Marc Stierand

• PhD
• Director of the Institute of Business Creativity at EHL Hospitality Business School

In this conceptual methodological paper, we introduce the first building block of what we hope to become “quantum phenomenology” one day. Our starting point comprises two phenomenological studies on creativity, one of top chefs and another of top scientists. In both of these studies we have observed that what triggers the creativity in the respecti...

This paper describes methodological challenges when conducting multi-level archival research of strategizing in extreme contexts. Strategizing in extreme circumstances is methodologically tricky, especially given the complexities between the individual and organizational levels throughout time. This study demonstrates how these two levels interact...

Trauma is a difficult-to-research area contemporaneously because of a wide range of practical and ethical reasons. This paper considers the nature of trauma, reviews the literature on studying trauma contemporaneously, considers the merits of archival research and reports on one author’s study of four episodes involving traumatic experiences using...

How we see decisions has changed significantly over the past few decades. However, what has not changed is that any decision requires knowledge, and this knowledge needs to be validated. In a traditional view, choice is preceded by intelligence and design, more recently, it has been argued that choice is often the first step, followed by intelligen...

Creative leadership has been studied in different collaborative contexts that can be summarized as facilitating employees' creativity, directing the realization of the creative vision of a leader, and integrating different and diverse creative contributions. In this paper, we present the findings from a qualitative meta-analysis of literature-based...

Purpose The purpose of this study is to improve our understanding of bracketing, one of the most central philosophical and theoretical constructs of phenomenology, as a theory of mind. Furthermore, we wanted to showcase how this theoretical construct can be implemented as a methodological tool. Design/methodology/approach In this study we have ado...

An autistic researcher presents a participatory autoethnography developed to explore how transformational threshold moments present in autistic adults across knowledge levels, and how identifying these moments in a participatory way can be used to enable people, both autistic and non-autistic, to achieve their potential. The importance of bracketin...

This paper is a first step towards gaining a better understanding of how to methodologically work out the unfolding of experiences through using archival process data. In recent years, management and organization scholars have used archival data to identify temporal phases Bingham and Kahl, 2013, reveal the unfolding of these temporal observations...

Organizational research has explored how design thinking can fulfill the human needs of customers or users, but it has largely overlooked how it is shaped by the designer’s subjective experiences. In an attempt to stimulate greater scholarly interest in exploring the designer behind the process of design thinking, we integrate materials from three...

Using a qualitative-exploratory study that spans over several years, we explain how highly creative chefs engage in aesthetic composing, which we define as the deliberate transforming of felt aesthetic stimuli in due consideration of advancing a creative identity. We induce how world-renowned Michelin starred chefs receive inspiration from aestheti...

In this conceptual methodology paper we explore the concept of bracketing in the phenomenological tradition. In this conceptual study we draw on experience from two empirical studies, one of which focused on the cognitive complexity of top scientists and the other on the creativity of top chefs. Both of these studies were framed in a phenomenologic...

Accounts of the creative process tend to be retrospective and implicitly ground the creative act within the person, the mind, the moment, the idea; in doing so, they often miss the larger sociomaterial qualities that can provide us with important insights about the social relationality and playfulness of the creative process. In this article, we ex...

In this chapter we reflect on a particular way of studying immensely high complexity, such as creativity, by investigating extraordinary achievers. The basis of our reflections are two empirical studies, one conducted in the area of haute cuisine, through interviewing top chefs, and the second conducted in the area of science, thorough interviewing...

“Though the river’s current never fails, the water passing, moment by moment, is never the same. Where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, bursting and disappearing as others rise to replace them, none lasting long. In this world, people and their dwelling places are like that, always changing.” Kamo no Chōmei (c. 1200): Hōjōki

We discuss some methodological struggles we are currently facing with regards to an exploratory-qualitative PhD project on the process of intuiting of strategists in crisis situations. We deal in particular with a notion of creativity and strategy that characterises intuiting and takes place in flow, which naturally forces us to bring in the dimens...

Experience innovation through co-creation is crucial for the competitiveness of tourism businesses. Exploiting technology for enabling and managing experience within a space of co-creation can significantly increase value for consumers. Although this is becoming well documented in academic literature, a look at the tourism industry, however, often...

The basis of this study are two underlying empirical projects. In the first one Viktor interviewed 17 Nobel Laureates trying to understand their cognitive complexity. (Dörfler & Eden, 2014a, 2017) In the second one Marc interviewed 18 top chefs trying to understand their creativity. (Stierand, 2015; Stierand & Dörfler, 2016; Stierand et al., 2014)...

The aim of this chapter is to detail directing practices contributing to creative leadership and identify what creative leaders actually do to enhance team creativity and materialize the leader’s creative vision through the organization’s outcomes. This research relies on a practice-based approach, which allows it to enter into the minutiae of orga...

Understanding intuition puzzled many researchers. Only philosophers were feeling comfortable to think about intuition not only as a legitimate but also as a possibly superior form of knowledge (see e.g. Bergson, 1911, 1946; Jung, 1921: §770; Spinoza, 1677: Part 5). It was thus during this early stage of intuition research, that philosophy provided...

We developed a systemic process framework for reflecting on becoming that we currently employ to study graduate students’ reflecting on becoming. We describe the process of reflecting on becoming as a systemic process of continuous self-making and discuss some philosophical reference points by building on process philosophy. We conclude that, in or...

Structured Abstract Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new workshop format concerned with the facilitation of Communities of Practice (CoPs). The introduced workshop format is based on a method of causal mapping, and it is aimed at helping the CoP members to understand better the possibilities of 'making most' of their community...

The purpose of this paper is to describe the roles of the coach and the coachee from the perspective of their respective competences and a particular type of the coaching process that we call ‘competent coaching’. We also show how this process can be supported with a knowledge-based expert system (KBS); to illustrate this, we introduce a particular...

Scholars studying intuition are frequently focusing on decision-takers and to this day conceptualize intuition as a form of judgment. More recently, the notion of intuition in creativity has been challenged by the argument that although the creative process may contain intuitive judgments, any creative idea or solution is essentially the result of...

In this narrative review we go beyond other organizational creativity research attempting to find a comprehensive narrative structure of creative conditions and look instead through an antenarrative lens at more dynamic interplay of embodied practices that can bring about new discoveries. Through theorizing, contextualised in the haute cuisine indu...

In this paper we look into the modes for enhancing intuition suggested in the literature. Our starting point is that although the various intuition-enhancing techniques often work, it is rarely clear why. This also makes more systematic development of further techniques more difficult. First we provide a quick overview of the features of intuition...

Creative process research has identified the role of certain cognitive abilities, affective processes, and personality traits in the creative process, but has accorded less emphasis to the role of aesthetic knowing in this process. In this study we contribute a set of empirical findings which portray that aesthetic knowledge plays a fundamental rol...

Contrary to the practical application of revenue management (RM), its theoretical definition has remained virtually unchanged. Today’s data-driven approach to RM forms an integral part of management and clearly contributes to the financial performance of hotels. Its growing importance and the shifting balance between art and science in RM decision-...

Relatively little practice-based research explores situated learning beyond the level of basic skill development. This article seeks to expand our understanding by focusing on the situated development of high-level creativity in the practice of haute cuisine and the role of the master–apprentice relationship in this development. Much has been writt...

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the phenomenon of creativity as experienced by world-leading chefs in the organizational setting of their creative industry - haute cuisine. By capturing holistically the complexities and interactions of high-level creativity in high-performance settings, we endeavoured to illustrate how world-lea...

Purpose This paper reflects on hospitality management education from a ‘practice epistemology’ and discusses how a connecting of savoir (theoretical knowledge or ‘knowing’), savoir-faire (knowing how to do tasks, i.e. task-related skills), and savoir-être (knowing how to be, i.e. behavior) can develop into practical knowledge. Design/methodology/a...

The role of formal education in general and of university education in particular is often discussed nowadays. We have engaged in this debate previously, arguing that although it is bound to change, university education is here to stay. We have developed a model of education, in which universities and corporate universities play complementary roles...

“Disciples be damned”, Picasso once said, “It’s not interesting. It’s only the masters that matter. Those who create.” And Nietzsche replied: “He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.” This dialogue is pure fiction but points towards an important yet underexplored...

In this conceptual paper we start from the conception of experience innovation as originally proposed by Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2003) since this approach seems to contradict the assumption that entrepreneurship is a systematic behaviour based on concept and theory rather than a personality trait based on intuition (see Drucker, 2006). We attend to...

This chapter introduces Insider Explanatory Phenomenology (IEP) as viable approach to researching intuition in personal creativity. Drawing on a study elucidating experiences of personal creativity, the key contribution is to make explicit why IEP is particularly suitable for investigating context-dependent cognitive and nebulous phenomena such as...

The contribution of this study is an increased understanding of personal creativity and the innovation process in haute cuisine, a validation of the socio-cultural systems view of creativity and a model that accounts for the socio-cultural dimensions of haute cuisine. In this paper we discuss existing views that conceptualize creativity and innovat...

Our first issue of 2014 starts with a small mini-special on the challenges, experiences and future directions of facilitating creativity and innovation in hospitality organizations, guest edited by Marc Stierand from EHL Lausanne. The special consists of two parts.

This paper introduces Idiographic Explanatory Phenomenology (IEP) as viable research approach to collect and analyse rich qualitative data on experiences. Drawing on the example of a study elucidating experiences of personal creativity of 18 world-class chefs, the key contribution of this paper is to make explicit the data collection and analysis p...

Based on in-depth interviews with haute cuisine chefs from the UK, Spain, France, Austria and Germany, we propose five essential components (sensibility, emotion, harmony, simplicity and authenticity) of the underlying structure of personal creativity that seem to interplay tacitly during the creative process. We describe the experience of personal...

This article critically reappraises a key concept in hospitality management (and specifically food and beverage management) — that of the meal experience. Focusing primarily on the commercial sense and applications of the concept, while recognising the many other contexts that provide a basis for much wider study of the phenomenon, the discussion q...

Purpose: This paper aims to present and reflect on a phenomenological research process used to elucidate the nature of creativity and innovation in haute cuisine. Design/methodology/approach: In-depth unstructured interviews and field notes capturing subjective experiences were employed to elucidate the experiences of 18 top chefs from the UK, Spa...

For nearly two decades we have been trying to find appropriate ways to support executive decision takers and dedicated most of both our academic research and our consultancy to this issue. We developed a conceptual framework and some practices for coaching, a software tool for knowledge engineering, and three post-experiential, post-MBA courses for...

This study investigates the nature of creativity and innovation in haute cuisine based on conversational in-depth interviews with world-class chefs from the UK, France, Spain, Austria and Germany. These interviews were analyzed following a two-layer phenomenological analysis starting with an idiographic description of the interviewees’ accounts fol...

Purpose This conceptual paper explores the problems associated with trying to address culture as one of the key aspects in effective workplace strategies. Design/methodology/approach This paper critically addresses the relationship between workplace strategies and the behavioural components of locality. It reviews the role that the concept of cult...

In this chapter we intend to clarify some issues about creativity and innovation methods, because we believe that the term is often misunderstood. For us neither creativity nor innovation is guided by a method. There are only methods against methods that can help the extraordinary individual to step faster and easier into a state of mind that is co...

This developmental paper is the first step towards a full paper on the fluid research approach of a phenomenological study on culinary innovation. One of the characteristics of our study is that we gained access and interviewed 19 of the best chefs in the world, which was facilitated and led to in-depth conversations between experts due to the fact...

Purpose This paper aims to explore the phenomenon of molecular gastronomy by conducting empirical research focusing on renowned chefs. Design/methodology/approach The approach taken is a literature review summarising past culinary innovations then the paper focuses on the origins and evolution of molecular gastronomy, followed by 18 phenomenologic...

The life worlds of innovating chefs are identified as important aspects towards a better understanding of culinary innovation. Hence, the concept of personal culinary innovation is proposed as a verifiable way to identify innovators in the field. Current studies, however, interchangeably use the term invention and innovation and fail to address cen...

The master-apprentice relationship has a long history in all areas of human education beginning from the old Greek Sophists in the West and various traditional schools in the East. Today, however, this form of knowledge transfer seems to have widely disappeared. One of the very few areas in which the master-apprentice relationship still flourishes...

One of the essential aims of service process organisation is to increase the added value for the customer, thereby increasing customer satisfaction and stimulating consumption. In a haute-cuisine context, customers typically have a higher degree of uncertainty as they often lack the experience of receiving and judging quality in a haute-cuisine set...