Absolute nonsense! Despite it’s currency in both business-speak and common use, this is a useless phrase, and quite a useless concept. Pretty much any time I hear this said, I end up in a mind-maze something like this:
Let’s think about swans for a moment. If you lived in London in the 1600s (or before), you are likely to have seen a swan or two. They would be easily described – something like ‘large, graceful waterfowl with a long curved neck, broad wings.’ You might also note a swan in London is likely owned by the Crown. And, you might note that all swans are white. Based on your experience, and that of anyone you knew, this was a truism. All swans are white.
Until 1697. In January of that year, a Dutch explorer sailed into a river on Australia’s West Coast to an amazing sight: the river was full of black swans. Not one or two, but thousands of them. They weren’t make-believe or mystical animals. They were black swans.
What does this discovery do to our rule that all swans are white? A black swan is clearly an exception. Further, it clearly doesn’t ‘prove the rule’ that all swans are white. Indeed, it refutes it. It disproves the idea that all swans are white.
The phrase ‘The exception Proves the Rule’ sounds right – clever even – solely because we’ve heard it said over and over growing up. It has been accepted as fact that we don’t stop to think about it. But taken at face value, it makes no logical sense at all. We really should stop using it.
The phrase is commonly used to explain away data that don’t support the model being held up as truth. This works well when you rely on a model that is generally useful and accurate, but doesn’t explain every outcome or observation. Rather than examine those outlying data or review the model, we dismiss the inconsistency with a cliche.
You are looking to buy a business. The owner tells you that ‘Our customers are incredibly loyal.’ Your due diligence showed they lost their biggest customer this year. You point that out. Their response: ‘And that’s the exception that proves the rule.’ Not very reassuring, is it?
I before E, Except After C
Except when your weird foreign neighbour Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.
These little sayings are meant to make our lives easier by reducing our need to think. This only works if the aphorisms are true, and can stand up to scrutiny. But when you have a rule, like the one above, with more exceptions than examples, it isn’t much of a rule. Indeed, any exceptions invalidate the rule.
Popper and Kuhn, and the Philosophy of Science
Which leads me here, as a bit of a waypoint. Austrian-born British philosopher Sir Karl Popper (1902 – 1994) gave us the principle of falsification. As Popper saw it, you can never prove a scientific theory – but a single, valid, demonstration of an exception can prove the theory false. In other words, ‘An Exception Disproves the Rule.’
In dealing with social systems – i.e., those involving people – we often see theories and rules get developed as part of the sensemaking process as we learn more and more about those systems. One stark example of this is the attempt to invoke the notion that the study of social systems is a scientific discipline, as in ‘Marketing is a Science’ or ‘HR is a Science.’ My first encounter with this was when taking a post-grad paper, and we were each tasked with developing a paper arguing for or against ‘Is IT in Business a Science?’ We were expected to rely heavily on Thomas Kuhn’s (1922 – 1996) ideas in our argument. This was in 2001, and I had never heard of him. Kuhn was an American philosopher, best known for his 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this book, Kuhn introduced the concept of a paradigm, which is a framework or model that explains the extant knowledge about a scientific topic, made up of one or more consistent theories.
Popper viewed science as advancing through the continual testing and attempted falsification of theories. Kuhn argued that scientific progress is not simply a steady accumulation of facts, but rather proceeds through periods of normal science interrupted by paradigm shifts, where the existing dominant paradigm is replaced by a fundamentally different one. This is not a deterministic process; there is nothing that requires the current dominant paradigm to be replaced. This isn’t saying ‘we believe this now, but in 20 years, we’ll believe something else.’ Some of these scientific paradigms stand the test of time. Many see fine tweaks to incorporate new data. The new data don’t disprove the paradigm (and nothing can prove it), and can be explained in some kind of tweak or add-on to the base theory. But at times, these anomalies accumulate, some bright spark comes up with a better model that explains everything, and a new paradigm emerges. With enough support, this new paradigm may become the new dominant paradigm. In the Kuhnian world, An exception requires an explanation consistent with the dominant paradigm, or the proposal of an alternative paradigm. Not as catchy, is it?
Both Popper’s and Kuhn’s ideas are useful when studying social systems – even without answer whether the study of these systems is science. The study of these disciplines can be scientific without elevating them to some debatable status as a science. We can have theories being developed and studied, paradigms and ‘normal science’ going on to explain things, even if only in a tentative and general way. But these haven’t led to universal Laws (as seen in Physics). Indeed, in human systems, there will always be exceptions to any theory. Some actors (the term used to denote the individuals in the system) are bloody minded, and can rationalise any action they take, even if inconsistent with accepted theory (i.e., the dominant paradigm). Other exceptions can be valid outcomes because they were not considered in advance when the model (rules) were set. Or they are true outliers that require explanation. There tend to be a lot of these. When you have too many exceptions to a rule, it’s probably not a very good rule.
In a World of Exceptions
Business sits in the space of human systems. There are no true universal rules, no models or paradigms without exceptions. From a scientific point-of-view, there are no absolutes in these fields.
As a result, I don’t deal in absolutes. I don’t think in absolutes. I don’t use the language of absolutes. Everything is contingency-based. Contingency is the science-adjacent space where we find the business disciplines. A space where we have ‘some,’ ‘most,’ ‘likely,’ and ‘almost always.’ I am often pulled up for my writing style that doesn’t deal in absolutes as if this somehow weakens my argument. I don’t believe it does. It makes it less precise, but more correct.
But there are the occasional exception.