Page 148 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Organizations and rationality
course, reinforce the undiscussability of any problem and the distancing of the
working-party members from the issues at stake. It is clearly a form of collusion
aimed at avoiding making the issues, or the working party’s difficulties, explicit.
It is important for us to recognize that by counter-rational we do not mean
irrational or emotional. Counter-rational behaviour may be highly rational from
the viewpoint of the individuals concerned, given their situation, the power and
resources under their command and so on. By counter-rational we simply mean
based on different sources of rationality.
Forrester (1969) discusses this problem when he refers to the ‘counterintuitive’
behaviour of complex systems (such as urban systems or large corporations). He
tells us that we have been ‘conditioned almost exclusively by experience with first-
order, negative-feedback loops [which] are goal-seeking and contain a single impor-
tant variable’. This form of experience suggests that cause and effect are closely
related in space and time. He argues that complex systems appear to be the same,
i.e. they appear to present cause and effect close in time and space. However, causes
of a problem may be complex, may actually lie in some remote part of the system
or may lie in the distant past. What appears to be cause and effect may actually be
‘coincidental’ symptoms.
Action to dispel symptoms in a complex system will often leave the underlying
causes untouched. Forrester claims that intuitive solutions to the problems of
complex systems will be wrong most of the time. He also suggests that change pro-
grammes will often have an effect that is less than originally anticipated because
they tend to displace existing internal processes. Pressman and Wildavsky (1973)
quote one example of an ‘underemployed-training programme’ training 19,100
people per year which led to only 11,300 people becoming employed, this being
a consequence of declining job starts occurring naturally. Based as it was on sim-
ulations, this is not an entirely convincing example.
However, Pressman and Wildavsky (1973) describe a programme aimed at
developing employment opportunities for ethnic minority groups in Oakland,
California. The federal government, through the project, committed $28 million
during a four-year period with little result as far as the aims of the project were
concerned. Their evidence suggested that the majority of the benefits derived

from the programme went to people other than members of the ethnic minority
groups. We do not need to interpret this as failure; we merely offer it as an exam-
ple of counterintuitive behaviour.
People in organizations, whether representing themselves or their groups, tend
to advocate views and positions with a degree of certainty which discourages fur-
ther enquiry. Moreover, they tend to act in ways which inhibit the expression of
negative feelings. We often talk of the need to ‘sweeten the pill’ or not to overdo
criticism in case people are ‘upset’ by it. Sometimes we offer presentations in such
a way as to emphasize that there is nothing new or radical in a set of proposals.
People appear to design their behaviour to appear rational. Thus they focus on
what they argue to be necessary and attainable goals, realistic means and clear
objectives. All this is to suppress issues that might upset other people. Moreover,
people tend to control meetings to maximize winning, minimize losing, mini-
mize the expression of negative feelings and to keep others rational. Following
Argyris (1982, 1985), I summarize these ideas in Table 8.1.

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