Confronting Strategic Inertia in a Top Management Team: Learning from Failure

By G. Hodgkinson, George Wright. 2002

290 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recently there has been a growing interest in the use of scenario-planning techniques and related procedures such as cognitive mapping as a basis for facilitating organizational learning and strategic renewal. The overwhelming impression conveyed within the popular management literature is that the application of these techniques invariably leads to successful outcomes. To the extent that this is not the case, the absence of documented accounts of instances where these techniques have failed may mislead would-be users into embarking on inappropriate courses of action, unaware of their fundamental limitations. In keeping with a number of recent calls to make organizational research and management theory more relevant to the world of practice, we present a reflective account of our own (largely unsuccessful) attempt to apply these potentially powerful methods of intervention in the context of a private sector organization. Drawing on the rich seam of qualitative data gathered over the course of our work with the senior management team of the organization concerned, we explore the reasons why our attempts to utilize these methods did not yield the benefits anticipated. The data are analyzed using Janis and Mann's (1977) Conflict Theory of Decision Making. It is argued that the primary reason why our process intervention failed is that the participants adopted a series of defensive avoidance strategies, amplified by a series of psychodynamic processes initiated by the Chief Executive Officer (CEO). We contend that these defensive avoidance strategies served as a means of coping with the unacceptably high levels of decisional stress, which arose as a result of having to confront a variety of alternatives, each with potentially threatening consequences for the longterm wellbeing of the organization.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b2a370bac9e973ee8eb4eed634807e1106fda989

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In Management Science and Operations Research

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Explaining Discontinuity in Organizational Learning: A Process Analysis (2010, background): “This may be due to a clear outcome, such as the realization of change in organizational structure, procedures or systems (Kim 1998), or to a blockage such as the failure to connect cognition and action (Edmondson 2002; Hodgkinson and Wright 2002).”
Toward a (Pragmatic) Science of Strategic Intervention: Design Propositions for Scenario Planning (2008, background): “…makers high in Neuroticism with strong ego-defensive needs might be expected to attempt to maintain control over the process by forcing other team members to accept without question their particular visions of the future, while undermining others’ contributions (see Hodgkinson and Wright 2002).”
Directions in scenario planning literature – A review of the past decades (2010, background): “Recognizing that the application of scenario planning is not a panacea, a few articles focus on the „hurdles faced in the practice of scenario planning and future studies‟ [42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47].”
Conceptual note: Exploring the cognitive significance of organizational strategizing: A dual-process framework and research agenda (2007, background): “…inertia, escalation of commitment, and the various other related forms of threatrigidity identified by behavioural decision-making and strategy researchers over the years (e.g. Hodgkinson & Wright, 2002, 2006; Huff et al., 1992; Janis & Mann, 1977; Johnson, 1987; Schwenk, 1986; Staw et al., 1981).”
A Dialogical Approach to the Creation of New Knowledge in Organizations (2009, background): “The case studies reported by Beech et al. (2002) and Hodgkinson and Wright (2002) are particularly revealing in that regard.”
Performance failure in the public sector (2006, background): “1981 ; Kelly and Amburgey 1991 ; Hodgkinson and Wright 2002 ).”
Strategy tools as boundary objects (2009, background): “For example, Hodgkinson and Wright (2002) showed that the CEO, due to his or her power and position, had a strong influence on the use of scenario planning tools among a senior management team and also on which scenarios were regarded as viable.”