Master the Math of Predicting Human Behavior

If you want to under­stand – and man­age – peo­ple well, you need to become a mathematician.

“The book of nature is writ­ten in the lan­guage of math­e­mat­ics.” - Galileo

Recent­ly, I was sit­ting with a young guy in his late 20s who had just received a big pro­mo­tion to run an aggre­gate plant in north­ern Eng­land. He was excit­ed! Although he’d worked there for 12 years, and had man­aged a cou­ple of peo­ple, he knew run­ning a full facil­i­ty would be much hard­er. He asked for my advice.

I shared with him that most peo­ple are like a math prob­lem you need to solve – that there are a few basic prin­ci­ples he could learn to mas­ter, over time, to man­age and get the best from peo­ple. It’s quite straight for­ward, like vari­ables in a math for­mu­la. Once you learn enough about those vari­ables — what peo­ple need, their moti­va­tions, and the envi­ron­ment they are in — you can gen­er­al­ly under­stand and begin get­ting bet­ter at pre­dict­ing human behavior.

Love Lan­guages and Learning

This young man hap­pened to be on his hon­ey­moon, so I talked to him about the con­cept of ​‘love lan­guages’ — the idea that dif­fer­ent peo­ple feel appre­ci­at­ed in very dif­fer­ent ways. His chal­lenge was to under­stand which unique ​“lan­guage” res­onates most with each per­son on his team.

He need­ed to learn — to read 10, 12, 15 books — about busi­ness, man­age­ment, soci­ol­o­gy and psy­chol­o­gy. If you con­tin­ue to learn about peo­ple and try to under­stand human behav­ior, you’re able to more eas­i­ly rec­og­nize what’s at play and what can work.

At the end of the day, it’s just math.

The Chal­lenge

1. What vari­ables of human behav­ior do you need to learn more about?
2. How close are you to tru­ly grasp­ing the key issues that will help you under­stand the peo­ple you work with?