Interviewing Professor Mintzberg's “Right Brain”

Probably every planner, while reading an article about managing, has felt a twinge of discomfort or gnaw of disbelief over the discrepancy between management as it is written about and management as it is practiced. According to the canons of business literary tradition, management's style and thought processes are presumed to be logical and orderly. Any MBA soon learns that top management does not behave as if it has read the right textbooks. Usually this discrepancy between real operation and literary tradition is dismissed with the Platonic argument that the real is always flawed when compared to the ideal. But last year, Professor Henry Mintzberg of McGill caused a stir in the business community by observing that the textbook version of how managers operate is a fantasy. Managers may pay lip service to planning and tables of organization, pointed out Mintzberg, but they actually function quite well in near chaos. In a subsequent article, he identified managers as holistic, intuitive thinkers “who revel in ambiguity; in complex, mysterious systems with relatively little order.” A record number of readers responded, most of them applauding Mintzberg's revelation. Professor Mintzberg has synthesized data from some evocative physiological brain experiments with his perceptions of management thought processes. Physiologists now believe that each hemisphere of the brain has special abilities. In most people (right‐handed ones) the right hemisphere controls conceptualization, intuition, synthesis, judgment. The left hemisphere employs logic, linear thinking, organizational abilities. According to Mintzberg, much of a manager's work involves such processes as following hunches in the midst of a chaotic problem‐solving process, and this indicates that managers have exceptionally well‐developed right brains. It is this “right‐brainedness” that makes great corporate strategists capable of epoch‐making leaps of conclusion. Planners and other staff aides, who Mintzberg says are left‐brained, are best suited to taking their direction from these masters of strategy and tidying up the logic in the aftermath of the conclusion. It's a rather startling concept of the planner's role, so Planning Review asked Professor Mintzberg to discuss his theories and define his sense of the true function of the planner in more detail.