Chris Argyris’s Theories of action: Zombie Apocolypse

Theory in use and espoused theory

Chris Argyris is a very clever man. He worked with his friend Donald Schön and came up with some very interesting theories about how people think. One of the ideas these two clever men explored was the theories surrounding action. Particularly the idea of theory-in-use and espoused theory.

At first I was thinking oh no! not technical theories surrounding action they are going to be terribly boring! But as I read I began to understand just what these actions were and the best way I can explain them is with the age old example of a zombie apocalypse.

Everyone has had that conversation about what they would do in a zombie apocalypse. People have super action plans about what weapon they’d chose, where they’d go and how they fight. All this plan and discussion of action is all espoused theory of action. It is how we’d suppose we’d act in a given situation.

Conversely if suddenly alerts started coming in that the world was facing a major zombie outbreak and you were immediately threatened, the actions you take would be the theory-in-use idea which is what actually would govern your actions.

Examining the distinction between the two allows us to see whether the espoused theory reflects the theory-in-action. So perhaps instead of planning to stay and fight with the chainsaw from the back shed, in reality, when actually faced with stumbling, slobbering, brain-hungry sub-humans you would find the nearest quickest way out of there.

For more interesting theories by Chris Argyris check out this article: http://infed.org/mobi/chris-argyris-theories-of-action-double-loop-learning-and-organizational-learning/