Pragmatism and Management Knowledge

Posted on August 22, 2007  Comments (1)

Is the Theory of Constraints (TOC) a Theory?:

There are strong ties between Deming’s ideas and the pragmatic philosophy; one paper offers a nice overview: Deming and Pragmatism.

I like George Box’s quote “All Models Are Wrong But Some Are Useful” This can also be dangerous when people don’t understand the limits of usefulness. A danger is that people believe the model is more true than it is (they don’t understand the limitations).

The pragmatists were concerned with the theory of knowledge – how we know what we know. They were very concerned with evaluating thought and beliefs. They believed in testing to determine whether theories were correct. This thinking underpins the Shewhart/Deming/PDSA cycle.

I believe the question raised in the original post is very similar to the struggle Shewhart went through in developing the control chart and Shewhart cycle. He wanted to address the exact issue of finding things that not only appear to be useful (which includes many instances of things that appear to be useful but in fact are not – we people are prone to this in many ways) but are predictably useful.

Related: The Illusion of Understanding – Illusions – Optical and Other – Management is Prediction – Experiment and Learn