Flawed Advice and the Management Trap: How Managers Can Know When They're Getting Good Advice and When They're Not

271 Pages·2000·11.33 MB·English

by  Chris Argyris

Flawed Advice and the Management Trap
Recent Books by the Author
On Organizational Learning
Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice
with Donald Schön
Knowledge for Action: A Guide to Overcoming Barriers to
Organizational Change
Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating
Organizational Learning Action Science
Flawed Advice and
the Management Trap
How Managers Can Know
When They're Getting Good
Advice and When They're Not
CHRIS ARGYRIS
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
2000
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Oxford New York
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Copyright © 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Argyris, Chris, 1923-
Flawed advice and the management trap :
how managers can know when they're getting
good advice and when they're not / Chris Argyris.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-513286-6
1. Business consultants. 2. Management.
3. Error. I. Title.
HD69.C6A698 2000 658.4'012-dc21 99-32358
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 3
Part I Getting Flawed Advice
1 Inconsistent and Unactionable Advice 15
2 Organizational Consequences of Using
Inconsistent Advice 38
3 Why Flawed Advice Persists 52
4 Human Resources Practices 82
5 Concluding Observations 93
Part II Finding a Model that Works
6 Critiquing Advice 99
7 Appraising Performance: The Dilemmas 113
8 Evaluating Group Performance 127
vi CONTENTS
9 Generating Internal Commitment to Values 158
10 Generating Internal Commitment to Implementing
Strategy (with Roger Martin) 173
11 Building Generic Competence in Organizational
Learning 219
12 Summary 238
Bibliography 249
Index 255
Preface
PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONS continually strive to achieve effec-
tive action. But they do not have to do so in isolation. Available
to them, especially on non-routine issues of great importance,
is a broad array of advice from executives, change consul-
tants, and academics. This is especially true on topics having
to do with organizational learning, transformational change,
and employee commitment.
Much of this advice is appealing; much of it compelling.
Providing it has become big business in its own right. The
only problem is, most of it does not work—that is, most of it is
not actionable. It is simply too full of abstract claims, inconsis-
tencies, and logical gaps to be useful as a concrete basis for
concrete actions in concrete settings.
How can this be? At base, it is my contention—and the core
argument of this book—that this advice fails because it is based
on an implicit theory of effective action that, by definition, is
counterproductive when applied to important, non-routine
issues. Those who provide it may honestly believe it to be
vii
viii PREFACE
true, relevant, and useful. But their belief is based on the very
same theory of effective action that, when followed correctly,
got them into trouble in the first place.
Again, how can this be? Their theory of action often makes
advisors blind not only to the gaps and inconsistencies in
their advice, but also to the fact that they are blind. What they
say, therefore, is not the result of ignorance, but of skilled
unawareness and skilled incompetence. Professionally, they
are very good at being wrong. They are not alone.
Decades of research have shown that the vast majority
of individuals—regardless of age, race, gender, education,
wealth, or culture—adhere to the same theory of effective
action. The organizations they build are, not surprisingly,
based on it. The inevitable result: patterns of skilled unaware-
ness and skilled incompetence that manifest themselves in
complex defensive routines, which are themselves undiscuss-
able. Worse, even their undiscussability is undiscussable.
This is not a question of odds or probabilities. Advice that
derives from this theory cannot help leading to actions whose
effectiveness is limited. Whatever the specific context of the
advice—whether about programs for building transforma-
tional leaders, generating organizational learning, or develop-
ing internal commitment—the outcome will, at best, take the
form of a short-lived fad. And the managers who rely on the
advice will, at best, see their credibility undermined. Equally
important, since none of this is discussable, colleagues will
either distance themselves from taking constructive action or,
if they do choose to face up to their organizations' defensive
routines, will be met with cries of "immaturity," "foolishness,"
"romanticism," and "impracticability."
My goal in this book is to examine, in depth, why and how
PREFACE ix
most professional advice on non-routine issues continues to
fail. The methodology I follow is to look with great care at a
limited number of representative examples, which are drawn
from my review of more than one hundred books and count-
less articles. I then place all this material in the context of a
different theory of effective action—one that leads not to
skilled incompetence, but to specific predictions that can be
tested in real life.
Nearly two decades ago, I published a book that surveyed
the action-oriented research in the academic literature (Argyris
1980). My judgment then, as now, was that most research on
implementation was quite weak—not because the researchers'
experience base was too limited or because their research
designs were impractical. Now, as then, the problem lies with
the implicit theory of action that underlies the questions they
ask, the data they use, and the interpretations they make. I
intend to show—in careful detail—exactly why that is so, as well
as how a different theory of action can both illustrate these
problems and correct them.
Cambridge, Massachusetts C.A.
March 1999