Toggling Between Two Worlds:
Making Sense of Organizational Change
“And twofold always. May God us keep
From single vision and Newton’s sleep.”
William Blake
It is forty years since the Harvard Business Review published my first (and only) piece of writing for them. The article, Of Boxes, Bubbles and Effective Management[i] outlined the transformational experience our corporation had been through after it had been acquired in a wildly overleveraged buyout on the eve of a steep recession.
The founding family’s attempt to sell their controlling, but minority, stake in the business had precipitated a full-blown takeover fight, which resulted in new owners who tried to take the company private via a leveraged buy-out. They failed to do this on the eve of what turned out to be the deepest recession since the Great Depression and the highest interest rates ever experienced in North America. We went insolvent overnight but owed the banks so much money that it was their problem, not just ours.
My article told the detailed story of what had happened, how we had muddled through, dealing with our challenges and what the implications of our eventual survival and success were for management. I approached this task by balancing a then-popular ‘hard’ management model with a ‘soft’ counterpart. This allowed a Taoist ‘yin-yang’ interpretation of our experience. For to me it seemed as if we had switched from a hard, ‘yang’ structure to a softer ‘yin’ process, although not in any unilateral, unconditional way. It had been like a figure-ground reversal with crisis as the catalyst.
As the corporate agenda changed abruptly from that of an acquisition-hungry, performance-driven enterprise to that of a cash-starved wreck, the priority was survival. With the old guard gone, the conventional hierarchical organization retreated into the background to be replaced with a network of small project teams. The projects were directed at the “emergencies”, in our case nineteen situations requiring urgent attention. None of them fitted into anyone’s job description. Nineteen project teams were despatched into the field to find out what was happening and what we should do about it. It was as if we had gone through a managerial looking-glass and everything was topsy-turvy. Instead of a management downward focus on tasks and results, all our attention and resources were directed upward at how best to support our people and their relationships in the field. Here they flourished under the new arrangements.
It was as if the conventional organizational hierarchy had been turned upside down:
The Taoist yin-yang symbol suggests that the ‘yang’ component never went away. Rather, it was held in abeyance for use only in situations that demanded it[1]. Whether you would need it or not all depended on the context.
My opening proposition in the article was, “Two models are better than one.”
The Beginning of the Quest
Personally, this tumultuous experience had helped me realize that my real management competence was helping people make sense of what Russel Ackoff has called ‘messes’ — intractable, apparently insoluble challenges, that twist and squirm as you try to grasp them. With the HBR article I discovered that I could write and had something to say. After another eight years at the company, during which time things had got a lot tamer and the formal hierarchy had returned to the foreground, I set off to become a management educator.
The intellectual journey took me from Taoist philosophy through systems theory and ecology to the social sciences, complexity theory and philosophy in general, as I tried to understand why what we had done had (more or less) ‘worked’. I knew it all depended on context which then, as now, was virtually ignored by mainstream Anglo-American management[2]. Early on in my hunt I had encountered the writings of Karl Weick, a sensemaking pioneer, who understood importance of context. I liked them but wasn’t entirely sure where everything fitted. Now, as I start to sum up the results of a forty-year quest, I think I know a lot more.
Sensemaking
Sensemaking in organizations addresses two important managerial questions: “What’s going on here?” and “What do I/we do next?”. Nothing unusual about that. But the philosophical assumptions which many sensemaking frameworks are based on are quite different from those of mainstream Anglo-American management[3]. Sensemaking doesn’t view social reality as a ‘given’ to be examined in a scientifically rational, quantitative way. There is no privileged, ‘objective’, God’s-eye view of social reality. Instead, sensemaking sees reality as a rolling construction, a product of our own collective perception, action, emotion and cognition: an exercise in practical rationality. According to Weick, “The basic idea of sensemaking is that reality is an ongoing accomplishment that emerges from efforts to create order and make retrospective sense of what occurs”[ii]. Thus, sensemaking is embodied, it involves action and the mindful noticing of certain cues from the environment that can then be interpreted using a variety of useful sensemaking frameworks.
For the last forty years I have been working with an ecological framework that is a particularly useful platform for making narrative sense of the world, so that one can act in it[4]. It helps focus one’s attention and functions as a catalyst for conversation (for background see Appendix 1).
The Ecocycle: The Trajectory of Complex Social Systems
The ecological sensemaking framework serves as the scaffolding for an extensive analogy applied to complex human systems. A colleague, Brenda Zimmerman, and I called this the ‘ecocycle’[iii]:
From this ecological perspective, enterprises are conceived in passion, born in communities of trust and practice, grow through the application of reason and mature in power[5]. Here they tend to get stuck, which sets them up for crisis and destruction, but with the possibility of renewal. The result is a trajectory that shows how a small, entrepreneurial, networked supporting organization can become a large, hierarchical reporting organization and then struggle to change back again. It’s an old story.[iv]
The Front Loop
The front loop (solid line) of the ecocycle begins with the entrepreneurship that results in the conception and birth of start-ups, what Steve Blank describes as temporary organizations “built to search for a repeatable, scalable business model”[6]. This demands a process of constant improvisation in complex situations that promote the possibilities of discovery and emergence. The founders may be working on the project only in their spare time before they decide to dropout from school or college and devote their full time to it. Even then, everything will be uncertain and nascent enterprises can easily get caught in an innovation or poverty trap.
Most entrepreneurial efforts are stillborn, but the few that survive can enter the scale-upprocess and the emergence of strategic management. This phase consists of a steady process of extension and rationalization of what’s working — strategy is emergent. The focus is now on exploiting economies of scale and increasing efficiency, rather than enabling emergence. The organizational focus is steadily narrowed and conversations become channeled. Improvisation is replaced by standardization, as good practices are discovered and enabling constraints are introduced that allow for greater efficiency. Often this includes the adoption of off-the-shelf solutions and even “best practices” and the hiring of people for their technical expertise and experience in larger companies. This will dilute the founding culture with those of more established firms. If the enterprise goes public to raise finance during this scale-up process, there will be additional requirements for formal quarterly reporting in standardized formats. Slowly the enterprise becomes more specialized and machine-like, as a formal power hierarchy of command-and-control emerges.
By the time the enterprise reaches the stage of a large public company the founders have often left, with their original vision long since achieved or even surpassed. Their places will have been taken by professional managers who may bring with them mainstream assumptions about the nature of management. They will apply the finishing touches to the enterprise’s business model. They have entered the conservation mode.
What were once means-to-an-end have become ends-in-themselves: the efficient functioning of the organizational machine and the control of accumulated resources. People derive their status and power from their positions in a command-and-control hierarchy. Strategy will tend to be incremental and formulated top-down. Organizational attention and conversations will be preoccupied with performance measurement and compensation. So-called ‘masculinity contests’[7] and turf wars may break out. Major change may be seen as subversive of an apparently successful status quo. With stock price-based compensation prevalent at the top, the organization can become stuck in a rigidity or power trap. The firm has become a model of the environment designed to minimize surprise. This is often accompanied by a loss of peripheral vision and an inability to detect and act on the straws-in-the-wind, the weak signals that presage big trouble. The firm may last for years, mired in mediocrity and confusion, but eventually it becomes an accident waiting to happen. Crisis and destruction are at hand….
The Back Loop
On the back loop (dotted line) of the ecocycle, large-scale, successful organizations focused on producing results from well-established processes struggle to behave like natural ecosystems[v]. A top-down stress on economies of scale encourages managers to keep their people’s attentions focused on the tasks at hand and restrict conversations within the organization to their achievement. Their time is taken up with budgets and targets, the measurement of results and performance management. These actions restrict any innovation dynamics. The result is that mature institutions tend to spin in rigidity or power traps, lurching from crisis to crisis but never entering the back loop of the ecocycle.
Very rarely incumbent management may realize that major change is required and have the resources and creative leadership skills to make it happen. At Intel, in the early 1980s, founders Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore and early employee Andy Grove recognized that Random Access Memories (RAM) (on which the business had been founded) had become a commodity and that they needed to switch to microprocessors. This is extremely unusual: most firms do not have major innovations like microprocessors waiting in the wings. Incumbent management have generally lost their peripheral vision and are blind-sided. Often it takes an external threat such as a hostile takeover or a steep recession to precipitate the crisis and the removal of the old guard: all those managers whose investment has been in the status quo. This was, of course, the experience my organization went through.
The Adaptive Space
The perils of both the innovation (poverty) and power (rigidity) traps and the difficulties that enterprises have in escaping them suggests that it would be best to either avoid them or at least anticipate them. Every enterprise has to go through the innovation trap at least once. After that it would be best to try and dwell in the adaptive space between the twin traps, never being so bereft of new ideas that one falls into the innovation trap, nor being so rigid and efficiency-minded that one gets stuck in a rigidity trap. The adaptive space is a proverbial ‘Goldilocks Zone’, where the conditions are just right for the enterprise and its people to flourish.
The size and shape of the zone and the dynamics within it will vary from firm to firm and technology to technology. An integrated steel mill offers far fewer opportunities for flexible organization and innovation than a software start-up, although many do exist. But staying in the zone will never be a simple see-saw balance. It will demand a dynamic equilibrium, a constant ‘toggling’ of ‘yang’ with ‘yin’, at many scales, constantly weaving to and fro between apparently irreconcilable poles: stability and change, discipline and freedom, deliberation and spontaneity and so on and on.[8]
The Microsoft Story
One of the best-known documented examples of a CEO trying (and apparently succeeding) to move a large firm ‘back’ into the adaptive space is that of Satya Nadella after he was appointed CEO of Microsoft in 2014. At the time observers of the company were describing the previous ten years as a ‘lost decade’.
As the diagram illustrates, the stock market crashed shortly after Steve Ballmer was appointed CEO in 2000. He introduced a series of top-down initiatives to reduce costs, including the collaboration-killing ‘rank and yank’ approach to performance management advocated by Jack Welch of GE. Kurt Eichenwald, wrote in a Vanity Fair article in 2012, “The story of Microsoft’s lost decade could serve as a business-school case study on the pitfalls of success. For what began as a lean competition machine led by young visionaries of unparalleled talent has mutated into something bloated and bureaucracy-laden, with an internal culture that unintentionally rewards managers who strangle innovative ideas that might threaten the established order of things.
By the dawn of the millennium…. life behind the thick corporate walls had become staid and brutish. Fiefdoms had taken root, and a mastery of internal politics emerged as key to career success…. Staffers were rewarded not just for doing well but for making sure that their colleagues failed. As a result, the company was consumed by an endless series of internal knife fights. Potential market-busting businesses — such as e-book and smartphone technology — were killed, derailed, or delayed amid bickering and power plays.”
Satya Nadella, who believes in empathy as an “invisible and universal value”, set about returning Microsoft to its core values. He spent much of his first year listening and learning, practising the non-violent communication of Marshall Rosenberg[vi] (who was influenced by Gandhi) that encourages empathy. Nadella selected women to play key roles, saying to one of them, “I’ve seen you work with others, and you treat them well. You show respect. I want my office to be about the culture we are trying to create and not about power.”[vii] He worked hard to turn people around from being inward focused to outward, with their attention directed toward customers and developments in Silicon Valley. At the same time, he disrupted the formal hierarchical structure, inviting people with exciting ideas and perspectives to senior management retreats. All of these represent a serious attempt to move ‘left’ on the ecocycle, out of the rigidity trap in which Microsoft was becoming stuck, and back into the adaptive space.
Why We Need Two Models
In The Witch Doctors: Making Sense of the Management Gurus (1996)[9] John Micklethwait (former editor-in-chief of The Economist, now of Bloomberg News) and Adrian Wooldridge (Former Schumpeter columnist for The Economist, now Bagehot columnist) identified four defects in management theory:
1. That it was constitutionally incapable of self-criticism.
2. Its terminology confuses rather than educates.
3. It rarely rises above common sense.
4. It is faddish and bedeviled by contradictions.
After declaring management theory “guilty” on all charges in various degrees, they went on to identify the root cause of the problem as an “intellectual confusion at the heart of management theory; it has become not so much a coherent discipline as a battleground between two radically opposed philosophies. Management theorists usually belong to one of two rival schools. Each of which is inspired by a different philosophy of nature; and management practice has oscillated wildly between these two positions.” They went on to identify the two schools as scientific management on the one hand and humanistic management on the other, concluding that, “This, in essence, is the debate between “hard” and “soft” management.”
We Are the Battleground
It’s time to identify this “intellectual confusion” as a feature of both humans and organizations, not a ‘bug’. It’s time to recognize that our fundamentally divided nature is the essence of our humanity and that it is the practical weaving together of apparently irreconcilable opposites that is the very warp and woof of our existence. The roots of this split are in the need for living creatures to be able, in real time, both to focus on a task at hand and to remain aware of peripheral threats, to live simultaneously in two ‘worlds’[viii]. These two tasks must be performed together, yet they demand different kinds of attention and different contexts (the one individual and the other collective). The result is an asymmetrical architecture that goes a long way down the tree of phylogeny. This suggests that it must have significant survival benefits.
This fundamental duality, spirals through our existence as individuals, families, communities, organizations and societies and throughout our history as a species. It has grown in complexity as our languages, cultures and institutions have grown more complex. Like the twin arms of a double helix it also coils through philosophy in general and the history of management thought in particular. Here the dualities are familiar: exploitation and exploration, calculation and judgement, individual and team, performance and learning, detachment and immersion, mechanical and organic and so on and on.
That’s why we need two models in a Taoist yin-yang relationship to understand organizational change and make sense of our experience.
Reconciliation in Ecology
There will always be a tension between the scientific and the humanistic, but there need not be a battle. We can render the tension creative rather than destructive if we can frame it in a higher-level understanding of the dynamics of life in a real world[ix].
The adaptive cycle/panarchy framework (Appendix 1) offers just such an opportunity for reconciliation. It and its ecocycle derivatives outline what a dynamic ecological balance might look like between various polarities, creating a unity of opposites. Applied to complex human systems, the ecocycle requires dual-process or two-factor models of human cognition (see Appendix 2 for examples). This double feature of our minds has been noted by many observers over millennia, but recently and notably by psychologist, the late Daniel Kahneman.[x] Although the twin minds have many names, following some other cognitive scientists, he called them System 1 and System 2. System 1 a.k.a. ‘intuition’ is also known as the adaptive unconscious. It works fast, effortlessly and associatively and it is often emotionally charged. System 2 a.k.a. ‘reasoning’ is slower, conscious, effortful and deliberately controlled. It often follows rules. System 1 is not really a single system, but a collection of ‘apps’ cobbled together by evolution. It is thought to be the kind of thinking that we share with other animals. System 2, on the other hand, is assumed by many to be unique to humans.
There is a debate between dual-process theorists.[xi] Default-interventionists, like Kahneman, argue that humans favour the automatic type 1 heuristic processes over the slower Type 2 analytic ones. This, he suggests, can lead to harmful biases and poor decision-making. The parallel-competitive theorists, on the other hand, contend that the two processes operate in parallel and compete for the control of thinking and action. A key difference may be the situation and experience of the managers involved. There is evidence that experienced entrepreneurs in familiar contexts can make effective use of intuition and analysis in concert, ‘toggling’ between the two, as the situation demands.[xii] This finding is supported by Gary Klein’s work on experts’ use of ‘naturalistic decision making’ under dynamic conditions with time pressure, ill-defined goals and critical outcomes.[xiii]
The Role of Reason (Rationality)
The emphasis that sensemaking places on both processes in dual-factor models raises another challenge to Anglo-American management orthodoxy. This is the Argumentative Theory of Reason, first proposed by researcher, Hugo Mercier and sociologist, Dan Sperber in 2011[xiv]. They contend that reason did not evolve to allow individuals to make better decision but to allow them to make better arguments in a group context in support of decisions that they had reached through largely unconscious processes. In other words, they used the logic from System 2 to rationalize, and thus justify, decisions made using System 1. This tallies with my experience, working with CEOs, especially since the advent of automated spreadsheets. Too often CEOs would decide that they wanted to make a particular deal and then demand that assumptions be found to support formal recommendations to the board. The result was usually spectacularly bad deals! The ubiquity of policy-based evidence, rather than evidence-based policy, both in business and government, would seem to bolster the argumentative theory of reason.
An Ecological View of Management
As we have seen, the assumptions that sensemaking frameworks make about the nature of reality and what it means to be human are in tension with those of mainstream Anglo-American management. The latter aren’t ‘wrong’ but have been pushed too far and taken into areas where they don’t belong. They claim to be universal when everything is dependent on context. They appeal to our systemizing mind, while ignoring the empathizing one.[xv] The mainstream doesn’t care. This is where a dual-process theory of cognition and emotion helps with its both…and approach, rather than either/or. It can embrace and contain the mainstream and keep it in its proper place.
This is how we can connect management practice, which is always singular and unique, with theory, which describes the world in terms of rules, generalizations and universals. It is how to approach the debate between ‘relevance’ and ‘rigour’ that has plagued the management academics for so long. It is to handle paradoxes and dilemmas like these that evolution has equipped us with bicameral minds, minds that can ‘toggle’ rapidly between the two modes of perception, between two different ‘worlds’. In management we can think of it is as instrumental search for explanation/cause-and-effect (to earn a living) conducted within the existential quest for purpose/meaning (to live our lives). This thought is expressed in the diagram below:
Forty years ago I called the two worlds ‘boxes’ and ‘bubbles’. My recommendation to managers then was that “You have to find the bubble in the box and put the box in the bubble”. That is still good advice.
The table, “A Dual-Process, Ecological View of Management”, expands on this idea by showing some of the key management polarities in a different format: an individual, instrumental search for explanation (right side) conducted within a collective, existential quest for purpose (left side). The central barrier between the left and righthand columns is permeable with infinity loop/adaptive cycle connectors to emphasize the nature of the ‘dancing’ ecological balance between the two that plays out in space and time. At the organizational level the challenge for managers is to toggle between the two modes as the situation demands, keeping the enterprise in the adaptive space, the ‘Goldilocks Zone’, between the extremes.
The journey continues….
Appendix 1 The Adaptive Cycle and Panarchy
The adaptive cycle/panarchy framework was developed originally by Canadian ecologist C.S. “Buzz” Holling, based on patterns he had noticed in his study of ecosystems like forests and estuaries[xvi]. It consists of a nested hierarchy of ecosystems, a “panarchy”, each with the same adaptive cycle running within it, but at different speeds and scales. The bigger, slower levels constrain those beneath them, while the smaller, faster levels disrupt those above.
The resulting hierarchy of nested, adaptive cycles is a tri-level (macro-meso-micro) hierarchy of constraints, not a hierarchy of command-and-control. Understanding the difference between the two is important. In a hierarchy of command-and-control the ‘top’ tells the ‘bottom’ what to do and how to do it. There is no room for deviance from standard procedures and routines. In a hierarchy of constraints the upper levels create adaptive spaces in which the lower levels have room to learn and the discretion to act. The result is distributed control of the system. The ‘Whats’ are expressed in the form of a cascading set of outcomes or intentions that form the boundaries of the spaces, but don’t specify how they are to be achieved. At the same time, the lower levels have the capacity to disrupt those above them.
This arrangement satisfies Peter Drucker’s advice that: “A decision should always be made at the lowest possible level and as close to the scene of action as possible. Moreover, decisions should always be made at a level, (e)nsuring that all activities and objectives affected are fully considered.” [xvii]
The Adaptive Cycle
Complex ecosystems, like forests and estuaries, go through a constant process of birth, growth, destruction and renewal. At the core of the ecological perspective is the adaptive cycle which captures the essentials of this dynamic. The resulting trajectories are shaped like infinity loops or Moebius strips. The dimensions of the adaptive cycle are scale (or potential) on the vertical axis and system connectedness (from ‘looser’ to ‘tighter’) on the horizontal one. One can think of time as a third dimension, coming out of the picture toward you.
The cycle goes through two very different sequences and four distinct phases: exploitation and growth, conservation and constraint on a slow ‘front loop’, destruction and release and reorganization and emergence on a fast ‘back loop’. The result is a grand narrative of ecological change.
I first read Holling’s work in the early 1990s and I realized that his frameworks could be used to understand the trajectories of complex human organizations, and particularly our own management experience ten years earlier. The result was a book, Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change[xviii], also published by Harvard in 1995.
Panarchy and Levels: Ecological and Social Applications
Holling’s panarchy framework can also be used as a scaffold on which to construct a multi-level model — micro-meso-macro (or more) — running from the smallest, fastest processes up to the larger, slower systems at the planetary level and higher. This makes for a much larger inquiry that can bring in many different models from different disciplines to focus attention and guide conversations.
Unfortunately, an outline of that is beyond the scope of this introductory essay. But such a large, multi-level application of Holling’s ecological framework may well resonate with a recent call from the management academy for a social-ecological approach to management learning and education (MLE)[xix].
The editors of the Academy of Management Learning & Education accuse mainstream MLE of “teaching narrow and mechanistic approaches to business and economics, fostering ’a culture of greed’”. Firstly, they urge management educators to “to examine the telos (i.e. purpose) of MLE”. Secondly, they contend that “Management theory has largely been grounded in Western philosophies assuming a human-nature duality, such as Cartesian thinking and the Enlightenment’s rationality (that) have given rise to mechanistic assumptions, implying the separation between economic, societal, and environmental domains.” They say that MLE must bring different philosophical approaches into the classroom. Thirdly, they call for collaboration across disciplines, noting that, despite calls in the past for multi-disciplinary approaches, little progress has been made. Fourthly, they ask for a critical examination of the teaching content of MLE as well as what is not taught. Lastly, they appeal for new ‘critical’ and ‘phronetic’[10]methods of teaching.
I would venture to suggest that an application of Holling’s adaptive cycle/panarchy framework and the use of its ecocycle derivatives in a sensemaking role in MLE would be capable of handling such challenges.
[1] People at Gore & Associates call this ‘hierarchy-on-demand’, when the formal hierarchy, instead of being permanent, becomes contingent on the situation.
[2] In the last decade this has started to change, see: Hodgkinson et al. (2023), “The Heuristics and Biases of Top Managers: Past, Present, and Future”, Journal of Management Studies, 60, July 2023
[3] For example, ecological psychology on which this framework is based is inspired by American Pragmatism, Gestalt Psychology and Phenomenology, among other influences.
[4] I agree with Jonathan Haidt that the human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor (Haidt, J., (2012) The Righteous Mind, Pantheon Books, Random House, New York, N.Y.
[5] The three phases are based on Kenneth Boulding’s three catalysts for collaboration: Threat, Integration and Exchange (Boulding, K.E., (1981), Ecodynamics, Sage Publications, Beverly Hills, CA.). ‘Power’ (threat) here means domination, what Mary Parker Follett called ‘power over’. Both ‘passion’ (integration) and ‘reason’ (exchange) are forms of power and the boundaries between the phases really mark a shift from one form of power to another.
[6] https://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-principles/
[7] Berdahl, J.L., Glick, P. and Cooper, M. “How Masculinity Contests Undermine Organizations, and What to Do About It”, Harvard Business Review, Nov. 2, 2018.
[8] Louis, M. R. and Sutton, R. I. (1991). ‘Switching cognitive gears: From habits of mind to active thinking’. Human Relations, 44, 55–76.
[9] The Witch Doctors was updated by Adrian Wooldridge in Masters of Management (2011). The major conclusions were unchanged.
[10] Phronesis was Aristotle’s word for an intellectual virtue that deals with concerns for ethics in practice and what is good or bad for mankind. Two other virtues were episteme (science) and techne (craft or art).
[i] Hurst, D.K., (1984), “Of Boxes, Bubbles and Effective Management”, Harvard Business Review. May-June, p.78–88.
[ii] Weick, K.E. (1979), The Social Psychology of Organizing 2nd ed., Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
[iii] Hurst, D.K., and Zimmerman, B.J., (1994), “From Life Cycle to Ecocycle: A New Perspective on the Growth, Maturity, Destruction and Renewal of Complex Systems”, Journal of Management Inquiry, Volume 3, №4, December.
[iv] Hurst, D.K., (1991), “Cautionary Tales from the Kalahari: How Hunters become Herders (and may have trouble changing back again), Academy of Management Executive, Vol.5, №3, p. 74–86.
[v] Hurst, D.K., (2020), “Forces of Nature”, Strategy+Business, Summer, Issue 99, p.58–67.
[vi] Rosenberg, M., (2003), Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life, Puddledancer Press.
[vii] Ibarra, H., Rattan, A., and Johnston, A.,“Satya Nadella at Microsoft”, London Business School Case LBS Ref: CS-18–008
[viii] McGilchrist, I., (2009), The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
[ix] Hurst, D.K., (2012), The New Ecology of Leadership, Columbia University Press New York, N.Y.
[x] Kahneman, D., (2011), Thinking Fast and Slow, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, New York, N.Y.
[xi] Hodginson, G.P. et al. (2023), “The Heuristics and Biases of Top Managers: Past, Present, and Future”, Journal of Management Studies, 60, 1033–1063.
[xii] Baldacchino, L., Ucbasaran, D. and Cabantous, L. (2023), ‘Linking experience to intuition and cognitive versatility in new venture ideation: A dual-process perspective’. Journal of Management Studies, 60, 1105–46.
[xiii] Klein, P., (1998), Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press
[xiv] Mercier, H. and Sperber, D. (2011), Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory. Behav. Brain Sci. 34, 57–74
[xv] Baron-Cohen, S., (2009), “Autism: The Empathizing-Systemizing (E-S) Theory” The Year in Cognitive Science, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1156: 68–80.
[xvi] Gunderson, L.H. and Holling, C.S., (2002), Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems, Island Press.
[xvii] Drucker, P.F., (1954), The Practice of Management, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, N.Y. p.199.
[xviii] Hurst, D.K., (1995), Crisis & Renewal: Meeting the Challenge of Organizational Change, Harvard Business School Press, Cambridge, Mass.
[xix] Columbo, L., Moser, C., and Muehlfeld, K., (2024), “Sowing the Seeds of Change: Calling for a Social-Ecological Approach to Management Learning and Education”, Academy of Management Learning & Education, Vol. 00, 1–7.
