Chris Argyris

So my background academically is in organizational development and organizational psychology.

And very early on in my academic career, I got interested in the work of Chris Argyris at Harvard and Don Schoen at MIT and their work around organizational learning and dialogue.

So that's kind of where the interest came.

And I was raised by a father who worked for the post office.

And Charles studied with him.

And then also, you could link this with the work that Chris Argyris did at MIT on defensive routines and our psychological weakness to want to defend what we're doing and be right, which means we don't want to be seen that way, so we camouflage ourselves.

that we're doing that.

And then, oh, that's naughty, so we camouflage the camouflage.

I'm going to talk about what's called the ladder of inference.

It was a concept developed by Chris Argyris and Peter Senge, if you've read any of his work, made it into what is known as the fifth discipline.

Now, in the insights discovery work I do, we talk about perception as one of the grounding concepts as we do the self-awareness work.

And it has been adapted a bit in insights to be called the ladder of perception.

So let me ask about systems.

You know, the subtitle of the book frames this around software delivery, but your sources include the aforementioned Dr. Deming, Walter Schuhart, Chris Argyris, Donella Meadows.

I mean, is it really a book about software or is it a book about systems and leadership and such? I'm trying to help expand the market for you.

Oh,

Yeah.

Model one organizations.

That's Chris Argyris.

Yes.

That is where we have to look at how organizations diagnose their own failures.

Parsons brings in some foundational work here from Chris Argyris and Donald Schoen regarding the types of learning.

OK.

They draw a very clear line between single loop learning and double loop learning.

And then at the third level, I-- Is, is it shared understanding as in it's a, it's a similar-- So like I don't know if you're familiar with his work, but a gentleman named Edgar Schein would've characterized this, I think, as underlying basic assumptions.

And in Chris Argyris' model, I forget exactly what it's called, but essentially it's the often unconscious set of values or beliefs that we share versus having a goal.

And I could see goals fitting in here, but it sounds to me like you're not saying, "What is the goal of democracy?" You said something to the effect of, "What is it that we're doing when we do democracy?"

Okay, so that's fascinating.