Page 218 - The Resilient Organization

204 Part Four: Step 3. Rehearsing a Culture of Resilience

(Mintzberg, 1994; Hamel, 2002). Gary Hamel has recently called for manage-
ment innovation to deliver “management moon shots”—that is, ambitious
changes in management practice. Management innovation, while benefiting
the work of a manager, can thus also contribute to determining which organi-
zational characteristics are historical legacy and path-dependent happenstance
and what are inescapable “laws” or first principles (Pfeffer & Fong, 2005).
That business schools lack management clinics is interesting. Much like
medical schools have their clinical practices, perhaps business schools
would also benefit from laboratories for studying and experimenting
on management principles and practices systematically. Of course, many
business professors do consult for companies much as medical doctors have
private clinics, yet the business schools themselves are not vested in develo-
ping “new treatments” and clinical practices.

TOWARD INVENTIVELY EXPERIMENTAL SCHOLARSHIP

While invention and experimentation routinely take place in science labora-
tories, the norm in management scholarship has been away from such a
pragmatist-inspired “productive inquiry” (Hickman, 1990) that would
evoke an epistemology of practice—or knowing as action—rather than an
epistemology of possession—knowledge as something possessed in the head
(Cook & Brown, 1999). While the Cartesian in us may afford reasoning
about the world, the Deweyan is poised to meddle with it, to try and change
things (for example, Argyris & Schon, 1992; Lewin, 1945; Romme, 2003).
Thus the inventive experimenter seeks not only to explain what has (already)
happened (or tends to happen) but to open up the possibility for something
else to happen. It is not being resourceful about the theoretical explanation
to an existing, observed phenomenon (Dunbar & Starbuck, 2006). Rather,
it is being inventive about the possibility of experiencing or creating differ-
ent phenomena and sometimes variations of existing phenomena.
Perhaps experimental scholars could learn from venture capitalists. As
one founder of a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm was admiringly
described: “He is often wrong, but when he is right, he is really, really
right.” The role of an experimental scholar should be to entertain a portfo-
lio of management innovations, much as does a venture capitalist, in full
knowledge that many of these experimental innovations will soon fail but