Member-only story
Fair Process — A Primer
INSEAD is big on “Fair Process”, a leadership mental model formulated by the creators of Blue Ocean Strategy W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, and I am in that camp. Here’s a primer on what Fair Process is.
Summarized in Kim and Mauborgne’s 2003 Harvard Business Review article, Fair Process is based on learnings from behavioral economics, decision science and psychology of justice.
(All quotes in this post are from the 2003 HBR article.)
Distributive Justice (Taylorism) vs Procedural Justice (Fair Process)
The article circles on a false assumption stemming from good’ol Taylorism, the factory model of organizations:
[In traditional economics,] “economists assume that people are maximizers of utility, driven mainly by rational calculations of their own self-interest. That is, economists assume people focus solely on outcomes. That assumption has migrated into much of management theory and practice.”
“Traditional management science … operate in the realm of outcome fairness or what social scientists call distributive justice, where the psychology works like this: When…
