Kierkegaard reminds us that practitioners must act forwards into an unknowable future, while theoreticians can only understand events backward.

Mainstream Anglo-American management valorizes the analysts and ignore the players and their experience.

I have been teaching an EMBA course that addresses these (and other) issues at McGill and McMaster universities here in Canada:

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This course is a non-traditional one, based on systemic thinking, complexity theory, and a dual-process approach to understanding (embodied) human cognition. The analogies are organic and ecological and the primary polarities are between the logico-scientific and narrative approaches to understanding the process of organizing in complex social systems.

Science takes things apart to see how they work, narrative puts things together to see what they mean. The philosophical underpinnings are pragmatic (is it helpful?) rather than positivist (is it true?). As such, the course is often critical of conventional management thinking and constantly questions the nature of the evidence on which managers base (or at least justify) their decisions.

It becomes clear that management is not just a technical practice, preoccupied with meeting corporate goals, but also a moral practice concerned with assessing the worthiness of those goals, both for the enterprise and for society.

The result is a sense-making framework that allows you to understand organizations as if they were created by people with bodies and intentions, situated in time and space, culture and society, searching for identity and meaning, and struggling for credibility and authority. In short, history matters and context matters.

The overall objective is to develop the participants’ capacity to make meaning from their experiences.