LO & the New Sciences LO4918

John Zavacki (jzavacki@epix.net)
Tue, 16 Jan 1996 04:53:56 -0500

Replying to LO4879 --

DHurst1046@aol.com wrote:
> snip...
> One of the major issues in the use of the New Sciences as metaphors and
> models in management is the extent to which one can "map" between the two
> universes. Ideally a metaphor should allow one to understand the
> unfamiliar in terms of something familiar, but often we seem to end up
> with two things which are unfamiliar! The same applies of course to the
> more familiar Newtonian metaphors of "motivation", "inertia" etc: they are
> surface descriptions of organizational phenomena, not explanations. So
> they don't really help us understand cause-effect relationships.
>
> I find that when talking to general managers I have to keep the complexity
> and chaos metaphors buried in the footnotes. Otherwise (understandably)
> their eyes just glaze over when they hear about the "edge of chaos": chaos
> (scientific or generic) is the last thing that they want to hear about!
> They need their question "So what?" answered for them in their context.
> What we need is stories of management action taken which can be mapped
> onto the New Science models and which produced results consistent with
> them. A major challenge, but it would be really helpful!

Juran leaned very heavily on this point. Albeit complexity and chaos
theory are beyond the perceived needs of most of my clients, it is still
necessary to use "their" language to describe "my" ideas in order to make
them think they thought them up and consequently get their support for
work important to change in the domain of relevance.

Juran and Deming both comment that the language of upper management is the
language of money. The correct answers lie on the bottom line. It is
interesting to note, however, that in small and/or family owned
businesses, it is just thatlanguage which is misunderstood (the
penny/pound parables).

The overall point is from Lewis Carrol: the name of a thing does not equal
what it is called does not equal what it is.....the fear/boredom/disdain
may be towards what we call the thing, not the thing in itself.

-- 
jzavacki@epix.net 
	John Zavacki
	The Wolff Group
	900 James Avenue
	Scranton, PA 18510
Phone: 717-346-1218	Fax: 717-346-1388