JONATHAN B. KING - Oregon State Universityclasses.bus.oregonstate.edu/BA465H/Some Key Articles/An Exercise … · 64 JONATHAN B. KING content and quite independent of results, could

JONATHAN B. KING

AN EXERCISE IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY: SEEKING TOUNDERSTAND “NOBODY”

(Accepted 24 December 1996)

ABSTRACT. The late Hannah Arendt proposed that many, perhaps most monstrous deedsare not committed by moral monsters but by individuals who do not “think.” However,understanding the significance of “activity of thinking as such” requires a moral philosophythat transcends rational actor assumptions and instrumental reason centering, instead, onthe conditions of self-knowledge. The ubiquitous and often lethal phenomenon of informa-tion distortions provides a vehicle for expanding our understandings of individual moralresponse-abilities in our modern times.

KEY WORDS: banality of evil, cognition and institutions, cognition and morality, ethics,evil, information distortion, morality, moral philosophy, self-knowledge, systems theory

The assumption current in all modern legal systems [is] that intent to dowrong is necessary for the commission of a crime : : : [However], politics isnot like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

Hannah Arendt

How can we trust that we get the information we need to make intelligentdecisions? How can we know what is the right information to look for? Howcan we remain sensitive to and retrieve the information we lost when wewent looking for the information we got?

Margaret Wheatley

Instead of moral philosophy starting from a notion of the human subjectas a sovereign agent for whom free choice is the essential condition : : : adifferent kind of moral philosophy would be centered on the conditions ofself-knowledge.

Mary Douglas

In “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Hannah Arendt (1971) restatesher primary conclusion from studying Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Despite “themonstrosity of the deeds” in which he played a leading role, Eichmann was“neither monstrous nor demonic.” He instead demonstrated a “curious,quite authentic inability to think.”

Arendt’s verdict of the banality of evil is hard to swallow, especially formany of those intimately familiar with the Holocaust. But the late HannahArendt is worth listening to and here is what she asks:

The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit ofexamining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific

Teaching Business Ethics 1: 63–91, 1997.c 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

64 JONATHAN B. KING

content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it“conditions” men against evil-doing? (1971, 418)1

Has Arendt unearthed an anomaly given our conventional representa-tions of the relationships between moral agency, intent, and cognition? Ifshe has, then what, precisely, is entailed by “the activity of thinking assuch”? And to what, if any, end(s)?

ANOMALIES

The representation that defines the problem space is the problem solver’s “wayof looking at” the problem and also specifies the form of solutions. Choosing arepresentation that is right for a problem can improve spectacularly the efficiencyof the solution-finding process. The choice of problem representation is : : : acreative act.

Hubert Dreyfus

Hannah Arendt opens her analysis with a crucial distinction.

We owe to Kant the distinction between thinking and knowing, between reason, the urge tothink and to understand, and the intellect, which desires and is capable of certain, verifiableknowledge. (422)

“Truth” pertains to knowledge whereas “meaning” pertains to thinking.Knowledge exists and operates within “problem spaces”; thinking existsand operates within the interstices of problem spaces, interstices createdby two or more “representations.” Put another way, knowledge is learningor acquiring skills whereas thinking is “unlearning” or “letting go” (Varelaet al., 1991).

Arendt, repeatedly emphasizing that the activity of thinking as such“does not serve knowledge and is not guided by practical purposes” (424),turns to Socrates (her exemplar). “The first thing that strikes us in Plato’sSocratic dialogues is that they are all aporetic. The argument either leadsnowhere or it goes around in circles” (428). Not only does such thinkingrequire taking “time out” but, more ominously, it is “out of order.” More-over, “not only is this faculty for the ordinary course of affairs ‘good fornothing’ while its results remain uncertain and unverifiable, but it also issomehow self-destructive : : : the business of thinking is like the veil ofPenelope: it undoes every morning what it had finished the night before”(425).

So who can justify taking “time out” for a such an inefficient andineffective activity in today’s busy (business) world? And who wants to

1 Subsequent citations from Arendt (1971) merely note the page number.

AN EXERCISE IN MORAL PHILOSOPHY 65

be “out of order” if such thinking risks getting you labeled a troublemaker,fired, or terminally quarantined? Worst of all, why engage in anything thatis both “good for nothing” and “somehow self-destructive”?

Perhaps we are not asking the right questions. Perhaps the activity ofthinking as such begins to make more sense if we wish to change “therepresentation that defines the problem space.” Or if, in Wheatley’s words,we are attempting to “retrieve the information we lost when we wentlooking for the information we got.” Or if, as Arendt puts it, we wish to“unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozeninto thought” (433). Or if, in more conventional terms, we wish to “thinkoutside the box,” “box” being a metaphor for “context” which is the groundof meaning.

Wilfred Campbell Smith offers us a box – a context – to ponder. It isan especially interesting box for it denies its own existence and, as a directconsequence, the potential value of the activity of thinking as such.

As is often remarked, reason has descended from a consideration of ends to a concernmerely with means. Reason : : : is in this curtailed outlook seen as something that servesus: an instrument to be used, in our pursuit of whatever personal interests we may happenor may choose to have. Thus modern culture, in the phrase of Jacques Ellul, has becomethe striving by ever more “rational” means after ever more irrational ends (Smith, 1988).

To the degree that the “box” of Instrumental Reason infuses our moderntimes, conventional representations of moral agency confront a secondanomaly which Arendt termed “the Rule of Nobody.” Langdon Winner(1977) offers us the general architecture of Nobody:

In classical ethics a person is excused from blame for a misdeed if sufficient extenuatingcircumstances can be shown to exist : : : What is interesting about the new ethical contextoffered by highly complex systems is that their very architecture constitutes vast webs ofextenuating circumstances. Seemingly valid excuses can be manufactured wholesale foranyone situated in the network. Thus, the very notion of moral agency begins to dissolve.

Joseph Weizenbaum (1988) offers us a more concrete and Kafkaesquecharacterization of Nobody:

Computer personnel believe in certain fairy tales. These include: 1) Computers are merelytools; 2) People control computers rather than the reverse : : : [S]everal questions should beasked about any computer system. These include: 1) Who controls it? 2) Who designed it?3) Who said they wanted the system? 4) Who has authority over it? When the final questionof who is held accountable for its operation is asked, the answer is no one.

But how, exactly, are we to represent the Rule of Nobody? What doesIts problem space look like? Surely it is something more than an anthro-pomorphized “rational actor”? But as Argyris and Schon note, there issomething “paradoxical [that] organizational learning is not merely indi-vidual learning, yet organizations learn only through the experience and

66 JONATHAN B. KING

actions of individuals” (1978, p. 9). Similarly, in How Institutions Think(1986), Mary Douglas – again, “paradoxically” – titles her first chapter“Institutions Cannot Have Minds of Their Own.” And yet another decadelater, Metzger and Dalton (1996) document the continuing controversy –and confusion – over what it means to hold organizations morally account-able for “their” actions.

Perhaps we are not asking the right questions. After all, paradoxes,(ethical) dilemmas, and other forms of deep confusion cannot be resolvedwithin their own frames of reference. So what if, in Douglas’ words,we were to alter our representations of moral philosophy from assuming“free choice is the essential condition” to centering on “conditions of self-knowledge”? Would realizing the latter challenge the Rule of Nobody?Would it lessen the chances of our tacit compliance – our “intent bydefault” – in evil yet banal acts?

Such possibilities encounter at least two difficulties, one is philosoph-ical, the other practical. First, there is very little in Western epistemologythat permits one to conclude that “ ‘Know Thyself ’ is the most essentialof all conditions for meaningful and responsible engagement when think-ing about the future” (Michael, 1985). Second, if “Know Thyself ” were areasonably straightforward business, most of us would be saints.

A MODEST EXERCISE

Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention not of will. We need anew vocabulary of attention.

Iris Murdoch

We must not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be toarrive where we began and to know the place for the first time.

T.S. Eliot

We shall first describe, then “explore” the phenomenon of organizationaldistortions of information. The exploration is our primary concern. Infor-mation distortion – an often lethal variant of the Rule of Nobody – providesthe vehicle. The point of the exploration is to develop a “new vocabularyof attention.”

Describing It 2

Most of us first encountered the phenomenon of organizational distortionsof information when, as kids, we played that game where what you whisper

2 See Larson and King (1996).


to the person next to you is nearly unrecognizable by the time it circlesback to you. As adults, all of us are caught up in variations of this game tovarying degrees.

The insidious and sometimes catastrophic consequences of organiza-tional distortions of information have been the subject of extensive inquiry.This is especially so due to the distressing frequency with which well-intended, competent leaders and managers continue to make fatal mistakeswhich upon hindsight seem to be obvious errors.

Examples abound. The more notorious include the Bay of Pigs fiasco,the “march of folly” into the Vietnam War, the space shuttle disaster, theHubble Telescope foul up. Less catastrophic variations occur regularly inboth public and private sectors.

Consider a banal example. Someone in your outfit informs you thatunfavorable information has been omitted in a report evaluating a newproduct line. Succumbing to an urge to be ethical, you determine to findout who is responsible.

But how are we to represent this “problematic situation”? For that iswhat it is. Like “problems,” almost everyone agrees something has gonewrong. Unlike problems, it is by no means clear, agreed upon, or both, howand why things have gone wrong.

Exploring It

Since explorers don’t know where they are going until after they’ve beenwhere they’ve gone, we shall deliberately try to resist seeking solutionsto the problematic situation of information distortions. This is becauseseeking understanding is a qualitatively different strategy from seekingsolutions. And seeking understanding is at the heart of the activity ofthinking as such.

In seeking to understand what is entailed by seeking to understand, weshall honor T.S. Eliot’s admonition by exploring a specific sequence ofboxes or representations. This particular sequence requires us to take lessand less as given – by anybody in general and by Nobody in particular– thereby expanding our understandings of individual moral response-abilities. Yet, “paradoxically,” such explorations also threaten to peel awaythose layers of insulation that protect us from exercising individual moralresponse-abilities.

This essentially means that Hannah Arendt re-presents for us theprimary paradox of the world’s great monotheistic religions – the coexis-tence of good and evil. To her lasting credit, she (re)introduces us to crucialrelationships between cognition, intention, and morality.

68 JONATHAN B. KING

Figure 1.

Figure 1 is my attempt to honor Arendt’s fundamental insight. It is amap for exploring individual moral response-abilities based on expandingour “vocabulary of attention.”

As we circle through the above quadrants, we will repeatedly ask:

1: Who is making decisions (who is distorting information)?2: How is this being done (what are the processes of information distor-

tion)?3: Why or on what basis (what are the reasons or purposes fueling these

processes)?4: So what does each re-presentation reveal in terms of individual moral

responsible-abilities?

The “+” signs mean we’ll try to transcend either/or traps – e.g., “Systemsthinking is the fusion of analysis and synthesis” (Ackoff, 1993). And thearrows (“!”) mean that we don’t “end up” in any Quadrant. Indeed, if weend up anywhere, it will be where we began.

QUADRANT I: NOBODY IS SOMEBODY

The characteristic way of management that we have taught : : : is to take a complexsystem, divide it into parts, and then try to manage each part as well as possible.And if that’s done, the system as a whole will behave well : : : [to be continuedin Quadrant II].

Russell Ackoff


Figure 2.

Our first representation or box (Quadrant I) is that of the “the rationalactor.”3 Economic analysis, political theory, and most modern moraltheories, for example, inhabit this quadrant. Rene Descartes is its lead-ing philosopher and Issac Newton its principal architect. Its root metaphoris the machine. Mechanistic causality structures this problem space, hencethe form of solutions.

The above schematic, a humorous if all-too-familiar representationof organizational distortions of information, serves to illustrate essentialpresuppositions of Quadrant I or what Ackoff terms “machine-age” think-ing. In this problem space, somebody or something causes – conspires to,should be blamed for – the untoward effects of organized distortions ofinformation.

Quadrant I representations remain many (most?) people’s favored wayof explaining “What happened?” This is especially so in turbulent timessuch as ours when conspiracy theories, scapegoating, and other virulentblame games flourish.

3 The epistemological counterpart to the ontological premise of atomic individualism isthe “detached observer” which is the supposed ideal type for modern science. See Polanyi(1958) for decisive objections.

70 JONATHAN B. KING

Key Questions

So, who is making the key decisions? How is this done? On what basis orfor what purposes? And given this genre of representations, what does itmean to be a morally responsible person? The answers are familiar to afault.

Some “entity with attributes” – an individual, a group of individuals, oranthropomorphized organization – is responsible. It makes little differencewhether the individual is being rational or irrational, emotional or unemo-tional, satisficing or maximizing. The point is that (only) individuals makedecisions.

And how are such decisions made? What are the mechanisms or deci-sion processes? “General Linear Reality.”4 Subject-verb-object: I choosethis, unmoved movers, solitary wills. On the other side of the same coin,this-does-that: the “concussion” metaphor for causal relationships, inde-pendent and dependent variables, regression analyses, “fishbone” causalmaps.

On what (moral) basis? To what end(s) or for what purpose(s)?Maximizing or satisficing personal utility or more specific “preferences”or “values”; living out suppressed childhood needs; responding to stimuli;enhancing self-esteem. The point is that nothing transcends the rationalactor.

Therefore, what does it mean to be morally responsible? That dependson the context. In the context of Quadrant I it means “be rational” –think through the likely consequences of alternative choices, avoid gettingemotional, weight alternatives by (“good”) values or principles. The largerpoint is that cognitive processes are goal oriented; thinking functions asproblem solving.5 And moral reasoning is a “skill.”

Iris Murdoch summarizes Quadrant I’s ideal type.

[W]e derive from Kant, and also Hobbes and Bentham through John Stuart Mill, a pictureof the individual as a free rational will : : : He is morally speaking monarch of all he surveysand totally responsible for his actions. Nothing transcends him. His moral language is apractical pointer, the instrument of his choices, the indication of his preferences. His innerlife is resolved into his acts and choices, and his beliefs, which are also acts, since a beliefcan only be identified through its expression. His moral arguments are references to empir-ical facts backed up by decisions. The only moral word which he requires is “good” (or“right”), the word which expresses decision. His rationality expresses itself in awareness

4 See Abbott’s (1988, 1990) outstanding analyses of “general linear reality.”5 See Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ (1986) critique of dominant understandings of thinking in

general and the absence of either theory or empirical evidence that “problem solving” is adominant mode.


of the facts, whether about the world or about himself. The virtue which is fundamental tohim is sincerity (Murdoch, Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch).

None of this should come as a surprise. We have been explaining andjustifying things more or less within Quadrant I’s “problem space” for atleast three hundred years.6 And so it should also come as no surprise thatwhile the considerable research on organizational distortions of informa-tion has contributed to our understandings of this phenomenon, there hasbeen a marked tendency for managers – as well as consultants and acad-emics – to focus on isolated factors and not on the broader organizationalcontexts that foster these behaviors. This, of course, “every schoolboyknows : : : ”7

QUADRANT II: NOBODY IS THE SYSTEM

[cont’d from Quad I] : : : and that’s absolutely false because it’s possible toimprove the performance of each part taken separately and destroy the system atthe same time.

Russell Ackoff

In our official [and flawed] theories of causation we typically suppose that allcausal relations must be between discrete events ordered sequentially in time.

John Serle

Information distortions need not be solely attributed to “causes” such asthe malicious intent or hidden agendas of individuals and groups. Suchfactors clearly can and do exacerbate information distortions, but they areneither necessary nor sufficient to account for all sorts of moral lapsesincluding monstrous deeds.

Quadrant II expands our vocabulary of attention by re-presenting orga-nizational distortions of information as systemic distortions. Here, the rootmetaphor is biological – the adapting organism. Systems behave as ifguided by “invisible hands,” as if they have purposes or “attractors” oftheir own. Functionalist causality structures this problem space, hence theform of solutions. This means that micromotives cannot be inferred frommacrobehaviors and vice versa – patterns of interactions “emerge” whichcannot be fully explained by examining “parts.” Such patterns feature

6 MacIntyre (1981) makes perhaps the strongest case that Quadrant I’s origins were the“failed project” of the Enlightenment.

7 The intended sarcasm mimics Gregory Bateson’s (1979, Part II).

72 JONATHAN B. KING

feedback loops or circular causality. In this domain, Darwin remainsdominant.

Sound functionalist explanations have a demonstrated and growing rele-vance in our modern times. Major accomplishments include explaining themechanisms of our immune system (Cziko, 1995), the intriguing possibilityof understanding consciousness as an emergent reality (Serle, 1995), andthe distinct likelihood that the vast majority of organizational problems aresystemic in nature.8

Be Careful

Moving from Quadrant I to Quadrant II requires care and rigor; thinking“holistically” is not as easy as many seem to believe. William O’Brienis blunt: “We are absolutely illiterate in subjects that require us to under-stand systems and interrelationships” (Senge, 1994, p. 14). So it shouldcome as no surprise that a large number of sloppy and often self-servingfunctionalist explanations have proliferated over the years.9 At best, theseexplain “the system” as if it functions like a big individual – Quadrant Iexplanations decked out in Quadrant II buzzwords. At worst, they equatewhat is with what ought to be – e.g., the “fit” survive and if you don’tsurvive you’re not “fit.”

In stark contrast, rigorously linking the apparent disjunctions betweenindividual intentions (micromotives) and institutional or behavioralpatterns (macrobehaviors) is typically revelatory – the “aha!” of discover-ing “the pattern than connects.” For example, the significance ofMacGregor’s famous Theory X and Theory Y hinges on shifting ourattention from “entities with attributes” to “interacts” – from the onto-logical presuppositions of Quadrant I problem spaces to those of QuadrantII. It hinges on shifting our attention from comparing and contrastingassumptions about what workers are “really” like, to the dynamics of theself-fulfilling prophecy, a robust and ubiquitous pattern of interactionsranging from ruined children, businesses, and marriages, to ruinous armsraces.

8 “I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities forimprovement add up to proportions something like this: 94% belong to the system (respon-sibility of management) 6% special” (Deming, 1986, p. 315).

9 For examples and critiques see Clifford Geertz (1973, esp. Ch. 8, “Ideology As aCultural System”) and Mary Douglas (1986, esp. Ch. 3, “How Latent Groups Survive”).


Figure 3.

Re-presenting Information Distortions10

To get a feel for the reality of Quadrant II explanations, take “time out” towork through the above re-presentation as follows:

� Start by reading any statement, then move along the arrow to the nextstatement;

� If you move forward, label the arrow “therefore,” if you move back-ward, label the arrow “because”;

10 My colleague, David Bella (1987), developed this model based on stories offrustrations told to him by scientists in environmental studies. An interesting aside isthat during the investigations into the 1986 space shuttle disaster, David sent Figure 3 andTable I to one of the investigative team members, the late Nobel Laureate and physicistRichard Feynman who responded, “Perfect predictor” for what he had uncovered duringhis own investigations.

74 JONATHAN B. KING

� Work your way around the entire diagram, moving forward and back-ward until you’ve gone through as many feedback loops as you canfind.

Now put yourself in the several positions of a typical organization.How are you likely to respond to questions aimed at finding out who isresponsible or to blame for distorting the assessment of that new productline? Table I predicts what you are likely to say. Do you disagree?

Key Questions

So who, precisely, is making the decisions to distort information? How,exactly, is this being done? On what basis or for what purposes? And,therefore, what are the implications for being a morally response-ableindividual?

First, note that Nobody is a system of feedback loops, a pattern of rein-forcing individual behaviors which has a life of its own largely irrespectiveof the particular individuals involved. There is no unmoved mover here,no anthropomorphized individual, no homunculus. Nor is there some sortof blank slate upon which Nature, experience, or “market forces” write.

Note that Nobody’s decision processes are not so much composedof “entities with attributes” as of “interacts,” in this case, balancing feed-back loops. Also note that if a picture is worth a thousand words, thencomputer graphics are almost always mandatory in representing dynamic(non-linear) systems. As a case in point, the variable “resources-tend-to-be-allocated-to-tasks-and-people-that-produce-favorable-information”occurs in twelve separate loops, any one of which includes up to eightvariables.

What is it that “attracts” Nobody such that organizational informationdistortions are such a ubiquitous phenomenon? Even without the help ofcomputer software programs, it is pretty obvious that Nobody is stronglyattracted to certainty and to consensus. This comes as no surprise, forgenerating consensus and certainty are precisely the great strengths ofhierarchical systems – especially in times of rapid changes. Paradoxically,generating consensus and certainty are precisely the great weaknesses ofhierarchical systems – especially in times of rapid changes.11

11 Nobody’s obsession with certainty and consensus is by no means news. For example,these two dimensions from Douglas and Wildavsky’s outstanding analysis of Risk andCulture (1982) and King’s (1993) analysis of nuclear power issues in America. Otherswill recognize Nobody’s obsession as a cybernetic representation of Oliver Williamson’s(1975) seminal theorizing on forms of organizations. Within his “organizational failuresframework,” Nobody is attracted to minimum transaction costs given 1) (all-too-human)conditions of bounded rationality and opportunism interacting with 2) environmental factors


TABLE I

Person in system Questions addressed Answer to question

to person by person addressed

Higher levelmanager

Why didn’t you consider theunfavorable information yourstaff produced?

I’m not familiar with the information thatyou’re talking about. I can assure you thatmy decisions were based on the best infor-mation available to me.

Mid-levelmanager

Why didn’t you pass the unfa-vorable information up to yoursuperiors?

I can’t pass everything up to them. Basedon the information available to me, itseems appropriate to have this informa-tion reevaluated and checked over.

Projectprofessional

Why wasn’t the unfavorableinformation checked out andsent back up to your superiors?

That wasn’t my job. I had other tasks todo and deadlines to meet.

Troublemaker Why didn’t you follow upon the information that youpresented?

I only worked on part of the project. Idon’t know how my particular informa-tion was used after I turned it in. I didmy job. Even if I had all the information,which I didn’t, there was no way that Icould stop this project.

Higher levelmanager

Why was the source of unfavor-able information (the trouble-maker) removed from theproject?

I hardly know the person. A lot of peoplehave worked on this project. I must, ofcourse, make decisions to keep this orga-nization running, but there has been no“plot” to suppress people! On the con-trary, my decisions have been objectivelybased on the available information and therecommendations of my staff.

Mid-levelmanager

Why was the source of unfavor-able information removed fromthe project?

I don’t like your implications! I’ve gottasks to complete and deadlines to meetwith limited resources. I can’t let every-body do “their own thing”; we’d neverfinish anything. I base my recommenda-tions and assignments on the best avail-able information!

Projectprofessional

Why was the source of unfavor-able information removed fromthe project?

I’m not sure about the details because Idon’t work with him. I guess that it hadsomething to do with a reorganization ora new assignment. He is a bright person,somewhat of an eccentric, but I’ve gotnothing personal against him.

Troublemaker Why were you removed fromthe project?

My assignment was completed and I wasassigned to another project. I don’t thinkthat anybody was deliberately out to getme. My new job is less of a hassle.

76 JONATHAN B. KING

And how does such systems thinking increase our vocabulary of atten-tion? What does individual (moral) response-ability entail in Quadrant II?Between the either/or extremes of “your life is your own fault” and “thesystem is to blame” is the and or the fusion of Quadrants I and II. The lateW. Edwards Deming put it as well as anyone: “It is management’s job tooptimize the system.” This, of course, requires seeking out those leveragepoints which keep Nobody from misbehaving. In stark contrast, “partial”remedies such as replacing middle management, do not qualify as systemicleverage points in coping with organizational distortions of information.

We could profitably spend the rest of our lives in Quadrant II’s problemspace, modeling various situations and trying out existing models for goodfits. By eliminating a balancing loop here, adding a reinforcing loop there,managing a time delay elsewhere, we could simulate which actions aremore likely to reduce information distortions, which are likely to fizzle outwith little or no impact, which are likely to generate even bigger problems.

Yes, but

What about the paradox that Nobody’s attraction to certainty and consensusis both a blessing and a curse? Perhaps we could finesse this paradoxby transforming Nobody’s attractor – by changing the “box,” “story,” or“representation” within which Nobody is making decisions. Meg Wheatleyoffers a Quadrant III remedy:

When a meaning attractor is in place in an organization, employees can be trusted to movefreely, drawn in many directions by their energy and creativity. There is no need to insist,through regimentation or supervision, that any two individuals act in precisely the sameway : : : We believe that little else is required except the cohering presence of a purpose,which gives people the capacity for self-reference (Wheatley, 1992, p. 136).

(Note, incidentally, that this is a good description of a cult.)This should be easy. Consultants speak blithely of changing corporate

“cultures,” “transforming” management, “empowering” workers, building“teams,” and otherwise “zapping” everybody in sight and in “one minute.”But perhaps we should take time out to mull over Deming’s admonitionthat “profound knowledge must come from outside the system” which, infact, is another way of characterizing the activity of thinking as such.

What kind of systems inhabit Quadrant III? In this domain, our indi-vidual and collective minds are now part and parcel of the very realities weseek to understand; we explicitly confront for the first time that what weobserve necessarily interacts with our observations: “We are not outside

of complexity and small numbers. Others focus on tracing Nobody’s obsession much fartherback in time, e.g., Smith (1979) and MacIntyre (1981, esp. Ch. 8).


the story we tell: each of us is a part of the story” (Michael, 1985, p. 101).This both complicates and simplifies matters as it always has.

QUADRANT III: NOBODY IS THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OFREALITY

A central thesis then begins to emerge: man is in his actions and practices, aswell as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal : : : But the key questionfor men is not about their own authorship, I can only answer the question ‘Whatam I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I findmyself a part?’

Alasdair MacIntyre

First the people are tempted out of their niches by new possibilities of exercisingor evading control. Then they make new kinds of institutions, and the institutionsmake new labels, and the labels make new kinds of people.

Mary Douglas

Quadrant III adds the realities of “stories” – contexts with meaning. Itsroot metaphor is culture – more precisely, theater. Intentionalist causalitystructures this problem space, hence the form of solutions. Quadrant III’spatron saint is Emile Durkheim.12

In Quadrant III, systemic distortions of information are systemic distor-tions of meanings. They include such problematic plays as managementversus labor, right wing versus left wing, pro-choice versus pro-life, menare from Mars and women are from Venus. Culture wars, especially reli-gious wars, are the most lethal form of systemic distortions of meanings.

Be Careful

If Quadrant III is to truly increase our “vocabulary of attention” – henceour response-abilities, then we must guard against several temptations.For one, we must not simply extend Quadrant II by adding “ideas” asvariables in non-linear systems. We cannot merely reiterate that “ideashave consequences” or that “mythologies build civilizations.” Moreover,we must avoid omitting Quadrant II even though combining QuadrantsI and III offers us the comforting and thoroughly modern fiction that wewrite our own scripts.13 Third, we should avoid relapsing into variationsof C.P. Snow’s “two cultures” thesis – the either/or of objectivism or

12 See Mary Douglas’ (1986) argument for the resurrection of both Durheim and therelevance of his work.

13 On this particular issue, see Murdoch’s (1992) and MacIntyre’s (1981) critiques ofSartre.

78 JONATHAN B. KING

subjectivism. Instead, we should expand our vocabulary of attention toinclude interactions of the subjective and objective.

Our starting point in Quadrant III is therefore radical, relative to ourprevious Quadrants. There is not, cannot be, and ought not to be such athing as “The” system.

Consider, as an example, how four blind men – an economist, a sociol-ogist, a cultural anthropologist, and a political scientist – would diagnoseorganizational distortions of information. Would their stories of elephants– “the” system – differ significantly?

And would it matter if some were to abandon incrementalism forradicalism? What would happen if some were to renounce the “center”(the securities of consensus and certainty afforded by hierarchical orga-nizations) for the “edge” (the excitement of risk-taking entrepreneurs)?Would their worlds, in fact, change?14

And what if some of us were to switch our affections from Pollyannato Cassandra? Would information, knowledge, and even understandingfurther rotate as if viewed through a kaleidoscope?

If “the map is not the territory,” yet if we must view elephants, orga-nizations, and ourselves through lenses, then we must (somehow) makechoices. Explicitly or by default. This is as true of the “hard” sciences asit is of the “softer” (social) sciences, though with a crucial caveat.15 Theways physicists view rocks and stars have few if any effects on the rocksand stars themselves. In stark contrast, the ways we (choose to) view our-selves have sometimes glorious, sometimes trivial, sometimes monstrouseffects on how we treat one another and ourselves. Thus crucial complica-tions emerge – “ideal types” are transformed and understandings of moralagency change – when you add conscious minds to our representations ofNobody.

Key Questions

Who makes decisions, how, and on what basis? In a nutshell, our (shared)storied are the decisions. As “representations,” they determine our “prob-lem spaces.”

The most important aspect of political discourse is not the appraisal of alternative solutionsto our problems, but the definition of the problems themselves. This simple truth is easy tomiss because what we see when we look at politics is a series of particular problems andpossible remedies : : : But in the background – disguised, unarticulated – are the myth-based

14 See Douglas and Wildavsky’s elaboration of this point in their outstanding Risk andCulture (1981).

15 Michael Polanyi (1958) and Richard Bernstein (1983) are perhaps two of the best incomparing and contrasting the “hard” and “soft” sciences.


mortality tales that determine when we declare a fact to be a problem, how policy choicesare characterized, how the debate is framed (Reich, 1987, pp. 5–6).

The mechanism? Acting out our scripts, thereby maintaining the storieswhich we then reenact. More precisely, Tools “R” Us, as we shall soonsee.

On what basis? Paraphrasing the late Ernest Becker, “Man is the onlycreature who must create his own meanings. But to believe in them, tohave faith in what he has created, they must be carefully staged. Theremust be a supporting cast and a play worth playing.”

What does moral response-ability entail? Managing meanings (readmanaging the “culture”). It is managing organizations such that they are“Built to Last” (Collins and Porras, 1994). Response-ability may also entail“Creating Common Ground” (King, 1995). (We postpone managing themanager until Quadrant IV.)

As W. Edwards Deming put it:

The most important things in an organization cannot be measured. They include enthusiasm,joy, love of learning, commitment, and loyalty. Organizations prosper and have deep wellsto draw from when these attributes are highly valued. Although they cannot be measured,they can be managed – we can do something to promote and support them.

Fine, you say, but surely this stuff is old hat by now. We urgently,disagree. Consider some of the implications of re-presenting Nobody basedon the dynamics of intentionalist causality.

First, all representations themselves necessarily embody purpose,intent, values. The following observation is absolutely crucial to under-standing the realities of Quadrant III.

[Wittgenstein] argued that the analysis of everyday situations into facts and rules (which iswhere most traditional philosophers and AI researchers think theory must begin) is itselfonly meaningful in some context and for some purpose. Thus, the elements chosen alreadyreflect the goals and purposes for which they are carved out (Dreyfus, 1988, p. 26, emphasisadded).

It is in this precise sense that there can be no such thing as “value-free”measures, concepts, models, or theories. Not even immaculate perceptionis possible in principle; even at this rudimentary level, our brain constructsfrom preselected data the perceptions which it then leads us to think thatwe perceive.

Second, our “representations-cum-intentions” do not only exist in ourheads. Most are embodied – instantiated, built in, institutionalized, con-cretized “out there” – as language, methods of inquiry, and the very largearray of other tools including our various organizations. (The term “orga-nization” comes from the Greek “organum” which means “tool.”) Yet it isevidently still news to point out that

80 JONATHAN B. KING

Figure 4.

Organizational design may be a mirror image of our cognitions. Therefore, to redesign theorganization, we need to redesign the way we think : : : Our organizational arrangementsare a projection of our mental patterns, whether or not we know it (Keidel, 1994, p. 17).

Third, while “our organizational arrangements” and other tools areprojections of our cognitions, our tools, in turn, project their “scripts” backonto our cognitions. By then reenacting our tools, we reproduce them.

The tool as symbol in all these respects thus transcends its role as a practical means towardscertain ends : : : It must therefore inevitably enter into the individual’s imaginative calculusthat constantly constructs his world (Weizenbaum, 1976, p. 18).

Checkland and Scholes underscore this key point and a means of re-presenting Nobody which does not exist in the problem spaces of QuadrantsI or II.

What is being argued is that we perceive the world through the filter of – or using theframework of – the ideas internal to us; but that the source of many (most?) of those ideasis the perceived world outside (1990, p. 20).

Figure 4 combines the above insights, explicating the seeming paradoxof “How Institutions Think.” Only in Quadrant III can Nobody be under-stood as a social construction of reality. This domain, properly understood,is where the fusion of the “subjective” and the “objective” occurs.

The dynamics seem simple enough: 1) we make a tool with the intended objective of achiev-ing certain results based on some particular mental model at the time; 2) in symbolizing a


now-objectified mental model, the tool-as-script then projects it back to us whenever wesee it or use it; 3) we then map this reinforced “mental model” back onto whatever we thinkis going on out-there.

In this circling process, our tools “tell us” what representations to use. They thereby“specify” the form of solutions for us, and, in so doing, they “inform us” what is of value.By then reenacting what they tell us, we reproduce them (King, 1994, pp. 251–2).

Note the key differences between Quadrant II and Quadrant III repre-sentations. Quadrant II representations – what Checkland and Scholesidentify as “systems engineering” – are “predicated on the fact that theneed and hence the relevant need-meeting system, can be taken as given.Systems engineering looks at ‘how to do it’ when ‘what to do’ is alreadydefined” (Checkland and Scholes, 1990, p. 17). In contrast, Quadrant IIIrepresentations presuppose that “what to do” or the intention is not alreadydefined. Except, of course, by default.

We could profitably spend the rest of our lives in Quadrant III, siftingthrough historical evidences to discover when, where, and why certaintyand consensus emerged as Nobody’s paramount concerns. We could decon-struct our preferred constructions of the present and past to uncover howNobody’s obsession interactively evolved to become instantiated in top-down power structures and a widespread faith in prediction and, in partic-ular, control.16 We could further examine the various “tools” through whichNobody reproduces itself, ranging from the ways we organize ourselves inindustry, in politics, and in school, dominant methods of inquiry includingcurricular organization, to numerous other unexamined habits. We coulddebate the socio-cultural architectures needed to change Nobody’s mind –e.g., an organization’s “culture” – to resemble, say, something like the idealtype of what Habermas terms a “speech community” or, for that matter, theNazi SS, an Amish community, an ultra right wing Militia, a Communistcell.

Which raises an absolutely critical issue.

Yes, but

Is “relativism” or “incommensurability” the inescapable offspring of Quad-rant III? Consider the implications of Donald Michael’s argument in “WithBoth Feet Firmly Planted in Mid-Air.”

In this regard a fundamental insight for me has been – there are many pasts. Alternativechoices of events, time periods, interpretations and intentions provide unnumbered ways tolink past events to a present. And there are unnumbered ways of putting together the present,i.e. what is ‘really’ happening and what is ‘really’ important. Since the present is always

16 On the issue of “control,” see Huston Smith: 1979, “Excluded Knowledge: A Critiqueof the Modern Western Mind Set,” Teachers College Record 80 (February 1979): 419–45.

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constructed out of a presumed past, I have learned that thoughts about the future derivefrom preferred constructions of the present and the past. These constructions are preferredbecause they are deemed ‘fitting’ in that they seem, according to the prevailing socialconstruction of reality and its cultural norms, to be sensible, familiar, logical, authoritative,or otherwise acceptable because one has participated in their creation (Michael, 1985,p. 96).

So, even if we have managed to transcend objectivism-versus-subjectivism in Quadrant III, what are we to do about the far more prob-lematic prospect of objectivism versus relativism?17 How are we to livewith both feet firmly planted in mid-air?

Do we back up to Quadrant II and its selectionist logic declaring, ineffect, that “might makes right” and “right makes might” are equivalentin the longer run? Are we to gamble that in the longer run bad “memes”will be selected out of our cultural meme pools of stories?18 If so, are wewilling to grant the processes of “creative destruction” – the invisible handof selectionist logic – the slack to experiment with “random mutations”such as holocausts and other less monstrous deeds?

On the other hand, sticking with objectivism-versus-relativism is risky.Arendt quotes from Yeats’ soul numbing prophecy (The Second Coming):

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world : : :

The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

Yet if “Tools ‘R’ Us,” how are we to think outside the boxes that areboth in-our-heads and out-there? Varela et al. (1991) point out that bothcognitive science and Western phenomenology have proven incapable oftranscending such self-referential circles. Indeed, what does it mean forthought to reflect upon itself? As Kirshnamurti pointed out, “That, Sir, isa very good question.”19

These are hardly academic issues. Yeats’ commentary on modern timesbears a frightening resemblance to the conditions engulfing Descartes dur-ing the horrific Thirty Years War which ravaged Europe killing off, forexample, one third of Germany’s population. “God,” it seems, was onnearly everybody’s side.

17 See Bernstein (1983) for the argument that “Beyond Objectivism and Relativism” isthe major (philosophical) challenge facing us these days.

18 I’m referring to Dawkins’ hypothesis that the cultural counterpart of a “gene” isa “meme,” and that selectionist mechanisms may work for mind (“culture”) as they dofor body. See Gary Cziko’s (1995) chapter on this dimension of the “second Darwinianrevolution.”

19 Krishnamurti (1994).


So where are (were) “the best” to stand? What is the ground of their“conviction”? Is it possible to re-present objectivism versus relativism suchthat we stand a chance of transcending such lethal distortions of meanings?Donald Michael notes some necessary conditions.

Emotions are critical to what happens – both those emotions driving creativity and reason,aspiration, power, greed and the will to control; and those emotions struggling with theexistential questions of being human : : : .

We are not outside the story we tell: each of us is part of the story. Each must bea quester after existential meaning, vulnerable, uncertain, and ethically concerned aboutwhat happens to our thoughts about the future since, if they are used, they will affect thefuture we are telling stories about.

The Delphic injunction, “Know thyself,” is the most essential of all conditions formeaningful and responsible engagement when thinking about the future, for finding one’sway among the claims, distortions, feelings and fantasies that each of us harbors in ourunconscious (1985, pp. 100–101).

It is time to enter Quadrant IV with Socrates. After going temporarilyinsane – engaging with others in those “aporetic” dialogues – he retiresinto his house to consult with his Daimon. “[He] must go home wherehe will be alone, in solitude, to meet the other fellow” (444). The “otherfellow”? As Hannah Arendt points out, the word “conscience” means “toknow with and by myself ” (418). Thus, “For Socrates, this two-in-onemeant simply that if you want to think you must see to it that the twowho carry on the thinking dialogue be in good shape, that the partnersbe friends” (442). Perhaps conscience is the by-product of practicing theGolden Rule inwardly?

QUADRANT IV: I AM NOBODY

But wretched Man is still in arms for Fear.From fear to fear, successively betrayed –By making risks to give a cause for fear(Feeling safe with causes, and from birth afraid)

William Empson

[W]e can develop a way to select the right mind, not the mind we would usuallychoose. In more traditional terms, this yields an internal stability, detachmentfrom the different minds within, and an increase in ability to select the right one.

Robert Ornstein

Quadrant IV adds the reality of inner dialogue, an emergent propertyof self-consciousness. Its root metaphor is the wilderness, a somewhatfrightening, sacred, and empty place where one “makes up one’s mind.”

84 JONATHAN B. KING

“Mindfulness” – “the keystone of emotional intelligence” (Goleman,1995, p. 43) – structures this problem space, hence the form of solutions.It is here where thought reflects upon itself, where, in Arendt’s words, “atwo-in-one soundless dialogue” takes place between myself and me.

A number of people could rightfully lay claim to this quadrant, Danteand Dostoevsky being obvious choices. We opt for Antonio Damasio –a world renowned scientist – because he has recently opened a doorwayto ancient truths in the context of modern science. And that matters – therigor and the accountability of science.

It is thus even more surprising and novel that the absence of emotion and feeling is noless damaging, no less capable of compromising the rationality that makes us distinctivelyhuman : : : Emotion and feeling : : : assist us with the daunting task of predicting an uncertainfuture and planning our actions accordingly (Damasio, 1994, pp. vii, viii).

But who, precisely, is managing whose emotions-mind(s)? Who is doingthe thinking? How is it done? And, above all, as it turns out, for whatpurpose?

Be Careful

Doesn’t the journey of “the hero with a thousand faces” (Joseph Campbell,1949) reduce to NLP-ing ourselves to Unlimited Power in Seven Stepswith or without the special help of Angels? And is this why few if any(business) ethics texts make mention of – let alone pursue – the conditionsentailed by the ancient injunction “Know Thyself ”?

In stark contrast, our ancient wisdom traditions warn us that “knowthyself ” is an often frightening and perilous journey, where the tempta-tions for self-deception abound. Take a moment to review some of thevery best. Ponder the opening cantos of Dante’s Divine Comedy; reflectupon the nature of the obstacles facing Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgram’sProgress; test the state of your soul with those three crucial questionswhich Dostoevsky lays out in his tale of “The Grand Inquisitor.”

Iris Murdoch comments on the stark contrast.20

We live in a scientific and anti-metaphysical age : : : whose chief feature, in my view, is thatwe have been left with far too shallow and flimsy an idea of human personality. With theaddition of some modern psychology man is seen as capable of self-knowledge by methodsagreeable to science and common sense. So we have the modern man, as he appears inmany recent works on ethics and I believe also to a large extent in the popular consciousness(Murdoch, Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch).

There is a second (biological) challenge to “Know Thyself,” shades ofthe ancient Buddhist doctrine of “split selves.”

20 Stephen Covey (1989) offers a similar critique in contrasting the “personality ethic”with the “character ethic.”


The mind is a squadron of simpletons. It is not unified, it is not rational, it is not welldesigned – or designed at all : : : The mind evolved great breadth, but it is shallow, for itperforms quick and dirty sketches of the world. This rough-and-ready perception of realityenabled our ancestors to survive better [and for millions of years]. The mind did not evolveto know the world or to know ourselves (Ornstein, 1991, pp. 2–3; bracketed commentadded).

There is yet another challenge. Language, the medium of thinking,yet language whose “words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines),whose ‘weakness’ and inflexibility Plato denounces so splendidly in theSeventh Letter” (433–434).

Key Questions

So who, precisely, is making the decision to distort information? One of ourminds. How, exactly, do such distortions occur? What are the mechanisms?Cognitive-emotional heuristics.

Simply speaking, there has never been, nor will there ever be enough time to be trulyrational. Rationality is one component of the mind, but it is used rarely, and in a verylimited area. Rationality is impossible anyway. There isn’t time for the mind to go throughthe luxurious exercises of examining alternatives : : : .

Mental processes, I have come to believe, are not organized around thought or reasonbut around emotional ideals: how we feel we want something to be : : : The relationshipbetween emotional drives and reason is like the relationship between an entrepreneur andher lawyers. The entrepreneur knows what she wants to do and employs the lawyers to tellher how (Ornstein, 1991, pp. 3, 95).

On what basis or for what purposes do our emotions defer to Nobody?The need for certainty and consensus? That makes eminent sense: wesimply can’t spend much if any of the time required to reinvent our verymany wheels. In particular,

[T]hinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria,values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and values of conductwe treat of in morals and ethics (434).

But there’s a hitch. Dostoevsky, moraliste par excellence, describes it:

So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to findsomeone to worship. But man seeks to worship what is established beyond dispute : : : Thiscraving for community of worship is the chief misery of every many individually and ofall humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of worship they’ve slain each otherwith the sword (Part II, Book V, Ch. 5, “The Grand Inquisitor; first emphasis added).

For a more “banal” variation of the Grand Inquisitor’s point, reviewStanley Milgram’s (1974) experiments to see what it takes for you toshock a fellow human being nearly to death. Contrary to all predictions

86 JONATHAN B. KING

(a frightening finding), it takes very little indeed. Consider the nature ofthe prompts given to you by the “authority figure” which results in yourshocking the “student” to the max (450 volts).

When, in response to your concerns, the authority figure says, “I willtake responsibility if anything happens to the student,” a large majorityof us go all the way, despite the student’s shouts of discomfort, despiteentreaties to “let me out of here, let me out of here, I can’t stand the pain!”and despite a then deathly silence. No other prompt by the authority figure– e.g., “the experiment requires that you continue,” “you must go on, youhave no other choice” – none comes close to “I’ll take responsibility.”

In stark contrast, when a third party sits next to us and insists onasking such questions as, “Why are we hurting this person?” the resultsare spectacular.

Now ponder the logic of the first prompt in view of Arendt’s observationthat “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people whonever made up their mind to be either bad or good” (438). Now ponderthe logic of the second prompt in view of her observation that the activityof thinking as such, “the two-in-one soundless dialogue, actualizes thedifference within our identity as given in consciousness and thereby resultsin conscience as its by-product” (446).

On Dialogue

The emergent phenomenon of self-consciousness provides the potentialfor inner dialogue. The activity of thinking realizes this potential withconscience as a by-product.

So how does one conduct inner dialogues? And why does consciencearise as a by-product of dialogue?

Unfortunately, “The trouble is that few thinkers ever told us what madethem think and even fewer have cared to describe and examine their think-ing experience” (427). Indeed, “the whole history of philosophy, whichtells us so much about the objects of thought [tells us] so little about theprocess of thinking itself ” (424–5).

Although she notes that thinking as such is a form of “meditation,”Arendt perhaps overlooks someone who spent his whole life teaching andexemplifying the activity of thinking as such. Given his seminal influenceon such people as the late Joseph Campbell and David Bohm, it is worthlistening carefully to Krishnamurti’s account of inner dialogue. Note, inparticular, his emphasis on the crucial significance of emptying one’s mindof motive – i.e., intention: anybody’s in general and Nobody’s in particular!

Do watch yourself. Don’t look at me or anyone else; watch yourself. That is, when you say,“I really don’t know,” “What has taken place?” your mind is not actively thinking about


how to find out. Say, for instance, I really don’t know, which means I have no hope offinding it, I have no conclusion, I have no motive. This is very important. When I say I don’tknow, in that is implied having no motive whatsoever. Because motive gives a direction,and then I have lost it. So I must be very, very clear and terribly honest in myself to say Ireally don’t know (J. Krishnamurti, 1994).

We have arrived at the crux of what it means to be morally response-able in Quadrant IV. Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Roschunderscore the significance of Hannah Arendt and Krishnamurti’s concep-tion of the activity of thinking as such as being without object or motiveor intention.

Contemplative traditions from around the world agree that if one thinks the point of medi-tative practice is to develop special skills and make oneself into a religious, philosophical,or meditative virtuoso, then one is engaging in self-deception and is actually going in theopposite direction. In particular, the practices involved in the development of mindful-ness/awareness are virtually never described as the training of meditative virtuosity : : : butrather as the letting go of habits of mindlessness, as an unlearning rather than a learning.This unlearning may take training and effort, but it is a different sense of effort from theacquiring of something new : : : The importance of the distinction between skill and lettinggo should become increasingly apparent as we continue our story” (1991, p. 29).

Their “story” is that Western cognitive science, Western phenome-nology, and Eastern (Buddhist) mindfulness/awareness can and ought tobe integrated. It is about filling an increasingly worrisome vacuum inWestern science. Note their response to the seeming contradiction of usingreflection as a mode of learning – the activity of thinking as such –:

This question brings us to the methodological heart of the interaction between mindful-ness/awareness meditation, phenomenology, and cognitive science. What we are suggestingis a change in the nature of reflection from an abstract, disembodied activity to an embodied(mindful), open-ended reflection. By embodied, we mean reflection in which body and mindhave been brought together. What this formulation intends to convey is that reflection is notjust on experience, but reflection is a form of experience itself – and that reflective form ofexperience can be performed with mindfulness/awareness. When reflection is done in thatway, it can cut the chain of habitual thought patterns and preconceptions such that it can bean open-ended reflection, open to possibilities other than those contained in one’s currentrepresentations of the life space (1991, p. 27).

Cutting habitual thought patterns and preconceptions? Developing sucha capacity seems of the utmost significance for the foreseeable future. Rea-sons range from thinking more creativity and holistically on the job,21

21 Stanley Davis (1991) is hardly alone in claiming that “Education will have to con-centrate more on development of those skills that are poorly done by computers. Thedevelopment of creativity and holistic thinking ability should have top priority.”

88 JONATHAN B. KING

to creating and using a “sacred place” for yourself,22 to developing the“ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed mayprevent catastrophes, at least for myself, in the rare moments when thechips are down” (446).

EPILOGUE

The assumption current in all modern legal systems [is] that intent to do wrongis necessary for the commission of a crime : : : [However], politics is not like thenursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.

Hannah Arendt

[However, our world today is far] different than the world for which the mindevolved. We’d better have a good idea of the possible change points of themind, to know how we take information from the world, in which bits, what ishard-wired, and what can be changed.

Ornstein (1991, p. 166)

Hard systems, soft systems, and our minds/emotions make decisions forus. Increasing our “vocabularies of attention” includes the dynamics ofthese problem spaces and the ways intentions and values are embeddedin them. By expanding our understandings of moral response-abilities, westand a chance of making the world a better place for our children. Thealternatives are frightening and they are wrong.

There are some obvious obstacles. Managing hard systems still posesreal challenges in view of our linear methods of inquiry and reductionistways of organizing which continue to suffuse management thinking andpractice.

22 Joseph Campbell is worth quoting on this point:

Moyers: Where are the sacred places today?Campbell: they don’t exist : : : .Moyers: What does it mean to have a sacred place?Campbell: This is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or acertain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning,you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’tknow what anybody owes you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bringforth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. Atfirst you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it,something eventually will happen. : : : But our life has become so economic and practicalin its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great,you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doingsomething that is required of you. (1988, 9 92)


Managing “soft systems” and managing our various selves/emotionshinges on conducting real dialogue – outer and inner, respectively,23 Themotivation driving dialogue is the desire to understand, not the desire toknow and to control. This is a key distinction, one which Arendt points outat the very outset of her inquiry into the “banality of evil.” This is becausethe desire to know and to control necessarily takes too much as given, byanyone in general and by Nobody in particular.

So how are we to take Arendt’s final claim that the activity of think-ing as such should be reserved for “the rare moments when the chipsare down”? Since information distortions run the gamut from misunder-standings between you and your significant other, to business failures, toholocausts, such “moments” seem, in fact, to be fairly common these days.It therefore seems to me that Arendt’s central insight thereby gains evengreater force and relevance.

William O’Brien, former CEO of the Hanover Insurance Companymakes the point:

The third attribute that [winning] twenty-first-century companies will need is [dialogue].This is the single greatest learning tool in your organization – more important than com-puters or sophisticated research : : : We have so many defense mechanisms that impedecommunications that we are absolutely terrible : : : (Senge et al., 1994, p. 14).

O’Brien’s observation seems so – banal? Indeed it is. But only inthe precise sense in which Hannah Arendt has expanded our vocabularyof attention concerning the relationships between thinking, intent, andindividual moral response-ability.

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Jonathan B. KingCollege of BusinessOregon State UniversityBexell Hall 200CorvallisOR 97331-2603U.S.A.

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