Management,productivity and risk—The way ahead

Any world in transition is not short of things to argue about and we are now in transition. How our arguments are settled, whatsoever may be the virtue of the settlements, may be important. It has recently been suggested, for example, that 10 British governments have made over thirty fiscal interventions in the conduct of manufacturing industry since the Second World War, in addition to such general economic encouragements as tinkering with the minimum lending rate and the exchange value of the currency. A few of these ups-and-downs are the result of policies argued about during general election campaigns, to be sure, but even they, as well as all the others, are largely based on the advice of experts of one kind or another. But when we ask ourselves from where these experts seek the foundations of their advice, we discover a professional world no less short of its internal dissensions; when successive governments take sides with the different schools of experts, we may expect to find our transitional world also in violent oscillation. Expert controversy then may become mere intellectual brawling; this can be noticed within the professions and even lead to some soul searching.... As Johnson observed, after his efforts to secure the reprieve of a well-known preacher had failed: “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in fortnight, it concentrates his attention wonderfully”. There is much concentrating of the attention just now. But we need to ask what to concentrate it on; nothing is as bad as the ill-conceived plan efficiently carried out, with its insistence on answering the wrong questions rather than in identifying the right ones. In the regenerative confusion of these iron times, our first need is to recognise the most discriminating questions obscured beneath the distractions of constant change; it is a need no less imperative for a profession like operational research than for the most quick-witted and evasive of party politicians. The doubts thrown on the credentials of our trade by Russell Ackoff's two recent papers are no more than the sentiment of the music hall song: “All dressed up but nowhere to go!” It is, in other words, easy to arm oneself with technique—indeed, with an arsenal of different techniques—but much more difficult to know what to do with it. There is no general theory of search, because if you do not know what you are looking for you do not know how to sample your experience. You must therefore start to guess. Decisions about the future, whether or not taken on the advice of experts, call for intelligent conjecture (if they are to be thought out) or just for simple guesswork (if they need not be). But since experts do not like risking their reputations, they are averse to guessing; they prefer to bank on the certainties of the elapsed past rather than to grope blindfold into the future. This paper suggests that action learning may be one means of concentrating attention upon the questions dying to be asked.