Economists and their social-science brethren often talk about “stated preference” versus “revealed preference.” It’s a useful concept, and it goes like this: stated preference is what people say that they want (or want to do), and revealed preference is what they actually do, especially when they don’t think that anyone is keeping track.

This was noticed many years ago in the radio and TV ratings business. When people were asked to keep diary entries about what stations they had on at what times, worthy fare like classical music and documentaries scored higher than they did when later technology tracked such things remotely. Political polling can show the same effects, with respondees being a bit unwilling to admit to preferences that they know are generally unpopular. It shows up all the time in marketing data — for example, if you go out and ask people if they’re interested in green eco-friendly products, everyone says, “Why, yes, certainly!” No one wants to seem like the sort of person who isn’t. But the products themselves don’t necessarily sell as well on the shelves as the surveys predicted, and if they’re a few cents more than the competition, sometimes they don’t sell very much at all. A stated preference for the Lite-n-Healthy tofu burger sometimes turns into a revealed preference for the fried chicken wing special at lunchtime.

This goes as well, naturally, for what people and organizations say about their values, goals, and plans. As with politicians, you want to tune out what their lips and saying and watch what their hands are doing instead. Let’s take one of the most common statements that R&D-driven companies make, the one about how they’re looking for fearless innovators, rule-breakers who do great things. You’ve heard that one. Is it true?

In far too many research organizations, it clearly isn’t. Look around you. Take inventory of the people who get promoted, and ask yourself how many of them got there through fearless innovation, and how many got there by, well, let’s just call them “various other means.” Is rocking the boat the way to the top? In many large companies, the very disruptive agents of change that they’re officially looking for are treated with indifference or outright hostility.

There are several reasons for this. When pressed, managers might say that well, sure, they’re looking for innovators, but innovators who know how to get along with the system. Can you have it both ways, though? These innovative folks are not always “team players,” as the jargon has it, and they get marked down for it. Another big problem is that real discoveries, despite the best efforts of consultants everywhere, do not come on any sort of schedule. The sorts of people who produce them tend to look, for extended stretches, as if they’re not getting very much useful stuff done at all. In a world of regular performance reviews, this style of work is at a clear disadvantage compared the steady-but-unremarkable one, which always leaves its practitioners with something to write down on the goals form. Way too often, having something to write down on the flipping form turns into a much more important goal than anything that’s officially listed in print.

Another quality of people who make big discoveries is persistence. And although companies officially say that they’re looking for this quality in their people, they often find that they’re not looking for quite as much of it as some people are capable of delivering. An interesting number of huge marketed drugs have come from small teams that kept working on their projects in the face of increasingly stern warnings to stop all that stuff immediately. (A word of caution is appropriate here. This isn’t to say that everyone who keeps burrowing away on a project is going to make a big success out of it, any more than all the people who don’t look like they’re producing anything are on the road to big discoveries. That’s the hard part; just because every big pharma success had some vice president trying to kill it somewhere along the way doesn’t mean that you can engineer big things by including that step in your standard flow chart, tempting though that might be).

Mark Twain certainly knew about stated preferences and how they were revealed. In his Letter to the Earth, he has an angel writing to one Abner Scofield, coal dealer, with an inventory of his recent requests received in Heaven. He notes the pious prayers that Abner had been making in public, and points out that every single one of them was in conflict with what he called “secret supplications of the heart.” Those, he pointed out, always took priority whenever possible, although he regretted that his fellow angels would be unable to deport Scofield’s long private list of irritating people directly to Hades for him, as per repeated heartfelt request.

What are a large drug company’s secret supplications of the heart? My guess is that they go something like this:

Please let our earnings grow. But not too much. A tiny bit over what those Wall Street people think, that would be perfect. If we have some big upwards spike, they’ll expect us to do it all the time, and there’s no way that we know how to do that. Besides, then we’d have to think of something intelligent-looking to do with the extra money, and that’s really a pain — ask those people at Apple. So let our researchers discover some new drugs. But not all at once. Spread them out on a reasonable schedule so we can keep the Street happy and so the shareholders won’t get ideas. And keep those discoveries in the range of what we can deal with around here. If they’re not like what we’ve handled before, we might mess them up, and nobody wants to be on the hook for that.

That’s the root of the problem. It’s not only that big discoveries come along unpredictably, and through behaviors that aren’t always valued. It’s that when they do manage to happen, they can be downright terrifying. Although working on something like that can be exhilarating, if you have that sort of personality, it’s also quite scary, because you find yourself at an altitude that’s higher than you’ve ever been willing to fall from. Video games and movies try to simulate that feeling for people, but its real-life form can be more than anyone’s ready for.

So when a company openly calls for bold new discoveries, for the lightning to come down and the ground to open up beneath them, you might want to adjust the rhetoric to scale. Has the company ever had anything like that happen to it before? Has anyone in management ever had to deal with a really disruptive change? Would they recognize one if it reared up and roared in front of them, or would people flee back into the upper-floor suites and frantically call up the consulting firms to come take this thing away? You should, as they say, be careful what you ask for. If you can, you should probably be careful about what you need.