Some of the ideas that have inspired the western practices of managing people are honest expressions of the prevailing reality in its historical moment, although in its original version today they cause us concern. A second reading, however, brings that concern to the brink of red alert, when we discovered that they are still in very good health.
I will start with some quotes capable of spicing up this analysis.
"In almost all mechanical trades, the science behind each worker's act is so great and of such importance that the most suitable worker to do the job is unable (either due to lack of education or insufficient mental capacity) to understand this science. ”
"The work of each operator is fully planned by management at least one day before, and each man receives, in most cases, complete written instructions that describe in detail the task to be performed, as well as the means to be used to do the job."
"All those who, after adequate training, do not want or cannot work according to the new methods and at a higher speed, should be dismissed by management."
These paragraphs are part of the work Principles of Scientific Administration, published in 1911 by the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor, which almost literally reproduces thoughts exposed in the early nineteenth century by the Scottish Robert Owen and the Englishman Charles Babbage. For his part, in 1916, the French engineer Henri Fayol made his work known Industrial and General Administration, which started the current known as classical administration theory.
The philosophical basis of the fourteen principles enunciated by Fayol can be traced by any attentive reader in The Art of War, a book published by the Chinese general Sun Tzu two thousand five hundred years ago.
The scientific-classical paradigm was rounded off with the contribution of Max Weber, a German economist who died in 1920, whose influential work " Economy and Society " was published posthumously. In it he develops the concept of bureaucracy as the only suitable means to optimize efficiency, a system of the “legal rather than human type: a system in which the rule covers all contingencies and in which obedience is ensured by choosing technically savvy supervisors, who administer the law accurately and with cold impartiality. ”
I exempt myself from comments. No one can be surprised that these ideas gave birth to the popular expression “ human resources ”, with which it was labeled - forever, judging by the available evidence - the people who work in an organization. Its effect continues to permeate many concepts in this matter, although today it does so in a much more subliminal way than in its beginnings. There is talk of "middle management", "subordinates" and "orders". Disciplinary criteria based on "rewards and punishments" are maintained and there continue to be " Organization and Methods " departments that draft instructions to be followed by those who must "obey." Because, basically, very little has changed in this regard.
Timid efforts have been made to disguise this situation, driven by the explosive development that cognitive psychology experienced since the 1950s, as a reaction to behaviorism that prevailed during the first half of the century. Probably the most influential in this regard was the so-called Theory Y, by the American psychologist Douglas McGregor, who postulated that people like to do things well and that, properly motivated, they demonstrate initiative, responsibility and commitment-as opposed to Taylorism, by which McGregor called Theory X.
The roots of this thought go back to the 1930s, based on the Hawthorne studies conducted by the American psychologist Elton Mayo between 1924 and 1932, but they gained strength after the works of Abraham Maslow and Frederick Herzberg on human motivation were published. middle of the century. Finally, they were condensed in 1960 by McGregor in his work "The human side of organizations", which constitutes one of the most respected works of the century in the field of management.
They also influenced concepts from other areas of knowledge, such as the game theory of the mathematician John von Neumann, who tried to explain human behavior from the interaction of variables that supposedly can predict it. And in the social sciences, the American economist Herbert Simon's approach to decisions was presented as a model for the decision-making process based on what he called limited human rationality.
However, reality has been in charge of thwarting any attempt to systematically control or predict human behavior in organizations, because the brain that governs us behaves in ways that science has just timidly begun to unveil. Some discoveries in neuroscience, made a century ago, are being rescued and dusted to explain human behavior in its many manifestations. And the results of the latest research in this field border on the most delusional fiction or metaphysics, alerting us to the profound mistake we make when we try to manage humans as if they were resources.
Our time has witnessed an unprecedented fact since science became independent from religion: our civilization is approaching the brink of the abyss, where rational explanations are no longer viable. The deterministic conceptions of classical physics gave way to the probabilistic theories of quantum mechanics to cast doubt on what we already believed to be happily proven. The instruments have reached the limit of their recording capacity, exposing immense questions in the infinitely small and in the immeasurably large, while something within us alerts us to the need to introduce radical and urgent changes in our way of perceiving ourselves. ourselves as individuals and as members of work teams.
We need a new paradigm. It's time to bet on Bioliderazgo.
