For the past 25 years (at least) I have been trying to make sense of one paramount issue. How is it possible that Homo sapiens, possibly the smartest species to have inhabited this planet, is consciously hastening its own extinction by managing its affairs in ways that are not at all conducive to sustaining life? A matter bothering me more than any other, is whether we are sufficiently wise to survive our own ingenuity and hubris. This question is manifestly relevant today with the advent of artificial general intelligence.
Technologies, particularly the technology of knowledge, bias reasoning in preference of perceiving the world a certain way. A blackboard, for instance, encourages erasure, continual modification, flexible thinking. Pen and paper require neatness, attention to syntax, orderly thinking. Online hypertext inspires discontinuity, non-linear, collective, exploratory thinking. Thus, the way we construct our thinking space is also the way we orchestrate ideas. The problem is that over time we come to believe our particular model represents the way the world itself is organized. Patently that is not the case.
Essentially, each paradigm shift in technology has changed what we mean by knowing. In effect our culture is just a vast thinking space, an architectural semiology of symbols and idiosyncratic structures. And, just as our culture moved from the printed word to the electronic text, and then from text to speech, so are we shifting from tiered social orders (of empires, sovereign states and corporations) to a dynamic network culture (of communities and social movements) layered on each other.
Such shifts challenge even the most well-worn of truths and alters, quite significantly, any embedded conventions and traits of thought that produce for us a sense of reality.
A paradigm shift of this reality-altering kind occurred at Cambridge University in 1792. A tutor by the name of William Farish suggested that student papers be graded. This novel proposal - that a numerical value be assigned to the expression of human thought - was a leap forward in our acceptance of numerical measurement as an authenticator of knowledge, and of our formulating a mathematical impression of reality.
A simple idea changed the entire experience of learning and meaning. By instituting fierce competition among students, through the provision of sharply differentiated symbols of attainment, grading provided what was assumed to be an unprejudiced measure of human performance. It created the illusion that accurate estimations could be made of worthiness. In Michel Foucault’s words, the human being became a calculable person.
This concept quickly caught on, for if a number could be assigned to the quality of a thought, then it could equally be given to other qualities - such as mercy, love, hate, beauty, creativity, personality, intelligence, and even sanity.
This notion of appraisal still permeates our thinking today. Just try to imagine a world in which there are no clocks, no timetables, no accountants - most of us would find it quite impossible to do our work without resorting to mathematical calculation of some kind. We have been thoroughly indoctrinated into a mode of numerical patterning (of counting, measuring and calculating) in order to perceive the world this way - in effect a facsimile of the real world. That does not mean the real world exists precisely as we perceive it to be in that representative state.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that, so long as we realize that our ontological awareness of what is real is being shaped, and our choice of imperatives significantly predetermined, by such ingrained preferences. Nor should we assume the absence of (and deficiencies in) other, peculiar, unfashionable, or even contrasting yet equally valid, ways of comprehending the world. The rich wisdom traditions of first nations, for example, provide a distinctive appreciation of reality that differ significantly from the mainstream.
Secreted within every technology is an ideological bias - a predilection to construct meaning as one thing, rather than another. We are easily seduced by such ideological biases. But that is not all. Those who become adept in the use of a new technology quickly become part of an elite information monopoly, accumulating power and influence in such a way that they are then granted authority, status and prestige by those lacking in such competence.
For well over 500 years, for example, teachers and academics have been part of such a monopoly created by the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Before that it was the clergy who were the only people in society who spoke Latin and could therefore translate the word of God to the unenlightened. Today, given our ability to instantly communicate with anyone, anywhere, for whatever purpose, the trajectory is towards decentralization and the disintegration of such dominance. The same fate awaits all "status" companies and professions - from lawyers to medical practitioners. Sooner or later, when the technology shifts, the knowledge monopoly crumbles.
Industrial society in the West spawned its own self-referential ideology as it developed. Modernism became a "totalitarian technocracy", purging alternatives to itself. This was accomplished, not by rendering alternatives illegal, immoral or unpopular, but simply by making them "invisible" and therefore mostly irrelevant. In the process of fashioning modernism, new meaning was ascribed to old concepts as diverse as religion, culture and progress, so that our previous definitions still made sense within the new context. And we devised additional instruments - among them management, bureaucracy and production.
Innovations like these spread rapidly through industrial society, cementing the latest ideology in place. Based implicitly on the appropriation of notions of calculability and the authority of the written word - which inevitably led to devices such as accounting mechanisms, inventory control, and productivity norms - the new techniques became the bedrock for so-called "scientific management" systems.
Although there was nothing particularly scientific about them, the modern corporation was created by adopting these principles. The economist W. H. Galbraith maintained that, perhaps even more than machinery, massive and complex business organizations are the tangible manifestations of advanced technology.
Like any other technology, though, management has progressively tended to operate independently of the system it was designed to serve. The technology of management is comprised of rational protocols, reductionist controls, and precise regulations and routines aimed at achieving clarity and efficiency, while standardizing behaviours and dampening down unwanted perturbations in the system of industrial manufacturing. In that role it has become sanctified, fixed, ruling out any possibility of more appropriate alternatives taking its place. In terms of societal progress this is a huge problem.
Only now, poised in a liminal moment in history when the depleted frameworks of modernism are breaking down, and the new have yet to be created, are we gradually discovering that our identity is not fixed, but fluid and transitional. We have become multiple - a community of mind as Gregory Bateson suggested. Chaos and complexity theories assert that the world is both unknowable and unpredictable. All we can do is engage in moments of transient meaning-making. In this bewildering and unfamiliar context, the prevailing "science" of conventional management endures as a zombie-like irrelevance.
And so our cultural memory adjusts, at times painfully, to post-modernism - a world shimmering with new possibilities, confusing and exhilarating. Everything in this new world is infused with new meanings. There is no central authority, as yet no keeper of wisdom or knowledge - only fiduciaries of particular ephemeral points of view.
Now the art is to find suitable models for a new society and then trust sufficiently in these models to supplant the old ones. This is far easier said than done. Management has become deeply implanted in our consciousness as the prime means for effectively coordinating and directing the institution of work and governance. We have come to regard management as an unquestionable imperative. Indeed, it has become so analogous with getting things done that it is difficult enough to make changes to the institution of management, let alone devising alternative methods for achieving our purposes. Worse still, it has managed to wheedle itself into our collective mind as a valid substitute for leadership.
Indeed management has become an "invisible technology" working subversively but convincingly to insinuate itself into our cultural mindset as a substitute for leadership. And yet, distressing though it might be to imagine, it is entirely possible for business, and almost any other institution, to operate once again without a highly technocratic management structure or managerial elite. In fact, it is inevitable that such sociocratic democratized governance will ultimately prevail.
My central hypothesis is that modernist management - as a "technospheric solution" to running contemporary enterprises and government agencies - is obsolete. Almost any attempt by a professional management elite to manage as it has done in the past now risks serious damage to their organization as a whole. Besides it is unnecessary. This hypothesis is based on two revolutionary principles resulting from close observation of the pathology of many different types of organization:
Principle 1: Observing the laws of complex adaptive systems, such as economies and ecosystems, teaches us that organizations may consciously need to adopt comparable processes to those found in nature in order to survive in the long term. Within this context, strategic development becomes nothing less than the creation of new social ecologies.
Principle 2: Noting the results of recent research, much of which is held under wraps, it is apparent that the greater proportion of an organization’s financial and operational performance (especially in long-surviving companies) appears to result not from any formal plans, vision, or management control system, but from informal actions, habits, instinct, conversations, and personal-cultural agendas enacted routinely by every member of the enterprise.
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