Just for giggles, take a few minutes to google the contents of your average MBA curriculum.

I’m not going to quibble about what’s in them. My quibble is with what isn’t. High on the missing courseware list: project management. Curiously, this, the practice needed to make tomorrow different from yesterday isn’t important enough to be a mandatory business management skill.

Then there’s this week’s missing subject: epistemology.

Yes, epistemology. It sounds abstruse and esoteric. But one of the eight tasks of leadership is making decisions, and decision-makers can’t make good ones if they don’t know what they know and how much they should trust it.

Read about epistemological thinking and you’ll bump into Karl Popper, the pre-eminent philosopher of science. His key insight: Science never proves anything. Scientific research fails to disprove – to falsify. Fail to falsify an idea enough times and scientists start to have confidence in it.

Or, more accurately, they have more confidence in it than in any of the competing ideas floating around in the meme-o-sphere.

Which leads to the business response to COVID-19.

Most of the decisions your average business leader must make might be scientific in a metaphorical sense, but they’re rarely about scientific issues. Quantum electrodynamics, for example, has little impact on compensation policy.

COVID-19 changed that, calling for business decisions about a scientific issue. And so, decision-makers were advised to “follow the science” – advice I made myself and still endorse.

With this caveat: As pointed out in Michael Lewis’s excellent The Premonition: A Pandemic Story, when the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared there was no science to follow. Epidemiologists had few established facts about it – too few to formulate high-confidence policy recommendations. Even such fundamentals as the virus’s lethality and contagion had large error bars.

Nor did economists have a body of knowledge to guide how to go about putting the economy in an induced coma … necessary given the millions of lives that were at stake … and then, when the situation was safer, to resuscitate it.

To everyone’s credit, most leaders endorsed the idea of “following the science” in their decision-making. What became blurred, though, was that the science being followed wasn’t yet actual science. Our ability to forecast how the virus would behave in real-world populations hadn’t yet been tested by multiple Popperian falsification loops.

What we did have were seasoned, dedicated, brilliant researchers who extrapolated from their knowledge of coronaviruses, viral propagation, and economics to the situation at hand.

Recall that even the prosaic idea of taking maximum advantage of the tools and practices associated with employees working remotely was an extrapolation from far too little data to accurately predict where it would lead.

“Follow the science,” that is, didn’t, and couldn’t, mean what the plain words signaled. It meant that, given the choice, we should take the current scientific consensus about the virus as the best alternative available – in the phrase made famous in Argo we followed, for the most part, the best bad plan we had.

Bob’s last words: In the early 1990s, Al Gore sponsored the legislation that, combined with Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of HTML, led to the modern internet.

Imagine what today’s world would be like had he not provided this leadership. And yet, as his reward, he was widely ridiculed for a claim he never made … that he’d “invented the Internet.”

Culminating on January 2, 2000, an army of dedicated and hard-working technologists successfully prevented world economic collapse through their response to the Y2K problem. Instead of throwing a parade for the IT professionals who had just saved the world, the world griped ignorantly about the so-called Y2K hoax.

And so, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the level of appreciation we as a society have been expressing for the dedication and hard work aimed at deflecting the worst of the pandemic is somewhat lacking in enthusiasm.

Which gets us to takeaways in the leadership and management principles we apply every day to do the work of the businesses we support:

There will come a time when you have to formulate a response to a difficult, complicated, and high-impact challenge. It won’t be the kind of challenge that comes with a well-defined, packaged solution you can follow with confidence.

The best you’ll be able to do is to pull your best experts together to figure it out, knowing they won’t achieve perfection.

Please – when this happens, apply the lessons of recent world history. Thank the team for the successes they do achieve; don’t grouse about what they missed. They did their best … and, very possibly, did the best possible. That they failed to predict the future with precision won’t have been a failing.

It’s the nature of the future.

On CIO.com’s CIO Survival Guide: “The successful CIO’s trick to mastering politics,” about the basic principle that relationships outlive transactions, and what happens when a CIO fails to embrace this fact of organizational dynamics.

I just read another CIO top-10 priorities list. As is often the case, it struck me as being right on the money.

So long, that is, as the money it’s right on is in Martian dollars.

No, I’m not going to give you the link. Today’s offender isn’t a standout. Do some Googling to find your own missing-the-point list.

I say this because right now, as of this writing, CIOs have three and only three priorities (updated from The CIO’s missing priority | CIO ):

(1) Preventing ransomware attacks; (2) figuring out how to lead and manage IT’s workforce given today’s staffing challenges; and (3) helping the business executive leadership team focus on how IT can and should be used to create competitive advantage, or, failing that, to mitigate competitive disadvantage … without increasing the risk of a ransomware attack.

We’ve already covered ransomware attack prevention to the extent my sources and I are able – see “Ransomware: Don’t just accept the risk” (KJR,10/18/2021).

Helping your execs stay focused on competitive advantage? You’ll find ideas for that here: “The CIO’s missing priority” (CIO.com, 4/7/2022) and I don’t have much to add on that subject either at the moment.

That leaves staffing. This used to be about finding, recruiting, hiring, and promoting the best talent you could find. It’s no longer that straightforward. The logic dictating how CIOs need to plan has become more convoluted as well. IT hiring managers have these ingredients to deal with (at least):

Employer/employee relationship: Do you want employees to feel like they’re part of something, or will a transactional perspective, where each employee’s role is to move work from their inbox to their outbox, suffice?

Inter-employee relationships: While this decision might seem to be joined at the hip to how you define the employer/employee relationship, it isn’t: Even if you decide the employer/employee relationship will be transactional, that doesn’t mean employees will interact with each other solely on a transactional basis.

In fact, employees might find it impossible to limit their relationships to a transactional perspective. It’s unlikely you’ll be able to manage the organization you’re responsible for by parsing responsibilities to such an atomic level that employee can work independently. Like it or not, situations will arise in which employees will find themselves relying on each other to get their work done.

Siting: Remote vs Onsite vs Hybrid workforce: Back in the good old days of COVID-driven improvisation on this subject, the workforce siting decision was independent of the employer/employee and employee/employee relationship models.

To the extent their responsibilities allowed it, employees worked remotely. But as COVID declined and the situation evolved, the siting decision became a consequence: The desired relationship models became the driving logic underpinning the siting model. According to this view, if the goal is non-transactional relationships, you need an on-site workforce, or at least a hybrid one.

Power sharing: Employers are accustomed to having more power over employees than employees have had over them – even more so for job-seekers. That imbalance has, over the past few years, eroded. Management (that is, you) is no longer in a position to decide what is optimal for the business and inform employees of how it’s going to work.

You’re going to have to negotiate your staffing preferences with employees who’s view of “optimal” is predicated on their very different perspectives.

All of which leaves you with the current, messy situation, where employees mostly want to work remotely because it’s more convenient, while employers mostly want employees on site at least part of the time so as to encourage the formation and maintenance of trust-based relationships, both between employees and their managers and employees with each other.

What’s making your situation even trickier is that it isn’t even clear who you’re supposed to negotiate with. You certainly can’t negotiate siting and relationship models with employees one at a time. But in the absence of unions, no defined entity has the authority to speak for all employees.

Which leaves it up to you to help employees choose credible representatives to figure it out with you.

Bob’s last word: Because employees will have to depend on each other no matter how everything else comes out, everyone will have to figure out how to use collaboration tools to maximum advantage no matter how siting and the employer/employee relationship comes out.

Making that real has been an IT priority for the past several years already. In this respect, count on the future being just like the recent past only more so.

Bob’s sales pitch: Aw, c’mon. You know what I do for a living and what I can do for you.

Now on CIO.com: “Bad metrics are worse than no metrics.” It’s about being smart without embracing SMART.