One of the greatest pitfalls in practice, and especially in practice leadership, is what the legendary investor Charlie Munger used to call “physics envy.” Physics envy is the desire to take highly complex systems and imagine that there is a secret, knowable formula driving it all. The unfortunate truth is that this is not how systems involving human beings actually work, and the search for a rinse-and-repeat approach to the human side of practice is generally wishful thinking.
No matter how much we wish there was a reliable formula to answer problems about how to motivate different people, build good cultures in radically different teams, or change the behaviors of people with different worldviews, there simply isn’t. There is and never will be a “one-size-fits-all” way to talk to clients, to heal patients (or even treat specific conditions), or to manage a hospital team.
This, of course, does not mean we should throw up our hands and let the chaos overwhelm us. Instead, it’s just a reminder that we need to be continuously listening, learning, and adapting. It means that no one will ever be able to give us the ultimate answer that will permanently solve our people problems, and that we will never have certainty about what the future holds (as long as other people are involved in it).
While working with humans may not have the beautiful certainty of a physics problem, there is a certain magic in navigating an environment that is always changing. People are interesting, and mixing different people together is a creative alchemy that should be appreciated by leaders and managers. At the very least, we should forgive ourselves for all the times we have failed to “figure people out.”
While it might be less stressful and more efficient if humans could be “solved” by science, the world is more beautiful because people are art. They are messy, improvisational, and often manifest themselves in unexpected ways.
If your practice is always running into new and different challenges around working with people, do not despair. You are not doing anything wrong. There will never be a “right answer” for working with other humans, there will only be a best way for here, today.
