← Social Renewal: The Story of the Quakers and the First Industrial Revolution The Ecology of Digital Transformation: Sense-Making in Silicon Valley →

The Ecology of Organizing: A Management Course for the 21st Century

Posted on May 17, 2022 by David

For the past six years or so I have been teaching what I call the “ecology of organizing” on masters-level programs at both McGill University in Montreal and the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Ontario. Here is my latest curriculum outline:

This course is a non-traditional one, based on systemic thinking, complexity theory, and a dual-process approach to understanding (embodied) human cognition. The analogies are organic and ecological and the primary polarities are between the logico-scientific and narrative approaches to understanding the process of organizing in complex social systems. Science takes things apart to see how they work, narrative puts things together to see what they mean. The philosophical underpinnings are pragmatic (is it helpful?) rather than positivist (is it true?). As such, the course is often critical of conventional management thinking and constantly questions the nature of the evidence on which managers base (or at least justify) their decisions. It becomes clear that management is not just a technical practice, preoccupied with meeting corporate goals, but also a moral practice concerned with assessing the worthiness of those goals, both for the enterprise and for society. The result is an anticipatory, sense-making framework that allows you to approach organizations as if they were created by people with bodies and intentions, situated in time and space, culture and society, searching for identity and meaning and struggling for credibility and authority. In short, history matters and context matters.

The overall objective is to develop the participants’ capacity to make meaning from their experiences.

Upon completion of this course, participants will be able to:

Use multiple perspectives (lenses) to appreciate complex adaptive socio-technical systems and the complex (wicked) problems that can emerge from them.
Recognize systems dynamics across multiple levels: the organization, its contexts (industries, markets) and its components (technology, products, teams and individuals).
Come away with an ecological framework that allows them to discern the situation in any organization and sort out what kinds of people with what habits and experiences might be able to contribute and what tools and techniques might be helpful.
Grapple with the generative tensions between exploitation and exploration, technical problems and adaptive challenges, management and leadership, detachment and immersion, the individual and the group, conflict and cooperation, continuity and change, plumbing and poetry…. and what it takes to navigate among them.
Understand the difference between experience-based Naturalistic Decision Making (Recognition-Primed Decision-making) and the Rational Choice (Heuristics and Biases) model. The former, in combination with a sense-making framework, gives one a bearing on where the enterprise is in time, space and scale. This helps form expectations and sensitize one to relevant cues, while suggesting plausible goals and possible actions.
View organizations as nests of dynamic cooperative activities that have evolved to handle uncertainty, not as command-and-control machines. From this perspective, strategy, leadership and organizing are all emergent entrepreneurial activities, embracing awareness, insight, discovery, judgement, persuasion, practice and learning.