How can I motivate employees who are always complaining? How can I make sure that managers from other departments commit to the decisions taken in the management team? How can I keep my highly skilled employees once they are good enough to start their own business? How can I make unpopular decisions and retain the trust and good working relationship with subordinates? How can I prevent human vices such as greed and hubris from leading to flawed strategic decisions?

All managers encounter problems which have a negative impact on organizational performance—bottom line or working climate—and which defy all the managers’ attempts at solving them. Such problems are often human, rather than technical. This is sometimes humorously expressed in the phrase: Management would be easy if it weren’t for people. Sometimes you may find yourself in a situation where everybody in the organization seems to agree on doing something but for some inexplicable reason, it just never gets done. For example, if you are a manager in a cleaning service organization, you may want employees to systematically carry out cleaning controls as a way to secure quality. Everybody in the organization may agree that this is important. Yet, it always gets left out or down prioritized, and nobody knows why. There just never seems to be time to carry out the controls. At other times, you may find yourself in a situation where you feel you understand all stakeholders’ interests and it is clear to you that there are conflicts inherent in the system of stakeholders which simply cannot be solved. For example, nurses have chosen their vocation because they want to help people to the best of their ability, and through their education they acquire knowledge about what today’s medical technology can do for each patient. However, when they start working, they discover that due to limited resources they will often have to do what is second (or third) best for their patients. This can be profoundly discouraging to them and make them feel that they are doing a bad job as a nurse. As their manager, you may understand the problem as the inevitable result of the clash between professional and economical interests, which can never be fully solved. Yet at other times the problems are internal to the manager. For example, you may be a manager of a one-man organization. On the one hand, you know that you need to take time to follow up on potential customers and to collect and label invoices for your accountant. On the other hand, every time you engage with such administrative tasks, you feel restricted and bored as if all life has been drained out of you. Or maybe you are the manager of a team of employees, and sometimes you get angry with them, but you feel this is an inappropriate feeling for a manager to have toward employees. You cannot help it—only hide it.

This book is about those seemingly unsolvable problems managers face every day. It is about the problems which persist year after year; the problems which persist even after you have tried all the tips and tricks provided by teachers, colleagues, friends, and books; and the problems which are immune to the MBA toolbox.

This book presents a new approach to dealing with such problems. This approach is based on recent research and theoretical developments in cognitive science (Barsalou 2010; Lakoff 2012; Wilson 2002; Johnson and Rohrer 2007; Johnson 2007), which shows that cognition is metaphorical and embodied in nature, that is, we represent more abstract phenomena, such as social interactions, power, motivation, commitment, success, negotiation, communication, and value, as analogous to more concrete sensorimotor experiences. In other words, we use the structure in concrete sensorimotor experiences to give structure to more abstract phenomena. I call the sensorimotor experiences used in this way “sensory templates”.

For example, you may be faced with the problem of having a demotivated team of employees, who keep being demotivated no matter what you do. Every time you address one reason for their demotivation, another one emerges. You may feel the situation is like a tug-of-war where the employees pull in the direction of discontentment and you in the direction of contentment. Or you may feel that the situation is like Sisyphus work where raising the contentment is like pushing a large boulder up the mountain and every time you leave the employees the boulder tumbles back down into the valley of discontentment. Or you may feel that dealing with the employees is like riding your bicycle toward contentment with the breaks of discontentment on. Thus, you may use different sensorimotor experiences, such as engaging in a tug-of-war, pushing a boulder up a hill, or riding your bicycle with the breaks on, as tools to understand what kind of situation you are dealing with.

Depending on which sensory template managers use to represent a problematic situation, they will be able to imagine very different ways in which they can act in this situation. Using the tug-of-war template, a manager may try to pull harder. Using the Sisyphus template, a manager may try to find ways of making the boulder stay at the top of the mountain. Using the bicycle template, a manager may try to identify and remove the cause of the friction.

It may seem that it shouldn’t matter which of these sensory templates you use. However, in this book I argue that it matters a great deal. In fact, seeing the problematic situation as analogous to one particular sensorimotor experience may result in the problem appearing unsolvable, whereas seeing the problematic situation as analogous to a different sensorimotor experience can result in the problem becoming an easy thing to deal with. The reason the use of a particular sensory template can make a situation appear unsolvable is that none of the possible ways of acting afforded by this sensory template work. In the example with the discontent employees, it is possible that no forms of pulling, such as monetary rewards, acknowledgment, threats of sanctions, and highlighting successes, will ever make them content. In such situations, a solution can be found by changing the sensory template you use to imagine possible actions in the situation to one that does afford efficient ways of acting. In the example with the discontent employees, it is possible that no forms of pulling will work, but detecting and removing forms of friction may.

The starting point of this book is Chris Argyris and Donald Schön’s work on managers’ theories of action (Argyris 1976; Argyris and Schön 1974; Schön 1986) . In short, Argyris and Schön claim that managers’ actions are guided by unconscious assumptions about markets, the organization, what motivates employees, and so on. They call these assumptions theories-in-use. What theories-in-use managers operate from can be deduced from their concrete actions and may be very different from the theories the managers consciously believe they are following, their espoused theories of action. Sometimes managers’ theories-in-use are detrimental to their efficiency as managers and consequently to organizational performance. Thus, it is important to change such theories-in-use to increase managers’ efficiency. However, this can be very difficult to do (Argyris 1990). In Chap. 2, I present Argyris and Schön’s work and, drawing on a range of relevant psychological theories, I elaborate on why becoming aware of, testing, and changing one’s theories-in-use is both useful and a formidable challenge.

In Chap. 3, I present new research and theoretical developments in cognitive science . I focus on Cognitive Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Grady 1997; Grady 2005) and embodied cognition (Barsalou 1999; Barsalou 2008; Barsalou 2010; Wilson 2002; Johnson and Rohrer 2007; Lakoff 2012) . These theories show that some of the fundamental theories that guide individuals’ actions are metaphorical links between abstract concepts and sensorimotor experiences. In this chapter, I develop the concept of sensory templates as referring to the way managers model their social interactions as analogous to physical interactions, like pulling a rope, pushing a boulder up a hill, riding your bicycle with the brakes on, removing stones to let a river flow more easily, and so on.

In Chap. 4, I describe nine cases from my own research to illustrate how working with sensory templates can help managers solve seemingly unsolvable problems. I describe the cases in some detail, as it might be interesting for managers reading this book to follow the learning processes of the research participants.

In Chaps. 5 and 6, I look at two new trends within management education, namely the use of art (Taylor and Ladkin 2009) and the use of religious and spiritual doctrines and practices (Delbecq 2013). I argue that the concept of sensory templates can greatly develop our understanding and use of these approaches to management education.

In Chap. 5, I argue that art-based methods can be used both for making managers aware of the sensory templates they use (projective technique) and for finding new sensory templates they can think with—either in classical works of art (illustration of essence) or in the experience of being engaged in art creation for its own sake (making).

In Chap. 6, I focus on the use of religious and spiritual doctrines and practices. As an example, I examine the use of teaching on vices and virtues as it appears in Greek philosophy, Christianity, and Tibetan Buddhism . It has been suggested that cultivation of virtue is important to managers as a means of preventing internal forces of human vices in the individual manager from leading to flawed strategic decisions detrimental to the organization, its environment, and the manager’s own career (Delbecq 2006). The main argument in this chapter is that cultivation of virtue is not primarily a matter of adhering to a morally good code of conduct, but rather of adopting specific sensory templates from which virtuous acts follow spontaneously and without any effort. Drawing on Tibetan Buddhism, I consider which sensory templates have this effect.

In Chap. 7, I present a collection of practices for working with sensory templates through the use of language and exercises aimed at increasing managers’ sensory awareness. I call these practices Somatic-Linguistic Practices.

This book is written for managers, academics, and management educators. The individual reader may belong to one, two, or all t...