William H. Starbuck

Camping on Seesaws: Prescriptions for a Self-Designing Organization

This article prescribes how an organization can meet social and technological changes and reap advantage from them. Long-term viability maximizes in a self-designing organization, in which those who perform activities take primary responsibility for learning and for inventing new methods, and in which nonparticipant designers restrict themselves to a catalytic role. Designers can form such an organization by putting together processes, the generators of behaviors. Although complex interactions among processes make designers’ forecasts unreliable, people can mitigate serious future problems by keeping processes dynamically balanced. Six aphorisms caricature the desired balance: Cooperation requires minimal consensus; Satisfaction rests upon minimal contentment; Wealth arises from minimal affluence; Goals merit minimal faith; Improvement depends on minimal consistency; Wisdom demands minimal rationality.

To Avoid Organizational Crises, Unlearn

Crises force organizations to replace top managers, so top managers should try to avoid crises through continuous unlearning. The authors suggest ways in which top managers can help themselves unlearn.

Organizations as Action Generators

Most of the time, organizations generate actions unreflectively and nonadaptively. To justify their actions, organizations create problems, successes, threats and opportunities. These are ideological molecules that mix values, goals, expectations, perceptions, theories, plans, and symbols. The molecules form while people are result watching, guided by the beliefs that they should judge results good or bad, look for the causes of results, and propose needs for action. Because Organizations modify their behavior programs mainly in small increments that make sense to top managers, they change too little and inappropriately, and nearly all organizations disappear within a few years.

How Much Better Are the Most-Prestigious Journals? The Statistics of Academic Publication

Articles in high-prestige journals receive more citations and more applause than articles in less-prestigious journals, but how much more do these articles contribute to knowledge?This article uses a statistical theory of review processes to draw inferences about differences value between articles in more-prestigious versus less-prestigious journals. This analysis indicates that there is much overlap in articles in different prestige strata. Indeed, theory implies that about half of the articles published are not among the best ones submitted to those journals, and some of the manuscripts that belong in the highest-value 20% have the misfortune to elicit rejections from as many as five journals.Some social science departments and business schools strongly emphasize publication in prestigious journals. Although one can draw inferences about an authors average manuscript from the percentage in top-tier journals, the confidence limits for such inferences are wide. A focus on prestigious journals may benefit the most prestigious departments or schools but add randomness to the decisions of departments or schools that are not at the very top. Such a focus may also impede the development of knowledge when mediocre research receives the endorsement of high visibility.

Learning to Design Organizations and Learning from Designing Them

The academic focus of organization studies has unfortunately drifted over the years from the issues that organizations pose for their members and their societies, and the issues that confront people who seek to improve organizations. However, studies of efforts to design organizations can help us to better understand organizations and may also help us to improve them. The papers in this special issue of Organization Science describe several specific efforts to design organizations, telling why people wanted to make changes and what happened when people sought to make them.

Turning Lemons into Lemonade Where Is the Value in Peer Reviews

Authors need to view reviewers’ comments not as judgments about the value of their work, but as good data about potential readers of their articles. The editorial review process does have deficiencies, the most serious being that reviewers should decide what articles warrant publication. “Peer review” should mean that reviewers and authors are indeed peers. However, editors typically act as if reviewers have more competence and more valid opinions than authors, and as if they themselves have the wisdom and knowledge to impose constraints on manuscripts. Empirical evidence indicates that editorial decisions incorporate bias and randomness. However, authors need to persuade potential readers to read their articles and that authors’ ideas and theories are plausible and useful. Authors must adapt their manuscripts to readers’ perceptual frameworks. Nevertheless, authors should remember that editors and reviewers are not superior and that the ultimate decisions about what is right must come from inside themselves.

When is play productive

Play at work is not a contradiction in terms. Rather, distinctions between work and play are becoming less clear as more jobs involve expertise and microcomputers. This paper starts by describing play, its motives, and its consequences. Then the paper focuses on computer-based activities and suggests guidelines for activities and situations where play can enhance productivity. These guidelines should interest both software designers and those who choose software. The guidelines also generalize to work without computers.

Innocents in the Forest: Forecasting and Research Methods

This article presents guidelines for making forecasts and draws inferences about research techniques. Inertia produces highly autocorrelated time series in which random events have lasting effects. Such series make it easy to draw incorrect inferences about causal processes. They also make it easy to predict accurately over the short run, using variants of linear extrapolation. In forecasting, simplicity usually works better than complexity. Complex forecasting methods mistake random noise for information. Moderate expertise proves as effective as great expertise. Linear functions make better judgments than people. Analogous principles probably apply to research. Three common myths do not stand up to scrutiny: One, using fewer categories does not reduce the effects of observational errors. Two, least-squares regression does not produce reliable findings. Three, better fitting models do not predict better, even in the very short run, if researchers use squared errors to measure fits to historical data and forecasting accuracies. However, better fitting models would predict better if researchers would replace squared-error criteria with more reliable measures.

PERSPECTIVE---Researchers Should Make Thoughtful Assessments Instead of Null-Hypothesis Significance Tests

Null-hypothesis significance tests (NHSTs) have received much criticism, especially during the last two decades. Yet many behavioral and social scientists are unaware that NHSTs have drawn increasing criticism, so this essay summarizes key criticisms. The essay also recommends alternative ways of assessing research findings. Although these recommendations are not complex, they do involve ways of thinking that many behavioral and social scientists find novel. Instead of making NHSTs, researchers should adapt their research assessments to specific contexts and specific research goals, and then explain their rationales for selecting assessment indicators. Researchers should show the substantive importance of findings by reporting effect sizes and should acknowledge uncertainty by stating confidence intervals. By comparing data with naive hypotheses rather than with null hypotheses, researchers can challenge themselves to develop better theories. Parsimonious models are easier to understand, and they generalize more reliably. Robust statistical methods tolerate deviations from assumptions about samples.

Perspective---Cognitive Reactions to Rare Events: Perceptions, Uncertainty, and Learning

Research provides some observations about learning from events that appear to be rare or quite unusual. All learning has uncertain consequences, but learning from rare events is especially problematic. Learners see many idiosyncrasies and exogenous interference, tendencies that suppress learning on an organizational scale. Rare events also rouse uncertainty and bring on reactions to uncertainty such as wishful thinking, reliance on prior beliefs, biased probabilities, a search for more data, cautious action, and playing to audiences. The most important contingencies affecting these reactions are the content and strength of prior beliefs: people are unlikely to learn if they think they have nothing to learn. Although learning from rare events is statistically unusual, and effective learning from rare events is rare, both individuals and organizations can benefit significantly from active efforts to learn from rare events.