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2020 Best Practice Oriented Paper Award

  
The winner of the 2020 SAP Best Practice Award are Booth, Branicki, and Badham with their paper “Mindful Ambidexterity An ethnographic study of how managers navigate exploitation and exploration”

Congratulations on winning the SAP Best Practice Award! What is your paper is about?

Thank you! We are thrilled and humbled to receive the award. Our paper looks at ambidexterity through a lens of collective mindfulness. Collective mindfulness is thought to help organisations to create and sustain enriched awareness and to maintain a capacity to anticipate and contain the unexpected (Weick, Sutcliffe, & Obstfeld, 1999). We follow a company, CallCo, as it tried to maintain its traditional business and transition towards Artificial Intelligence technology. That strategic shift created tensions, contradictions, and challenges within the business, and so provided a context that allowed us to explore how collective mindfulness might contribute to navigating ambidexterity. This approach builds upon prior scholarship (see Rerup, 2005; Vogus & Rerup, 2018; Vogus & Sutcliffe, 2012) to examine how practices of collective mindfulness might impact strategy execution in mainstream organizational settings. Our study shows that ambidexterity, like collective mindfulness, is fragile and continuously accomplished and re-accomplished by managers in their daily actions. A mindful framing of ambidexterity highlights where contradictions may arise: the new perspectives and expertise that are needed to explore fruitfully; and the likelihood of interpersonal and intergroup tensions arising as new expertise is incorporated within a context of complex social relationships. The continual adjustment and flux of ambidexterity in action – in changes to firm identity, in resource allocation and priority resolution – demands enriched and careful attention. We also find that the prescriptions of collective mindfulness are appealing at a practice level, offering insights for managers navigating the uncertainty inherent in strategy execution.

What sparked this project? How did it change over time?

A long-term relationship between Richard and CallCo’s parent company led to Kate’s PhD project on the organizational challenges of responding rapidly to changing environmental demands. At the time, CallCo was reorienting its strategic approach and diversifying its business. Initial fieldwork sought to capture this strategy in flight through observations of CallCo’s day-to-day practices and the corridor conversations typical of ethnographic study. Around this time, Kate spotted an article about mindfulness in action in Academy of Management Discoveries (see Fraher, Branicki, & Grint, 2017) and asked Layla to join the team. From first-hand observations of strategy practice at CallCo, the team was able to translate the study’s general question into a more precise focus on the role of collective mindfulness in CallCo’s pursuit of ambidexterity. Remaining in the field for a further 12 months, Kate was able to collect naturalistic data about the role of collective mindfulness in CallCo’s day-to-day managerial practices and pursuit of ambidexterity.

Did you experience challenges during the research process? If so, how did you manage them?

Ethnography can be a fascinating research method which yields incredibly rich data, but researchers need to be very comfortable with ‘not knowing’, as you navigate towards, around, and away from a very large number of potential research questions. This uncertainty makes data gathering complicated, and many avenues of inquiry were pursued. We should have turned the lens of mindfulness onto ourselves as a research team much more often! During the ethnographic data gathering process, researchers might not know that an event is salient until afterwards - so flexibility was key in managing the research process. Data gathering used multiple methods, including participant observation, passive ethnographic observation, formal and informal interviews, and questionnaires. Managing a large volume of unstructured data and the diversity of the dataset also created challenges, and the dataset felt much messier than those often described in published papers. Some necessary analytical order was imposed by applying an a priori theoretical lens, by choosing subsets of data for inductive work, and by creating maps of the ideas and themes in the data and timelines of salient events, to supplement work with NVivo. It was also useful to have a team with diverse skills and different disciplinary backgrounds because when one of us got stuck we could talk the problem through from a different perspective.

Your paper studies a service firm’s pursuit of an ambidextrous strategy to explore how collective mindfulness contributes to ambidexterity. Can you tell us more about your key learnings for studying and theorizing complex constructs such as those you used?

Time and talking were key for us as a team in handling the inter-relationships between the large volume of data collected by Kate and the complex concepts considered in the study. The theorization and paper itself have had very many iterations, which can be challenging to manage in the context of a PhD candidature of fixed duration. We draw comfort from the reassurance of our colleagues in the SAP community that this is a very common experience. One critical issue we faced was in bridging between collective mindfulness and ambidexterity. This presented three major challenges. First, collective mindfulness is often examined in high-risk settings. Second, except for the work of Rerup (2005) and Turner, Kutsch and Leybourne (2013), references to mindfulness in the context of ambidexterity have been somewhat brief and incidental. Third, while a practice-based view of ambidexterity is growing, there is still relatively little on the topic. These gaps in the literature meant that we had to build a convincing synthetic theoretical connection largely from the ground up. These things are of course so much easier to see in retrospect, but the paper really came together when we considered that managerial enriched awareness might form a conceptual bridge between collective mindfulness and ambidexterity. We wish we could say that this realization was our eureka moment and that the paper flowed effortlessly from there, but the truth is it was just one step in many of working collaboratively on the theorization for the paper.

If you were able to do this study again, what if anything would you do differently?

This is a tricky question, because one of the strengths of ethnography is that, like mindfulness, it is about thinking and acting in the present. Corridor conversations are somewhat serendipitous, and one opportunity taken may be another missed. One area that perhaps we could have approached with more forethought without impacting the research design overall, would be in adding some additional interview questions that would have been fascinating to have answered while people were in the midst of the change we track in this paper.

Finally, do you have any recommendations for members of the SAP community who aim to also win this award?

We did not set out with a goal to win this award but were delighted to do so. One of the most fascinating and rewarding parts of this project was getting up close to the lived experience of participants and finding out more about how they experienced CallCo’s pursuit of ambidexterity across time. So often ambidexterity is portrayed as a structural concern – we found it to be a more on-going and effortful process, made and re-made through the day-to-day practices of CallCo’s managers. Exploring such issues is a complex and time-consuming affair, and we would not wish to under-estimate the challenges posed by getting close. However, the insights enabled, and the intellectual stimulation offered by the approach, we believe, makes the enterprise very worthwhile.
References

Fraher, A. L., Branicki, L. J., & Grint, K. 2017. Mindfulness in action: Discovering how US Navy SEALs build capacity for mindfulness in High-Reliability Organizations (HROs). Academy of Management Discoveries, 3(3): 239–261.
Rerup, C. 2005. Learning from past experience: Footnotes on mindfulness and habitual entrepreneurship. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 21(4): 451–472.
Turner, N., Kutsch, E., & Leybourne, S. A. 2013. Rethinking project reliability using the ambidexterity and mindfulness perspectives. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 9(4): 845–864.
Vogus, T. J., & Rerup, C. 2018. Sweating the “small stuff”: High-reliability organizing as a foundation for sustained superior performance. Strategic Organization, 16(2): 227–238.
Vogus, T. J., & Sutcliffe, K. M. 2012. Organizational mindfulness and mindful organizing: A reconciliation and path forward. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 11(4): 722–735.
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. 1999. Organizing for high reliability: Processes of collective mindfulness. In R. S. Sutton & B. M. Staw (Eds.), Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 1: 81–123. Stanford University, CA: JAI Press.
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