Strategy, change, and defensive routines

by Chris Argyris

Book

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Chris Argyris is a director of elite strategy consulting firm, the Monitor Group, and is the James Bryant Conant Professor of Education and Organizational Behavior at Harvard Business School.

Agyris's early research focused on the unintended consequences for individuals of formal organizational structures, executive leadership, control systems, and management information systems, and on how individuals adapted to change those consequences. He then turned his attention to ways of changing organizations, especially the behavior of executives at the upper levels of organization.

During the past decade, Argyris has been developing, a theory of individual and organizational learning in which human reasoning (not just behavior) becomes the basis for diagnosis and action.

Reviews

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential to understand why strategy initiatives still fail. An organization is founded on defensive routines, like a castle or a medieval town. Our defensive routines are so "normal", we don't even notice them. This also makes the book a very hard read, sometimes difficult to understand. But still on e of my all-time favourites.

Chris explains how use two "theories" at the same time, one "in use" and one "espoused". The latter says, we're open, innovative, pro-active or visionary. The latter is how we act: closed, reactive, protective. The issue in many organizations is that you're not allowed to talk about the differences in what is being said ("this is a safe place") and how you perceived ("an unsafe place") and you're not allowed to talk about the cover-up.

[Aaron Bolin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great ideas...boring presentation. Get to the point already.