The Art of Management

One of the oldest debates in management education concerns its very nature: is management an art or a science? Proponents of management science quote a long line of illustrated authors who see the firm as a potentially well oiled machine and insist upon both the necessary division of labour and the empirical nature of best practice. Proponents of the art of management compare business to a social system, and argue that effective management must deal with people who have both strengths and weaknesses, take irrational choices, and can’t always implement what good sense would imply.

This seemingly theoretical debate none-the-less goes a long way to explaining the way we think, and our latitude to learn.

On one side, the vision of scientific management, based on works like those of Frederick Taylor, assumes that the employee who is best suited to actually doing his work is incapable of fully understanding the production process without the guidance of those who are working over him. In sum, improving work practice requires a clear and precise division of responsibility between the echelons of management. The workplace can be compared to any “mechanical study”, it can be divided into a series of activities and tasks that can be isolated, tested empirically, and improved.  Hence the concept of the “science” of management…

On the other, the proponents of the art of management see the work place as a stage of human activity, and as such a complex social system that defies scientific precision and empirical proof. In this view, our perceptions, our memory, and our ability to learn are intimately tied to working of the human mind. Nothing can be further from the truth than the dictum that our memories are graved in stone. In fact, the opposite is true; our memory is tied to various emotional stimuli that activate diverse patterns of synapses in our mind. Learning is thus an exercise in identifying relevant patterns of experience.

In responding to a business challenge, our minds are stimulated by a variety of inputs: symbols, images, sounds, odours and numbers. These inputs flow in specific patterns through thousands of synapses in our brain to produce our memories, our thoughts and our actions. Reading this blog, for example, stimulates mental patterns that can potentially be compared with previous patterns of experience. If this idea “rings a bell”, it corresponds closely with one or several patterns that can be recalled in our memory. “Holes” in our memory aren’t due to holes in our brain, but to our inability to recall the precise pattern of experience that we associated with a particular event.

In your course of your day the subject of the art of management may come up, which in turn will stimulate synapses which may lead you to remember this article. Improving our ability to learn implies understanding how we recognize various stimuli (symbols, images, sounds…) that we feel most comfortable with. The mind doesn’t store clear ideas of the “right answers”, but captures relationships of stimuli that can provide the “best response” to challenges from the environment. The learning process isn’t as much about memorizing “facts” as developing our capacity to detect patterns in external stimuli.

Consequently, knowledge can not be easily extracted from the context in which it emerged; structure and context are inherently entwined in our perceptions of knowledge and reality. There are two very different processes at work here. First level learning requires us to “match” patterns of past experience. Second level learning implies that we force ourselves to reframe our mental patterns to better fit the observable reality around us. If the first process conforms to the needs of scientific management, the second is fundamental to the art of management as we adapt to the needs of complex social systems. This process of reframing, or learning to learn, is at the very heart of imagination, creativity and innovation.

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