Biographical Sketch
When organizations face disruptive changes, creating a democratic strategic plan can be useful. Furthermore, uncovering and leveraging cognitive diversity has been shown to positively affect a strategic management team’s performance. However, typical strategic plans only reflect the beliefs and values of the most powerful stakeholders. Consequently, cognitive diversity is minimized.
Using specialized Group Support Systems software, we uncover cognitive factions; subgroups of individuals with diverse views and beliefs. The group-driven causal mapping approach provides clarity in understanding the underlying belief structures of the cognitive factions through the use of givens-means-ends and causal path analysis of cognitive faction theme maps. Cognitive faction – driven analysis has been useful in both academic and corporate strategic planning settings and also in supporting student learning.