ESSENTIALS MANAGEMENT Setting up your team the way you would set up a machine can give you a ton of leverage — as long as you realize how complicated and unpredictable the people in that machine can be. This is where quantum mechanics (and my term ‘quantum leadership’) comes into play. As a discipline, it makes the unpredictable understandable. Similarly, by applying these quantum principles to management, you can ifnd solutions to your team’s seemingly unsolvable problems. MANAGING FOR UNIMAGINABLE OUTCOMES There’s a fundamental principle of quantum physics called ‘superposition’ that asserts: if the state of an object is unknown and unchecked, the object exists in all possible states simultaneously. The Nobel prize-winning physicist Erwin Schrödinger proposed a theoretical experiment in which a cat, a vial of hydrocyanic acid, and a small amount of a radioactive substance are placed together inside of a box. If a single atom of the substance decays during the test period, it causes the hammer to break the vial and kill the cat. As long as the box remains unopened, however, the experimenter won’t know whether or not the sequence has been triggered. Thus, according to the principle of superposition, the cat exists as both dead and alive simultaneously until a measurement is taken — that is, until someone looks in the box. Now, as someone who found it diiffcult to lfip the cognitive switch from science to management, I understand that trying to map the implications of Schrödinger’s theoretical experiment to the everyday challenges of running an engineering team might feel slippery at best, but bear with me. If observation does in fact affect outcome, and engineers and their completed projects can exhibit the property of superposition, then the dependent variable in my amateur managerial experiment is the state of success or failure of those projects, and the independent variable is the presence or absence of my (or the manager’s) observation. Every team’s project is a cat, and every manager has to constantly decide whether to look in the box at the risk of killing it. 8