Page 228 - The Resilient Organization

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

unrelated to the initial purpose of the experiment). It provides a playground
or a setting for observation, and therefore it is well placed to receive the gift
that serendipity has to offer. Should there be multiple experiments in parallel,
serendipity has a larger arena in which to make an appearance under the
9
focused attention of the experimenter. Inventive experimentation is a quest,
and there is an implication that serendipity is the natural companion for
quests of various kinds and requires alertness and good judgment. The
Princes of Serendip were poised for discovery, accidental and otherwise.
2. Beyond the retrofitting of theories—testing the limits to our knowl-
edge. Management research has been criticized for its backward-looking
posture:

One problematic consequence of researchers being able to choose what
they study has been a focus on the past (Starbuck, 2006). Data are
always retrospective, and theories consistent with retrospective data
may not describe the future or even the present. In a challenge to the
usefulness of such research, Platt (1964) argued that theoretical
progress depends on confronting theories with crucial experiments that
rule out unproductive lines of thought. Because researchers can craft
retrospective theories to make them consistent with prominent stylized
facts, these theories never appear utterly inadequate, and so testing
them never rules out unproductive lines of thought. To expose the lim-
itations of theories, organization researchers and designers alike have
to use theories to predict and then they have to verify whether what
happens corresponds to what they predicted. Organization design is an
important and interesting area because it requires designers to make
predictions, and it then generates evidence about the extent that pre-
dictions prove out in practice. (Dunbar & Starbuck, 2006)

McKelvey (1997) suggests paradigm proliferation in organization
science is due to the difficulty of refuting competing claims across para-
digms as they are not testable. While the purpose of inventive experimen-
tation is not focused on testing predictions of existing theories in practice,
it does offer an avenue for playing out the implications of current manage-
ment theory in specific experiments.
However, to create such experiments in the first place often requires an
experimental and inventive attitude (as in organizational design). Being