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"It is rare that an organization is able to use double loop learning for [technical] issues if it cannot do so for [its] norms [because] the norms prevent people from saying what they know about the technical issues." ~Chris Argyris in @HarvardBiz, 1977 hbr.org/1977/09/double…
"Why is it that organizations appear to be less effective as the technology to manage them becomes more sophisticated? [The] management theory underlying the new sophisticated technology is the same as the one that created the problem in the first place." ~Chris Argyris, 1977
"Someday even our newspapers may suffer a reduction in autonomy. I predict this because of what I found in the study of a leading paper. Top executives felt helpless in creating within their own organization the conditions they insisted should exist in government." ~Argyris, 1977
"Few people are aware that they do not use the theories they espouse & few are aware of those they do use. If people are unaware of the propositions they use, then they design for themselves assumptions that are not self-corrective. Thus they are prisoners of their own theories."
"The validity of the theories that most people use to design and carry out their actions is tested by their effectiveness in achieving the values people hold. Schon and I have identified four basic values that people...seem to strive to satisfy and that govern their behavior..."
"...They are (1) to define in their own terms the purpose of the situation in which they find themselves, (2) to win, (3) to suppress their own and others’ feelings, and (4) to emphasize the intellectual and deemphasize the emotional aspects of problems." ~Argyris, 1977
"To satisfy these variables, people use strategies such as advocating a position & controlling others to win that position, controlling the tasks to be done & secretly deciding how much to tell people & how much is to be distorted, usually to save somebody’s face." ~Argyris, 1977
People "do not invite confrontation of the inconsistencies within their theories or the incongruities between what they espouse and what they actually use..."
"...To do so would allow for the possibility that someone else could get control or that someone else could win, and negative feelings might be aroused--all violations of the governing variables."
"The people observing the actor usually see and react to his or her inconsistencies and incongruities. However, they often hold the same theories of action, and so they say nothing, lest they upset the actor and be seen as insensitive and undiplomatic." ~Argyris, 1977
Among other items on his agenda, Argyris is challenging us to acknowledge our complicity in creating the conditions that lead to dysfunction in organizational life. Stop blaming others and look in the mirror. This is really hard work that most of us are reluctant to take on.
Argyris is ALSO telling us to see organizations as systems governed less by explicit rules and more by tacit behavioral norms. A key function those norms serve is to minimize embarrassment or threat, but that also minimizes learning and growth. edbatista.com/2012/06/risk-m…
Today there's a renewed emphasis on candor and directness to support improved learning and problem-solving, but such efforts will run into the same obstacles Argyris identified 40 years ago in the absence of training that helps people manage feelings of embarrassment and threat.
Noteworthy: 13 years before this article Argyris had a @HarvardBiz piece on "T-Groups for Organizational Effectiveness" (which I've heard about but can't locate.) T-groups are great places to learn how to effectively manage negative emotions. More on that: edbatista.com/2018/06/a-brie…
And yet by 1977 Argyris was also cautioning us about the role of emotions in guiding action, a concern in response to excesses of that era: "[M]any in management education go to the other extreme and emphasize the expression of feelings even to the point of suppressing ideas..."
"...Not only is this polarization ineffective; it misses the point that feelings have meanings and meanings are intellectual phenomena. Without focusing on meanings it is not possible to ascertain whether feelings are valid or productive." ~Argyris, 1977
As we've learned from Damasio, Davidson et al, emotions are essential inputs for the reasoning process. Emotions are data, a fast-but-noisy signal. We should neither suppress their influence nor view them as unerring guides to right action. More here: edbatista.com/2011/07/antoni…
Back to Argyris in 1977: "Another example of a misplaced emphasis is the recent push toward participation by employees in organizations, by citizens in communities, and by students in schools. The idea was to give these groups more power in the decision-making process..."
"It was assumed that students or employees could enhance the effectiveness of the decision-making process. This overlooked the fact that such participation would increase the number of people with Model I assumptions, who...would create even more complicated learning systems."
"The older and more successful a system is, the more likely it is that its participants will find themselves dealing with dilemmas and paradoxes that have been shunted aside during the early development of the system." ~Argyris, 1977
This highlights a further benefit of T-groups, which, when most effective, incorporate an ongoing self-evaluation of the group as a learning system & leave participants better-prepared (cognitively & emotionally) to conduct such an analysis of organizations in the real world.
And yet a risk of T-groups (which Argyris highlights from the vantage point of 1977) is that they create a culture that privileges emotions as dispositive and irrefutable. We see this in many contemporary manifestations of Theory Y, not just T-groups, of course.
Today I’d amend this: Emotions are privileged in a counter-productive way not under Theory Y, but under “soft” (McGregor’s term) versions of Theory X: edbatista.com/2019/04/accoun…
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