Finding good enough ground for now
On the ubiquity of 'leveraging' the tangible and the intangible.
Give me a still point, Archimedes is reputed to have said, and I will move the world. In the saying is the idea that finding something certain and using abstract, mathematical reasoning enables a relatively small amount of force to move a very large object. You might argue that there is a whole history of human longing about finding the immoveable place, firm ground on which to stand, from which to know and control the world, to leverage what we want but also to come home. It is both desirable and illusory.
The word leverage (sometimes known as gearing), is originally a financial term meaning to borrow money in order to finance the purchase of an asset. Borrowing to buy allows for a return to investors bigger than the sums involved in financing the debt: it also allows for counting the purchased asset to be used as collateral in other financial transactions. Anyone who supports Manchester United football team will be aware that this is the financial model that the Glazer family have used to buy the club and pay themselves and their investors large sums of money on an annual basis. They have saddled the club with hundreds of millions of pounds worth of debt, increased ticket fees for fans, and pay themselves annual ‘management fees’ for the privilege. But, as an example of the ways in which organisations have become permeated by financial language, it has come to be applied to all manner of management practices. As instances, managers might claim to be able to leverage talent or creativity in their organisations, or perhaps they might intend to leverage knowledge. Recently I heard a colleague say that they intended leveraging their relationships with others.
Leaving aside the implied instrumentalization of highly intangible abstract concepts, the idea of leveraging implies two clear intellectual assumptions.
First is the idea of ground. For Archimedes to leverage the world implies a fixed place to work from, what the poet TS Eliot referred to in The Four Quartets as ‘the still point of the turning world’. The longing for ground as part of the human condition, a yearning of respite from the daily experience of being blown about in a world of ceaseless change. Perhaps we all crave some stillness and certainty in our lives as the pace of change gets faster and faster and things fall apart.
The concept of ground shows up in Platonic thinking, with the idea of pure forms, or as Plato’s highest form of knowledge, mathematics. It also reveals itself in religion, where the still point in the turning world is God; and again in certain forms of natural scientific thinking and reasoning, where one established fact leads sequentially in linear and logical fashion to the next. We add, cumulatively, to the stock of knowledge in the world, with fact leading to fact until we understand things completely. This way of thinking is sometimes referred to as foundationalism, the idea that we proceed in our reasoning from something fixed and certain about a world which is there to be discovered. The equal and opposite tendency is the postmodern reaction to foundationalist thinking as anti-foundationalism, the idea that there are no fixed points from which to proceed, no grand narratives in which we can believe: there are only competing truths.
The second clear assumption is the idea of control and a god’s eye view to find the firm ground. In organisations, somehow the manager is considered to be outside the processes of creativity, or knowledge, or even relationship, and is in a privileged position to act upon them to achieve what they want. To draw on Hartmut Rosa’s typography sketching out our aggressive attitude to the world and each other, instrumentalization involves making things visible, making them accessible, making them manageable, then pressing them into use. The objects, be they natural objects of even people, are appropriated and, in the process, made mute. The predominant theories of management taught in most business schools imply this privileged position, that managers can control and manipulate (to manage — to put under one’s hand) sometimes highly complex and intangible human processes like culture or knowledge using instruments and tools, levers if you like.
If we take away the assumption of firm ground, and the assumption that we are in a privileged position to cognise and manipulate, then what is left for managers to do? If applying ‘levers’ to human affairs is only ever a probabilistic undertaking, then what’s the point of taking an MBA? Taking an interest in complexity and process can indeed be wounding to the managerialist soul.
One way of thinking about rehabilitating management, and what managers might achieve would be to consider that there are more options than having ground or no ground: there could be good enough ground for now. This is sometimes called a post-foundational position, and is one adopted by the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. It leads managers to abductive thinking, rather than induction or deduction, a process which starts with surprises of puzzles and draws on the full gamut of human reasoning, including imagination. It does not necessarily assume that reasoning just proceeds in linear fashion from firm ground. Secondly, to say that managers have no privileged position is not the same as claiming that they have no influence at all. Managers are often highly influential players in the game of organisational life, and what they say and do, and don’t say and do, will affect the way the game is played. Although in no position to ‘leverage’ anything, managers often have considerable power to persuade, to cajole, to reward, to punish, to inspire those for whom they have responsibility. Rather than thinking about these processes of influence as instrumental, levers of power, they are instead rhetorical and processual. Managers will get some of what they want, but also the unexpected and the unwanted.
It is interesting to think about what is possible if we give up on the idea of leveraging and focus instead on what we require of each other to take the next step.