Organizational Traps: Leadership, Culture, Organizational Design by Chris Argyris

Author:Chris Argyris
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2010-04-28T14:00:00+00:00

4. What big assumptions do you make that inhibit learning and changing (yourself and your group)?

These questions result in a diagnostic grid (see Table 4.1).

Completing this grid alerts the individuals to the inconsistencies between their actions and intended consequences. It also alerts them to make explicit the competing commitments which they had previously denied they were producing. It prompts them to surface the big assumptions that underlie their actions despite their denials that this is the case.

The grid makes transparent the defensive reasoning that leads to Traps. The grid also makes it difficult for people to deny their personal causal responsibility in creating features of Traps as well as the denials that they manufacture to deny that they are denying.

The authors caution that conducting these interviews is not easy. It does require individuals who are skillful at asking questions that are not easy to answer. Interviewers also have to be able to see that competing commitments are not signs of weakness but natural versions of self-protection. Most individuals find it difficult to describe how they may unrealizingly inhibit the very dialogue they genuinely seek to produce.

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