Making Sense of Management: Theory and Practice
“In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, while in practice there is.” Benjamin Brewster, The Yale Literary Magazine (1882)
The management scholar, Donald Schön, began his 1987 book, Educating the Reflective Practitioner, as follows: “In the varied topography of professional practice, there is a high, hard ground overlooking a swamp. On the high ground, management problems lend themselves to solution through the application of research-based theory and technique. In the swampy lowland, messy confusing problems defy technical solution. The irony of this situation is that the problems of the high ground tend to be relatively unimportant to individuals or society at large, however great their technical interest might be, while in the swamp lie the issues of greatest human concern. The practitioner must choose. Shall he remain on the high ground where he can solve relatively unimportant problems according to prevailing standards of rigor, or shall he descend into the swamp of important problems and non-rigorous inquiry?”[i]
Schön’s concern was the Anglo-American management academia had become preoccupied with technical problems on the ‘high hard ground’ and had ignored the swamp in which complex problems lurk, and practising managers must dwell. Now, nearly forty years later, one wonders how Schön would have assessed the progress that has been made. The mainstream seems to many observers to have changed little, but if Schön had looked to the ‘edges’ and ‘open patches’, the places where innovation in ecosystems is often found, he might have been encouraged. Here the emergence of topics like complexity, uncertainty (as distinguished from risk), paradox and sensemaking has been promising. Sensemaking offers a particularly useful way to distinguish between the ‘high, hard ground’ of management theory and the real-world swamp in which management must be practiced.
Sensemaking
The sensemaking perspective in Anglo-American management has its origins in the work of Karl E. Weick, an organizational theorist at the University of Michigan. Management academics began studying it in the late 1960s, as management’s faith in the rational, ‘scientific’ models of reality and choice began to wane. As Weick puts it, “The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs” [ii]. In short, sensemaking looks at how people make meaning from their experience and, in so doing, create and maintain their identities.
Sensemakers take a much broader, humanistic perspective of people and organizations than mainstream Anglo-American management. The latter’s ‘Cartesian’ approach regards reality as a given, people as passive observers who can view the world objectively and it focuses on decision-making. The manager’s job is to ‘align’ their organizations through a series of ‘interventions’ to an objective reality that exists ‘out there’. It sees management as an applied science, rather like engineering, with the same relationship to economics that engineering has to physics.
The sensemaking perspective embraces and contains this so-called structural-functionalist approach[iii]. Managers are seen more as gardeners than as engineers: reality is constructed rather than given. Here is Brenda Dervin, a sensemaking pioneer, describing the human condition: “Perhaps most fundamental of Sense-Making’s metatheoretical assumptions is the idea of the human, a body-mind-heart-spirit living in a time-space, moving from a past, in a present, to a future, anchored in material conditions; yet at the same time with an assumed capacity to sense-make abstractions, dreams, memories, plans, ambitions, fantasies, stories, pretenses that can both transcend time-space and last beyond specific moments in time-space. This (makes) fodder for sense-making not only thoughts and ideas, observations and understandings, but emotions, and feelings, dreams and visions, pretenses and illusions, connections and disconnections.”[iv]
This broad perspective is nicely illustrated in Chris Rodgers’ helpful diagram of the dynamics of sensemaking, adapted from his book The Wiggly World of Organization[v]. The diagram shows five ‘acts’ of management, four vertical and one horizontal.
The horizontal dimension of Rodgers’ diagram can be thought of abstraction or granularity, with fine-grained, grounded action on the left and coarse-grained, theoretical abstraction on the right. The vertical dimension in the diagram is the river of time, which flows from bottom to top. As can be seen in the table in the appendix, implicit in Rodgers’ diagram are some of the tensions in Schön’s landscape of professional practice.
From Practice to Theory and Back Again
In the diagram Act 1 through Act 4 running from left to right describe a process of abstraction from grounded action (practice) to high abstraction (theory). Act 5, running from right to left, takes us back from theory to practice. As we will see, the trajectory of Act 5 begs a major question: What is the relationship between theory and practice in management?
In Act 1 managers are actors in real time, immersed in situations, muddling forward as they go. Here the time is always now. They are improvising, trying to get a grip on the situation. They reach for any possibilities for action that are ready-to-hand and use heuristics — rules-of-thumb[vi] — to help them get the job done. Ecological psychologist, J.J. Gibson, called these action possibilities ‘affordances’ — the opportunities that the situation ‘affords’ you to advance your cause[vii]. Affordances ‘solicit’ actions — you are drawn to move. This relationship between the perceiver and the perceived is what French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, called ‘motivation’[viii]. These affordances exist in time as well as space. The Ancient Greeks had a concept of time called Kairos. It meant the opportune or ‘right’ time. It was derived from their experiences of archery and weaving. There was a right time to release an arrow to hit the target and a right time for a shuttle to pass through the warp threads on a loom. Today the term is growing more common in discussions of communication and how there are right times and occasions on which to deliver messages, make decisions and take actions. Timing may make all the difference to the fate of thing said and things done.
In this context everything managers say or don’t say, do or don’t do, counts. Context is everything. In Act 1 managers are practising what philosopher, Hubert Dreyfus, called ‘absorbed coping’, an engaged way of dealing with routine activities that have been mastered[ix]. As cognitive psychologist, Gary Klein, concludes from his study of how experienced practitioners make decisions under time pressure, uncertainty, unclear goals, high stakes, poorly defined procedures, and dynamic conditions, this action will include mental simulations of whether a particular approach might work or not[x]. Gary Klein calls it ‘naturalistic decision-making’. Unless the situation proves intractable, experienced actors don’t have to ‘think’, invoking rules, concepts and reasons. It’s all about recognizing patterns derived from long and varied experiences to create expectancies, trigger sensitivity to cues, and suggest plausible goals and possible actions — affordances. This is the practical sensemaking using judgement that can become second nature to us. The result is the wisdom that Aristotle called phronesis.
Act 2 shows how managers account for their actions in retrospect. Instead of acting forwards, they are now looking behind them, telling the story of ‘what happened’. Storytelling maybe the most important feature of sensemaking — we may work for money, but we live for story. Story represents a first level of abstraction as the stream of events is parsed and punctuated. It addresses a human need for some order, predictability and control over our lives. Sometimes Act 2 is triggered by a breakdown in Act 1, when the situation does not respond to our efforts and we are forced back to analysis, thinking about what we did and why it didn’t work. Depending on the purpose and the audience, the story may take the form of a rationalization of what we did, justifying our actions. In that process we may be tempted to turn to currently politically acceptable explanations of what we have done. Indeed, our accounts may even end up supporting prevailing concepts of best practices and approved methodologies.
Act 3 and Act 4 are further abstractions from the original management experience. Moreover, as we move from left to right actors are immediately detached from real time. Actors in Act 3 and Act 4 are trying to make sense of how events from the past played out over time. The concept of time is now measured time — quantitative and linear. The Greek concept for this kind of time was Chronos or chronological time.
As Rodgers points out, in Act 3 conventional (scientifically rational) academics and researchers turn managers’ retrospective accounts (which have already been partly rationalized) into theories. In the process of aggregating those first-person accounts they drop any consideration of the social, political and economic contexts in which they occurred. Rodgers explains “…. this process results in even more abstract and partial representations of what are already abstract, partial, and ‘polished’ accounts of the messy reality. This error is then, compounded by the suggestion that such theories can be applied universally. That is to say, they ignore the path-dependent and context-rich nature of what people are actually experiencing and doing in practice. These assumptions, of universal applicability and identifiable causal links, then serve to reinforce still further, the myths of rationality, predictability and control that disfigure current understanding, and the prescriptions that flow from them.”[xi]
This, in a nutshell is the problem for management practitioners with mainstream Anglo-American or ‘Cartesian’ management. It is preoccupied with the Act 3/Act 4 cycle, almost to the exclusion of Acts 1 and 2, let alone Act 5. The philosophy in use is scientific realism: the belief that reality is a ‘given’ and that scientific inquiry is the only way to develop true knowledge about it. Theory is seen as superior to practice because practice involves only the application of context-free, scientific principles derived from ‘evidence-based’ theories. Many consultants claim that such approaches can transform an enterprise from a dysfunctional, unhealthy state into a future healthy one. But this approach assumes that we always think our way into better ways of action by applying theoretical principles. This is in sharp contrast with what philosophers might call the Act 1/Act 2 phenomenological[xii] view that we don’t see reality as it is, but as we are, constantly looking for action possibilities that will address our needs, desires, interests and abilities. In this view we often improvise our ways into better ways of thinking.
In this context it’s worth remembering that for much of the past century Anglo-American philosophers of scientific realism and those of Continental phenomenology have been talking past each other, if they talked at all. Their views of ‘reality’ and how we apprehend it are so different, their vocabularies so incompatible, that communication is all but impossible. The sensemaking perspective allows us to see the relationship between these apparently diametrically opposed philosophies in a different way: as opposing yet complementary, context-dependent forces, operating in an endless yin-yang cycle.
Act 5: From Theory to Practice and ‘What’ to ‘How’
We are now able to look at Act 5 in the dynamics of sensemaking. How does one get from the ‘evidence-based’ prescriptions of Act 4 to the grounded action of Act 1, from the ‘high, hard ground’ back to the ‘swamp’? The long smooth trajectory in the diagram conceals a basic conundrum in management (and all such practices): knowing ‘what’ to do is not the same as knowing ‘how’ to do it[xi].
The relationship between ‘what’ and ‘how’ is rather a subtle one and the two are often confused:
For instance, I know what I have to do to drive a golf ball 300 yards:
· Swing the club at 115 mph or more
· Produce a ball speed of 170 mph or more
· Launch the ball at an upward angle of between 10 and 14 degrees
· Impart a backspin to the ball of between 1800 and 2800 rpm
These are desirable outcomes of a good swing with a driver. I can’t disagree with them but neither can I produce them. Driver technology helps, but if I don’t have the skills, I can’t turn the ‘whats’ into ‘hows’. To do that I will have to go through long periods of training and practice and, even then, I may not have the physical abilities.
The same goes for much management advice — it tends to be all about ‘what’ and ignores ‘how’ — what the receiver of advice can actually do with it. Consider the first five ‘moon shots’ from Gary Hamel’s 2009 “Moon Shots for Management” initiative[xiv]:
· Ensure that the work of management serves a higher purpose
· Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems
· Reconstruct management’s philosophical foundations
· Eliminate the pathologies of formal hierarchy
· Reduce fear and increase trust
These may all be desirable outcomes, but the injunctions are achievements, not actions. How does one actually produce them? Our ability to connect ‘what’ with ‘how’ all depends on our ability to connect what we must do with what we can do. Advice that is a ‘how’ for one enterprise may turn out to be a ‘what’ for another organization, because they don’t have the skills. That’s one of the reasons why the transfer of ‘best practices’ doesn’t work very well. Everything depends on context.
So, the successful completion of Act 5 of Chris Rodgers’s diagram requires managers to be able to make this connection between abstractions and actions, to go from universal, context-free advice to action in their particular situations. This takes a finer-grained discrimination of context. Classes and categories — abstractions created during Act 3 and Act 4 — must be broken down into meaningful sub-classes and sub-categories, each of which may demand a different tactical response. The search is in the spaces between the categories for differences that make a difference. Only then do the affordances — action possibilities — emerge, soliciting action. That’s sensemaking.
The Role of Power
One of the most important aspects of context is the distribution and dynamics of power within an enterprise. Practising managers know that political, economic and social power structures that perpetuate the status quo and allow only incremental efficiency innovations are barriers to more radical experimentation. As Italian sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto pointed out a long time ago in a political context, unless the elites circulate, we cannot revitalize our organizations and institutions[xv]. The same goes for management enterprises. This does not imply wholesale revolution, only continual renewal, as power is spread more widely and moves around the organization. This allows people to exercise responsibility and take action in the areas where they are best suited to do so. Executives surrender formal power, what Mary Parker Follett[xvi] called ‘power over’, only to receive it back again, multiplied many times over in the form of ‘power with’.
Sensemaking vs Prescriptive Frameworks
Thus, for managers, the most useful management frameworks are not the context-free, prescriptive ones that tell them ‘do this and you’ll get that’, but those that help them understand and interpret complex situations — to make meaning. Such frames, together with their associated heuristics, direct their attentions and guide their conversations (and that’s what organizations consist of — focused conversations) in their search for affordances and the actions they solicit.
It is this ability of managers (a practical wisdom developed through experience) to find these affordances that makes or breaks their efforts to change enterprise conversations by enabling new voices to be heard and new topics to be addressed. Context matters! This may be why many managers prefer to read history, biography and even fiction to management books[xvii]. They search there for insight and inspiration from quasi-experiences that show how other humans discovered action possibilities in the situations in which they found themselves. It helps them understand their own stories and those of their enterprise. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out, “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’” [xviii]
Thus, Act 5 brings us full cycle back down into the ‘swamp’ with action and storytelling and its power to help us make sense of ourselves and our experience.
Life is the ultimate context.
Appendix: Tensions implicit in Schön’s Landscape of Professional Practice
Schön’s contrast between the ‘high, hard ground’ and the ‘swamp’ evokes a many of the tensions encountered by reflective management practitioners. These tensions are always present but grow over time as successful organizations scale. The pace and direction of change is mediated by technology of all kinds.
[i] Schön, D.A., (1987), Educating the Reflective Practitioner, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.
[ii] Weick, K.E. (1993). The collapse of sensemaking in organizations: The Mann Gulch disaster. Administrative Science Quarterly, 38(4), 635.
[iii] Burrell, G and Morgan, G. (1979), Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis, Heineman, London, U.K.
[iv] Dervin, B., (2003). Sense-Making’s Journey from Metatheory to Method: An Example Using Information Seeking and Research Focus. In B. Dervin, Sense-Making Methodology Reader (p 139). Hampton Press, Inc.
[v] Rodgers, C., (2021), The Wiggly World of Organization, Routledge, London, U.K. p.91.
[vi] Flyvbjerg, B., (2024), “Heuristics for Better Project Leadership: Teasing out Tacit Knowledge”, Project Management Journal, Vol. 55(6), pp. 615–625.
[vii] Gibson, J.J., (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, Ma.
[viii] Merleau-Ponty, M., (1964), The Primacy of Perception, ed. by James Edie, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, Ill.
[ix] Dreyfus, H.L., (2014), Skillful Coping: Essays on the phenomenology of everyday perception and action, Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K.
[x] Klein, G. 1998, 2008 Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, Ma.
[xi] Rodgers, C., (2021), The Wiggly World of Organization, Routledge, London, U.K. p. 93.
[xii] Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. It emerged in Europe in the second half of the 19thCentury. It is a study of the structure of lived, conscious experience in our surrounding ‘life worlds’.
[xiii] Raynor, M.E., (2010), “What’s Wrong with What is that it’s not How”, The Conference Board Review, Winter, pp. 66–67.
[xiv] Hamel, G. 2009, “Moon Shots for Management, Harvard Business Review, February, pp. 2–9.
[xv] Pareto, V., (1968), The Rise and Fall of the Elites, The Bedminster Press, Totowa, N.J.
[xvi] Hurst, D.K., (1992), “Thoroughly Modern — Mary Parker Follett”, Business Quarterly, Spring, 56, 4. pp. 55–58.
[xvii] There is growing support for the view that the primary role of the arts and the humanities is to guide our experience of the world and suggest possibilities for action. Ander, A., (2011), “Pragmatisms by Incongruity: ‘Equipment for Living’ from Kenneth Burke to Gilles Deleuze”, The Journal of the Kenneth Burke Society, Vol. 7, Issue 2.
[xviii] MacIntyre, A. (1981) After Virtue, University of Notre Dame Press, IN. p. 216
