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Postcard No. 4 from Woodside, California 215

forthcoming with the testable implications invites scholars to hack at the
limits of their knowledge. The motto “If you think you understand some-
thing, try and change it” (in the spirit of Kurt Lewin and Bill Starbuck)
illustrates the difference between personal engagement (Van de Ven &
Johnson, 2006; Hanson, 1972) and detached ex-post analysis.
Experimentation (or changing what we think we understand) can thus be
an avenue to discovering the limits to our knowledge. (For example, in the
famous Hawthorne experiment, the puzzle about productivity increases
exposed misconceptions of worker motivation.) But it can also be a tool for
eventually expanding that understanding (by experimenting on what we do
not yet understand). 10 Thus experimentation allows us to expose the limits
of our knowledge; it is also a methodology for exploration and the learning
of new things. (Children, for example, experiment constantly.) Or in
Weick’s (1989) terms, experimentation helps us both create (a need for)
theory as well as (in)validate it (or its laden hypotheses).
3. Evolving judgment criteria (or, the endogeneity of the desirable).
Inventive experimentation will also help redefine the problem at hand. In con-
trast to Donald Campbell’s view on experimentation as a methodology for
validation (see Weiss, 2000), James G. March has emphasized the unexpected
discovery of new goals and preferences as a consequence of social experimen-
tation: the problem definition may change. As March and Olsen (1976) wrote
in a paragraph that makes the experimenter an engaged participant:

In particular, the evaluation of social experiments need not be in terms
of the degree to which they have fulfilled our a priori expectations.
Rather we can examine what they did in terms of what we now
believe to be important. The prior specification of criteria and the
prior specification of evaluational procedures that depend on such cri-
teria are common presumptions in contemporary social policy mak-
ing. They are presumptions that inhibit the serendipitous discovery of
new criteria. (p. 80)

Experimentation thus engages, and even occasionally challenges, the nor-
mative beliefs of the experimenter as to what should be experimented on in the
first place! Such experimentation will thus help redefine the issue at hand and
its major or important characteristics. Should we accept not only the challenge