Can M. Alpaslan

Why Technology Always Bites Back

We investigate the faulty assumptions responsible for the failure of a prime technology. We show that many of the faulty assumptions apply to virtually all technologies, and that, in essence, technology is literally encased in a vast and complex web of institutions and stakeholders, and their assumptions. We raise a prime ethical question: If technologies contain potentially dangerous known and unknown side effects, should we ever use any technology, the consequences of which we do not completely understand and are able to contain? We argue that the management of technology and Ethical Management must be done together at every step from the initial design of a technology to its operation, maintenance, and eventual disposal. In short, we show why technology and ethics are inseparable.

Digging Deeper—Jungian Psychology

We argue that business schools accelerate and reinforce intellectual, emotional, and philosophical fragmentation. They compartmentalize knowledge in disciplines that have no explicit connections to one another and with no incentives to make connections. They reduce knowledge ultimately to a single school of thought such as classical economic theory, and in particular, theories of short-term, self interested profit maximization. Then they treat this single school of thought, which is not robust enough to account for everything, as a “totality” or “reality.”

The Risks of Risk Management

This chapter compares and contrasts Risk Management (RM) with Crisis Management (CM). RM aims to calculate the expected damage that crises inflict. To do this, RM multiplies the likelihood of a crisis by its consequences measured in dollars, injuries, and so on. It then ranks crises in terms of their expected damage, and ignores crises that are below a certain cut-off level. Inevitably, RM neglects disasters that are extremely low in probability but high in consequences such as 9/11. CM acknowledges not only the existence of deep assumptions that prevent serious planning for crises, but surfaces such assumptions so that we can confront and overcome them. For CM, the least likely crises are precisely the ones that are most likely to do the worst damage. In effect, CM is the Management of Key Assumptions.

Heuristics for Managing Messes

There are no ironclad rules or procedures for guaranteeing the complete and perfect management, resolution, and/or treatment of messes. If there were, we would not be dealing with messes. In this chapter, we present a list of “systems heuristics” which are tools and “rules for experimentation” that enable the discovery of problems and more importantly the questioning of our deep-seated assumptions about ourselves and the nature of messes with which we deal. We proceed in two steps. First, we list the heuristics as briefly as we can. Second, we illustrate them based on one of the most important messes of our time, to which business schools have contributed significantly: the Great Financial Mess/Crisis.

What Is a System? What Is a Mess?

The idea and nature of “systems” and “messes” are central to the concept of Schools of Management. For this reason alone, we concentrate on the theory of systems and systems thinking. We argue that management is a system, not a conglomeration or loose confederation of separate disciplines. Thus, merely improving the parts (such as curriculum, faculty, disciplines, etc.) of a system will not improve the status of the whole (such as management, or even business). We also argue that every important management problem is in fact part of a “mess” that is, a system of problems, and the Management Mess includes all the messes that besiege modern, complex societies.

The Management of Knowledge—Systems Age Inquiry

One of the most important philosophical assumptions of the Machine Age is that the true (epistemology), the good (ethics), and the beautiful (aesthetics) are separable. Business schools not only accepted but promulgated further the division between the true, the good, and the beautiful. In the Systems Age, however, truth is that which makes an ethical difference in the quality of one’s life. The most general question we want to pursue in this chapter is, “What kinds of systems of inquiry (knowledge systems) are appropriate for studying and managing messes?” The general topic of Inquiry Systems is central to answering this question. We argue that truth, goodness and beauty are the results of the Management of Inquiry.

Why People and Organizations Break Down

One of the most difficult tasks facing humans is to become aware of and challenge their key operating assumptions before a major crisis has occurred. The only way to do this is to study a wide variety of crises both within and outside of one’s industry. In addition, one must continually study and review the assumptions under which one’s organization and technology operate. In this chapter, we focus on several operating assumptions that lead to technological and organizational breakdowns. We investigate why the reliance on technology is not always a good idea, why training is not enough, why organizational culture matters, why organizations mistake the absence of accidents for the presence of safe operations, and why organizations constantly drift away from safety into failure.

The Nature of Human Nature—The Psychodynamics of Everyday Life

Business schools split reality and favor one aspect of reality over another. They overemphasize the economical drivers of human behavior but they either ignore or are unaware of the effects of unconscious forces on human behavior. In this chapter, we concentrate on psychoanalysis almost exclusively because it still does not receive the recognition it deserves, and one cannot get to the heart of and hence treat complex social messes unless one can analyze and understand the immense and largely unconscious fears, anxieties, and paranoia that unfortunately are an important aspect of many messes. Dealing with messes fundamentally demands that we question why we have split the world into different disciplines, factors, professions, variables, the arts versus the sciences, etc. It demands that we question the ways in which we have divided up the world, and that we come up with ways to put them back together.

How We Got into the Mess and Prospects for Getting Out

Business schools are broken. They split research, teaching, and learning. They split mind, body, and soul. They split business, ethics and society, and ultimately the true, the good, and the beautiful. As a result, they do not and cannot develop knowledge about how to grow ourselves in and through a dynamic society in which messes are intertwined and where recognition of intertwining is a fundamental part of the solution. In this chapter, we trace historically how business schools became the engines of fragmentation that they are today. In addition, we suggest that future Schools of Management (SOMs) will not just teach how to manage messes, but messes will be the prime idea around which they will be organized.

The Future of Crises

Assumptions, not facts, are the building blocks of our knowledge of the world around us. Therefore, monitoring of key assumptions is an integral part of strategic thinking and crisis management. Our guiding motto is “Know thy assumptions and prepare for the highly likely event that they will be rendered false.” We hope that we have examined enough crises and assumptions so that the reader is better equipped to face new crises head on and to anticipate and uncover the critical assumptions that underlie them.