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.