I'm writing a book

Been feeling pretty good about myself. Time to ruin that.

Image credit Patrick Tomasso via Unsplash

Been feeling pretty good about myself recently. So, I think I’ll try fix that by writing a book.

I’ve wrestled with ideas before that I thought were book-length. Even gotten as far as drafting titles and chapter lists. But for one reason or another, I’ve always abandoned them. However, the last few months I’ve found myself in the fortunate position where my academic interests have (finally) come to overlap nicely with my professional life. This rare moment of serendipity has helped to reignite my love for organizational decision-making. And now I want to destroy explore that love by writing a book-length treatment of it.

The idea in a sentence:

How do organizations make decisions and how might we improve this process?

The idea in a few sentences:

Large organizations dominate our existence. But popular explanations of how they work, what they pursue, and how they make decisions around these issues tend to frame them in terms that are both reductionist and (overly) rational. Organizations are ascribed clear objectives shaped by defined preferences which are either delivered by individual decision-makers or treated as though models of individual decision-makers serve as appropriate proxies for the wider organization.

A better understanding of organizational decision-making - and by extension the wider world it helps to create - needs to address five issues:

1. How do organizations make decisions?

2. How do issues come to be defined as decision-worthy?

3. How do opportunities to decide come into existence?

4. How do decision-worthy issues find their way into opportunities to decide?

5. How does this process work over time?

The current working outline for developing answers to these questions covers seven chapters.¹ I’ll begin with the obligatory introduction setting the scene and covering varieties of organizational decision-making models, etc. Next up, the essence of decision: framing; choice; definitions; search; information; and organization. Planning to follow this with an examination of how organizations create opportunities to decide. Exploring the mix of stimuli that create opportunities to act and how issues come to be recognized as decision-worthy. At present, I’m working on deep dives into framing / search / organizational learning (to bring temporal elements of decisions to life), information (what counts and why), and organization (the real man behind the curtain). I’ll naturally tie it all together in a conclusion that is both insightful and impactful - ha!

The foundation of my approach to answering these questions is constructed of mixed materials. A bricolage of American pragmatism, Carnegie School organizational theory, and lots and lots of sociology of various schools and strains combined with nearly 20-years of working with companies to define and make decisions and create the architecture to align these with wider objectives. My objective is to bring enough academic rigor to placate the earlier version of me who trained for the professoriate balanced against the need to be of use in everyday corporate life that presently pays the bills. Hopefully this balance provides a book that is both interesting and useful.

Sharing this all here for two mains reasons.

1. Creating some pressure to actually follow this through. Going public at idea phase will force me to do the basics (e.g. getting the publisher proposal together) and press on with writing.

2. Set out how I hope to use this place for a while. I’ve never really had a plan or approach for what I write here. There have been some false starts and dead-end but now I have some focus. My plan is to try and write here more often about things related to this project.

I’ve been fascinated by organizational decision-making since I read Lee Clarke’s Acceptable Risk: Making Decisions in a Toxic Environment in an undergraduate Sociology of Organizations course. Through the PhD, the mid-life crisis Masters, and nearly 20 years of corporate life, it’s a topic that not only holds my (frayed) attention but still has the power to excite me. And I’m hoping that I can channel this excitement into something a bit more substantive. Here’s the first step.

1. Current and working are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Best laid plans, etc.