Roger, this is a great frame for seeing interventions. It makes me think about some of your recent writing and provokes an interesting question.

When you approach PTW projects by analyzing where the organization is, not where it says it is, looks like you're bypassing Argyris' Theory-Practice Gap in the domain of business strategy. You don't even look at the declared strategy, you just look at "what the system does" and redesign the cascade around that.

That works as long as you're there to keep helping the organization, for instance, when they reach the hairy issues of trying to implement the coherent EMS (I think that's when many leaders start saying, "The board will never accept this.").

But what if you know you won't be there for long, or you're trying to make sure the PTW design survives leadership tendency to "not rock the boat" or, more charitably, the lack of a forgiveness management system? Should one name the existence of the Theory-Practice Gap? Or even try to engage it? Even though Model I behaviors are self-sealing and resist open challenges?

Yet, not engaging with learned ignorance does reinforce it. I'm not sure what the answer is here. Perform a PTW-based design, bypassing the existing Practice-Theory Gap through POSIWID diagnosis, yet being quite sure that the end-state design is also going to be distorted by organizational defenses that will just recreate the gap... Or engaging with the defenses, at the risk of not even launching the project at all.

Or maybe just practice integrative thinking and do a mix / a better version of both? What are your thoughts? 🙂