GUILLERMO WECHSLER

February 15, 2007

Ontological Design

In the early 80s, an engineer captivated by the emergence of PCs and networks, working at Stanford University and completing his PhD at Berkeley University, produced a historical philosophical insight. After many years of working with his theoretical breakthrough, he hesitated on how to name it. He tried “hermeneutic pragmatic”, and after a while “pragmatic hermeneutics.” He abandoned both, and never persevered in creating a definite name for his contribution.

His work wasn't particularly theoretical or abstract. On the contrary, he chose very practical issues as the terrain to develop his thinking: software design, management, organizational & processes design, education & skill development. In engineer Fernando Flores' view, most of the difficulties related with productivity, quality, and innovation were rooted in modern understandings of work. His critique didn't target particular management traditions, such as bureaucratic administration, scientific management, rational decision making, or the cybernetic approach. His critique was directed at the philosophical underpinning of all those theories at once.

Inspired by Martin Heidegger – or better, by Hubert Dreyfus' interpretation of Heidegger – and by John L. Austin – in professor Searle's version – Flores claimed that modern understanding of work missed one fundamental piece: a phenomenology of action. It sounded simple, but with that claim, he was turning up-side down a wide variety of management assumptions, organizational development criteria, and software design principles. Furthermore, he was spotting a historical cognitive blindness.

As an illustration, I'm going to point out a few of his claims. He claimed that the essence of work is communication, that human communication in a business context is about engaging in conversations and exchanging commitments, and that commitment always happens in the listening of the involved actors (including the situations in which I'm listening myself). Consequently, he developed a wide variety of theoretical papers that reinterpreted traditional thinking, putting at the center this new perspective language and human coordination. He and his team wrote on a wide variety of subjects including: managing networks of conversations, linguistic ontology of organizations, conversations for action, conversations for possibilities, ontological reconstruction of discourses, team leadership, focalization of strategy, and even subjects that seem closer to psychology than to business, like cognitive emotions and moods.

While exploring the possibilities of his theoretical insight, Flores assembled a diverse team that included computer scientists, biologists, physicians, philosophers, politicians and a variety of business professionals. Among the most active contributors were Francisco Varela, Michael Graves, Richard Owen, Rachelle Halpern, Chauncey Bell, and Bob Dunham. They simultaneously built a company – Logonet, Inc., set up a lab for designing networked social practices (Ontological Design Course ODC), and created a discipline that they named Ontological Design.

In many respects, Ontological Design was a reaction to a pervasive orientation in education, psychology, and management unbalances to be extremely prolific in explaining the past, and extremely weak in shaping futures.

The basic premise of Ontological Design was that the primordial foundation of human realities and human existence is the historical stability of patterns in a wide variety of interplaying and autonomous phenomenological domains. Using technology and networking for distinguishing patterns, observing patterns, assessing patterns, and creating new patterns was at the core of the game.

Flores' insight was that there are a set of linguistic patterns configured and evolved out of human social life, that allowed human beings to share historical worlds and to create new worlds. He called those patterns commitments, and he distinguished four basic forms: Request, Promises, Declarations, and Assertions. The original intuition on this matter came from previous works of Adolf Reinach and John Austin; however, Flores hermeneutic interpretation of these linguistic patterns gave them whole new dimensions. Probably, the change is equivalent in magnitude to what Karl Marx did in reinterpreting G.W. F. Hegel's dialectic.

These linguistic patterns – commitments – become the primordial principles of Ontological Design. Basic human practices like communicating, learning skills, managing a team, dealing with money, or developing careers were complex unities whose components were simple commitments. Consequently, those practices were reconstructed as structures of recurrent conversations built out of commitment.

Following the same approach, valuable historical disciplines like management, finances, education, manufacturing (TPS), politics, software design, among others, were reinterpreted as discourses and practices whose essential value rested in its capacity to synthesize patterns of commitment, and by that, able to disclose possibilities and disclose action pathways to effectively address specific business, social, political, spiritual or any other historical human concern.

The notion of commitment empowered the Ontological Designers to put most of their attention on inventing patterns to shape the future, and to overcome the often wasteful explaining-the-past habit.

The notion of commitment seems obvious, and for that reason is most of the time unnoticed or overlooked. Commitment patterns have some very striking aspects.

1. Commitments are social practices that allow us to bring forth new futures, by virtue of being celebrated in the present, based in past consensual conventions. We produce action in social networks based in our capacity to invent and celebrate commitments. Basic patterns of commitment are few; they exist in every culture – in their own way; they exist with independence of idioms; and they produce enormous simplicity and focus at the moment of producing action.


2. Commitments are at the heart of language, and make us sensitive to the facticity that, in speaking and in listening, we are never describing an objective-independent world. To the contrary, we are socially co-configuring – better to say disclosing – a shared world based in consensual distinctions and a shared background of practices and habits.


3. The ultimate grounding of our commitments is our communal humanity that grants modern human beings the freedom to bring forth commitments – out of traditions, nothingness, and will – and the obligation to cope with the consequences.

So, going back to our story on Ontological Designers, I said that the core of their design work was designing commitment-based practices, and exercising them. In doing so, they produced new practical skills. They were able to build paradigmatic practices to modify individual and collective styles or cultural orientations – a rather existential exploration, and they were able to articulate – reconstruct, and make visible – and modify social habits, emotional patterns, and moods.

There are three valuable sources for this story: Understanding Computers and Cognition by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Disclosing New Worlds, by Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, and Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships, and Life by Robert Solomon and Fernando Flores

I was an early participant in this experiment and I will share with you my view about what was produced in that prolific social lab and I will also elaborate on what I have produced out of my work with ontological design.

Labels: ontological design