How we can introduce useful novelty into our thinking about management consulting?
In this talk, David Shaw draws upon ideas from his new book, “An Ancient Greek Philosophy of Management Consulting”, to suggest how we can introduce useful novelty into our thinking about management consulting by incorporating into it the ancient Greek philosophers’ ways of looking at the world. Strategic organisational change is a major part of management consultants’ business. They typically offer their clients interventions that consist of step-by-step processes for changing an organisation from one kind of thing into another kind of thing. But is an organisation a thing? And can step-by-step processes reliably change it into another kind of thing? The notion that the universe, and everything in it, consists of substance has been a dominant notion in western thought since the fifth century BCE. But organisation theorists are increasingly drawn to the work of one of the earliest Greek philosophers, Heraclitus, who believed that continually changing processes constituted at least some of what we observe in the world. From this perspective, organisations might be collections of continually changing processes, and organisational change interventions attempt to guide those processes in a particular direction. In association with their representation of organisations as things and their rational, linear methods of intervening in them, management consultants lay claim to management science knowledge that enables their interventions to produce predictable outcomes. Yet if Heraclitus is nearer the mark than his substantial list of successors, the effects of interventions in organisations are unlikely to be predictable. Aristotle drew a distinction between the intellectual virtues of sophia, possessed by those with scientific knowledge, and phronesis, possessed by those with experience-based practical ability. Management scholars are increasingly recognising the role of phronesis in an organisational world that requires the ability to improvise in response to uncertainty and surprise. In exploring these ideas, David develops the notion that the effort to enter into the thinking of people from a different time, and with different ways of looking at the world, may enable us usefully to re-examine the assumptions and principles that underlie our practice.