The view that individuals can be controlled through conditioning is predominant in the business
environment. However, in recent years, people have started to question this control mechanism. In
this article, the authors elaborate further on the implications of conditioning to business and present
another approach to making organisations agile, highly productive and VUCA (volatility, uncertainty,
complexity and ambiguity) ready. Ivan Petrovich Pavlov’s famous experiment with dogs, focused on
the quantity of saliva generated in the dog’s mouth, which he measured under different conditions.
He also demonstrated that every conditioned stimulus became completely ineffective on repetition,
such that even the reflex action ceased.
In business terms, this implies that too much control will eventually fail to have the desired effect.
The introduction of employee conditioning aimed at the achievement of a certain goal may have a
negative impact on employees’ natural abilities. This may directly affect an organisation’s bottom
line without there being an observable direct connection between the conditioning process and the
impact of the drop in natural responses elsewhere. However, an integratively intelligent mindset
creates room for natural reflexes. Integrative intelligence is the ability to discern how much
individual intelligence and systems intelligence can be built into the organisational design while
maintaining the natural instinctual responses of employees and others involved in the organisation’s
context. The more the organisation embodies integrative intelligence, the higher its tendency will be
to adopt an organisational design with self-managed organisational structures and decentralised
decision-making authority. Buurtzorg is an example of a self-managed organisation in which the lack
of formal conditioning has made its employees more adept at self-managed processes. It all starts
with the mindset. This requires that organisations let go of conditioning in order to encourage
natural responses. The Buurtzorg case offers some guidance on designing a business without or
with minimum conditioning, and how such a design affects client and employee satisfaction, leading
to high productivity and saving resources that would otherwise go to waste.
What if Business Revisits Pavlov’s Kennel? The Case of Buurtzorg Nederland
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