Continuing to work through Overcoming Organizational Defenses to find links with the TOC approach it struck me that creating a CRT was in itself a form of Cognitive Mapping.
In other words by extracting the key concepts from the book into a CRT it should be possible to graphically display and test the book’s argument at the same time as comprehending it.
In the first chapter Argyris gives some strong clues about the sort of Undesirable Effects (UDEs) we might see in the real world…
Argyris gives examples of seven symptoms commonly seen in organisations:
- Actions intended to increase understanding and trust often produce misunderstanding and mistrust
- Blaming others or the system for poor decisions
- Organisational inertia: The tried and proven ways of doing things dominate organisational life
- Upward communications for difficult issues are often lacking
- Budget ganmes are necessary evils
- People do not behave reasonably, even when it is in their best interest
- The management team is often a myth
He then suggests that for rational, well-meaning human beings to consistently create these sort of problems there must be something wrong with their thinking processes, especially when dealing with business issues that are embarrassing or threatening – they must be using what he calls “Defensive Reasoning” – the three symptoms of which are:
- Individuals hold premises the validity of which is questionable yet they think it is not
- Individuals make inferences that do not necessarily follow from the premises yet they think they do
- Individuals reach conclusions that they believe they have tested carefully yet they have not (because the way they have been framed makes them untestable)
Using the terminology of the TOC thinking processes I’m going to take these as the initial UDEs
Argyris states that the causes of this defensive reasoning are four-fold:
- The human programs held by the people concerned about dealing with embarrassment or threat
- The fact that they use those programs skillfully
- The organisational defence routines that result
- The organisational “fancy footwork” used to protect the defensive routines
We can use those UDEs and causes to start making a skeleton CRT.
At the moment the the logical jumps between the entities seem too large to start plotting cause-effect arrows; as I work through the following chapters of the book I’ll develop the tree in line with Argyris’s argument.
Earlier articles:
* Invisible dogma and learning organisations
* Learning Organisations and TOC pt 2
June 24th, 2003 at 14:41
Damnit, Julian!
I’ve got better things to do than be distracted by your tinkering with TOC.
That said, take a look at…
http://www.focusedperformance.com/misc/SynesthesiaCRT.gif
…for a very rough starting point (still relatively “long arrows” and with no “bananas” indicating “AND” logic…but like I said, I should be working on stuff that pays.)
Embarrassment and threat come from avoiding poor perceived performance, and usually those perceptions are driven by erroneous or conflicting measures. We get so good at making these local measures look good, we start to believe our own footwork.
Since, as Goldratt is oft heard saying “Tell me how you’ll measure me and I’ll tell you how I’ll behave,” metrics drive behaviors (including and especially the internal metrics about embarrassment and threat), you’ll often find them either at the root of such problems — or worse — as reinforcing loop roots.
Note that this is a rough cut against the main points you started with. The other symptoms you mentioned could equally be starting points for building a CRT and/or could/should be merged into this one — they sound very familiar as components of what we in the TOC world refer to as a fairly generic “human behavior CRT” — most of them are subsets of your entities about skillful defenses and footwork.
Also note that I don’t know the Argyris book at the core of your analysis. I may be way off base.
That said, if there is something wrong about the thinking process, it probably comes from the erroneous premise that the performance of a system is simply the additive performance of its parts, which leads to emphasis of local players on local performance, to the detriment of global/team performance and to games to protect oneself.
By the way…There’s an alternative approach to building CRTs, based on the conflicts/dillemas associated with the presenting symptoms rather than brute force searches for cause-effect links. Maybe some day I’ll take a crack at your/Argyris’ seven symptoms.
June 25th, 2003 at 01:29
Hi Frank – yes, it’s not (directly) my day job either!
However your interest is much appreciated – I’ve been impressed by your grip of issues and your comment reinforces that.
I haven’t had the time to work through the implications of the quick tree you have put up – in general it feels right but there is one area that I think will merit further exploration – you have an entity “local measures are often out of sync with global needs and with other local measures” – I can understand why a TOC focus would lead you to suggest that entity, my instinct (not yet proven) is that Argyris’s theories would suggest that even global measures (since they are devised and monitored by human beings) suffer from the biases inherent in standard human behaviour as explained in his model. (for want of a better example think of the fiction that is “standard costs”!)
As you may have noticed I’m a student here – I know a little about TOC and a little about Argyris’s stuff – I’m following my instinct that the two areas of learning are mutually reinforcing if we can put them into a clear map. Where I’m aiming is to derive some new ideas about effectively delivering technology into a business (since that IS my day job!)
July 4th, 2003 at 14:20
Learning Organisations and Constraints – more
Set up a new section on my Wiki for the discussion and development of thoughts around the overlap betwen Chris Argyris’s work and Theory of Constraints.
Using a drawing tool plugin for the wiki software to aid visual thinking and noting…