The Age Of Unreason

by Charles Handy

  The result is not just fewer jobs, but different organizations. Labour-intensive manufacturing was traditionally managed with a large pool of relatively cheap labour, a lot of supervision and a hierarchical management structure. There were a lot of people around, most of them full-time employees whose time was bought to be used at the discretion of the organization, subject increasingly to the agreement of the union.

  It was a convenient way to run things; everything and everyone you needed was yours. If you want to control it, own it, was the message. It proved, in the end, to be a very expensive message. The Japanese always did it differently, with a small core staff, a raft of subcontractors, heavy investment in clever machines and enough clever people to instruct them and work with them. The demise of mass manufacturing has led to the end of the mass employment organization and with it a redefinition of the job.

  A move towards knowledge-based organizations

  The end of labour-intensive manufacturing leaves us with organizations which receive their added value from the knowledge and the creativity they put in rather than the muscle-power. Fewer people, thinking better, helped by clever machines and computers, add more value than gangs or lines of unthinking ‘human resources’. Manufacturing has gone this way. The more obviously knowledge-based businesses of consultancy, finance and insurance, advertising, journalism and publishing, television, health care, education and entertainment, have all flourished. Even agriculture and construction, the oldest of industries, have invested in knowledge and clever machines in place of muscles.

  The result is not only a requirement for different people, but different organizations, organizations which recognize that they cannot do everything themselves, that they need a central group of talented and energetic people, a lot of specialist help and ancillary agencies. They are smaller, younger organizations than their predecessors, flatter and less hierarchical. We shall examine them in more detail in the following chapters, but their most immediate effect is on the numbers – fewer people inside who are better qualified, more people outside who are contracted not employed.

  A move towards service

  Paradoxically, rich societies seem to breed dependency. If you are poor you are forced into self-sufficiency. As you get rich it is easier and more sensible to get other people to do what you do not want to do or cannot do, be it fixing the roof or digging the garden. It makes economic sense to let others make your clothes and to buy them in the store, that way you get better clothes and more time to do what you are good at. It goes on and on. Convenience foods take the chore out of cooking, and package holidays the work out of leisure. We all of us become more specialized, better at one thing and worse at others. Like knowledge-based organizations we contract out everything we are not good at and so breed a raft of services on which we now depend.

  Affluence breeds service industries and they in turn create affluence. Sometimes it seems as if everyone is taking in everyone else’s metaphorical washing and making money out of it, or in my particular case, that everyone is going to everyone else’s conference and being paid for it or paying for it. Affluence is a matter of mood and self-confidence as much as of economics, for dependency has its own imperatives. If you need to buy all these services you have to find something to do to pay for them, hence some competitive striving. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy which works as long as everyone believes the prophecy of continued affluence.

  The service industries of affluence are therefore ephemeral creations, which could always disappear overnight. The point however, once again, is that the organizations which they spawn are of a different kind. Because they are essentially ephemeral they have to flex with every shift in demand. Small core staff and lots of part-time and temporary help has to be the rule. Many of them are not knowledge-intensive businesses, although some are, of course. Retailing, transport, cleaning, catering, leisure, are all industries with large requirements for the competent but semi-skilled. It is here that you will find most of the 30 per cent who do not have the brain skills for the knowledge-based organizations. It is here that you will find the bulk of the part-timers and the temporary workers.

  It is the growth of the service sector which has transformed the working lives of so many people in Europe and the USA because of the kind of organization which it needs and breeds.

  These shifts are irreversible. The degree of affluence may increase or wane in each country but labour-intensive manufacturing will not return to Europe, or to the USA and Japan. Knowledge-based enterprises have to be the way forward for all our countries, the more and the better the richer, whether they are manufacturing goods or providing services. The service sector will ebb and flow with local prosperity but will never now fade away.

  If the shifts are irreversible so are the changes in the patterns of work which they induce, and therefore the numbers with which this chapter began. A dramatic change in the economic climate may slow things down, but it will not stop them. The world of work has changed already. We need to take notice.

  3 The Theory

  THE MESSAGE, I hope, is clear: the times are changing and we must change with them. Yes, but how? In Chapter 1 I argued that because most people do not like change, change is forced upon them by crisis and discontinuity. Thrown up against things, or into new arenas, we confront new possibilities and discover bits of ourselves we never knew were there. Discontinuity is a great learning experience, but only if we survive it.

  My daughter was smitten by an unexplained viral illness earlier this year. She is 22. These illnesses knock the stuffing out of the sufferer and she had to drop everything for a year – work, friends, study, even the television. It was, for her, a massive discontinuity and profoundly depressing. Getting better slowly she went to a meeting one evening on ‘Gratitude’. ‘If they had asked me to speak,’ she told me, ‘I would have said that I was grateful for my illness. I have learnt so much.’ And changed so much, I wanted to add.

  Change, however, does not have to be forced on us by crisis and calamity. We can do it for ourselves. If changing is, as I have argued, only another word for learning, then the theories of learning will also be theories of changing. Those who are always learning are those who can ride the waves of change and who see a changing world as full of opportunities not damages. They are the ones most likely to be the survivors in a time of discontinuity. They are also the enthusiasts and the architects of new ways and forms and ideas. If you want to change, try learning one might say, or more precisely, if you want to be in control of your change, take learning more seriously. This chapter, therefore, is an introduction to the theory of learning, which is the theory at the heart of changing.

  ‘A theory of learning?’ the Professor of Medicine said to me when he heard what I was writing, ‘I never knew there was such a thing.’ It is indeed ironic that those who teach us, particularly in our universities, are so often ignorant of the basic principles of learning. The Professor had never heard of Kolb, who first convinced me that learning is a cycle of different activities, although I have used different words from his in this chapter. Nor had he heard of Bateson or of Argyris and Schon who persuaded me that learning is a double loop, that there is learning to solve a particular problem and then, more importantly, there is the habit of learning, the learning to learn to do such things, that second loop which can change the way you live. He knew not of Revans, the unsung hero of Action Learning, who showed me that the best learning happens in real life with real problems and real people and not in classrooms with know-all teachers. There were others, too, he knew not, Dewey who said, many years ago, that learning was a process of discovery and that we must each be our own discoverer, others could not do it for you; or Illich who thought that we would be better off without schools which were concerned with indoctrination not teaching. He had, sadly, heard a bit about Skinner who believes that learning is training, that teaching is producing a conditioned response as when your dog responds to your whistle.

  There are many others, f
or learning has intrigued mankind for centuries. This chapter is my personal anthology, turned into my own images and metaphors, for reasons which will, I hope, become clear.

  A Theory Of Learning

  The man stood in front of the class. ‘Now learn this,’ he said, writing an equation on the board. We wrote it in our books. Three months later we wrote it out again in an examination paper. If the second time of writing was the same as the first, we had learnt it. I exaggerate, but only a little. That was my early concept of learning. Later on, I came to realize that I had learnt nothing at school which I now remember except only this – that all problems had already been solved, by someone, and that the answer was around, in the back of the book or the teacher’s head. Learning seemed to mean transferring answers from them to me.

  There was nothing about change in all of that. Nor, in fact, was there much about learning as it really is. Real learning, I came to understand, is always about answering a question or solving a problem. ‘Who am I?’ ‘How do I do this?’ ‘What is the reason for . . . ?’ ‘How does this work?’ ‘How do I achieve this ambition?’ The questions range from the immense to the trivial, but when we have no questions we need no answers, while other people’s questions are soon forgotten.

  It is best, I realized, to think of learning as a wheel divided into four parts:

  I draw it as a wheel to emphasize that it is meant to go round and round. One set of questions, duly answered and tested and reflected upon, leads on to another. It is life’s special treadmill. Step off it and you ossify, and become a bore to others. The trouble is that for most of us for much of the time the wheel does not go round. It gets stuck or blocked.

  Mankind, I am sure, is born to learn. One has only to look at little children to see that wheel turning furiously. Why, we must wonder, does it slow down for most of us as we grow older? If we knew more about that we would know more about our reluctance to change and the consequent need for crisis and calamity to budge us into action. This chapter, therefore, is really about the things in us and in our surroundings which stop or block the wheel. First, however, we need a brief introduction to the wheel itself.

  The Wheel of Learning

  Logically, the wheel starts with a question, a problem to be solved, a dilemma to be resolved, a challenge to meet. If it doesn’t start there, and if it is not our question, we shall not push the wheel round to the stage of Reflection. It won’t become part of us. I could learn a poem by heart at school to recite the next morning, but to forget by lunchtime. This was learning to answer other people’s questions. Just occasionally the poem would touch some chord in me, some unspoken question; it would provide some clue to the emerging mystery of life – those poems I remember still. The question, in other words, does not have to be some kind of examination question, more often it is a sort of reaching for, a questioning, a need to explore. Learning is discovery, Dewey said, but discovery doesn’t happen unless you are looking. Necessity may be the mother of invention but curiosity is the mother of discovery.

  Questions need possible answers. The next stage provides them. Theories is too grand a term. I use it only to emphasize that this stage is investigating possible ideas. It is a stage of speculation, of free-thinking, of re-framing, of looking for clues. One way is to open the equivalent of a cookbook or, in my case, a series of cookbooks in search of that elusive formula which will produce a culinary miracle in half-an-hour from my random collection of left-overs. There are other ways to find possible answers; good friends, hired coaches, or even one’s own imagination.

  Ideas and Theories can never be enough. At this stage of the wheel all is still fancy. ‘Dreams,’ as my children used to remind me, ‘give wings to fools.’ The theories have to be tested in reality, the next stage of the wheel. Some will work, some won’t. My sauce is always lumpy – why? Until I know why, which is the stage of Reflection, the final stage, I will not have learnt. Change only sticks when we understand why it happened. Too often have I invited chief executives to explain their philosophy only to listen to a bare record of their achievements, with no interpretation, no theory to explain them, no philosophy expounded. Such men have not changed and will not change. They have learnt nothing from their success which makes it unlikely that they will be able to repeat it.

  The wheel, however, is difficult to turn. For some it never gets started. They have no questions and seek no answers. Content or dull depending on your viewpoint, they will not voluntarily learn or change.

  There are those, too, who stick at the Question stage. Like small children they delight in asking why, or how, or when, or where, and as long as they get an answer, any answer, they are satisfied for it is the questions which fascinate them, not the answer. They don’t learn and others don’t learn much from their questions. They are life’s Inspectors or Auditors; useful, no doubt, but irritating.

  The next stage, Theory, has its own specialists. They are the bad Academics, full of answers to other people’s questions. They teach the answer first and assume the question. Knowledge for its own sake is what motivates these people, they are fact-collectors who know a lot and have, in a fuller sense, learnt little. I have a friend who turns every conversation into a lecture, on anything. He has read a lot and forgotten nothing and is eager to share it with anyone who will listen. At last I have learnt how to enjoy his company, to come with a question to which I wanted an answer and which he could always provide.

  The Testing stage has its own enthusiasts, the Action Men or Pragmatists. No time for theory or for thinking, their immediate reaction to a problem is to attack it with the tools nearest to hand. Energy conquers all, they believe, and if at first it doesn’t work, try and try again. Often it does work. The trouble is they don’t know why. ‘I kick it, that usually does the trick’ is their formula. Success without prior thought or subsequent reflection does not help you to repeat the process or to improve on it, although it does get the problem moving. They can be effective, these pragmatists, but find it hard to communicate their secret to other people because they have not gone through the other segments of the wheel.

  Lastly there are those who get stuck at the Reflection stage. Endlessly they rehearse the past, seeking for better explanations of what went wrong or what went right. They are the Pundits amongst us. They have learnt because they have been round the wheel but there they have stopped. One lesson is enough; they have made up their minds and feel no need for further explanation. Busy people often have no time for more curiosity. They formed their opinions long ago and see no cause to change them. ‘Consistent’ we call them if we agree with them, ‘bigots’ if we don’t.

  Most of the time, most of us do not go through all the four segments of this wheel. I describe it here to emphasize how difficult true learning is and why the sort of deliberate change that goes with learning is so rare. This sort of learning, the one from experience and life, is the one that matters if we are to change. It is not to be confused with more trivial definitions of learning:

  — Learning is not just knowing the answers. That is Mastermind learning at its best, rote learning at its most boring and conditioned response at its most basic. It does not help you to change or to grow, it does not move the wheel.

  — Learning is not the same as study, nor the same as training. It is bigger than both. It is a cast of mind, a habit of life, a way of thinking about things, a way of growing.

  — Learning is not measured by examinations, which usually only test the Theory stage, but only by a growing experience, an experience understood and tested.

  — Learning is not automatic, it requires energy, thought, courage and support. It is easy to give up on it, to relax and to rest on one’s experience, but that is to cease to grow.

  — Learning is not only for the intellectuals, who often shine at the thinking stage, but are incurious and unadventurous and therefore add little to their experience as they go through life.

  — Learning is not finding out what other people already know, b
ut is solving our own problems for our own purposes, by questioning, thinking and testing until the solution is a new part of our life.

  The Lubricants Of Change

  The wheel of learning, I have emphasized, is difficult to start and hard to keep moving. Most of us don’t succeed most of the time. We get stuck at one or other segment and only a crisis or calamity can then move us on. Luckily there are some lubricants which make it easier – ‘the necessary conditions of comfortable change’. There are three of these lubricants, each of which needs some interpretation. Leave them out or screen them out and change or learning is effectively blocked.

  1. A proper selfishness

  This is a responsible selfishness. I am often tempted to observe that the Christian injunction to love one’s neighbour as oneself gives the neighbour a rather poor deal since few people seem to love or even like themselves that much.

  Unfortunately, however, self-hate or just a lack of some ‘positive self-regard’ is no way to start learning. I am not advocating a narcissistic self-indulgence. I am suggesting, on the basis of good evidence, that those who learn best and most, and change most comfortably, are those who