A Pragmatic Approach

The pressure to be pragmatic in the way we work is overwhelming. I wonder to what extent the pressure to be pragmatic crushes out opportunities to better understand what it is that we are trying to achieve.

Our pragmatic organisations seem embedded in a short-term outlook that leads to excessive (and obsessive) task orientation and process management. Leaders and managers at every level are trapped in the endless present from which they do not have the energy or wit to escape. Yet, they can all give voice to a symptom of the deeper problem: Why are we so busy?

Does our unhealthy desire to be seen as pragmatic, task focused, can-do, action-oriented, heroic leaders grind out diversity of thought in our organisations? Does it grind out possibility and opportunity? Through a thousand small, pragmatic decisions that we are addicted to making every day, do we lock ourselves into an ever smaller and more tactical world view just when we need to see the bigger picture of transformational change?

The strident voice of managerial pragmatism argues that ‘survival of the fittest’ and being ‘red in tooth and claw’ as strategies for success. In doing so, control over uncertainty is placed in our grasping managerial hands. We are in control as long as we are pragmatic. Change, reform and adaptation become manageable.

But, the quest for control also betrays deep managerial anxiety.

At a time when being concept-led, research-driven or evidence-based can be seen as an impediment to ‘getting things done’, G.K Chesterton’s parable of the gas lamp is worth reflecting on (Heretics, 1905).

Suppose that a great commotion arises in the street about something, let us say a lamp-post, which many influential persons desire to pull down. A grey-clad monk, who is the spirit of the Middle Ages, is approached upon the matter, and begins to say, in the arid manner of the Schoolmen, “Let us first of all consider, my brethren, the value of Light. If Light be in itself good —” At this point he is somewhat excusably knocked down. All the people make a rush for the lamp-post, the lamp-post is down in ten minutes, and they go about congratulating each other on their mediaeval practicality. But as things go on they do not work out so easily. Some people have pulled the lamp-post down because they wanted the electric light; some because they wanted old iron; some because they wanted darkness, because their deeds were evil. Some thought it not enough of a lamp-post, some too much; some acted because they wanted to smash municipal machinery; some because they wanted to smash something. And there is war in the night, no man knowing whom he strikes. So, gradually and inevitably, today, tomorrow, or the next day, there comes back the conviction that the monk was right after all, and that all depends on what is the philosophy of Light. Only what we might have discussed under the gas-lamp, we now must discuss in the dark.

I wonder how many of our conversations about organisation, work, people, change, transformation and reform are being discussed in the dark because we are unthinkingly 'doing stuff'.