I first visited Piotr Pawłowski when he was preparing his Ashoka candidacy in 1995.

The diversion into the anthropology of techniques that we have just taken should not induce one to underestimate the contribution of authors more directly concerned with management and the tools it deploys. Such authors have left their mark in texts analysing the functioning, structure and development of organisations in order to improve their performance. Their work is brought together in a body of works called ‘organisation theory’. Several lines run through this literature and various classifications have been put forward. We shall now examine two of the better known among them.

Throughout this book we’ve shared stories of remarkable people achieving extraordinary things. But none of them accomplished these feats alone.

In the 1970s, I was a member of an alternative mental health group called Synapsis, which worked to humanize psychiatry in Poland. At that time the predominant model of mental health was strictly biological, grounded in the organic (genetic and anatomic) etiology of human disorders dealt with solely through medical treatment.

Throughout this book we’ve shared stories of remarkable people achieving extraordinary things. But none of them accomplished these feats alone.

The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.

Let’s imagine an ordinary employee, Smith, a member of the marketing team of a fictional company whose name, Tools Ltd, echoes the theme of this book. On a Monday morning after a pleasant weekend Smith goes into the entrance hall of a multi-company building in a business district on the outskirts of a large city. It is 09.10 when he presents his smart card at the doorway. In doing this he encounters a technical arrangement that does not give him any more pause for thought than the turnstile on the underground, his usual mode of transport. The door opens obligingly for him, but of course if it hadn’t done so Smith would have had an anxious moment. Then again, the security guard would have come and put things right. It would have been just one of those little vexations of modern life.

You may have noticed that most of my practical suggestions for building possibilitivity, such as creating distance, using metaphors and simulations, introducing joy, dancing, practicing bodily techniques, and introducing imagination, are all related to stimulating brain plasticity and contribute to cognitive flexibility.

My fascination with synchrony started with Steven Strogatz’s book, SYNC: How Order Emerges from Chaos in the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life.

The many pieces of research examined in the preceding chapters have revealed the social importance of management tools and recognised their role, place and influence in the coordination of organisational action, thereby justifying, in return, the efforts made in the research. As an extension of this work, we would like to propose an integrating analytical framework that would allow us to examine the different facets of what we call the ‘agency’ of management tools.1 We chose this term because it accounts for the fact that tools have a capacity to act on and influence the world and human beings.

The need to take into account technique in analyses of social phenomena now seems obvious, given the place that it occupies in our industrialised societies, which George Friedmann, one of the founders of the sociology of work, said arises within a ‘technical civilisation’ (Friedmann, 1964). And technique does not exist on its own without the technical objects that the tools constitute. However, for a long time, objects considered as something belonging to the natural order, appeared as intruders in the human sciences (Blandin, 2002, p. 7).

Let’s get back to those three stories introduced earlier and find out how the education system in a disadvantaged urban area could attract and retain the best teachers, how dealing with personal issues at work became a win-win situation for employees and employers, and how an individual with autism revolutionized the way the livestock is handled.

So, at this point we’ve explored several tools we can use to dismantle the fortress of the mind and open ourselves to possibilitivity.

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.

The many pieces of research examined in the preceding chapters have revealed the social importance of management tools and recognised their role, place and influence in the coordination of organisational action, thereby justifying, in return, the efforts made in the research. As an extension of this work, we would like to propose an integrating analytical framework that would allow us to examine the different facets of what we call the ‘agency’ of management tools.1 We chose this term because it accounts for the fact that tools have a capacity to act on and influence the world and human beings.

For the authors brought together in this chapter, social asymmetries, and the balance and relations of power are at the heart of the analysis. Management tools are caught up in these relations which they often mediate and facilitate, or sometimes moderate or regulate. Although these approaches allow the construction of a critique of management tools, showing how far they serve projects of domination and exploitation, participate in forms of oppression and violence and produce suffering, nevertheless the way in which the different theses construct their critique are diverse but complementary. Taken together, these approaches allow us to move from the most global social functioning and its systemic effects to the oppressed individuals in their subjective experience.

In the 1970s a young Canadian named Mary Gordon graduated from college and became a kindergarten teacher, in the hope that she could have a positive effect on children’s lives.