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

of serendipitous discovery but also its potential impact on our scholarly beliefs,
we have created, arguably, the ultimate conditions for involved scholarship.
Indeed, we as scholars, apply ourselves in the experiment.
Such evolving judgment criteria may also help uncover and escape
theoretical orthodoxy, including the choice of applying a particular theoret-
ical framework to a research situation in the first place (when another
framework could potentially yield much more inventive results). While the
framework or theory may appear endogenously desirable—the scholar has
a tradition of research in this area or the journals tend to look upon publi-
cations within this framework favorably—the very framework may be the
barrier against alternative hypotheses. Furthermore, as certain research
traditions become established, they become desirable as entry points for
young scholars looking to build their scholarly reputations. This desirabili-
ty may be entirely endogenous (that is, grown within) to the scholarly com-
munity, however, who through a peer-review process assess the validity of a
research paper (leaving managers, journalists, and other societal stake-
holders out of the evaluation). This is not to say that the academic commu-
nity is not the right audience to assess a scholarly contribution; it is,
however, to acknowledge that this assessment is exclusive 11 and is not
subject to the test of other, exogenous, criteria (like practitioners’ views).

RESILIENCE AS INVENTIVE EXPERIMENTATION

What inventive experimentation is not, is starting another consulting organ-
ization but rather creating a laboratory for management innovation.
Inventively experimental scholarship is proposed as a sincere, altruistic
pursuit of knowledge that aspires to contribute to, and potentially acceler-
ate, the evolution of management practice by developing and trialing
promising management concepts and/or inventions.
In Table 14.2, there is a summary of the assumptions behind inventive
experimentation as a knowledge creation approach. As a strategy, such
inventive experimentation would likely serve management research by sup-
porting ambitious or interesting idea creation and theory construction.
Circumventing the steps involved in invention and experimentation, it is
proposed here, has been costly to management research, making the work