Chris Argyris: the manager's academic.

At first glance, Chris Argyris' career looks more like that of a classical academic than that of a management guru. Certainly he has spent much of his working life in one or other of America's leading academic institutions--for most of the 1950s and 1960s he was at Yale, and since then he has been at Harvard--but Argyris is no stuffy academic. His passionate interest in management, and his work on organisational problems, make him one of the most respected management thinkers of our time. He is also one of a small, exclusive band of `cross-over' management experts: people who are as much at home in the earthy world of factory and boardroom as they are in the rarefied atmosphere of academia.

Argyris is firstly a behavioural scientist, and he has earned his place in the forefront of that discipline with a career devoted to understanding how organisations behave and how managers learn. His style is rather special. He is anxious not to compartmentalise his work and gives equal weight to research, teaching and consulting: three things he sees as interrelated and supportive of one another.

Life and career

Chris Argyris was born in 1923 and at an early age developed an interest in how people learn. "It sounds corny, but I love learning for its own sake" is how he explains it. After service in the Second World War he returned home and, like so many young men at that time, felt a strong determination to help create a better world. Fortunately for us, he chose to direct his interest in education towards the needs of organisations and the individuals working in them. His great energy and formidable academic qualifications--a Baccalaureate in psychology, a Masters in economics and a Doctorate in organisation behaviour--equipped him perfectly for the task and by the early 1950s he was teaching and carrying out research at Yale University.

By the mid 1960s he was Professor of Industrial Administration at Yale and in 1968 he moved to the Harvard Business School where in 1971 he became the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organization Behaviour, a position he still holds.

His consulting work has been, and continues to be, wide-ranging and highly influential. Clients have included IBM, DuPont and Shell, along with the US State Department, other US government bodies and several overseas governments.

Key theories

A staunch supporter of job enrichment, Argyris has always challenged the extremes of Taylorism, especially the suggestion that one `hires a hand', rather than a whole person. Underlying virtually all his thinking is a fundamental belief in people, and he tirelessly reminds us of the mutual benefit that comes when organisations assist and encourage individuals to develop their full potential. He believes that each person already has the `psychological energy' that provides motivation. The challenge, he suggests, is not to find ways of artificially motivating people; it is to recognise and channel this innate energy.

T-groups

Chris Argyris was the main force behind the ground-breaking T-group experiments in the1960s. T-group training is a phrase used to describe a number of similar training methods whose purpose is to increase the trainee's skills in working with other people--and a considerable proportion of time on such a training course is spent in discussing trainees' relationships with each other. Along with many others, Argyris was elated by the success of T-groups, with their power to unfreeze the rigid, authoritarian behaviour of so many managers and to generate a feeling of liberation and excitement. However, as we now know, for most people these positive effects were short-lived. Once back in the turmoil of their organisation life, mixing again with those who had not been trained, the resolution and ideas were quickly forgotten and people reverted to their old ways of doing things.

This rapid return to original behaviour, by people who had been extremely enthusiastic about the `new approach' generated by T-group training, led Argyris to formulate an idea that has affected people's views about organisational behaviour for many years. The way people behave in organisations, he suggests, shows there is a sharp difference between the beliefs they profess and the beliefs on which they appear to act.

Espoused Theories and Theories-in-use

Argyris coined the terms Espoused Theories for what people profess to believe, and Theories-in-use for what they appear to believe when faced with problems in the real world. After much research, Argyris concluded that no matter how genuinely we believe in some approach to a situation, at the first sign of threat, embarrassment or loss of face, most of us fall back on a deep-rooted, `master programme' of behaviour. This behaviour, which is characterised by a powerful defensive attitude and a tendency to blame others whilst struggling to maintain control and save face, is surprisingly consistent across different cultures and classes.

Not only do people slip easily into defensive routines, they are totally unaware they are doing so. It is a reflex action, an automatic response to any threat or challenge. Argyris argued that the organisation can inhibit learning because it imposes--perhaps unconsciously--rules over the ways in which people relate to each other. Argyris says that problem-solving and decision-making can be dominated by an almost unconscious drive to `save face', `protect others', or maintain the status quo. What concerns Argyris most about this behaviour is that it blocks any opportunity people have to learn from experience and provides an all too effective strategy for avoiding change.

Single-loop and Double-loop Learning

Concern at people's failure to learn from experience has led Argyris to the theory for which he is best known: the concept of single- and double-loop learning. Developed in collaboration with Donald Schon, and described in their book Organisation Learning published in 1978, the theory stresses the importance of human reasoning as a basis for decisions and action.

Their work also produced the idea of a `learning organisation'. An organisation, Argyris and Schon suggest, differs from a mob by having procedures for making collective decisions; by delegating authority to individuals to act for the `collectivity'; and by setting out boundaries and rules. For all this activity, norms and strategies re developed, but in a healthy organisation these are constantly being tested and challenged as people interact and learn new ideas. The constant learning of people within an organisation, when reflected in the way the organisation itself changes and develops, can reasonably be described as organisation learning--hence the term `learning organisation'.

The two types of learning--single-loop and double-loop--refer to the way people respond to changes in their environment. Single-loop learning occurs when a manager responds with a simple `application of the rules' approach to a problem, for example: Problem: budgets are being exceeded. Solution: cut costs. Argyris uses a thermostat as an analogy for single-loop learning; the thermostat switches the heating on and off in response to temperature changes.

Double-loop learning goes beyond this simple feedback response and questions the assumptions on which the response is based. In the thermostat model the double-loop approach would be to question the validity of the selected temperature. In the example involving exceeded budgets, the double-loop approach would be to check the appropriateness of the budget figure and the basis on which it was calculated.

Speaking to a conference in 1982, Argyris described the theory thus:

"Learning can be defined as occurring under two conditions. First, learning occurs when an organisation achieves what it intended; that is, there is a match between its design for action and the actual outcome. Second, learning occurs when a mismatch between intention and outcome is identified and corrected; that is, a mismatch is turned into a match.... Single-loop learning occurs when matches are created, or when mismatches are corrected by changing actions. Double-loop learning occurs when mismatches are corrected by first examining and altering the governing variables and then the actions."

Impact

Argyris' work is rarely a comfort to managers. He raises profound questions about how we run organisations and frequently throws into doubt much of what is widely accepted to be `good practice'. And when he does outline solutions they are never simple or easy. What he offers, and what makes his contribution to management thinking so important, is a profound and detailed exploration of the fundamental principles of organisation behaviour and human interaction in the workplace. He pulls no punches when showing us how hard we will have to work, and how much we will have to change if we are to achieve our full potential; but he is equally convincing when describing the rewards we will receive for our efforts.

Future

In recent years Argyris has been looking at leadership and, after considerable research, he claims the massive literature on this overworked subject has failed to produce anything practical. Such strong views should make his forthcoming book on leadership compelling reading.

Argyris is also taking a lively interest in IT, something he feels will play a key role in learning within organisations. He says, "In the past the one-way, top-down approach gained strength from the fact that a lot of behaviour is not transparent. IT makes transactions transparent so that behaviour is no longer hidden. It creates fundamental truths where none previously existed." Key works by Argyris

The editions cited here are those held in, and available for loan to members from, the Chartered Management Institute's Management Information Centre. They may not always be the first edition.

Books

Personality and organisation: the conflict between system
and the individual
New York: Harper and Row, 1957

Understanding organisational behaviour
London: Tavistock, 1960

Organisational learning: theory, method and practice,
with Donald Schon, 2nd edition
Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1996

Reasoning, learning and action: individual and organisation
London: Jossey Bass, 1982

Overcoming organisational defences: facilitating
organisational learning
Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1990

On organisational learning
Cambridge: Blackwells, 1994

Knowledge for action
San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1993

Journal Articles

Teaching smart people how to learn
Harvard Business Review, May/June 1991 pp99-109

Education for leading learning
Organizational Dynamics, Winter 1993, pp5-17

Good communication that blocks learning
Harvard Business Review, July/August 1994, pp77-85