Decision Making / 1 / 1.5

1.5 KNOWLEDGE ELICITATION BASED ON MANAGERIAL COGNITION

At this point it is necessary to make the distinction between individuals and organisations. Individuals possess cognition, but organisations do not. Individuals learn. The form of learning that occurs in organisations does not come about through the development of a single system of meaning or, in relation to any particular issue, through development of comprehensive and unanimously understood schemata or mental models. Arguably, a learning organisation exists when there is a shared reality. At least, this involves the close alignment of a number of individual’s mental models.

Attempting to combine the cognitive maps of individuals off-line, that is without the intimate involvement of the individuals, is problematic:

‘Cognition belongs to individuals, not to organisations; the attribution of cognition to an organisation is problematic and depends completely upon the legitimacy of reification. Even if reification (amalgamation of maps derived from different individuals) can be justified on the practical grounds that doing so allows the research question to be addressed, the sources of data are dependent upon eliciting material from individuals, or small groups, or from documents written by individuals or a team… [For example,] what is written in documents is mediated by considerations of formality, audience and record keeping. The issue of reification is further exacerbated once the relationship between emotion and cognition is recognised; emotion can only belong to an individual (Eden and Ackermann, 1998a: 193).’

The basic argument for use of cognitive mapping is that operative knowledge, that is, manager’s knowledge relevant to the problem at hand, exists as part of managerial cognition and this can be elicited, mapped and used to inform progressive stages of problem conceptualisation. Fundamental to mapping managerial cognition are the following assertions, (Eden and Spender, 1998):

• Managerial cognition exists as a ‘readable’ entity depicting managers’ or decision makers’ operative knowledge, relevant to that person’s domain of action.
• Cognitive mapping is a valid way of eliciting and recording managerial cognition.
• Analysing managerial cognition using cognitive mapping is a valid means of informing and fostering problem conceptualisation.