For many years our ability to add value to the organisations we work for has been compromised by the behaviour of those who manage us.

For many years our ability to add value to the organisations we work for has been compromised by the behaviour of those who manage us. We have an image of ourselves that tells us we are intelligent, imaginative and energetic. The organisations we work for have another view. They believe that their workforces are lacklustre, inexperienced and lazy, they drive performance based on those assumptions. This is not new.

These two different ways of looking at the same people were characterised in the late fifties by Douglas McGregor in his book “The Human side of Enterprise.” What Douglas McGregor also said was that if you take a person who is intelligent, imaginative and energetic, and you treat them as if they were lacklustre, inexperienced, and lazy, then their behaviour will start to mirror the way that they are treated. They will become lacklustre, inexperienced, and lazy.

Goethe said the same thing in the 18th century, “Treat people the way you expect them to be, and that is what they will become.” Current management practice has not yet figured out the complementary position, that if we treat people as if they are intelligent, imaginative and energetic, then that too is what they will become.

Since McGregor there has been a growing number of people who understand the fundamental truths in what he and others have written about. A few have been able to take his ideas and turn them into a practical Management strategy that produces an Autonomous work environment. This removes the need for continual management interference and as a result releases massive amounts of hitherto unrealised potential.

The number of people involved in this effort to allow managers and management educators to understand a different way to manage is growing. While still far from the mainstream, groups of like minded progressives are beginning to coalesce around the idea that current management practices do not add value to the organisations they are trying to manage.

One of the most advanced of these groups is called, The Unreasonable Learners. Peculiar name?

• Unreasonable – They aim to constructively challenge the status quo by seeking to illuminate and improve that which is not working to its full potential. Those resistant to that challenge might judge that as ‘Unreasonable’!

• Learners – They recognise that THEY do not have THE answers; THEY trust that by engaging with diverse, passionate people, together they can enquire and discover what is not yet known.

The Unreasonable Learners are at the forefront of a movement that is not prepared to accept that we do things the way that we do them, just because that is the way they have always been done.

The way that we manage what we do is changing. Discredited are the many management fads that seek complex ways to make others do what we want. Instead we are exploring what we need to do to create an environment of autonomy in which the workforce, freed from the destructive influence of their managers, are able to realise their full potential and become proud of what they do.

We are approaching a time when it will not be possible to compete using a conventional approach to management in the same marketplace as an organisation that has allowed their workforce to become autonomous.

The traditional “Command and Control” approach to management will succumb to market forces, replaced by a non-directive breed of manager who understands the power of the workforce and what needs to happen to allow them to achieve their full potential.

If you recognise this approach or are curious about an alternative to the current destructive management strategies that are preventing the workforce from achieving that potential, whether manager or not, contact the “Unreasonable Learners” to find out what they have been doing in the Scottish Parliament to change the way that public services are managed and how the same approach works just as well in the private sector.

A change is coming, for those that still consider it Unreasonable, hang onto this link, it will become Inevitable.