WB's Way: A Certain Kind Of Modesty

The way of ignorance, therefore, is to be careful, to know the limits and the efficacy of our knowledge. It is to be humble and to work on an appropriate scale.

How are we ever going to make our collective way toward healthier communities? Wendell Berry’s been suggesting for years it has to start with personal decency, humility and cautiousness, a disposition he’s referred to as the way of ignorance. (a phrase borrowed from T.S. Eliot’s poem, East Coker)

I’m interested – for purposes of this short series – in what happens when the way of ignorance meets and conducts business. How do people and companies live up to its requirements in the real world? What kinds of results do they get when they do? Mr. Berry’s done more than his share to frame questions and provide answers, but I think more work is needed still.

Specifically, I’d like to try to link his ideas to the MANAGEMENT ADVISEMENT arena. And I’ve been keepin’ a sharp eye out lately for anyone or anything that might help.

Enter stage right: David Brooks and his new book, The Social Animal.

Enter, too, the concept of epistemological modesty. 

Epistemological What?

Might as well let him explain:

Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know. Epistemological modesty is the knowledge of how little we know and can know.

More user-friendly:

Epistemological modesty is an attitude toward life. This attitude is built on the awareness that we don’t know ourselves. Most of what we think and believe is unavailable to conscious review. We are our own deepest mystery.

Epistemological modesty is just like the way of ignorance.

If our ability to understand our selves is limited, so, also, by extension, must be our ability to understand other people, circumstances, and events. We still have to make decisions and take actions, of course. So the question becomes, How do we do so modestly? Mr. Brooks submits that we “can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge.” In one of my favorite parts of the book, he then takes his best shot at illustrating what he means.

What really set my eyes a poppin’, though, were the parts in which he relates epistemological modesty to business management. This he does c-o-n-s-p-i-c-u-o-u-s-l-y via the characters (this is a fictional work) of Harrison, a “typical” management consultant* who DOES NOT exhibit epistemological modesty, and Raymond, a mid-level manager, who DOES. The narrator goes to great lengths to describe their respective decision making processes and the effects their decisions have on their companies.

It’s here where Mr. Brooks does just the kind of linking I alluded to before, and where he fills in some of the missing pieces. I don’t know what kind of impact this has had inside the consulting community, but I’m curious to find out.

I also want to find out if there are any real, living, breathing consultants who are talking this same sort of talk.

Philip Evans of the Boston Consulting Group is referred to in The Lords of Strategy (Walter Kiechel, III, 2010) as one who likes to think and talk about epistemology, specifically the nature of the knowledge of how to achieve competitive advantage. But, as for the modesty part?

BCG’s bailiwick has been strategic analysis and strategy formulation, along with the mission, vision, and values stuff that precedes it. In conversations about these topics with clients, what characteristic attitude does he bring? I’m sure all BCG consultations address enterprise risk management (ERM), but is that the same thing DB and/or WB have in mind?

"The Full Wendell" would call for companies to carefully consider, among many other things, the ramifications of the use of their products or services in the world. (Do they help end users become more self-sufficient? Do they promote wasteful consumption? Are they instrumental in helping people maintain and enhance their home towns?) Has any consultant at BCG, itself a US$ 3.05 billion firm, ever gone so far as to recommend to a client that the scope of her company’s operations should be limited, because, for example, further growth could be destructive?

These things I don’t know.

As always, more investigation is needed.

*Can you believe it, a management consultant in a novel?!?

Simply Illuminating, 1.02

[Part 2 of a short series]

A smattering of diagrams. A few abstract representations. That’s the normal extent of the artwork in the business bibles I read -- much of which, in my opinion, is mediocre: as if tacked on at the last minute; not well-integrated with the text (like the best illuminations of old); not effective in its own right.

Why’s this the case? Why do some business communicators place more emphasis than others on telling their tales with pictures? How is the relative success of their methodologies impacted by their art choices?

Don’t know. Don’t know. Don’t know.

Won’t know, either, ‘til I start asking questions.

And bringing up a few examples.

THE BAD

I don’t want to dwell on the bad, but I would like to start with (and then summarily dismiss) an example. The diagram directly below was used in a just-published book I just read. The main message therein? It’s a leader’s job to align his or her company’s strategy, organization, and people:

Had a chance to drink it in? If so, need I say why it added next to nothing in terms of my comprehension or appreciation of the authors’ theme? Why it detracted from my reading experience? Seeing the thing made me want to revisit…

THE GOOD

The good ol’ growth-share matrix. Probably the most important conceptual tool of the earliest stage (between 1960 and 1980) of the so-called strategy revolution. Walter Kiechel III wrote appreciatively about it in his 2010 book The Lords of Strategy:

Admire for a moment, the beauty of the thing. In a single graphic and conceptual device, the Boston Consulting Group had managed to pull together all the elements it thought essential to strategy, including the three C’s. [costs, competition, customers]

I can relate. Here was a simple, balanced, four-box structure -- “festooned with witty symbols” – that captured and integrated several complex concepts that BCG had taken years to develop. It was easy to understand. And powerful. It could both track and predict industry change, and thus offered guidelines for how businesses were to be managed. Here ‘t’is:

THE BETTER

Another diagram I especially like is this one below, devised last year by Haviland Studio (Palo Alto, CA and Lahaina, HI) and used by John Hagel, et. al. in The Power of Pull. It’s essentially a roadmap of the authors’ “new approach to value creation.” Take a gander:

By my count, it incorporates at least eleven (11) major factors, or themes, covered in the book. It strikes me as: original; imaginative; harmonious; balanced; thoughtfully constructed. The sizes and shapes and relative positions of the various elements all have meaning, i.e., they’re well-matched to the concepts they represent. (The overall shape and directionality of the arrow, for example, reflects the exponential nature of what the authors call an “increasing-returns collaboration curve.” ) All for the better.

(NOT) THE END

If I had to rate the topmost diagram on an imaginary scale from one to ten, with one = “ugly” and ten = “beautiful”, I’d give it a two or three. I think it does have some redeeming qualities. (The scales we use for judging diagrams are less like old-fashioned phone lines with single metal wires – and more like bundles o’ fiber optic strands; objects can strike us as beautiful in some ways, but not in others.) By the same token, however, the two diagrams beneath it each have their own shortcomings:

• GROWTH-SHARE: If beauty is truth, as the poet Keats said, then you could make a case that the g-s matrix and the logic behind it -- which came to be attacked as simplistic, even dangerous (i.e., untrue) -- became less beautiful over time. From a strictly artistic standpoint, it's also not something you're likely to see in a gallery. Even in an intro to design course it wouldn't get high marks.
• PULL: Like it a lot but I have some doubts about its utility as a teaching tool (it hasn't furthered my understanding of the authors' approach) or as a guide for going forward (it's not something to which you’d refer before making decisions). It strikes me more as an impressive feat (as in, How in the world did they engineer all o' those concepts into a single diagram?) than an impressive communication tool intended to make a real-world difference.

The quest goes on. 

What have you seen out there? I’d welcome hearing about particular diagrams that've made lasting impressions. One way or the other.