The overall aim of this research was to gain an insight into owner manager cognition during business turnaround. The objective was to examine managerial sense-making and decision-making during this potentially traumatic period. The exclusion of the psychological pressures and stressors encountered by owner managers as they endeavour to operate effectively in an unfamiliar and stressful working environment are limitations in previous small firm strategy formulation research. The failure of any company whether large or small will affect the lives of the managers, employees, their families and possibly the communities in which they reside. The need for a situated account of owner manager decisions and actions is necessary. These, and many other considerations pertain in business turnaround. A number of factors determined the research methodology. These included a lack of prior research within this area of management cognition; difficulties in finding Smaller firm owner managers prepared to spare the time to become involved in academic research while trying to avoid corporate failure and the recognised reluctance of individuals to convey their innermost thoughts and feelings in relation to subjects considered personal and private. These factors precluded the use of a more traditional positivist approach base on multiple samples and carried out by an independent expert observer. Instead, a qualitatively orientated case study was developed, based on the reflections of the author during the course of a live business turnaround. Records and personal reflections were maintained throughout an eight month period. Through interpretative analysis, major categories of owner manager cognition emerged which were integrated within an overall research model to indicate changing patterns of owner manager thinking across the various stages of business turnaround. These findings provide an initial understanding of the role played by owner manager cognition during business turnaround and the effect of psychological pressures on sense-making and decisionmaking processes.

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This study looks at the topics of creativity and innovation and how they are experienced as ordinary, everyday work. In business publications there is much hype and hope around the words “creativity” and “innovation”, but there is also a limited understanding of how creativity and innovation are enacted in organisations. Consequently, academics have stressed the need for ‘opening the black box’ of the firm and understanding how innovation really works (Birdi et al, 2003). This research uses the Complex Responsive Processes approach to understand the ordinary, everyday experiences of people involved in work which was novel for the organisations concerned. I selected three organisational cases from the health and education sectors. I selected these because, in each case, people were working on complex challenges which had no single, obvious solution and which required the generation and development of new and useful ideas. The research makes a novel contribution to knowledge in three ways. First, it has been unusual in that it has extended the application of complex responsive processes to understand the processes which impact on creativity and innovation in the health and education sectors. While complex responsive processes thinking has been applied to these sectors before, to my knowledge, this is the first time it has been applied to understand processes impacting on creativity and innovation in these sectors. Second, this research finds a pattern of dynamics between trust and a paradoxical concept of diversity, comprising both sufficient difference and sufficient common-ground between organizational members. In this research, trust was a necessary foundation for the exploration of ideas. However, for risks to be taken and ideas to be implemented, in contexts of high uncertainty and risk, trust alone was insufficient. The quality of conversational life flourished where both trust and diversity were present. Finally, this research makes a methodological contribution through using Stacey’s five areas for focusing attention as a conceptual framework. The use of this framework helps provide a depth of compelling detail and insights which would not have been obtained through traditional lenses from the domains of creativity and innovation. This is the first time this framework for focusing attention has been applied in this way to understanding creativity and innovation in empirical settings.

Business process discovery is one of the most fundamental steps of business process management (BPM) lifecycles. Incorrect, misleading or biased results of this stage can cause the whole BPM project to fail or the information systems that are created based on them to have great alignment problems with the reality of the organisation and how people carry out their work. The main problems of the business process discovery phase stem from two main sources. Firstly, the wrong attachment of BPM definitions and business process discovery techniques to the functionalist social paradigm whose only objective is the survival of the organisation through ensuring its efficiency and adaptability like a machine. This attachment to the functionalist paradigm has made BPM definitions to assume that organisations as social systems are in a unitary problem context, which means its constituents have similar beliefs and interests, they share common goals and objectives and they have all been involved in the decision-making. These assumptions are obviously far from the reality of today’s organisations which are normally either in pluralist or coercive problem contexts. The second source of problems in the business process discovery phase are BPM’s definitions and techniques over-reliance on human memory and cognition that has made them suffer, like any other knowledge acquisition technique, from human memory and cognition limitations. Using Design Science Research methodology, this research develops a conceptual framework in which new definitions for business task, business process and business process model in pluralist and coercive problem contexts will be presented. It will also be shown that conversation logs are a good source of information for business process discovery based on the new definitions and that using conversation logs can reduce the limitations caused by human memory and cognition. To develop the new conceptual framework, organisations as social systems have been analysed using the creative holism systems approach, and sound theories such as viable system model (VSM), i* framework, speech act theory, conversation for action diagrams and episodic memory have been leveraged. Based on the conceptual framework that consumes email messages as the conversation log and as its source of information, a method for business process discovery has been developed. Using two case studies it has been demonstrated that the proposed definitions and the developed methods are applicable in unitary, pluralist and coercive problem contexts; and taking advantage of the conversation logs as their information source, they suffer to a lesser extent from human memory and cognition limitations. As a consequence, the resulting business process models created from applying the proposed definitions and methods are closer to the realities of the organisations and can increase the success rate of the business process management projects and reduce the information system’s alignment problems.

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