Page 226 - The Resilient Organization

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

have already been referred to as motivations to inventive experimentation.
Below I revisit the issue point by point:

1. An agenda for management innovation. What are the important
management issues or problems to address today? Inventive experimenta-
tion would support the development of an agenda of management innova-
tion, in collaboration with practitioners, in areas that scholars deem impor-
tant to advance management practice on a sustained, nonaccidental basis
(big, thorny management issues of timely importance such as the cost of
strategic renewal or corporatewide innovation capability) and in areas that
practitioners deem could make a difference to their capacity to manage. In
addressing these important issues, inventive experimentation (to the extent
it has institutional quality) would help make management innovation inten-
tional and sustained, not merely serendipitous and occasional. An agenda,
or a set of known “bugs,” would support the persistent “hacking at” man-
agement problems by an open community of scholars and practitioners.
2. Development of a portfolio of management innovations. As it is
unlikely that solutions to big management problems can be devised with
one shot, inventive experimentation would help create a portfolio of ideas,
experiments, and eventually emergent innovations that have desirable qual-
ities. Such a portfolio would add variety to management practice, and to the
extent radical ideas can be created and experimented on, it would con-
tribute to the enlargement and substantial revision of the selection set of
management practices. This would avoid myopia in management practice
such that most practices are small variations of one theme, thus lacking real
variety as a population of options.
3. Creating a scholarly interest in management innovation.
Management innovations should not be the privilege of consultants or the
lone responsibility of managers with an insider bias regarding the proper-
ties of their organizations. Such bias might be reduced should management
innovation be open to the scholarly community, able to consider the cir-
cumstances from a comparative, and hence more objective, stance, and
bring a wealth of knowledge to bear on the management problem. It is this
mutual interaction and cross-influence—or harangue—that might super-
charge management innovation and add to the quality of ideas being
invented and experimented on.