The Strategic Management Atelier or DreamLab by Ger Jonkergouw

THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ATELIER ®: AN INCUBATOR FOR DESIGNING AND CREATING PROTO-STRATEGIES EXPERIMENTS IN KNOWLEDGE CREATION WHILE MINING FOR MEANING

AUTHOR: DRS.

GER F. JONKERGOUW

MANAGING DIRECTOR OF JONKERGOUW CREATING SOLUTIONS

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1. CONTENTS 1. CONTENTS 2. INTRODUCTION In Search of Strategic Gold: Alchemists Mining for Meaning The Strategist as Knowledge Alchemist: Sorcerer or Entertainer? From the Alchemist to the Strategic Knowledge Laboratory Limits of the paper and Acknowledgement

3. SEARCHING THE SOUL OF STRATEGY: THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF KNOWLEDGE CREATION Searching in the Dark: Knowledge Creation is Beyond the Light of the Street Lamp The Triumph of the Technocrat Managers Emotional Intelligence as Runner-up?

The Soul of Strategy The Soul but Not the New Age of Strategy

Understanding the Subconscious The Cultural Load of Mental Programming

A Bridge Between Dark and Light: The Fertile Twilight Zone of The Subconscious Locating Stars: Gaze or Focus? Subconscious Diving and Decompression Sickness

Intuition: A Mind-Body Language of its Own What ‘Exactly’ is Intuition? Chess-playing and Intuition The Role of Intuition in Management Decisions Intuition: Friend or Foe of Strategic Uncertainty, Complexity and Unpredictability?

A Laboratory for Research & Development of the Subconscious? Where Do Artists Go After Breakfast? Discovering and Understanding Chaos Through Visual Dialogue

4. FROM INDIVIDUAL

ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE CREATION: TACIT

AND

EXPLICIT

KNOWLEDGE Using Organizational Intelligence for Joint Knowledge Creation The Organizational Intelligence Quotient Transformation of Sub-conscious Organizational Knowledge: Knowledge is Social of Nature

Organizational Creativity and the Search for Wells of New Approaches Motivation, Expertise and Creative Thinking Skills as the Roots of Knowledge Innovation Organizational Procedures Stimulating Creativity and Knowledge Creation Knowledge Conversion and Creativity: the Need for A Knowledge Creation Laboratory?

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5. THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ATELIER ®: THE ART OF STRATEGY? Background, The Strategic Management Atelier ® Set-up Creativity as a Powerful Engine From Knowledge Creation Laboratory to Strategy Incubator Proto Strategies The Impact on the Business School Set-up

6. The Strategic Management Atelier®: Case Studies

Executive Business Education Training: 1. International Executive Development Center, IEDC (Kranj, Slovenia) 2. The International Management Institute, IMI (Kiev, Ukraine)

Strategic Consulting 3. RootFruit; Fruit Tree Nursery (Boxmeer, the Netherlands)

4. Bridgewater Research Group (USA, the Netherlands) ABSTRACT ABOUT THE AUTHOR REFERENCES NOTES

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Introduction What is the Price of Experience? Do Men Buy it for a Song? Or, Wisdom for a Dance in the Street? No, It is Bought for the Price of All that Man Has! (William Blake, The Price of Experience)

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IN SEARCH OF STRATEGIC GOLD: ALCHEMISTS MINING FOR MEANING Who is not looking for clues to achieve success in the contemporary social and business world? We all look for proper metaphors or conceptual frameworks that accurately represent our understanding of a chaotic world. Often, our perception is ‘out of balance’: small or local events deconstruct our paradigms and distort the complex overarching system (1). This all results in heavily fluctuating organizational and mental compasses, leaving managers behind without clear images of the business courses they are navigating. Besides, proper representations of our strategic metaphors must also provide an optimistic outlook on how to deal with such complexity and they should even feed our hope that there is a way out of the maze of fundamental uncertainty. All these issues together make the field of strategy intimately linked with core individual and societal questions. Although this era has lost its interest for big stories and ideologies for a while, there nevertheless is a great need for the strategist as a kind of Deus ex Machina, who can unravel the Mystery of the Search for Business Gold. The strategist is easily put into the archetypal role of an Alchemist, who can lead us to the making of Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze out of Iron. But, what are these precious metals of our time? I think they are more than ever mental over material. We talk about Knowledge Creation to take an essential role in the mystery of survival and new business creation (2). This brings us also a new Value Continuum: At the High End we find Wisdom (Platinum), then comes Sense Making (Gold), Knowledge Creation (Silver), then Pattern Recognition (Copper) and finally, at the Low End we find Information Processing (Bronze). Huge mountains of raw Facts and rivers of Figures form the data Iron that need to be forged. For sure! We live in the Knowledge Society and we are mining for meaning! Fortunately we have our professional Chief Alchemists who inspire us with their models, concepts and charisma. Sometimes they convince us that we are close to the edge of a strategic chasm and make us see and feel how deep we are about to fall. This results in great eagerness to jump in the open, rescuing, unfortunately rather expensive arms of the expert consultants. They can lead us safely away from the abyss of mental decline and business chaos! Beyond rescue, some experts even promise strategic Revolution or Salvation. With the fear comes the hope. Over the last decade we have seen whole series of such brilliant describers of management disasters waiting and protagonists of potential new business heavens. For example: The first time I heard Gary Hamel present one of his fascinating up-tempo keynotes speeches was at the 1992 Strategic Management Society Conference in London. I clearly remember the ‘shockwave’ that went through the conference audience when he mesmerized his public and talked about “STRATEGIC PLANNING? NO! STRATEGIC THINKING? YES!” - “YOU MUST BECOME A REVOLUTIONARY” - “CREATE WEALTH” - “USE YOUR INTUITION”- or even worse “BE CREATIVE” (3). This was followed by an even more challenging call: we were not

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just invited to explore these themes individually, back home, on a lost evening in a safe environment. We were provoked to develop, perform and share such innovative behavior openly with colleagues within our organizations: our strategic learning, creativity, revolution and intuition hence should be collaborative. But, so was the promise, if we succeed in doing so, the result of our investments will be pure business gold! Now, who then does not want to become a Business Alchemist too? After the inevitable applause at the end of such plenary key-notes, the conference or workshop rooms are left with well-dressed managers and academics, pushed against the back of their chairs. In complete bewildering asking around: “Yes, he may be right and bright. BUT HOW DO YOU DO IT?”, “What type of revolution should I start? Do I need to start a bush guerilla? And if so; how can I do so with my current standing army?” Or, “Do you actually know what INTUITION is? I only have an intuitive notion of it”. Or, “Yes I like Creativity and Art (I even buy some of what they prescribe me). But, you know, artists are weird people. In general we should not take them too seriously in business! They live in a separate world”. I trust most of the presenters enough to assume that the type of conference, workshop and consulting interventions as described above are meant to seriously ask profound questions and to honestly transfer strategic wisdom. They hence, should not be understood as plain rhetoric exercises, or as just as a kind of cheap or expensive entertainment. Such speeches often deeply impact on conversations during the rest of such events, they even may invade the mind of the participants and inspire their activities back home at the office. Apparently at least part of us gets fascinated but is also left behind with some big remaining operational strategic questions. The above observation is not an isolated one. Over and over again I hear this type of guru credo’s for change and related operational audience questions. The good thing is that there is clearly a great deal of managers who are not reluctant to deeply

change

their

organization,

structure,

strategy,

culture, technology, etc. However, they feel stuck in finding the right way doing so. It seems to me that there is a wide gap between our revolutionary and innovative theoretical concepts and the operational or practical questions. Or, the other way around: Sometimes we witness revolutionary new business creations, without proper theoretical understanding why they are so successful (4). Now, how to get out of such strategic knowledge doldrums? Would it help when we opt for one of Baron von Münchhausen’s type of strategies? Why not? Only we ourselves can free our minds. (5)

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THE STRATEGIST AS KNOWLEDGE ALCHEMIST: SORCERER OR ENTERTAINER? In the magical search for strategic knowledge and new business creation, we need to identify the type of alchemist we are dealing with. To my experience, we should clearly distinguish between the category of sorcerers on the one hand and the juggler or magician type of alchemists on the other: •

The first category (the sorcerer) strives for uncovering deeper forms of knowledge of economic, business and management reality. They search for hidden structures and undiscovered opportunities to be found beyond the borders of the every-day consciousness. They really try to find the secret of making gold.

•

The latter one category (the juggler), the ones who master the art to conjure, can be seen as champions in masking reality, and often are extremely good in hiding what they exactly are doing, harnessed by piles of shining statistics and dazzling logic/analytic reasoning. Their behavior is more ‘performance’ oriented, focused on pleasing-while-cheating the public. They are the ones who pretend they show and make people believe to see gold.

I am not saying that one category is good and the other is bad. There is a huge market for “Emperors without a Dress”, who perform seductively in their Knowledge Cabaret Shows. Moreover, when we talk about knowledge as the gold of our time, we enter the fascinating world of psychology and sociology. Hence, the definition of gold is also a matter of beliefs and assumptions. However, we seem not to make any clear distinction between the two types of searchers! To me though, there is a big difference between ‘substantial’ and ‘entertaining’ strategic knowledge (6). Now, let us focus on the first type, the ‘sorcerer’, the one who tries to get beyond this dayto-day awareness of reality? Is the Search for Substantial Strategic Knowledge then also a search for Witchcraft knowledge and related Magic Powers? Or is this type of knowledge creation more like Zen awakening? Can we really get access to such hidden and secret worlds? And, if so, is this route a gateway or a mountain trail? Is it about the passive following of a well-described road or is it intrinsically linked to doing (7), to finding-whilemaking a new route? If this true, ‘Searching for’ and ‘Designing of’ New Strategy are intimately linked through ‘Creation’.

FROM THE ALCHEMIST TO THE STRATEGIC KNOWLEDGE LABORATORY When processing ‘knowledge’ we deal with a very special type of material. To increase or improve our knowledge we not just have to transform ‘outside’ materials. The core processes take place within ourselves. It is the set of assumptions that underlie our current

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state of knowing and which form the boundaries of our insights. The barriers that structure our point of view mostly are implicit and hidden. New views are beyond the boundaries of the existing. Knowledge creation then largely consists of inner struggle to first discover the nature and location of these borders and second to learn how to cross these. To my experience this requires a special attitude, process and environment. A next question, therefore, is for the Laboratory of our Alchemist/Sorcerer. In what type of context is the Search for Strategic Knowledge executed? For technologies we have Research and Development laboratory environments. But, WHERE and HOW is innovative knowledge created? And, can we be more specific about the type of problems our innovative alchemist is trying to solve? In studying these issues I learned that to find a possible answer to the above “How and Where to Do” knowledge creation questions, it could be interesting to ask ourselves whether the question as raised is appropriately raised? Can we break it down in other questions? Are there other areas in our potential knowledge creation organism that could fertilize our search? And, should we not study the subject from a different point of view, within a new conceptual context? (8). I have been searching in these areas myself for many years and, on these travels have discovered and experimented with a specific working environment for strategic imagination, team building, etc. At some point I started naming this context the Strategic Management Atelier ®. It proved to provide a fruitful environment for working intensively on issues like strategic innovation, imagination, tracing & overcoming barriers, teambuilding and managing cultural differences. It is a concept that will be introduced and explained in this paper and it will be made better understandable by giving a few examples of Strategic Management Atelier ® sessions in the past. This text originally was written for a paper presented at the 18th Strategic Management Conference in Orlando, USA on November 3, 1998. I started writing it somewhere in the summer of 1998 and found out that many theme’s and issues that I have been thinking and reading about started to tumble into the framework. Since then I have been editing the original text into the ‘thing’ it has become today. Several new materials, published in the recent period have been included (like the concepts of ‘Organigraphs’ (Mintzberg and van der Heyden (1999)), ‘Knowledge Landscapes’ (Oliver & Roos (2000)) and, ‘Ba’ (Nonaka & Reinmöller (1998/1999)). The current version is ‘fixed’ at a non-logic moment in time and is also influenced by experiences gained in new Atelier sessions, but also through my experiences of a life Atelier presentation at the 19th SMS-Conference in Berlin, Germany (October 2-6 1999). Several other important issues have not been included yet. To mention here are the themes of ‘self-organisation’, ‘order out of chaos’, ‘fractals’ (how simple rules (with

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feedback loops) can create complex organisms) or ‘storytelling’. This work needs to be done in a later stage. In chapter 1 I make a long tour along a variety of issues that are not so often explicitly addressed in strategic management literature (and practice). These are issues in knowledge creation that are beyond the well known, trained and applied, more formal and rational methods. Such issues are: •

Left and right hemisphere skills and the impact on management styles

•

The soul of strategy

•

The conscious, unconscious and subconscious levels of our knowledge creating machine.

•

Intuition

•

Creativity and Imagination

•

How and where are artists working on innovation of symbols and meaning?

These subjects are studied at an individual level of knowledge creation. The links to strategic management and organizational dimensions are only made implicit or incidentally. The focus is on how to understand what type of skills they are and how we could apply them in our conceptual framework. Creativity, innovation etc. are presented as processes that take place in a specific context, under special conditions. I will specially describe the environment in which some professional creative people (artists - painters) work. I do so with the strong idea that we can learn and benefit from these experiences that are not so ‘obvious’ in the land of strategic management. The objective is twofold. On the one hand I try to bring the above mentioned issues closer to the fields of management and strategy. On the other hand I confront the ‘soft’ themes of creativity and intuition with the ‘hard’ needs of management and business, to test whether they can become fit to be applied in these worlds. So, both sides could benefit. In chapter 2 I broaden the previous scope from the individual to a more social and organizational level: •

The theory of innovation & organizational knowledge creation of Nonaka and Takeuchi.

•

Creativity, Learning and Imagination according to Amabile, Senge and Morgan.

First question that will be answered is whether we can distinguish also at the organizational level a kind of knowledge dichotomy, and a kind of organizational conscious – subconscious watershed? I will furthermore argue that there is a strong focus on the content and process of creativity, innovation, imagination etc., and that there is a gap related to the context in which these processes take place. So, there is a lot of talking about the need for, elements of and procedures for knowledge creation. But there is little description of where such sensible processes can take place within an organization. We are used to create new technologies and products in Research and Development Laboratories. However, when talking about the knowledge creation industry, we have no good concepts of places where we can work on invention, innovation and incubation: there might be a need for a concept

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of the Knowledge Creation Laboratory. In the final two chapters 3 and 4 I will introduce a new kind of such knowledge creation R&D laboratory: the Strategic Management Atelier ®. I will argue that, given the specific nature of knowledge creation, we need a separate environment and working space in the company. Especially when working at the level of Tacit Knowledge we need a kind of Knowledge Innovation Center that can act as an Incubator in the knowledge creation process. The ‘normal’ company context often is only good in killing creativity and innovation. I believe that the Strategic Management Atelier ® can work as such an incubator for new strategy creation. The history and background are described: The atelier as an incubator for proto-strategies. At the end of the paper, the exhausted reader will have the chance to relax a little and read three short stories about Strategic Management Atelier ® projects. Since 1997 I have had about 100 Strategic Management Atelier ® sessions in countries like Switzerland, Slovenia, Ukraine, Germany, Russia, France, the UK, the US and the Netherlands. These sessions were on different topics like Redesigning Strategy at the SME-level, New Business Development in a Virtual Environment, Creativity in Career Counseling, Executive Coaching, Managing Cultural Differences in Transnational Teams, Team Building, Networking, Organizational design, DreamLab etc.: For this paper I selected three early sessions. I will do no more than tell the story, provide the basic facts about the background of the participants, the ‘starting-question’, the process and some illustrative pictures. In a later paper I will select some other Ateliers as case study.

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Limits of the paper

In this paper I do not focus yet on a necessary final step in knowledge creation in a strategic business environment: Innovation of the strategic knowledge base must add value to a company. This means that not all knowledge innovation that takes place in a business context, automatically is also relevant and worthwhile of pursuing. Hence, a necessary next step in the process is to make the results of the process into a profitable activity (9). In this paper this type of Value-Based Knowledge Creation Management is not studied. Neither have I focused on the impact of the use and development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) or Knowledge Technology (10) on knowledge creation and innovation. There is a lot of predictions about the quantum leap that ICT, Multi-Media, Ecommerce, Technology Enhanced Learning, the Virtual Economy, Database Mining and Cyber Business will bring to our lives. And, I do believe that this impact indeed may be huge. In fact the future has started to happen already. So far, however, I have the strong impression that the forces of the virtual middle ages are stronger than the ones from the future. There is a lot of whispers, gossip and predictions based on single or narrow assumptions. Company-wide accessible databases with ‘all‘ information are confused with a learning knowledge organization. And, I also think there is too much focus on hardware and software issues. There is a tendency to reduce Wisdom to Knowledge, Knowledge to Smartness, Smartness to Information, Information to Facts and Figures and finally, Facts are broken down into Bits and Bytes. And, the other loop around, many people try to transform Iron into Platinum. In other words, there is no deep understanding of the mind-ware and socio-ware of business knowledge creation. I express the hope that my research and experimenting my help in getting out of this knowledge creation fallacy. Future technology should help us in the collaborative opening, exploring and exploiting of the powers of the individual, organizational and collective sub-conscious. It will need a few quantum leaps to get that far. But, I trust there will be enough and the right types of alchemists to get us there. Acknowledgement

When diving into waters like the ones in this paper, one sometimes looks like a scuba diver. The outside world just sees some bubbles at the water surface, indicating that the diver probably is still alive. After going through a short, slightly painful compression phase, the diver feels pretty well in a totally different world. He may discover extraordinary plants and fishes in the most fantastic forms and colors. He may have completely forgotten about what is happening in the world above water. But, at a certain moment time is up. One has to return and go through a decompression phase. At that moment one may discover that diving should be not for ones own pleasure only. One should bring materials, impressions, pictures etc. that tell an underwater story to those who did not join in going there.

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When returning from diving, the important thing one may discover is that the most beautiful and valuable things exist above water. And, when one is very lucky they did not run away while you were ‘out’. I would like to thank colleague divers for their support in the last few years of experimenting in strategic management, knowledge creation and survival in the academic world: Grant Tate, Jim Skyrms, Dany Jacobs, Danica Purg, Willem Lammers, Herman Ambergen, Sybren Tijmstra, Aad Vijverberg and many others. Then, there is one person with whom I have discovered a key element of working in the Atelier (also called the Visual Dialogue). This is Harold Pieternalla. In the text there is a section in which I describe the process and you can see one of our mutual paintings. Without my experiences in painting together, I would have never been able to learn the key aspects of creating a shared inner space, to enter it and to learn to the other and what the two of you really share. I would like to express my deepest feelings of gratitude, however, to Wil Botden. She is the one who sustained in supporting me in my process of leaving the solid academic institutional environment and jump into the wild sea of small business entrepreneurship. She is also the one with whom I dive together, already for many years now, in the waters of creativity. In fact she taught me the beauty of this underwater world and the way not to get lost there. After my long trip through the Coral Sea of strategic knowledge creation, in which I found the research materials that form the basis of the current paper, the most precious discovery did not come from under water. It came from above and was that she was still there when I returned from the deep. Waiting for me.

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SEARCHING THE SOUL OF STRATEGY: THE TWILIGHT ZONE OF TACIT KNOWLEDGE CREATION Wisdom is Sold on a Desolate Market Where None Come to Buy (William Blake, The Price of Experience)

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SEARCHING IN THE DARK: KNOWLEDGE CREATION IS BEYOND THE BRIGHT LIGHT OF THE STREET LAMP More than 20 years ago, Henry Mintzberg, one of our most senior management alchemists, wrote a famous article “Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right” (11). Curiously enough he started his article with a little story about a man in the street named Nasrudin, who was searching for something on the dirty street, on his knies. When a friend passes he asks what he has lost. Nasrudin answers that he is searching for the keys of his house. The friend starts helping and then both search the ground. After a while, when nothing is found, the friend asks whether Nasrudin might remember where he possibly lost his keys. Nasrudin immediately answers that he knows exactly where he lost them, namely inside the house. The friend, completely puzzled, then asks why they are searching outside the house. Nasrudin replies that this is because there is more light outside the house than inside. Already in 1976 the story was described as old and worn. Nevertheless, I think it even now is still beautiful because of the rich metaphorical layers and it is fresh in meaning. We all know it in different variations. For example, Nasrudin as a drunken man standing under a street lamp in the night, searching for his car keys, which he lost in the bar.

Left Hemisphere Skills

Right Hemisphere Skills

Analysis Rational/Logic Thinking Intellectual Intelligence Verbal and Written Language (Syntax ) Doing/Acting/Physical Reduction in Parts Explicit Knowledge Sequential/Linear Processing Repetitive Strategic Planning Management Conscious Ego

Integration Intuitive Feelings Emotional Intelligence Non-verbal Language (Semantic) Mental Reflection Holistic/Relational (Imagination) Implicit/Tacit Knowledge Parallel Information Processing Creative Strategic Thinking Entrepreneurship Un- or Sub-Conscious Soul

Figure 1 An Overview of Skills Related to the Left and Right Brain Hemisphere (12)

Mintzberg used the story to start an exposé about understanding the cognitive psychological difference between the left and the right brain hemispheres and the impact on management and planning. How can we make an optimal use of our full brainpowers? (Figure 1). In western business cultures, managers are dominantly strong in using the left hemisphere skills. They are trained in and used to apply this part of themselves, and rather weak in using the skills linked to the other brain side.

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THE TRIUMPH OF THE TECHNOCRAT MANAGERS This unbalance has become even stronger over the last 20 years. According to research, executed by Patricia Pitcher (13), the composition of management teams has changed from the 1980ies into the 1990ies. She distinguishes three basic stereotypes of management styles: the Artist, the Craftsman and the Technocrat (Figure 2).

The Technocrat

The Craftsman

The Artist

The Entrepreneur

Conservative Methodical No-nonsense Controlled Cerebral Analytical Determined Meticulous Intense Serious

Responsible Wise Humane Straightforward Open-minded Realistic Trustworthy Reasonable Honest Amiable

Bold Daring Exiting Volatile Intuitive Entrepreneurial Inspiring Imaginative Unpredictable Funny/Playful

Homo Ludens Curious, Esthetic Creative Open Minded Improvisation (Rule book?) Uncertainty Diversity Competition of Ideas Diseconomies of Scale

Figure 2 Description of 3 management stereotypes according to Pitcher (1993) and a description of the Entrepreneur by Hofstede (1998).

In applying this triptych of management archetypes, Pitcher found the following interesting ‘trend’ in management (ranging from the CEO/Board level, down to lower management): •

In the 1980ies, out of every 7 managers, 4 could be identified to belong to the Craftsman’s stereotype, 2 to the Artist’s and only 1 to the Technocrat’s.

•

In the 1990ies, this image has completely changed. The Artists are almost completely wiped out and, there is a majority of Technocrats (with an engineering or mainly financial/accounting/legal background) and just a few Craftsmen are left (Figure 3).

Conclusion? The mix of management styles in the team composition has dramatically changed from a strategic and innovative diverse culture (with somehow balanced representations of Technocrats, Craftsmen and Artists) to a situation where the (financial) Technocrats have taken over. Management Level

1980ies

1990ies

CEO/Board Middle Management Lower Management

Figure 3 (R)evolution in the composition of management teams (Pitcher, 1993).

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And, as they are regarded to be the weakest in understanding, creating and establishing innovation, we could say that the competence to understand and create true non-technical innovations has almost disappeared from the boardroom. Of course it is important to keep in mind that the above described styles are ‘just’ stereotypes. I know many creative technocrats and technical oriented artists as well. One of the many complaints in contemporary management literature is about the lack of entrepreneurial effort and competencies in large corporations. Now, when we compare the description of the above Artist management type with a description of a typical Entrepreneur as mentioned by Hofstede (1998), we easily can see the correspondences between the two types. I will come back to this issue in Chapter 4. When technocrat managers put on their strategy hat, they tend to become a kind of pilots who need as many indicators and clocks as possible. See what SAP and Arthur Andersen have created for them (Figure 4):

Figure 4 The Ultimate Technocrat Strategic Toy?: the Management Cockpit (Source: Business Week, 5-10-98)

a Management Cockpit. No outside or real organizational world is visible, just facts and figures. What type of cockpits would the other manager stereotype opt for? The artist for a studio or atelier, and the craftsman for a workshop? And, the revolutionary? For the barricades? The above triptych, as said, is a rather rough typology. When composing new teams, such typology will not do. One should further detail the types of roles and functions in teams, like for example according to the well known typology of Belbin (14).

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Emotional Intelligence as Runner-Up?

There is no research for the second part of the 1990ies similar to Pitcher’s. Among managers we witness a fast growing interest in issues like Emotional Intelligence (15), attention for the ‘other’ mind so to say. Goleman, the alchemist of emotional intelligence, distinguishes five components of emotional intelligence:

E m o tio n a l I n te llig e n c e

( G o le m a n )

Com ponent

D e fin itio n

E x a m p le

1 . S e lf-a w a re n e ss

U n d e rsta n d th e e ffe ct o f m o o d s, e m o tio n s a n d d riv e s, o n o th e rs

2 . S e lf-re g u la tio n

C o n tro l o r R e d ire ct d isru p tive im p u lse a n d th in k b e fo re a ctin g

3 . M o tiv atio n

In trin s ic m o tiv atio n , e n e rg y a n d p e rsista n ce

4 . E m p a th y

U n d e rsta n d a n d tre a t p e o p le a cco rd in g to th e ir e m o tio n a l re actio n P ro fic ie n t ra p p o rt, re la tio n s h ip a n d n e tw o rk b u ild e r

S e lf-co n fid e n ce R e a listic S e lf-im a g e S e n se o f H u m o r In te g rity A cce p ts A m b ig u ity O p e n to C h an g e D riv e to A ch ie v e O p tim ism O rg a n is. C o m m itm e n t E x p e rt ta le n t-b u ild e r S e n sitiv e , C lie n t a n d C u sto m e r S e rv ice E ffe ctiv e C h a n g e L e a d e r, P e rsu a siv e E x p e rt te a m -b u ild e r a n d Le a d e r

5 . S o cia l S k ill

Beyond Intellectual Intelligence, these five dimensions form qualities of people who excel in professional and private relationships. Such upcoming trend probably will get an impact on the desired management styles and will have an impact on the balance in management team compositions too. So, we can predict that the technocrat management wave, with its focus on intellectual intelligence and a kind of emotional illiteracy, soon will be over its top and followed by a wave more driven by Emotional Intelligence. What we can learn from Mintzberg’s story and Goleman’s ‘other’ intelligence is that we have a much broader range of mental skills available for planning and managing than we initially seem to apply. A next questions then is whether we can succeed in better practicing these ‘other’ skills: Can we combine the two types of ‘hemisphere’ skills in a balanced way? And, can we actually reach to deeper levels of understanding. Are some of the skills better tools for exploring the knowledge darkness beyond the street lamplight? And, finally, we have to answer the question whether such ‘new’ knowledge can help us in better making strategic gold? THE SOUL OF STRATEGY To start answering some of the above raised questions, I would like to broaden the ‘mental skills’ metaphor in the Nasrudin story to the context of the search for strategic knowledge creation. One of the things the story tells us is that, although we know we lost our knowledge keys in the darkness inside our houses, we seem to prefer to proceed searching in the light of the outside sunshine or street lamp. We opt for a well-illuminated search context, as we

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have become dependent of working and living in the bright light of our rational/logical competences. We seem to be afraid of, or do not know how to search in the more dim and dark areas of our individual and organisational selves. And, more importantly, we often even seem not to be aware of the fact that we are looking for solutions at the wrong places and in the wrong manners. Whatever the cause, the result is that we do not find what we are looking for. No keys to open locked doors, or answers to questions. We often stay at the outside, the superficial side of the matter and cannot get in touch with the inside, with the deeper, more essential layers. Sometimes these deeper layers of being are referred to as the ‘core’ or ‘the soul’. Intriguing concepts, indeed. But do we actually know what we talk about when we speak about the ‘soul’ of something? “The Soul is the entity that gently slips out of the room when the Ego’s march in” or “It is the Ego that seeks refuge into power; it is the Soul that looks for clues for its next steps on a journey through the landscape of life”. and “The Soul stands in the shadow of the Ego. It is not its shadow, though. On the contrary. It feeds the Ego like roots do a tree. And together they are one.” These are a few of my favourite ways of trying to ‘explain’ my understanding of the difficult concept of ‘the soul’. In this view, we have to differentiate between the 'soul' and the 'ego' levels of individuals, as well as of organisations. •

The ego has the function to unify the specific characteristics of an individual or a group and to communicate these ‘towards’ the outside world. We need to be ‘one’ person, one group or one organisation. The ego therefore has the role to articulate, isolate, define, to reduce complexity, ignore paradoxes, to integrate, fix and harmonize the variety of options, impulses, emotions, ideas etc. that live within a single organism. It gives the individual person (or organization) an identity within its environment. It, however, also has some blind spots. It is the home of intellectual intelligence, uses mainly rational analysis and oral or written language, which is ruled by syntax. Such knowledge that is generated at the level of expression of words and numbers represents only the tip of an iceberg, as “we can know much more than we can tell”(16). The ego this way can be

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compared with he parts of a tree that are above the ground: the trunk, branches, leaves and fruits. •

The soul level. In this ‘other’ world so to say, we distinguish a multitude of options and points of view. Not just one point of view. We find richness, openness, diversity, complexity, Gestalt, feelings, many, sometimes contradicting forces. When taking a close look at the soul level of individuals and organizations we will discover a kind of Multi-Faceted personalities (17). The soul level uses intuition (which integrates all images intrinsically: “To know something is to create its image or pattern by tacitly integrating particulars “(18)). And, it speaks in symbolic or visual language, that is ruled by semantics (or quality) and less by syntax (or quantity). It is the seat of emotional intelligence. Following the tree metaphor: these are the parts of a tree that are underneath the surface: the roots (19). Above the ground we find the world of actualisation, beneath the surface, we find the world of the potential. The problem for us, however, that we have not well-developed our ways of understanding how rootsystems work in a tree or plant. And, when we get interested in these matters, we tend to start studying our ‘roots’ by pulling a tree out of the soil, in order to be able to ‘look’ (e.g. use our logical/analytical forces) at them. Meanwhile forgetting that, that way we kill the organism and won’t find the way roots exchange energy and food with the soil.

I believe that many people only recognize the ego-dimension of an organizational identity, of their own personality and life etc. So, there is room for discovering and exploring new dimensions of our knowing. The deeper soul level of the world furthermore cannot be understood

simply

applying

rational/logical,

left

hemisphere

mental

and

communicative techniques alone. The question then is how can one reach, explore and apply the other layers of knowledge? Do we need to extend or replace our search equipment with ‘other’ capabilities? Are skills, that traditionally are linked to the ‘other’ world, appropriate tools to get access to these deeper levels of understanding and being? Do skills like intuition, creativity, metaphor, story-telling, poetry, empathy, dreaming, meditation etc. fit such category? And, can they help us in getting in touch with the soul world of opportunities?

The Soul but Not the New Age of Strategy

At this point I have to clarify my point of departure. It may look from the outside that I am thinking and working on the above issues in the field of knowledge exploration from a New Age point of view. This is not a correct impression. I regard New Age Philosophy and Strategy to be a kind of fashionable Quick Snack, Hamburger Tao, a Fast Food Jump into Strategic Enlightenment or, some sort of Spiritual Bungy Jumping. These will never lead to true and sustaining knowledge. In the New Age movement it is fashion to focus on ‘right brain side’ issues only, and to ignore the advantages, even to oppose against the ‘left brain

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side’ skills. And that is exactly one of the main points where I disagree with New Age. It is my opinion that both the left and the right side ‘skills’ need a critical approach. Neither will benefit from an a-critical or even anti-critical ‘believers’ approach. I do not reject the left brain side tools at all. I only see them as ‘half the story’. I even think that it is necessary to first develop a fair level of logical/analytic reasoning before one enters the ‘other’, more foggy areas. Our (educational) culture is so overwhelmingly build on logical/analytical skills that one needs to silence them, as they can become rather noisy and dominant and prevent from listening to the other ‘voices’ that are feebler of sound. It also takes training to discover and master these other levels of being and knowing. They are not part of our culturally dominant set of trained skills. This particularly is true for MBA’s coming from business schools. In the end, the greatest challenge is to critically integrate both types of senses, to become an expert in balancing both dimensions. Mixing the best of two worlds. In New Age it is also suggested that it is ‘easy’ to get access to the deeper or higher levels of life (one would not need to go through fierce confrontations) and that it also is easy to get a ‘sustainable’ link to this level of wisdom. I learned (through many years of Yoga and contemplation/meditation) that the road to deeper knowledge and understanding is difficult, full of booby-traps, but also leading to sudden jumps of great insight. It is absolutely worthwhile to go that way, but it certainly is not a simple and easy road.

UNDERSTANDING THE SUBCONSCIOUS Let us now return to the issue of strategic knowledge creation. Are there no other, less philosophical, more practical ways to describe and understand the difference between the light and dark sides of our knowledge creation process? Of course there are other ways. Otherwise you would not be reading this paper. When we replace the words ‘ego’ and ‘soul’ with ‘consciousness’ and ‘unconsciousness’, we might make a good first step forward, because that way we implicitly link these concepts with the metaphor of light and dark knowledge areas! In the ego we aggregate the (more or less) conscious, left hemisphere parts of our knowing, the illuminated area where our mental eyes can see. The soul or right hemisphere world (Freudians would call part of this the ‘Es’, or ‘Id’) remains ill-understood darkness for many people as it is not illuminated by our thinking and rational knowing. Then, what is in this ‘unknown’ world of the un- and sub-conscious? First of all, the genetic and the biological metabolisms belong to it. Our mental hardware, so to say. These are the patterns and mechanisms guiding, or maybe we better speak about ruling our body and mind right from the beginning of our conception. It can be divided in areas that we can get access to and that we can learn to know and influence: the sub-conscious. It also consists of a very deep layer that our mind can never control. These

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latter areas are for example our genetic programming, our heartbeat, respiration, etc. This unconscious ‘knowledge’ is organised at the deepest biological level. Also the software programming of our minds is found here. What is the software of our mind? According to G. Hofstede (20): “Every person carries within him or herself patterns of thinking, feeling, and potential acting which we learn throughout our lifetime. Much of it has been acquired in early childhood, because at that time a person is most susceptible to learning and assimilating. As soon as a certain pattern of thinking, feeling and acting have established within a person’s mind, (s)he must unlearn these before being able to learn something different, and unlearning is more difficult than learning for the first time.. We call such patterns of thinking etc. mental programs … software of the mind”. This mental programming can also be compared with an iceberg. Only the tip is visible. But, most of the ice remains under water, is completely invisible. This part, hence, stays subconscious. Likewise invisible remain our implicit basic assumptions about reality, our norms and values, our social and cultural pre-dispositions, our emotional drivers, our hidden rules, our pre-programmed choices in case of dilemmas etc. (21). The subconscious world often is also a reservoir of unresolved conflicts. It is full of unclear images and symbols, of (re-organization) trauma’s, frustration, blockades, unresolved private or professional experiences from long ago or from recent or still ongoing events. And, the programming is not a static thing; it is dynamic in many respects. The Cultural Load of Mental Programming

Hofstede, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner are a few of the scholars who have thoroughly focused on the cultural aspects of our mental programming (22). Our subconscious value system is largely influenced by our cultural heritage. The fact that most people are unaware of their cultural programming can be demonstrated by putting them in dilemma situations, forcing them to make a choice of one out of only two options. Through such research method it has been clearly demonstrated that e.g. Japanese people, in terms of cultural programming are behaving rather different from, if not totally opposite to Americans (Figure 5). In this comparison I have included the different ways of focusing on knowledge between the two cultures, as mentioned by Nonaka and Takeuchi (23). In a later section I will come back to their theory of knowledge creation in organizations. In the case of inter-cultural co-operation, communication and strategic design, people often find it extremely difficult to understand or solve problems arising in such context. As a result of the ongoing globalisation, such culturally determined conflicts in business environments are becoming very regular issues management has to deal with. As long as the cultural dimension would be clear to both sides of the table, people, could try to establish a kind of meta-cultural model, which fits to both (sub-) cultures and transcends

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the locally provided solutions. The problem, however, is that people are not aware of the nature of the differences. Their cultural programming remains implicit, part of their notilluminated or badly understood personality.

Dimensions

Americans

Japanese

Hofstede’s Dimensions: • Power Distance • Individualism • Masculinity • Uncertainty Avoidance • Time Perception

Average High Average Low Short Term

High Low High High Long Term

Trompenaars Dimensions: • Universalism/Particularism • Analysing/Integrating • Individualism/Communitarism • Inner-Directed/Outer-Directed • Time: Sequence or Synchronised • Achieved/Ascribed Status • Equality/Hierarchy

Universalists Analysing Individualists Inner-Directed Sequence Achieved Equality

Particularists Integrators Communitarists Outer-Directed Synchronisers Ascribed Hierarchy

Explicit & Individual Knowledge

Tacit & Shared Knowledge

Nonaka & Takeuchi: • Knowledge Focus

Figure 5 Hofstede’s and Trompenaars’ Dimensions in Cultural Programming and Nonaka & Takeuchi’s Focus on Knowledge and the Ratings of Japanese and Americans (24)

That is why in inter-cultural co-operation (within or between organizations), one often witnesses escalating culture clashes and parties separating without truly understanding what exactly or why something went wrong (25). And, only when parties go through a stage of increasingly becoming aware of the cultural nature of the conflicts, there is a way out of the trouble. However, we hardly learn to study and understand our implicit cultural or other programming. That is why, in the previous section, I referred to the unconscious world as a world full of unresolved issues, often resulting in neurotic behaviour. No wonder that a growing number of business schools assigns HRM or Organizational Sciences professors with a strong background in psychiatry or psychology. The best known organizational psychiatrist/therapist in this area is possibly Manfred Kets de Vries at INSEAD, France (26).

A BRIDGE BETWEEN DARK AND LIGHT: THE FERTILE TWILIGHT ZONE OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS So far the metaphor of the dark and light sides of our knowledge machine have played an important role in this paper. Implicit to such metaphor we can draw an obvious conclusion: in complete darkness we cannot see anything. So, when we cannot create additional circumstances that help us to observe and understand, there is no use in roaming there. What equipment do we have available there? Spectacles, telescopes, microscopes, spotlights, camera’s, filters? I think there is a whole variety of them. Each of these first has

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to be discovered. Then it takes time to learn to master them. In

the

rest

this

chapter

will

focus

two

them:

intuition

and

creativity/imagination. A first question is where to start? Should we just step out in the dark? This does not seem to be an attractive strategy. Is there no in-between? Is the ‘light-shed’ between conscious and unconscious, between light and dark sharp as a knife? Or is there no hard concrete wall between the two worlds? No, it is not. There is an inter-space, which is neither clearly illuminated, nor completely dark. And, the size of this twilight zone varies from person to person. This narrow or wide ‘twilight’ zone is called the ‘subconscious’. It provides a kind of bridge between the known and the outskirts of the unknown. The width of the area depends on the number and weight of the blockades that surround the sub-conscious. In some cases one truly needs a key or a hammer to get access to the bridge. In other cases people know their way around and use it easy and frequently. Following my reasoning in the above sections, one might get the impression that I regard the subconscious world to be filled with just terrible things. In other words, I may have given the impression that when we start dwelling into that area we will only encounter troubles. Well, indeed I can not deny that the soul-world for many people is a garbage can: it smells terribly and the lid is only lifted to put garbage in, while the garbage-out job is nicely ‘outsourced’ to a trash company. Such a world seems not to be that interesting for knowledge creation and strategy. My main reason, however, for spending so much time on this issue is, that I strongly belief that the world of the almost or hardly visible, of the subconscious can be developed into a rich and fertile one, full of strategic inspiration. It can provide access to weak signals of new opportunities and approaches. It can provide profound insight in complex matters. It may help in learning to think and act through parallel processing. It provides a gateway to creativity and imagination. This paper is written with the intention to invite readers to further explore such internal sources and, to use their own materials waiting there to improve their rational competencies. This is an invitation to not rush away from the dark, or to throw away any accumulated light. This is an invitation to step in the twilight zone. Therefore it will be important to focus on the ways to find access: are there keys, is there a door at all, or a road that leads there. How can you travel there? And, once you are there, is there a way back to the rational world? And finally, how can we make this all relevant to Knowledge Creation and Strategic Management? Locating Stars: Gaze or Focus?

Let me start with a problem that the beginning traveler of the subconscious will have to face and that can easily be solved. We all know what happens when we stand in the night and watch the stars. We will see none when we stand in spotlights. When we try to scan

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the nocturnal sky from an open field to identify a specific constellation, it easily happens that when we look at a specific star, we first have the impression we can see it. But, as soon as we really focus on it, it disappears. Only when we look at it from the corners of our eyes, through gazing from aside, it may return. The explanation for this phenomenon is simple. Starlight is so faint that just the black/white type receptors (the rods) in the retina of our eyes are sensitive enough to detect it. The centre of our retina, however, is mainly covered with receptors that are sensitive for color (the cones) and it has just a few rods. This is an appropriate configuration for looking under normal light conditions. But it hinders us when looking under dim circumstances. Coming from an illuminated room, it also takes some time to make our visual system accommodate to the new conditions. What can we learn from this example? Under different circumstances, we have to use our senses in a different way. One often also needs training in observing ‘faint’ objects (sprite). This not just holds true for the physical world. It is the same with detecting non-obvious symbolic patterns and faint knowledge objects or sensitive things like emotions (27). We do have senses to trace al of these, but it takes time, experimenting, effort and skills to understand and apply these. And, let’s not forget that the reverse is true also. When we have spent a while in the dim or twilight and return into full light, the way back takes time for accommodation too. Subconscious Diving and Decompression Sickness

Putting this all in yet another metaphor: When the conscious world is compared with the ‘air’ world above water and the unconscious with a world under water, we better can explain the possible transition problems when traveling between the two worlds. Even when we have the adequate diving equipment, when starting to dive one nevertheless has to take time to adjust to the increasing pressure when going deeper. But, after a while, our body accommodates and we can dive to rather deep levels. On our way up we also slowly have to accommodate to the decreasing water pressure. It is extremely dangerous to go up and out of the water in one movement. This can lead to the caisson sickness, e.g. when the oxygen/carbon-hydrogen balance in the blood is out of control. One can suffocate or even die from such event. This is also what sometimes happens with sub-conscious peek-experience workshops when participants are taken into too deep water levels in one day and than are quickly released, out of the training resort, returning to normal life without appropriate decompression. Often this results in depressions. Before introducing the first type of skills (Intuition), let me give a final metaphorical example that can help understanding why it is also not so easy to write and talk about ‘traveling in and discovery of the world of the subconscious’. This has to do with the metaphor of a person or organization as a tree. Its visible dimensions (branches, trunk, leaves, fruits) are above the ground and the invisible part, its roots, is under the ground. How can we study the roots of plants? Looking from above the ground brings us nowhere.

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And, when we start digging until we can map the full length and spread of even the tiniest roots … we kill our object. This is a type of paradox, which often occurs in the exploration of the world of the subconscious: our ‘normal’ ways of trying to understand phenomenon, e.g. by making them visible or audible, often kills them. This is because we then force subconscious phenomena to express themselves in a formal language they are not constructed of.

INTUITION: A MIND-BODY LANGUAGE OF ITS OWN The unravelling of the intuitive dimension of the subconscious starts mainly with questions: •

What ‘exactly’ is intuition?

•

When or how is it used?

•

What can it bring to knowledge creation, management and strategy? Does it help or hinder the strategic manager?

What ‘Exactly’ is Intuition?

To start answering the first question on what intuition is we have to develop a better understanding of how our knowledge system works. Human beings create knowledge by having active relationships with objects and others. This means they actively open themselves for (self-involvement) and relate to (commitment) the outer world. This process can be called ‘indwelling’ (28). Our knowledge, hence, is the result of our total involvement with the world. This is with our body and with our conscious mind as well. Hence, part of our knowledge is build-up beyond the mind. It precipitates in our memory, in the cells and organs of our body. We relate insights, feelings, observations, experiences, smells and tastes. We create implicit, symbolic patterns, fuzzy logic, that is personal, context specific and hard to formalize or communicate (29). This means that we do not process incoming information just in a binary way: the conscious = logic or the subconscious = chaotic. There is also a process of subconscious pattern recognition and pattern formation. This is where we can identify our intuition, it is an active mind-body network: “For intuition is precisely that: another unique language created by the brain and the body to help us gain insight into and understanding of our past and to provide solutions for the future and help us create stronger ….lives”(30). In this type of definition intuition is related to knowledge which as it were is ingraining in our whole being. It is experience based and ‘dissolves’ in our body & mind. And, as it is not just a sort of passive derivative of observation, but an active, knowledge integrating one, it also needs a special form of communication, a special language, to express itself. Lebraty distinguished several specific dimensions when attempting to define intuition (31): •

It has to do with unconscious induction, a kind of lateral thinking (32), with the irrational or a-rational.

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•

There is a strong link with ‘qualitative’ dimensions (less focus on ‘quantity’).

•

Sometimes it is related to the Eureka factor: a quality jump in problem solving through which one attains a different point of view and discovers hidden solutions (association).

•

Intuition, sometimes is seen as something rudimentary, a slumbering extra-cognitive type of perception. This is the way intuition often is presented e.g. in science-fiction. In this approach it is assumed that our early ancestors where much more and better intuitive than we are.

•

There is logic in intuitive decision making … but it remains subconscious and it is open for post-hoc analysis. In this description intuition is understood as ‘another’ language with its own semantic and syntactic rules.

Another useful definition comes from H. Bergson (33). In this description intuition is opposed to Intelligence: “with Intelligence we move around an object: with Intuition we enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative, the second … to attain the absolute“.

Thinking Style Deductive Objective Stressing on Facts Decision making: Solving problems by breaking the problem in parts & sequentially using logic reasoning

Intuitive Style Inductive Subjective Stressing on Feelings Decision making: Solving problems by looking at the whole & creating hunches

Figure 6 The difference between thinking and intuition according to W.A. Agor

In all or most of the above definitions of intuition there is a link to the process of how we generate knowledge and build-up our memories and experiences. Hence, intuition is not a thing that stands and acts totally separate from our mind. But, the problem is that often, when describing intuition, we end up in a kind of negative definition, explaining what it is not. W.H. Igor, with his still ground breaking research in intuition (34) describes a difference between the ‘thinking’ skill and the ‘intuitive’ skill in the following dichotomy (Figure 6). Chess-playing and Intuition

Maybe we need an example to illustrate the above. I will use the example of chess-playing: A master chess-player will intuitively make choices during the chess game. Or, better stated, he/she will use his/her intuition at certain stages of playing. But, it is always combined (falsified) with calculations. When you ask an experienced chess player to look for 3 seconds to a chess board with 24 pieces, he probably can correctly ‘reproduce’ about 90 % of the positions of the various pieces. While a non-chess player will only come to

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some 15 % This means that the chess player has the competence to recognize patterns quickly and to break down the images into meaningful details again. This is true for as long as the player is able to recognize patterns. When we do the same test and show randomly positioned (hence ‘meaningless’) pieces, the chess player will perform as ‘poor’ as the non chess player. Apparently the chess player is able to quickly ‘see’ (or inductively construct) a pattern from which he can deduct (break down in pieces) the nature and position of the separate chess pieces. How is this possible? A first explanation can be found in the difference in expertise. The experienced chess-player has a much larger reservoir of played and studied chessgame patterns in his memory. A second part of the explanation has to do with the role our visual system plays in our cognition. In the evolution of the human species, our visual system was developed much earlier than our language system. So, the imagination and visual mechanisms are much more engraved in our system. The human brain processes visual impressions 60.000 times faster than textual language. We only retain 15 % of what we hear and with the use of visual attributes we learn 4 times faster than without visual support. We, however, remember 90 % of what we do. When relating these facts to intuition, we can first state that our visual system is not just a passive receptive system. When we register signals we do so in an active way, the (visual) system organizes, structures and interprets the incoming information. And, it does so in a total way, comes with symbols and gestalts. The point however, is that we normally are hardly aware of this visual information processing. It goes rather automatic and we are surprised when it produces unexpected fast, complex or profound conclusions.

The Role of Intuition in Management Decisions

The above descriptions and example have demonstrated that intuition ‘clearly’ exists, however, that it also is difficult to ‘exactly’ describe what it is and how it works, as it has its own language. In general there seems to be no effective intuition possible without a form of well evaluated experience. Or in other words, we should distinguish between intuitive decisions of an expert in a certain field on the one hand and opinions of a ‘laymen’ based on ‘just’ subjective and emotional impressions. When we would make a link between this insight and the field of management, we can conclude that intuition could be interesting for managerial knowledge creation and decision making. However, that this should only be true for the mature manager and in the case of decision to be made within the broad limits of his expertise (products, technology, organization, market etc.). W.A. Agor studied whether and to what extent managers apply intuitive methods in their decision making. In his research among 3.000 US managers he found the following (35): •

The use of intuition increases with the increase in hierarchical position. Top managers

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•

considerably more and more often make intuitive decisions.

•

Women apply more and more often their intuitive forces.

•

Intuition is more used in general functions than in specialized functions.

•

Thrust has a positive impact on the view of intuitive decisions.

•

Power/force has a negative impact on the use of intuition (you cannot force it to work).

Next was studied in what type of decision making situations intuition tends to be used: Intuition is more applied for important decisions. •

In case of highly complex problems with high uncertainty (need for holistic view).

•

When little comparative material, limited information, data is available.

•

When there are contradictory but valid alternative solutions available (unpredictability)

•

When there is a short period for decision making (time pressure)

•

and a high pressure to make the right decision (high risk).

The clear conclusion can be drawn that intuition might be a good tool of knowledge creation and decision making in cases of badly structured, non-programmable problems of management situations which are characterized by high uncertainty, little possibilities to make comparisons and a very low predictability.

Intuition: Friend or Foe of Strategic Uncertainty, Complexity and Unpredictability?

Can we then also relate the above configuration in which intuition is a favourable skill for knowledge creation and decision making to special areas of strategic management? This seems exactly the case in an increasing number of situations in business and industries. The above described types of management decision demands are puzzling the minds of many strategists too. Let us look at some of the more recent questions. At the SMS conference in Barcelona, October 1997, Kevin Coyne and Hugh Courtney, Jane Kirkland and Patrick Viguerie of McKinsey & Company had a few very fascinating presentations. In their presentations they drew the picture of the current strategic management landscape and distinguished a variety of different competitive situations according to the level of uncertainty in which companies have to operate. Each type of situation requires different types of strategic tools (36) (Figure 7). •

At uncertainty Level 1 the strategist can develop “an analysis robust enough to allow a single strategic direction. Think about the fast-food industry, where change over the past 10 years has been largely predictable.”

•

At Level 2 it sometimes is not easy to tell which scenario (1, 2 or 3) will be required, but it is possible to make a detailed outline of what needs to be done given situation 1, 2 or 3 (example: telecom legislation in the US in 1995).

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Level 1

Level 2

Useful Prediction

Discrete Scenarios

Forecast is Relevant

Few Distinct Outcomes Alternate Futures

Clear Enough Future

Level 3 Continuous Uncertainty Outcomes Around 2-3 Key Uncertainties Range of Futures

Level 4 True Ambiguity Multiple Dimensions of Uncertainty No Relevant Forecast

= Strategic Situations Potentially Fit for Intuition

Figure 7 Strategic Management Under Uncertainty – A Complex Jungle of Strategic Options with Different Levels of Uncertainty (37)

•

At Level 3 “ the analysis cannot reduce the future to a number of discrete scenarios. … it might lie along a continuum for each direction” (example: new technologies (E-cash) face uncertainty over the rate of acceptance in the market).

•

At the highest level of strategic uncertainty, Level 4, “the environment contains multiple dimensions of continuous uncertainty“ (example: investment decisions for entering the consumer multi media market, gene therapy or the Russian market in 1992) (38).

Now what is suggested by McKinsey & Company to be an appropriate type of strategic response for uncertainty Levels 3 and 4? Although there are ‘analytical’ approaches that offer a rigorous and systematic way of thinking about uncertainty and unpredictability (like shaping the future - adapting to the future or - reserving the right to play), these cannot fully take away the limits of our analytical competencies. Coyne proposes strategy models that include continuous innovation, adapting to a learning organization and, knowledge ground strategies. But, he also concludes that there are important zones in today’s strategic landscape where no adequate models are available (Ibid. p. 9-13). The link between intuition and the above type of strategic problems, for the time being is associative of nature. The Level 3 and 4 types of strategic uncertainty fit precisely the characteristics of those situations in which Agor found that managers actually do use intuition. So, it seems that intuition already is an integral part of the strategic toolbox. It is

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already applied when answering such types of questions. Intuition is an appropriate tool to deal with uncertainty, complexity, time-pressure, and unpredictability. But, how exactly it is applied, remains unclear. Important remaining questions, hence, are: what is the precise impact of intuition on decision making (large or small, positive or negative etc.). At what stages of strategic decision-making can it have a positive role (does it bring something unique that other skills cannot provide) and, in what stages should it not be applied? When is it misleading? We know that it ‘subconsciously’ organizes our knowledge, creates fuzzy patterns, interprets weak signals and provides hunches. But, how precisely does it work and how can we benefit from it? The link between strategy and intuition is clearly established. Intuition can be a friend of the strategic alchemist, but its operational opportunities needs to be further understood. We must learn to create situations that invite intuition to become active. To work in an environment where we can visualize our available knowledge of a certain subject and where we can project our related myths and images. This could be a first and interesting step. But, when we do, we at the same time enter the world of artists, imagination, visualization, creativity etc.

A LABORATORY FOR R&D OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS. Like in the previous section, when we deled with Intuition, the same is now true for the next sub-conscious ‘skill’: Creativity. There is a lot of talking in business and management literature on the subject of the ‘Art of …. Management’. It is fashionable to be creative. Even more so. When one is not creative as a strategic manager, one seems not to count. In sharp contrast to the frequent naming of the word creativity, there is very little detailed information on what it means and how it can work. Or, if there is, this often comes from a strong technical – engineering approach (39). So, also in this case, we have to try to deepen our understanding of what we are really dealing with when we are trying to be creative. As a first step I suggest to have a better look at what happens when artists are creative. Then, in the next chapter we look at some ‘creativity-and-organization’ issues.

What is Creativity?

One thing strikes in the ‘creative management’ literature: the artists themselves are almost totally absent. No references are made to how people like Frank Stella (painter/sculptor), Dmitri Shostakovich (classical music composer), T.S. Eliot (poet) or Martha Graham (dancer) work with their creative talents. They all were very innovative, if not revolutionary in their field, as a visual-spatial master, as an engineer of heavenly chamber music sounds,

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as a ground breaking manipulator of language, or as a fashioner of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence (40).

A Mental Skill?

In the psychological search creativity has been contrasted with other mental skills. To understand what it is, it is explained what it is not. When compared to intellectual intelligence, which is a kind of converging thinking, creativity is seen as a form of diverging thinking. According to Gardner (Ibid. p. 45) there is agreement among psychologists on two issues: •

Creativity is not the same as intelligence. Psychometric intelligence (above the IQ 120 scores) is not related to psychometric creativity.

•

Creativity tests are reliable: creative people score consistently high on such tests.

Although I do value these results, this type of truth brings mainly tears in my eyes. This brings us not that much closer to understanding the subject. According to Gardner, however, any further understanding of creativity in psychological literature depends on the psychological perspective one takes: •

Psychoanalysis: the impetus and significance of creativity remains hidden from the individual creator and from his/ her community.

•

The Behaviourist perspective: people engage in creative activity, because of the related ‘positive reinforcement’.

•

The Intrinsic Motivation perspective: According to this perspective “creative solutions to problems occur more often when individuals engage in a creative activity for its sheer pleasure than when they do so for possible external rewards” (41). Creative persons seek after an affective state, called flow or flow experience, that’s is connected to their creativity (42).

After evaluating the lives of the above mentioned creative innovators (and some others, like Einstein, Gandhi and Freud), Gardner (Ibid. p. 44-47) concludes that: •

“We should not just focus on the individual aspects of the creative person. There is always a number of intensive social and affective forces that surrounds creative breakthroughs”.

•

This is an interesting image of the social embedded ‘revolutionary’ artist that is far from coherent with the common image of individualistic artistic creativity. The common image of creativity is much more linked with a kind of ‘divine inspiration’ that suddenly comes out of the blue, or comes together with a special “talent” of an individual, almost

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anti-social artist to create something new out of nothing. Furthermore, Gardner is not blind either for the price top-artists often have to pay for their achievements: •

“Creators come into some kind of bargain deal, or Faustian arrangement. They get so caught up in the pursuit of their work mission, that they sacrifice all for it. In other words, they gave their lives for the achievement of their goals”.

Maybe we can refer here to diving into deep water levels of the subconscious. When one really wants to search for the depth limits of our potentials, we pay a price. We hardly ever come out of the water and remain in areas where hardly anybody else dwells. Apparently it is relevant to distinguish the depth levels at which knowledge creation and also artists are focusing. I.A Taylor identified five different Levels of Creativity (43): 1.

Expressive Creativity: is direct, free and spontaneous (the child)

Productive Creativity: is focused on technique, realism, objectivity, productivity, competence (can be compared with gardening). This is also the level where we could locate aesthetic creativity.

Creative Invention: is focused on the ingenious application of materials, methods and techniques.

Innovative Creativity: is focused on new points of view, on theoretical innovation and the breaking of boundaries.

Reforming Creativity: is linked to paradigmatic artistic, philosophical or scientific innovation.

Such a taxonomy of creativity levels, together with Gardner’s description of the creative context, may help us in relating creativity to knowledge creation: •

There are many different types of creativity around; hence, there are also many types of artistic approaches and results to be distinguished. Some of the art as we know it, is ‘just’ aesthetic playing. Which is nice, but is not interesting for the case of paradigm shift, breaking barriers of the known, when creating revolutions.

•

Just a few types or levels of creativity are related to knowledge creation. Conclusion? When we would like to learn from creative persons, from artists, in order to improve our own knowledge creation competencies, we should look for those artists who specially are ‘dwelling’ at these levels too. We, hence, should look for artistic experiences at levels 3 to 6.

Where Do Artists Go After Breakfast?

The author of this paper has been working for 4 years as director of a high-tech, virtual International Executive MBA program, for 8 years at an University as course developer and teacher of International Business Strategy and for over 10 years as strategic management

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consultant. Parallel to that I have been active as a non-professional artist for more than 15 years. I do not regard myself as a professional artists. Though, I do have an atelier at my home where I frequently work. I have produced over a 1.000 ‘pieces’ of visual artwork in that period. Beyond my own, private experience, I have several professional artists as acquaintances and have frequently visited them or worked with them in their ateliers. So, I have a broad experience base in terms of knowing what is going on in studios and ateliers. It is also my experience that many people have no realistic idea of what is happening in an artist’s atelier. What are artists doing there? Are they just ‘projecting’ on canvas and ‘printing’ in paint what they have ‘designed’ in their mind before? I don’t think so. Let us take a look into the ateliers of two artists (Figure 8).

Figure 8 Ateliers and Artists: Rik van Iersel in his Subconscious Laboratory or Small Office Creative Home Office (left) and the atelier of Frank Stella (right) (44).

On the left picture we see the non-famous Dutch painter Rik van Iersel in his ‘laboratory’ and on the right hand picture we see the atelier with attributes of the famous American painter and visual/spatial master Frank Stella. To many people such rooms primarily looks ‘messy’. To me they are fascinating like a laboratory. Be it chemical, technological or metaphysical. Whatever they may look like, these are the places where artists like Frank Stella and Rik van Iersel go to after breakfast. Their working hours may be rather different from normal office hours. And, as many artists work till very late so may be their dinner-time. But, they too go to their ‘office’. To my experience, the atelier works like a kind of Research and Development laboratory for creative products and services. For some it is an area for fundamental research, for others it is more applied research and for some artists it is just a value-creating factory. The R&D function, the marketing and the manufacturing functions in that case are integrated in the ‘factory’ too. Their paintings and sculptures directly go to the shop/gallery. As artists work in the ‘visual arts’ industry, their research equipment is related to the design and development of such ‘products’. In the above pictures we, hence, can see

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objects that are at least linked to the 2nd and 3rd level of creativity. In many cases the results of creative R&D consist of innovative artwork prototypes, of ‘things’ that, for the artist, are ready as a painting, but not yet ready as a theory, a complete thought line. This, often, makes them rather ambivalent towards getting paintings out of the atelier. My purpose in this section, however, is to see whether creativity at Taylor’s levels 4 and 5, which we linked to knowledge creation and innovation, also provides insights and procedures that may help broadening the understanding of knowledge creation in other areas, like strategic management. In a previous section of this paper I wrote about some assumptions for relating knowledge creation and innovation to the ‘other’ levels of consciousness. Reviewing my own experience in working creatively in the atelier, the fascinating thing is, that the just described creative work in ateliers precisely fits these assumptions. The atelier can act as a kind of laboratory environment for the creative study of the Subconscious. •

True knowledge creation was identified to take place in the twilight zone between the conscious and the unconscious: the subconscious.

•

In the same section I identified that the ‘unconscious’ type of knowledge was deeply ingrained in the whole of our body & mind. Not just in our conscious mind.

•

Thirdly, I also identified that our visual-symbolic language system, or imagination, is much closer linked to this layer than our oral/written language system. So, when we can include this system into a process of knowledge innovation, it might help in bridging between our world of formal knowledge and language on the one hand and the ‘underlying’ world of images, pre-assumptions, symbols etc. on the other.

•

Finally. When tracing the images, assumptions, emotions, conflicts, contradictions etc. underlying our reasoning, the result is far better understanding of the specific context of our questions. Such understanding of limits, borders and boundaries is an ultimate requirement for paradigm shift, or true innovation. Creative working, hence, is not just a nice bridge between the conscious and the unconscious; it can also alter the fundaments of our intellectual projects.

So, when I see Rik van Iersel painting in his atelier, I see someone searching in his subconscious, trying to visualize impressions, emotions, ideas, metaphors, paradoxes, analyses, points of view, experiences etc. He also can ask himself profound questions, try to imagine his ‘deeper’ assumptions and convictions. And, he can do so at a pre-oral or written language level, where he can play with symbols, paradoxes, images, visual metaphors, colors, forms etc. What he finds is partly what he is looking for. Painting can provide desired results. But he also may find out that things do not work out the way he initially wanted it on the canvas. He is confronted with new questions, hence there are new problems to be solved. Some of them may be technical questions related to forms and colors. Others will be related to the

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content of the particular piece he is working on. That can be irritating questions, as they do not fit into the ‘research paradigm’. But they cannot be denied and ask to be solved. In case one is working on a ‘good’ painting it will turn out that the new questions often are better questions than the previous ones. Such a creative search process can last for quiet a period. Artists therefore often work on several pieces or projects at the same time, parallel. My conclusion is that working on a painting (or a sculpture or a choreography or…) is or can be a means to get into contact with the subconscious layer. It is also a method to interact with the subconscious. And, it can help in creating an intellectual breakthrough. This does not mean that all art is similar and like what I have just described. Many professional artists have no intention whatsoever to create new knowledge. They produce nice aesthetic products, which please the eyes for its colors and forms. That’s it. Let’s call this art and creativity at levels 1 to 2. These artists are not struggling with theory in their art. For some other artists (who work at level 3: Creative Invention) such level of results is not enough. They, on their turn, are satisfied when the result of a painting procedure provides a good visual impression of a struggle they went through. For others, this is not enough either. They want to establish and use the link between the subconscious and the conscious process, not for the artistic results but as a means for application to search in fields like philosophy, epistemology, to deconstruct their own building of understanding, getting implicit values and mental programming explicit, etc. Let us say that these are working at the levels 4 (Innovative Creativity) and 5 (Reforming Creativity). They, sometimes, are not satisfied till they are able to also express their innovative findings in oral or written language, or to transform the new ‘insights’ into a sort of ‘formal’ knowledge. For some this language or knowledge can be poetry, for others this must be a story or an article. “… To Lucassen, imagery is no more than an instrument to trace and visualize emotions. He chooses images mainly for their associative value. In an apparently contradictory use of images, Lucassen decodifies and unmasks traditional commonplace memories and perceptions of ‘the world’. In his way he creates a place for new meaning….. Different motives are mutually intensifying to form a total image. Ideas and feelings are suggested, but any exact meaning is out of the question”. (45) Discovering and Understanding Chaos Through Visual Thinking

To illustrate the above analysis I will give and describe an example of the level 4 or 5 type of research, based on my own ‘painting’ experience. The creative working in an atelier for me started after a period of trying to explain the world in clear theory and solid written models. Writing or typing at that time was my main research vehicle. But, when writing I always had the feeling that this was not the right

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device for expressing my thoughts and impressions when wandering through the landscape of my mind. At a certain moment I started drawing schemes, making mind maps etc. However, I always felt that even then, each of the theories and models I tested did not have enough ‘richness’ of information about a specific subject. I wanted such rich information to be included into a model, to avoid falling into a reductionism. This was also the period when I started working with paint on paper, oil-pastels etc. Over time I learned a variety of interesting things about imagination, or visual thinking: •

First of all I learned that painting and drawing are rather different from writing. In ‘researching’ theoretical/mental issues through working with paint and pastels, the manual movements are much rougher; they require much more body involvement. Especially when starting to work on large pieces of paper (say 150 x 200 cm) this is the case. This allows large, heavy brushstrokes together with tiny faint lines. So, in such process the body is involved too.

•

Moreover, paint smells and has its own mixing and expression language. The forms somebody wants to make (gentle or sharp etc.) need to be controlled by the different types of movement of the brushes. This all adds to the total physical involvement.

•

On top of that, painting results in an image. And, such image provides direct, visual feedback to the searching mind. It ‘tells’ directly whether what I see is coherent with what I am looking for, or not. And, I can easily change my point of view towards the result: I can step back and look from a distance, or study it with my eyes almost on the surface. And than I can intervene in the results, continue with the process. It provides a kind of interactive work with the subconscious.

•

Another thing I learned in working with paint and pastels etc. in my atelier is that, while working on a painting, the intellectual mind is stimulated to work creatively too, to come into motion. This leads to a form of internal dialogue. Sometimes, this is directly related to the subject I am working on. In other cases it is only slightly related. It then feels like a separate, totally parallel process. For me, an artistic creative ‘project’ is not completed when the ‘painting’ is ready. The painting needs a specific title (oral language) and in this title I express the result of my intellectual search process. Only when both painting and title are there, a painting is completed.

•

Later I learned that one can learn to master even the other way around: starting with theoretical questions, translating these in ‘artistic’ procedures, work with the artistic equipment and then finding results and understanding that add considerably, feedback to or even go beyond my ‘normal’ rational analysis. This is partly the result of that fact that knowledge, found through this type of searching again, gets ingrained into the total body and mind knowledge reservoir. I am not saying that such knowledge is

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better, but it gives at least a more profound understanding and a complete feeling. Which is something different.

ChaoticDissipative System

Patterns of Self-Organization

Figure 9 Understanding Chaos: “Silent Jump #3: A Non-Predicted Meta-Solution 100 x 120 cm, February 1990.

Now, the example I would like to give (Figure 9), has to do with a period in my life (at the end of the 1980ies, beginning of the 1990ies) during which I was trying to better understand the new theories of “chaos, complexity and self-organization”. For someone like me, with just some basic statistical, mathematical and natural sciences background, these new areas were fascinating, but not easy to comprehend or even to get access to. They often are full of complex formulas and concepts, coming from the world of thermodynamics or other exotic scientific areas. However, after spending just one afternoon listing to a lecture of Ilya Prigogine, I got extremely fascinated by the metaphorical force of the approach and the core themes did not leave my mind. I tried to read the book Order out of Chaos, found some extremely good points in it, however was left with more questions I could not solve. The questions mainly were at a kind of philosophical level of understanding what dissipative structures are etc. etc. The ‘strange attractors’ remained strange to me to grasp. Then, I asked myself whether I could work on these problems in my atelier environment. I managed to develop a material procedure on paper, by which I could put the paper ‘under

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pressure (adding energy) and, that way to simulate chaotic processes to start. At a certain stage, the paper and the paint started to arrange themselves in a way that was not intended by me. However, when I studied the results, it looked very much like a form of self-organization. After the initial surprise and satisfaction, I have used and played with the process for at least a year and many paintings, till I had the impression that nothing new came out anymore and, that I have a much deeper and better understanding of the subjects dealt with. I, by the way, did not have the idea that I had become better in mathematics. Now, why are such painting/sculpting processes so essential to me? And why are they relevant for knowledge creation? Let me try to answer these questions: 1.

Because they are activities of both the body and the mind (mental and physical) I work with all my senses: materials, kinesics, smell, colors, senses etc.

They deal with visual procedures, with imagination, symbols, myths, forms, preassumptions of our knowing etc, much better than writing or composing. At least to me.

They not only provide a method to get and stay in contact with the subconscious. They also provide mechanisms to establish interaction between the conscious research questions and the subconscious processes.

Furthermore, I learned that when working with visual thinking, during a painting process, one finds ‘unexpected’ issues, forms, and outcomes. At the moment when they are observed for the first time, they puzzle, seem not to be an answer, even not to belong to the subject at all. However, as they seem to be irritating though interesting, one can start continuing trying to understand what they are and mean. And often, not always, they proof to be the non-predicted nuclei of a new solution, direction, of a higher level of questioning etc. Later I started calling these moments in the process; proto-strategies. Because at the moment when they occur, they are no more than seeds. And they need to be nourished otherwise they fade away, or will not bloom. In Figure 9, the self-organizing lines in the painting are the things I would call the proto-strategies. I will come back on this topic in the final chapter.

Working in the atelier is also a developmental process, a way of learning. Sometimes one painting takes weeks to be ‘completed’. Previous results need to be repainted. This often is a tough process!

On top of the above, I learned that the insights, confrontations, learning, images etc. that result from the above described activities provide excellent material for further

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logical/analytical or intellectual/mental processing of the search in a certain knowledge area. It provides unique input. It is not just a way to get access to the subjective world. Which it does and is a great achievement. It also helps in formalizing and making the knowledge fragments ready to become more objective, ready for the intellectual mind. I call this part the visual thinking. I think that especially this element of visual thinking, and imagination can make the working in an atelier special and relevant in crossing the borders of understanding and creation of innovative knowledge. Conclusion

In this chapter I have tried to explore a variety of areas, like left-right hemisphere, the soul and ego in our mind, the conscious and the subconscious, intuition, imagination and creativity. I have done so at a very individual level. This to first get a much better understanding of the basic problems we are facing when trying to make these areas conceptually as well as practically fertile for the strategic knowledge process. In case I have succeeded in doing that it may have become clearer that, for individual managers there are ‘other’ skills and competencies available for exploring the barriers and boundaries of their ‘known’ world. To stay in the alchemist metaphor: this chapter promises that individual managers can become ‘alchemists’ too. However, when we talk about strategy and knowledge creation, we always talk in a business or at least organizational context. A following step must be the answering of a next question: do the above phenomena also exist at a non-individual, social or organizational level? In other words, is there a kind of organizational subconscious? And, if so, is it relevant for the strategic management process and, how can we explore and exploit it for making business strategy? Is there a way to ‘commit’ strategic alchemy in a collaborative way?

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FROM THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE ORGANIZATIONAL: TACIT AND EXPLICIT KNOWLEDGE CREATION When You Move You Always Bring More Into Motion Than Just Yourself (Peter Sloterdijk: Eurotaoism)

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USING ORGANIZATIONAL INTELLIGENCE FOR JOINT KNOWLEDGE CREATION The ‘Organizational’ Intelligence Quotient

In the previous chapter we made a clear distinction at the individual level between two different modes or areas of knowledge, namely - the conscious and the - sub-conscious. Between the lines we referred to the possibility that such distinction also could hold true for the organizational level. In this chapter we will take a closer view at this supra-individual level of organizational knowledge. The capacity to deal with knowledge and the environment at the individual level is often measured in terms of intellectual intelligence; the I.Q. Halal (46) extends this concept to the level of Organizational Intelligence: the O.I.Q. This is the organizational capacity to create knowledge and to adapt to the environment in a strategic way. It is the problem solving and learning capacity and it uses all types of knowledge: “..using tacit forms of intuitive knowledge, hard data stored in computer networks and information gleaned from the environment, all of which are used to make sensible decisions. Because this complex process involves large numbers of people interacting with diverse information systems, O.I.Q. is more than the aggregate intelligence of organizational members; its is the intelligence of the organization itself as a larger system” (p.12). In the above we can trace a Gestalt or holistic approach towards knowledge at an organizational level. Reference is also made to the multi-level approach of tacit/intuitive knowledge as opposed to explicit knowledge. So, it is assumed that there are two different entities. And, organizational intelligence must be understood, developed and well managed. Many companies have adopted a Knowledge Management Program, and many of these programs fail because: “top management fails to recognize that learning requires new management practices and is uncertain about the role it should play”(47). I belief that the above fragments could set the stage for deepening our search for organizational knowledge creation: •

We need to better understand what is meant with the tacit and explicit world at the organizational level.

•

How can such different forms of knowledge be converted, how can it become a form of innovative change process?

•

How should such processes be managed?

•

What role does creativity play in these processes?

Transformation of Sub-conscious Organizational Knowledge

The core question now is whether we can develop a better understanding of the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge at the organizational level? Nonaka & Takeuchi (48) distinguish between information and knowledge in the sense that

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•

Knowledge is defined to be related to action-to-some-end, it is context specific and dynamic,

•

while information tends to be independent from perspective and more static of nature.

The field of knowledge, furthermore, is split-up into two sub-areas: Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. They distinguish between these two forms according to a list of characteristics as provided in the next overview (Figure 10):

Tacit Knowledge (Subjective) • • • •

Knowledge of Experience (Body) Procedural Knowledge Simultaneous Knowledge (Here and Now) Analog Knowledge: (Practices within a Specific Context)

Figure 10

Explicit Knowledge (Objective) • • • •

Knowledge of Rationality (Mind) Declarative Knowledge Sequential Knowledge (There and Then) Digital Knowledge: (Context-free Theory)

Nonaka & Takeuchi: The Worlds of Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (49)

Such dichotomy to a large extent fits the various dichotomies we used at the individual level in the previous chapter. So, we can link the tacit world to the ‘organizational subconscious’ and the explicit world to the formal; ‘organizational explicit’ form of knowledge. “the Tacit world consists of mental models, beliefs and perspectives, so ingrained that we are hardly aware of them, take them for granted, cannot easily articulate them”(p.4). However, Nonaka & Takeuchi continue their analysis by asserting that these forms of knowledge are not completely separated. They are understood as mutually complementary entities. “They interact with and interchange into each other in the creative activities of human beings” (Ibid. p. 61). And, for the anchoring of their dynamic model of knowledge creation, they make the assumption “that human knowledge is created and expanded through social interaction between tacit and explicit knowledge”. “It should be noted that this conversion is a ‘social’ process between individuals and not confined within and individual”. According to their view such an approach opposes the traditional western rationalist view that assumes that human cognition is a deductive process of individuals. “… Thus, through this ‘social conversion’ process, tacit and explicit knowledge expand in terms of both quality and quantity”. Instead of asking whether these forms of knowledge have a social dimension, they state that they are social of nature. It is also argued that the transformation process between tacit and explicit knowledge is an interactive and spiraling type of conversions. When talking about the boundaries of our regular knowledge it is here that we start understanding what the nature of these boundaries is! Knowledge Creation traditionally is understood in terms of hard, formal, systemic data, codified procedures, universal principles, processing outside information coming in. This is seen to be typical for Western

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type of knowledge management. In the case of creating truly new knowledge, in the case of change and innovation, however, one needs also cryptic slogans, analogies, metaphors, which are rather different from the processing of objective data. So, subjective insights, intuition, hunches are needed. And the type of process is initially more inside out. Figure 11 provides an overview of Nonaka & Takeuchi’s approach by summarizing it in a graphic format.

INTERNALISATION (Learning by Doing – Collective Operational Knowledge – On Site)

SOCIALISATION (Field Building - Images - Metaphors - Mental Models - Sympathised Knowledge - Face to Face)

COMBINATION (Networking – Collaborative Systematic Knowledge)

EXTERNALISATION (Sharing Knowledge - Collective Reflection - Peer-to-Peer)

Figure 11 Four Modes of Knowledge Creation according to Nonaka & Takeuchi.

Nonaka and Takeuchi distinguish four modes of knowledge conversion: 1. Socialization: Knowledge Creation within the Boundaries of the Tacit When sharing experiences, one also shares and shapes in a social way mental models and technical skills. Knowledge, hence, increases when it gets shared, by imitation, observation, and practice. In organizations this sharing most directly takes place at the team level. This is also closely linked to one of the five ‘component’ technologies and disciplines that are core to Peter Senge’s concept of the Learning Organization, namely Team Learning (50). “Team learning is vital because teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. This is where 'the rubber meets the road'; unless teams can learn, the organization cannot learn”(p.10). In team learning, mutual dialogue (dia-logos) among the members forms the basis for mind shift, for knowledge conversion. Dialogue, in the meaning of Senge, is the free flow of meaning through a group, allowing the group to discover insights that cannot be attained by individuals alone. So, learning and knowledge transformation within organizations are closely twined. We can also assume that this is happening on the basis of the day-today practices of co-operation at the level of tacit, experience-based knowledge. This is also the domain of organizational culture and group processes. According to Baets (1998, p. 181), organizations will not only need knowledge as such, but the skills to

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renew and apply it to practice as well. When an organization is not able to learn continuously, it will not be able to play a significant role in the knowledge society (51). At this level, or in this mode, we will also find the roots of in organizations (52). According to Weick; “Organizations were conceptualized as social sense making structures that combine the generic subjectivity of interlocking routines, the intersubjectivity of mutually reinforcing interpretations, and the movement back and forth between these two forms by means of continuous communication. Tensions between the innovation of inter-subjectivity and the control of generic subjectivity animate the movement and communication.” (p.170). However, as long as the aggregate of shared experience in a company remains locked at the level of shared tacit knowledge it also remains intangible. It cannot be made fruitful for other levels of organizational operating is it not speaking the language of such levels yet. Tacit knowledge consists of images and, as such, it is incomplete, inconsistent, insufficient therefore needs to be articulated. It is valuable but not ‘explicit’ enough to act as shared mental models and clear images of our organizations. This type of knowledge can be called ‘sympathized’ knowledge (Ibid. p. 71). 2. Externalization: From Tacit to Explicit Knowledge The next step in the articulation process, from tacit to explicit, is called externalization. This is a process that can take the form of shaping tacit knowledge into metaphor, analogies, concepts, hypothesis or modeling, writing, conceptualization of an image. Due to the felt gap between the built-up knowledge, based on images and experiences (tacit) and the formal language of the organization (explicit), teams are triggered to forms of ‘joint reflection’ to bridge such gap. This is the start of creative interaction, of true dia-logue (53) through deduction and induction, through metaphor and analogy (54). It results in ‘conceptual’ knowledge (Ibid. p. 71). When talking about metaphors in organizations, we should also refer to Morgan (1997) who distinguished eight types of metaphors of organizations (55): 1.

Machines (Science - Computers – Mechanics – Switches – Engineering)

Organisms (Flowers – Gardens – Animals – Virusses – Ecology)

Brains (Nervous system – Learning)

Cultures (Creating Social Reality)

Political systems (Interests – Conflict – Power)

Psychic prisons (Plato’s Cave – Catch 22)

Environments for flux and transformation (Logics of Change)

Instruments of domination (Exploiting Resources)

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Each of such metaphors creates a way of seeing, interpreting and it shapes organizational life. To give an example of the impact of the difference between looking at an organization as a machine or as an organism: “….. A principal reason why companies do not become business that can reinvent themselves is that their managers take a rational, even mechanistic approach to developing their business. These managers are often locked into the implicit assumption that a business is like a machine.

They

understand

rational

tasks

identifying

markets,

spotting

competencies, and creating visions, but they miss insight that businesses are also living things. This distinction is absolutely fundamental. Living things grow. They adapt and evolve with shifting competition and varying climate. Change is what living things do. In contrast, machines run. They mostly don’t change, or if they do, it is because they have been built, like neural nets, to mimic living things. Machines are built by assembling component pieces. Living things develop and evolve over time….”(56). For organizational diagnosis of the fit of a corporate structure, metaphors can proof to be a strong tool: Vijverberg (1995) applied images derived from the fairground attraction world like the ‘bumping car’, the ‘giant’s stride’, the ‘(double) cuttle-fish’ (octopus) and the ‘roller-coaster’ to study the organizational top-structures of multibusiness companies (57). According to Nonaka and Tekuchi externalization is regarded to be the key to knowledge creation, because it creates new, explicit concepts out of tacit knowledge (Ibid. p. 65). In this phase the symbolic language of metaphors, analogies and images starts transforming into more formal language. They also state that this stage in knowledge creation is grossly neglected in management science. When speaking about the need for creativity in knowledge creation this stage needs to be critically observed and designed to activate a meaningful dialogue about new ideas, about solutions for problems. Or, in other words, in this phase, subconscious knowledge is becoming conscious. 3. Combination: From Explicit to Explicit The third stage of knowledge conversion is a process of systemizing concepts into a knowledge system, by sorting, adding, combining and categorizing of explicit knowledge (as in computer databases). This is the world of the organizational conscious that is well studied and practiced. It is the world of the organization as it is formally defined, described and worked with. We mainly deal with systematic knowledge, facts and figures and networking of newly created knowledge. This level is also linked to formal learning, like in an MBA or in business school courses.

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4. Internalization: From Explicit to Tacit Once new knowledge has been aggregated and transformed in new products, models, organizational structures or procedures, such results should not just remain at the mental – formal - conscious level only. It should become ‘complete’ organizational knowledge, hence also be ‘injected’ back into, or disseminated over the tacit level, become part of the organizational subconscious. Internalization comprises of the conversion of facts into (success) stories, diagrams, documents, rapid prototyping etc. and enhances the embodying of organizational knowledge. It is closely linked to learning by doing. What conclusions can we draw from this discourse of Nonaka and Takeuchi? I think that the following points are highly relevant for my search in this paper: •

Our question about the existence of a kind of organizational sub- or unconsciousness is confirmed with the concept of tacit knowledge and there is a morphological similarity between the two. We also can speak of the tacit as the collective programming of the organizational mind. Moreover, in many organizations such under-water level of the knowledge pyramid is often ignored, while Nonaka and Takeuchi regard the tacit world as a rich source, not to say an inevitable world for knowledge innovation. And, this world can be traveled collectively (socialization).

•

We furthermore learned that especially the transition of subconscious knowledge into conscious knowledge, from image to concept, is a difficult process that is poorly studied and understood in organizational sciences and management literature (externalization).

•

A third conclusion is that in the organizational tacit world, like in the individual subconscious one speaks a visual/symbolic language that needs to be translated into formal language in order to be managed and communicated properly. A related conclusion is that the search for new knowledge is not a matter of looking for something that already exists in a ready-for-use format. It is not a plain translation. Such translation process is a creation process at the same time.

In the next section we will study how such transformation process takes place while answering the question how creativity (dis)functions at the level of organizational knowledge creation.

ORGANIZATIONAL CREATIVITY AND THE SEARCH FOR WELLS OF NEW APPROACHES Motivation, Expertise and Creative Thinking Skills as the Roots of Knowledge Innovation

Many understand ‘creativity’ as mainly something playful. Certainly when linking the concept of creativity to business organizations, one easily meets an ironical attitude. Business management often is understood in terms competitive, if not a warrior type of behavior. When competition is fierce, one tends to focus more on harnessing ones position and decreasing uncertainty than on being open for change and vulnerable, or to even

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create more uncertainty. The latter characteristics are related to creativity. So, why then would people be creative in a company? In the previous chapter we wrote about the shift between the technocratic approach and the emotional intelligence approach. Are there other changes taking place at the management level that might explain why the issue of ‘creativity’ is so important? Can we establish a link between creativity and entrepreneurship? Hofstede (1998) compares the ‘desired’ characteristics of the traditional manger with those of the entrepreneur (58). The ‘mental programming’ of the entrepreneur in this comparison is rather different, if not contradictory to the programming of the mind of the traditional manager (Figure 12). The way e.g. dissatisfaction and frustration are being perceived differs strongly over different types of national cultures.

Traditional Managers • • • • • • • • •

Homo Economicus Technocratic Rational Goal Oriented Perfect Information Dealing with Equilibrium Optimization Price Competition Economies of Scale

Entrepreneurs • • • • • • • • •

Homo Ludens Curious, Esthetic Creative Open Minded Improvisation Dealing with Uncertainty Diversity Competition of Ideas Diseconomies of Scale

Figure 12 A Shift From Traditional Management to Entrepreneurs (Hofstede, 1998).

The first one seems to naturally love and the second one seems to naturally hate change. Hofstede argues that this is not a correct interpretation. According to his research on the start of entrepreneurial types of business, the motivation for change is not the result of satisfaction (in life, work etc.), but it is the result of dissatisfaction and frustration. And, When the above is true, we can say that the entrepreneurial type of approach to change can be understood as the result of rather disappointing experiences build-up in a traditional management context. A similar approach to managerial creativity is found with Nonaka (59): “Creativity is born …. by pushing people against the wall and pressuring them almost to an extreme”. In both cases, of Hofstede’s driver of entrepreneurship (frustration) and Nonaka’s driver of creativity (pushing to an extreme), motivation is the important driver for organizational innovation and knowledge creation. However, this sort of motivation is rather harsh, or pessimistic of nature, seems to be more linked to ‘hating’ what you do than to ‘loving’ it. It is the result of sad experiences with the environment, not from the longing for something nice new and beautiful.

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The latter, more optimistic type of approach to creativity is found with Theresa Amabile (60), who sometimes is called the grand-mother of business creativity. Although she does not distinguish the above identified level of the organizational conscious and subconscious for knowledge creation, she nevertheless puts creativity as the fundament of organizational innovation. Amabile (1998, p. 78) identifies three basic components of individual and organizational creativity: •

Creative-Thinking Skills: Such skills refer to the attitude with which people approach problems and solutions and the way they establish new combinations and approaches. This is strongly linked to the identity (personality), competencies and the mental programming of individuals or organizations.

•

Expertise:

the

knowledge-technical,

procedural

and

intellectual

world.

…“encompasses everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work.”. Expertise and creative thinking are seen as a kind of ‘raw material’ that needs a third factor to become operational and get direction: •

Motivation: Motivation is at the heart of Amabile’s model. Without motivation there will be no creativity. Two types of motivation are distinguished: extrinsic motivation to change and problem solving (coming from the outside, from management, the environment, money) and intrinsic (coming form the inside, is linked to the passion and desire of the person).

Amabile stresses that intrinsic motivation is the component, management should focus on when stimulating organizational creativity. Moreover, she assumes that intrinsic motivation, in principle, is available among employees and management. However, as its needs are mostly not properly understood and ‘serviced’, the practical situation in many companies is one in which creativity is killed instead of nourished: “…Intrinsic Motivation of Creativity: people will be most creative when they feel motivated primarily with the interest, satisfaction and challenge of the work itself - and not by external pressures”(Ibid. p. 79). Organizational Procedures Stimulating Creativity and Knowledge Creation

When comparing Nonaka’s and Amabile’s approach we could say that the one (Nonaka) stresses the extrinsic part and Amabile the intrinsic dimension of motivation for organizational innovation. Both of them list a series of procedures management should apply in order to create conditions that positively enforce creativity and innovation.

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Enabling Conditions for Organizational Knowledge Creation (Nonaka)

Managerial Practices Affecting Creativity and Innovation (Amabile)

•

Intention: Strategic Development of the Organizational Capability to Acquire, Create, Accumulate, and Exploit Knowledge

•

Challenge: Right Assignments Ignite Intrinsic Motivation

•

Autonomy: To Increase the Chance of Introducing Unexpected Opportunities. Enlarge Intrinsic Motivation to Create New Approaches /Autopoietic systems/SelfOrganization

•

Freedom: Autonomy Concerning Means How to Climb a Given Mountain

•

Resources: Time & Money - Threshold of Sufficiency

•

Supervisory Encouragement - Praise Efforts, not just Results

•

Work-group Features: Team Design, Diversity of Perspectives and Backgrounds - Share excitement over Goal - Willingness to Help - Valuing the Other

•

Organizational Support: Mandate Information Sharing and Collaboration and Prevent Political Problems

•

Fluctuation/Creative Chaos: Helps in Reconsidering the Fundamental Thinking and Perspective/Ambiguity/Change the Flow and Reflect! Redundancy: The Existence of Information that goes Beyond the Immediate Operational Requirements of Organizations Requisite Variety: An Organization’s Internal Diversity must Match the Variety and Complexity of the Environment in Order to Deal with Challenges Posed by that Environment.

Figure 13

Nonaka’s and Amabile’s Lists of Organizational Conditions and Procedures Supporting Knowledge Creation and Creativity

The two lists in Figure 13. may differ in details. In general they express that it is possible for management within companies to set-up a system of procedures and models that can ensure to get good flows of creativity and innovation. Knowledge Conversion and Creativity: the Need for A Knowledge Creation Laboratory?

Despite the interesting findings by the above authors, I nevertheless identify a blind spot. That is that none of the authors seems to be aware that one also needs a kind of special environment in which some or several of the stages of knowledge creation should take place. It is clear that in most of the regular corporate day-to-day working environments there is no mental space or social room to step back from the formal or explicit type of knowledge production and routines, and to create ‘air’ and context for tacit knowledge exchange or collaborative thinking. Moreover, when working on new business and services creation, problem solving etc. in a knowledge society environment, there is one big difference with the more technical oriented businesses and the types of change & innovation that can be found in industry sectors. In the technical sectors, it is from the beginning clear that, when working on JONKERGOUW CREATING SOLUTIONS * ger@jonkergouw.demon.nl * http://www.jonkergouw.com

innovation of processes, technologies and products, this must take place in a special research and development area. However, when dealing with knowledge innovation in the service sectors, the ‘subject’ of research is non-material of nature. The question, therefore, is not just HOW to stimulate knowledge creation at the tacit level and to stimulate externalization, but also WHERE such activities should take place. For example, for socialization and externalization Nonaka talks about special corporate camps, about brainstorm sessions and colleagues joining together again after work in a restaurant or a bar. In all such cases people leave the ‘normal’ working environment and join again elsewhere, outside the company when they want to communicate and co-operate at the level of the organizational sub-conscious. In knowledge creation it is vital to search for and understand the boundaries of our knowing: we need to detect our shared but hidden assumptions, trace the implicit structures, the bugs in our joint mental programming, our images of the organization we work in. And we need to detect the controversial dimensions of such knowledge, the dividing lines between the areas that we share and those about which we disagree. It is obvious that such activities are different from administrative or other normal office work as it concerns forms of sensitive communication and interaction that have their own pacing. My point now is that more and more it is understood that such steps in knowledge creation are vital phases within the total ‘spiraling’ process. But, it seems that our normal architectonic working environment and our organizational routines (like meetings) as well are not inviting nor do they provide a proper context for creation. We have to go ‘elsewhere’ to discover our hidden images, myths and metaphors, to communicate about them and/or to transform them into concepts. And, when talking about the use of intuition in tracing the nuclei for change, the formal light in our offices is far too bright to allow us to detect such faint signals. There is another important thing missing in the current organizational context. That is something that I call ‘room to become empty’. The whole organizational environment is so focused on productivity, on efficiency, on filling the agenda’s and maximizing the use of minds of employees, that even the impression of openness or emptiness automatically results in procedures to fill or erase any empty space or open moments as soon as they get detected. Free time is nice, but not WITHIN the boundaries of the company. Without an empty mind, however, we can never be open for new information, for other approaches, or for the beginning of revolution. As many of our mental programming is subconscious, it is the everyday formal organizational consciousness that prevents us from getting beyond its borders. We keep searching in the light of the organizational street lamp and have no place to go elsewhere,

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or where we can move back and forward between the tacit and explicit world. The average organizational context is not fit for innovation, creativity, tacit knowledge etc. It kills such worlds and organizational dialogue, learning, imagination and creativity are the victims. Change and innovation are like young plants. They don’t bloom on a stone road. And, even if they have a strong potential, they are very sensitive, quite vulnerable just after birth. They need nursery and careful treatment. We find it absolutely normal that technological R&D no longer takes place in the kitchen of a factory and that it has its own organizational location, its own staff, equipment etc. Any company in the world of science and technology has a sort of Laboratory. However, when talking about the knowledge creation industry we not yet have good concepts (neither organizationally nor ideologically) of locations that are properly equipped to work on invention, innovation, imagination and incubation of our knowledge. I conclude that we therefore should consider the formation of a kind of Laboratories for Knowledge Creation. Such knowledge laboratories should not just be made on remote, isolated places like training resorts. That would only make the use of such venues into something rare and strange and … incidental. We must consider how to create knowledge laboratories also at the heart or at least very near to the center of our activities. Because when competition in the knowledge society becomes ‘competing on the edge’, ‘competing on the boundaries of our imagination’ has become everyday business. In the next chapter I will present a kind of knowledge creation laboratory called the Strategic Management Atelier ®. It will not be based on heavy theoretical explanation or explicit knowledge type of analysis. I hope that the materials, provided in this and the previous chapters can be seen as the roots of a little tree. When you understand its roots system, the rest needs only some pictorial description.

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THE

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ATELIER®: THE ART OF STRATEGY?

Catching full reality? A poet or painter would admire the attempt, and reject any claim of success The wise would smile. (Gur)

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BACKGROUND Over the last 15 years I have been painting and drawing in my private atelier (workshop). I have used this ‘artistic’ environment and creative toolkit to acquire a deeper understanding of issues I am intellectually or emotionally struggling with at that moment. I learned that to me this form of ‘active meditation’, ‘visual thinking’, or ‘imagination’ often leads to interesting new insights. I think this is partly by the fact that it is both a rational & an intuitive, a mental & a physical, an analytical & integrating/composing or intuitive activity, that leads to nice results. The good thing of it is also the fact that I work in the atelier on ‘professional’ problems and questions within a context that differs totally from my ‘normal’ working

environment

(it

non-boardroom,

non-academic,

non-oral

language

environment). In Chapter 2 I gave an example (Figure 9) of how the working in the atelier provides me the context and equipment to dive into my own sub-consciousness and to relate things found there to more formal types of language and insight, from Metaphors into Concepts. Over time I have broadened this experience to the way I encounter my closest friends. When I meet some, every now and then, we not just share for a long intellectual talk, for a dinner, a walk or a drink. We then spend a full day in my atelier and work together on a joint painting (on paper, 200 x 200 cm) in which we try to create images of our symbols, questions about where we stand and go, about our past and future. etc. Figure 14 presents the results of one of such full day sessions. In as far as my knowledge goes, such collaborative working in an atelier is not unique. But, such working together in an atelier is mostly done by visual artists who focus on creativity at the more esthetic levels and less on the innovative levels. At the basis of such experiences, I learned how the working in an atelier context can give access to forms of awareness, collaborative working and communication that remain beyond the borders of regular interconnection: •

It provides much better insight in each other’s deeper feelings, notions, barriers etc. Hence, it allows interconnection of individual tacit areas through a mix of images, metaphors, analogies and conceptualization. It is a fine method for socialization.

•

It provides a process that allows a different game of questioning and answering than comes from usual dialogue. It also is a good environment/method for externalization.

Over the first period of about 10 to 12 years, this collaborative type of working took place through a process that ran almost complete parallel to my academic work in the design and development of International Strategic Management courseware and a new European focused MBA-program build on distributive learning technology. In this period I learned that many companies in the current fast changing networking knowledge creating society are

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pushed through the frontiers of their strategic landscape and find themselves in strategic ‘uncultivated’ territories, without appropriate maps or compasses.

Figure 14

Result of Early Collaborative Painting with Harold Pieternella (10-1985) 200 x 150 cm. “Archaic Self: From Very Far and Long Ago”.

Even stronger so. Managers have great problems in ‘imagining’ at all where exactly they are, or to (literally) draw the picture of what is going on, and how they can (re)design and navigate their strategic course. During the 1990ies it became clear to me that the traditional strategic management methods and tools had their limits. This idea that ‘something is missing’ in strategic decision making and in certain strategic circumstances is not new. Managers often feel they cannot solve their strategic problems within the existing knowledge creating (consulting) context. Some of the strategic challenges I see in the following areas: •

Internationalization requires the competence to work with and beyond borders. Borders often are more of a psychological than of a legal, technical, economical, political, etc. nature;

•

Operating in a multitude of cultural settings requires a profound understanding of ones own cultural mental programming as well as the competence to work with a multitude of values, expectations, styles, structures and processes. One, therefore, needs to develop a multi-dimensional mind;

•

To change the boundaries of an industry, to permanently innovate technologies, products and markets and also to create and set new rules (boundaries) for competition, requires the utmost of ones creativity and flexibility;

•

To survive in the high-speed, fast changing, networking business environment, one needs to be highly sensitive to 'weak signals' and to be able to transform both rational

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and intuitive information into choices with an impact at a 'deep', structural level of the company. These boundaries of industries, companies, technologies, markets and strategies often are only partial legal, technical, international, organizational of nature. Boundaries, limits and borders in many cases are of a mental/psychological and cultural nature. To have just a fair understanding of what is going on, no longer is sufficient. To truly innovate, to really cross international borders or change the rules of competition, or just to survive, the strategists have to be able to 'think beyond their existing world’ or even to invent totally new worlds. However, the ‘normal’ strategic management (consulting) process often just reproduces and reconfirms what is generally known already. It fails in truly breaking through the walls of the existing and does not produce innovative and/or customized solutions. The boardroom is proven to often be not a stimulating environment to start the breaking away from the existing and to start the creation of clear new strategic directions. Hence, a need is felt for new strategic management practices and tools for shifting (mental) frontiers, exploring new strategic worlds, to become creative, intuitive, aware of cultural differences and to open all imaginative forces of the strategic mind. It was during one of the Strategic Management Society Conferences that the Coin fell at a neat place in my Mental Slot Machine: the concept of working in the atelier might also be very interesting as a method and environment for strategic management, management development and knowledge creation. And, more specifically such a crossover possibly could provide a vehicle for traveling in the organizational and individual sub-conscious or tacit world as well and that way also help in setting first steps in the externalization of subconscious into conscious organizational knowledge. After the coin fell in the slot, the machine started working.

THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ATELIER ® SET-UP I started using my private experience in ‘joint working in an atelier-environment’ as a basis for a variety of experiments with senior managers of commercial companies who are dealing with the above-mentioned type of strategic troubles. I started by asking them to act as guinea pig and help me with my experimenting in the Strategic Management Atelier ®. However, I wanted to work with them only once they personally recognized the type of strategic problems: when a strategic break-through is required and there is somewhere a notion lingering of some sort of valuable knowledge, which is ‘locked’ and one cannot get ‘it’ on the table. Or, in cases when truly new strategic approaches are needed, and the available ways of changing don’t work. In later sessions I worked with professors at international

business

schools,

with

executive

MBA

students

and

with

university

undergraduates.

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My purpose has been to test a mix of traditional and artistic training and consulting approaches. One of my underlying assumptions is that to solve deep strategic problems, one often has to change the conceptual context of such problems, and also the spatial context in which the problem is being attacked. I established a physical and psychological space for strategic creativity where participants can explore areas of knowledge that in the normal interaction process remain out of order. The Strategic Management Atelier® environment, creates a ‘strategy incubator’ by using special equipment (walls covered with large pieces of white paper, some tables with smaller sizes paper, paint, charcoal, ink, pencils, felt-tip-pens, brushes, projection equipment (overhead projector and episcope), recording equipment (digital video- and photo camera's) and a sound-machine). Since the end of 1996 some 100 consultraining atelier sessions now have been given. They range from: •

Eastern European Business School Professors (Ukraine, Russian),

•

Undergraduates (Japan, US, Russia, France),

•

Executive MBA students (Belgium, Dutch, German, Swiss, Lithuanian, Spanish, Kroatian, Albanian, French, Finnish, Irish, US, Slovenian),

•

Senior managers of individual companies (Dutch, US, Finnish, UK, Hungary, Portugal ).

So far most of the participants to the sessions have participated with great enthusiasm. Here are some statements coming from workshop participant evaluations: •

“I learned how to draw my imagination now, and I am a painter of my mind. I am the expresser of my imagination. I am a creator, I can train other people to be creators!”

•

“There is a new and different way for expressing our ideas”.

•

“New way of thinking which can prevent ‘burning out’.”

•

“Creativity is a key to face and deal with rapid changes.”

•

“I have learned how to use pictures and looking at solutions in a new perspective – something that I have never seen before. I found it amazing the quality of the projects produced from the assignments given.”

The following long evaluative statement of Dr. Grant R. Tate, president of Bridgewater Research Group Inc., the company that is described in the third case study, clearly describes the impact of a Strategic Management Atelier ® session:

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•

"Many of us "have a hunch" about what we'd like to do with our business. Sometimes, we have a dream, but that dream is locked inside of our psyche, blocked by our feelings of inadequacy or fear of failure. Sometimes, we simply cannot find the right words to express the vision. Other times, we can only see bits and pieces of the dream. It exists only in unconnected bits and pieces. In these times, formal strategic planning methods offer no way to draw the grand picture. Like a parade without music, they march rigidly toward mechanistic solutions. The Strategic Management Atelier gave me an opportunity to break out of my rigid habits. At first, my pictures were tight, formal little diagrams that could have been drawn with a protractor and straight edge. These reflected my training in "mechanical" drawing. But, as the session continued, the paint (and my creativity) began to flow and the painted wall started to take on grand proportions. Sure, we talked about philosophy; what was important to us. We expressed our "gut feelings" about what kind of business we'd like to have. And we expressed our fears and concerns about things that might be wrong. Sometimes, the pictures were hard to paint, but the abstract signs, lines and swivels helped us make our thoughts clear. I'm not an artist and the Strategic Atelier did not make me one, but I found that the experience of confronting a huge blank sheet of paper with a paint brush forced me to confront my limitations and to find ways to express my inner hopes and to paint them. This is an effective and exciting tool!"

Participants need to prepare themselves before coming to the atelier. They therefore receive instructions in advance. They e.g. need to have contemplated about where they and their company (and products and industry and technology) stand in the life-cycle (in terms of being before, on, or after a strategic crossroads) and they have to come to the workshop with ‘meaningful pictures’ or sounds. The role of me (as the ‘creative strategic consultant’) is to intervene, question, suggest solutions, both by using rational language, but also by intervening in and providing artistic assistance during the painting/imagination process. Objectives of the Strategic Management Atelier® sessions have been: •

to familiarize the participant with 'being creative' in general,

•

to create a new space, in which to discover the multitude of layers in strategic problems,

•

to study the level of 'cultural programming' of participants,

•

to create a new context in which 'old' strategic problems are approached from new angles,

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•

to enhance the strategy process mixing the pure mental/rational/analytical type

adding physical/intuitive/synthesizing work, •

to learn to understand the personal consequences of the new competitive world (networking is competing & co-operating),

•

to uncover the 'known yet not describable', to 'break-through' the mental walls of the known,

•

to unleash the often hidden creative talents of management, to open the creative mind of the strategist and to enhance his creative brainpower.

Although the first results of the working with the Strategic Management Atelier ® concept are promising, it still is far too early to draw ‘heavy’ conclusions that are based on systematic analysis, as the growing experience base is still too heterogeneous. There are a few issues I would like to reflect on some more, before I provide three case study examples of Strategic Management Ateliers ® session. These issues are: •

The creativity process: the engine of creativity;

•

The atelier as an incubator in the knowledge creation process and;

•

The issue of proto-strategies as the germinating seeds of new strategies.

Creativity as a Powerful Engine

In my workshops I use the following 6 stages in a (cyclical) creativity process. It is an analogy with what happens with the drive mechanism in a cylinder during a full cycle of a combustion engine. This is called The Engine of Creativity: 1.

Liberation: The Creative Cylinder Head should become Empty before taking in New Fuel. Clarify the Strategic Mind, Throw Away Old Approaches. Become Ready for the New, Forget about the Past, Be Open for the Future, Clean the Soil for New Plants. At the beginning of the Strategic Management Atelier ® session it is important to start with some sort of relaxation exercises.

Exploration: Search for New Ideas, Recycle Old Ones, Gather New Points of View/Departure, Create Asymmetry, Chaos, Broaden, Brainstorm, Enrich and Fill your Workspace – Cylinders. Gather seeds and put them in the soil, increase fertility. In the second step of a Strategic Management Atelier ® session we start with getting the ‘problem’ clear. Do we agree on the articulated issue? What ‘exactly’ is the problem? And, what other issues are related? Do we have images that symbolize the situation? What contradictions do we feel? Etc. In this phase we start creating images.

Tenacity: Compress the Gathered Material, to Get it Into a Pre-Revolutionary State. Persist in the Effort to Break-through, Crunch or Destroy the Existing

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Structure; Nurture the Building-up Tension and Let it Grow. Thinking Lateral. This phase is also linked to waiting, to pushing while knowing that results come later. In the third step of a Strategic Management Atelier ® session. The creation of images often leads to a feeling that a solution either is completely impossible, or that it soon and automatically will pop-up. This leads easily to ‘penny wise – pound foolish’ solutions. It therefore is important to take time in this step to get a deeper understanding of the nature and composition of the problem. In this stage we step back from the images as produced in the previous step and try to look at them from a different angle, to take a ‘second’ look at them, to discover hidden meanings, blockades, joint myths, etc. To find the reality-behind-the-reality. 4.

Inspiration: This is the moment of ‘Divine Ignition’, an Indescribable Experience, a Sudden Jump of Insight. The Quantum Leap. This May Result From an Outside Event or From Crossing an Internal Critical Level of Mass/Pressure/Heat. It can also be compared to the moment in which a seed starts becoming a tiny plant. The moment of birth, of germination. The fourth step of a Strategic Management Atelier ® session often is not such a long phase. After dwelling into the twilight of the first three steps, at a certain moment, some or several of the participants have been switching and interconnecting so much that they suddenly come up with a totally new insight, image or approach. The interesting thing is that they often cannot talk about it, or explain it in oral language. It is at this moment that they (again) are able to paint or draw something new, or to change forms and colors in the so far produced painting.

Creation: Let the Build-up Energy Explode, Into New Fragments and Compositions. Establish a Break-through, Let New Combinations Be Born, Compose. This phase is also the phase of creation of new ‘things’, ‘hunches’, nuclei of ideas, the popping up of proto-strategies. In the fifth step of a Strategic Management Atelier ® session, the ‘hunches’, are ‘getting on the table’. In other words rather new insights and ideas are crystallizing into forms, colors and meaning. The freshly found new directions and metaphors, in first instance tumble over each other. It seems there is too much ideas, options, concepts and possibilities. But, as is normal for a creative explosion, it is most important to let the process freely go. This often results in a chaotic batch of not so clear inter-results. These intermediate knowledge results are still vulnerable, easily get killed by tradition. One has to be careful not to erase some of them, as they often are so different of what people are used to.

Incubation: Let the Powers Expand, Spread, Refine and Apply the New Space of Opportunities, Create New Horizons, and Evaluate. Throw Away the Things You Cannot Use, Reduce. This is also the phase where the value added of newly created

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products or services should be realized in the market. In the final step of a Strategic Management Atelier ® session it is important to start sorting the bad from the good ideas and to see which of the proto-strategies really can be applied with the market, organization etc. Some other connotations that are linked to this metaphor of a combustion engine are related to the issues of internal or external motivation and socialization and externalization: •

In the first three steps (from 1. Liberation to 3. Tenacity) we could say that this is the stage in which one has to put external pressure in order to get to the moment of ignition, hence we can speak of external motivation. And, I think these are the stages most closely linked to Nonaka’s phase of socialization.

•

In the latter three steps (from 4. Ignition to 6. Incubation) we can say that it is the power of the creativity process itself that drives the engine. In other words this is the area of internal motivation. And, moreover, this is also the phase of externalization. This is also the phase where invention (which is the result of the first 3 steps) is made into innovation.

Furthermore it is my experience that, except for the undergraduate students, most of the participants to Strategic Management Atelier ® sessions are rather senior. Despite individual differences in mastering the creative thinking and imagination skills, they show to have not that many problems to work in five out of the six steps of the process. The biggest difficulty I see is in the fact that almost everybody ignores the essential role of the first step: to make the (organizational or individual) mind empty. It seems that we ignore the ‘nothing’. Although many complain they have not enough ‘free’ time, open spaces in their agenda etc. At the same time we do not know how to create such empty spaces. Maybe we are even afraid of being empty, taking real rest? From Knowledge Creation Laboratory to Strategy Incubator

The metaphor of creativity as a machine, of course, has its limits. It might be better to compare it with organisms, with the growing of a plant. It is my experience so far, that one of the interesting things of the Strategic Management Atelier ® is the fact that it creates an environment in which even people, who are not so experienced in diving into the symbolic world of the subconscious, quickly start trusting themselves and their colleagues to nevertheless explore this twilight zone. And, it proofs that they too can see faint objects in dim conditions. In that sense it works as a proper environment to work with the subconscious: it is a kind of knowledge creation laboratory. It works as a kind of pressure cooker, it acts as a sort of catalyst that provides optimal circumstances under which the creative/innovative, or the tacit <-> explicit knowledge spiral process goes faster or better. It provides special conditions to enable processes that normally hardly occur, or to speed up such a process and also to inhibit distortions coming from the normal office and work environment.

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Moreover, as is mentioned in the previous engine of creativity section, the young germinating plants are rather vulnerable in their first period of life. And, not all plants are proper ones to be implemented in the market or organization. Hence, there is a need for a certain period and environment in which new ideas can be born, tested and nourished before they are put into commercial production of value added. It is not enough to get to the single moment of creating an invention (ignition), it also must become an innovation, which is a process. In the case of new strategy development the Strategic Management Atelier ® also has this function of incubator of what we call ‘proto-strategies’. One needs an ‘Incubator’ where new strategies can be born, where management teams can give birth to new strategies. Proto Strategies

With the work in the Strategic Management Atelier® we research the still vague and unclear area of the ‘birth’ of new strategies, which I call ‘proto-strategies’. This is the area between being without any direction on the one hand and clearly defined strategic goals, missions and visions on the other. In fact this is the area where we can work on changing the vision and mission of the company. Here we find the ‘things that can be but not yet are’, pre-mature intuitive forms which still have the potential to develop into different forms and directions. This is the area where people do have ideas and images, but which are still inexpressible in regular language. They have to go through a phase of becoming metaphor, analogy to end in new concepts that innovate and add value to the corporate strategic knowledge level. The Impact on the Business School Set-up

Knowledge creation, as described in the above sections, is intimately linked to organizational learning. In Chapter 2 I identified, however, that the required skills and competencies for organizational learning not easily are met, as the average management person is not that much in favor of leaving the safe building of rationality. We witness too much focus on narrow areas of ‘processing information’ as a ‘manager’ of a ‘business’ in the ‘economy’ and too little understanding of what it means to ‘create knowledge’ as a ‘human being’ in a ‘society’.

This is partly the result of the way we have been educated. Our

management education is rather uni-dimensional focused on training of intellectual intelligence. And for the knowledge subconscious or tacit world we are not or almost not trained. How many B-schools do we know that have subjects like yoga, meditation, philosophy, sociology, psychology, cultural differences, art, theatre, music, poetry, or creativity …. as compulsory elements of their curriculum? How then can we expect people to understand how to deal with ‘Tacit Knowledge’, when they don’t (dare to) know what intuition is? And, when people do not learn such things as a novice in management or strategy, how then can they apply these later in their business life, when one has become a Very Important Person as CEO, or President or….?

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If we want to change organizational learning, knowledge creation and strategic innovation in organization, I think we must also change the way we educate the creators of the future, hence must change the content and structure of our management education systems and programs. We must train people in becoming masters of the exploration and exploitation of the twilight zone of the individual and organizational subconscious. Only then we can expect them to become masters in the conversion of facts and figures into value adding knowledge. Only that way we can avoid MBA graduates from leaving the b-school as business jugglers. We need knowledge sorcerers that can change strategic information iron into knowledge gold. We need Strategic Alchemists! Since the beginning of working with the Strategic Management Atelier ® I have been running over 100 workshops for companies like: •

VNU/ACNielsen, Imtech, Rabobank, Thremen, C-Mark, PGGM, Logica-Consulting, EsserCaradon, WM Mercer, Bridgewater Research Group, DAS-Rechtsbijstand, Habitat, Unimills, Essent Netwerk and Essent Kabelcom, and Botden-van Willigen.

I also worked with the concept at institutes like: •

The Institut d’Administration des Entreprises (Aix-en-Provence, France), Euromed, (Marseille, France), LIFIM (Finland), Teikyo University (Netherlands), das Institut für angewandte Sozialwissenschaften (Schweiz), the International Executive Centre (Kranj, Slovenia), the International Management Institute (Kiev, Ukraine), the Institute of International Business Education of the Moscow Institute of Electronic Engineering "the Technical University", (Moscow/Zelenograd, Russia), Riinvest (Kosovo), the Piedmont Virginia Community College (Charlottesville, USA), IBO Business School (Zeist, the Netherlands), Hogeschool Zuyd (Heerlen) and Hogeschool Avans (den Bosch) and the EURO*MBA (Maastricht, the Netherlands).

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THE STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT ATELIER ®; THREE CASE STUDIES (1)

The names of some of the persons and companies have been changed for privacy reasons.

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In this final chapter I will give a short description of three different Strategic Management Atelier ® session. They have the function of illustrating the ideas in the previous chapters and should not be regarded to be full case studies or complete analysis. •

The first case study is about the three-day summer school workshop for executive students that took place at the International Executive Development Center in Kranj, Slovenia.

•

The second example is about a full day strategic consultraining session with the CEO of a fruit tree nursery and trading company.

•

The final example is also about a commercial company networking and operating at a global level.

EXECUTIVE BUSINESS EDUCATION TRAINING: 1

The International Executive Development Center (Kranj, Slovenia)

In July 1998 we executed a three-day summer school workshop for alumni executive students of the International Executive Development Center in Kranj, Slovenia. The Strategic Management Atelier ® program was focused on working with a rather large group of 25 participants, coming from different types of companies (Food Industry, IT, Banking etc.) and having different types of position within the company (ranging from CEO’s of small national companies to middle managers of large international companies) In the three days, the following steps were made: Getting Ready for the Atelier

Each of the three days started with a session called “Getting Ready for the Atelier” of about 60 “, in which the participants had to become ‘empty’ and ready for the atelier. The first day this consisted of relaxing exercises, the second day of one hour Yoga exercises and the third day of different forms of meditation. Day 1

The rest of the first day was devoted to: •

a lecture based introduction to strategy and creativity;

•

an individual exercise in painting ‘Images from the Deep’;

•

creating, competing and discussing images produced by couples of participants.

Day 2

The second day comprised of assignments related to imagination at the team and intraorganizational levels.

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•

Teams of 5 participants, working in separate rooms, had to create large images of their ‘team heaven’ (200 x 150 cm).

•

Later that day each team had to identify and explain the problematic sides of their design.

•

One of the other teams then acted as a group of consultants and, on the basis of the metaphors in the images, had to propose in the images how to solve the identified problems.

Day 3

On Day 3 the focus of the program shifted toward the inter-organizational level and to new business creation. The assignments consisted of: •

First the teams had to invent (as 5 different organizations) services, products, technologies and organizational set-ups that not yet existed and heavily use internet technology. The result of the design again was a painting of 200 x 150 cm.

•

After the innovative products, services and organizations were plenary presented, the next task was to create a network among the new businesses and to assess the types of alliances, the nature of the inter-firm co-operation that would be required to make the network function and flourish.

The IEDC workshop was not used to solve any ‘real existing’ problems, as is the case in consulting. It was used as a tool to practically work on understanding the nature and impact of creativity, intuition and imagination on innovation of organization and strategy. In Figure 15 an overview of impressions, made during the three days is provided.

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Figure 15 Executive Management Development, Strategic Management Atelier® Kranj, Slovenia, 7-1998

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CONSULTING ATELIERS 2

“Roots for Fruit”; Fruit Tree Nursery (Sambeek, the Netherlands)

Background – Strategic Issue – Approach and Results

Mr. Henry Gardner (1950) is CEO and very senior expert in growing and trading of fruit trees all over Western and Eastern Europe and also in the US and Canada. His company belongs to the 15 largest fruit tree nurseries and trade firms of Europe. He thoroughly knows what is going on in and around the sector and his company. The company was setup by his father (at that time combined with rose growing) and later merged with a trade based fruit tree company. The sector is traditionally full of out-sourcing, with many small nursery ‘jobbers’. Henry Gardner is now at a point in his live where he wants to evaluate the past and tries to refocus his personal and business future. The business is a tough business with small margins. And, there is a continuous pressure for upscaling and internationalizing. During his many and long trips through Europe, Henry has met a wide variety of people and cultures and contemplated many issues. Some of these are related to his personal life and future: taking over the company from his father but at the same time having a much broader business interest. There are a lot of new services he imagines to be very interesting, feasible and profitable as well. However, he never has taken the time to elaborate on such options, to draw a more detailed picture and/or to make a clear business analysis and plan for them. They are images slumbering in his sub-consciousness. The same is true for several options that are related to his actual core business. However, business and family leave little time for such things. In the Strategic Management Atelier ® session we worked a full day on visualizing these personal and business strategic options. It meant a process where Henry Gardner worked on making explicit what had remained implicit, or sub-conscious so far. This was not just a matter of talking and then painting. The watershed between the everyday consciousness and the sub-consciousness is strong. It is linked to the fact that, for the CEO of a family based company, it often is emotionally forbidden to openly contemplate options that may include a departure from the company. To sell it, or to completely turn it upside down. So, there are quite a few emotional barriers. The working in the atelier meant that Henry Gardner started allowing himself to take these intuitive ideas more serious, explicit. And, to start working on several of them afterwards. Some of the options are related to a totally new personal professional role: to sell the company and to start a life as an International Consultant in the Fruit Tree Business. Other options have to do with the up-scaling of the company to a true European format. This would include a total re-evaluation of his current network of sub-contractors! Several other

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options e.g. even for new types of management training in the fruit tree business came on the ‘wall’. In Figure 16 some pictures of the process during that day are presented. The apple that is painted on the right side of the painting had to be there, to symbolize that the fruit tree nursery is very important still. It acted as a reminder to Henry Gardner, not to forget about this current responsibility. Till the moment the apple was painted it remained rather difficult to talk openly and in more detail about the nature, content and impact of his ideas for new businesses. But, after we drew this nice colored apple, the next part of the picture was easily drawn: It shows a straight main route/road, which leads to a, for Henry, rather too obvious future. The yellow deviating routes are the potential side-paths leading away from the main business on the one hand and through a wide world of new options on the other. The circular, organic objects represent nuclei strategies or Proto-Strategies, each of them is a possible new strategic option which, in case Henry Gardner would start it, was perceived and experienced to possibly ‘enlighten’ his future road! Each side-road ends in the main road. This symbolizes that Henry, in the end, has to make a choice. Which of the historically build-up options will be leading? Can they merge into one new main road? According to an evaluation of the workshop by Henry Gardner, working in the atelier helped him getting over the barriers of his “frame of mind”, to create images of his “realistic” dreams, and made him realize that the establishing of these proto-strategies was much closer to reality than he had thought before. At the end of 1998, Henry Gardner has actually transformed some of his proto-strategies into reality. He is preparing the start of several new businesses.

S T EP 2

DEVELOPMENTAL BLOCKADE

STEP 1 IMAGE OF THE FUTURE ROADS

Step 3

Proto-Strategies

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Bridgewater Research Group

Background – Question/Problem – Approach/Process – Results

Bridgewater Research Group Inc. (2) in the past few years has been pioneering in the execution of research in the field of the application of Information and Communication Technology for Corporate Training and Higher Education. The firm has been working for the Commission of the European Union, the European Training Foundation, The European Association of Distance Teaching Universities and several large commercial companies. Its' European headquarters are located in Valkenburg, the Netherlands and the American branch is in Palmyra, Virginia. The company operates with a network of associates spread all over the US, Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia. For several research projects, Bridgewater has extensively used the opportunities of email and the internet. Such projects have been executed with a minimum of travel. Most of the communication was done via email. We could call such an organizational set-up virtual research. This makes that Bridgewater from the beginning to the end works in the knowledge creating industry. The CEO of the company is Dr. Grant Tate, at the time of the ateliers (April and May 1997) still living in Europe. Most of his professional life he spend at IBM, but since 1992 he had switched to a home base in Europe and worked as research – consultant through Bridgewater. Grant Tate was in the phase of preparing to move back to the United States. The European branch of Bridgewater would get a new Managing Director, Dr. James Skyrms, who is an expert in multi media design and development and in executive management development. James Skyrms holds a US passport and lives in the Netherlands since 1990. Part of his other working time is devoted to being rector at Teikyo University in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The business of Bridgewater had developed in a prosperous way. However, it was clear that future business heavily depended on active involvement in the detailed network of links with universities, companies and governmental bodies like the European Union. The Mission of Bridgewater is expressed as: “Helping People Learn and Prosper in a Networked World”. This implies that Bridgewater needs to stay in the front-end of expertise in the fields of Information and Communication Technology, Multi Media and Learning Technology. Furthermore, when working as a networked company, this means that a lot of issues at the level of the organizational structure of and the communication within the network have to be resolved. An interesting point in this respect is that this type of organizations is still rather new. And, the future of the virtual society is not that clear either. Hence, there is little experience 2

http://www.cobweb.nl/Bridgewater

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base to build on, when designing strategies and operational plans for the future. Grant Tate and James Skyrms, knowing that they would not that often travel between Europe and the US, used the opportunity to participate in the Strategic Management Atelier ® to work in-depth on the issues of the future. Some of these issues were: •

Who will be our future clients, where are they and how can we stay into contact with them?

•

What will be the needs for support of people living in the virtual knowledge society? What are their problems? Are these located in the area of hardware and software? Or are they getting stuck at the level of the mental- and socioware? Where are the niches?

•

Can we draw the landscape in which Bridgewater will operate?

•

What does it mean to work in a network and at a global level?

•

What is the role of Bridgewater? Scouts, Technological problem solvers, researchers? How can Bridgewater provide value added?

•

How can we picture the competencies that are gathered at the network level and that are ‘stalled’ in the various associates to Bridgewater?

•

What type of ties and communication should there be into a networked organisation? And, what are the disadvantages of virtual communication?

This is just a list of the questions that were discussed already, but not yet properly answered. The problem, as it was articulated, was that it remained extremely difficult to ‘picture’ who Bridgewater is, where it stands in the services landscape (core competencies) and how it could use its strengths and move forward. In the two atelier sessions, each time the landscape of Bridgewater was imagined and step by step ‘filled in’ through discussions and option generating. The two sessions took a full day each. In Figure 17. we provide an impression of Grant Tate working on the creation of his understanding of his company. Currently Bridgewater has stepped out of the design of a new service and is setting up a service for on-line technology problem solving.

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Abstract Strategic limits are only partial of a legal, financial, technical, international, or organizational nature. Boundaries increasingly are of a mental/cultural nature. Managers face problems in picturing where they are and in creating a sound strategic course. Strategists need ‘additional’ tools and competencies for shifting frontiers and for exploring new strategic worlds. It is argued that in general, management tends to only use the resources available in the conscious/logical/rational areas of his personality and the organization. It is also argued that there is a whole extra world available, the individual and organizational subconscious that can provide a fertile ground for knowledge creation. However, to open up and exploit such extra resources, one needs a special creative and research environment: a kind of knowledge R&D laboratory. In the Strategic Management Atelier ®, traditional and artistic forms of reflecting, imagining and knowledge creation are combined, to reconfigure the conceptual context of strategic problems, to discover and apply innovative, creative and intuitive tools and to explore knowledge areas which in a normal change process remain out of order, to open all imaginative forces of the strategic mind we work in an artistic atelier environment. The atelier works as an knowledge incubator for the ‘birth’ of new strategies (‘protostrategies’). These seem to be generated in the sub-conscious, ill-illuminated world of individual and organizational tacit knowledge. The paper reports about the most recent discoveries in this area and hopes to demonstrate that strategic discovery is closely twined with innovation and creation of new competitive worlds. Strategy is not just about the best way to understand what is out there. It is more and more also about fundamentally and irreversibly changing the world as it always has been. This requires the utmost from our strategic brainpower. And, as we are strong in using only part of our mental resources and very week in other parts, we need new practices and a new environment to help us better understand and apply these new opportunities.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Ger F. Jonkergouw is Social Psychologist of education and Managing Director of Jonkergouw Creating Solutions. Till September 1998 he was for 8 years Assistant Professor for International Strategic Management at the Open University of the Netherlands and inventor, developer and Program Director of the European Master of Business Administration program (Euro*MBA). This international, consortium based MBA program is designed and delivered on the basis of dedicated distributive learning information, communication and telematic technology, has a strong focus on business in Europe, and is provided by a consortium of European Business Schools and Universities. Ger Jonkergouw is currently engaged in the design, development and dissemination of innovative flexible business education and management learning environments. He worked with companies, business schools and universities in a variety of Western and Eastern European countries like Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovenia, Spain, Ukraine, United Kingdom & the Arab World. He also provides services to the European Commission as a consultant in the field of Science & Technology Fellowships to Japan and Korea and is currently acting as chair reviewer of Esprit project for multi media in learning and training. The services of Jonkergouw Creating Solutions focus on helping to trace and cross strategic, organizational, cultural, personal or innovative knowledge barriers. Collaborative imagination is believed to be a strong tool for the creation of worlds that lay beyond the current mental boundaries. The services range from research, consulting, coaching, to lecturing and training in the (in-company and business school) areas of:

•

International

Strategic

Management,

International

Project

Management,

Cultural and Organizational Change and the Development of Management Learning Programs; •

Strategic Implications of Multi Media and Information and Communication Technology for (International) Flexible Business Learning and Higher Education;

•

Managing Cultural Differences in Transnational Teams;

•

The Strategic Management Atelier ®: The Application of Creativity Methods as Tools for Strategic Management, Innovation, Team Building, Cultural and

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Organizational Change. In this service he integrates the build-up expertise in Strategic Management, Social Psychology and Knowledge Creation as well. Jonkergouw Creating Solutions will not just focus on the creation and invention of new knowledge. It is a core ambition to shape new insights into a working, living and shared reality. Ger Jonkergouw is also associated with BOLD - Performance Improvement. This is a group of consultants that work on projects that on integrated Business, Organisation and Leadership Development projects

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REFERENCES Agor, W.H. (1989). Intuition in Organizations, London: Sage Publications. Agor, W.H. (1986). The Logic of Intuitive Decision Making, Westport, Quorum Books. Amabile, T.M. (1996a). Creativity and Innovation in Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, pp. 1-15 (9-396-239). Amabile, T.M. (1996b). The Motivation for Creativity in Organizations, Harvard Business School Press, pp. 1-14 (9-396-240). Amabile, T.M. (1996c). Managing for Creativity, Harvard Business School Press, pp. 1-13 (9-396-271). Amabile, T.M. (1996d). “Motivating Creativity in Organizations: On Doing What You Love and Loving What You Do”, California Management Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, Fall 97, pp. 39-58. Amabile, T.M. (1996e). Creativity in Context, Update to The Social Psychology of Creativity (1983), Boulder, Westview Press. Amabile, T.M. (1998). “How to Kill Creativity”, Harvard Business Review, SeptemberOctober 1998, pp.77-87. Baets, W.R.J. (1998). Organizational learning and Knowledge Technologies in a Dynamic Environment, Dordrecht, Kluwer. Belbin, R. Meredith (1981). Management Teams, Oxford, Butterworth-Heinemann. Boisot, M. (1998). Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantages in the Information Economy, Oxford University Press, Oxford. Bono, E. de (1985). Six Thinking Hats, Key Porter Books. Bono, E. de (1991). Six Action Shoes, London: Harper Collins. Botden, W. (1991-a). Confrontatie op Formaat, Eindhoven, Galerie Willie Schoots. Botden, W. (1991-b). The Collection, Acquisitions, Heerlen, Stadsgalerij. Brown, S.L. & Eisenhardt. K.M. (1998). Competing on the Edge: Strategy as structured chaos, Boston, Harvard Business School Press. Brown, S.L. & Eisenhardt. K.M. (1998). “Time Pacing: Competing in Markets that Won’t Stand Still”, Harvard Business Review, March-April 1988, pp. 59-69. Burgoyne, J. & Reynolds, M. (Eds) (1997). Management Learning: Integrating Perspectives in Theory and Practice, London: Sage. Chia, R. (1997). “Process Philosophy and Management Learning: Cultivating ‘Foresight’ in Management Education”, in: Burgoyne and Reynolds (1997). Management Learning, pp. 71-88. Courtney, H., Kirkland, J. & Viguerie, P. (1997). “Strategy under Uncertainty”, Harvard Business Review, November-December 1997, pp. 67-79. Coyne, K.P. (1997). Toward a Comprehensive Approach to Strategy, Key Note Speech at the Strategic Management Conference, Barcelona, 1997 (not published).

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Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row. Empson, L. (1999). “The Challenge of Managing Knowledge”, in Mastering Strategy, Financial Times special edition, Monday October 4, 1999, pp.8-10. Gardner, H. (1983). Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, London: Heinemann. Gardner, H. (1993). Creating Minds, New York: Basic Books. Geus, A. P. de (1997). “Living Company”, Harvard Business Review, January-February 1997. Goleman, D. (1997). Emotional Intelligence, Bloomsbury, Bantam. Goodman, M. (1995). Creative Management, Hemel Hempstead, Prentice Hall. Halal, W.E. (1997). “Organizational Intelligence”, Strategy & Business, Issue Nr. 9, 1997-4, pp. 10-13. Hamel, G. (1997). “The Search for Strategy”, published by Strategos, Menlo Park: www.strategosnet.com. Hamel, G. (1996). “Strategy as Revolution”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1996, pp. 69-82. Hamel, G. & Prahalad, C.K. (1994). Competing for the Future: Breakthrough Strategies for Seizing Control of Your Industry and Creating the Markets of Tomorrow, Boston, Harvard Business School Press. Hampden-Turner, C. & Trompenaars, F. (1993). The Seven Cultures of Capitalism, London: Piatkus. Hampden-Turner, C. (1994). Corporate Culture, How to generate organisational strenght and lasting commercial advantage, London: Piatkus. Hermans, H.J.M., Kempen, H.J.G. & Loon, R.J.P. van (1992). “The Dialogical Self: Beyond Individualism and Rationalism”, American Psychologist, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp23-33 Hofstede, G. (1991). Cultures and Organizations, Software of the Mind, London: Harper Collins. Hofstede, G. (1998). Entrepreneurship in Europe, Schuman Lecture 1998, Studium Generale Maastricht, House of Europe. Kets de Vries, M. (1995). Life and Death in the Executive Fast Lane: Essays on Irrational Organizations and Their Leaders, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Lebraty, J-F. (1996). “Intuïtion et Management”, Revue Française de Gestion, June-August 1996, pp. 57-69. Lorenz, Christopher (1992). ´Into the Great Wide Open”, Financial Times, Management Supplement, 2-11-1992, pp 10. Lucier, C.E. & Torsilieri, J.D. (1997). “Why Knowledge Programs Fail: A C.E.O.’s Guide to Managing learning”, Strategy & Business, Issue Nr. 9, 1997-4, pp. 14-28. Mintzberg, H. (1976). “Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1976, pp.49-57.

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NOTES: 1

Prigogine & Stengers (1985). P. 131-212. In such cases also the establishment of ‘positive energy cascades’ is prevented. 2 Arie P. de Geus, former Chief Planning of Royal Dutch Shell: “… The Ability to Learn Faster than Your Competitors May Be the Only Sustainable Competitive Advantage Left …” (1997). 3 Lorenz (1992), Hamel (1996 & 1997) and Hamel & Prahalad (1994). 4 I am not saying that our Guru Alchemists ignore these issues. See e.g. Gary Hamel’s company Strategos and the Strategos Institute, where previous revolutions are studied and the future ones prepared. See: http://institute.strategosnet.com and http://www.strategosnet.com. 5 The famous man who (among many other mysterious adventures) saved himself from drowning in swamp waters by lifting himself & his horse up by pulling his own hair. See: Raspe R.E. (1785). 6 The fact that the 1998 SMS Conference was organized in the Disney World venue (Orlando, USA) illustrates nicely the distinction between strategy as entertainment or as learning by painful searching. 7 As is the case in Yoga and meditation: “There will be no Progress in Understanding without Daily Practice”. 8 Quoting Albert Einstein: “To solve a problem … I had to change its context”. 9 Tissen, Andriessen & Lekanne (1998). 10 Baets (1998). 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Mintzberg, H. (1976). Note: The concepts in the listing are not only derived from Mintzberg’s article. Pitcher, P. (1993). Belbin (1981). Goleman (1998). Polanyi, P. (1966) Op. Cit. : Nonaka, I & Takeuchi, H. (1995), pp. 59-60. Hermans, Kempen & van Loon (1992) and Gardner (1983). Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995), pp. 60 It is important to note that the difference between the ego and the soul is not the same as the difference between an ’internal’ and an ’external’ world. The soul is linked to the social world as is the ego (Carl G. Jung). It is not the most inner layer of ourselves, neither is it the core. It is just a deeper layer of being. Neither has the difference between ego and soul to do with ‘good’ and ‘bad’, with ‘truth’ and ‘lies’, nor ‘heaven’ and ‘hell’. Hofstede. (1991). pp. 4-10 and (1998). Trompenaars (1993). Hampden-Turner (1994), Hampden-Turner & Trompenaars (1993), Hofstede (1991) and Trompenaars (1993). Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995), p. 61. Hofstede (1991) and Trompenaars (1993). Of course, ‘THEY’ were wrong, ‘WE’ dot it the ‘NATURAL’ way. Kets de Vries, M. (1995). Or, with oscillations around an attractor with positive feedback loops, the beginning of ‘urbanization’ (see: Prigogine & Stengers (1985). pp. 121-124, 196-203), or with implicit assumptions about the world and our cultural assumptions (myths) and values. Polanyi (1966), Op. Cit. In Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995), pp. 59-60. Ibid. p.59. Schulz, M-L. (1998). p. 2. Lebraty, J-F. (1996). De Bono (1985 and 1991). Op. Cit. In Chia, R. (1997). in: Burgoyne and Reynolds (1997). Agor, W.H. (1986 & 1989 (p.207)). The research was executed in the 1980ies. So, when taking into account that the composition of management teams has changed enormously, we can doubt that these findings would be found again when this study would be repeated today (See: Pitcher 1993). Coyne (1997) and also Courtney, Kirkland and Viguerie (1997). Source: Courtney, Kirkland and Viguerie (1997). “Strategy under Uncertainty” , HBR, 1997, November – December, pp. 67-79 and Kevin Coyne (1997). Toward a Comprehensive Approach to Strategy”, 17th Strategic Management Conference, Barcelona. Coyne (1997) p. 9-13. Goodman (1995) and Petty (1997). Gardner (1993), p. 12. Amabile (1983). Csikszentmihalyi (1990). Taylor (1959) in P. Smith (Ed.), The Nature of Creativity, New York, Hastings Books. Botden (1991-a), Rik van Iersel and - Rubin (1987), Frank Stella. Botden (1991-b), p. 48. Halal (1997). Lucier & Torsilieri (1997), p. 15.

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Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995), pp56-58, and Nonaka (1991). Nonaka & Takeuchi, (1995), p. 61. 50 Senge (1990), p.10. 51 Baets (1998), p 181. 52 Weick (1995). 53 See Senge (1990), p. 10 “To the Greeks dia-logos meant discover insights not attainable individually”. 54 Where Metaphor is “a way of perceiving or intuitively understanding one thing by imagining another thing symbolically” it is not aimed at differences, while Analogy “helps understand the unknown through the known and bridges the gap between an image and a logical model” and is focusing on differences. 55 Gareth Morgan (1986 and 1993). 56 Brown & Eisenhardt (1998). P. 193 57 Vijverberg (1995). 58 Hofstede (1998). 59 Nonaka (1988). 60 Amabile (1996, a-e and 1998). 49

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