The administrative “thing”, for the “naive” thinking of some administrators or leaders of the organizations, without observing the systems and subsystems and the relationships they have between them, constitutes the reality and the essence of the administration. There is nothing more absurd.
You have to break down the administrative "thing" into systems and subsystems and observe the relationships between them. Specifically, forms of communication between systems, systems with subsystems and between subsystems, are essential in any organization or company. The Aristotelian thought of the synergy that "everything is much more than the sum of its parts" is based on dialectical reflection: to know reality it is necessary to decompose everything into its parts and integrate it, under the perception of "everything" that, for On the other hand, it does not escape the ideological question of the observer, which will ultimately be the administrator's "common thought".
But the risk is that the administrator or, furthermore, the leader of the company, does not recognize this reality as the essence of the administrative "thing", along with the phenomenal experience (the sensible knowledge of things under daily practice).
With this representation, the administrator validates his actions and creates (recreates) the world of appearance, like the reality of the company. This has dire consequences for imaginative thinking, for creativity and innovation.
The relationship between systemic thought and dialectical reflection is found, in which dialectics is concerned, among other things, with critical thinking that wants to understand "the thing itself" and systematically asks how it is possible to arrive at reality (Kosik, 1967).
The "conscious" administrator observes that the administrative "thing" is saturated with related systems and subsystems, not isolated, he knows that reality (essence and phenomena) is not immutable, it is dynamic, and his perception of that reality may change the next day. The administrator or leader of the company must fight to change the current ideas and the current conditions of the company. The human-social reality or the administrator's world view (Weltanschauung), must be transformed, re-evolved, according to the external environment to adjust to natural reality.
The human-social reality of the “naive” administrator, if he intends to “reify” or establish as the natural reality or as “common sense” of the entire company, is not allowing the breakdown of paradigms of the organization and rejects drastic transformations, fruit critical thinking.
The human-social reality of the "naive" administrator is the mystified "world of appearance", which is far from reality. Mystification starts from a limited and frequent praxis, which has rarely changed. To be transformed, you have to think "unreasonably", you have to be customary crazies. The rational allows the interpretation of the real; it allows to make models of reality and allows to elaborate the subsystems and systems of the complexity of the real. The reasonableness of the human being is the characteristic of making use of reason, but reason itself opens the scene for other reasons. That is where the unreasonableness of the human being lies. It is not the contradiction of the reasonable but it is the transformed reason, the transcended reason (Martínez / Abrego, 2012).
Now, how can the administrator know natural reality without "fetishisms" and transform the current world view or current mental models as Peter Senge mentions?
An alternative is breaking everything down into its parts. That is, recognizing the systems and subsystems that are part of a whole and observing the interrelationships between them. The Checkland Soft Systems Methodology is a good option (Checkland, 1981) since it makes a critical examination of reality and confronts it with the human-social thinking (Weltanschauung) of the organization's leaders, to find the true reality. of the organization and act accordingly.
The "common sense" of some administrators or leaders of a given organization, see the administrative "thing" in isolation and do not make a reflective and critical inquiry into reality. The “limited rationality” hides the systems and subsystems that exist within an organization and when seeing things in isolation, one falls into reductionist paradigms that solidify the current mental models and that give strength to the “comfort zone” of the organizations.
On the other hand, the systems and subsystems of an organization are unique, that is, they carry their own uniqueness. Knowing all the systems and subsystems of the organization does not allow knowing the “whole” of an organization, since between them, there are communication relationships and when combined, they give rise to other relationships with different impacts on the organization (here lies the Synergy principle).
Dialectical thought allows us to see the rich totality of the multiple determinations and relationships (Kosik, 1967), not only the chaos that is perceived, first of all, as knowable reality through a rather limited, non-exhaustive practice of the systems and subsystem that they make up the administrative "thing".
Furthermore, dialectical thinking investigates the totality of things in all their dimensions and without a doubt, is the foundation of systemic thinking that explores all the relationships between systems and subsystems.
Frequently the “naive” administrators or leaders of an organization observe the “apparent” way in which they give things. They do not discover the relationships that exist between systems and subsystems as a concrete "totality"; make this thought the fundamental paradigm, the "common sense" that permeates the vision and mission of the company or organization.
Reality, the "everything" of reality, cannot be fully known, because there are new contexts, new obstacles, every day. To the administrative thesis in force in the organization, the antithesis must be opposed as a negation of the given and thus find unknown forms of creation and innovation. Without understanding reality as a concrete "totality", the administration becomes a mystification, a fetish. For administrative facts and phenomena to gain meaning, all internal and external systems and subsystems that affect the organization must be recognized and transformed or re-evolved.
Footnotes
- Kosik, Karel., “Dialectic of the Concrete”.Martínez, Juventino. Abrego, Adrian. "The Unreasonable University" Book in edition. Senge, Peter., "The Fifth Discipline" 1990.
