As you know by now if you are reading this issue straight through, Mike Coovert decided to use his last issue as editor differently than the "usual" TIP. He requested that each of us talk with someone internationally well-known, outside the field of I-O, regarding the future of work and the implications for I-O psychology. In response to this request, I asked Ian Mitroff to talk with me about work in the twenty-first century and the challenges facing our field. I selected Ian because I consider him a leading thinker and writer on organizational issues, and because he brings a great breadth of knowledge to his work. This article is a summary of our conversation, not a verbatim transcript. I found Ian’s perspective to be thought-provoking, and I imagine you will, too. Ian’s comments may reflect a narrow definition of I-O psychology, but may provide us with some insight about how our field is perceived by others, including the organizations with whom we work. His comments challenge us to think about how we conceptualize our field, apply our skills, and train our students. I am interested in your reactions to Ian’s comments.

The challenge facing leaders today is learning to take a systemic approach to managing businesses and people. Two current approaches to management include trying to solve single problems and using popular gimmicks and fads. Both of these approaches involve a focus on some part or parts of the system in isolation, and until we work with the whole system, we will not enable our organizations to reach their potential.

Not only do we need to consider the organization as a system, but leaders need to manage employees as whole people. In order to truly be successful, we need to recognize multiple aspects of people, including the feeling, spiritual dimensions of their lives. Some of the current employment trends (e.g., temporary workers and boundaryless organizations) allow organizations to discount people as whole individuals and, therefore, are not sustainable organizational models.

We really don’t know what organizations will look like, nor do we understand the forms they will take. Most of today’s organizational forms are based on gimmicks and don’t allow us to harness the full creative energy and power that can come from people. Although we don’t know what forms organizations will take, we do know we need to create organizations that value learning, knowledge (both tacit and explicit), and ethics.

While jobs will likely be more specialized, most jobs won’t be fixed in a job description. Rather, work will flow across disciplines and across corporate functions. This kind of integration depends upon people having the ability to inquire, and organizations allowing people to explore. If people are managed as whole people, they will be better able to perform their work in an integrated way.

As a profession, I-O psychology is limited. While traditional I-O training provides people with a good base of skills, our reliance as a field on quantifiable information gives us a narrow, limited view of the reality of organizations. In order to be more valuable practitioners, I-O psychologists must transform themselves. This transformation could take a number of forms, but it generally involves recognizing the value and limits of our tools and perspectives, and actively pursuing additional approaches to understanding organizations. For example, if we use data as an indicator rather than an end, the data might point us in the direction of other less quantifiable, yet valuable, information.

It is not the specific questions we ask, but the approach we use that will make the most difference. The range of questions we can answer from a traditional I-O perspective is narrow, leading to staid, stable, reductionistic thinking. We need to use our base of quantitative analysis as a starting point and then broaden our approach by incorporating thinking from other fields. One way to learn would be to read studies of organizations from different perspectives (e.g., philosophy, ethics) in order to see more of the picture.

Ian I. Mitroff is the Harold Quinton Distinguished Professor of Business Policy and the Founder of the USC Center for Crisis Management which he directed for 10 years at the Graduate School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He received his B.S. in Engineering Physics, an M.S. in Structural Engineering, and a Ph.D. in Engineering Science and the Philosophy of Social Science, all from the University of California at Berkeley. He has been a Professor of Business Administration, Information Science, Sociology, and a Research Associate in the Philosophy of Science Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He has also been a visiting Professor in the Departments of Management and Social Systems Sciences at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Academy of Management. He has published over 250 articles and 19 books of which his most recent is Smart Thinking for Crazy Times: The Art of Solving the Right Problems, San Pablo: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 1997. He consults widely on crisis management, critical thinking, organizational and strategic change, and strategic planning for a wide array of public and private organizations. He writes frequent op-ed pieces for leading newspapers. He is a frequent guest on Marketplace on National Public Radio.