New Instruments for Management Research

Abstract

The growing acceptance and emphasis on interactive decision support systems (DSSs), and executive support systems (ESSs) built with expert systems software, has brought forward a need to better understand how managers actually go about producing or constructing their decisions. This is an exciting development because the DSSs show the need for a new management research paradigm.

DSSs are constructed to show the essence of the decision and planning problems we try to solve with computer support; this is sometimes described as modelling the internal logic of the problems, which is a straightforward application of the analysis paradigm well known from operations research. Experience with DSSs shows that the internal logic can be formulated only in what Simon called well-structured problems. Even if we normally manage to formulate problems in such a fashion that they appear well-structured, there still remains a growing uneasiness with the trade-off between precision and relevance.

Zeleny recently suggested the metaphor of cognitive equilibrium as a basis for a better descriptive understanding of human decision making: a decision is an emergent pattern properly balancing all components of the decision. This metaphor is useful for dealing with semi- or ill-structured problems, for which no internal logic can be formulated. Without a logical pattern it is improper to tackle a problem with mathematical tools, as the resulting representation would induce a non-existing structure on the problem.

We need a methodological framework for the cognitive equilibrium, and we need research instruments, which – unlike mathematical models – can deal with semi- or ill-structured problems. We will show that a proper methodological framework can be constructed around Vickers' appreciative systems concept, and that it can be implemented with expert systems.