Mike Metcalfe, 2014, How Concepts Solve Management Problems

Excerpt

When I saw the title of this book I got very suspicious. Was this going to be sophist rhetoric ‘solving’ problems by reframing them; describing a problem using different concepts so the problem evaporates into a ‘situation’? But then of course the author of this book is Mike Metcalfe, a thinker and practitioner on strategy and planning at the University of South Australia. Metcalfe’s previous work can be characterised as providing pragmatist heuristics for project planning and strategy in various fields, including knowledge work, entrepreneurship, profit forecasting, information systems, and argumentation. His take on problems is not to conceptualise them away. Rather, what seems to drive his work is the observation that problems are often poorly solved—and projects poorly executed—because they have been poorly conceptualised. …