Page 222 - The Resilient Organization

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

that would add variety to organizational life, perhaps by using some of the
above analogues as sources of inspiration (see, for example, Jacobs, 1993).
In addition to expanding the imaginary space with different perspectives
and analogues, management invention might benefit from a purposeful
exposure of its underlying assumptions. What are the beliefs or norms that
a particular management practice such as strategic planning builds on (see,
for example, Mason, 1969)? Or the tendency of companies to reward
people financially for innovation suggests that their belief, potentially mis-
guided or detrimental in implementation, is that people innovate for pecu-
niary benefit. Identifying and setting aside, and thus neutralizing, some of
these hidden, toxic, or orthodox assumptions is a first step toward an alter-
native conception of the issue at hand toward developing new management
practice. According to Ghoshal and Moran’s (1996) critique of the transac-
tion cost theory, it offers a poor basis for management development as it
builds on assumptions of human behavior not to be encouraged, despite or
due to the fact that it appears, perhaps as a self-fulfilling prophecy, to
explain organizational behavior to some extent (Frank, 1988; Bowie &
Freeman, 1992). This raises an interesting question about the foundations
of management development: whether the theories that best fit (current)
reality are also the most desirable tools for developing new practice (or vice
versa, see also McCloskey, 1988). Inventive experimentation might offer an
avenue for building management practice on alternative, more preferable
(Collins, 1997) theory grounds.

EXPERIMENTATION: LEARNING-BY-TRYING

Miner and Mezias (1996) in their review of organizational learning litera-
ture note that “surprisingly, there is almost no research explicitly address-
ing organizational experimentation in pursuit of inferential learning” (p. 93).
They go on to note that while its importance has been noted by Argyris
and Schon (1978), the conceptualization of such experimental learning and
its distinct features are undefined. Dewey (1916), as quoted in Raelin
(1997: 566), argued that “mere ‘doing’ or activity was not enough to pro-
duce learning; rather, doing should become a trying, an experiment with the
world to find out what it is like.” This is a radical departure from the