文獻回顧：期待未預期的意外【蘇筠】

Author: Millie Yun Su- Assistant Professor (Education) in Singapore Management University.  Research topics on innovation management, qualitative research, knowledge boundaries.

Expecting the unexpected? How SWAT Officers and Film Crews Handle Surprises (Bechky and Okhuysen 2011)

Summary of the paper:  This paper begins with a question, how do organizations develop collective resources for dealing with surprises.  Surprises can be positive or negative events that disrupt the standard progression of work.  The authors looked at two cases, film production crew and SWAT team, and found that these two types of organization engage in bricolage on social and cognitive resources, to respond to surprises.  Different from material or physical resources, sociocognitive resources are people’s shared knowledge of tasks and their expectation of the workflow.  The implication is that organizations that have a common stock of sociocognitive resources to adjust their roles, routines, and work, in order to deal with surprises. 

Sociocognitive resource: Common stock of knowledge about each other’s work

Social and cognitive resources are keys for organizations to deal with surprises that disrupt their standard workflow.  Sociocognitive resources refer to shared task knowledge and common expectation for workflow.  Shared task knowledge has to do with knowing how to perform the other person’s tasks.  For example, when a camera operator didn’t arrive for work, other crew members who have some knowledge about camera operation ended up substituting work for the absent camera operator.  In the SWAT team example, when policy found more suspects than expected, the lead officers changed their primary roles from covering the location to covering suspects.  Bechky and Okhuysen suggest that the more people hold knowledge of certain tasks, the easier it is for team members to shift roles and thus enable the team to deal with surprises easier. 

The other sociocognitive resource is common expectation for workflow, which refers to a shared understanding for how the work will progress subsequently.  For example, film crewmembers had a common expectation for how many shots they wanted to complete in a day. When the day was coming to an end, cinematographer would hustle people and other crewmembers would also modify the sequence of shots to pick up the speed of shooting.  In a mission of arresting suspects, as the SWAT team was going to blow up a door and found that the door was already open, they switched to “stealth entry” mode.  When dealing with a given surprise, people having common expectation of what subsequent events should take place would be able to adjust their rhythm and routines accordingly.       

Formal and autonomous processes to develop common expectation for workflow

Bechky and Okhuysen found that both film crew and SWAT team have processes, either formal or autonomous for developing sociocognitive resources. Because SWAT team faces more time pressure at the time of mission, it adopts a formal process to develop the common expectation for workflow.  For example, before a mission, they held meetings to go through sketches of home, suspect photographs, surveillance videos, and location maps that help them to understand the mission.  Officers would also assign roles for team members and pair them up for a mission.  They would develop a mission plan and make evaluation of the mission.  

On the other hand, film crew uses both formal and autonomous process to develop a common expectation for workflow.  They developed schedules to keep track of the production process, sequencing and time for each shoot.  They also had meetings to discuss scripts, planning and location before filming.  During the shooting period, film crew would also take downtime to meet on ad hoc basis to discuss script, rehearse, running through scenes, and discuss how to improve the execution on the day of shooting.  In general, having these processes, whether its formal or autonomous, allow people to develop a common expectation about subsequent events, so that they know what they have to do next if any surprises arise. 

Cross-functional learning to develop shared task knowledge

Bechky and Okhuysen also found that both SWAT team and film crew enable people to gain familiarity with each other’s work.  Both settings adopt rotation process for people to engage in cross-functional learning.  For example, junior officers need to learn about the roles of snipers and marksmen.  And when they attend cross-training sessiongs, they they have to learn to teach others about what they learn.  As a lead officer said, everyone in the SWAT team “are supposed to know everybody else’s job.”  In a similar vein, cross-functional learning is built into the film crew’s career progression process, where individuals advance through working in multiple projects and in different departments.  For example, production assistants are not limited to a specialized area, such as costumes, lighting, or sound, but rather worked on tasks that gave them access to different departments. They become familiar with the specialized work within a department as well as the interdependencies between departments.  Having cross-functional learning in organizations expose people to have general knowledge about a variety of tasks, so that they can easily shift roles and adjust routines to keep up with sudden changes of the work. Even though there are formal processes for building sociocognitive resources, people in the organizations also use informal meetings, rehearsals, and ad hoc discussions to accumulate sociocognitive resources.

My 3LL

It’s about sociocognitive resources, not bricolage

1.  The framing of this paper presents an interesting lesson.  While the key finding is about sociocognitive resources, the introduction is about surprises and then the literature review is about bricolage.  The authors introducing a question about how organizations deal with surprises constructed an argument with surprise, where the answer to the question is actually a specific kind of resources.  Through the introduction, readers would think that it’s bricolage that enables organizations to deal with surprises, but the authors go in deeper that it is about sociocognitive resources used in bricolage that allow organizations to deal with surprise.  Therefore, bricolage is actually not the main character, but rather resources as the hero of the paper.               

Socio-cognitive resources across networks and organizations

2)  The paper focuses on developing sociocognitive resources within teams of medium size, film production crew about 35- 50 people and the SWAT team about 18 people.  However, the paper did not extend to the question about how to develop socio-cognitive resources across networks or cross-organizational setting. People across different networks, organizations, and even cross-functional teams have different goals, routines, language, and workflows.  They also have interpretative barriers preventing people to understand each other’s work.  Given the differences across teams and networks, how do they develop socio-cognitive resources to support bricolage?  

For example, in the Danish turbine industry, entrepreneurs were scattered across different domains, networks, value chain, but what kind of socio-cognitive resources do they have for developing shared goals (Garud and Karnoe 2003)? This could be a theoretical gap that future studies in bricolage can address- the development of socio-cognitive resources across networks and organizations.  

Common stock of knowledge about an opportunity enables bricolage across networks

3.  Bechky and Okhuysen only talked about one kind of sociocognitive resource for supporting bricolage.  However, we know that organizations have heterogeneous forms of resources, not just material and physical, but also cultural (i.e., norms and codes), organizational (i.e., process, practice) and socio-cognitive (i.e., knowledge, collective understanding). An unaddressed issue is how do organizations recombine heterogeneous forms of resources and for bricolage between organizations? 

Looking at the cases of Danish wind turbine industry and the case of Advantech versus Kontron, people need to create common knowledge about opportunities in order to conduct bricolage across different networks.  In the Danish wind turbine industry, actors from different domains (i.e., engineers, researchers, producers, and users) kept on enacting opportunities to learn, build, and advance wind turbine technology, so that they could simultaneously contribute to the bricolage effort (Garud and Karnoe 2003).  In Advantech and Kontron case, the local distributors have local knowledge and networks to SOEs, and Advantech has engineering knowledge and organizational process, which consist of heterogeneous forms of resources. What enables them to make-do of heterogeneous resource is their shared understanding of opportunities (i.e., exploiting Kontron’s weak spots).  This could be another possible area for future research.

References

Bechky, Beth A., and Gerardo A. Okhuysen. "Expecting the unexpected? How SWAT officers and film crews handle surprises." Academy of Management Journal 54.2 (2011): 239-261.

Garud, Raghu, and Peter Karnøe. "Bricolage versus breakthrough: distributed and embedded agency in technology entrepreneurship." Research policy 32.2 (2003): 277-300.