Knowledge
“There is no substitute for knowledge”
“We cannot solve our problems from the same level of thinking that created them.” Albert Einstein.
Best efforts and hard work, not guided by knowledge, only digs deeper the pit we are in. …there is no substitute for knowledge – W Edwards Deming
This cartoon comparing Wisdom with Clverness is from Edward de Bono's book "Parallel Thinking"
The above three are just a sample of the many many quotes that scream out at us that if we want change and to secure different outcomes, then we have to start at the thinking level, not at the action level. We have to be able to identify how we think and then be prepared to challenge it, and improve it relative to modern research
There are four words inscribed on the Scottish Mace are:
Wisdom, Justice, Compassion, Integrity.
So it is a Scottish national aim to develop our wisdom. The Chambers Dictionary defines wisdom as the application of knowledge. So what is knowledge? To quote the eminent management scholar W Edwards Deming – “Knowledge is built on theory.” So we can argue that wisdom is the application of the underpinning theoretical assumptions of our society.
But wisdom and knowledge are never static. New theories are continually being researched and proven. So as a nation, does Scotland have, as a core value, the continual development of its “Wisdom?” The rest of this paper explores this issue of wisdom, knowledge and underpinning theories.
Scottish Enlightenment
The eighteen century Scottish enlightenment was possible when the restrictions of freedom of thought began to be lifted. The Christian Church of that time was hierarchical in that it considered that they were the sole arbiters of “The Truth.” Their flock were actively discouraged from questioning and challenging any part of the doctrine, to the extent that a young man, Thomas Aitkenhead, was, in 1696, hanged for ridiculing the church. But from this time the obsessive authority of the church began to be broken down. The “Act for Setting Schools” was passed and a school was established in every parish. By the end of the eighteenth century Scotland had a literacy rate approaching 75%, higher than any other European country. There were also philosophers such as Rene Descartes promoting the individual’s right to think and develop logical conclusions – “I think therefore I am,” Plus many eminent Scots such as David Hume who was calling for knowledge to be based on experience and observation. It was from a critical mass of alternative thinkers that the Scottish Enlightenment was born.
Scientific Method
What evolved is now referred to as scientific method. It is an approach that considers that knowledge, rather than being handed down from authority, is developed by disciplined experimentation. It is a cyclical process starting with a hypothesis followed by experiments and then the careful analysis of the results with the loop being closed by action that confirms or disproves the hypothesis. This process eventually develops a theory – that can be supported, updated and refuted.
The practice of science allows us to predict. Through the above cyclical process we gain a confidence level that if a set of conditions apply then we can predict the outcome. If the outcome does not match our prediction then we must return to our theory and consider revisions.
For example a scientific law states that water boils at 100°C. It enables prediction. It also enables experiments to refute this law – If we attempted to boil water on the top of Mount Everest, we would find that water boils at 69°C. We therefore need to revise our scientific law to say that water boils at 100°C when it is at sea level. With each disciplined experiment we extend our knowledge.
In this way the application of scientific method has seen the most amazing development of our knowledge over the past three hundred years. We just need to consider developments in medicine, engineering and electronics. The doubling of life expectancy in the developed world, being able to fly around the world at near the speed of sound and the modern marvel of the internet and the mobile phone.
Scientific Method in Management
Douglas McGregor in his seminal book “The Human Side of Enterprise” (1960) took this concept of Scientific Method into the realm of organisations:
“The theoretical assumptions management hold about controlling its human resources determine the whole character of the enterprise”
We interpret his word “management” as a collective term to mean the thinking of the organisation as represented by “management”. What he was pointing us towards was the significant opportunities available – akin to engineering and medicine - when our organisations or society moves into a disciplined learning mode as exemplified by Scientific Method. In the conclusion to his book he writes:
“The purpose of this volume is not to entice management to choose sides between theories. It is rather, to encourage the realisation that theory is important, to urge management to examine its assumptions and make them explicit. In doing so it will open the door to the future”
We can encapsulate McGregor’s message in the following:
Theories lead to Methods Used which provide Results
The methods the organisation uses evolves out of the its underpinning assumptions. The enterprise makes progress by the development of new theories – at the thinking level. If the focus is on simply improving the methods the organisation will achieve only minimal improvement because the basic thinking remains unchanged.
From Peter Senge:
We are coming increasingly to believe that this (failure to implement modern concepts) stems not from weak intentions, wavering will, or even from non systemic understanding, but from mental models. More specifically, new insights fail to get into practice because they conflict with deeply held internal images of how the world works, images that limit us to familiar ways of thinking and acting. That is why the discipline of managing mental models – surfacing, testing and improving our internal picture of how the world works – promises to be a major breakthrough for building learning organisations.
In a presentation to the Society in Sync conference in Aberdeen, Peter Senge used the analogy of an iceberg to portray the depth of thinking necessary if the organisation is to actually to secure progress.
Senge is portraying that Mental Models evolve into artefacts which underpin the systemic structures of the organisation. Systemic structures are the interrelationships between variables that cause the organisation to behave in certain ways. For example, an organisation may wish to eradicate the negative effects of “crisis management” only to find that the route causes are somewhere deep inside the organisation in how they collect and analyse data and how they ‘motivate’ their managers. We are usually unaware of these structures but they influence the more subtle patterns of behaviour, which in turn lead to observable events or results.
In other words if the organisation is not aware of the mental models that underpin their methods, then there can be little expectation that it will learn from the knowledge and many improvement opportunities that are available.
Revolutions in Science
Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” postulated that there are there are three stages in the development of scientific knowledge.
Kuhn further identified the existence of “paradigms.” A scientific community, while developing existing theories, programme their minds to think from a fixed perspective. In so doing they close off considerations of alternative perspectives. .
Paradigms
In expanding our appreciation of paradigms we look to Noel Baker’s book “Future Edge.” To define a paradigm he uses this quote from Adam Smith.
“A shared set of assumptions – a paradigm is the way we perceive the world; water to a fish. The paradigm explains the world to us and helps us predict its behaviour … when we are in the middle of a paradigm it is hard to imagine any other paradigm.”
What Noel Baker recognises is that we are flooded with information every minute of the day. Paradigms help us cope by filtering out any information that does not agree with our present thinking. It allows through only that information that is in sympathy with our existing mental model. It reverses the old adage of “seeing is believing” – to “we see what we believe.” While Paradigms help us cope, they have a down side in that they block new thinking. They filter out information that conflicts with our existing mental models. Noel Baker refers to this feature as “Paradigm Paralysis.” It makes it very difficult for us and our organisations to absorb new concepts. It is a wide spread disease.
The classic example of paradigm paralysis was the Swiss clock making industry. Their industry was built on the highly developed clockwork model with its gears, pinions and springs. When the competing paradigm of the digital electronic watch came along they were unable to comprehend its potential. They were slow to adapt and within a few years it decimated their industry. The irony is that it was the Swiss themselves that invented the digital watch. The developers got no encouragement from their own companies, and eventually made it available to the open market – the Japanese saw it and the rest, as they say, is history.
Where is management?
In line with Douglas McGregor, we see “Management” as a social science. So we would ask where is “management” in context of Thomas Kuhn’s picture of the three stages of scientific development:
Is management still in the craft phase where the majority of knowledge is acquired through experience with some skills being passed down from the culture of the organisation; or is it a profession that is progressing by identifying and continually developing its underpinning theoretical assumptions; or is it even in the transformation phase where new theories and concepts are readily accepted?
All the evidence points to the conclusion that “management” is still in the craft phase. Very few managers are aware of the underpinning theoretical assumptions of their organisation. The outcome of “management” remaining in the craft phase is that our management thinking has failed to develop over the past decades.
Lack of Development Examples
Systems Thinking – the concepts of systems thinking was well developed by The Second World War. Deming and Juran ware teaching Systems Thinking to the Japanese in the 1950s. The primary message of Systems Thinking is the recognition that at least 90% of outcomes are a function of the design of the system rather than the diligence of the individual, yet in 2010 we still have concepts of individual accountability and the belief that our problems would be solved if we had better, more skilled, more motivated people.
A Reward Culture. It has been long established that the most valuable asset of an organisation is the intrinsic motivation of the individual. Further more research conducted by Alfie Kohn in the 1980s showed that the persistent use of extrinsic motivators such as targets, bonuses, qualifications etc actually damages intrinsic motivation. It moves the person’s focus from the work itself to securing the reward. The focus on the reward can be such that the individual may even destroy their organisation to secure the maximum reward. – the banking industry is the most recent high profile example. We can also see how our love of learning is destroyed though having to chase qualifications. Students attend University for the qualification not for learning and knowledge. The use of targets in the public sector has developed widespread manipulation of data – “gaming” as it is commonly called.
Management by measurable figures alone – The unique processes that provide measures amount to only 3% of the whole. Other considerations such as training, morale, teamwork, purchasing policy, appraisal systems etc are non measurable but still require to be managed. As organisations get larger they have drifted, over the past 30 years, into the trap of managing by visible figures alone. The Oil Industry has a phrase – “If you cannot measure it you cannot control it” – which means that the industry is managed by looking at only 3% of the whole.
There is a growing belief that our management practice over the past 30 years has been getting worse rather than better.
Organisational Thinking and Learning
Now we come to what is possibly the most challenging recognition. It is not so much individuals that believe in rewards or manage by visible figures alone but the organisation of which they are part. We work within organisations, and to survive and develop within that organisation, we have to adapt to its culture and way of operating. It might be possible to have different approaches within the section for which we are responsible, as long it does not attack the basic thinking of the organisation.
So the opportunity is for the organisation to learn. This implies that the organisation is a living entity, with a learning ability.
“Organisations are living entities. They too are intelligent, creative, adaptive, self organising, meaning seeking” – Margaret Wheatley
Our education and culture has for centuries been founded on tackling problems by reducing them into their component parts and addressing each part individually. This style of thinking goes under the name of reductionist thinking. But through the development of systems thinking we are now having to turn our attention away from the parts and onto how the parts interrelate. We are being asked to think of the whole, the parts and their interrelationships. We are being asked to think how the organisation is to learn.
So the challenge has moved from how do we educate, provide knowledge (wisdom) to the individual, to how do we provide knowledge for the whole, the organisation or society.
Our education system, for example, will have evolved out of the dominant thinking of our society. How do we change society’s thinking? The bonus culture of the banks may have evolved from the culture of individualism and financial rewards coming from the USA. It will also have been heavily influenced by the short term thinking of the stock exchange.
The purpose of this site is to open out consideration as to how we address the whole. How do we establish a society that recognises “management” as a social science? How do we get society to be comfortable with ongoing experiment, and the learning and application from those experiments? How do we create a culture of knowledge (wisdom) in our society? How do we create a learning society?
From “The New Economics” by W Edwards Deming
The reference book for these statements is Arthur Herman’s book “The Scottish Enlightenment”
An important exploration of Scientific Method comes from the work Carl Popper. We recommend the short book on “Popper” by Bryan Magee.
These figures come from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_point
For an expansion of this section please visit www.learningsociety.org.uk and go to file on “Theories.”
From “The Fifth Discipline – The Art and Practice of Organisational Learning” by Peter Senge
See “Juran on Planning for Quality” by J M Juran and “Out of the Crisis” by Edwards Deming.
See “Punished by Rewards” by Alfie Kohn.
This observation comes from Edwards Baker’s of the Ford Motor Company – see the book “The New Economics” by W Edwards Deming.
See “The New Economics” by W Edwards Deming, The Puritan Gift” by Kenneth and William Hopper and presentation by Simon Caulkin to the Deming Forum in 2009.