supported, such hypotheses could explain the tendency of distressed firms to make
more risky decisions than untroubled companies.
One of the major implications of this management framework has to do with the
understanding and acceptance of emergent decisions in the face of low task certainty.
We propose that in today’s rapidly changing, highly globalized environments, firms
and decision makers face increasing task uncertainty. Managers who are able to make
successful decisions when little information is known (by using MUS decision-making)
we hypothesize will thrive. We purport that the sooner organizations accept this notion
and engage in input control (hiring the right kind of people), training (such as creativity
training (Osborn, 1953) or scenario planning (Schoemaker, 1991)) and exposure to lore
and cases highlighting details of prior success in the face of uncertainty, peer support
systems, and compensation paradigms to enable and encourage “thinking outside of
the box” – the better such organizations could withstand external turmoil and
volatility. The framework offered in this paper suggests that managers invest not only
in planning for the foreseeable future, but also in building a management team that can
deal with uncommon situations by being creative, inspired, adventuresome and highly
innovative.