Show Notes
Andy and Mon-Chaio explore the dense yet insightful book ‘Action Science’ by Chris Argyris. They discuss Argyris’s method of developing self-knowledge to break existing norms and achieve actionable knowledge. The conversation covers the core principles and propositions of action science, including the importance of understanding one’s reasoning, questioning underlying assumptions, and fostering mutual learning. Tune in to discover how self-awareness can transform not just individuals but entire organizations.
References
- Action Science – https://actiondesign.com/resources/readings/action-science
- The School of Life – https://www.theschooloflife.com/
- Episode on Future Search – https://thettlpodcast.com/2025/01/28/s3e3-future-search/
Transcript
S3E4 – Action Science
Andy: We’re back for another episode of the TTL podcast. How are you doing today, Mon-Chaio? Are you energized? Are you ready to science?
Mon-Chaio: I am ready to science. I’m less energized because I spent, time last week reading 300 pages of the action science book. And the more I read,
Andy: The stranger it got.
Mon-Chaio: confused I was. There are a lot of different ideas and threads and conversations that run through the book and it is quite dense.
Andy: It is. Let’s back up just a second. We’re talking about action science. So, Action Science is a book, you can actually find it online now, which is how we were reading it. So, yay, we have a way to just link our listeners right to what it is we’re talking about, which is not what we can always do.
Action Science is the method kind of, created and promoted by a guy named Chris Argyris. It’s a very dense read. I will admit that up front. It is a very dense read and I inflicted it on Mon-Chaio here. Mon-Chaio, I’m sorry. I threw you in at the deep end as well, as I said, hey, skip all the beginning parts.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: Just read the last three chapters, I think, is what I threw you at. And the idea behind action science is he wanted, he wants a method that creates valid knowledge to take action. That’s what you get out of, I think it’s the first chapter, is, he says. That’s what this is. And then you start reading all of this stuff about philosophy and ontology and all these other things,
so, Mon-Chaio, I threw you in at the point where he’s talking about how a seminar basically worked with some consultants. That was the background. That was what was going on. That’s what all those excerpts were from. And for everyone who’s listening, normally we talk about what we’re going to go over before we start recording.
This time we haven’t. So this will be a surprise to both of us of what it is that we’re going to talk about for Action Science. But let’s take one more step back, which is why are we going here? And that is because we’re trying to go down this path of you have an organization. And you’ve started to realize that something needs to happen.
So we went over the future search method last time, which was a way of having a group come together and understand where they are and where they’re trying to go and come up with what they can do.
We’ve also talked about differential diagnosis, the idea from the medical field, around how do you kind of disentangle so many different things that could be going on, and your lack of information in certain ways, your inability to test to the nth degree. How do you take all of that unknown and still come up with things that you can do?
And this time, we’re going to talk about Argyris’s action science. So Mon-Chaio, how would you start us off here?
Mon-Chaio: I don’t really know. So as I’m reading through this book, I’m trying to figure out what is action science, and I believe I actually started a chapter earlier on chapter eight instead of chapter nine.
Andy: Which is good, because as I was reading as well, I realized he refers so much to chapter eight that you kind of need to go back and at least skim it.
Mon-Chaio: So I started on chapter 8, and as I’m reading through chapter 8, I’m simply trying to figure out what action science is. And it sounds like he is comparing it to other science, and how other science is less applicable in the applied sciences world. And he says, often, I think if I’m understanding him correctly, you don’t have anything applicable that you take out of your research. And so what you need to do is you need to marry sort of the theory as well as what we would call the tactics. And so that seemed fine to me. And then as I was going through chapters nine and beyond, I had a very difficult time finding structured tactics.
They would talk about, well, what you want to do is, in this case, is you could use the ladder of inference, which we’ve talked about before. And in this case, you want to question espoused theory versus theory in use, which we’ve talked about before. And in this case, you want to divide the paper up into two sections, and on the right side, you write down what happened, and on the left side, you write down how you felt. But I never felt like it coalesced for me into, this is what you do, like, inference, ladder of inference is useful in X, Y, Z cases. And so if you’re running into these problems, use that. And once you’ve done that, then you can lead into whatever it is, right?
It never felt like that. It felt like 30 different or 50 different types of exercises you could use. It was just really difficult to nail down about, okay, well, what do I do with this?
Andy: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And as you pointed out, we’ve talked about a lot of the parts that he brings up. I think Mon-Chaio, because I think you learned a lot of those different parts through conversations with me, right? I don’t think you’d heard of them in other areas, had you?
Mon-Chaio: Like the ladder of inference, no. The espoused theory versus theory in use, the terminology I also learned from you, but the concept was not new.
Andy: Yeah. I learned these things from Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Frederick. But they learned them as well, not from this book. They learned them primarily from others, other people. So, this is what I’ve come to learn.
And this is the danger that we hit in trying to go back to the source materials, is the source materials sometimes are inscrutable. And it’s the disciples of the original people that are the ones that are able to kind of take that knowledge, take that nugget of understanding and turn it into more actionable things for us. And so that’s where I know most of these things from, is from people who have kind of, either from the disciples by reading their materials directly, or from the people who have learned from them and practiced it and I’ve learned from them. And so when we read the source material, when we read Argyris himself, I have to admit, I get lost.
I have all of these other things to connect it to and I’m trying to figure out how it all fits together and I can see the glimmers of it in there. I can see what it all is, but his writing, I was struggling the whole time and I sat there at times going like, what are these things you’re talking about?
Just list them out. There’s a point in those chapters where he’s saying something along the lines of, they need to write them up, basically. They need to understand what their current propositions for thinking are. And they need to practice applying, Model 2 thinking, Mutual Learning Model, and basically discover the propositions of Model 2. And he mentions several of them. He has little points where he says, Oh, and here’s one of the propositions, you can see them trying to do it. But he never just says, Here’s, like, the basic set of propositions. There are more, there’s nuances to these, but here’s the basic set. I don’t think that ever shows up anywhere.
Mon-Chaio: Never. And it’s not just in those propositions, it’s throughout the entire thread of the book. Even when he lists them out, he says, here’s 10 different rules, let’s say, for this particular category. But within them, like the rules tie together to each other. And within them, he’s like, well, this isn’t fully the right way to go.
And we should still think about x when we’re talking about this rule. So yes.
Andy: Yeah. So, the question is, is there anything we can learn from this? And I think there still is. Because we have enough of that grounding in other more clarifying ways of thinking about it, that I think going to the source material can still help us.
What do you think, Mon-Chaio?
Mon-Chaio: I think we are now the disciples, Trying to take this dense material and tell our listeners. Instead, probably of reading 400 some odd 500 pages of this book, what can we distill it down to that’s actually actionable and useful?
Andy: All right. This will anchor us in a particular direction, possibly. And I’m going to start us off with a completely different book that you didn’t read.
Mon-Chaio: Fantastic.
Andy: I’ll give a little background in how I got to this point. I’m in Boston right now. Mon-Chaio and I are on almost the same time zone now, so it’s light outside while we’re recording this. Normally it’s completely dark outside for me at this time of year.
I was reading the chapters on the plane. I was highlighting things and going over it all. And just like you, Mon-Chaio, I was having this reaction of like, oh my god, what do I do with this? Because I told you to read it. I hadn’t read this section of it yet.
I’d read pretty much everything up until this point.
Mon-Chaio: Hmm.
Andy: Which was a slog. But I hadn’t read this section. And, and partly I had us read this because I was in the hope that this is the point at which it all starts coming together. And it kind of does, but not all that clearly. So I got to Boston, checked into the hotel, and I’m in a Citizen M hotel.
Rather than Bibles in their rooms, they have books from a place called the School of Life.
So here I was, got to the room, and I’m thinking like, oh my god, how do we talk about this? How do we talk about action science? And I was looking at the books that are on the shelf here. And there’s four of them, and one of them is called Self Knowledge.
Mon-Chaio: Hmm.
Andy: And I started reading it and I thought, this gives me the framing for us to possibly have a useful discussion about action science.
And the idea is that action science, as we were talking about, like, why are we talking about action science? We’re talking about it because it could be useful for someone who’s trying to transform an organization. But if you read Action Science, if you read the book, you realize he never ever talks about, well he might at some point, but he doesn’t really focus on an organization.
He doesn’t focus on anything really all that much larger than the individual. Now he does in the sense that the Mutual Learning Model, Model 1, Model 2, it’s about the impact it has on yourself and others. And the thing that really, to me, started to come together when I saw this book from the School of Life, was action science, or at least the part that we can talk about here, is all about a journey of self knowledge.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: Because in order to operate in Model 2 thinking, you have to understand the reasoning that you had, the thinking that went into a behavior that you exhibited, a thing that you said, or a gesture that you made, so that you can explain your reasoning to others, give them the conclusion that you come to from it, and then inquire to see if others are understanding that, agree with it, disagree with it.
And see if you can learn about it together. You also need to have that, so that you can provide to them your interpretation of things that you’re hearing from them. So, a lot of it is about self knowledge.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: What do you think of that, Mon-Chaio?
Mon-Chaio: I agree. I think a big part, maybe the primary part of action science, is the acquisition of knowledge, as I think Argyris would put it. And, I think the big thing that I get out of it, if I try to summarize it, from just reading the end of the book is that we need to be able to know what we know and question what we know in order to get to some sort of, I don’t know if he would call it truth or if he would call it agreement, he might call it truth.
The one, you know, the ideal truth or the actual truth of the situation.
Andy: I think he might call it actionable knowledge.
Mon-Chaio: I think that’s as reasonable as anything, and probably the term he uses to get to actionable knowledge. And so to me, then what he talks about is in order to get there, first, you have to break down the situation that you’re in or the knowledge that you have an example might be you come into an organization that can’t ship software. I think what he would say is as you talk about that, instead of talking about that specific case, Oh, you’re shipping twice a week and in every two weeks you’re shipping 80 percent bug fixes.
He would say interrogate so that you can genericize that into organizations that ship fewer than 50 percent features over, certain cases tend to be organizations that don’t perform well in the marketplace or some more generic model. And then he says that when you have that generic model, then you can start to question whether that’s the right model you even want to be working towards and that allows you to interrogate more deeply your specific situation into saying, well, we’re not an organization that wants to deliver value to customers.
Oh, okay. I see. So now we can take a step back and say, well, maybe it’s okay. You deliver buggy software. That’s sort of a thing. And then he gives a bunch of different. tactics for how you might interrogate that, by asking questions and the whole model two thing where it’s you, you break down what you think, you know, and then you have a different loop.
So you can question what are the underpinnings of what I know. If I were to break down action science, that’s how I would break down. I think what he’s saying.
Andy: When you first started, I was disagreeing with you. When you were talking about his whole focus is on this, like, generic model, I was going to say, I’m not sure about that. When you then connected that to you are building up this generic model in order to question the validity of it. And it’s to question the validity of it, it’s also to question the outcomes you’re getting of it.
To be able to see that connection between the belief system that you have and the outcomes you’re getting. And a lot of his things, are about that most of us operate in what he calls Model 1, the unilateral control model. And that the unilateral control model is so ingrained and so hard for us to see, and it prevents us from doing things, the approach is you need to get people to understand, first they have to see the model that they operate by, because most of us have no self knowledge.
We don’t know why we do it. Once you can see that, then you can unfreeze, reframe, and change your model, change the norms by which you think. And so, some of those norms could be those very wide, what is the operation that we do as a business? He normally keeps it much more personal, I believe.
He normally keeps it much more on the level of, I want to make sure that you don’t feel uncomfortable, Mon-Chaio. It is my norm to deprecate myself, so that I don’t have to worry about harming you when I have an uncomfortable truth that I believe I need to say. A lot of this stuff is about getting to that self knowledge. And then examining, once you can state it, and this is what those propositions are, once you start coming up with these rules of how you’re supposed to behave, now you can start examining, are those the rules that are actually helping me?
Or are they hindering me? This gets to, a quote from the School of Life book that I actually want to bring in, “a lot in our inheritance,” and he’s talking about your emotional inheritance, “Works against our chances of fulfillment and well being because its logic does not derive from the present. It involves a repetition of behaviors and expectations that were formed and learned in childhood, typically as the best defense we could cobble together in our immaturity in the face of a situation bigger and more complex than we were.
Unfortunately, It is as if part of our minds hasn’t realized the change in our external circumstances, but insists on reenacting the original defensive maneuver even in front of people or at moments that don’t warrant or reward it.” So I think that is actually a central tenet of action science, that our default mode of operation that almost all of us have was formed at a time When we had the least knowledge of how things can work.
And we should re examine it and come up with a different default mode of operation.
Mon-Chaio: And I think that fits really well into something we’ve talked about, that there are these two models model one and model two, and that for most people, they’re behaving in model one, without understanding that there is a model two.
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And it’s funny that you use the word defensive, because I think that’s how I would describe model one.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: This concept of most of your reasoning is here to defend. I don’t know what you would call it your self worth.
Andy: Some of us Don’t even recognize that this is why we’re doing certain things. We do things not to even to protect ourselves. We do it to protect others.
Mon-Chaio: It’s interesting, because as you were mentioning, he mostly in this book deals with the core individual and improvements in an individual. But when I think about the concept of defensive reasoning, I do think a lot of, like you were saying, it’s not just about protecting yourself. And I wouldn’t so much think about it as protecting others, but I think about it as like protecting the system.
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: And when we go into what we talk about in tech. We could think about protecting a culture that already exists and you’re not questioning the tenets of the culture But any threats that come in around let’s say you’re a culture that’s really focused on Individual achievement. So when a threat comes in that says no we should think about team achievement It doesn’t matter what the tactics are around that you’re pushing those off because you’re in model one saying no, no, no you hear this a lot.
This isn’t how we do things here. That’s very much a model one piece of behavior.
Andy: Yeah. In the interventions that he talks about, he has several different phases that people go through. And I think the one most interesting to us at the moment, and probably for this entire episode, is the early phase, the kind of self discovery phase.
He says, “The question to stress in this early phase is not so much how should participants act differently, as what are they doing? What leads them to act as they do? What prevents them from acting differently? And what are the skills they need to answer these questions on their own?” Notice
Mon-Chaio: that last one.
Andy: Yeah, notice it’s not what skills do they need to act differently, it’s what skills do they need to even be able to start answering some of these questions about why do they act the way they do.
Mon-Chaio: And he says that in many parts of the book, this concept that they should gain these skills so that they can go and practice action science on their own. And that’s the job of the interventionist or the facilitator is to give them the skills that they can become action scientists.
Andy: Yep. And I think you can take his explicit things, somewhat explicit as we were complaining about, they’re not all that explicit, you can take his things, but you can also Take things like the School of Lifebook, it has explicit tactics of how do you do this self-knowledge.
And Argyris came up with a different way of doing it, which was this much more, unfreezing approach where people need to start coming face to face with the reality of the norms that they’re living by and how they’re producing the consequences that they don’t like.
One of the things in these chapters is he says you need to get people stuck, but in a way where they’ve recognized that they’re stuck. Where in the past, if they got stuck, they wouldn’t have actually ever recognized that their behaviors have them stuck.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: His way of doing that
is really to work with them in a way where the interventionist, the facilitator, is confronting people with kind of the consequences of their reasoning. So where people will be saying something. And the facilitator will start holding them to standards. The standard of the new world that they’re explicitly trying to get them to, which is the Model 2 thinking. And so those are things like you need to illustrate what it is that you’re claiming with data statements or actions that everyone can observe and then provide your reasoning and then be inquisitive.
And the facilitator will do this again and again. And do that in a way, and this is the hard part. This is the part where it’s kind of like, and how do you do this? But do it in a way where the people don’t get triggered to be defensive. So you have to avoid getting them defensive. So you can’t just tell them, yeah, you’re, you’re dumb and wrong.
You have to do it in a way where you’re explaining what’s happening back to them. They have to come face to face with the norms that they’re operating under, the consequences of that operation, and that to resolve the situation, experimenting with different ways of behaving in those conversations, in those interactions, pointing out that the methods by which they’re operating are creating the same outcomes again and again and again. And getting them to the point where they’re stuck because they can’t come up with anything to do to get a different outcome.
Mon-Chaio: That’s interesting. I did see his unfreezing
Andy: Mm
Mon-Chaio: but I guess I didn’t see the first part of that he’s there to get them frozen, before they unfreeze.
Andy: Yeah. Give them a vocabulary for talking about being stuck. And once they all have that kind of aha moment of like, but everything I can do ends at this same problem, now they’re ripe for unfreezing. And that’s the point at which a new mode of thinking will start to be accepted, and they can start practicing it.
Mon-Chaio: Right, right, right. And that’s a big thing that he talks about, which is because most people aren’t introspecting what they’re thinking. A lot of solutions don’t work because they’re not ready to accept new ideas.
But the other thing that he really likes to do is replay. Where people analyze conversations that they’ve had. And really dig into the reasons for those conversations and I think a big thing that he brings in is that feelings are as important as anything else and so that the way that you were feeling during that time is a key data point that most people miss when they try to re evaluate how they’re behaving and what could change
Andy: Absolutely, because, getting people to that point where your emotional state is a valid data point, is a key data point that you can use, is one of the differences between Model 1 and Model 2 thinking. In Model 1 thinking, your emotions are something to be hidden. Because they’re considered unreliable, you need to be rational instead.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm
Andy: Emotions are completely valid. They are interesting data. And you can combine them with your reasoning. Use them as a trigger to understand what’s going on. And this is then the self knowledge. One of the things is you should start thinking about, like, I’m feeling upset right now.
Why am I feeling upset? What is causing this? Where is that coming from? Going back to the kind of philosophy stuff, it’s very much tied to, like, Stoicism. You can’t be causing this for me. I have to be going through some sort of maneuver that is resulting in this. So what is that? How do I explain that? How can I make that visible so that we can have an informed conversation about this?
Mon-Chaio: I think The way action science and future search both tie in to me is action science espouses this idea of model two thinking or behavior.
Andy: Yes. It enables what he calls double loop learning. So you’ve got single loop learning, which is that you have a goal, it’s fixed. You have norms, they’re fixed. And you’re trying to achieve your goal, and you will change up what you’re doing within your norms to achieve that goal.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: Double loop learning says, well, yeah, sit inside that single loop, but you can question the goal. You can say that what we’re trying to achieve isn’t quite the right thing, or the way that I’m trying to achieve it, I’m working within constraints that don’t have to be there.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: And so, Argyris’s method, I think, sits very well within the future search, because the future search, if it’s going well, their facilitator is, taking people through a similar kind of, approach of, well, where is that idea coming from?
Can you question it? Because if you don’t change your situation, your future will look exactly like your past.
Mon-Chaio: And I think the thing that resonates across those two for me both methods touch on the fact that you don’t know what the solution is.
Andy: Yes.
Mon-Chaio: You are in search of the capability to go find the solution.
Andy: Yes. And that’s what, I think Argyris is going for, is he doesn’t know what your solution is. But he does know that if you change your thinking patterns, you’ll be able to start going and finding a solution.
Mon-Chaio: And Weisbord would say you don’t know what your solution is and he doesn’t know what your solution is, but going through the confusion of the future search method allows you to organically figure out ways of finding a new solution,
Andy: Mm hmm.
Mon-Chaio: which I think is very uncomfortable for a lot of organizations and a lot of people, people don’t like to be told, You don’t currently have it in you to solve this problem. So you have to solve a different problem first, which in the action science model is within yourself. In the future search model might be more group dynamics or a lack of knowledge and understanding, lack of context. But you have to solve a different problem first before you can even start to solve the problem that you’re truly confronted with.
And I mean, can you imagine working in some sort of many of the different organizations that we’ve worked for in the past and your manager or your leader comes to you and says, Hey, I have a problem for you to solve and you tell them, well, honestly, I nor my team have the capability of solving this today and we need to go through a self discovery journey.
In order to solve the problem that you’re asking me to solve. I don’t think that tends to sit very well with people.
Andy: I think Argyris method, at least for yourself, Once you’ve gone through it, you now have the capability to go off and do it. You might not be able to tell that person, Oh, I know exactly what we need to do. But you do now know how to talk to them about that uncertainty, get them understanding it, get their reasoning across, get them on board, and give them a method that you can both agree on will get you to, How do we solve this?
Mon-Chaio: You practice action science on yourself. And then the way you influence others is you teach them also to be action scientists.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: And then because now you’re both action scientists, you can go teach others to be action scientists. And that allows everyone then to come together in the same model to speak the same language.
Think the way that I think about it personally is I like the tenets of action science, but I like thinking about it as in how can I apply it to a group setting and then maybe it doesn’t become action science anymore. But it’s like the great tactics from action science I can use.
In order to drive transformation, even if it doesn’t change the people,
Andy: Mm
Mon-Chaio: it changes the way that we approach work. A tactic that I would give that we come out of action science with is when you’re trying to solve a tough problem, go back to first principles. and really question the underpinnings of why your problem exists in the first place.
Don’t take the shortcuts around what we see a lot in retrospectives or in, incident analysis of just solving what you see is not enough. You need to, like the five whys, right? Ask why, why, why, why, why, until you get to first principles, even not first principles, but deeper.
So you really question the foundation. So I would say that that’s a thing that I take from action science to apply to a situation.
Andy: I think there’s another thing that can help, actually, and I have watched it slowly change a group, it does take multiple iterations as people do experiments and get feedback from me about whether or not they’re applying this. Because one of the things is, and he gets into this quite a bit, which is people may think that they’re applying the principle or applying the norm of mutual learning, But once you examine it, it’s actually just a different form of unilateral control. He calls these three propositions that are very useful. And I think this is the core, that if you can focus on these three propositions, and yourself in enacting them, actually hold to, a mutual learning approach, which is the core principle of mutual learning I would say, I have useful information, and so do you. I think that’s the core principle of it. He says, These three, propositions are conducive to vulnerability and risk taking, and they’re participants will make mistakes. They will all make mistakes. So, just accept that.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: The consequences their actions yield are necessary but unintended,
Mon-Chaio: Interesting. Okay.
Andy: and errors are puzzles to be engaged. So I think if you can go into situations and enact those three propositions, I think that you will then start coming up with a group that is more and more open to learning.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: And I would say you have to get there first by practicing it yourself. And then as you do it, you can then start, helping others practice it.
Mon-Chaio: I agree. And I think that when we talk about transformation in terms of changing yourself and changing people, as a means towards changing the organization, this makes a lot of sense.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: Now the question is, can we take this and apply it to other things around transformation? Right, like, I don’t know, I think it’s oftentimes challenging when you go into a situation like if you’re a consultant, for example, and you’re hired on a three month contract,
Andy: Just as a hypothetical.
Mon-Chaio: just as a hypothetical, when you write your statement of work about what you’re going to do,
Andy: Hmm.
Mon-Chaio: could you ever imagine yourself submitting a statement of work that says, Look, what I’m here to do is to change the way you think. I mean, that’s the thing for our podcast. Change the way you think to change the way you lead. Right. But if you’re, if you’re on a three month contract and you’re coming in and saying, look, I’m just here to change the way you think.
I don’t think you get a lot of bites at the apple, man.
Andy: No. And I don’t think you’d ever want to try to sell it that way. I think that what you’d do is you’d go down an exploration with them. Around what is it that you want to achieve that you can’t right now.
Mon-Chaio: But that might be like the consultant or the negotiation phase.
Andy: yeah.
Mon-Chaio: But eventually, as they look at your proposal between you and the six other consultants that are trying to hire, you know, consultant two says, well, in week one, what I want to achieve is I want to achieve clear goals on actual metrics for project a, and then week two, I’m going to develop KPIs for, and, you know, in consultant three says the same kind of thing in four and five and six, right?
And what you’re saying is, I don’t even know if KPIs are the right way to move forward for your organization. The group will figure it out as they learn how to deconstruct the situation.
Andy: No, I would say, look, given your current understanding, that is what you’re going to be able to get to. But you’re not doing it because you can’t.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: you wouldn’t be even talking to me.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: Right. I would go into it with the thinking, So you can’t do it. That means that you have some norms that are preventing you.
It could be that you get in there, And it turns out, like, they don’t have any norms actually preventing them. It’s that they lacked a little bit of knowledge. If that’s the case, then, easy gig. You tell them, like, oh, this is what you need to do. And they’re like, oh, cool. Yeah, you’re right.
Okay, let’s just do that.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: I think much more likely is, and I think we’ve seen this multiple times, you start digging into it and you realize, ah, thinking about things wrong.
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: thing that you want to achieve still seems completely reasonable, given our current understanding, so why not? But you’re thinking wrong. Your norms are preventing you. Well, that’s action science, that’s saying like, okay, how can I help you get to that understanding to behave differently so you can do this? And that’s it. And so the engagement, I don’t have to tell them about that at all. Like, I would prefer to be able to talk about it up front and explain what it is that we’ll probably be doing. But I wouldn’t predicate, exactly what I’m going to be doing on that. I would say, that’s what you want to achieve.
Yeah. Let’s achieve it. Here’s how I’d probably go about it with you. That’s my take on it.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I’ve seen
Andy: if someone’s not open to it, then they’re probably not open to changing their norms, and they’d be a very bad client for me.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, and I think that’s the other thing around. I mean, we were talking about Weisbord who doesn’t engage with many clients because they’re not in the confused state. Right? We were talking about that last week. I think as a consultant, that’s really important. Oftentimes as a consultant, you have shorter timeframes.
I’ve certainly written these things where, how do I introduce transformation? I was just going through this, a few months ago where I wrote something around, well, the first thing I do is I don’t want to meet all the people and see, What they’re, you know, how they think about the situation and the feedback I got on my proposal was, I mean, what, like we brought you in because you were an expert to tell them what to do, not to listen to that.
Like, it’s great if you’re a full time employee, go nuts, but like, I want something in a month,
Andy: I will say this is another reason why on these kinds of engagements you get paid up front. Because if they could be asking for something that the norms of their organization and the defensive routines of their organization are such that it is literally impossible. The value, the reason you’re paid up front is because, the value you’re providing doesn’t change based on their defensive routines.
Mon-Chaio: hmm.
Andy: And you can still provide them a huge amount of value in being able to now explain to them why what they’re trying to do isn’t working.
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely.
Andy: And they can be left with that knowledge, which is, well, if they want to use it properly, incredibly valuable to them.
Mon-Chaio: Know, maybe full time employees should be paid up front too. Everybody gets paid, in January for the whole year.
Andy: So we’ve talked, we’ve talked kind of in parts around this. Do we need to do a summary of what all we’ve got?
Mon-Chaio: Sure. I mean, I’m happy to do sort of my view on it. I kind of take a step back and I think about what can I take from action science. I like to think about, you should always think that you’re in knowledge acquisition mode.
You never have all the knowledge, you are sort of always gathering knowledge and always refining your worldview based on your knowledge. The second thing for me is Always go back to what I call first principles. Go back to the roots of why you think you know what you know in that epistemological, questioning way, and then be able to explain why you know what you know in sort of a generic model for people to understand it irrespective of the specific situation that they’re in.
So you can criticize the model itself, At the same time, once you agree with the model, then you can build back up from there and say, okay, well, here’s a specific situation on how that fits on top, see how it’s different than what you’re doing today and go from there.
Andy: I like those. And I’m going to connect them. I’m going to say that those provide then the mechanism by which you can build self knowledge. The reason you want this self knowledge is so that you can keep changing your norms, your behavior patterns as you learn more, as you understand things better. once you can do that, You can have an impact that is much greater than what you ever could have had before. I think that’s the hard thing to always get your head around, is that yes, you are just an individual in this. But if you can change the way you think,
Mon-Chaio: Mm hmm.
Andy: you’ll change the way that you lead, and you’ll be so much more effective, that the fact that it’s just you, I don’t think, is as big of an impediment as it seems.
Mon-Chaio: I like it. I certainly hope that’s true because that’s what we’re hoping for this podcast, right? By changing an individual, you will bring that into your organization and be able to make great impact.
Andy: If anyone out there is listening and is interested in this, get in touch. If you have questions, if you have comments, we love hearing from you. If you want help in your organization in doing this, Mon-Chaio and I both. Espouse these things, practice these things, and help others to find this self knowledge so that they can have a greater impact on their teams.
If you’re interested in that, and if you want to talk, you can contact us at hosts at the TTLpodcast. com. That’s hosts with an S at the TTLpodcast. com. And so, until next time, Mon-Chaio, be kind and stay curious.
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