Lotte Lüscher

Working Through Paradox: an Action Research on Sensemaking at the Lego Company Lotte Lüscher

Managers need to keep awareness on complexity, equivocality and ambiguity of the discipline of managing. Organizations need managers who can take the lead and recede in the background, managers who can make tough decisions and carefully involve employees in the decision-making. This book builds on a social constructionist view on managerial sense making, attempting to broaden our view of what "good management" is. Through studies of 45 managers at the LEGO Company the author shows examples of how the managers made sense of seemingly contradictory demands. Three types of paradoxes were derived from the studies: Managers face: Paradoxes of performing, paradoxes of belonging and inherent systems paradoxes. Paradoxes of the organization all call for managers who are able to embrace seemingly contradictory demands of managing organization and create a workable certainty, while keeping an open mind to stay with the paradox. Paradoxes are paradoxical: they paralyze you and call for a solution...