Making Sense of Management: Theory and Practice

Plato and Aristotle in detail from Raphael’s School of Athens (1511). Plato points upward toward universal truths and his Theory of Forms, while his student Aristotle indicates that true reality lies lower in the particulars of practice and experience

What’s the relationship between management theory and management practice? Today I published a 3,000-word essay on the topic on Medium. Here’s a brief introduction:

The relationship between theory and practice has vexed management academics and practitioners alike for decades. Traditionally the Anglo-American approach has been to address it as a knowledge transfer problem. This approach was helped by making no distinction between the natural and human sciences. The assumption was that reality was ‘out there’ to be studied objectively and that the goal of knowledge, via the scientific method, was to learn more and more about its true nature. This perspective assigns a superior position to formal-technical ‘scientific’ knowledge and sees practical knowledge as an inferior derivative of it. This was a triumph for Plato’s views over those of Aristotle. Plato had contended that the knowledge of forms or universals was sufficient to understand reality. Aristotle, on the other hand, had argued that, while knowledge of forms was necessary, it was not sufficient: one also needed experience with particulars. He said that this explained why experienced practitioners with little theoretical knowledge often performed better than those who knew a lot of theory but had little experience.

Ever since the Enlightenment Plato’s ideas have dominated Anglo-American management thought but in recent years Aristotle’s views have been making a comeback. Management theory and management practice are increasingly seen as different types of knowledge, with different philosophical assumptions about reality and how we apprehend it. Theory and practice may appear to be in opposition and even as substitutes for each other, but their relationship is best seen as complementary. This complementary relationship becomes clear if one takes a sensemaking perspective which is where my Medium article begins….

Restoring Humanity to Management: the Power of Context

My blog on this topic has just been published on the Drucker Forum here.

My biggest beef with mainstream Anglo-American management (‘Cartesian’ management, as I call it) is that it ignores context. It treats management as an amoral, technical practice, modelled on the natural sciences and often based on what John Dewey called the spectator theory of knowledge. This myth, that we are passive observers who can view the world objectively, lies at the root of our impoverished models of what it means to be human.

Cartesian management sanctions the stripping of apparently successful methodologies from the human contexts that made them successful and presenting them as abstract, context-free ‘principles’ that can be ‘applied’ by anybody in any situation. This disregards the importance of initial conditions and path-dependent nature of whatever happens in practice and perpetuates an illusion of rationality, predictability and control. Many academics and consultants like this approach, but it is anathema to effective managers.

Effective managers know that abstract principles cannot be applied to humans in the same way that they are in the natural sciences. If people are treated as objects – assets and resources – they respond badly. The best management frameworks are those that help managers make sense of the contexts that they are in. The frames direct their attentions and guide their conversations in their search for affordances, the action possibilities afforded by the particular situations in which they find themselves.

It is the ability of managers (a practical wisdom developed through experience) to find these affordances that makes or breaks their efforts. Context matters! This may be why many managers prefer to read history, biography and even fiction to management books. The former offer quasi-experiences that illustrate how other humans discovered action possibilities in the situations in which they found themselves.

Management academics and consultants persist with the Cartesian approach for at least two major reasons. Apart from allowing them to wrap themselves in the mantle of ‘science’, ignoring context broadens the markets and industries that they can address – one size fits all! The second advantage is that the Cartesian approach leaves the current power structure of the organization (and society) unchallenged. This allows a servants-of-power approach, especially in the business schools: “In other words, they say given your ends, whatever they may be, the study of administration will help you to achieve them. We offer you tools. Into the foundations of your choices we shall not inquire, for that would make us moralists rather than scientists.” Philip Selznick Leadership in Administration P 80.

Once again, this is anathema to effective managers trying to enable significant organizational change. They know that power structures that perpetuate the status quo and allow only incremental efficiency innovations are barriers to more radical experimentation. This does not imply a need for wholesale revolution, only continual renewal, as power is spread more widely and moves around the organization. This allows people to exercise responsibility and take action in the areas where they are best suited to do so.

Management cannot be treated as an amoral technical practice that deals only with means and leaves ends unaddressed. Rather, it is also a human inquiry, a moral practice that questions chosen ends and their good for both business and society. People are ends-in-themselves.

The Scientific and the Humanistic Modes of Inquiry

The core of the blog is the diagram, which captures some of my intellectual journey over the last forty years, as I tried to make sense of a major organizational transformation experience:

The contrast between the scientific and humanistic modes of inquiry has many precedents. Among my inspirations were the writings of psychologist Jerome Bruner, psychiatrist/philosopher Iain McGilchrist and many dual process theorists of cognition and emotion. Underpinning it all is the taijitu, the yin-yang symbol of complementary yet opposing forces that form a self-perpetuating cycle of the kinds found in complex ecosystems like forests and estuaries.

The “Cartesian Search for Truth” and the “Goethean Quest for Meaning” titles were inspired by the long debate on multiple topics between Anglo-American and Continental philosophers, particularly on the contrast between naturwissenschaft (natural sciences) and geisteswissenschaft (human sciences) (e.g. Dilthey).

The left column is effectively a summary of the current mainstream Anglo-American management canon. The right column is a ‘both…and’ addition to the left. Together they outline my conception of the next management canon. It is not a movement from one canon to a new one but a dynamic synthesis of the old and the new, the conservative and the radical. The dynamic has been described as a dance, but the ‘both…and’ nature of the humanistic perspective, means that it must always embrace and contain the ‘either/or’ scientific view.

In short, the Next Management Canon regards organizations as constantly emerging processes fashioned by humans: creatures of nature, with bodies and intentions, situated in time and space, culture and society, searching for identity and meaning and struggling for credibility and authority.

Life is the ultimate context.

Toggling Between Two Worlds: Making Sense of Organizational Change (abridged)

“And twofold always. May God us keep

From single vision and Newton’s sleep.”

William Blake

This is a summary of a longer article I have just posted on Medium to mark forty years since the publication of my first (and only) article in the Harvard Business Review. That article, Of Boxes, Bubbles and Effective Management, outlined the transformational experience our corporation had been through after it had been acquired in a wildly overleveraged buyout on the eve of a steep recession. We had gone insolvent almost overnight, but owed the bank so much money that it was their problem, not just ours.

I told the detailed story of what had happened, how we had muddled through, dealing with our challenges and what the implications of our eventual survival and success were for management. I approached this task by balancing a then-popular ‘hard’ management model with a ‘soft’ counterpart. This allowed a Taoist ‘yin-yang’ interpretation of our experience. For to me it seemed as if we had switched from a hard, ‘yang’ structure to a softer ‘yin’ process, although not in any unilateral, unconditional way. It had been like a figure-ground reversal with crisis as the catalyst. It was as if the conventional organizational hierarchy had been turned upside down:

The Taoist yin-yang symbol suggests that the ‘yang’ component never went away. Rather, it was held in abeyance for use only in situations that demanded it[1]. Whether you would need it or not all depended on the context.

My opening proposition in the article was, “Two models are better than one.” The bottom line after another four decades of experience, reading and research since then is that I don’t think that we can make much headway in management (or politics and the social sciences for that matter) unless we find a way to reconcile science with the humanities in a new synthesis. In the longer article I suggest that an ecological sensemaking framework shows the way ahead.

Why We Need Two Models

In The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus (1996)[2] John Micklethwait (former editor-in-chief of The Economist, now of Bloomberg News) and Adrian Wooldridge (Former Schumpeter columnist for The Economist, now Bagehot columnist) identified four defects in management theory:

1. That it was constitutionally incapable of self-criticism.
2. Its terminology confuses rather than educates.
3. It rarely rises above common sense.
4. It is faddish and bedeviled by contradictions.

After declaring management theory “guilty” on all charges in various degrees, they went on to identify the root cause of the problem as an “intellectual confusion at the heart of management theory; it has become not so much a coherent discipline as a battleground between two radically opposed philosophies. Management theorists usually belong to one of two rival schools. Each of which is inspired by a different philosophy of nature; and management practice has oscillated wildly between these two positions.” They went on to identify the two schools as scientific management on the one hand and humanistic management on the other, concluding that, “This, in essence, is the debate between “hard” and “soft” management.”

We Are the Battleground

It’s time to identify this “intellectual confusion” as a feature of both humans and organizations, not a ‘bug’. It’s time to recognize that our fundamentally divided nature is the essence of our humanity and that it is the practical weaving together of apparently irreconcilable opposites that is the very warp and woof of our existence. The roots of this split are in the need for living creatures to be able, in real time, both to focus on a task at hand and to remain aware of peripheral threats, to live simultaneously in two ‘worlds’[i]. These two tasks must be performed together, yet they demand different kinds of attention and different contexts (the one individual and the other collective). The result is an asymmetrical split-brain architecture that goes a long way down the tree of phylogeny. This suggests that it must have significant survival benefits.

This split, this fundamental duality, spirals through our existence as individuals, families, communities, organizations and societies and throughout our history as a species. It has grown in complexity as our languages, cultures and institutions have grown more complex. Like the twin arms of a double helix it also coils through philosophy in general and the history of management thought in particular. Here the dualities are familiar: exploitation and exploration, calculation and judgement, individual and team, performance and learning, detachment and immersion, mechanical and organic and so on and on.

That’s why we need two models in a Taoist yin-yang relationship to understand organizational change and make sense of our experience.

Reconciliation in Ecology

There will always be a tension between the scientific and the humanistic, but there need not be a battle. We can render the tension creative rather than destructive if we can frame it in a higher-level understanding of the dynamics of life in a real world.

This will mean challenging the assumptions of mainstream Anglo-American management about the nature of reality and what is means to be human. These aren’t ‘wrong’ but have been pushed too far and taken into areas where they don’t belong. They claim to be universal when everything is dependent on context. They appeal to our systemizing mind, while ignoring the empathizing one.[ii] The mainstream doesn’t care. This is where a dual-process theory of cognition and emotion helps with its both…and approach, rather than either/or. It can embrace and contain the mainstream and keep it in its proper place.

This is how we can connect management practice, which is always singular and unique, with theory, which describes the world in terms of rules, generalizations and universals. It is how to approach the debate between ‘relevance’ and ‘rigour’ that has plagued the management academics for so long.  It is to handle paradoxes and dilemmas like these that evolution has equipped us with bicameral minds, minds that can focus while still retaining peripheral awareness and ‘toggle’ rapidly between the two modes of perception. In management we can think of it is as instrumental search for truth (to earn a living) conducted within the quest for purpose (to live our lives).

Forty years ago I called the two worlds ‘boxes’ and ‘bubbles’. My recommendation to managers then was that “You have to find the bubble in the box and put the box in the bubble”. That is still good advice.

The table, “A Dual-Process, Ecological View of Management”, expands on this idea by showing some of the key management polarities in a different format: an individual, instrumental search for explanation (right side) conducted within a collective, existential quest for purpose (left side). The central barrier between the left and righthand columns is permeable with infinity loop/adaptive cycle connectors to emphasize the nature of the ‘dancing’ ecological balance between the two that plays out in space and time. At the organizational level the challenge for managers is to toggle between the two modes as the situation demands, keeping the enterprise in the adaptive space, the ‘Goldilocks Zone’, between the extremes.

The journey continues….

[1] People at Gore & Associates call this ‘hierarchy-on-demand’, when the formal hierarchy, instead of being permanent, becomes contingent on the situation.

[2] The Witch Doctors was updated by Adrian Wooldridge in Masters of Management (2011). The major conclusions were unchanged.

[i] McGilchrist, I., (2009), The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.

[ii] Baron-Cohen, S., (2009), “Autism: The Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) Theory” The Year in Cognitive Science, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1156: 68-80.

Making Sense of Time: Memory, Attention, Expectation

Words and Looks: Leadership Lessons from A Christmas Carol

A Christmas Carol First Edition

Charles Dickens’ classic, A Christmas Carol, was first published on December 19, 1843. So it’s close enough to roll this blog out again. Happy Holidays to all!

Management gurus have drawn lessons on leadership from diverse sources, ranging from the practices of Attila the Hun to the fictional events in Star Trek. Yet they seem to have missed one of the finest accounts of transformation and change familiar to us all. It is Charles Dickens’ best-loved story, A Christmas Carol. He said that he himself laughed and cried over it more than anything else he wrote, and it can still have that effect on us today. For there is a little bit (perhaps more than a little) of Ebenezer Scrooge in each of us and Dickens’ penetrating observation of the condition of our “shut-up hearts” is as relevant now as it was 179 years ago. As everyone knows, it is the story of personal renewal, of the conversion of a grasping, joyless taskmaster into a public benefactor and caring friend. Dickens also outlines a process of change, which many modern organizations might try to follow. Indeed, as a story of personal and organizational transformation, it reports results that would delight any change consultant. Of course Scrooge had three consultants…

Scrooge’s transformation begins in crisis, with the disturbing appearance of the ghost of his former partner, Joseph Marley, seven years after his death. It seems that real change often demands a crisis – a manifest failure of the status quo – to smash the constraints, imagined or real, that bind people and their organizations. Shocked out of his comfortable routines and intellectual self-assurance, Scrooge is prepared for the visions to be shown him of the Past, Present and Future. For change in behaviour takes experience, not just exposure to ideas, and Scrooge has to be immersed in each of these dimensions of time if he is to be changed. He must relive the past, truly experience the present and anticipate the future.

In his visit to the Past Scrooge sees himself as the lonely young boy he once was: neglected by his family and bullied at school, but full of imaginative ideas and youthful enthusiasms. He sees his beloved sister Fan and old values and aspirations are reawakened. Following the chronology of events, he revisits the firm where he was apprenticed under his first master, Mr. Fezziwig. Here he experiences once again the excitement and warmth of that small community at the office Christmas party. When the Spirit disparages Fezziwig’s contribution and the small expenditure involved, Scrooge defends his former boss with powerful insight into the role he plays: “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and looks, in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to count ‘em up; what then? The happiness he gives us is quite as great as if it cost a fortune.” And the sudden recollection of this old role model makes Scrooge strangely thoughtful.

The sustaining power and warmth of community wherever it is to be found is the central theme of Scrooge’s experience of the Present. He sees the family of his poor clerk, Bob Cratchit, busily preparing for Christmas dinner. Bob Cratchit has few material possessions, but he has a rich life with his family, all of whom care deeply for each other. Dressed in their threadbare best, each member of the family has their own special role to play in the great ceremony. Scrooge is right there with them, participating in every activity. All his senses are alive again: the smell of goose and applesauce, sage and onion, and the steamy aroma of the pudding. After dinner, as the family sits in a circle round the hearth drinking each others’ health, he hears Tiny Tim, physically crippled but spiritually whole, give his brave blessing. The joy of community continues at his nephew’s house, his nephew who is now the only connection left with his dead sister. Indeed, the story is now about the development and sustenance of relationships. The small group entertains itself with music, song and games in which Scrooge takes part. Once again he feels at first hand what it is like to belong among a community of friends.

The Spirit of Christmas Future comes to Scrooge hooded and silent, part of the darkness, reflecting its mysterious, unfathomable nature. The future that Scrooge sees is a jumble of events, a series of scenes (we would call them scenarios today) in no particular order, and yet he has more control here than he had in either the Past or the Present. He is able to move about, to explore and to ask the Spirit to wait a while. It gradually becomes clear to him that the Future he is seeing is not something that inevitably will be: it is something that may be. The Future can be changed. And with the realization of what he needs to do to change and through an effort of sheer Will, Scrooge succeeds for the briefest of moments in grasping the spectral hand of the Future. “I will live in the Past, the Present and the Future”, he cries “The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that teach.”

At the end of A Christmas Carol then, we begin to understand our own condition. To have a shut-up heart is to be stuck in Time, to be chained on the treadmill of the Present, without an appreciation of Past and Future. It is to be locked up with our own concerns; senseless and separated from the community of others. It is to be obsessed with superficialities and abstractions, for our spirits, like Marley’s, never to rove beyond the narrow limits of our “money-changing holes”. We also gain insight into the nature of leadership and even of how change consultants might help the process. Leadership is about the recreation of community, about reconnecting the narratives of people’s lives: giving meaning to the past, explaining the present and supplying guidance for the future. The best leaders are continually aware of their place in time: they are always dealing with endings and beginnings. Too often, as managers, we just seem to muddle along in the middle.

There are crises a-plenty in our organizations and institutions today: but the message of A Christmas Carol is that in crisis there is opportunity. It is a sobering thought, but in that realization there is redemption. As Dickens put it, “Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!” And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!