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

Abstract

An emerging problem-finding and problem-solving approach suggests that management's discovering problems to solve, opportunities to seize, and challenges to respond to, are 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.