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.

Change Discourse: An Aside on Planning and Evaluation

In large organizations, in the accepted practices of planning and evaluation, we are hampered by our inability to acknowledge unanticipated benefits, i.e., the creativity of what is proposed. We seem to be unable to value options that we haven't anticipated in advance or even to accommodate valuations of unanticipated options. What would count as legitimation in these instances?  The unanticipated benefit cannot be considered relevant, based on pre-established criteria.

Why do we deprive ourselves of anything more than our presupposed potential?  The standard (ontological and meta-ethical) notions of objectivity and fairness in evaluation are in need of a major rethink, especially in a complex, rapidly changing world where future potentiality becomes at least as important as present actualities. Adaptability and responsiveness are more important than adhering to artificial and outdated notions of objectivity, which for at least two millennia, have been more about projecting our conceptual filing cabinets on events than on encouraging openness to new an novel ideas and approaches. To add irony to insult, in today's variant, to mimic the successful model of reductionist science, it is assumed that the ability to assign a number to some evaluative criterion makes that criterion objective. 

The difference between living and mechanical linear/reductionist notions of objectivity needs to be emphasized. In the linear/reductionist model, the relevant determinants of an event  are isolated and identified in a rigorous way, such that they can be arranged and used in planning experiments and building machines. As successful as this method has been, however, according to scientists such as Eugene Wigner, the approach legitimately applies to only a small set of relatively easily manipulable things (which is why basic physics is about necessary laws and anything more complex is statistical at best at the lowest level of granularity.)  The attempt to apply it to a large open-ended organization occasions the kinds of issues described by Burt Perrin (Paragraph 103). 

Stuart Kauffman shows that a living system is one where the boundary conditions are intrinsic to the phenomena under investigation, which are not "placed by hand" as they are in a more mechanistic model. He further argues(cf. pp. 131-143) that there is "no way to pick out the relevant collective variables that will play a causal role in the further evolution" of living systems.  (p.140-1) Nevertheless, we put our methodological carts before our ontological horses, and worse, we justify our aims based on our methods, rather than the reverse. This is not only reductionist. It reduces us.


Our model of measurement needs to change from a mechanical one to one that respects that we work in living systems. We need to use something a bit less pedantic than a pre-established list of specific criteria for evaluation and learn how to acknowledge context, the context being our actual overall aims in relation to what is being evaluated both now, and as they change, with learning, over time.  We need to look at a higher level of granularity if we're really serious about innovation or getting beyond a nihilistic means-focused outlook (a hamster wheel).  This will require a sea change at every juncture. Responsiveness and resiliency will be key.

Change Discourse: Discretionary Effort, Power and Routinization

I have been reading a grand sweeping tome by Yale historian and archaeologist, Ian Morris, called Why the West Rules...for Now. What struck me in the reading is how ancient kings, who orchestrated hierarchical economic systems, claimed deity - and how readily subjects believed in the kings' "mandate of heaven" ... until things went awry, of course. I didn't think it was a matter of rulers simply appointing themselves as gods and then expecting everyone to believe it - there must be something much, much more unconscious and instinctive going on. This supports Joseph Campbell's thesis that, until now, each age gets the mythology it needs to support its social/technical/economic arrangement. 

People prefer order until it chafes. They get their sense of tribe and belonging via the social order and organization, if not the day to day rituals, the situating of one's activities in the scheme of things.  People tell themselves (internalize and identify with) the prevailing story (or mythology) in order to feel more socially and economically secure. This explains the dismal fate of many would-be change agents in the distant and recent past and the depressing mantra of "that's just how it is - it's never going to change." Usually there is some kind of "reaction formation" (e.g., today's fundamentalisms) before there is change.

With that in mind, think about the Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant said "Have the courage to use your own understanding!" How does this tie to high demand/low control situations at work and employee engagement?

I was at a workshop facilitated by Julie Diamond last fall called "Deep Democracy." A very interesting discussion occured about people defaulting to routine/process during work time, and not bringing their personal powers (talents and abilities) into the converstion. There's a certain amount of risk involved and courage required to use personal power in a more or less hierarchical situation, but engagement requires it. (The hierarchical order isn't necessarily embodied in individuals, but in organizational norms and habits of belief.) 


It's important to feel that you bring your whole self into work. This ties directly to high demand / low control issues often referred to in discussions of workplace stressors, because the definition of engagement includes the willingness to invest discretionary effort (which would require a good degree of freedom from control) to achieving the organization's objectives. 


So now the question is, what would allow people to apply more discretionary effort? How can we loosen up whatever version of "the divine right of kings" mythology that the organization is labouring under, and today's kings are just those bureaucratic norms of discourse that provide default support to initiative-sapping routines and hierarchies.

Change Discourse: Power Relationships

I’m starting to get an inkling about why people resist change and, believe me, if you think words like “attitude” might sum it up, you’re just going to have nightmares reading this.  In the process of reading Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules - for Now, it became quite evident to me that it was during the so-called “Enlightenment” that people’s thought structures began to detach from the hierarchically inspired mythos of the preceding eras of history and the idea of democracy and ideal of the “rule of law” occurred to people. It was wonderful, however brief. 

Up until that time, political organization was roughly the same as a grand protection racket. Some of you may think that little has changed, but in fact things have changed immensely. Nevertheless, we are backsliding.

What does the pre-enlightenment “divine right of kings” mythos give us? How does it feed and nurture the so stable pillars of our mindset? How does it keep us holding on to something we see as sane in a complex and dangerous world?

It gives us a self-contained little cosmos with us at the centre.

It gives us clear cut rules of social engagement.

It gives us the acceptable routes to and rites of kinship (e.g., the walk down the aisle and father giving his daughter as a bride to his son-in-law)

It gives us the limits of acceptable convention and the unacceptably unconventional or "weird". 

It gives us the limits of civilized and uncivilized behaviour, e.g., the ideal of professionalism that allows you to bring only 10% of yourself to work.

It gives a small group of people full permission to lead and direct the course of events to their own advantage.

So, what has changed? 

The introduction of the “rule of law” is a vast improvement over the "divine right of kings" mythos if it protects the ideal that each person can be the captain of their destiny, the ideal of everyone having the right to develop and express themselves in mutually beneficial ways (or in ways that do no harm to others).  

But let's face it, we remain to a large extent under the yoke of the ancient mythos, this vestigial patriarchy and hierarchy that so many on the modern ideological bandwagon think had been overthrown three hundred years ago. 

We have sold away a lot of our enlightenment thinking to buy swiffer-clean houses, big box convenience and the North Pacific Garbage Patch. So the rule of law reverts to might is right - until the yoke gets tight. Given that our identities are inexorably tied to the worldview of the group or community we identify with and measure ourselves against.

Seems that we are only the least bit interested in liberty when it is obviously threatened. I think today our numbing of the intellect to avoid facing the Darth Vader that haunts our economic and socio-political realities is what threatens us most. The most disturbing thing is that the numbing is the Darth Vader. 

It takes courage and humanity to develop real understanding in any era, Enlightenment, post-Enlightenment. We think we look better in the dark, perhaps. 

Change Discourse: Public and Private Worlds

No doubt, we all have our secrets, but even those are framed using the belief systems available to us through public discourse. Our lives are lived in the public domain. 

Who each of us is in the public world is very much a part of our identities as private people. If you are a woman, for instance, your personal and social identity is still largely defined by the roles you play in the lives of men.  In turn, the roles of men and women evolve with the types of division of labour required to support the economy given a level of technology. 

Women's lives throughout history were until very recently restricted to the private sphere. While it is said that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world, in fact, to express any of her thoughts, women must conceive and articulate their thoughts in terms that are comprehended in a public world that has been almost entirely defined by men who had economic power.  Women's personal identities were defined through the interests and needs of the men: Mother, lover, madonna, whore... Woman means wooed by man; i.e., wife of man.  Consider also the distinction in language between matter and spirit, and the patriarchal nature of religion, and also the symbols for masculine (mind) and feminine (body). Matter/Mater... More on this later.

The default gender is the masculine. Political power (political majority) is not measured in terms of how many women there are in relation to men, or even how many women there are in boardrooms in relation to men, but that we have to relate woman's success to that of the norm, the default gender, male.

Every thought we have can be articulated, but then it has already been forged in the public discourse. Even if we keep to ourselves, our selves are more publicly determined than self-determined because our opportunities to articulate our identities to ourselves are framed and validated in the public sphere. If there's too much of a discrepancy between how we view ourselves and our public reception, we lack legitimacy and credibility (and it is assumed the fault lies with us) and we feel alienated, disenfranchised, marginalized, even crazy. 

So what is the "private sphere"? Is it the sphere dominated by women? No, it's the sphere demarcated, defined and dominated by the historical economy. The economics of the home is publicly defined, and that definition informs our expectations of the roles of women and types of discussion men will engage in about their private lives. The default reality is the public world.

Due to changes in how we produce and distribute goods, larger numbers of women have access to the public domain than ever before. But being a woman doesn't make one's talk less patriarchal. If the discourse is becoming less patriarchal, it is because social organization around the modes of production requires it, or it is because we are becoming more aware of the affect of our institutions during times of change, and more aware of the effect of the terms of discourse. We no longer see our social institutions as natural arrangements, but as historical developments and therefore we can question them.

Change Discourse

It's been a long time since I posted a blog entry on Peripheral Vision.

I've decided to contribute something a little different now - on subjects that I have been thinking about for a very long time.  I was going to open another blog, but thought that it would save distractions if I just continued here.

I should warn you that this is going to be pretty "big picture" but for all that, it is definitely not going to be abstract. Over the next few months of postings (I hope) you'll come across terms such as "narrative" and "social discourse" but let's be clear - those are not abstract concepts like "the average family" or the GDP.

Social discourse is that living sea of language that you inherit from the many cultures in which you were raised. It's the theatre of your cognition, the shaper of your experiences and what allows you to communicate a wealth of information to others by means of these mere marks on the screen, or those little puffs of air that resonate throughout the cafe. It's the window through which you look out from your inner self to the world around you. It's the sedimented history of thousands and thousands of years of human existence.  It sorts, organizes and informs your basic, habitual awareness.  It exists in the world around you. (If you still think that's abstract, you can blame that label on several trends in the evolution of social discourse ;). Social discourse or narrative is mainly about the habitual tags, labels and markers we give to all of our personal experiences in the private or public sphere. It's the channel through which things make sense to us and amongst us when we take in, think or talk about them.

Social discourse traverses generations and changes the conditions of our understanding over time. It carries a set of key connotations that have some very strong influences on our experiences. They arise from living in a natural world and the social organization demanded from a given level of technology. Social discourse influences and is influenced by the needs that a level of technology produces:  The needs that organize us around gathering, changing and distributing nature's provisions, the ideals that support that organization. The core ideas in our cognition and evaluations are:

• The definition of private versus public
• Gender, family, and reproductive relationships
• Power relationships (e.g., boss, employee; government, capitalist)
• Values (e.g., "freedom" "kindness" or "success" - what are they?)
• Human beings and our understanding relation to the planet Earth
• What we take to be real in the universe

However, there's usually a lag and some upheaval before the brain and heart catch up with the hands but now, all of our core ideas are about to change markedly .... and therefore so will our experience.

Overcoming Institutional Inertia

Change is difficult in large institutions.  In a previous post, I wrote:

I'm not even sure that it's that "people prefer the devil they know," as the old saying has it. It's just that it is dangerous to both the authors of the narrative and those subject to it to question the rules, to disturb the "collective illusion" that sustains the power structures. For better or for worse, power structures represent "the very fabric of society" and resistance to change should not be underestimated. 

There I argued that it would be technology that would inevitably drive changes. I was thinking, for example, that the Web 2.0 phenomenon that has emerged in recent years presents a platform for horizontal, collaborative, collegial and networked dialogue.  

But to get on board with these technologies to solve work related problems and issues, your heart just has to be in it. You have to care enough about doing things well, or creating an environment where people can be more effective, that you're willing to share your ideas and have them peer reviewed. Before you can do that, you have to be able to identify where changes and improvements are needed, and where people can make a difference.  But even before that, you need the hope that your individual or collective efforts can make a difference.  You have to believe that making a difference is possible.  


Employees can sidestep these risks by focusing on processes and tasks, rather than the broader purposes and the overall efficacy of these activities.   Managers can sidestep institutional roadblocks by behaving "Quantophrenically" or they can simply take roadblocks as natural and eternal aspects of the managerial landscape. In so doing, employees and managers contribute passively to institutional inertia.


These approaches are either products or results of cynicism, which is unfortunate.  Where does the root of the cynicism reside?  How can the tide be turned, now that we have such amazing opportunities to make changes?  


This may be much more about cultural ideology than about individuals. IMO, there has been massive oversimplification with rationalizing and standardizing over the history of business culture in general, and so much of a focus on means and methods (e.g., money, processes, perpetual "growth" in economic terms).  This means that we are cogs in a big economic machine that is, as Charles Taylor put it, "all dressed up with nowhere to go."  In order to make the changes we need now, we need to refocus on things that are intrinsically valuable (growing and sustaining mental, emotional and ecological well-being). The focus on means, methods and quantophrenics has in the past eclipsed discussion on the more intrinsically valuable objectives. 


I do think the tide is turning, however, and that a newer, richer understanding of the complexity of our natural and social systems is causing our more human values to surface, and new voices will increasingly be heard.