My Focus on Catalytic Frameworks

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Before you go any further, I feel it is important that I set out my approach to research as this will put what follows into context.  My approach is driven by the acceptance that we live and work in a complex world.

This complexity means that it can be very difficult to make sense of the world around us. As a consequence it also means that routines that have worked in the past may not work the next time they are applied. This is often due to some minor variation in the prevailing circumstances.

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For practitioners, complexity means that they will, almost always, have to make decisions in less than ideal circumstances. Inevitably the circumstances surrounding the decision will be clouded with uncertainty. However much of the academic literature on how to manage such situations focuses on the removal of that uncertainty: I did not find this approach very helpful. I looked for another direction.

That direction was provided by John S Reed in his speech to the Academy of Management as their ‘Executive of the Year, 1999’. He stated:

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We (as managers) have to do two things: we decide what to do, and we try to make it happen. If you boil down all of the practice of business, it is the combination of those two things and the interaction between them that defines the world in which we live.

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He went on to suggest that:

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All… research can do is inform us. It certainly does not give us answers.

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From this I asked myself that if we researchers do not provide answers, how can we help? Of course, the answer came from Sir Winston Churchill.

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After the fall of Singapore, Churchill is reported as having said: “I ought to have known… I ought to have asked”. More recently, in 2010, Lord Browne (when head of BP) is quoted in a newspaper as saying 'I wish someone had been brave enough to say "we need to ask disagreeable questions"'. I therefore looked to focus my research on helping practitioners ask better questions. However, before going down this route, I first checked whether there was any support for this approach already within the academic literature. I found that there was.

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Karl Weick agrees that there is utility in academic work that “provokes” discussion (it ‘gets us talking, digging, comparing, refining, and focusing on the right question’). Peng and Dess also state that scholarship ‘can help managers frame issues, ask the right questions, and question their underlying assumptions’. Keith Grint promotes the idea of managers being 'investigators' (hunting for the truth) rather than 'experts" (knowing the right answer).

I have therefore set the purpose of my research as being to provide “good questions” that provoke animated risk discourse. The issue then became one of how to do this. Within academia there is a wide range of models and frameworks; these are used to describe how a system works or they are designed to predict what will happen within a system. Neither of these suited my purpose. I needed something that provokes questions in the way described by Weick. I therefore now refer to the frameworks and models that I produce as being Catalytic Frameworks. I see these as being ways of promoting foresight.

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I am aware that there are many different ways of looking at any single problem and many different ways to solve that same problem. With this in mind, I therefore expect (and hope) that people reading these pages will question what I say for this is my purpose. I hope that what my work does is to provide a framework for the discussion that enables diverse groups to reach levels of cross-understanding sufficient to achieve their goal and to avoid the many pitfalls en route. While the advantage of having a diverse range of opinions (providing requisite variety) is that it is one way of avoiding groupthink, the downside is that it is hard for the group to align their mental models of any situation.  I believe that this approach can help.

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If you have any ideas how we might do better, please let me know.