I mentioned before that I think both scientific management vs. human relations and theory vs. practice are artificial distinctions. This is especially true of the supposed divide between theory and practice, which seems to me about as logical as saying that one group of people must only think and write about sex while another is allowed only to have sex but not think or write about it. There’s probably an instinctual pull among most of us toward the latter group, though I imagine being enjoined from anticipation or reflection about the experience would soon diminish its prurient lustre.
Kurt Lewin, one of the leading lights in defining org theory as a field, once remarked that there is nothing so practical as a good theory. In itself, that’s probably a true statement; after all, who wouldn’t want to understand an endeavour–dentistry, say–better before beginning it rather than learning through a series of trials and errors? That said, I have occasionally remarked that there is nothing so theoretical as a good practice; that is, refinement of a theory eventually has diminishing returns in practice. Sometimes you know enough to just get on with it.
This is an important point for a book that seeks to bring org theory down from the ivory tower whilst bringing the daily experience of organisations within sight of that tower. Theory-practice distinctions are the stuff of many academic debates, and I won’t claim for a moment that the discussion itself isn’t important. What I will say is that for the day-to-day experience of how org theory shows up in our lives, it’s probably not the best place for us to start.
For our purposes, think of theory as an idea of how something might work and practice as how it actually works. Before we seem to be throwing up a wall between the two, though, let’s be clear where theory originates: we probably came to an idea of how a thing works by having watched similar such things work in similar contexts; that is, we saw a lot of practice and found a theory to explain what patterns emerged. Similarly, we generally don’t enter into an activity without some idea of how it might work and which approaches might produce the best results; that is, we come to practice with at least some inkling of theory. Ultimately, what we are describing is a cycle: theory guides practice, which informs theory.
The distinctions aren’t always quite so neat in academic debates, but we’re really most interested now in picking up a few rules of thumb that will help us make sense of some of what we see in the world. Our understanding at this point won’t be perfect, but it will do.
We should keep one principle at the ready in this journey: theory has to earn its place at the table. An elegant theory that describes nothing in reality is as useful to us as a process that only works once. The burden of applicability is upon theory, and the more venerable a theory, the more generally it has to apply. In understanding how organisations work in public life, we will be looking at decisions as the fundamental unit of an organisation. Very specifically, we will be looking at five well-established theories about organisational decision-making and how they might help us to understand and predict the behaviour of the organisations around us. These theories were chosen for their broad acceptance and applicability, but they won’t get a free ride on this trip: even the most sacred org theory has to explain what we are experiencing.
To move on from the relatively academic discussion of theory and practice to the real fun of dissecting organisations, let’s pause to note that we will draw no clean line between theory and practice, that the set of theories we will use have generally worked out in practice, and that any theory that doesn’t hold up in practice is open to question. These will be the basics of our discussion and should keep us from descending into meta-theoretical debates about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Often the value of a theory is to be just good enough just long enough to get us to the next better theory. Our goal isn’t perfection–just learning.
