Get strategic

Abstract

With this essay I seek to elicit discussion and debate about some key ideas that I believe accentuates the differences between what academics do and what people do ‘in practice’, and yet also provides an opportunity for shared sense-making in order to bridge the scholar-practice divide. In particular I look at the differences in how we in academia approach theory and value compared to people in other domains. What I say here is not new or novel, but it has been absent from discussions between scholars and practitioners in our field of strategic contracting and negotiations. I close by arguing for closer collaboration between university, government, industry and the third sector in working on complex wicked problems facing societies and economies.

Introduction

As someone who has spent over a decade of his life in the private sector and now over a decade of his life in academia, I can say with at least some legitimacy that the life of an academic is a strange one. Irecall when I looked from the outside, academia seemed a mysterious place and I had a stereotypical view of life in academia as comprising half mad professors dressed in colorful gowns subverting, inspiring and challenging young minds. My actual experience of academic life as a student was quite different. Everyone was rather normal, and aside from some of the really cool doctoral students and recently graduated PhDs not much subversion was being inspired; rather like the mass production of milk for a market, we were being standardized, homogenized and pasteurized. University was normal, if not somewhat boring sometimes. My first degree was a BSocSc (Hons) majoring in Psychology at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney. On occasions I had the eccentric professors who I found inspiring (like Professor Peter Birrell), or suave and charismatic, doing amazing research into mapping the brain (like Professor George Paxinos). Other times it was simply compassionate and caring tutors who, through simple gestures such as offering a little more attention to you when you were struggling as a student, could change the course of your life in a positive way (like Dr Stephanie Moylan did, but who died ever so young). For the most part academia was a strange world to me, and in some ways it continues to be so. However, I can also say with some legitimacy that the world outside of academia is just as strange in its own way.

In this essay I would like to present why I think there is much to be gained in exploiting the elements of strangeness that exist between the “academic” and “non-academic” ¹ diaspora. This essay is aimed at the non-academic so is devoid of some of the elements you would expect if you are a scholar. I will not provide a comprehensive review of key concepts, ideas and theories that various academics use and believe in. This is an essay not a review article, and so it is written as such. In so doing, I hope this essay serves as an impetus for inspiring some level of corrobaree ² to celebrate and make sense of the theories of how our world works; but not just to celebrate them but to also question and to challenge these theories. Specifically I hope it provides you with some talking points to start, continue, or seek to close out conversations about the divide between scholarship in strategy more broadly and contracting and negotiation more specifically. This will perhaps enable you to discuss and argue whether that gap actually exists, why it exists and how we can bridge it in a way that is meaningful.

This essay is partly experiential, in that I engage in anecdotal evidence to construct my arguments. This anecdotal evidence comes from what French Sociologist and Social Theorist, Pierre Bourdieu, refers to as the “feel for the game” (Bourdieu, 1977). By that Bourdieu meant that when agents act upon their instincts, they are actually acting upon their years of accumulated experiences. The hunch or assumptions we make rarely come from nothing or from nowhere. In my case, my assumptions are based on my interactions of thousands of students studying business in MBA and EMBA programs. In addition I draw upon my experience as a researcher during the process of studying strategy of inter-organizational collaboration in the form of mega-projects. That is large-scale, expensive, ambitious and complex projects or programs usually delivered by way of public–private and sometimes third sector collaboration (Flyvbjerg, 2014).

In this essay I focus on two key areas where I see the strangeness of being (there are many more but space precludes me from going into them). What I mean by strangeness of being is that the language we speak may be similar but the experience of these concepts and how we practice them are different and so may seem somewhat strange or foreign in terms of how they are practiced, these being: Theory and Value. I have always believed it is in the strangeness of things where the greatest opportunity lies in working out ways to make shared sense (see the work of Karl Edward Weick on sensemaking – e.g. Weick et al., 2005), and inspire collaboration that can be transformational. Think about how strange it would have sounded to several Americans (especially the Amish) when President John F Kennedy stood up at Rice University giving his historic speech that humanity was going to the moon (underlying this statement was the strangeness of global and internal politics, national identity, dangerously risky dream building and its realization – and a short while later JFK was assassinated).

Theory

As a student in the social sciences, the importance of theory was instilled in me from my first year as an undergraduate. In addition to this, the hours of doctoral research training forced us to seriously and deeply reflect on and consider my “theoretical framework”, my “conceptual model” and my “theoretical contribution”. I doubt there is not a PhD student somewhere at this very moment that does not share with me the experience of lying awake panicking about our theoretical contribution or our theoretical framework. I also doubt there are no PhD students wondering what is actually meant by a theoretical and conceptual framework. This “idea” of theory that dominates scholarly discourse is something that even academics themselves do not necessarily understand. The senior editors of Strategic Management Journal wrote a basic but very informative editorial on theory in strategic management, an article that I highly recommend (Bettis et al., 2014). My thoughts when reading the editorial is that editors seldom write such pieces unless they are experiencing some issues in the sorts of submissions they are receiving – for example, articles which lack or may be devoid of a convincing theoretical backbone, or theoretical contribution and a convincing theoretical story.

A theory is an assumption or set of assumptions about causality. That is, in its simplest form, it is a rational, logical assumption about why things happen, how they happen and can include predictions about what will happen. We all have theories about causality. A head of risk and compliance of a global company based in New York may assume a watertight contract will ensure her suppliers in Xiamen comply. Hence, if relations break down, she will seek to enforce the terms of the contract believing global universal standards are possible and can be followed: there is cause and effect. When it all goes horribly wrong she might change some, or all, of the criteria that frame those assumptions about cause and effect, but most probably she will seek a legal or punitive response. Rather than saying the letter of the law is wrong, and we need to rethink it, we hold onto it with dear life. Of course, it may be the right thing to do, but where is the evidence that it is?

I was once an executive chef, my theories were all about proving that I was correct, as much as possible, about a situation or a decision that I had made or must make under uncertainty (it’s much easier to be certain about your decision under certainty). Theory in the social sciences, however, is quite different. In the social sciences theory means something more specific. Essentially we do not, in principle, seek to prove our theories right or correct (what is known in psychology as ego defense). Theoretically speaking, our aim in the social sciences is to disprove our theories, to systematically show that we may be wrong (that is why science differs to religion). As such, we seldom would say we have proven our hypothesis or propositions – which are predictions or statements about the strength, direction or intensity of our assumptions about causality. Rather we would say that we failed to reject our hypothesis.

These ideas in the social sciences, like many ideas, are an artifact of the pure sciences, although “science” as it is applied in the social sciences is an area historically open to great debate and criticism. There are terms used in the social sciences derived from the sciences (such as objectivity, significance, linear and non-linear for example) that resemble each other only in name, and not in practice (See http://io9.com/10-scientific-ideas-that-scientists-wish-you-would-stop-1591309822). Data gets so manipulated, and methods of analysis so convoluted that the data no longer has the essence of what it is meant to represent: work the data until that rejected hypothesis can be accepted. A theory is something that is open to testing and replicability and subject to failure (the tests can be repeated and the same results should be found – all things being equal). If it cannot be replicated, the theory is wrong and must be changed or dropped. This also applies in practice. It is a rare leader, manager or lawyer who says, “I am wrong” and drops his or her theory. They keep at it until the data says what it needs to say.

In the social sciences not only is replication difficult; many of the journals we seek to publish in will not publish studies which seek to replicate previous studies (see, for example, Open Science Collaboration, 2015). ³ The testing of theory, at least in organization and management theory, seems to be more oriented towards creating new theories, rather than establishing that current theories work. Part of this has to do with a publish or perish mentality – which should really be thought of as publish and perish when the number of publications outweighs the importance of quality.

There also seems to be a reluctance to accept that multiple theories can actually be right in terms of producing workable results, and there is room for several theories to co-exist. For example, there are multiple theories about parallel lines – they are based on different assumptions but all have practical applications. Do parallel lines eventually meet? Do they get further apart? Do they always stay exactly parallel to each other? There are Euclidian and non-Euclidian theories. As long as they serve a pragmatic use, they make sense. The battles in academia are often about who is right, theoretically speaking for a wonderful discussion on this idea (see M. Scott Peck's (1997) The Road Less Traveled and Beyond: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety. Simon & Schuster: London.). In science, particularly pure science, theory is something specific, testable and can be done in a value neutral way. One can study a flower’s structure, a material’s properties and the existence of telomerase, in a way that allows one to be a disinterested observer – objective as to its nature or properties. With this in mind I now turn to value.

Value

In management and organization theory, value neutrality (or objectivity) is a problematic concept. The assumption is that we can study business, government or even the third sector from what appears to be a value neutral or objective stance; however, this assumption ignores the fact that we do so within a particular economic and political context. For example, philanthropy is about rich people giving. As such it presents a level of nobility to the act, but the act is an artifact of the socioeconomic conditions of our times – that wealth is accumulated and concentrated to fewer and fewer people. Or take the word performance. The very word “performance” is a value-laden concept – is performance about profit maximization, or market share, or a successful merger or acquisition, of lean operations or efficiency? Is it none of these, or is it all of these? The reality is that the word is being used in terms of the value inherent in what is being produced. Studying performance requires one to accept that this term exists independent of human invention, and it does not. Performance is never free from its political economy. A follower with an orientation towards Marx – Karl not Groucho – or Adam Smith or Ayn Rand will conceptualize performance in different ways. So, we scholars fight about these assumptions. We obsess about objectivity, subjectivity (that experience is unique to each and every individual) and inter-subjectivity (that experience is the product of one’s own experiences but structured in a social reality of phenomena invented and shared by humans). The battles are about truth, reality, episteme (how we know) and ontos (why we exist). In short, we (should) take our theorizing very seriously.

In everyday life, however, the average MBA and Executive MBA student looks upon our battles and seriousness about theory with bewilderment. If I had a dollar for all the times I have heard, “that sounds good in theory, but in practice the reality is….” What is actually being said to a scholar when such statements are being made? These are questions of inherent value. What is the value of scholarly pursuits? What is being implied, often in very overt ways, is that theory does not matter. Theory is (ironically) not about a search for truth but a fantasy devoid of any practical relevance. However, I can see it from this perspective. When I was a Sous Chef in the Flagg Inn group of hotels a researcher came in to study us. He used several intelligent sounding words, and was keen to describe to us our practices. He was also shocked to find that what we actually did was complex, and that we dealt with a lot of complexity and that we actually performed in a way similar to an ethnographic researcher when we were dealing with problems to be solved. He left and we never heard or saw him again. To this day, as the researcher left, I remember the operations manager turning to me and saying “what the…is he for real?” We scholars can sometimes assume we know better about what it is you are doing, how you are doing it and how you should be doing it. The non-academic’s practice can sometimes be seen as a dumbed down version of our theories.

Standing on the other side of the fence now, I feel like I have taken on the spirit of that researcher – as I deal with remarks very similar to my old operations manager, and as my colleague Stewart Clegg will attest, sometimes worse. This difference in world views regarding theories has major implications in today’s academic environment; and yet this is an area where we can make some great collaborative advances between academics and non-academics. Universities, and especially business schools, are expected to be more efficient, more productive and do more with less. At the same time they must be more relevant to their stakeholders (i.e. business), in order to make a student more employable. The risk here is that universities will one day in the near future no longer be where you go to free up and open your mind to new possibilities of how the world works, and how it can work. They will no longer be the engine rooms of free, dangerous ideas, of experimentation, of risk taking and of both incremental and revolutionary innovations and inventions. They will simply become annexes of what we think business wants, and not what it needs – we will produce manageable, safe, risk aversive automatons. They will be complicit in the demise of a free and vibrant democracy, written about in the works of some of the great pragmatic American and European philosophers, political and social theorists (for example, see for a start the work of William James, Richard Rorty, Hannah Arendt and Richard Sennett, etc.).

This quest for economic efficiency and orientation to profit maximization is not problematic in itself. As a social democrat, for example, I believe in the market, but one that is regulated. Also there are some private universities that produce immense value while carefully balancing a quest for profit with innovation. However, the increasingly dominant narrative of a neo-liberal agenda applied to universities will have implications for a vibrant future.

While much is written about the differences about public and private value, less is known about the value differences between universities and business, and universities and governments. By value I mean the sense making and sense giving, and the strategic intents inherent in what value each of these stakeholders think they need to produce, are able to produce, want to produce and cannot or should not produce. As stated earlier in a different way, however, these actors cannot answer these questions in isolation from one another – the questions and the answers are politically, socially and economically loaded ones.

Get strategic…

I wish to now bring this essay to a close, and to leave you with at least some pragmatic tips so that you can at best experiment with some of the ideas within this essay, or at least agree or disagree with them (I don’t care much if you agree or disagree, as long as I have got you to think). There are many people better than I, actively building collaboration between industry, government, community and university. So I am in no way saying that this is not happening. However, more needs to be done to develop frameworks for productive collaboration that excels in allowing for plurality of ideas and value, but works towards building and testing good theory. Good theory does lead to good practice – be it landing a robot on Mars, a man on the moon, curing mental and physical illness, or perhaps even in negotiating a great outcome, or in designing a contract that enables innovation of the highest order.

I believe with great conviction that one way to break through some of the differences is to work together on wicked problems facing our democracy and our humanity. Of course this requires that you (1) agree that democracy is, as a theory, the one worth advancing, and (2) that a democratic society is best placed to solve such problems through collaboration: a vibrant, free democracy where people’s rights to opportunity are not based on who they were born to, where they went to school, and how well they do and say the right things. With an open innovation policy, the process of collaboration will deliver value for all stakeholders (if carefully managed and driven by “good” theory). Working together on big things puts the little things into perspective, and actually makes them much easier to manage.

To this end most of the strategic problems facing our society (if not humanity) are ones of a “relational quality”, be it relations between people, or people with their technology, or people with their environment. These are the ideal context within which to build partnerships that make an impact in multiple ways in terms of value and benefits to be realized. Be it relationships between or amongst two or more of the following: religions, nation states, businesses, governments, social enterprises, non-governmental organizations, universities, communities, and the list continues. Challenges face us in a global context in terms of how resources are being shared, how services are delivered to their maximum value for the users (be it in health, development, defense, housing, education, industry, international trade, diplomacy), how rights are protected and how relationships are structured, governed and regulated are all big ticket items where at the very least government, university and industry can work together to deliver value through theory, research, resources and practice.

At the IACCM (International Association for Contract and Commercial Management) America’s Forum – where the focus is on people, planet and profit – I hope we all take this as an opportunity as non-academics and academics alike to explore, discuss and debate; and most importantly we can partake in strategic, game changing and problem solving collaboration, collaboration that accepts that our different notions of theory can co-exist and does lead to good practice, and that we do not necessarily need to produce the same sorts of value because value plurality leads to innovation (open innovation).