Exploring the Problem-Finding and Problem-Solving Approach for Designing Organizations

Abstract

Executive Overview An emerging problem-finding and problem-solving approach suggests that management's ability to discover problems to solve, opportunities to seize, and challenges to respond to is vital to organizations. This paper explores the extent to which the problem-finding and problem-solving approach can provide a foundation for joining the capabilities, dynamic capabilities, and governance perspectives as a way to help scholars and practitioners to coherently design organizations from the perspective of design science. The problem-finding and problem-solving approach offers a unit of analysis and a set of behavioral assumptions that enable us to address open questions within the extant literature and to propose new questions in management research.