Materialists aren't materialists.

We don't live in a "materialist" society.  The prevailing views about what's real in the world are not based on a materialist philosophy, but on an inverted kind of transcendence, the decaying legacy of an ancient metaphorical, conceptual separation of heaven and earth. (This separation has evolved over history, but I'm starting with its most recent incarnation.)

So, what is inverted transcendence? Think of it this way. Since ancient times, we have believed that the most knowable is the most real. The most profound way we have of knowing our world comes through the use of concepts and mathematics. Concepts and mathematical relationships describing nature are idealizations of patterns of regularity that we find in nature. 

To get objective about nature, we have to arrange it so it fits our conceptual and mathematical tools, our idealizations of it. This has proven very successful in areas where researchers can control and eliminate local contingencies to get to the universally constant laws (such as laws of motion.) This is what allows people to build reliable machines. However, not all of nature is amenable to this approach to research (unless you think that nature is "nothing but" particles in motion; i.e., unless you privilege that one scale of things and stamp it with the label, Reality, and talk of building blocks, putting the methodological cart firmly before the ontological horse as is the wont of reductionists...) 

Nature is not just particles in motion, it exists on many scales - it is ecosystems, tectonic plates smashing together, the act of breathing, rustling leaves, strange creatures swimming by vents in the ocean floor, reproducing, etc.  These things have power to make changes in the world. Not all causality occurs at the level of sub atomic particles. 

One cannot locate and eliminate local contingencies and make rigorously controlled experiments when studying human behaviour and other phenomena. All natural phenomena are complex.  Human beings reduce natural phenomena to idealized mathematical objects, quantities and relations - particles in motion governed by natural laws. 

So, from a scientific perspective, the matter we call objective reality is a conceptually reduced scale of existence - a useful idealization. Note the absence of any value ideal in those mathematical idealizations, though. Nature, as seen through the reductionist lens, has no purpose. So what are we transcending with our idealizations of matter? Our vitality? Our lived experiences? Our woes and joys? Certainly there is joy in the act of genuine discovery, but that's peripheral to the reductionistic project. More and more people talk of the next stage of evolution as a cyborg society, to my mind a symptom of the nihilism in the project. Even basic drive is purpose. Even this nihilism is purpose.

So what is inverted transcendence, as distinguished from materialism? Painted in an extreme kind of way, I'd say an inverted transcendence is one which focuses on reduced idealized matter, not on nature, and has as its point the reduction and idealization of nature, and the subjection of our human interests and cares to that model.  Or perhaps I could put it this way: Heaven and earth became separated and nature was reduced to an idealized inert matter. It was virginalized. Next, heaven was eliminated from the picture of how the world is,  leaving us with laws of nature or what Sheldrake calls "the ghost of the god of the world machine." (Have a listen to Minute 13:30 to 15:30 of his CBC podcast. I'm deeply skeptical of many of Sheldrake's explanations, but like his questions.)

Having shied from understanding material nature in its richness, we're not really asking or learning about ourselves in a way that situates us in nature, where we might gather the learning we need to adjust and make the right decisions. There is a loss of meaning. Meanwhile, we're inundated with products. We're all dressed up with nowhere to go, except to an ecological tipping point.

I don't think the solution to this strange nihilism is to reinstate some kind of theological or platonic heaven but to heal the split and come back to earth. To do that, we need to find a new way of looking at matter, while questioning what it is we wish to transcend.

Matter is not inert.

It is a mistake to confuse methodology with objectivity

People use a variety of evaluative processes in business to ensure objectivity. But the dangerous fact is that these evaluative processes, these methodologies, even the most rigorous, are woefully insufficient to guarantee objectivity.

Why? There are three basic dangers in relying on method to ensure objectivity.

1. The normative dangers

The overarching danger attaching to evaluative models is the belief that we can use methodology as a legitimating device, even if our evaluative methodology has flaws. Furthermore, if any kind of injustice has resulted from the application of a methodology how can it even be called an injustice, if the "test" for justice is the methodology?

2. The epistemic dangers

I use staffing as a paradigmatic example because of its situation, which cross-cuts the human and the operational domains of management.

To ensure transparency and effectiveness, it is assumed that a method which permits the definition, measurement and testing of people's "competencies" will do the job.  First, who guarantees that the definition of competencies is appropriate? What sanctions the applicable criterion?  It depends on the motive - are the criteria sanctioned in terms of the business needs that the hire will meet or the efficiencies that the hiring process will meet? (If you have to think more than 5 seconds on that one, you're in trouble.)

Second, competency is not a feature of potential hires like the number of doors on a car. People are living, learning beings with potential and we can't screen for traits we haven't identified but might have found very valuable.

Competencies mean little without relationship to motivation to develop them further and opportunities to use them.

We have a collective Western habit of freeze-framing states and confusing the ability to label the frame with the ability to recognize the meaningful stuff in phenomena. Nothing living stands still, including the level of the abilities of your potential staff.

3. The ontological dangers

Empiricism is at pains to distinguish itself from teleology - the identification of ends. The underlying belief at stake is the idea that a grand purpose or design to everything is an anthropomorphic projection. This may or may not have clear import in certain areas of scientific research, but to carry that principle of wariness over into the types of planning whose purpose is to improve quality of life is ludicrous.

For example, in staffing (the most clear examples come from that domain, as I explained earlier), operationally defining merit criteria in terms of a screening methodology puts the methodological cart before the ontological horse. A competency is not an exhausively definable capacity, but a set of potentials that evolves over time. Efforts should be made to ensure fairness and objectivity, and to ensure thereby that the right person is selected for the job (i.e., the "telos" or end is that the essential criteria are connected to the needs of the job and the person's fitness for the role overall is assessed according to those ends). This connection is lost when the specific criteria become disconnected and itemized, and especially when they become too narrowly defined due to a different objective - the objective to manage the "empirical" screening process efficiently. Of course, divorced from its ends, efficiency has no meaning. This is neither fair nor effective.

I may have said this before, but it is clear that no matter how much “empirical evidence” we have, in the end it is our capacity for meaningful valuation that allows us to identify worthwhile goals and our capacity for reasoning that allows us to collect the relevant evidence in support of those and assess it. These two capacities are not separate, but deeply connected in us and contribute equally to the quality of our lives. My examples tend to be drawn from staffing because they are the most straightforward, but the underlying principles could apply to many areas public admin.

Going against the grain of the contemporary Zeitgeist, to ensure objectivity, and by extension, fairness,  in people or program evaluation, we should be sure to use our capacities for meaningful valuation and reason to the best of our abilities.

Conceptual Filing Cabinets are not Reality

Ever noticed that when corporate downloads an initiative to remedy an internal management problem, the effects on the ground tend to be the opposite of what was intended? Without going into details, this may explain why. Mintzberg said:

"Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. One is analysis, the other is synthesis"*

The fact is, the corporate structure tends to be organized in terms of business lines or branches, so initiatives get forumulated around compartmentalized resources.  That means analytical thinking will predominate in planning - and analytical thinking relies on compartmentalized categories – checklist items. People mistake their conceptual filing cabinets for reality and are rewarded for substituting numbers for facts. But as some astute Brit said not long ago, “You don’t fatten a pig by weighing it.”  The success of mechanistic models of the past has seduced us to seeking "simple" solutions in  complex arenas, much more complex than are tackled by the hard numbers of "hard science." 

Most activities in business are dynamically interconnected and adjustments in one area can be offset by failing to consider their impact on other areas. Thinking strategically involves connecting the dots, lateral thinking, the use of the right brain, which is basically grounded in intention, will, and commitment (caring).

The first thing required for an effective strategy is that you genuinely care.

The second thing is flexibility and openness.

Some folks believe that analytical thinking is a cut above more poetic sensitivities and that it is the sole defender objectivity and of fairness. I'd like you to consider that such a view is rather narrow, sometimes honest but simplistic, other times useful to people with a power-for-power's-sake agenda. Models of evaluation based on analytical thinking are just as prone to manipulation and bias as any poetic kind of perspective. They are also dangerous as one doesn't need brute strength or mass hysteria to convince, but one can just point to "the numbers"as an incantation. This is less likely in very precise areas such as physics, but in business, there are just no exhaustive and exclusive definitions that can be reliably used for evaulative purposes. Our definitions and indicators are handy rules of thumb, never meant to be the be-all and end-all of evaluation. (ISO - I despair.) A planner can pick a few handy items from a potentially infinite list of possible indicators.  Nevertheless, those who employ a definition, a methodology, who fail to think things through broad-mindedly with an honourable meaning, purpose and value, who yet check a list of measures, have the advantage of the appearance of objectivity. This is a pernicious effect of the "trope of science" and needs rooting out.

*link no longer available.

Methodolatry

I just came across this article discussing "methadolatry" and although the author is discussing modelling and simulations, I think a lot of his insights could be applied in business planning. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jos/journal/v2/n3/full/jos20087a.html

I love the sections entitled Methodolatry, the Dead fish fallacy, and the Jehova problem (6-8), especially the stuff in each section written under "The motivation".

I will be expanding on these thoughts in the near future.... Something about their impacts on the culture of work and employee engagement. Stay tuned.

Complexity and Employee Engagement

In a blog entry called Social Media vs. Knowledge Management: A Generational War , Venkatesh Rao states

[N]ot only do Boomers not get complexity, they are suspicious of it, thanks to their early cultural training which deifies simplicity. The result of this difference is that Boomer management models rely too much on simplistic ideological-vision-driven ideas. Consider, for instance, the classic Boomer idea of creating “communities of practice” with defined “Charters” and devoted to identifying “Best Practices.” No Gen X’er or Millenial would dare to reduce the complexity of real-world social engineering to a fixed “charter” or presume to nominate any work process as “best.” … I suspect, as Gen X’ers and Millenials take over, that the idea of vision and mission statements will be quietly retired in favor of more dynamic corporate navigation constructs.

I don’t know that this is strictly about the generations, but it certainly is insightful. I’d like to link this to the debate between what is called reductionism and complexity. Reductionists believe that “the truth is simple” and try to explain things by reducing everything to a narrow set of definable objects and a set of laws for their interactions. It’s as if there is a warehouse full of categorized objects (e.g., sub-atomic particles, genes) and a certain set of rules about how these are to interact, that are based on these things’ intrinsic, mathematizable qualities.

To me, it’s obvious that nothing in the universe is like that. First of all, laws are not forces, but mathematical conceptions of patterns of interaction. The idea that you can produce and explain things through the placement of objects and the application of laws leaves out a lot of information. For instance, in nature, when does a process start, and with what event or thing? What are the boundaries and parameters of a system of interactions? (How do you know what factors will be/become relevant?) Does one particle have the same properties as a number of them, and if not what is the “minimum”?

In recent years, complexity and complex systems theory have undercut a lot, but certainly not all (or even most), of reductionist thinking. Physicist, Robert B. Laughlin, for instance, argues that laws are not what causes certain interactions, but the reverse, laws are what emerge from interactions. Complexity theorist, Stuart Kauffman observes that reductionists just take parameters as givens, while showing that in living systems, life creates its own parameters (e.g., cell walls). Nature is self-organizing.

The point is that the old Newtonian paradigm is now crumbling and a new paradigm is well underway to becoming the reigning one, a point that Gilles Paquet has made with effect. So how does this tie to mission statements and charters and what-not?

Methodologies parameterize: They define limits of operation, without necessarily any awareness being generated of how the limits are drawn. This is why there are predictably going to be “perverse effects” of target-setting. Transaction quotas, for instance.

Programmed procedures might be great when you can reasonably identify all of the things that might have an effect on the outcome and control for that but, outside of a laboratory or some staple factories perhaps, life’s not like that. It’s putting the cart before the horse to think that the methods, processes, templates, and formalized procedures we've come up with so far provide adequate parameters of possible activity. Process templates and toolkits, initially touted as panaceas, are all eventually discarded, not always because of the shocking unforeseen, but due to the fact that they can never capture all of the complexity of normal operations. And besides, most people prefer to think rather than follow instructions, as long as they have the time to do so.

An over-reliance on methodology cuts off possibilities and prohibits learning and risk-taking and the use of good judgment, and sets up blind, impersonal systems as abstract authorities. The results of over-programming organizational processes mean you’ll lose the engagement of more risk-tolerant and innovative employees and wind up entangled in a web of rules.

The Art of Objectivity

As many people have pointed out across several disciplines including management (Gilles Paquet), physics (Robert Laughlin) and psychology, there is a ubiquitous and lamentable tendency to believe that all that is real is measurable and only what is measurable is real. A few years ago, I found a great article on "The Top Ten Problems of Psychology" (I believe it is no longer available) by Jack F. Martin. In it, he commented on the thinking of Sigmund Koch, saying

Koch (1981) views such tendencies in psychology as residing within a more general twentieth century trend toward…regard[ing] knowledge as the result of "processing" rather than discovery…[and]…he is not the only historian of psychology to make the general observation that psychology has typically placed its methodological cart in front of its ontological horse (e.g., Bevan, 1986; Danziger, 1990)

What Koch is saying when he criticizes the notion that knowledge is a result of processing rather than discovery has nothing directly to do with computing. He is talking about the view that what is considered real (one's "ontology") is the output of a methodology, and if you think about it, this is putting the cart before the horse!

Robert Laughlin laments the same tendency in physics when he says,

The myth of collective behaviour [of particles] following from [laws of nature] is, as a practical matter, exactly backwards. Law instead follows from collective behaviour, as do the things that flow from it such as logic and mathematics.

You may think that scientific methodology is the arch guarantor of objectivity and truth, but as I have said before, to count anything you need a definition, sometimes called an "operational definition", and to test anything, you need to consider what types of things would have an effect on the outcome. The shorthand for that is, you have to identify, at least provisionally, the relevant determinants. The even shorter shorthand for that is that you have to identify the context, or "frame of reference." But coming up with definitions and determining contexts are not themselves products of a method, but preliminary to the development and application of a method, and arrived at by reasoning. Before anyone can apply a method, there has to have already been some observation (guided by interest, knowledge and reason, of course) and some reasoned hypothesizing.

What happens if we take this into consideration when it comes to business metrics? What happens when people are subject to an illusion that some kind of process or methodology determines what is considered real? The usual: Reason flies out the window and the B in Bureaucracy takes over. Consider Martin's tenth problem of psychology and then draw the analogy to business:

[The] inquiry practices of psychologists mostly reflect a misunderstanding of Bridgman's (1952) notions of operational analysis and definition. ...[P]sychologists frequently treat such definitions as exhaustive of the very conceptual meanings to which they are intended…only to point...[and] psychologists' conceptualizations of complex phenomena such as human motivation and confidence often are impoverished to the point where they are equated...with...a small number of predetermined factors such as effort, ability, luck, and task difficulty…

When the results one is supposed to achieve are tied to narrow indicators, and when people conflate the indicators (the report) with the result (the real, physical "out there" event/state of affairs) there is more attention to efficiency (the method) than the actual results (the ontology). It all goes horribly awry once some sort of methodology is in place that is supposed to be adhered to thoughlessly, as if the magic of some operational definition has created an "objective" situation, and we follow the methodology like unthinking robots, because in contrast to the robotic following of method, thought is supposed to be "subjective". This ignores the fact that it is through reasoning (well or badly) that we have come up with the method in the first place!

The advice to "let the managers manage" is the advice to trust that managers can reason things out. Why else were they hired? Strangely, there is more risk in following methodology and discouraging reasoning than there is in allowing creative human thought.

What is really needed is worthwhile goals and some committed, honest, thoughtful people to bring them into objective reality.