The Myth Of Intelligent Decision-Making

There are increasing numbers of consultants offering their clever schemes and methods for enhancing the thinking, planning and decision-making of managers in business and government organizations.  At the same time there are decreasing numbers of senior managers with real decision power in business and government who want or invest in better thinking, planning and decision-making.  Economically, the specter of privatization and monopolization coupled with widespread corruption in governments is diminishing thoughtful decision-making in the rank and file managers who are increasingly becoming somewhat debilitated automatons charged with merely keeping their organizations cranking along on kinetic energy.  Never has so much thoughtful planning been offered with so little take-up. Cognitive facilitation consulting is experiencing a tragedy-of-the-commons as more and more consultants compete for less and less business and government investment in intelligent decision-making.

There is really very little that can be said to brain-dead senior managers that would convince them to invest in the future through enhancing management thinking and planning.  This is particular true in America , Britain and Europe where whole nation-state economics are divesting their decision-making capacity to India and China through the self-destructive processes of outsourcing.  The entire consulting industry better learn Chinese and Hindi if it wants to get paid for knowing how to enable management thinking.  This is the growing trend and there does not seem to be much force in the attempts to renew intelligent decision-making in America , Britain and Europe .  Wrong economic theories based on stupidity and corruption are in the ascendance along with the farcical and manipulative “War On Terror”, which seems to be a euphemism for a War On Human Rights.

The idea of the Learning Organization cannot be actualized in the cognitive systems of contemporary managers in the present ecopolitical environment.  One sees a deliberate dumbing down of management.  All the trends are toward a degeneration of the quality of thinking, planning and decision-making.  The entire field of cognitive facilitation consulting is based on a myth of intelligent decision-making in business and government.  Progress that was made in things like Scenario Planning and Dynamical Systems Thinking in the 80’s and 90’s has been willfully regressed in the early 2000’s, particularly after the efforts of Neo-Conservative and New Labour governments in America and Britain. Thoughtful decision-making is increasingly treated as An enemy of the State.  Growing ecopolitical totalitarianism feels threatened by enlightened and ethical managers and consultants, all of whom are being discouraged and divested by something resembling a virtual conspiracy of incompetence.  Intelligent decision-making has become politically incorrect.  It is an undiscussable surrounded by defensive routines.

So what is to be done?  Any middle manager, line or staff, who develops enthusiasm for improving decision-making in the organization has to tread very carefully, softly, quietly.  It could cost him or her their job to become too proactive about organization learning.  The “F” word (Future) must not be used.  The frontal cortex of the management brain is being systematically lobotomized.  The System Four (Futures processing) of Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model is no longer merely fallen, but undergoing elimination.  Any form of cognitive renewal of decision-making has to be smuggled into the organization.  Managerial thinking is now a kind of black market.  Communities-of-Enhanced-Practice have to meet informally outside organizational boundaries.  Both business and government are investing in increased surveillance of their middle managers.  They do not want their managers to think better so much as they want to know what their managers are thinking.  Senior managers feel they must monitor middle managers due to the danger of an outbreak of greater competence and ethical concern.  Management, after all, rightly suspects that it is being dehumanized.

In actual fact, how well we face it that almost nothing can be done is the key to whatever slight things can be done.  Intelligent and ethical competence is a negative growth industry.