Influential Thinkers: Arie de Geus
Organisational Learning and the Living Company
“It has been my experience that extraordinary practitioners like Arie can make unique contributions to management thinking, but that their contributions are rarely acknowledged. Unlike academics who write about what they have thought, practitioners write about what they have lived through. Because the source of their thinking is experience rather than concepts, they show how sometimes the most profound ideas are the simplest.” — Peter Senge 1
Arie de Geus (1930-2019) was a remarkable individual with whom I had the fortune to work on two boards: as fellow Directors of the Society for Organisational Learning (UK) from 2009-2015 and on the Advisory Board of The Daedalus Trust from 2010-2017.2
As our former mutual colleague Dr Graham Robinson observed, Arie’s life was bracketed by two global catastrophes — the Second World War and the global Covid19 pandemic. 3
Arie’s professional life also spanned, and significantly contributed to, a seismic shift from seeing organisations as machines for producing dollars, to organisations as human communities seeking to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
As Peter Senge said in his 2020 in memoriam in “The Memory of the Future”:
“Over the years, Arie and I found ourselves entwined in a human community dedicated to advancing workplaces as human communities. In these times of accelerating everything and new “disruptive” change popping up everywhere, it is good to ponder what do we not want to change. People working with common purpose. Organizations dedicated to living in ways that creates more space for others to live. Businesses that create the sort of internal environments where we would like our children to work”. 4
Arie was a genuine pioneer in this shift in organisational thinking, firstly as Head of Group Planning with responsibility for Scenario Planning at Royal Dutch Shell and subsequently at the heart of the organisational learning community. 5
Much of his perspective is crystallised in his 1997 book The Living Company, predicated on the question “what if we thought of organisations as living organisms?” 6
His views on this began to develop at university, where he observed that:
“When economists talked about human behaviour as part of their theories, they postulated a mythical creature, homo economicus: a perfectly rational person who always operated from self-interest, with clearly defined reasons for every action and decision. Economic theory could thus encompass sophisticated formulas to describe complex, large-scale, aggregated activities, which could then be translated into ‘managerial science’. But the formulas said very little about the actual behaviour of homo sapiens — which is immeasurable, unpredictable, unfathomable and deeply ambiguous. Even a 19-year-old student like me could tell, from my part-time job at a Shell refinery, that, whereas the management curriculum had no place for human beings, the workplace was full of them.” 7
His thinking was heavily influenced by the German psychologist William Stern’s concept that the world is essentially comprised of two categories: things and persons.
Whilst the former are passively affected by events, the latter have the power to make things happen.
Stern suggested that a living being has four defining characteristics: 8
It is goal oriented;
It is conscious of itself;
It is open to the outside world;
It is alive — but has a finite lifespan.
Arie concluded that these criteria meant that all human organisations could be seen as alive.
Unlike the common analogy of organisations being ships, steered by their CEO “captains” from port to port, making profits for their owners:
“A living company, by contrast, is a living being. It moves from birth to death, seeking to extend its own potential. There is no one steering. Instead, to change the metaphor, the living company takes one step at a time. Each decision is followed by an action, and then new observations about the effect of that action, and then another step tomorrow.” 9
In my time working with him, I often heard Arie quote Spanish poet Antonio Machado as follows: “Life is a path that you beat while you walk it”.
Quoting this in his book he concludes:
“To me, this line embodies the most profound lesson on planning and strategy that I have ever learned. When you look back, you see a clear path that brought you here. But you created that path yourself. Ahead, there is only uncharted wilderness. You do not navigate a company to a predefined destination. You take steps, one at a time, into an unknowable future”. 10
To thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world, organisations must continuously make fresh sense of their evolving context, make decisions on next steps to take, and take action to allow their own unique path to the future to unfold.
As well as bringing great embodied, experiential wisdom to the organisational discourse, Arie’s character as a human being inspired all who knew him — something well captured in this deeply personal tribute from Peter Senge:
“Being an only child, I have no biological siblings. But I have had the enormous good fortune to acquiring many in my life’s journey. Arie was that older brother who had the patience to tolerate my impatience, the wisdom to teach in those rare moments when I could listen, and the wit to not take any of it too seriously. I will miss him”. 11
The Living Company is an immensely readable, insightful, and impactful book that I wholeheartedly recommend as a counterweight to the mechanistic mindset that plagues organisational life and continues to propel us past planetary boundaries.
Peter Senge in the foreword of Arie’s book The Living Company.
The Daedalus Trust advanced for the public benefit the effects on decision making of leaders in all walks of life who suffered personality change – commonly known as hubris – while in office and who in the words of Bertrand Russell became ‘intoxicated by power’ The Daedalus Trust website contains a wealth of material related to hubris.
Graham, a Senior Research Fellow with the University of Surrey, wrote “An appreciation of Arie de Geus’ contribution to the learning organization” in 2020.
The Memory of the Future p8 - available to view online here in both French and English.
Arie was centrally involved in the founding of the MIT Organization Learning Center in 1990 and the Society of Organisational Learning (SoL) itself in 1997.
Ibid (Living Company) p101.
Ibid (Living Company) p104.
Ibid (Living Company) p185.
Ibid (Living Company) p186. Arie spoke enough Spanish to translate Machado himself. The more commonly quoted English translation is: “Traveller, your footprints are the only road, nothing else. Traveller, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk. As you walk, you make your own road, and when you look back you see the path you will never travel again. Traveller, there is no road; only a ship's wake on the sea.”
Ibid The Memory of the Future p9.