The dark places of wisdom: a review of The Age of Heretics

Citation

Bokeno, R.M. (2010), "The dark places of wisdom: a review of The Age of Heretics", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 24 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/dlo.2010.08124cae.002

The dark places of wisdom: a review of The Age of Heretics

Article Type: Book review From: Development and Learning in Organizations, Volume 24, Issue 3

The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws and the Forerunners of Corporate Change

A. KleinerCurrency Doubleday, New York, NY, 1996, 414 pp.

The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management

A. KleinerJossey Bass, San Francisco, CA, 2006, 391 pp.

In The Dark Places of Wisdom, Peter Kingsley (1999) spins a semi-viable tale about how the world may indeed be different today if all the knowledge currently attributed as a “footnote to” Plato was contextualized more properly – and correctly – as a footnote to Parmenides, Plato’s teacher. In sum, had we been able to hear what Parmenides actually had to say, we’d have a world attuned to “both-and” thinking, rather than the “either-or” absolutism of Plato.

Kingsley reminded me that wisdom, new thinking and hope for changing status quo stagnation can come from dark places – those foreboding as well as those we simply cannot see from our current perspective.

In a way, Art Kleiner has written a similar book about the origins of what we now call development and learning in organizations. He asks us to look back at those origins as a way of moving forward. In a time when nanosecond technology provides nanosecond knowledge, when information substitutes for understanding – and both are routed to the IT agenda – we would do well to recall the origins of human development and learning in organized worklife. This is what Kleiner admirably offers in The Age of Heretics (1996; Second edition, 2008).

While full of exciting OD history and intrigue, The Age of Heretics is no history lesson in any exclusive, simple, or textbook way. It is rather the lineage of organizational heresy courageously dealing with the dangerous issues surrounding the uncomfortable fit between the individual and the organization (when the latter is conceived as an institutionalized, impregnable hierarchy of authority, power and absolutist thinking).

And organizational workilfe in the mid-1900’s was indeed a dark place, as Warren Bennis writes in his forward, “a vast sea of grey flannel suits”. But also there amongst and sometimes firmly entrenched in the mainstream, were the sparks of a new work arrangement, a new construct for superior-subordinate relations, a new and acute global awareness – indeed, all the real counter-culture thinking and activism that never really made it to the front page. The seeds of human development and learning in organizations – as a vital dimension of making work better and business more productive at the same time – were sown here.

Consequently, The Age of Heretics is awesomely inspiring reading. There is no formula that would give it the review it is due. Although the major theorists and seminal figures in OD thought are certainly there (Argyris, McGregor, Bennis), they are not there as textbook theorists; rather more intriguing are their stories – the influences on them and their influence on others. Kurt Lewin’s influence upon Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis, and an entire lineage of interventionist thinking and action is prominent. And then there are the characters, major and minor, whose radical influence on organizational development is barely known at all: Edie Seashore, Saul Alinsky, Jay Forrester, Willis Harman, Herman Kahn, Pierre Wack, and many others.

There are changes in the second edition that seem to cool the revolutionary sentiment of the first edition, and that disappoints me a little. The change in subtitle subtly guides the sentiment back into more mainstream comfort. As well, the inclusion of Tom Peters, Rosabeth Kantner, Jack Welch seems more like an invitation to a sit-in they would have never attended. And they do not mix well with the company above: for those of us who remember, picture a few late 1980s BMW’s parked amongst an array of surf woodys and beat-up VW vans.

Nevertheless, the disappointment is mild compared to the thrilling documentation of the initiation and demise of the National Training Laboratories; Ted Newland’s prescient identification of Herman Kahn as one whose eerie scenario visioning might assist Shell in anticipating the future of oil; the institutional resistance to Jay Forrester’s systems dynamics (which grounds what we now call “organizational learning” popularized by Senge’s (1990) The Fifth Discipline); and Willis Harman’s experimentation with alternative states of consciousness, which saw “a different kind of interconnectedness as plausible, where individuals could gain their own power over their own future … ” (p. 172).

Yes, Kleiner calls us back to a time when there was in Dylan’s words “music in the café’s at night, revolution in the air”, and he achieves two quite wonderful purposes. Firstly, in addition to an almost unfairly engrossing journalistic treatment of those major theorists we may have come across in the textbooks in grad school so long ago, there is an equally irrefuseable invitation to the backstories and characters – heretics who thought and did as Pelagius implored them: that people are basically worthy, and that through human actions and human will, guided by God, they are perfectible. And no institution need mediate that quest. Thus, the second achieved purpose – a radical reinspiration for those practitioners and scholars in the OD field, to get back to the garden, to what is really important, and rediscover the human trajectory for humanity launched by the original OD thinkers and doers.

R. Michael BokenoProfessor of Organizational Communication and BB&T Fellow in the College of Business, Murray State University, Murray, Kentucky, USA.