Mapping causal knowledge: how people consider their environment during meetings

Causal mapping can help managers to think through the causal influence between issues, enabling them to base a decision on a more structured consideration. Even in regular meetings, learning and the integration of knowledge from diverse stakeholders can benefit from causal mapping. Four causal mapping meetings with management teams are analysed to assess how managers thought causally about their environment when strategy-making. We found that although managers can use other views to expand their environmental knowledge, some prefer to use familiar information rather than less familiar information. Despite this preference, many managers thought systemically about a raft of related issues. We discuss our findings in the context of regular meetings and offer improvements to the facilitation of group causal mapping.

The role of meetings in the social practice of strategy

This article addresses the recent turn in strategy research to practice-based theorizing. Based on a data set of 51 meeting observations, the article examines how strategy meetings are involved in either stabilizing existing strategic orientations or proposing variations that cumulatively generate change in strategic orientations. Eleven significant structuring characteristics of strategy meetings are identified and examined with regard to their potential for stabilizing or destabilizing existing strategic orientations. Based on a taxonomy of meeting structures, we explain three typical evolutionary paths through which variations emerge, are maintained and developed, and are selected or de-selected. The findings make four main contributions. First, they contribute to the literature on strategy-as-practice by explaining how the practice of meetings is related to consequential strategic outcomes. Second, they contribute to the literature on organizational becoming by demonstrating the role of meetings in shaping stability and change. Third, they extend and elaborate the concept of meetings as strategic episodes. Fourth, they contribute to the literature on garbage can models of strategy-making.

The 'law of requisite variety' may assist climate change negotiations:a review of the Kyoto and Durban meetings

Ashby wrote about cybernetics, during which discourse he described a Law that attempts to resolve difficulties arising in complex situations – he suggested using variety to combat complexity. In this paper, we note that the delegates to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Kyoto, 1997, were offered a ‘simplifying solution’ to cope with the complexity of discussing multiple pollutants allegedly contributing to ‘climate change’. We assert that the adoption of CO2eq has resulted in imprecise thinking regarding the ‘carbon footprint’ – that is, ‘CO2’ – to the exclusion of other pollutants. We propose, as Ashby might have done, that the CO2eq and other factors within the ‘climate change’ negotiations be disaggregated to allow careful and specific individual solutions to be agreed on each factor. We propose a new permanent and transparent ‘action group’ be in charge of agenda setting and to manage the messy annual meetings. This body would be responsible for achieving accords at these annual meetings, rather than forcing this task on national hosts. We acknowledge the task is daunting and we recommend moving on from Ashby's Law to Beer's Viable Systems approach.