Beyond the stable company
Donald Schön and the need to learn while doing
Organisations increasingly live beyond the stable state, with the “stable company” fading into memory, just as many of them still use it as a planning model. But the stable state has broken; gone. The work now is to build organisations capable of learning in motion.
Professor Donald Schön gave that phrase a deceptively simple definition. A stable state is “the state of affairs in which… the assumptions under which you conduct your life come true”, he said. It is the world in which the plans fit the outcomes, the categories hold as they always have, routines still produce the expected results and the governing assumptions remain useful long enough to build around them a life, a profession or a company.
Schön also made another, sharper observation. “If you see something remain the same, you know that work is going on to keep it the same.” Stability has to be maintained.
A living system regulates itself through continuous effort. An organisation tries to do the same through meetings, budgets, reporting lines, incentives, habits, authority, language, and the stories it tells about itself – to others as well as internally.
The difficulty now is that the assumptions under which companies conduct their lives come true with ever shorter expiry periods. Technology changes the tools, then the market, then the customer’s expectations. Then the behaviour of employees shifts, as does the language with which people describe the issues. Then the regulatory environment is adjusted. (This may happen in this precise order, or not.)
Supply chains expose geopolitical risk, so-called “social” media change the tempo of acquiring, or losing, reputations. Artificial intelligence disturbs almost every profession’s account of its own competence. Younger workers arrive with different expectations about meaning, autonomy and authority, and customers become harder to read but easier to lose. They certainly get faster to display any disappointment in public.
Schön described four responses we move towards when the stable state breaks. One can try to return to the old order. One can revolt against the new one. One can drift into mindlessness, of course - that is a well-established coping mechanism. Or one can learn, and learn quickly. The first three are everywhere and happen automatically, or almost. The fourth requires design, discipline and culture.
Australian Major General Mick Ryan (Ret.) gives the military version of this problem with plain severity. Writing about Western military institutions, he argues that the evidence of massive, structural changes in modern war is already visible, yet the will to act on that evidence remains weak. Ukraine, Iran and other contemporary theatres of military engagement have shown the changing character of war – with drones, sensors, electronic warfare, rapid adaptation, distributed learning and a tempo of operational revision that traditional institutions struggle to match, let alone keep up with.
Ryan calls this a systemic learning disorder. Defense establishments keep exploiting existing competencies while failing to explore new solutions quickly enough. Promotion systems reward conformity, and procurement cycles defend the past, with doctrine hardened into identity. Leaders speak about learning while protecting the very structures that prevent it, as procedures win over practice. Not ideal for quick adaptation or institutional learning at scale.
The business version is less lethal but just as stubborn. Evidence of tectonic shifts is everywhere. Other companies’ failures, public-sector collapses, disruptions caused by rapid technological shifts and supply-chain shocks appear to be competing for attention with cultural misreadings, employee departures, and customer revolt. Strategic mistakes are freely available for viewing to anyone willing to look. So are the psychological explanations for why leaders avoid looking: confirmation bias, sunk-cost attachment, status anxiety, groupthink, defensive reasoning, fear of incompetence, fear of disloyalty, the comfort of familiar metrics and the social rewards of appearing certain. None of this is secret knowledge.
Bernard Williams gives us another useful way to name the same failure: the poverty of concepts – as in concepts being inadequate, not as in there not being enough of them. The result? A woeful attempt to flatten what is inherently complex, resulting in an “understanding”, the chief feature of which is paucity and lack of subtlety.
Organisations often try to manage complexity through what can be labelled, measured, reported or cleanly explained, while much of the intelligence that keeps a company alive remains tacit. Judgement, timing, empathy, intuition, creative risk, trust, team cohesion, the ability to sense when a plan no longer fits the situation: these live in action before they appear in formal language. If they ever appear in formal language...
Traditional training tends to teach what is measurable, while the capacities most needed in unstable conditions often remain unrecognised because the organisation lacks the concepts, patience or humility to see them.
Artists help break this pattern because they work through embodied, tacit and situational knowledge all the time. They do not explain ambiguity from the outside. They enter it, shape it, test it, and make it available to others. In a workplace, that kind of presence can help people recover forms of intelligence that competency models and performance reviews rarely catch, moving the organisation from information toward judgement, and from judgement toward wisdom.
Schön spent his life exploring the intelligence people use when they are acting inside unstable situations, before the problem has settled into a neat form, and before the report can be written. His “reflective practitioners” think while doing. They notice surprise, examine the assumptions built into their own action, reframe the situation and try a different move while the situation can still be influenced, and its outcome altered.
The beauty and elegance of this type of action has rather a lot to do with art in general, and music in particular, and here we come to the the fact that Schön was also a serious musician. He was an accomplished pianist and clarinettist who played in jazz and chamber groups, and the musical intelligence he swam in during that practice gave his theory a living model. He literally lived his work since jazz offered him a way of seeing thought in motion: disciplined people, inside a shared form, listening and adjusting in real time. It is the closest thing we have to “enquiry live”, a field where learning while doing can be heard as it happens – and its results are appreciated by those who are listening.
In a jazz ensemble, the musicians may know the theme and the key. They are grounded in the pulse and the tradition, yet the performance exists through listening and response, even if - or especially if - the tune they’re playing is a famous standard. Each player contributes while hearing the whole, and the music changes because somebody risks a phrase, another player catches it, the rhythm section shifts emphasis, a mistake becomes material. The combo recognises the opening just made. They enter it, and the piece evolves while being played. Schön called this reflection-in-action. The players are making the music and considering it at the same time.
This can happen in response to the music itself, of course, or to other stimuli. In 1957 Miles Davis and a small combo recorded the soundtrack to the French crime thriller Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud.) Davis had seen the film ahead of the recording session but none of the others did. They played live, through the night, watching the film and recording what they felt was the right response. Today, the soundtrack is considered a far more accomplished piece of art than the film itself. (As an aside, it is a great listening exercise to compare it to the monumental Kind of Blue, which came out two years later, and to Davis’s soundtrack to Siesta, from thirty years down the road.)
Closer to our own time, in 2014, master photojournalist Tomasz Tomaszewski shared some stories on the TEDxWarsaw stage. When he finished speaking, two musicians (Michał Salamon on piano, and Staszek Plewniak on sax) improvised to a slideshow of his recent images. Neither of the players had seen the images ahead of time.
That musical insight takes us straight to the centre of organisational life now. A complex company can no longer rely on the fantasy that thinking happens first and action follows afterwards. (Schön spent his working life, indeed wrote his dissertation, rebelling against the idea that such dualities were somehow “normal”.) The market talks back, technology keeps pushing on. Employees talk, customers talk back... A leader who cannot listen to all those conversations going on inside the performance is managing from memory.
Magnus Ramage’s study of Schön’s work shows how deeply he lived at the boundary between research and consulting, theory and practice, institutional analysis and direct engagement. Schön worked in product design, government, urban planning, organisational consulting and academic life. His ideas grew from practice examined with theoretical seriousness. He insisted that practical knowledge could not be reduced to subsequent application of abstract thought.
In one of his interviews, Schön said something any company should take seriously: “Everybody is a practitioner, including the people who build theory, because theory building is also a practice.” This cuts through a damaging organisational habit, where strategy is imagined as thinking done somewhere else and implementation as actions carried out by people further down the chain. Schön keeps pulling these activities back into their proper relationship – thinking happens in action, action contains theory, and practice reveals the truth of a theory more ruthlessly than any presentation ever can.
A paper by Peter Oeij, Jeff Gaspersz, Tinka van Vuuren and Steven Dhondt makes the connection to innovation leadership explicit. Studying project leaders in innovation teams, they found that effective leaders dealing with critical incidents often behaved like Schönian reflective practitioners – they sensed that something had gone wrong or might soon go wrong, investigated the situation, developed alternatives, tested them, chose a response, implemented it and evaluated the result - all while managing the context around it. Much of this intelligence was tacit, with the leaders were often using a rigorous practical method before they could name it.
One of the leaders in the study said, “Projects need rhythm.” Regular meetings, in his account, created urgency, cohesion and shared attention. They pushed new ideas, validated hunches and provided unexpected yields. Another project leader worked with an unusually high number of back-up plans, kept moving “up and down the project”, and aimed to provide a solution before the problem was formally brought to the table. This is disciplined adaptation inside the action-present.
The action-present is one of Schön’s most useful ideas. It names the period in which an action can still affect the situation. For a jazz musician, it may last seconds. For a project manager, months. For a company facing technological or cultural change, the action-present may be the few quarters in which it can still revise its habits before the market, workforce or operating environment moves on.
Art. In a Place of Work. was created inside this understanding. Companies need ways to recover attention before the action-present window closes. They need ways to make tacit knowledge visible, to hear in the decision-making centre what the periphery already knows, to examine the assumptions hidden inside routines, and to practise reflection while work is still happening. Importantly, they need encounters that interrupt automatic thinking without humiliating people, because defensiveness is one of the strongest enemies of learning. All this needs spaces where theory and practice can safely meet through experience, conversation, observation and shared risk.
An artist in a workplace creates that kind of practice field. This can sound counter-intuitive, but only when art is positioned as decoration, entertainment or brand polish. In practice, the artist brings a trained relationship to ambiguity, material, attention, timing, perception, language and form. An artist can enter a situation without immediately reducing it to a deliverable.
In this sense, the artist functions rather like the improvising musician in Schön’s ensemble – entering with own skill, history and form, then listening to what the situation is actually playing. They do not impose a finished composition on the situation but compose it on the go, with the situation, as it demands. Artistic practice can influence operational and strategic thinking in ways conventional training often struggles to reach – it gives people a live experience of seeing, listening, adjusting and making meaning together.
That is exactly what began to happen during Ivan Davydenko’s residency at Medisept, a leading manufacturer of hygiene products for both professional and domestic use. The company sells to numerous markets around the globe, and prides itself on placing creativity at the centre of its approach to business. (As I write, we are running a season of artist residencies in Lublin companies, as part of the Lublin European Capital of Culture 2029 programme.)
Ivan is a poet and a writer, and entered the company as such - and the workplace itself became part of the material very quickly: the glass walls of his working pavilion, the rhythm of production, the office rituals, the language of work, the experience of being watched and then of watching in return. He described the residency as an adventure, and gave that word an exact meaning: “adventure means agreeing that not everything can be foreseen.”
That sentence could serve as a compact theory of innovation. Agreement with the unforeseeable must come before genuine learning, otherwise, organisations ask for new ideas while protecting themselves from entering the conditions that can produce them. It is, unfortunately, common to admire creativity after it has been tested and made presentable, filtering out the hesitation, awkwardness, failed attempts, changed assumptions and slow accumulation of attention from which useful novelty can grow.
Ivan’s method looked simple. He sat, wrote, listened, watched and allowed himself to be watched. After two weeks, he noticed his attention shifting toward the rhythm of other people’s work, their gestures, conditions and routines – a familiar environment became available for inquiry. This is Schön’s reflective movement in artistic form. The situation speaks because someone has entered it with a different discipline of attention.
Barbara Gryka, the second artist-in-residence at Medisept, described the attitude from another angle. She spoke of the desire to avoid “arriving with a ready-made answer.” She wanted to exercise her curiosity to see “what would come out of meetings and conversations,” and was drawn to what lay underneath: “how the firm functions as a community of people.” These are approaches with a profound organisational charge: a company is a system of work and a community of people, and its operational truth lives inside both dimensions at once.
The company’s CTO captured the strange anticipatory power of the process when he said, “my relationship with Ivan began before he even physically appeared.” The artist had begun to affect the organisation before he entered the building, because the company had started to imagine itself in relation to him. People wondered what he would see, and how their work would look from another angle. They became aware of the frame before the frame was physically occupied.
In a long interview, the CTO used the phrase “business exhibitionism”. The humour works because the description is exact – a company inviting an artist into its working life exposes itself. It allows someone to see its habits, informal codes, hesitations, jokes, frustrations, forms of pride and pockets of anxiety.
Schön wrote about the difficulty organisations have in making their real theories-in-use discussable. People often know what is happening, yet lack permission (even their own permission) or language to say it. A art residency creates an opportunity to safely enter a humane version of exposure. The company looks at itself because the artist is looking with it. The ordinary becomes the working material. Ivan noticed how quickly familiar objects lose force. A pallet lies on the hall floor and nobody sees it. A forklift becomes part of the background. Things lose intensity because routine covers them. His small intervention of walking from the main building towards his working pavilion with a glass on his head made the point with comic precision: “A person holding a glass disappears into normality. A person with a glass balanced on his head reappears.”
A production-floor perspective is important here because art thinking influences operational thinking most strongly when it touches the real texture of work. Ivan recalled a sentence he heard there: “the monotony of the production line stimulates an examination of conscience.” It is a remarkable line because it opens a whole field of inquiry from inside an ordinary operational setting. Repetitive work becomes a social and psychological space. It turns out, this may allow people to talk, confess, over-share, build trust, irritate one another, create small rituals and reveal the emotional life of the workplace.
Here again, the connection to jazz is direct. The repetition does not deaden perception when the listener is awake - a repeated form can become the condition for variation. A groove, a loop, as well as the rhythm of production or a regular meeting, can become a place where difference appears because the form is stable enough to reveal it. The question is whether anyone is listening closely enough.
Ivan described one of his working methods as entering a situation linguistically, technically and thematically: “to be inside and listen. Something remains. Only then can one write.”
A company could take that sentence seriously as a method of organisational learning. Being inside and listening requires time, permeability of established defences and a suspension of the reflex to convert every encounter into output. Schön’s work on learning systems makes a similar demand. Knowledge often lives at the periphery, in local situations where people are in direct contact with reality, while the centre lacks the information it needs and tries to compensate with routines. A learning system must carry local knowledge back into shared understanding without flattening it beyond recognition.
The artist can slow down perception long enough for the local to speak, maybe making the periphery visible to the centre, maybe creating a frame in which employees, managers and leaders become more aware of what they already know, what they have stopped saying, and what they have learned to leave undiscussed.
Leadership decides whether this kind of encounter remains an interesting episode or becomes part of the organisation’s learning capacity. A residency can create surprise, conversation, humour and recognition, but transfer requires care. The organisation has to ask what has become visible, which assumptions have been disturbed, what language has changed, which relationships have opened, and how the experience might alter meetings, feedback, communication, design, strategy or the next encounter with uncertainty.
Ivan said something similar about conceptual art. The artist creates a frame, while the work is ultimately co-created by the receiver through sensitivity, history and readiness to enter contact. He recognised the same structure in the residency, with the effect depending on the situation, on the people and on what happened between them.
The “between” is where much organisational life actually occurs: between departments, between roles, between stated values and actual behaviour. Organisations often try to manage this space through procedure, and procedure has its place. The “between”, however, also requires attention, interpretation, timing, generosity and imagination.
Artists can inhabit ambiguity without rushing to close it down. They can treat a small displacement as meaningful and regularly work with material that has no category as yet. These are artistic skills and in the right conditions, they become organisational skills.
To an organisation that keeps working to maintain a stable state that has already gone Schön’s answer is learning. Not training as a periodic correction to an otherwise stable system, but learning as a permanent organisational capacity. Learning through action and public testing of assumptions. Learning through the courage to make theories-in-use discussable. Learning through reflection before, during and after action.
Managing a complex organisation of any size has become a reflective practice. It asks leaders to hold theory and practice in continuous conversation, to test plans against reality before reality has moved on, to notice when people at the edges know something the centre has not yet understood, and to create cultures where changing one’s mind can be seen as competence rather than weakness.
This is the reason Art. In a Place of Work. exists. We bring artists into places of work because companies need better conditions for seeing. They need to practise attention, getting comfortable with ambiguity, listening, experimenting and shared reflection while life is still happening. They need to recover the link between action and thought, theory and practice, the centre and the periphery, the plan and the situation. Organisations learn when people are given conditions in which they can see, hear and think again, and differently.
Donald A. Schön (1930–1997) was an American philosopher, organisational theorist and long-time professor at MIT whose work reshaped thinking about professional knowledge, learning systems and practice. Trained in philosophy and deeply involved in research, consulting and public policy, he explored how people and institutions learn when established assumptions no longer hold.
His books Beyond the Stable State, The Reflective Practitioner and Educating the Reflective Practitioner, along with his influential collaborations with Chris Argyris on organisational learning, introduced ideas such as reflection-in-action, theories-in-use and single- and double-loop learning.
A musician and composer, as well as a scholar and consultant, Schön was an embodiment of his work, and often drew on jazz improvisation to describe the kind of disciplined, responsive intelligence professionals need when acting inside uncertainty.
Sources:
Donald A. Schön, Beyond the Stable State / interview material on stable state: https://www.geocities.ws/jtrevino41/Schon.pdf
Mick Ryan, “The Systemic Learning Disorder in Western Militaries”: https://mickryan.substack.com/p/the-systemic-learning-disorder-in
Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy — https://e-docs.eplo.int/phocadownloadpap/userupload/aportinou-eplo.int/bernard_williams_ethics_and_the_limits_of_philosophy.pdf
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Bernard Williams”: https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/williams-bernard/
Magnus Ramage, paper on Donald Schön, research, consulting, theory and practice: https://oro.open.ac.uk/50423/3/50423.pdf
Peter R. A. Oeij, Jeff B. R. Gaspersz, Tinka van Vuuren and Steven Dhondt, “Leadership in innovation projects: an illustration of the reflective practitioner and the relation to organizational learning” — https://doi.org/10.1186/s13731-017-0062-3
Donald A. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action: https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/donald-a-schon/the-reflective-practitioner/9780465068784/
Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, Organizational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practice : https://www.pearson.com/en-us/subject-catalog/p/organizational-learning-ii-theory-method-and-practice/P200000003170
Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön, Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness : https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Theory+in+Practice%3A+Increasing+Professional+Effectiveness-p-9781555424466
Peter Tosey, Max Visser and Mark N. K. Saunders, “The origins and conceptualizations of ‘triple-loop’ learning: A critical review” — https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507611426239