Eisenhart: Making fast strategic decisions in high velocity environments.

In this paper, Eisenhart studies how organizations make fast strategic decisions and argues for why fast decisions are better for organizations. She establishes the following:

1)      Fast decision-makers use more, not less information

2)      Fast decision-makers develop more alternatives

3)      Centralized decision-making is not necessarily fast

4)      Layered advice emphasizing advice from experienced counselors is fast

5)      Conflict resolution is critical to decision speed moreso than conflicts themselves

6)      Integrations among strategic decisions and between strategy and tactics speeds the process.

 Overall, faster decisions lead to better performance. By helping to promoting good patterns of interaction and creating an environment in which it’s easier to overcome psychological and emotional barriers to effective decision making.

As for links to my project, the anecdotes in this paper about how strategic decisions are made are useful, particularly the areas discussing the importance of immersion in real time information and the emphasis on real time communication. To me, that suggests that decision makers should spend at least some time observing users and adding access to qualitative data to the quantitative data sources mentioned in the paper.

Strategy under uncertainty

I finally finished reading this paper on strategy from HBR. I’m not quite sure how it ties into my project yet — it seems to me like user research could help inform any of the strategies for dealing with uncertainty listed.

In the paper, the authors basically classify the degrees of uncertainty in business situations and outline the appropriate strategic responses. They then address the impact of some of the strategic postures and actions on the different levels of uncertainty. Summary follows after the jump.

Courtney, Hugh; Kirkland, Jane; Viguerie, Patrick. “Strategy under uncertainty.” Harvard Business Review. (Nov.-Dec. 1997): 67-79.

Update

I’ve spent the last couple weeks looking for good strategy papers to read, and have identified a couple that I will have up in the next couple days:

Strategy Under Uncertainty by Courtney, Kirkland and Viguerie and Making Fast Strategic Decisions by Eisenhart.

The MIT OpenCourseWare site for the Sloan School of Management  has been a great resource in finding readings.

Additionally, I had a good talk with Coye today, which helped flesh out a framework for my paper going forward:

• Based on the criteria established in Hargadon, classify the data generated by user research into tacit and explicit
• Based on further reading of the strategy literature, identify which pieces might be most useful to making strategic decisions
• Combining those two things should have interesting/useful implications for how to transfer user research insights to strategic decisionmakers.

I’m planning on interviewing practitioners to glean insight into the first, which should be the bulk of the field work. I’m less optimistic about getting enough meaningful access to strategic decision makers/have the time to meaingfully interview them in the time frame.

Also, I’m hoping to speak with Prof. Jenna Burrell, our qualitative research person here, about scoping my interviews tomorrow.

Knowledge management as a framework

Having read that series of papers, I feel like a fruitful avenue of research would be applying the knowledge management framework to the question of how user research insights can better inform strategic decisions.

A study of the type of “knowledge” user research insights represents could help flesh out the shape of how to best share those insights. Are user research insights fully encoded in interviews and reports or do they exist more fully as tacit knowledge in the heads of user researchers. When working at Bolt Peters, one thing we found anecdotally was that clients who sat in and observed user testing sessions were better partners, seemed more receptive  to our recommendations and in general seemed to “get it.” On the other hand, the process, in my experience, definitely generates its share of documents.

If user research is tacit, then that would imply, based on the Hanson and Haas paper on knowledge management,  that such information would:

• Need to be shared through personal interaction
• Would impact the quality of work done — in this case the quality of strategic decisions made
• Barriers that would have to be overcome are:
  • Tacitness of knowledge: in this case leading to difficulty in transfer, since it must be transfered via personal interaction
  • Limited absorptive capability by receiver: manager jokes aside, there is probably a limit on the amount of tacit knowledge that can be passed. Might this be a theoretical justification for having decision-makers regularly rub shoulders with their customers or, more modernly, sit in on or directly view ethnographic-type interviews?
  • Lack of trust between receiver and provider

It will be interesting to try to do some research in a company with this perspective in mind.

Hoffman – Social capital, knowledge management and sustained superior performance

Hoffman, James; Hoelscher, Mark; Sheriff, Karma. “Social capital, knowledge management, and sustained superior performace.” Journal of Knowledge Management. 9.3 (2005): 93-100.

This paper was not as relevant to my research, and seemed to be more of an overview of social capital/network theory. At the risk of being snarky, it reminded me of a certain riff on business plans.

Phase 1: Gather social capital.

Phase 2: Knowledge management improves.

Phase 3: Economic rents!!!

 

Hargadon – Brokering Knowledge: Linking Learning and Innovation

Hargadon, Andrew. “Brokering knowledge: Linking learning and innovation.” Research in Organizational Behavior. 24 (2002): 41-85.

 This was a pretty interesting paper.

Central question: Why is it so hard for organizations to learn from their experience and then forget that knowledge when faced with a new environment. 

The punchline is that innovation is basically made possible by distinct domains of knowledge and is the process of applying knowledge from one domain in another, potentially rearranging said knowledge in the process.  If you’re lucky enough to be a “knowledge broker” who interacts with many different domains, you win!

Implications for my research: (Ethnographic) user research helps identify the other domains that are relevant and not necessarily obvious.

 More detailed notes after the jump.

Hanson and Haas: Different knowledge, different benefits

So it’s been a month, but I finally finished reading this article.

The cite: Haas, Martin and Hansen, Morten. “Different knowledge, different benefits: toward a productivity perspective on knowledge sharing in organizations.” Strategic Management Journal. 28.11 (2007): 1133-1153.

The punchline

• Different kinds of knowledge have different impacts on knowledge worker productivity:
  • Electronic documents, generally providing codified knowledge, help save time but don’t improve work quality
    
  • Personal advice, generally providing tacit knowledge, help improve quality but don’t necessarily save time due to the time associated with getting and capturing it
• Cost of acquiring and processing knowledge means that more knowledge sharing isn’t always better

 

Implications for my thesis

• What types of knowledge is generated by user research, tacit or codified?
• What processes are used to share knowledge about user research from researchers to strategic decision-makers?

More after the jump.

Hargadon – Action and Possibility: Reconciling Dual Perspectives of Knowledge in Organizations.

Cite:

Hargadon, Andrew and Fanelli, Angelo. “Action and Possibility: Reconciling Dual Perspectives of Knowledge in Organizations.” Organization Science 13.3 (2002): 290-302.

So this article turned out to be pretty interesting. The 50,000 ft. view is that this paper explores the dichotomy of two different models of knowledge management in organizations: organizational learning and innovation. Without getting too much into it, organizational learning deals with the idea that individual experiences and expertise become encoded into knowledge in the form of work practices, artifacts, etc. These then serve to constrain potential future behavior. Whereas in innovation, latent knowledge is combined or applied in novel ways that generate new possibilities.

The punch line is that the two modes complement each other: learning is necessary to develop the latent knowledge that precedes innovation. Luckily, the paper also explores ways that knowledge might be learned by organizations and then applied innovatively.

The obvious application to my project is that user research data is obviously present in many of the organizations I hope to study — but how to propagate those insights through organizations in such a way that they can impact decision-making? Or to put it in more concrete terms: If some people designing a web experience have important insights regarding their users with strategic implications, how does that actually translate into the decision-makers in a company making the right decision?

After exploring a couple short case studies about how IDEO and Design Continuum innovate, here are their some of their best practices:

1. Force people to work across different domains so they don’t become set in their ways.
   

   Repetitive cycles of interaction generate alignment between what people believe possible and confirmation of these beliefs in the actions (and sanctions) of others. Firms like IDEO and Design Continuum, by the variation in experiences faced by organizational members, avoid the cycle of action and experience that might rectify similar knowledge in other organizations.

2. Knowledge passes socially:
   

   The recursive processes of knowing become social when the knowledge manifested in one individual’s action, by becoming a social artifact, shapes another individual’s schema. Orr’s (1996) description of copier technicians provides a rich example of how this cycle of action and interaction create (relatively) shared understandings about possible actions (scripts), desired ends (goals), and identities. In particular, the storytelling that occurs between technicians while “, and the stories that the technicians tell circulate that knowledge” (Orr 1996, p. 5). It may appear semantic, but in this sense “shared knowledge” refers not to knowledge that is commonly held (meaning identical) across technicians but rather knowledge that has been shared between technicians—knowledge made empirical through the generation of social artifacts, in this case stories, and made latent again through each individual’s interpretation of those stories (300)

3. Isolate people from existing schemas so that they can forge their own.
   

   Other strategies for managing innovation, for example, focus less on providing a diverse set of experiences—shaping the empirical knowledge that is available—and more on directly changing the goals or identities of the participants to enable them to see new possibilities. Lockheed’s Skunkworks and Apple’s Macintosh team are famous examples of new product development teams that have been isolated from the past practices, values, and expectations of the old organization and given new and different goals and identities for acting. (300)

4. Cross-functional teams
   

   Conversely, Leonard-Barton (1995) describes a strategy of “creative abrasion,” which exploits the inherent differences based on the schemas, goals, and identities of different functional groups within an organization. This strategy generates novel actions by forcing interactions between diverse organizational members to elicit confrontation (and creative resolution) of their otherwise different perspectives on the world. Both of these strategies assume that the answers, in the form of latent knowledge, already reside to a large extent within the organization. (300)

One and three seem to be ways in which individuals within an organization can learn new things/innovate, while two and four seem more geared toward spreading those insights through an organization (not to be too simplistic or anything…). None of this is particularly earth shattering, but it’s good to have some documented cites.

Roger Martin

I did a Google Scholar and Harvard Business School search for Roger Martin’s work, and most of it doesn’t seem directly relevant to my work. His most cited stuff seems to be about the ROI on corporate responsibility, which is interesting but not too helpful. There are a couple other articles on things like how leaders think and conflicts of interest for board members.

Starting lit review

Yesterday I met with Coye and chatted with him about my project, then drove down to San Mateo to meet with Conrad Wai of Jump Associates.

My Coye meeting was productive, though I did not quite get the list of readings I was (perhaps unreasonably) hoping to walk away from the meeting from. He pointed out that since I’m writing a paper on limited time, considering the entire strategic decision-making process(es) of an organization might be too broad, and encouraged me to focus on perhaps strategic decision-making around the creation of web experiences. That sounds like a pretty good idea and I think I’m going to run with that for now. He did recommend Andy Powell (I think), which I will try to track down. And recommended that I schedule a time with Anno.

My meeting with Conrad was also very productive. He seems interested in my project. One of the things he did that was helpful was break up my work into three general areas (which I may have to narrow down in the future):

1) Organizational theory – Why orgs are the way they are, how are they, how do they manage networks of innovation, etc.

2) User research – This is basically the CHI community perspective on things.

3) Design – How to design good experiences.

Actually, now I’m not sure if design is the third one, but it was useful to break it up. He also seems visual, and a doodle he made in his notebook strikes me as a good touchstone for my project:

(drawing of a web site): “Why do I suck?”

I think if I stay grounded in trying to explore the larger reasons websites suck, that will lead to interesting findings that go beyond the typical HCI griping about not having enough say in the org.

He also left me with a more well fleshed out set of stuff to read, which is helpful:
Andy Hargadon, UC Davis
ACM Interactions for the HCI “insider’s” perspective
Harvard Business Review, in particular Roger Martin from UToronto bschool
Stuff from AP for the webby stuff
The “anthropology design list” which I should attempt to track down for useful modules of information
AIGA – American Institute (?) of Graphic Artists

Just downloaded a bunch of papers by Andrew Hargadon, UC Davis business professor that Conrad from Jump recommended I read. The last paper, titled “Action and Possibility: Reconciling Dual Perspectives of Knowledge in Organizations,” looks the most promising. The abstract:

At times knowledge can be seen as the source of organizational innovation and change—at other times, however, it can be the very constraint on that change. This conflicted role offers insights into why the phenomenon of organizational knowledge has been interpreted by researchers in multiple and possibly conflicting ways. Some theories depict knowledge as an empirical phenomenon, residing in action and becoming “organizational” in the acquisition, diffusion, and replication of those actions throughout the organization. Others consider it a latent phenomenon, residing in the possibility for constructing novel organizational actions. This paper argues that while each of these qualities—empirical and latent—are intrinsic to knowledge in organizations, our understanding of organizational phenomena is essentially incomplete until the relationship between them is considered. Building on structuration theory, we propose a complementary perspective that views organizational knowledge as the product of an ongoing and recursive interaction between empirical and latent knowledge, between knowledge as action and knowledge as possibility. We ground this complementary model of knowledge in evidence from the field study of two firms whose innovation practices provide unique insights into how knowledge simultaneously enables and constrains behavior in organizations. We then discuss how a complementary perspective avoids the reification of knowledge by depicting it instead as an ongoing and social process and offers an alternative distinction between individual and collective knowledge.

To do’s:
Schedule time with Anno
Read papers
Download Eric’s suggested papers