Page 233 - The Resilient Organization

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

less innovative than it could have been. In Donald Campbell’s terms, we
have become mere assessors of the effectiveness of certain practices or
programs. However, managers do not (often) intentionally set out to invent
new management practice either. Rather, such activity appears to be
serendipitous, not planned (see Birkinshaw, Hamel, & Mol, 2005).
Partly to blame, perhaps, is a methodological mindset. By rushing into
the comfort of validation as the acceptable tool (Lindblom, 1987; Weick,
1996), a researcher is confined to refining the existing knowledge claims,
shortcutting his or her capacity to be imaginative in creating interesting ideas
to begin with (Weick, 1989; Hanson, 1960). Should the objection be that
such inventive experimentation is the job of (open-minded) managers or the
work of (occasionally mad) inventors and (frequently failing) entrepreneurs,
not scholars, I would conjecture that it is not good enough for scholars to sit
back and wait and see what works. Scholars need to get in the act of inno-
vation and experimentation. Among managers, it is the instinctive mode,
despite the evidence that local knowledge is sticky (Szulanski, 2003), to
study best practices: What do other (well-performing) companies do about
this? How do they manage the issue? Through inventive experimentation,
inventor-experimenters, scholars, and managers alike can enrich or add to
the quality and potential of management experience we can learn from.
An increasing interest in outlier performance (Lewin, 1989) suggests a
frustration with studying the best practice (or the average and the aggregate)
and may help drive inventive experimentation. Yet ultimately, inventive
experimentation is motivated by the inventor-experimenters’ desire, indeed
compulsion, to invent and tinker with management practices. Let us hope
there are more than a few inventor-experimenters among us, because—to par-
aphrase Karl Popper—if we do not experiment, we become the experiment. 12

CATALYZING MANAGEMENT INNOVATION:
AN EXAMPLE

To illustrate, I will relate an exercise that was specifically aimed at catalyz-
ing management innovations at a U.S. retailer (see the full case study in
Chapter 9, “Resilience in Action—Building Reservoirs for Change”). In one
instance, the company engaged a group of people in an effort to invent