key: cord-0859894-9fh30bt7
authors: Dent, Eric B.
title: Learning from a lifetime of provocative thinking about organizational dynamics
date: 2020-07-27
journal: Organ Dyn
DOI: 10.1016/j.orgdyn.2020.100780
sha: 33da9e6c24136cbc41c262a769f8de3b4658a7f2
doc_id: 859894
cord_uid: 9fh30bt7

nan

Former Organizational Dynamics editor, Peter B. Vaill passed away in 2020. Although the bulk of his working career was in the 20th century, he had a prophetic voice that is as current today as it was when he spoke and wrote. The purpose of this article is to outline his body of work and its relevance for 2020 and beyond.

In addition to the legacy of his own work, Vaill edited Organizational Dynamics from 1986 to 1989 publishing some of the most celebrated works in the annals of this journal. In 1986 I became a full-time management consultant and a key article in my consulting tool box was Vaill's Organizational Dynamics piece, "The Purposing of High-Performance Systems" in which he updated his earlier seminal work that defined the field of organizational excellence and high-performing systems.

In the remainder of this article I will share Vaill's vision for the management field, explaining the key influences on his own thinking and explicating the challenges he saw in the practice of management and the field of organizational behavior. Although Vaill advocated for many viewpoints that are counter-cultural among mainstream professional managers, executive education leaders, classroom teachers, and MBA students, some continue to exemplify his vision, so encouraging examples will be provided. In the same way that Servant Leadership became much more widely accepted after Robert Greenleaf's death, I am hopeful that Vaill's ideas will be embraced more thoroughly posthumously.

For almost 60 years we've been living with a massive misconstruction of the nature of organizations. Since Douglas McGregor published the "Human Side of Enterprise," we've accepted that constructionthat there is a human side of enterprise . . . and then there is all the business stuff; that's a misconstruction. The more correct construction is as follows: There is only one side to organizations and that's the human side. -Peter B. Vaill

Vaill's vision for how we can think and work in a more impactful way is provocative and this article will elucidate his guidance to improve the state of affairs described above. His philosophy and perspective will be outlined in five sections (1) "Permanent Whitewater," (2) Managerial-Leadership not Management Competencies, (3) Management (i.e., Running an Organization) is En-courag-ing, (4) Practice, and (5) Management Education, that all feature Vaill's unique vision for the practice and study of management.

Peter Vaill is, perhaps, most famous for coining the term permanent whitewater (PWW) to describe the constantly changing organizational context that seemed to pick up pace in the 1980s. He and I created a "Change Assessment Inventory" and among thousands of respondents over many years, only three reported working in a less turbulent context than five years earlier. Questions ranged from asking whether people had more, or less, deadline pressure, unexpected interruptions, technological complexity, aggressive objectives, adequacy of information for decisions, and so forth. Vaill saw as "the grand paradox of management" the idea that managers are asked to bring greater control to their objectives, which, by definition, are less and less controllable.

Vaill christened whitewater events as the most extreme aspects of this turbulence characterized as surprising, novel, Organizational Dynamics (2019) xxx, xxx-xxx Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / o r g d y n https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2020.100780 0090-2616/© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. messy or ill-structured, costly or obtrusive, recurring (although not in exactly the same way) or unpreventable (Vaill had a good enough sense of humor to chuckle at the irony of his death occurring during the most extreme whitewater event of his lifetime, the COVID-19 pandemic). Vaill was preceded by Emery and Trist whose metaphor was "the ground itself is moving" to describe the phenomena of a destabilized context that prevents predictable plans of action from being viable. Vaill loved the metaphor of Siu who wrote about "Chinese baseball," a sport in which, when the ball is in the air, any player can move any base anywhere. Currently, the U.S. military has popularized the VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) Model to describe the turbulent organizational environment.

The proper name for what we are talking about is not management and leadership, but "managerial leadership." . . . the leading and the managing cannot be separated. -Peter B. Vaill Despite Vaill's admonition, the current textbook my university uses for the "Principles of Management" course differentiates between "leaders" and "managers," as if an individual in an organization could be one or the other. The same mindset is found in corporate training programs. Vaill, however, preferred the term "leader-manager" when discussing those with managerial responsibility in organizations. Of course, the management or leadership competency movement makes far more distinctions than just that between "leader" and "manager."

The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL), a highlyregarded, international leadership development organization, touts 52 leadership competencies that are important for managerial success. This list has been vetted and refined over a period of decades. Yet, glancing at the list, it is easy to take issue with the framing of much of what managers "do" or "are." For example, research has shown that successful leaders are emotionally intelligent. The CCL list includes factors such as "compassion and sensitivity," "interpersonal savvy," and "resilience," which, even collectively, don't adequately capture the emotional intelligence requirements of top managerial success. The only factor that approximates working virtually in a multinational environment is "global team management." Finally, "spirituality" is not on CCL's list. The closest competencies might be "balance" or "vision." Spirituality may be too loaded a word, but for Vaill those "running an organization" successfully, clearly transcended its activities, policies, and practices and conveyed a deeper meaning to its employees and customers. Vaill might agree that such a list of factors provides most of the bricks needed for the foundation of a structure of managerial success, but he would contend that most of the mortar is missing.

For Vaill, even our use of language creates an ontological issue. For example, the Harvard Business School in the 1920s adopted as its primary focus for the school's mission first "the administrator" and later "the general manager," as if this one person could be extracted from an organizational context. Vaill pointed out the logical inconsistency in the work of someone he considered a giant seminal figure in the field, Chester Barnard, whose most famous book is entitled The Functions of the Executive. Yet within that book, first published in 1938, Barnard wrote, "The executive functions, which have been distinguished for purposes of exposition and which are the basis for much functional specialization in organizations, have no separate concrete existence [italics added]. They are parts of aspects of a process of organization as a whole." Because we don't have techniques for studying wholes, we study parts, but Vaill concluded that our study of the parts was often fallacious.

The problem compounded over the years. In 1960 Douglas McGregor published The Human Side of Enterprise, a title that suggests there is a non-human side of enterprise. By 1973 the split into what are often called management competencies was complete with the Mintzberg's publication of The Nature of Managerial Work. The management competencies body of work contains many assumptions Vaill questioned such as that learning a competency largely means the student knows how and when to use it, downplaying the contextual considerations of PWW. Current research by Beer, discussed below, shows that Vaill was right in this questioning.

Vaill was so insistent on not prematurely being reductionist that when he launched the field of organizational excellence or high-performing systems in 1972 with 47 descriptive characteristics, he wrote that he was not interested in doing conventional research to continue to validate the characteristics. He explained "I feel this way because behind the hypotheses is some kind of dimly perceived gestalt that will evaporate entirely if I become analytical too soon." This would be an entirely foreign notion to nearly all management researchers today. Vaill lamented that he was handicapped in trying to conceptualize wholes by language, which forces a sequential, discrete rendering and that his own writings were forced to be reductionist. Still, he would argue that our field is missing the target by focusing on management competencies rather than the overall managerial experience. Running an organization is exceedingly intricate, and certainly not a mastery of a variety of managerial competencies.

A philosophical successor to Vaill is Michael Beer, who has described his approach in books such as High Commitment High Performance (HCHP). Rather than focusing on management competencies, he counseled companies including Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard, and Goldman Sachs that leaders must think in terms of a multi-stakeholder perspective. They must lead-manage with their hearts and provide "employees at all levels with a sense of higher purpose, meaning, challenging work, and the capacity to make a difference." HCHP makes no distinction between management and leadership, focusing holistically on resilience, sustainable action, and viewing their behaviors and the organization as a total system. Beer advocates both/and, not or/either thinking.

An organization would not have "management" . . . it would have "encouragement." You'd no longer have + Models ORGDYN-100780; No. of Pages 6 Please cite this article in press as: E.B. Dent, Learning from a lifetime of provocative thinking about organizational dynamics, Organ Dyn (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2020.100780 schools of management; you'd have schools of encouragement. A promotion would not be to move into management; it would be to move into encouragementand the difference is almost breath-taking. -Peter B. Vaill

We do not have a theory of leadership or management that is independent of performance. Coaches who win games are considered great. Coaches who lose games are not. It's that simple. The management field does not have a model or theory that can delineate when leader-managers have performed outstandingly while their organizations have not, even though it is not difficult to list reasons largely outside the leader-manager's purview, such as macro-economic factors. Vaill was critical of the framing of most popular management and leadership theories. He wrote that he had seen outstanding leaders that ranged from "tyrants [with] almost maniacal commitment that would get them locked up in other contexts to laid-back managers who seem outwardly to do very little. Drucker agreed noting that in 65 years he had seen exceptional CEOs who were "all over the map in terms of their personalities, attitudes, values, strengths, and weaknesses. They ranged from extroverted to nearly reclusive, from easygoing to controlling, from generous to parsimonious."

From the beginning of his career until the end, Vaill was still inspired and informed by Chester Barnard's 1938 statement that the "sensing of the organization as a whole and the total situation relevant to it transcends the capacity of merely intellectual methods, and the techniques of discriminating the factors of the situation. The terms pertinent to it are 'feeling,' 'judgment,' 'sense,' 'proportion,' 'balance,' 'appropriateness.' It is a matter of art rather than science, and is aesthetic rather than logical. For this reason, it is recognized rather than described and is known by its effects rather than by analysis." Similarly, Vaill bemoaned that just because some activities in an organization lent themselves to quantitative analysis, as Deming clearly demonstrated, management researchers assumed "running an organization" would also.

Vaill's thinking evolved over the years, but began with the argument that managing is a performing art. In the early 1970s he used that metaphor and etched it into the management field with a book of that title in 1989. In a 1992 article, Vaill started using "running an organization" (denoting a richly holistic role) and I still assign that article to my Leadership MBA students each semester. If this article has motivated you to read only one of Vaill's writings, I recommend this one, because I think you can get a strong dose of "overall Vaill" in this single publication. I include this reading in the course with fear and trepidation because the nearly unanimous (and mutiny-like) response of my working MBA students is "Vaill is exactly right. Why hasn't business and higher education fixed this in the last 28 years!!"

Vaill's final thoughts on the subject are quite controversial and may represent breakthrough thinking. He wondered whether management is, surprisingly, encouragement. He built the case based on Ackoff's notion that what top leaders really needed was "guts" and Deming's admonition to "drive out fear." Consequently, what leader-managers need is courage. He thought of courage as "the capacity and process of maintaining one's identity and values in the face of psychic challenge." Vaill sometimes spelled encouragement as en-courage-ment to emphasize courage, because encouragement in the vernacular has a softer, cheerleading connotation, which doesn't capture the bold role he intended by encouragement. Managerial leadership, he mused, might be "leading people out of superficial tranquility and into anxiety and then into a feeling of a need for courage and then along the courage-formed path itself." As noted in the quotation opening this section, he saw this reframing as breath-taking. He also believed this framing was consistent with the research on emotional intelligence and servant leadership.

Vaill was knowledgeable about, and supported, Kouzes and Posner's Leadership Challenge (now in its 6th edition) behaviors -model the way, inspire a shared vision, challenge the process, enable others to act, and encourage the heart. In later work on the model, they contended that of their five practices of exemplary leadership, the most important might be Encourage the Heart, which they then gave book-length treatment. Kouzes and Posner focus primarily on recognition and celebration rather than courage, but the term courage is now appearing in more article and book titles about leadership, so all aspects of Vaill's definition are still under discussion in the field.

Theory and practice do not "integrate;" they dance with each other, sometimes lustily, but just as often ploddingly or with one lording over the other or warily and with stony indifference. But it also must be said that in a school of administration, management, leadership, or practice, if theory and practice do not dance with each other somehow, the learner will graduate not knowing much about practice not having gained any increment in concrete skill nor remembering any of the theories that were intended to be relevant in the future. -Peter B. Vaill

In his last months, at age 83, Vaill joined Dave Fearon in hosting a podcast series entitled "Choosing a Practiced Way of Life," and was intending to publish his next book, On Practice as a Way of Being. For Vaill, theory and practice were inextricably linked. The phrase "that's fine in theory, but what about in practice" is commonly expressed, yet most researchers and trainers focus more on developing and understanding theory, not practice. Vaill studied at the knee of Fritz Roethlisberger who spent more than a decade working inside a single organization, the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric Company. Vaill's dissertation was a detailed analysis of the inner workings of actual organizations, an approach that would not be common in dissertation research today.

Fast forward nearly 50 years to Vaill's last conference presentation to the Organizational Behavior Teaching Society, "Three Organization Behavior Legacy Statements." He spoke about learning, co-inquiry and practice, but referred to the topic of practice as his "biggie." He introduced the intriguing metaphor of dark matter. Dark matter comprises 85% of the matter of the universe but it cannot be detected with existing instrumentation. Dark matter prevents galaxies from flying apart and has a strong influence on the structure and ongoing unfolding of the universe. Dark energy plus dark matter constitutes 95% of the universe's + Models ORGDYN-100780; No. of Pages 6 Please cite this article in press as: E.B. Dent, Learning from a lifetime of provocative thinking about organizational dynamics, Organ Dyn (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2020.100780 total mass-energy content. Vaill dramatically asserted that "practice is the dark matter and energy of social science. Practice is everywhere." Moreover, practice, like dark matter, does not get nearly the attention it deserves. Just as dark matter can't be seen by scientific instruments, Vaill believed that practice remains largely undetected by the current tools commonly in use by management researchers who operate primarily in a positivist, objectivist paradigm.

A worthy successor to Vaill's work on practice are Joseph Raelin and colleagues who contributed chapters to Leadership-as-practice. They eschew perspectives of leadership that focus on traits, behaviors, or competencies. They place their lens primarily on practice, the "interaction with the environment through both individual and collective sensorimotor processing" and engage in process-oriented studies.

Vaill defined the field of management/organizational behavior as consisting of the responses to two questions, how do people in organizations get things done, and, how can we help them do it better? The second question essentially encompasses management training and education, so Vaill thought and wrote extensively about the question of how faculty and trainers educate, including writing the book Learning as a Way of Being. The field of management has had a long-running dialogue about what percentages of teaching are divided between content and process. Vaill recommended placing significantly more weight on the latter. In fact, he considered too much emphasis on content as losing focus. He saw the Ford and Carnegie Foundation reports of the late 1950s as basically mandates to teach subject matter. They assumed that passing on more content would lead to better education. In his words, this assumption is fallacious and the promised better education "didn't happen." Another fallacy Vaill saw in management education can be clarified in distinguishing between inside and outside knowledge. Inside knowledge is very context-dependent. Outside knowledge is mostly context-independent and is what faculty and trainers teach when they cover feedback skills, leadership approaches, teaming, etc. Yet another fallacy is that we teach outside knowledge with the assumption that the learner can automatically transform it into inside knowledge. This mostly doesn't happen either, though.

Vaill described his own teaching not as instructing, but as engaging in conversation about people as they are in organizations. The conversation covers problems/issues, theorizing and modeling processes, and action. Part of the dialogue in the field of management is how much of the class is about personal growth. Vaill would applaud personal growth, but he didn't conceive any part of what he was doing as functioning like a therapist. He strongly recommended that faculty and trainers engage in experiential activities but believed that they needed to create the activities for novel behavior to emerge, then learn from that, not run canned experiential activities such as a version of Desert Survival, that are designed to produce a predetermined behavior in the participants.

Vaill also abjured the teaching frame commonly placed on management that excludes moral agency. Vaill claimed that values and morals should permeate management education. To teach leadership, human behavior, and values, Vaill included non-management sources. He taught elective courses on these topics exclusively with the lenses of movies, poetry, and novels. Vaill tweaked management educators with the question, "Do we really believe that Henry Mintzberg (I'm sorry, Henry) is more important than Tacitus?" To become a better leader-manager Vaill recommended reading publications such as the New Yorker, and any other sources that provide vivid narrative. He recommended writing organizational novels, such as Fearon and Cavaleri's Inside Knowledge: Rediscovering the Source of Performance Improvement. From some frames of reference, these seem like bizarre recommendations. There is, perhaps, paradox in Vaill's observation that "the best behavioral scientists . . . .. are influential and memorable with managers and leaders for who they are, not for what they know. It is the way they are, the way their minds work, the way they express themselves in their protean passions that we love and remember. One does not read Peter Drucker or Warren Bennis for the facts, but rather for the song of possibility that sounds through their writings."

Vaill identified three hallmarks to his own teaching style, (a) his personal fascination with the subject matter, (b) his desire to achieve a genuinely collegial relationship with participants, and (c) his hope that participants would want to develop their own versions of love for the subject matter and desire for collegiality in all their other learning contexts. To these ends, for example, Vaill worked hard at reducing the power and status imbalance between himself and the students, who he referred to as participants. He wrote extensively on a co-inquiry model of teaching in which a professor and students achieve a genuine collaboration in seeking to understand the subject matter of the course or program. Still, consistent with Evidence-Based Management, Vaill felt obligated to teach what was grounded in the best peerreviewed, realistic, empirical research available.

The aforementioned Michael Beer published such research in a recent Harvard Business Review article and reported that management education is a $160 billion business in the United States and $356 billion globally. For the most part, this "training clearly had not worked." The "context in which [participants] work makes it difficult for them to put what they're taught into practice." The training is directed at an "aggregation of individuals" when what is needed is training focused on the "systems of interacting elements" (i.e. the context).

I simply can't imagine a . . . field which lacks any of the components of OB: its interest in action and its connections to the world of affairs; its eclectic intellect and relative freedom from preoccupation with the fine differences between psychology, sociology, philosophy, history, political science, and economics; its pragmatic approach to methodology and avoidance of formalism; its devotion to fostering true learning in the student and the experimental spirit this has produced; its location in management schools where, in my opinion, most of the action has been for the last quarter century; its fundamental con-+ Models ORGDYN-100780; No. of Pages 6 Please cite this article in press as: E.B. Dent, Learning from a lifetime of provocative thinking about organizational dynamics, Organ Dyn (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2020.100780 cern with persons. These characteristics have been articles of faith for me, the source of the high quality pleasures and pains which I think go with being fully alive -Peter B. Vaill Now that Vaill is gone, what torches would he want us to carry forward? In one of his last recorded interviews, Vaill's answer was three-fold: to transform the image of people-inthe-organization to people-as-the-organization, to resurrect the idea of a spirit and purpose into organizational thinking, and to define leadership as a landscape of practice. Fortunately, Vaill was a frequent speaker to professional audiences, usually taught a heavy course load, wrote prolifically, and directed numerous dissertations, so there are many people picking up this torch and continuing to question some of the guiding assumptions that may be fallacious or incomplete in our field.

Part of Peter Vaill's genius was his ability to develop metaphors (i.e., permanent white water or Satchmo's Paradox (Vaill' s observation that those with expertise often can no longer adopt the perspective of the novice learner, as embodied in Louis Armstrong's quote "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know")), that perfectly captured the essence of a dynamic. In the practice and education of management, reductionism and holism are present, the person and the context are present, and rational management and feeling-judgment-sense management are present. Vaill's career is a plea that if our task is to create greater productivity and workplace satisfaction, we must not keep the reductionist, context-free, rational, etc. as our primary focus. The more we can also see holism, context, judgment, etc., the better off society will be.

As noted above, there are corners of the management field where Vaill's vision persists and thrives. To expand those corners, management education and practice need to focus on the whitewater or messiness of context. Rather than focusing on management competencies (competencybased learning and competency-based education are ascendant), training and education should emphasize running an organization with Barnard's insistence on feeling, judgment, sense, proportion, balance, and appropriateness. In practice and teaching we must blur the distinction between human and business sides of enterprise. My hope is that this essay will provoke some reconsideration of Vaill's vision. Others made his points before him, and others will after him. However, he crafted the vision with such an elegance of writing and an insight into the current zeitgeist.

I will conclude with a quotation by Vaill about what it means to meet someone with vision, from the introduction to an issue of Organizational Dynamics he edited. For me, Vaill was someone with tremendous vision. Each encounter I had with him stretched my mind and enflamed my passion for my work. "When we meet someone who does indeed have a vision, our sense of its essence is its noncontrived, nonoccassional, noninstrumental quality. We feel that we are in the presence of something very deep about the person, something unmistakably genuine, something that lies close to the person's core values and beliefs." Please cite this article in press as: E.B. Dent, Learning from a lifetime of provocative thinking about organizational dynamics, Organ Dyn (2020), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.orgdyn.2020.100780

The messy history of OB&D: How three strands came to be seen as one rope

Learning as a way of being: Strategies for survival in a world of permanent white water

Leadership-as-practice. Routledge. Michael Beer offers a modern illustration of the full integration of management and leadership in Beer

Learning from a lifetime of provocative thinking about organizational dynamics