Before the church accepted the idea that the Earth is round, it was considered a true heresy just to suggest that it really was. Of course, at present it is known that it is not round either, as that would give it a geometric perfection that it does not possess, but the fact is that it was definitely not flat as was long thought.
But the idea of having a flat figure with rectilinear edges that determined the limits was not entirely unreasonable, it responded to a logic and a practically correct interpretation according to the knowledge that was possessed at the time or that it was desired to impose, it was simple: the earth had to be flat to distinguish heaven (above), humanity (on the plane) and hell (below), otherwise, when assuming another structural form, how could it be said in the South that heaven was above if it was below the North? It was more comfortable to think that the Earth was flat and thus be able to locate more easily what in the prevailing logic was considered correct.
The same happens with Management.
The Management observes its management as the clergymen and scientists of the Middle Ages observed the Earth: only in two dimensions (2D). In it, value judgments have only two dominant variables and a short range of distortions that bring them closer to or further away from generally accepted concepts.
How in a Cartesian plane, where the numbers have positive or negative values, things are good (excellent, wonderful, extraordinary) or bad (terrible, poor, of low quality), you succeed or you have failure, because it is not usually thought in the possibility of having a half-success or a half-failure; Are you the market leader or follower of the leader, just to name a few examples.
The exercise, vision, measurement and evaluation of business activity, including its conceptualization and image, are saturated with an extreme dualism in all its expressions.
Now, in a world where one-dimensional and two-dimensional expressions have been considered basic, with three-dimensional structures being the ones that have made possible the great differences in the social and cultural aspects of peoples, since without them buildings, transportation, art and many other manifestations, would not be even half of what they are now, as can be seen in the immortal human expressions arising from the advance in the concept of geometry and in the complexity of mathematical and physical thought reached at an early age after the Sumerians invented the calculation, it is curious that the science that is responsible for managing resources and promoting the evolutionary advance of thought, action and result, as is administrative science, responds to such a limited and flat paradigm.
Perhaps the two-dimensional conception of Management responds more to the way in which man conceived the superhuman phenomena that govern the Earth, observing natural manifestations from two points of view: day and night, up and down, wet or dry, cold or hot, floods or drought, extremes that generated the concepts of good and evil, of good or bad.
But that idea may have made sense in cultures where such phenomena had no response and the subatomic world was practically unknown, so the bases for imagining a two-ended Management lost its validity from the moment that man began to feed his curious to know and deciphered a good amount of mysteries.
Today we know that the earth is not flat, that day and night are nothing more than the consequence of the planet's rotation, that the same matter can have up to four states (liquid, solid, gas and plasma) that cold is a consequence from the absence of excitation of the molecular components of a compound, that the smallest unit known so far is the quark and that physical laws do not act in the same way in different scenarios. Today we know that things are not one-dimensional or two-dimensional, even that they are not three-dimensional, they are multidimensional, that it is the observer who limits and frames them, and yet, in the face of such flourishing and diversity of knowledge there is a marked tendency to direct in 2D.
Once the existing self-limitation regarding the vision of Management that prevails in the present is understood, it is completely logical to ask what a Management in 3D or MD should be like, unfortunately it is not possible to explain such advanced expressions in such a short summary of the chapter That this matter has been arranged in my book "Inept Managers", however you can resort to the following device to facilitate its contextualization and inspire your interest in developing and practicing it.
When man observed the Sun and the Moon and represented them pictorially, he gave no signs of analysis or samples of complex thought, since he limited himself to repeating what was obvious at first glance: a circle. When he drew the square and other shapes not common in nature, he showed his capacity for creation and innovation, but it was when he realized that such expressions only represented one of the faces of what they really were that he transcended and produced wonders, he opened up to an unknown world, impossible to think until then that marked all the technological and social advance that we now have. Can you imagine if this was also done when directing?
Of course, this approach will generate doubts and questions: how can the 3D or MD concept be integrated into Management? What elements have not been considered until now? Or, it is simply an absurd idea!
It should be remembered that such expressions and questions arose in the minds of intelligent and wise people when the thesis of the roundness of the Earth was raised, and how wrong they were! Well, Management, as it is understood nowadays, is only one face of everything that can truly be, what happens –and to quote Antoine Saint-Exupéry– is that "what is essential is invisible to the eyes" and it is so seized with the paradigm that surrounds it that it is a real challenge to imagine it differently from how it is conceived today.
