Taket's suggestions for the OR toolkit
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r 2003 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/03 $25.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/jors
Viewpoint Taket’s suggestions for the OR toolkit Journal of the Operational Research Society (2003) 54, 322–323. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601486
In her paper on facilitation, Taket1 introduces two areas of theory that she has found useful in her practice when facilitating group work. She suggests that they are worthy of being considered for inclusion in the OR toolkit. She emphasises that the new tools represent additions to the range of tools and techniques that facilitators draw on: they are not necessary or sufficient on their own. She places the paper as part of the agenda for the future development of OR practice as set out in the ovumnal paper by Taket and White.2 As such the contribution is to be welcomed. The purpose of this viewpoint is to discuss the methods suggested. The two areas of theory that Taket examines are (i) deconstruction and (ii) re-evaluation counselling or co-counselling.
Deconstruction Given Tacket and White’s post-modernist emphasis on action rather than theory, it is difficult to know whether comment on her use of deconstruction theory is appropriate or not. Depending on how seriously she takes the theory of deconstruction leads me to different questions and conclusions. If Tacket is merely borrowing (in a post-modernist way) from deconstruction theory a list of strategies (included in Table 1 of her paper) to suggest probing questions, then fair enough. If so, the question raised in my mind is whether this is a particularly useful set of strategies. It certainly has a good pedigree in that deconstruction theory has been very influential in philosophy, literary criticism, history and other subjects where written texts are important. However, it seems to me that there are plenty of other potential sources of probing questions including soft systems methodology (culturally feasible and systemically desirable?), strategic choice analysis (types of uncertainty?), cognitive mapping (consequences of reversal of poles?), critical systems heuristics (the 12 boundary questions) and others. There seems no harm in adding Table 1 to the list of sources for probing questions in the postmodernist OR woman’s or man’s toolkit. Indeed, Tacket finds the table helpful in practice. If, however, we take it that Taket is serious about deconstruction theory, then her use of the theory illustrated
in her paper applied to the text in Table 2 bears a closer look. As pointed out in the earlier Taket and White paper, deconstruction theory derives from the philosopher Jacque Derrida, although paradoxically he denies this labelling and insists that it is impossible to define deconstruction. However, from my (vanishingly small) understanding of the theory it quintessentially relates to texts. Texts are seen as fundamentally flawed. Deconstruction theory is used to uncover these flaws by seeking contradictions. Speech (as a yet-to-be-written-down text) is similarly flawed. By capturing what is spoken in a text,
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