THE MANAGER AS AN ARCHITECT IN THE JOINT CREATION OF CONVERSATIONAL REALITIES

John Shotter

Department of Communication

University of New Hampshire

U.S.A.

“Though he was trained both to develop such models [of his country’s economy] and to evaluate the models others developed, he [Fernando Flores] seldom found time to do this work. Instead, he was constantly talking: he explained this and that, to that and this person, put person A in touch with person B, held press conferences, and so forth... Because he was sensitive to [this] anomaly [i.e., to the fact that his work was not producing any abstract or concrete thing but that he was working nonetheless], it lead him to take a course on the theory of speech acts, and in that course he found the key to the anomaly... He saw that work no longer made sense as the craftsmanship of writing this or that sentence... but that currently his work was becoming a matter of coordinating human activity - opening up conversations about one thing or another to produce a binding promise to perform an act” (Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus, 1997, pp.45-46).

“... the difficulty - I might say - is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it... This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.314).

“But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is prototype of a way of thinking not the result of thought” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.541).

“What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities” (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.26).

Fernando Flores was the Minister of Finance in the ill-fated Allende government in Chile. His experience reported in the quotation above is relevant to this article in two ways: 1) Rather than responding to the anomalous situation in which he found himself as a problem to be solved (thus to be able to return to his economic modeling), he, so to speak, dwelt on it, and developed from it a new way of going on. 2) The new way of working he developed was, to become an improvisational, conversational architect. In conversations with those working around him, he helped them to fashion the beginnings of a dynamic ‘relational-landscape’ within which all concerned could gain a sense of the parts they could play in relation to each other in developing the structure of that ‘landscape’ further.

              What I want to do in this short article is first, to say something about what in fact it is like to live inside a living human reality (rather than the inert, objective, external world we are used to talking of when acting as a natural scientist). I then want to outline two ways in which we might respond to an anomalous experience, to an experienced difficulty, or to an experience of strangeness or newness: should we respond to it as a problem to be solved within the terms of a reality already known to us, or, should we treat it as possibly offering us the opportunity to begin to enter into a new reality of a character as yet radically unknown to us? Finally, I will try to say something about what all this might have to do with managers functioning as improvisational ‘architects’ in the joint creation of conversational realities.

Life inside living human realities

When we exert an influence on people with our words, we often say that our words have an ‘impact’ on them. We speak as if our words can force people to move as one billiard ball forces another to move by hitting on it. Such talk easily misleads us into thinking, that to get people to do the right thing, we only have to give them the right verbal instructions, and the appropriate right actions will follow, automatically. But this is not how our words work.

              Much of our talk is constitutive or formative of a particular kind of reality. We say something as simple as: “It was a dark and stormy night,” and we immediately know that in the situation we talk of, the sun is not shining (nor, probably, is the moon), that the wind is blowing, that few people are venturing out, it will be difficult to make one’s voice heard, and so on, and so on. In other words, from just these few words, one already begins to get a shaped and vectored sense of a scene in which, not only are certain things in fact happening, but so also can only certain things happen next (if, that is, the situation is not to seem somewhat bizarre to us); there are only a limited number of directions in which it can be ‘developed’, so to speak. “It was a dark and stormy night, and the wind whistled in the leaves,” is OK, while: “It was a dark and stormy night, and the wind whispered in the leaves,” is somehow all wrong. As Wittgenstein (1953) would say, the ‘scene’ has a certain logical grammar to it.

              The reality we began to create above was, of course, a fictitious reality. But, as soon as we walk into a room along with another person, and hear them say something like: “God, what a mess,” the same formative power of words - to create a shaped and vectored sense of a situation - is at work. We feel their words at work upon us ‘inviting’ us or ‘calling upon’ us to act in a certain way... in what way? Perhaps, to condemning the person whose room it is; or perhaps, to join in with them in clearing a space in which to work; or perhaps, to go on with them in some other way. Whatever. Given their words, we sense ourselves as facing a certain limited opening calling us to action, an opening which we can make more precise between us as we go on to react and respond to them, and they to us.

              This, I think, is how we exert our influence over another’s actions with our words: In our talk entwined activities with others, we create realities - what elsewhere I have called “conversational realities” (Shotter, 1993a) - from within which we act and have our being. And, inside such conversational or dialogical realities, besides ourselves (as I’s) and others (as you’s), it is as if a third living agency (an ‘it’) is also present: the situation itself makes ‘its’ demands upon us, and upon them. ‘It’ faces all those participating in it with ‘its’ own requirements, and they act as ‘it’ demands. Thus, just as in driving their cars, people sense some parts of their surroundings as offering them ‘openings’ or ‘invitations’ to drive as they please while other part require them to ‘keep their distance’ or their ‘avoidance,’ so in many of the rest of our daily activities. In the living human realities we create between us - and to which we give a further more specific shape by our words - we mostly act by spontaneously responding to the moment-by-moment changing sense of the ‘callings’ and ‘prohibitions’ to act our immediate surroundings offer us. Thus, it is by their words that a few can give shape to the surroundings of many, and thus influence their behavior.

              In living like this, always inside unceasing, ongoing, spontaneous, responsive, living relations to our surroundings, what matters to us are not mechanically repeatable, isolated events, but unique events of a relationally-responsive kind, events in which we are responsive in a unique way to unique changes in our surroundings. Bakhtin (1993) calls such events, which are so to speak always happening for yet another first-time, “once-occurrent events of Being.” Such once-occurrent events of Being ‘call’ responses from us to which we are ‘answerable’; they are events which, in the routine flow of activity in which we are embedded, make a difference which moves or affects us (they are differences which makes a difference - as Gregory Bateson once put it). What is special about such events is that within them, we never confront objects pure and simple, we only know of them from within a living relation with them. Thus, in facing a cubic box, say, if as we moved around it, the three sides currently visible stayed visible to us, while the sides currently hidden from us stayed hidden, we would find ourselves suddenly disoriented - perceptually, we spontaneously expect precise changes in the aspects presented to us by objects as our relations to them change. As Bakhtin (1993) puts it: “This world-as-event is not just a world of being, of that which is given; no object, no relation, is given here as something simply given, as something totally on hand, but is always given in conjunction with another given that is connected with those objects and relations, namely, that which is yet-to-be-achieved or determined... An object that is absolutely indifferent, totally finished, cannot be something that one experiences actually. When I experience an object actually, I thereby carry out something in relation to it; the object enters into relation with that which is to-be-achieved, grows in it - within my relationship to that object. Pure givenness cannot be experienced actually” (p.32).

              In other words, the living world of everyday life in practice, the world in which we act in relation to the others and othernesses around us, is very different from that of the neutral, objective, dead, mechanical world of the natural sciences. It is a world of values as well as a world of facts: we orient toward it in terms of the values of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects, in terms of both its already-achieved nature and in terms of the ‘calls’ it exerts upon us to ‘go on’ acting within in it in certain ways rather than others. How should we orient ourselves in such a world on encountering a new or strange situation in which we are uncertain as to what the ‘calls’ are which it exerts upon us, how might we make the value of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects more clear to us?

On encountering newness or strangeness:

two kinds of responses to an ‘experienced difficulty’

As Wittgenstein (1981) notes above, there is a tendency to treat circumstances we find bewildering or disorienting, ones which are strange and new to us, as posing a problem for us. Thus we often respond to such events by seeking a solution to them, by trying to explain them. There is, however, an altogether different way of responding: we can ‘enter into’ a dialogically-structured relationship to them, and, as we ‘dwell on, with, or within’ them for a while, gradually gain an orientation toward them as their ‘inner nature’ becomes familiar to us - much, say, as we get to know our ‘way around’ inside a city which is at first unfamiliar to us by exploring its highways and byways according to the different projects we try to pursue within it. In becoming familiar with something in our surroundings in this way, we come to know not just their inert, objective nature, but to know them in terms of a whole realm of possible responsive, living relations that we might have to them. We orient toward them in terms of their yet-to-be-achieved values, the (grammatical) ‘calls’ they might exert on us to ‘go on’ with them in one way rather than another. The development of a sensitivity to such calls is not a part of the problem-solving process. Below I set out some notes relevant to these two stances, these two very different ways of responsively relating ourselves to our surrounding circumstances:

1. PROBLEM-SOLVING: THE CONTINUAL MONOLOGICAL REDISCOVERY OF SAMENESS

A sequence of steps:

‒            treat the newness or strangeness as a problem to be solved

‒            analyze it into already known elements

‒            find a pattern or order amongst them

‒            hypothesize an agency responsible for the order (call it, say, SYNERGY or some other such ‘stuff’)

‒            find further evidence for it

‒            enshrine it in a theory or theoretical system

‒            theories, way of thinking, become central in giving shape to our actions

‒            manipulate the strangeness (now known in terms of the theory) to produce an advantageous outcome

‒            call this ‘the solution’ to the problem

‒            turn ‘to apply’ the theory elsewhere

Properties of the process:

‒            it is a search for regularities

‒            it establishes a single order of connectedness among certain perceived aspects of one’s circumstances

‒            occasionally, ‘the solution’ can occur to one ‘in a flash of insight’

‒            it works wholly within the realm of the already known to elaborate it internally

Effects on the self of the investigator:

‒            the SELF remains unchanged in the process

‒            we remain outside the other or otherness, we are ‘set over against’ it

‒            we are not engaged or involved with it

‒            we acquire extra knowledge about it in the form of facts or information

‒            we gain mastery over it

2. ENTERING INTO A DIALOGICAL RELATIONSHIP WITH AN OTHER: BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS AND BEGINNINGS, BUT NO ENDINGS

A sequence of steps:

‒            treat the other or otherness as still radically unknown to us

‒            ‘enter into’ dialogically-structured relations with it, become involved or engaged with it

‒            we must ‘open’ ourselves to being spontaneously ‘moved by it

‒            relate to it responsively and responsibly - this is crucial: we always know when a person is ‘with’ us or not, whether at a party they are responsively ‘following’ us, or whether they are looking over our shoulder to find others they want to be with

‒            this sense of contiguity, of contingency, of the other’s responses to us being contingent on our own, is very basic - present even in new-born children

‒            to ‘enter into’ dialogically-structured relations with another requires ‘tact’, ‘courtesy’

‒            we must not only ‘follow’ the other, but also provide opportunities for them to ‘follow’ us

‒            the other ‘calls on’ us - comes both to be ‘with’ us, as well as to ‘call out’ responses from us

‒            the other can affect us, move us - their meaning for us in the responsive movements they ‘call out’ from us

‒            we are ‘answerable (partially) to’ their calls as they are (partially) to ours - we do not reply to every aspect of their influence upon us

‒            an ‘it’ appears between us: produced neither solely by ‘me’ or by ‘you’

‒            the ‘it’ is our it: there is poiesis at work between us - the sensed creation of form

‒            the form has a shaped and vectored sense to it

‒            central to giving shape to our actions is our sensitivity or sensibility to the particular details of the other’s responsive activities

‒            as we ‘dwell on, with, or within’ the other, there is a gradually growth of familiarity with its ‘inner shape’

‒            we have a sense of the value of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects - the prospects it offers us for ‘going on’ with it

‒            we gain orientation, a sense of ‘at homeness’, we come to find our ‘footing’, to know our ‘way about’ in relation to it

Properties of the process:

‒            “once-occurrent events of Being” are crucial - single, unique events that make a difference: we talk in terms of what we are ‘struck by’

‒            we establish multiple, complexly ordered sense of connectedness among the perceived aspects of the other or otherness: a synopsis of trivialities

‒            our familiarity with it grows only gradually and is never finished

‒            it works at the boundaries between the radically unknown and the realm of the known to expand its boundaries

Effects on the self of the investigator:

‒            the SELF is changed in such encounters

‒            we become involved with, immersed in, the ‘inner life’ of the other or otherness

‒            everything we do is partly shaped by the other in being a response to what it might do

‒            at first wholly ‘bewitched’ by its ‘voice’, as our familiarity with it grows, its voice becomes one voice among the many other voices with us

‒            rather than knowledge of its nature, we gain orientation in relation to it, i.e., we grasp how to ‘go on’ with it

‒            we never gain mastery over it - others can always surprise us, no matter how familiar to us they have become

Managers and managing: the joint creation of conversational realities

In the first, problem-solving stance, theories play a crucial part. They function, however, by providing tools for thought, perception, and action of only a one-way, monological, manipulative kind. Indeed, because a theory provides us with only an uninvolved, third-person, external observer, systematic version of events, it orients us toward influencing those events, only ‘from the outside’. Such a way of acting inevitably cuts us off from acting in a two-way, dialogically-responsive fashion, thus to gain a relationally-responsive knowledge of the others and othernesses around us. The kind of encounters in which we can gradually acquire of a shaped and vectored sense of the dynamic ‘relational-landscape’, within which all in a company can play their part, is denied us. While the picture we may have of our company in approaching it theoretically - what we might call our referential-representational knowledge of it - may be perfectly accurate, and enable us as individuals to act effectively, such a picture it does not give us a sense of the values of its yet-to-be-achieved aspects, a sense of the ‘calls’ it exerts on those within it to act in certain ways rather than others. We cannot understand how to act in ways which will help all involved to coordinate their activities with each other.

              Clearly, the good manager makes use of both the stances outlined above, but the second, dialogically-involved stance would seem to be crucial. With a shaped and vectored sense of ‘where everyone and everything stands’ in the company, acquired through many conversational encounters with many participants in many different locations throughout the company, and with those with whom the company does business, the good manager can gain a shaped and vectored sense of the ‘landscape’ within which he or she must act. Indeed, we can go further. While occasionally, the provision of a good theory suggestive of an effective action can be important, another kind of imaginative activity altogether can be important also: the ability to provide an intelligible and publicly accessible formulation of what has become a chaotic welter of impressions for others in the organization, is crucial to helping everyone act in an unconfused way in relation to the others in the organization. But to do this, the manager needs a good command of metaphor, an ability to create ‘striking’ poetic images, images which will help give others a sense of the ‘grammar’ of the landscape they all occupy. For, besides their current placement on it, all need to share a sense of the next places to go if they are to act in ways coordinated with each other.

              Thus, just as in my ‘dark and stormy night’-example above, the good manager must, like a good dramatist or novelist, create in those around them the scenic sense of a dynamic landscape in which events of a certain kind can be expected to happen: they must be able to do this in such a way that people gain a) a sense of its grammar (i.e., of the next possible actions it invites or calls out); b) a sense of the network or ‘moral positions’ or ‘commitments’ (understood in terms of the rights and duties of the ‘players’ on that landscape); and c) be able to argue persuasively and authoritatively for this ‘landscape’ amongst those who must work within it. Elsewhere (Shotter, 1993b), I have suggested that the good manager be thought of as a “practical author,” i.e., as the author not of a text but of a certain kind of activity or practice.

              While problem-solving requires the creation of an effective theory, which in turn requires a sensitivity to repetitions and regularities, the dialogically-oriented manager requires a sensitivity of a very different kind: a sensitivity to fleeting, first-time events, events in which people are responsive to their surroundings in new kinds of ways previously unnoticed. “The origin and primitive form of the language-game is a reaction,” says Wittgenstein (1980b), “only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’” (p.31). The beginning a whole new way forward is to be found in the noticing of new reactions, new ways of responding to one’s circumstances - where, as noted in one of the epigraph quotes from Wittgenstein (1981), rather than as a result of thought, such a new way of acting can be the prototype for a new way of thinking. Indeed, this is precisely the power of the dialogical: in being free to encounter others who can spontaneously ‘call out’ unique, first-time, living responses from them that they could never call out from themselves, people can between them create new ways forward that are inaccessible to theoretical thought (which works, as we have seen, in terms of analyzing a ‘problem-situation’ into already well-known elements).

Conclusions

In this short and very sketchy article, I have not been able to do more than to make some suggestive comments about the power of a dialogical approach to issues in management studies. I have suggested that if we are to understand the practical, joint creation of shared, conversational realities, within which a whole crowd of people can find the orientation they require to coordinate their activities in an unconfused way, then, more than just the representational function of language, we must understand its formative or constitutive function. We need to understand people’s ability, in otherwise vague or only partially specified situations (arising as a result of their spontaneous, living responsiveness to each other), to ‘give’ or to ‘lend’ to such situations a more determinate structure by their use of words. We need to grasp how in doing this, they rely upon a shaped and vectored sense, a feeling for, not only how things are currently placed in relation to each other, but for the only vaguely specified ‘tendencies toward change’ the situation ‘allows’ or ‘invites’. We need a much better understanding of what our lives are like ‘inside’ the living realities existing between us. Talking of these realities in ‘objective’ terms makes the ‘tendencies toward change’ they offer us, invisible. To refer to systematic theory when facing a ‘crisis’ in human affairs, is to treat it as like something already well-known to us, and thus to cut our selves off from the possibly new ways of acting it can teach us.

              The aim of these notes, then, is not to suggest a new theory that we might put into practice, but to suggest a new, dialogically-structured, linguistic practice, that we might put into our already existing practices. The new practice would function within the context of the old. Simply by the utterance of certain crucial words at certain crucial moments in the routine flow of current practice - the equivalent of saying: ‘Hey, wait a moment, lets look more closely at what’s happening here’ - we can move those involved in it to notice aspects of it previously unnoticed. We can then go on from such new but fleeting beginnings to fashion utterly new ways of acting which do not ‘solve the problems’ of the old ways, but leave them behind. Like Fernando Flores’ sensitivity to what he called an ‘anomaly’, the good manager must continually notice hundreds of ‘small things’. Rather than the implementing of a few very basic principles and insisting that everyone derive their actions from them (as if deriving theorems), the good manager (like a good Wittgensteinian philosopher) must continually produce “a synopsis of trivialities.” From all the small details, he or she must fashion the sense of a scene toward which everyone concerned can orient, and within which they can know their ‘way about’. It is through their own invention - with the ‘architectural’ help of a co-participant/manager - that the participants of an organization can conversationally fashion for themselves a shared, dynamic, relational-landscape for action, and in so doing, elaborate themselves into a “mutually enabling community,” in which, instead of obstacles to each others projects, can come to see each other as a resource.

References:

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Shotter, J. (1993a) Conversational Realities: Constructing Life through Language. London: Sage.

Shotter, J. (1993b) The manager as practical author. Ibid.

Spinosa, C., Flores, F., and Dreyfus, H.L. (1997) Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980a) Wittgenstein's Lectures: Cambridge, 1930-32 Ed. Desmond Lee. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980b) Culture and Value, introduction by G. Von Wright, and translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.), G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.