Generative action and preference reversal in exploratory project management

Organisations trying to innovate, despite being naturally encouraged to use project management and associated rational theories of choice, will necessarily experiment in some way or another due to the high levels of uncertainty and the unknown to be discovered. Exploratory project management may face situations requiring a constant reconfiguration of beliefs and hypotheses as a reaction to external factors. In this paper, we propose to discuss the existence of a generative rationality breaking away from classical decision theory by deliberately reversing preferences and designing decisions.

[1]  B. Flyvbjerg,et al.  Big is Fragile: An Attempt at Theorizing Scale , 2016, 1603.01416.

[2]  Laure Cabantous,et al.  Decision Theory as Practice: Crafting Rationality in Organizations , 2010 .

[3]  J. Davidson Frame Book Review: Reinventing Project Management: The Diamond Approach to Successful Growth and Innovation , 2008 .

[4]  H. P. de Vladar,et al.  Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective , 2016, Leonardo.

[5]  Rajesh Sethi,et al.  Stage-Gate Controls, Learning Failure, and Adverse Effect on Novel New Products , 2008 .

[6]  Rodolphe Durand Predicting a firm's forecasting ability: The roles of organizational illusion of control and organizational attention , 2003 .

[7]  H. Tsoukas Strategic decision making and knowledge : a Heideggerian approach , 2010 .

[8]  M. Tushman,et al.  Organizational Ambidexterity: Past, Present and Future , 2013 .

[9]  Gordon Müller-Seitz,et al.  Financing innovations in uncertain networks—Filling in roadmap gaps in the semiconductor industry , 2013 .

[10]  N. Barberis Thirty Years of Prospect Theory in Economics: A Review and Assessment , 2012 .

[11]  Franklyn Mansfield Branley,et al.  Floating in Space , 1998 .

[12]  Pascal Le Masson,et al.  The Value of a 'Failed' R&D Project: An Emerging Evaluation Framework for Building Innovative Capabilities , 2009 .

[13]  Jörg Sydow,et al.  Path Constitution Analysis: A Methodology for Understanding Path Dependence and Path Creation , 2009 .

[14]  P. Wason On the Failure to Eliminate Hypotheses in a Conceptual Task , 1960 .

[15]  P. Samuelson A Note on the Pure Theory of Consumer's Behaviour: An Addendum , 1938 .

[16]  Tom R. Burns,et al.  The Management of Innovation. , 1963 .

[17]  Andreas Schneider,et al.  Rethinking leadership in drug discovery projects. , 2012, Drug discovery today.

[18]  Jean-Baptiste Mouret,et al.  Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites , 2015, ArXiv.

[19]  Shiko M. Ben-Menahem,et al.  Coordinating Knowledge Creation in Multidisciplinary Teams: Evidence from Early-Stage Drug Discovery , 2016 .

[20]  James G. March,et al.  How Decisions Happen in Organizations , 1991, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[21]  J. Söderlund Pluralism in Project Management: Navigating the Crossroads of Specialization and Fragmentation , 2011 .

[22]  D. Ellsberg Decision, probability, and utility: Risk, ambiguity, and the Savage axioms , 1961 .

[23]  Sylvain Lenfle,et al.  Exploration and Project Management , 2008 .

[24]  J. Schreiber Foundations Of Statistics , 2016 .

[25]  Joe Tidd Innovation management in context: Environment, organization and performance , 2017 .

[26]  Julian Birkinshaw,et al.  Organizational Ambidexterity: Balancing Exploitation and Exploration for Sustained Performance , 2009, Organ. Sci..

[27]  O. Houdé,et al.  Deductive reasoning and experimental inhibition training : the case of the matching bias , 1996 .

[28]  Laure Cabantous,et al.  Rational Decision-Making as Performative Praxis: Explaining Rationality Éternel Retour , 2011, Organ. Sci..

[29]  W. Starbuck Organizations as Action Generators , 1983 .

[30]  H. Laroche From Decision to Action in Organizations: Decision-Making as a Social Representation , 1995 .

[31]  Michel Regenwetter,et al.  Parsimonious testing of transitive or intransitive preferences: Reply to Birnbaum (2011). , 2011 .

[32]  R. Epstein Generativity theory and creativity. , 1990 .