Brown Bag: Prof. Masson

The Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation (Prof. Georg von Krogh), ETH Zurich, invites you to a brown bag research seminar with:

Professor Pascal Le Masson (MINES ParisTech)

Date: Wednesday, 15 November, 2017

Time: 12:00-12:30 joint lunch, 12:30-14:00 presentation and discussion

Location: ETH WEV F109-111, Weinbergstrasse 56/58, Zurich

“Managing in the unknown: towards a post-decisional paradigm in management”

Abstract:

This paper contributes to show how design theory enables to extend decision-making logic to the unknown. The “unknown” often appears as the strange territory beyond the rationality of decision-making manager - we contribute to the (re)foundation of management by making the unknown become an actionable notion for the decision-maker. To this end, we build on the pioneering works done on “managing in the unknown” and on design theory to systematically characterize rational forms of action to structure the exploration of the unknown in a decision-making perspective. We show that action can be organized on the basis of the notion of “decision concept”, which is not yet a decision but help organize the generation of better decision situation – a decision concept supports decision-oriented generativity. We identify four archetypes of decision-oriented generativity. Two consist in generating “wishful decisions”, either by improvement or by genericity and two consist in generating “decision-changing states” by generating a “best choice hacking state” or by generating “all decisions hacking state”. These archetypes correspond to forms of collective action characterized by specific knowledge acquisition strategy, specific performance and specific organization. It particular they help make sense of the variety of known organizational forms that managers could rely on to explore the unknown.

We look forward to welcoming you!