Leading Through Restructuring

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tions.

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Individual Versus Organizational Decision Making An important issue that enters many discussions of decision making is being raised here: the question of individual versus organizational decision making. On the one hand, there is the widely held expectation that persons in administrative positions will personally “be decisive.” What that means is far from clear, but it is often taken to mean making decisions swiftly, without delay or temporizing and, clearly, with minimum ambiguity. It also often implies that the individual tends to make decisions that conform to certain accepted qualitative standards: For example, decisions are well informed and ethically acceptable. Thus, discussions of administrative decision making often focus on the personal behaviors of individuals who are construed to be “decision makers.”

On the other hand, because administration is defined as working with and through other people to achieve organizational goals, it is important to consider the mechanisms by which the organization (and not merely the individual) deals with decision making. In this perspective, the issue begins to turn on the ways in which the organization “acts” (or “behaves”) in the process of making and implementing organizational decisions, rather than on the idiosyncratic behavior of the person in administrative office. For many of the clients of organizations (students and parents, for example), the individual roles of administrators in decision-making processes are obscure and perhaps irrelevant, whereas the “behavior” of the organization

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is most relevant. In this view, the vital decision-making functions are organizational—although administrators may be seen as implicated.

This point was illustrated in one university when the heating system was constantly malfunctioning, classrooms were chronically unkempt, and student seating was typically in disrepair. Students were astounded when, in the spring, an ambitious project was undertaken to beautify the campus by planting flowers and shrubs and setting sculptures among the trees. This action, of course, prompted outcries from students, such as the following: “What is wrong with this university? It obviously doesn’t care what happens in the classrooms. All that matters is what visitors see on the outside!” The implication was that, regardless of the persons who might be involved in the process, somehow the decision-making processes of the university, as an organization, had gone awry.

The discussion of decision making in this chapter recognizes that the personal decision-making style of the administrator is important insofar as it gives rise to the ways in which the organization, as an entity, goes about the unending processes of identifying problems, conceptualizing them, and finding ways of dealing with them. The individual decision making of persons in administrative office takes on significance as organizational behavior chiefly because of its inevitable impact on the behavior of others and on the decision-making processes of the organization itself.

This emphasis on the responsibility of the administrator for the nature and quality of the decision-making processes used in an organization is compatible with the contemporary view that the administrator is a key actor in the development of the culture of the organization. That is, decision- making practices are not so much the result of circumstances inherent in a given organization (the kind of place a school is) as they are the choices of those in authority (namely, administrators) about how decisions ought to be made. These choices are closely tied to assumptions held by

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administrators on issues that are now familiar to the reader, such as the following:

What motivates people at work The relative values of collaboration versus direction in the exercise of leadership in the workplace The desirability of a full flow of information up, down, and across the organization The best ways of maintaining organizational control and discipline The value of involving people throughout all levels of the organization in decision making

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Rationality In Decision Making Even an elementary understanding of contemporary approaches to decision making in organizations requires brief consideration of some of the ways in which we have learned to think about the issue. Those who live in the Western world tend to use and accept logic, rationality, and science when thinking about concepts such as decision making. This propensity reflects generally held assumptions in our culture about the ways in which we ought to go about making decisions. These assumptions have formed the core of our thinking about such matters.

During the three centuries since the Reformation, the history of Western thought and culture has been dominated by the rise of science, technology, and industry. Scientific thought, with its strong emphasis on logical rationality, has become almost ingrained in the institutions of our culture. Thus, in seeking explanations of our experiences, we are accustomed to respect the rationality of logical positivism. In short, we tend to see the solution to all sorts of problems as requiring the application of engineering approaches. This penchant was reflected in Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic organization. It was epitomized by the work of Frederick Taylor, who adapted the principles and methods of science to a form of “human engineering” in the workplace and sought to create a science of management that could be applied to everyday problems in the organization. Taylor called it scientific management and, as Donald Schön pointed out, “Taylor saw the . . . manager as a designer of work, a controller and monitor of performance . . . [seeking through these roles] to yield optimally efficient production” (Schön, 1983, p. 237).

The concept of management as a science grew steadily during the first half of the twentieth century, but World War II stimulated its development

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enormously. This growth was due to three factors associated with the war:

The great emphasis on the roles of science and technology in winning the war The development of operations research and systems theory (These theories involved the application of the rational logic of mathematics modeling to the solution of complex problems ranging from how to reduce the loss of shipping to submarine attack to how to increase the effectiveness of aerial bombing.) The unprecedented scale of organizing that was required to manage the global dimensions of the conflict

The post-World War II era was one of great optimism and energy, when industry and business moved rapidly to exploit the markets that abounded as a result of the years of wartime shortages everywhere. Confidence in science and technology boomed, and the rational, logical methods associated with science soared in acceptance and prestige. It was common to refer to the wartime Manhattan Project as a model for conceptualizing and solving problems: “After all, if we could build an atomic bomb we ought to be able to solve this problem.” Government expenditures for research surged to new heights on the “basis of the proposition that the production of new scientific knowledge could be used to create wealth, achieve national goals, improve human life, and solve social problems” (Schön, 1983, p. 39).

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I. The United States reacted with another spasm of emphasis on the logic of applying mathematics and science to the solution of problems. Under the leadership of President John F. Kennedy, the United States began a large-scale effort to develop new space technology. Before long, the U.S. educational infrastructure found itself involved in meeting the demands of the space program for scientists and mathematicians, as well as managers trained to apply the

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concepts of those disciplines to complex organizational challenges. The new rallying cry became, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we solve this problem?” The implication was that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had—since its inception under the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower—developed and demonstrated the effectiveness of a model for complex decision making that was applicable to all sorts of problems, social as well as technological.

During the post-World War II era, another similar model—widely admired and emulated—was proffered by medicine. It emphasized clinical- experimental research as the basis of knowledge:

The medical research center, with its medical school and its teaching hospital, became the institutional model to which other professions aspired. Here was a solid base of fundamental science, and a profession which had geared itself to implement the ever-changing products of research. Other professions, hoping to achieve some of medicine’s effectiveness and prestige, sought to emulate its linkage of research and teaching institutions, its hierarchy of research and clinical roles, and its system for connecting basic and applied research to practice. The prestige and apparent success of the medical and engineering models exerted great attraction for the social sciences. In such fields as education . . . the very language . . . rich in references to measurement, controlled experiment, applied science, laboratories and clinics, was striking in its reverence for those models. (Schön, 1983, p. 39)

This is precisely the view and the hope that is so very much in evidence among the supporters of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act as it was created and as it began to unfold in practice.

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Rational Decision-Making Models

It is not surprising that students of decision making tried to develop and assist administrators to master, a science of making better-quality decisions through the analysis of decision-making processes. An early and major contributor in this effort was Herbert Simon. Simon’s analysis identified three major phases in the process of making decisions (Simon, 1960):

First, there is intelligence activity. In view of the influence of World War II on postwar thought, Simon used the term intelligence much as military people do: the search of the environment that reveals circumstances that call for a decision. The second phase is design activity: the processes by which alternative courses of action are envisioned, developed, and analyzed. The third phase in Simon’s analysis is choice activity—the process of actually selecting a course of action from among the options under consideration.

Simon’s great stature as a scholar and his popularity as a consultant to numerous prestigious corporations ensured wide acceptance of his pioneering approach to decision making, which now stands as classic work. Many who were to follow would create a substantial body of literature devoted to efforts to improve his conceptualization, usually by elaborating the number of steps to be found in the process. Thus, one finds numerous models proffered in the extensive literature on decision making. Two basic assumptions incorporated in almost all of them are based on Simon’s work: the assumption that decision making is an orderly, rational process that possesses an inherent logic; and the assumption that the steps in the process follow one another in an orderly, logical, sequential flow (which some refer to as linear logic). Such models, and the

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assumptions on which they are based, became important in the training of administrators and have been widely applied in planned, systematic ways to real-world organizations in the hope of improving their performance.

Peter F. Drucker, a leading organizational scholar whose thinking was very influential in corporate circles from the 1960s to the 1980s, listed the following steps in a rational decision making process (Drucker, 1974):

1. Define the problem. 2. Analyze the problem. 3. Develop alternative solutions. 4. Decide on the best solution. 5. Convert decisions into effective actions.

Such a formulation was seen as helping the administrator to organize decision making and make it more systematic, an alternative to intuitive, perhaps haphazard, knee-jerk responses to the flow of events in the busy environment of organizational life. Drucker’s model, much elaborated and detailed, was widely applied in corporate and governmental organizations throughout the United States, and it was accepted by many as the essential logic of administrative thought.

Nevertheless, even as the number of models proliferated and efforts to install them in organizations intensified, a widespread disparity between the theoretic notions of the scholars and actual practices of administrators was also apparent. It was noted, for example, that decision making usually does not terminate with either a decision or the action to implement a decision. In the real world, decision making is usually an iterative, ongoing process whereby the results of one decision provide new information on which to base yet other decisions. Thus, feedback loops were added to some process models to ensure that the outcomes of decisions would be considered when future decisions were pondered.

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