it
scans the world, zooming in and out in response to its owner's will, although
the pictures it takes are considered in this school to be rather
distorted.
The other wing sees all of this as subjective: strategy is some kind of
interpretation of the world. Here the mind's eye turns inward, on how
the mind does its "take" on what it sees out there—the events, the
symbols, the behavior of customers, and so on. So while the other wing
seeks to understand cognition as some kind of re'creation of the world,
this wing drops the prefix and instead believes that cognition creates
the world.
Notice where this chapter sits in this book: as a kind of bridge between
the more objective schools of design, planning, positioning,
and entrepreneurial, and the more subjective schools of learning, culture,
power, environment, and configuration. In line with this, we
begin with the objectivist wing, first the work on cognitive bias,
namely what research tells us about the mental limitations of the
strategist, then on an information-processing view of strategic cognition,
and finally on how the mind maps the structures of knowledge.
Then we turn to the subjectivist wing, of strategic cognition as a
process of construction. We conclude with observations about the
limits of the cognitive approach as a framework for explaining strategic
thinking.
Cognition as Confusion
Scholars have long been fascinated by the peculiarities of how individuals
process information to make decisions, especially the biases and
distortions that they exhibit. Management researchers have been especially
stimulated by the brilliant work of Herbert Simon (1947, 1957;
see also March and Simon, 1958), a political scientist who spent most
of his career at the business school and then the psychology department
of Carnegie Mellon University, and in 1978 was awarded the
Swedish Prize in Economics named for Alfred Nobel. Simon popularized
the notion that the world is large and complex, while human
brains and their information-processing capacities are highly limited
in comparison. Decision making thus becomes not so much rational as
a vain effort to be rational.