It's Less About Theory and More About Thinking

I've always told myself that I like theory. I did my Master's degree in conflict resolution at George Mason University, and I remember talking to colleagues of mine in the conflict resolution field who weren't so sure about the program because it was too theoretical. I didn't dispute its theoretical bent--that's what I liked about it. 

Yet here I am, a management consultant working mostly in the association world, two fields of endeavor that are not known for their theory. Susan Cramm, in a Harvard Business Review Blog, asks readers to help her figure out why people don't follow best practices, which is kind of an assault on theory. If theory tells us what to do, then why aren't we doing it? She cites a very interesting article in the Atlantic from 2006 by a management consultant with a philosophy Ph.D. (whoa) called "The Management Myth." Matthew Stewart describes management theory as "at its core a collection of quasi-religious dicta on the virtue of being good at what you do, ensconced in a protective bubble of parables (otherwise known as case studies)."

Ouch! 

But I am not sure I can argue with that. He traces the theoretical foundation of management education back to the famous Frederick Taylor and his "scientific management," and points out that there wasn't much science to it. Taylor didn't come up with hypotheses that could be proven true or untrue. He didn't seem to have an interest in developing actual theory. He didn't publish his data to let other scientists further develop it, and while actually measuring productivity might have been a new idea back then, his "scientific" method still had places where he made huge "adjustments" that were based on a gut assessment of the situation or the people involved, rather than data analysis. Stewart ultimately argues that Management is actually just a subfield of Philosophy. Ongoing debates about how to do management and lead organizations are simply disputes over different value systems, often just a dialectic between the efficiency camp and the humanist camp.

About that point in his argument, I started not caring. If this is a discussion about whether or not the school of Management should be incorporated into the Philosophy department, I'm not interested. I realized that at that level, I don't like theory. I get the importance of academic theory development and research. I mean real theory development, not case-study based research that tells us a best practice. And when it comes to management, I just don't care about theory. Maybe this field is not ready for theory. I'm glad there are people who do the case study research and do their surveys and use that research to come up with their two by two quadrants, or X measures, or Y-step processes. Some of that becomes useful in what we do. 

But it's not theory, and that's okay by me. I'm happy being a philosopher that uses research to help clarify my thinking, because that is what this field needs more than theory: thinking.

Too often what we read in the management "theory" books and research reports leads us astray because we think it is a theory that will tell us what to do. We think it is proving something that will rule out options that used to confuse us. I think these books and reports are more useful when they help us to think more, not less.

Cramm's blog post wonders why we know the right thing to do, yet we don't do it. The answer is because we read about the right thing, rather than thinking about it. We are searching for the right thing to do, rather than trying to better understand our own philosophical tenets and make sense of what's actually happening in our organizations. That's the challenge. 

What if it were up to us, not the management theorists, to figure out what to do and (more importantly) why we should do it? What if we had to question our theories in use? What if we had to explain more of our choices and specifically could NOT cite best practices as the rationale?

This requires more thinking, and in the end, I just don't think we collectively value deep thinking enough to make room for it in our organizations. And I mean thinking as an interactive, group process too, not just the CEO noodling things over on the train ride home. This is thinking that uses real data from real life within YOUR organization (not a case study), but we don't end up with that data because (a) both managers and employees are too busy and (b) employees won't tell the managers the truth anyway.

We need to make some shifts. Getting more truth spoken is one of them, but there's more than that. If we break some routines around time and rewards and accountability we might free up some internal resources we can put towards better thinking. And, of course, better thinking leads to better learning, and that leads to better results. 

That's my theory philosophy, anyway. 

Comments

[Maddie Grantm]

Interestingly I just read a post yesterday (http://bit.ly/cTOIl) debunking the concept of "best practices" which seems to be similar to what you're saying here. The post is specifically about Search Engine Optimization but the author's point can be extrapolated to other management theory, I think:

"By definition, a best practice:

* is a static ruleset
* is a standard to be followed
* has worked in the past (read: is old)
* has been popularized (read: is average)
* limits judgement, evaluation, and strategy (cornerstones of quality search marketing)"

Best practices are precisely about "reading what to do" and not "thinking what to do".

And you might argue best practices have been arrived out by people testing theories out and throwing out those that don't work, but there's less and less of a "one size fits all" model for, well, pretty much anything these days, IMHO.

[patti digh]

Thanks for the food for thought. (A favorite t-shirt in graduate school said "Philosophy. I'm in it for the money.") :-D

Two thoughts:

1) Abstract knowledge (theory, best practices) cannot be accessed in hot moments. We need embodied knowledge at those moments.

2) Best practices assume the knowledge we need is "out there." It isn't. It is internal to us, our way of being in the world, and the particular context in which we find ourselves. No amount of "how" will address "why," and yet we stay stuck in "how."

That's my theory, any way.

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