Here we have two sets of dice: the top three white with black dots, and the bottom three black with silver dots. So, what are the odds of rolling a 6 with one of these sets of three dice? With six sides on a die, a 6 on one side, and 3 dice; the odds of rolling one, two, or three 6’s would be 91 out of 216 rolls or 42%. However, the black dice are loaded for 6’s, so that the odds of rolling a 6 with the black dice exceed 42%. It’s a story that comes loaded with a 2022 Nobel Prize and men who died too early to receive the Prize.

John Bell in 1964 wrote a paper that proposed a way to prove whether quantum entanglement was real. Basically, it said that if the odds of 6’s exceeded 42%, then the 6’s would be entangled (the dice loaded). He most likely would have won the 1990 Nobel Prize for his paper, had he not died that year of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 62. The question of entanglement had been a matter of conjecture for 30 years, ever since 1935 when Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr took opposite sides in separate papers with identical titles. Albert argued in his May paper that quantum entanglement didn’t hold and Niels argued in his October paper that it did. Twelve years later in a letter to Max Born, Einstein referred to the entanglement as “spooky action at a distance” (spukhafte Fernwirkung) wherein (as he, Podolsky, and Rosen had shown in their 1935 paper) two particles would instantaneously interact over distance. It was the reason Einstein called quantum science incomplete (as it is and physics is in being a science). In other words, Albert, of all people, criticized quantum science for being a science.

In 1972 John Clauser and Stuart Freedman performed an experiment based on Bell’s 1964 paper that, to most everyone’s surprise, showed that the dice were indeed loaded. That finding proved Bohr right and Einstein wrong. (However neither of them knew, since Einstein had died 17 years earlier at age 76 and Bohr had died 10 years earlier at age 77.) Then in 1982 Alain Aspect closed the so-called locality loophole in the Freedman-Clauser design. Alain called John Bell to tell him, to which John responded with a warning “Do you have tenure?” Luckily, unlike John Clauser who couldn’t get an academic position after his surprising 1972 experiment, Alain did have tenure. Next, Anton Zeilinger removed the remaining loopholes in Alain Aspect’s design. Having lived long enough, Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger shared the 2022 Nobel Prize for their experimental verification of quantum entanglement. Sadly, Stuart Freedman did not share in the Prize, having died unexpectedly at a science conference in Santa Fe, NM 10 years before at age 68.

As Dr. Blue’s book Tool Making to Making Time explains, quantum entanglement holds in organizations. In enterprise, the dice come fully loaded. However at a subconscious level, the loading favors entropy (the loss of order) which promotes the instinctive disassembly of organizations. Sigmund Freud called it a death drive that Joanne Faulkner found in organizations “takes specific pleasure precisely in what is most painful.”.

 Yet with an intervention by an experienced social-analyst, employee groups beat the odds in superposition to their benefit and to the benefit of their employers.