mag #1 - gam magazine
analyze the key processes, and, where needed, to propose a critical but productive alternative. Within an existing system, change is difficult to organize: for most actors within a given system, it is hard to understand or predict the possible shortcomings of that system. Culture is historic. It has historic registers and taboos that one can barely consciously relate to, a sense of intimidation to act, behave and design the way we do things. A system tends to confirm existing paradigms, but rarely attempts to discover that, which is beyond its safe and imaginable framework. Now, it is of course a case-specific question what this ‘productive’ alternative really means, and who it benefits. In the commercial business milieu, there are very different notions and practices of how this external agent can or will function. The two most interesting methods in the context of critical practice are the McKinsey model opposed to the Königswieser1 approach: an analytical opposed to an embedded model. Whereas McKinsey’s analysis is based on a catalogue of experience, a knowledge management system, which has essentially been built up by McKinsey since the late 1930s. Königswieser is best known for what they call Complementary Consulting. This method is fundamentally different in that it enters the companies through long-term involvement. Such alternative method beyond the analytical seeks a specificity that allows for a network approach regarding problem solving without formulas. Its intuitive rather than analytical set of soft protocols acknowledges the value of failure, non-linear thinking, and the notion of ‘learning from’. Rather than prescribing solutions, it tries to enable them through processes of sustainable change, realizing that one cannot solve problems, but only tweak their performance. Instead of strategy planning, such model promotes a redesign process of the structure that one is working in. The analytical approach is arguably, in terms of critical re-design, likely to fail, as it tends to base the elements of change on the existing structure without asking the wider question. Or, as candidly noted by Arnab Chatterjee during a recent think tank in Austria: «if one asked a McKinsey consultant and a designer to redesign a
glass, there would be two fundamentally opposing reactions: the McKinsey consultant would look at the glass and think about a way in which it could physically be redesigned, in other words: aesthetically. The designer would look at the glass and think about it as a vessel for rehydration». This of course poses a question as to the boundaries that one sets as well as permits. An iterative design process constantly goes through a series of reframing exercises, whereby the result is very unlikely to be within the orginal framework. Now, if those processes of change can be stirred through a design towards conversations and productive communication, design in this context is understood as the re-ordering of affairs on a meta-scale. Smart design decision-making is always based on dynamic variables and addresses and interacts with more than one layer and several variables at once. The network itself does not produce anything – what is crucial is the position within the network. From Problem to Proposal Through a series of conversations with political theorist Chantal Mouffe, I have learned more about the understanding and outlining of problems than about possible solutions that one may propose. Mouffe is very good in outlining the problematic, but rarely delivers any productive means to move forward. How can one deal critically with the conditions that one is surrounded by or investigating, but simultaneously turn it into a constructive and propositional discourse? In a corporate context, what Mouffe is doing would be called ‘formulating the mess’. The mess, in this case, should be understood as the territory of investigation and action. One formulates the mess in order to convince oneself or others that things have to change. As a method or tool, it creates a common understanding of a problem, or – as Mouffe would phrase it – a joint space in which there is an agreement to disagree. For a consultant, it means that one is preparing the ground, mapping the realities that one is dealing with, in order to develop alternatives. It denotes a stimulation of a circumstance in which there is a consensus
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about the existence of a bilateral conflict, which can – as a result – be dealt with in a productive way. In order to map this mess or field of conflict, it is important to observe and understand the rationale of the system, learn its history and watch how it performs. The mess, in this case, acts as a tool to design structures for the future, to become propositional. Designing change takes time. Designing through playing out the conflicts that exist, and by inserting certain conflicts as productive triggers from the outside, is crucial. Consensual agreements within the early phases of the design process have to be avoided. In fact, the more room a design leaves for future conflicts to be played out, the more successful it will be in the long run. Such design would then embody the potential for those conflicts to always return to a productive mode. Sociocultural systems are self-evolving. Conflicts replace the distorted shared image by transparency. Individual stakeholders have a tendency to define problems free of context, relating them to solutions that are already known and in regards to a set of universal constraints such as time, money and information. Within this register, deviations from the norm tend to be understood as threats. But a problem is most likely not an aggregate, but an independent and emergent property. The Outsider should invest a healthy curiosity as a driving force for testing the performance of a given system, driven by an intuitive understanding of a situation. Critical practices and the challenging of conventional structures and truisms can emerge only from the actualities of praxis and the extrapolation of the feedback-loops of the purely critical into the propositional, the applied. Without falling into the trap of urgency, as urgency never leaves time for the important. For further reading, please find: Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation (Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality), Sternberg Press, 2010 1
See also: http://www.mckinsey.com/ and http://www.koenigswieser.net/