situation

A Letter About Mary Parker Follett

February 16, 2016 Albie Davis

Inspired by Episode 5. The Law of the Situation – Mary Parker Follett

By Albie M. Davis

Dear Podcasters,

What can I say?  Your discussion about Mary Parker Follett’s (1868 – 1933) thoughts about “The Giving of Orders,” with a focus on her notion of  “the law of the situation,” is such a delight.  The way you each share your thoughts and listen to one another, occasionally modifying your own thinking, after hearing and considering the thoughts of your colleagues, was like watching Follett’s ideas take form and evolve during the course of the conversation. To top off this experience, I listened to Johan’s summary last.  Sensational!

Albie M. Davis

Thank you for developing such a novel and contemporary way to learn about and contribute to something as essential as how to work together in groups, whether they be families, schools, community meetings, the workplace, national governments or the United Nations. 

I first “met” Follett in 1989 in the Schlesinger Library, which was then part of Radcliffe College (for women) and is now The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  I asked a librarian if she knew who Follett was, for I did not know if she was alive or dead.  The Librarian handed me Dynamic Administration:  The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett, and let me know that she had died in 1933.  However, when I flipped open her book and landed on the chapter on Constructive Conflict, a talk she presented before a Bureau of Personnel Administration conference group in January 1925, I thought, “She may have passed on, but her thinking is the most alive of anyone I know.”

Since your episode was so engaging, I made a few notes about what I might say if I were there. I hope you will forgive me for stepping into your exchange with the way I have come to think about “the law of the situation.”  This is a concept that has arisen slowly for me over the years, and probably will continue to change, but it is where I am today.

One of the things I love about Follett is the way in which mid-stream in her writing and talks she can modify her thinking. And another quality comes when she herself gets “swept up” in an idea.  Below is one of my favorite Follett’s trips.  I call this “The Surge of Life.”  It is from The New State, page 35.

The surge of life sweeps through the given similarity, the common ground, and breaks it up into a thousand differences. This tumultuous, irresistible flow of life is our existence: the unity, the common, is but for an instant, it flows on to new differings which adjust themselves anew in fuller, more varied, richer synthesis. The moment when similarity achieves itself as a composite of working, seething forces, it throws out its myriad new differings. The torrent flows into a pool, works, ferments, and then rushes forth until all is again gathered into the new pool of its own unifying. (NS35)

I love the phrase “the law of the situation,” however, “law” does suggest a certain static quality.  If you add up statements by Follett, it is clear she doesn’t see the world standing still. And in her third book, Creative Experience (1924) she makes it clears that:

 A situation changes faster than anyone can report on it.  The developing possibilities of certain factors must be so keenly perceived that we get the report of a process, not a picture, and when it is necessary to present to us a stage in the process, it should be presented in such a way that we see the hints it contains of successive stages.(CE9)

I agree with what sounded like a semi-consensus among your team: Follett only occasionally laid out a “how to” list of steps and stages.  She trusted the readers or listeners to figure that out themselves. And, it is thrilling to think that you are interested in tackling some of the challenges that face humanity in a world bursting with technological possibilities.

I admire the élan with which your team is creating your Talking About Organizations podcast, site and blog, and I look forward to your individual and collective insights into Follett and all those who shed light on how people can tap the creative energy spawned by the differences among members in a group.

With anticipation and appreciation,

Albie Davis

Albie M. Davis served as Director of Mediation for the Massachusetts District Courts from 1981 to 1999. In that role, she helped develop community-based mediation programs which trained volunteers to provide mediation services instead of taking their conflicts to court. In this role, she trained mediators as well as mediation trainers. When she left her court position to move from Massachusetts to Maine, she expanded her interests from mediation to mixed media, and began to paint in oils and watercolor, as well as serve as a conflict resolution consultant/coach for the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2013 she returned to Boston and with a three-country team, (France, Canada and the USA) co-authored and co-edited a book, The Essential Mary Parker Follett: Ideas We Need Today. Additionally, she wrote an article for the Negotiation Journal which explored Follett’s influence on James E. Webb, the Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the period when the USA geared up to put a man on the moon. 

 

5: The Law of the Situation – Mary Parker Follett

January 26, 2016 Dmitrijs Kravcenko

Mary Parker Follett

Mary Parker Follett (September 3, 1868 – December 18, 1933) was an American social worker, management consultant, and philosopher who did trailblazing work in the fields of organizational theory and organizational behavior. This episode is a review of one of Follett’s lectures, The Giving of Orders, contained in a collection of Follett’s lectures and writings that was assembled by Lyndall Urwick at the end of her life in an effort to preserve her ideas for others. Follett believed that exploring “the science of the situation” involved both management and workers studying the situation together. In many ways, Follett was ahead of her time in emphasizing the need for systems thinking (understanding “the whole situation”) and espousing the belief that workers should have a much more prominent role in functions that had traditionally been considered the province of management such as planning and execution of work.

Follett identified the importance of cross-organizational processes within hierarchical organizations, which was an important development supporting matrix-style organizations such as DuPont in the 1920s. She advocated non-coercive power-sharing in the workplace based on the use of her concept of “power with” rather than “power over.” Follett coined the term “win-win” in conflict resolution. She believed organizations would benefit from embracing conflict as a means of achieving diversity and integrated solutions rather than merely compromising.

Follett viewed organizations as networks of groups rather than as hierarchical structures, and paid special attention to the influence of human relations within the group. In the text for the podcast, The Giving of Orders, Follett revealed her pragmatist approach to management through taking a responsible attitude toward experience, depersonalizing orders through identifying and obeying the “law of the situation,” and balancing supervision with worker autonomy.

Follett disagreed with interpretations of scientific management that reduced managers to giving orders and charging workers to comply with those orders. In her view, “the essence of scientific management the attempt to find the law of the situation” (p. 33). A manager’s job was “not how to get people to obey orders, but how to devise methods by which we can best discover the order integral to a particular situation” (p. 33). Follett was an early advocate of systems thinking, advising leaders and works to “study the entire situation.” She believed that “the joint study of the problem [prepares] the attitude for integration” of diverse perspectives on situations encountered. Follett believed that workers were just as capable as managers of determining the law of the situation through the “authority of expertise.” It is the situation that determines what needs to be done, not managers alone because of their positions within the organizational hierarchy.

Join us as we discuss Follett’s alternative take on the scientific management practices discussed in Episodes 1 and 2.

You may also download the audio files here:  Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Also read an exclusive TAOP essay, “A Letter About Mary Parker Follett,” by Albie Davis.
Read with us:

Follett, Mary Parker. “The giving of orders.” Scientific foundations of business administration (1926), 29-37.  Available through the Mary Parker Follett Network (scroll to page 10 of the hyperlinked document).

To Learn More: 

Davis, A.M. (2015) When Webb met Follett: Negotiation Theory and the Race to the Moon, Negotiation Journal, 31(3), 267-283.