Pursuing the Art of
Strategic Conversations
An investigation of the role of the liberal arts of
rhetoric and poetry in the business world
Tony Golsby-Smith
Doctor of Philosophy
Social Ecology
2001
I certify that this thesis does not include any material previously sent
for a degree or diploma in any University; and it does not contain any
material previously published and or written by any other person
except where due reference is made in the text.
In memory of Terry Palmer
(1940 – 2001)
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Pursuing the Art of Strategic Conversations by
Dr. Tony Golsby-Smith
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Abstract of Thesis
This thesis reflects upon a significant ten years of my life. In this time, I moved from
a career of teaching English at high school level to a career as an influential
management consultant specialising in strategic thinking processes. The bridge
between these two worlds was my initial consulting career as a technical writer.
These different careers moved me between two different paradigms of thinking that
on the surface have little to do with each other. But underneath the veneer of
difference, I found the love and the methods of my first career increasingly framed
the practices and, in the end, the very purpose of my second career. Thus I found
myself living a paradox. I had the nous to hang on to the paradox. For paradox can
be the useful surface tension that masks the unifying currents of a new theory.
This thesis stalks that ‘New Theory’.
Chapter one begins with the problem. I start by telling a couple of stories, then
widen their significance by investigating both a case study and the recent history of
planning in organisations. The chapter finishes by reframing the issue as not so much
a crisis in the functionality of planning as a crisis in ways of thinking, and ways of
thinking about thinking. Having repositioned the problem as a ‘thinking’ problem
rather than a ‘strategic’ problem, in chapter two I examine some seminal writers in
the business literature who are advocates of new ways of thinking, and link them to
some of the writers who influenced me in my English career. These writers have all
helped structure my reflections: I trace these influences, but then move beyond
them. Whereas they frame the problem as a polarity between common places like
‘right and left brain’ (Mintzberg), or ‘hard and soft’ (Garrett), I frame it as a confusion
between ‘describing’ and ‘making’.
Having explored the paradox, in chapters three and four I explore the seminal
experiences where I was able to invent the strategic conversation methods which
integrated my liberal arts skills with the business context.
The first and earlier case study describes in detail how traditional planning methods
worked in a major Australian manufacturing firm. What made this case promising
was my partnership with the CEO: he was a creative, intuitive thinker who felt
hemmed in by the very planning processes over which he presided. The second,
later case study, tracks the development of the conversation process as a method
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for senior teams to ‘make’ strategy and vision. The seeds that were born in the
chapter three case study grow and develop in the chapter four case study.
These few chapters then leave me with a better-articulated ‘problem’– honed into a
useful paradox, and five years of experience with business leaders that point to a
new way of thinking. What is left for me then, is to dive below the surface tensions,
and find deeper currents that could account for the ‘new way of thinking’ at a
theoretical rather than merely experiential level. Without that theory, there could
be no art. Without an art, there can be no amplification of the method.
In chapter five I search for the art in poetry, and in chapters six and seven I search
for it in rhetoric. Poetry was my childhood love, rhetoric my adult love. Three of
the great poets who influenced me from childhood are T.S. Eliot, Wordsworth and
Coleridge. All wrote profoundly on the theory of poetry, and in particular on the
nature of poetic thought. In their theories of poetic thought, I find much that is
relevant to construct a theory of ‘strategic’ thought, as I had begun to practise it.
Rhetoric is lesser known today than poetry, but ironically is more obviously relevant
to businesses. This is because it is a social art, with civic purposes, not a private act
of expression. In chapter six, I build a bridge between this ancient art and the
modern business situation. In chapter seven I cross the bridge and investigate in
more detail three great architects of rhetorical thought, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero,
and how they developed the theory of rhetoric. Their great debate was, ‘Is rhetoric
a cosmetic art of words or a formative art of thought?’ I conclude this chapter with
Cicero, who not only considered rhetoric an art of thought but also used it as a
major tool to build a democratic community.
These three chapters leave me then with the outlines of a new ‘art of thought’ which
has been grounded in my experience, but brought to light by the ancient arts of
poetry and rhetoric.
The final chapter addresses the heart of the emerging thesis: what purpose governs
my methods? In the end, I cannot find such a purpose in the writings of others, or
even in my experiences. One can have no theory or art without purpose. I
discovered in struggling with this final task that my purpose is not, in the end, to
promote effective thinking in organisations, or even to champion a new art of
thinking to balance the scientific method. Rather it is to unite the individual and the
community around the act of thinking through new futures. This takes my inquiry
full circle. I began it with marooned and lonely individuals estranged from formal
organisational processes: I finished it with Cicero, the great champion of individual
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liberties who used rhetoric to create amenable societies. So in the end I discover
not just a cognitive process, but a humanistic one.
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Acknowledgements
No thinking occurs in a vacuum: the individual mind is, in T. S. Eliot’s image, a
‘filament’ that combines the ‘gases’ of our environment (Eliot 1950, p. 7). Many
relationships and conversations have provided the environments upon which my
mind has turned.
These are some of the most significant.
Firstly, I am grateful beyond words to a series of business clients who have believed
in me and my fragile, implicit methods long before I had the wit to express them
fully. These people were the Medici patrons who commissioned my ambitious
projects, and who reflected with me on the significances that emerged. Two men in
particular were foundational here: Terry Palmer, now the CEO of Comalco, the
aluminium arm of the Rio Tinto mining group, and John Landau, now the CEO of the
Royal Blind Society of N.S.W., and formerly the head of the Withholding Tax
Business Line in the Australian Tax Office.
Secondly I am grateful to several colleagues who worked for me during the time
covered in this thesis. Conversations with them formed my intellectual climate, and
in some cases, they provided crucial encouragement to pursue the tenuous ‘liberal
arts’ methods rather than sell out and retreat to safer, more traditional business
services.
Jim Ireland, now a consultant with the World Health Organisation working in Third
World countries, taught me what experiential learning meant. Jim remains the most
empathetic and skilful cross-cultural communicator I have met. From him I learnt
the power of ‘letting go’, and the social implications of servant leadership.
David Jones, now a senior executive with a large veterinary products firm, gave me a
strange double gift: he brought to me deep brilliant insight into scientific thought, and
paradoxically, an appreciation of hermeneutics, and the role of dispositions in
thinking patterns. David began using the word ‘conversations’ as a business tool long
before I did (although David used the word more widely than I do: in this thesis I use
it rather specifically to refer to workshops).
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Mark Strom, now a writer and business consultant, was my earliest colleague, and so
has been on this journey with me the longest of all. Mark and I have had so many
conversations that it is hard to untangle who first thought what. But I particularly
remember Mark for first introducing the rich field of soft systems thinking to me,
and for encouraging me to build a ‘whole of life’ way of thinking that integrated my
faith and my work. Mark also introduced me to philosophy, and was the first person
to make it seem interesting to me.
Rob McGregor was my colleague first as an English teacher, then as a business
consultant. It was with Rob that I first began to discover the power of language to
shape thought, and in particular, the role of the essay as a task to develop the faculty
of argument.
All four men have subtle gifts of expression and are superb conversationalists;
superb not as dilettantes, who show off verbal flourishes, but superb as Paolo Freire
would define it: they bring integrity into conversation.
My supervisors Martin Mulligan and David Russell, who stood in for Martin while
Martin was on leave, restored my faith in the academic process. I had feared that
this thesis would entrap me in either university bureaucracy or dry academic
erudition – or worse still, both. Neither happened. They shielded me from
bureaucracy, and made doing a PhD possible for a busy person like me. More
importantly, they and Martin in particular, provided astute readings, the right doses
of encouragement, and diagnosis of the weak spots, or the next thing to be done.
They supervised ‘rhetorically’ and that is a high compliment.
Vivian Taylor my secretary worked tirelessly to type and correct manuscripts.
Finally I thank Anne, my wife and greatest friend and my four children Sarah, Tim,
Peter and Rebekah. Anne, you first encouraged me to undertake this daunting task,
and then you demanded I finish it! All along you believed in what I am saying, and its
usefulness to the world. You grounded my wanderings. As before I acknowledge
your role in John Donne’s classic words, ‘Your firmness makes my circle just and
makes me end where I began’. My four children have always supported me with a
range of reactions from intense curiosity to bemusement. Together with Anne they
have created the family environment which made this thesis possible.
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Index to Chapters
Introduction:
11
The purpose, method and structure of the thesis
11
i.1. The corporate versus the individual in a post-modern age
12
i.2. The liberal arts versus the sciences in the modern mind
17
i.3. My career: a life of unusual combinations
20
i.4. Method
25
i.5. Connecting rhetoric with other methods
34
Chapter one
37
Symptoms of unease
37
1.1. Noticing the problem
40
1.2. Finding the problem: a thinking problem not just a planning problem
49
1.3. Interpreting the problem: two types of planning, two types of thinking
55
Chapter two
64
The hypothesis: the lost art of conceptual thinking and the emerging art of strategic conversations
64
2.1. Seeds of the hypothesis: early influences
66
2.2. Management literature: Fertile soil for the hypothesis
74
2.3. Shifting the polarity: not intuition versus logic, but making versus describing
89
Chapter three
94
Foundation case study – Hierarchy, logic and cascades
94
3.1. Organisational and business context
95
3.2. Phase one: Diagnosis (1988)
99
3.3. Phase two: Early design and workshops (1989)
105
3.4. Phase three: Attempting a redesign of the planning system
125
3.5. Final reflections
135
Chapter four
137
Developing the art of strategic conversations: ‘An infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing’
137
4.1. The executive team – destined to be dysfunctional?
140
4.2. Upgrading ABCD™ from structuring proposals to structuring plans
143
4.3. Beginning the strategic discourse
149
4.4 What is data?
156
4.5. Reinventing a planning system as strategic conversation
162
4.6. Conclusion
175
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Chapter five
176
The poetic soul: pursuing the art of the ‘design-facilitator’
176
5.1. Liberal arts as seeds for design-facilitation
177
5.2. T.S. Eliot and the poetic task
181
5.3. Wordsworth and the poetic capability
189
5.4. Coleridge and the imagination
192
5.5. Imagination and metaphor
201
5.6. Metaphor and Leadership
204
Chapter six
207
Mastering the design conversation: Rhetoric, logic and the two roads to truth
207
6.1. Aristotle and the two roads to ‘truth’
211
6.2. The integration of speakers, audiences and the argument
219
6.3. A proposed rhetorical system
223
6.4. How logic dominated thought – and rhetoric was neutered.
232
Chapter seven
239
Reinventing rhetoric: A dialogue with the ancients
239
7.1 The birth of rhetoric: An art of action
242
7.2. Rhetoric: The early debate between Protagoras and Gorgias
244
7.3. Plato’s uneasy relationship with rhetoric
254
7.4. Aristotle and the system of rhetoric
262
7.5 Cicero and the civic leader
267
Chapter eight
275
Discovering Purpose
275
8.1. Reviewing my thesis
277
8.2. Locating my purpose: Humanising corporate life
282
8.3. Rhetoric as a bridge between the individual and the corporation
286
8.4. Mapping the development of my consulting services
289
Bibliography
B1
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Introduction:
The purpose, method and
structure of the thesis
This chapter introduces my thesis. I begin with a discussion
about my purposes in writing the thesis. Then I discuss the
methodology I have used to guide my inquiry. Finally, I
overview the structure of my argument for the six chapters
of the thesis.
Introduction
Introduction
i.1. The corporate versus the individual in a post-modern ageError! Bookmark not defined.
i.1.1. A tale of two magazines
Error! Bookmark not defined.
i.2. The liberal arts versus the sciences in the modern mindError! Bookmark not defined.
i.3. My career: a life of unusual combinations
Error! Bookmark not defined.
i.4. Method
Error! Bookmark not defined.
i.4.1. Key aspects of the method
i.5. Connecting rhetoric with other methods
Error! Bookmark not defined.
Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figures
Figure I-1: The archetypes of rhetoric
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29
Introduction
i.1. The corporate versus the individual in a post-modern
age
On the surface this thesis addresses the problems of corporate planning systems.
How can they be improved? How can they involve people more actively? How can
they more readily accommodate creative thinking? In pursuing this question I quickly
confront paradoxes of control versus exploration; hierarchy of structure versus
fluidity of topic; budgets versus strategies.
But the issue then migrates from ‘planning’ to ‘thinking’. A planning system is no
more than a large institutional thinking system. Thus it offers a unique opportunity
to observe a group thinking together in a bounded environment. Within this wider
domain I move on to confront two fertile areas of inquiry: the paradoxes between
‘analytical’ thinking and ‘creative’ thinking and between individuals and groups
thinking.
These topics, in turn, widen the concern beyond mere organisational efficiencies into
the deeper matter of our humanity and how corporate or organised institutions
entrap us. This issue is not a mild or extraneous one as we enter the new
millennium. In fact I would argue that it represents a problem of deep and critical
proportions. Have we become so enamoured with efficiencies that we have lost the
art of conviviality? Is the modern organisation ‘humanistic’ or ‘mechanistic’ in its
orientation? Is the modern organisation fundamentally anti-humanistic?
That this question is current and pressing in the minds of the modern worker is well
illustrated in the respective fortunes of two magazines, both of which address the
business market.
i.1.1. A tale of two magazines
Harvard Business Review is probably the world’s most quoted business magazine. It is
published by the Harvard Business School and describes itself as ‘a bimonthly
publication for professional managers’. It aims to support the organisation and its
effectiveness: it targets ‘professional managers’ in that they serve the organisation,
not in that they are human beings.
A brief survey of a typical table of contents will illustrate its emphasis. The
September-October 1999 issue included these topics:
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Introduction
‘Bringing Silicon Valley inside’
‘Organigraphs: Drawing how companies really work’
‘Decoding the DNA of the Toyota production system’
‘The new meaning of quality in the information age’
‘Capturing the real value in high tech acquisitions’
‘Go downstream: the new profit imperative in manufacturing’
‘Job sculpting: the art of retaining your best people’.
These titles have a new age ‘spin’, in that several of them address the new economy,
but they are still all oriented towards serving the organisation’s interest, and the
effectiveness of the organisation’s surrogate – the professional manager. The
perspective is that of an acquisitive, competitive CEO: we ‘bring inside’, we ‘decode’,
we ‘acquire’. The standpoint of interest is the organisation. We digest competitors
and their practices. The one article on people focuses on ‘retaining’ them – as if the
value of a human being is what they do, or do not, bring to the organisation.
In recent years, Fast Company has risen up and rapidly become a publishing success
story, whose readership far outstrips Harvard Business Review. In stark contrast to
Harvard Business Review, Fast Company targets individuals who work inside the
organisation, be they CEO or staff member. Consider the emphases of the
‘November 1999’ issue.
Some of the key articles are:
‘Its about time – 17 ways to control your life’
‘Inspired by work – or betrayed?’
‘Special report: how to make your job work, and your work matter’
‘Reinvent your career’
‘Become an E-Lancer’
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Introduction
‘You tell us: Do you hate your boss?’
‘Join an extreme team’
These titles appeal to the interests of the individual, not the organisation. They
promise liberation and independence, a voice, not profitability or organisational
success. The verbs are humanistic and personal: ‘become’, ‘inspire’, ‘reinvent’ and
‘tell’. In fact, they almost incite rebellion against the organisation. Whereas Harvard
Business Review could be accused of using implicitly militaristic or combative language
on behalf of the organisation against other organisations, Fast Company uses emotive
and combative language on behalf of the individual against the corporation
(‘betrayed’, ‘hate’). This is not to say that Fast Company avoids the CEO, and
organisational effectiveness, in its appeal: in fact it attracts mainstream CEOs and
contributions from major business thinkers. But they are profiled as individuals
much more colourfully than the clinical case studies of Harvard Business Review would
ever countenance.1
I am not concerned here to diagnose the relative merits of both publications (I
happen to read and enjoy both). What I am noting is the phenomenon. Firstly,
Harvard Business Review targets the organisation and has done so for decades
whereas Fast Company targets the individual and has been published only in the last
decade. Secondly, that Fast Company has become a mainstream publishing success
for outstripping Harvard Business Review. Its appeal to the individual to rise up against
the corporation has fallen on welcoming ears. Clearly, people spend the bulk of
their conscious lives working and Fast Company has recognized that this working life
is diminishing people insofar as they are rendered as ‘human resources’ – as means
to an economic end. Stuff the organisation – get a life. Rather than ‘opt out’ as the
hippie era offered, Fast Company urges people to humanise and reclaim the
humanistic value of work. Work becomes ‘self-expression’ not a factor in the
economic equation. Fast Company uses the context of the new technology primarily
as a tool in the humanistic enterprise, rather than as a new economic factor in the
business game. (In this context, the first Harvard Business Review article I quoted
‘Bringing Silicon Valley Inside’, ironically suggests a counter-attack by the corporation
against the individualising agency of the new technology).
1
One of the great ironies in the relationship between individuals and corporations is the growth of
superannuation funds. They are the primary investors in organisations and so bind individuals to
capital markets more widely than ever before in history.
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Introduction
Recent mainstream management texts have also addressed this issue of the individual
against the organisation. In their 1997 book, The Individualised Corporation, Ghoshal
and Bartlett studied several organisations who are pioneering new management
structures and processes that release individual creativity by relaxing centralised
control systems, devolving accountability and resources, and perhaps most
importantly of all, by believing in the potential of the individual. They assert ‘rational
corporate models are creating an environment in which thousands of capable
individuals are being crushed and constrained by the very organisations created to
harness their energy and expertise’ (Ghoshal and Bartlett 1997, p.38). They assume
that people are innately curious, interactive and motivated to learn – but that
‘somehow, modern corporations have been constructed in a way that constrains,
impedes and sometimes kills this natural instinct in people’ (ibid., p.69). Importantly
Ghoshal and Bartlett identify that more than economic goals drive those
organisations which appear to have made substantial progress in unlocking the
individual: ‘The individualised corporation reverses the focus from value extraction
to value creation by establishing continuous learning of individuals as a cornerstone
of its organisation – not just as a means to achieve its business objectives but as an
end in itself’ (ibid., p.70)2.
The issue of the relation of the individual to the organisation underlies wider fields
than business: it pervades education, religion and politics. Wherever it occurs, this
issue associates the individual with freedom, and the organisation with control. This
can easily translate into a facile polarisation and a romanticising of the individual
against the corporation whereas, of course, the autonomy of the individual can
create a tyranny of its own. In this thesis I try to chart a course that includes and
reconciles these two perspectives rather than polarises them.
2
Ghoshal and Bartlett seek an answer in organisational structures, whereas I pursue the answer in
thinking styles and systems.
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Introduction
i.2. The liberal arts versus the sciences in the modern mind
Another major issue that shadows the individual/organisation polarity is the polarity
of the liberal arts and the sciences. This shadow is helpful because it locates two
thinking traditions behind the social polarity, and thus indicates potential solutions.
Today the liberal arts are under siege. They are perceived as less relevant than the
sciences, and less supportive of action in this world. In the popular mind, they
support contemplation, entertainment and withdrawal. Hence they are attracting
less funding and fewer students.
Adam Bresnick comments despairingly on the crisis facing the teaching of English in
his 1999 review of The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline by
Robert Scholes (The Australian, Feb 3, 1999, p. 40).
These are rough times for those who would teach English. The much-bruited job boom
prognosticated for the 1990s has yet to materialise, as universities everywhere have
taken the corporate route of downsizing rather than reinventing their greying literature
faculties. At the same time, in the US at least, English graduates continue to grind out
PhDs, many of them finishing their degrees deep in debt, only to face a dire academic
job market… The discipline of English is commonly declared to be in crisis… literature
continues to lose its prestige and allure in a world ever more concerned with functional
professionalism and the bottom line.
Like most embattled groups, English faculties have not responded strategically but
have polarised into the withdrawing purists and the compromising functionalists. For
Scholes this is typified in the debate between schools that teach Homer Simpson of
the TV show, The Simpsons, and schools that teach Homer who wrote the lliad.
David Kaufer, the head of the English department at Carnegie Mellon University,
Pittsburgh, has lamented to me about the same dilemma: in a bid to be ‘relevant’,
English scholars study and teach functional English like writing complex instruction
manuals, but in so doing lose academic credibility within their profession3, and the
prize for which they suffer seems minor: writing manuals positions them on the
edges of modern capitalism not at the heart.
Recent events at the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) dramatise the clash
of cultures and the embattled status of the declining liberal arts. As reported in The
Australian of May 4 2000, under the front page headline, ‘Mind games cost the ABC
its TV guru’, the new Managing Director, Jonathan Shier, sacked his venerable head
3
Personal conversation with David Kaufer,1995.
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Introduction
of programming, Hugh McGowan, because McGowan failed a business-based
psychological test. McGowan was a ‘maverick aesthete’ who had achieved creative
successes throughout his career by his ‘skill, judgement and intuitions’. Shier was a
professional manager who believed in ‘modern management practices’. Initially they
got on well but this soured soon after Shier insisted McGowan reapply for his
position and sit a psychological test run by an employment consultancy. As the
paper reported, ‘The cultured and erudite McGowan was faced with hundreds of
mathematical problems, logic tests and character evaluations; he had to work out
train timetables, calculate figures and answer personal questions.’ McGowan could
not even bring himself to treat the tests seriously: he was confronted with simplistic
questions (‘Authority must be challenged’. Do you agree or disagree?) which could
not be answered out of context, and begged serious questions. The 61 year-old
architect of some of the best television shows in Australia was then debriefed by a
‘twenty something consultant’. Predictably McGowan did poorly in the test. When
Shier confronted him about it, McGowan resigned in disgust. Shier tried to console
him by admitting that Michelangelo and da Vinci would probably have failed too.
This sad story illustrates how the liberal arts have lost their constituency in the mind
of modern management, and have been usurped by ‘scientific’ reasoning. If one can
perform and contribute in the modern enterprise – even apparently one focusing on
entertainment and the arts – one must be accredited by scientific reasoning, not a
liberal arts heritage. The saddest feature of this story is that it is a parable of how
the two cultures fail to understand each other.
Little wonder that the arts feel bitter about their diminished place. Malcolm Gillies,
president of the Australian Academy of Humanities and professor of music at the
University of Queensland, wrote recently (Sydney Morning Herald, May 3 1999) about
his dream of an upside-down world.
For a day, doctors would have to swap lives with musicians, and busk
for their living in city malls. Company executives rather than
philosophy graduates would be driving taxis. …. Surely matters of the
mind and the heart are more important to us humans than matters of
the body. In my upside down dream, issues of humanity are king.
Their study, the humanities, stands at the core of the school
curriculum…. in our universities, the humanities joyously wolf down
the best slices of the financial cake, leaving it for others to squabble
over the crumbs.
The reality, from which Gillies’ upside down dream seeks deliverance, is that the
humanities are embattled. ‘In the real world, humanities appear not to be doing very
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Introduction
well. We frequently hear about crises in the teaching and learning of history, of
foreign languages, of the arts and even of our common language, English. And there
are few openings these days for philosopher-kings’ (ibid.)
Gillies sees hope in two things: the ongoing interest of students in the humanities,
and in the genuine relevance of the skills which the humanities train, such as
communicating, analysing and writing clearly. Even more ambitiously, Gillies believes
that the humanities equip people better for entrepreneurship in an age of increasing
self-employment.
Roslyn Atkinson is a judge of the Supreme Court of Queensland: she addressed
graduating students from the Arts and Humanities faculty of the University of New
England and exhorted them to see value in their liberal arts education. She offered
her own successful career as a parable.
I am an arts graduate from the University of Queensland, which gave
me a broad liberal education and to which I attribute my ability to
think laterally, to solve problems, to consider the broader questions
rather than just a multitude of instances, and to strive to achieve the
ideals of fairness and justice in my professional life. My education in
English language, literature and drama taught me the performance
skills and precision in language that were brilliant training for a
barrister. Literature also enables one to see events from someone
else’s point of view – to view life as others see it.
[Atkinson, 2000]
Atkinson was moved to make this spirited defence because she believes ‘we are now
living in an age, in which, for the first time since the European Renaissance, this
pursuit of a broader education is being questioned’.
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Introduction
i.3. My career: a life of unusual combinations
My career traverses all these grounds of our modern landscape. I am steeped in a
liberal arts tradition, having loved and excelled in the study of literature, and poetry
in particular. But my love for literature did not equate to a love for the academic
life, so I did not pursue postgraduate studies. Neither did the world of commerce
interest me. So I fell into school teaching which I loved and where I had the privilege
of guiding and inspiring many students towards a similar love for the humanities.
Towards the end of my time as a schoolteacher, I became more and more
dissatisfied with the specialist silos of the curriculum and with the content bias of
education. Teaching skills – especially thinking and writing skills – appealed to me as
the real job teachers were undertaking. Hence I developed a unique crosscurriculum essay writing and thinking skills program. Without realising what I was
doing, I was moving the study of English out of its specialist shrink wrapping and
positioning it as a true liberal art that could inform all other content areas.
However, in the end, teaching failed to engage me: what I yearned for was a place in
the world of action, of real problem solving. I wanted to demonstrate that these
thinking skills could make a difference in the world of affairs, not just in the
classroom.
Hence I began to consult to organisations. Initially I trained middle managers and
professionals in thinking and writing skills. Some of my clients were research
scientists in two major fields – mining and medical technology. This gave me a first
hand experience of ‘science’ at work. I found to my amazement that a liberal arts
trained, scientific novice could indeed help scientists think and communicate. As
time went on, I became less satisfied to merely train people, and began to work on
the systems and processes within which those skills were exercised. Given that I
was working with professionals, these systems and processes were in fact thinking
systems: the new product development process, proposal writing and report writing
process, the capital approval process and best practice procedures for operators.
Process improvement had become a credible activity due to the Total Quality
Management movement, and I applied these principles to the processes mentioned
above. But rather than viewing these processes as bureaucratic or technical, I
viewed them as thinking processes. So the real topics I explored and documented
were activities like conceptualising, synthesising, exploring, focusing, hypothesising,
validating, deciding and persuading.
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While these gave me a unique feel for designing systems and processes, I eventually
found even that scope limiting, and aspired to shape organisations and cultures. I did
this by moving my attention to the planning process, which is the key leadership
process in organisations.
Finding most planning processes in a degenerate state of bureaucratic inertia, I
designed different processes to energise leadership in planning. My clients and I
moved the locus of planning from documents to dialogue, and we lifted the topic
from operational to strategic. These moves combined to make planning more
explicitly a thinking event, and a community event. They also moved people’s roles
from a managerial, checking role to a leadership, envisioning role.
Since I moved to planning systems, I have designed and facilitated scores of strategic
conversations across Australia, in both the private and public sector. In performing
my task I have had the unique privilege of observing and reflecting upon groups of
leaders thinking and deciding together. Teamwork, thinking and leadership are
prevailing themes in today’s world. Of this trio, I choose thinking as the dominant
note from which to observe and influence the other two.
Very few people have had this breadth of experience. The essence of my experience
is different worlds combining. In one life I have combined the worlds of education
and the professions. Thus I have observed first hand the way we train young people
and how those young people actually work with this training. In one life, I have
combined the world of the humanities and the sciences. I have taught poetry, and
have taught scientists to plan and report sophisticated experiments. As a poet, I
have observed first hand how scientists actually work and think. In one life, I have
combined the world of leadership and the world of operations. I have directly
observed leadership decision-making, and work practices at the coalface of
organisations. In one life, I have combined private sector and public sector
consultations. I have observed the topics that occupy the attention of private sector
leaders, and the topics that occupy the attention of public sector leaders.
Unexpected and unusual combinations have characterised my life. If these
combinations were eccentric and idiosyncratic, they would not demand public
reflection but, as I have argued in the preceding pages, these combinations have
clustered around themes that are urgent, that press upon many people’s minds, that
polarise and confuse our age. Whoever I talk to, no matter what occupation or
gender, finds my story entrancing and a parable.
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These experiences have not accumulated haphazardly or inevitably. I pursued them
by a series of transitions that have led me from teaching poetry to leading strategic
conversations for some of the largest organisations in our country. These
transitions have been driven at first by intuitions, but increasingly by design, as I have
proposed my way into larger and larger organisational forums.
The climax of these transitions has been the ‘strategic conversation’ – a rolling series
of one or two-day dialogues where I guide leaders to invent and design new futures
their organisations.
In these forums, I seek to bring individual creativity and organisational mission
together; and in these forums I have found that it is the liberal arts not the sciences
that provide the most useful techniques and approaches. Thus we find, in these
forums for strategic conversations, a crucible where we can observe the great
contraries of the individual and the organisation, and the arts and the sciences.
But my creation of the strategic conversation has been tentative and gradual. I have
groped towards it over several years, as a sweet thing, threatened by a hostile
environment. It has been made more vulnerable by being intuitive, and uncertain
over its origins and its heritage. Thus I have written this thesis to understand the
real arts and techniques that underpin my work in designing and facilitating strategic
conversations. Strategic conversations have become my major consulting product –
growing out of my original work as a technical writer. Technical writing requires
keen skill, but is more limited in scope than strategic conversations in two main
ways. Firstly, the task of writing a business document is narrower in scope than
redesigning a planning system. You tend to write on subjects that are stable and
more minor than the broad scope of strategy: manuals and policies document parts
of organisations, whereas strategy has an unlimited canvas. Secondly, writing is a
communicating exercise, but designing and then leading strategic conversations is a
thinking exercise, involving creation, design and integration.
These two factors mean that writing has its toolkits and its techniques. It is a stable
and settled craft – intellectually demanding admittedly, but well charted territory
nonetheless. The emerging area of ‘dialogue’ or ‘conversation’ is newer and far less
stable. It is not adequately addressed by courses in speech or oratory or
communication skills. In contrast to the suite of communication skills and courses,
dialogue is dynamic, interactive and fluid. An instance of the immature development
of the art of conversations is the issue of quality. The answer to the question ‘What
makes a “good” strategic conversation?’ is far less certain than to the question ‘What
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makes a good piece of writing?’ So the issue of quality is like a barometer for the
stage of development of the art.
As I have moved more into this kind of consulting, I have not had textbooks or
manuals to follow, but have invented the programs as I have travelled with my
clients. This has been an instinctive and emergent process. My clients have happily
sponsored the projects, partly as research projects and partly because they have
believed they will deliver value to their organisations. But they have always believed
that we were involved in a kind of organisational research. In this way they were in
marketing terms ‘early adopters’ – people who are intellectually stimulated by new
ideas and enjoy conceptual thinking.
Aristotle, one of the guiding inspirations behind this thesis, commented that only
teachers have the highest command of an art.4 He maintained that there are three
levels of mastery over a subject matter. The first is performance itself. You may
perform that task effectively but you cannot say how you do so, and cannot
guarantee a repeat performance. You work by instinct and innate, implicit skill. The
second level of mastery is the apprentice model, which works by imitation. You
have enough space to tutor a disciple one-to-one. You cannot predict ahead of time
what you will do, when, or why, but you can articulate a raison d’etre after the
event. So if the disciple is accompanying you in the task you can turn aside
periodically and comment. Still, according to Aristotle, you are not a teacher, and
you do not understand the art of what you do. The third level of mastery means
that you understand the art – you can predict a course of action ahead of time and
can say what are the key elements of the task. The goal of this thesis is to move me
towards mastery of the art, the third level. If I can attain this level then I can teach
others my art. I am a teacher at heart and cannot grow my business or serve my
clients in a leveraged way without mastering the art. Thus I stand at a threshold of
my career. I have personally mastered a difficult and obscure art, but I need to
move my understanding of it beyond the instinctive towards the methodical.
My project is not unlike the project that Giambattista Vico set himself in 1720,
although I would not claim so vast a significance as Vico’s work.5 Vico had grown up
heavily educated in one tradition – Cartesian learning – but found as he got older
that it was less and less useful to him. He finally rejected it as a method. But he was
left with a quandary: what parts of his earlier education had contributed, albeit
4
I do not have the direct reference for this in Aristotle. It was mentioned to me by Richard Young
in a conversation in 1995.
5
See The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico trans Fisch & Bergin (NY 1944)
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inadvertently, to the man he had become? What skills and arts from his childhood
had proved valuable in his adult enterprise and habits of thinking? In those areas that
emerged as very important for him – informal areas and areas where he had great
difficulty finding appointments or publishers – what were the formative experiences?
To discover the answer to this question Vico wrote his autobiography (although he
did not call it that: the genre had not really been invented, and certainly had not
been formalised). His aim was to document his experience in order that he and
others could then stand back and inductively derive the key formative elements in his
education, the ‘accidental’ curriculum of his life, as it were. Having derived it, they
could then formalise it into a curriculum for others.
This is my purpose: To tell the story of my transition from technical writer and
communicator to designer and leader of strategic conversations. And from that I
aim to derive key elements of this new art, and to find the ‘accidental’ curriculum of
my life so that I might formalise it into a curriculum from which others can learn
more directly and intentionally.
An associated purpose is to reposition the liberal arts as useful and functional arts in
our technological world. Since my only training is in liberal arts, I find my case
interesting. I have achieved great influence in several of Australia’s leading
organisations, trading only with my liberal mind. This is a promising phenomenon
and one that I wish to understand more completely. Hopefully in finding an art for
conversations I will discover an argument for the practical value of the liberal arts in
the world of work and enterprises.
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i.4. Method
Talking about method reminds me of a story. I was once asked by a client to
participate in a three-week workshop that another consulting organisation was
holding for this client. This was unusual and awkward for both of us consultants,
particularly as the client had done this because he had begun to have doubts about
the efficacy of the other group, had just met me and decided that I could balance
their formulaic approach with a more creative or (his word) ‘grey’ approach. Their
method was a rigorously procedural approach to problem solving that was being
applied to organisational design – it was quite out of its depth. They had planned a
full-time three-week workshop for over twenty people. In the first week they had
led the people through tedious analysis of various data sets about the company. The
process seemed to be going nowhere useful. All the time I was viewed as an
awkward presence asking awkward questions. Eventually they agreed that I might
take a two-hour workshop about creative design, since they felt that they were weak
in that area, and it sounded more like my field. Their previous week had been
notable for its lack of planning and structure. It was a force-fitted process that in
their view did not need any adjusting for context. But they were nervous about
what I might say, particularly since I had no notes to speak from but was just going
to work from the impressions I had gained from listening to the previous week’s
work. They were also nervous lest I show them up. So they arranged a ‘showdown’
meeting the night before. I had to defend myself and my experience for more than
two hours. The climax came when one of their junior consultants, a fairly
pugnacious and confident young man from London, asked aggressively, ‘But can you
tell us what your method is, and where you have applied it before?’
His assumption was that methods cannot be varied and must be explicit. He
followed a rulebook, but I worked from intuitions and experience. I was angry but
privately a bit shaken – Should I have a method? Perhaps I don’t have one really and
thus I am only a pragmatist? Perhaps I am unprofessional?’ Methods seem to
legitimise people.
Of course I had a method of sorts, it was just that it was not a step-by-step
articulated procedure. When we use the word ‘method’, it suggests steps that, if
followed, can guarantee some kind of outcome. It also suggests that the steps are
clear and conscious before the task, and that the planning of the task grows out of
the method. So without steps and a clearly promised outcome, we can feel we have
no method.
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However, if we broaden our understanding of method to include more the faculty of
self-consciousness and reflection, which directs choice and action – then I did of
course have a method. I later realised that I had several other key ingredients that I
would now argue make up a method in the stronger sense of the word. Firstly, I had
a sense of problem or inadequacy. I had an unease that something was not working.
Secondly, I had a sense of goal or vision: I had a view about how things ought to be
working. Thirdly, I had values which were my measures of quality and which
mediated both my sense of problem and my sense of vision. These contributed to a
fourth faculty, the art of patterning or making sense out of data. From these
patterns – claims of truth in the situation – came my decisions to as to what to do
next.
In a sense this thesis has this kind of method. It is a reflective thesis, not a scientific
thesis. A scientific thesis must work to prove or disprove a hypothesis. It involves
experiment where we can test the claim to truth, and adjust it if necessary. This is
essentially a deductive system of truth making. It is most particularly suited to
studies of the natural or material world. Many thinkers have found this formulation
of truth-making inadequate. Gregory Bateson is a famous example. Fritjof Capra
reports this conversation with Bateson.
‘Logic is a very elegant tool,’ he said, ‘and we’ve got a lot of mileage out of it for two
thousand years or so. The trouble is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and
porpoises, and butterflies and habit formation’ – his voice trailed off, and he added after
a pause, looking out over the ocean – ‘you know, to all those pretty things ... logic won’t
quite do ... It won’t do’, he continued animatedly, ‘because that whole fabric of living
things is not put together by logic. You see when you get circular trains of causation, as
you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes. ...
‘So what do you use instead?’
‘Metaphor’
‘Metaphor?’
‘Yes, metaphor. That’s how this whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together.
Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.’
[Capra 1989, pp. 78 –79]
Bateson’s difficulty with logic was causation and the world of living things. Logic was
not adequate to handle or predict circular causation, and in particular circular
causation in the world of living things. Causation is a kind of linking that interprets
the meaning between two events. Bateson called this linking ‘the pattern which
connects’ and he found his linking patterns in metaphor rather than in logic.6 Like
Bateson I am uncomfortable with logic as an exclusive system of truth making. Like
6
Bateson found metaphor as a working alternative to logic. This is not unlike Aristotle’s use of the
enthymeme as the rhetorical equivalent of the syllogism. I discuss metaphor in chapter five.
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Bateson I am passionate about truth making. Being suspicious of logic does not imply
a carefree insouciance about truth and interpretation. Like Bateson I categorise
truth making into boxes depending on the kind of data or world that one is
observing. Bateson’s two boxes were the inanimate and the living.
In my life I have put the descriptions of sticks and stones and billiard balls and galaxies in
one box ... and have left them alone. In the other box, I put living things: crabs, people,
problems of beauty...
[As cited by Capra 1989, p. 76]
Unlike Bateson, my two boxes are the human and the natural world. By ‘human’ I
mean the social world, the world of human construction. Hence where Bateson
found his difficulties with logic around causation and the world of living things, my
difficulties with logic are around human constructions and the world of people and
thinking. My thesis addresses how people think effectively. I study thought not as an
ontology but as a sociology, as a behavioural phenomenon. I study people and
action, not philosophy. Hence I study the process of people thinking, not thoughts
or philosophies as such. The problem I address is what different types of thinking
are there? And in particular, can we usefully differentiate logic and creativity as two
types of thinking? This division has been probably the most enduring classification
and bifurcation of thinking processes in our century.
I come to the conclusion that this is the wrong formulation of the problem, that the
more profitable way to study the process is to separate thinking processes by task.
Given different tasks we employ different thinking processes. I reclassify the two
styles as tasks of making and tasks of describing. Both require understanding, and
both seek truth of sorts. Both employ analysis and intuition. Thus there are two
domains of thinking. I trace how the methodology for one these two domains – the
describing domain – has dominated the ways we have characterised the thinking
process: logic has been this methodology. However, I also argue that this
methodology is appropriate for one domain but not the other. It is appropriate for
describing but not for making. It is appropriate for the domain where the data and
problem are in the field of natural systems. It is not appropriate for the domain
where the data and problem are in the field of human systems and decisions. Logic
tells me what happens when a liquid composed of certain chemical is boiled to a
certain temperature for a certain time – it does not tell me whether we should teach
Shakespeare in the schools. For this second domain the Greeks invented the system
of rhetoric, and I turn to explore this thinking system for much of my thesis.7
7
I discuss the issues raised in this paragraph in chapter two of the thesis.
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Thus the subject matter of my thesis is thinking processes, and, in particular, thinking
processes where rhetoric rather than logic provides a more effective method. Given
that formulation, it is obvious that my method in constructing this thesis would
derive more from rhetoric than it does from logic. There would be a huge selfdefeating irony if I used a logic system to structure my inquiry into a rhetorical
system.
Hence I base my method on rhetoric rather than logic. Two other methodologies
akin to rhetoric have also inspired me: they are grounded theory and experiential
learning. So in expounding my method I will first outline the key features of a
rhetorical approach that have influenced me, and in doing so I will contrast it with a
logical, ‘scientific’ approach.8 Then I will also explain the aspects of grounded theory
and experiential learning that have influenced me.
i.4.1. Key aspects of the method
Firstly, rhetoric focuses on the kinds of truth that are constructed, and that are
socially constructed.9 For instance, a jury’s decision is a socially constructed truth,
and a decision to invade Carthage is a socially constructed truth. Once made, the
decision has indeed become an incontrovertible piece of our world – it has become
truth.
I find it convenient in the context of this essay to align science as a manifestation of the logic
approach. This is quite normal, and the words ‘scientific’ and ‘logical’ are used interchangeably in
much management literature. Nonetheless I am not entirely satisfied with this easy distinction, largely
because I find much of science is ‘constructed’ and thus is a kind of rhetorical or design activity. The
data that I have for this observation is extensive consulting experience with some of the major groups
of working scientists in Australia. I am also aware that John Dewey punctured the immuno-membrane
of objective science in his reasoning: he claimed that since practising science needed to build
experimental machinery to test hypotheses, it was in fact a technological and design art. ‘The
consideration that completes the ground for assimilating science to art is the fact that assignment of
scientific status in any given case rests upon
facts which are experimentally produced. Science is now the product of operations deliberately
undertaken in conformity with a plan or project that has the properties of a working hypothesis’
(quoted in Buchanan 1992, p. 7). Despite this unease, the matter is too diversionary and large to
pursue within the context of this thesis. Hence I am content to use the popular formulations that link
science with logic rather than art.
8
9
In the following section, I describe how my methodology of inquiry is essentially rhetorical. I discuss
rhetoric more substantively during the body of the thesis where my focus is not my method, but the
sociology of thought. See chapters six and seven.
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So inquiry is a social issue, not a clinical issue. Hence subjectivity is not avoided but
must be explored. Thus the whole issue of subjectivity is no problem for rhetoric,
whereas in logic it would pollute truth-making. In rhetoric, subjectivity invigorates
truth-making. Far from being caught up in the subjective/objective debate, rhetoric
welcomes it as part and parcel of the fabric of constructed truth. The archetypal
rhetorical model comprises the three elements, argument, speaker and audience.
Figure I-1: The archetypes of rhetoric
These three elements are all components of the ‘truth’, and hence are all part of the
subject of inquiry. It is not merely that people’s dispositions influence their view of
the data or subject matter – they are part of the data and the subject matter.
This means that my story and purposes are an integral part of the matter that must
be studied in this thesis. As a rhetorician I have no inclination to background my
story in a search for objectivity. Hence I include myself as a key part of the thesis.
Secondly, and associated with the first point, rhetoric does not seek universal truth
in the way that a metaphysical inquiry might. Rhetoric is content to search for local
truths that are true to a context and a community. This truth is accredited as true
by the values and experiences of that local community. So if a group of workers tell
the truth about their experiences of working a particular machine, if they confess the
frustrations and the limitations perhaps for the first time, then this is a kind of truth
emerging. It will liberate only that particular group, not the whole of humanity.
However, it is nonetheless significant for the community, and the rhetorician will be
pleased to have elucidated the truth. Clearly this does not equate with relativism –
we are not denying the possibility of universal truths. Rather we are distinguishing
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between the local and the universal. Richard McKeon10 referred to this, I believe,
when he addressed the question of pluralism. I quote from Buchanan’s commentary:
The unity of an ongoing philosophy of experience and humanity is a product of a
plurality of perspectives focused on common experience rather than a consensus of
opinions stated in a common belief. The universality it achieves is not a specification of
generic inclusions but an expression of individuality or particularity placed in its context
and traced through its coherences ...
[Buchanan 2000, p. 12]
This concept of two kinds of truth –universal/metaphysical and cultural/rhetorical –
is also articulated forcefully by Harold Nelson, writing from the perspective of
systems thinking. Nelson argues that there are two domains of truth: the true and
the real. The true is the universal domain and the real is the cultural domain.
Nelson argues with force and succinctness that the academic world has invested
unduly in pursuing the true, fed by logic, while businesses are seeking leaders who
can understand the real. If leaders are intellectually fed by the logic mould, they will
seek undue certainty in their decisions and stumble into ‘analysis paralysis’, whereas
if they were trained in pursuing the other kind of truth – real – they would be much
better equipped to decide and to lead.
The scientised approach, with some exceptions, however has not provided the kind of
guarantee of outcomes imagined possible. This comes from what I believe is a confusion
between what is true and what is real. Science deals only with what is true but
managers and others must deal with what is real as well. ... a painting by Cezanne is
real, the atomic weight of copper is true. An experience is real, a proven fact is true.
[Nelson 1996, p. 6]
I seek the real in this thesis. Thus the key touchstone is that it is grounded in
experience. I work with the primary sacredness being the experiences not the texts.
I do not really care if such and such an authority were to disagree with me, or was
neglected in my readings – there is nothing sacred in their works. But if an aspect of
the experience were overlooked or distorted, I feel that this would be irreverent.
The experience is real and hence has a kind of sacredness that cannot be traversed
without compromising the truth that I aim to construct. Where I do use texts it is
10
McKeon is one of my intellectual influences. In chapter six I provide more details about him in a
footnote comment. I was first introduced to rhetoric, and McKeon, by Richard Buchanan, the head of
Design at Carnegie Mellon University. I had been attracted to CMU by its work in document design,
and paid a visit in 1992 at the invitation of Richard Young who was then head of English at CMU. It
was then that I met Richard Buchanan: he remarked to me that I was a fine rhetorician. I had no idea
what he meant, since I had barely heard of the study of rhetoric. That began a conversation that
continues to this day.
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to help understand and shine light onto the experience. Hence I use texts for their
functionality, not for their authority.
Thirdly, the goal of rhetoric is adherence, not demonstration. We seek to persuade,
not to demonstrate. So my goal is not demonstration of a certain mathematical
relationship. I do not seek certainty and repeatability of that kind. My goal is to
write a telling and compelling argument that elicits the response, ‘This makes a lot of
sense to me’. So the style is the warm and engaged style of the writer, the
evangelist, seeking to convert. Like all evangelists, we must first convert ourselves.
Hence the first ‘me’ that the argument must make sense to is Tony Golsby-Smith.
Fourthly, rhetoric is about invention. It unashamedly seeks to invent. The aim of the
rhetorician is to invent new ways of looking at something – new arguments or
metaphors. So the task is not bound by caution in the same way that scientific
investigation is. In a scientific problem solving process, deduction and accuracy are
key faculties; the issue must be clarified and isolated. Accuracy is a goal. We must
be precise. So key intellectual tools in a scientific analysis isolate the data sets,
establish key factorial relations, and determine the cause and effect combinations
between the data. Hence a logical process is asking, ‘What is the true cause of this
situation?’
By contrast, a rhetorical method seeks to discover and invent new ways of looking at
and naming situations. A key tool in this process is metaphor, Bateson’s favourite
device. Metaphor renames and so re-categorises experience. This renaming
amplifies possibilities and so creates options for action. Metaphor moves people to
believe and act. Hence causal effects are not the prime interest in a rhetorical
inquiry, but rather reclassifications, or re-conceptualisation. This makes rhetoric an
essentially verbal task, in that conceptual categorising is a feature of language. In
contrast logic, with its emphasis on isolating, combining and deducing, tends towards
the arithmetical and geometrical. This feature of rhetoric links it heavily as a method
to grounded theory.
Hence in my thesis, the great drive is to find better namings of my experience. I
have had several years of experience that I understand but only at too atomistic or
eventist a level. I seek greater patternings of this experience, patterns that explain.
This task is a task of naming and renaming. So I have, in each chapter, sought eagerly
in the writing for patterns to emerge. They do so as I find better key conceptual
categories to name my experience. The words by which people name experiences
are key data sets for my inquiry. An example in my thesis is the way that I renamed
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the age-old polarity of analysis versus creativity as ‘making’ versus ‘describing’.11 The
four sets of names are important. To move from one to the other was a key point
of invention for me since it offered a much better explanation of the thinking
process.
Fifth, values and principles are key. They become the criteria for ‘good’ and ‘true’. In
contrast in a scientific experiment, the laws of nature provide the arbiters for what is
true and thus for success in the inquiry. The chemicals boil at a certain temperature
and that is all there is to it. We know if the experiment is successful or not, because
natural laws arbitrate on it. Thus in science, the key variable for truth claims is the
statistical validity of the sampling and of the extrapolations. Can we extrapolate
from a bench test or a sample survey to the universe? Thus rightly we must assess
the sampling and the statistical extrapolations to test truth claims.
But in a rhetorical inquiry, values will provide the arbiters, and they are not simple
or self-evident. On the contrary they are often ambiguous; discovering them is part
of the inquiry. The key principle for what is real is that the value-search is made
explicit and is part of the inquiry. In a sense the inquiry for rhetorical truth might be
paraphrased as a search for ‘what we really care about’.
Thus in this thesis I make the value search a legitimate and necessary part of my
inquiry. My case studies document my search for what is important, for what is
good, true and beautiful in my experiences.
Sixth, the work of rhetoric is an aesthetic pursuit. That is, the love of beauty and
form drives it. The love of beauty is the precursor to pattern-finding. Aesthetes
love patterns and patterns are elegant and unifying. Thus part of truth or value
criteria must include the beautiful as well as the true.
Seventh, coherence is the rhetorician’s great test of validity. If an argument is true, it
will cohere the disparate. This is what I believe McKeon was driving at when he said
‘universality is ... an expression of particularity ... placed in its context and traced
through its coherences’(Buchanan & Garver, p. 146). Finding coherences in
particulars yields truth. Thus the great testing question of validity in rhetorical
inquiry is, ‘Is this argument cohering the events of the story?’
Eighth, coherence emerges in the hypothesis and the thesis. That is, we make an
interpretation of the events that is tentative at first, but if it is valid it becomes
11
I do this in chapter two.
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Introduction
rooted and grounded in particulars, until it emerges as a governing principle. Only
as we cling tenaciously to the data of our experience and try to trace its coherences
can a principle or thesis emerge. This emergent principle is the truth we seek to
construct in the rhetorical process. If this coherence emerges, then the thesis will
be an act of discovery and learning. This was my experience in writing it.
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Introduction
i.5. Connecting rhetoric with other methods
Clearly the rhetorical process has close similarities with experiential learning and
with grounded theory. Both have influenced me heavily, and I seek here mainly to
acknowledge their influence rather than to explore them, as they have been
subsidiary in their influence.
Grounded theory is an inductive method of research that seeks to create new
theory rather than to test old theory, and that seems to me to be particularly suited
to sociological situations. Strauss and Corbin (1990, pp.24) define it as a ‘qualitative
research method that uses a systematic set of procedures to develop an inductively
derived grounded theory about a phenomenon’. They are at pains (somewhat
defensively, I suspect) to establish that grounded theory is a scientific method and
meets the criteria for good science: ‘significance, theory-observation, compatibility,
precision, rigour, and verification’ (ibid., p. 27). The essence of the method is coding
– a renaming of the data of experience by placing that experience in new conceptual
categories. They divide coding into two sorts, open and axial coding. Open coding
they define as ‘the process of breaking down, examining, comparing, conceptualising
and categorising data’, (ibid., p. 61) and axial coding as ‘a set of procedures whereby
data are put back together in new ways after open coding, by making connections
between categories’. Thus axial coding is a more inventive process, much like the
interpretive phase in rhetoric. Rhetoric does not use the term ‘coding’, but it is
rather like the key rhetorical device of ‘placements’ or ‘topics’. Buchanan views
placements as the key intellectual tools of designers. He differentiates them from
categories: categories have fixed meanings but placements ‘have boundaries to
shape and constrain meaning but are not rigidly fixed or determinate’ (Buchanan,
1992). While I have not used coding with the procedural rigour that Strauss and
Corbin would want, I have used placements as my key intellectual tool for
positioning and reshaping ideas and data. Placements give rise to new theories or
constructions, and as such are a tool very much in sympathy with the inductive
nature of grounded theory.
The other major theory that is clearly linked to rhetoric is experiential learning. My
grasp of the experiential process has been deeply informed by Dewey’s essay ‘Having
an experience’ (Dewey, 1973). Dewey differentiates between experience that just
occurs, and experience that is designed and intentional (which he expresses as
‘having an experience’). He uses the metaphor of a river to capture the sense of
flow in designed experience. I cannot here do justice to the marvellous and rich
thinking in that essay, but to point to one of his major accomplishments in that essay:
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Introduction
The way he manages to locate this artistic managing of experience half way between
passivity and procedure:
Between the poles of aimlessness and mechanical efficiency, there lie those courses of
action in which through successive deeds there runs a sense of growing meaning
conserved and accumulated toward an end that is felt as accomplishment of a process.
[Dewey, 1973, p.558]
Within this sense of an aesthetically managed experience, Dewey comes to the
matter of what a conclusion is, and his words are worth quoting in full.
We say of an experience of thinking that we reach or draw a conclusion. Theoretical
formulation of the process is often made in such terms as to conceal effectually the
similarity of ‘conclusion’ to the consummating phase of every developing integral
experience. These formulations apparently take their cue from the separate
propositions that are premises and the proposition that is the conclusion as they appear
on the printed page. The impression is derived that there are first two independent and
ready-made entities that are then manipulated so as to give rise to a third. In fact, in an
experience of thinking, premises emerge only as a conclusion becomes manifest. The
experience, like that of watching a storm reach its height and gradually subside, is one of
continuous movement of subject matters. Like the ocean in the storm, there are a
series of waves; suggestions reaching out and being broken in a clash, or being carried
onwards by a co-operative wave. If a conclusion is reached, it is that of a movement of
anticipation and cumulation, one that finally comes to completion. A ‘conclusion’ is no
separate and independent thing’ it is the consummation of a movement.
[ibid. p. 557]
Rather than seeing a conclusion as a separate entity, Dewey sees it as latent in the
whole movement, and arising naturally out of the thought energies accumulating in
the process. His marvellous metaphor of a wave articulately captures some of the
subtleties of the rhetorical and learning processes. The particles of water are the
subject matter through which the energy of thought moves. Just as the wave
assumes different shapes through its cycle, so the thought energy pushes the wave
subject matter into different shapes and formulations, each moving seamlessly on
from the one before. Some waves peter out, some crash and clash into a cataclysm
of whitewash, but some move into productive accomplished shapes that complete
the cycle elegantly. This is like the restlessness and risk of thought. Some is
productive and some is not. Thus it is with our thinking projects. Some subject
matter yields to the kinaesthetic of our intellectual energy, some resist and frustrate.
Kinaesthetic achievement is the conclusion or the ‘emergent principle’ that
completes the cycle.
Thus my method is a somewhat organic method just as Dewey’s metaphors suggest.
Nonetheless the method is age-old, as I hope I have demonstrated. I feel that I have
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Introduction
found good waters to surf, and that the energy levels have given me some very good
waves.
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Chapter one
Symptoms of unease
In this chapter I try to find my problem. To do this, I begin
with two stories of conversations with clients. These
conversations were defining moments in crystallising my
sense of unease. From these narratives, I widen my focus to
the story of the Australian Customs Department, and the
inquiry that almost destroyed it. Was the department beset
by the same problems that my clients had informally alerted
me to? From this beachhead I move on to widen the scope of
the problem from specifically the planning system to the
thinking underlying it. In short I conclude that we lack the
tools that support conceptual thinking. Why is this so? I finish
with a different planning systems model of organisations: how
they think rather than how they are structured. I identify two
types of thinking task that confront the modern organisation
and explain why they are naturally much better at one of
these two tasks than the other. However, in a turbulent and
pluralist world, an organisation must be strong at both tasks.
This then locates the focusing question for my thesis: What is
the art of the second type of thinking? What are the tools
and methods that can build it in organisations?
Chapter one
Chapter one
1.1. Noticing the problem
40
1.1.1. Two stories of unease
40
1.1.2. The Customs case: vision and strategy matter
41
1.1. Noticing the problem
40
1.1.1. Two stories of unease
40
1.1.2. The Customs case: vision and strategy matter
41
1.1.3. Turbulent times demand strategic thinking
43
1.1.4. A brief history of planning
43
1.2. Finding the problem: a thinking problem not just a planning problem
49
1.2.1. The SWOT technique as an example of a thinking problem
49
1.2.2. Pinpointing the problem area: thinking about the new
50
1.2.3. Resistance to change: myths around thinking and action
52
1.3. Interpreting the problem: two types of planning, two types of thinking
55
1.3.1. What is planning?
55
1.3.2. Organisational thinking: two distinct types
58
1.3.3. A final story
61
1.3.4. The focusing questions
62
1.1.4. A brief history of planning
43
1.2. Finding the problem: a thinking problem not just a planning problem
49
1.2.1. The SWOT technique as an example of a thinking problem
49
1.2.2. Pinpointing the problem area: thinking about the new
50
1.2.3. Resistance to change: myths around thinking and action
52
1.3. Interpreting the problem: two types of planning, two types of thinking
55
1.3.1. What is planning?
55
1.3.2. Organisational thinking: two distinct types
58
1.3.3. A final story
61
1.3.4. The focusing questions
62
Figures
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Figure 1:1 Two types of planning ............................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 1:2 The Thinking Wave™ ............................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 1:3 Upstream & downstream tasks ............................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 1:4 Different tools ............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 1-5: The concept vacuum ................................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
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1.1. Noticing the problem
‘Something is going on, and you don’t know what it is, do you Mister Jones?’
Bob Dylan: ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’
1.1.1. Two stories of unease
In 1990 I had a series of disturbing discussions with the young manager who had the
responsibility for corporate planning for a major public sector organisation. With a
mixture of bemusement and despair, he recounted what really happened in the
corporate planning process underneath the veneer of the espoused formal process.
There was no integrated discussion between the senior managers about the
organisation’s direction. Instead they had retreats where presentations were
delivered about various topics. Then the individual leaders went away to work on
their plans, and Ron had to chase them up. They were recalcitrant about submitting
their plans and in the end Ron as often as not drafted some ideas for them and they
gratefully took his suggestions and adopted them. Ron had a sense that the whole
process was a charade which had little impact on the activities and decisions that
guided the organisation. This was despite the fact that the planning process is
probably the most explicit leadership and guidance process in a senior team’s
arsenal. But in place of earnest discussion and wise decisions as these people
grappled with the organisation’s future, Ron felt that he was cast in the role of the
schoolmaster goading reluctant pupils to hand in their homework.
These murmurs of discontent about the planning process were not isolated. For
instance, later I talked with a private sector client who had a similar experience. He
was a General Manager who had the responsibility for the planning process as part
of his role. He said that the planning process was ‘just a ritual every year’. The ritual
focused on the production of a document – which went to Head Office always one
day late. The ritual included ‘pizzas about 9 pm the night before sending’ and
‘couriers late at night’. Other managers and staff passing by the frantic, red-eyed
group, huddled around the photocopier, would conclude ‘it must be plan time’.
He had experienced the same alienation as Ron: there was a sense that the plan was
his plan and ‘they’ (the other members of the senior team) were helping him to
write it. They had to manage their operations and so could not spare a great deal of
time for this magnanimous help with planning, so he was always goading the
unwilling. Most of his effort went into preparing the formal written plan that went to
the corporate headquarters from his business unit. He jokingly symbolised the task
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as a late night collating job around the copying machine, a kind of annual ritual which
evoked sympathy. ‘Oh, you red-eyed lot must be sending the plan to Melbourne –
good luck!’ He then went on to tell me with some relief that he had passed that role
on to a peer and now it was ‘their’ problem – at which comment he suddenly
realised the irony of his present mindset. He had unwittingly joined the band of the
recalcitrants who had frustrated him so much in the last year!
What is going on? Corporate planning of one form or another holds out such
promise of control and of certitude. It is generally a well-funded and lengthy process.
It assures the organisation’s stakeholders that leaders have their hand on the rudder
and their eyes on the finish line, that sails are well set and even the fickle winds are
being read and interpreted. This ship will not founder; victory is in sight. But
beneath decks I was hearing another story, murmurs of discontent and cynicism.
The process seemed to have a formal life but not to live. It was more complied with
than embraced.
1.1.2. The Customs case: vision and strategy matter
If these stories tell us that the planing process may not be healthy or well practised,
then the case of the Australian Customs Office tells us that the subject matter for the
planning process may also be a cause for some concern. An expansion of topic has
been forced onto organisations by today’s changing world. The Customs case also
cautions us that this expansion of topic is not an inconsequential trifle but is the
primary accountability charter between an organisation and it stakeholders.1
It began innocently enough. The Customs department confiscated a shipment of
goods – for three long years in fact. Needless to say this annoyed the importers,
especially when they went broke as a result. They took the Customs department to
court and won a very large compensation payout of several million dollars. This kind
of humiliation has a way of attracting the attention of boards and directors, and the
‘board’ that runs the Customs department is the Federal Parliament. They ordered
an inquiry into the affair, led by independent business and community leaders – every
manager’s worst nightmare.
1
This is a publicly documented case, and the data I use comes from the report published under the
title ‘The Turning Point’ (1993).
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One might expect that the inquiry would focus on wrong procedures, or poor
controls. These are the kinds of managerial oversights that usually get exposed in
audits. But in this case it was not. Instead the inquiry focused on the strategy and
culture of the organisation and found that both were out of date. The inquiry found
that obeying the rules was not the real problem, but that the ideas behind the rules
were ill advised and inadequate for the emerging role of the organisation in the
modern world.
The organisation had an image of itself and its role in the world. That image was as
the keeper of the gates, the inspector at the airport, the police force of goods and
services flowing into the country. From that image came a whole set of procedures,
skills and resources to run the organisation. Attached to that self-image was a
culture of behaviour and of interpretation of how the organisation related to its
world. But the inquiry found that the self-image was out of date, it needed
renovating. It was yesterday’s identity for the organisation. And the organisation had
a culture that reinforced the old identity and did not question its currency or
relevance. In the view of the inquiry the organisation was not listening to the wider
community of businesses. Many of these wanted help, not regulation. They were
keen to trade with the outside world (in line with the national interest as well as
their self interest), but were red-taped by customs rules and procedures that
inhibited trade. They looked for help and advice but the department turned a deaf
ear, as if to say, ‘It is not our job to offer advice with import and export, we are
regulators and inspectors. Go somewhere else.’
So the inquiry made drastic recommendations, including to sack the entire upper
echelon of the department, institute a new strategic vision and to change its culture.
This case study illustrates how serious is this question of the expanding topic of
plans. The department, according to this inquiry, was living in a changing world, and
its big folly was ignoring this fact. There was a lack of vision for a new role in the
world. One of the key recommendations of the inquiry was to adopt the new vision
and mission which the inquiry had drafted. In a changing environment the
organisation had not created a new vision of how its role should change.2
2
There is an interesting postscript to this story which strengthens my hypothesis that organisations
need a conversation process as well as a strategic process. Quite a few years after these events, a
large section of the Customs Department (Excise) was annexed to the Australian Tax Office. One of
my key clients then took a leading role in the new Excise Department. He reported to me that,
although the recommendations of the inquiry were astute, the Department had tried to implement
them by authority and decree, not by conversation. As a result the organisation successfully
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This is not surprising really. For any discussion of change is, by implication,
recognition of the possibility that something might not be working now. This, of
course, is the voice of heresy, and not many want to be heretics, or have any training
in how to be good heretics. Heretics get burnt at the stake, and don’t get made
prefects in schools, so we all avoid that calling. The subject of change, the terrible
whisper that something might not be working well, thus often goes underground or
into the corridors of organisations. So the fact that a large organisation does not
naturally cultivate the ability to plan for change is hardly surprising. In fact it would
be surprising if it were otherwise.
1.1.3. Turbulent times demand strategic thinking
Some time ago this might not have mattered. Life was more stable for one reason or
another. But we live in turbulent times. Change is upon us, just as it was upon the
Customs Department. If we ignore it, it will eventually be to our peril. The
challenge for the modern organisation is this: Can we plan for change? Or is planning
for change an oxymoron?
The first two cases indicate that many large modern organisations have not mastered
or even understood the planning process. They run it in an overly bureaucratic,
document-centred fashion that does not engage the minds of the very senior
managers who are the putative authors of the plan. The Customs case illustrates that
the topic of the planning conversation has shifted imperceptibly but massively to
another area, that of strategy and identity. It also illustrates that these topics are not
trivial, and that they are culture-forming for the organisation. Problems with process
and problems with a widening subject matter suggest that planning is a system under
stress.
1.1.4. A brief history of planning
The topic of plans has been widening for over thirty years. Bonn and Christodolou
(1996) traced these changes in their article ‘From strategic planning to strategic
management’. The corporate planning process began in the 1960s primarily as a
budgeting exercise.3 As such it was driven by the financial section of organisations,
immunised the change virus, and many of the cultural and procedural behaviours criticised in the
inquiry remain strong and resistant to this day.
3
In the following discussion I use Bonn and Christodolou’s summary of the main stages of planning,
but add my own interpretation on the significance of some of the stages. The comments on budgeting
are particularly important and result from my own observations.
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which provided the culture and intellectual tools that drove the process. Not only
did they provide the tools, they locked the organisation into a thinking paradigm and
into an assumed model of the organisation. The paradigm was reductionist,
deductive and quantitative, and the model of the organisation was technical and
financial. The de facto goal of the organisation was to make a profit and to increase
assets. These goals are not real missions; they are more qualifiers for sustainability.
They beg the bigger questions of what business an organisation wants to be.
During the 1970s the topic of planning widened beyond the financial to include the
more strategic topics of markets and positions. ‘Strategic planning in the 1970s ...
supported an increasing response to markets and competition through situation
analysis and competitive assessment, the evaluation of strategic alternatives and a
dynamic allocation of resources’ (Bonn and Christodolou 1996, p. 543). This was
strategic in that it widened the tactics and options from an internal and operational
focus to an external and competitive focus. The strategic analysis was performed by
internal specialist units rather than by line management. The strategic planning unit
was a professional and high-powered group. In a sense the science of
macroeconomics had superseded the science of accounting as the intellectual tool
for plans.
During the 1980s, this strategic-logical paradigm extended more directly into the
sphere of management (thus the move to ‘strategic management’ as mentioned in
the title of Bonn and Christodolou’s article). ‘The 1980s were characterised by a
phase of strategic management … which cut across operational boundaries, a flexible
and creative planning process and a corporate value system which reinforced
management commitment’ (ibid., p. 543). The key driver in the 1980s was the Total
Quality Management movement (TQM) which had its origins in statistical theory in
the United States beginning before the war. As such TQM was a theory of scientific
management and fitted in with the 1970s strategic-logical paradigm. But TQM had
not taken root in the United States, and remained a minor intellectual movement
until it was transplanted to Japan during the reconstruction phase after the Second
World War. There the American exponents of TQM who had been prophets
without honour in their own country (most notably W.E. Deming) found a market
for their ideas. The Japanese acclimatised TQM to their culture by transforming it
into a tool for worker participation, not just an analytical tool. Their culture
appreciated both precision and dialogue, so TQM took root vigorously and became
the backbone of the post-war Japanese economic miracle. By the 1980s, the success
of TQM was irresistible and American firms began to take it very seriously.
However, they were now buying not just a statistical tool but a socio-technical tool
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that emphasised participation and implied a richer paradigm of the organisation than
the dry financial or strategic analysis schools.
TQM’s brand of planning was called ‘Hoshin Planning’ (see Goal/QPC Research
Committee 1989) and focused on integrating customer needs and improvement
suggestions into the planning cycle. Although Hoshin (or Policy Deployment as it was
also called) never had the wide success of its parent, TQM, it was notable in that it
made a serious attempt to build the planning cycle around improvement, not just
budgets. It recognised that without integrating concepts of quality and and
continuous improvement into planning, the organisation’s thinking would just circle
perennially around the dry desert of numbers and costs. Even though Hoshin as a
formal planning system failed, TQM did socialise a kind of local planning process in
that its key mantra was the ‘plan, do, check, act’ cycle. Thus planning in the 1980s
was breaking away from the formal systematics of the 1970s, becoming less
specialised and more integrated into the tasks of line management.
In the 1990s, Peter Senge’s seminal concept of the ‘Learning Organisation’ (Senge,
1990) took the social awareness begun by TQM to a new level. During the latter
stages of Deming’s life, the old prophet of TQM had moved away from statistics as
the central platform for his theory to ‘deep learning’ as the centre. However,
Deming had no real wider theory to build a more structured approach to deep
learning, so it was left to others to capitalise on the socialisation of management that
TQM had initiated. Senge led this move by introducing the concept of learning as a
key organisational capability, indeed as perhaps the defining capability of successful
organisations (Senge 1990). Learning was always implicit in TQM methodologies, but
by making it explicit, Senge did something more momentous than add method and
structure to an implicit idea: he was changing world views of the nature of
management from instrumentalist to adaptive, and changing the metaphor of the
organisation from machine to organism. Although TQM’s social methods moved in
this direction, its statistical roots retained a strong enough sense of the mechanical
and instrumentalist to prevent such a sea change ever occurring. TQM is also
limited to the instrumentalist by its strong addiction to the goal of control, a goal
which is enshrined in its statistical tools which seek to control variation (see
McConnell 1988 as an example).
Unlike TQM, Senge sought learning as a way for an organisation to manouvre in a
changing environment. Two key ideas buttressed his image of learning. The first
was the idea that systems are organic and live in unstable environments which
cannot be predicted, much less controlled. The second was his idea that surviving
organisations must learn rapidly from their environment and adapt in order to
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survive. Clearly these concepts change the nature of planning in an organisation
away from instrumentalist prediction and control to intelligence, learning and
adapting (see de Geus, 1988).
Senge also widened the concept of mission to ‘mission, vision and values’. This
broadened the subject of planning from the strategic-logical subject of mission to
include the humanistic and imaginative subjects of future desired states, service and
values. It also recognised the persuasive nature of plans inside an organisation: if
people are not inspired by a sense of belonging to a wider purpose than economic
functionality they will not identify with the work of the organisation. This work on
vision was significantly extended by Collins and Porras (1996) who argued that what
distinguished lasting organisations was a ‘core ideology’ which transcended economic
goals and which articulated the contribution that the organisation made to the
world.
In the latter part of the 1990s the planning debate returned to a more strategiclogical frame with the work of Gary Hamel, who has argued that strategic planning
should create value not just control costs or manage budgets. Hamel links strategy
to creativity, product ideas and expanding markets. ‘Our view of strategy recognises
the need for more than an incrementalist, annual planning rain dance; what is needed
is a strategic architecture that provides the blueprint for building the competencies
needed to dominate future markets.’ (Hamel, p. 25). Such efforts, he comments,
work on the numerator rather than the denominator in the revenue over costs
equation. ‘Denominator management is an accountant’s shortcut to asset
productivity’ (ibid. p. 9).
Despite this expansion of the scope of planning which has taken place in the
academic literature, organisational practices remain stubbornly focused on
operational management and budget based planning.4 The Learning Organisation
4
The anchoring tug of budgeting is so strong that some companies committed to change are
jettisoning budgeting. A recent article commented, ‘Many well planned changes and many attempts to
shift the culture from one of compliance and control to enterprise and learning have foundered when
management behaviour has been “snapped back” into its old shape by the invisible power of the
budgeting system’ (Hope & Fraser 1997, p.21). As a result several Scandinavian companies, including
Ikea and Borealis, are dismantling budgeting (ibid., p. 22).
This sense of undertow has led to a crisis in the future of budgeting. The topic is too large to explore
here fully but is worth mentioning. A recent article (Hope 1997) reports several leading European
companies that have abandoned formal budgeting because it inhibits their moves away from a stiff
organisational hierarchy towards a more networked structure. They have found that the obduracy of
the budgeting process has stifled attempts to reform and decentralise. More recently, budgeting is
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concept has not penetrated organisations as successfully as TQM, nor has the value
based strategy of Hamel. The practices of the formal planning process remain
strongly shaped by the budgetary/financial undertow.
Why is this so? I believe that whilst these strategic and socio-technical movements
have charted a new direction successfully, they have not provided sufficiently
powerful tools and methods to support the new directions. Since the tools and
methods are in fact new ways of thought, it is necessary to frame them in a wider
argument about the nature of thinking, and in particular about the inadequateness of
the scientific approach to create alternative futures. The writers mentioned above
have made a great start by widening the technical to include the social. We now
need to widen it further by including the art of thought. In essence, planning must
move to design.
So the Customs case is not atypical. The widening of the planning topic into more
strategic fields, and the expectation that an organisation will draft its own future, are
symptoms of a wide trend in the planning literature. But as in the Customs case, it
appears that this widening has not provided tools and methods, rather it has
provided expectations that are not met. The budgetary process continues to
provide an undertow to the strategic themes – it is the dominating paradigm.5 As
such it limits the thinking around plans to a non-conceptual area. For a budget is
more a shell than a definition of an organisation’s destiny and pathway. It addresses
only the question of viability, and then only from a monetary perspective.
Furthermore, it focuses naturally on costs and control, rather than on markets and
expansion. It also extrapolates from last year’s experience rather than imagining
future possibilities. These characteristics limit budgeting as an intellectual process.
The intellectual tools that are useful in budgeting do not grade up to the strategic
making a counter-attack to preserve its relevance. It is moving away from costing inputs to costing
outputs and outcomes. (The Australian Department of Finance has mandated this shift to outcomes
budgeting for all Federal departments.) This move could be heralded as a welcome broadening of
budgeting or viewed with suspicion as a rearguard action to retain control of corporate planning. My
view is that the matters discussed in this thesis are crucial to ensuring that the move is positive. The
thinking underlying budgeting must change. If it does then the move will be a positive alignment. If
the thinking remains the same reductionism as I document in this thesis, then the move will prove to
be a rearguard lunge to retain control.
5
Charles Handy has remarked on the dominance of the accounting profession in his book Beyond
Certainty (1995). He claims that the accounting profession has dominated British companies and has
locked them into conservative management decisions (see p.137 ff).
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process. This creates a vacuum of tools for strategic thinking and hence there will
be a natural tendency for the thinking to slip back into budget-inspired paradigms
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1.2. Finding the problem: a thinking problem not just a
planning problem
1.2.1. The SWOT technique as an example of a thinking problem
The suspicion that strategic thinking is an art that lacks methods is reinforced by a
recent research into the use of the SWOT (Strengths-Weaknesses-OpportunitiesThreats) technique in England (Hill and Westbrook 1997). The SWOT technique
analyses a company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Hill and
Westbrook investigated the use of the SWOT technique in twenty UK
manufacturing firms in 1993-1994. They found that this widespread technique was
so disappointingly used that there should be a ‘product recall’. The major problem
was a lack of conceptual agility and rigour underlying the fairly broad categories that
the SWOT technique provides. For instance, one food company had a dominant
customer (X) who took 50% of its product. In their SWOT analysis, strengths
included ‘the value of our contract with X’ while weaknesses included ‘over-reliance
on company X’. As Hill and Westbrook note, this contradiction could have been the
source of fertile discussion such as, ‘In what circumstances is it a strength and in
what circumstances is it a weakness?’ But these questions were not raised and the
organisation seemed quite content to leave the contradiction unexplored. The
researchers summarise the following as the major problems in the use of the SWOT
tool
* Lists of strengths and weaknesses are too long
* No requirements to prioritise and weight factors
* Unclear and ambiguous words and phrases
* No resolution of contradictions (as in above example)
* No obligation to verify statements with data
* Single level of analysis is all that is required
* No logical link with implementation phase
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There is a common theme behind these weaknesses; the lack of agility with
conceptual and verbal tools. SWOT is a verbal technique in that it begins with a
descriptive process but the description is shallow; mere sloppy labelling as we have
seen in the example above. The methodology does not take people beyond the
shallow labels into deeper analysis of a factor, nor does it indicate the nature of
relationship between each ‘cell’ factor. So it is a listing technique that leaves us with
a non-systemic description of factors. Since the outcomes of a SWOT analysis can
be presented in a table6 it has the appearance of rigour and form, but underneath the
tabular grid lies confusion.7
We are not concerned here to diagnose the SWOT technique of planning per se:
our concern is to note that beneath the veneer of techniques there is often a lack of
real method and art. The verbal clumsiness that quicksanded SWOT for twenty UK
firms is a symptom of this lack of deeper art or method to inform the strategic
thinking discourse.
1.2.2. Pinpointing the problem area: thinking about the new
So while strategy is opening up new and more demanding topics, it is also requiring a
new kind of thinking, a more conceptual and formative kind of thinking. But
management experience or education does not seem to equip the mind for this kind
of thinking.8 And if one lacks a method to perform a task, one will naturally avoid
6
The use of tables, grids and matrices in planning makes an interesting study. In my view they all
derive from the mother of all budgeting tools, the double entry accounting matrix. This marvellous
system, invented by Luca Pacioli, created the accounting profession in the sixteenth century, and it
remains the fundamental intellectual tool upon which budgets rest. ‘Look-alike’ tools like SWOT
assume the rigour of the system, and thus court favour and credibility in the budget-inspired kingdom
of analytical rigidity. But tools like SWOT are tables, not matrices; the cells do not describe
interactions between the categories. So they are merely descriptive, whereas double entry accounting
is dynamic and functioning. Nonetheless accounting matrices share the same weakness that bedevils
the SWOT system: it is a verbal/numerical system masquerading as a tight numerical system.
Conceptual thinking precedes the numerical. First you must create the horizontal and vertical
categories that bound the matrix; on this intellectual activity everything else stand or falls. And this is
primarily a verbal/conceptual task. The other major weakness of all mathematical matrices is that they
purport to make your inferences for you – ‘the matrix made me do it’. (See my discussion on the use
of the matrix as a decision tool, in Chapter three.)
7
These limitations of SWOT are similar to the conceptual limitations that I noticed when an
engineering colleague attempted to facilitate a strategic session. (See chapter five on ‘The engineering
mind and design facilitation: a bad mixture’)
8
A recent article in Harvard Business Review suggested that the time is ripe for an alternative stream of
management education based on design rather than analysis (Lester et al., 1998). A recent collection
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that task. It will be honoured in the breach rather than the observance. For every
performance of that task will result in some failure and a sense of inadequacy.
Take the case of a large multinational company with diverse operations in different
autonomous divisions. At the hub sat the parent company, providing funds for
development and maintaining some kind of common identity. There, a young keen
General Manager of Finance had joined the organisation. He reported to the
Finance Director who had been in the company for years.
While the company was profitable, the new General Manager soon saw that it could
be a lot more profitable. In particular, he was concerned by the sloppiness of the
planning process, and the litany of disasters that he knew had accompanied many of
their new ventures. One day we explored this topic. He listed a sad tale of
expensive equipment requests that were not used for the stated purposes,
acquisitions and partnerships that had turned sour, divestments that were disastrous,
new business ventures that seemed ill conceived and hastily thought through. In no
time we generated twenty or more examples from the last three years. They all had
this common theme: they involved new ventures and poor planning.
The processes involved were capital request processes, due diligence, joint
venturing, acquisitions and strategic planning. But behind all lay a common theme:
they involved a situation which was new and complex for the people preparing the
task. These people were operational executives who were changing something in
order to grow their business. This meant they had to conceive of issues in areas
which, in some significant aspects, they had not encountered before and in which
there was no experience (theirs or that of others)9 to fall back on. They all involved
one other ingredient, the future. What was being contemplated had not been done
yet. They could not look out their window and observe an operation, or talk to
operators, to get data; it was a possibility, not an operating reality, so the data was
simply not there. This meant they had to use their imagination, an intellectual tool
that they had not cultivated or deemed relevant to business success. Not that
imagination is a widely acknowledged faculty in the world of business; as we have
observed above, financial analysis is the more dominant tool. But when something is
of essays also suggested we need to rethink management education basing a wider curriculum on
sources as diverse as Plato and experiential theory (French & Grey (eds), 1996)
9
If there were the experience of others to fall back on, company politics and culture make it difficult
to do so. Asking for help from a peer or subordinate not directly accountable is not necessarily a
smart career move in ego-land.
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new, it is simply not there to analyse, so imagination is much more the appropriate
cognitive task.
However, it was not only imagination that was missing. It was conceptual rigour.10
The reality was that these strategic planning processes were implicit and bumbling.
Written plans were thin and inadequate. Proposals did not betray a strategic
framework but rather opportunism. Risks were not foreseen or managed. In other
words, good arguments were simply not developed for the ideas. If the proponents
had been debaters they would have been trounced by any acute opponent.
We are not only observing a lack of certain intellectual tools here. The outcomes of
this ineptitude and reluctance were financially significant: the General Manager
estimated that the cumulative losses suffered by the company were in the order of
$100m – $200m. The company was still profitable and somehow nobody had
counted up the $100m until we did. The losses were invisible in that they were not
operating losses but missed opportunities, deflated profits, legal fees, wasted
investment and so on. So nobody was particularly concerned.
1.2.3. Resistance to change: myths around thinking and action
The young General Manager then convinced his boss that this issue was worth
attention, and so improving the board approval process became one of his annual
objectives the following year. The new year rolled around and the young General
Manager was joined in the task by another young manager from the operating side of
the company. But the atmosphere from one year to the next had changed: the
operating manager had a pragmatist’s view of the business – ‘you win some, you lose
some‘ – and he assumed that the Operating Divisions knew their task and should be
left alone without centralist interference. His presence changed the flavour of the
discourse completely. Energy drained out of the talk. In his implicit view, the
operators were ‘frontline troops’, and in the face of this perspective the complexion
of the young General Manager’s view changed and he began to feel bureaucratic and
formalist rather than a rigorous thinker and ‘radical improver to the operating base
of the company’. This repositioning of the change motives sapped the General
Manager’s energy and belief in himself.
10
I discuss imagination in more detail in Chapter five where I explore Coleridge’s theory of the
imagination versus the fancy. I discuss conceptual rigour in more detail in chapter seven where I
examine Plato’s discovery of dialectic.
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As this happened, he narrowed the scope for change. Originally he had envisioned
changing the behaviour of the divisions by introducing more rigorous thinking and
planning for changes. But now he narrowed his scope to redoing the company
procedures manual for submissions to the board. Then he took his early design
ideas to his boss. The boss was uninterested in even the narrowed scope of refining
submission documentation. Instead he narrowed the scope still further to
wondering who could authorise what amount of money. He was not keen to
interfere with divisional autonomy, and could see no need for much effort at all even
regarding revising company documentation.
The General Manager was by now defeated. He felt irrelevant and sidelined. He
doubted his own perceptions. Was there really a problem? Was he so misguided in
expecting rigour of argument from divisions? Did clear thinking not count for
anything?
Doubtless this company also pays some lip service to planning, improvement, and
organisational learning. But no one except the young General Manager saw11 any
problem at all. Why did only he see it? Partly because he was the company finance
director and he had a memory. He analysed the financial performance of poor
investments, and he could recall the glow of optimism that had accompanied their
proposals. Partly because he was new to the organisation and brought with him
fresh ideas; partly because he had previously worked with a consulting firm and so
had a natural interest in method more than just operational outcomes.
But why did the organisation not see? They did not prize the art of planning, but
seemed to prize the ‘cowboy’ action-orientated approach. Intellectual approaches
featuring analysis and forethought were not valued. What was valued was action and
performance; a chauvinistic male culture of risk and instinct. Another feature that
prolonged the hegemony of action over forethought was the unspoken but powerful
belief in the local supremacy of the business units. This deterred head office from
imposing any kind of rigour on the proposals emanating from the units. There was an
assumption that planning was an art that inhibited action rather than an art that led to
11
I use the term ‘saw’ advisedly. It implies the whole perceptual range from concern to paradigm.
John Seely Brown has commented on the importance of seeing for organisations as an intellectual
process. He analyses some of the failures at Xerox Park’s famed research centre as primarily a failure
of the organisation to see. He ends his article quoting the words of the British nineteenth century
artist and designer, John Ruskin; ‘The greatest thing a human soul does in this world is to see
something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but
thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion – all in one’
(Seely Brown 1995, p. 16).
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wiser action. And beyond these belief systems there was the evident lack of
intellectual tools. Compared to the budgeting process, the planning process lacked
specific tools, and reverted to a document-centred, bureaucratic process. The units
did not discuss proposals with the board in any structured way, instead presenting
summary proposals that had less depth and rigour than a good teacher would
impose on a Year 12 English or History essay. They put what faith they had in
planning into inadequate written tools. They neglected entirely any investment in
structured dialogue.
The lack of intellectual tools and intellectual tradition in the firm left my client
organisationally marooned. Marooned, he shrivelled, lost faith in his own
observations, and began to surrender the desire to redesign the planning process.
Having done that he has only one of two choices: leave or to begin to assimilate.
Assimilation will mean some personal revision of history; he will need to reinterpret
his earlier conclusions and veneer them with company sarcasm like ‘another typical
stuff up’.
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1.3. Interpreting the problem: two types of planning, two
types of thinking
These stories widen the problem we are dealing with beyond a specific business
process called ‘planning’; something deeper is at play here.
The heart of the problem is in the nature of the thinking required in planning, and in
particular in the kind of strategic planning that confronts the modern organisation.
This is not a business process that needs reengineering; it is a deeper cultural and
skill malaise that incapacitates organisations. In order to get closer to understanding
what is going on, we need to redefine the nature of the planning task in more
general, intellectual terms. To do this we need to perform some surgery on the
word ‘planning’.
1.3.1. What is planning?
Planning is a slippery word, too well worn by overuse to be relied upon for
conciseness and clarity. It has two distinct connotations that must be differentiated,
but rarely are.
Planning
Creating/
Conceptualising
Organising
Figure 1:1 Two types of planning
o most people planning is a synonym for organising. This is how the word is used in
most large organisations. The planning function is primarily logistical, a sequencing of
activities, and a tug of war over budgets. Important as these activities might be, they
assume that a prior activity has occurred, which also goes under the planning
umbrella. This is creating or conceptualising. Before you put anything into a
sequence, you must have conceived something to put into the sequence, and conceived
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a reason to put it there. So planning as conceptualising involves designing the new;
planning as organising involves arranging the familiar.12
In each case I have mentioned so far, the planning tasks that confronted people
required conceptualising more than organising. In confronting this task of
conceptualisation, the people were plunged into a situation where they had little or
no rigorous method to guide them. This was true of the individuals, but it was even
more so of the organisational structures around them. Rather than supporting the
individuals, the organisational structures seemed to conspire against them, not out of
deliberate malice but out of a lack of available and appropriate tools and methods.
This should not surprise us. For organisations and individuals are specifically not
trained or prepared to handle the new; they are masters of the routine and familiar.
Let me explain this phenomenon.
For the moment, forget organisations, and just consider how an individual
conceptualises and grows an idea. Let us imagine that the individual’s memory is a
river of several mingling currents – including past decisions and events – that are
shaping present behaviours. Memory governs thinking very efficiently as long as the
tasks are routine and familiar. We are comfortable using protocols and routines that
have served us well in the past. But when we are confronted with an anomaly or a
new situation we cannot just draw on the previous intellectual routines; we need to
conceptualise and find new ways of doing things.13
12
This contrast is analogous to Coleridge’s distinction between the ‘fancy’, which arranges ‘fixities’ like
a string of beads, and the imagination which melts down fixities into new combinations (See Chapter
five).
13
Edward de Bono (1993) examines the way past experience lays down tracklines that inhibit
discovery in his theory of lateral thinking. Most of his tools consist of techniques to break these prior
patterns. There are some similarities between de Bono’s tools and my methods, but I feel de Bono,
for all his well publicised cleverness, is ironically narrow. Most of the problems he confronts are
mechanical/scientific and not systemic, and he has no principles of context, social purpose or values in
his methods.
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I draw the growth cycle of conceptual thinking the following way:14
A point of patterning
‘crests’ the wave…
Unease begins a cycle
of reflective thought…
Ready to move into
experimental action in the
world…
The river of life:
Currents of past
decisions and
events…
Figure 1:2 The Thinking Wave™
At its origin, it is cloudy and uncertain. It lacks shape, it lacks substance and it lacks
clarity.
It is probably even hard to put into words. It is inchoate, like a fog.15 At this stage,
the idea is more accurately described as a ‘concern’. Something has excited or
disturbed us, we have encountered a new person who has unsettled us; we are
beginning the study of a new field and we are all at sea; or an old well-worn theory is
under challenge, and looks less adequate than it was once. But ideas or concerns
grow. We have an impulse and a great capacity to tidy things up, to understand
14
I created this model some years ago and have since registered it as a trademark. I cannot recall
any articles or writers that influenced my thinking around this model so I presume it was my own
inspiration. But since then I have come across one major supporter in the form of John Dewey. His
article on ‘having an experience’ (1973) uses the model of the sea and waves to capture the natural
cycle and energies of conceptual thought. ‘The experience, like that of watching a storm reach its
height and gradually subside, is one of continuous movement of subject matters. Like the ocean in the
storm, there are a series of waves …’(p.557). Aristotle also conceived of thought in organic terms.
He was a biologist who characterised thought in ‘vitalist’ terms, according to one commentator
(Hughes, 1994) The model of the wave and the river is also similar to Vickers’ model of appreciative
systems (Checkland et al. 1986).
15
My ideas on the creative instinct in humans are heavily inspired by the account of creation in the
first chapter of the Bible. Genesis 1:2 states, ‘Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was
over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ (NIV translation
1985) The verse evokes this transformation from the inchoate to the fruitful, and the word ‘hovering’
to describe the creative act is very suggestive of an emergent process.
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things, and to explain things. We are a creative and controlling species, and we are
restless when our ideas are too ‘foggy’. So thinking becomes dynamic and mobile.
We want to move past the fog. And we have great ability to do this.
So we work things out. Whether by discussion, introspection, or reading, we push
the ideas into a more reflective explicit plane: we bring them to the light, so that we
can crystallise them.
When we do, we create a new explanatory pattern which moves the concern from
fog to focus. This pattern is really a claim or proposition explaining how the world
works, or about how our world works. Technically, we can call it a hypothesis. Now
although ‘hypothesis’ may seem a technical term, it does not require technical
training: we live by hypothesising. Every human on God’s earth does so. We have
theories or explanatory mechanisms about how things work in a certain field. These
theories help us to live a great deal more efficiently than we could without them,
because they are devices whereby we structure our perceptions and explanations of
the world.
What is the value of such a way of structuring and explaining phenomena in the
world? Essentially that it helps us to organise our responses and actions in the world.
1.3.2. Organisational thinking: two distinct types
Now let us apply this model of conceptual thinking to an organisation. Like an
individual, an organisation engages in a variety of thinking tasks. It is worth
differentiating between these tasks so that we might manage them better. In the
following model conceptual thinking is on the upstream side of the crest of the wave,
and deductive thinking is on the downstream side.
Point of the
hypothesis
Upstream
Defined
pattern or
model
Downstream
Changed
situation
Ambiguous …
Defined ….
Familiar
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Figure 1:3 Upstream & downstream tasks
An organisation is
almost by definition on the downstream side of this wave of thought: the name itself
tells us that an organisation is adept at organising. That is its strength, its role, and
also its weakness. Organisations have a governing hypothesis about how their world
works, i.e. their present set of goods and services. These define their place in the
world. Into this definition are built assumptions about the mission, culture and
operating capabilities of the organisation. The organisation then uses these
assumptions to structure its responses to the environment: it rarely challenges them
unless somehow the hypothesis stops working well. When the audience doesn’t
believe, the market stops buying. But most organisations do not adapt well to the
threat of a hypothesis not working.
That is because a great deal of effort goes into building the organisation with its
downstream world. This effort goes into developing tools, methods and people who
suit a post-definitional downstream world. These capacities are focused on control
and organisation. The style of thinking they induce and reward is deductive thinking,
thinking that operates in the shadow-lands of a hypothesis, working out how to apply
a rule someone else has discovered. These tools include hierarchy as the
organisation structure, delegation and authority as the mode of interaction,
promotion and levels of work, task definition and procedures, audits and reviews of
performance, reports on performance specifications and methods.
Crucially, the tools that work on the downstream side do not work on the upstream
side, simply because they are different ‘places of thought’. When I organise, I want
clarity and control. When I conceptualise, I want possibilities and forms. The
downstream is a tidy world, the upstream is turbulent. If you live on the
downstream side the upstream side will be threatening, and your impulse will be to
tidy up the mess and calm the chaos. In so doing you will nip conceptualisation in
the bud, and you zip across to the downstream side prematurely.16
16
Russell Ackoff, in a promising phrase, calls planning ‘mess management’ (Ackoff, 1982 p. 79ff). Eliot
Jacques (1990) identifies comfort with ambiguity as a key indicator for a senior leader who must work
at a level of abstraction where uncertainties predominate and judgements must replace data.
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Here the apt response is a design
process…
Here the apt response is a
deductive process of
management…
Defined
pattern or
model
Conceptualising
Organising
Changed
situation
Ambiguous …
Defined ….
Familiar
Figure 1:4 Different tools
However, more and more organisations are finding themselves on the upstream side
(conceptualising) in a pre-definitional situation. That is where the nature of the task is
still fundamentally unclear, or where the role of the group is still fundamentally
unclear.
Now this is a most significant point for modern organisations, so significant that it is
hard to overemphasise. It is significant for the modern organisation because the
tools and experiences of the downstream side are useless, inefficient and harmful if
applied to the upstream side. But organisations rarely recognise this shift in place and so
keep applying the wrong tools with increasing intensity.17
17
Planning unfortunately is often confused with project management. It is assumed that they are
similar tasks and that consequently people who are good at project management will also be able to
lead and guide planning exercises in an organisation. In chapter five I discuss an experience where I
directly observed a project manager at work trying to facilitate strategic planning. Essentially my
upstream/ downstream model diagnoses the problem: project management is a deductive thinking
exercise much like budgeting. It works off a settled scope and assumptions about the business case.
All the tools it uses are linear and detailed (e.g. work breakdown structures, critical path analysis and
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It was this lack of tools and supporting culture that shackled my clients in each of the
cases above: they were asked to do a task that was in fact on the upstream side,
when their skills and the organisation’s expectations pushed them to the
downstream side. They were required to perform a task which required a certain
style of thinking which they had not yet mastered. All of the clients above were
mute and confused about this problem.
1.3.3. A final story
On one occasion another client actually articulated the dilemma to me very neatly.
Interestingly, he was a Chinese person who was working in a major Australian
resource company. His group had embarked on a ‘continuous improvement’ drive.
One of the key projects identified was ‘communication’, so they had set up a team to
work on it. A previous effort had yielded nothing more than a more rigorous set of
team briefings, with times for meetings and sequences formalised (‘... the
superintendents’ meetings must follow the managers’ meetings within 24 hours ...‘).
Another suggestion had been a staff newsletter. Others had considered electronic
mail. While theses ideas may well have been elements of a better communication
system, they were only that – elements. They dealt with ‘downstream side’
organising situations. They all involved heavy commitment of resources and energy,
yet may well not focus on the key issues. These key issues are
* The purpose of a communication system
* The nature of communication
* The central theme or concept of the system.
Articulating such an integrating system would set up the groundwork for composing
the key elements of the system: the time, resources, procedures and controls or
roles in the system.
The General Manager in this organisation drew the following diagram to explain
where he thought his organisation was deficient:
specifications). Many are mathematical (e.g. the Monte Carlo technique for modelling risk). I speak
from extensive consulting experience with project managers, including writing several major project
management guidelines for major organisations. But most of the major problems in project
management occur precisely where they have no tools, in the early conceptual phases. Here they
need methodologies such as the ones I am exploring in this thesis, but they have few available.
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Concept
Strategy
Plans
Implementation
Figure 1-5: The concept vacuum
He commented that while the organisation was strong from strategy onwards, it
lacked tools or experience to create concepts and move from them to a strategy.
The result was firstly a false start, and then paralysis. The team was spinning its
wheels and waiting for some direction. If no such direction was forthcoming, the
team would eventually yaw suddenly onto the downstream side and start to
‘organise something’ to give everyone a comforting feeling that they were achieving
something. The result would be fragmented efforts, much time wasted and too much
detail with too little governing pattern.
1.3.4. The focusing questions
Thus we are faced with the question: what is the governing methodology for the task
of conceptualising? Or indeed is there such a thing? Can intuition have methods? Can
conceptualisation (or creative thought) be structured? Can organisations create
space and a conducive environment for designing and planning new things rather
than administering the familiar?
It is these questions that this thesis addresses. It is fundamentally a quest to discover
the intellectual arts that underpin conceptual thinking, and it uses the specific case of
strategic planning in organisations as a vehicle to pursue the quest.
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The hypothesis:
the lost art of conceptual
thinking and the emerging
art of strategic
conversations
This chapter introduces my hypothesis, that the lost art of
conceptual thinking undergirds strategic conversations.
Without a strong art of conceptual thinking to undergird it,
you cannot introduce a robust strategic conversation into an
organisation.
I make the point that it is the art that is lost, not the
experience. Plenty of people think very well conceptually.
What we lack are strong theories and methods of conceptual
thinking.
Chapter two
Chapter two
2.1. Seeds of the hypothesis: early influences
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2.1.1. Impressions as an English teacher
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2.1.2. Winnicott and the ‘transitional object’
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2.1.3. Moffet and the ‘active voice’
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2.2. Management literature: Fertile soil for the hypothesisError! Bookmark not defined.
2.2.1. Gareth Morgan and metaphors of organisation
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2.2.2. Mintzberg and the left brain/right brain polarity
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2.2.3. Garratt and the ‘hard’/’soft’ polarity
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2.2.4. Burns and transformational leadership
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2.2.5. Mant and ‘ternary’ leadership
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2.2.6. Ackoff and systems thinking
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2.3. Shifting the polarity: not intuition versus logic, but making versus describingError! Bookmark not
2.3.1. An example to finish – Lincoln at Gettysburg
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Figures
Figure 2-1: The ‘Me’ and ‘Not Me’ worlds............................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 2-2: Garratt’s socio-technical model ............................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 2:3: Mant’s Ternary Leadership ...................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 2:4: Compliant vs Transformational thinking .............. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 2:5: Purpose, not tools ..................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
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2.1. Seeds of the hypothesis: early influences
Planning systems characterise all large organisations and usually intertwine a complex
set of organisational culture, systems and structures. In retrospect I can see that it
was not the mechanisms of planning systems nor their content matter that lured me,
but rather their all-too-human dimension of being a thinking system. My interest was
sparked by their characteristic as a proxy for conceptual thinking on an
organisational or community scale; thinking systems that were on a communal scale
not just an individual scale. such thinking systems involve a certain kind of thinking:
not inference, calculation, computation or deduction but conception.1
Of course my recognition of planning as communal conceptual thinking was more
visionary than actual. Chapter one cites multiple episodes illustrating how trapped
this kind of thought process is in organisations. But although it was trapped, I felt
palpably the cry for freedom, a sense that a living thing was trying to emerge from
within a mechanical, constricting fortress. This is not mere verbal flourish: the case
studies from chapter one chronicle an emotional angst from my subjects as much as
a logical angst.
2.1.1. Impressions as an English teacher
I was predisposed to the nexus between conceptual thinking and strategy. My first
career was as a teacher of English in a secondary school. In that role I developed a
fascination for the essay writing process. I became dismayed at the way content
governed students’ writing. They seemed overawed in the face of data, somehow
subservient to that data, and indeed, assessed on their facility in transporting that
data onto the page. Teachers seemed compliant in the hegemony of data and
content, demonstrated by the way we marked essays as finished products, stressing
accuracy and coverage as vital components, almost the defining components of a
good essay. ‘You do not cover the issue of x in enough detail...’ ‘You write fluently
1
A recent book has acknowledged that conceptual thinking is the sine qua non of the modern
manager, and has set out to articulate a toolkit of conceptual thinking tools (Rhodes 1991). ‘Over the
past two generations we have seen all manner of images for the perfect manager. ... We have had the
rational, the analytic, the bureaucratic manager; the realist and the pragmatic manager; the sensitive
motivator and the controlling autocrat; the charismatic, and the inspirational visionary; the
entrepreneurial and the creative manager. ... what is significant by its absence in all the descriptions of
managers is that to do all these things in a maelstrom of uncertainty and change demands constant and
rapid conceptualising’ (ibid., p. 22).
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but must become more familiar with the facts...’ Coverage of detail acquired almost
a moral quality to it – rather like ignoring your grandmother during a home visit.
Even more sinisterly, we set topics that invited students to sit in a kind of premature
judgement2 over areas in which they had little or no experience. Even if they were
successful at the task, they were being successful at a cosmetic packaging of other
people’s ideas and conclusions.
To counteract this imbalance, I explored and taught the process of essay writing
rather than the finished product. I developed and taught skills of question analysis,
exploring and gathering data using spider diagramming,3 and arranging arguments
using visual models. This push back upstream, towards planning essays rather than
writing them, seemed to liberate students in the face of data, to unlock confidence
and a personal voice. So the upstream move to process opened up a second
emphasis: from an impersonal objectification of data to finding a personal voice
which negotiated meaning with the data. The move to personal voice was not an
invitation to indulge opinions free of data; primarily it was a challenge to find and use
forms to select and arrange data. So, in a sense, form was the third ground between
data and self.
This interest was an interest in the planning process of tasks rather than the delivery
aspect. As a teacher I had developed the instincts, interests and tools that would
inevitably draw me away from the packaging and delivery of information, upstream
towards the planning of information.
Two authors particularly influenced me during those formative years.
2
People and issues don’t change much. Cicero complained that the arts of judgement dominated
learning in Roman times ahead of the far more significant arts of invention. ‘The Stoics have worked
in only one of the two fields. That is to say, they have followed diligently the ways of judgement …
but they have totally neglected the art which is called ‘topics’, an art which is both more useful and
certainly prior in the order of nature’ (Topica, II.6). In the eighteenth century, Vico complained that
the education system taught students to criticise before they could create. ‘When by logic lads are
led prematurely into criticism (that is to say, are led to judge before properly apprehending, against
the natural course of ideas – for they should first apprehend, then judge and finally reason), they
become arid and dry in expression and without ever doing anything set themselves up in judgement
over all things. On the other hand, if in the age of perception, which is youth, they would devote
themselves to Topics, the art of discovery that is the special privilege of the perceptive … they would
then be furnished with matter in order to later to form a sound opinion on it’ (Vico 1944, p.124).
3
Spider diagramming is a visual representation technique like mind mapping. I invented it and named
it ‘spider diagrams’ long before Buzan (1993) popularised mind mapping. My technique is significantly
different from Buzan’s and I explain the differences in chapter three of the thesis.
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2.1.2. Winnicott and the ‘transitional object’
The first was D.W. Winnicott and his book Playing and Reality4 (1971). I do not
attempt to summarise this rich and complex book here, rather to acknowledge its
formative effect on my thinking, and to describe, not so much Winnicott’s argument,
as the use I made of the argument.
Winnicott was one of the first people to link medical care and psychiatry with
paediatrics. He worked in England from the 1920s to the 1960s. He was President of
the Paediatric section of the Royal Society of Medicine and Chairman of the Medical
Section of the British Psychological Society. He studied and speculated on the way a
child develops and in particular how a child constructs reality through playing. He
hypothesised that a child, when first born, is totally engulfed in subjective world (the
me world) and is not cognisant of external reality, but probably imagines that it
creates the external world. As the child grows, the disturbing reality that there is, in
fact, an external world which it cannot control begins to break upon its
consciousness. How can it accommodate this reality without losing a sense of self?
The answer is that the child develops a ‘transitional object’ which mediates between
itself and the world. This transitional object is usually a toy or familiar precious
object of which the child is very fond. It is, in fact, an object from the hostile external
world, but the child so completely transfers its subjective world onto the object (e.g.
renames it, gives it imaginary qualities, talks with it, etc.) that it is neither external
nor internal; it is transitional. Thus the child begins the lifelong process of mediating
between the creative inner world and the not-me, given external world.
Winnicott captivated my attention because he fluidly moved from this experience of
the child’s development to adult experience and creativity. He did not see the child’s
development as finishing at a certain age; rather he saw that the transitional objects
became art in the adult world, and that the process of mediating between an inner
and outer world was a lifelong task. Doing it well was a key to mental health.
I have introduced the terms ‘transitional objects’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ for
designation of the intermediate area of experience, between the thumb and the teddy
bear. ... the third part of the life of a human being ... is an intermediate area of
experiencing, to which both inner reality and external life contribute. ...It shall exist as a
resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and
outer reality separate yet interrelated. ... I am therefore studying the substance of
illusion, that which is allowed to the infant, and which in adult life is inherent in art and
4
I first came across Winnicott as an undergraduate, introduced to me by one of my significant
mentors, Dr Rob Jackson from the English department at University of Sydney.
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religion, and yet becomes the hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a
claim on the credulity of others, forcing them to acknowledge a sharing of illusion that is
not their own
(Winnicott 1971, pp. 2-3)
In a later chapter on creativity and its origins Winnicott contrasted the ‘creative
apperception’ with compliance in the face of the external world.
It is creative apperception more than anything else that makes the individual feel that
life is worth living. Contrasted with this is a relationship to external reality which is one
of compliance, the world and its details being recognised but only as something to be
fitted in with or demanding adaptation. Compliance carries with it a sense of futility for
the individual and is associated with the idea that nothing matters and life is not worth
living.
[ibid., p. 65]
From Winnicott I drew heart that creativity mattered in life in general, and that it
was something far more pervasive than a subject to be covered if we had time in a
classroom. His framing of the creative process took it out of the specialist realm and
replaced it in the whole cycle of life from cradle to adulthood. He also linked it with
character formation and mental health; that is, it was not just utilitarian technique for
solving problems, which could be laid aside like a raincoat when the need
evaporated. Rather it was a life and identity-forming process. I had instincts that this
was so but Winnicott strengthened them and fuelled what has become one of the
lifelong quests of my intellectual life.
As well as deepening its relevance, Winnicott provided structure to the creative
process. Others I have read have framed it as a set of steps, but Winnicott framed it
as a model of life. The model has three interactive elements
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Figure 2-1: The ‘Me’ and ‘Not Me’ worlds
The key element for me was the third element, the transitional object.5 For me this
was writing – text or image. So with Winnicott’s framing I began to see writing not
as self-expression (‘me’ world) at one polarity, nor as description at the other
polarity (‘not-me’ world), but as a third place mediating between the other two.
This mediation was not mere negotiation between fixed entities but was a
developmental mediation; as it was played with, so it developed the relationship
between the individual and the data. Thus Winnicott’s model was not static but
dynamic and formative.
Winnicott’s model not only confirmed my own instincts that creativity was somehow
central to living a healthy full life, it also gave me a framework with which I could
diagnose and understand the aridity of most corporate planning activities. I could
locate planning as overly compliant psychologically, an activity that veered too much
towards being an attempt at codification of the ‘not-me’ world. Thus the plan
(which in Winnicott’s model would be the transitional object) was ineffectual in
mediating the space between the people and the world they lived in. It was not
5
Winnicott’s model is clearly Trinitarian and shadows the rhetorical model. (See chapter six, where I
discuss the three elements of rhetoric in. Even more evocatively, Colin Gunton develops a similar
model in the field of theology to characterise the Triune God of Christianity, and to argue that its
Trinitarian balancing of polar opposites offers useful alternatives for the post modern era.
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sufficiently interactive and creative. Furthermore I could weigh up the significance of
such intellectually compliant activity. It was not just that such plans were thin or
uncreative, less functional than they otherwise might have been, but they were
dehumanising in that they did not allow sufficient scope for this mentally healthy
processes of playing with and structuring reality.
2.1.3. Moffet and the ‘active voice’
I came across the second formative influence that predisposed me to move to the
‘downstream side’ of intellectual tasks while I was school teaching. James Moffet was
one of several academics whodevised writing across the curriculum programs for
secondary students in America. His theme was to evoke the ‘active voice’6 of the
writer and to move writers away from passive describing towards emotional and
cognitive ownership of their subject. He articulated two continua across which
writers develop.7 The first is between writer and subject matter and the second is
between writer and audience. The four stages of the first continuum are what
Moffet calls the four stages of discourse.
Inner verbalisation
Outer vocalisation
Correspondence
Formal writing
This continuum is formed simply by increasing the distance, in all senses, between
speaker and audience. The audience is, first, the speaker himself, then another person
standing before him, then someone in another time and place but having some personal
relation to the speaker, then lastly, an unknown mass extended over time and space. ...
For me no discussion of language, rhetoric and composition is meaningful except in this
context, for there is no speech without a speaker in some relation to a spoken-to and a
spoken-about.
[Moffet 1981,
p. 142]
The second continuum extends between the concrete and the abstract. Moffet
traces this continuum in terms of tense.
What is happening now (perception)
What happened (narrative)
6
7
This is the title of his book (1981).
These ideas are expressed in the essay ‘I, You and It’, a chapter of Active Voice (99. 140–148)
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What happens (generalisation)
What could happen (theory)
He illustrates this progression through the case study of a cafeteria, tracing original
perceptions and talk in the cafeteria as they move through stages of symbolising.
We begin by saying ‘Do you notice the way that waitress ignored us’? and move on
to theorising about the key to success in the service industries being service. The
key point about Moffet’s approach that influenced me was his emphasis on reclaiming
the origins of theory in personal perceptions, of locating theory in experience, and
his emphasis on reclaiming personal voice in writing. He believes that education
forces students to expound theory (phase 4) before they have enriched perception
(phase 1) and explored narrative (phase 2). Thus they fail to engage meaningfully and
personally with topics.
Most students fail to create original and interesting classes (of inclusion and exclusion)
because they are unwittingly encouraged to borrow their generalisations from old
slogans, wise saws, reference books, and teachers’ essay questions, instead of having to
forge them from their own experiences.
[ibid., p. 147]
Thus, from Moffet, I crystallised my sense of two things: the primacy of data and
personal experience, and the need to recover and confirm the speaking voice. I
recognised that most students borrow their ideas and their stances and that
somehow we did not encourage them to find their own voice in their transactions
with intellectual tasks. Much later I found similar ideas expressed in Wayne Booth’s
marvellous essay The Rhetorical Stance (1994). He too traces the sterile writing style
that objective prose and the academic task seem to encourage in students. In
discussing the Moffet article in 1995 with Dr David Kaufer (Head of the English
department at Carnegie Mellon University) we agreed that Moffet was encouraging
authorship, and that I was doing the same thing in organisations. But Kaufer
cautioned whether organisations really wanted their people to become ‘authors’ and
to find the ‘cafeteria’ in their own experiences from which they could contribute to
the organisation’s ideas and theories. Kaufer was not suggesting that I surrender on
the enterprise of ‘authorising’ organisations, only that I be aware that the vision was
fundamentally revolutionary, and sought to redistribute power.
Thus from Winnicott I strengthened my disposition for creative processes and from
Moffet I strengthened my disposition for authorship and finding the inner voice.
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These seeds incubated and formed the strategic conversation hypothesis, a move
upstream to the formative away from the formed, and upstream to the speaker from
the spoken; from text to discussion and inquiry.
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2.2. Management literature: Fertile soil for the hypothesis
I have traced my predispositions for the hypothesis that strategy and conceptual
thinking are complementary. At the same time the management literature had been
creating a place for conceptual thinking among the tasks of management. As
discussed in chapter one, Senge (1990) nominated shared vision as one of his five key
disciplines for organisation learning. He characterised shared vision in terms that
clearly identify it as conceptual and formative thinking:
A vision is truly shared when you and I have a similar picture and are committed to one
another having it, not just to each of us, individually, having it. When people truly share
a vision they are connected, bound together by a common aspiration.. while adaptive
learning is possible without vision, generative learning occurs only when people are
striving to accomplish something that matters deeply to them.
[Senge 1990, p. 206]
Senge’s work, among others, sensitised organisations to the need for an entirely
different kind of intellectual task than had previously been acknowledged as part of
management’s responsibility. The tasks of management were seen as logical and
analytical, with the role of people management regarded with a kind of
condescension: necessary but somehow compensatory rather than mainstream.
Senge elevated the art of management to the quasi-religious.8 In Winnicott’s terms
Senge’s vision is a religious or artistic topic that has moved the subject of managerial
discourse from the compliant, not-me world back towards the apperceptive,
creative, me world of the transitional object. Without wishing to demean the toys
8
This statement is sweeping and impossible to justify within the bounds of this thesis. It is not integral
to my main argument so I will not develop it in detail. I include it because I have certainly felt palpably
the transition, and because it has provided a more congenial seedbed for the conversation hypothesis.
One key indicator of the movement from the logical to the religious is the paradigmatic status of
Senge today, as key myth-maker of management, in contrast to the paradigmatic status of Kepner and
Tregoe in the previous era. Kepner and Tregoe’s definitive book The Rational Manager was published
in 1965; Senge was published in 1990. Another indicator is the ascendancy and subsequent decline of
the Quality movement. Total Quality Management flourished in the 1980s in the USA and Australia
but has diminished as a myth-making paradigm for management. It was in essence a scientific and
logical paradigm for management, based as it was on statistical theory. However, its theories have not
graduated well to the wider arena of developing whole organisations any more than Kepner and
Tregoe’s have. They are stuck in the smaller scale of local problem solving and process improvement.
(See my discussion of the history of planning in chapter one.)
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of children by the analogy, the organisation’s vision is a corollary of the child’s teddy
bear, mediating reality at the membrane between the inner and outer worlds.
2.2.1. Gareth Morgan and metaphors of organisation
For Senge’s work to take root as it has, other paradigms have had to be shifted. One
of the key paradigms has been the very nature of the organisation. Probably the most
significant assault on the conceptual barricades around this word was undertaken by
Gareth Morgan in his sense-making and sense-breaking book Images of Organisation
(1986). Morgan’s thesis is simple but compelling: the concept of ‘organisation’ is a
construction, a metaphor. No one can see or touch an organisation.
Morgan contends that different eras embed different metaphors into their concepts
of the organisation. Furthermore, he contends that these embedded metaphors are
not cosmetic or descriptive but generative: they influence the kinds of procedures
and cultures that will operate in that organisation. It is not germane to our
argument to summarise all Morgan’s metaphors. But the key shift is relevant: he
sees a move from militaristic and mechanical metaphors of the organisation to
organic and ecological metaphors of the organisation. The military view of the
organisation assumes command and control dialogue, and the key discourse is the
imperative, the procedure and the policy. The key organisational response is
obedience and compliance. In such a paradigm the key planning tool would be
management by objectives, in which senior managements set key outcomes and
objectives for the organisation to follow. Initiative is exercised in working out how
an objective is to be implemented, not in generating one’s own objectives. The
sister concept of the military metaphor is the organisation-as-machine metaphor.
This assumes that the organisation can be influenced by levers and works by cogs
and interlocking moving parts. Within this paradigm the organisation is complicated
but fundamentally understandable and static. It will follow a cause-and-effect logic or
a command and comply response. If senior management gives an instruction it is
analogous to putting one’s foot on the accelerator: the complex mechanical
interactions should result in the car picking up speed. It is a cause of some
consternation to wondering senior management that this phenomenon of
compliance does not occur. They are fundamentally confused because they have a
metaphor of organisation-as-machine. Within that metaphorical grid non-compliance
is illogical. The machine metaphor also assumes a static environment which cannot
threaten or change the organisation.
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In contrast to these metaphors, organic and ecological metaphors suggest that an
organisation is human and changing, and that it must adapt to its changing
environment. The qualities of the organic to which the organisation must aspire
include the perceptual and adaptive qualities of organic life. Cells have a membrane
that separates them from the external world but also joins them to it, allowing
sensory input from the external world. They have an extraordinary ability to capture
and act upon data from the external world and to adapt their activities to this input.
The analogy for the organisation is that it must develop qualities of perception of the
external environment and also develop its learning qualities so that it can act upon
this data. This has led to the widely influential movement of ‘scenario planning’.
Scenario planning was made famous at Shell when it successfully prepared itself for
the catastrophic drop in the price of oil using the technique. As described in The Art
of the Long View (Schwartz 1991), the technique involves the organisation scripting
various hypothetical scenarios of rapid and invasive changes in a company’s
environment. Senior management then participate in workshops where they plan an
appropriate response. It is mildly reminiscent of a rehearsal for a disaster plan.
Charles Savage, in Fifth Generation Management (1990), builds on Morgan’s organic
metaphor with extensive models of the networked organisation. He suggests that
we replace hierarchy with networks and that knowledge creation is a core process
of a successful organisation.
We have been plagued by those who take the official organisational chart, with its boxes
and lines, too seriously. ... A management strategy based on ‘command and control’ is
giving way to one centred on ‘focusing and coordinating’ multiple cross-functional teams.
[Savage 1990, p. 72]
My point is that new concepts of what an organisation is have emerged in the last
decade, and that these managerial concepts have provided a much more conducive
environment for the hypothesis of the strategic conversation. Within these broader
constructs of the organisation as organic and topics as quasi-religious, planning can
be seen as a learning and a generative process. The seeds of Winnicott and Moffet
fell on ground prepared and fertilised by significant shifts in the management
literature.
2.2.2. Mintzberg and the left brain/right brain polarity
The movement in the management literature generally towards the organic and the
emergent was mirrored in the specific literature around planning. The writer who
most resonated with my thinking is Henry Mintzberg. In The Rise and Fall of Strategic
Planning (1994) he argued that strategic planning was an oxymoron. Planning was a
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numerical and logical exercise dominated by the accountancy profession and a ‘left
brain activity’. Strategy was, in contrast, a conceptual exercise that required creative
thinking and ‘right brain ability’. They were incompatible but were usually unhelpfully
combined both in a single phrase and in the same organisational unit and process.
It is worth quoting Mintzberg’s hypothesis in full.
The Grand Fallacy
Thus we arrive at the planning school’s grand fallacy: Because analysis is not synthesis,
strategic planning is not strategy formation. Analysis may precede and support synthesis,
by defining the parts that can be combined into wholes. Analysis may follow and
elaborate synthesis, by decomposing and formalising its consequences. But analysis
cannot substitute for synthesis. No amount of elaboration will ever enable formal
procedures to forecast discontinuities, to inform managers who are detached from their
operations, to create novel strategies. Ultimately the term ‘strategic planning’ has
proved to be an oxymoron.
[Mintzberg 1994, p. 321]
Mintzberg’s contribution to my hypothesis is fundamental because he widens the
management topic of planning to include our topic of the nature of thinking. He sees
that the discontinuities and problems of strategic planning are not addressed at all
adequately by a management or organisational analysis. Rather, what we are
observing is a clash of paradigms about the nature of thinking. Thus, if we approach
the twin topics of strategy and thought from the entry point of strategy, we find in
thinking the key arts of the process. But if we approach them from the entry point
of thought, we find in strategy a very appropriate application in which to study
thinking at work.
Mintzberg sees that the beginning of planning’s grand fallacy is the belief that strategy
could ever be formalised. This belief flows from a mechanistic view of cognition,
which assumes that human thought processes can be standardised and replicated.
Not surprisingly he chooses to confront the pioneer of artificial intelligence, H.A.
Simon, in this chapter. Mintzberg contrasts the work of two Nobel Prize winners,
Simon and Roger Sperry (who won the award for his work on the right and left
hemispheres of the brain). He sees the contrast as a defining point in the debate
over the nature of thought.
This striking contradiction between these two intellectual giants defines one of the most
significant issues we face today: whether intuition exists as a distinct process of thought,
different from rational analysis.
[Mintzberg 1994, p. 303]
Simon believes that intuition is mere pattern recognition. ‘It would appear that the
process named “intuition” by Gestalt psychologists is none other than our familiar
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friend ”recognition” and that recognition processes are readily modeled by
computer programs’ (ibid., p. 310 – quoting Simon). The upshot of Simon’s
reasoning is that the mind is a machine and that it can be adequately mimicked by
computer programs. Simon’s cognitive research relies heavily on the limitations of
short term memory and the process of chunking information to overcome the short
term memory bottleneck.9 He believes that he has demystified intuition . ‘It is a
fallacy to contrast “analytic” and “intuitive” styles of management. Intuition and
judgement – at least good judgement – are simply analyses frozen into habit and into
the capacity for rapid response through recognition’ (Simon in Agor 1989, p. 38).
But Mintzberg is unconvinced. If Simon is right, then strategy can be a cookbook
approach, and analysis of data is the only cognitive process that matters. But if
Sperry is right and right brained functions cannot be conveniently reduced to
chunkable, replicable steps, then strategy formulation will be an intuitive approach
that cannot be reduced to analysis.
Mintzberg argues against Simon’s reductionism from various angles. It is not
important for our thesis to enter this debate here in full for it is a vast topic in its
own right. My sympathies lie with Mintzberg on the whole. Although I admire the
work of Simon for its numerous intriguing insights, I believe it is curiously blind. For
instance, most of his research is based on what is best called puzzle solving rather
than problem solving, let alone the vastly more complex task of designing strategy.10
Simon uses a tool called ‘protocol analysis’ to analyse the self-commentary of people
doing various cognitive tasks, but these tasks are puzzles with direct instructions and
right/wrong answers. So even if he can demonstrate pattern recognition as the
driving force in their decision-making, he cannot generalise from that to more
complex tasks, tasks like those that characterise the real world of managerial
planning.
For instance, cognitive science and computer science cannot replicate the writing
process. The subtlety of thought with which we began this section – Moffet’s
process of symbol making and authorship – are clearly not addressed in any relevant
9
The role of short term memory in problem solving processes is a key aspect of Simon’s research.
See ‘How big is a chunk?’ and ‘The Information storage system called “Human memory’’’ in Models of
Thought Vol. 1 (Simon 1979).
10
Goel and Pirolli (1992) have criticised Simon’s work on the basis that it extrapolates cognitive
theory from experiments of thought that set people what are essentially unambiguous, simple tasks.
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way by Simon’s theory of analysis and chunking. Something vastly more complex and
ambiguous than analysis is going on in people’s minds during this process.11
So Mintzberg’s point stands: he has named the game. Strategy formulation versus
traditional planning is not a debate about two managerial techniques. It is a proxy
for the great debate of the centuries over the nature of thought, and, in particular,
over the question of whether the scientific approach, with its reliance on analysis,
can smother and subsume the rebel of an alternative kind of thinking variously called
‘synthesis’ or ‘intuition’. Mintzberg certainly makes a compelling case that in the field
of planning the pure analysis approach does not work: it is not true to what actually
happens. But having positioned the problem and argued for the place of intuition as
an alternative process to analysis, he does not move on to articulate the art of such
an alternative process. This is hardly a weakness as he does not set out to address
the question, and he has done us a great enough service by enlarging the debate
from planning to thinking.12
While my sympathies lie with Mintzberg, I feel that the search for the art is clouded
by the polarity he sets up between logical and intuitive thought processes. There are
two distinctive thought processes going on, but they are not well characterised by
the terms ‘intuition’ and ‘analysis’. Setting up intuition in contrast to analysis invites
rationalists like Simon to assault intuition and bring it captive back within the camp of
analysis. This is indeed what Simon does, claiming that intuition is no more than
speedy analysis facilitated by rapid pattern recognition. This polarises the debate
unhelpfully and, in my view, will not unlock an alternative art to the dominant
scientific method. The polarity fixes the debate within the boundaries of science,
and asks what role intuition and analysis play within these boundaries.
11
Some of these observations come from extensive talks with Dave Kaufer, head of English at CMU
and one of Simon’s colleagues. While respecting Simon’s work within boundaries, he complained to
me that the simulations of the writing process achieved by cognitive psychologists were totally
inadequate.
12
Others have joined Mintzberg in identifying intuition as a key thinking process that organisations
clearly benefit from and would do well to understand better. Weston Agor edited a book Intuition in
Organisations in which he calls for a deepening of the research effort in understanding intuition. Agor
srites in his concluding essay, ‘it is startling to find that there is little in the way of applied research on
this subject’, he calls for the gap to be filled. Nevertheless he expects it to be filled in the way that
Simon does. ‘Take as your working hypothesis that intuition is simply a rational and logical brain skill
that can be used to guide decision making. It is not paranormal (Agor 1898, p. 267).
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Others have come as far as Mintzberg, traversed the same territory, and peered
over the same precipice, but, like him, found the view clouded by fog. A couple of
these authors are worth mentioning here.
2.2.3. Garratt and the ‘hard’/’soft’ polarity
Bob Garratt (1987)actually coined the term ‘learning organisation’ several years
before Peter Senge but did not achieve Senge’s fame. Like Mintzberg he studied
senior teams and planning. He found, as I did in chapter one, that life at the top of a
large organisation is frustrating and lonely. He quotes the views of one managing
director of a UK engineering company.
The daft thing is that you work for high office throughout your career. You become
more and more specialist and more and more valued. Then you are finally promoted to
the board, get your title and all the perks, only to find that it’s a hollow joke. You are
suddenly expected to be omniscient. You are meant to know everything about
everything. The truth is that you know a lot about a little because you have become so
specialised. At this level you need to feel that you will not be fooled by other specialists
– but that does not happen. Yet there seems to be no way of saying, ’help’.
[Garratt 1987, p. 25]
Garratt builds the case that leaders caught in the predicament that this person so
candidly describes tend to take decisions at too operational a level. ‘Too many top
management decisions are taken at too low a hierarchical level’ (p. 73).
He describes three levels of work in organisational planning as policy, strategy and
operations. He then argues that the three levels should work together to form two
loops of learning, a ‘reframing loop’ and an ‘operations loop’.13 The first should
concentrate on effectiveness, the second on efficiency. Integrating the two loops is
the ‘business brain’, or strategic thinking. ‘Straddling this divide between the internal
and external worlds of an organisation is, for me, the definition of “strategic
thinking”’ (ibid., p. 75). Thus like Mintzberg, Garrett has identified that strategy is a
thinking process.
Like Mintzberg he characterises strategy as a particular type of thinking which he
variously describes as integrative, reflective, and learning. He contrasts it with
13
Chris Argyris also used the term ‘double-loop learning’ in his ground-breaking book, Overcoming
Organsational Defensiveness (1990). He contrasts double-loop learning with single-loop learning. Singleloop learning occurs when we address only the presenting problems of a situation; double-loop
learning occurs when we address the ‘more basic problem of why these problems existed in the first
place.’ The double-loop learning will have to address core values (Argyris 1990, p. 92).
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‘hands-on’, activist management behaviour. He admits that this kind of thinking is
rare in managerial circles: ‘The processes of managerial thinking are being spotlighted
as needing drastic re-evaluation, especially at the senior management level’ (Garrett
1987, p. 91). But like Mintzberg, while he clears the path to the edge of the
precipice, as he peers off towards the valley to discern the new, the view is clouded,
and clouded by a false polarity. For Mintzberg that false polarity was a too-easy
contrast of analysis and intuition; for Garratt it is a more heavy-handed contrast
between thought and feeling. Garratt, having built a subtle case, unexpectedly
becomes clumsy when confronted with the task of articulating the nature of the
‘business brain’ thinking for which he has been at pains to argue the need. He cedes
the grounds of thinking to the technical and ‘macho’ realm (presumably of older
style, crash-through managers) but argues for the balancing ground of the feelings.
‘One way of looking at this issue is to see the director’s job as essentially an
organisational problem solving process. The inputs are technical and socialemotional. The need is to strike an appropriate balance between the two inputs...’
(ibid., p. 102).
Thus while Garrett has argued effectively for the need for a new kind of thinking, he
fails when it comes to articulating the nature of this alternative thinking. The art
eludes him. It is pertinent to note here that while it might have eluded him, he is not
alone. Most organisations pursuing organisational learning have invested in the ‘soft’
skills of psychology and feelings to provide the learning capability. They have worked
within Garratt’s paradigm of the polarity between technical and feeling, in effect
surrendering thinking to the technical realm and relying on the compensations of
feeling to balance the ledger. The evidence of this in organisations is the dominance
of facilitation and team building functions, as attempts to provide the soft side.
We move closer to the hypothesis and to understanding the issues that are clouding
the view from the cliff top, through studying a couple of authors who have addressed
the question, not of strategy per se, but of the closely allied topic of leadership.14
14
In a sense all these authors are converging on a common theme from different perspectives.
Strategy and leadership imply each other, and together they seem to be not quite destinations but
rather pathways towards a deeper subject. This deeper subject synthesises their differences in its
unity.
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2.2.4. Burns and transformational leadership
First let us consider James McGregor Burns in his epic book Leadership. Burns’
concept of leadership reveals the weaknesses in Garratt’s hard/soft polarity and
points the way more clearly towards our new art. While Burns does not address
our question of the art of conceptual thinking, he does clarify the direction in which
we should look and not look.
Burns distinguishes between ‘transactional’ leadership and ‘transformational’
leadership. He defines transactional leadership as the art of persuasiveness and
influence, and identifies transactional leaders as superb at interpersonal relationships.
In the hands of political ambition this swiftly slips into ethically dubious practices of
flattery and insinuation. These leaders may have great sway; they may command
allegiance but they do not transform the organisations which they lead. To put
Garratt’s case in Burns’ terms, the soft skills of the social domain are transactional
skills. They can smooth conflict and address emotional commitment but they cannot
transform. To get a team to relate more genially is a worthwhile task – their
transactions will be facilitated15 – but that is all. Harmony is not vision.
In contrast to transactional leaders are transformational leaders. These are leaders
who work on vision and substance. They work to transform the organisations they
lead, and they do it by transforming the ideas of the people who comprise those
organisations. Transformation, of course, is more radical than transaction, so a
transformative leader will, by definition, accomplish greater change than a
transactional leader. But that still begs the further question of the ethics or the
morality of the transformation. One can transform rather than transact, but will the
transformation be for the wider good or not? Put simply, Hitler was clearly a
transformational leader rather than a transactional leader. And we all wish he was
less effective at transformation than he was.
Burns addresses this question somewhat by appealing to values. He explains that a
great transformational leader will appeal to latent values in the organisation and will
render explicit and operational values that, until the elixir of leadership touched
them, lay inert.
15
The widespread use of the term ‘facilitator’ to describe interpersonal skills is revealing. The term’s
Latin origin is the word ‘facilitas’ or ‘easy’. So literally the term means one who ‘makes easy’ or
smoothes the pathway. This task is important but secondary; first one must have a pathway to tread
together. This is more properly the art of transformation or navigation than facilitation.
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The leader, like the hypnotist, cannot inspire us to act outside our value set. But the
leader can inspire us to realise the full potential of our value set. We cannot resolve
this great debate here, but it is very pertinent to our case: strategic planning has a
moral edge. Vision appeals to values and cannot be regarded as a value-free zone.
The same caveat applies to our search for the alternative art of intuition or
conceptual thinking. Once we cut the cords anchoring us to logic and analysis, we
move freely on a very wide ocean. Some, like Mintzberg, perhaps do not cut the
cord so much as loosen it, so we move from logic to intuition but still we are circling
around the anchor of a scientific or utilitarian concept of thinking. It is mechanistic
and functionality is the goal: we seek intuition in order to find greater functionality.
We need more techniques to make the plan or solve the problem. Loosening the
anchor line allows us to roam in a wider sphere. But still we are tethered to a field
of mechanism and utility in thought. Did the organisation make a profit? Did the
share price thrive? Was the problem solved? If we answer ‘yes’, then we have an
effective process and an effective leadership team.
But if we really are searching for an alternative art to analysis and logic, then we
must cut the cord. Once we do so we float on a wide sea and must find new anchor
points, not just circle around the same anchor in a wider circumference. We will
find, once the cord is cut, that the issue of truth and ethics is inescapably part of the
new anchorage. It cannot be dismissed as an indulgence or as an add-on.
Burns’ model of transformative leadership led us to this vexed issue. Burns does not
solve this problem but he acknowledges it and works towards an outcome.
What Burns does with this issue of transformation versus transaction cannot be
underestimated. He confirms that transactional skills alone are inadequate to lead
greatly; one must shine in transformational skills. Thus he addresses the flaws in
Garratt’s model of organisational thinking (Garratt 1987, p.102)
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Technical inputs
Problem-solving process
Social/emotional inputs
Figure 2-2: Garratt’s socio-technical model
Garratt’s social-emotional inputs equal Burns’ transactional capacities. Garratt’s
process is probably the same for him and Burns. While he calls it problem-solving
here, it clearly means strategy-making elsewhere. And strategy-making is also clearly
for Garratt equal to leadership. That leaves Garratt’s technical skills and Burns’
transformational skills. Clearly neither would suggest that technical skills transform
organisations. So we are left with a clear sense that Garratt’s model has a gaping
vacuum. There is a capacity for transformation missing, an intellectual capacity that
is not provided for us by the technical domain.
2.2.5. Mant and ‘ternary’ leadership
A more recent book on leadership (Intelligent Leadership, Mant 1997) builds on Burns’
notion of transformation and takes us still closer to clearing away the mists so that
we can see more clearly towards our hypothesis. Like Burns, Alistair Mant
addresses the question of leadership: what are its defining characteristics? Mant
quotes Burns and turns his notion of transformation into a model and name:
‘intelligent leadership’. His thesis is that leaders must be intelligent in order to
transform their organisations, and that, while social skills are important, they are
subsidiary, not qualifying attributes. The type of intelligence that Mant refers to is
‘systemic’ or ‘broad-band thinking’, not analytical. The peculiar ability of intelligent
leaders is their ability to articulate the governing purpose of their organisation.
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To expand this idea Mant uses a model (Mant 1997, p. 6):
Figure 2:3: Mant’s Ternary Leadership
He contrasts binary and ternary leadership. Binary leadership is the equivalent of
Burns’ transactional leadership, but Mant characterises it as political leadership. It is
the art of managing power and authority, of persuading and influencing. In
organisations it is particularly characterised by the ability to haggle and command
resources, for the nature of power in organisations is traditionally the base load of
resources that one can control.16
In contrast to this political leadership is intelligent leadership (Burns’ transformative
leadership). This is ternary thinking. The master/servant relationship of the binary
model has been replaced by the ternary model. In the ternary model a third element
has entered the relationship, the articulated expression of the organisation’s
purpose. This articulation, this artifact of intent, compels people to follow. So the
purpose, expressed in compelling terms, becomes the new ‘master’, and the players
become the servants of a shared purpose.
Mant does not stop there. He describea the quality or the attributes of this
intelligence. He defines it as systemic or broad band thinking: the ability to consider
the multifaceted and interacting parts of the system as they serve the whole. Mant
draws on several sources to describe the essential characteristics of this systemic
16
Sadly Australia seems to have developed this kind of leadership. Ray Ball, in a compelling paper
entitled ‘Beyond the Current Pessimism’ (1987), argues that Australia’s convict/guardian origins have
enculturated the art of politicking – of arguing for resources to be granted so that one can accumulate
wealth. In our colonial origins one became wealthy by persuading the Colonial Secretary to grant land
and labour (convicts). The political power to gain resources was the guaranteed road to wealth.
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thinking, including Elliot Jaques’ (1991) stratified systems theory, Goleman’s recent
work on Emotional Intelligence (1995), and systems thinking literature. However, I find
Russell Ackoff gets closer to the defining point of the ternary thinking when he
addresses system thinking17 in his fine book on planning, Creating the Corporate Future
(1981).
2.2.6. Ackoff and systems thinking
Ackoff contrasts machine age thinking with systems age thinking. Machine age
thinking decomposes systems into constituent parts and assumes that in so doing we
understand the system. Take a bicycle apart into all its bits and pieces and you will
understand the system of the bicycle. But a systems age thinker would disagree. The
system of the bicycle can be understood only in the context of the wider system that
it serves and is part of. Only as we understand the wider context and the purpose of
the part in that wider context can we say that we understand the thing at a systemic
level. Thus taking the bike apart renders only us a technical understanding of the
bike. To understand the bike as system we must understand the host environment
and the bike’s role in it: the riders, the roads and the rides. These wider contexts
and purposes are then linked back to the bike by its functions. So context, purpose
and function are key elements of the systems view. Clearly, different intellectual
tasks provide the different views of the bike. Analysis provides the technical
(compartmentalised) view of the bike; synthesis provides the systemic view of the
bike.
The heart of systems is to ‘describe the behaviour or properties of the thing to be
explained in terms of its role or function within its containing whole’ (Ackoff 1981, p.
16).
Mant’s model takes us back to our beginning. His model of leadership is ternary and
Winnicott’s model of creative thought was ternary. The similarity is not coincidental.
For Mant the master was articulated purpose, the third thing that governed and
inspired the players in the organisation. Ackoff’s definition of systems as parts bound
together by purposes enriches the Mant model of leadership: leaders build wholes
17
While I use Ackoff’s work on systems here, the systems writer who has most influenced me
historically is Peter Checkland, whose work on soft systems thinking gave me my basic grounding in
systems literature. His concepts such as core transformations, worldview and root definitions have
permeated much of my work in diagnosing fragmented situations. (See Checkland, Systems Thinking,
Systems Practice 1981.)
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(systems) by articulating purposes. The expressed purpose is powerful enough and
good enough to integrate the parts of the organisation into a coherent whole.
Winnicott helps us understand the psychological source of this intense ability to
articulate purpose. It is a life skil,l not just a managerial skill. It is the ability or the art
of mediating between the me and the not-me world, by creating objects of transition.
This is the field of play, not analysis. Teddy bears in children, poems and plays in
adults, strategies in leaders. Serious business in all three cases.
Winnicott contrasted this serious play with ‘compliance’. Compliance meant that the
world around one was taken as given and immutable, there only to be complied with
and obeyed. In this compliant frame of mind, the only articulation can be description,
not purpose. For purpose is interactive and interventionist. Winnicott’s model can
be used to enhance Mant’s.
Figure 2:4: Compliant vs Transformational thinking
Thus in the compliant frame of mind, leaders will craft plans that describe rather
than create the reality. They will take the not-me world outside their organisation as
static and given, there to be described and analysed. The task of planning in that
frame is descriptive and analytical. We need analysis to describe well and we must
name all the parts. But the transformative leader will be fired by possibility and
imagination; the plan or strategy will be a mediation between the fluid states of our
will and our world. Both are unstable in a dynamic and interacting relationship – how
do we manage the instability? Winnicott’s answer is to play, to create transitional
objects that mediate between the inner and outer worlds. This is healthy living.
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The strategic conversation, far from being merely an organisational mechanism, is a
process for healthy, creative living. It is, in Mant’s terms, the articulated purpose that
unites. In Ackoff’s terms, it is the purpose that creates a meaningful system out of
the organisation’s parts. In Burns’ terms, it is the act of a transforming leader. In
Winnicott’s terms, it is the transitional object that mediates between the inner
world of our hopes and models and the outer world with which we collide and
collude. Winnicott positions the process of strategic conversation firmly as playing;
playing to create alternative realities.
If neither Mintzberg nor Garratt gave us a clear view of the emerging art of
conceptual thinking do the others help? I think they do. In essence they move the art
away from analysis (reading and receiving) towards creating. This is the shift that is
central to understanding the art. Logic and intuition are different methods of thinking
rather than different kinds of thinking. They are different ways of accomplishing a
task, rather than different tasks.
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2.3. Shifting the polarity: not intuition versus logic, but
making versus describing
Mant and Winnicott take us in a different and more promising direction, a direction
which will lead us to a vantage point from which we may see through the mists to an
alternative art. Mant names the task as articulating or expressing a purpose rather
than solving a problem. Thus he moves us in two directions. First he establishes that
the task is one of construction, of making something. Secondly, he clarifies that this
task is a making with words a use of language18 as the material from which we can
craft a purpose. Winnicott is even more precise about the nature of this task. It is
creative and not compliant. It is not only a task of construction, it is a task of play.
And the purpose of the play is serious. The child is desperate to preserve its sanity
and establish its identity, so this is no casual diversion. The child is making an object,
dressing it, naming it, investing it with meaning. This is not analysis, it is interactive
mediation. It is a field in which two worlds combine.
This clarifies the nature of the thinking that we are seeking. The contrast is not
between logic and intuition, but between analysis and making. The first is descriptive,
the second is creative. The first is the domain of adult cognitive processes (little
children do not analyse); the second is the domain of all human beings. Thus the
differentiating feature of the thinking process is not method but purpose and type of
task
Clearly, if we make our point of helpful distinction the nature of the thinking task
rather than its methods, we can be more relaxed about modes of thought. They
could well support either task, although in different proportions.
18
By language, I do not restrict myself to grammatical text, but to representations in general including
visual models.
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Purpose
Type of
task
Tools
Survive, grow & relate
Understand, describe
Analyse
Create
Logic
Anaolgy
Imagination
Intuition
reason
perception
Figure 2:5: Purpose, not tools
If we relocate our task as making, we have a vantage point from which we can scan
and we have a vista to scan. The ancient Greeks articulated an art for creating or
making with words: they called it rhetoric.19 It was an art of leadership, persuasion
and invention. It was a civic art useful to build communities, not for private reflection
and analysis. Thus if we accept that ‘logic versus intuition’ is not our best vantage
point to search for our method, and if we consider that ‘making versus analysing’ is a
more useful vantage point, then we can peer through the mists to contemplate the
ancient art of rhetoric as perhaps containing the germs of our method, the seeds of
our art. If this is so then we have found much more than a useful mechanism to
organise strategic conversations; we have used our problem of finding a method to
guide strategic conversations as a stepping stone to discover an alternative thinking
process to the scientific method.
2.3.1. An example to finish – Lincoln at Gettysburg
Let me conclude with a brief example of the art of rhetoric which can bring
19
One of the pre-eminent experts on rhetoric today is Richard, who co-authored Rhetoric: Discovery
and Change with Becker and Pike (1970), an epic that rediscovered rhetoric as a process for the
modern reader. Richard once described rhetoric to me as ‘one of the greatest inventions of the
Western mind’. I explore rhetoric more fully in chapter six and seven of the thesis.
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together many of the themes discussed in this chapter. It exemplifies the act of
leadership at a defining moment in history. It is also the most dramatic example I
know of Mant’s type of ternary leadership. It clearly exemplifies the art of making
with words, rather than analysing, and it is an act of creation, fuelled by imagination
not of description. It is clearly in Winnicott’s terms the creation of a third world, of
an intermediating world of words that created a bridge between the inner world of
the speaker and the outer world of a hostile and catastrophic reality that, left to
itself, was too horrible to contemplate. If the speaker was compliant before this
reality then indeed life was not worth living. It is also a consummate example of the
art of rhetoric at work. I refer to Abraham Lincoln’s great Gettysburg address in
1863.
Gettysburg had been the turning point of the Civil War. Two mighty armies had
blundered into one another’s paths at the tiny peaceful hamlet of Gettysburg.
Gettysburg, then as now, seems to be more appropriate as the setting for a pastoral
play than for one of the bloodiest battles of modern times. Gently rolling hills,
patchwork rough-hewn fencing, deep serene glades all abutted by a couple of
knotted hills at the perimeter of the town’s environs. In July 1863 Lee’s troops,
probing forward to find a back way through to Washington so that they could strike
a mortal blow on the Yankee capital, encountered a smattering of Northern troops
who were quickly reinforced by the army of General Meade. Over the next three
days of fierce fighting, over 50,000 men were killed or wounded. The heart was torn
out of the Confederate cause on that day.
The war swept on elsewhere running out its inevitable course. But the tiny town of
Gettysburg was left with a terrible and unmanageable legacy: rotting corpses. The
ciroses gad been preserved from putrefaction by the winter, but in the spring
something had to be done. The Northerners decided to create a memorial cemetery
and bury Northerners and Confederates side by side, just as in this unhappiest of
wars brother had fought brother. The inauguration ceremony was a major event.
But pause for a moment to appreciate the massive problem that Lincoln faced. He
wanted a nation to rise out of the ashes of war, but he was the victor, so how could
begin to unite victor and vanquished in a common cause? Anything he said would be
construed as gloating. We might think that change confronts modern organisations
with dilemmas but they are small compared to the chaos and no-win options that
confronted Lincoln.
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At the ceremony inaugurating the cemetery, Edward Everett was invited to make the
major speech. Everett was a renowned public speaker. He researched the war for
three months and delivered a careful account of the three days that took him two
and a half hours. Then Lincoln got up to address the crowd with the famous words
that he had only a ‘little something’ to add. He spoke for two and half minutes, and
in that time delivered the 273 words that make up the epic Gettysburg address. So
powerful were his words that a recent political historian has described them as ‘the
words that made America’ (Wills 1992). His vision of hope and the future, his moral
weight and his persuasive ability to move people’s hearts and minds created a way
forward for the divided nation.
Abraham Lincoln had a task when he stepped up to deliver his speech at the opening
of the War Cemetery at Gettysburg. He had to persuade all Americans, including his
vanquished foes, that America had a future and that both parties could co-operate in
that future. This task of persuasion and adherence was not in any way an analytical
task. Lincoln was not concerned to describe and explain phenomena. He was
concerned to persuade, to move hearts and minds and gain adherence to a vision of
a future that did not yet exist. He was concerned to create a speech that could
inspire adherence and conviction.
Lincoln’s task was of a different quality and type to the scientific problem solving
which has provided the base data over which the analysis versus intuition debate has
raged. I would argue that Lincoln used both analysis and intuition in his task. The
proportions in which he used them are not the key difference between him and a
scientist analysing mass balances. The difference lies in the nature of the tasks they
were doing. Lincoln’s task was a combination of persuasion and construction. He had
to persuade people to his view, but he also had to construct the speech that would
do this. When he began to construct the speech there was no pre-existing matter
available for him to study as an object in the same way that a scientist such as Kepler
had an external object to study. Rather he had a purpose and from this he had to
create his materials: he had to find and invent devices of speech that would serve his
ends.
He did this by some marvellous devices of language. It is not our place here to
analyse them all. But apart from the rhythms which swell through the speech, the
parallel constructions which emphasise key distinctions and move the listeners from
one paradigm to another, and the images which colour the language ... apart from all
these, the major device is structure. Lincoln begins by evoking the Declaration of
Independence rather than the more controversial Constitution. In this way, he
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soared above a point of contention, invoking values that were felt and shared by all
Americans, both Southerner and Northerner. Thus he outflanked his audience’s
scepticism and located his memorial in a wider purpose. The whole speech revolves
around this brilliant device.
The nature of the strategic conversation is less elevated than Lincoln’s case, but
essentially it is the same task domain, to find and establish a new identity in the face
of hostile and new circumstances. Winnicott’s model establishes the territory of
Lincoln’s task, identity finding which is as urgent and vital for health as child’s play is
to structure their growing sense of the world. Both Lincoln and the child used the
same method: they created transitional objects that mediated between their
imaginations and their environments. Both Lincoln and the child had the same
purpose: not to be compliant but to create, exercising in Winnicott’s delightful
phrase ‘creative apperception’. Lincoln’s context was social in a way that the child’s
was not. Burns’ and Mant’s models explain Lincoln’s type of leadership,
transformative and ternary, intelligent leadership. And Lincoln was, in Ackoff’s terms,
a marvellous systemic thinker. Why? Because he explained the system not in terms
of its operating parts (Everett did that) but in terms of its emergent purpose. Note
how purpose and historical context dominate the intellectual preoccupation of that
speech. Why are we here? is the throbbing heart rhythm pulsing through those 273
words.
But Lincoln’s speech does more than synthesise many of the strands of our themes.
It also points the way ahead, the way into method. For Lincoln was a master of
rhetoric. So his speech, and its success, confirm that the art of rhetoric is a key art in
delivering the capability for transformative leadership, and for delivering strategic
conversations. We can do worse than study it further.
We shall do so in chapter six. But before we do we will look at how the art of
planning worked in the world in two major organisational cases. These case studies
confirm the central themes of this chapter; i.e. that the key art of strategic
conversations is not found in logic and analysis; those get in the way. Instinctively
people will move to more creative modes to sustain the strategic impulse.
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Foundation case study –
Hierarchy, logic and
cascades
This case study covers three years of a consulting relationship, and my
first major experience of planning systems. The first year was largely
one of observation, and the second two were consulting assignments
to work on and improve the planning system.
It meant coming to grips with organisational structures, information
structures, and the communications flow-down through a reasonably
large, complex manufacturing organisation of about 1,000 people.
Chapter three
Chapter three
3.1. Organisational and business context
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3.2.3. The text
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3.3.2.4. The crucial decision
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3.4.0.1. High level mission and critical success factors added
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3.4.0.2. Improvement system invented and split from sustaining
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3.4.0.4. Ideas register added
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3.4.0.5. Key business processes added
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Figures
Figure 3-1: Three phases in an emergent process
Figure 3-2: Communication model
Figure 3-3: Hierarchical task structure
Figure 3-4: The logic of the hierarchical structure
Figure 3-5: The hierarchical architecture of documents
Figure 3-6: Themes emerging
Figure 3-7: Paradox at work
Figure 3-8: Paradox integrating
Figure 3-9: Thinking and engagement
Figure 3-10: Planning document format
Figure 3-11: Repetition in the task hierarchy
Figure 3-12: Task decomposition
Figure 3-13: Organisational decomposition
Figure 3-14: The notion of emergent property
Figure 3-15: From hierarchy to expansiveness
Figure 3-16: The linear flow of processes
Figure 3-17: Projects vs line accountability
Figure 3-18: The matrix as decision maker
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3.1. Organisational and business context
This client was a large manufacturing company in Sydney's western suburbs. In 1988
it employed about 1,000 people and processed large amounts of metal for a variety
of customers. It was subject to pressures that are typical of manufacturing in
Australia: small national markets, economies of scale and competition from imports.
There were five layers of the workforce, each with strictly specified and
differentiated accountabilities.
Managing Director (MD)
(Level 5)
General Managers (GM)
(Level 4)
Managers
(Level 3)
Superintendents
(Level 2)
Operators
(Level 1)
This structure had been introduced in the group within the preceding four years, and
had flattened the hierarchy and taken out intermediate layers. It had also, as part of
the process of rationalisation, eliminated separate specialist functions (like engineers)
who previously had a separate organisational structure, but now were reporting to
the main line production managers. This was all in the name of achieving a business
focus.
This context added up to an organisation under pressure. The impending lowering
of tariff barriers, needs to cut staff, and the difficult quality imperatives of the
business conspired to make improvement a necessity.
My work with the planning system was in three main stages, each of which lasted
approximately a year.
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Three Phases in an Emergent Process
1
Diagnosis
1988
2
Early Design
&
Workshops
1989
3
Formal
Design
attempted
1990
Figure 3-1: Three phases in an emergent process
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3.2. Phase one: Diagnosis (1988)
In the diagnosis phase I examined the current planning process. This involved
reviewing the previous year’s plans and planning procedures with a view to designing
a better process the following year. My client was the new Managing Director (MD),
who was keen to improve the planning system as he saw it as a major tool for
leadership.
Since my background was in writing, and my interest was in thinking as crystallised in
written text, I adopted a rhetorical model as the basis for my diagnosis.
Figure 3-2: Communication model
The major thing that struck me was the imbalance between these three elements,
there was an inordinate focus on the written document. It was an icon, a product,
and all efforts seemed to be on polishing it as an end in itself, whereas the discourse
of composition and communication (i.e. the perspectives of speaker and user) was
relatively neglected and certainly not a matter for deliberation or design.
Here is what I found in each of the three elements.
3.2.1. The audience (communities of users)
The audience for the plan was twofold: the group headquarters (an external
audience) and the company's internal workforce (internal audience). The first
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audience was clearly the primary one since it comprised the senior executives, who
decided the fate, resources and rewards of the company. To that end this document
was persuasive in nature, attempting to persuade the senior executives that the
company could achieve a viable, profitable future.
The second audience, internal management, was very much secondary. The plan was
limited in its circulation to the GM level, and the whole document architecture was
dictated by head office formats. If the external audience had been removed, I doubt
that this planning system would have long remained.
3.2.2. The speaker (authorship and composition)
The second aspect of the diagnostic (speaker and composition) is also instructive.
The plan was very much composed by the MD and only one of his GMs (Business
Analysis). It was perceived widely to be their document: and theirs it was. It
brokered the relationship between the MD and his bosses. He personally presented
it as his analysis and plan for the business. The GM (Business Analysis) supported
him because the plan was quantitative and numbers-driven. He was the man who
made the budget balance, who quantified the equations that linked costs to revenue,
productivity to revenue, waste and recoveries to production, inventories to cost of
capital and so on.
It was a two-man show, and attempts to encourage other GMs to ‘own’ the plan
were noble but frustrated. There was no emphasis on a process of involvement
which included management in the formative discussions of the plan. There was,
one manager said, an informal process of discussion around plans but it was
‘somehow separated from the formal process’.
3.2.3. The text
The third aspect of my analysis was the text itself: the ‘discourse’, in rhetorical
terms. This was a highly structured document with a very deductive logic. The
front page had this architecture.
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Options
Objectives
Critical
Issues
MD’s Critical
tasks
7 year
targets
Figure 3-3: Hierarchical task structure
One can immediately see the hierarchical structure running from left to right.
Implicit behind this structure is a strong sense of causal relationships. Working
backwards, the MD’s critical tasks will impact the ‘critical issues’ and thus achieve the
‘objectives’ that support various chosen ‘options’. The destiny of the organisation
(its options) can be chosen, and then achieved by actions/decisions of the leader.
The logic looks complete, and indeed it must be, given the audience and purpose.
The leader has to persuade the bosses that there is a viable future and that he knows
how to achieve that aim.
The text is confidential but some generalisations can be made. The objectives cover
broad outcomes like profit and revenue; the critical issues divide into business
challenges like competitor movements, plant bottlenecks, quality imperatives and the
need for key systems; the critical tasks logically address each issue. They include
tasks like making new appointments, but are in the main rather notable for their
general nature, such as maintaining a quality drive, promoting various HR emphases,
reducing inventory. The seven-year targets add a note of quantifiable accountability
in keeping with this company's culture.
The rationalist paradigm dominates the plan structure with its strong emphasis on
cause/effect reasoning and analysis. But the plan structure also reveals a fascinating
insight into the culture of planning systems: in that the intellectual logic of hierarchy
feeds a social logic of control and ‘accountability’. At the left of the page are
intellectual options; by the right side of the page they become personal tasks for the
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MD and seven-year targets. The leader's perspicacity is on show here: he must
demonstrate that he can guarantee victory by predicting the key issues and
responding pre-emptively.
Options
Choices
Objectives
Promise of
profitability
Critical
Issues
Environmental
challenges...
MD’s Critical
tasks
7 year
targets
Met by moves With these
from the leader promised outcomes
Figure 3-4: The logic of the hierarchical structure
Thus planning systems codify not only an intellectual decomposition but also a social
order of control: first the planner must control his or her environment by a system
of analysis and tasks. Secondly, the planner enters into a social order of controlled
and controller. Planners must commit to outcomes and objectives and must achieve
them to demonstrate that they are doing their job. The social order places a great
deal of stress on intellectual order, which explains why so much effort is invested in
planning systems.
But the social and intellectual orders feed off each other in unhealthy ways. The
leader must pretend completeness and certainty on the intellectual side in order to
gain the confidence of the bosses on the social side. Assumptions of hierarchy
underlie both orders. A key part of hierarchy is the value of control: the top of the
hierarchy includes and owns all the layers below, intellectually or socially. In this
atmosphere, if you admit to uncertainty or ambiguity it will undermine you fatally.
Intellectual certainty feeds social success. Perhaps this explains why managers are
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often so fragile and so keen to appear certain and in control. There is nothing
wrong with confidence, but there is something wrong with not being able to explore
the unknown. If knowledge is born out of a sense of wonder and confusion, then the
fear of uncertainty will inhibit learning. Worse still, the twin hierarchies of social and
intellectual order can promote an atmosphere of deceit and dissimulation.1
The support pages follow this format (one page for each critical task):
MD’s Critical task #1 “........”
7 Year target
MD’s actions
\& targets
“...........”
GM’s actions
& targets
“...........”
1990 targets
1990 targets
Figure 3-5: The hierarchical architecture of documents
The top two boxes maintain the linkage with the front page architecture. Basically
they then break down into a derivative set of actions by the MD and his GMs to
achieve the seven-year target.
A recent fiasco illustrates the deceit of the ‘paper’ culture. In March this year (1998) a prominent
Melbourne lawyer was found murdered in Cambodia. This led to the uncovering of a vast scam that
he had engineered which had enticed many of Melbourne’s most prominent business and social
people. The lawyer had concocted a plausible scheme of buying and hiring industrial equipment, and
had sought money from investors to buy units in the scheme. He had raised over $30m in the
scheme, but in reality not one pair of safety glasses and not one helmet had been purchased. As one
financial adviser commented, ‘No-one looked behind the documents.’ A literate society that places
great faith in logic and documentation is very vulnerable to this kind of sophisticated cargo cult around
the printed word.
1
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At this second level some inconsistencies between language and feasible behaviour
reveal themselves. There are roughly 25 separate actions ascribed to the MD. This
for an executive who travelled overseas and interstate regularly and whose life was a
giddy round of contacts, requests, and management meetings. It is obvious that
there was no possibility of the MD actually doing these tasks as separate units. Most
of them were fairly substantial, such as major reorganisation, personal profiling in key
accounts, gaining approval for major capital projects.
The proliferation of tasks is an inevitable outflow of hierarchical decomposition: at
each level of a hierarchy it bifurcates and splits. Hierarchies disintegrate, they do not
integrate. That is their power as a tool of logical decomposition.
The practical impact of this logical proliferation on people is the burden of promising
to accomplish numerous tasks to achieve the higher-level objectives. The weight of
complexity and commitment hangs like a thin sword of Damocles over the whole
thing. The only rescue from this entrapment is not to take it seriously: don't really
believe you will do the 25 tasks That is in fact what everyone does. It is a
reasonable response to an impossible situation. At no time in my analysis did I see
anyone refer to the previous year’s plans or to goals and outcomes from the
previous plans. Individuals confessed to me that they relied on their superior
forgetting their goals by next year’s reviews. As one manager said to me, ‘We put
the plans in the bottom drawer and forget about them. We rely on everyone else
doing the same.’
A final point of ambiguity arises here. When one examines the MD's 25 tasks it is
quite unclear whether he personally will actually perform them.2 The expectation of
the language of the plan is that he will (i.e. they are non-delegable) but clearly this is
ridiculous. For instance, one task is to ‘examine the implications of withdrawing
from a specified product area’. It is possible that the MD can do this personally,
although it is unlikely he will do so. Another task is ‘personal public involvement in a
site wide quality program’. Obviously he will have to do this, that is show up at
some meetings. But a third task is a large survey of customer needs. This is certain
to be delegated.
2
This organisation emphasised individual accountability. It was believed and avidly taught that one
cannot hold a group or team accountable for an action, only an individual. Hence the critical task
format was an attempt to pinpoint exactly who was accountable for doing what. This only added to
the unreality of the list of tasks ascribed to the MD, since he really was meant to do them himself.
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3.3. Phase two: Early design and workshops (1989)
3.3.1. The formulation process: creating space to explore
In this section I trace the intellectual process of formulating ideas for the plan. I
move behind the formal facade of documentation and trace the real origins and
development paths of one key idea. But it will also become evident that this ‘real’
idea was divorced from the formal planning process. This informally conceived idea
actually produced action, whereas the formally presented ideas did not. I will also
trace how the informal ideas were mediated by non-hierarchical intellectual tools of
spider diagramming, paradox finding and conversation.
The second phase of the work began early in 1989. It was an informal series of
conversations with my client, the new MD who had arrived late in 1988 to take over
the company. He had no technical background in manufacturing, having spent his
technical and management life in mining. So the manufacturing environment was new
to him.
My conversations with Terry were long discursive discussions up to four hours in
length. They were a way of a briefing me about the context of the company prior to
my engaging in a consultancy, but later they struck me as much more an opportunity
for Terry to explore issues that were uncertain in his own mind. Importantly, this
involved a great deal of ‘story telling’, where Terry would recount anecdotes that
illustrated his point or provided data for him to explore.
3.3.1.1. Use of spider diagrams to aid exploratory, systemic thinking
As Terry talked I drew a ‘spider diagram’ of his ideas. A similar technique has since
been popularised by Tony Buzan (1992) as a ‘mind map’ but I had invented my own
way of doing it as a teacher and was not taught by anybody. Once I had begun to
explore the technique as a teacher, I found that it was also being developed under
the label of ‘clustering’ by Gabrielle Rico and others in the Bay Area Writing Project
in San Francisco.3
Both my technique and Rico’s are significantly different from Buzan’s. Buzan’s mind
maps arrange information in a radial way just like a spider diagram, but Buzan prearranges information into hierarchical bunches. Although his maps are radial they
3
See Writing the Natural Way by Gabrielle Rico (1983)
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are in fact deliberate hierarchies of information which just happen to be graphically
presented as a circle. The mapper first describes the top branch and writes that
name, after which subsequent branching decomposes the topic into component
parts. The technique then encourages the use of illustrative symbols to describe
components of the map (e.g. a ship sinking might symbolise a dangerous factor that
could destroy plans). This use of illustration is graphical but cosmetic. The skeleton
of the map remains hierarchical decomposition.
This hierarchical architecture is further reinforced by another graphical technique
that Buzan uses to build the mind map. He advocates writing the descriptors on the
lines or branches. So the visual impression that a Buzan mind map gives is of a series
of data branches with writing along each of the veins of the branch. This is not very
far from a biological breakdown of parts of a plant into components.
Buzan’s technique is a powerful way to organise information but is, in my view, a far
less powerful way to discover information, particularly when the nature of the
information or of the person’s understanding of it is ambiguous. By contrast, the
spider diagramming and clustering techniques are far more fluid. They are derived
from the world of writing and composition to accommodate the early idea-gathering
in the writing process. This ideation phase is elusive and frustrating. The writer is
attempting to find topics, not just ways of expressing the topic. This is a vital stage in
good writing, for a writer must invent a compelling story, not just find stylistic
elegance. The spider diagram technique begins somewhere on the page but this
starting point does not remain the centre. Instead the diagram ‘travels’ as the topics
unfold. Ideas are not arranged hierarchically at this stage, but are explored in webs
of connotations and associations. The cognitive driving force between two topics is
association not decomposition, and the nature of the association need not be explicit at
this stage. In other words, intuition can drive the webs of connection. I put far less
emphasis on drawing graphical symbols of data pieces, except as a kind of doodling
to win time while new subjects are pursued. But I emphasise drawing bubbles
around each topic, idea or data chunk. Hence the page begins to show a series of
networked bubbles, with a loose structure that is faintly radial, but seems to move in
swirls of radiation like a spider’s web.
This explains only the first map, the rough draft or the first trawl through a set of
ideas. Subsequently it will be tidied up. This occurs by bunching the different
elements of the map into new bunches and looking for themes that emerge to
govern each bunch. As this bunching occurs, new ways of arranging the information
will suggest themselves, and new central themes will occur. What began as a minor
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point of elaboration that was originally expressed in a corner of the page could take
on a central role in the second map as the organising force.
3.3.1.2. Comparing spider diagramming with SWOT
The gentle process of gathering ideas by diagramming can be usefully compared to
the more structured use of the SWOT technique mentioned earlier. The bubbles
are not arranged in either a class or a hierarchical level. These (i.e. classes and
levels) are constructed inductively afterwards. So we would not normally start with
a question like ‘What are your strengths?’ That is starting with a category and at a
high level in the hierarchical field. It demands that people abstract before they select
data, that they must start by building a concept of what they mean by ‘strength’ and
then they must use that concept to gather data around the theme of strength.4
In contrast the fluidity of the spider diagramming proved useful to Terry. Being nonlinear, it allowed meandering and exploration. It also traced emerging themes and
networks of multiple links. In fact it more than traced these, it actively guided their
creation, in a way that linear text defies. This tool thus lends itself to the
development of systemic thinking. If we view systems as networks of ideas and
functions, then a spider diagram is an early representation of a system. It is
diametrically opposed to listing (as used in brainstorming) which draws no links
except linear order.
This tool of representation suited the exploratory nature of Terry’s thoughts. It was
a halfway house between the discipline of writing ideas down and the socially rich
but cognitively loose discourse of talk. At this early time in my consulting career I
did not compose the spider diagrams publicly while people spoke. During this talk I
composed the diagrams privately, occasionally referring Terry to it for confirmation
or for summary. However, in later years I diagrammed publicly and methodically.
This has now emerged as a key part of my method of visual facilitation.
3.3.1.3. How the conversation unlocked a helpful paradox
I now turn to discuss the actual spider diagram of one of my key meetings with
Terry. It demonstrates how the diagramming helped Terry to explore, identify key
themes and then crystallise hypotheses for action.
4
Behind the SWOT architecture of pairs of strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats, lies
the military metaphor for the organisation.
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Traditionally the company’s goals had revolved around volume. Since the plant could
sell all it produced, the limit on profit was throughput. In our conversations Terry
addressed this volume issue. Although the organisation had an historical focus on
volume as the key indicator of revenue, he was attracted to quality as a key issue.
These two parameters are often in apparent contradiction but he guessed they were
not ‘actually exclusive’. He also believed they could achieve a quantum leap in
volume with ‘process improvements’, but this led to the question, ‘Could the market
absorb the extra volume?’ He felt that it could, and this led him to a discussion of
the Asian market, its needs and potential versus the American and Japanese markets.
He then seemed to find quality as his emerging theme and warmed to it. This led to
an excursion into the quality theme. He felt it was culturally new for the company
(and for him), and that ‘quality is threatening’. It was ‘not an issue’ in upstream
minerals processing. An associated cultural attitude to the quality issue was the
approach to capital. Culturally, he felt that the company sought capital solutions to
technical problems when non-capital improvements were more crucial.
Hence a linkage was emerging in his mind between these elements.
Figure 3-6: Themes emerging
The issues as they emerged were not linear or hierarchical in their interrelationship
but were networked, paradoxical and systemic. Hence, volume existed not as
separate from quality but as a paradox to it. There was a dialectical tension between
the two. This tension was much recognised at the workface, as an irreconcilable
either/or choice. But Terry saw it more as a creative tension. Paradox is the
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seedbed for creative tension. It certainly seemed to work like that in this
conversation, for Terry moved from this topic to the apparently unrelated topic of
capital improvements. In a linear, logical sense the progression appears not to
advance the resolution of the paradox, since capital improvements can be a way to
lift both quality and volume and hence heighten the paradox rather than resolve it.
Pouring more money into capital projects (e.g. with the acquisition of better quality
cutting and slitting machines) and pouring more money into volume projects (e.g.
bigger machines that will release bottlenecks) will only increase the debate as to
which of the two goals is paramount, and hence it will drive the either/or thinking
further apart.
Paradox
Volume
goals
Quality goals
enhanced by ...
Capital
enhanced by ...
Capital
Figure 3-7: Paradox at work
Why then did Terry intuitively move to capital as a key to unlock the paradox?5
Because he had tacitly moved from hard technical systems to culture. Although the
capital system is a technical system, in that it involves the purchase and fitting of
complex bits of machinery, allied with sophisticated financial justifications, it is in
essence a decision-making system. And Terry intuitively believed6 that decisionmaking was as much driven by mythologies7 and attitudes as by logic. Hence he saw
5
His move was undoubtedly unconscious, not preplanned. The conversation was unstructured, and
Terry's manner of delivery was discursive, unhurried and circular. He seemed to be unfolding large
scenarios for his own viewing and contemplation one by one.
6
Terry always featured lengthy and amusing character descriptions in his discussion. He never recounted
corporate decision making as a cold analytical process: it was always with very insightful p en portraits of
the key players, and the devils and desires that drove them to adopt the positions they did.
7
'Mythologies' and 'culture' were well defined, much used terms in this company. Terry had engaged an
organisational consultant, Ian McDonald, who conducted sophisticated training around these words. (See
McDonald et al. unpublished, ‘Leadership: a New Direction’.)
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the capital system as being driven by a lack of imagination, by fixation on the
technical rather than the creative solution, by a concern with ‘more of the same’
rather than a re-engineering of process. In contrast, he was envisaging leading a
revolution of innovation, and part of that would be to turn the heat up on the ‘lunge
for capital’ by demanding new rigour in the capital request system.8
This if the capital ‘mindset’ was loosened and became an innovative mindset, it would
pursue the non-capital solution. This would include people-based solutions, and
process enhancements (doing more with what we've already got).
This shift is indeed relevant to both quality and volume, as the new mindset would
support both. Process enhancement will release volume, and the process/innovation
mindset will enhance quality.
Figure 3-8: Paradox integrating
This subtle shift is an
example of
apparently non-linear connections which our minds can make given the right
conditions. These conditions appear to include creative paradoxes, necessity, and
time for reflection.
3.3.1.4. Formal planning process failed to support emergent thinking
It is instructive to observe in retrospect how these fluid, informal conversations
fitted in with the formal planning process. Despite the rich experience of our
conversation, neither Terry nor I made moves to change the structure of the plan
8
This emerged later, and I cooperated with him in it. It is probably fair to say that we influenced each
other significantly in his enhancement of the capital system.
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document,9 perhaps because the structure was rather ‘set in concrete’ by the
headquarters group and we did not want to run the risk of unsettling them. Terry’s
main focus was internal cultural change, not external window dressing.10 So the
format was unchanged with the same logical structure of critical tasks (six in all) each
of which broke down into several actions for this year. There were 20 such actions
compared to 25 the previous year: a slight reduction but still not practically feasible.
What impresses is the shallowness of thinking behind many of the actions. They
seem to be bullet pointed into the document in order to give an impression of
business and activity. These actions were usually written in by the GM (Business
Analysis), with limited collaboration from the MD (he was travelling a lot at the
time).
But how did the formal planning process handle the topic of quality that Terry and I
had explored so richly and gently? How did the emergent thinking around quality fit
in? How was the seed of ideas nourished?
One of the six critical tasks was to do with quality improvement. It had three
supporting actions:
(1)
Establishing various standards for product quality
(2)
Attending local workgroup quality team meetings
(3)
Allocating resources to needful areas
These are fairly narrow and it is doubtful whether they would combine into a
strategy that would have made much impact on quality. Furthermore, only action (1)
involves any thinking work and that would be certain to be delegated to technical
teams. Action (2) was just ‘management by walking around’, and action (3) was a
task that was hardly critical, but should be part of the normal role of a manager.
None of these actions captured the subtlety of Terry’s thinking around the quality
issue.
9
This is the structure I analysed in phase one.
10
This is a key point. Terry was most interested in cultural change and engaged me as a
communications consultant to work with a focus on internal communications. Many MDs might have
focused on the external documentation, employing a consultant to ‘dress it up’ in order to impress
the Board or Executive team. Terry and I avoided this affectation but also missed the broader
possibilities of changing the planning process internally at this stage.
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Thus the formal plan’s perspective on quality was at the margins of Terry’s real
strategic thinking. At the time of writing the plan, Terry had not thought through all
these things. He had identified quality as a key issue for the business, and, in
retrospect, that was all the plan needed to say. ‘Quality is a key issue for our
business: I will make every employee more aware of its significance ... I don't quite
know how at this time.’ However, as I discussed earlier, the hierarchical model of
thinking demands the planner presents a tight program of control, not an openended process of exploration. So Terry was left no space in which to wonder and
explore. 11
On other issues, Terry was more confident. For instance, the second critical task
involved the development of young professionals to stop a perceived ‘brain drain’.
This task was of Terry’s making, it was new and it was his. His ideas and actions on
this point were much more convincing and assured.
The plan format and ambience gave no space to acknowledge where thinking was at
a preliminary stage. There was a monochromatic view of the thinking represented in
the plan, as if each area had to be equally prepared and equally competent. But
thinking is a process, and like all processes it advances through stages to ripeness.
The learning and uncertain phases were eclipsed in the plan format and culture, as
the leader had to present a Napoleonic image of control and perspicacity. In
response people will create unofficial systems to help them to live effectively in the
world. These unofficial systems are not systems of rebellion. In fact they are
responsible actions to help people perform just what they think the enterprise wants
and needs. People just cannot admit the existence of these unofficial systems, since
they often contradict the papier-maché formal systems of organisations.
What Terry did about quality in the following year was at the level of system design,
but was nowhere written up in the plan. He toured the USA and privately
benchmarked TQM champions. He assessed some Quality consultants and engaged
one to give him and his GMs a three-day training program which deeply challenged
them. He then widened the TQM training to include the whole site. He began to
ask for technical reporting in the form of statistical control charts. Within a year the
whole company was vastly more aware of quality as an issue and a methodology than
it was at the beginning of the year.
11
John Seely Brown (1994) used his Xerox Park experiences to reflect on a similar theme.
Corporations need to learn to thrive in the fog of ambiguity, not fear it.
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Not only did the official planning system fail to accommodate emerging and tentative
ideas, it failed to provide a helpful social process for open-ended discussion. There
was not a forum in the planning process where Terry (or another of the leaders in
the business) could pursue questions and uncertainties. In other words, there was
no conversation process in which ideas could be developed.
Another feature of social process is also important. It seemed that Terry needed a
non-company person to reflect with, who brought objectivity and also organisational
neutrality. It occurred to me only years later (after I had noticed how often senior
executives confided in me) how natural this was. Who else could they talk to in an
unguarded manner? With subordinates, doubt and honest confusion would be
constrained. Peers were in competition, and the boss was not someone to wonder
out loud to. The net result of this organisational dynamic is that a necessary thought
process is crimped and cut off in the organisation, leading to a lack of reflection and
exploration. Organisational exigencies conspire against reflection and exploration,
yet they are necessary precursors to wisdom and hypothesising.
Thus the formal planning process failed in two areas. It failed to accommodate the
exploratory stage of thought, the seminal stage. It then failed to influence behaviour.
What happened in fact was much more connected to the emergent conversations
that we had shared than it was to the formal charade. This would indicate that
planning influences behaviour to the extent that it is connected to the exploratory
stages of thought. People do what they believe in, and they believe in only what they
have explored.
If ideas are explored here…
they will have more chance of moving
into implementation later on
Figure 3-9: Thinking and engagement
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3.3.2. The cascade process: discovering ‘conversation’
In the previous section I considered the thinking processes of one man. In this
section I focus on the thinking process of the organisation, and how the ideas in the
plan were deployed throughout the organisation as a whole.
We did not have time to redesign the planning process in the first year, so I
proposed a study of how the ideas in the plan documentation actually got deployed
and acted on throughout the organisation.
I traced the documentary path right from the MD’s plan to shop floor plans. That is
I kept following the trail until I could find people who had no-one else to delegate to,
but actually had to do something.
However, I did not propose only a diagnosis. I also planned to enhance the system
when I could, by working with its participants. Hence I facilitated some planning and
communication meetings to try to get the cascading system to work more effectively
at the lower levels. It was during these interventions that I discovered the power of
conversation as an organisational tool.
Three points are important to make in overview.
(1)
There was no manual or training program to circulate and explain how the
planning system was meant to work, or what it was meant to achieve. The process
was implicit, and thus open to individuals interpreting it with their own overlays and
assumptions. It was also very open to the ‘emperor with no clothes’ syndrome.
Individuals who might have questions about it kept quiet, believing that they were
the only person who did, and that to everyone else it was crystal clear.
(2)
As mentioned before, the actual written plan which went to headquarters
was never circulated freely in the company. It was a prose document which gave
context and reasoning to the objectives in the plan. What most people received was
just the task setting system that fell out of the plan.
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This meant, apart from any thing else, that middle and lower management had only
an impoverished view of the context within which they were to perform critical
tasks. The critical task documents were not prose documents, but in tabular and
point form. They gave no context for a critical task, except the relevant critical task
of the level above.
(3)
The process for distributing the plan and developing subordinate plans was
called cascading. This is based on a traditional communication device in large
organisations whereby a message is cascaded via levels of the management to the
workforce below. It is rather like a waterfall which hits various ledges on its way
from top to bottom.12
The cascade model of communication seems to be based on the obsolete
sender/receiver model of communication. If the received message is equal to the
intended sent message, we have ‘quality communications’. To the extent that there
is some distortion in the received message there is error and we do not have quality
communications.
In the planning (as opposed to team briefing) context, the cascade model is more
than the passage of a message from top to bottom. At each level there is
composition of a local plan in response to the received plan, so that what is passed
on is not just the original received plan but also the additions to it at the particular
ledge or layer of the cascade.
The goal is consistency of action and understanding: a well-oiled machine acting in
co-ordination.
3.3.2.1. The first cascade: from MD to GM's plan
At this time there were seven GMs reporting to Terry. I took only one – a GM in
charge of about one third of the operating production line.
The format of the GM's plan mirrored the format of the MD's plan.
The waterfall metaphor is suggestive. One of its connotations is that no extra water enters the
cascade on its journey down the falls; the only transformations in the state of the water are that it is
sprayed and separated from one stream to many. This is analogous with assumptions in the planning
cascade that no new ideas or directions are added as the plan cascades; all lower level actions are
interpretations into tasks of the ideas generated above.
12
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Critical Task:
This year’s action:
1
2
3
Target:
3 year target:
1
2
Last year’s statement:
Action
Achievement:
Figure 3-10: Planning document format
This GM had six critical tasks, but four of them were mere restatements of four of
the MD's critical tasks. These four covered the areas of quality, market share, cost
reduction, and cost reduction of inputs/raw materials. The two new tasks were to
achieve a three-star safety rating and to conduct performance appraisals of
subordinates. The latter task is not new, and should be part of the ‘business as usual’
activities of the GM.
Two points to emerge here:
(1)
There was very little conceptualisation of tasks going on at this level: it was
more a filtering or paraphrasing of the MD's tasks.
(2)
The word ‘task’ was loosely used. It was in fact an objective, a desired
outcome, more than a task. For instance, ‘to achieve 90% delivery performance by
item and tonnage’ is not a task but a target, or objective. The majority of the critical
tasks reduced to this level of objectives. The significance of this prevalence of
objectives masquerading as task/actions is that this plan looked like a wish list. There
was no reasoning behind the choice of any targets, either internal or external
reasons. For instance, a target like ‘6.7 week lead time’ looks specific and scientific.
It satisfies the image of science and quantification that the plan portrays. But why 6.7
not 6.8 or 6.6? These were the questions employees often asked. The reasons
could have been external (imperatives forced on us by competition) or internal
(perceived opportunity), but neither reason was advanced.
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This GM had 24 actions under the six critical tasks. As we have seen, four of the six
critical tasks were entirely unoriginal, and 16 of the 24 actions were
objectives/targets. The other eight actions included six which were no more than
descriptions of business as usual (e.g. conducting performance reviews, attending
accident investigations). Only two of the actions involved design of a new
procedure, policy or system. These were to do with developing a purchasing policy
and hedging mechanisms. Thus strategic topics were mixed with operational ones.
It is also interesting to note how framing the tasks as objectives and targets
reinforced the social hierarchy of obedience and compliance. These targets were
not the subject of exploration and negotiation. The informational hierarchy
supported a social hierarchy: ‘You have a task, so obey it’.
Thus a pattern emerges at this second level, of:
(i)
little original thought
(ii)
replication of language and tasks from above
(iii)
statements of objectives rather than actions
(iv)
a mix of operational and new tasks causing undue planning complexity.
3.3.2.2. The second cascade: from GM to the Manager's plan
If one develops a sense of foreboding, wondering who is actually going to do
something to achieve these grand objectives, the Manager's plan begins to fulfil the
picture of doom gathering towards the bottom of the organisation.
The Manager's plan ballooned into 14 critical tasks which subdivided into 84 actions.
These plan actions were not meant to include supposed ‘sustaining’ or business-asusual tasks: I have a rather forlorn note from this zealous and good-hearted manager
enumerating some of the sustaining tasks he was committed to. These included
meetings and written reports to management. There were nine types of regular
meetings he attended weekly, fortnightly or monthly. He also wrote a monthly
report to his GM and a bimonthly department newsletter.
One of his major critical tasks was to increase productivity and reduce costs.
Interestingly, this critical task was exactly the same as the third of his GMs critical
tasks, which, in turn, was the same as one of the MD's critical tasks.
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MD Critical task 5
“Develop and implement
a raw material & operating
cost reduction program”
GM Critical task 3
“Establish cost reduction
plans”
“Develop metal price risk mgt
system
Reduce white collar
Eliminate endstock rolling
pass & self anneal
Increase productivity
Reduce costs by 10%
Reduce inventory
Mgr Critical task 9
“Increase productivity”
Figure 3-11: Repetition in the task hierarchy
This critical task was to increase productivity to 390 kg man/hour, a figure promised
in a moment of generosity on their behalf to the MD. This was no mean
achievement, contributing significantly to the heart of the business. It broke down to
12 actions, each of which was significant technical or thinking work.
3.3.2.3. The first workshop – opening up the planning conversation
It was at this stage that I intervened as helper, not just analyst. One thing I had
observed was that each node of management separately briefed (either by writing or
talk) each of its direct reports. The managers assumed that they need only get four
individuals to do four discreet tasks and this would accumulate to the one indivisible
outcome.
This is an endemic fault throughout hierarchical structures. Hierarchy assumes that
any point of abstraction is merely the sum of the constituent parts.
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Figure 3-12: Task decomposition
This conceptual decomposition translates into organisational decomposition. Four
departments (split either by geography or function) exist autonomously, but their
outputs aggregate into one coherent ‘department’.
Figure 3-13: Organisational decomposition
The error in the first (logical structure) is revealed in the second (organisational
structure). The symptom of the breakdown is the departmental meeting. It is a
generically dysfunctional meeting: The head of section one does not want to listen
while section three talks to the department head about her problems, and so on.
Hence these departmental meetings are unpopular and add little value to the section
heads. Where is the fault? It is in the original supposition that the whole equals the
sum of the parts. Systems thinking relies on the notion of an emergent property, a
governing theme that is greater than the sum of the parts. This emergent property
is the indivisible theme that the unit shares.
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Boss
Shared responsibility for all
Reporting
responsibility
for each unit
Emergent
theme
Boss
Divisible
responsibility
Sect 1
Sect 2
Sect 3
Figure 3-14: The notion of emergent property
The emergent theme is more than a sum of parts. It is a proposition about value and
purpose which transcends all units, and which is indivisible. It is the cohering
mechanism of the group.
In a game of soccer, the game is the indivisible emergent property. True, it can be
divided into component skills, positions and people; it can be divided into component
time phases. But adding these up – aggregating – does not create a game of soccer.
The emergent property is a subtle and vast systemic which connects skills and
players in a meaningful, almost infinite, variety of networks of anticipation,
prediction, response, action, expectations, wishes, desires and so on. This makes the
game.
Yet one cannot logically map this systemic integration, this unifying emergent
property. therefore logical representations of planning systems leave it out, as do
organisational structures. But it is the game that unites the department; that which
they share and cannot divide into constituent parts. This is beyond co-ordination. It
is more a common conceptualisation of the task of the unit. Unfortunately, only one
person has titular responsibility for this emergent property of the group: the
departmental manager. These managers often are left deserted, feeling that they are
the only ones responsible for the welfare of the whole, the only ones really
interested in the team meetings.
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At the time I lacked the framework to realise the above dynamic was at work. But I
had the wit to realise that these people were the victims of remorseless hierarchical
decomposition and that they had the unenviable task of performing these fragments
of projects littering the ground under the profligate giant fig tree objective. So they
needed integration.
3.3.2.4. The crucial decision
I advised the manager to hold a meeting of his superintendents where we could
discuss his tasks, and jointly conceive of a series of integrated projects that could
then be differentiated into sub-tasks. This decision proved crucial to my later
consulting career. My major methodology for implementing the strategic
conversation became the workshop where a group constructs a joint strategy using
my model of design thinking (the ABCD™ model).13
The logo I drew on my notes at the time was this.
Figure 3-15: From hierarchy to expansiveness
13
The ABCD™ model is explained fully in Strategic Conversations System Manual (Golsby-Smith 1999).
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I gathered the team in the room and spider diagrammed their task, bunching them
up into about five major areas. They were appreciative of this and noted as the
major benefit that they could see, at last, the connections between things.14
We then amalgamated these areas into a project proposal format I had begun to
design, which began with the ‘context of this project’, and moved on to the ‘purpose
of this project’. This was a belated effort to fill the voids in the plan.
The project proposal for the productivity project (ominously titled No 153) is
instructive. The first task was ‘find best measure of performance’. This was a direct
reference to the GM-generated target of 390 kg manpower/hour. The team knew
how open to manipulation this parameter was, and that it was not, in fact, a good
measure of productivity. So their first task was to challenge the very objective which
had been the main mechanism for conceptualising and communicating the tasks all
the way down the cascade chain.
The second point worthy of note was task three ‘establish feed quality arrangements
with upstream units’. This reflected their belief that the source of much of their
productivity problems was the quality of feedstock from upstream departments. In
other words, although the problem of productivity had been decomposed along both
logical and organisational lines, it was a cross-departmental, or systemic problem.
They could not solve it alone, it needed an integrated approach.
This was my first concrete experience of another key anomaly of organisational
planning systems.
Hierarchy's logic structure is vertical,
but
task/problem/process logic structure is horizontal.
I was now using the spider diagramming tool to support the conceptualising and exploration of a
group rather than an individual. This was a more adventurous application but a most successful
widening of the tool to support the strategic discourse.
14
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Organisation
Figure 3-16: The linear flow of processes
Processes run across organisational boundaries, rarely within single departments.
The upshot of this is that they cannot be solved within one department at the
bottom of the hierarchy tree, because that department is not a viable or
autonomous system.15 This means that this group relies on the co-operation of
other groups to achieve their goals. In the event, the manager had a meeting with
the upstream manager, but the upstream manager was working to different priorities
for his boss, so he was cool to any real commitment of will or resources to this
project.
Other tasks, even at this level, still defaulted to wish lists. For instance, task six was
‘minimise reworks/remakes’. This circular reasoning camouflaged a lack of real ideas
to solve deep technical problems. For two of the six tasks there were no measures
yet. as if that revealed a kind of nakedness of capability.
There is a dynamic operative here and throughout the plan: management can hold
the workforce accountable for control and feedback by routine measures of
operating achievements. But if they try to hold one another accountable for change,
it immediately defaults to management by objectives. And the objectives become
quantities. The parameters often lack insight and veracity to true outcomes (as in
the productivity case study) and the target numbers are hopeful ‘wish lists’.
In short, all the plans are high on quantification. Whatever lends itself to
quantification gets quantified – volumes, time, costs, rates. But the conceptual side
15
See Stafford Beer's (1979) discussion of viable systems.
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of the plans is wanting, i.e., descriptions of purpose, boundary of system, hypothesis
of influence, benefit, leverage, or judgement/criteria exercised.
This concluded my analysis of the plan system. In brief, I tried to identify a complex
but intangible organisational system and follow its path through the entrails of the
organisation. This pathway was marked by key communication artefacts: documents,
meetings and interviews. I followed and mapped the pathway and became aware of
key shortcomings, and inefficiencies. I engaged with the participants at the working
end of the system to try to bring some effectiveness and integration to their efforts,
to gain coherence, both at the team and the conceptual level. One of the benefits I
sought at this level was to reduce paperwork and the proliferation and fragmentation
of activity that had become a burden on the system. No mortals could ever actually
accomplish even half the tasks they were describing for themselves, yet they were
binding themselves to promises of achievement under a sober policy of
accountability. In effect, responsible people were perjuring themselves at every level
because the system was so remorseless and all-encompassing that no one could cry
‘enough’ without seeming to admit to some kind of weakness and incapability.
The overriding impression I carry with me of this analysis is the burdens that a cruel
combination of the control myth, reductionist logic, and task accountability conspire
to lay on people's shoulders.
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3.4. Phase three: Attempting a redesign of the planning
system
In the third phase of the project I moved from analysis to formal design. I tried to
design a system for planning that could address the weaknesses I have described in
phases one and two. The approach was only partially successful. The main
shortcoming was that I tried to address the logical discontinuities of the system by
offline work with a project manager. We did not involve the senior management
team sufficiently in the work. Hence they never owned the strategic conversation,
but continued to see it as secondary to their main role of running their department.
Following the diagnosis phase we attempted a major redesign of the plan (or ‘critical
task setting’) system for the following year. The ‘we’ was the MD Terry, his newly
appointed GM (Systems) (Laurie), who had a background in managing computer
projects, and I. Terry was particularly warm to the task because it was an
intellectual challenge and qualified as high level systems design. He had also been on
the group-wide team that had originally devised the plan system for headquarters.
Far from making him defensive of the system, this inspired him towards change since
he believed that the original work had been hurried and had not thought the design
through fully enough.
Laurie’s inclusion was timely in that he was a rigorous thinker used to designing
conceptual models as part of his computer work. But one key factor worked against
him. He was new to the site and had no real rapport with his GM peers. Hence we
worked in isolation from the other GMs. We designed a system without engaging
them in the effort. This proved a significant flaw in our work. It inhibited the
development of a genuine conversation and perpetuated the polarity between
formality and individual reflection that had weakened the previous planning efforts.
We reflected but did not engage the others in that reflection. Hence we were
introducing a deeper level of reflection into the planning but not at a group or
conversational level.
One key point of background is vital to understand the changes we attempted. The
MD was committed to a model that distinguished work into improving and sustaining
work. Sustaining work involved monitoring and regulating the present way of doing
things. Improving involved the redesign of systems, the changing of behaviour,
inventing and doing new things in pursuit of organisational goals. Terry believed that
a key indicator of capability to improve effectively was an abstract thinking capacity,
and that this capacity manifested itself as a comfort with ambiguity and complexity.
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He explicitly stated that he wished to change the focus of GMs from sustaining to
improving, and that the more senior in the organisation you were, the more
improving and the less sustaining work you would do.16
So in the first months of 1989 we began to conceptualise the new system. We
introduced new elements to the conceptual building blocks of the plan.
3.4.0.1. High level mission and critical success factors added
We wrote a mission statement for the whole site and ten ‘critical success factors’.17
These gave a higher-level sense of purpose and context to the plan without being
wholly satisfactory as purpose statements. The critical success factors seemed to
me, in retrospect, to be conceptual scaffolding which described the major areas of
success and performance that were crucial to the business. Thus they had a kind of
timelessness to them, as categories do. They included areas like ‘product mix’,
‘qualified staff’ and ‘customer service’. They were not objectives, but parameters or
bounded categories within which objectives (i.e. measurable performance) could
occur. The hypothesis was that these critical success factors would be necessary
and sufficient for the achievement of the mission. The mission was a rather obvious
statement of business goals.
In crafting this system we were influenced by a paper on planning by two IBM
consultants (Hardaker and Ward 1987). While its logic was cleaner than the old
plan, its world view was similar. The critical success factors were adjectives
describing attributes of the successful organisations. They were organisational
norms that did not require open reading of the firm’s environment or stories. They
were also far too generalised and did not address the firm’s special situation.
16
From conversation Nov 1988.
17
Critical success factors was then in vogue in Business Planning. We were also influenced by the book
Top Management Strategy (Tregoe & Zimmerman 1980) which espoused the need for focus on key leverage
points in business planning. This book was helpful in stressing the need for genuinely strategic topics to be
the focus of management. It identified nine topics as options for a senior team to focus on. But it did not
address the need for conversation or participation in the planning process, since at that time this had not
been thought of. We were left then with a cognitive tool but not a social or rhetorical tool. The approach
of the book was rationalist.
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3.4.0.2. Improvement system invented and split from sustaining
Underneath this ‘policy umbrella’ we devised a system which separated improving
and sustaining work. All improvement work was done through integrated (possibly
cross-functional) projects. We devised key roles and accountabilities around
projects. These roles were independent of a person's position in the hierarchy of
the organisation. They were: the client who sponsored the project and was
accountable for its outcomes (or objectives); the project manager who led the
project and was responsible for its deliverables (which we distinguished from its
outcomes); team members who participated in the project; and the customers of the
project who would use its deliverable outputs.
3.4.0.3. Dual accountability
It was decided that a GM would be responsible for two streams of work,
improvement projects (as clients) and the business-as-usual performance of their
departments.
It was to work like this.
MD
Line accountability
MD Team
GM
GM
GM
GM
Line accountability
GM Team
Projects
Mgr
Mgr
Mgr
Mgr
Mgt Team
Projects
Sup
Sup
Sup
Line accountability
Sup
Projects

Figure 3-17: Projects vs line accountability
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The key feature of this model was that a project should be non-delegable: it must
not slip through the system like the slippery tasks did in the old plan. What
determined the level of a project was the level of system involved. The indicator of
a project's level was the level of its client.
3.4.0.4. Ideas register added
It will be noted that this model, while a vast improvement on the old plan, was still a
cascading model of communicating the plan. It was top-down. There was a felt need
for some bottom-up mechanisms, but these were sporadic and not integrated into a
holistic system.
The major bottom-up mechanism was an ideas Register. This was a laborious and
well-intentioned attempt to record, evaluate and respond to ideas for improvement
from all sections of the workforce. This ideas register was conceived as a computer
system, and was, in fact, a mechanism for worker involvement which, although
computerised, was only a second-generation fancier version of the earlier Team
Quality Circles that the MD had derided as window dressing. The perceived
problem was that ‘ideas’ would not be strategically aligned or directed at key
leverage areas of the business. Thus the system had a rather patronising tone of
worker involvement about it (‘your idea might not do our business any good, but we
want to humour you....’). The MD certainly did not feel this way about the
workforce.18 He felt they had genuinely useful ideas; his concern was that systems
like an ideas register were too disconnected and did not give the workforce
sufficient context and direction for their suggestions.19
The three main weaknesses of the ideas register were that
(1)
it invited people to suggest solutions rather than explore
problems20
18
He later authorised a major project whereby local work units would write their own job
procedures. This lifted the operators’ discretion beyond suggestions, giving them authority to create
and decide their own systems within the wider context of the business strategy.
19
Paul Adler (1993, p. 265) comments on the failure of suggestion schemes. ‘Suggestion schemes
illustrate the two approaches to organisational technology design. At many companies, suggestion
schemes are idiot proof and opaque. They are designed primarily to screen out dumb ideas, and the
basic review criteria, the identity of the judges, the status of proposals, and the reasons for rejection
are all a black box as far as the workers are concerned.’
20
Vickers (1981) offers the insight that real creative thinking occurs around problem finding, not
problem solving.
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(2)
(3)
it was a ‘management knows best’ system
it did not create any conversation space for the workforce.
3.4.0.5. Key business processes added
A final addition to the planning model at the last stage was the ‘key business
processes’. We sorted the business into its component key processes. These were
to be the focus of any improvement effort. The concept of a business process was a
natural extension of the TQM emphasis on process and process improvement. The
idea to include key business processes came from the IBM document on planning. I
remember Laurie being keen but cautious about the key business processes. He said
that most senior managers were unfamiliar with the concept of process. In
retrospect he was right. For instance, in following years the company tried to set up
a process task team to have quality custody of a product as it was processed through
different departments of the factory. It failed for lack of authority and support.
Processes clashed with structure. GMs were accountable for a section of the
business, not a process. Hence, every process crossed boundaries.
3.4.1. The senior manager conference and the use of the matrix
After several months of design, the new system was put to the MD’s team at a twoday session. The desired outcome from the session was a set of projects which
would be the first cabs off the rank in the new project based improvement system.
This session occurred in July 1989, a couple of months ahead of the traditional plan.
The conference was a ‘project suggestion and choosing’ conference. The major
decision-making tool to select projects was a matrix, borrowed heavily from the IBM
planning document.The matrix was structured like this.
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Figure 3-18: The matrix as decision maker
The key
business processes (KBPs) were verbs, as befitting a process. The critical success
factors (CSFs) were nouns, as befitting categories.
The KBPs included ‘develop employees,’ ‘induct’ and ‘plan and control inventory’.
There were 26 of them, which could approximately be grouped into production,
scheduling/programming, marketing, human resources and improvement/business
development processes. (They lent themselves to being linked into a system map
but we did not do this.)21
The idea of the conference was to choose as the subject for improvement some of
these core processes. So we ranked each process on a score out of 10 as to how it
impacted on each critical success factor.
For instance, the recruiting process was assessed as ‘10’ under the CSF for ‘good
people’ but only as ‘3’ under the CSF for ‘good systems’. So, in the end, each
process was ranked against what were by now eight CSFs. The maximum a KBP
could score was thus 80 points. The highest ranked KBP scored 65, and the lowest
scored 14. This total was recorded in the criticality column. Finally the current
state (or quality) of the system was ranked A-E in the last column.
A system map would have linked the processes into each other in some pattern. Such a pattern
would have created a high level model of the business. In later years I have come to realise the
importance of such a model, but it is often avoided or not seen as relevant by some leaders.
21
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Out of this process we chose three KBPs to work on as improvement projects. Each
project was assigned to a GM, and each KBP was a functional area that included
parts of the business normally outside the scope of the GM.
The three chosen were
*
*
*
white-collar productivity
induction
internal customer linkages
These were assigned on 11th August 1989.
A few retrospective observations are timely here.
Firstly, the matrix structure allowed no space for the GMs to explore the issues that
to their minds confronted the business. It was a strictly deductive process.
Furthermore the conceptual grid of the matrix was foreign to them, and we
provided no conversation space for them to explore this grid and make it
meaningful. Thus they were playing in a conceptual sandpit that they did not really
understand.
Secondly, no one owned a process in the organisation. It was not a territory for
anyone in the organisation, so had no roles, resources or responsibilities assigned to
it.
Thirdly, the matrix had a veneer of logical tightness that was illusory. This was
because many of the processes did not match naturally onto the evolving CSFs. For
instance one of the CSFs was ‘good systems’ (whatever that meant!). So the KBP
‘improve systems’ scored ‘10’ here, but only ‘1’ against the major production
processes. But the ‘1’ score really only registered the irrelevance of the criterion of
good systems to a production process. The question, ‘How does the process of
“transforming to finished product” impact on the critical success factor of “good
systems”?’ is a non-intuitive question to ask, and a non-sequitur. But the matrix
demanded the question be asked, a score be allocated, and that the scores be added
up.
Finally, the matrix automated decision-making, and thus usurped the judgement of
human beings. We deferred to the logic of the matrix because it seemed so
scientific.
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A matrix aligns two classes of information against each other. For instance in a
spreadsheet it aligns activities against costs, or functions against revenues. Once the
two classes of information are arranged, the matrix can be used to calculate
intersections. These calculations then can be prioritised or sorted. So the matrix
gathers and matches information and can offer a kind of integration. As such, this
matrix intervened as a mechanised form of human judgement.
The matrix is a tool that fits within the logical tool kit. It is a sister of hierarchy and
decomposition as a major tool of reason. Whereas hierarchy and categories tend to
gather information, the matrix is a proxy for decision-making. So categories
substitute for perception and the matrix 22substitutes for judgement.
The key feature of the matrix that makes it appear scientific is the use of numbers.
While the classes on each axis are conceptual categories described in words, the
field of intersection is filled in by a number. This is significant because it lends an
aura of certainty to the vagueness inherent in words. It also allows computation to
substitute for judgement. There is a tacit assumption that mathematics is more
logical and certain than words or concepts. When we get really serious about
decision-making we use numbers. But, as we shall see, this is a figment. The matrix
failed to yield wisdom.23
The reality of this was demonstrated experientially. After we had been through the
matrix (which we had found rather a wearying, tedious process, but we had
persisted courageously), Terry felt a sense of unease with the three KBPs it had
thrown up for us as candidates. The top two were ‘improve systems’ and ‘improve
process’, 24 scoring 65 and 61. How on earth could one have an improvement
project to improve processes? It was too circular! Terry had much earlier (in one
of our conversations) told me he thought the administrative staff was overmanned,
and had asked himself and me, ‘What on earth do they do all day?’ So he had made a
judgement a long time ago that they need reduction, hence he nominated the low
There is another use of the matrix that is less scientific. That is where the matrix is used not for
calculation but for dissonance and comparison. In this case the fields of intersection are not filled by
numbers but by paradox. Whatever resolves the paradox is written as word or phrase (not a
number) into the field. This is used not for decision-making but for heightening perception and for
creative juxtapositioning.
22
I shall never forget the bitterness of a very talented young manager when confronted by a matrixinduced decision that was ill advised: ‘The matrix told me to do it!’
23
24
I acknowledge the problem with these two KBPs. They raise the old chestnut, ‘What is the difference
between a process and a system?’ This only reinforces the folly of non-intuitive language.
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scoring ‘white collar productivity’ process as one of the three (it had scored 23). He
also believed in the importance of developing good people and retaining morale, so
in a counter-cyclical judgement decided to nominate the low scoring ‘induction’
process (28) as the second project.
This situation demonstrates the folly of over-reliance on a matrix as a decisionmaking tool. Terry exercised his judgement quite rightly, trusted it and implicitly
overturned our matrix tool.25
Apart from the failure of the matrix, I would make this observation of the
conference: the focus on choosing took the GMs to a fairly constrained downstream
place to do their thinking. They were rather hemmed in, and we had unwittingly
plunged them beyond the earlier process of exploration which could well have
engaged their interest much more powerfully.
3.4.2. What happened to the improvement projects?
The pilot proved a failure. The three projects did not produce action, and the GMs
who were nominated as project leaders failed to move with any urgency, or to move
at all in one case. The MD was quietly using this task to assess the capability of his
GMs. If they showed alacrity for change and moved ahead purposefully then that
would indicate capability to design systems. The fact that there were ambiguities
inherent in the projects (as discussed in the previous section) should not have
hindered a capable GM from moving ahead meaningfully since one criterion for
capability of work at this level was ease with handling ambiguous tasks.
I recall my sense of surprise when I realised a couple of months later that little or
nothing was being done. After the August decisions, the normal business planning
process rolled in and diverted the MD's attention. Then came Christmas and the
torpor of the holiday break.
25
Another MD in this organisation commiserated with me years later about the folly of matrices as
decision-making tools. He had been on the decision-making committee to allocate a World Sailing
Championship to one of several candidate yacht clubs around Port Phillip Bay in Melbourne. They had
used a matrix to decide, despite a sinking feeling intuitively that they had erred. Sure enough, come the
Championship, the winning club performed well in all but the one factor you need for sailing – wind – while
the failed candidate enjoyed fresh breezes! The matrix had equalised the key factors and led to a poor
outcome.
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During the torpor phase I visited the GM charged with the induction project and
began making suggestions about what improvements could be made. His thinking on
the topic seemed to stop at remaking the induction video and rewriting the
company's introductory brochure. Of course, the reality was that there was no
induction process as such. It depended entirely on the individual efforts of the
managers who received inductees. Compared to an Aboriginal or Fijian induction
process, we were naive and had no shared procedures at all! To some extent this
was natural and explicable, as induction was an extra process to be added on to a
busy operating manager’s work life.
In the event, this GM had evidently decided to wait for more signals from Terry as
to what was wanted and when. He had survived this way a long time, and I
suspected he felt the whole site-wide improvement push was an intrusion.
The GM addressing the review of white collar productivity was more earnest but
nonetheless unconsciously caught in a cleft stick. He happened to be the manager of
most of the white-collar (clerical) workers on the site and was a hardworking and
caring GM. So he approached the task looking for process enhancements and
minimal staff reductions. He was fundamentally the employer of the people and the
owner of the systems in the administrative area. This dynamic conspired for
inaction, or slow progress on the ‘white collar productivity’ project.
The third project, ‘internal customer linkages’, had not been allocated to anyone and
was in limbo.
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3.5. Final reflections
This consulting assignment was the seedbed from which most of my ideas on the
strategic conversation developed. It gave birth to what has now become the
cornerstone of my consulting work in the strategic conversation, the facilitated
design workshop.
I tasted the power of this when I ran the workshop for the middle manager’s team. I
sensed the relief and the team ownership of the problems once we threw the issues
into the melting pot together. Ironically this workshop was the least prepared of the
other interventions that I worked on. In contrast I spent months with Laurie
working out the design of the improvement system and the senior management
workshop.
Why did this workshop succeed where the senior workshop did not? Now that I
look back I can see that the senior workshop was over-designed and did not involve
the senior team early enough in the intellectual tasks of the business. We prefabricated the mission, critical success factors and the key business processes of the
business, gave them to the team and said in effect, ‘Work within these.’ 26 So we
unwittingly robbed them of the key opportunity to create a shared purpose and
architecture for the business.
Furthermore the conversation in the senior workshop was not a fully accountable
conversation. By this I mean that the burden of accountability lay with the formal
planning system, and we left that intact. The budgetary process still allocated the key
resources in the organisation and provided the key measures.
The other major blindness was that I designed so much of the new system offline
with a single partner, in true management consulting style. This provided an
overworked set of models and processes. We solved problems at a level of
elegance and sophistication that was irrelevant to the GMs who ran the business.
This has made a deep impact on me: conversation is a real concept and process. It
means surrendering to the conversation space the majority of the work. While it is
vital that the workshop must be designed beforehand, most of the work must be
26
A recent senior management workshop illustrates what I have learned from this point. This team
was attempting to develop a social strategy for its future workforce. The climax of the two-day
workshop was the invention of the headings which formed the top and side columns of the matrix,
the equivalent of the critical success factors and the key business processes in this case study. In
other words, the recent workshop ended where the workshop cited in this case study begun.
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agreed and done inside the workshop. It must resemble the designer’s studio, full of
dust and slop and paint, rather than the analyst’s library. It must be a place of
energy, edginess and risk, wondering and precipices of shared decisions. It must be a
place of open and truthful discourse. This conversation must become the
cornerstone of the strategy making process; senior management must taste it and
then authorise it.
In later years I have learned to deploy this conversation throughout the organisation,
in effect to layer it across all levels. I had the instinct to do so in this project but
could not quite clinch it. Laurie and I focused on cascading improvement projects,
not fostering conversations. Now I see that what recurs is a strategic conversation.
Each level of the organisation faces its own level of system for which it must plan and
strategise.
Finally, the tools we used let us down. I was still in undue awe of the more logical
tools like matrices and the more usual business categories like critical success
factors. Later I saw them as constricting and developed much more faith in poetic
tools like story telling and analogy.
My reflection on the failures and learnings from this project would not be complete
if I did not mention in closing an issue that was very important to Terry, leadership
ability. Terry believed that the core reason that the GMs failed to deliver on their
projects was that they lacked the ability to conceptualise the tasks at that level.
They dropped back into familiar territory – operations – as soon as the workshop
finished. I have been convinced of this truth more and more as my consulting
experience has gone on. Leaders tend to be promoted from technical and
operational areas and often fail to rise above them.27 They often cannot see the
relevance of change and instead sponsor the efficient management of the present and
the familiar.
27
This raises the question of how we can identify leaders. This is a vexed question, and one greater
than we can address here. However, since these early days, I am more explicit with clients about
both choosing and developing their leaders. Many approaches to modern leadership focus on style,–
and stressing a coaching, mentoring style of leadership. While this is important, Mant (1997), Jaques
(1991) and DePree (1989) argue that intelligence or producing ideas is the crucial ingredient in a
leader. Hence I now use the services of a firm of consultants who diagnose the systemic thinking
ability of leaders.
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Developing the art of
strategic conversations:
‘An infinitely gentle,
infinitely suffering thing’
The second case study builds on the first. In this period I took
the early discovery of the conversation as a tool and used it
more widely and ambitiously. As I did so, I began to reflect
more deliberately on the art of conversation, and its
application to the topic of strategy.
Chapter four
Chapter four
4.1. The executive team – destined to be dysfunctional?Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.1.1. How hierarchy hobbles the senior team
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.2. Upgrading ABCD™ from structuring proposals to structuring plansError! Bookmark not define
4.2.1. Using clear language to break down the silos
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.2.2. George Orwell on politics and language
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.2.3. The ABCD™ architecture as a tool for simplicity and coherenceError! Bookmark not defined.
4.3. Beginning the strategic discourse
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3.1. Context: An organisation in transition
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3.2. Moving conversation out of the backroom
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3.3. The story of the meeting
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3.4. Learnings from the meeting
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3.4.1. Move from ‘discussing’ to ‘making’
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3.4.2. Have an explicit process
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.3.4.3. Move from solution to problem finding
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.4 What is data?
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.4.1. Deploying the conversation
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.4.2. The nature of data
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.4.2.1. Numbers are interpretation, not data
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.4.2.2. Story telling and history mapping get closer to the data
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.4.3. The nature of the voices in the conversation
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5. Reinventing a planning system as strategic conversationError! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.1. Protecting the conversation
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.2. An emergent ‘design-as-you-go’ approach
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.2.1. Joint reflection, not expert packaging
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.3. Freire and dialogue
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.3.1. Identity – the emerging subject matter
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.3.2. Identity and systems
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.3.3. Love and a domain of influence
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.3.4. Dialogue and humility
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.3.5. Humility and engagement
Error! Bookmark not defined.
4.5.4. Dialogue and design-facilitation
Error! Bookmark not defined.
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4.6. Conclusion
Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figures
Figure 4-1: Hierarchy and the senior team
Figure 4-2: The ABCD™ model
Figure 4-3: Three voices in a dialogue
Figure 4-4: A grammar of purpose
Error! Bookmark not defined.
Error! Bookmark not defined.
Error! Bookmark not defined.
Error! Bookmark not defined.
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4.1. The executive team – destined to be dysfunctional?
When I was beginning my consulting career, a senior client working at GM level
warned me to avoid the senior management team. He described it as a bear pit of
warring egos that could entangle me in internecine rivalries and compromise my
career with failures. His analysis of the reason this team was generally dysfunctional
was simple: big egos. They were chosen he said, because of their self-confidence and
competitiveness, and this profile mitigated against teamwork.
Recently an article in Harvard Business Review (‘The myth of the top management
team’ November-December 1997) elevated this dysfunctionality from anecdote to
theory. Jon Katzenbach argued that it is pointless trying to develop the senior team
of large organisations into a team because they are not a team; their tasks are so
disparate that they cannot be forged meaningfully into a joint effort. So he argued
that the mantra of teams should stop before it reaches the boardroom or the
executive suite.
Whatever the reasoning, it was ominous for me. I was attracted to large planning
systems and, whatever their faults, they are the discourse of the senior team. So
they would be my clients. If they are indeed irredeemably dysfunctional then my
consulting assignments would be condemned to frustration.
I finished the chapter three case study commenting that I had run a successful
workshop with a middle management team, but was less successful with the senior
team. In this chapter I trace the story of how I began to apply conversations to a
senior team, and how this discourse helped forge them into a coherent community,
contrary to Katzenbach’s misgivings.
The senior workshop is hard to organise at a purely pragmatic level. People working
at this level are very busy and it is difficult to find common times in diaries to
commit to a two or three day workshop. Even more fundamentally, it takes courage
to open up a genuine dialogue at this level of work; people do not disclose very
easily and, in particular, they will not admit weakness or confusion. As I have
explained in chapter three, the culture of senior leadership is one of certainty and
control; to admit confusion or wonder is not the style. But good workshops grow
out of wonder and confusion, great thinking begins there. So the entry point for the
workshops is like a great rusty door that has not been opened in many years. One
must put one’s shoulder against it and push very hard to prise it open the first time.
After that it becomes much easier.
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But the topic of the senior team must be well chosen. A discourse must have an
appropriate level and type of subject matter. It must be a subject matter that unites a
group and for which they feel jointly accountable. For the senior team this is the
business itself, its fate, its destiny, its problems and its glory.1
A key feature of the modern organisation inhibits this systemically. Hierarchy is the
villain, once again.
4.1.1. How hierarchy hobbles the senior team
Hierarchy splits structure into components at every level of declension.
1
Whole sy stem
2
??
2
2
2
2
Figure 4-1: Hierarchy and the senior team
The logic of hierarchy is remorseless and traps the senior team more aggressively
than any other levels. I would argue that this logic is the systemic reason behind the
so-called dysfunctionality of the senior team, not personality or complexity of issues
(although both are extenuating factors). Hierarchy distributes the scope of level one
to components at level two. Hierarchy also talks downwards not upwards, that is, it
describes a zone of accountability downwards but not upwards or horizontally. The
hierarchy explains to me that I have a department to manage alongside other
departments at the same level. But it leaves two holes. One I have already
discussed, the gaps between departments (laterally); but even more flawed is the
upward gap. On the hierarchy chart only the top of the pyramid is accountable for
the whole system. In an organisation this means one person. So only one person is
accountable to think about and plan the work of the whole, to design purpose and
1
Bartlett and Ghoshal (1994) argue that purpose transcends strategy, and that discovering and
articulating the organisation’s purpose is the true role of leadership. My use of the term ‘strategic’ in
the phrase ‘strategic conversation’ combines purpose and strategy.
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interrelatedness. Others may join by invitation, but they are condescending to help
in a game that they are not playing; they are spectators taking time out of their own
game to watch and lend encouragement while you play yours. Only when I
understood this did I understand the dynamics of loneliness at the senior level. I had
identified a strange reluctance from level two players to join in and sponsor the level
one conversation. They were passive but not active in organising such discussions.
The logic of hierarchy explained this reluctance to me in systemic terms, not just
personality. I saw that the level twos were in a system and acting logically within the
system’s logic.
If this diagnosis is true then it explains in systemic terms why senior teams struggle
against the tide to be functional. For the whole system discourse, perched
excrescently between two levels, is the planning discourse. It is where the
architecture of purpose is hammered out if it is to be hammered out anywhere. The
analysis above reveals a key lack: there is no forge, no blacksmith’s anvil readily
available where one can do the work. So perhaps it is not even the tools that are
lacking, it is the workshop itself. Call the workshop the place where the discourse is
legitimised and enabled. It is a room that few have visited in the modern
organisation.
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4.2. Upgrading ABCD™ from structuring proposals to
structuring plans
The first development was intellectual, not social. A major new client in Western
Australia asked me to help document his company’s strategic plan in a more elegant
and readable style. I used the ABCD™ model as the architecture of the whole
document. Previously I had used the architecture only to structure proposals, and it
was this genre of use that I applied in the chapter three case study. This new client,
Jon, had a vision for simplicity and clarity in corporate communications that gave me
the space to experiment.
Jon engaged my firm to redraft the annual strategic plan using more powerful simple
language. He wanted to break from the dry language of traditional management and
produce a plan that could communicate change in warm and compelling terms. His
valuing of plain language provided another key platform on which to build strategic
conversations.
4.2.1. Using clear language to break down the silos
One of the inhibitors of discourse at the senior level is the sheer level of complexity.
Since the whole organisation is represented in the forum, the potential topics are
very complicated. This is often exacerbated by the technical focus of many
managers, who are promoted all too often on the basis of technical competence
rather than managerial ability, let alone strategic or leadership acumen. As a result
their natural recourse is to the technical; this is what they know, but even more, it is
where their ego and sense of worth lies. As such, it is safe ground for them
emotionally. They can use their technical know-how to advertise their legitimacy.
Within this environment, they can also use their technical know-how to keep others
out of their patch, out of finding out too much about what is going on in their area.
These dynamics worsen in highly technical knowledge industries. The ego of
knowledge creates silos of control.
As long as this dynamic dominates one cannot hope for integration. Integration
demands some level of shared understanding of each other’s silo so that we can
share enough mutual understanding to forge connections. Without integration we
cannot create a shared discourse. It is for this reason that the strategic conversation
often begins with integration. Strategy comes later.
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My teaching career and then my consulting career began with communication and
breaking down knowledge silos. This was the craft or core skill from which I
upgraded to strategic work. Hence I brought with me a key aptitude that I now
believe is essential to create the plasticity of conversation, the teacher’s/technical
writer’s ability to explain things simply. Two defining moments had lifted the veil for
me on the knowledge conspiracy. The first occurred in the first month of my
consulting career. I was teaching Plain English writing skills to a group of highly
sophisticated scientists working in research and development. I asked them to
rewrite a one-page technical memorandum from their organisation entitled
‘Blanking’. It was indecipherable for me but I assumed that this was due to my
ignorance of the technical content. After I asked them to do the exercise, I noticed
a shifty silence; no one moved, the silence was awkward. So after a minute I
admitted my ignorance. ‘I must say that I have absolutely no idea what this means –
it’s all Greek to me!’ The relief was instantaneous. ‘Neither do we! We never
know what those guys are talking about!’
The second defining moment occurred much later. I was writing a high profile
article for another scientific client. This article was to appear in one of the world’s
leading science magazines; the technology we were describing was complex, elegant
and extremely significant commercially. I wrote a ‘plain language’ version of the
article then watched in growing despondency as my colleague plastered the
complexity back on to the prose line-by-line and device-by-device. What amazed me
was his skill and deliberateness. For he actually liked and understood what I had
done. But he layered the complexity back on with remorseless grammatical
intensity. First the personal tone of the first person went ... ‘we cannot admit that
real people worked on this’.... then the sense of story and connection went ... ‘ get
rid of the “then we found out…” it sounds too tentative and lays too obvious a
trail...’ At the end he pitied me enough, or felt enough guilt, I don’t know which, to
explain to me the system. He had spent two decades getting to the front row of the
conference theatre, row-by-row, triumph-by-triumph. Now he and the others in the
front row would not open up an easy path for others to leapfrog their progress. So
‘science is not about open communication, Tony.’ It is about ego and protection.
To protect our position, we must use ‘weasel speak’ (his phrase). Never had I felt
more palpably the devious obdurateness of the knowledge ego.
Between these two defining moments, I had helped to reform Australian legislation.
I, among others, introduced plain language and document design to the writing of
Federal law. I helped rewrite the Income Tax Act in plain language in 1995 with the
chief parliamentary counsel to the project, Tom Reid. During that project I observed
how threatened sections of the legal community were by the project, and how
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offensive they found simple commonsense language. Our critics were naive
linguistically. They could not necessarily have parsed a sentence, so a great irony
underpinned the debate; the sophisticated users were the champions of simplicity
and the naive users were the champions of continued complexity. This reveals the
real game: the issue was politics, not language. They were safeguarding their
knowledge areas, areas defined by their mastery of content. This mastery gave them
power and income. Our assault in the name of commonsense was in fact a political
act of rebellion; we were sponsoring power sharing.2
Changing language was a political act. This is a matter of opportunity as much as it is
a problem. For changing language can be a lever to affect culture and power. Hence
my long background in the battle for words to be able to make meaning was not a
sideshow in the theatre of organisations; it was a practical rehearsal for centre stage.
4.2.2. George Orwell on politics and language
George Orwell understood and expressed this probably better than anyone else this
century in his landmark essay Politics and the English language (1961). In this
marvellous essay he makes two points that are germane to our task of invigorating
the discourse of an organisation. Firstly, he connects language and thought in a
mutual causality. Language does not just describe thought, it helps forge it. ‘If
thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought’. Then he links the
notion of dead thought to politicised usage. The more dead one’s thought life is, the
more pliant one becomes in the political gaming. Politics seems to be a recessive
cavity where spiritless people gather.
They (clichés) will construct sentences for you – even think your thoughts for you.. and
at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning
even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and
the debasement of language becomes clear. [Italics are mine]
[Orwell 1961, p. 362]
Politics, then, is a field of activity where meaning has been replaced by a trade in
clichés. Clichés are borrowed phrases that lie over other people’s experiences.
Using them is way of disengaging from one’s personal experience and beginning a
proxy life of trading in half understood experiences of other people. At this point I
2
The mastery of content is a sly proxy for intelligence. But the kind of intelligence it requires is
memory rather than discovery. Mastery of content does not require skills of inquiry and discovery.
But if content masters find their content moving away underneath them, their whole ego and
confidence is threatened. These forces are major inhibitors to cross fertilisation of ideas. Rhetoric, in
contrast, has no subject matter, but is a process of discovering new subject matters.
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refer back to my discussion of Moffett’s work on the active voice in chapter two.
For Moffet, true prose was the recovery of voice rather than technique. In
recovering voice, I recover my engagement with personal, concrete experience. The
move back to the personal voice is paralleled by a move back to the personally
experienced as the data for my generalisations.
Orwell develops his attack on politics and dehumanised language:
Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. ... one has a
curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a
feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the
speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind
them. ... A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance into
turning himself into a machine...The appropriate noise is coming out of his larynx but his
brain is not involved ... this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any
rate favourable to political conformity.
[ibid., p. 362]
In light of this linkage between language and humanising, Jon’s commitment to using
simple colourful human scale language in the major business document of his
organisation was not a sideshow.
4.2.3. The ABCD™ architecture as a tool for simplicity and
coherence
We used my ABCD™ model to express the plan on one page.
A
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Figure 4-2: The ABCD™ model
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The ABCD™ model arranges four topics graphically across a landscape page.
By using the ABCD™ model we established some important new conventions for
the business topic.
It was a graphical device not word heavy. The model carves out relationships
between the parts as a key aspect of its architecture. The way in which A relates to
B is vital to create tension. Whether C fits into the tension is essential for
relevance. Think of A and B before you think of C, and so on. The upshot of these
relations is that we broke the topic of strategy into a system of related topics.
It was simple, but the simplicity was undergirded by complexity. That is, the one
page was not a gloss or glib, it was a level of abstraction that brought the four
elements into dynamic relationship. Underneath each of the four elements was a
pyramid of data and complexity for which each of the four elements was an
interpretation, not just a summary. Hence we were establishing a convention that
the task of the leader was to simplify complexity. This simplification was to elucidate
and relate the four elements to each other. For one of the evils of complexity is that
it camouflages relationships.
Most importantly, and this point only emerged in my understanding later, the
ABCD™ model moved the topic of planning to a new genre of discourse. The
ABCD™ model is a discourse of argument in rhetorical terms. I had first developed
the model to frame scientific proposals, and a proposal is an argument. Hence my
use of the model shifted the planning discourse into the genre of argument. In later
years the essence of my strategic conversation system became, ‘Every plan is an
argument for the business’. The seeds for this realisation lay in the opportunistic
choice of the ABCD™ model to serve Jon’s needs for simplicity and
communicability.3
Orwell comments that only rebels open up language:
Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel,
expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’.
[ibid., p.362]
3
Ironically, Jon was never deeply enamoured of the ABCD™ model as a tool for strategy. He liked
its simplicity of structure but felt it lacked depth to structure a strategic analysis. At the time I did not
understand its linkages to argument so could not draw across the theories of rhetorical argument to
enrich my use of the model and make it more appealing to him.
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Jon was that kind of rebel. He was a reformer who wanted to advance humanised
organisations, not to toe party lines. This commitment to re-engage humans in the
life of organisations came to the fore in a later appointment. Jon managed a mining
operation that he had to eventually close because he decided it was unsustainable.
Having made the economic decision he moved to manage the human case. He
personally led the whole demobbing exercise, using ritual and myth4 as well as outplacement consultants to heal the wounds of disappointment. It was a complete
success and the workers who lost their jobs not only found others, but retained
human dignity. So Jon’s sponsorship of a human scale method of documenting the
plan was true to type.
The five-year strategy document was such a success that the organisation later used
the same format to structure its maintenance strategy. Thus the ABCD™ model
entered the discourse of that very large organisation and became a shared language.
4
This included having a Tibetan promise tree at a farewell BBQ for the team.
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4.3. Beginning the strategic discourse
In the second case I combined visual facilitation and the strategic use of the ABCD™
model to create a strategic conversation.
Jon’s assignment called for changing words on the page, but did not open up the way
for me to create workshops out of which the content would be forged. The process
of composition was still traditional: Jon worked as the behind-the-scenes architect of
the plan content. He was the GM of Business Analysis, just as Laurie in chapter
three, and he perpetuated the same process of backrooming the work. We worked
with Jon to interview senior managers, but there was no joint workshop. The
reform was confined to the words on the page. It was a breakthrough, but not a
complete one.
A little later I began working with John, a senior bureaucrat in the Australian
Taxation Office (ATO). John emerged as my major partner and sponsor in
developing the eclectic ideas I had developed so far into a coherent package around
the planning process. The major shift that John sponsored was from the backroom
to the workshop. Hence he was the first sponsor of the strategic conversation
system.
4.3.1. Context: An organisation in transition
The ATO had decided to streamline its functional and geographical structure and
move to market segments, that is, common bunches of clients or taxpayers. The
national leader of each new program was to control all functions within that
program; the old functional hierarchy was broken down and deployed to the new
market-focussed business units. (The regional structure remained obdurate as a
local substrate for several years after the change, but that is another story). John
was chosen as the first leader to develop and manage a national business program
(initially called Business Taxes). It was a huge task of major transformation, and he
decided to call a preparatory workshop to discuss how he might approach this task.
Since John’s role was not yet confirmed, nobody formally worked with him except
those who had been reporting to him in his previous role. John asked me to
facilitate the meeting. I remember it to this day.
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4.3.2. Moving conversation out of the backroom
Before I explain what happened it is important to point out the key difference
between John’s approach and the backrooming method I had worked with thus far.
John threw everything into the melting pot of the conversation. He was quite unsure
what would emerge but was committed to living with the outcomes. So here I
tasted a living and authentic faith in the conversation process for the first time. He
saw the workshop not as a communication tool but as a thinking tool. Whereas
language for John was a political act, he widened it to be a thinking act as well. John
was avowedly fascinated by thinking processes. His agility and conceptual power
meant that he did not fear new ideas, and could flexibly work with ideas that
emerged in real time during the workshop. Hence he did not feel threatened by
spontaneity, nor did he fear debate.
This was a massive cultural move for this bureaucracy; it thrived on paper and
proliferated meetings of a bureaucratic kind, each of which was flanked by reams of
agenda-supporting documents at one end and minutes at the other. John cared for
neither, pursuing instead the rare commodities of insight and wisdom.
John was attracted to my craft of simple language, and particularly to my penchant
for visual models (such as the spider diagramming technique that I had used with
Terry as described in chapter three). John saw in my visualisations the perfect tool
to guide the thinking process, the idea constructing process. He saw in visual
diagrams the medium that could mediate between the private grappling with chaos
that goes on inside one’s head, and the public space of discourse where
organisational futures are crafted and decided. Orwell gestured towards such tools
in his essay...
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, not the other way
about. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is to surrender to them. When
you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe
the thing you have been visualising, you probably hunt about till you find the exact
words that seem to fit. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to
use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the
existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring
or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as
possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures or sensations...
[Orwell 1961, p. 366]
John not only sponsored the workshop, opening up the space for the conversation
to happen; he encouraged and valued the use of the my poetic tools of visualisation
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that I had previously thought of as part of the sideshow. He recognised such tools as
the most appropriate tools of the forge – the sculpture’s hammer and chisel that
facilitated representation and development of thoughts when they were tentative
and inchoate. A social and an intellectual space were thus created as the forge for
the planning work. And John did not even allow us time for rehearsals!
John believed that the knee-jerk reaction of groups in ambiguous situations was to
preserve sanity by prematurely vaulting to the downstream side of my thinking wave.
They would do this by two tactics:
1. Borrowing previous processes and plugging them into the new situation
2. Rushing to structure themselves into groups with titles.
In Orwell’s terms, the second instinct is a substitute for meaning: usurp a role title
that works like a cliché. It gives you credibility but relieves you of the burden of
working out what you actually do. John denied either instinct with a pre-emptive
strike: have the first workshop when everything is still unsettled and new.
John and I shared the belief that function precedes structure. This builds on Orwell’s
point above. Organisational structures give people security but they beg the point of
function. What contribution are you making? ‘I have a new role – Manager of
Organisational Learning [it helps a lot if you capitalise all the words in the title].
Don’t know too much about it – I guess I’ll find out more next week…’ John and I
believed that we must first explore functions; structural legitimacy could follow later.
I must admit that this was unsettling for people at the workshop, many of whom
merely wanted to know whether they would be part of the new organisation.
Despite the lack of roles, this unit was a viable system in Stafford Beer’s
terminology.5 Because it encapsulated all functions under one roof, the unit could
operate viably in delivering business outcomes. For us, viability was a by-product of
functionality. Functionality determined a service to be offered, a contribution to be
made to an element of the market. Viability meant that you controlled all the key
resources to deliver that service or contribution without being compromised by
another organisational unit. For example, if the audit group operated under a policy
of taking a hard line on a particular claim, whereas the appeals group operated under
5
A ‘viable’ system, according to Beer (1979), comprises five functional elements or sub-systems.
System one is directly concerned with implementation, system two with co-ordination, system three
with control and interpretation, system four with intelligence gathering and reporting, and system five
with policy (Flood 1991, p. 90-91).
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a policy of leniency, there would be a clash in business mission (or function). If the
two units operate under different objectives, and are housed in different
organisational units, then each unit leader is compromised in delivering his or her
business mission to their market. Due to the organisational change, John now had all
the units that delivered services to his market segment under his control. This
meant that he now led a viable business unit.
This is vital for the strategic discourse. The strategic conversation rides on the back
of viable organisational units. The more viable the units, the more assuredly the
strategic conversation can be levered into strategic performance.
Finally, this was a fully authorised conversation. Jon’s position (the only formally
announced one in the room) authorised it. He could confer authority on it.
‘Authorise’ is an interesting word. It is a compound created from the root word
‘author’. It has come to be read as a derivative of ‘authority’, hence carrying
shadowy connotations of bequeathing rather magical power. Thus it connotes
politics. Authority is something we have, and that we wield in relationships to get
our way. It is a close cousin to wealth or resources, linguistically. It is a possession
that affords us status and homage. The more we have of it the better.
But the link to authoring changes the word from a possession to an action. The
action is one of making meaning, not of politicising. It suggests relating, but of a nonpolitical kind. As an author I relate to you by engaging you in my story; and to have
a story to engage you with, I must first discover it myself, I must first make my own
meaning and find my own voice. As I find my voice, I have a basis for relating with
you. Hence to authorise a business conversation means in effect to liberate voicefinding throughout the organisation, to create a community of authors who have
made, or are making, meaning. Relationships that flow from that are based,
therefore, not on power as it flows down the organisational tree, but on networks
of conversations where authors tell each other stories. Thus we have an authorised
conversation.
4.3.3. The story of the meeting
The meeting began with a buzz of expectation and nervousness. John was never
good at setting contexts for a meeting and most people had come without a clear
sense of why the meeting was called. The mood was volatile, to say the least, and
this spilled over into friction and frustration. John worsened matters considerably by
announcing that he had to leave to attend a meeting with the Commissioner, and
that the Commissioner would come across at 2pm to get a report on progress.
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Although I was the facilitator, I could not gain control of the meeting. Opinions
were swirling back and forth. One person had brought a long technical report that
he was keen to table. The behaviour was completely dysfunctional.
After half an hour of this chaos, where various people had tried unsuccessfully to
wrest control, a strong manager who understood something of my techniques and
who supported them, took the floor and said, ‘We are completely in a mess here –
we only have three hours to convert this chaos into something useful to say to John
and the Commissioner. We are paying Tony to be here – at least let’s give him a
chance to help us!’ With this opening I took the floor with some trepidation.
I briefly explained how we could use the ABCD™ model to structure our thinking.
Importantly, I stressed that we only had three hours to make a ‘product’, a set of
ideas that we could present to the Commissioner. I explained that we must begin
the discourse by building a shared sense of the present situation. The decision to
create a new group (Business Taxes) was, in the fourfold topic structure of
ABCD™, an hypothesis (C). It begged the question of what the problems were that
this decision addressed. We needed first to explore the A and build a shared
picture of the problems.
I then divided the group of twenty into sub-groups, directing them to work on
building a shared model of the A. From that we moved to building a shared model
of the inferred purpose of the new group (B). The topics were only rudimentarily
explained and the exploration was, given the time, fairly thin. But nonetheless the
results were astonishing, not only for the intellectual outputs but also for the sense
of community that occurred. There was a meeting of hearts and minds that, given
the starting point of dysfunctionality, was amazing to me. The outcome defied my
ability to explain it. I was in despair when I got to my feet and held out no hope of
success, yet within a short time this dysfunctional group had coalesced into a
cohesive, productive work unit. Clearly here was evidence that a senior team could
work as a functional entity since the circumstances I had encountered were entirely
unpropitious. If one could forge a senior team in such hostile circumstances, then
there must be every chance that one could do it reliably given more time and
planning.
4.3.4. Learnings from the meeting
If this was my first significant taste of the strategic conversation working, what were
the lessons about the art that emerged? What repeatable techniques made the
dynamic productive?
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4.3.4.1. Move from ‘discussing’ to ‘making’
Firstly, we moved the group from discussion to making. I clearly painted a picture of
a shared task to be done – and done inside the meeting. We actually had to craft the
presentation and allot speakers inside the meeting. Normally a meeting finishes by
allocating actions to complete outside the meeting. For this reason meetings are to
be avoided. By contrast, we did all the work inside the meeting. This turned the
forum from a meeting to a forge, a design studio, and a workshop. The sense of
urgent construction was palpable. In Winnicott’s terms we were seriously ‘playing’:
we were building our teddy bear, our transitional object which would mediate our
relationship with the external (stakeholder) world. We were engaged in art, not
science. Thus in terms of my hypothesis (from chapter two) we had moved, not
from logic to intuition, but from analysis to making. This shift in the discourse
proved central and has only grown in stature since then in my mind and method.
Transform the discourse from discussion to manufacture.
4.3.4.2. Have an explicit process
Secondly, the group was palpably soothed by having a process to follow. The
process was not just a sequence of topics but also a set of heuristics to guide inquiry.
Each of the four elements in the ABCD™ model is a topic opened up by a question.
So ABCD™ is in fact four issues that work together to produce an architecture for
inquiry. That architecture provided structural integrity that subdued both the
diversity of the content and the emotions of those involved.
In Orwell’s terms, the fact that the tool kit or topic set was non-verbal and ‘strange’
was vital. I did not want cliché to override fresh thought so I avoided categorical
words of planning like ‘objectives’ and ‘goals’. This meant that the group had to
create its own meaning around this architecture. Investing time in understanding the
architecture helped ‘get one’s meaning clear’ (to use Orwell’s phrase).
4.3.4.3. Move from solution to problem finding
Thirdly, the architecture moved the group from solution bickering to problem
finding. The creativity commentator, Nadler, observed that groups divide over
solutions and unite over problems (Nadler 1990 p. 18ff). The systems thinker
Geoffrey Vickers regarded problem solving as a limited intellectual activity. … ‘to
focus on problem solving is to divert attention from the far more important function
of problem definition…’ (Vickers 1981, p.16). The technical culture trades in
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solutions, for technologies are worlds of ‘hows’. Our society is so technologically
developed that it is replete with solutions or mechanisms.
But if we can move the group back upstream behind the solution and ask what is the
problem we face, then we tie into a much humbler and more cohesive dynamic. We
no longer trade in solutions which alienate but in perspectives or places which
integrate. Vickers (1981) goes further than Nadler. He asserts that problem solving
is impoverished, it is problem finding that is interesting. And he goes further than
that; he maintains that situation understanding precedes problem finding and is even
more foundational.
These were the key arts that made this marvel of cohesion occur.
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4.4 What is data?
Soon after this groundbreaking experience I had an opportunity to develop the
conversation mechanisms further. A major mine at Queensland was embarking on
designing a maintenance strategy and wanted to follow the Western Australian
template that had used my ABCD™ model as the architecture. The Queensland
group was keen to advance on the Western Australian effort and so asked me
where they could go further. The client at Queensland, Geoff, was the GM of
Technology for the organisation, and that was why he was given the maintenance
task. He had a background in managing operations so he was close to the ground.
Despite his technical role and operational background, he was more intrigued by the
social and cultural challenges of management than by the technical. In his words to
me, ‘How to run large organisations is the crucial management challenge of the next
decade.’
I pointed out that the Western Australian effort had been an intellectual use of
ABCD™, not a social use. It was used as a tool of description not construction. So
we decided to use a workshop strategy to create the maintenance strategy. There
had been two major efforts previously to create a maintenance strategy and both
had failed. In one they had employed a major management consultancy but the
recommendations and the arms-length ‘expert’ approach had alienated the client,
who sent them packing. The organisation had then decided to try to create its own
strategy, but the first team meeting of senior management had led nowhere. There
was friction at the meeting and no outcomes were produced. So I had a field of
failures to try to build on.
4.4.1. Deploying the conversation
We designed a process that took the discourse a stage further than the ATO
workshop: we decided to deploy the strategic conversation across all layers of the
organisation. We had four workshops, one for each of the four topic areas of the
model. A vertical slice of management attended each workshop, from the MD to
shopfloor superintendents. After the first workshop the GM of Operations was so
impressed by the process that he challenged us to widen it still further and involve
the operators from the plant in the discourse. This we hastily did. We organised
shadow workshops to accompany each of the leadership workshops, pursuing the
same topics but with somewhat less time to do so. The result was similar to the
Canberra outcome, a palpable meeting of hearts and minds. Operators were keen
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to be involved in the workshops and many commented on the healthiness of the
process.
Two further aspects of the art of the conversation emerged during this assignment.
The first was on the nature of data, and the second was on the different kinds of
authorship in the conversation.
4.4.2. The nature of data
The topic of the A is a précis of the present situation and of the problems we
discern in it. It thus involves a reading of the data of the situation. The question is,
‘What constitutes data?’ This question was attenuated for me because the head
office had already pre-formulated the A before the first workshop; this rather took
the rug from under my feet as there is nothing more fatal to a design workshop than
to ‘backroom’ the design before and outside the meeting. But there was another
issue. The head office group had used my ABCD™ model to structure its analysis
and had analysed the A using quantitative data to measure and represent the present
situation. Maintenance activities can be measured using common numerical
measures such as equipment availability and utilisation. The back room analysts had
worked through this data and come up with the A. I felt that the life had gone out of
the process using this numerical method but could not, at first, find an alternative, or
a reason for my disquiet, other than a poet’s desire for words to be part of the
situation description.
4.4.2.1. Numbers are interpretation, not data
Then I realised that maintenance was a system, a subtle and sophisticated human
system involving a network of conversations, people, technologies, computer
systems, forms, relationships, pieces of equipment, methods and processes,
mythologies, contracts and memories. Importantly, I realised that measures were
inside this system not a window onto it. Measuring a system involves techniques and
cultures that are as much the objects of design and distortion as the system whose
status they purport to represent. Any passing familiarity with business systems will
alert one to the fact that the object of greatest cynicism and manipulation is the
measures system. It is the first game an artful manager learns to play. Recall that in
the middle management workshop I designed (see chapter three), the first aspect of
the task that participants wanted to set right was the means of measurement. They
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wanted a measure that had integrity and told the truth, and they doubted that the
official measure came close to doing so.6
Thus a deep irony presented itself. This icon of accuracy, the measurement system,
was as culturally bound and human as any other aspect of the system. If we wanted
to represent the present system we could not use the measurement system as a tool
of representation. It was part of the system that needed to be represented. (We
were not saying that numerical measurement was useless and should be abandoned,
just that it was part of the system not a window onto it.)
4.4.2.2. Story telling and history mapping get closer to the data
Thus we decided to use two key methods as the window onto the data of the
present system. The first was story telling and the second was history mapping.
Both tools were verbal and both served a key end: they located the generalisations
and the interpretations of all the players in the concrete data of the situation. They
helped everyone tell the truth. When we first proposed the story telling method,
the senior clients were sceptical that the truth would come out in a crossmanagement environment. They felt that people who were close to the action
would water down the data of their experiences in the audience of their senior
managers. Could we craft a discourse of honesty and truth telling? An interesting
aspect of story telling came to our aid unexpectedly during the first workshop:
humour. If you want to tell a successful story in a group, you want to create a
response in the audience, and one successful method is humour. One easy source of
humour is human folly and hypocrisy, the truth behind the veneer of formality. So
the stage was set for the kind of truth telling that King Lear’s fool made into an art
form, the behind-the-scenes revelation of folly that gave the lie to the staged dignity
of the king. We certainly found out what happened on the back shift on Saturday
night.
Out of the eight stories we created in a day a tapestry of a system. The topics
ranged freely and eclectically across a variety of maintenance topics, and they were
lubricated by humour and a sense of fresh honesty. Importantly, we did not preformulate the categories of maintenance that the stories should cover. We only
6
I cannot recall reading any article that led me to this insight, although I am sure others have
articulated this point. However, I was probably influenced by an earlier consulting assignment writing
the technical manual for implantable defibrillators. For this device, the key system function is sensing
or measuring rather than intervening electrically. I carried this thought with me ever since, and I think
I used it here analogically.
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asked that they should be significant stories that captured some theme of wider
import and exemplified some key aspect of ‘the way we do maintenance around
here’. The themes emerged and we bunched them later using inductive reasoning.
The coverage was impressively wide.
Michael Kaye comments on the power of story telling:
Without system wide stories each part of the organisation becomes a subsystem with
its own set of stories and cultures. .... In the story telling organisation, there is
collective creation, telling, maintenance and revision of what is known and understood
by its parts. ...Each storyteller creates a small piece of a larger jigsaw puzzle. When all
the stories are told, shared and interpreted, the pieces can be fitted together to form an
overall picture. No individual in an organisation knows the whole story, but by listening
to the stories of other members, that person can understand an event or human action
from a broader perspective.
[Kaye 1996, p.24]
The stories accomplished something else that I only later realised. They keep the
community members in the first topic area of data and prevent their moving
prematurely towards interpreting that data. Interpretations (hypotheses) tend to
divide, and they also mitigate against creativity because they are a highly formulated
generalisation that is already some way developed from the data of the concrete.
They are too structured, and if we start to trade in them we are trading in the kind
of loose generalisation and cliché that Orwell and Moffett eschewed, and that
offends the poetic spirit. The mind ceases to engage.
But a story works to suspend interpretation. Jesus’ parables are a perfect example
of the art. Jesus told parables rather than propound generalisations.7 The
concreteness of the parable then allowed the disciples to interpret it themselves.
This is how stories work. They deliver the act of interpretation to the listener; thus
the individuals in the group tell their story, and the group makes the meaning.
The second method was history mapping. We created a social history of the mine’s
maintenance system, and displayed it graphically like a time line with lay events
chunked into key ‘chapters’. We then segregated the flow of history into several
layers of events, each layer representing a system that affected the maintenance
system (e.g. the capital purchase system). This history graphic proved illuminating to
7
The theologian, N. T. Wright, argues that stories are undervalued by modern society, and their role
in the peasant villages of first century Israel was far more profound, and technical than we would
appreciate. A story was ‘not mere gossip: the community would order its life and thought by telling
and retelling important events which made them who they were. This provides a window on a
world… it is the world of informal but controlled oral tradition.’ (Wright 1996, p. 134)
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the team as it connected disparate events and gave a sense of continuity and
background to their present problems.
I have continued to use this design and find it always contributes to the strategic
understanding and to strategic options. Although in this thesis I examine only the
role of English literature in my consulting techniques, clearly this is the case of
another liberal art (history) proving very useful. The role of history in decisionmaking was studied by Neustadt and May (1988), who claimed that US presidential
decisions that were informed by history were significantly better than those that
were not. The role of history is also an issue over which Vico and Descartes
seriously differed. For Descartes, history was too localised and current to yield the
pure truth that mathematics and philosophy did. Vico disagreed. Only by studying
histories could we understand communities and their decisions. Clearly my
methodology explicitly chose Vico (history) over Descartes (mathematics and
measurement) in this case. Or perhaps more precisely, since we did use numerical
measurements as well, the methodology subsumed Descartes (mathematics) within
the broader sociological framework of Vico.
4.4.3. The nature of the voices in the conversation
The second key learning aspect of this case was discerning the different types of
voice we release in the authoring process. Not all voices are the same. They have
different roles in the discourse. We discerned three distinct voices around the
organisational dialogue.
Figure 4-3: Three voices in a dialogue
The voice of intent expresses the goals and the mission of the system. The voice of
operating experience expresses the uses and practices of the system. The voice of
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design expresses the patterning and aesthetic forms of the system. In authorising the
strategic conversation all three voices must find their place in the dialogue.
System owners must explore and express intention; if they are not part of the
dialogue, it is impoverished and cannot move with organisational authority. It leaves
the bipolar dialogue of the voices of design and experience still full of ingenuity and
honesty but bereft of the authority to act.
Designers must explore and express the aesthetics of the system. Without their
sense of form, the voices of intent and experience polarise around command and
control. They lack a mediating method to locate intent in practice.
Operators in the system must also have a voice, otherwise the dialogue lacks
reality and concreteness. This kind of clinical, antiseptic purity produces elegance
without purchase in the life of the organisation. This was the case with the
backrooming in both the chapter three case and the Western Australian cases. The
voice of experience was not engaged.
The Queensland case study was the first time I had designed a conversation where
the three voices were all authorised. Thus the Queensland case taught me to
extend the conversation throughout an organisation. We found the power of story
telling to ground the conversation in constructing a shared sense of the situation, but
to do that I had to rethink the meaning of real data.
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4.5. Reinventing a planning system as strategic
conversation
These cases had widened the tool of conversation but they were still not applied to
the planning system as a whole. They were events. As such, the tool of
conversation was not institutionalised; it was a guest at corporate processes, waiting
like a foreigner for an occasional invitation to the main banquet of organisational
rituals. Like all strangers it was not franchised and relied on the good graces of its
hosts. ‘Let’s hold a workshop ... it might help us get some ideas... let’s have a
brainstorming session to get creativity going....’ This kind of patronage limits the role
of conversation at the same time as it praises it. For it maroons it in off-stream
circumstances, leaving the traditional corporate processes to their domination.
This changed when John took over as head of Business Taxes. Once John’s group
was established, he decided to use the planning system as his vehicle for
transformation. John felt that of all the systems in an organisation, the planning
system could be the voice and the vehicle of the leaders, but not as it was
traditionally conceived. John wanted to reinvent planning as ‘strategic
conversations’.
To do this required more than just holding workshops: we needed to redesign the
planning system as a whole. This was not a tidy or mechanically planned process. It
was, however, a very deliberate process, one for which we planned and budgeted,
discussed and replanned. It was conscious and thoughtful. In retrospect several
features of the project were significant in its eventual success.
4.5.1. Protecting the conversation
Firstly, we decided to design our planning process separately from the corporate
process. This was a pragmatic decision, as we had not scope to address the
corporate system. Most would use this as an excuse to do nothing, but John used it
to create a kind of authenticity for the dialogue by immunising it against corporate
compliance.
John wanted the new planning system to serve three purposes: to foster creation,
not just communication; to focus the minds of his managers on strategy, not just
operations; and to engage the whole of the staff in the process as much as possible.
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John emphasised that the world was at our feet, it was ours to design, and ‘this is
our sand pit to play in’.8 We encouraged people at the workshops to recognise that
they faced a unique situation, one that did not come along frequently in life. They
could design their world.
This changed the nature of the discourse from a communication exercise to a cocreation exercise. Rather than conceiving of the task as communicating to senior
sponsors, we conceived of the task as a group of people trying to work out what to
do. They were really planning in the sense that they were discovering corporate
purpose and inventing courses of action to achieve that purpose.
John also moved the dialogue away from the budget topic. This is worthy of some
explanation. Corporate planning is a budget driven conversation.9 This came home
to me with force when I interviewed one of the middle managers about the present
planning system. He talked about what happened in the planning cycle, but kept
returning to his branch office planning as the only process which mattered to him at
the end of the day. At first this surprised me since his branch head was only the
office manager (branches were the traditional power source of the organisation but
had been downgraded in the recent restructure). But when I pressed him about the
issue, he explained that the branch manager held the budget purse strings and so
controlled the amount of resources he could get, and resources was a proxy for the
size of your empire. Only then did the lights go on for me: planning was in fact a
tug-of-war over resources. All the analysis and all the discussions culminated in the
dividing and granting of the resource pie.
This shrinking of the topic to resources concentrates the mind and the dialogue on
inputs. A budget is essentially an allocation of inputs (resources) in exchange for
some promised outputs. The process begins with the inputs since the accountants
can provide those much more easily than the business operators can think of the
outputs. Also since the budgetary process is historically created by the accountancy
profession, inputs will dominate the thinking. All of this has its time and place, but it
should not drive strategic thinking. By banishing the budget aspect from the strategic
8
The sand pit image is one of John’s favourites. The linkage to Winnicott is clear; for John, strategy is
playing.
9
Compare with my earlier discussion on budgets (chapter one)
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conversation, John gave us the opportunity to move the dialogue firmly onto the
matters of purpose and strategy.10
4.5.2. An emergent ‘design-as-you-go’ approach
A key aspect of our approach was that we admitted that we were not quite sure
what we were doing. At the time I felt exposed and amateurish about this, and
envied the packaged neat solutions that I imagined big consulting firms could wheel
out to supply as ‘planning systems’ for clients. Much later I realised that this was in
fact a strength as I won major contracts against just such packaged solutions, with
clients specifically saying that the lack of a packaged solution was a major attraction
of my bid.11
4.5.2.1. Joint reflection, not expert packaging
I now realise that the lack of a formula was quite fortuitous. It forced us to honour
the process and to allow it to emerge. The lack of formula did not mean a lack of
intention or deliberateness. Instead it meant that we were committed to acute and
regular reflection on the process; rather than implement a package of pre-arranged
steps we had to observe and hypothesise as the process unfolded. And I engaged
the client in this process of emergence and reflection. This engagement included not
just the client’s project managers, it included the participants in our workshops. We
were quite honest in admitting that this was new, and we were improvising.
This explicitness had an important effect: it raised process awareness in the client
much more widely. Few of the clients’ managers had ever consciously reflected on
the planning system as a system; it was corporate rain dance in which one cooperated without thinking much, rather like cleaning teeth or brushing shoes. But by
inviting them to join in reflection on the process we opened up process awareness
as well as content awareness12.
10
Some firms are moving away from corporate controlled budgeting for these very reasons (see
Hope & Fraser 1997).
11
Compare with my discussion about method in the Introduction. Reflection is a method, especially if
it is consciously guided by heuristics. But it is a humble method than a tight predictive plan.
12
Schein (1990) distinguished between process consultants, who help clients with process, and
content based consultants, who trade in expert solutions. While both have their place, experts breed
dependency and inhibit the client’s learning. There are some fields where this is quite acceptable
(computer programming or law) but strategy is hardly one of them.
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Hence we divided our second series of planning workshops13 into two streams of
discussing process and formulating content. We spent the first half of the day
presenting an evaluation of the planning system for comment and discussion, and the
second half formulating content for the first of the new plans. The evaluation
presented six hypotheses about the present planning system for comment and
discussion.
This process awareness becomes significant, for the strategic conversation is a
disciplined and deliberate discourse that requires a group to sustain a level of
reflection and awareness. Thus the group must have a diagnostic grid that allows
them to differentiate strategic topics from operational topics, and, perhaps, more
importantly to recognise the whole purpose of the planning discourse. Without this
sophistication the discussion will lapse into uncontrolled topics and meander around
in gossip and chat. Only later did I realise that this was the real discipline of the
strategic planning process – not a set of mechanical steps or a set of neatly packaged
questionnaires around competitive positioning.
In later assignments I became more deliberate in educating the participants about the
nature of the strategic discourse, but it was during this seminal assignment with John
that I first realised that process awareness was a prerequisite to playing the game.
4.5.3. Freire and dialogue
I later encountered Paolo Freire, whose explanations of dialogue threw further light
on what we were achieving (Freire 1972, p. 60 ff).14 Freire wrote that the essence of
dialogue is the word, but that the word is more than an instrument. It has two
dimensions, reflection and action, and these two dimensions must enjoy ‘such radical
interaction that if one is sacrificed ...the other immediately suffers’. Thus true words
(i.e. a word which have preserved both reflection and practice in radical interaction)
transform the world. But if the two elements are dichotomised, then we will have
13
These followed on from the first workshop whose story I told earlier. They happened almost a
year later.
14
Freire wrote about liberal education in Brazil. But he related powerfully to any attempt to build
corporateness. I sent a copy of this chapter to a client who was then the GM of Organisational
Development with a major industrial organisation. That organisation was led by a fearsome and
overbearing leader whose ideas were inspirational but whose manner was tyrannical. Some weeks
later I was stunned to hear my client say to me that he had read Freire’s article several times and that
it perfectly described his organisation – a place of the oppressed. Freire named and diagnosed the
dynamics of oppression in this Australian industrial company perfectly. Soon afterwards my friend
resigned.
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unauthentic words which are unable to transform reality. Words deprived of the
dimension of action become idle chatter. The sacrifice of action will result in
verbalism; the sacrifice of reflection will result in activism. Freire saw that words are
not just descriptive but generative,15 and for people to exist humanly means to
‘name’ the world. ‘Men are not built in silence but in word, in work, in actionreflection.’ Importantly Freire emphasised that while words are transformative, one
cannot say the true word for another person, each must say it for himself or herself.
It is ‘the right of every man’. ‘Consequently no one can say a true word alone – nor
can he say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words’
(Freire 1972, p. 61).
Hence Freire concluded that ‘dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by
the word, in order to name the world.’16 Thus if people transform their world by
speaking their words, then ‘dialogue imposes itself as the way in which men achieve
significance as men’. For dialogue to be thus it cannot be an act of communication,
or as Freire describes it, an act of one party depositing ideas in another. Nor can it
be a wrangle of words between two groups of polemicists, neither of whom wish to
transform the world, but who merely seek intellectual gratification in overbearing
and in winning arguments. Thus it cannot be debate. It must be ‘an act of creation’.
The key elements of dialogue are thus agents, the mediating word and
transformation. Victims and students must recover agency; the word must become
a real naming of experience, reintegrating reflection and action; and the purpose of
dialogue must be recovered: to name and transform the world. John was a rebel, a
revolutionary. He staged a revolt in which we declared recovery of agency (‘it’s our
world, let us design it’). Together we honoured the word and reinvigorated it.
Reflection was honoured (‘Why are we doing this thing called ‘planning’? What is
this thing called ‘planning’?’). Action was reintegrated with reflection17 through
delegated authority to divisions. And transformation was claimed as our goal.
15
Clearly Freire’s models augment J.L. Austin’s work on ‘performative’ language which I discuss in
chapter seven.
16
My text has the phrase ‘mediated by the world’ but I cannot believe that Freire wrote this. Surely
it is the word that mediates.
17
Although not as quickly as we would have hoped. It would have certainly helped me to push the
action further if I had been aware of Freire’s diagnostic at the time. The movement to action was too
tenuous in the work with John. This was partly because John was not temperamentally a finisher.
Reflection was his strong suit. But my next assignment moved us to much more satisfying integration
between thought and action. See the Small Business case.
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4.5.3.1. Identity – the emerging subject matter
All true agency begins with the naming of purpose. Hence, the topic that emerged
as the key was the B in the ABCD™ model. (You will recall that the ‘B’ was the
desired state or identity of the group.) If the Queensland case taught us about the
nature of data around the A, this case taught us that the cohering topic for the
senior team was the B, the ultimate ‘why’ behind the organisation.18 The answer to
this question would forge the identity of the organisation and from this would flow
structure and process.
When we first formulated the B,19 it was a casual set of outcomes which included
revenue objectives and other desired changes, such as working in teams, and
changed culture. But as the conversation continued we rejected some of these
topics as subsidiary to the real B. They were more means than ends. We arranged
the B as a hierarchy of purpose, with the essence of ‘why’ at the top of the B. Team
work could not be a superordinate goal of the organisation. I can remember the
night that this occurred to us; we were working late after dinner in a city hotel
grappling with the topics and the ABCD™ model; I suddenly saw that this topic
called ‘team work’, while it was a key change initiative and did result in significant
cultural changes, was not the real B of the organisation. It was a hypothesis for
moving towards the desire, not the desire. (Thus it was a ‘C ‘ in the ABCD™
architecture.)
The B, we realised, must answer the question, ‘Why do we exist?’ This led to a rich
dialogue sustained over several workshops. It provoked a sense of emerging and
changing answers to that question. The Tax Office had traditionally answered that
question by saying ‘We collect revenue’. This had led to a culture of enforcement
18
See Bartlett’s and Goshal’s (1994) work on purpose and Collins and Porras (1996)on core
ideology. The recent commercial failure of Sydney’s airport rail link has been attributed to this
confusion over purpose. ‘Transport consultant, Mark Carter,…believes the government-consortium
partnership was the key flaw. If it is public infrastructure, then the public sector should supply it. ‘As
soon as private goals become involved, then it muddies the water as to why you are doing it,’ Carter
says’ (Bromby, 2000). This issue is often crucial in public sector organisations that are privatised, in
part or in whole. They get caught with a schizophrenic sense of mission, stranded between altruism
and profits.
19
The idiosyncratic use of this symbolic language was a key part of the developing dialogue. We
disliked more traditional planning categories such as ‘objectives’ and ‘goals’ and preferred this kind of
conceptual algebra. It allowed us to import our own meanings into the categories and enhanced our
reflection on the structure of the discourse. ‘What should be in the B?’ became a regular question,
born not out of frustration but out of inquiry and choice. ‘What do we want to be in the B?’ was
what we really meant.
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and auditing. But during the time of the previous Commissioner, Trevor Boucher,20
this style was changed to one of service and self-assessment to balance the auditing
culture. The organisation was still caught in this debate: are we enforcers or are we
service providers? Our workshops took this issue deeper. We realised that the
fundamental task of the organisation was not just to collect revenue, but also to
influence compliance behaviour of the community. We then constructed a model of
four stages of compliance, with phases being key transitions in the relationship
between the community and the Tax Office:
We clarify obligations to pay tax
We identify people and their obligations
People know and accept their obligations
People meet their obligations on time
(they later added ‘we make it easy for people to meet their
obligations’)
Thus rather than identify themselves as collectors of revenue these people reidentified themselves as influencers of behaviour. They then defined the nature of
that influence. This was an outside-in definition of their organisation, not a definition
by way of structure or even of numerical revenue goals, but a definition by way of
interaction and influence. The group also moved from a sense of dominance over
the community to a sense of service. It was the community which had the obligations
under the law, not the Tax Office; hence the office was an arbiter between the
community and the law for the good of the country as a whole.
In this way purpose was conceived not as a goal but as an identity. Identity in turn
was conceived as an interaction and a service. Service in turn was conceived as
influence and transformation. Transformation in turn was bounded by a scope of
influence, a scope emerging from the role of the organisation in the wider world. All
were underpinned by a set of implied values.
Hence a grammar of purpose or identity emerged. 21
20
This story was documented by the then Second Commissioner of Taxation, Senge (1994).
21
This paradigm is similar to the five key terms of dramatism that the rhetorician Kenneth Burke
(1945) uses. He identifies a ‘grammar of motives’ which we use to diagnose purpose. Burke’s five
are: act, agency, scene, purpose and agent. Three of these accord directly with my sentence: act =
nature of service; agent = agent; and purpose = desired transformation. I have not directly included
scene or agency. These are the environmental factors that might influence decision, or the tools and
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Figure 4-4: A grammar of purpose
4.5.3.2. Identity and systems
This kind of naming encourages systemic thinking. Ackoff’s (1981) explanation of a
system reveals this. For Ackoff, the system is named only by finding its interaction
with its host environment, not by cataloguing its constituent parts.22 Nor does the
wholeness lie in the parts, in fact naming them will only divide. The wholeness does
not lie in summarising the system but in the interaction that the system has with the
outside world. Thus the identity of the system cannot be entirely known as an
ontology as a self-generated description. And the more internal the focus of an
organisation becomes, the less of a true systemic identity it will create for itself. But
by moving outside itself to its domain of influence, and then looking back inside to
itself, the organisation will find purpose and integration. Thus, almost by definition,
structure and process will not create integration; at most they might be coordinated, but integration is beyond co-ordination. Integration requires purpose.
methods by which one acts. Within the architecture of the purpose statement that we constructed
these were implied elsewhere. Below this headline statement of identity we had a statement of the
‘operating vision’ which aligns with Burke’s ‘agency’, i.e. what is the envisioned agency or method by
which we will accomplish our mission? The environmental factor is half captured in the ‘domain of
influence’ which locates the mission within a certain field of human endeavour. ‘Act, Scene, Agency,
Agent, Purpose. Although, over the centuries, men have shown great enterprise and inventiveness in
pondering matters of human motivation, one can simplify the subject by this pentad of key terms
which are understandable almost at a glance.’ (Burke 1945, Page xv)
22
See my discussion of Ackoff’s use of system thinking in chapter two. This was my first strong
experience of a group thinking systemically, but ironically no mention was made of systems thinking
explicitly. Our approach was indirect, via the avenues of purpose and identity.
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Thus this team had moved to a systemic view of its organisation via the enabler of
identity as defined in the grammar of purpose.
4.5.3.3. Love and a domain of influence
Above I mentioned a phrase on which I also wish to elaborate: ‘domain of influence’.
This contrasts somewhat with the word Ackoff uses, ‘environment’. Ackoff’s
inspiration for systems comes from natural ecologies. In a natural ecology, purpose
is a moot point; adaptation is the key transformative factor. Thus, the more an
organisation can mimic an adapting natural system, the better, the more systemic it
will become. But I come from a different perspective, one better served by Freire’s
perspective, which is theological, not biological. My perspective is captured
inadvertently23 in the title of a book by Sir Geoffrey Vickers Human Systems are
Different (1983). My view is that human systems are more subtle than biological
systems and that imitating a biological system’s adaptive qualities is not the greatest
good that an organisation can aspire to. The difference is love. Human systems
should be defined by purpose and purpose should be defined by love. This is a
greater good than adaptation, and is a greater energy for transformation.
Freire says that dialogue cannot exist without ‘profound love for the world and for
men’. ‘The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and co-creation, is not
possible if it is not infused with love. .... If I do not love the world – if I do not love
life – if I do not love men – I cannot enter into dialogue.’ (Freire 1972, p. 62) So I
would argue that the top of the B is a statement of love. Interaction and service are
acts of love. It is deep in the nature of people to act out of love, but organisations
deny them that opportunity. Instead they act out of compliance and duty. But when
people act out of love they are energised. There are two loves in work; the art
employed and the constituency served. Most workers live oppressed lives engaged
by neither. Many are at least relieved by a love of the craft they employ: law,
carpentry, tax collecting, science, or teaching. But few go further and love the
constituency they serve, and the transformation they desire in that constituency.24
23
I say ‘inadvertently’ because Vickers meant in that book that human systems are different from
technical systems. I mean human systems are also different from biological systems.
24
I realise some people are coy about love. It is a word reserved for emotions and affairs of the
heart. Even Freire feels the need to apologise for it. This coyness reflects the disease of our time
that has dissociated person and work so radically. A brief conversation with one of my public sector
clients validates this sense of love on a personal level. I asked him why he worked in the public
sector. He replied that his father had died as a result of war wounds and the state welfare system had
supported him and his mother. So from the age of 16 he decided to join the public sector as a
response to the care he had received.
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Naming a system as its interaction with the environment is thus, in my terms, an
expression of love and intention, not merely perception and adaptation.
4.5.3.4. Dialogue and humility
But Freire goes further than love. He says that dialogue also requires humility. For
dialogue cannot ‘be born out of arrogance’. Co-creation assumes that one is
partnering in the act of creation. Freire asks, ‘How can I enter into dialogue if I
always project ignorance onto others and never perceive my own?’ This is a
besetting sin of bosses. For, cocooned in abstractness and stereotyped by notions of
control, they cannot confess ignorance. Senior teams, who sit at the top of an
organisational hierarchy, are assumed to sit at the top of a knowledge hierarchy.
From this Olympian height they dispense wisdom. One of the most commonly
accepted roles of the senior team exemplifies this expectation: the role of decision
maker. Senior teams are expected to make decisions; this implies finality and
certainty. It is the opposite of exploration and wondering. It implies we already
know what must be done and are assessing ideas for pass/fail results. We are telling
the organisation what can and cannot be done.
This sense of sureness opposes the development of humility. Humility requires that
we honour the experience of others. John sponsored humility in the discourse by
connecting strategy and operations. While he wanted strategic thinking to transcend
operational thinking, he also believed that we could never separate them and allow
strategy to develop in isolation.
4.5.3.5. Humility and engagement
In retrospect I now realise this approach by John was not merely democratic but
also philosophic. It addressed the nature of data and abstraction.
The need for worker involvement is well documented. ‘Participative leadership’ is
the flavour of the time. We need to involve the workforce so that they can own the
solutions. These are political words; they invoke power and property, rights and
claims. But participative processes are implicitly condescending as well as being
tedious.
I experienced this recently. I was involved with other consultants who had
developed a process map for the whole Tax Office. In doing this they had worked
only with two of the business lines in the office. They had produced a four-step
process which was very general, as it had to be in order to encompass such a diverse
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and complex operation. I could see that the generality of the map washed out
various distinctions that were critical to other areas of the office. When I raised this
with the other consultants (who were from an IT background, organised but
mechanical thinkers) they agreed and said, ‘It is an ownership issue – and a matter of
semantics’. This was a political interpretation of the weakness in the map which
condescended to the disenfranchised players. That is, they were implying, not that
the map was substantially flawed, but that the missing players needed to be
humoured by being allowed to ‘participate’.
However, in my view they were missing the key issue, abstractionism. The problem
with their map was its abstractness. In seeking to generalise across disparate data
and experiences, they had over-generalised. It was not that people had not had a
chance to contribute, but more that they had taken too aloof a view. Humility is fed
by a rejection of abstractionism as well as a respect for the experience of others.
This workshop process began a strategic conversation in the group that continued
for three years and still survives to this day.
To explore the real dynamics that enabled this leadership team to embrace dialogue,
I have turned to a theologian and his sense of the word. I have not done this to be
different; Freire’s model of dialogue adequately helps me understand what we
created. Acting on intuition, we created a ‘community of seekers in Babel after the
fall.’ (Young 1970, p. 9).
4.5.4. Dialogue and design-facilitation
Let me conclude this section by referring to David Bohm’s (1997) work on dialogue.
Bohm has developed a specific process called ‘dialogue’ which has some similarities
with my approach, but also major differences. Bohm’s process is essentially an
attempt to regain coherence between people by uncovering and articulating
assumptions and beliefs. He explains the need this way: ‘What is needed is a means
by which we can slow down the process of thought in order to be able to observe it
while it is actually occurring... We can be aware of our body’s actions while they are
actually occurring but we generally lack this sort of skill in the realm of thought
(1997, p. 2). Hence the dialogue process has no agenda and no purpose. ‘It is not
concerned with deliberately trying to alter or change behaviour nor to get the
participants to move toward a predetermined goal.’ In fact the real goal seems to be
the creation of fellowship or ‘koininia’ (the Greek word for fellowship used in the
New Testament). ‘As this fellowship is experienced it begins to take precedence
over the more overt content of the conversation.’
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Bohm specifically separates dialogue from discussion or debate which seem to him to
be fragmenting behaviours both socially and intellectually (ibid., p. 283). In practice a
dialogue session has no agenda, involves about twenty people and lasts around two
hours. Bohm admits that many people experience some frustration with the
apparent aimlessness of the process.
My process shares with dialogue the commitment to establishing a substrate of
shared meanings. We work on creating shared mental models around topics, and
exert much energy in achieving that. I also strive for synthesis rather than analysis.
Like Bohm, I begin with a process of suspension in order for the sense of group and
problem to emerge. But design facilitation differs from dialogue in important ways.
We have an unashamed sense of purpose. We are meeting to achieve something.
We achieve this by synthesis rather than analysis, but we are purposive. We have
topics, and they are vital. They are the glue that unites the group, for we believe
that self-existing, self-referential groups are not viable. Bohm’s process is
introspective whereas my process is focused on a task at hand.
The interest of the business community in dialogue or conversation is growing, and
the term ‘dialogue’ is loosely used. Rarely does it mean what Bohm means by it,
indeed, I find it hard to imagine such an extravagant process being consistently used
by my constituency of senior management teams. A recent article by Brown and
Isaacs (1997) exemplifies the interest in conversation. Entitled, Conversation as a Core
Business Process it claims that collaborative conversation is central for creating
knowledge. ‘These self organising networks are formed naturally by people engaged
in a common enterprise – people who are learning together through the practice of
their real work’ ( p. 2).
But while these moves share with Bohm the general flavour of informality and the
move towards oracy away from literacy, the similarity ends there. These
conversations are purposive and revolve explicitly around tasks, not around
providing a space for fellowship.
While my design facilitation shares features with the conversation movement, it is
also different. It shares the task orientation and the distrust in bureaucracy and
hierarchy. But the examples and cases that Brown and Isaacs study focus on
technical problem solving and knowledge creation, whereas my cases with the
executive teams focus on decision and policymaking. Brown and Isaacs also focus on
accidental ‘corridor’ conversations. I am trying to mainstream conversation and
design by taking over a very formal system that lies at the heart of organisational
decision-making, the planning system. It is the very formality and authority of this
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process, bed-ridden and archaic as it is, that attracts me. For if it can be usurped by
genuine creativity and conversation then we have made a major move towards
institutionalising organisational change.
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4.6. Conclusion
This chapter has traced the emergence of the strategic dialogue in practice. The
practice covers seven years of stories and growth. In it, I have sought to capture the
essence of dialogue in senior teams, not the shadows. This pursuit of essence has
not been easy but I hope it has been productive. Conversation is a mystery. If it
was easy to create and foster; every senior team in the land would be doing it but
they are not. Chasing the essence has given me a deeper respect for dialogue. I
think of it like the Greeks did of their inspirational arts, as a Muse, coy, teasing and
elusive. I have sought as T.S. Eliot did to find the life of the conversation, ‘the
notion of some infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing’ (T.S. Eliot, Preludes from
Selected Poems 1972).
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The poetic soul:
pursuing the art of the
‘design-facilitator’
This chapter explores the ways that poetry has contributed
to my art of facilitation. It has nurtured and authorised a way
of thinking that has proved deeply useful. In this chapter I
pursue the art of poetry and generalise it into a way of
thinking. I study three major poets writing on poetry. From
T.S. Eliot, I draw the task of the poet, the recovery of the
intractable. From Wordsworth, I draw some of the key
attributes of the poet, in particular empathy and reflection.
From Coleridge I draw further attributes, in particular the
imagination. I conclude by considering a connection between
metaphor and leadership.
Chapter five
Chapter five
5.1. Liberal arts as seeds for design-facilitation
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5.1.1. Making with words
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5.1.2. Two kinds of facilitation: designing or team-building
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5.2. T.S. Eliot and the poetic task
Error! Bookmark not defined.
5.2.1. The ‘Objective Correlative’
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5.2.1.1. The task: elucidating the intractable
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5.2.1.2. The task requires character
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5.2.1.3. The task involves aesthetics
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5.2.1.4. The social context
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5.2.2. The poetic subject: communal, not just private experience
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5.2.3. The poetic skill – the catalyst
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5.2.3.1. Empathy
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5.2.3.2. Eclecticism, generalism
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5.3. Wordsworth and the poetic capability
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5.3.1. Poetic ‘thought’ – the organic sensibility
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5.3.2. Poetic truth
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5.4. Coleridge and the imagination
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5.4.1. The fancy
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5.4.2. The imagination
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5.4.2.1. Imagination and synthesis
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5.4.2.2. Imagination and heat
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5.4.2.3. Imagination and crystallisation
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5.4.2.4. The engineering mind and design facilitation – a bad mixture Error! Bookmark not defined.
5.4.3. Two kinds of facilitation – assemblage or meltdown
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5.4.3.1. The engineering versus the poetic task
Error! Bookmark not defined.
5.4.3.2. Poetic tools – melting down and diving deep
Error! Bookmark not defined.
5.4.3.3. Imagination and pictures
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5.5. Imagination and metaphor
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5.5.0.1. Metonymy
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5.5.0.2. Synecdoche
Error! Bookmark not defined.
5.6. Metaphor and Leadership
Error! Bookmark not defined.
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5.1. Liberal arts as seeds for design-facilitation
The cases in chapters three and four document my discovery of the strategic
conversation. I now turn to consider what tools of intellect and character equipped
me for this discovery, and how my liberal arts training in particular was instrumental
in this equipping.
5.1.1. Making with words
In my consulting I had moved from being a technical writer to a design facilitator.
But how did my training and love for English (and in particular poetry) and for
teaching English, help me? Was it incidental or fundamental in my movement?
I argued in chapter two that we are better advised to distinguish thought as
‘description’ or ‘making’ rather than as analysis or intuition. Thus we are searching
for the arts of making. My journey as a facilitator was a journey back into the forge
where meanings are made, away from the shopfront where messages are displayed
or polished. And the materials we are making with are words. So words remain the
matter of the art.1 Not words as garnishing or as elaboration but words as scalpels,
words as mirrors, words as fires to melt down fixities. A facilitated workshop is a
dynamic, swirling cauldron of thoughts and ideas fabricated as words, the heat of the
context melting down positions into possibilities. Once this meltdown has occurred
the facilitator/sculptor/artist can begin to fashion the word-materials into a pleasing
and useful object.
What do poets do and how do they do it? Do they have a technique or a craft? Or
are they born not made? What is the heart of a poet? And what contribution do
poets make to a society? Many people would search for the essence of poet’s craft
in technique, the ability to write well, to produce metaphor, to rhyme and to
condense: a kind of lyric fluency or eloquence. Many managers use the term
‘wordsmith’ to describe clear writers; for them, poetry would be a utilitarian art of
techniques. The wordsmith term irks me because it limits the art to veneer, and
denies the poet’s mastery over thought and meaning.
I argue that poets are masters of meaning, not just technique, that the essence of a
poet is the soul of the poet, and that the poetic soul is a fundamental aspect of the
design facilitator. To understand the soul of the poet, we will consider three great
1
Of course the Greek word ‘poesis’ is derived from their verb to make or to manufacture.
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poets writing about the master craft of poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, and T.S.
Eliot. From T.S. Eliot we will discern the task of the poet, the work of the poetry.
From Wordsworth we will consider the particular capabilities which enable the poet
to perform the poetic task. From Coleridge we will discern the particular value of
poetry, its contribution to the modern world.
This then is the work. Let us look for the craft of thinking in the art of words called
poetry.
5.1.2. Two kinds of facilitation: designing or team-building
Before I explore the arts of poetry that contribute to my facilitation work I need to
distinguish my kind of facilitation from the more normal style that works in
management today. Facilitation is a now a widespread and recognised service in
organisations. It is a by-product of the Total Quality Management movement which
emphasised teamwork and group problem solving. Facilitators coach teams and help
them run meetings or workshops, apparently much as I do. But there is a key
difference. Most facilitators work to enhance teamwork and relations rather than
the quality of the thoughts and arguments. Their focus is on facilitating or ‘making
easy’ group dynamics; they are skilled at breaking the ice, handling conflict and
diagnosing team roles. Thus their contributing arts are psychology and sociology,
the study of behaviours and relationships. Their object of work is the team itself,
and they remediate dysfunctional teams. Hence psychological tools such as conflict
resolution methods, the Myers-Briggs index and Belbin’s team roles predominate in
their work. I emphasise different things. I focus not on the team as an entity but on
the argument and ideas. Rather than view the team as self-existing, I view it as
coincidental to the task of making together; in a sense for me the task forms the
team, not the other way around. This means that while I respect these
psychologically based tools I do not use them, and I work much more aggressively on
the task of the teams than on the relations of the teams.
Thus I am more designer than facilitator. I design idea-products in real time using
the group as design collaborator and source. My service is much more invasive and
fundamental than teamwork facilitators; they work on the peripherals of the team,
while I work on the core, the product the team produces.
This difference distinguishes my inspiring arts from those of the teamwork
facilitators. Their inspiring art is psychology while mine is poetry (and teaching).
Mainstream psychology is a social science; poetry is proudly a liberal art. As a social
science, psychology locks facilitators into the same scientific thought paradigms as
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their management clients; empiricism, experimentally derived truth and data as
demonstration. So while on the surface the social work of team facilitation offers a
‘soft’ alternative to the ‘hard’ edge of technical managers, the undercurrents of both
flow together, powered by the same gulf stream of scientific reasoning. However,
my design facilitator role comes from a different stream of liberal arts and thus has
always had less of a natural home in organisations, seeming to challenge management
more fundamentally and to offer newer perspectives.2
2
Nowhere have I seen this contrast more saliently demonstrated than in the readings from the 1977
conference on metaphor hosted by Chicago University (Sacks 1979). One of the readings was from
psychologists (Howard Gardner and Ellen Winner) while the others were from English professors or
philosophers (such as Wayne Booth and Paul Ricouer). Gardner and Winner (ibid., p. 121) begins
nervously feeling the need to distinguish between ‘the psychological and humanistic studies of
metaphor’. They astutely contrasts the two cultures -- the conceptual distinctions and theoretical
concerns of humanist versus the tests, experiments and laboratory apparatus of psychologists, and
acknowledges their mutual suspicion and distrust. They quotes one piercing remark by the literary
critic Rene Wellek who said that psychology was based on a false empiricism, a ‘superstition of
behaviourism’ that denies ‘introspection and empathy, the two main sources of human and humane
knowledge’. It is interesting that psychologists have successfully gained credibility in the management
field while humanists have not. For instance Gardner has since this conference, become a bona fide
renowned management writer by expanding into the field of leadership. In contrast great humanists
such as Booth (whose conference paper struck me as far more profound and memorable than
Gardner’s) have not done so. Perhaps none of them have ever wanted to. But I feel the reason lies
more in the complicit streams that unite psychology and management, and in the paradoxical gulf
streams that divide humanities and management.
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5.2. T.S. Eliot and the poetic task
5.2.1. The ‘Objective Correlative’
We can begin indirectly. Eliot was not explicitly addressing the art of poetry when
he wrote his famous essay Hamlet and his Problems (Selected Essays, Eliot 1950), but
during the course of this essay he develops what has since become one of the
greatest statements of the art of poetry. Eliot maintains that the problem is Hamlet
the play, not Hamlet the character. (We need not divert here to explore what
critics have found problematic about Hamlet; we can just take it as given that they
have found it so). Eliot sees the work of great art as to ‘drag to light’ the intractable
aspects of human experience. Hamlet fails as a play because it fails to do so; in
essence Hamlet’s loathing of his mother for her hasty remarriage forms the dramatic
energy of the play, but is in excess of the facts as they appear. Shakespeare created
an energy that was excessive for the facts of the drama. ‘Hamlet, like the sonnets, is
full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate
into art’(ibid., p. 124). The task of art, Eliot is implying (and in particular the art of
words) is to drag the intractable into light. And by light Eliot does not mean an
experiment that explains behaviour in causal relations. He goes on to explain what
he means by this:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective
correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be
the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must
terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
[ibid., P. 124-5]
You bring to light the intractable by creating an objective correlative, a work that
will evoke the emotion. The object is a thing commonly experienced in the world
and shared by many people; an image, a situation or a set of things. When people
engage with it, they do so at a sensory level, not primarily at a cognitive or abstract
level. But if the created object is skilfully crafted, it will not be a glancing encounter,
it will signify deeper emotions that are caught shimmering in the webs of
connotations around this ‘object’. It will correlate with a wider emotional field of
human experience. Thus the particularity of the object will paradoxically assume
some kind of universality by the ‘correlations’ it evokes.
If we have a wide enough definition of metaphor, then Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’
could be seen as metaphor. All art then would be metaphor, for objects signifying
beyond themselves via a web of correlations out into the cosmos of human
experience.
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5.2.1.1. The task: elucidating the intractable
For our purpose several key points emerge. First, the topic that intrigues the poet is
the intractable, not the tractable. The whole challenge that fires up the poet is to
drag to light (the phrase evokes effort and struggle) that which is hidden and not
easily laid open. This challenge of lightening the intractable makes the poet’s
preferred task domain precisely what the scientific management avoids, the
ambiguous and the half understood. We observed several times in this thesis that
modern managers must feel that they are in control and can drive out ambiguity, the
Cartesian aim of living in a certain world. But if poetry had formed their minds,
ambiguity would be a playground and challenge.
The first chapter of the book of Genesis is one of the great archetypes for the
creative act. The second verse dramatises the creative act thus:
Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep and
the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters
[Genesis 1:2]
The primordial state was darkened, formless and empty. This sounds much like the
‘intractable’ to me. Thus the primordial state that the poet wishes to transform is
the dark places of the intractable and the confusing, of the anomaly and the paradox,
of frustration and challenge. The cycle of reflective thinking begins with unease, or in
Eliot’s term, the intractable.
If the group does not feel this intractability then the design task will be minimised.
Groups that want to minimise worry and challenge will not be able to design with
vigour. This intractability3 is the topic we must address in design activities.
5.2.1.2. The task requires character
Secondly, it will require a character of openness and honesty to pursue the
intractable. It requires more than cognitive skill or linguistic facility; it requires
character. The facilitator must therefore possess more than cognitive skill or
linguistic skill; the design facilitator must have character and honour the dark places
that lie around human experience. If we avoid them then the poetry cannot be
3
I think that it is what Keats was referring to in his great phrase ‘negative capability’. ‘..The quality
that went to form a man of achievement especially in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so
enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance, would
let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of
remaining content with half knowledge’ (Keats 1970, p. 41).
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written. These dark places, this intractability, could be technical, or aesthetic or
ethical. The design facilitator must offer himself or herself as the one who opens up
the poetic endeavour by recognising the intractable and setting out to move it
towards a governing pattern.
5.2.1.3. The task involves aesthetics
This leads to the third point that emerges from Eliot. While the intractable is the
task domain of the poet it is not the final goal; a work of art is the final goal. The
intractable is the enemy of art, because it is formless and without substance. Artists
wish to move on both the aesthetic and the substantive fronts to create an
explanatory pattern. Thus the design facilitator is driven to move the group towards
its own work of art, its own ‘poem’. This work of art will be the object that
correlates, it will be a metaphor that usefully explains, guides and enhances.
5.2.1.4. The social context
Fourthly, and finally, Eliot’s brilliant analysis locates the poetic task in a social
context. Others must find their lives explained in the work of art, they must find
their emotions resonating as they watch. So the poet seeks to move people to
heightened feeling and sense of meaning in their world. This sense of meaning is
achieved not by a set of propositions but by a metaphor or a story that will connect.
Thus the design facilitator leads the group to create a work that will connect; the
task is social and others must identify with the work.
A byproduct of Eliot’s essay is that some subjects are not ready to be dragged into
the light, for whatever reason. Clearly Eliot felt that Hamlet the play was such a
thing. Similarly I have found that intractable topics are not universal in their degree
of difficulty. Some are ready for elucidation and some are not. (For instance,
Terry’s intractable topic of quality which I covered in chapter three was clearly not
ready for elucidation at the time the plan was written).
If the task of the poet is to drag the intractable into light, where does the poet find
his or her subject matter? How does the poet get bothered in the first place? What
kinds of problem does the poet find and where? These questions are addressed in
the second essay of Eliot that I will consider, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
(Selected Essays 1950 p. 3).
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5.2.2. The poetic subject: communal, not just private experience
Common myths of poets characterise them as loners. Eliot contradicts this popular
view in his extraordinary and famous essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1950).
He argues that great art or poetry is, in fact, a corporate experience, not a local
individualistic one. He argues that great poets live in a tradition of poetic thought
that they draw on when they write. ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete
meaning alone.’ This historical sense is not merely a cataloguing of the past; it
involves ‘a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence ... this
historical sense (is) a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal’. (ibid., p. 4)
This working with the past (by which Eliot means the wider sense of the civilisations
or corporate histories that have formed the poet’s context) is not a descriptive
refashioning or a slavish conformity. Eliot said that the poet could neither take the
past ‘as a lump’ nor could he base his observations on ‘one or two private
admirations’. Rather he or she must be aware of the current of the past, and of the
obvious fact that ‘art never improves but that the material of art is never the same’.
That is, ‘he must be aware that the mind of Europe – the mind of his own country –
a mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own private
mind – is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which
abandons nothing en route, which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or
Homer, or the rock drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen.’
Thus Eliot has significantly transformed the task of the poet. Poets’ material is not,
at best, private but social. They have absorbed the wider tradition of the societies
that have formed them, and have internalised the great arts of the past that have
represented the high moments of interpreting that civilisation. In Eliot’s view,
humanity is not atomistic but corporate and traditional; he conceives this corporate
life with some humility, unlike the development agenda of modernist science where
‘improvement’ is the fuel of the tasks. We experiment in order to develop and we
know more than the past. However, for Eliot this past is not a thing to be improved,
but a river or current to recognise and work within.4
If the subjects that interest poets are thus shared and universal rather than private
and idiosyncratic, then our image of the poet changes from recluse to sharer. This
builds a firmer bridge between poet and design facilitator. If the heart of poetry was
reclusive, then it would betray the heart to facilitate, since facilitating is a group or
4
Compare this with my discovery of the power of history to aid discovery for a community which I
discuss in chapter four.
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corporate process. As I facilitate, I work with the ‘tradition’ of the group and the
accumulated history of the corporation, the profession and society; I feel palpably as
if I am indeed working with a current of matters not my own. To do so I respect
the thoughts in the tradition that are not my own, but that form the tradition of
which I am now a part. I respect past efforts; working with change I honour
tradition; I feel I must understand the past. Every facilitation is not an event that
truncates the past, and promises a different future; it is part of a flow, a current, and
a tradition. Thus, in my honouring of the group and its history, I do not abandon the
soul of the poet but, according to Eliot, I find it. This opens up the domain of the
corporate and the societal to the poetic spirit. Poets can work in industry without
betraying the deepest part of the poetic soul.
Of course, in doing so they will work from deeper allegiances than just to the
corporation that employs them. The poet will work to freshen the past and to
confirm the human values and meanings embedded in the corporation. Poets
cannot, in the end, merely serve a locally corporate function. They will always in the
end seek to serve the universally corporate function, the humanistic enterprise that
unites Homer with Shakespeare.
5.2.3. The poetic skill – the catalyst
If the task of the poet is to conquer the intractable, and if the subject matter of the
poet is not purely private but corporate (in a human sense) how does the poet fulfil
this role? Eliot pursues the analogy of ‘catalyst’ to explain this, and in his explanation
I find the most resonant and accurate description of my emotional and intellectual
experience as a design-facilitator. He renders this corporate role of the poet as a
kind of ‘depersonalisation’. He then says, ‘I invite you to consider, as a suggestive
analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is
introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide’ (Eliot 1950, p. 7).
Eliot claims, ‘The mind of the mature poet [is] ... a more finely perfected medium in
which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations.’
He then explains his analogy.
When the two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of
platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum
is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the
platinum itself is apparently unaffected: has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The
mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the
experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind who creates; the more
perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
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[ibid., p.7]
Thus I facilitate as a catalyst. The mind of the poet is the mind of the facilitator. The
filament of platinum is the mind of the design facilitator. The materials are
contributed by the participants who bear in themselves not just a private task but
also a task for the community – they come as representatives of a wider whole. The
materials enter the mind of the poet which then acts as a catalyst to combine these
elements into new wholes. Thus the mind of the poet is the forge that creates new
materials for the group. These materials cannot enter the mind of the poet ‘neat’
and unassimilated as with swallowing pills; the poet must assimilate them by empathy.
They must become the poet’s own feelings to some extent. The group provide the
oxygen and the sulphur dioxide. The poet creates the sulphuric acid. Thus the poet
offers his sensibility as a kind of sacrifice, a kind of shared flask in which universal
problems are blended into new wholes, a sulphuric acid.
But the process, despite being completely dependent on the filament, carries no
trace of the filament in the final product. Thus the art of poetry is invisible in many
ways. It is certainly so with the art of design facilitation. The products that I create
are inextricably dependent on my ‘filamental’ role, but bear no trademark that
carries my name. The group has produced the sulphuric acid.
5.2.3.1. Empathy
Thus the poet is able to experience much vicariously. ‘It is not in his personal
emotions that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting.... the emotion in his
poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of emotions of
people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life’ (Eliot 1950, p. 8). As I
facilitate I vicariously experience ‘complex or unusual emotions’ that are not directly
my own. I first must vicariously live other lives, feel others’ frustrations and hopes,
run other people’s organisations before I can begin to create and make. One
anecdote will illustrate the reality of this. Design facilitation exhausts the participants
and me. Why? Because in the course of a one-day workshop we vicariously become
many people and experience many lives. This is a daunting task, especially given that
we are talking of poetic experience, not propositional experience that we are
digesting.
Participants regularly comment to me that they find the experience

mentally stimulating, even exhilarating
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
exhausting
After one recent facilitation the clients thanked me in an unusual way: they
commented on the emotional energy that I had poured into the task. While they
appreciated the intellectual mastery that I had displayed in guiding them over the vast
terrain of their organisation unscripted, they appreciated more the way I ‘gave blood’
in the process. I acted as if the company was my own, as if I was a shareholder, not
as a visiting consultant. They were identifying the soul of the poet.
5.2.3.2. Eclecticism, generalism
Eliot (1950) identifies another characteristic of the poet that allows him or her to
gather experiences: eclecticism. ‘The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing
and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the
particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together’ (p. 8).
Thus the poet must be fascinated by a wide and disparate set of experiences that, at
the time of apprehension, cannot find a use, but are harvested, stored and loved.
They are recognised as potential elements that could prove useful. So we might say
that irrelevance is a key attribute of the poetic soul. This is true also of facilitation;
the mind of the facilitator stores vast number of images that enter the mind as loved
irrelevances but which can emerge later as key tools of formulation.
After storing comes intensity. The artistic process is intense; it must provide
‘pressure ... under which fusion takes place. ... Great variety is possible in the
process of transmutation of emotion..’ (p. 8). The process of forging is energetic and
unpredictable. This aligns with the intensity of the design workshop; it cannot just
be a listing exercise or a description. There must be heat and there must be
transmutation.5
Eliot crystallises the poetic act as ‘a continual surrender of the poet as he is at the
moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a
continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.’ Hence the poetic
disposition is one of self-sacrifice and service to a greater whole. This sacrifice
results, – not in a ‘recollection’ of the data, but in a ‘concentration, and a new thing
resulting from the concentration’ (ibid., p.10).
5
Compare with Coleridge’s description of the formative powers of the Imagination which I discuss
later in this chapter. Coleridge’s great image of the imagination at work was volcanic, in his epic poem
Kubla Khan.
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Thus in any workshop I surrender myself to the group in order to vicariously absorb
their experiences. This is a palpable experience of sacrifice to the greater good. In
fact if there was one distinctive attribute of the emotion of design facilitation, I would
nominate this one of self-sacrifice. I risk ridicule, rejection and alienation by offering
my plainness, my ignorance and my confusion as a crucible for the intractable. I risk
contempt as I invite them to ‘play’. Within the eggshell egoland of knowledge
workers such play is culturally a risk. But moving a leadership group to such a place
is the key task of the design facilitator, and Eliot has fleshed out the emotional
intricacies of this task in his great analysis of the work and capacities of the poetic
soul.
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5.3. Wordsworth and the poetic capability
Eliot is not alone in contemplating the poetic soul in this way. Ironically,
Wordsworth, the doyenne of the Romantics, writing almost a century earlier had
identified similar capabilities and functions for poets. Wordsworth contended for
the social role of the poet much like Eliot. But he took us further than Eliot in
understanding the nature and capabilities of the poet in this work. Eliot elucidated
task, subject and role, Wordsworth elucidated competence and capability. The
following analysis is based on a reading of the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads written in
1800 (Wordsworth (ed. Norman) 1962).
5.3.1. Poetic ‘thought’ – the organic sensibility
Wordsworth elegantly explains several key faculties of the poetic soul. Firstly, he
explains that the poet must have deep feelings and like Eliot, he contends that these
feelings are not purely private but are somehow perceived and shared from a wider
life. In answer to his own question, ‘What is meant by the word poet?’ he says that
the poet has a ‘disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if
they were present’. In other words, the poet can create proxies for experience
which are the data or the seedbed for reflection, for enthusiasm, for passion. From
these proxies the poet can use superior powers to express what he thinks and feels.
Thus the poet is filled with a kind of internal data, a verdant thought life from which
expression flows. Poetry thus becomes, in Wordsworth’s famous phrase, ‘the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.
But there is more to it than spontaneity. Thought must now act upon this ‘organic
sensibility’. ‘For our continued influxes of feelings are modified and directed by our
thoughts which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings.’ Two roles
seem to be ascribed to thought here. The first is intriguing. For Wordsworth,
thoughts are the vestiges of feelings, the memory trace of a feeling. The ‘sensible’
soul opens the poet up to gather emotional data, but once the stimulating
experience has moved away, the feeling is preserved as a thought. Thus when we
are thinking we are not just manipulating propositions but we are dealing with
remembered feelings, feelings that are the vestiges of our responses to situations.
The second role of thought is to modify and guide the influxes of feelings. Thus
thought acts upon the memories of feelings. Wordsworth sees thinking as
comparison, ‘contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each
other’. That is, the act of thought is not analytical in the sense of pulling apart, but
contemplative, and the thing contemplated in the act is ‘relations’. Furthermore
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there is a purpose in the act of thinking. In so doing ‘we discover what is really
important to men ... and our feelings will be connected to important subjects.’ Thus
thinking moves beyond contemplation and comparison into significance.
In this was Wordsworth has identified four key stages of poetic thought. First, the
sensibility by which feelings are gathered. Second, thought that acts upon the data of
feelings in two ways, representation and comparison. Third, composition by which
patterns are created. And fourth, significance by which feelings are connected to
wider importance. This last stage was important for Wordsworth; he saw poetry as
a kind of philosophy.
Aristotle ... has said that poetry is the most philosophic of all writing: it is so; its object
is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative; not standing upon external
testimony but carried into the heart by passion; truth which is its own testimony, which
gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it appeals, and receives them
from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man and nature.
[Wordsworth (ed. Norman), p. 147]
This poetic thought describes the faculties of the design facilitator. The design
facilitator must be able to live in vicarious worlds without ever having personally
experienced them. If a group describes a process or an organisational problem, the
design facilitator must be able to internalise the feelings, not just the propositional
content of these stories. Many lives must jostle within the mental space of the one
person. Importantly, the designer will not need undue external stimuli to recreate
this data of experience; Wordsworth, writing with startling prescience, complains
that his age is one where the ‘discriminating powers of the mind’ are blunted by a
‘craving for extraordinary incident’, and the mind is being reduced to a state of
‘savage torpor’. In contrast to this leechlike dependence on external stimuli, the poet
must develop internal stimuli that do not need excessive promptings but are fed by
an internal capacity to recreate experience. So design facilitators must have great
imaginations, but imaginations that recreate feelings rather than dream up fantasies.
The design facilitator must have an organic sensibility, a soul of great empathetic
qualities.
Then the design facilitator will build onto this empathy a capacity for contemplation
and connection. Both the empathy and the contemplation are key processes in my
facilitation. I need not so much gather data as feel the feelings of the group. To do
this I must get inside events and processes, to feel them as a participant might.
Hence I eschew abstraction and opinion and search instead for the data of
experience. Having assimilated this data onto my soul, I often move into silence,
letting the group talk. It is as if, my energy having being absorbed by the process of
feeling, I need to contemplate relations in a search for an emergent truth. This
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means relatively long periods of inaction on my part while I search, like the poet, for
the ‘pattern that connects’. The key word for this thinking process is ‘composition’
rather than analysis or ratiocination. This is Wordsworth’s word, and it is the
climactic act of thought just before ‘pleasure’.
The emotion is contemplated until, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually
disappears and an emotion kindred to that which was before the subject of
contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. In this
mood successful composition begins and in a mood similar to this is carried on...but the
emotion is qualified ... by various pleasures.
[Wordsworth (ed. Norman), p. 154]
‘Contemplation’ precedes ‘composition’. Successful composition ignites pleasure.
Pleasure is a kind of truth. This is the process of poetic thought. It is very different
from the scientific method, and far closer to the work of facilitation in my view.
5.3.2. Poetic truth
As with Wordsworth, this process is not a casual gloss or an elaborate edificing of
thought, but a search for truth, for significance in ordinary things. This search for
truth is not a search for empirical truth but for aesthetic truth, truth as pleasure.
The artist will be in a state of enjoyment as the beauty of connecting patterns reveals
itself. This is the joy of creation, not the relief of problem solving.
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5.4. Coleridge and the imagination
Coleridge probably moved closer than either Eliot or Wordsworth to the real value
or character of poetic thought; if Eliot located the task of poetry, and if Wordsworth
explained the key attributes by which poetic thought operates, Coleridge made the
great claims for the distinctive way that poetic thought contributes to the
philosophic enterprise. Poetic thought coheres.
A poem is that species of composition which is opposed to works of science, by
proposing for its immediate object pleasure, not truth; and from all other species ... it is
discriminated by proposing to itself such delight from the whole as is compatible with a
distinct gratification from each component part.
[Wordsworth (ed. Norman), p. 163]
This ‘delight from the whole’ builds on Coleridge’s theory of the imagination6 and
the fancy. In the extraordinary chapters twelve and thirteen of the Biographia Litteria
(Coleridge, 1978, p. 502 ff) we find probably the most evocative and promising
explanation of the art of poetic (or conceptual) thought ever written. In chapter
twelve, Coleridge has catalogued the great faculties of ‘the soul and its organs of
sense’. Coleridge identifies:
* The sensory organs by which we experience the world – the eye, the ear, touch
etc.
* The imitative power (i.e. the power of representation akin to Wordsworth’s
definition of ‘thought’ as ‘representation’)
* The imagination or the ‘shaping and modifying power’ (akin to Wordsworth’s
‘composition’)
* The aggregative and associative power – i.e. the fancy (probably akin to
Wordsworth’s ‘contemplation’)
6
One of the most successful and influential management books of recent times, Hamel and Prahalad’s
Competing for the Future (1994) emphasises the need for modern managers to foster and use their
imaginations. Rationalist restructuring and reengineering are not enough, they argue. ‘The goal of this
book then can be simply stated: to help managers Imagine the future, and having imagined it, to create
it. ... In business, as in art, what distinguishes leaders from laggards, and greatness from mediocrity, is
the ability to uniquely imagine what could be’ (ibid., p. 26-27). This observation makes Coleridge’s
insights into the faculty of imagination all the more relevant for modern organisations.
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* The understanding – i.e. the power of regulating, substantiating and realising
(probably akin to Wordsworth’s move into the realm of truth making and
significance)
* The speculative reason, or the power by which we produce unity, necessity and
universality (akin to Wordsworth’s notion of philosophic truth)
* The will, choice and the sensation of volition.
This rich spectrum of conceptual thought is well worth investigating deeply7 as it lays
out a set of competencies contrasting with the narrow band of scientific logic. But
that is beyond my scope at the moment.8 Rather, I wish to point to Coleridge’s
distinction between fancy and imagination, a distinction that he felt Wordsworth did
not understand. Certainly Wordsworth’s distinction between composition and
contemplation is much less sustained and emphatic than Coleridge’s. The terms
seem to be rather synonymous for Wordsworth, whereas for Coleridge fancy and
imagination where utterly diverse.
5.4.1. The fancy
Fancy ‘has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definities.’ In other words
fancy strings categories together like a string of beads. Each element is pre-existing
and is thus only arranged by the act of composition, not fundamentally fused. The
whole thus created by fancy is merely a cobbling together of fixed categories, at a
surface or verbal level. It is not a real whole. This is because
Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from time and space...(it)
must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
7
Coleridge himself fought a long ideological battle with mechanist psychologists of his day. He
contended for the shaping, active, God-like power of the imagination. His opponents limited
perception to passive reception, and imagination to a memory driven selection process. James Baker
(The Sacred River) summarises Coleridge’s battle in a chapter entitled ‘The Polar Imagination’. He
concludes, ‘Coleridge’s vitalistic theory of imagination is the culmination of the vitalistic reaction to
rationalism which, as we have seen, was growing powerful in the late eighteenth century.’ He then
quotes Basil Willey, ‘Coleridge is summarising the great struggle and victory of his life – his triumph
over the old tradition of Locke and Hartley, which had assumed that the mind in perception was
wholly passive, a “lazy looker-on” in an external world’ (Baker 1957, p. 123).
8
I believe there is much potential to take Coleridge’s sketch of poetic thought and codify it into a
method. In my concluding words on this thesis, I complain that the liberal arts have been too coy
about method, and one of the further tasks beyond my thesis will be to articulate more explicitly a
method for creative thought.
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[Coleridge (ed. Richards), p. 516]
Thus the materials or elements that the memory serves up to the workbench of
fancy are merely hinged and shaved, glued together with varying degrees of skill. It is
kind of intellectual carpentry or splicing or lamination, not a melting together, not
design but decoration, not making but arranging and laminating ideas.
5.4.2. The imagination
By contrast, the imagination fuses elements together at a sub-molecular level. It
moves beyond mere ‘aggregation and assembly’, and on this topic Coleridge
disagreed with his friend Wordsworth. Wordsworth thought that fancy and
imagination were synonyms. In his words, ‘to aggregate and to associate, to evoke
and to combine, belong as well to the imagination as to the fancy.’ Coleridge
disagreed emphatically and claimed that while he thought the one person may do
both kinds of work, they were different: ‘a man may work with two very different
tools at the same moment.’ Coleridge deified the imagination as the echo of the
divine.
The primary imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human
Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the
infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will; yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its
agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves,
diffuses, and dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered
impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital,
even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
[Coleridge (ed. Richards) 1978, p. 516]
So the imagination is active and living, an agent of creation, in contrast to memory
which is essentially a cataloguer. The imagination breaks down pre-existing
relationships in order to forge new ones. It does not allow fixities to remain as
fixities but rather seeks to melt them down to more elementary constituents in
order to recombine and recreate a new thing. This active process is living. That is,
the force of recombination is provided not by the objects which are so combined
(for they are dead and, left to themselves or the quiescent fancy, can only aggregate)
but by the living force of the imagination. It provides the heat and the shaping from
which the new emerges. The fancy is thus not only less interventionist, it is also
guided by a less intense phase of the will. Coleridge sees that fancy is driven by
choice. Choice is a mere ‘empirical phenomenon of the will’ which only modifies
and blends.
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5.4.2.1. Imagination and synthesis
The result of the work of the imagination is that a whole is created, not as a string of
beads (objects) but as a melted down recrystallisation. This whole coheres all the
parts, and the new constituent parts inhere the whole. This finally is the value
provided by the poetic soul: holism. So Coleridge maintains that the work of the
poetic soul climaxes in the imagination. This is Wordsworth’s ‘composition’. But
whereas Wordsworth allowed composition to be relaxed (‘recollected in
tranquillity’) Coleridge thought of it more deeply and aggressively. He identified
imagination as active and generated by the higher drive of will; he identified it as
living and not merely descriptive; he did not place such store as Wordsworth did on
the unity of nature and man but he linked creativity with the more interventionist act
of Genesis; he identified imagination as a fundamental fusing that recombined and
produced new things; and he linked imagination with a search for the whole and the
cohering function.
5.4.2.2. Imagination and heat
Coleridge explored the work of the imagination in his poetry more richly than in his
prose. He characterised imagination as the ‘esemplastic power’ and he developed
this geological imagery9 in his most famous exploration of imagination, Kubla Khan. In
Kubla Khan he characterised imagination as a volcanic life force erupting from the
bowels of the earth as a river which feeds the more serene architecture of the arts,
song, dance and dome. The action of the river is eruptive and molten, Dionysian in
its heat and intensity.
and from this chasm ... a mighty fountain momently was forced/amid whose swift half
intermitted burst huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail/ ... and midst those
dancing rocks at once and ever/it flung up momently the sacred river.
[Coleridge, Kubla Khan]
Thus the Dionysian energy from under earth, where tectonic forces pressure up vast
rock plates into molten swirls, produces the ‘river’ that then feeds the muses amidst
the green gardens over the earth. The molten energies become ‘sacred’ and the
9
You will notice how I slipped into similarly geological and metallurgical metaphors myself as I strove
to explain the formative workings of the imagination, in design workshops. (See chapter four, ‘How
hierarchy hobbles the senior team’.)
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turbulence flows into the Apollonian beauty of the song and the dance. Heat
becomes form.
5.4.2.3. Imagination and crystallisation
Less violent, but no less striking, is Coleridge’s more indirect and prosaic account of
the imagination in Frost at Midnight. Here the work of the imagination is alluded to as
crystallisation operating under the secret ministry of frost. The dripping water from
the eaves is silently transformed from liquid flow into brilliant chandeliers which
‘hang ..up in silent icicles quietly shining to the quiet moon.’ Here the image is
delicate but still transformative, still ‘esemplastic’. The water has changed molecular
state, no less than the molten rocks, and as the rock-fed river has produced dance
and serene song (art) so the faces of the crystalline frost (water fed diamonds)
reflect in a glittering display the lights of the silent moon.
This unifying, this esemplastic unifying, is the work of the imagination. But if this is
the apex of the poetic soul, how does it practically support the arts of the design
facilitator? How indeed does the esemplastic foundations on which my training and
inclinations are built support the art of design facilitation? Of the ‘making with
words’?
5.4.2.4. The engineering mind and design facilitation – a bad mixture
Let me tell you a story. Recently I had a rather unique experience. I participated in
a workshop for my client where not I but an engineer from the client’s team
facilitated, and I was paid to participate. I was awkward about it (the decision was
left to me as to whether he or I facilitated) but acquiesced. He had a method for
business planning which involved the formula of:
vision (15 mins)
mission (25 mins)
values (35 mins)
objectives (2 hours)
key Performance Indicators (45 mins)
key actions (1 hour)
Why was I so depressed by this agenda? The effect on me was palpable. I was
stressed and tense, all the more because I watched as the client’s team complied
with the process and proceeded to work to this agenda. The actual process was
undisciplined beneath this veneer of structure. The group agreed that we did not
want any ‘wordsmithing’, just agreement on the ideas, but then proceeded to deal in
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words for much of the day. The process was merely to list suggestions on the board
that fitted these headings. The aim was to move rather quickly into ‘objectives’ and
then ‘measures’ and ‘actions’, for after all these people were engineers.
Let me explain the significance of this remark. They were project managers who
were used to building plant. When you build plant you need a timeline and you need
structured milestones to predict when you aim to have the roads built, the
foundations poured, the frames in place, the piping buried, and so on. Engineers, in
fact, mainly assemble things they procure. So they literally price objects and set risk
parameters as to whether the price will increase between the time of cost estimating
and eventual procurement. Once they buy everything they then construct, but
‘construct’ means ‘assemble’ rather than ‘make’.
The key distinction emerged around the facilitator’s handling of objectives and
measures. If we did not emerge from the meeting with a list of objectives and
measures, then we would not have created a business plan. He showed me how he
had used this business planning method in the very large engineering construction
project he was running. In that project he had listed the key equipment steps as
objectives: thus he may have a group of seven objectives, each of which was a large
module of the plant. Thus, his objective might be to complete the underground
piping of the plant by June, and to do so on time and on budget. His objectives
were, in fact, a task completion date and quality specification. Sometimes the
objectives might also include a functional specification, whereby rather than an
equipment completion date, the aim would be expressed as the ability of the
equipment to perform a certain function. In the case of the piping, for instance, he
could add that the piping must be able to handle a certain volume and pressure of
water, and must last for ten years without corrosion.10
He was using exactly this same method for our business planning. He was aware
that I was awkward, and so were others of his colleagues. They expressed this
awareness in a sympathetic fashion as, ‘I hope that my approach is not too
structured for you.’ This sympathy only irritated me more. They were implying that
my approach – which they would have dubbed ‘creative’ or ‘intuitive’ – had flair but
was less disciplined, less outcome-focused and less structured than their approach.
In fact, their approach, as I intimated above, was sloppy, had no real structure to it
and was inefficient. But I need to stress again, they were sympathetic, respected me
10
The distinction between a functional specification and an equipment specification is very significant
in terms of project accountabilities, and is in itself a fascinating intellectual topic. Nonetheless it is not
germane to our discussion here.
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and would have gladly let me lead. The issue was rather that neither they nor I
could put our fingers on the real difference between what I would do and what they
would do. Only as I write this is the nature of the distinction, which is so palpable,
becoming clear. It is important to pinpoint this distinction, because it evidences in
microcosm the core of my thesis.
5.4.3. Two kinds of facilitation – assemblage or meltdown
I would now distinguish what we did in terms of task and tools. In Coleridge’s
terms, when the group tried to be creative, they engaged only the fancy, whereas I
engaged the esemplastic imagination. They aggregated and assembled, I melted and
recrystallised. The elements of composition in both cases were words. This is also
a vital point, and begins to explain why poetry is indeed a core business function.
Before people do anything they must create a picture of it in words. Thus words are
the pre-existent form of material creations. I italicise ‘words’ to indicate that the
term includes any form of symbolic representation, any symbolising tool which represents to our senses some figure of reality. This art, of re-presenting experience to
the mind, is the art of the poet.
5.4.3.1. The engineering versus the poetic task
First consider the task. That facilitator’s method suits a task where the components
are already invented, and hence where the challenge is to arrange and assemble
them. This is exactly the case in a large engineering project. The components are
already invented and manufactured (or at least specified for manufacture), and the
task is to procure and to cost them in a timely and orderly fashion. We might
characterise the nature of this task as logistical.
Thus he was using the engineering mind of assembly on a task that was in fact a task
of invention. Our task was one of invention, for this organisation that we were trying
to create did not yet exist. It was ‘pre-manufacture’; it had no shape or specification.
We were planning the future of a new group formed to review and audit the large
capital projects for a multinational organisation. Such a group had never existed
before; the different business units were left to their own devices in running their
projects. But some disasters had eroded the Board’s confidence in project
management in the group and this team had been formed with an urgent but
ambiguous mandate to make a difference. The leader of this new group and I had
conceptualised five core functions that the group could perform in order to fulfil its
business mission. Only one of these fitted the conventional role of an auditing
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group. The other four all involved a more expansive and visionary role to enhance
the ‘softer’ side of projects, and project management. One of the five areas was
‘competency development’.
The leader was moving to attach objectives to each of these five areas, just as he
would attach objectives to his multi-million dollar building/assembling projects. To
do this he used one page of the electronic whiteboard, and wrote the five areas
across the top of the page with columns underneath and space to write the
objectives. He expected the task to be done quite quickly, without too much
wordsmithing. I felt distinctly uncomfortable and complained that first we had to
conceptualise what each of these meant since they had not existed before, and
indeed still did not exist in all cases except one. Furthermore, there were no ready
models for each of these four. They were softer models of learning and people
development, areas in which these folk as engineers had no particular experience or
skill. The group agreed to try to describe a ‘what’, but all that meant was that the
leader added a first row under each heading for the what.11
This task, which to my mind was a major opportunity to explore and invent the
shape of a new thing, became a peremptory sentence. For instance, competency
development became ‘recognising and developing project staff to the competencies
required.’ This was seen as no more than a quick bridge to the objectives which
were ‘to have competent people in all key project roles and produce development
plan’. There was very little difference between the concept and the objective, and
neither of them is surprising or substantial.
5.4.3.2. Poetic tools – melting down and diving deep
Let me contrast my methods in a similar situation. I design-facilitated a similar, but
more ambitious, workshop for the Australian Tax Office. The scope of the
workshop was to invent how the Tax Office would work in the future. The task was
very similar in that we were envisaging something new. We were searching and
uncertain of what we would find or create.
As a stepping-stone to modelling the future, I asked the group to draw an operating
model of how the business worked today. I divided them into three groups and asked
them to express their ideas graphically. Each group found the task more difficult than
they had anticipated. They had expected that it would be difficult to model a future
business but surely not the present business. To their surprise it was hard enough to
11
Compare with my discussion on the weaknesses of the SWOT technique in chapter one.
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model the present! This exercise confronted the groups with the difficulty of
modelling anything that is ambiguous. They also all realised that there was no one
right model, since each of the three attempts had some merit yet were all different.
Each picture surfaced a different mental model of the business.
Thus the drawing process covered a lot of ground quickly.
5.4.3.3. Imagination and pictures
The drawing of pictures is a key part of my method, and relates my techniques
directly to Coleridge’s ‘esemplastic Imagination’. In a picture you relate elements to
make a whole – this is the instinct to draw. It is to show how parts relate, how they
function and fit together. This is entirely congruent with Coleridge’s claim that
poetry and imagery cohere.
When I draw I am palpably going ‘underground’. I am diving into the realms of substructures, of pre-verbal murky concepts, and I am retrieving the molten preformulated elements of the thought string. The drawing takes these pre-formulated
elements and recrystallises them. The drawing is my ‘frost at midnight’, reflecting
the moon.
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5.5. Imagination and metaphor
I would associate Coleridge’s concept of the imagination with metaphor. That is, the
essence of the act of composition by imagination, as opposed to fancy, is metaphor.12
We could go further and postulate that metaphor is the defining characteristic of the
poetic mind. This immediately raises the question of what we mean by metaphor.
The term is rich but varied in its usage. At one end of the spectrum metaphor is a
figure of speech, a ploy by which comparisons are made. At this end of the
spectrum, metaphor is not much different from simile. Quintilian, for instance,
minimises the difference: ‘On the whole metaphor is a shorter form of simile’
(Lanham 1991, p.100). But at the other end of the spectrum metaphor is more
invasive and more general. It is less a figure of speech and more a type of thought.
It is at this end of the spectrum that metaphor becomes, if not synonymous with
Coleridge’s Imagination, at least its prime agent.
This more transformative concept of metaphor is worth investigating since it lies at
the heart of the design-facilitation process I have outlined above. Aristotle expresses
this transformative view of metaphor in a key passage:
We all naturally find it agreeable to get hold of new ideas easily: words express ideas,
and therefore those words are the most agreeable that enable us to get hold of new
ideas. Now strange words simply puzzle us; ordinary words convey only what we know
already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.
[Rhetoric, III, 1410b]
Thus, as Richard Lanham says, Aristotle conceives of metaphor not just as a
comparison between two things, but also as the creation of a third thing (‘something
fresh’) (Lanham 1991, p 100). This creation of a third thing, or something fresh, is
the whole aim of my design-facilitation. Mere listing is not good enough. A new
thing must emerge.
Kenneth Burke explains that metaphor works by reframing perspectives; but he goes
further and widens the boundary to include purpose.
It is precisely through metaphor that our perspectives, or analogical extensions, are
made – a world without metaphor would be a world without purpose.
[Burke 1945]
12
Compare this discussion of metaphor with my discussion of Bateson in the introduction. For
Bateson, metaphor was the operational equivalent of logic, when we deal with living systems as
opposed to mechanical or physical systems.
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Lanham offers a key insight into the ‘esemplastic’ nature of metaphor by pointing to
its inherent instability as its source of creative energy. For metaphor works always
by implied extension from some norm, a norm which it seeks to challenge in some
way. Thus metaphor is always revolutionary, inviting the audience to consider a
different way.
Perhaps it is metaphor’s intrinsic instability which has attracted so much recent
attention: to appreciate the metaphoricality of a metaphor we must posit a nonmetaphorical, normative ‘reality’ against which to project the metaphorical
transformation. The oscillation of the two reality states, normative and transformative,
provides the essential bounded instability of a bistable illusion.
[Lanham 1991, p. 101]
The engineered approach to discussion, as evidenced by Lanham's process, was a
non-metaphorical process, and hence a stable one. It was an attempt to describe
reality accurately, and thus was non-transformative. There was no oscillation. Since
there was no instability set up, there was no creative energy. In contrast, when my
group worked I continually set up metaphorical possibilities which posited a
transformational possibility. Thus there was a ‘bounded instability’ emerging within
which the minds could create. Their normative world became ‘esemplastic’.
This use of the intellectual tool of metaphor emerges then as the intellectual engine
of change. For if people view the world as stable and needing only to be described,
catalogued, assembled, measured and analysed, it cannot and need not be changed.
But if we wish to change the world, we must begin to think of the whole world as
metaphorical;13 we must start to live with the bistable illusion, oscillating between
perception and imagination, between normative and transformative poles. To
change the world we must indeed take on the mind of the poet, the heart and the
art of metaphor.
Before leaving the art of metaphor and our discussion of it as the agent of the
esemplastic imagination, I briefly allude to two other rhetorical devices that are
associated with metaphor, and are associated particularly with the transformative
nature of metaphor. They are metonymy and synecdoche.
13
The marvellous Italian-English film, Il Postino, raises this question. The barely literate Italian postman
sits with the Nobel Prize winning poet Pablo Neruda, on the seashore, with dawning realisation of the
pervasiveness of metaphor, and asks, ‘Do you mean to say, Pablo, that everything in the world is a
metaphor for something else?’
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5.5.0.1. Metonymy
Metonymy is the art of representing a whole by its part. Burke (1945) describes it as
the art of reduction. The post-modern world has been attracted to metonymy,
according to Lanham, because it is a form of ‘scale-manipulation’. In my designfacilitation I use a form of metonymy frequently, when I represent a system by a
story or by a snapshot. This device preserves the concreteness of representation
and rescues it from the curse of much modern data, its over-abstract quality. Hence
the well-chosen story represents the whole, not merely illustrates it, in a way that the
spreadsheet, the vague mission statement or the annual report, can never do. And
since I identify my use of story telling as a form of metonymy, which is, in turn, a
form of metaphor, I am using it as a transformative device.
5.5.0.2. Synecdoche
Synecdoche is the shadow of metonymy, for it is the art of substituting a part for the
whole, as in the phrase ‘all hands on deck’. Burke claimed a central role in human
thought for synecdoche. ‘The more I examine both the structure of poetry and the
structure of human relations outside of poetry, the more I become convinced that
this is the “basic” figure of speech, and that it occurs in many modes besides that of
the formal trope’ (cited in Lanham p. 148). Lanham’s commentary expands further:
If this is so, at the centre of figuration stands scale change. To define A, equate it to a
part of B, derived by magnification. Experience is described in terms of other
experience, but at a different level of magnification. ... similarity of part to whole, selfsimilarity as it is called, is a central characteristic of the fractal geometry introduced into
modern thinking by chaos theory.
[Lanham 1991, p. 148]
Since I am trying to characterise vast systems in my design-facilitations, I must rely
on representing the whole by a part. What defies representation is the scale of an
organisation or of a large system; thus we must rely on the veracity of scale change
to capture the key aspects of the whole in a part. There is a trust that the spirit of
the whole inheres the part.
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5.6. Metaphor and Leadership
Wayne Booth gave a landmark address on metaphor in 1978 (Sacks 1979). Booth’s
address was entitled, ‘Metaphor as rhetoric: the problem of evaluation.’ In it he
confronts the problem of quality in metaphor, which immediately raises the linked
question of the nature of metaphor. What are the qualities of a good metaphor? he
asks, and he begins to list some good metaphors and their attributes. But as he lists
qualities he only demonstrates to us and himself that these attributes, while useful,
are eclectic and marginal. He searches for something fresh and more intrinsic.
By way of breaking the deadlock of weary expectations and jaundiced academic
evaluations, Booth introduces a page of Norman Mailer’s writing which is crammed
full of jostling and violent metaphors that break some of the rules for elegance and
coherence that Booth has been implicitly setting up. He recounts how a whole
lecture hall had laughed at the Mailer passage when it was read out, and how all in
the room rejected it as good metaphor; all, except one of Booth’s colleagues who
complained that the passage was read out of context. The page was the final page in
Mailer’s polemic The Armies of the Night. Booth pursued his colleague’s defence of
Mailer’s use of metaphor, a use of metaphor that we know galvanised public opinion
in America against the Vietnam War. He identified a new quality beyond the
intellectual armoury of the metaphor, a quality of personality:
The key word is personality. Such metaphoric muddlings ... are designed to flaunt
personality – that is, a special ethos. The character of the speaker is flaunted..
[Sacks 1979, p. 59]
Booth then explored a similar passage in Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in
France.
I need not tell you that Mailer was not the first rhetorician to attempt such immense
metaphoric identifications of a constituted self and a constituted cause. Every great
political speech or pamphlet reveals similar grand fusions. ... Like Mailer, Burke implies
that the fate of the whole nation depends on embracing a national character that will
match the personal ethos of the speaker.
[ibid., p. 61]
For Booth, metaphor becomes a laying aside of the false objectivity that the scientific
method has forced onto speakers. It is laying aside the cloak of impartiality.
Metaphor captures not just an intellectual perspective but also the animus of the
speaker – the speakers values and passion for the subject. Thus metaphor moves
from being a reformulation of the object to a presentation of the ethos of the
speaker. This locates metaphor at the heart of rhetoric since rhetoric involves the
art of influencing by speech and word (see chapter six). In that art, the credibility of
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the speaker is a key variable. So metaphor encapsulates not so much the reinvented
qualities of a topic, but also the values of the speaker around that topic. ‘In this
perspective, criticism of metaphoric worlds, or visions, becomes ... perhaps the
clearest and most important instance of a general human project of improving life by
criticising it.’ (Sacks 1979, p. 64)
Thus, moving the discourse of a large organisation towards metaphor will reinvolve
the self of the speakers. They will stamp their ethos on the discourse in a way that
the economic rationalist paradigm has denied them. In so doing they will build a
sense of purpose much more effectively than they could in the economic paradigm.
For purpose is a rhetorically constructed sense, not a logically derived one.
This excursion into the rich thinking of three great poets identifies how the poetic
mind has been instrumental in equipping me to discover design facilitation. Poetry is
the art of making with words, and acquaints the mind with ambiguity. Rather than
trying to subdue the ambiguous by analysis, the poetic mind seeks mastery by
contemplation, empathy, metaphor and the imagination. These and other tools of
poetry have regularly proved essential to me in my task of design facilitation. They
have been not cosmetic or tenuous uses of the poetic mind but regular and
fundamental.
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Chapter six
Mastering the design
conversation:
Rhetoric, logic
and the two roads to
truth
In this chapter I look to the lost art of rhetoric to inspire a
new, clearer expression of the art of creative thinking. I
contrast rhetoric with logic, and confront the question of
why logic and its derivatives have become so dominant in our
era, and conversely why rhetoric has not flourished. I try to
untangle the logical from the rhetorical in order to highlight
the distinctive elements of a rhetorically inspired method of
conceptual thinking.
Chapter six
Chapter six
Chapter six
Error! Bookmark not defined.
Mastering the design conversation: Rhetoric, logic and the two roads to truthError! Bookmark not defined.
6.1. Aristotle and the two roads to ‘truth’
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6.1.1. The logic road
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6.1.2. The rhetoric road
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6.2. The integration of speakers, audiences and the argumentError! Bookmark not defined.
6.3. A proposed rhetorical system
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6.3.1. Establish the domain of inquiry
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6.3.2. Clarify the civic situation
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6.3.3. Find the appropriate questions
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6.3.4. Invent possibilities
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6.3.5. Argument
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6.3.6. Judgement
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6.3.7. Decision (adherence)
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6.3.8. Criteria of coherence
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6.3.9. Values
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6.3.10. Words and figures
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6.4. How logic dominated thought – and rhetoric was neutered.Error! Bookmark not defined.
6.4.1. The tyranny of logic
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6.4.1.1. Galileo and numbers
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6.4.1.2. Descartes and the deification of mathematical logic
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Figures
Figure 6-1: The three elements of rhetoric
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Figure 6-2: Ten characteristics of a rhetorical thinking system Error! Bookmark not defined.
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The love and study of poetry guided me in my adolescence and my twenties; thus I
took all its arts with me into my consulting career, which I began in my thirties. But I
knew nothing of rhetoric when I went into consulting, finding out about it only midway through my consulting career, by which time I was already engaged in design
facilitation. Rhetoric provided an architecture where poetry provided a disposition
and a skill with language. By architecture, I mean that the theory of rhetoric
positioned my intellectual tasks within a wider field of thought, and it offered
structure, process and method. I used it, not so much to invent new methods of
work, but to diagnose what I was doing and present it as a wider system. With
rhetoric I could reflect more broadly on my practice and position it in the light of
centuries-old debates. I could place my practice in context and identify its uses and
principles as major tools for culture and community building. Thus I became
confident and convinced that I was more than just a dilettante or an organisational
accident. I was engaged in a serious attempt to build community around shared
purpose using rhetorical methods. I realised why I felt like a stranger most of the
time performing this task; for I was working with a lost art that is marginalised and is
no longer the guiding art of our age.
Thus the study of rhetoric explained, whereas the study of poetry prepared. And
since rhetoric explained, it also began a second stage of preparation. I came across
rhetoric roughly between the cases reviewed in chapters three and four. Poetry
offered me different ways of doing lots of tasks, creative edges as it were. But I was
left still without a sense of system. Rhetoric, however, gave me a sense of system.
With it I moved from being a performer to a builder. I became convinced that
organisations were a new polis; that strategic planning was a new rhetoric; and that I
was developing a new style of leader, one equipped for the rhetorical task. Poetry
gave me a sense of private competence; rhetoric gave me a sense of civic
competence.
Let us examine and develop the art of rhetoric. What is it? How is it relevant?
Rhetoric is a lost art that is regaining credibility and exposure. As far as I know no
Australian university offers studies in it; however in the United States, it is
burgeoning: in the 1970s only two universities offered doctoral programs in rhetoric,
while today over 70 do so.1 However, while rhetoric offers a rich body of insights,
we must do more than dust it off the ancient bookshelves and republish it. It must
be actively reinvented if it is to regain its prominence and become the guiding art of
the age. In the discussion that follows I am not primarily concerned to rediscover in
precise terms the meaning of the art, but rather to contribute to its reinvention. The
1
This information came from a personal conversation with Richard Young in 1995
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discussion is partly informed by the writings of others on rhetoric, but just as
actively invented and applied by me to fit the modern organisation. True to the
spirit of rhetoric, I am partly acting in a tradition and being formed by that tradition,
and partly inventing a new tradition to serve my community of interest.
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6.1. Aristotle and the two roads to ‘truth’
Rhetoric is an art of inquiry by argumentation. We could distinguish the art by its
methods – and we will do so shortly – but if that is all we did, we would miss the
essence of the art.2 For rhetoric is a lost, and fragile, art. It is fragile, not in itself,
but in its place in the modern world. It has the opprobrium of an exile, and is little
understood. It is very much like Eliot’s ‘infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing’
(‘Preludes’ in Selected Poems, Eliot 1972). In an age where the blunt hegemony of the
scientific method holds sway, rhetoric is an elusive art. If we are to recover some
sense of the art we must stalk it quietly. And the place to begin the stalk is not with
its methods. For if we explain the art by the methods, we will somehow miss the
point. Missing the point, we will even miss the methods in the end, and have
nothing.
No, the place to begin, is with what I call the ‘task domain’, that is, the tasks for
which rhetoric is designed and fitted. To address this issue we must be patient and
approach the topic indirectly. For in understanding this, we will understand
everything. Let us approach via Aristotle. There is a good reason for this. For
better or worse, Aristotle set up the structures of Western thought, and thus, in a
sense, we all live under his long shadow.3 This includes those of us who, like famed
creativity merchant Edward de Bono, dislike Aristotle.4 If we disagree with someone
2
Cicero said much the same thing in his introduction to rhetoric in De Inventione. ‘But before I
speak of the rules of oratory I think I should say something about the nature of the art itself, about its
function, its end, its materials, and its divisions. For if these are understood the mind of each reader
will be able more easily and readily to grasp the outline and method of the subject.’ (Op cit I iv 5)
3
Richard McKeon makes this point in his introduction to The Basic Works of Aristotle. ‘The influence of
Aristotle, in the ... sense as initiating a tradition, has been continuous from his day to the present, for
his philosophy contains the first statement, explicit or by opposition, of many of the technical
distinctions, definitions, and convictions on which later science and philosophy have been based, and
those distinctions and emphases were broadly and ingeniously applied in the learned disciplines by the
scholarly sect which early attached itself to his teachings. Much of the history of civilisation in the
West can be and indeed has been written in the form of a debate in which the triumph of Aristotle in
the thirteenth century and the defeat of Aristotle in the Renaissance indifferently herald great
intellectual advances’ (McKeon 1941, p xi).
4
In Parallel Thinking, de Bono lumps Aristotle, Socrates and Plato together as the ‘Greek gang of
three’ who created the Western thinking method that was ‘intrinsically fascist in nature, with rigid
rules, harsh judgements, and a high degree of righteousness’ (de Bono 1993, p. 6). He does not refer
in any detail to Aristotle, but mainly considers Socrates and Plato. There is great irony in de Bono’s
neglect of Aristotle, because it highlights his neglect and probably ignorance of rhetoric. He attacks
logic, and his whole thesis being to find alternative thought patterns that yield unexpected answers. I
agree with his sense that the logic paradigm has not served us well, but I look to rhetoric. Rhetoric
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we are arguing within the boundaries they have set up, and Aristotle set up the
boundaries for thought which have structured our sense of reason and logic ever
since.
6.1.1. The logic road
Aristotle demystified knowledge in that he set up an intellectual pathway to truth. If
we can imagine tribal societies ascribing causation to the gods, and limiting all inquiry
to religious inquiry, then Aristotle delivered to mankind alternative truth-making
equipment, an engine for making knowledge. This engine was logical analysis or
scientific reasoning, which he described fully in his Organon, particularly in the
Analytics. The essence of his system was premise, inference and conclusions, and the
outcome was certain knowledge through demonstration. The engine he invented
was the syllogism which operated with all the precision of a machine on matters of
inquiry. If a = b, and if b = c, then a = c. It is important to realise that Aristotle
proposed that this engine is a universal engine, i.e. that it works for all its subject
matters, independent of particulars or of circumstances. Not only is it a truthmaking machine, it is a universal truth-making machine.
Aristotle linked this intellectual machine heavily into cause and effect reasoning.
Inference is essentially a relating of a cause to an effect, and the demonstration is
that the effect arose from the cause.
We suppose ourselves to possess unqualified scientific knowledge of a thing, as opposed
to knowing it in the accidental way in which the sophist knows, when we think that we
know the cause on which the fact depends, as the cause of that fact and of no other,
and further, that the fact could not be other than it is. ... Consequently the proper
object of unqualified scientific knowledge is something which cannot be other than it is.
[Posterior Analytics 71b pp. 1015]
Like every good marketer Aristotle made both a bold value claim for his product,
and a pretty healthy disclaimer in case of product failure. The value claim is
tantalising; it is universally applicable knowledge.
Since the object of pure scientific knowledge cannot be other than it is, the truth
obtained by demonstrative knowledge will be necessary. And since demonstrative
opens up community, values and context, areas that de Bono does not consider deeply. His weakness
and disservice to Aristotle is revealed tellingly in his chapter, ‘Definitions, boxes, categories and
generalisations’ (p. 76). He writes, ‘The basic concept of boxes has totally dominated Western
thinking – sometimes with excellent effect and sometimes with disastrous effect.’ (p. 81) To equate
‘boxes’ with the rich field of topics shows some major ignorance of the rhetorical writings of
Aristotle, and of the rhetorical tradition.
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knowledge is only present when we have a demonstration, it follows that demonstration
is an inference from necessary premises.
[ibid. 73a pp. 20-25]
Aristotle clarified what he meant by necessary truth. It is ‘true in every instance of
its subject’, ‘essential’ and ‘commensurate and universal’. Essential attributes
contrast with ‘coincidental’ and ‘accidental’ ones. Thus the nature of pure scientific
knowledge is universal; it cannot be tainted or qualified by circumstance, personality
or conditions. One can discern here the scientific quest for knowledge that is
universal and general. Attaining such outcomes is the design goal of scientific
experiments; they are set up to maximise the chance of a truth that is ‘true in every
instance of its subject’. Scientific controversy and verification often turn on this
point; are the experimental outcomes coincidental or have we really nailed the cause
and effect relationships of the variables under scrutiny?5
The quest for certainty and universality is an alluring promise of Faustian
proportions, but Aristotle was cautious enough and wise enough, to issue a caveat
emptor. He warned that not all knowledge is demonstrative.
Knowledge of the immediate premises is independent of demonstration. (The necessity
of this is obvious; for since we must know the prior premises from which the
demonstration is drawn, and since the regress must end in immediate truths, those
truths must be indemonstrable.)
[ibid., 72b p. 20]
So we must draw a line in the sand with the ‘premises’. They must be self evident,
and are not achieved by demonstration. Thus the outcomes can only be as good as
the inputs. While Aristotle’s syllogistic engine delivered lockstep logic and produced
universal truth, it was only as strong as its self-evident premises.
Aristotle addressed this with an extraordinary and undeveloped section on intuition.
He foreshadowed this section which concludes Book 2 of the Analytics, right at the
beginning of his treatise. ‘There may be another manner of knowing as well – that
will be discussed later.’ (ibid., 71b p. 17) He turned to the accumulated knowledge
of the senses, memory and experience to provide his premises. ‘From experience ...
from the universal now stabilised in its entirety within the soul.... originate the skill of
5
Modern physics is of course robbing even science of the kind of cause and effect certainty that
Aristotle expected to find in the observed world. Cf Margaret Wheatley’s comments, ‘.. this search
for stable, well-defined targets has been, if we can admit it, a great cosmic joke. We thought we could
pin reality down, get it in our sights, or maybe even line up our ducks; but how do you do that in this
elusive world of potentials? We’ve been playing with “vast networks of interference patterns”, with
the “continuous dance of energy”. The world is not a thing. Its a complex never-ending, always
changing tapestry.’ (Wheatley 1994)
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the craftsman and the knowledge of the man of science...’ (ibid. Book II 100a pp. 510) Thus we have the universal somehow located within a private and local realm of
truth, truth mediated through experience. These are large concessions to ambiguity.
He finished with a peroration on intuition that would have done Coleridge proud.
Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premises by induction; for the
method by which even sense-perception plants the universal is inductive. Now of the
thinking states by which we grasp truth, some are unfailingly true, others admit of error
– opinion, for instance, and calculation, whereas scientific knowing and intuition are
always true: further, no other kind of thought except intuition is more accurate than
scientific knowledge ...if therefore it is the only other kind of true thinking except
scientific knowing, intuition will be the originative source of scientific knowledge.
[ibid. Book II 100b pp. 5-15]
Thus intuition – or the grasp of primary premises – is the source of premises and
hence of demonstration. So Aristotle wrapped his product offering of ‘necessary’
truth in careful packaging.
This formidable logic machine laid down the foundations for the progress of logical
thought. It has provided the foundations for modern science and modern
management. ‘Demonstration’ is the catchcry from modern boardrooms as much as
it is from the science laboratory, where I remember writing ‘quid erat
demonstrandum’ (q.e.d.) at the end of my formulaic workings. But it has done more
than that; it has come to dominate the representations of thought in our twentieth
century era. Almost every characterisation of logic or reason is some variation on
the scientific method; the person in the street characterises thinking as scientific.
Epithets like ‘logical’, ‘rational’ or ‘scientific’ are more than mere classifications of a
mode of thought; they are general appellations of praise for good thinking in any
mode of thought.6 We will return to this theme later in the chapter; it is sufficient
to say at this point, that Aristotle gave us the logic machine, and he gave with it
breathtaking promises around certainty and knowledge. So breathtaking have these
promises been, that they have dominated the Western mind for long periods ever
since.
6.1.2. The rhetoric road
So complete has been the domination of logic in the Western psyche that it has
successfully clouded a major qualification or limiting of the application of the
machine: Aristotle himself did not offer it as the only road to truth. He offered a
6
Kepner and Tregoe’s influential book The Rational Manager (1981) highlights this acceptance of
rationality as synonymous with thought.
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second road to truth which has for various reasons largely been ignored: rhetoric
and dialectic. This point is forcefully made in Perelman’s, The Realm of Rhetoric
(1982).
Aristotle in his Organon distinguished two types of reasoning – analytic and dialectic.
He undertook a study of the former in the Prior and Posterior Analytics, and this study can
be considered in the history of philosophy as the basis of formal logic. However,
modern logicians have failed to see that Aristotle studied dialectical reasoning in the
Topics, the Rhetoric and the Sophistical Refutations. This failure is caused by their inability
to see the importance of the latter works, which made Aristotle not only the father of
formal logic, but also the father of the theory of argumentation.
[Perelman 1982, p. 1]
This second road to truth is aimed not to produce demonstration but rather to
produce ‘adherence’. Whereas logic is impersonal, this second road of
argumentation is personal. It always exists in a social context.
How does the second road differ from the logic road to truth? Again we can turn to
Aristotle for illumination. Whereas logic addresses universal questions of a scientific
or philosophical nature, rhetoric and dialectic7 address questions of action and
decision. Science addresses questions where the domain of truth cannot be other
than it is. Rhetoric addresses questions where the domain of truth can be other
than it is. The first domain is the domain of the natural sciences where natural laws
present apparently immutable data and promise certainty of description and
understanding. The second domain is the domain of human decision and discussion
where all is possibility until the decision is made. Note that I say ‘made’; decisions
are made, not analysed or described. A decision is a construction of the minds of
people confronted with some kind of controversy. It is not discovered as one might
discover a natural law; it is constructed as one might construct a work of art or a set
of furniture.
Rhetoric happens in the cut and thrust of social activity and community action. It is
not science, for it does not aim to demonstrate, it aims to persuade. And it is not
philosophy, for it does not aim to discover universal laws of truth, it aims to move
7
For the purpose of this treatise I use rhetoric and dialectic somewhat synonymously. In fact
Aristotle distinguished them. Both were species of argumentation and as such were contrasted with
the ‘logic’ species of thought. But dialectic was a search for universal truth independent of a specific
audience, whereas rhetoric was invention of argument to persuade for decision. It was a search for a
local and community-bound truth. However, Perelman (1982) felt that Aristotle’s distinction was
unnecessary. Perelman maintained that all dialectic was in fact rhetorical: ‘unlike the processes of
analytical reasoning, a dialectical argument can not be impersonal, for it derives its value from its
action upon the mind of some person.’ (p. 3)
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people to action. The link between knowing and action is essential in rhetoric; if
action is not in view then we are not in the realm of rhetoric. If ‘demonstration’ is
the aim of logic, then action is the aim of rhetoric.
Thus rhetoric differs from logic not primarily in its methods, though they do indeed
differ, but in the questions which it addresses.
The subjects of our deliberations are such as seem to present us with alternative
possibilities ... about things that could not have been, and cannot now or in the future
be, other than they are, nobody who takes them to be of this nature wastes his time in
deliberation.
[Aristotle, Rhetoric Book I 1357 pp. 5-7]
This is the crucial distinction. If the subjects of our deliberation present us with
genuine alternatives, it is a rhetorical matter. In logic we seek right/wrong answers
for that is appropriate to the field of logic. However much of life presents us not
with right/wrong answers but with possibilities. If we are in this domain of truth,
then we are foolish to use logical tools or presuppositions. Similarly we do not
waste our time deliberating (i.e. developing alternatives and arguments) when the
domains of truth we address cannot be ‘other than they are’.
Aristotle develops this rhetorical domain further:
There are few facts of the ‘necessary’ type that can form the basis of rhetorical
syllogisms. Most of the things about which we make decisions, and into which therefore
we inquire, present us with alternative possibilities. For it is about actions that we
deliberate and inquire, and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of
them are determined by necessity.
[ibid., 1332 p. 25]
This is a crucial claim. Aristotle is widening this second domain of truth to include
the realm of general decision-making in human affairs. He claims that the challenge
of decision drives inquiry. And the nature of the inquiry is about action, ‘for it is
about actions that we deliberate and inquire’. And actions, unlike science, are
contingent; in other words they live in the great ebbs and flows of life’s affective
systems. They live in the tides of observation as they swirl around eddies of
aspiration and flow down with all the directionality of past decisions and
remembrances. Onto this vast sea of human endeavours, Aristotle launches the ship
of rhetoric, not the ship of logic.
This sea is, furthermore, one that all people sail upon. Aristotle makes it clear that
rhetoric is a common art, not a specialist art:
Rhetoric is the counterpart of Dialectic. Both alike are concerned with such things as
come, more or less, within the general ken of all men and belong to no definite science.
Accordingly all men make use more or less, of both; for to a certain extent all men
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attempt to discuss statements and to maintain them, to defend themselves and to attack
others.
[ibid., 1354 p.1]
Rhetoric has since been degraded to a cosmetic art of words, and in so doing has
lost the bridge to action. Let me illustrate the ironic depths to which this
degradation has slumped.
Recently I was working on the planning document for a large public sector
department. I was working with the planning secretariat which supported senior
management in drafting the plan. Part of the plan included a set of programs
designed to illustrate how the strategies were being implemented in the organisation.
These read impressively but had no basis in action. I knew that the words were only
a flourish and that there was no program to turn these high-sounding strategies into
accountable actions. This was largely because the whole planning process at this
level excluded the key people who could make action, the senior second tier
managers. The plan document was the brainchild of the senior boss aided by the
writing skills of this offline secretariat; they nobly gilded the words and prepared a
glossy and impressive looking document.
Today modern rhetoric studies prepare people to write documents like this.8
Indeed communication design consultancies fed by graduates of rhetoric would jump
at the opportunity to work at the apparently formative stage of such a high profile
document as this. But I was strangely bored and disengaged by the whole process.
Why? Because the process was unrhetorical. There was no intrinsic link with
decision and action. All the deliberation over words was purely cosmetic.
Aristotle’s key ingredients were missing: no actions being deliberated upon, no
contingencies swaying in the balance, and thus no real inquiry.
8
I cannot overstress the importance of this strategic oversight on the part of today’s rhetorical
community. Once we move to writing, we can invoke the intellectual tools of rhetoric, but we have
left the fluidity of community decision-making which was the heart of the rhetorical process. Thus if
any era wishes to reposition rhetoric as a living vital art, one that guides the community, it must first
identify the key decision-making forums and locate rhetorical processes in those forums. This is not
easy to do, since those forums are held in sway by paradigms of logic and rationality. Thus it is
tempting for the academic rhetorical community to slink away and find a comfortable domain within
which they can teach the process of rhetoric. Perelman moves towards a similar insight: ‘In our
civilisation, where the printed word has become a commodity and utilises economic organisation to
draw attention to itself, this preliminary condition is seen clearly only in cases where the contact
between the speaker and his audience cannot be brought about by the techniques of distribution. It is
accordingly best seen where argumentation is developed by a speaker who is orally addressing a
specific audience, rather than where it is contained in book on sale in a bookstore’ (Perelman 1971,
p. 18).
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6.2. The integration of speakers, audiences and the
argument
Rhetoric is distinct from logic in more than the different domains of truth that they
address. Scientific logic requires that we separate the subjective from the objective,
lest the subjective distort the objective. In contrast rhetoric requires that we
integrate the subjective and the objective.
Every rhetorical matter occurs in a community of engaged people; indeed, every
rhetorical matter is a matter of inquiry or controversy purely because the
community is concerned about it. That is, a truly rhetorical matter cannot be
individualistic or impersonal. We can run scientific experiments entirely alone,
following lines of inquiry into cause and effect relationships purely out of academic
interest. But rhetoric demands that there be an audience to persuade towards a
point of action.
St Augustine makes this point tellingly about the true heart of the rhetorician.
When such things are taught that it is sufficient to know or to believe them, they
require no more consent than an acknowledgment that they are true. But when that
which is taught must be put into practice and is taught for that reason, the truth of what
is said is acknowledged in vain unless that which is learned is implemented in action...
[On Christian Doctrine, p. 138]
Thus rhetoric has three generative parts acting together in a dynamic oscillation.9
Argument
Speaker
Audience
Figure 6-1: The three elements of rhetoric
9
This figure guided my diagnosis of the planning system discussed in chapter three.
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This opens up the nature of persuasion to include character for the speaker and
adherence or moved hearts and minds for the audience. Character is important to
both Cicero and Aristotle because character renders the speaker more plausible; it
is a very twentieth century paradigm to want to exclude matters of character from
matters of persuasion and argument. For the ancients, character was part of the art
of persuasion.10 Similarly we cannot exclude the emotions of the audience. They are
part of the rhetorical dynamic just as much as the information and the argument.
We are not used to such breadth of coverage operating under the heading of
knowledge. The myth of the logic road has been taken to its logical conclusions in
modern science, with enforced objectivity that excludes personality and persons
from inquiry. But in the domain of rhetoric this is nonsense; people make decisions
and so are part of the tapestry. Objectivity is a myth; relatedness matters in
decisions.
Speaker and audience do not operate merely as contexts for the argument. They are
constituents of the argument, for it develops and grows inside their hearts and
minds. Hence the actual argument itself must include matters of the speaker and the
audience’s positions around the question. The speaker and audience are not
spectators who must clap and cheer or boo and reject while the argument plays out
its progressions on the arena; they actually are creating the questions and the
arguments. Thus what is a problem to one person may well not be a problem to
another. What is a solution to another may well be problematic to another. All
questions are perspectively fashioned; all decisions are cartilaged with values.
Perspective and value are part of the argument itself.
Thus a true rhetorician must make the values and the perspectives of the
participants explicit; they must become part of the forge, part of the materials on
which the blacksmith works with flame and anvil. This is why story telling is such an
important tool in my workshops. For the stories bring in the storyteller. This is
why personal aspiration is a key to the workshops. For dream and vision introduce
values.
So, by devices, the rhetorician must introduce the speaker and the audience as part
of the argument’s development. They are intrinsic to the argument. Perelman, in a
magnificently subtle passage, takes the notion even further. The rhetorical activity
10
Compare with Booth’s (1994)discussion of how metaphor engages the speaker’s ethos, (see chapter
five). Also compare with Moffet’s (1981) emphasis on the active voice which I discuss in chapter two.
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will create the community; the community is not self-existent but rather a potential
community, which the rhetorical act will galvanise.
For all argumentation aims at gaining the adherence of minds, and, by this very fact,
assumes the existence of an intellectual contact. For argumentation to exist, an
effective community of minds must be realised at a given moment. There must first of all
be agreement, in principle, on the formation of this intellectual community, and, after
that, on the fact of debating a specific question together; now this does not come
automatically.
[Perelman 1969, p. 14]
I can attest to this with real feeling. Much of my work, my energy and my drama
arise from the creation of this intellectual community. And the effort and
emotional11 cost is palpable. If I cannot create it, the workshop has no dispositional
energy, no ownership of the issues, and no edge. It degrades into debate or critical
judging. And while the creation of this community occurs in potential form before or
in the early stages of the workshop, the workshop itself then moves on to form and
cohere the intellectual community further. Thus the final creation of the workshop
is not just intellectual but an intellectual community cohered around arguments it has
developed. The clear aim for a rhetorical conversation is the creation of a
community of hearts and minds, with shared values and vision.
The contrast with the logic engine and its derivative, the scientific method, could not
be more stark. Questions of subjectivity have to be purged for the machine to work
well.12 Within a scientific discourse the killer comment is to accuse someone of bias:
‘But that is just your opinion, you are not being objective in what you are saying, you
are being influenced by your emotions or your personal experience on this matter....’
Such comments are incontrovertible within a scientific discourse. The only defence
is denial. No one would conceive of saying, ‘Yes, this view is very influenced by my
emotions on this subject – let us explore together the source of my emotional
intensity...’13
11
We tend to be coy about discussing emotion as an aspect of an intellectual task. If we do, it is as a
concession to weakness. Thus the pervasiveness of the logic virus. In contrast the study of the
emotions formed a large part of Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a key constituent of the art. Recently Daniel
Goleman widened the notion of intelligence to include emotional intelligence in his book Emotional
Intelligence (1995). Interestingly he began the book by positioning it as a response to Aristotle. ‘In the
Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle’s philosophical enquiry into virtue, character, and the good life, his
challenge was to manage our emotional life with intelligence’ (Goleman 1995, p. xiv).
12
My story in chapter four of how a scientific client deliberately shredded the first person from my
text on his discoveries illustrates the power of the scientific, objectivist culture.
13
The work of Thomas Kuhn has loosened considerably this view of objective science. His
historiographic study of scientific revolutions led him to identify both social and creative strands in the
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Insofar as anyone would allow some subjectivity to creep into a logically framed
argument, it would merely be preparatory, as a kind of team-building or purging
exercise. This is what some team-building books call ‘storming’ in group behaviours.
But we repeat for emphasis, and we must repeat since the paradigm of logic is so
entrenched in the common psyche, rhetoric does not just admit the humanistic
element as condescension. The humanistic element is a key, even the defining,
element of the problem or the issue on which we work. It is one of the materials
which the rhetorical forge must melt down and reformulate; it is part of the data
which the imagination must take as the ingredients for composition.
Perelman makes the distinction forcefully:
The authors of scientific reports and similar papers often think that if they merely
report certain experiments, mention certain facts, or enunciate a certain number of
truths, this is enough of itself to automatically arouse the interest of their hearers or
readers. This attitude rests on the illusion, widespread in certain rationalistic and
scientific circles, that facts speak for themselves and make such an indelible imprint on
any human mind that the latter is forced to give its adherence regardless of its
inclination.
[Perelman 1969, p. 17]
process of scientific discovery. ‘The result of all these doubts and difficulties is a historiographic
revolution in the study of science ... (historians) attempt to display the historical integrity of that
science in its own time. They ask for example ... about the relation between (Galileo’s) views and
those of his group, i.e., his teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors in the sciences’
(Kuhn 1970, p. 3).
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6.3. A proposed rhetorical system
What then might be the key elements of a rhetorically inspired system of thought –
one that supports the art of making rather than analysis? And how would such a
system contrast with the scientific method?
The following schematic identifies ten characteristics of a possible rhetorical thinking
system.14 They can best be explained by using Cicero’s example of the types of
questions which rhetoric should and should not address. As we have seen, rhetoric
addresses issues where things can be other than they are (human decisions and
action), whereas logic addresses questions where things cannot be other than they
are (natural science and philosophy). Thus Cicero excludes questions that are
universal in scope, such as,
How large is the sun?
What is the shape of this world?
The kinds of question to which a rhetorician would turn include specific matters of
decision such as,
How should we govern the Carthaginian colonies?
Are the Fregellans friendly to the Roman people?15
These questions involve humans deciding on a course of action; they do not have a
demonstrable right or wrong outcome, and demonstration of some truth is not their
aim. Rather they are challenges facing a certain community at a certain point of
time, and the aim of the inquiry will be to discover arguments in support of a
decision, and then to gain adherence of the community to this view.
Clearly counsel can only be given on matters about which people deliberate; matters
namely, that ultimately depend on ourselves, and which we have it in our power to set
going. For we turn a thing over in our mind until we have reached the point of seeing
whether we can do it or not.
[Aristotle, Rhetoric 1337 p. 35]
14
I am not advancing this ten point system as the last word on the subject. Rather it is presented to
illustrate what such a system might look like. I conclude the thesis with what I consider are next
steps in this inquiry; discovery and articulating a modern rhetorical method is one such task.
15
Cicero was discussing Hermagoras’ distinction between general and specific questions. Cicero
argued that general questions are the business of philosophy whereas specific questions are the
business of the orator (De Inventione, Book 1 VI). I have combined Aristotle’s two domains with
Cicero’s two types of question; the questions exemplify the two domains succinctly, but the two
domains argument distinguishes the two types of question more powerfully than Cicero does using
the general versus specific categories.
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I will demonstrate how the rhetorical system provides a pathway to answer the
‘Carthaginian question’, and how the scientific method simply is not appropriate, or
even logical to address this question. Conversely I will show how the scientific
method16 is more appropriate for the ‘sun question’ than the rhetorical method.
Despite the differences it will also be obvious that at points the methods crosspollinate and help each other in their foreign domains. A rhetorical approach
enriches scientific inquiry; some of the tight rigour of cause and effect reasoning
contributes to stages of a rhetorical inquiry.
Deliberative?
Forensic?
1 Domain of inquiry?
Epideictic?
2 Civic situation?
4 Invention
3 Questions?
Speakers and
Audiences?
Topics?
8. Coherence?
5 Argument
7 Decision
6 Judgement
Adherence?
Local truth
9 Values?
10 Words and
Figures
Figure 6-2: Ten characteristics of a rhetorical thinking system
16
I need to make fairly strongly a point which I have alluded to only indirectly so far. My experience
of scientific method goes well beyond reading about, and dealing with, abstractions about science. I
have extensive consulting experience with scientific organisations where I helped their thinking and
methods. Thus I have observed and co-designed on science with scientists. For instance, my Top
Down Reporting system is used by the research division of Rio Tinto, the largest mining house in the
world. In it, we cover key issues of experimental design, verification and the use of data in arguments.
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6.3.1. Establish the domain of inquiry
Rhetoric is designed to address a certain class of question. Thus we must first ask,
‘Is this issue a rhetorical issue or a scientific issue?’ A rhetorical issue will be one
where ‘things can be other than they are’, whereas a scientific issue will be one
where things cannot be other than they are.
Take the isse of how we might govern Carthage. This matter can emerge in an
infinite array of possibilities which will be crafted by human decisions. It can be other
than it is. Thus it is unambiguously a rhetorical matter. Conversely, the question of
how large is the sun cannot be other than it is. It is a matter for data gathering and
inferences, and it will be resolved one way. Thus it is unambiguously a scientific
matter.
Within the domain of rhetoric both Aristotle and Cicero divided questions into
three classes:
Deliberative (questions of the future)
Forensic (questions of the past)
Epideictic (questions of the present)
Strategy is clearly a deliberative question. It addresses possible futures and how we
might attain them. Here the inappropriateness of the scientific method is quite
apparent. Humanity does not move into the future by analysis, but by deliberative
argument. We pose alternative futures for ourselves and then argue for their merits.
Once convinced we move to enact these futures by constructing pathways. We
cannot analyse the future by scientific observation and data gathering because it does
not yet exist: it can be ‘other than it is.’
Cicero developed a forensic system of inquiry but not a deliberative one. Hence we
could argue that the application of rhetoric to strategic deliberation is a newer field
of study than its application to law.
6.3.2. Clarify the civic situation
I use the slightly quaint term ‘civic’ rather than ‘social’ because I want to distinguish
rhetoric from psychology or sociology and I want to introduce the notion of
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responsibility not just individuality. Rhetoric specifically addresses matters of
decision that formalise a community; ‘civic’ connotes civilisation and responsibility.
People will determine what shape our issue will take. Thus we must identify the
relevant speakers and audiences that constitute an issue. These terms are rather
too specific to the classical decision-making context of speeches to suit a modern
purpose. Hence I generalise from them, changing speaker into ‘agent’ or ‘system
owner’, and audience into ‘actors’ or ‘participants’. In the classical rhetorical
situation, the rhetorician was neither the speaker nor the audience but the coach of
the speaker (in Greek law courts one had to speak for oneself). This is also a useful
role to preserve as a third role – that of coach or designer. Rhetoricians were
skilled in the art of developing arguments rather than in any of the issues being
debated; in that sense they ‘owned’ a method of invention rather than specific
subjects. Thus the rhetorician is the analogue of the design facilitator in my strategic
conversation system.
Clearly Cicero could not get anywhere in his question on Carthage without
identifying the agents who would construct alternative methods of governance and
the audiences who would judge the alternatives. This matter of governance will be
judged entirely by humans in a civic context, and the judgement will reflect their
values and objectives. Conversely, the question of the sun is not a civic matter but a
natural matter, and the issue of who will arbitrate is not germane to the inquiry at
all. In a sense, nature will arbitrate, as it is against nature’s laws that hypotheses will
be measured.
6.3.3. Find the appropriate questions
All inquiry, both scientific and rhetorical, is entered by questions. And in both
circumstances the inquiry will benefit significantly from the effort of clarifying those
questions at an early stage. Both kinds of inquiry will confront the obstacle of the
human lunge for the solution and must resist it.
There are, however, differences. In a rhetorical matter the issue of the question is
circumstantial, and must be determined by the community. In contrast, in a scientific
matter the question will be universal, and will be determined by the universal
community of human thinkers. Thus the discovery of the question in a rhetorical
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matter is much more a matter of direct exploration than it might be in a scientific
matter.17
The rhetorical question of how to govern Carthage merits exploring. Why is this a
question for you now and not before this time? Is there a significant question for
your community at this time? What would we risk if we avoided answering it? Do
you have much experience of governing an African colony or is this a new situation
you are confronting? All of these questions will be answered differently by different
communities.
Another key difference between the rhetorical and the scientific question is the
expectation of the answer. In rhetoric we expect a local and pragmatic answer,
whereas in science we expect a universal and necessary answer. If we carry the
scientific expectations into a rhetorical matter, our inquiry will be paralysed because
we are seeking an impossible, and inappropriate certainty.
Cicero divided rhetorical questions into four types:
Conjectural
Definitional
Qualitative
Translative
These four were specifically related to a forensic issue, but they can be translated
into the deliberative context quite well. For instance, in the strategic field I identify
four issues that typically confront organisations.
Mission or purpose (‘Are we still relevant?’)
Hypothesis or strategic design (‘Are our products and services still
relevant?’)
Method or processes (‘Are our processes adequate?’)
Culture (‘Do we have a coherent culture? Do we have a shared way
of evaluating proposals?’)
17
The notion of ‘wicked problems’ is pertinent here. This idea was invented by Rittel, a physicist who
moved into urban planning, to distinguish between scientific problems and humanistic, sociological
problems. One of the key distinctions is that wicked problems are essentially indeterminate, defying
easy definition. Thus the problem (or question) becomes a major object of discovery in itself. (See
Buchanan(1992), Wicked problems in design thinking, for an explanation of Rittel’s system.)
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‘How should we govern the Carthaginian colonies?’ sounds like a method question,
but is probably more a strategic question, which I would express as the search for a
hypothesis for governing, not as a search for an improved method of governing.
The key methodological issue here is that these classes of question guide and frame
all the inquiry that follows. The pathways of inquiry that they open are different, so
they merit some serious attention at the beginning of a rhetorical inquiry. All my
design facilitations now begin with an explicit discussion to locate the class of
question we are considering and to position it across my Thinking Wave™,18 This
proves most valuable and helps the inquiry to be efficient.
6.3.4. Invent possibilities
Invention is a process of discovering and crafting arguments that can persuade the
audience. Hence it lies at the heart of rhetoric, and that is why Cicero’s treatise on
rhetoric is entitled De Inventione. The rhetorician used ‘topoi’ as a tool of discovery;
topoi or topics are sets of mental heuristics that expedite search and initiate
creativity.
Discovery and invention are significantly different. One discovers what is already
there, albeit hidden; one invents what does not yet exist. Thus invention implies
human agency and making.
Take the Carthaginian question. The best way to govern Carthage might not yet
have been invented. If we know of only two methods of governance, that will limit
our options. Another more creative group might invent a third option that we have
not yet considered and end up with a superior answer.
This is not so in the question of the largeness of the sun. One group cannot invent a
different or superior answer to another. However, invention has played a serious
and underestimated part in scientific discovery through the invention of
experimentation techniques. This is a matter for design and human agency, not just
dispassionate analysis of data. Vico makes this point powerfully:
‘The things which are proved in physics are those to which we can perform something
similar, and the ideas as to natural things which are thought to have the most perfect
clarity … are those to the support of which we can bring experiments by which we so
far imitate nature.’
(Vico 1944, p. 39)
18
I used the Thinking Wave™ as an icon in chapter one.
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6.3.5. Argument
Rhetoric builds towards proposals which claim that a certain course will yield
benefits. We can call this the argument or the hypothesis. An argument is not a
description or an analysis. It must generate persuasion. So it is a claim which
challenges and provokes, and suggests a difference.
Whereas an argument is the climax of the rhetorical process, the discovery of a
cause is the climax of the scientific process. The discovery of true causes is integral
to most problem-solving methodologies which ask the problem solver to identify the
problem, find causes and search for solutions.
6.3.6. Judgement
Judgement arbitrates the truth in rhetoric. The audience must weigh up the
arguments and choose the one that they prefer. Invention and judgement work as a
pair, to arbitrate over the argument. Judgement is not universal but reflects the
nature of the question and the values of the audience (or judges). Aristotle identifies
different kinds of judgment according to the different rhetorical domains.
1) Deliberation – Utility (‘Is this more or less useful?’)
2) Epideictic – Nobility (‘Is this person worthy of praise and trust?’)
3) Forensic – Justice (‘What is the just decision?’)
[Rhetoric 1:Ch.6 line 20, ibid 1:Ch.9 line25, ibid 1:Ch.13 line 1]
Judgment is often paralysed when the scientific method is mixed with a rhetorical
situation. A scientific experiment requires certainty in data to support a claim, but
this certainty is inappropriate in rhetorical matters. For instance, when we judge
various arguments as to the best way to govern Carthage, we are asking whether a
method of governance is more or less useful, not whether it is right or wrong. Since
every method we might recommend has not yet happened, it is nonsense to judge
whether it is right or wrong.
Judgement is a faculty that can be practised and developed but it is malnourished in
an education system that emphasises science. Statistical manipulation becomes a
proxy for judgement. In contrast a liberal art such as painting develops judgement, as
the competent artist must regularly judge the effectiveness of his or her
brushstrokes.
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6.3.7. Decision (adherence)
Decision is the goal of a rhetorical exercise, for it moves the argument into action.
The colloquial phrase ‘making a decision’ fortuitously preserves the sense of human
will and construction in the decision process.
In a mature rhetorical process, the decision phase naturally closes the matter. I have
never had to vote on proposals in a facilitated workshop, because the pathway of
inquiry that had led to the point of decision had cohered the participants and made
the decision point rather obvious. The community make the decision by adhering to
the argument; they feel it is just, useful or noble and the argument adheres to their
values. Thus they feel connected internally, not dissonant. The decision has
completed their sense of values, not disrupted or ignored them.
6.3.8. Criteria of coherence
All decisions are based on criteria of coherence and adherence in the rhetorical
process. We ask whether the decision coheres with the elements of the argument
and the values of the group.
I do not seek to find the right way to govern Carthage, but I do seek to find a way of
governing that will be coherent with the values, history and goals of the audience.
This contrasts with the scientific method where the criteria are the laws of nature
and we must judge our experimental rigour, data and sampling. As we do so we are
asking whether the data demonstrates the proof beyond reasonable doubt.
6.3.9. Values
The rhetorical method is underpinned by values. The community’s values will inform
the judgements and the inventions. They will raise the questions.
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6.3.10. Words and figures
The rhetorical method uses words and figures of speech as its mechanism for
argument. In contrast the scientific method has preferred mathematics and
numbers. 19
The use of figures of speech is germane to the rhetorical method because we are
dealing with possibilities. We have never governed Carthage before so we must
create some kinds of mental imagery that we can then contemplate and reflect upon.
This explains why poetry is so useful as an art to support a culture of rhetoric.
19
This tenth point reflects the popular usage of science and the mind of modern management rather
than the practices of great science. For instance, Arthur Miller has demonstrated conclusively that
imagery was the key intellectual tool in creating 20th century physics (Miller, 1984).
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6.4. How logic dominated thought – and rhetoric was
neutered.
If rhetoric has been such a robust system of thought in the past, how did it lose
influence as an architectonic or guiding art? There are two parts to this question.
Firstly there is the story of how logic came to dominate thought, and secondly there
is the way in which rhetoric was neutralised by the decisions of Peter Ramus.
Neither of these is the complete answer to the issue of lost influence, but they are
certainly key parts of the story and deserve some mention at this stage of my
argument.
6.4.1. The tyranny of logic
How did logic take over the kingdom of thought so conclusively? The full answer to
this question is obviously beyond the scope of this thesis, but we can make some
indicative points.
Firstly, the grandeur of its claims proved alluring to the human quest for knowledge.
Most dictators promise heaven to their subjects. And as we have seen, Aristotle’s
offer was complete, ‘necessary knowledge’, complete knowledge of causes and
effects. If you cannot reach God by faith, then you can become a kind of god
through analytical logic. We cannot underestimate the attractiveness of this
proposition. Against it, the merely local and pluralistic claims of rhetorical truth
must have seemed trite and evanescent. So what if we make a wise decision about
the Carthaginian colonies? Such wisdom merely serves our time and our generation.
It merely helps build our coherent community. These claims by rhetoric are humble
in comparison to logic. Mephistopheles did not offer Faust a local way of knowing
when he tempted him, and Faust did not desire a local way of knowing when he
lusted after power.20
Emperors and kings
are but obeyed in their several provinces,
nor can they raise the wind or rend the clouds;
but his dominion that exceeds in this
stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man.
[Marlowe 1969, Doctor Faustus]
20
I am aware that Faustus rejected the lure of Aristotlean logic as too limited. But my point is this:
he was attracted by the desire for a metaphysics rather than a local knowledge. He happened to seek
that metaphysic in necromancy rather than logic. The twentieth century has not bought the same
product as Faustus did, but we are attracted by the same offer.
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So the marketing allure of the logic machine was always potentially extravagant. But
it needed some product enhancement to sweep the market, and that was provided
in three significant steps that have certainly contributed to its monopoly.
6.4.1.1. Galileo and numbers
The first was provided by Galileo. Aristotle had identified that logic was only as
good as its inputs; the machine worked but it needed reliable inputs. If it did not get
them, then its claims for truth could not be universal:
Assuming then that my thesis as to the nature of scientific knowing is correct, the
premises of demonstrated knowledge must be true, primary, immediate, better known
than and prior to the conclusion which is further related to them as effect is to cause.
Unless these conditions are satisfied, the basic truths will not be ‘appropriate’ to the
conclusion.
[Aristotle, Post Analytics 71a p. 20]
Galileo was the first person to make the vast claim that mathematics was the most
precise way of representing the ‘buzzing blooming confusion’ of the world around us.
Fritjof Capra claims that this makes Galileo the architect of modern science:
The role of Galileo in the Scientific Revolution goes far beyond his achievements in
astronomy ...(He) was the first person to combine scientific experimentation with the
use of mathematical language to formulate the laws of nature he discovered, and is
therefore considered the father of modern science. ‘Philosophy’, he believed, ‘ is
written in that great book whichever lies before our eyes; but we cannot understand it
if we do not first learn the language and characters in which it is written. This language
is mathematics, and the characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures’.
[Capra 1982 p. 39]
This transition was vastly significant. In rhetorical arguments, data is mediated by
topics, topics being conceptual categories expressed in words. But Galileo
effectively offered certainty to the logic machine by suggesting that the essence of
data was numerical. If we accept Galileo’s offer of certainty through mathematics,
then the inference-making work of the logic machine becomes equally certain.
Deduction becomes calculation. Thus the nature of intellectual action upon data
becomes calculation, expedited by formulae. So calculation becomes the proxy for
the generative and formative action of the mind upon data, which for Wordsworth
was composition, and for Coleridge was ‘esemplastic imagination.’ R.D. Laing
bemoaned the consequences of Galileo’s legerdemain:
Out go sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell and along with them has since gone
aesthetics and ethical sensibility, values, quality, form; all feelings, motives, intentions,
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soul, consciousness, spirit. Experience as such is cast out of the realm of scientific
discourse.21
[Laing, cited by Capra 1982, p
40]
6.4.1.2. Descartes and the deification of mathematical logic
Galileo’s influence might not have been so pervasive had Descartes not hardened
mathematical representation into a philosophical system. In his Rules for the Direction
of our Native Intelligence (1988, p. 1), Descartes’ second rule is ‘Only those objects
should engage our attention, to the sure and indubitable knowledge of which our
mental powers seem to be adequate’.
He elaborated thus:
… we reject all such merely probable cognition and resolve to believe only what is
perfectly known and incapable of being doubted …
and further:
…In fact none of the errors to which men … are liable is ever due to faulty inference;
they are due only to the fact that men take for granted certain poorly understood
observations, or lay down rash and groundless judgements.
These considerations make it obvious shy arithmetic and geometry prove to be much
more certain than other disciplines: they alone are concerned with an object so pure
and simple that they make no assumptions that experience might render uncertain; they
consist entirely is deducing conclusions by means of rational arguments. They are
therefore the easiest and clearest of all the sciences and have just the sort of object we
are looking for …
[Descartes 1998, p. 2]
Allied with his respect for certainty, as supplied conveniently by mathematics, is
descartes’ admiration for the abstract over the concrete, an admiration founded
upon the apparent certitude of the abstract and conversely the apparent uncertainty
of the concrete. He expressed these qualities as the ‘absolute’ and the ‘relative’,
which are the subject of Rule VI. The absolute was for Descartes that which
‘contains within itself the pure and simple essence of which we are in quest’, whereas
the relative ‘while participating in the same nature, (as the absolute) ... involves in
addition something else which I call relativity.’ This rather tautological definition
means, I think, that the absolute is not involved in time and place, which corrupt the
essence with change, gradation and qualification.
21
The German theologian Moltman, has lamented that we have little philosophy of experience, and
less theology of experience. ‘H.G. Gadamer points out that experience is one of the least explained
concepts in philosophy. This may be said even more emphatically about theology’ (Moltman, p.18)
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The upshot of this Cartesian line of argument leaves us with modern management’s
unshakeable faith in ‘management by fact’. This version of ‘fact’ is clearly numerical.22
And even if the experience to be gathered as data is qualitative, we confer credibility
on the data by turning it numerical. Hence if an organisational development team
presented stories of ‘employee morale’ as the basis for observation, Cartesian logic
would treat them as light and unreliable data. In the light of this spurning, we can
meretriciously clothe data in the seductive allurements of mathematics by ‘surveying’
morale, and then turning the results into mathematics, as in ‘67%’ of employees are
satisfied with the company’. This figure (67%) can now serve as input to calculation,
and we can factor it into the logic machinations. This numerising of our data will lend
us credibility with minds influenced by Cartesian logic.
This is not an absolute argument against surveys and percentages. My aim is to
demonstrate the predominance of the logic paradigm in creating the terms upon
which debate must be joined.
In this process what gets diminished and lost is the stuff of human stories, the colour
and the tone of speech, the anecdote and the idea. These are in fact real data,
precisely because they are less abstract and more located in time and place. They
are also more human, capturing the voice and mind of the human spirit more really
than numbers.
So Galileo and Descartes significantly enhanced the logic machine by moving
numeracy to the foreground as the tool of human perception and reason. The logic
machine has since achieved one other major product enhancement that has made it
almost complete in its mastery of information and formulation: the digitising of
information. This invention, probably the most significant of the twentieth century,
has provided the logic machine with failsafe watertight inference-making capacities.
Accept that data is essentially mathematical, and then it can be digitised; if it can be
digitised, it can be fed into computers and they will calculate complex inputs with
mesmeric accuracy. The spectre of artificial intelligence lies waiting at the end of the
logic road, waiting to devour the increasingly insignificant and inadequate humans
whose minds created the logic path in the first place.23 This devouring is not an
22
Refer to my discussion on the nature of data in chapter four.
23
The dramatic nature of the confrontation between people and machine was symbolised by the
chess competition between the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and Deep Blue, the IBM
computer. Deep Blue won. An article in The Australian newspaper eloquently described the battle
lines. ‘As computers become faster and smarter ... they are slouching towards what was long
considered to be solely humanity’s province. Computers can watch, listen and learn. They can mull
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exaggerated threat. Herb Simon and his colleagues have devised a computer
program called, aptly enough, Bacon, which can derive scientific laws from data in a
matter of seconds. Kepler’s second law takes under twenty seconds to derive. The
implication is clear; what took Kepler so long?24
On a wider scale, digital technology is displacing human intellectual workers
everywhere. Computers can assimilate and analyse mathematical information vastly
quicker than humans can. They have turned the logic road into a multilane highway.
And what is the place for people in this brave new world?25
Thus logic has become the tyrant ruling the kingdom of thought aided and abetted by
its chief adviser, mathematics. But the hegemony has been eased by the demise of
rhetoric which needs some brief comment. Here the chief culprit was Peter Ramus.
Today the common meaning of ‘rhetorical’ is persuasive going on manipulative.
‘Rhetoric’ in the popular parlance is a synonym for propaganda. It implies verbal
ability to persuade and suggests that no character or truth is involved. This is a
travesty of classical rhetoric and in particular of Cicero for whom rhetoric was a
balanced product of both wisdom (truth) and eloquence. Cicero was pained by the
possibility of foolish people becoming eloquent, but he maintained that true rhetoric
over a situation, assess possibilities and decide on a reasonable course of action to take. They can plan
for the future and remember the past.’ (Kendall & Manier, The Australian 24 May 1997) I am arguing
in this thesis that computers may be able to ‘think’ logically, but they can never ‘think’ rhetorically.
We have exposed ourselves terribly to this spectre by narrowing all ‘reason’ to logic and surrendering
the concept of another type of reason – rhetorical argumentation.
24
This material came from lectures and personal conversations with Herb Simon during 1995 at
Carnegie Mellon University.
25
Jeremy Rifkin (1996)paints a sobering picture of the future of work in his disturbing requiem for
labour, The End of Work. ‘The intelligent machine is steadily moving up the office hierarchy, subsuming
not only routine clerical tasks, but even work traditionally performed by management. In perhaps the
unkindest cut of all, high-tech computerised hiring systems have been installed in hundreds of
companies to screen job applications’ (p. 149). He explains what computers will do to the wholesaling
industry as an example of the digital decimation we are facing. ‘The new information technologies
allow retailers and manufacturers to come together in a single continuous-flow process, leaving little
need for wholesalers. In 1992 the wholesale trade industry lost 60,000 jobs. Since 1989 the wholesale
sector has dropped more than a quarter million jobs. By early in the next century most wholesaling,
as we have come to know it, will have been eliminated, a victim of the revolutionary innovations in
electronic transmission control and co-ordination’ (ibid., p 152). It is interesting to speculate, as
Ralston Saul (1997) does on the complicity of economics in all this. Economics has erected an
unassailable value system based on productivity which legitimises the loss of jobs.
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must address truth or wisdom just as much as it must address expression or
eloquence.26
Richard Lanham explains how Peter Ramus intervened in the sixteenth century:
Ramus separated the traditional five parts of rhetoric into two divisions, giving invention,
argument and arrangement to philosophy, and leaving ‘style and delivery as the only true
parts of the art of rhetoric’. Ramus also separated thought from language ... rhetoric
and grammar thus became cosmetic arts, and speech and writing along with them.
[Lanham 1993, p. 156]
Thus Ramus crippled rhetoric from its broader functions. By decoupling it from
thought, he cut loose words from reason, and delivered words into a kind of
backwater of artifice. Meanwhile he reserved the headwaters of real thought for
‘philosophy’, which in his time was used in a very broad sense and included what we
now call science. Thus at a time when the logic road was about to get significant
product enhancement through its marriage with mathematics, rhetoric was being
stripped of its core and rendered cosmetic, a sidelined spectator in the game of
inquiry and truth making.
Ramus’ influence was catastrophic and lies at the heart of some our great twentieth
century problems. Not only did he neuter rhetoric, he also created the beginnings
of specialisation, and separated thought from action. Both follies are intrinsically
connected to the demise of rhetoric. For rhetoric’s great product offers include
both integration and guidance of action by thought. Lanham’s words are worth
quoting at length here.
Add to a free-standing reason the Ramest zeal, one might almost say obsession, for
dividing the seamless web of learning into self-standing and self-sealing divisions, divisions
that later became academic disciplines, and we can see anatomised the two crucial
elements that separate the traditional rhetorical paideia from the modern curriculum.
Ramus, or the broad cultural change that he focused, not only settled the Q question 27
by breaking rhetoric down the middle, but also reversed the centripetal flow the
rhetorical paideia had built into its heart. In the traditional rhetorical curriculum, all
subjects exfoliated out from the ars disserendi. This central focus meant that the arts
were perpetually shifting position and overlapping one another. Such shifting is what
Ramus hated most: ‘For arts ought to consist of subjects that are constant, perpetual,
and unchanging, and they should also consider only those concepts which Plato says are
archetypal and eternal.’ And the self-contained discipline meant the possibility of a real
textbook.
[ibid., p. 158]
26
I develop these issues further in the next chapter.
27
The ‘Q question’ is the question Quintilian posed, ‘What is the relation between wisdom and
eloquence?’
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The issue of specialisation haunts the modern organisation. In many ways it is the
consequence of the modern curriculum which Lanham is commenting. Professions
build their own silos of knowledge which are power bases; they develop their own
language and breed secondary levels of specialisation.
The separation of thought from action is no less fatal. Lanham again comments with
passion:
Value-free language and the possibility of a self-contained discipline of thought make
possible both modern science and that mapping of humanistic inquiry onto a scientific
model which has created modern science as well. And they create a concomitant
problem, one Richard McKeon finds characteristic of our time: they render problematic
the relation of thought to action.
[ibid., p. 158]
Thus a variety of factors have conspired to deprive our era of one of the great tools
by which it can address its problems and create stronger communities. Buchanan’s
summary of the powers of rhetoric emphasises what we have lost, and how much
we have to gain in recovering this lost art.
McKeon’s science of first principles (i.e. his theory of rhetoric) is important because it
turns attention away from disputes about beliefs and ideologies, toward the activity of
ordering in the concrete circumstances of problems and experiences. The activity of
ordering, disordering and reordering in a wide community does not privilege one
principle or belief over another. Rather it is an ongoing exploration of possible
principles in particular circumstances. ... If our dilemma is how to achieve an order that
does not stifle and oppress the individual, then we must understand and cultivate the
activities of ordering, disordering and reordering.
(Buchanan 2000, p. 14)
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Reinventing rhetoric:
A dialogue with
the ancients
In this chapter I ask how we might use rhetoric as a guiding
art in our age. To answer this question I trace the birth of
rhetoric in ancient Greece and the great debates over its
function and its significance. Was rhetoric a cosmetic art of
communication or a formative art of thought? Three great
figures from the ancient world addressed this issue: Plato,
Aristotle and Cicero. If we want to make the most of
rhetoric today, we need to learn from their writings.
Chapter seven
Chapter seven
7.1 The birth of rhetoric; an art of action
242
7.2. Rhetoric: The early debate between Protagoras and Gorgias
244
7.2.1. Protagoras: Rhetoric as debate
244
7.2.2. Gorgias: Rhetoric as persuasion
246
7.2.2.1. A key issue: the relation of words to action
247
7.2.2.2. A second issue: absolute truth versus relative truth
249
7.2.3. Rhetoric: wisdom or eloquence?
7.3. Plato’s uneasy relationship with rhetoric
250
254
7.3.1. The Phaedrus: Rhetoric and thought
255
7.3.2. The Gorgias: Rhetoric and power
259
7.4. Aristotle and the system of rhetoric
262
7.5 Cicero and the civic leader
267
7.5.1. McKeon’s iterpretation of Cicero’s role
268
7.5.2. Cicero and Roman law
269
7.5.3. Rhetoric as an integrative art
271
Figures
Figure 7-1: The Flying Wedge™ model........................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-2: The Flying Wedge ™ of visions and cases ................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-3: The Pipeline model of persuasion ................................ Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-4: The Flying Wedge™ as a cognitive reflex.................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-5: The triple reflex of word, thought and action .......... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7- 6: The wisdom/eloquence polarity .................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-7: Two thematic variations on the wisdom/eloquence polarityError! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-8: A third thematic variation .............................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-9: Aristotle’s three types of knowledge .......................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-10: Aristotle and wisdom.................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-11: The progress of ideas from the Sophists to AristotleError! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-12: The progress of rhetoric from the Sophists to AristotleError! Bookmark not defined.
Figure 7-13: Rhetoric as a meta-art .................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.
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Having discovered rhetoric, I now explore its development in more detail to glean
specific lessons that may contribute to the strategic conversation. I do this by
conducting a ‘conversation’ across the ages with the three major classical figures
who have influenced me: Plato, Aristotle and Cicero. My aim in so doing is not to
provide an exhaustive coverage of these three thinkers; there is not space to do so.
But even if there were, mere coverage would not serve the purpose. Rhetoric
cannot be merely implemented into today’s world if it is to blossom as the
architectonic art that I believe it is. Rather, we need to engage in a productive
dialogue with rhetoric across the river of the ages. On our side of the river the
dialogue must be rooted in experience of the cut and thrust of civic life, not merely
the academy. And the discourse between modern civic life and classical rhetorical
thinking will produce ambitions and a ‘third way’ or a new rhetoric, able to move
from the suburbs of modern thought life to which it is consigned as an oddity of
antiquity, back to lead the main game, to Cicero’s ‘helm of state’.
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7.1 The birth of rhetoric: An art of action
Why do I insist that the ‘new rhetoric’ cannot be developed from within the
academy? Primarily because rhetoric is an art of action. It emerged from
experience, not contemplation. Greek and Roman society advanced by means of
argumentation. The reforms of Kleisthenes replaced the traditional power
structures of family and clan with a system of representative government, and the
reforms of Ephialtes diminished the closed role of the magistrates and instituted
common courts where judgments were made by citizens chosen at random. These
reforms opened up Athenian politics and society, creating possibly the most
participative democracy in Western history. Every citizen could now aspire to a
career in politics. Every citizen could judge another citizen on legal matters. And
these law courts were not the ‘closed shop’ of the modern courtroom where highly
paid barristers argue through the arcane rituals of modern law on behalf of their
clients, to a judge equally well versed in this arcane law. Rather, every citizen had to
argue their own case, and they did so before up to 200 ‘jurors’. The atmosphere
must have been closer to a football stadium than a mahogany-lined courtroom.
Within this environment, the practice of rhetoric was born. Sophists skilled at
training citizens in the art of persuasion, flocked to Athens. These sophists were
highly paid mercenaries; speech was at the service of a vast decision making
community. ‘Truth’ was not a universal but the pragmatic outcome of arguments. It
was neither religiously divined nor autocratically dictated nor philosophically
established. All of these conditions encase truth in universal armoury safe from the
slings and arrows of your ideas and mine. Now, by a series of bold reforms of civic
life, truth donned street clothes, became open to assault and manoeuvre and could
protect itself only by agility of thought and word.
The theory of rhetoric developed from reflection on this state of affairs. But no
matter what techniques or commentary were wrapped around rhetoric, we must
not forget that it was an art whose end was action, and an art born where the
institutional reforms centralised it as the key mode for social activity. Words
mattered in fifth century B.C. Greece. However, if experience is studied long
enough it can get coated in a perspex of propositions that foster the illusion that we
grasp it, while denying its texture and mobility. We will not get to a productive
engagement with rhetoric through such a perspex. We need to locate modern
contexts just as mercenary, necessary and sweaty as the arenas of public action into
which it was born.
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I have found the arena in two places, and both place1 rhetoric in a new and
productive environment. Firstly, I have studied rhetoric in the decision processes of
the modern organisation (both public and private sectors) rather than the academy.
Secondly, I have positioned it not in speech or writing but in dialogue. In my view,
this latter shift in ground is important if rhetoric is to reclaim a central place in the
practices of mankind. This is because neither speech nor writing is central to
decision-making in today’s arenas of business organisation; the executive
management meeting is. This is the closest a modern organisation gets to the public
assembly of Athens: but in that public assembly judgement was mobilised by speeches
(often written and then memorised), not dialogue. So if we engage with the ancients
over their methods we will find them less than relevant.
To conduct a productive discourse with the ancients, we need to learn from their
purpose rather than their methods: the purpose of open decision-making rather than
the method of speech. Sadly, we often learn technically from the method, (speech
and writing) rather than socially and philosophically from the purpose (open
decisions) into which the methods were born.
By locating rhetoric within the context of dialogue as opposed to speech and writing,
I am not of course eliminating speech and writing from consideration; both are vital
to good dialogue. But my main concern is to recover what Cicero called the
‘controversia’ of rhetoric, as described by Conley.
It is a multi-voiced method, which begets controversia, a dialogue in which practical or
philosophical formulations are situated in divergent frames of reference, brought into
conflict in debate, and tested for their respective claims of probabilities.
[Conley 1990, p.37]
This multi-voiced method is dramatised in the leadership workshop where values are
declared, strategies are invented and judgements made.
In moving rhetoric unambiguously towards ‘controversia’, I am taking a clear position
in the great debate which lies at the heart of the nature of rhetoric: whether
rhetoric is a cosmetic art of communications, or a formative art of thinking and
values.
1
I use the term ‘place’ here in the same manner as Buchanan (1992) does in his article, ‘Wicked
problems in design thinking’. In describing the ‘doctrine of placements’, he explains, ‘A primary
concern begins in one area, but innovation comes when the initial selection is repositioned at another
point in the framework, raising new questions and ideas’ (ibid. p. 11).
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7.2. Rhetoric:
The early debate between Protagoras and Gorgias
We can see the seeds of this dilemma in the earliest exponents of rhetoric,
Protagoras and Gorgias. These two men had contrasting claims for rhetoric, which
have persisted ever since.
7.2.1. Protagoras: rhetoric as debate
Protagoras, who came to Athens about the time of Ephialtes’ reforms before 450
BC, believed debate to be essential in rhetoric. He is ascribed the role of the
inventor of ‘antilogic’, the method of pursuing an argument by two lines of
contrasting views.
View 
Agreement
View 
Figure 7-1: The Flying Wedge™ model
I schematise Protagoras’ method with this diagram. It is a model which I have used
for several years in my business called ‘The Flying Wedge’™, to represent dialogue. 2
It highlights two aspects of dialogue:
2
Golsby-Smith 1999, Strategic Conversation System Manual chapter 3. The Flying Wedge™ model is
expanded in this chapter to a total system of strategic conversations deployed throughout an
organisation, by layering ‘flying wedges’ on top of each other.
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It is a non-linear pathway.
It is participative.
In an ambiguous world of rapid change these two aspects interact. Decisions cannot
be made ahead of testing, and testing can occur through participation. Let me
illustrate what I mean with a story.
The Australian Tax Office lives in a time of turbulent change: globalisation and ecommerce are dissolving the tidy boundaries of nation states and threatening
nationally enclosed tax systems. Within our nation, the Government is completely
renovating the tax system in probably the most significant overhaul of a revenue
system ever attempted by Western government. This provides the context in which
rhetoric as a thinking system thrives: fluid subject matter and a loosening of central
decision-making.
Within this context, the leaders of the ATO were attempting to craft a ‘vision for
change’ statement which would anchor the staff through the changes. We were
testing this in a workshop, but the team was uneasy about how to do it. Their
traditional approach was linear: craft the vision then apply it. But they clearly felt
ambivalent. I then showed the leaders the ‘Flying Wedge’ and explained the reflexive
principles it entails. In parallel, craft vision, then test it with instances and cases. As
they judged whether the vision provided a stable enough set of values to guide
decisions in each case, so we could reconstruct the vision.
Vision 
Vision 
Vision 
Cases
Figure 7-2: The Flying Wedge ™ of visions and cases
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This approach pleased the group, and it opened the way for an expedient and
productive session to develop. The group had been trapped by a linear model of
logical progression. But an ‘antilogic’ method had released them into productive
dialogue.
I had used a ‘commonplace’ (The Flying Wedge™) as a master heuristic to discover
values. This use of rhetoric is broader than cosmetic, and is what, I think; Richard
McKeon was alluding to in this quote from ‘Essays in Invention and Discovery’:
When Aristotle separated the methods of the universal art of rhetoric from the
characteristics of particular subject matters and related them to audiences, the
distinction of three ends of persuasion which he made was broadened in later
discussion…to provide commonplaces for all values and for all activities in pursuit of
values. The end of political rhetoric was the expedient or the useful and the
inexpedient…
[McKeon 1987, p. 47]
There was no ‘particular subject matter’ to govern our discourse on values: rather
there was an audience who could judge what was ‘useful’ or ‘inexpedient’.
I was using a Protagorean approach of antilogic to craft the values.
7.2.2. Gorgias: rhetoric as persuasion
In contrast, Gorgias emphasised the persuasive, one-way momentum of clever
speaker acting upon passive audience. For him, speech was a despot, a ‘powerful
lord’, and it bewitched an audience. We hear and feel in Gorgias the modern public
relations guru, the spin-doctor and the ‘Saatchi & Saatchis’. The schematic I have
used to represent this ‘one-way traffic’ of ideas is the pipeline.
Ideas

Speaker
Words

Audience
Figure 7-3: The Pipeline model of persuasion
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Behind the contrast between Protagoras and Gorgias lie several hidden issues.
7.2.2.1. A key issue: the relation of words to action
The first issue, and in some ways the most pervasive, is the relation of words to
thought, and of thought to action. The pipeline model suggests that words are
packages encasing thoughts; our discourse is a mere pipeline along which the
packages travel. The debating model can assume the same minimalist interpretation
of language, if we interpret Protagoras’ reflexivity as a social rather than cognitive
interaction. Nonetheless, if we interpret the reflexivity of debate as both cognitive
and social, we can find in the Protagoran thesis a richer concept of how words work:
not as packagers of meaning, but as catalysts of meaning.
To carry this weight, the Protagoran thesis of debate needs to be explicitly widened
to embrace both the social reflexivity of two voices and the cognitive reflexivity of
thought and word.
Thoughts
Words
Figure 7-4: The Flying Wedge™ as a cognitive reflex
J.L. Austin (1975) staked out a wider place for words in his book How to Do Things
with words. He admits that philosophers have robbed words of their fullest functions
by limiting their role to statements.
It was far too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a ‘statement’ can
only be to ‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact’ which it must do
whether truly or falsely.
[ibid., p. 1]
Austin identifies another class of language beyond mere statements, which he
describes as ‘performative’.
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I propose to call it a performative sentence or performative utterance … The name …
indicates that the issuing of the utterance is the performance of an action – it is not
normally thought of as just saying something
[ibid., p. 6]
Whereas we evaluate ‘statements’ by asking whether they are true or false, we
evaluate performative utterances by asking whether they are ‘felicitous’ (p. 25). Thus
Austin opens up a class of discourse that we may, with McKeon, identity as a
rhetoric around values, particularly the political or deliberative part of rhetoric,
which pursues utility.
Cicero implies a performative view of language when he relates rhetoric to action in
his marvellous exposition on the art in De Inventione. He imagines the origins of
civilisation.
...a time when men wandered at large in the fields like animals and lived on wild fare;
they did nothing by the guidance of reason but relied chiefly on physical strength; there
was as yet no ordered system of religious worship nor social duties;. at this juncture a
man – great and wise I am sure – became aware of the power latent in man and the
wide field offered by his mind for great achievements if one could develop this power
and improve it by instruction. ... to me at least it does not seem possible that a mute
and voiceless wisdom could have turned men suddenly from their habits and introduced
them to different patterns of life.. (this was not possible) unless men had been able by
eloquence to persuade their fellows of the truth of what they had discovered by reason.
[De Inventione I p. 3]
Thus Cicero locates the art of rhetoric as a vast lever by which humankind has
created communities built around values and reason. It exerts more power than
physical strength: ‘I think that men although lower and weaker than animals in many
respects, excel them most by having the power of speech.’ And so Cicero attributes
the growth of civilization to rhetoric and language. This kind of dynamic agency for
language cannot be sustained if we merely conceive of language as statements; we
must with Austin conceive of language as performative.
Austin’s thesis widens the scope of words from packaging of subject matters to
initiators of action. The narrow scope locks discourse into the scientific mode of
verification. But the widened scope makes of discourse an architecture for action.
The scientific view of language as descriptive often traps management discourse into
a hopeless round of quibbling empiricism. (‘How do you know that is true? Where
is your data?’)
The three poets I studied in chapter five explored the reflexivity between word and
thought. Now Austin develops a third axis; the reflexivity between word, thought
and action.
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Thought
Word
Action
Figure 7-5: The triple reflex of word, thought and action
This triplet of reflexivity is fundamental to position rhetoric as a guiding art in our
age. And it is a reflexivity we find implied by Protagoras but denied by Gorgias.
7.2.2.2. A second issue: absolute truth versus relative truth
The second issue underlying the Protagoras/Gorgias polarity is that of absolutes.
We cannot stray far into the question of rhetoric without confronting this issue.
Both Protagoras and Gorgias held that absolute truth was unattainable, and that
opinion (doxa) was the ultimate criterion for decision. The difference between them
on this matter was merely that in the Protagorean dialogue, decision was attained by
a sharing of doxa, whereas in the Gorgian pipeline, decision was coerced by skilful
manipulation of doxa. This moves beyond the issue of reflexivity into the broader
issue of philosophy and the nature of truth. On this matter rhetoric has always been
exposed to the charge that its very pragmatism disqualifies it from any serious truthmaking.
Rhetoric is an art of particulars, not universals. As such it does not seek an absolute
truth, but rather a truth grounded in the audience who make the truth. Does this,
then, condemn rhetoric to relativism? Does a person who uses rhetoric as an art of
inquiry automatically deny any objective criteria for truth? If the jury or the citizens
are the arbiters of truth, and tickling their affections is our only metric of success,
does the orator surrender all sense of objectivity or extrinisic truth to the ebb and
flow of opinion?
For the Ancients this question was phrased as the battle between ‘wisdom’ and
‘eloquence’. Quintilian agonised over it in Book xii of his Institutio. What if a fool is
eloquent? Will ‘eloquence’ then only serve to communicate error? Quintilian
shudders at the thought.
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… if the powers of eloquence serve only to lend arms to crime, there can be nothing
more pernicious than eloquence to public and private welfare alike, while I myself, who
have laboured to the best of my ability to contribute something of value to oratory,
shall have rendered the worst of services to mankind …
[Institutio xii, I]
Quintilian could do no do more than offer circular reasoning in defence of eloquence and
its natural liason with wisdom (or truth). He recoiled from this chasm into which he
peered with such horror that his mind did not seem to have been spared any opportunity
for process and reasoning: mere exclamation would have to do!
For I do not merely assert that the ideal orator should be a good man, but I affirm that
no man can be an orator unless he is a good man …
[xii, I, p. 3].
Cicero also was deeply bothered by the uncertain nature of the relation between wisdom
and eloquence. He began his De Inventione with just this concern.
I have often seriously debated with myself whether men and communities have received
more good or evil from oratory.
He does not offer us a fully worked though resolution of the issue, but he at least offers
us the authenticity of an honest personal journey.
For my own part, after long thought, I have been led by reason itself to hold this opinion
first and foremost; that wisdom without eloquence does too little for the good of the
states, but that eloquence without wisdom is generally highly disadvantageous and is
never helpful.
Thus the orator must also study philosophy to ensure he grasps wisdom. For
Cicero, the orator must have a statesman’s character, and in fact he develops such a
broad set of criteria for the good orator that, in De Oratore, the auditors complain
that he is specifying a superman, not a real person.
Now our friend Crassus seemed to me to delimit the range of the orator, not by the
bounds of the art concerned, but by the well nigh infinite extent of his own talent. For
by his verdict he even handed over to the orator the helm of statesmanship …
[De Oratore Book 1, x/ix, p. 214]
How can we be free from the uncertain fates to which the judge and jury may lead
us? Let the orator be a character of statesmanlike proportions, Cicero seems to
argue. We must take refuge in superhuman qualities to safeguard us from the perils
of relativism.
7.2.3. Rhetoric: wisdom or eloquence?
Several issues are entangled in this debate and it serves us well to untangle them.
The general issue is whether rhetoric is a formative art or merely a cosmetic art.
This was phrased by the ancients as ‘wisdom’ or ‘eloquence’. All who have valued
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rhetoric highly have positioned it as an art for wisdom, from which eloquence flows;
those who have marginalised rhetoric have positioned it merely as an art of
eloquence. This positioning may or may not have been deliberate. Indeed the valuing
works both ways; an advocate who emphasises the eloquence of the rhetorical arts
will inadvertently marginalise it.
Thus we have a polarisation.
Wisdom?
Eloquence?
RHETORIC
Figure 7- 6: The wisdom/eloquence polarity
If we emphasise
the eloquence end of the spectrum, we will concentrate on the many verbal devices
by which rhetoric works. If we emphasise the wisdom end of the spectrum, we find
several meanings implied in the one word; these are what we can usefully untangle.
I have emphasised the cognitive meaning of wisdom in the discussion of Austin’s
work; in this reading we are certainly moving rhetoric to the wisdom end of the
spectrum, but we are doing so by arguing that rhetoric is a thinking process and that
words are a key formative feature of thought, not just a tool for expression
(eloquence).
However, Cicero and Quintilian imply another meaning of wisdom which is closer to
ethics or character than to cognition. For them the wise person is statesmanlike and
‘good’. This implies a reading of wisdom as ‘values’ or ‘goodness’. Thus a wise
person is one who has true and good values, and who uses eloquence to express
those values and move people to act in accordance with them. A fool, by contrast,
trades in doxa or opinion, useing eloquence to express fashions and to move people
to act in accordance with fashion.
Thus we can construct two axes that vary the theme of wisdom and eloquence.
Eloquence?
Wisdom?
Expression
Thinking/cognition
Character/ethics
RHETORIC
Opinion/doxa
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Figure 7-7: Two thematic variations on the wisdom/eloquence polarity
In my use of the strategic conversation, I work on both these themes.
Firstly, I create a valid thinking space for the rhetorical discourse as opposed to an
analytic discourse. I convince the group that there is a domain where play and
possibility are the absolutes, not fixed answers and subject matters.
Secondly, I design the dialogue so that the group participants discover and craft a
relevant set of values, which they can use to make judgements. These values are not
universal, and cannot be deduced from a canon of universal values. Hence they
discover their values by expressing them, and discovering them they confirm their
character, and define a kind of ethics for their organisation.
A story will illustrate how this works. The leadership team of the ATO had to
decide on a new measurement regime that was being introduced to the Australian
Public Service departments by the Department of Finance. This system mandated
that each agency nominate a set of outcomes by which it would be measured. First I
initiated a discussion on whether this issue mattered to them and to the
organisation. ‘Was it significant?’ I asked. Secondly, I provoked them to discover
what a good outcomes statement would look like, by getting them to compare
outcome statements from five other organisations. These two activities did not
attempt to discern an absolute set of truths, but they were aimed to promote
wisdom and the statesman-like qualities so important to Cicero. This first question
of significance evoked their responsibility for the civic life for which they were
responsible. I was cultivating in them the voice of the speaker, the agent.
This is reminiscent of Cicero’s definition of the qualities of the statesman:
Whoever knows and uses everything by which the advantage of a State is secured and
developed, is the man to be deemed the helmsman of the State, and the originator of
national policy.
[De Oratore, Bk 1, xlviii]
I was asking them ‘Do you care?’ The second question forced them to articulate the
values against which they would judge the formulations to be presented. These values
were of a deliberative nature, ‘What is useful? What is expedient?’ They were not
universal. Nonetheless, by first articulating them, and then demanding that their decisions
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accorded with these values, I was ensuring that the group acted in coherence to the
values.
This establishes two principles for authenticity (or wisdom) in dialogue: integrity and
coherence. The integrity was established by the group owning the significance of the
topic, and articulating its importance to the organisation. The coherence was
established by the group aligning their judgements with their espoused values.
Thus I would argue that this community was wise as well as eloquent, and that they
were wise in both senses of the word. They were using language as a tool for
thinking, and they were using language to discover the good (ethics and values).
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7.3. Plato’s uneasy relationship with rhetoric
Plato had an uneasy relationship with rhetoric. On the surface he positioned it as an
art of communication rather than of wisdom, and so blamed it for much of the social
malaise that afflicted Greece in this time. Yet he was a superb technician of language,
as was Socrates, his mentor and the protagonist of many of his dialogues. Both used
language to debate and argue superbly, that is, as a tool for at least intellectual
formation if not for ethical formation. This dilemma makes Plato’s writings on
rhetoric intriguing.
Born in 427 BC, Plato lived shortly after the era of Protogoras and Gorgias. Several
important events disenchanted him with public life. The most traumatic was the
death of his revered teacher Socrates in 399 BC, executed for misleading the youth
of Greece. He had also seen Sparta defeat Athens and had lived through a time of
political instability during which the forces of oligarchy rose up to supplant
democracy. Confronted with this, he pursued a transcendent philosphic truth that
would be impervious to the ‘slings and arrows of outragous fortune’. This left him
with little time for the ebbs and flows of civic life where rhetoric was making its
mark.
I decided at last that all existing forms of society are wrong: their institutions are just
about past remedy, unless some uncanny force should intervene at just the right time. I
was thus moved to give my attention to a true philosophy and say that only from the
standpoint of such a philosophy could one get a comprehensive view of what it right, for
the social order as well as for the individual. Mankind would never get rid of its miseries
until philosophers, in the true sense of the term [ie as ‘lovers of wisdom’] gained
political power, or else, by some stroke of fate, the ruling classes took to that true
philosophy.
[As cited by Conley 1990, p. 8]
The key term is ‘comprehensive’. Plato valued a comprehensive truth and for him
this was found in philosophy. Thus we can add a third theme to our
wisdom/eloquence schematic.
Eloquence?
Wisdom?
Expression
Thinking/cognition
Character/ethics
RHETORIC
Philosophy
Opinion/doxa
Choice
Figure 7-8: A third thematic variation
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For Plato the three themes are linked: the lover of transcendent truth (philosophy)
uses powerful dialectical reasoning (thinking) to define what is good (ethics and
character). As we shall see later, there is a great irony in this triplet, for the tool
that the philosopher uses to do all this is language. This makes rhetoric, in McKeon’s
terms, a superordinate art which is used to construct other arts and subject matters,
even ethical and philosophic subject matter. But more of that later.
Plato discusses rhetoric in the Phaedrus and the Gorgias.
7.3.1. The Phaedrus: rhetoric and thought
In the Phaedrus, Plato discusses rhetoric using a dramatic dialogue between Phaedrus
and Socrates over the subject of a speech Phaedrus has heard by Lysias on the
subject of love. Phaedrus, a neophyte about matters of rhetoric, was apparently
unimpressed by Lysias’ speech, so Socrates asks him to repeat it, which he eventually
did. Even allowing for Phaedrus’ paraphrasing it is an inept and muddled speech;
emphatic but disorganised. As such it probably characterizes the worst of rhetoric –
verbal swirls lacking substance and intellect. To exemplify the danger of such a
combination Plato dramatises, in the character of Phaedrus, the naïve impressionable
audience who thought it was all great. (‘Well, what do you think of the speech,
Socrates? Isn’t it a wonderful piece of work, especially the diction?’ Phaedrus, p. 31).
When pressed by Socrates on the speech’s lack of form (‘it seems to me that has
said the same thing two or three times over’), Phaedrus defends it for its
fulsomeness: ‘If the speech has one merit above all others, it is that no single aspect
of the subject worth mentioning has been omitted: no one could improve on it
either in fullness or quality’.
This is significant: Phaedrus has been impressed by verbal flourish without intellectual
rigour, and this is the theme that Socrates will pursue. Socrates then composes and
delivers two alternative speeches on the same subject which demonstrate a vastly
superior approach, and give Phaedrus a tangible case against which he can compare
Lysias’ froth and bubble. The first speech is orderly and clever; the second is
profound and philosophical.
Later Socrates and Phaedrus discuss the relative merits of the three speeches.
Lysias’ speech is disordered: the arrangement is back-to-front. ‘He is like a man
swimming on his back in reverse; his speech begins where it should have ended …’
(Phaedrus, p. 78). Socrates finds that any speech must have its own ‘organic shape,
like a living being’.
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Thus Plato identifies in rhetoric an art of intellectual architecture, not of mere
verbalism and persuasive moments. Rhetoric is an art that arranges the parts of a
large body of thought into pleasing proportions and sequences. The quality that will
emerge is coherence. This locates aesthetics as a key aspect of clear thinking, and
strengthens the case for the use of the liberal arts as a core skill in any education.
Socrates’ point explains beautifully how I craft a conversation session. I do not
provide the content or subject matter, which must be provided by the participants,
but the form or intellectual architecture. I design a conversation so that it will not
look like Socrates’ ‘man on his back swimming in reverse’ but will emerge with its
own ‘organic shape like a living being’. I do this by shaping and sequencing the
conversation along my Thinking Wave3 architecture. Thus the conversation has
rhythm, an appropriate sense of rise and fall, and an aesthetic pleasure at closure.
Like Socrates, I believe the collective speech of a day’s workshop is a living entity
that must develop organically with a pleasing shape and sequence. Whenever I have
lost control of the design for discussion (particularly with a group new to my
methods) a jumble like Lysias’ speech has resulted.4
But Socrates moves beyond shape to substance. He does this by opening up the
question of content; the great orator must master content, not in its materials or
matters, but in its ‘likeness and unlikeness’. ‘(The orator) must have an exact
knowledge of the likeness and unlikeness between things’ (Phaedrus, p. 75). This
leads Socrates to expand his idea of dialectic. Dialectic is the art of fine distinctions
and classifications which unite and divide bodies of knowledge. (For instance, in his
speech Socrates had begun by distinguishing two types of madness, the first human,
the second a divine affliction. Among divine afflictions, he then distinguished four
types, the last of which was love, the theme of his speech.)
3
The ‘Thinking Wave’™ is based on the schematic that I used extensively in chapter two. I use this
explicitly in every conversation session to map progress and decide our goals for the session. The
Thinking Wave™ is described in detail in ‘Strategic Conversations Manual’ (Golsby-Smith 2000)
4
The architecturing of a speech or conversation is more than a technical objective exercise; it is also
humanistic. Aesthetics serves pleasure and pleasure is a matter of human values. This was dramatically
demonstrated to me in the writing task that I describe in chapter four where all the plain English
characteristics of my rewritten scientific article were pared back by my client in order to preserve
scientific objectivity. Not only did he get rid of the use of the first and second person, he also
targeted the sequences which arranged the information. The sequencing humanised the article and
thus had to be expunged.
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This art of distinctions can be either inductive or deductive: ‘the first method is to
take a synoptic view of many scattered particulars and collect them under a single
generic term …(the other is) to divide a genus into species, again observing the
natural articulation, not mangling any of the parts, like an unskillful butcher’
(Phaedrus, p. 82). Though the rhetorician cannot master every kind of subject
matter, he or she can master these ‘methods of division and collection as
instruments that enable (him) to speak and to think’.
It was precisely this ability that Lysias lacked, and so he could only produce turgid,
unstructured prose. Socrates declares that anyone who possesses the gift is rare,
and when he finds such a man, he will follow in his footsteps ‘like the footsteps of a
god’.
Dialectic thus moves beyond form as ‘sequencing and proportions’, to form as
‘inductive search agent’. Dialectic is the capacity of the mind to ‘unitise experience’
(in Richard Young’s memorable phrase). It governs the search and selection of
information, not just its arrangement and expression, and thus is intensely formative.
When you stand in front of a group of scientists versed in the subject of
electrophysiology, or when you stand in front of a group of economists, versed in
the subject of taxation policy, or when you stand in front of groups of computer
programmers, versed in the subject of the massive SAP business software, and you
promise to guide them in a ‘speech’ strategizing and planning their actions and
benefiting their consequences, you can feel an impostor disqualified by your lack of
subject matter knowledge. You can also feel, as Cicero said he did before a speech,
‘frightened of the difficulty of a speech, and the doubtful fate of a speech, and of the
anticipations of an audience’ (De Oratore 1, xxvi, 120). Socrates’ art of dialectic
explains the nature of the contribution rhetoric can make to these domain experts.
By clarifying conceptual boundaries, and breaking their issues and matters into
logically connected categories, rhetoric lays out the field of inquiry and debate, and
enables them to traverse it expeditiously.
Thus Plato unarguably locates rhetoric as an art of thought in the cognitive sense at
the least. Rhetoric enhances thinking processes, and to the extent that this
constitutes wisdom, rhetoric is an art of wisdom, not just of eloquence.
But Socrates includes more than dialectic in his art of rhetoric. In his second speech
he pursues the subject of love through his famous image of the winged charioteer.
When he introduces this image he explains that he is using imagery rather than
dialectic at this juncture, because imagery can capture more of the divine than
dialectic can.
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To describe it (the soul’s immortality) as it is would require a long exposition of which
only a god is capable; but it is within the power of man to say in shorter compass what
it resembles. Let us adopt this method and compare the soul to a winged charioteer…
[Phaedrus, p. 50]
Thus he widens the compass of rhetoric to include metaphor as well as dialectic.5
For Plato, metaphor is energised by more than aggregation of components presented
to the mind by sense impressions. It is fed by embers of eternity, a divine memory, a
wing of the soul recalling the immortal. And even dialectic shares this mystic sense of
the eternal.
It takes a man to understand by the use of universals, and to collect out of the
multiplicity of sense impressions a unity arrived at by a process of reason. Such a
process is simply the recollection of the things which our soul once perceived when it
took its journey with a god, looking down from above on the things to which we now
describe reality and gazing upwards towards what is truly real.
[ibid., p. 55].
Here Plato implies that the art of thought is divine. When we combine and divide, we
recognize forms that make coherent sense from the assault of an infinite diversity of
events and data. This unitizing capacity, working by induction and metaphor, does more
than equip us to manage a dialogue and map a path of inquiry: it is more than a utilitarian,
handy technique. It is an imprint of the divine. The forms are eternity remembered, not
just the geometry of cognition.
At the end of the Phaedrus, Plato culminates this line of argument by moving the art of
rhetoric from an art of writing to an art of love. In a significant conclusion, Socrates gives
Phaedrus a message for Lysias and all other orators.
Socrates: Go and tell Lysias that we two went down to the stream and shrine of the
Nymphs and there received the following message which we are charged to deliver to
Lysias and other speech writers, to Homer and other poets, whether they compose for
accompaniment or not, and finally to Solon and anyone who has written treatises in the
form of political utterances, which he call laws. If any of them had knowledge of the
truth when he wrote, and can defend what he has written by submitting to an
interrogation on the subject, and make it evident as soon as he speaks how
comparatively inferior are his writings, such a one should take his title not from what he
has written but from what has been the object of his serious pursuit.
Phaedrus: What is the title you have in mind for him?
Socrates: To call him wise, Phaedrus, would, I think be excessive; God alone deserves
to be so described. But to call him a lover of wisdom … would be more appropriate.
5
It is instructive to compare Plato’s emphasis on metaphor as a proxy for the divine with Bateson’s
emphasis on metaphor as the alternative reasoning process to logic. I discuss Bateson’s use of
metaphor in the Introduction.
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[ibid., p. 102]
Socrates renames rhetoricians as ‘lovers of wisdom’ – but only if they are not
enamoured by the surface texture of words as their product. They must be
enamoured by thought, and submit to the interactions of debate. Thus as Plato
ponders the lyric qualities of speech he seems to locate it firmly as love, and as an
art of wisdom, not just on the cognitive axis but also on the philosophical axis (by his
use of dialectic) and on the ethical axis (by his peroration on love).
7.3.2. The Gorgias: rhetoric and power
The Gorgias takes a much more prosaic view of rhetoric, and veers away from the
divine origins of speech towards the terrible consequences of speech. At the heart
of the dialogue lies the proposition, which we suspect is Plato’s real position, that
rhetoric is ‘a knack gained by experience … producing a kind of gratification and
pleasure’ (Gorgias, p. 43).
Socrates pursues his inquiry into rhetoric by dialogue with three people: Gorgias,
Polus and Callicles. Unlike Socrates, who is a philosopher, each of these is more a
man of the world. Gorgias is an older man and a dignified orator, and Socrates
treats him in a respectful manner, sparing him from his acid wit and intellectual
scalpel. He is followed by Polus, also an orator, but young, over-confident and
presumptuous: Socrates demolishes him and reduces him to mere strident
assertions. The most chilling opponent of all, Callicles, who represents the young
power player, then follows them. Callicles cares for nothing but power, politics and
influence. He despises philosophy and believes that thinking and speech are merely
ornamental to the main game of power plays.
Whereas in Phaedrus Socrates ventured upstream from words to thoughts and
thence to divinity, with Gorgias he goes downstream and pursues the ends of
oratory. This is because in the Phaedrus he was, in fact, analyzing the process of
composition, and using introspection to do so; in Gorgias he is external to all the
speeches, and is confronting not composition but utility and objectives.
He drives Gorgias to define the essence of oratory, but Gorgias can get no further
than this:
The orator need have no knowledge of the truth about things; it is enough for him to
have discovered a knack of convincing the ignorant that he knows more than the
experts.
[Gorgias, p. 38].
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He drives Polus further into meaninglessness by comparing oratory to cooking: it works
on formulae and exists only to produce pleasure. Socrates then turns to duty, and
suggests that criminals offer themselves for punishment voluntarily rather than pollute the
state.
This raises the ire of Callicles who cannot bear the thought of ethical self-abasement
interfering with self-interest. The world is made up of the weak and the strong;
power, not ethics, makes the world go round.
Conventions … are made, in my opinion, by the weaklings who form the majority of
mankind.
[ibid., p. 78]
He even offers Socrates a job!
That is the truth of the matter, and you will realise it if you abandon philosophy and
turn to more important pursuits.
[ibid., p. 79]
We can hear in Callicles’ pragmatics the values and the iron-willed presumptiveness of a
captain of commerce, of people who believe that facts are concrete, and not open to
inquiry and possibility. McKeon characterises this concreteness as the ‘idolatry of facts’:
The concern for concreteness in the modern world has become an idolatry of facts.
The adjectives … ‘stubborn’ and ‘irreducible’ express the underlying attitude aroused in
most men by reference to facts. Such solidity as we find in the world is based on facts
which are fixed and well grounded.
[McKeon, The Future of the Liberal Arts, p 2.]
Given a world of ‘facts’, men like Callicles turn to social power as the means of
mobilizing action. In so doing, they despise philosophy or the art of thought, since it
is mere cosmetics sprayed over the concreteness of facts. Why bother with it?
In the context of the alternative direction of the Phaedrus, where thoughts recover
the divinity of the soul, men like Callicles are more than irritants who believe in
different methods: they are atheists who deny the immortality of the soul and
diminish the scale of what it means to be human.
Plato’s Callicles symbolizes his despair over civic life. For Plato, the civic world that
had murdered Socrates was a mere shadow of reality, and so was not worthy of
serious renovation or engagement. For Plato, the body was a cage ‘to which we are
bound like an oyster to its shell’ (Phaedrus, p 57). Thus Plato bifurcated reality
between his Callicles and the winged soul. The only true reality (and thus
knowledge) was transcendent and immune to the fluctuation of circumstances. In
such a paradigm, decision and judgement would at best be an exercise in pragmatic
manoeuvre, not arts with which to construct reality. Plato’s comprehensive values
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ensured he would never find in rhetoric an art to guide civic action. For that we
must turn to Aristotle and Cicero.
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7.4. Aristotle and the system of rhetoric
Aristotle clearly positioned rhetoric as an art of wisdom. He did this by broadening
the definition of knowledge and truth beyond the eternal, to include the practical
and the productive. The significance of this shift from Platonic idealism cannot be
overstated: truth had hands and feet for Aristotle. It was not just a world of the
ethereal.
Importantly, the productive and the practical were not merely utilitarian areas of
activity. They were not lower functions enabling us to clothe ourselves and decide
on expedient courses of action; they were aspects of truth. Significantly, Aristotle
introduces his schema for knowledge in the Nicomachean Ethics. There he defines
the ‘states by virtue of which the soul possesses truth’. He enumerates five such
states:
Scientific knowledge
Philosophic wisdom
Intuitive reason
Practical wisdom
Art
[Ethics, Bk VI 113]
He explicitly excludes judgement and opinion because ‘in these we may be mistaken’.
In other words, he is interested only in truths, their discovery and their
construction.
Of the five states, the first three are connected, and can be grouped together under
‘theoretic or scientific knowledge’. Intuitive reason yields the first principles that
scientific reasoning uses as starting points. ‘Philosophic wisdom is in fact intuitive
reasoning combined with scientific knowledge’ (ibid., Bk VI, 1141). Scientific
knowledge is ‘eternal’. It is a knowledge of ‘things that are necessity … and things
that are ungenerated and imperishable’ (ibid., Bk VI, 1139). The object of scientific
knowledge is the capacity to demonstrate.
This area of truth accords with Plato’s ideals, although Aristotle does not lyricise it
as Plato does. We can also recognize in it all the seedbeds of our modern view of
science, in the pursuit of unchangeable facts that can demonstrate and are free from
the taint of the human touch, in the focus on the ‘real’ world.
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But Aristotle does not stop there. He extends the scope of truth to include arts, by
which he means ‘a state concerned with making, involving a true course of
reasoning’. The subject matter of art is the variable not the universal. It is
concerned with possibilities and varieties. It is the state of ‘truth making’ where
mankind plays God and creates the object.
All art is concerned with coming into being, i.e. with contriving and considering how
something may come into being which is capable of either being or not being, and
whose origin is in the maker and not in the thing made; for art is concerned neither
with things that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor with things that do so in
accordance with nature (since these have their origin in themselves).
[ibid., Bk VI, p. 1140]
So the architect and the furniture maker are engaged in a kind of truth. The object, once
made, has entered the world of things, not by nature, not by necessity, but by human
production.
Aristotle’s next state for pursuit of truth is ‘practical wisdom’. This is the area of
judgement about what is good for man. ‘Practical wisdom, then, must be a reasoned
and true state of capacity to act with regard to human goods’ (ibid., Bk VI, p. 1140).
Its object is not making, but doing. Making has an end other than itself (the product),
but doing has no end outside itself (other than good action). Thus, people skilled in
practical wisdom ‘are good at managing households or states’. We can diagram
Aristotle’s schema of knowledge by this model.
Source
Nature
Scientific
Productive
Practical
Source
Man
Figure 7-9: Aristotle’s three types of knowledge
The source of scientific knowledge is nature, that which is necessary and invariable. The
object of scientific knowledge is the eternal causes of things in nature. The subject of
practical wisdom lies within mankind, that which produces a good outcome for humanity.
The subject of productive wisdom is the product, which originates within mankind, not
nature, but uses nature’s materials as the elements of construction.
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Whether we agree or disagree with Aristotle’s schema of knowledge is not the point
here. The point is that Aristotle extended the range of truth beyond Plato’s
universals to include human art and values. The architectonic, or master art, of
doing was politics, and the archetectonic art of making was rhetoric.
Art is architectonic with respect to making, and the architectonic art of making is
rhetoric, insofar as rhetoric is an art of thought.
[McKeon 1987, p. 4]
Thus Aristotle moved rhetoric to an art of wisdom by widening the understanding of truth
beyond the idealist limits of philosophy. Rhetoric was not a mere knack, but one of the three
branches of knowledge.
Eloquence?
Wisdom?
Expression
Thinking/cognition
Character/ethics
Three branches
of truth:
a) Philosophic
b) Productive
c) Practical
Opinion
RHETORIC
Philosophy
Choice
Figure 7-10: Aristotle and wisdom
We can schematise the progress of ideas from Protagoras to Aristotle in this diagram:
Nature
of truth
Sophists
Plato
Aristotle
(Pragmatists)
(Idealist)
(Systemic)
Universal
Universal
Universal
Nature
of truth
Particular
Particular
Constructivist
Particular
Figure 7-11: The progress of ideas from the Sophists to Aristotle
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Both the Sophists and Plato, for all their differences, shared the same conception of
truth as philosophic and idealist. Their responses were quite different. The Sophists
were content to live and work within the particular, accepting its separation from
universal truth. Plato despised the particular and pursued the universal. However
Aristotle created a third order mediating between the two extremes. For the
moment let us call this third order the constructivist domain as it was the domain,
where human beings construct legitimate realities. Aristotle lived and worked to
create systems of thought that enabled people to work in this constructivist domain.
Within these conceptions of knowledge, rhetoric was valued and configured very
differently.
Sophists
Plato
Aristotle
Pragmatists)
(Idealist)
(Systemic)
Universal
Universal
Universal
Nature
of truth
Constructivist
Rhetoric
Particular
Rhetoric
Particular
Particular
Rhetoric
Figure 7-12: The progress of rhetoric from the Sophists to Aristotle
The Sophists and Plato both attached rhetoric to the particular, and thus by
implication excluded it from the art of truth-making, banishing it to the role of a
cosmetic art. (Although as we have seen, for Plato this banishment was an uneasy
and complex affair).
Aristotle, however, positioned rhetoric as a central art of making truth; he
configured the elements of rhetoric, not as mechanics for producing ‘conviction,
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(which) is the be-all and end-all of (rhetoric’s) whole activity’ (Socrates in the Gorgias,
p. 28), but as an art of thought, structuring lines of inquiry which will produce a type
of truth, a type of knowledge. This truth and knowledge will not be claimed as
universal, but will be pertinent to a circumstance (either forensic, epideictic, or
deliberative) and a community (audience and speakers), and will be judged by values
(just, good, or useful). This realm is not the universe, but it is a human universe – a
Carthage, an Athens, or a modern organisation.
Aristotle, in fact, turns rhetoric’s engagement with particulars into a kind of
universality. For free of any particular subject matter, rhetoric defines a universal
pathway of inquiry.
It is clear then, that rhetoric is not bound up with a single definite class of subjects, but
is as universal as dialectic.
[Rhetoric 1355 (b)]
Thus, what Plato struggled over – the lack of content expertise of the orator, which
potentially condemned him to become a generalist with no real art – became in
Aristotle’s hands a ‘universal’.6
This issue of content expertise versus process mastery has dominated my service to
clients. In the realm of strategy, most corporations seek a content matter expert
who can give them the answers, and the major consulting houses position
themselves in this way. Thus clients and consultants combine to perpetuate the
scientific type of knowledge which is fixed, in which the consultant becomes the
modern philosopher, expert in wisdom, which he or she dispenses. By contrast I am
a rhetorical consultant who offers a thinking process to organisations, which will fit
any subject matter.
Thus Aristotle widened rhetoric, and positioned it as a key architectonic art in a vast
system of knowledge. In locating rhetoric as a key part of this system, Aristotle
legitimised human involvement in truth-making, and offered the Western world the
art of thought that would be the ally of open societies.
Aristotle divides the art of dialectic and rhetoric on the grounds, not of method, but of the nature of
questions considered: dialectic addresses universal audiences, rhetoric addresses specific audiences.
Perlman suggests we forget this distinction and treat them as one, since the distinction is not major, and
unnecessarily diverts serious attention from rhetoric (Perlman 1982, p. 485).
6
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7.5 Cicero and the civic leader
We know a little of Aristotle from reading his works. By contrast, Cicero was not a
philosopher, but a man of action engaged in the world of public affairs. He was not
even a rhetorician in the necessary sophistic sense; rather he was a statesman.
Thus he was at the centre of the cut and thrust of political and legal life(1990, p.
113), but he was not there merely defending and taking positions of interest. He
saw himself as defending the nobler cause of virtue and liberty. Without the modern
mentality that ruptures thought and action,7 Cicero was also a man of contemplation
who yearned for nothing more than the solace of reflecting and writing on his busy
life. As Thomas Conley (1990, p. 18) says of him, ‘Cicero taught two important
issues: that the primary duty of man is action, and that the vita activa does not
distract from one’s intellectual powers but stimulates them’.
Cicero’s autobiographical opening to De Oratore is worth quoting at length. One can
note his rhetorical skill in establishing his character as the speaker, by telling his
story, a story which not only provides introductory context to the work, but
demonstrates his moral beliefs and his dignifying concern for his audience (his
brother Quintus).
When, as often happens, brother Quintus, I think over and recall the days of old, those
men always seem to me to have been singularly happy who, with the state at her best,
and while enjoying high distinctions and the fame of their achievements were able to …
enjoy a dignified repose. And time was when I used to imagine that I too should
become entitled, with well high universal approval, to some opportunity of leisure and
of again directing my mind to the sublime pursuits beloved of us both, when once, the
career of office complete and life too taking the turn towards its close, the endless toil
of public speaking and the business of canvassing should have come to a stand still. The
hopes so born of my thoughts and plans have been cheated alike by the disastrous times
of public peril and by my manifold personal misfortunes … By my consulship I was
drawn into the midst of a universal struggle and crisis, and my whole time since that
consulship I have spent stemming those billows which, stayed by my efforts from ruining
the nation, rolled in a flood upon myself.
7
Lanham notes that the effect of Peter Ramus’ splitting of rhetoric into two halves caused this
rupture. ‘We can hardly make too much of this decision. Value-free language and the possibility of a
self contained discipline make possible both modern science and that mapping of humanistic inquiry
onto a scientific model which has created modern social science as well. And they create a
concomitant problem, one Richard McKeon finds characteristic of our own time: they render
problematic the relation of thought to action’. (Lanham 1993, p. 158). Indeed McKeon was so
concerned about the problem that he wrote a paper on it: ‘Mankind: the Relation of Reason to
Action’. In it he declares, ‘The use of reason in action is a problem common to all the disciplines’
(McKeon, 1964).
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[De Oratore, Book 1, p. 1]
Cicero’s values are transparent: he prizes a stable and peaceful civilization. It was this
valuing of civic action and an open society that equipped Cicero to adapt Aristotle’s
placement of rhetoric as an art of thought to the needs of his day. Cicero’s valuing of
action contrasts with Plato’s comprehensive values. Just as Plato’s comprehensive
values disinclined him to pursue rhetoric as a serious art, so Cicero’s civic values
impelled him to find in rhetoric the art by which he could reconstruct his society.
7.5.1. McKeon’s interpretation of Cicero’s role
Richard McKeon, in his essay, The Uses of Rhetoric in a Technological Age: Architectonic
Productive Arts (1987), positions Cicero as the key interpreter of Aristotle’s rhetoric, and
perhaps the greatest exponent of the use of rhetoric as an architectonic art.
McKeon surveys the history of rhetoric, and distinguishes two major uses to which it has
been put over the centuries: either as a cosmetic art of persuasion, or as an architecture
to guide how people think, reason and develop claims to truth. In some eras, rhetoric
became technical and preoccupied with its own protocols and methods, which are
basically verbal arts. In these eras, rhetoric was diminished morally and sold its soul to
the highest bidders; it was used as an art of advancement and manipulation.8 In other
eras, rhetoric became a master art, which organised other arts. It became the source
code from which mankind constructed reasons, proofs, and values. During these eras,
rhetoric was the servant of social equity, participation and the dignifying of local cultures;
it was the intellectual companion of the open society.
McKeon complains that traditional histories of rhetoric miss this grand oscillation
and instead ‘tend to be pedantic explorations of traditions of rhetoric as an art of
persuasion.’ Instead, McKeon searches for ‘principles … by which present methods
and uses of rhetoric might be evaluated or changed …’ (ibid., p. 1). To throw light
on his inquiry he explores the way rhetoric was used during the Roman Republic and
the Renaissance, the two key periods when rhetoric was practised ‘as an art of
revolution… contributing to innovation and growth in theory, practice and
8
Cf. McKeon on the liberal arts: ‘The true function of the Liberal arts, as their name suggests, is to
liberate men. They have performed this function from time to time in the past by adapting disciplines
to the problems men have faced. They have become absolute and ineffective at other times, by
elaborating old methods without consideration of new facts or problems. The liberal arts are then,
the arts of the freeman, in the sense of his possession and mark, which other men seek as symbols of
status, and which liberate only by facilitating ascension in the social scale’ (The future of the liberal arts,
McKeon 1964, p. 1)
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production.’ During these periods rhetoric was ‘enlarged in its operation … to
become a productive or “poetic” art … in all phases of human activity’. To achieve
this enlarged role, rhetoric had to be ‘schematised’ so that it functioned at a cultural
level, shaping mental models rather than being trivialised as a technique for
persuasion selling its wares to a wide variety of disciplines and subject matters.
Once schematised, rhetoric then became an architectonic art, an art of production.
The phrase ‘architectonic art’ is McKeon’s code for the nature of the function that
rhetoric performs at its largest scope: it becomes a paradigm maker, and is used to
structure the way mankind thinks about thinking and inquiry. To achieve this,
rhetorical devices must be amplified beyond techniques, and become templates by
which we can develop new intellectual tools.
7.5.2. Cicero and Roman law
McKeon then explains how Cicero achieved this. Cicero adapted Aristotle’s four
scientific questions to the rhetorical context of law. He did not do it arbitrarily but
rather to solve a problem. Cicero was concerned to strengthen the role of common law
in Roman society, and was appalled by the movement to dictatorship at the hands of
Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. He saw in the move to the strong man a loss of civic
freedom.9 For him the role of common law was noble, providing a decision environment
that should be immune to machination, power and influence.
Let the goal then of the common law be defined as the preservation, in the concern and
disputes of citizens, of an impartiality founded on statute and custom.
[De Oratore I. xlii, 188]
In the face of the lifelong problem that he confronted of preserving freedom in Rome,
Cicero adapted Aristotlean hetoric to construct his forensic system of legal inquiry: he
turned the four scientific questions into his four legal issues, the constitutio.
Aristotle’s four scientific questions were:
The kinds of questions we ask are as many as the kinds of things we know. They are, in
fact, four: –
9
Plato obviously shared Cicero’s sense of values. Socrates’ long debate with Callicles in the Gorgias
revolves around their disagreement over the value of political ego. Callicles thinks strong men make
things happen, and conventions are made by the ‘weaklings who form the majority of mankind’
(Gorgias, p. 78). Socrates crystallises his disagreement with a poised rhetorical question, ‘Is it possible
to be better, but at the same time, less powerful and weaker, and stronger, but also more vicious?’
(ibid., p. 85). This question emphasises that Cicero and Plato were not disagreeing over values but
over fundamental beliefs about how to act in the world, in response to one’s values. Plato believed
aloof contemplation was appropriate; Cicero believed civic reform was appropriate.
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Whether the connection of an attribute with a thing is a fact
What is the reason of the connection?
Whether a thing exists
What is the nature of the thing?
[Post Analytics 89 (a)]
McKeon summarizes them in this way:
Aristotle enumerates four scientific questions – ways of discovering and establishing
facts and causes in subject matters:
Is it?
What is it?
What properties does it have?
Why?
[McKeon 1987, p. 5]
Cicero applied these to rhetoric in De Inventione by creating the famous ‘states’ or
‘constitutions’ of a law case.
When the issue is about a fact, the issue is said to be conjectural …
When the issue is about a definition, it is called the definitional issue …
When however the nature of the act is examined, the issue is said to be qualitative …
When the case depends on the circumstances (of pleading) it is called translative
because the action seems to require a transfer to another court.
[De Inventione I viii]
These issues or questions constituted the entire case. ‘This question, then, from
which the whole case arises, is called constitutio or the “issue”’ (De Inventione, 1. vii,
10). Cicero’s move here is a key shift in ground: questions become the method by
which inquiry is structured, invention creates, and judgements are made. Rather
than seeing knowledge as composed of fixed subject matter, he sees knowledge (in
the judicial sense) as constructed by questions. The questions lay down the
pathways of inquiry, from which one will select data, and invent arguments. That is
why Cicero expounded the four questions with such care and incisiveness. He laid
out his system of inquiry like a landscape, charting the roads and bridges and
laneways down which inquiry could run. In so doing he was aiming to preserve the
judicial landscape from the political forces which sought to control judgement and
decision.
Why did Cicero engage in such a task? Was it an intellectual exercise, driven by
curiosity or philosophy? Not at all. He did it to unite wisdom and eloquence, and so
preserve the good life.
From eloquence, the state receives many benefits, provided only it is accompanied by
wisdom, the guide of all human affairs. From eloquence those who have acquired it
obtain glory and honour and high esteem. From eloquence comes the surest and safest
protection of one’s friends.
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[De Inventione 1, iv, p. 5]
Thus Cicero did not ‘implement’ rhetoric, or study it: he used it as an architectonic art to
solve a problem (the separation of wisdom and eloquence in Imperial Rome) and to
construct a system that could govern inquiry into the affairs of society.
Since Cicero made such a fundamental use of rhetoric to defend values and wisdom, he
blamed Socrates for diminishing rhetoric by separating it from philosophy.
The older masters down to Socrates used to combine with their theory of rhetoric the
whole study and the science of everything that concerns morals and conduct and ethics
and politics; it was subsequently … that the two groups of students were separated
from one another, by Socrates … and the philosophers looked down on eloquence and
the orators on wisdom…
[De Oratore, Book III, XIX]
This separation suited Plato and Socrates because it allowed wisdom to drift
heavenward, unencumbered by eloquence which could tie it to earth, and to the
pragmatic fate it deserved. For Cicero, who loved the civic life just as Plato and
Socrates loved the heavens, wisdom and eloquence must be combined forever, so
that civic life could be redeemed by character, and wisdom could be made available
by eloquence.
7.5.3. Rhetoric as an integrative art
Cicero identified this wisdom as integrative, and contrasted it with the specialisations
of subject matters. He made this point in an epic passage eerily predictive of our
modern era of many hermetically sealed sciences.
That is not the only loss – there are a great many others also that have been inflicted on
the wide domain of science by its being split up into separate departments. Do you
really suppose that in the time of the great Hippocrates of Los there were some
physicians who specialized in medicine and others in surgery and others in ophthalmic
cases? … that nobody embraced culture as a whole, but instead of that everybody
chose for himself a different division to work in? … Nowadays … men usually come to
the pursuit of office and to positions in government quite naked and unarmed …
familiarity and kinship with the whole of the liberal sciences and in fine with the virtues
themselves … lies outside their ken.
[De Oratore, Book III, xxx iii]
Interestingly Cicero identified two drivers for integration: the ‘liberal sciences’ and
experience in the civic life. These two are the magic combination that produce the
orator/statesman.
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One of the deep problems the modern organisation confronts is fragmentation. This
has been driven by hierarchical structures,10 which divide organisations into power
units and which localize thinking. Challenging this fragmentation are two modern
concepts of organisation: alliances and horizontal networking. Both diminish the
control available from mere power, and demand higher levels of trust and shared
understanding.
These movements make good sense. But they fall upon barren soil, for the
organisational silos represent thinking silos, and reinforcing them all in their diversity
is a unifying commitment to scientific knowledge and its discreet subject matters.
Cicero offers a return to the liberal arts and practical experience as factors that
promote integrative thinking. These two are connected: rhetoric has, as its goal,
action. Thus it must be practised in an arena of civic life. Rhetoric will then reflect
to a community its values, propositions and possibilities. If rhetoric is properly
yoked with wisdom, this engagement will lead to actions which are good, useful and
true. Thus actions – the stream of human decisions interacting purposefully with
circumstances – provide a cohering unity to the rhetorical act of thought. They also
engage the speaker and audience in the humbling consequences of their judgement,
promoting learning and character.
Separate thought from action, and it becomes arrogant, self-serving and theoretical;
it is not confronted with consequences and thus develops ornate complicated
embellishments. Character is tested and revealed in action, so the rupture also
separates thought from character, and allows the development of intellectual
systems discrete from values and self-awareness.
Similarly, if thought is dominated by scientific knowledge it will fragment, since the
essence of science in Aristotle’s formulation was subject matter, and subject matters
are unique to a science and discrete from each other. What have interest rates got
to do with nanotechnology?
But if thought is constructed as a liberal art of rhetoric it will unify, since the essence
of rhetoric, in Aristotle’s formulation and in Cicero’s application, is questions that
are shared by all subject matter. Thus interest rates and nanotechnology find the
common ground of purposes, people and possibilities. Both are hypotheses, or
means, requiring a coherent set of values to guide their use.
10
I address this issue in chapter three.
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Cicero enlarged rhetoric by using it as a template to create the art of legal
reasoning. In so doing he exemplified what was implicit in Aristotle, that rhetoric is
an art by which one makes things, an art which actually constructs other arts and
other subject matters. Locating rhetoric as a meta-art, we can unambiguously
position it as an art of wisdom, not just a cosmetic art of communication.
Eloquence?
Wisdom?
Rhetoric as architectonic
Rhetoric as a meta- art, producing other arts &
subject matters
Thinking/cognition
Language
Character/ethics
Action
Arts
Philosophy
Figure 7-13: Rhetoric as a meta-art
Thus rhetoric can ‘make’ values and ethics, character and leadership, philosophy and
truth. In engaging in this manner with the liberal art of rhetoric, we can hope, in the
words of McKeon, to ‘adapt disciplines to the problems men are facing’ and thus to
recover the true function of the liberal arts – ‘to liberate men’ (McKeon 1964, p. 1).
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Discovering Purpose
In this chapter I ask what is my purpose. Without purpose
there can be no art, just technique. I realise that humanising
corporations is my purpose. This leads me to seek a balance
between the individual and the community.
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Chapter eight
8.1. Reviewing my thesis
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8.2. Locating my purpose: Humanising corporate life
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8.2.1. Organisational life and the Individual
8.3. Rhetoric as a bridge between the individual and the corporation
283
286
8.3.1. Rhetoric and the shared ‘text’
8.4. Mapping the development of my consulting services
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289
Figures
Figure 8-1: The Self and the Organisation ............................................................................................... 284
Figure 8-2: The Widening Scope of my Consulting Services ............................................................. 289
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8.1. Reviewing my thesis
The last thing one understands, according to Aristotle, is why we do something.1
This is not to say that one acted in the first instance totally devoid of purpose, it is
only to say that those initial impulses were shadowy, parlaying their way into
consciousness by proxies and surrogates. Thus the final stage of the journey is to
discover and articulate the smoldering purpose hidden under layers of
consciousness.
Plato, Aristotle and Cicero were solving their problems, in their world. What
problem am I solving? Where is my ‘Roman Republic’?
I began thinking it was an organisational problem: strategic planning processes were
hollow and did not actively engage line management. Thus the annual business
planning process was a charade. I widened this observation to include not just
strategic planning but any major new activity; organisations do not really handle new
things well. They organize but do not create.
In the second chapter I deepened my diagnosis from organisational process to
cognitive process: the real problem is an inadequate thinking process. To sustain this
diagnosis I suggested a new metaphor for the nature of organisations, a thinking
community. This allowed me to characterize kinds of thinking that organisations do
well along my ‘Thinking Wave’™ model. Organisations understand a ‘downstream
side’ or deductive, post-hypothetical mode of thinking, but not an ‘upstream side’ or
inductive, hypothesis-creating mode of thinking. I fine-tuned the typical polarity
between intuitive and analytic thought as a polarity between thought which makes
and thought which describes.
I then studied two major organisational assignments where I could observe this
thinking problem more closely, pursuing my hypothesis that organisations are
competent at one kind of thinking (describing or analysis) but not at another
(making). The strategic process presented an obvious case to study how
organisations think creatively because it aspires to be a creative thinking process.
The first case demonstrated how the organisational mechanisms, both social and
informational, of strategic planning often trap genuinely creative thinkers, offering no
real space for exploratory, ambiguous reflection. The CEO was expected to control
1
‘Why?’ is the fourth of Aristotle’s four questions, according to McKeon (1987, p. 5).
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the environment intellectually by a combination of analytical breadth and hierarchical
task decomposition, The whole process was heavily mediated by documentation
rather than dialogue. This was a culture that valued solutions and data, not
questions and intuitions.
The second case documented my discovery of the more open thinking process
which has since matured into strategic conversations. My client was in a dynamic
new environment (the creation of a major new organisational unit) but rather than
feign control, or hire external consultants to produce a business strategy, he initiated
and authorized a major process of exploration using dialogue as the social tool, and
questions and heuristics as the intellectual tool. The whole process was mediated by
public mind-mapping of the dialogues rather than documentation. (I had used exactly
the same technique in the first case, but privately not publicly). This process proved
revolutionary but successful, as it equipped the organisation to think effectively in the
‘creative’ zone. I then examined the conditions that seemed necessary to create this
dialogue space, using Paolo Freire’s model of logos balancing praxis. These conditions
include humility, love, faith, hope and critical thinking. Thus I realized that the
conditions for a true conversation were not just cognitive. They are also political (in
that power is involved), moral (in that values are involved) and epistemological (in
that ways of knowing are implied).
Thus two major, lengthy experiences had afforded me the rare privilege of a
‘laboratory’ in which I could intervene and observe how groups of leaders think and
converse strategically.
From here I moved on to search more purposefully for the method which seemed
to facilitate strategic conversations. I first returned to my literary roots and
reflected on the ways poetic thought – apparently quite distant from the business
world – had equipped me for more creative thinking tasks, including facilitating
others in their thinking. These ways included comfort with ambiguity (the
‘intractable’); the ability to sample other worlds by empathy; the isoplastic
imagination; and, overall, a facility with expression to capture diverse and intangible
human experiences. These capabilities were not marginal, but instrumental in
creating and sustaining the kinds of dialogue situations that Freire characterizes.
I then turned to the newer influence of rhetoric, which allowed me to identify some
more systematic features of the art. Poetic thought is private, but rhetoric is a
social, or political art which catapults private thinking capacities into a public arena,
and in particular an arena for action. Rhetoric studies the imagination (invention
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enabled by topics) but also the roles of persuasion (speakers and audiences) in
community tasks (forensic, deliberative and epidectic).
The study of rhetoric also allowed me to contrast what I began to call ‘two roads to
truth’: the thinking machineries of analysis versus the thinking machineries of
rhetoric. The two roads metaphor usefully framed what I could call the sociology of
thought, and helpfully distinguished the contrary forces of humanistic and
mechanistic thinking which compete for the allegiance of modern management. Thus
I characterized the prevailing sociology of thinking in the modern organisation as
‘mechanistic’ (analytic) with occasional assaults from the ‘humanistic’ (rhetorical).
Having identified rhetoric as the promising feedstock for a new art of thought, I
studied the development of this art through three of its progenitors: Plato, Aristotle
and Cicero. I used Richard McKeon to frame the discussion, as he is a leading
example of a modern philosopher who has turned to rhetoric as the architectonic
art which we can use to construct new arts of thought. Rhetoric has always
struggled with its own role and identity, caught between a cosmetic art of persuasion
and a substantive art of discovery. In the cosmetic livery rhetoric is the tool for
manipulation and the servant of the powerful; in the second substantive livery,
rhetoric is the tool for inquiry and truth finding, and is the servant of an open
society.
Plato wondered whether rhetoric was an art at all, and sustained an ambivalent
attitude to it through his writings. At heart he believed that rhetoric was a
technique (knack) without a real art of its own, borrowing heavily from whatever
subject matter it was addressing. Nonetheless he was a great artist with words and
persuasion, and could not help himself from contributing to the development of the
rhetorical art, principally in his articulation of dialectic (the art of slicing up topics
like a skilful butcher). Rather ironically for one who considered rhetoric a mere
knack, he elevated imagery as an art of remembered love and as an intimation of
immortality.
Aristotle, in contrast, admired rhetoric, and fitted it into his system of thought as a
key element complementing the analytics. He unambiguously positioned the art as a
substantive art not a cosmetic art, in fact as an architectonic art in McKeon’s terms,
an art by which other arts are created. Thus for him rhetoric (a system of social
inquiry) created new truths by a revolution of invention, judgement and expression
operating within a socially constructed space of speakers (agents) and audiences
(judges, participants). Within this broadened role for rhetoric, Aristotle articulated
for the first time in history a full exposition of the art of rhetoric, dividing the art
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into its three key components of speakers, audiences and arguments. He defined the
art as a manner of thinking: ‘A faculty of discovering the available means of
persuasion with regard to any subject’ (Rhetoric, Bk 1. Ch. 2). Thus rhetoric was
not tied to any specific science or subject matter, but applied to them all as an art of
discovering arguments.
Cicero moved the study of rhetoric from philosophy to action. Given that rhetoric
was the art by which thought creates action, this was entirely appropriate. He
wrote from experience, not merely speculation. Cicero made two important
contributions to the development of rhetoric.
Firstly, he used Aristotle’s rhetoric to create a system of Roman law: he applied the
template of Aristotle’s rhetoric to the subject matter of law, and thus created a
system of legal inquiry which institutionalised equity and fairness. This contribution
has continued into the tradition of Western law. Therefore Cicero serves as
McKeon’s major example of the architectonic or formative powers of rhetoric.
Secondly, he positioned his system, or his application of the art of rhetoric, as
serving a major social purpose in his day. Cicero was not merely improving the
efficiency of the legal process; he was building a system of inquiry and judgement that
would strengthen an open society, and support the principles of the republic, and
that would weaken the tyrannical coercions of the Roman Empire that sought to
concentrate power and decision into autocratic hands and deny open justice to all.
Thus the nature of the problem I was addressing grew from an organisational
process to a thinking process, then from a thinking process to a civic process.
Therefore the art must address more than just method. Cicero maintained that
every art must also address purpose, otherwise it is not a fully articulated art, it is
merely technique. And the study of rhetoric as an art graphically illustrates this:
Plato, Aristotle and Cicero did not differ on method; they differed on purpose. For
Plato rhetoric was mere method and thus disqualified as an art. One can disagree
with Plato in his conclusion (I do) but not in his rationale. If rhetoric is mere method
then it is indeed cosmetic and not an art. And as a technique it is dangerous because
it offers itself meretriciously into the hands of political egos such as Callicles.
Methods are dangerous in that they lack purpose and principles, and so will serve
power and personality. In contrast, Cicero, using the same rationale, came to a
different conclusion. Yes, rhetoric had identifiable explicit methods (one can do
things with words, as Austin says) but these were in the service of principles and
purpose. The legal system Cicero constructed was not a value free, amoral zone; it
was not a collection of verbal and inventive techniques that could be used by anyone
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for any purpose. It was a method crafted to preserve and protect, as community
institutions, certain principles and purposes.
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8.2. Locating my purpose: Humanising corporate life
Thus I return to my ‘why’, having located this last question as the key to the art. Do
I wish only to enable organisations to think and plan more productively? Is this my
highest purpose? If the answer was ‘yes’, then I would have slipped my versions of
rhetoric back into her prostituted livery, a cosmetic art of persuasion ‘available’ to
suit any Calliclean client.
Does this then mean that I qualify my clients, and offer the art of strategic
conversations for morally appropriate clients only? No work for cigarette
companies or the Mafia? Well, I would not work for cigarette companies or the
Mafia, but that does not substitute for a wider purpose. In fact, such reasoning
pushed to its limits would turn rhetoric into a new kind of dictator, a moral pontiff
choosing pure clients. This is idiosyncrasy, not purpose.
What is my society’s equivalent of the Roman Empire and the Roman Republic? For
me, it is the humanization of corporate life. This issue may not be as dramatic as
Cicero’s Rome, but it is purposive, it is a matter of deep principle, and it is
fundamentally the same issue in different guise as Cicero’s: the relation of individuals
and their liberty to an organisation and its mission. This is an enduringly problematic
issue for human civilizations. It is an issue to which the method of rhetoric offers
pathways of resolution, provided that rhetoric is conceived as an art of liberty not
coercion, and an art of construction not cosmetics.
Let me illustrate with an example. Recently I spoke with a young manager who
teaches strategic marketing at an MBA school. He was contemplating using a
rhetorical technique to engage the class: asking them to write letters expressing
their goals and their aspirations in the course. While he was attracted to this as a
technique, he was cautious because it would also disturb the comfortable arm’s
length framework of an MBA and the organisations it served: ‘This is an
organisational topic, don’t bring your personal feelings into it’. He was aware this
simple technique would ruffle the comfortable feathers of his society. Why?
Because it would re-address the balance between the individual and the organisation.
The method as method was not disturbing him; the method as a principle was.
The highest good for me is not to enhance the strategy of my client organisations, or
their productivity, but to create healthier communities where individuals can
contribute more of their whole self to issues that confront the organisations they
work in. This has evidenced itself in my search for widening methods of
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participation that put the private task of writing into a broader and broader public
space. This enhances thinking, by engaging the rhetorical tools tucked away inside
good writing process, but it also engages the organisation’s staff in the act of
authorship. This essentially moves them from the status of readers who read the
text of the organisation and comply with it, to the status of authors who help write
the text of the organisation and create it. Certainly this shift requires an appropriate
intellectual toolkit (and I provide those tools for invention) but more fundamentally
it requires a shift in power and control, away from the organisation towards the
individual.2
Thus my purpose is to humanise corporate life, by providing pathways of inquiry and
invention whereby individuals can bring more of their selves to the corporation. The
principle that guides me is the belief that a polarization between the individual and
the corporate diminishes both parties. Individuals are enriched by social or
communal contribution and corporations; communities are enriched by welcoming
and using individuals’ contributions.
8.2.1. Organisational life and the individual
Organisational life is fed by the architectonic art of science and logical analysis, which
explicitly reduces the individual self in favour of objectified information. Thus the
polarization between private lives and public institutions is enhanced.
I must say that these terms are used metaphorically or as figures, rather than as specific nominators.
Everyone in an organisation is an individual, even the CEO. Thus I am not here delineating a divide
between, say, the executive team and the workforce, or management and unions. Rather, the
‘organisation’ is a metaphor for the collective, the external, and the functional. These forces coalesce
into a unity sustained by an unpredictable blend of bonding devices: explicit and implicit missions,
shared histories, market forces, production processes, symbols and regulations.
2
In order to sustain the organisation’s collective coherence, the individuals within it must constrain the
amount of their individuality they bring to the enterprise. If they do not, their differences will rend
the organisation’s coherence. A similar trade-off occurs between the external and the internal: the
organisation is a compact of external public parts of our selves, not necessarily of our private internal
selves. Thus organisations conceive of individuals primarily in terms of roles, skills and experience by
which they can contribute to the organisation’s mission. This valuing of the external self gives rise to
descriptions of people in economic, market terms such as ‘human resources’, ‘customers’, and
‘consumers’. Organisations gather individuals to support their mission or function. Thus they
emphasise doing rather than being, and the operational rather than the reflective. Thus the term
‘organisation’ is not a descriptor of a class of humans as opposed to other classes; it is a descriptor of
the forces by which individuals form communities, and by which those communities begin to take on
identity and life of their own.
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We could model the situation this way:
Self
The arts
Technologies
E
x
p
r
e
s Organisation
s
i
o
n
P
Figure 8-1: The self and the organisation
e
r
f
o
The self seeks expression. Individuals wish to write theirr text in life. The arts enable
them to do this. The arts provide materials (in the sensem of words, music, painting,
sculpture, graphics) and technologies of invention. Thusathe arts attract creative
n
people who wish to express themselves, who develop a csophisticated rapport with
their internal selves from which they can draw the inspiration
and the places for the
e
inventive process. But since there is no bridge into the world of functions and
enterprises, the arts are generally valued more as therapy or entertainment than as
organisationally or socially relevant disciplines.
Thus from an early age students are encouraged into disciplines that draw their
materials from the external world and that equip students for productivity rather
than invention.
For its part, the organisation seeks productivity and performance, not expression, so
it invests in technologies. It creates human activity systems, procedures that enable
it to deliver its ‘self’ onto its markets and stakeholders. It values learning about
technologies, since they will enable individuals to contribute to organisational
performance. Since the paradigmatic organisation in our world is no longer church,
state or military but is now the commercial organisation, the technologies that are
valued are commercially relevant technologies. (This is evident in the rapid moves
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to privatise the public sector, and to globalise the world economy).3 Thus the
organisation will value the sciences and the logical tradition, which have produced
successful technologies, and will find the arts only marginally relevant. So both the
self and the organisation, in an ironic union, seek to expand their influence either by
expression or performance/production. The cumulative effect of these two tectonic
plates grating against each other so obliquely is that individuals find modern
organisations less conducive to inhabit, and organisations find themselves branded as
de-humanised or anti-humanistic.
Individuals are liberated by expression, but organisations wish to commodify them as
resources or customers. Having renamed humans as resources, organisations can
now view them as a cost which is recurrent, and which can be reduced by
technology. Thus the commercial organisation does much to deserve its reputation
as an inhumane place.
Organisations survive by performance and are not helped by individuals whose sole
goal is self-expression; these seem an indulgence without a practical point. In so far
as liberal arts stress expression without contribution, and develop disciplines that
spurn technology and commerce, they will brand their graduates as aesthetes or
dilettantes who can be easily rejected as irrelevant by the world of commerce.
This stand-off depletes the opportunity for a Renaissance type of continuity between
the self and the world. Rhetoric as an architectonic art can significantly contribute to
rebuilding this continuity.
3
John Ralston Saul has belligerently addressed this issue in his book ‘The Unconscious Civilisation’.
Like me, he identifies a similar polarisation between the individual and the corporate life, but then
unlike me searches for the villain and finds it is economics. He argues trenchantly that economics has
been wrongfully credited with the prosperity of the 20th century Western world. On the contrary, he
says, economic rationalism has scythed through societies causing extensive dislocation, victims, and
hardship. What really accounts for 20th century prosperity is the growth of democracy and the civic
role of public spirited service. ‘Voice’, not ‘money’ accounts for prosperity.
Saul identifies the public sector as a victim caught in the pincers of economic rationalism and service
for the common good. (In this theme, he mirrors Henry Mintzberg’s (l996) penetrating essay where
he distinguishes between citizens and consumers.)
I have a mixed reaction to Saul’s writing. He so astutely deconstructs the iron mask of economic
rationalism that is encasing the mind and allegiances of Western people. But his style is polemical and
his use of arguments and facts so erratic and glancing that I fear he devalues his great cause, and opens
the wider cause to easy rebuttal.
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8.3. Rhetoric as a bridge between the individual and the
corporation
What qualities in the art of rhetoric qualify it for this task?
Rhetoric is a truth-making (inquiry) process and as such it engages the full person.
The processes of inquiry, invention and judgement confirm our dignity as humans
because they employ our role as agents in the world. They emphasise responsibility
and possibility. Thus rhetorical methods awaken agency in individuals. They liberate
human beings. But they do so with responsibility, for no rhetorical inquiry is a
private process. Every rhetorical inquiry takes place before an audience, and thus
(local) inventions are evaluated by peers or the community. Rhetoric is not mere
self-expression; it is persuasion, self-expression for a civic purpose. Thus it locates
individuals within their community, but it locates them as active agents, as authors,
and not as compliant followers or readers.
While rhetoric is a truth-making process, it is a local truth-making process, not a
universal one. This is the distinction between philosophy and rhetoric. Thus
rhetoric is suited also to the community or the organisation by its pragmatism; for it
is the goals and functions of the community which rhetoric uses to arbitrate over
inventions and make decisions. Unlike philosophy, which would exasperate an
organisation by pursuing universal questions, rhetoric confirms an organisation by
crystallizing local questions, and clarifying local purposes.
Rhetoric also helps build corporate life because it is an art of coherence. Philosophy
and science seek universals, so they judge truth by demonstration that a hypothesis
works in universal conditions. But rhetoric seeks a local truth, so it judges truth by
its coherence both within elements of the argument and to the social values of the
community. If you ask how large is the sun, we must demonstrate that the claimed
diameter is true universally, not just on Sundays. If you ask how we should govern
Carthage, we must agree that our invented method coheres with your goals and
values in annexing Carthage in the first place. Thus a rhetorical process both
liberates humans and coheres communities.
8.3.1. Rhetoric and the shared ‘text’
What unites the individual and the organisation is the ‘text’ they compose. Language
is more than naming; it is the vehicle by which agency is exercised on the world.
Rhetorically conceived, language builds a road between inchoate intent and
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objectified action via a series of questions, heuristics, decisions, mental prototypes
and specifications (communications). Thus language liberates humanity from the
stimulus/response modality of instinct, and delivers us into the intentional modality
of design.
Text will do this when it is, as I say, rhetorically conceived, that is when the methods
of language are articulated as tools of discovery, inquiry, and judgement, as
heuristics. This is what Cicero created in his legal system. It was rhetorically
conceived and so was in essence a set of shared heuristics by which the community
could write its own texts. In a sense every legal judgement delivered under the
Ciceronian system wrote and created a different local truth using the one set of
heuristics. These local truths then accumulated into the system of precedents that
created the community tradition of Western law.
Similarly any strategic conversation system is rhetorically conceived as a set of
shared heuristic paths by which the community can write multiple texts. These local
truths can then accumulate into bodies of truths that create strong traditions.
I have often thought that the final mark of the most coherent community,
rhetorically created, is indicated by its passage to Cicero’s fourth issue or question,
the translative issue. In this issue we ask, not about the case and its features, but
about the forum in which the case should be heard. For if we choose the wrong
forum, as we well know, all the brilliance of our argument can be nullified and we
must start the whole case again. When I first encountered Cicero’s translative issue
I thought it rather mechanical, and could not reconcile its analogical pairing with
Aristotle’s fourth question of ‘why?’
This was because I conceived the why in philosophical not rhetorical terms. In
rhetorical terms, the ‘why’ is provided by the values resident in an appropriate
community forum. It was once explained to me4 how the District Court differed
from the local Magistrate’s Court: the Magistrate’s Court is a more populist forum
and is sensitive to topical issues. If ‘drunk driving’ is getting a beating in the press,
then the Magistrates Court will deal severely with it. The community must see its
values recognized in the judicial system. Conversely the District Court is a more
technically oriented forum which pays stricter attention to legal precedent and
reasoning.
4
This came from a conversation with a solicitor in 1999 over a private legal matter.
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Thus the most mature community is one where everyone knows ‘the forum’ where
the decisions will be made. In most organisations this is a shadowy and ambiguous
place, and this fact confuses the community and saps its spirit. But where inquiry and
argument confidently understands the forums of decision, the community is
coherent. It has a sure sense of purpose because it knows where and how the
‘good’ will be judged. These judgements about what is good will reflect and create
the values which in the end bond a community in a healthy manner. Conversely,
nothing is more toxic for a community than a creeping sense that decisions are being
made elsewhere, behind closed doors, and that dialogue has effectively been shut
down. The community is no longer sure what is being valued, or where, and so
begins to mistrust and fragment.
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8.4. Mapping the development of my consulting services
Thus I can map my consultancy services as a deepening use of a range of rhetorical
devices, extending over a widening range of topics.
As the rhetorical method and reach strengthened, it yielded more evident purposes.
Certainly individuals became more intellectually productive and thus enhanced the
corporation. But equally individuals brought more of themselves to writing the text
of the organisation and so their corporate experience became more human in scale
and less alienating.
How have I used rhetoric as an architectonic art or template to construct pathways
by which individuals can become agents in their communities? We can map the
widening scope as a matrix extending on two axes between the diagonal poles of the
individual and the organisation. The scope of my services has widened over two
axes: firstly the range of topics has expanded and secondly the nature of
participation has deepened.
Deepening levels of participation
Widening Range of Subjects …
Individual
People
Strategic
Organisation
Things
Process







 Talk
Advise
 Write
 Facilitate
 Decide

Organisation
Figure 8-2: The widening scope of my consulting services
My early consulting assignments were typical ‘technical writing’ assignments where I
gathered information by interview, wrote privately and produced a document
artefact. No matter how inventive or well expressed this artefact was it did not
cross the boundary between the individual and organisation because it did not
engage individuals as authors.
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My services became more ambitious on two fronts. Without extending the topic
range, I experimented with participative writing that widened the dynamic of
authorship in the organisation, (move from  to ). In other assignments ( + ),
I widened the range of topics, which I was inventing. These wider topics covered
issues of process in the organisation, that included roles, and eventually also issues of
strategy, which included vision and mission. Having expanded my mastery over
topics, and having practised rhetorical deepening on simpler topics, I began to use
rhetorical methods over the widened range of topics ( + ). This allowed me to
expand authorship over subjects in which I had first developed intellectual heuristics
in more private conventional assignments.
As clients realized that these assignments were intervening in the culture of the
organisation, and humanizing them, they more deliberately confirmed them as
forums for decision, not just participation ( + ).
Thus my consulting has been driven by a move to build bridges between individuals
and corporations, between the self and the collective. So the capstone for the art of
conceptual thought is humanistic values. As humans can conceive and create
together, they can create coherent communities and worlds that are not just
productive but also convivial to inhabit.
What are the next steps in my journey of discovery?
The primary move that I can foresee is to create methods and techniques that bring
the art of rhetoric into the 21st century, and make it accessible and useful for
modern people. In doing so we must remember our goal is not to advocate rhetoric
but to liberate humanity. If you were to study rhetoric today, you would encounter
a series of verbal techniques that facilitate writing, or to a lesser extent, speechmaking. The only people who use these tools professionally are ‘communicators’.
But for people to be equipped to discover and invent better futures, we need to
invent methods and techniques that facilitate common problem-solving, not just
communication.
It is instructive to contrast the spread of the scientific method with the narrower
application of the liberal arts. Science has articulated a methodology and applied it
to the problems confronting humanity. Having been explicit about method, it has
borne derivatives such as the Total Quality Management System, which use science
to solve practical challenges.
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In contrast, rhetoric and the liberal arts have been coy about method, even
disdainfully so. They have to a great extent spurned engagement in the practical
affairs of community. So in a sense they have neglected the great toolkit available in
the liberal arts.
I envisage several practical outcomes of this move into method. Firstly, we need
something as prosaic as a toolkit of rhetorical techniques that aid problem solving,
and particularly community-based issues. This could be envisaged as an analogue to
Total Quality Management ‘Seven Tools’ or its ‘Seven New Tools’. This toolkit
could deploy rhetorical thinking methods widely in organisations, and current affairs.
Secondly, I would envisage on the liberal arts side, a conscious movement to
articulate the thinking processes and abilities that their curriculum fosters. What
mode of thought is trained by the study of King Lear, and by the writing of critical
essays? What mode of thought is trained by the study of social or political history?
Once educators lift their aims beyond the content to explicit and targeted thinking
processes, then they can contribute much more relevantly to people’s lives.
Thirdly, I would envisage a movement of the profession of design beyond its
traditional applications to objects and graphics, into the design of processes, systems
and cultures. Richard Buchanan (1995) argues that design is the modern rhetoric.
This argument reframes design as more than a trade skill, and also positions language
as the key tool of design. Once design widens its applications, it will need a broader
theoretical base, and this can be found in rhetoric and language.
These are three practical challenges that would extend my thesis. Each requires
reflection as well as practice. Perhaps beyond them all, and uniting them all, is the
task that we are primarily authors of our world, not observers or analysts, and that
our greatest responsibility is to design our world.
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