Michael McConkey "Exploring the MIFO Age"

The title to this posting may seem rather, even doubly, anomalous to the reader familiar with the blog’s themes. First, what does this have to do with MIFO and, second, how could anyone suggest that Einstein was in any way under-rated? Well, under-rated is precisely what I will argue Einstein is. As to the relevance to the blog, maybe it’s a bit tenuous. But regular followers of the blog will know that my approach to organizational theory is very much concerned with abstract reasoning – getting beyond the received wisdom about organizational practice and seeing into the deeper inner workings of the processes. Additionally, like Einstein’s relativity, MIFO derives its unique virtues from the fact that there is no absolute, fixed configuration of knowing possible; each context requires its own configuring of knowledge relevant to the prevailing circumstances. This is the same whether one is trying to measure time in different contexts or finding solutions to problems in unstable organizational circumstances.

In this way, Einstein’s contribution to MIFO studies is important both in spirit and in fact. He both sets the tone and lays the material basis for MIFO studies. So, this brief ode to him is certainly relevant to the theme of the blog. And, as will be seen, it is precisely in the ways that he has been underappreciated that constituted his greatest contribution to MIFO and organizational studies.

Again, though, how could one suggest that Einstein was under-rated: he is the most famous scientist and quite arguably the most famous intellectual of all time? The problem is that all that fame is uninformed. Here’s the extraordinary thing about Einstein: he completely changed the historical course of not one, but two separate disciplines. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that he’s the greatest single thinker in the history of the world. But, again, being an icon of popular culture is irrelevant to proper appreciation of his accomplishments.

Most people are aware that he made a major contribution to physics – some even have a vague notion of what that contribution was. That of course was a major achievement and if that was the extent of his legacy, the verdict would certainly have to be that he was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. My point, and the focus of the rest of this posting, is that his achievement in and contribution to physics was equalled (if not surpassed) by his achievement in and contribution to epistemology. Indeed, it’s arguable that this latter was the more important contribution! Of course, without the success in physics, his contributions to epistemology may well never have been taken seriously. However, while most of us still go on, day after day, basically living in a Newtonian universe, in which Einstein’s contribution to physics has no appreciable impact on our daily lives, his contributions to epistemology have had a pervasive impact – changing the way we all live and think. Whether we’re conscious of it or not?

The contribution to epistemology – reasoning about the defensible grounds for reasoning – was in some senses even more remarkable as he broke not one, but two new paths in the field. Appreciating the first of these requires us to recall the response to his initial famous essays about a hundred years ago, now. Today, the popular culture version of the story has it that the reaction against Einstein was that he was overthrowing one of physics’, and science’s, great deities. No doubt there is some truth in this interpretation, but, for the previous decade or so, some serious questions had been raised which Newtonian mechanics didn’t seem to adequately address. It wasn’t so surprising that Newton was being challenged at that point. And, of course, there was some consternation that this challenge came from a nobody: someone with no standing in the scientific community. But all that was in second place; the biggest ground of contention with Einstein, presumably related to this later fact, was the allegation that what he’d done wasn’t science, at all.

Where was the laboratory work? Science was supposed to be working experimentally with the material world. This guy came along and wrote up a handful of mathematically speculative essays and this is supposed to be science? Many dismissed his work as mere philosophy – and metaphysical philosophy at that. But, of course, it was science. What was special here was the unapologetic deductive nature of his work. As Karl Popper has demonstrated, this is of course how science always has and must work. But scientists didn’t see themselves that way. Rather they’d been misled by the writings of their great early cheerleader, Francis Bacon, with all his gushing about the fundamental role of observation to science. Observation, of course, has its place as does experiment, but as Popper demonstrated, scientific knowledge can never come from that. Observation and experiment have to be put to use as instruments for the testing of hypotheses that already derive from the educated imagination: scientific knowledge is deductive.

This may have always been true of science, it may in fact be in the very DNA of science, but Einstein was the first to unapologetically, unabashedly, base his scientific work and reputation on deductive reasoning. Of course, the theory still had to stand up to tests in the material world. Einstein knew that as well as anyone and already knew what those tests would have to be when he proposed the theory. And, of course, in 1919, during the Eddington expedition his theories did past the experimental tests. And, on that day, when the experimental tests in the natural world showed that Einstein’s mathematical speculation provided more successful predictions than Newton’s (supposedly) observational scientific practice, everything changed in the self-understanding of intellectual life about what constituted science and how knowledge could be discovered. This contribution, alone, would have put him among the giants in epistemology. As I’ve said, though, that was only one of his two contributions to the field.

The second was the extraordinarily unique worldview of knowledge which he proposed and had confirmed on that day in 1919 on the Portuguese island. To my knowledge, Einstein is the first person in history to propose a worldview that separated the validity claims for epistemology and ontology. In all of previous history, everyone else had based their understanding of both fields upon the same validity claims. By this I mean, one was either a relativist or a realist. If a relativist, one’s view of both epistemology and ontology was relativist: we can’t know an absolute truth, because there’s no absolute reality to know. Or, if a realist: there is an absolute reality, so we can gain absolute truth of it. Obviously, through history, there has been nuance, gray areas, spectrums, and so on. At the core, though, these were the positions available for thinking.

It was Einstein who uncoupled these apparently inseparable domains. He was an ontological relativist, as the title of his famous theories implies. Changing circumstances change the configuration of the dimensions of what we would call reality. From a philosophical perspective, Einstein’s biggest break from Newton was in that while the latter held firmly to a background independent view of the world, Einstein had demonstrated a background dependent view: the background didn’t exist as an independent variable, but was constituted out of the relationships between the elements of reality. Ontologically, this was certainly a relativist position. Again, such views were not unique, one thinks of Leibniz’s ontology as a kind of forerunner. And of course today we’re inundated with science studies types who gush over their mutual relativist bona fides.

What made Einstein’s contribution so remarkable was that, despite his uncompromising ontological relativism, he was an equally ardent epistemological realist. Rather than surrendering to soft-headed intuition – if the material world were composed of relativist relationships, how could anyone know anything? – he insisted on the know-ability of even that which was relative, in the context of its relativity. Just because reality was slippery, didn’t make it any less real, and if it were real, it was subject to understanding. This was logically implied in his very creation of the famous essays themselves. Notwithstanding the relativity of dimensions and their background dependence, he was able to make predictions about the bending of light in the tangible world. In this sense, the apparent inconsistency of his ontology and epistemology was actually much more consistent than the odd exceptionalism of the postmodernists and poststructuralist – in which all forms of knowing are unmasked as foundationless and meaningless (except of course the one form of knowing making this claim for foundationlessness and meaninglessness).

The key difference for Einstein was that being relative didn’t imply being random. That radical change of dimensional circumstances could completely defy one’s ability to understand a specific context, did not preclude the ability to understand that defied ability nor to understand why and how it happened. If Einstein believed the universe were random, then a realist epistemology would have been impossible, but then, so would have been the success of his essays on relativity. If that logical proposition isn’t adequate, one need only look at his debates with Bohr over the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. The latter, despite its almost universal acceptance, again in the same popular culture that carelessly lionizes Einstein, is intellectually impoverished and actually fails the test of science. This is something else I’ll blog on in the weeks to come. The point here, though, was Einstein’s position in the debate, famously summed up in his quip about God not playing dice with the universe. As Einstein had explained elsewhere, if he in fact believed in a god at all it was Spinoza’s god – not the kind that intervenes in wars and sporting events. Spinoza’s god is better understood as a kind of motive force, a tendency within the universe. One might think of the tendency in natural selection toward ever greater fecundity and diversity. There’s no guiding hand or wise overseer here. There is though an idea that certain tendencies are at work in the unfolding of the world. They may be manifested in countless, elusive ways, but their very existence reveals that the world is not random. If the phenomena of the world were random, predictive science would be impossible.

It was this theoretical leap of Einstein’s – acknowledging a world that couldn’t be reduced to billiard ball mechanics, on the one hand, and yet, despite that relativity, was still subject to the knowledge of the searching mind – that allowed him to advance his unprecedented worldview: ontological relativist, epistemological realist. As we look at MIFO practices, with their emphasis upon precisely the contingency of shifting problem complexes, which defy reduction to simple recipes prescribed by hierarchical authorities, but, still, are subject to a moving, adaptive solution space, generated out of the nimble search to understand the problems in their existing configuration, it should become clear that, in addition to all the other laurels dispensed to him here, minor as it might be on the totem of his great achievements, Einstein is as well the intellectual father of MIFO theory.

In an earlier post on this blog, July 10, I discussed Open Method of Coordination (OMC) as a manifestation of MIFO (multi-directional iterative feedback organization/s). In this post, I want to explore the connection more closely, specifically OMC as a kind of elementary sub-form of MIFO. OMC, we’ll see, is a form of MIFO, but a form that is significantly limited in its dynamism. This is not a criticism, nor even a shortcoming. For its intended purposes, these limitations provide benefits. However, OMC only hints at what is possible and actual in the more dynamic forms of MIFO. Understanding OMC serves then as a useful introduction to the more expansive superior category of which it is a sub-form. As we’ll see, OMC is based upon periodic and routine iterative feedback, while MIFO, in the most expansive version, is based upon constant and meta-routine iterative feedback. This latter claim will require some explanation, of course, but first let’s review the nature and function of OMC.

In the earlier post, I introduced OMC as a MIFO development that has been most saliently explored in the public sector, at least by that name, and I briefly discuss the example of the Chicago School system that is drawn upon by Charles Sabel in one of his many discussions of this topic. In getting a conceptual handle on OMC, we might think of it as a kind of laboratory clearinghouse. To quickly reiterate, in that example, the individual schools and the board of education collaborate to establish agreed upon, realistic, basic, very broad outcome goals. Then each individual school is free to pursue those goals by whatever means its members/stakeholders see fit – abiding, of course, by understood ethical standards to prevent harm. The board continues to play a role in providing advice, resources or even training where necessary. After all, the schools now have responsibilities for which they may have no prior experience. In the absence of any threat of harm to anyone under the board’s responsibility, the schools are provided extreme latitude in finding their own way toward the designated goals. In the process, then, each individual school becomes a separate laboratory of organizational innovation.

The schools, or the local unit in whatever application, have specific responsibilities, which include a thorough documentation of what they did, how and why they did it, along with measurements of their performance and results. At the end of a pre-stipulated period, in the case of the Chicago school system it was three years, the central body comes back to the front of the stage: the central office gathers, audits, evaluates and, most importantly, makes available through a user-friendly medium, the information and experience produced from this broad scale series of experiments. The fruition of this process is an ambitious collaborative internal benchmarking in which all participating units are able to review and assess what worked, where, how, and under what conditions. In this way, the board – or central agency, in any application of the practice – acts as a clearinghouse for the findings produced by all the individual laboratories: in our example, the individual schools.

As one of the underlying motives for this approach is the understanding that distinct local circumstances mitigate the effectiveness of centrally imposed systems, there is no movement from here to a centrally enforced regime based on the resulting best practices. Rather, each individual school studies the most successful practices for ideas of how they can improve their own practice. If their circumstances permit a wholesale implementation, all for the best, but, if not, there is still the opportunity to discern what elements of others’ practices – identified as best or not – that they might retrofit to their own local needs. With the learning benefits absorbed, the process resumes. Each individual unit tries to apply lessons learned to improve their performance over the subsequent period, until the assessment and learning phase starts again. And so on.

In the earlier post, I developed these ideas to highlight how OMC constituted a genuine transcending of the now obsolete rhetoric of centralism-decentralism as a zero-sum game. Here, instead, I want to emphasize the process. As mentioned above, we have a multi-directional (as, via the centre, the schools all communicate with each other, in a vast geometry of channels, about what has resulted) iterative (in that it is done repeatedly, every three years) feedback (in that after every designated period each school gets to see again how its innovations stack up in light of those taken elsewhere, creating further opportunity to learn) organization/s. This integral marriage of best practices, benchmarking, continuous improvement and organizational learning, therefore, does create a MIFO. However, it is periodic, in that it is only every three years, and it is routine, as it is a very set process, with a precise series of steps, as delineated above.

To repeat, this is not a criticism. The periodic delimitation makes sense in that the schools need time to implement any intended changes and to see and measure how those changes play out. Patience for results pays dividends if they provide an appropriate horizon to assess the trajectory of the experiments and innovations. Likewise, the exceedingly large numbers of partners in the process (in Chicago, some 550 schools) and the generally conservative mindset of public institutions, who have to answer to vastly more “shareholders” (i.e., taxpayers) than even the largest private organizations, makes the use of highly delineated, thoroughly documented and painstakingly transparent routines both inevitable and probably necessary. And, of course, a focus upon routine encourages standardized periodic scales.

However, for all that, OMC is considerably constrained in the degree of its dynamism. To fully grasp the potential of MIFO and recognize just how radically it is reinventing modern organizational life, we have to use this sketch of OMC as a jumping off point, from which we do move on beyond it to the richer dynamism of MIFO experimentalism. Sketching a history of MIFO, something I am working on, is complicated and subject to regular revision as scholars reconsider what had been previously taken for granted as vertically integrated, hierarchical and/or bureaucratic processes. For instance, for a long time, the story was that MIFO first began to emerge in the 1970s, in Japanese automaking and U.S. computer enterprise. However, research has since shown that in fact many of the core ingredients of MIFO were already activated in the U.S. auto industry of the 1920s, in some instances lasting right through to WWII. So, there’s no easy sketch or definition to be drawn from history.

At a theoretical level, too, diversity militates against conceptual conviviality: Charles Sabel, Lynn Applegate, John Paul MacDuffie, Jonathan Zeitlin, Charles Heckscher, Susan Helper, Gilles Paquet and Keith Sawyer are just some of the scholars whose differing approaches, methodologies and conceptualizations have all funnelled into my understanding of MIFO. I don’t claim that the model that I sketch below would be consistent with all their analyses, nor, depending upon one’s chronologic framing, does my rough ideal type provide a guide to charting the permutations of organizational history. Still, the discussion has to begin somewhere, so I provide below, as I say, a kind of rough draft ideal type. Ultimately, understanding its practice, theory and history is the object of my long term research project.

The most radical expression of MIFO is found in those organizations that find themselves in need of, either, rapid adaptation or continual innovation. Hierarchies are designed to best ensure the fulfilment of established routines. They are good at mobilizing effort in established, standard methods, which is why they have been so prevalent in the era of mass standardized production under relatively stable social, economic and technological conditions: the long term amortization required to make economic the high fixed costs of such production suited such organizational processes. However, when condition become less stable and, either, rapid adaptation or continual innovation is required, hierarchies are not so affective. The very stability and repeatability that they institute under more stable, often monopolist market conditions, impede adaptation and innovation, and the economics of long term amortization no longer work. Additionally, rapid adaptation’s and constant innovation’s requirement for a far more complex knowledge space, created specifically to allow an option diversity that is anathema to hierarchies’ command and control methods, defy the capacity to be thoroughly grasped and comprehensively managed by a handful of top executives.

The only way for this approach to work is by bringing together those with the appropriate knowledge, to work, directly, together. This creates opportunities and challenges. The opportunities lie in the unprecedented synergy made possible through the direct collaboration of aficionados of multiple disciplines. That too, alas, is also the challenge. On the one hand, a new level of creative dynamism is made possible, but, on the other hand, achieving that creative dynamism requires finding a way of negotiating the insular vocabularies, assumptions and even cultures of such diverse disciplines. Under these conditions, managers have to learn how to make the transition from that of being delegators of tasks to that of facilitators of dialogue. One of the most famous examples of such processes is the relationship between “original equipment manufacturers” (OEM) and their partner component builders. At various times in history, including and especially now, demands for adaptation or innovation have required high levels of collaboration between such partners. These collaborative processes, such as iterative design and simultaneous engineering, require high levels of information sharing and mutual teaching.

It is by these means that the various disciplines can mesh without need of a parsing and delegating authority. However, the professionalism of the disciplines, combined with safeguards for assurance about the effectiveness of such meshing, has also entailed the use of a variety of methods that – as unthinkable as it may seem to the traditional hierarchical organization – actually undermine routines. The meshing of these different disciplines and knowledges require a spirit of invention and experimentation which does not settle for mundane implementation of the fruits of such efforts. Indeed, much of the old hierarchical separation of conception and execution is eclipsed under these new MIFO regimes. Among the key practices to take note of here are benchmarking, error detection and reduction and just in time production flows. All of these are means by which existing routine practices can be challenged for their degree of excellence in meeting state of the art performance. So, both the actual dialogue of creation between the disciplines and the practical implementation of the resulting work are marked by processes that routinely challenge the existing state of routine in the organizational practice.

Such processes then are multi-directional (the disciplines are in constant dialogue amongst themselves, as they mutually adapt to each others’ innovations, while interacting with design and production teams and processes, all responding to the findings from routine challenges in the products and their production) iterative (in that all these processes are repeated constantly in dialogue about implementing the newest state of the art knowledge in products and production, as well as testing of their effectiveness) feedback (as the dialogue among the disciplines are always incrementing new insights back to each other about how designs can be better engineered, and the results of routine-challenging design and production processes provide further gist for the mill of collaborative design and engineering) organization/s. However, unlike the OMC, these MIFO are starkly different in the level of their dynamism precisely because, rather than being routine, they are meta-routine. The only routines which are not subject to challenge in these MIFO are those routines that constantly challenge the taken for granted routines of design, engineering and production. There are no fixed processes or schedules that exceed the bounds of creative challenge. And, in this way, too, these MIFO are not, like OMC, periodic in their operation, but rather operate in a realm of constant challenging and reinventing.

There are still elements of OMC at work in many of these more dynamic organizations. For instance, the benchmarking, which is so important to the meta-routine processes for both design and production, are often based upon information from industry or sector associations or institutes, through which individual organizations that agree to share their own performance specs are able to gain access to those of all other such organizations, who have agreed to the same arrangement. In this way, such institutes or associations play a clearinghouse role not dissimilar to that played by the school board in the example above.

However, for the most part, we can say that while OMC provides an illuminating entrance into understanding the basic elements and mechanisms of MIFO, to fully grasp the dynamic potential in these increasingly important and influential organizational forms and practices, we have to look beyond those practices that are restricted to routine operations under a periodic schedule. We have to grapple with trying to understand the complex dynamics and emergent results of these far more dynamic, boundary-eroding, organizational manifestations of the MIFO phenomenon. We have to go beyond OMC, into the MIFO age.

By the time I entered grad school, in the mid-80s, Karl Popper seemed to be largely disposed of. The zeitgeist felt against him. I wasn’t in a philosophy department, but insofar as such questions do, and most self-consciously, in those days, did bear upon the wider debates in the social sciences and humanities, there was certainly acknowledgement of Popper holding a certain place. The overall gesture of The Open Society and Its Enemies, I think, was appreciated – in that slightly weary way that it was always good to be against Nazis. But wasn’t there a certain sense that he’d carried things just a bit far. And, in any case, at the root of those arguments were the more basic ones about the character of science, evidence, knowledge and truth. And, hadn’t those debates all been carried by others: Wittgenstein and Kuhn, particularly?

By the time I was a grad student, it felt to me that the consensus verdict of the academy’s collective judgment was that Popper was a kind of noble, but failed, effort. In the end, wasn’t he upholding positivism, with its implicit devotion to the very impossible Truth that had been so thoroughly discredited by the reigning wisdom of the various relativist schools of scholarship? And didn’t that fruitless and doomed clinging to an outdated and exhausted philosophy carry in it, like secret assailants stealthily stowed away in a wooden horse, the return of the Scientist as high priest of Truth: the return, in fact, of modernity as Holocaust, the Enlightenment as domination? Wasn’t Popper in fact the fading prophet of rigid hierarchy, authoritarian science, public policy by the fiat of allegedly benevolent experts? This was certainly the impression of Popper that I absorbed at that time.

These considerations, of course, have relevance for debates over MIFO governance, dialogue and organization in more than one way. Certainly, a major driver in debates relating to MIFO has been a concern for the need to more thoroughly integrate greater diversity into decision making processes, tapping into a more fertile cross section of opinion and discussion generally. This was in large part because it has become increasingly acknowledged that public or private policy and the risks that it may entail cannot be determined by any strictly logical formula. What risks and choices are acceptable, at the end of the day, comes down to value judgments. No scientist, no expert, has any privileged insight into which of the available options are the best for any organization or community, much less for the larger society. Science can inform such decision making; it cannot determine it.

As important as that is to the debates over organizational governance generally, and organizational communication in particular, there is an even more fundamental concern here: if the effectiveness of MIFO processes, which, as will be discussed at greater length in postings to come, constitute the potential of a dramatic change in the direction, form and practice of organizational administration and management, and will inevitably present serious challenges around matters of legitimacy and transparency, how are the merits of such dramatic change to be evaluated? Scientific method may not be the only valid consideration in such an evaluation, but can it be simply dismissed? There is certainly a problem with an excessive focus, in the evaluation of organizational governance, on perhaps too narrow a concern for what is quantifiable and measurable. However, a science of some kind cannot be dismissed: any legitimate and accountable use of stockholders’ or taxpayers’ money has to demonstrate tangible benefit. Especially in the public sector, value for money may not be the highest consideration, but wanton waste and/or incompetence are surely not defendable. Again, science may not have the last word, but it must be heard.

Finally, though it may strike some involved in the workaday tangles of making contemporary organization work as a tad esoteric, if we are concerned with MIFO governance specifically as, in significant part, a kind of archipelago of fora for dialogue – among teams, departments, partners, governments, customers, NGOs, citizens, etc., depending upon the context – then, surely, in any re-evaluation of Popper we must not neglect those noble, but supposedly failed, arguments about the nature of an open society. And, while Popper’s concern was primarily directed to public policy and governance, as many second generation theorists of knowledge management, like Mark McElroy, argue, the same principles of the open society, applied to commercial organizations, invoking the ideal of the open enterprise, are just as important for the success of MIFO in the private sector.  The mere existence of those fora does not, in itself, guarantee or demonstrate commercial success or the existence of democracy; it is what goes on within them that tells the tale.

Though I went right through my graduate studies and well beyond them without giving too much thought to the fate of poor old Karl, I have to admit there was always something, some inkling, which kept nagging at me. Even in my rather crude, and all too mediated, understanding of his ideas, there were a couple notions that I kept finding myself being drawn back to, despite the apparent definitiveness of the verdict on the part of my intellectual mentors. These were the ideas of falsifiability and historicism. There won’t be occasion to address the latter head-on here – though, I expect it will arise in passing.

For Popper, falsifiability marked the separation of science from other forms of knowledge. Contrary to the relativist critics I recall from my grad school days, this did not entail some privileging of science as a capital “S” science with claims to superior knowledge. Rather, it merely made the obvious point that if science were to mean something particular, if it was to be distinguished from other forms of knowledge – and if not what was the point of even using the word, ideological rhetoric aside – then something had to demarcate what was and wasn’t science.

I’ve never been able to see beyond the need for the idea of falsifiability. In an era when the stature of science has been so diminished in public esteem, it is hardly surprising that much gets away with passing itself off as science. But, again, if science means something there must be some litmus test. For Popper, that was falsifiability. To be scientific, a theory must have built into it, arising from its own internal logic, the very conditions required to prove it false. Popper was greatly influenced by Einstein; here was an immensely abstract thinker in the process of overthrowing the accepted consensus on physics for the previous two centuries and yet, notwithstanding the theoretical density of his arguments, he knew and identified the practical physical experiments that needed to be conducted to create the conditions for falsifying his theory. Indeed, if the Eddington expedition’s eclipse experiment had not resulted in the bending of the starlight passing near the sun, Einstein’s theory of relativity would indeed have been proven false.

I think of the widespread belief, today, that there’s consensus on some overarching scientific theory of global warming. There, of course, though is nothing scientific about it at all. It’s more like a rolling improv show in which any new oddity is somehow woven into the central narrative in some patchwork method that keeps the thrust of the idea moving forward. Now, none of this is to pass judgment on the truth or untruth of the claims as seen from a God’s-eye point of view. But whatever God does or doesn’t know, it’s not science because there are never any conditions for falsification. Would sudden worldwide temperature drops disprove the overall warming of the climate? No, just as overall temperature rises doesn’t prove it. In the absence of some testable conditions, the result of which, as suggested by the internal logic of the theory, could disprove that theory, it doesn’t meet the conditions of being science.

Now, of course, one can make a case for a public policy that takes seriously the prospect of global warming on the basis of work that actually is scientific. Such work, though, is much more focused and modest: dealing with the melt rate of glaciers, the reading of sediment samples from fjords, and hypotheses on the impact of sun spot activity. None of that, though, makes the widespread, vernacular, media-driven idea of a theory of global warming into something scientific.

As alluded to above, though, taking falsifiability as the defining characteristic of science does not privilege scientific knowledge nor ennoble the role of the scientist in society. In fact, quite the contrary! The principle of falsifiability requires that anything that is scientific is always open to being tested. Now, at a certain point, in Popper’s phrasing, a theory may be taken to have proved its mettle – an endless, exhaustive testing is not the point. But, at no time is any scientific proposition considered beyond testing. The testing test is that anyone can find out how to do it; can actually do it; and, if doing it, will reliably reproduce the expected results. So, anyone, any time, can test. Furthermore, new tests can always be devised. And, in the case of the eventual emergence of competing theories and propositions, a return to determined testing is required. For Popper, commitment to any proposition that does not meet these conditions of falsifiability constitutes nothing more than mere dogma.

Therefore, those who have dismissed Popper as promoting a positivist science based upon the presumption of an ultimate truth which can only be accessed by an ordained cult of master experts called scientists have completely missed his point. Indeed, in reading Popper it is completely dumbfounding how anyone could possibly read him this way.

First, the falsifiability requirement means that any scientific proposition, no matter how reliable, how thoroughly tested, is always in some long view only tentative: it’s merely waiting to be disproved. Think again of Einstein’s dethroning of Newton: for generation after generation, people were born, lived and died believing that Newton had solved the deepest mysteries of the cosmos. (Kant said that Newton had gazed into the mind of God. And, as Alexander Pope put it: “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said, “Let Newton be!” and all was light.”)  There has never been a more successful scientific theory. But it too, eventually, fell. It’s not that Popper does, or needs to, conclude on the existence of absolute truth. The point is that that’s not the domain of science. Even if the historical unfolding of our scientific process did hit upon some absolute, unassailable truth, God may know it, but we never would. Any time we treated any such proposition as the absolute truth, it would no longer be a scientific proposition. In this very real sense, just as Popper dismissed the historicists (see, told you) for their delusion that there could ever be an end to history, so, for Popper, there can never be an end to science – as long of course as it remains science per se: i.e. based upon falsifiability.

So, to present Popper as some obsolete old positivist bent on the eventual transparency of an absolute Truth is a complete misrepresentation. Plus, there’s an additional point that is too easily overlooked in all of this that needs to be emphasized. In the principle of falsifiability, Popper is also rejecting any notion of science as an esoteric practice, rooted in any kind of cabalistic knowledge. Indeed, part of the reason for his rejection of induction as scientific method (besides its simple unworkability) is the degree to which it lends itself to the filtering of initiates based upon approved or disapproved experience. The principle of falsifiability, with its basic testing requirement, leaves the practice of science open to anyone. No special initiation or recondite rites are required. Any person of reasonable intelligence with a critical faculty and capable of following a logical process, is able to participate. Furthermore, that very same person, with those same qualities, not only is capable of participating in science, but is capable of assessing and judging science. There is nothing here that suggests the promotion of scientists as some secular priesthood.

Rather, Popper quite explicitly argues that as knowledge – rooted in critical and rational thought – scientific knowledge is no different than any other. Yes, its discovery has methodological qualities that make it distinctly science, but as a form of reason it’s merely an extension of reason and knowledge in the general society. The open society, for Popper, is the society in which knowledge and critical reason learn from science, not one in which science is reduced to a dogma and scientists elevated to a priesthood administering that dogma. Far from making a fetish of science and scientists, Popper’s logic of scientific discovery and his philosophy of science bring science into the domain of public scrutiny – makes it accessible, in practice and judgment, to the democratic citizen.

Popper democratizes science – a proposition that would seem pretty odd to the postmodernist types who have taken such comfort in consigning him to the dustbin of history. I won’t even make the slightest gesture toward explaining how that state of affairs came about. However, to wrap up this rather lengthy posting, I will come back to the matters of relevance for the concerns of MIFO and organizational governance and communications.

First of all, what does this suggest for the science of MIFO? At the most obvious level, a passion for constant measurement and ranking does not in itself constitute science. Indeed, it’s in some danger of lapsing precisely into inductive thinking. Evidence is always important, but whether it’s being used scientifically, where it’s leading to universally legitimate statements (however tentative all such statement must inevitably be), is quite another matter. Induction all too easily lends itself to the endless accumulation of evidence to support a tautology in the absence of falsifiability. If we’re only measuring for indicators that support our presupposed expectations we are ill-prepared for the surprises that life has a way of delivering. All such measurements, if only based upon inductive presumptions, can all too easily turn into a house of collapsing cards.

On the more positive side, though, the most dynamic expressions of MIFO put a great emphasis on the experimentalist and nimble nature of the new arrangements. In Poppers version of scientific method one finds a vision of knowledge and theory-building that lends itself (dovetails?) quite elegantly to these notions and practices of organizational governance. In Popper’s version of scientific discovery, MIFO finds both a tentative confirmation that indeed it may be moving in just the right direction at the experimentalist level, while also offering a way to rethink the inductionist tendencies that, if left unexamined, could undermine not only the new organizational governance, but the popular legitimacy of 21st century democracy itself.

Finally, that brings us to the other two points raised above for MIFO and its heavy emphasis on organizational communication, with its distinctly dialogical dimensions, which can be conveniently considered together for my purposes, here. The opportunity provided by the emerging organizational communication to elude the kind of technocratic policymaking, public and private, so romanticized in the mid-20th century, through an expansive and dynamic integration of stakeholders, including the public itself, into value-laden policy decisions – such as those related to agreeing on acceptable risk and the allocation of scarce resources – is not only based upon the opening up of that archipelago of dialogic spaces. It is equally based upon the capacity of their participants to exercise the critical reason that transforms such spaces into the enabling fora of democratic citizenship and organizational dynamism. As we’ve already seen, contrary to widespread misrepresentation, Popper’s falsifiable and testable version of science tames the authoritarian impulse. The scientists are given their rightful place as the custodians of a special form of knowledge discovery, but in the very process are also integrated into a democratizing process by which science is made transparent and accountable to the general public.

This democratization inherent in Popper’s notion of science, though, isn’t restricted to accessibility of scientific knowledge. It extends to the contours of a model for critical reason that breathes life into the very notion of the open society: a society in which decisions are made upon evidence and arguments, that invite debate and diverse contribution, and which eschew esoteric shamanistic and cabalistic tendencies in favour of rational processes open for all to examine, assess, criticize and challenge. And, as we’ve seen, the same principles apply to the open enterprise of commercial MIFO. At the core of Popper’s project for a rational science is the promise of democratic citizenship and dynamic organizational governance. Certainly Popper’s logic of scientific knowledge is no panacea for all potential obstacles posed in society or organization. However, the contribution that his legacy offers far exceeds the appalling neglect and misinformed dismissal that has characterized his treatment by trendy relativists over recent decades.