Edgar Schein at 90: A Celebratory and Exploratory Metalogue

Here’s how I frame this topic. I’ve come to learn the term interiority as a philosophical term that expresses a way of holding both our engagement with what we see and hear (the outer data of sense) with how we are thinking and feeling (inner data of consciousness) (Cronin, 2017). We can attend to data, think a matter through, and ask the relevant questions. We can know when we are puzzled, attend to the questions we have, know when we have reached reasonable conclusions, and can take responsibility for what we do. We can learn to recognize our biases, prejudices, fears, and anxieties. This is the data of consciousness and giving the same significance to it as we give to the data of sense, I think is both essential for social scientists and for the development of action and theory. The point is that we can be attentive to experience, be intelligent in understanding, be reasonable in judging, and be responsible in taking action, which can be applied to the data of consciousness, just as the specialized empirical methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the data of sense. Sensible data, such as the content of acts of seeing and hearing, do not occur in a cognitional vacuum but in the context of our interests and preoccupations. Yet I do not think that the field of OD has learned how to hold both data of sense and data of consciousness as complementary. In a recent discussion where a colleague answered a student’s question about how do you know when you have enough data with “The data will tell you,” I riled at that answer and replied to the effect that data does not tell us. We make a judgment, and it is through attending to how we come to that judgment that we can affirm reasonably that we have enough data (or not) on which to be able to formulate conclusions. This is an activity of the human mind, not an externalization. In the final chapter of his book, Cronin has a heading titled “Being at home in a Philosophy of Interiority.” When I read that, it jumped out at me, and I had the stereotypical aha! moment where everything I’ve been working on fitted and made sense (Coghlan, 2017b). I also realized that it was your work that has me at home in a philosophy of interiority long before I could put a name on it.

Ed, you have consistently been explicit about your own intellectual development and how it has shaped your practice as a scholar-practitioner. You consistently work from your experience to be practically helpful to clients (practical knowing in the present tense), and you build knowledge from your experience. For instance, in your exploration of the theory and practice of clinical inquiry/research and humble inquiry as you focus on building a helping relationship with a client, you also emphasize the need for self-reflexivity by the consultant/inquirer. You combine data of sense with data of consciousness by demonstrating how you reflect on your own thinking as you work to be helpful, frequently identifying errors in how you misread situations and intervened inappropriately and how your own theory and practice has been shaped by this reflection. This, for me, is interiority, though you do not use that terminology. In your writing, you consistently explicate your inner thoughts and show explicitly how you are thinking, how you are figuring out, how to be helpful, what your experience is, and so on. How did you get to valuing, including yourself, in your writing? It is rarely done.

I wish I could answer that question but the truth is that I have always written about myself and never gave it a second thought. I saw it as natural, and only later in life when I read Van Maanen’s (1988) little book I realized it was a style and an option and not automatic. One other thought is that the T-group years taught me how to access my feelings and how to try to express them to be helpful.

I have been both impressed and helped by how you share what is going on in you as you listened to clients and are figuring out how to respond. When you have done that I have questioned my thinking and you have shown me something of how I might attend to my interpreting processes as I engage in research conversations. You put a humanity into the academic setting of your books. I am not sure that OD research education provides the philosophical foundation or training to go beyond the dated subjectivist-objectivist impasse.

Your observation reminds me of two other experiences that influenced my consciousness of myself and my ability to enhance that self-consciousness. The first was encountering Ellen Langer’s (1997) work on mindfulness and a personal encounter where she shocked me with the question “What else was going on?” after I had told her my tale of woe of driving many hours to take a grandchild to a hospital on Cape Cod to have a small cut fixed. I had completely blocked out that in all those hours my wife and I had had a delightful conversation with this child. I learned that what we think about and talk about is much more a matter of choice then I had realized. This insight was then reinforced when I encountered the dialogue process in which the initial instructions encourage us to consider whether we have to give in to every impulse to respond to a question or a disagreement, or, alternatively, whether we should suspend that impulse and instead ask ourselves why we disagree or why we need to respond just because we have been asked. I think the initial T-group experience, Bill Isaacs’ (1999) dialogue method, and mindfulness are all ways of becoming conscious of how coercive our cultural rules are and how important it is to learn to overcome them when appropriate.

As I reflect on what Ed has said, I am wondering how my writing may be grounded more in my interiority. I find it hard to write in this manner. It is not how I was trained to write academically, and often I do not have the insight into how I have moved from experience to understanding to judgment on a particular point nor have the confidence to write it down for others. I am learning from Judi Marshall (2016) how to do this. In the wider context, the notion of interiority is an unfamiliar one in the OD field, and I am hoping it can become regular currency in OD research, paralleling how self-skills are currency in the practitioner arena of OD. The so-called paradigm wars of what constitutes research with the polarization of the subjective and the objective continue. Through its emphasis on how we know interiority enables us to hold both data of sense and data of consciousness as complementary. That is what we are bringing to the fore in this metalogue, where we are not only talking about interiority but also doing interiority by exposing our thinking processes (usually kept tacit and private) to each other as we discuss it.

I frame this topic in the context of how philosophers have been discussing the different forms of knowing since Plato and these discussions have dominated explorations of the philosophy of social science. That we know in different forms is without question. We have learned the distinction between knowing that and knowing how. In our academic world of organization studies, practical knowing has been neglected by scholars. This is due to how in the 17th century philosophers turned to problems of the objectivity of knowing, thus marking a shift from knowing in a descriptive mode to knowing in an explanatory mode, where things were no longer presented in relation to the knowing subject but were related to one another in recurring patterns. A tendency to relate any method of thinking to the subject was criticized as being subjective and invalid, and limited to surface appearances, contrasted with scientific patterns of knowing, which emphasize the objectivity and separation of the knower (subjective) from the known (objective). This view continues to be held by many in the academy and by those who hold a particular view of the nature of social science. I have framed a philosophy of practical knowing so as to retrieve its value for the academy (Coghlan, 2016).

You have, Ed, long been making the case that OD is a philosophy that finds expression in your term process consultation as clinical inquiry. Clinical inquiry is an orientation to inquiry that views the researcher as one who enters the organization at its invitation and helps clients understand their organizational challenges and works with them to help address those challenges and be helped by the clients to generate the relevant data and build relevant theory that is useful to both practice and scholarship (Schein, 2008). In a reflective paper on the philosophy of OD that has been significant for me, you pointed to Lewin’s work as the tap root of OD and grounded Lewin’s work as being rooted in the practical social science that Lewin practiced (Schein, 2010). You concluded that OD can be scientific, not in the “outmoded model of experimental physics but scientific in the emphasis on careful observation and careful study of the effects of one’s own actions on the human systems we deal with” (2010, p. 100). For decades you’ve been making the case that being helpful is at the heart of OD and OD research and arguing that through the process of trying to be helpful you are both helping the client practically and generating knowledge of what really goes on in organizations. From where did you get this insight? Where has it taken you over your working life?

I think it is very important to note that my interest in helping and what I have called clinical research came about in my postdoctoral years. My father was a physics professor so I grew up in a scientific home bubble and had huge respect for formal science. During my education at Stanford and Harvard, I concentrated heavily on learning to be an experimental researcher in social psychology. I knew this was feasible because I had learned about the brilliant experiments of Kurt Lewin, Ash, and Sherif, then followed up by Bavelas, Leavitt, and the group dynamics researchers that grew out of the MIT Center in the 1940s and early 1950s. Group dynamics was a well-established experimental discipline, and I was totally committed to it all through my PhD years. For my dissertation, I did an experimental study of imitation, which tested a specific hypothesis, ran an experiment with human subjects, and published a paper in the highly respected Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

When I left the Army in 1956, I faced a major identity issue around the question of whether to take a job in a traditional psychology department or to take up MIT’s offer from Douglas McGregor (whom I knew only by reputation) to go to a management school, given that I knew nothing about management. So I gambled that I could make experimental social psychology work in the MIT management school. I was assured by the dean and McGregor that they really wanted me as an experimental social psychologist because the school was testing the theory that bringing in people from relevant disciplines would be better than hiring PhDs in management or exmanagers. So I was quite comfortable planning an experimental career at MIT. I saw many ways that I could do similar experimental research. In the meantime, I still had a lot of data from the Korean repatriates—a consulting contract to work with a group at Walter Reed that was exploring how to enhance interrogation by various means other than torture and was planning a major follow-up study of repatriates with several former colleagues from Walter Reed. The desire to continue to be an experimentalist was as strong as ever, and in my teaching, I drew heavily on reporting experimental findings to students, even though that often left them with the feeling of “so what?”

All of this changed late in my second year of teaching (1958) when McGregor suggested in a fairly coercive manner that I should attend the human relations workshop that was offered in the summer at Bethel. This experience added an entire new dimension to my learning and deeply influenced the future direction of how I thought about science and social psychology, recognized how much I had already deviated from the experimental model through the POW research and how exciting direct involvement with here-and-now experience could be. I also remember McGregor inviting me into his class of Sloan Fellows to observe how he used experiments and experiential exercises in the classroom to give students a direct experience in gaining some knowledge rather than reading or telling about it. I could see for myself how exciting it was when a student experienced something rather than being told about it, because that had of course been the essence of my T-group experience. So by the third or fourth year at MIT, I was sold on experiential education and was beginning to learn how that could also play into being a consultant.

I think what I was beginning to learn from running T groups and consulting with DEC is that I had much more fun making sense of the here and now than preparing material to lecture about in the classroom. Jumping 40 years ahead it is not accidental that the change class, which I eventually evolved and taught, was mostly my helping students and coaching them rather than lecturing. I love the idea of explaining events and sharing my theoretical knowledge in explaining something that we had all experienced.

In fact, I have realized in recent years that I have a great need to explain and tell people things, but I have realized that only works when we have a shared experience that needs to be understood better. I have tried to explain this in my papers on experiential learning because I also believe so strongly that the explanation has to be based on the model of symbolic interaction via Goffman and others. I am not at all sure that helping is my motive, so much as clarifying what is going on. I think I often see better into situations than others and can be helpful by broadening perspective and introducing oblique new ideas. I think I feel best after a consultation if the other party has been helped by learning something new or getting a new perspective on something. As the world becomes more complex, I think my ability to see complexity becomes important, so my models and theories tend both to simplify and to deal with complexity. Even though I wrote a lot about helping, I don’t think that has ever been my goal at a personal level. I think what I’ve always wanted to do is to clarify better, showing how smart I am in seeing complexity and connections where others may not and contributing this skill to my multicultural upbringing and my valuing of scientific clarity. But I often say, my version of science in the human sciences is to build on good observation and replication not on experimentation, which is impossible, or on surveys, which are not valid indicators of actual behavior.

This is the first time I have heard you step back from framing helping as the foundation of your OD work and reframing it in terms of clarifying in order to contribute to systemic complexity. Previously you have been so strong in making a case for helping. Is this a new insight? At the same time I’m seeing a consistency with the focus on being helpful in a practical mode? Is that an accurate interpretation of what you have just said?

I think helping others comes into play by my discovery that my ability to clarify and broaden perspective was not only helpful to students and clients and colleagues, but in the case of consulting, I also discovered that in the helper role I was given access to what was going on in groups and individual clients that was incredibly interesting and revealing. Being told by a client what really worries them and being invited to talk to others under the aegis of their need for help rather than my need for research was for me a true discovery. I was fortunate to have gotten involved with Digital Equipment Corporation and Ken Olsen, their cofounder, because they did not want me as an expert telling them what to do, they wanted precisely what I was able to do, to stimulate their thinking and their perceptions around their own problems. I had previously experienced being a consultant through doing an interview survey of an engineering group and giving feedback to management on the problems that we discovered in our interviews, only to be thanked stiffly and feeling that we had accomplished very little except to embarrass the head of this group because he had been seen as the cause of what worried this group and we had mindlessly reported it back to him. I have learned from this that even if the client says “Come and look us over and then tell us what our problems are” can produce consulting income but can be hurtful instead of helpful. Becoming a psychologist implied to me that understanding had to lead to some kind of improvement and that our job as psychologists was not just to report back to people what we saw but to ask ourselves how we can be helpful. I did not like the feeling of doing my job of giving feedback only to be paid, thanked, and basically thrown out. I discovered that I needed to be liked and valued and that being helpful was a better path to that feeling than being an outside researcher and just telling the subjects what I found without considering the impact this might have on them. I have also learned in my many hours of running T groups how complicated it is to tell someone our observation of or reaction to them because culturally we have learned, at least in Western culture, that you don’t tell people honestly what you think of them and how you react to them. In fact, the reason Carl Rogers said that the T group might have been the most powerful social invention of the 20th century is because in the T group we found a way to safely suspend these cultural rules and actually learn things about ourselves and each other that normally remain hidden or the subject of other people’s gossip. But we also learned that such information is only helpful if we have built the norms in the group that permit sharing those data in a non-hurtful way. I learned to take this for granted and apply it to my interactions with clients in the consulting arena. I also realized that this form of consulting is totally different from the traditional model and often more helpful from the client’s point of view. It is also not incidental that in a professorial role in a management school we were expected to consult to learn more about how management really worked and thereby also get additional income. It was quite apparent to me that the traditional consulting model evolved commercially into a money machine through building contracts and longer range commitments and that my process model made a point saying that the relationship with the client should be an hourly or daily affair that could be terminated when it was no longer helpful. Less money but more satisfaction and a sense of evolving an ethic of being helpful.

As I reflect on this exchange with Ed, I am surprised by his apparent shift from helping as being at the heart of what OD is about. He has been very clear about it in so many publications (e.g., Schein, 2010). His reframing, however, does not change the central theme of his work that I have internalized, which emphasizes that inquiring with managers into their experience of practical challenges and working with them to develop understanding and ways of addressing them generates practical knowledge for the manager and for our knowledge of how organizations work.

I’ve always had a fearful curiosity and a deep personal motivation for acute attention on the here and now, which derives from the personal need to figure out what is going on and especially to identify threats and puzzles in order to (1) avoid harm and (2) look for opportunities to enhance my own agenda. My multicultural early years with refugee parents moving first away from Switzerland because of my father losing his green card to work there, then leaving the Soviet Union, then Prague, then Europe at age 10 to settle in Chicago made me both skilled in figuring out what is going on and fearful if I could not figure it out. I was not aware of this until reflecting in recent years on how anxiety/fear motivate voyeurism and learning inquiry methods. Turning such fear motivated inquiry into creative opportunism in the world of work is how I analyze my interest in such here-and-now inquiry, which also leads to my interest in theories such as Erving Goffman’s, which analyze “situational proprieties” in a brilliant fashion. A correlated thought is that as an only child, much praised by my parents for all my efforts and productions, I developed confidence, maybe overconfidence, in the correctness of what I figured out and definite resentment at being told something unilaterally that I did not agree with or knew to be wrong by my own logic or knowledge. All my experiences in the T-groups and association with the NTL colleagues, the commitment to “spirit of inquiry,” and the power of the here-and-now process analysis in groups turned fear-oriented processes into work processes that produced successful outcomes both in immediate experience and in response to my writing. In other words, I discovered that behavior, which was initially motivated by compulsive fear-based behavior, turned out to be empirically successful and theoretically valid. I would add that I always want to learn something in every here-and-now conversation, which would include learning that what I am telling is being received well, that I am being helpful, or at least entertaining. I don’t want any interaction to be a dangerous, boring, or meaningless Level 1 transaction. I also want a sense of being helpful, which gives me a sense of “learning” that I am OK, still competent. I think I am addicted to being “productive”—always achieving something—so that even when I am walking or just sitting around I am doing something meaningful, which includes spending time on puzzles or listening to music, but I hate the feeling of having “wasted time.”

You are linking the spirit of inquiry in the present tense explicitly to being “productive,” which I’m reading as being practically helpful. As you make links to your T-group training, I am wondering that, given that sort of training is no longer a basis for being in OD work, how might doctoral or neophyte OD researchers learn these skills.

I find this question elicits in me the very thing we are talking about. In the here and now I find this question that you raised triggers the 90-year-old expert in me and at the same time immediately triggers the question “Why are you asking me this? Are you worried the students are not getting this kind of training or experience?, and How can I help you figure out the answer?” My wisdom answer is simple—everyone needs T-group experience if they want to go into humanistic scholarship and practices. But were I to give you that answer we would be immediately confronted with the question of how that could be brought about and would immediately confront all the barriers in the current cultural setting that would make that very difficult to implement. You would then have to decide whether you wanted to become a client and work on this with me or begin to evolve some other kind of joint inquiry process to deal with the question, but it would be your choice and we would go from there.