(14) The rise and rise of a scientific mindset
- Jon Smart
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
This is the 14th blog post in the Organising for Outcomes series. It is helpful to understand where we’ve come from, how today’s ways of working have evolved, and the context that those ways of working evolved in. This helps us to understand why we’re working the way we’re working and what we might want to change in today’s context, which is significantly different compared to previous technology-led revolutions.
In previous post we looked at the shift from Systematic Management to Scientific Management, and some of the more engrained behavioural traits that came with it, such as order giving and order taking without question and the separation of planning (thinking) from execution (doing), with the Planning Department giving workers detailed Instruction Cards. Order giving and order taking, with a planning department doing all the planning without involving the people doing the work is still prevalent today in organisations.
In this post, we look at the rise and rise of a scientific mindset and the direct link from the Scientific Revolution in the 1600s, to Scientific Management in the Age of Steel, to the prevailing mindset in most organisations today.
The rise and rise of a scientific mindset
Many of the key people behind Scientific Management, such as Professor Thurston, Frederick Taylor, Henry Gantt, Carl Barth, James Dodge, Morris Llewellyn Cooke, Horace Hathaway and Charles Day, were mechanical engineers, as students, practitioners and teachers. They shared learnings and learnt from each other, including via the American Society of Mechanical Engineering (ASME).
Engineering
With the 2nd and 3rd Industrial Revolutions, the field of engineering and the number of engineers grew rapidly. For most of history, engineers were, by definition, military engineers. The origin of the word engineer is ‘maker of war engines’, from Latin ingenium (6th century CE). This began to change on the eve of the 1st Industrial Revolution, when in 1750, John Smeaton in the UK, became the first to describe himself as a civil engineer, distinguishing his work on bridges, canals, and lighthouses from that of the military.
It took another 70 years and the invention of the steam engine for the term mechanical engineering to emerge in the 1820s, in reference to steam engine builders. For example, employees at Boulton & Watt’s Soho Manufactory in Birmingham, UK, the first major steam engine works, were some of the first workers to be referred to as “mechanical engineers” in correspondence and trade directories from this time.
A scientific approach to mechanical engineering at the turn of the 20th century combined physics, mathematics and materials science to design, manufacture and maintain mechanical systems. For example, steam engines, boilers, ships, armoury, textile machinery, rails, wheels, axles, bridges, girders for buildings and the machine tools used to make the products such as lathes, milling machines, cranes and giant hammers for pressing sheet metal.
Societies
In order to share rapidly advancing learnings, practitioners formed societies. In 1847 the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IME) was formed in the UK, in 1856 the German ‘Verein Deutscher Ingenieure’ (VDI), in 1880 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and in 1897 the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME) was formed.
Periodicals, trade journals and proceedings of the associations were full of shared learnings on the topic of mechanical engineering with measures such as pressure (PSI), tensile strength (PSI), energy (BTU), power (HP), speed (RPM), durability, temperature, volume and fluid dynamics (PSI, GPM, FT/S) filling publications and talks.
From engineering as a craft to engineering as a science
Engineering was increasingly being treated as a science, rather than as a craft or an art, as had been the case with Guilds and apprenticeships and a rule-of-thumb approach (the bridge is staying up, we’re not sure why, and we’ll carry on building them like that).
With the growth of the 2nd and 3rd Industrial Revolutions, conversations increasingly included scientific observations, experiments, methods and measures. As is the case with each Industrial Revolution, it was engineers who were at the forefront of innovating new ways of working, optimising for the new means of production.
With the growth of mechanical engineering, the rise of systematic management and a worldview that was reductionist (the whole is no more than the sum of the parts, the clockwork universe) and deterministic (the future is predictable), it was almost inevitable that there would be attempts to apply scientific ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ and measurements in increasing detail to socio-technical systems (i.e. to human organisations, to people), which is what happened with the introduction of Scientific Management, with Taylor applying a stopwatch to people.
However, this meant that socio-technical systems were treated as if they were only technical systems, as if people were machines to be controlled, that ‘laws’ of work once ‘discovered’ can be imposed upon people without any consideration for free will, autonomy or emergence. This is especially the case with Taylor’s approach, which led to union unrest, a US House Committee hearing, a public sector ban and for Taylor to feel that he needed to fight his workers to get his way. As Taylor said:
“Anyone who has been through such a fight knows and dreads the meanness of it and the bitterness of it [...] the bitterness that was stirred up in this fight before the men finally gave in.” (source: Sudhir Kakar, Frederick Taylor: A Study in Personality and Innovation, 1970)
This reductionist and deterministic worldview dates back to the Scientific Revolution, starting in 1543, a topic which we look at in the next section.
At the inaugural address of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) on 4th November 1880 in New York City, Professor R. H. Thurston, the first President of the ASME, said:
“We must seek to acquire a knowledge of the facts, to understand natural laws, and to ascertain their positions and their mutual relations in Nature's code.
The first step in any such work is the careful collection of facts and the patient study of all phenomena involved, and the registry of such facts and phenomena in the most accurate possible manner, and so systematically and completely that they shall be readily and conveniently available, and in such shape that their values and their mutual relations shall be most easily detected and quantitatively measured.
In this work we need the aid of careful and precisely-directed observation, and if we can secure the assistance of men whose powers are exceptional, and whose skill has been perfected by training and experience, and who are prepared by habits of study to direct such effort and to supply the demand for the application of knowledge already acquired, we shall find our work immensely facilitated.” (source: ASME Transactions, Vol 1, 1880)
This is language that Sir Isaac Newton would be proud to hear.
Thurston was the first professor of mechanical engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, NJ, USA. He designed the curriculum for the country’s first bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, which was available from 1871. Thurston was a firm believer that mechanical engineering was a scientific discipline.
Taylor and Gantt both study Mechanical Engineering under Prof. Thurston
It is no coincidence that Frederick Taylor, Henry Gantt and others studied mechanical engineering at Stevens under the direction of Thurston. Taylor earned his degree in 1883, having studied remotely while working at Midvale Steel, and Gantt earned his degree in 1884. Thurston’s curriculum had a focus on applied sciences and experimental methods, combining theory with observation and experiments in a dedicated laboratory. This would have influenced both a young Taylor and a young Gantt.
Thurston therefore, is a key person in the evolution of Scientific Management.
And Thurston was continuing a scientific approach which has direct lineage from the Scientific Revolution, which started 350 years earlier.
Scientific Management’s lineage from the Scientific Revolution (1543)
Professor Thurston was taught by Professor William Norton at Brown University, Providence, USA, graduating in 1859. Norton had created a scientific curriculum for engineering.
Norton, in turn, studied engineering at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in New York state, under a scientific curriculum created by Claude Crozet, graduating in 1831. The four-year course was modelled directly on the curriculum of the École Polytechnique in Paris, France.
Ecole Polytechnique, Paris
Crozet, in turn, had been educated at the École Polytechnique, graduating in 1807, before emigrating to the U.S. in 1816.
The École Polytechnique was founded in 1794 by two mathematicians (Monge and Carnot) in the first year of the new French Republic, with a motto of “Pour la Patrie, les Sciences et la Gloire” (“For the Nation, Science and Glory”).
The Polytechnique‘s purpose was to produce scientifically trained engineers, which it still does to this day. It replaced rule-of-thumb artisanship with analytical mechanics and applied sciences. Hence, ‘poly’ and ‘technique’, applying multiple sciences to engineering, rather than a singular Guild or apprenticeship approach.
Scientific Revolution (1543 to 1687)
The École Polytechnique and the French Revolution that led to its creation, are products of the Enlightenment (1688 to 1789) and the Scientific Revolution before it (1543 to 1687), with a lineage from Bacon’s inductive empiricism, Galileo’s experimental observation, Kepler’s empirical inquiry, Newton’s universal laws and Descartes rational method, through to Locke’s natural rights, Kant’s call to ‘dare to know’ and Diderot’s Encyclopédie.
The Scientific Revolution began in 1543, with Copernicus’s heliocentric revelation that the Earth revolves around the Sun, rather than the Earth being at the centre of the universe. This marked the beginning of a shift to reason over superstition and evidence over authority, with universal laws of nature discovered through observation, empirical evidence and the scientific method.
This language sounds remarkably similar to the language used by Thurston and Taylor 350 years later (the words ‘law’ or ‘laws’ in relation to work appear 55 times in Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management book alone)!
The Scientific Revolution saw the introduction of a reductionist, deterministic worldview. It was a case of discovering ‘universal laws’, which once discovered always held true. The universe was reimagined as a rational, mechanical, ordered system governed by rules, knowable through reason and experiment. It was a shift from “It’s true because Aristotle, Ptolemy, Plato or the Bible says so”, to “It’s true because we can observe it, measure it and reproduce it”.
The Scientific Revolution is the beginning of a worldview, a mindset, that is still prevalent today, 400+ years later, with most people in most organisations, treating unknowable, emergent work, in socio-technical systems (i.e. organisations), as if it is deterministic and knowable, that there are laws, rules and plans that predict the future, even when applied to complex adaptive systems, which are emergent and not reductionist (whole being greater than the sum of the parts).
Taylor was looking for the 'universal laws of work', in a complex adaptive system, which once found could not possibly be questioned, like Newton's laws of motion. Unfortunately human behaviour is not as predictable as gravity.
Doubling down on a deterministic approach, planning harder, having change control, reducing autonomy, creating learned helplessness, having a Red Amber Green (RAG) status on predetermined milestones in a plan for predetermined output for unique, unknowable work, punishing people for the prediction of the future not matching the reality of the future, for there being gap between what is knowable and unknowable, is not the answer in an emergent domain of work.
It reminds me of the saying "the beatings will continue until morale improves". Yet, this is how many companies still work today in the context of change.
This is a once in a 400 year pivot in mindset for how we work. There is a need for people at all levels, in all roles, to go from a reductionist, mechanical, predictable, order giving and taking, fixed mindset to embrace an emergent, experimental, learning, supporting, nurturing, diverse, growth mindset, in order to optimise for outcomes. From Know It All to Learn It All.
This pivot in the 1600s to a mechanistic view of the world has been so profound, and remains so deeply embedded in many people’s worldview, that to understand why we work and think as we do today, it is worth examining more closely the shifts in thinking introduced by Bacon, Descartes and Newton, three among many who contributed to the transformation from scriptures to science. We will explore this in the next post.
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