musings of an itinerant lover

According to wikipedia “conceptual frameworks are a type of intermediate theory that have the potential to connect to all aspects of inquiry (e.g., problem definition, purpose, literature review, methodology, data collection and analysis). Conceptual frameworks act like maps that give coherence to inquiry.” I view it as an explicitly stated understanding of what you know to be true. So we go through life making tons of assumptions: people are bad, people are good, that’s just the way it is, business is business, don’t mix business and friends, businesses are supposed to make money, organizations are supposed care for the well-being of their members, reality is integrated, etc. Of course some of our assumptions are accurate and others are not. The purpose of writing a conceptual framework is to hang these assumptions in front of you so that you can examine them critically and hopefully, over time, you will be able to discard some of the erroneous assumptions and more deeply develop some of the more accurate ones.

In my first undergraduate economics course, a rather self-assured professor of mine stood in front of the classroom and confidently declared that humans are “selfish, greedy, have unlimited wants and the world has limited needs and thus the field of economics.” What he really meant to say was that “we have a conceptual framework that has evolved throughout the history of civilization and this framework has underlying assumptions about human nature, the purpose of governance, the distribution of wealth and other things. Sometimes those assumptions are accurate and sometimes they’re a bit inaccurate and what the field of economics is based on today is the assumption that human nature is exclusively selfish, greedy and has unlimited wants”….that’s what he really meant to say I think…it just came out wrong.

Whether we state it or not, we have a conceptual framework, and whether we want to or not, our conceptual framework deeply influences our methodology. By methodology I only mean what we do…our actions, our decisions. In terms of an organization, the way it will go about doing whatever it is that it does. To take an inadequate example a society that believes that people are inherently “bad” (selfish, greedy, etc) may spend more resources on prisons and laws to contain deviant behavior than on education and increasing capacity to allow for the full expression of what it means to be human (because what it means to be human as defined by this society is to be bad). A society that believes that people are noble may have the emphasis the other way around and a society that believes that people are noble but can also express “badness” may place the emphasis on increasing capacity and establishing a moral framework at an early age but have safeguards just in case.

As the Harmony Equity Group, or any other organization, continues to refine its (hopefully) ever-evolving conceptual framework, we also are developing a methodology which I understand to be the practical implementation of that conceptual framework. Because the methodology will get us the practical experience that will provide much of our data to inform the development of the conceptual framework, it is important that the methodology also be well thought out and refined.

I see other organizations and other initiatives that have done just that, but I also see that because the methodology is what everybody really sees that it tends to take up the bulk of the organization’s energy, and perhaps rightly so since we don’t want to take up all of our time in hypothetical debate. The trap seems to be that we can become so invested in our methodology that as time goes on we adapt our conceptual framework only to the extent that it does not jeopardize the methodology that we have painstakingly developed and refined. And I can really see how we could mistakenly justify this strange role reversal in the name of efficiency.

Of course there is a balance because it seems to me if you change your conceptual framework at every turn you won’t get anything done. You know how Christensen in his disruptive innovation theory talks about how the giants of one industry will often become blindsided by a disruptive innovation because they are looking for short term profit in order to survive and to be relevant to the market, but in doing so they end up losing their entire company with the disruptive innovation that transforms the industry in a radical way (e.g. hard drive industry)? Same as how centralized massive agriculture, for instance, in the name of efficiency does not allow for innovation at the fringe, because really there is less and less of a fringe. As such its making its own tomb in a sense. So there are definitely certain efficiencies of staying the course long enough if you are eventually willing to scrap the current methodology or at least be open to the possibility of radical alteration of that methodology should your new and improved conceptual framework warrant that.

The question for me, is that I have seen far greater men than me become trapped within their original conceptual framework because of what seems to be an investment in a methodology (a book, a theory, a “method”, etc). How do I avoid that? What are some of the elements that I need to develop within myself to be open to the possibility of that sort of change? Clearly there are a number of spiritual qualities at play here: humility, detachment and holding the truth above my own opinion come to mind. But in addition to the obvious personal element of this dilemma, I am wondering if there are institutional safeguards to this. The more I work with the UN and other large organizations whose names I won’t mention, the more I see how they have almost been designed to resist meaningful change. With HEG, we don’t only want to make this organization one that allows for change or tolerates such change, rather we want to build an organization that instead encourages and facilitates that change. What are some institutional safeguards that could allow for this? Is it possible to weave this into the very structure of our organization? I hope I am articulating this clearly. Change is so damn bumpy…I feel that we’re often like a beginner driver learning how to use a stick shift and that we build organizations more as a monument to our own egos and perceived brilliance than as a continuously evolving organization that would instead always reflect our increasing consciousness of reality. So…this is what I’m struggling with at the moment. Help Wanted.

Tags: assumptions, economics, HEG

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 at 12:42 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.