Our existing principles of leadership and management in organizations are largely based on metaphors from science that are hundreds of years old. It is time that we realized that science itself has largely replaced these metaphors with more accurate descriptions of what really happens in the world. Science is replacing its old metaphors not because they are wrong, but because they only described simplistic situations that progress has now moved us well beyond. Similarly, our organizations today are not the simple machines they were envisioned to be in the Industrial Revolution that saw the birth of scientific management. Further, people today are no longer the compliant “cogs in the machine” that we once thought them to be. We have intuitively known these things for many years. Management innovations such as learning organizations, total quality, empowerment and so on were introduced to overcome the increasingly visible failures of the simple organization-as-machine metaphor. Still, as we have pointed out, the metaphor remains strong.

The emerging study of complex adaptive systems gives us a new lens through which we can now begin to see a new type of scientific management. This new scientific management resonates well with more modern, intuitive notions about what we must do to manage increasingly complex organizations today. More importantly, the new thinking in science provides a consistent framework to pull together these heretofore intuitive notions. Now, for example, advocates of open communications and empowerment can claim the same firmness of ground that advocates of structure and control have been claiming exclusively. Science can now say rather clearly that structure and control are great for simple, machine-like situations; but things such as open communication, diversity and so on are needed in complex adaptive systems – such as those in modern organizations. The new scientific management will, no doubt, revolutionize organizations in the coming decades much as the old scientific management changed the world in the early decades of this century.

Next | Previous | Return to Contents List

Copyright © 2001, Paul E. Plsek & Associates, Inc. Permission. to copy granted for educational purposes
Please direct comments to: paulplsek@directedcreativity.com