The role of imagination in the organizing of knowledge

Portions of this essay are adapted from an article titled ‘Organizing and failures of imagination’ which is forthcoming in International Public Management Journal: Special Issue on 9-11 Commission Report. Knowledge has been defined in many ways, but seldom like this: ‘Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination’ (Cummings, 1953). Dead imagination seems to be present in the processes that led up to disintegration of the Columbia space shuttle over Texas (CAIB, 2003), in the Center for Disease Control’s initial misidentification of the West Nile virus (Weick, 2005), and in the mis-specification of the terrorist threat prior to the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 (9/11 Commission Report, 2004). The recurrence of phenomena such as these suggests that we need to tackle at least two questions: (1) How do people organize in ways that deaden imagination, (2) What is the effect of deadened imagination on knowledge? Related questions were raised by the 9/11 Commission that investigated the attack on the World Trade Center: ‘Imagination is not a gift usually associated with bureaucraciesy . It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing the exercise of imagination’ (9/11, p. 344). I want to say more about knowledge and imagination since my hunch is that most organizations think they have a capability for imagination when in fact, what they actually have is a capability for fancy. This is a difference that is potentially crucial for what it means to learn and to know. Imagination has not been much of a concern among scholars who examine learning and knowledge. If you look for the word ‘imagination’ in the index of the Dierkes et al. (2001), the closest you get is the heading ‘imaginary organizations.’ If you look in the index of the Easterby-Smith and Lyles handbook (2003), you find two pages devoted to ‘imagined communities.’ And if you look in the index of the excellent readers compiled by Choo and Bontis (2002) or Tsoukas and Shepherd (2004), you find no reference to imagination at all. The complex relationships among organizing, knowledge, and imagination can be illustrated in the context of the disintegration of the Columbia space shuttle over Texas during mission STS-107. Eighty-one (81.7) s after the Columbia shuttle was launched on January 16, 2003, blurred photographs taken during the launch showed that debris of some sort had struck the left wing with unknown damage. Requests for additional photographic images from non-NASA sources to get a clearer picture of the damage were initiated by three different groups in NASA, but were denied by the Mission Management Team on Day 7 of the 17-day flight (Wednesday January 22). Had better images been available, and had they shown the size and location of damage from bipod foam striking the wing, engineers might have been able to improvise a pattern of re-entry or a repair that would have increased the probability of a survivable landing. NASA was unwilling to drop its bureaucratic structure, and as a result, choked its capability for imagining. Here is what I mean. NASA had institutionalized a simple but central distinction that shaped their activity of imagining. They distinguished between problems that were ‘in family’ European Journal of Information Systems (2006) 15, 446–452 & 2006 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/06 $30.00