- Item type
- Periodical
- Language
- English
- Source
- Harvard Business Review. Sep/Oct2017, Vol. 95 Issue 5, p128-135. 8p. 4 Illustrations.
- Publication year
- 2017
- ISSN
- 00178012
The idea that management is a hard science, which MBA programs have promoted for the past six decades, has become even more entrenched in the era of big data. But a scientific approach has its limits, say Martin, the coauthor of the best seller Playing to Win, and consultant Golsby- Smith. In fact, overreliance on scientific analysis tends to narrow strategic options and shut down innovation. That’s because it’s designed to understand natural phenomena that cannot be changed. It’s not an effective way to evaluate possibilities—things that do not yet exist. The two authors offer an alternative approach to strategy making and innovation that relies on imagination, experimentation, and communication. To make decisions about what could be, managers should devise narratives about possible futures, using the storytelling tools first proposed by Aristotle (who ironically also originated the scientific method). If executives then hypothesize what would have to be true for those narratives to happen and validate their hypotheses through prototyping, they can determine which narrative has the most compelling chance of success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
