Perhaps you’ve heard Johnny Lee sing, “Looking for love in all the wrong places.” Aside from a couple being an excellent example of the quantum entanglement between two people (what one does evokes a polar response in the other, no matter how far apart) there’s places in the research into the organizational quantum condition that seem in the wrong places too. I found myself in that “wrong place” defending my dissertation.
The dean of the business school and eventually president of the university, as the outside reader, pointed out that I hadn’t used multiple versions of the questionnaire. In only using one, any socially appropriate responses and response-response bias remained in the data. Even though I had called attention to this in my dissertation, as the dean pointed out, potentially bias remained. I had no defense and thought it had cost me my degree, but somehow it didn’t.
Then recently towards the end of writing the book, Time for Change, I realized that I had instinctively been right all along. I had given out the questionnaire across the organizational extremes of diverse small businesses and municipal departments in order to cancel out extraneous variables, which left any bias found across organizations in the data. I realized how those two forms of bias constituted a significant part of the quantum entanglements across organizations.
Had I used multiple versions of the questionnaire, a significant portion of the quantum condition, found in these entanglements, would have cancelled out. As it was, that didn’t happen and the precision in the results showed it. For instance, the statistical uncertainty in the significance of authority and responsibility (and there’s always some) reflected Niels Bohr’s equation for the quantum condition.
The uncertainty of authority turned out to be equivalent to the proportional quantum jump from one management level to the next. The uncertainty of responsibility turned out to be equivalent to the proportional increase in the momentum at the next level. However, given inherent resistance to this topic, had I virtuously countered in my defense with bias being implicit in the quantum entanglements (unheard of at the time), it just might have cost me my degree.*
*Should you want a copy of my dissertation, titled “Social Adaptation at Work in Response to Recognition and Responsibility” covering the research methods and the statistical findings in great detail, it is available from Case Western Reserve University. In my humble opinion, It merits replication.