Leading through restructuring

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tions.

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Individual Versus Organizational Decision Making An important issue that enters many discussions of decision making is being raised here: the question of individual versus organizational decision making. On the one hand, there is the widely held expectation that persons in administrative positions will personally “be decisive.” What that means is far from clear, but it is often taken to mean making decisions swiftly, without delay or temporizing and, clearly, with minimum ambiguity. It also often implies that the individual tends to make decisions that conform to certain accepted qualitative standards: For example, decisions are well informed and ethically acceptable. Thus, discussions of administrative decision making often focus on the personal behaviors of individuals who are construed to be “decision makers.”

On the other hand, because administration is defined as working with and through other people to achieve organizational goals, it is important to consider the mechanisms by which the organization (and not merely the individual) deals with decision making. In this perspective, the issue begins to turn on the ways in which the organization “acts” (or “behaves”) in the process of making and implementing organizational decisions, rather than on the idiosyncratic behavior of the person in administrative office. For many of the clients of organizations (students and parents, for example), the individual roles of administrators in decision-making processes are obscure and perhaps irrelevant, whereas the “behavior” of the organization

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is most relevant. In this view, the vital decision-making functions are organizational—although administrators may be seen as implicated.

This point was illustrated in one university when the heating system was constantly malfunctioning, classrooms were chronically unkempt, and student seating was typically in disrepair. Students were astounded when, in the spring, an ambitious project was undertaken to beautify the campus by planting flowers and shrubs and setting sculptures among the trees. This action, of course, prompted outcries from students, such as the following: “What is wrong with this university? It obviously doesn’t care what happens in the classrooms. All that matters is what visitors see on the outside!” The implication was that, regardless of the persons who might be involved in the process, somehow the decision-making processes of the university, as an organization, had gone awry.

The discussion of decision making in this chapter recognizes that the personal decision-making style of the administrator is important insofar as it gives rise to the ways in which the organization, as an entity, goes about the unending processes of identifying problems, conceptualizing them, and finding ways of dealing with them. The individual decision making of persons in administrative office takes on significance as organizational behavior chiefly because of its inevitable impact on the behavior of others and on the decision-making processes of the organization itself.

This emphasis on the responsibility of the administrator for the nature and quality of the decision-making processes used in an organization is compatible with the contemporary view that the administrator is a key actor in the development of the culture of the organization. That is, decision- making practices are not so much the result of circumstances inherent in a given organization (the kind of place a school is) as they are the choices of those in authority (namely, administrators) about how decisions ought to be made. These choices are closely tied to assumptions held by

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administrators on issues that are now familiar to the reader, such as the following:

What motivates people at work The relative values of collaboration versus direction in the exercise of leadership in the workplace The desirability of a full flow of information up, down, and across the organization The best ways of maintaining organizational control and discipline The value of involving people throughout all levels of the organization in decision making

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Rationality In Decision Making Even an elementary understanding of contemporary approaches to decision making in organizations requires brief consideration of some of the ways in which we have learned to think about the issue. Those who live in the Western world tend to use and accept logic, rationality, and science when thinking about concepts such as decision making. This propensity reflects generally held assumptions in our culture about the ways in which we ought to go about making decisions. These assumptions have formed the core of our thinking about such matters.

During the three centuries since the Reformation, the history of Western thought and culture has been dominated by the rise of science, technology, and industry. Scientific thought, with its strong emphasis on logical rationality, has become almost ingrained in the institutions of our culture. Thus, in seeking explanations of our experiences, we are accustomed to respect the rationality of logical positivism. In short, we tend to see the solution to all sorts of problems as requiring the application of engineering approaches. This penchant was reflected in Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic organization. It was epitomized by the work of Frederick Taylor, who adapted the principles and methods of science to a form of “human engineering” in the workplace and sought to create a science of management that could be applied to everyday problems in the organization. Taylor called it scientific management and, as Donald Schön pointed out, “Taylor saw the . . . manager as a designer of work, a controller and monitor of performance . . . [seeking through these roles] to yield optimally efficient production” (Schön, 1983, p. 237).

The concept of management as a science grew steadily during the first half of the twentieth century, but World War II stimulated its development

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enormously. This growth was due to three factors associated with the war:

The great emphasis on the roles of science and technology in winning the war The development of operations research and systems theory (These theories involved the application of the rational logic of mathematics modeling to the solution of complex problems ranging from how to reduce the loss of shipping to submarine attack to how to increase the effectiveness of aerial bombing.) The unprecedented scale of organizing that was required to manage the global dimensions of the conflict

The post-World War II era was one of great optimism and energy, when industry and business moved rapidly to exploit the markets that abounded as a result of the years of wartime shortages everywhere. Confidence in science and technology boomed, and the rational, logical methods associated with science soared in acceptance and prestige. It was common to refer to the wartime Manhattan Project as a model for conceptualizing and solving problems: “After all, if we could build an atomic bomb we ought to be able to solve this problem.” Government expenditures for research surged to new heights on the “basis of the proposition that the production of new scientific knowledge could be used to create wealth, achieve national goals, improve human life, and solve social problems” (Schön, 1983, p. 39).

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I. The United States reacted with another spasm of emphasis on the logic of applying mathematics and science to the solution of problems. Under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, the United States began a large-scale effort to develop new space technology. Before long, the U.S. educational infrastructure found itself involved in meeting the demands of the space program for scientists and mathematicians, as well as managers trained to apply the

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concepts of those disciplines to complex organizational challenges. The new rallying cry became, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we solve this problem?” The implication was that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had—since its inception under the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower—developed and demonstrated the effectiveness of a model for complex decision making that was applicable to all sorts of problems, social as well as technological.

During the post-World War II era, another similar model—widely admired and emulated—was proffered by medicine. It emphasized clinical- experimental research as the basis of knowledge:

The medical research center, with its medical school and its teaching hospital, became the institutional model to which other professions aspired. Here was a solid base of fundamental science, and a profession which had geared itself to implement the ever-changing products of research. Other professions, hoping to achieve some of medicine’s effectiveness and prestige, sought to emulate its linkage of research and teaching institutions, its hierarchy of research and clinical roles, and its system for connecting basic and applied research to practice. The prestige and apparent success of the medical and engineering models exerted great attraction for the social sciences. In such fields as education . . . the very language . . . rich in references to measurement, controlled experiment, applied science, laboratories and clinics, was striking in its reverence for those models. (Schön, 1983, p. 39)

This is precisely the view and the hope that is so very much in evidence among the supporters of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act as it was created and as it began to unfold in practice.

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Rational Decision-Making Models

It is not surprising that students of decision making tried to develop and assist administrators to master, a science of making better-quality decisions through the analysis of decision-making processes. An early and major contributor in this effort was Herbert Simon. Simon’s analysis identified three major phases in the process of making decisions (Simon, 1960):

First, there is intelligence activity. In view of the influence of World War II on postwar thought, Simon used the term intelligence much as military people do: the search of the environment that reveals circumstances that call for a decision. The second phase is design activity: the processes by which alternative courses of action are envisioned, developed, and analyzed. The third phase in Simon’s analysis is choice activity—the process of actually selecting a course of action from among the options under consideration.

Simon’s great stature as a scholar and his popularity as a consultant to numerous prestigious corporations ensured wide acceptance of his pioneering approach to decision making, which now stands as classic work. Many who were to follow would create a substantial body of literature devoted to efforts to improve his conceptualization, usually by elaborating the number of steps to be found in the process. Thus, one finds numerous models proffered in the extensive literature on decision making. Two basic assumptions incorporated in almost all of them are based on Simon’s work: the assumption that decision making is an orderly, rational process that possesses an inherent logic; and the assumption that the steps in the process follow one another in an orderly, logical, sequential flow (which some refer to as linear logic). Such models, and the

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assumptions on which they are based, became important in the training of administrators and have been widely applied in planned, systematic ways to real-world organizations in the hope of improving their performance.

Peter F. Drucker, a leading organizational scholar whose thinking was very influential in corporate circles from the 1960s to the 1980s, listed the following steps in a rational decision making process (Drucker, 1974):

1. Define the problem. 2. Analyze the problem. 3. Develop alternative solutions. 4. Decide on the best solution. 5. Convert decisions into effective actions.

Such a formulation was seen as helping the administrator to organize decision making and make it more systematic, an alternative to intuitive, perhaps haphazard, knee-jerk responses to the flow of events in the busy environment of organizational life. Drucker’s model, much elaborated and detailed, was widely applied in corporate and governmental organizations throughout the United States, and it was accepted by many as the essential logic of administrative thought.

Nevertheless, even as the number of models proliferated and efforts to install them in organizations intensified, a widespread disparity between the theoretic notions of the scholars and actual practices of administrators was also apparent. It was noted, for example, that decision making usually does not terminate with either a decision or the action to implement a decision. In the real world, decision making is usually an iterative, ongoing process whereby the results of one decision provide new information on which to base yet other decisions. Thus, feedback loops were added to some process models to ensure that the outcomes of decisions would be considered when future decisions were pondered.

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Eventually, recognition of this cyclic nature of decision-making processes caused some students of the subject to abandon conventional lists of steps and linear flowcharts in favor of circular depictions. Both the feedback loop concept and the circular concept of decision-making processes illustrate two additional assumptions commonly found in the literature on decision making:

1. Decision making is an iterative, cyclical process that proceeds over time to provide successive approximations of optimal action;

2. Reaching optimal decisions is the central goal of decision making.

It has long been obvious, however, that people in an organization do not tend to search endlessly and relentlessly for the best way of achieving goals. They engage in decision-making procedures to seek alternative ways of doing things only when the organization’s performance seems to be falling below some acceptable level. This “acceptable level” of performance is usually not the highest level of performance possible; rather, it is one that is good enough to fit the organization’s perception of reality and values. Once those in the organization sense the need to seek some alternative way of doing things, they tend to seek a course of action that is perceived as sufficient to alleviate the need for action. That is, they tend to make a decision that will relieve the proximate problem but are unlikely to seize the moment as an occasion for moving to some optimal level of performance. This widespread tendency in organizations is called satisficing (March & Simon, 1958).

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Limits On Rationality In Decision Making As we have explained, much of the scholarly literature on decision making —both organizational and individual—represents the efforts of academicians to uncover and describe the logic assumed by them to be inherent in decision-making processes. Based on these efforts, a number of models of decision-making processes have been developed. These models, it has often been assumed, can be useful in facilitating the learning of this logic by administrators so that logic may be applied in their work. Many people—including practicing educational administrators, legislators, and school board members trained at a time when these assumptions were essentially unchallenged—persist in the belief that more rigorous application of these efforts to practice is essential to improving organizational performance. Recall our discussion in the previous chapter about discrete and emergent problems. Although a simple, rational decision-making model may be applied to a discrete problem by one individual having all the needed information, emergent problems are the domain of more complex decision-making processes.

Emergent problems, with their ambiguity and uncertainty are the dominant issues of the real world of the educational administrator. Organizations, their goals, their technologies, and their environments have become so complex that it is difficult to connect causes with effects, actions with outcomes. For example, the volatile nature of the economic, social, and political environments of the educational organization makes it difficult to predict the course of future events with any certitude. This condition is not limited to educational organizations by any means; it is of pressing importance in all forms of organizational life. This volatility has caused

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researchers to reexamine organizational life more carefully in recent years and, in the process, to question old assumptions concerning the logic and rationality of decision making.

The Gap Between Theory and Practice

Scholars commonly seek to improve the performance of administrators by instructing them in the application of rational, logical models of decision making to their work. Still one of the most practical decision-making theories, Victor Vroom and Philip Yetton’s (1973) contingency model points out with remarkable clarity that the central issue in contemporary leadership is participation in the process of making decisions. The issue is often confused by value-laden arguments over the relative merits of a hard- nosed, directive administrative style as contrasted with a more consultative style. Even the eminent Peter Drucker (1974) lapsed occasionally into contrasting “democratic management,” “participatory democracy,” and “permissiveness” with the supposed successes of autocratic, tyrannical management that makes decisions by fiat. Clearly, the complexities of modern organizations require decision-making processes that are carefully selected with an eye to the probability of effectiveness in view of the contingencies in the situation. There may be situations in which an autocratic style is most effective and other situations that call for highly participatory methods for greatest effectiveness. As Vroom and Yetton see it, the problem for the leader is to analyze the contingencies in each situation and then behave in the most effective manner.

Vroom and Yetton (1973) specified how leaders ought to behave in order to be effective in view of specific contingencies. The Vroom-Yetton model is not prescriptive, but it can be described as a normative model because it tries to tie appropriate leader behavior to specific contingencies.

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Vroom and Yetton’s Five Leadership Styles Vroom and Yetton have developed a taxonomy of five leadership styles, as follows:

Autocratic Process (Types AI and AII)

Style I: AI. Leader (manager, administrator) makes the decision using whatever information is available.

Style II: AII. Leader secures necessary information from members of the group, then makes the decision. In obtaining the information, the leader may or may not tell followers what the problem is.

Consultative Process (Types CI and CII)

Style III: CI. Leader shares the problem with relevant members of the group on a one-to-one basis, getting their ideas and suggestions individually without bringing them together as a group; then the leader makes the decision.

Style IV: CII. Leader shares the problem with members as a group at a meeting, then decides.

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Group Process (Type GI)

Style V: GI. Leader, acting as chairperson at a meeting of the group, shares the problem with the group and facilitates efforts of the group to reach consensus on a group decision. Leader may give information and express opinion but does not try to “sell” a particular decision or manipulate the group through covert means.

Notice that Vroom and Yetton have described these leadership styles in behavioral terms (for example, “leader decides” or “leader shares the problem with the group”) rather than in general terms (for example, “directive style” or “participative style”). They do not imply that one style is more highly valued than others or that an issue must be addressed in terms of which behavior works in the specific situation.

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Seven Situation Issues

In the Vroom and Yetton model, analysis of the situation begins with yes or no answers to the following questions:

A. Does the problem possess a quality requirement? One quality might be time: Is this a decision that must be made now, with no time to consult others? Other quality factors might be the desirability of stimulating team development or keeping people informed through participation.

B. Does the leader have sufficient information to make a good decision? C. Is the problem structured? D. Is it necessary for others to accept the decision in order for it to be

implemented? E. If the leader makes the decision alone, how certain is it that others

will accept it? F. Do others share the organizational goals that will be attained by

solving this problem? G. Are the preferred solutions to the problem likely to create conflict

among others in the group?

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Decision-Process Flowchart

The leader can quickly diagnose the situation’s contingencies by answering yes or no to each of the seven questions listed above, as they are arrayed on the decision-process flowchart (see Figure 10.1 ). As the flowchart shows, it is possible to identify 14 types of problems in this way, and the preferred way of dealing with each becomes evident as one follows the chart from left to right.

For example, given a problem, the first question is the following: Does the problem possess a quality requirement? In effect the question is as follows: Is one decision preferable to or more rational than another? If not, then questions B and C are irrelevant, and one follows the flowchart to question D: Is acceptance of the decision by others important to implementing it? If the answer to this question is no, then the leader may utilize type AI (solution style “I” in the chart) which is to make the decision alone, using information available. If acceptance by others is important, however, then question E must be asked: If I make the decision, am I certain others will accept it? If yes, the leader makes it alone (type AI), but if not, then the group makes the decision together (type GI or solution style “V” in the chart). The flowchart clearly suggests there is a logical basis for utilizing various leadership styles for maximum effectiveness under specific describable circumstances.

Early research conducted in a variety of organizations made it clear that practicing managers and administrators rarely used such models in their work. Henry Mintzberg, Duru Raisinghani, and Andre Theoret reported that normative decision-making models have no influence on the behavior of middle- and upper-level corporate managers (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Theoret, 1976). James G. March (1981) found that decision makers, in fact, tended to make sense of problems not by applying logical models to

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them but by assessing what kinds of options are actually available to be used in solving them. Paul C. Nutt (1984), after examining 78 different organizations, concluded the following:

Nothing remotely resembling the normative methods described in the literature was carried out. Not even hybrid variations were observed. … The sequence of problem definition, alternative generation, refinement, and selection, called for by nearly every theorist seems rooted in rational arguments, not behavior. Executives do not use this process. (p. 446)

A national survey of senior high school principals indicated a similar situation among that group of administrators (National Association of Secondary School Principals, 1978).

Thus, we have an obvious gap between theory and practice. What does this gap mean? It could suggest that the administrators and managers whose behavior was studied by the researchers were ill-trained and, therefore, unable to use the decision-making models available to them. An

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FIGURE 10.1 Vroom-Yetton normative leadership model. Source: From Luthans, F. (1977). Organizational behavior (2nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, p. 458. Reproduced

with permission of McGraw-Hill.

I. You solve the problem or make the decision yourself, using information available to you at the time. II. You obtain the necessary

information from your subordinate(s), then decide on the solution to the problem yourself. You may or may not tell your subordinates

what the problem is when you are getting the information from them. The role played by your subordinates in making the decision is

clearly one of providing the necessary information to you, rather than generating or evaluating alternative solutions. III. You share the

problem with relevant subordinates individually, getting their ideas and suggestions without bringing them together as a group. Then

you make the decision that may or may not reflect your subordinates’ influence. IV. You share the problem with your subordinates as

a group, collectively obtaining their ideas and suggestions. Then you make the decision that may or may not reflect your subordinates’

influence. V. You share a problem with your subordinates as a group. Together, you generate and evaluate alternatives and attempt to

reach agreement (consensus) on a solution. Your role is much like that of a chairperson. You do not try to influence the group to

adopt “your” solution, and you are willing to accept and implement any solution that has the support of the entire group.

equally plausible explanation is that the decision-making models espoused in the scholarly literature arise from assumptions about the nature of administrative work that do not reflect the conditions that the administrator on the job actually encounters. This disconnect leads us to consider research that describes the behavior of managers and administrators as it actually occurs on the job.

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The Nature of Managerial and Administrative Work Henry Mintzberg (1973) reported research that presented detailed descriptions of the activities of the chief executives of five organizations as they were observed in their daily work. The executives whose behaviors were thus recorded were (a) the manager of a consulting firm, (b) the president of an industrial company, (c) the manager of a hospital, (d) a manager of a consumer goods concern, and (e) the superintendent of a suburban school district. This research strikingly reveals, first, that the executive’s work is very diverse and requires a broad range of skills and, second, the pressure that appears to be inherent in the work. More specifically, Mintzberg developed five propositions from his observations:

1. Administrators and managers do a great deal of work, and they do it at an unrelenting pace. Each day, they attend a number of previously arranged meetings as well as a number of unplanned conferences and interactions, deal with a substantial volume of mail and paperwork, and handle numerous phone calls. There are seldom any real breaks in the work.

2. In doing their work, administrators characteristically devote a brief period to each of a large number of decisions, and these tend to center on specific, well-defined issues and problems. Important and trivial activities arise in juxtaposition to one another in an unplanned, random way, requiring quick mental shifts from topic to topic. There are many brief contacts with people interspersed with planned meetings of prolonged duration and other activities (such as desk work, telephone calls, unscheduled meetings, and tours) worked into the daily schedule.

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3. Administrators prefer to deal with active problems that are well- defined and nonroutine. Routine information (such as recurring reports) is given low priority, whereas “fresh” information (even if of uncertain quality) is given high priority.

4. Verbal communication is much preferred. (In Mintzberg’s original study, it accounted for over three-fourths of the executives’ time and two-thirds of their activities.)

5. Managers maintain working relationships with three principal groups: superiors, subordinates, and outsiders.

This research suggests a great deal about the ways in which administrators make decisions, particularly about why few seem to use formal decision- making models in their work. The rhythm of the administrator’s workday constitutes a driving force that evokes behavior in ways that are not likely to enter the mind of the contemplative scholar pondering the logic he or she seeks to find in the situation. As Mintzberg (1973) noted:

The work of managing an organization may be described as taxing. The quantity of work to be done, or that the manager chooses to do, during the day is substantial and the pace is unrelenting. After hours, the chief executive (and probably many other managers as well) appears to be able to escape neither from an environment that recognizes the power and status of his position nor from his [sic] own mind, which has been well trained to search continually for new information. (p. 30)

In conducting his observations of the administrators he studied, Mintzberg developed a technique that required the frequent recording of code symbols that described behaviors being observed during numerous short timeframes during the day. Eventually, these coded entries were reduced and arrayed statistically to produce a detailed, quantified description of the observable behaviors that occurred over the total period of time during which observations were carried out.

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A number of studies using the Mintzberg technique have examined the on- the-job behavior of educational administrators such as superintendents of schools and school principals (Morris, Crowson, Hurwitz, & Porter-Gehrie, 1981, 1984; Pitner, 1978). This research has confirmed that Mintzberg’s propositions apply to the work of school administrators who work long hours at an unrelenting pace. Their work is characterized by many brief interactions, mostly verbal. Meetings, phone calls, and paperwork account for almost every minute from the moment they enter the office in the morning until they leave in the afternoon or evening.

Mintzberg’s use of the term unrelenting pace needs a little clarification here. One could conjure up the image of an assembly line worker being driven at his or her task by the inexorable rush of work coming down the line, never stopping, never varying, which is not what Mintzberg appeared to mean in describing the work of managers. In the manager’s work situation, time becomes an important resource. Unlike the situation of the teacher, however, time for the administrator is a fluid resource rather than a constraining one.

For the teacher, critical time constraints (such as the school year, the school day, the bell schedule, and fixed constraints such as bus schedules and lunch schedules) sharply limit what he or she can do. Administrators, on the other hand, can—and often do—have considerable latitude to vary the pace of their work as it seems appropriate to them. They can take extra time to carefully consider some unimportant issues at length, if they wish, and seek to save time by making a series of rapid decisions on other matters. Or the administrator who wishes to do so can vary the use of time resources by stretching the workday into the evening, or the workweek into the weekend, and the work year into the summer and holidays, which is, of course, what many educational administrators commonly do. Thus, the “unrelenting pace” is not necessarily an unvarying pace; it is one in which

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characteristically the work to be done is never completed, and there is always more to be done. One never knows when the task is finished.

These characteristics of administrative work combine with the ambiguity inherent in the educational system—an ambiguity arising from the unclear goals and priorities of schools and school systems, uncertain methods of evaluating administrative performance, and problematic preferences exercised by various constituency groups—to put considerable pressure on educational administrators. One result, and an additional source of pressure, is that they—like administrators in other fields—seldom stop thinking about their work.

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How Administrators Think

Research suggests that a source of confusion in the minds of scholars who study organizations and the behavior of administrators in them may be the fact that academic people and administrators tend to think about administrative work in different ways. The models for decision making described in the beginning of this chapter are the products of persons conditioned in the belief that highly logical, linear thinking, sometimes called scientific thinking, is the single most appropriate way of exploring problems and seeking alternatives in the decision-making process. Such observers, largely academics, tend to expect to see administrators behave in much the same ways that they themselves do. They maintain “that thinking is visible in the form of long reflective episodes during which managers sit alone, away from the action, trying to make logical inferences from facts. Since observers do not see many episodes that look like this, they conclude that managers do not do much thinking” (Weick, 1983, p. 222). Indeed, much of the in-service training for administrators that emphasizes the so-called models for decision making is little more than an effort to train administrators in formal methods of reflective thought. The assumption underlying such training is that one can improve the decision- making behavior of administrators by improving their skills in logical, reflective thought.

But why do researchers report so few occasions in which administrators are observed, as scientists frequently are, thinking reflectively—cogitating, mulling over a problem, considering alternatives in the dispassionate calm of a quiet retreat? Karl Weick proposes three possible explanations. First, they do think but not while they are on the job: “[T]hey think at home, on airplanes, in the john, on weekends. . . . Thus, the reason researchers do not see managers think is that managers do not think when the observers are around” (Weick, 1983, pp. 222–223). The second possibility is that,

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essentially, managers do not think because they have reduced uncertainty to such an extent and anticipate the future so well that they are confronted by few situations in which they are perplexed or bewildered. The third possibility proposed by Weick (and the one he considers most likely) is that managers think all the time, but researchers have missed that fact because, while researchers look for episodes evidencing reflective thinking, managers go at the thinking process quite differently. That is, thinking is inseparably woven into, and occurs simultaneously with, managerial and administrative action.

Thus, when administrators tour, read, talk, supervise, and meet with others, all of those actions contain thought, and, indeed, they are the ways in which administrators do their thinking. “Connected ideas, which are the essence of thought,” Weick (1983) explained, “can be formed and managed outside the mind, with relatively little assistance from the mind. This is how managers work, and this is why we are misled when we use reflection as an index of how much their work involves thinking” (p. 222). Thus, most of the thinking that administrators do is woven into their actions when their actions are taken with attention, intention, and control; that is, they pay attention to what is happening, impose order on their actions, and correct their performance when it strays from accepted standards.

In considering the ways in which administrators think about their work, it is important to bear in mind that the organizational environment in which the work is done is characterized by ambiguity, uncertainty, and disorder: It is, in a word, messy. Situations that require decisions are often fluid and are therefore difficult to analyze, even after the fact; they are subject to a number of interpretations, often conflicting; and (as will be explained more fully later) they are often not clearly bound and labeled. In the daily flow of action, administrators typically engage in brief, spontaneous, face-to-face, verbal interaction with others. They are, in other words, constantly “fighting fires.” But, as Weick (1983) wrote,

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fighting fires, which managers do all the time, is not necessarily thick-headed or slow witted. Firefighting has seemed like mindless activity because we have used scientific activity as the ideal case for comparison, because we have thought of thinking as a separate activity that stops when people put out fires, because we have presumed that the only time people think is when they make distinct decisions or solve clearcut problems … and because we keep examining things as if they occurred in sequences rather than simultaneously. (p. 236)

A crucial issue is implied in this view: whether administration is, or can be, a science in the traditional sense or whether it is, instead, an art or a craft. Many continue to pursue the notion of administration as the application of management science to organizational problems (much as engineering is the application of physics and mathematics to other sorts of real-world problems), as envisioned earlier in the twentieth century. Those holding this view tend, of course, to emphasize the development of technical rationality in organizational decision making. Others—cognizant of the great complexities of human organizations and the uncertainty, instability, and uniqueness that are commonly found in them—recognize the importance of intuitive judgment and skill, the sense of proportion and appropriateness in the context of the traditions and values of the organization’s culture. Schön, like Weick, found the thinking of managers closely entwined with the action demanded in their work. Schön (1983) observed:

Managers do reflect in action. Sometimes, when reflection is triggered by uncertainty, the manager says, in effect, “This is puzzling; how can I understand it?” Sometimes, when a sense of opportunity provokes reflection, the manager asks, “What can I make of this?” And sometimes, when a manager is surprised by the success of his own intuitive knowing, he asks himself, “What have I really been doing?” (pp. 240–241)

Thus, Schön makes clear that the term art has a two-fold meaning in describing administration: intuitive approaches to understanding situations

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and also one’s reflection, in a context of action, when one encounters events that are incongruent with his or her intuitive understandings.

The reader should note that, in this discussion, we are talking about trained intuition (Blackburn, 1971). The point is that we can learn—through both formal education and socialization into the organization’s culture—to see a complex system as an organic whole as well as being trained (as we commonly are) to see individual parts of the whole. This crucial point is difficult for some observers to accept, perhaps for two main reasons. One is that, in the strong tradition of technical rationality that has long been emphasized in Western culture, the logic of breaking complex phenomena down into relatively simple, quantifiable parts has been thoroughly ingrained in many of us. It seems so sensible, so right, that holistic approaches to complex problems are suspect. It is also probable that recent research on right- and left-hemisphere brain functioning is important to our understanding here. One mode of consciousness, associated with the left hemisphere, is generally described as analytic, rational, sequential, convergent, logical, objective, and linear. The other, associated with the right hemisphere, is characterized as intuitive, holistic, pattern-recognizing, artistic, subjective, and nonlinear. Unquestionably, emphasis has been placed on training left-brain functions in education that stresses logical- positivistic approaches to decision making. If we are to improve the way we apply right-hemisphere functioning to our decision making, it is likely that we will also have to improve our training strategies (Pondy, 1983).

Thus, it is argued that administrators are thinking all the time, that their thinking is closely intertwined with the actions (decisions) they take, and that everyday thinking almost never represents a sequence of steps. These facts suggests that formal models for decision making have little relevance to everyday administrative thinking and that to try to implement them would run counter to the real world as administrators experience it. In

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the real world, problem situations are experienced holistically and the steps found in the usual decision-making models are