I
f we are really serious about understanding strategic vision as well as
how strategies form under other circumstances, then we had better
probe into the mind of the strategist. That is the job of the cognitive
school: to get at what this process means in the sphere of human cognition,
drawing especially on the field of cognitive psychology.
This school has attracted a number of prominent researchers in the
past ten or fifteen years, sometimes working in association with other
schools (for example, positioning, on cognition related to strategic
groups [Reger and Huff, 1993; Bogner and Thomas, 1993] and to
strategies of divestment [Duhaime and Schwenk, 1985]). Lyles's survey
of 1990 suggested such work was by then one of the most popular areas
of research in strategic management.
The body of work that we shall be discussing forms not so much a
tight school of thought as a loose collection of research, which seems,
nonetheless, to be growing into such a school. If it can deliver on its
intentions, it could very well transform the teaching and practice of
strategy as we know it today.
Prior to this surge of work, what took place in the minds of managers
was largely terra incognita. Investigators were more concerned
with the requisites for thinking rather than with thinking itself—for
example with what a strategist needs to know. Now the questions are
more direct. But we remain far from understanding the complex and
creative acts that give rise to strategies.
Hence, strategists are largely self-taught: they develop their knowledge
structures and thinking processes mainly through direct experience.
That experience shapes what they know, which in turn shapes
what they do, thereby shaping their subsequent experience. This duality
plays a central role in the cognitive school, giving rise to two rather
different wings.
One wing, more positivistic, treats the processing and structuring of
knowledge as an effort to produce some kind of objective motion picture
of the world. The mind's eye is thus seen as a kind of camera