EXTENSIONS OF MANAGEMENT

- Donald Officer -

Mark Federman and Derrick de Kerckhove
McLUHAN FOR MANAGERS: New Tools for New Thinking
Penguin Group, Toronto, 2003.

A Milestone

Nearly 25 years have sped by since the passing of H. Marshall McLuhan and exactly 40 since the publication of Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, his most influential and provocative work. His readership mostly ranged from scholarly to the mass market; however, business applications were never that far from his thinking. In 1955 he co-founded a public relations firm called “Idea Consultants.” McLuhan and his partner were surprisingly prescient foretelling a demand for products now taken for granted including aluminum soft drink cans, frozen diet dinners, videotape and electric pencil sharpeners among many other then outlandish, now common place artifacts.

Marketing unfortunately wasn’t a strong suit for McLuhan and company and they closed shop without a sale in the second year of operations. A decade later his ideas appeared much more relevant to the business community. By the end of the sixties thanks to book sales and fulsome promotion by journalists like Tom Wolfe or media consultants like Howard Gossage and Donald Theall, the once modest academic commanded five figure lecture fees from corporate customers. His name was prominently featured in the popular lexicon. In 1972 he published Take Today: The Executive as Dropout highlighting insights that reframed his theories for the world of management.

Since his first appearance as guru, McLuhan was never without critics. He persisted in presenting conjectural “probes” where academic audiences were expecting conventional scholarship. Furthermore, prediction on the scale McLuhan undertook could be bewildering. When his probes proved true as many have, the critics remained unimpressed dismissing such outcomes as luck or merely obvious. In 1968, McLuhan discussed personal computers with IBM executives as if they were already a given. The executives thought this notion “crazy.” Ten years later when technology caught up, they weren’t around for comment.

Mining McLuhan

In writing McLuhan for Managers coauthors Federman and de Kerckhove have mined McLuhan's body of work for the powerful, interesting and creative concepts we’d consider sustaining principles and the core of his method. They’ve been remarkably successful in defining and refining those aspects of McLuhan’s genius that managers, facilitators or planners can most readily benefit from.

Early on, McLuhan saw that historical changes in our cultural environment have transported us to an alien landscape where we must rediscover our bearings. Understandably, many people find modernity disorienting and look backwards to a reassuring past. McLuhan observed the standard “rear-view mirror response” we reflexively adopt is neither creative nor useful. To escape the shock of newness we must see things differently – take our eyes off the rear view mirror and watch the road ahead.

We’re all familiar with those ambiguous silhouettes depicting a chalice or opposing faces, a young or an old woman etc. The mind resolves such images by deciding which outline is figure and which is ground. The image you believe most important you see as figure; the rest of the picture defaults to background. New media, as radio and print once were, so change our habitual views of the world that each becomes a dominant figure in its time as earlier worldviews recede to ground. This tendency of the foreground medium to shape perception by consigning everything else to undifferentiated scenery in part inspired McLuhan’s most famous aphorism: “The medium is the message.”

Federman and de Kerckhove have developed in the figure-ground distinction an effective creative adaptation tool for the manager. New media at work often come in the form of imposed business technologies, management theories or bundles of buzzwords. Total quality management, downsizing, reengineering and knowledge management are ideas that moved to foreground before receding once more to ground in recent memory. The unfortunate consequence of such perceptual shifts is often loss of context. A firm obsessed by total quality management misses advancements on the horizon and a company dedicated to reengineering deskills too hastily.

The Real Issue

The issue, as the reader soon understands in reading McLuhan for Managers, is not intellectual awareness of specific problems, but appreciation of broader perceptual fields. The authors suggest we look at the very language that gets managers into trouble: the jargon and “newspeak” of current fads and “best practices.” Language is a medium, a man made tool that shapes and naturally distorts our most basic conceptual versions of reality. Business jargon is even further away from that internal light bulb and therefore even harder to place in understandable context. How are we to retrieve any sense from business process language?

Ingeniously and intuitively McLuhan began to explore clichés and puns as a way to expose hidden meanings or euphemisms in common usage. The harm as McLuhan observed is that clichés “demobilize” consciousness pushing disturbing realities into ground as the cliché (a verbal rear-view mirror image) assumes the figure role. Consider the harm “crackberries” are now wreaking on imagination. PowerPoint presentations are a giant cliché. Sometimes a management cliché ridden with ugly associations revives itself through deliberate overkill. Lately, I hear the expression, “Drink the Kool-Aid.” That nasty reference is to the mass suicide at Jonestown in the seventies, but the words now facetiously remind their audiences of zombie like corporate conformity.

So originates the technique developed by mcluhanites to transform the whitewashing cliché into meaningful probe. Playing with the wording of the hackneyed phrase turns “state of the art” into “fate of the start.” The “knowledge economy” becomes the “no-ledge economy” while “competitive edges” turn to “competitive cliffs.” Breaking the bonds of officious language is more than wordplay: it’s liberation. Brainstorming about nuances and reversals to entrenched clichés brings about radical shifts in problem framing. “Customer focused” can be reinterpreted as “customer magnified” or “customer concentrated” or even “customer hocus-pocused.” How do we regard our customers?

The Four Effects

In the last decade of his life, Marshall McLuhan in collaboration with his son Eric refined and postulated four laws or effects of media. These laws may well have been the most important single contribution McLuhan made to the world of thought. They are also the source of the most powerful creative facilitation tools he inspired. Here in brief are the four laws phrased as probing questions:

1. What does the artifact (medium) enhance, intensify, accelerate or make possible?
2. What is pushed aside or obsolesced by the new creation?
3. What recurrence or retrieval of earlier actions or services does the medium recall?
4. When pushed to the limit the medium will reverse. What is its reversal potential?

Every creation of mankind exhibits these four effects: extension, obsolescence, retrieval and reversal. They may appear to proceed sequentially in a kind of life cycle, but all are in play simultaneously. Note they are effects not causes. Cause or purpose created them, but now we must feed forward not backwards to see what may happen. The laws are easily mind-mapped as branches to explore all four effects in detail. Effect tetrads are a broad brush tool revealing surprising insights. The authors use many illustrative examples of tetrad effects throughout their book. Tetrads are of course only exploratory probes, but over time valuable new insights emerge from their implicit scenarios.

The laws of effect are particularly important to managers as they learn to appreciate what could happen rather than just rue what did. Emerging technologies are potentially pernicious as they reshape the way we regard the world before we detect their influences. Humans are suggestible and if new devices point towards particular outcomes, those outcomes will be favoured. “We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us,” wrote McLuhan in Understanding Media.

Hot and Cool

McLuhan spoke of hot and cool media meaning respectively, exclusive, structured and complete versus inclusive, unstructured and open-ended. By the way they play upon our senses and habits, media tools may be characterized as either hot or cold. Management styles are likewise more or less hot or cold. Hot media regimes are sometimes but seldom preferable as in true emergencies where immediate unquestioned action is required. A more forgiving style offers more choice. Not surprisingly, organizations generally fare better with cool flexibility than under hot compulsion.

McLuhan provocatively suggested that dominant media all but destroy the societies that create them. We may infer that all the innovation in the world is useless to those unable to appreciate the evolving landscape. In fact relatively little time has been expended on imagining the entire range of effect – intended and otherwise – that every new product or service creates. Without this wider view, managers are handicapped.

Mark Federman and Derrick de Kerckhove are leading figures in the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto. They and their colleagues are more than scholars and teachers; they are proactive consultants in the world of the contemporary workplace. Probably this is where McLuhan would want them to be.

Work and Play

Drawing on one more McLuhan aphorism, that if play is the work of children then work is the play of adults, the Culture and Technology consultants have devised a means to integrate their tools and expand management horizons: the connected intelligence playshop (CIP). In a CIP all the tools we’ve discussed are used to develop a common understanding of management situations. A CIP brings together experts and non-experts, clients and business contacts in groups and subgroups. Their mission is to explore fundamental questions about the nature of their world in terms of the widest and deepest contexts. Awakening buried insights, developing tetrads and exploring clichés are enlisted to develop shared perspectives.

McLuhan and his successors stress the importance of the creative artist in pioneering understanding and acceptance of new media. In the workplace, creativity extends to action. The authors do not detail their consultations in this book although they do mention both public and private sector clients including school associations, international business concerns and government organizations in Canada, Italy, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Australia, Argentina and Japan. Such broad connections indicate their extensions are indeed extensive.

This book is available through Amazon.com Bookstore.

McLuhan For Managers

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