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Developments in the social neurosciences over the past two decades have rendered problematic the main knowledge elicitation techniques currently in use by strategy researchers, as a basis for revealing actors’ mental representations of strategic knowledge. Extant elicitation techniques were advanced during an era when cognitive scientists and organizational researchers alike were preoccupied with the basic information of processing limitations of decision makers and means of addressing them, predicated on an outmoded conception of strategists as affect-free, cognitive misers. The need to adapt these techniques to enable the investigation of the emotional content and structure of actors’ mental representations is now a pressing priority for the advancement of theory, research, and practice pertaining to several interrelated areas of strategic management, from dynamic capabilities development, to upper echelons theory, to strategic consensus formation. Accordingly, in this chapter, we report the findings of two studies that investigated the feasibility of adapting the repertory grid, a robust method, widely known and well used in strategic management, for this purpose. Study 1 elicited a series of commonly mentioned strategic issues (the elements) from a sample of senior managers similar in composition to the sample recruited to the second study. Study 2 participants evaluated the elements elicited in Study 1 in relation to a series of researcher-supplied bipolar attributes (the constructs), based on the well-known affective circumplex model of human emotions. In line with expectations, a series of vector-based multivariate analyses revealed a number of interesting similarities and variations among participants in terms of the basic structure and emotional salience of the issues under consideration.

The psychological analysis of strategic management issues has gained a great deal of momentum in recent years. Much can be learned by entering the black box of strategic thinking of senior executives and bring new insights on how they see, make sense of, and interpret their everyday strategic experiences. This chapter will focus on a powerful cognitive mapping tool called the Repertory Grid Technique and demonstrate how it has been used in the strategy literature along with how a new and more refined application of the technique can enhance the elicitation of complex strategic cognitions for strategy and Board of Directors research.

This chapter shares the experience of National Grid to orchestrate two Appreciative Inquiry Summits in Massachusetts. One was framed around sustainability for the City of Worcester, Massachusetts, and the other was an industry-wide effort on energy efficiency in Massachusetts. The chapter demonstrates the potential for generative impact and transformation in complex and highly contentious environments. It also presents possible implications for the highly regulated energy utility industry and for the energy utilities that choose to lead the way.

The changing communication environment transforms social media as a source for obtaining competitive intelligence on rival firms through “social espionage.” This conceptual chapter discusses how the competitive information in the Web, along with the trend of corporate transparency, has created both opportunity and risk for firms in social media. Among the opportunities, we discuss (1) tactical marketing campaigns, (2) encouraging switching behavior, (3) identifying and targeting competitors’ weak points, and (4) learning from their success and failure. On the other hand, we discuss how engaging in social media results in a loss of total control in the dialogue between a firm and its customers and, ultimately, leaves a firm vulnerable to the same opportunistic tactics it may leverage in order to draw benefit from a competitor’s social media presence. Finally, we provide some recommendations aimed at reacting to social espionage in the form of a strategic grid.

The emergence of strengths-based management may be the management innovation of our time. Nearly every organization has been introduced to its precepts – for example, the insight that a person or organization will excel only by amplifying strengths, never by simply fixing weaknesses. But in spite of impressive returns, organizations and managers have almost all stopped short of the breakthroughs that are possible. With micro tools largely in place, the future of strengths management is moving increasingly to the macro-management level, as witnessed in the rapid and far-reaching use of large group methods such as the Appreciative Inquiry Summit and its next generation design-thinking summit. Macro means whole and, by definition, unites many improbable opposites – for example, it embraces top down and bottom up simultaneously. It is a prime time source of organizational generativity. But the rules of macro-management are different than any other kind, most certainly micro-management. A decade of research and successful prototyping with single organizations, regions and cities, extended enterprises, industries, and UN-level world summits reveals five “X” factors – a specific set of mutually reinforcing elements of success and organizational generativity – and provides a clear set of guidelines for when and how you can deploy the “whole system in the room” design summit to bring out the best in system collaboration. By analyzing the performance and impacts of six case studies of the “whole system in the room” Appreciative Inquiry design summit, this chapter provides a bird’s eye view of the opportunities, challenges, and exciting new vistas opening up in this the collaborative age – a time when systemic action and macro-management skill are the primary leverage points for game-changing innovation, scalable solutions, and generative organizing. The chapter concludes with a call for more research into the stages of large group dynamics and advances a metaphor from the leadership literature – the spark, the flame, and the torch – to give imagery to the “positive contagion” and “the concentration effect of strengths” that happens during an Appreciative Inquiry Summit where 100s and sometimes 1000s come together interactively and collaboratively to design the future.

Our preoccupation with the Repertory Grid Technique has left little time and attention to the core ideas articulated in Kelly’s (1955) Theory of Personal Constructs. After more than 20 years engaging with the method, I have (re)discovered his theorizing about man’s quest for knowing, to be the most insightful. This chapter shares my reflections/reflexions about the crucial role he placed on the notion of “anticipation.” I position this importance within the context of the challenges of our times and advocate that his “psychology of the unknown” is just as important today as it was 62 years ago.

This chapter presents a case study involving a socio-economic Organizational Development (OD) project carried out in a European subsidiary of a large multinational corporation traded on the New York Stock Exchange. This research case study, one of the 1,854 socio-economic interventions undertaken by the ISEOR research center, was chosen for its good illustration of the OD engineering process. It connects the dots between OD and financial performance, between immediate results and the creation of potential. We look at some of the tools and methods, such as overhauling loss and profit accounts and balance sheets with an eye on socio-economic balance, to illustrate socioeconomic tools at work and how they help enhance compatibility between the objectives of all stakeholders, including shareholders. With this case study, we also set out to provide food for thought on the contribution of socio-economic OD to the construction of socially responsible capitalism (Savall et al., 2015).

This study of a market-leader in a turbulent hostile telecommunications market uncovers how the competitive context influences strategy-making and cultivates central control that opposes autonomous initiatives. It shows how a highly competitive industry context reduces organizational slack that inhibits autonomy and drives central actions. Strategic initiatives primarily arise as deliberate actions induced by top management. This creates an information gap between ongoing experiences gained by employees operating in the periphery of the organization and the perceptions of decision-makers at the corporate center. In this organizational setting, the authors observe maverick behavior among entrepreneurial individuals that deliberately circumvent the formal rules to turn autonomous initiatives into viable strategic ventures in the best interest of the firm. Where conventional views presume that power delegation and organizational slack are necessary for autonomous strategic initiatives to emerge, the authors find that central control can provoke autonomous rule-breaking maverick behavior among resource-deprived entrepreneurial individuals inside the organization.

This chapter draws from Structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984) and Schema theory (Niesser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology. New York, NY: Appleton-Crofts.) to examine how words reflect changing frames of reference (Orlikowski & Gash, 1994) that affect adaptation to strategic technological change. The method of recursive dialogue analysis we use provides evidence of how expectations about a new technology introduced to a sales force changed over time. Individuals had expectations based on past experiences, made initial decisions about using the new technology, juxtaposed new concepts against previous ones, interacted with team-mates, and built further concepts around previously expressed phrases. The results we exhibit here allow us to visualize complex interactions under conditions of uncertainty, contributing a detailed view of the recursive and cognitive process of developing a frame of reference about technology in an organization.