Prerecorded session Live session tba Overview My session will focus on how play helps scholars and organizations learn when the world is complex, unclear, and hard to understand. This topic has had a deep impact on me because it shaped how I made sense of complicated data in my own work on rare events and failure. When I first read “Ambiguity and Choice” by March and Olsen, we were struggling to make sense of adverse event data in medical devices. I chose this data because I thought it would...

Prerecorded session Live session tba Overview The lecture flips the usual question of innovation research. Rather than asking how firms create new things, I ask why firms so often fail to use the valuable things they have already discovered. Across three empirical cases (artists in the music industry, ideas at Samsung, oncology drugs), the same pattern emerges: the organization that discovers a valuable innovation often hinders its own use of that innovation. I read this through the...

Prerecorded session This session will happen only in live format. Live session tba Overview Ronald Klingebiel reports on the implications for organizational learning of features of the kind of uncertainty found in strategy and organization. Such uncertainty comes in samples, varying degrees, and rarely alone. Decision makers appear sensitive to the statistical confidence (posterior probability that a choice is superior in expectation) that samples can afford as a decision criterion. They end...