2 Solving the Problem of Folk Wisdom

If you have spent decades reading books on management, you will know there are a lot of helpful ideas—but also that it’s an overwhelming mess. It’s overwhelming because there are so many ideas, models, and frameworks. It’s a mess because they don’t fit together coherently. People keep coming up with new ideas, models, and frameworks but frankly, they just add to the already unmanageable pile.

AI can already help managers better use the heap of folk wisdom. A manager could input a description of a team situation and ask, “Look at twenty of the best ideas or frameworks related to teams, then synthesize the insights most relevant to my situation.”

Our pile of folk wisdom may be an incoherent mess, but an AI can quickly make sense of that mess. Even if there is no progress in the science of management, progress in our ability to make use of what we have would be a big step forward.

Managers should already be using this capability; it’s a game changer in getting practical value from the last 100 years of management thinking.

Advice for Scientists

For anyone creating the kind of framework that I’ve been calling folk wisdom (e.g., “there are five types of leaders”), I’d say give it up. It’s not that your work is any less valuable than earlier frameworks; it’s just that we already have an unmanageable pile of folk wisdom and we don’t need any more. We might say the same about those writing pop songs about falling in love, but songwriters are not my target audience, so I’ll leave them alone.

I won’t argue with researchers who say what they are doing is completely different from folk wisdom because they are following the scientific method. And yes, in the book I do share my admiration for the “sweet spot” research of Mirvis, Worley, and Mohrman. However, surely management academics are well aware that what they have achieved individually and collectively is underwhelming. So, I share the advice I gave creators of folk wisdom: give it up.

What would be useful is examining how we can probe large language models (or whatever the latest AI tool is) to help managers sift through the pile of existing frameworks. If you prefer a more rigorous resource than folk wisdom, then perhaps examine how managers could sift through the academic research in a way that would be genuinely helpful to the highly specific problems they face.

In other words, we don’t need new management knowledge of the form we have been collecting over the past decades; we need to find ways to use modern tools to search through existing knowledge and match it to a specific problem.

Advice for Engineers & Practitioners

I have enjoyed my journey through hundreds of management books, but I wouldn’t recommend that path to practitioners today. You are far better off querying the large language models for advice than trying to absorb and remember all that folk wisdom. Enter as much detail as is practical about your situation and get help from the LLM.

You can experiment with prompts or ask an LLM to suggest prompts. Here are the prompts ChatGPT4o suggested:

1) Surface the Landscape:
What leadership, team dynamics, and change management frameworks might help us understand or respond to this scenario? Include classic and modern theories, and explain briefly how each might apply.

2) Apply Models to the Scene
Apply 3–5 of the frameworks identified to the scenario. For each, highlight what it reveals about the dynamics or what it suggests doing differently.

3) Compare and Contrast
Compare and contrast these frameworks. Where do they agree on what’s needed? Where do they offer conflicting prescriptions or emphasize different levers for change?

4) Identify Gaps or Blind Spots
Do these frameworks overlook any key factors in the scenario, such as informal power dynamics, cultural assumptions, or emotional tone? What might we add from other domains (e.g., behavioral economics, narrative theory, systems thinking)?

5) Select and Synthesize
Based on the comparison, what 2–3 frameworks or ideas seem most actionable in this context, and how might they be combined to guide the next steps?

6) BONUS: “If You Were Teaching This…
You’re designing a short workshop for frontline managers based on this scenario. Which 2 models would you teach, and why? What would your key takeaway messages be?

And there you have it. No shelves full of books you’ll never re-read. No important frameworks you learned but forgot to apply. Instant expertise attained.

…more to come…