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Restoring Humanity to Management: the Power of Context

Posted on November 3, 2024 by David

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.