Mario Pagliaro's Newsletter 10 November, 2004:

A new corporate culture

Summary:
Well before the Enron and Parmalat crashes, the case for a new corporate culture was evident and urgent. Ron Murray, Brian Rothery, Gary David, Tony Wright and myself discuss the reasons that make such change urgent and diffuse.
Early in the year 2000, well before the Enron and Parmalat giant crashes due to fraud and lack of overseeing, the case for a change in corporate culture was already apparent. The quality movement (PDF) started in the late Sixties and brought to the general public in the Eighties, held some promise; but the miserable failure of ISO 9000 in ridiculous quality verbosity, frustration and commercial frauds by "certification" societies and consultants, eclipsed quality as a strategic issue in management discussions.

The authors below, from UK, Ireland, Canada, US and Italy make a dialogue to shed some light on the  reasons originating an emerging new corporate culture.

Ron Murray: From the relational to the unifying age

In late 2000, technology and management author Brian Rothery was considering to write another 2 books, after the successful series on ISO 9000 of the early 90's: "I have been talking with my publisher, first about an ISO 9000:2000 title, then one centered on the new continual improvement emphasis, and for the past few weeks ('morphically' from around the time this discussion began) about the changing corporate culture.

Morevoer, in reviewing the major management techniques suggested by other writers and management gurus, I intended to include Six Sigma as one in a list of quality enhancement and defect reduction techniques.

I must confess -- objects Canada-based business consultant and management author Ron Murray -- that I have some doubts about Six Sigma based on my limited reading about it. In one article that was intended as a positive review there were 2 examples provided of companies that had used it successfully. The first was an electronics firm in Toronto that assembles cirucuit boards for General Electric - a big supporter of Six Sigma. 

The company was experiencing productivity problems so brought in a Six Sigma Black Belt to find the problem. After analysing mountains of data the Black Belt found the problem. In assembling circuit boards the company uses diodes provided by an outside supplier. The diodes were too large for the holes in cirucuit boards so were shattering when inserted. When diodes of the correct dimensions were used, the productivity problem was resolved. 

My question is, why did the people on the assembly line not say there was a problem when the diodes kept shatterin?. Were they up to their knees in broken glass? You would think even the cleaning staff would know there was a problem. What happens next month if a shipment of smaller diodes arrives and they keep falling out of the holes? Does this company not have a problem greater than the size of the diodes it receives?

The second expample was an appliance manufacturer. The problem was the chipping of enamel on stove tops. Again the Black Belt found the problem after much data gathering and analysis. Apparently the stove tops were not left in the drying room long enough for the enamel to harden. This company has been using enamel for decades. Why does it take this kind of analysis to determine that the enamel is not dry when coming out of the drying room? Why do the members of the organization not know what they are doing, or care about what they are doing?

A third example is Bombardier. Last week I read an article on how Six Sigma had helped Bombardier to find out why the paint is peeling off its jet aircraft. The problem was with the thickness of the primer. A Bombardier spokesman said it would have taken much longer for them to find the problem without Six Sigma.

I am quite willing to admit that these production processes may be much more complex than I realize, and that Six Sigma has much to offer that I do not understand. But the examples do suggest that these companies need to take a broader view of quality and how it can be built into their organization.

My own (interest) is a combination of discussion of why organizations are experiencing so much chaos today and a guide for how they can manage change in a way that overcomes the chaos. (I use it) as the basis of my consulting work. I find thinking and writing about the reasons underlying the chaos (using the work of Bois, Bachelard, Kuhn, Merleau-Ponty, etc) intellectually stimulating. I also think people need to have this level of understanding if they are going to manage change successfully at this time in history.

My approach when working with organizations on an organization development/change management initiative is to avoid telling people how they should behave or think. Instead organizations have to become the total situation in which the kind of thinking and behaviour they need becomes as normal and natural as old behaviours were.

Partial changes were appropriate during the relational age of thought because the foundation of organization was stable - part of the episteme.

But in the transition to a new age of thought (relational to unifying age) partial organizational change does not work. The foundation has been shattered by the transition. At these times in history every element of organization is changing simultaneously and interdependently. This is systemic vs. partial change. If we want to manage change all we can do is accelerate and direct what is happening as a result of a multitude of change drivers - social, cultural, political, economic, technological. Hence managed change must become systemic as well.

As the unifying age of thought replaces the relational age (we saw it in science and the arts beginning in the late 19th century) organizations move gradually from the machine model of interacting parts (perfectly normal and natural for the relational age) to an organic, integrated model (perfectly natural for the unifying age of thought). 

This change affects everything about organizations: their missions, processes, structures, cultures, their members' roles, reponsibilities, relationships, resource management practices, how they share information internally and externally, and their mental model of the organization that sub-consciously guides their behaviour into the patterns that constitute the organization's foundation. 

If this is the kind of change organizations are going through today because of a transtion to a new episteme, there is no point in trying to manage change by focussing on only one of these elements. Managed change has to be as comprehensive and integrated as the natural change it is trying to accelerate and direct. (e.g. we want to accomplish in 18 months a change that would occur on its own over a decade or more). 

When I work with organizations I use a tool I have developed called a Systemic Change Map to show them where they are in relation to all elements and where they are going as a result of the change drivers affecting them. Then we create a comprehensive set of integrated change interentions that will help them to accelerate and direct the change that is occuring.

What are the implications of this for improving quality in organizations? How do organizations become a total situation in which high quality is as normal and natural as poor quality. It is certainly not by changing their processes to impose quality checks, or building  a quality control unit into their structure. Nor can they tell someone their role is quality assurance - this just creates frustrated quality "experts" who are fighting against an organization that has not changed every one of its elements to support quality.

What are the change drivers that are requiring organizations to move towards high quality standards? Can you apply these to organizations and create a picture of where they will be in 20 years? Can you think through all the changes that will have to occur as this change occurs? Can you advise organizations on how they can intervene in this change process to accelerate and direct it? 

I don't know the answers to these questions. But if such change can be accerated and directed it will have to address every element of the organization simultaneously and interdependently.

Tony Wright: Keeping One Eye On The Plot

A lot of people in mid-to-large companies today have forgotten what they’re there for. They have their own little territories which they nurture and defend, and they lose the perspective of the primary purpose of the organisation. A few years ago, just after the public transportation system was privatised, there was a widely reported media story about empty buses hurtling past queues of people waiting at bus stops. In response to the numerous complaints which ensued the bus company allegedly issued the following statement. ‘It is impossible for our drivers to stick to their timetables if they have to keep stopping to pick up passengers.’ A classic example of a company which has lost the plot.

There is an ISO document, PD ISO/TR 10014:1998, which says that in order to be effective an organisation should first define its Primary Purpose, and the primary purpose of an organisation is either; to generate profit or to serve the community.

In other words, there can be only one primary purpose – and it’s make your mind up time.

This may seem like stating the obvious but what it actually does is clear away a lot of the excess baggage we’ve accumulated over the years by presenting us with a perspective which is clear and sharp.

With so much compartmentalisation and specialisation in our organisations today it’s easy for us to lose sight of that primary purpose. Quality people can often be heard to say that nothing is more important than quality, production people say that nothing is more important than getting the product out, sales people will tell you that without satisfied customers the company will cease to exist. And though these things are obviously important in any business, they are all servants of the primary purpose, not ends in themselves. They are therefore valid only to the extent to which they continue to serve that purpose.

The larger the organisation the more probable its employees are to lose sight of its primary purpose.

Small businesses have a passion for profit, their day-to-day existence depends on it. They have more of the ‘pull-together’ spirit, doing whatever it takes to reach the goal. Larger businesses, on the other hand, seem to have more of a passion for bright and shiny things which they hope will frighten the competition and dazzle the shareholders. 

They replace genuine pulling together with stirring but ineffectual mission statements and artificial motivational initiatives. The need for profit is not so urgent, not so sharply defined in these larger organisations. People in larger companies have less team ethic, they tend to concentrate on their own individual career paths rather than the overall success of the company and managers in such companies often see their roles simply as stepping stones, mere resting places on the road to higher and better things.

Unfortunately because these managers need to make short term impacts in order to secure their next career move, they tend to aim for the quick kills. For example a manager can cut corners by reducing the number of product trials or shaving the cost of bought-in components by placing business with a less reputable but cheaper supplier. T

he product may suffer when recalls and complaints happen a year or more down the line but by then the perpetrator will have proven himself to the board as a no-nonsense manager of note and been moved upwards, leaving someone else to clear up the mess. If he uses the same quick kill tactics in each position he can actually move quite a long way up the ladder before the sub-strata, the bread and butter of the organisation, begins to crumble under the weight of his short term decisions.

The frightening thing is that many of our larger organisations actively encourage this. How many times have we heard a CEO or Chairman say that they like to move their people around every couple of years, they don’t like them to get too comfortable in one position? What they are actually doing is forcing them to make quick kills in order to assure their continued upward progression, then absolving them of all accountability and responsibility for the long term results of their actions by moving them on.

Integrated Management is teamwork. Easier said than done, but not as difficult as you might think.

Teamwork doesn’t happen naturally in large businesses, it has to be forced. Mission statements won’t do it. We have to begin with making our people understand that the primary purpose of the business is profit. Take the traditional battlefield of Manufacturing versus Quality, for example. Quality people often regard Manufacturing supervisors as brain-dead Neanderthals, blindly producing ton after ton of worthless scrap and defective product. 

Manufacturing people see the Quality Department as pedantic Jobsworths, little Hitlers who don’t live in the real world. Why? The reason is that they operate to different agendas and so they perceive their roles in the organisation as having opposing outcomes. The result is constant war, stress and pandemic inefficiency. They should be working together, not at opposite ends of the spectrum.

‘Quality’ as a function of business is an unnatural state. It didn’t exist as a separate entity until the division of labour came along, it was an unquestionable part of the process, people knew their craft and they just did things right. During the building of Notre Dame there were no inspectors checking the length of the gargoyle’s noses. No Quality Engineers swarmed over the Santa Maria measuring the width of the planks, yet Columbus still sailed to America in it. Today we’ve come to accept that people do things wrong, we pay them to turn up and do something, we don’t expect them to have to do it right so we have Quality.

We don’t encourage our manufacturing functions to think in terms of profit, we bring them up to concentrate on making numbers of things, not making money. Thus any production supervisor worth his salt will move heaven and earth to get his thousand widgets made and through the door – at any cost. That’s his job as we present it to him. If he has to use substandard parts, he’ll do it. He’ll run machines into the ground before he’ll let them be stopped for adjustments or essential maintenance. He’ll arrange overtime and extra staff to deal with the reworks he incurs, hide suspect assemblies from the Quality Police, and at the end of his shift he’ll go home happy in the knowledge that once again he’s saved the day.

How much has he cost the business that day? That’s where a lot of the profit goes. The figures quoted vary, depending on the authority, but they are all staggering. UK manufacturing businesses are said to routinely lose between 12% and 25% of sales revenue because of errors or covering for the potential of errors. That’s turnover, not bottom line. Wouldn’t it be nice to add 12% to 25% to the profits without having to develop any new products, employ any additional workers or make any extra investments to plant and equipment?

Critics of ISO 9001 probably outnumber its proponents by something like a hundred to one. That’s because the critics have only ever seen it done badly. If they’d learned to drive on an isolated island and they’d had an instructor who could only drive in reverse then that’s the way they would have learned. So they buy a Ferrari, drive it backwards, then take it back to the garage two days later complaining that they can’t get it to go over sixty and it’s giving them a pain in the neck. There’s nothing wrong with the vehicle, they’re just not using it the right way. They need to be shown what the Ferrari can do when it’s driven in the right direction.

Almost no senior managers (and precious few Quality Managers) understand what ISO 9001 really is. Most of them think it is a set of rules that has to be obeyed in order to keep a certificate on the wall. In fact ISO 9001 can be the most powerful business tool you are ever likely to come across. Let’s begin by thinking of it in a slightly different way.

Imagine that we are sitting down opposite a potential customer. ‘You should do business with our company,’ we tell him, ‘because we are the very best at what we do, and we can prove it.’

We open up our Quality Manual and begin flicking the pages. ‘Look, if you place an order with our company this is how we’ll process it. This is how we’ll make sure we can deliver on time and to your specification. This is how we’ll design your product for you, and this is how we’ll select the suppliers and subcontractors who will make the components. Then this is how we’ll manufacture it and ship it out to you.

‘And these are not just words on paper,’ we say, ‘This is actually what we do. If you want proof you can come into our company and follow the process through for yourself.’

Now of course it’s not always possible or practical to have maybe hundreds of customers walking around our company so we hire a Third Party to come in and check things out on behalf of the customer. That Third Party is BSI or DNV or Lloyds or any of the other certification bodies. They check that what we say we do is what we actually do.

The new ISO 9001:2000 standard says, in paraphrase, that we should have a documented system which describes the business processes. It doesn’t say dictate. It doesn’t say impose. It says describe what you do. The widespread misunderstanding of this single point is the main cause of Third Party nonconformances in industry today. People write procedures which they think are best practice, or which they think might be nice things to do, then they try to impose them on the organisation. Of course no-one takes any notice of them. The Assessor comes along and starts issuing nonconformances all over the place which usually begin something like, ‘The procedure does not reflect the current practice in that…’

The procedure does not reflect the current practice. There’s the key to achieving zero nonconformances right there.

Why do we have such laboriously detailed procedures? Don’t we employ trained people? Would a bus driver need a procedure telling him how to change gear? Of course not, he knows that already, driving buses is what he does for a living. All he needs is a route map and some general guidance on how we want him to perform his duties. No procedure should ever be more than a single page in length. Max.

The purpose of the business is to make money, not promote bureaucracy.

Many of the corporate giants which were household names only yesterday are either gone today or are struggling to survive. Many of the new global giants didn’t even exist ten or fifteen years ago. Why are they so successful? Because the new kids on the block haven’t lost their passion yet. Their rise has been so meteoric that in many cases they haven’t learned the traditional way of doing things in business, they just naively pull together to get the job done.

Nobody likes change. Change makes us uncomfortable, it shifts the ground beneath our feet, but we need to reclaim that small-business drive that gave birth to the organisation in the first place.

We need to redevelop that passion for profit which the founders had, that overpowering singleness of purpose which led to the growth of the organisation we see today. If we don’t then people may soon be talking about us the way they talk about the giants of yesteryear.

Mario Pagliaro: Quality as source and end

Quality at work is pragmatically best defined according to Phil Crosby: conformity to the agreed work requirements.

Hence, carry out every single process with no mistakes and at completion and relationships will be successful.

First time and every time.

A process, in other words, gives a valuable output whose contents is, in every sense, goodness: something useful, (fit to the purpose, if you like). But the fact is: We do have organizations where processes are not spelled out properly, people do more or less what they like most, sometime well and sometime badly, and where work must be done over and over again. 

This gives place to costs that are usually higher than 25% of total revenues; simply, organizations do not know how to measure all that money and - while fully aware of their inadequacy, for which they call in one consulntant after another -- strive to achieve their products ready in time and good (containing quality) with ever different results.

Quality at work must be measured with money. Management then will then be involved and, as a result, everyone will have clear that there is only one way to accomplish quality: Prevention.

That is, if I transmit to you some information, this information must be exact, in time and complete. All of the so called "service" organizations work processing information which is incomplete, often mistaken and redundant with people at the ends of the information process that are poorly trained to do well thier job, lack the needed resources and -- when available -- lack the ability to exploit the novel IT resources.

More often than not, these organizations cannot face uncertainties; and in that way they're spoiling their best work-force with high employee turnover, frequent crisis and no understanding of the reason of their inadequacy. 

At work, quality has to be defined. And its standard well understood: Zero-Defects (which refers NOT to the 2nd law of thermodynamics or quantum physyscs that have well demonstrated that such a standard is physically unattainable), but simply to the fact that it is better, cheaper and more convenient for all carrying out work with no mistakes and at completness. 

The cost of not understanding that quality is conformity to the agreed requiremetns is huge: Work must be done again and this poses actually a threat to organization survival while every onw is left free to follow her/his mood.

Yet, a question remains open: What are the right things to be done right the first time? How can ve evaluate what is good and what is bad for an organization? And do we do that for an individual?

Here, the quest for what is good and what is bad, brings the quality movement back to the roots of the western thought. Greece. Athens: Fifht century before Christ.

And no one better than Robert Pirsig has, in my opinion, answered this question. In 1974, in his seminal book Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, Pirsig makes an umprecedented travel to the roots of human thought and comes up with an answer that -- I believe -- has changed for ever our understanding of quality and, therefore, of the world.

This vision has to be shared with companies executives as well as with working people. And that is what I do.

Brian Rothery: Quality, value and corporate culture 

The world's first management system standard was ISO 9000, for quality management systems. Brian Rothery wrote the first book about it in 1991, the second edition of which published in 1993 became a business book 'bestseller' and with a companion ISO 14001 title went into 16 translations. Brian began to ponder upon the 'epistemic' reasons for its success, in particular L.L Whyte's theories about dominant tendencies and facilitative growth, noting the same tendencies in the environmental revolution, and the Internet.

Now ISO is bringing out the first major revision of ISO 9000 - ISO 9000:2000 and the technical committee responsible has made dramatic changes which influence the very notion of quality management itself. Brian has been asked by his publisher to write or revise his material for a new 2000 edition.

Rothery took a 'fitness for purpose' approach to quality believing that this was what ISO required, whether for aircraft parts, junk food or children's paper party hats, not quality in the added value sense. Now ISO is increasing the requirement for 'continual improvement' so that value in the sense of Pirsig's below may be a very useful concept in particular for getting the message across to top management.

From the ISO 9000:2000 point of view the question is whether we can recruit these metaphysical ideas into the culture of an enterprise in a manner which achieves real continual improvement. But we are bound by the limit laws of life, and the Second law of Thermodynamics itself, to accept that continuous improvement in product manufacture and services is impossible.

A level of zero defects once achieved in manufacturing is just that. If we keep making the component exactly to the specifications supplied by our customer, that is that as far as quality improvements in the manufacture of that component are concerned. To say that we can all keep improving in a manufacturing environment is like saying that pyramid selling can work for all the people of the Third World. Similarly, surely there is a limit to the improvements in good service, to try to go beyond which would result in farce or vaudeville.

We can of course, and are, expanding the concept of improvement to the environmental probity and public safety and staff health and safety implications of what we are doing. But here again there is a limit. We will quickly reach zero undesirable or controllable emissions and discharges and human limits in safety. Many a plant has been operating with no serious worker accidents over many months and even years in recent times, and a philosophy of a completely safe environment is simply unrealistic.

So the next direction for improvement is into staff training and development, cooperation with suppliers and customers, and in the case of the chemicals industry at least into community awareness and participation.

But some advocates of a school of continuous quality are trying to go farther. Drawing for inspiration on Robert Pirsig's 1974 bestseller, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, and on his lesser known 1992 novel Lila, they are suggesting that quality, and perhaps more specifically value or ‘the adding of value’ is both metaphysical and the dominant and truthful evolutionary dynamic, as distinct from simple ‘goodness’. So that we are in an evolutionary moral order of intellectual, social, biological and inorganic (or chemical) patterns, with intellectual patterns having moral primacy, social patterns next, then biological patterns and finally inorganic patterns. But particularly in which we distinguish ‘quality’ and ‘value’, or accretions of value, as the main measure of our evolution.

The great writer Launcelot Law Whyte might have described this value added process as a formative or dominant tendency.

While this use of Pirsig’s philosophy is laudable and we do badly need an infusion or perhaps ‘transfusion’ of some new moral or quality substance into corporate culture, it seems hardly credible that corporate culture with its in-built power-mongering, ruthlessness and greed, can with sincerity adopt altruism or even Buddhism as a company policy, and this writer is mindful that he worked for IBM back in the days when its company song echoed General Motor's that 'what was good for General Motors was good for the USA'.

Yet, the advances in ‘corporate morality’ are impressive. Quality management as expressed through ISO 9000 is no less than a guarantee of honesty and accountability from the providers of products and services to their customers, an honesty which begins upstream at the farm, forest or coal face and cascades downstream all the way to the user. Now that we have added environmental probity and health and safety, what was simply honest and accurate is now also clean and safe or at least as best we can make it, but in all three cases truth and honesty are now literally legislated into industry and guaranteed by international standards and certification.

So supposing we go on down this value added-road, realistically what value components are left to add? We don’t live in a simple world where the farmer farms, the miller mills and the storekeeper sells, and perhaps we never did; on the contrary we live in a world where the wealthy get wealthier, the poor poorer, and the powerful more powerful, a world where fragile democracy can collapse overnight, where organized corruption reigns from politicians and judges down through the legal profession and the police, where the dominant culture appears to be ‘how do I get what I can from the system for myself?’

It would be almost laughable to suggest that we add selflessness to the new corporate moralities of honesty and environmental probity as competition and power are so fundamental to corporate business itself. But so much has been achieved in accountability that an open mind demands that we ask if we can continue to develop a continuous improvement culture under the requirements of the new Year 2000 ISO standard, which adds new socially desirable elements to corporate culture, so that companies can begin to adopt new policies which go beyond ‘excellence’, ‘quality’ and ‘environmental probity’ - for example, community good for those companies not already fully participating with their immediate communities.

What would such a program incorporate?

Level one: staff, customers, suppliers, community

Level two: cultural development within the company - a corporate cultural program.

Gary David: Systems, form and the episteme

When it comes to "systems" and "system-functions," it refers to how I structure my sayings about events, cluster of events, or cluster of clusters of events. System-function becomes the structured matrix imposed on my thinking-feeling processes by the assumptions buried deep in the culture in which I grew. 

In relation to the green leaf, our language imposes upon us a subject-predicate way of thinking, a substance-and-qualities view of the world that puts me in a particular relationship with the cosmos. 

Bois wrote:

"As long as I evaluate the goings-on within this system-function, I remain cloistered within a world of things and actions, of substances and qualities, described with nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This system-function is the framework common to Indo-European languages...It is relatively easy to change and/or correct a statement. It is more difficult to change a doctrine for a different one. When it comes to passing from one system to another, the task is Herculean. It is tantamount to a revolution in our way of life."

Lancelot Law Whyte wrote in Accent on Form in speaking on particles:

"It is the pattern or arrangement which counts for most purposes; the individual particles are indistinguishable and may come and go at random. Indeed apparently the only function of the particles is to build up patterns, for it is these latter that we actually observe. This is the final step: the "form," in the new sense of the underlying structural pattern, is more important than its material components, which lack individuality. Thus the twentieth-century idea of structure amounts to this...thus structure is spatial form seen in its full complexity....form is now grounded in ultimate structure."

Ron Murray: An education in systemic thinking

My interest in Bois, Bachelard, Korzybski and others goes back to the early 1970's. My doctoral supervisor from 1968 to 1975 was Alastair Taylor. He was very interested in Korzybski's work, and steered me in this direction. Taylor gave the annual Korzybski lecture in 1968. He was also very interested in General Systems Theory developed by Ludwig von Bertalanffy. As you know, systems theory focuses on wholes in all of their complexity, rather than breaking them down into their constituent parts, which destroys their emergent property.

Reductionism

However, many systems theorists apply concepts appropriate for physical and biological systems to human socio-cultural systems.

In attacking this reductionism von Bertalanffy referred to Existential Phenomenology stating "What I am trying to say is what the existential phenomenologists have been saying in more convoluted language." I had not encountered Existential Phenomenology so began to study the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other existential phenomenologists. 

Here I found a philosophical standpoint that seemed to underlie what I was reading in Bois, Korzybski and Bachelard. The central reference point of existential phenomenology holds that human consciousness is an active, meaning-giving orientation to the world, and that reality emerges in the consciousness-world encounter. We cannot think of the world without consciousness, nor can we think of consciousness without the world. Human existence is a social existence - "being-together-in-the-world." Hence, as Merleau-Ponty said, the only thing the phenomenological reduction of Husserl
teaches us is that it is impossible.

You may wonder how I digressed into these fields of thought, since the dissertation was supposed to be on Law of the Sea and the changes that are occurring to it as a result of social and technological change. Alastair Taylor is a historian, geographer and political scientist. He became my supervisor because international relations was one of my areas of concentration and this was one of his specialties within political science. He was an excellent teacher, and what I learned through studying with him shaped my thinking forever. But he did not force or encourage me to focus the dissertation.

Instead, he kept suggesting new dimensions to pursue. As a result, the dissertation became quite disjointed in, as suggested by the title "Towards a New Model of International Maritime Relations: The contribution of Existential Phenomenology and General Systems Theory." I am sure I passed only because the examiners became engaged in a heated argument that lasted through most of the examination.

The dissertation turned out to be more of an exploration of the philosophical foundations of social science than a study of maritime international relations.

I tried to make the case that the emerging age of thought (Bois and Bachelard) required a new philosophical foundation (existential phenomenology) and analytical tools that do not destroy the integrity of socio-cultural phenomena in the attempt to explain them. Contemporary social science was mechanistic and reductionist, since it tried to use the tools of other sciences that were not appropriate - sociologists were trying to create "value-free" analyses of social phenomena which destroys an essential component of the phenomenon being studied. 

I linked the idea of the transition from the relational age of thought to the unifying age of thought (Bois and Bachelard) with the emergence of a new social reality that was becoming manifested in new social behaviours and new social institutions, since social organizations are collective patterned behaviour that reflect our common social realities. Realities remain stable (or change incrementally) during an age of thought, but they change radically and relatively quickly during the transition to a new age of thought.

I also used the work of Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). I took his concept of paradigms as mental models on which consensus has emerged and applied it to social phenomena. It seemed to me that during an age of thought there would be consensus on the mental model of social organization ( at the level of society as well as organizations within societies) because social realities are relatively homogeneous and constant. But during the transition to a new age of thought the consensus would be shattered because competing social realities would co-exist, creating the kind of social chaos that is found within any science that is going through a revolution as described by Kuhn.

When I finished the doctorate my life took a significant turn. For a number of reasons I took a position in a School of Public Administration and Policy Studies for 8 years. During this time I tried to make students aware of the forces (including the organizations in which they work) that would shape their social realities, and that in preparing public policies they must take this into account. However, most of them wanted to know how to write a memorandum to Cabinet. Realizing that I was a fish out of water I left the academic world and joined the public service of Ontario to try to practice what I had been preaching. I worked for several years as an internal change management consultant, trying to help organizations become more flexible, responsive, and open.

I was (and am) concerned about the advice being given to organizations by many consulting firms and "gurus, so I began to write a book on the subject, going back to my dissertation and using the ideas of Bois, Bachelard, Kuhn, etc. It seems to me that much of the chaos in organizations today is due to the fact that we are still in the transition from the relational age to the unifying age of thought

The machine organization of interacting parts was perfectly normal and natural for the relational age. That form of organization was consistent with the existing social institutions, material technologies, and social realties as expressed in every kind of thought and art. But when the relational age began to give way to the unifying age of thought in the late 19th and early 20th century the foundation of the machine organization (the relational organization) began to crumble. Hence the paradigm shatter, not shift, of our times.

We have seen the emergence of the unifying age much more quickly in the sciences and arts than in social organizations because these are self-reinforcing phenomena. They help to create the reality within which we live, which is then reflected in social organizations because we behave in ways consistent with our realities. However, the shift to the unifying age has begun to affect organizations over the last couple of decades for a variety of reasons. In fact, the plethora (truly an unhealthy excess leading to a morbid condition) of change management ideas that are being proposed today is symptomatic of the transition between 2 ages of thought.

Almost all of these change management proposals are trial-and-error, one-dimensional and mechanistic (relational age thought). They do not treat an organization as an indivisible whole. They do not see the interdependence of the organization as a social entity (its mission, processes, structure and culture) with its members (their roles, responsibilities, relationships, resource management practices, information sharing, and their social realities). 

Hence they try to drive organizational change by modifying processes or structure or culture, etc. This mechanistic approach may have been appropriate during the relational age of thought, but it does not work during the transition between two ages.

I have found the work of Bois, Bachelard, Korzybski, Merleau-Ponty, Kuhn, etc. essential to understanding what is happening to organizations today and to advising their members on how they can accelerate and direct these change. This is extremely ambitious and even arrogant - to think that we can understand and modify social change at this level of complexity - but the alternative is either waiting for the future to unfold or engaging in simplistic one-dimensional change that creates more chaos. Change management involves understanding what is happening to the members of an organization, including their changing social realities, and trying to accelerate and direct this change.

In 1996 I created my own consulting firm to provide change management and organization development advice. I am still writing the book. I thought I had finished it but continue to find improvements as I work with clients. I am looking for The Art of Awareness and The New Scientific Spirit to review the ideas of Bois and Bachelard for the manuscript and to support the work I do every day with organizations to help them through the chaos that is making life difficult for so many people today.

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I corsi di formazione manageriale di Mario Pagliaro.


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