Why does so much management advice sound reasonable but turn out to be of little value? Most readers will know what I mean. Take the following guidance on how companies can ‘accelerate their agile transformation’:

1. Create a C-suite with an agile mindset
2. Hire and develop the right mix of talent
3. Foster an agile-friendly culture and organizational structure

What’s not to like? Well, that’s the problem. The first test of any management advice is to ask, “Is the opposite also true?” If not, then the statement is a simple truism like each of those above. Clearly one wouldn’t want a C-suite with an anti-agile mindset nor a firm with the wrong mix of talent and so on.

Nevertheless, some truisms bear restating because they deal with priorities – necessary conditions – without which change efforts may fail. So, we should look at this advice more closely. The problem is that each of the sentences is a linguistic trick. It starts with a verb, which makes it sound like an action, but it’s really an achievement, a desirable outcome. This is why one can’t disagree with them. They are like cut flowers: the spectacular result of a creative process but not its cause. They are emblems of success, outputs not inputs. To be truly helpful these generic ‘whats’ will have to be turned into specific ‘hows’ – how to ‘create a C-suite with an agile mindset’ in this organization, in our situation, with these people, right here, right now. And that’s where things get difficult. Every organization is different: history and context matter. Priorities will differ and what works in one situation may not work in another. And in the end it will turn out that the cluster of attitudes we call an ‘agile mindset’, like so many other ‘success factors’, is itself an emergent property, a consequence of a successful change effort, not its cause.

Many writers gloss over these problems by treating corporations as if they were rational decision-makers, actors in their own right, with clear goals. Companies are said to have ‘found ways to infuse a higher-purpose calling into their culture’, they ‘leverage their core capabilities to enter new growth markets’ and ‘unleash the creative abilities of their people’. Personifying corporations as actors in their own right may be useful for headlines but it’s unhelpful when we are trying to understand cause-and-effect in complex systems. When The New York Times publishes a report that “Boeing Fired Its Leader” its journalists are using writers’ shorthand to report the outcome of a complex process, not to describe the decision of a lone actor.

What Is To Be Done? Grow Your Own Flowers!

Peter Drucker contended that a every business had two tasks: the one administrative, the other entrepreneurial. Administration is needed to make the today’s business effective (efficiency is a minimum condition) and entrepreneurship is needed to create tomorrow’s business. These are the twin elements of performance.

Unfortunately, these two activities demand different logics, the one analytic and the other integrative. Administrative logic is that of the engineer: breaking down complicated mechanisms into their elements, identify causes and optimizing the parts to improve the whole. Or perhaps it that of the plumber: clearing blockages and stopping leaks. Whatever the metaphor, it is an analytic process and it has been the default approach for Anglo-American managers for the past seventy years. It is necessary but not sufficient. Used on its own, it has been the root cause of a lot of true-but-useless management advice that ignores history and context.

For the logic of entrepreneurship is integrative, synthesizing rather than analytic. It is more like that of a gardener than a plumber, someone who brings together people and resources: selecting people for their growth potential and the contributions they can make and then creating and maintaining the conditions in which they can grow, individually and collectively.  It’s about anticipating effects through pattern recognition developed through experience from the past, mixed with a vision of future. Gone are the clarity and certainty of administration to be replaced by the confusion and uncertainty of innovation.

The twin logics are often described as scientific management and humanistic management respectively, but the relationship between them has been a vexed one. As recently as a decade ago Adrian Wooldridge, Bagehot columnist for The Economist, described it as a ‘battleground’ between hard and soft management.  Paradoxically, successful entrepreneurial activities have plenty of vision, leavened with strict observance to detail and process There is a complex dynamic between contradictory, yet interdependent processes. The result is dilemmas that have to be lived, rather than problems to be solved.  With dilemmas, opposites are always true, depending on the context. To plan for the future we have to know the past.

Thus the practice of management is all about sense-making, using the integrative powers of narrative to make sense of the situation in which the enterprise finds itself, what the people know and can do and the actions the situation demands. It is about creating the conditions for emergence. It’s about helping individuals understand their own stories, make meaning from their experiences and anticipating what might happen.

Ancient Wisdom

This blog began with some simple truisms so it’s fitting that it should end with some profound truths. This is the wisdom from the past that, it sometimes seems, we have to keep on discovering and rediscovering through experience:

Over a century ago, management pioneer Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), one of Drucker’s greatest resources wrote:

“The skillful leader then does not rely on personal force; he (sic) controls his group not by dominating it but by expressing it. He stimulates what is best in us; he unifies and concentrates what we feel only gropingly and scatteringly, but he never gets away from the current of which we and he are both an integral part. He is a leader who gives form to the inchoate energy in every man. The person who influences me most is not he who does great deeds but he who makes me feel that I can do great deeds.” (The New State, 1918)

And 1,500 years before Follett, Lao Tzu, the semi-legendary author of the Tao Te Ching, wrote something like this:

Learn from the people

Plan with the people

Begin with what they have

Build on what they know

Of the best leaders

When their task is accomplished

The people all remark

“We have done it ourselves.”

About the Author:

David Hurst is a speaker, writer and management educator (www.davidkhurst.com). His most recent book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012)

Ed Catmull: co-founder of Pixar Animation Studios and president of Pixar Animation and Disney Animation.

Hal Gregersen: senior lecturer in leadership and innovation at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Moderated by Julia Kirby: Senior Editor, Harvard University Press

The workshop began with Hal Gregersen introducing the polling software Question Burst (questionburst.com) which was used to interact with the workshop participants.

Acknowledging the pandemic and its exponential features, he then told the story of Hungarian biochemist, Dr. Katalina Kariko and her 30 year-long quest to make RNA molecules in the laboratory and get mRNA into the cells of the body. Her work would form the basis for the successful mRNA vaccines that have been so instrumental in slowing the spread of COVID-19. Drucker would have called her a “monomaniac on a mission”.

Gregersen compared Kariko’s story to those of other visionaries like Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce) who, he suspects, saw the world through an “exponential lens” identifying opportunities that others could not. He then illustrated the nature of exponential growth by referring to Azeem Azhar’s book The Exponential Age and what Azhar calls the “exponential gap” between organizations designed for a linear world and exponential growth.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 13th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Human Imperative” on November 10 + 17 (digital) and 18 + 19 (in person), 2021.
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Hal Gergersen’s opening remarks supplied the frame for Ed Catmull to introduce the concept of a Learning Power Cycle. He began by recounting his experience at the University of Utah in the 1970s. Although computers were big (in all senses) at the time, computer graphics was not considered part of computer science. Catmull, who believed that computer images would one day become part of feature films, could get traction in neither the computer nor the film industries. This was due in part he thinks to the difficulty people have in grasping the explosive potential of exponential growth from its usually modest beginnings. For example, it took Pixar twenty years to produce its first feature film, Toy Story.

Reality is complex. Many exponential activities are in play and the dynamics are unpredictable. Catmull and Gregersen describe this dynamic interplay as the “Learning Power Cycle”. They used the example to illustrate this of machine learning and its origins in neural networks, a concept that had been around for fifty years but sidelined by a lack of computer power. The catalyst for machine learning to take off was the rise of the games industry from it humble origins in the game of Pong (1972)to its explosive growth through arcades, consoles, desktops, handhelds and mobile devices. In 2020 the market was worth $165 Billion. Nvidia capitalized on this growth by releasing a new GPU (graphics processing unit) every six months, creating a positive reinforcement cycle. Out of this emerged the application of GPUs to neural networks, enabling deep learning. A second example is the power of apps on mobile phones, the emergence of which was unpredicted.

The workshop then went to Breakout Rooms. Questions for discussion were:

• What exponential events will or are affecting your organization? Who is seeing them? Who is missing them?
• What is one of the biggest challenges faced by your organization because of these exponential events? How well is your organization responding?
• “What Great Surprises are Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) creating in your organizational industry? How did those Great Surprises come about? How are you and your organization approaching them?

Ed Catmull told the workshop that at Pixar they make it clear to their people that the growth and economic success of their films is not their #1 priority. They intentionally make films (often short ones) that don’t make money to show they have other values, like encouraging people to push themselves creatively. People are often focussed on data to the exclusion of softer sources of information. Pixar tries to create a “classless” organization to enhance the sense of ownership.

Nice quote: “Tenant farmers don’t pick up rocks”

The Learning Power Cycle

The cycle is conceived as going through three phases:

1. Potential Arising
   • First steps in exponential processes seem small and inconsequential
   • They are not intuitive or obvious
2. Realizing Potential
   • The results affect large numbers of people.
   • They affect the environment in a broad sense, good and bad (unintended consequences).
   • Many transformational events are not exponential. (Do not confuse rapid with exponential)
3. Preparing for Transition
   • There is an end to exponential growth.
   • The outcomes are highly unpredictable.

Great companies operate in all three phases simultaneously.

Each of these phases requires a particular mindset to navigate in a dynamic environment:

1. Potential Arising
   • Recognize the implications of exponential change at the beginning of exponential growth – when it is not obvious.
   • Start with a challenge-driven, project-focused mindset.
   • Vote at least one-third of your growth innovation resources to longer-term initiatives that hold the potential for becoming Learning Power Cycles.
   • Learning Power Cycles are neither sparked or sustained by people operating in isolation.
   • Build a broad umbrella allowing uncertainty, noise, and a high volume of small but interesting developments, often unrelated or loosely related. (in Pixar’s case those that fail the “elevator test” i.e. cannot be explained in 30 seconds or even longer).
   • Seek out ideas that have great exponential potential.
2. Realizing Potential
   • Continually modify the processes in almost every aspect – far beyond what the originators could conceive.
   • Beware of the “sweet spot” trap (Innovators Dilemma).
   • Hold long-term and short-term views/approaches simultaneously. (and retain the ability to function)
3. Preparing for the Transition
   • Many look for replacement systems but often make the mistake of only wanting systems that are already far up the exponential curve.
   • Align people around what “might” work when systems are built for them to hold onto something that is working.
   • Are we actively looking for the end of exponential growth?

The session closed with a general discussion around which mindsets were most difficult to master and what questions and insights the Learning Power Cycle and the associated mindsets had surfaced.

Ed Catmull suggested that the secret of creating the right mindsets is to hire people who want to make a difference by working in a company that wants to make a difference. People who will help each other spontaneously without expecting rewards.

Closing Questions and Answers

Question: As a small cog in a large corporate machine how do I get management interested in these ideas?

Answer: In most large organizations management is rewarded for short term results. The challenge is to change that system – there is no simple answer.

Question: What learning, experience or educational design can help me get better at thinking this way?

Answer: Observe what’s blocking you. You still have choices about how you behave. Good role models are really helpful. Read books by and engage with people who think like this.

About the Author: David Hurst is a speaker, writer and management educator (www.davidkhurst.com). His most recent book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012)

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 13th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Human Imperative” on November 10 + 17 (digital) and 18 + 19 (in person), 2021.
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Steven Spielberg’s 1975 movie, Jaws, tells the story of a seaside town whose shores are terrorized by a killer shark. After several fatal attacks, the town sheriff, played by Roy Scheider, sets out to hunt the monster in a dilapidated fishing boat, together with the local salt and a nerdy marine biologist. On his first close encounter with the terrifying beast a stunned Scheider retreats back into the cabin, muttering to the old salt, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

I now use a clip from that movie to open my EMBA classes. I tell the participants that they are going to need a larger conceptual framework, a “bigger boat” to handle the colossal challenges that they and their people will face in the future. For there is a sense of a sea change in the complexity of the problems we are facing today, a feeling they have outgrown the ability of our concepts, methods and tools to handle them.

The Defects of (Anglo-American) Management Theory

In The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus (2011) John Micklethwait (editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News) and Adrian Wooldridge (Bagehot columnist for The Economist) 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 contradiction

They described the root cause of the problem as an “intellectual confusion at the heart of management theory; it has become … a battleground between two radically opposed philosophies. Management theorists usually belong to one of two rival schools… and management practice has oscillated wildly between these two positions.” They went on to name 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.”

Hard Management’s Dominance Challenged

Today the hegemony of the hard style is being challenged as never before by a changing context, which includes climate change, growing concerns about sustainability and a digital revolution in information and communications technology. Many have experienced firsthand how the management methods used to control growth and scale in the industrial era can be at odds with those needed to nurture the creativity and innovation required in the digital one.

“Soft” management methods and approaches like agile and design thinking are now all the rage. Consultants recommend managers adopt “new principles” and move from “command-and-control” to “communicate-and-collaborate”.  Scientific management, they say, is “dead”.

It would be a mistake, however, for managers to try and follow any simplistic “from…to” advice. For the “battleground” metaphor used by Micklethwait and Woolridge is an apt one, and this battle will not end anytime soon.

We Are The Battleground

It’s time to recognize that the “intellectual confusion” in management between the hard and the soft is not a “bug” in the theory, but a feature of the human condition. It’s time to accept that our fundamentally divided nature is the essence of our humanity and that it is the practical weaving together of seemingly irreconcilable opposites that is the very warp and woof of our existence. It is also the secret of our success.

The tensions spiral through our lives as individuals, families, communities, organizations and societies and throughout our history as a species. They have grown in complexity as our languages, cultures and institutions have grown more complex. Like the twin arms of a double helix, the dualities coil through philosophy in general and the history of management thought. Here they are familiar: exploitation and exploration, intended and emergent, calculation and judgement, individual and team, performance and learning, detachment and immersion, mechanical and organic, hierarchy and network, rational and emotional, plan and story, plumbing and poetry….

Both…And, Not Either/Or

I think a “bigger boat”, a more comprehensive management framework, has to address this root dilemma, not statically by trying to replace the “hard” with the “soft”, but dynamically by embracing and containing the scientific within the humanistic. It’s a both…and predicament, not an either/or choice. This will require a new appreciation of context, especially the roles that space, time, scale and technology play in our ability to relate to each other and thrive together.

We know, for example, that when people are working together in groups less than 150 in size, management can be informal, face-to-face and “humanistic”.  Place the same people and thousands of others like them inside a giant, dangerous technology like an integrated steel mill and that is a recipe for disaster: a much more formal, “scientific” approach will be required. But large, complex organizations need not become oppressive prisons. There are examples of integrated steel mills, like the Canadian firm Dofasco, whose culture is a weave of the hard and the soft. They may never be as agile as a music-sharing service like Spotify but they aren’t competing with them and compared with other integrated steel mills they are light years ahead.

Understanding Relationships: Figure-and-Ground

The challenge for managers is how to frame the relationship between the hard and the soft in their own situations. It’s all very well to talk of “balance” and “weave” but those are outcomes. How does one produce them?  Here it’s helpful to think of a relationship that alternates between figure and ground. When the one is in the foreground the other is always behind it and their positions can flex to-and-fro, depending on the circumstances.

This is how to understand the concept of hierarchy-on-demand popularized by Gore & Associates, makers of Gore-Tex. They are a global $4 Billion business organized in clusters of facilities, each of which has about 150 people. This allows a unique humanistic approach to management, but it cannot handle everything. When teams reach an impasse managers invoke hierarchy-on-demand, bringing into the foreground a formal structure to make either/or decisions. Once that situation has passed, however, managers and hierarchy fade into the ground. Think of a fishing net that normally lies flat but can be lifted at a node at any time to form a temporary hierarchy and then let go to sink back into a network.

Every manager, then, must be alert to these fine-grained, constantly changing relationships between the hard and the soft and govern their behaviour accordingly. Hierarchy, calculation, command, and constraint all have a role to play in management, but they must be contained within an egalitarian philosophy that values above all else judgement, care and the cultivation of people.

Safely confined in a “bigger boat”, scientific management can be an excellent servant: unconstrained and on its own, it makes for an oppressive, even tyrannical master.

About the Author:

David Hurst is a speaker, writer and management educator (www.davidkhurst.com). His most recent book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012)

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 13th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Human Imperative” on November 10 + 17 (digital) and 18 + 19 (in person), 2021.
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David Hurst : Are analogies a faster solution than data based decision models?

The rats gave the first clue: they staggered onto the streets, emitted a drop of blood from their noses and died in droves. As their bodies piled up, newspapers agitated, and citizens complained – why was the sanitation department not removing them? The rodents were collected and cremated and the citizens returned to their preoccupation with working hard and getting rich.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Too little, too late

Only a local doctor and his colleague recognized the pattern – a plague was beginning to sweep through the population. They tried to alert the authorities, but the government was reluctant to sound the alarm. Some action was taken, but the language was optimistic and politicians downplayed the seriousness of the problem. It took a jump in the death toll before serious measures were taken: the town was sealed, and a plague officially declared. The pestilence went on to ravage the city, as usual affecting the poor the most.

From allegory to analogy

 You may recognize this story outline from Albert Camus’ The Plague (1947). Anyone who has read his newly popular allegorical novel would know what to expect during a pandemic.   At the onset of the current coronavirus pandemic, when there was little data, experts conducted what can be thought of as an analogical inquiry, using the liberal arts.

They consulted historians who had studied the flu pandemic of 1918 and other plagues from the past. They looked for comparable coronaviruses, like SARS and MERS. They began to compare experiences in different countries with similar circumstances. They searched for metaphors and analogies, even fiction like The Plague for ideas that might be relevant.

Action before data

Like so many entrepreneurs, it seems clear that those countries whose leaders took early decisions to quarantine their societies, based on wise judgement, had much better experiences. They were willing to commit to action, rather than wait for the inevitable delay for data and calculation. Only once data was available could they claim to be ‘guided by science’ and ‘evidence-based’. But because of the exponential growth of the virus, a few days delay could make a huge difference.

What really matters

“There are only two or three human stories,” wrote Willa Cather, “and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” We are living through just such a story right now.

The universe may be made of matter, but we humans live in a world of value and significance, of ‘what matters’. Science deals with fact, narrative deals with truth. As screenwriter, Robert McKee explains, “What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens.”

Leadership requires empathy and decency

This is the power of analogical inquiry. The liberal arts help us learn from the experiences of others, to feel what they felt and to think what they thought. We call the quality ‘empathy’, the essence of what it means to be alive and the critical ingredient of effective leadership – a preoccupation with “what matters”.

This is Camus’ message: the “plague”, ill-fortune and injustice in its many forms, comes and goes but never completely disappears. It is the underlying human condition, to which our response must always be one of caring – ‘common decency’ “There is no question of heroism in all this,” says Dr. Rieux, Camus’ narrator, “It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea that makes people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency.”

About the Author:
David Hurst is a speaker, writer and management educator (www.davidkhurst.com). His most recent book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012)

This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the fully digital 12th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “Leadership Everywhere” on October 28, 29 & 30, 2020.
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Panelists:
Chair: Richard Brem, Senior Advisor, Peter Drucker Society of Europe,
Peter Paschek, Management Consultant,
Timo Meynhardt, Professor for Business Psychology and Leadership, HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management,
Verena Ringler, Curator, Erste Foundation
Aaron Barcant, Independent Researcher, Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy

The round table began with Richard Brem introducing the panelists and each of them summarizing why Peter Drucker’s work and vision mattered to them.

Drucker’s vision

Drucker always argued that one’s worldview mattered to one’s understanding of one’s role and contribution in society and one’s ability to manage oneself and others. American philosopher Thomas Sowell, describes a vision as a ‘pre-analytic, cognitive act’ that helps simplify an overwhelmingly complex reality. Think of it as a walking stick that helps you travel over rugged terrain, giving you support when you need it and allowing you to probe the way ahead. A social vision gives us a sense of how the world works, of the nature of humankind, of causation and how social change happens.

As panelist Peter Paschek pointed out, Drucker described himself as a ‘conservative Christian anarchist’. While accepting the necessity of governance and government, he saw power and the yearning for power as the central problem of society, with that of managerial power and its legitimacy a particular concern. The political philosopher he admired most was Wilhelm von Humboldt, the pioneer of the modern research university, who found balance and harmony while managing the tension between continuity and change. Drucker was concerned with this balance at several levels, especially those of society and community. It was this interest that allowed him to see management as a social function, an organ of society that is responsible for the performance of institutions and gives the individual both status and function. Panelist Timo Meynhardt said that Drucker’s depth of thought and his emphasis on values – his practical wisdom – was his distinctive strength, making him a ‘companion in the darkness’.

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems” taking place on November 21 & 22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
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Drucker had what Sowell calls a ‘constrained’ vision – a feature that he shares with thinkers like Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, the authors of the Federalist Papers and Friedrich Hayek among others. It is a vision of society as an evolutionary product with much wisdom contained in the traditions that are handed down to us. History matters and experience is critical. Order is emergent from the interactions of many individuals rather than planned and the emphasis is on practices, processes, incentives, trade-offs and prudence. This constrained vision was in contrast to the much less, if not unconstrained vision of his close friend, Christian socialist Karl Polanyi. While he and Drucker agreed on their ends – to tame capitalism and hold economic power to democratic account – they differed greatly on the means to achieve it. While Drucker regarded economic man as a once-appropriate idea that had been over applied, Polanyi thought it an outright mistake, with the ideal of a self-regulated market never existing in practice. Drucker’s concern over the very real limits to what the state can do and the ever-present risk of factional strife, required a large role for markets, albeit imperfect ones, as a valuable and effective tool to help balance the private sector against the state. Enlightened individualism must serve society. Polanyi, on the other hand, with his more utopian vision of the primitive community, saw a much larger role for an activist state (it was noted that Polanyi’s ideas have attracted renewed attention since the financial crisis of 2008 and the disenchantment with capitalism that has accompanied it).

The role of history

For those with a constrained social vision history really matters. Panelist Aaron Barcant suggested that Drucker’s view of history matches that of Neustadt and May in their book Thinking in Time. Here is what they have to say about thinking of time as a turbulent stream:

“Thinking of time [as a stream] . . . appears . . . to have three components. One is the recognition that the future has no place to come from except from the past, hence the past has predictive value. Another element is recognition that what matters for the future in the present is departures from the past, alterations, changes, which prospectively or actually divert familiar flows from accustomed channels, thus affecting the predictive value and much else besides. A third component is continuous comparison, an almost constant oscillation from present to future to past and back, heedful of prospective changes, concerned to expedite, limit, guide, counter, or accept it as the fruits of such comparison suggest.” (p. 251)

Thus history has predictive value, not because the future will be like the past, but because some things will continue, habits will endure, and humans will tend to behave in the future much as they have behaved in the past, given similar contexts. We cannot predict the future, but studying history is a way of expanding our experience, making us resilient in the face of change, so that we can interpret the past to help us understand the present and anticipate the future.

Looking at the present

The study of history may actually enhance a manager’s ability to stay in the present and to focus on doing what is happening and has to be done.

As panel chair Richard Brem pointed out, Drucker was never a futurist. In 1992, relatively late in his career, Drucker identified himself as a social ecologist and wrote: ‘If there is one thing I am not…it is a “futurist”….it is futile to try and foresee the future….the work of a social ecologist is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important challenge in society, economy, politics is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and use them as opportunities.’

The events that mattered did not lend themselves to quantification. They happened at the margins of society. By the time they show up in aggregates and become statistically significant they are ‘past’. Drucker’s injunction was to ‘look out the window’.

When we ‘look out the window’ for clues to the future of society what do we see? Those with an unconstrained social vision sometimes talk of utopian moves toward cooperation on a larger scale and world government. The evidence around us indicates otherwise. The rise of populism and the disenchantment with both capitalism and democracy in the West suggest a movement toward disaggregation, with attention being paid to smaller units of cooperation. The failure of the federal government in America to address issues of popular concern has led to a renewed focus on the state and municipal government and local communities – the grass roots – as the places where things get done. Panelist Verena Ringler talked about the blurring of what is public and what is private and of cities like Palermo and Barcelona, where pockets of local cooperation are forming in opposition to the policies of national governments. Other cooperative communities, such as the well-known example of Mondragon, also offer alternative ways of coping with the tensions between democracy and management discretion, market forces and social forces, community and society.

‘What would Drucker have made of China?’, one participant asked. Karl Polanyi might have argued that the China case shows that capitalism is antithetical to democracy. Drucker would have taken a more developmental approach, perhaps quoting Berthold Brecht, ‘Food first, then ethics’.

The powerful play goes on….

About the Author:

David K. Hurst is a management speaker, writer and educator. His latest book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012)

This article is one in the Drucker Forum “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems”, taking place on November 21-22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems

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The respected management scholar, Donald Schön, began his 1987 book, The Education of the Reflective Practitioner, as follows: “In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, management problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy confusing problems defy technical solution. The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest might be, while in the swamp lie the issues of greatest human concern. The practitioner must choose. Shall he remain on the high ground where he can solve relatively unimportant problems according to prevailing standards of rigor, or shall he descend into the swamp of important problems and non-rigorous inquiry?”

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This article is one in the “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems” taking place on November 21 & 22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
#GPDF19 #ecosystems

Unfortunately, the concept of a business ecosystem has been largely captured by the high-ground dwellers in mainstream Anglo-American management. If you want to control something, treat it as an object and don’t allow it to move until “motivated”. With mainstream management’s emphasis on prediction and control, this is what has happened to business ecosystems. They are treated as static structures, waiting to be mapped, measured and set in motion, that is, designed by architects in lofty perches outside the system. This view of ecosystems-as-structures has mechanical appeal but little power. Missing from it are the dynamics of natural ecosystems and their capacity for generative metaphors and insights into the tensions between stability and change, the importance of scale and the workings of nonlinear causality.

Some key concepts from treating ecosystems as processes are:

• emergence, the discovery of novelty and the conditions that promote it
• ecological succession as economies of scale assert themselves
• attractors, especially rigidity and failure traps in which organizations can get stuck
• adaptive cycles and the roles of crisis and destruction in ecological renewal
• ecological versus engineering resilience and the dynamics of sustainability
• the power of acting one’s way into better ways of thinking
• the fundamental tension between continuity and change that confronts every reflective practitioner.

Schön’s book was published more than 30 years ago, but his question remains relevant. Current counterparts to his topographical metaphors are the concepts of complicated and complex challenges. Complicated tasks, like putting a man on the moon and returning him to earth, are risky, “high-ground” problems that yield to engineering-technical approaches. Complex dilemmas, on the other hand, thrive in the swampy lowlands of uncertainty. How to raise this child? How to create an enterprise in my situation? How to enable innovation in this organization with these people, right here right now? These messy, confusing questions require an ecological-adaptive approach tailored to each unique situation. The “what-to-dos” may be generic, but the “how-to-dos” are specific. History, context and narrative make every organization different.

In short, we still need to exorcise from mainstream Anglo-American management the ghostly remnants of a positivist commitment to a values-free, analytic, explanatory, instrumental “Cartesian” science of quantities, with its search for general laws. This can be achieved only by embracing and containing it within a values-laden, holistic, interpretive, existential “Goethean” quest for meaning.

Surely Peter Drucker would approve.

About the Author:

David K. Hurst is a management speaker, writer and educator. His latest book is The New Ecology of Leadership: Business Mastery in a Chaotic World (Columbia University Press 2012)

This article is one in the Drucker Forum “shape the debate” series relating to the 11th Global Peter Drucker Forum, under the theme “The Power of Ecosystems”, taking place on November 21-22, 2019 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF19 #ecosystems

“Warm hearts allied with cool heads seek a middle way between the extremes of abstract theory and personal impulse”

Stephen Toulmin, Return to Reason

In Masters of Management (2011) Adrian Wooldridge (Bagehot columnist for The Economist and frequent Drucker Forum participant) 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, he identified the root problem as an “intellectual confusion at the heart of management theory; it has become… 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.” He 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.”

It’s Not a Bug, It’s a Feature

It’s time to recognize our fundamentally divided nature as the essence of our humanity and that it is the practical weaving together of irreconcilable opposites that is the very warp and woof of our existence as human beings. It is not a bug but a feature of our success as a species and our ability to grapple with uncertainty by cooperating in groups much larger than the extended family. Managers and leaders must integrate this diversity. That takes art, craft, a little science, powerful metaphors and compelling stories, lots of stories.

The Engineer and the Gardener

Over the last sixty years the focus of Anglo-American management has been on means rather than ends. Many regard management as applied economics. The stress on efficiency has been very successful, at least according to the metrics it values. This engineering-technical approach, however, tends to view organizations as machines and people as instruments. The spotlight on utility and stability has led to an inability to address identity, purpose, innovation and change, especially in large-scale organizations. To do that requires an organic, ecological-adaptive approach – the earth-caked hands and patient habits of a gardener. Through this lens organizations are organisms and people are ends-in-themselves. The resulting tensions go with the job of being a manager and a leader.

Complicated and Complex Challenges

The engineering approach is not wrong. It works well in the natural sciences, but erratically in management. Complexity science tells us why. Project Apollo NASA’s program to put a man on the moon was a technically-complicated challenge. The cause-and-effect relationships were stable and understandable to engineers. On the other hand, raising children, starting new businesses or innovating in existing ones are complex challenges. The ‘components’ have minds of their own and causality has to be continually discovered and rediscovered. Complex challenges cannot be reduced to merely complicated ones, so managers are always grappling with an unknown compound of the two. When uncertainty rules ‘gardeners’ are needed.

The Individual and The Community

The engineering-technical approach to management emphasizes the role of the individual and neglects that of community, especially the role of the community in producing, not just individuals, but human beings. It privileges ‘I’ over ‘we’. There is much we can learn from the African concept of ubuntu, often translated as ‘I am because you are’. What makes us human is our connectedness with each other and the empathy that flows from that. The standard Zulu greeting is sawubona – “I see you.” The response is sikhona – “I am here.” Humanity is a quality we owe to each other. It follows then that management is always both a moral and a technical practice.

Masculine and Feminine

There is widening discussion in management about the meager representation of women at the top of business. It’s time to recognize the systemic roots of this issue in the Anglo-American management’s mono-logical mindset and heroic, ‘make-it-happen’ ethos that crowds out everything else. Engineering sounds hard, tough, masculine and predictable. Gardening has a very different feel. Gardeners care, they nurture, they tend. They realize that young enterprises and emergent strategies have to be cultivated and grown not designed and built. They understand the ecology of the situation, discerning the possibilities in this organization, right here, right now. They have to select and plant, water and fertilize, train and prune – and sometimes uproot and transplant. It’s a subtle, indirect approach, always embedded in complexity and calling on multiple perspectives to ‘help it happen’.

A Single Mind with Two Brains

After this litany of tensions and dilemmas the good news is that we humans have evolved to handle paradox. Our single mind consists of two brains, two ways of being in the world that are in creative tension with one another. One way is concerned with the familiar, the other with the novel, the one with what’s predictable, the other with what’s possible, the one with what is fixed, static, decontextualized and explicit, the other with the variable, dynamic, embedded and implicit. The mind is a loom that continually weaves a fabric of meaning, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

East and West

Gardeners and engineers, yin and yang; the Taoist polarities capture well the weaving dynamic of management. Evolution uses a dual model, with a creative dynamic between female and male, as its default for its key mission – the production, care and development of the next generation. Gender is not destiny, but both roles must be played. Why would it be any different for creating sustainable organizations and societies? As managers we need a dual-systems view; a ‘dialectic of polarity’ as Drucker called it, between the existential and the instrumental, complex and complicated. This will take a social movement, a community of practice and some gardeners who also know how to be engineers. And have the judgment to know when.

About the Author:

David Hurst is a speaker, writer and management educator. He is the author of “The New Ecology of Leadership”.

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article first appeared on LinkedIn Pulse

‘The arts of life…turn out to possess their own special methods and techniques…Bad judgement here consists not in failing to apply the methods of natural science, but, on the contrary, in over-applying them’.

Isaiah Berlin, Political Judgement

Ever since the European Enlightenment reason has been regarded as the hallmark of our humanity. The French philosophes argued that it was the power of abstract thought that separated us from animals. Only reason promised a certainty that could free us from the tyranny of tradition, dogmatic faith and arbitrary rule.

Reason and rationality

There was, however, not a single Enlightenment. While the French took Descartes as their model and focused on the supremacy of his rational method, the English and Scottish Enlightenments emphasized its limits. For the British the essence of human nature was a moral sense of right and wrong and a natural empathy for others. For them reason meant reasonableness, not rationality. These different perspectives have led to radically different understandings of change in social systems, exemplified by the clash between the conservative Edmund Burke and the radical Thomas Paine and their differing views on the French Revolution.  Burke saw it as an unmitigated disaster, a destruction of community and tradition that heralded the age of ‘economists and calculators’. Paine, on the other hand, cheered it to the echo.

American politicians have never quite figured out which branch of the Enlightenment they belong to. Jefferson and Hamilton took opposite sides and, despite his conservative views, even Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Paine’s aphorism that ‘We have it in our power to make the world over again’.  The divisions continue to this day. Conservatives, like Burke, are aghast at the thought of intellectuals trying to design and build what can only be grown, while the followers of Paine espouse progressive agendas to make the world anew.

American management, in contrast with politics, has never been in much philosophical doubt. One can track the roots of this confidence back to the 19th century influence of French thinking in the United States Military Academy at West Point, the nursery of so many early management pioneers. When the business schools were reformed in the late 1950s, Anglo-American philosophy was in a tight, analytic orbit. Academics aspired to make management a science in the mould of economics. Scientific rationality was seen as the only true knowledge and the scientific method as the only valid form of inquiry. Thus management was deemed to be a technical practice involving the application of theory. Organizational change was viewed as a rational, top-down, outside-in process, a perspective that reached its peak in the re-engineering craze of the 1990s. Even today, to be told that one is ‘rational’ is taken as a compliment and deviations from scientific rationality are described as ‘flaws’ and ‘biases’.

Evolution is smarter than we are

If scientific rationality is such a superior way to approach the world. why haven’t we evolved to be rational in this sense? In opposition to the ‘flaws and biases’ view there is that of cognitive scientists like Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber. They contend that reason did not emerge to enable individuals to reach better decisions; it developed to allow individuals to rationalize decisions that had they already made through largely unconscious processes. While at the individual level this results in the well-known ‘confirmation bias’, at the level of the group it is adaptive. Groups make much better decisions when they are exposed to passionate individuals making evidence-based arguments for widely differing course of action. What is rational for individuals may be irrational for society and vice versa. And the unit of evolutionary survival is the population, not the individual.

Return to reason

In management the age of ‘economists and calculators’ has been in full swing for decades and the advent of big data and AI promises only to extend it. But if machine algorithms can be better scientists than we are, then the dominant Cartesian rationalist philosophy is in trouble. To restore the human dimension to management we need to move away from narrow, scientific rationality (contra Steven Pinker) to a broader concept of reason. This will require a pragmatic philosophy that acknowledges our need to answer both existential and instrumental questions:

• Identity: Who are we and why do we matter?
• Utility: What do we/I want and how do we/I get it?

Machines can’t follow us there; they may process information, but they don’t make meaning.

This will not be easy. It requires us to see the arts and the humanities as analogical modes of inquiry, just as valid as the analytical mode of science. Here there is no Cartesian ‘I’ to change ‘my’ mindset. It takes compelling immersive experiences a.k.a. ‘life’ to appreciate the power of the arts and social movements to shape our identities, our ways of being. This is, of course, the genius of evolution; it does not rely on one generation to renew itself indefinitely. It depends on new generations with different genetic and cultural backgrounds and experiences to build in Burkean fashion on what has gone before them. Otherwise we could all switch to asexual reproduction and live forever as clones, but frankly that doesn’t sound like much fun.…

This article is one in a series related to the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum, with the theme management. the human dimension, taking place on November 29 & 30, 2018 in Vienna, Austria #GPDF18

This article was first published on Linkedin.

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