Practical Methods for Extracting Explicit Design Rules Grounded in the Experience of Organizational Managers

The concept of design rules, an element of design science, helps convert the tacit knowledge of organizational change agents into explicit, actionable knowledge. Design rules are heuristic statements in the form: If you want to achieve outcome Y in situation S, something like X might help. Research suggests that experts tend to think using such heuristic rules, and the authors propose that this is also true for organizational managers leading successful change programs. Although design science approaches aim to build a body of design rules applicable in a variety of settings, little has been done to explore how design rules are elaborated from particular change efforts. The authors describe experience in testing four methods for extracting explicit design rules from existing programs of organizational change. They found this to be both a promising field of research and a potentially valuable methodology for practicing managers and change leaders in organizations.