Abstract
Reading about taking team members off a project where everything seems to be going well, only to put them onto a failing one, did you have a sense of déjà vu? Your circumstances and experiences are probably different, but situations like these are quite common and, as it is highly likely a successful project will be derailed, the question is: why? Followed by: what do you do about it, or what can you do about it? Jeff’s answer to the first is that, when they assess how a project is going, project teams and the managers who make these decisions aren’t thinking about the same things. Their different ideas about what matters—actually different values—are a source of tension. “Tension” suggests a spring under pressure, or, as he sketched it, forces pulling in opposite directions (see Figure 4.2). What to do is more complicated. The immediate response depends a lot on the personalities involved, their motives, attitudes, and relationships. Can Jeff persuade someone (possibly Melvin, although he isn’t sure who made the decision) to reverse it? The larger agenda, though, is to do something about eliminating the tension, so that people who aren’t part of the team effort aren’t inclined to mess with success.
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Notes
See the growing literature on brain functioning including Daniel H. Pink, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005).
Figure 5.1 can be viewed as a Western perspective on knowledge from about the time of René Descartes onwards. Descartes, a French philosopher of the Enlightenment, was a prime influencer of the view that science and religion are separate, because they are different types of knowledge or different ways of knowing. Science, represented by the left-hand side of the picture, is associated with the mind. It is rational, analytical, empirical, objective, certain, and so on. Religion, on the right, is associated with the body (or spirit). It has to do with beliefs, values, and other non-observable, unquantifiable, hence “subjective” phenomena. When this “Cartesian dualism” took root about 400 years ago, the West began to turn its back on the phenomena of the right-hand side in the course of embracing empirical science. That process continued into the 20th century, with scientific knowledge gaining in stature at the expense of emotions, beliefs, feelings, intuition and other human ways of knowing, which were downplayed and even rejected as being subjective, hence anti-scientific, and not real knowledge. The Cartesian divide explains why we are deeply attached to management and ignore organizing and why students are taught to think about management as a science. Management doesn’t and won’t have anything to do with what’s on the right-hand side of the diagram. Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. J Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 197.
Don Lavoie was a colleague. As far as I know he never put the concept in print, but taught students about “returnability” in the context of how online collaborative tools like SharePoint or Lotus Notes change the nature of interactions and conversations. When you have an online conversation, mediated by these kinds of technologies, you can usually come back to the content, as office workers may find to their dismay when they discover that their employer has archived copies of all their emails. The problem, however, is we never know what another group, or the same people at a different time or in another place—i.e. in a different context—will make of the tools. Although you can return to them, these artifacts don’t have meaning on their own: people have to make meaning of them and, as Brown and Duguid explain so well, meaning depends on context. See John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2000): ch. 7.
I want to acknowledge here that the distinction I’m drawing between management and organizing was foreshadowed by Douglas McGregor’s “Theory X” and “Theory Y” organizations and by Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker’s “mechanistic” and “organic” systems, as well as other writers, none of whom had the benefit of philosophical discussions about paradigms or worldviews, which came later. Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960); Tom Burns and G.M. Stalker, The Management of Innovation, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961; reprint, 1994).
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© 2011 Mark Addleson
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Addleson, M. (2011). Left-brain management and right-brain organizing. In: Beyond Management. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230343412_5
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