It’s all very well being critical, but what should we do?

On the importance of thinking without a bannister

After a series of workshops a colleague observed to me that taking a complexity perspective is very good at taking apart the dominant discourse on management and presenting radical uncertainty front and centre. The trouble is though, it appears to offer nothing in its place. As my colleague observed, ‘so what do you leave people with. What should they do?’

On the train on the way back I was reading Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity (2003), because the term ‘authenticity’ comes up such a lot particularly in relation to leadership, and had done so again in the workshops. In the book I came across this quotation which Adorno uses from an poetic realist novel by Gottfried Keller called Der Grüne Heinrich, which I don’t think Adorno draws on to use it as a good example because he finds it too positive, but it did have some resonance for me, at least the second half of it:

‘…one is not always tearing down to build again; on the contrary, one tears things down eagerly in order to gain free space for light and air, which appear as it were, as though by themselves, wherever some obstructive object is removed. When one looks matters right in the face and treats them in an upright manner, then nothing is negative, but all is positive, to use the old saw.’ (quoted in Adorno, 2003: 31–32)

What Keller is pointing to is the potential discomfort we feel, I have felt, when the scaffolding of my thinking is taken away. It can have a radically decentering effect, which threatens identity. But the point of doing so, of being critical, of calling into question, of identifying assumptions, is to free up thinking, not to paralyse it, although this is precisely what happens because of the way we have been schooled. And of course the tools and techniques we have learnt may well be partially useful to us in alleviating anxiety, even if for nothing else. The point of critique, though, is to create the ‘light and air’ that Keller evokes, to create an opportunity to do something different which is not fully dictated to by previous ways of thinking, which are sedimented in management tools. But this demands much more of us.

The political theorist Hannah Arendt stressed again and again the importance of being able to think, which she termed a conversation between I and myself. The trouble with thinking, though, is that it unravels things just as Penelope unravelled her tapestry every night to put off her suitors while she waited for Odysseus’ return. It is important to think and to do so without a bannister, as she termed it. Because thinking affects judgement and it may help us when the chips are down. (1971).

Stopping to think might unravel things, might sound critical, might put nothing in its place immediately, but it does give us pause.

John Dewey tries to help us further in Art as Experience where he talks about the way we rush into action without reflection, but where reflection may give us just a moment to consider what we are doing differently. Dewey’s intellectual project was to constantly encourage us to inquire into the particular circumstances in which we find ourselves, and not to assume automatically that the way we have solved previous problems will help us in our current predicaments. He bemoans the drive towards battering down a problem with an existing solution:

‘Zeal for doing, lust for action, leaves many a person, especially in this hurried and impatient environment in which we live, with experience of an incredible paucity, all on the surface. No one experience has a chance to complete itself because something else is entered into speedily. What is called experience becomes so dispersed and miscellaneous as hardly to deserve the name. Resistance is treated as an obstruction to be beaten down, not as an invitation to reflection. An individual comes to seek, unconsciously even more than by deliberate choice, situations in which he can do the most things in the shortest time.’ (1934: 46)

Dewey is pointing to the importance of not rushing into another form of action out of impatience, nor to cast around simply for similar ways of doing what we have already failed at. In organisations where there is such an emphasis on ‘delivering’ things, there is often no time to dwell in the necessary experience to work out with others what to do, to reflect upon doing things differently in ways which we co-construct.

It’s worth noticing that Dewey also goes on to say that the opposite problem is being passive and just receiving experience without acting.

‘Some decisive action is needed to establish contact with the realities of the world and in order that impressions may be so related to the facts that their value is tested and organised.’ (1934: 47)

So it would be a mistake to understand Dewey as encouraging us to reflect simply for the sake of reflecting; it is not an end in itself. For him the ideal is to act, but to reflect on the action in relation to the context of experience, to reflect while we are acting. This speaks to the development of practical judgement, perhaps practical wisdom.

To stop and ask in a group: ‘what does this new situation require of us’ is a way of acting, of trying to find ways forward. It is not merely a negative approach which tears down and puts nothing in its place. It does demand a lot of us, though. Noticing, being patience, allowing ourselves to be struck which can lead to an exploration of plurality and differences of interpretation about what is going on. It might render the situation more complex, but one which also affords more possibilities.

References

Adorno, T. (2003) The Jargon of Authenticity, London: Routledge Classics.

Arendt, H. (1971) Thinking and moral considerations, Social Research, 38 (3): 417–446 .

Dewey, J. (1934) Art as Experience, Chicago: Chicago University Press.