The Placebo Effect

Last year there was an article in Wired Magazine and  NPR news talking about how drug companies are really struggling to get new products released because the drugs cannot be shown to be any more effective than sugar pills in clinical trials. The noteworthy thing here is the new drugs are not necessarily ineffective, its just that sugar pills seem to be working just as well.

If a patient believes or has an reasonable expectation that they are getting treatment, then in a lot of cases they do get better even though there is no medication involved. This is so common it has a name “the placebo effect”. However the scale on which it is occurring now seems to be at a historical high.  You could infer then that the more convinced people are about the power of modern medicine the higher the incidence of the effect.

Medicine by Leonid Mamchenkov, on Flickr

The whole situation indicates that medicine is not really as advanced as we think and there is some psycho-biological effects that still need to be understood. It also may explain why alternative medicine is still very popular despite the lack of recognised science behind it. You can probably get positive results as long as the patient buys into the whole thing.

Of course your are wondering why I am mentioning all this here and what relevance it has to with getting things done in large organisations?  Well I know a work place version of the placebo effect and they are called “consultants”.

I believe that consultants trade to a large degree on the clients belief that an external group can come in and make things better because the have some sort of special abilities that the client does not have. Even if they don’t have special abilities, as long as the client believes it then positive change can happen. Its very much like alternative medicine in that regard I guess.

Here is a more interesting connection: Lenore Jacobson was a school principal who partnered with a psychologist called  Robert Rosenthal to study the the effect of teachers’ expectations on students in the 60s. They found that if teachers were told that certain children were more advanced than the rest of the class then these kids tended to perform better regardless if this was true or not. ie. If you treat people as high performers then they behave as high performers. Strictly speaking this is known as the Pygmalion effect not the Placebo effect but they are very similar.

In the work place it would be like a manager extracting great performance out of a team purely on the basis that she/he treats them like high performers. I can totally see how this would work. If someone had the genuine expectation of being a star it frees them up from having to prove it and allows them to focus completely on doing great work.

Unfortunately, this strategy seems to most often take the form of a leaders setting unrealistic goals for their teams not in the sense that “you are a great team you can achieve this” but more as “a great team could achieve this, show me what kind of team you are” of course this doesn’t work.

Just like a patient getting better on the strength of belief and expectation, knowledge workers can work better based on the same ingredients.