This was, perhaps, one of the most important lessons of my entire medical career.
Half of every lecture, every piece of scientific evidence, every research paper, whether peer-reviewed or not; half of all the ‘facts’ I was being told about the pathogenesis of disease and how to reduce human suffering was, essentially, fake news.
What’s a medical student to do with such an intellectual earthquake?
Once the dust settled, I realised the point was to learn to think for myself.
Later in my medical career I spent some time designing and running phase 1, 2, and 3 clinical trial research to assess whether any new treatment worked. It didn’t matter whether the treatment was a new drug for intensive care, or homeopathy (I’ve done both). I had to get to the truth. Does it work, and if so why and how does it work.
Don’t just assume that what you’ve been told is true. Do your homework. Do your due diligence. Dig deep into the research; understand the solidity of the information on which the theories you’re studying are based. Try and separate the myth from the manifest, the con from the confirmed, the fact from the fiction.
Since I left scientific medicine, over 30 years ago, to try and reduce human suffering by working with global leaders of big corporations, this insight has stuck with me.
Think for yourself.
Question the validity of the stories you hear. If they are correct, you and they will benefit from challenging them.
With that in mind I want to shed some light on seven of the greatest management myths that most leaders share. These myths are passed around, on leadership programmes, as though they were unquestionable truths. In fact, they are misunderstandings, misinterpretations, misrepresentation and misappropriations. They’ve become fabricated folklore. In truth, they are fact-free fables.
Ill-informed leadership teachers, medical journalists, popularisers and influencers have created a perpetual pipeline of puffery that takes an interesting idea, or research finding, and transforms it into a "universal business truth". This pipeline is short, fast, and almost entirely unpoliced. Caveats get dropped, context gets stripped away, and a modest, qualified observation becomes legitimised into something that it isn’t. Such non-sense then ends up in MBA curricula, leadership competency frameworks, and most damagingly, becomes a way real organisations treat real people.
Let's start gently, because this one has a relatively simple explanation. A talented journalist totally misinterpreted a research study.
In 1993, psychologist Anders Ericsson published research on violin students at a Berlin music academy. The most accomplished violinists had averaged 10,000 hours of practice by age twenty. Malcolm Gladwell read this, stripped out every qualification, and declared in his 2008 bestselling book ‘Outliers’ that 10,000 hours is the universal "magic number for true expertise" in any field.
Ericsson was furious. The 10,000 figure was an average, and half the elite violinists hadn't even reached it. More importantly, Gladwell completely ignored the central point of the research: it wasn't the hours that mattered, it was quality of their practice that mattered. The best violinists were challenged by brilliant teachers who guided them through expertly designed programmes laden with feedback that pushed them way beyond their comfort zone. Simply doing something for 10,000 hours doesn’t make you world class. It just makes you experienced.
The 10,000-hour rule is wrong. Its originator said so, in writing, repeatedly. But it’s still cited in boardrooms daily.
This myth has done genuine harm to children. It’s also impaired many students or professionals who’ve sat through VAK-based training and been told they are a "visual," "auditory," or "kinaesthetic" learner.
Around 89% of educators believe in “learning styles”. The problem is that cognitive scientists describe it as the most thoroughly debunked neuromyth in their field. A 2008 review by Pashler and colleagues in Psychological Science, examined the entire body of literature and concluded that there’s no evidence to justify it. Several well-designed studies found results that flatly contradict it.
People do have study preferences, but they don’t learn any better even when they follow their own preferences. The science was weak from the beginning, and the industry that grew up around VAK training is based on, well, nothing.
Abraham Maslow never drew or even described a pyramid. And he never mentioned one in his 1943 paper, or in anything he wrote subsequently.
The pyramid was created in 1960 by a consulting psychologist named Charles McDermid, who simplified Maslow's ideas for a business audience in a journal called ‘Business Horizons’. The most recognised diagram in management education was invented by someone else, 17 years after the original paper.
If that wasn’t bad enough the theory itself wasn’t based on any research. Maslow identified a small number of historical figures and a few people he admired and then concluded they were all "self-actualised". No sampling. No controls. No data. Just one man's opinions about people dressed up in the language of a motivational hierarchy.
It remains one of the first models taught to management students everywhere.
The MBTI has been used by 80% of Fortune 500 companies and 90% of Fortune 100 companies. Over two million people complete the questionnaire each year even though the test, created by a mother and daughter, was based on their lay interpretation of Carl Jung’s 1921 theory, and was never subjected to any rigorous academic testing.
The main problem is that the MBTI has extremely poor test-retest reliability. Some researchers suggest that nearly 75% of test-takers will receive a different result every time they take the test. More than anything the MBTI doesn’t predict job performance, career success, or personal satisfaction.
And here is the detail that should stop every CPO in their tracks: the Myers and Briggs Foundation itself say it’s unethical to use the MBTI for hiring. But that’s precisely what many organisations do
Stephen Karpman's Drama Triangle with its three roles of “Victim”, “Persecutor” and “Rescuer” is now embedded in coaching practice, leadership development, and HR intervention programmes across the world. It is treated as clinical fact.
The original paper, published in 1968, was a five-page essay in a practitioner newsletter called the “Transactional Analysis Bulletin”. Its evidence base was an analysis of the role-dynamics in fairy tales, specifically, Little Red Riding Hood. Karpman was a junior psychiatrist at the time, doing postgraduate studies under Eric Berne. Berne liked the idea and encouraged him to publish it.
The first serious attempt to empirically validate whether the three roles even exist as distinct, measurable constructs wasn't published until 2020, fifty-two years later. By that point, the concept had already achieved near-universal status in therapeutic and coaching practice. The model may well have descriptive utility. But it was never science. It was a metaphor, and somewhere along the way it was misinterpreted as a piece of deep psychology.
This one deserves particular attention because it involves three successive distortions, each taking the concept way beyond Elisabeth Kubler-Ross original work.
Kubler-Ross studied terminally ill patients and described their experience of facing their own death. Her 1969 book ‘On Death and Dying’ was based on her personal qualitative but unstructured and unsystematic conversations with 200 patients. The stages she described “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance” were observations, not a model. She later said she regretted writing them in a way that had been so badly misunderstood.
Somehow the stages were applied to people grieving rather than patients facing their own death.
Then the stages became a fixed linear sequence, which she explicitly said they were not.
And then, worse of all in the 1980s, the five stages of grief became the Kubler-Ross Change Curve. This is now misappropriated widely and used in organisations to manage employee reactions to restructuring, technology implementations, and mergers.
A 2002 study by Bonanno tracking 205 individuals before and after spousal bereavement found that only 11% followed the grief trajectory the model assumes to be "normal." The change management industry has never really caught up with that finding.
Finally, there’s the Hawthorne Effect. This is, perhaps, the single most cited concept in management theory. It’s the idea that workers perform better simply because they are being observed. It has shaped everything from performance management philosophy to the design of research studies. It is foundational.
The original "research" study that gave its name to the effect, involved just six women assembling telephone relays in a room at the Hawthorne Works factory in Chicago between 1927 and 1932. The study was uncontrolled, methodologically poor, and drew no firm conclusions. The productivity improvements observed were almost certainly explained by other factors: not least the six women were acutely aware of their precarious employment during the Great Depression and wanted to keep their jobs.
But here is the detail that should genuinely trouble anyone who has cited this concept. In 2011, economists Steven Levitt and John List, of “Freakonomics” fame, uncovered the original data and found that the famous narrative that productivity improved was "entirely fictional."
The founding myth of one of management's most enduring concepts was totally made up.
The problem here is not stupidity. False ideas spread because they are often “new”, simple and sound right. The truth is expensive and often much more complicated.
And it’s not AI that’s spreading the lies. Bots spread truth and fakery equally. The dissemination of deceit is down to humans.
A lie spreads six times faster than the truth according to 2018 paper published in Science by researchers at MIT.
Falsehoods are 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.
The impact of this is not trivial. The damage is real. Millions of organisations waste an incredible amount of time and money building leadership programmes based on discredited myths. And there are many more we could have cited like the nonsense of “left brain-right brain” driving analytic or artistic capability; or software determining emotions based on facial expression. Every day at work leaders apply grief models to software rollouts; coaches label people as Victims and Persecutors based on an analysis of fairy tales.
Those responsible for training and development of leaders must invest time do some basic due diligence. They must be willing to think for themselves and avoid simply repeating or recycling outdated non-sense just because others are.
The insight of this article is not new news, but please don’t let that stop you sharing it.
Jonathan Swift wrote, in 1710, "falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it".
If we raise the bar, fall back in love with the truth, delight in due diligence and wonder deeply about what works, then we can genuinely develop the intelligence and uniquely human abilities of our workforce.
And, in a world where AI requires us to be more, learning to think for ourselves will create a much better future.