the consultancies and make more money on the gullibility of the FAA management team.