Creative Experience
Mary Parker Follett, 1924
Why does an argument go on even when all the facts are on the table? Mary Parker Follett herself sat on pay boards and watched factory committees at work, and her answer is unexpected: the difference between people is not an obstacle but material. You will learn how integration differs from compromise, why real power grows between people rather than over them, and why agreement is not yet participation.
Who it is for
For managers, team members and anyone who has to reach agreement with people who want something different.
In fact our “opponents” turn out to be our co-authors, for they have what we lack.
The man who brought the facts
Think of any meeting where an argument has reached a dead end. At the next session someone is sure to arrive with a folder of facts and look round at colleagues with a smile: now the figures will settle everything. Mary Parker Follett herself sat on such boards in Boston, where employers, workers and representatives of the public set wages together. She describes this smile and how it gradually fades. The facts have arrived, but the disagreement remains.
Follett is not against facts at all; she demands as many as possible. But exact information, in her view, removes not the difference between people but the confusion. If one person sees a black snake on the path and another sees a fallen branch, the conversation is pointless. When everyone agrees that it is a snake, the argument has only just begun: run away, kill it, or take it home so that it catches mice?
Hence her main question, which concerns everyone who works with people. How can people who want different things act together, if no one is ready either to submit or to command? A strong side's victory leaves resentment, and a compromise makes each person cut off a piece of his desire. Follett seeks another way and gives it a name: integration.
The book appeared in 1924, and it was written not by an armchair theorist. Here are cases from factory committees, farmers' cooperatives, courts and family disputes. You will meet five of her ideas: why we never answer simply the other person, how a new solution differs from a concession, how to take a dispute apart, which power is real, and why agreement is not yet participation. Let us begin with what happens between two people when they meet.
You answer not a person but both of you
Follett compared two people who were dealing with workers' complaints. One manufacturer told her that when a worker came to him with a complaint, he had someone study that worker's psychology. Earl Howard, labour relations manager of the firm Hart, Schaffner & Marx, did things differently. First he asked himself: what in the conditions of this factory, this trade or life in general had produced such an attitude in the worker?
The difference seems small, but Follett sees a whole philosophy in it. The first looks for the cause inside the person, as though he lived in a vacuum. The second looks at the whole situation in which the person finds himself.
The mechanism behind this Follett calls the circular response. When I answer you, I am already changing you by my presence, and you change me. That is why I answer not you alone but us both. If with some colleague you are always livelier and cleverer, perhaps the cause is not only him: something in you calls forth something in him.
Her example is simple. A boy goes to school and responds not only to the school but to his own response to it: in class he works better than at home, and this makes him grow faster still. The school changes too, because the boy himself or his parents demand better methods from it. The more the school changes the boy, the greater his chance of changing the school. Follett compares such growth to compound interest, where an increase itself brings an increase.
She explicitly names the relation between a manager and a group as an example of such a circle, and that makes responsibility look different. An employer who goes to the workers to learn what they think never learns it: as soon as he has come, the situation is different, because he is now part of it. One cannot observe life from outside: you are always inside it.
From this comes a conclusion for work, and here Livria's own practical advice begins. Before deciding that something is wrong with a person, ask Howard's question: what in the conditions, including my own behaviour, provoked such a reaction?
About the author
Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) was an American political scientist and social thinker. She worked on minimum wage boards in Massachusetts. Her ideas about conflict and power later entered the classics of management theory.
All books by this author: Mary Parker Follett
Terms from the book
- Howard
- cooperative
- compromise: A decision in which each side gives up part of its demand. Follett considers it temporary and calls it the suppression of desires.
- integration: Follett's term for a solution in which the desires of both sides find a place and neither is cut down. In her scheme it is a third way, alongside domination and compromise.
- Hart, Schaffner & Marx: An American manufacturer of men's clothing, known in the early twentieth century for its system of settling disputes with workers.
- circular response: Follett's concept: in answering another, a person also answers his own influence on that other, so the sides keep changing each other. It is her image from the psychology of the 1920s, not a strict scientific law.
- domination: A way out of conflict in which one side subordinates the other by force or weight of numbers. For Follett such an outcome holds only until the balance of forces shifts.
- Massachusetts: A state in the north-east of the United States, with its capital in Boston, where Follett lived and worked.
- bay window: A part of a room that projects outwards with large windows: a light corner at the wall of a house.
- power over: Follett's term for the power gained over others by force, pressure or manipulation. She calls it seeming power.
- power with: Follett's term for common power, which grows when people decide together and act together. She considers it the only real power.
- consent of the governed: The classic formula of political theory: power is legitimate if those governed agree to it. Follett holds that consent alone is not enough; participation is needed.
- minimum wage board: A council of representatives of employers, workers and the public which, in Massachusetts in the 1910s and 1920s, set the minimum pay in an industry. Follett herself sat on one.
- experience meetings: Follett's proposal: meetings where people relate a question to their own lives, look in their experience for everything that clarifies it, and combine this with the data of experts.
All terms
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