Thomas Grisold

University of St. Gallen

We propose a systems perspective on the cognitive foundations of innovation and knowledge creation. We show that the (standard) way we perceive, think and act is opposed to creating (radically) new knowledge. For example, the predictive coding paradigm claims that our brain is a highly complex ‘prediction machine’ being mainly driven by its past ex...

Individuals and organizations cannot learn perpetually. Managers should be aware that unlearning becomes necessary to discard obsolete and outdated mental models, assumptions, behaviors, or routines. We investigated new product development teams and interviewed change consultants to explore the phenomenon of unlearning in real-life contexts. We par...

Following recent calls to extend our understanding of organizational unlearning, we gain empirical insights into how the process unfolds in practice. Based on the findings of a study with change consultants in Europe, we conceptualize two forms of organizational unlearning. First, open-ended unlearning refers to instances where organizational knowl...

The only constant in our world is change. Why is there not a field of science that explicitly studies continuous change? We propose the establishment of process science, a field that studies processes: coherent series of changes, both man-made and naturally occurring, that unfold over time and occur at various levels. Process science is concerned w...

The rapid evolution of digital technologies is reshaping business process management (BPM). While recent research has focused on the small-scale dynamics of these changes, for instance, by applying process mining, we know little about the large-scale dynamics of process changes over extended time periods. This study examines large-scale changes in...

Organizations need to continuously adapt their business processes to keep pace with dynamic changes in their business environments. This implies that Business Process Management (BPM) needs to shift from static process models and governance structures to ephemeral process conceptualizations. We propose the 'BPM Sandwich Model', which balances betwe...

Process mining research has made tremendous progress in analyzing, visualizing, and predicting the perfor- mance of business processes through computational techniques. However, little attention has been brought to understanding why and how business processes behave as they do. Process mining results alone are not sufficient to arrive at meaningful...

Business process redesign has received considerable attention in research and practice. An important task contributing to redesign is idea generation. It has been argued that the choice of technique influences redesign outcomes, but empirical evidence is largely missing. In this paper, we examine the role of idea generation in business process rede...

Process science is the interdisciplinary study of socio-technical processes. Socio-technical processes involve coherent series of changes over time, entailing actions and events that include humans and digital technologies. The ubiquitous availability of digital trace data, combined with advanced data analytics capabilities, offer new and unprecede...

Information technologies are expected to improve organizational routines in a number of ways, yet their implementations often lead to unexpected, unintended, and even undesired effects. In this research, we investigate how IT-based changes affect the complexity of an organizational routine over time, that is, the number of ways through which the ro...

Unlearning outdated knowledge is crucial for organizations to adapt to environmental needs and foster innovation. While unlearning is an auspicious approach, little is known about how to design supporting tools. This paper explores how organizations can effectively implement unlearning interventions and presents an overview of design options for u...

Although the field of organizational unlearning has recently gained increased interest , its conceptual foundations and raison d'être are still debated. In this review, we aim to revisit various discourses and arguments to advance the understanding of organizational unlearning in management and organization studies. Using an inte-grative literature...

Progressively, information systems (IS) researchers draw on digital trace data to capture the emergent dynamics of today’s digitalized world. Digital trace data enable researchers to generate highly-context specific insights into the features and dynamics of socio-technical phenomena. We suggest how IS researchers can use digital trace data to deve...

Adopting a flat ontology, we discuss how phenomena of societal concern are connected to organizational routines. We conceptualize grand challenges as large patterns of actions to overcome the micro-macro divide prevalent in existing research. We introduce spatial, temporal, and agentic relations as three interrelated aspects of scale that are of pa...

Human-AI delegation occurs when a human delegates work to an autonomous AI-based system. We report on a simulation study to examine how human-AI delegation dynamically changes in an organizational routine as it is enacted over and over again. We build on findings from previous research and examine the interaction of various human and AI-related fac...

Pader

Large language models, such as ChatGPT, provide ample opportunities for organizational work. These models are capable of collecting, integrating, and generating information with no or little human supervision [1]. Despite their wide and rapid uptake, we lack systematic knowledge about how large language models can be used in business processes. Our...

We draw on predictive mind theory—an emerging paradigm shift in the cognitive and computational neurosciences—to characterize affordance perception and enactment in the context of digital technologies as a generative process. Key to our argument is that affordance perception and enactment are characterized by a forward flow from the agent to the ob...

Online communities are virtual communities where users exchange knowledge, organize tasks, and accomplish work. We focus on how individual users influence the ways others behave. We draw from mimetic theory and leverage computationally intensive theorizing to examine the influence of popular developers on other developers in GitHub, the largest and...

Digital trace data offer promising opportunities to study dynamics and change of various socio-technical phenomena over time. While we see a surge of empirical and conceptual articles, we lack a systematic understanding of why, how, and when digital trace data are or can be used to study dynamics and change. In this article, we present the findings...

Digital trace data, along with computational techniques to analyze them, provide unprecedented means to study how organizational phenomena change over time. Yet, as digital traces typically lack context, it is challenging to explain why and how such changes take place. In this paper, we discuss temporal bracketing as an approach to integrate contex...

Digital twins of organizations are software models that leverage operational and other data streams in order to dynamically monitor, analyze and improve organizational activities over time. Despite surging interest in practice, there is little research about this emerging topic. In this report, we draw from a panel discussion that has taken place a...

The information systems field has a long-standing interest in how individual actions co-evolve with social structures. Yet, studying the exact process of co-evolution turned out to be elusive. We propose a novel way to study this co-evolution using digital trace data. By analyzing the sequences of individual actions through digital trace data and t...

Digital infrastructures provide a space where possibilities for innovation continuously emerge. They are not stable entities but are evolving. Their boundaries are subject to constant negotiation among multiple organizational actors as well as changing connections of digital technologies, operations, and users. In this paper, we explore the evoluti...

Digital infrastructures are socio-technical arrangements of physical objects, digital technologies, users, and processes. They constantly evolve and provide the foundation for the emergence and implementation of a variety of applications. But how and why do digital infrastructures evolve? In this short paper, we report on an ongoing study of an Ind...

Information systems research has a long-standing interest in how organizations gain value through information technology. In this article, we investigate a business process intelligence (BPI) technology that is receiving increasing interest in research and practice: process mining. Process mining uses digital trace data to visualize and measure the...

In this paper, we respond to Grover and Lyytinen (2022). We agree with them that the advent of the digital age is calling for a reconsideration of the role of theory and theorizing. We also think their proposal does not go far enough. The time is ripe to question the role of theory in our field more fundamentally. We propose to instead focus on est...

Process mining is a fast-growing technology concerned with managing and improving business processes. While the technology itself has been thoroughly scrutinized by prior research, we are only beginning to understand the managerial and organizational implications of process mining. Creating such knowledge is essential for a successful adoption and...

We introduce a new theoretical construct to empirically measure and analyze the dynamics of actions and events in virtual organizing through digital trace data: DNA of virtual organizing. The new construct captures the actions and events that form the basic building blocks of all possible and actual paths in virtual organizing. By possible paths, w...

Information systems students need to be prepared to understand and manage unfolding dynamics in businesses operating in a digital world. We present a university course that systematically integrates knowledge from two streams of research that deal with dynamics: business process management and routine dynamics. Both streams of research study proces...

Policies to fight COVID-19 have largely targeted at indoor spaces. Abundant empirical evidence showed that COVID-19 spreads more easily through aerosols in closed rooms. We have been utilizing Design Science Research (DSR) to develop a smart space management solution that draws from space-related trace data to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in indo...

Explorative business process management (BPM) is attracting increasing interest in the literature and professional practice. Organizations have recognized that a focus on operational efficiency is no longer sufficient when disruptive forces can make the value proposition of entire processes obsolete. So far, however, research on how to create entir...

Action patterns occur wherever people perform work. Research has provided important insights about how action patterns form, change and dissolve over time. However, it has neglected the question of why actors choose to enact certain action patterns. In this research-in-progress, we shed light on the socio-cognitive factors underlying the formation...

Routine dynamics and Business Process Management (BPM) are two academic disciplines that investigate sequences of action for carrying out work in organizations. Even though they share this phenomenon of interest, there are fundamental differences that separate both research areas. In this chapter, we take a first step to overcome this divide. To do...

We present a framework to classify business processes according to their contextual management requirements. Our framework results from a real-world project with Hilti, a globally operating company. Following a design science research approach, we identify two key dimensions to classify business processes: variability and frequency. As these two di...

Given the diversity of business processes, isn't it strange that BPM approaches aim at a unified management approach? We report on research challenging this common assumption: We present an approach to account for contextual differences of processes in BPM. Specifically, we report on research that has developed a matrix to classify business process...

In this article, we point to the importance of considering the organizational context when deciding on an enterprise modeling approach. Based on extant research in the area of context-aware Business Process Management, we present results from an empirical investigation on how the context of an organization can be assessed regarding requirements for...

In places where pandemic restrictions are easing, companies must embrace this unique opportunity to retain the beneficial practices they adopted during the crisis. To do so effectively, leaders must be thoughtful about identifying which have been successful and deliberate in ensuring that the changes stick. The authors present a four-step framework...

In an effort to contribute to the recent debate around epistemological and methodological anarchism inspired by the thinking of Paul Feyerabend, we reflect on Habermas's pragmatist perspective of social science. We argue that the information systems field instantiates a sort of pluralism that goes beyond the relativistic conclusions of Feyerabend....

This report summarizes a large-scale online workshop series focusing on the connection be-tween digital innovation and business process management (BPM). The motivation behind our format was to complement the primarily conceptual claims in this field of research with in-depth insights from organizational practice. The format covered four consecutiv...

Design science research (DSR) is an established research paradigm aiming to create design knowledge on innovative solutions for real-world problems. As such, DSR has the potential to contribute to the solution of real-world problems of great societal value. In this article, we discuss how DSR can maximize such practical impact. Reflecting on our lo...

How can we enable explorative BPM in organizations? This is an important, yet complex question. Within our EU-funded Erasmus+ project on explorative BPM, we have formed a consortium between the University of Liechtenstein, the Vienna University of Economics and Business and the University of Bayreuth to jointly investigate this question. We have de...

Purpose – Process redesign refers to the intentional change of business processes. While process redesign methods provide structure to redesign projects, they provide limited support during the actual creation of to-be processes. More specifically, existing approaches hardly develop an ontological perspective on what can be changed from a process d...

Purpose: This study explores how process managers perceive the adoption, use and management of process mining in practice. While research in process mining predominantly focuses on the technical aspects, our work highlights organizational and managerial implications. Design/methodology/approach: We report on a focus group study conducted with pro...

The fields of business process management and routine dynamics both investigate organizational processes. However, the lexicons, methods, and aims of these disciplines are very different from one another. In this chapter, we reflect on both disciplines to outline similarities and differences. We introduce the reader to the BPM life cycle and explai...

Die Digitalisierung bietet Unternehmen ungeahnte Möglichkeiten. Gleichzeitig stellt sie diese auch vor große Herausforderungen. In diesem Kontext nimmt Prozessmanagement eine essenzielle Rolle ein, weil es dabei unterstützt, die Digitalisierung erfolgreich zu gestalten. In diesem Artikel berichten die Autoren von zahlreichen internationalen Forschu...

Purpose Business Process Management (BPM) is key for successful organisational management. However, BPM techniques are often criticized for their inability to deal with continuous and significant change and uncertainty. Following recent calls to make BPM more agile and flexible towards change, this study presents the results of a systematic literat...

Recent claims in the literature highlight that BPM should become more explorative and opportunity-driven. The underlying argument is that BPM has been mainly concerned with exploitation activities – i.e., analysis and improvement of existing business processes – but it has neglected the role of innovation. In this conceptual article, we aim to esta...

Neurology is concerned with diseases of the brain, spinal cord, and neuromuscular system. Neurological diseases can be acute or chronic, and residual or progressive disease often leaves patients with handicaps and disability. Besides many frequent neurological diseases as stroke, epilepsy, movement disorders and others, neurology also includes rare...

This chapter takes an international perspective on advocacy. It focuses on the question of how international advocacy projects can look like and what makes them successful. In doing so, we turn to the practical and applied sides of advocacy. Advocacy activities aim at taking the voice of patients to inform, protect, and support them. In the first p...

This chapter focuses on the operational side of advocacy. The question we are pursuing is, ‘What is needed to get an advocacy project done?’. Physicians and nurses are used to working in environments that are marked by stable (infra)structures, well-known goals, and specific requirements and incentives. Most often, advocates will find the opposite...

Projects end according to plan if the goals are achieved, or the content of a project becomes part of routine procedure. In specific circumstances, advocacy projects can be set up for continuous policy/procedure development purposes. Irregular endings can occur at any time for several reasons and do not necessarily indicate failure. Persons working...

Drawing on various definitions of ‘advocacy’, this chapter takes an epistemological perspective on the term. It focuses on patients’ knowledge of personal needs that require advocacy. While patients can be able to articulate knowledge of their needs, they might also lack the ability to express it linguistically. On that account, one can distinguish...

The main goals of this book are to provide a systematic view on advocacy and provide insight that advocacy is a useful and powerful tool. Advocacy, as used in the context of medicine and in particular neurology, is not new, but has always been practised by physicians and neurologists and can be considered an implicit permanent activity, even duty o...

Purpose This paper aims to study the export knowledge to be the determinant of export strategy, export commitment and export performance in carpet Industry. Design/methodology/approach Using a qualitative–quantitative approach, the unit of analysis is the individual export venturing firm in India. More in detail, a qualitative analysis was condu...

We report about the design and implementation of an undergraduate course on organizational learning in an Austrian business school. Using problem-based learning, this course enables students to put theories on organizational learning into practice. In a live case study, a case partner from industry provides an unstructured and ill-defined problem w...

Purpose-Unlearning of old and learning of new behaviour leads to cognitive dissonance when there are inconsistencies between the new behaviour and actors' established underlying attitudes and assumptions. Cognitive dissonance can lead to resistance to change and actors hold on to old behaviour. Design/methodology/approach-In this conceptual paper,...

Systems thinking allows for detecting and understanding interrelated parts and underlying dynamics of a phenomenon. The question of how systems thinking can be developed is essential for a number of fields, including management and organizational learning. In this article, we explore what systems thinking entails in terms of processes and capabilit...

Despite ongoing interest in organizational visions, both in research and practice, there is little understanding of what a vision should entail. What makes a good vision? We approach this question from a knowledge perspective and explore what organizations need to know in order to effectively plan and perform organizational activities. We will revi...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a decision support system to prioritize needs that are anchored in an organization. We build on a systems-thinking approach and develop a weighted additive index which considers different viewpoints of organizational stakeholders. First, we briefly review the literature about identifying and prioritizing ne...

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a decision support system to prioritize needs that are anchored in an organization. We build on a systems-thinking approach and develop a weighted additive index which considers different viewpoints of organizational stakeholders. First, we briefly review the literature about identifying and prioritizing ne...

An inspiring and compelling vision can help cities and regions to develop knowledge-based capabilities; it can guide future policy making, and it can set a city apart from other cities. In this article, we will apply the theoretical framework of the ‘Theory Wave’ to suggest how cities can develop a vision that is (1) participative as it involves pe...

In response to criticism on the concept of ‘unlearning’, we suggested that unlearning on an individual level should be defined as the reduction of the influence of old knowledge on cognitive and/or behavioural processes. In this article, we apply a systems thinking perspective on this definition to explore how far this kind of unlearning can possib...

Innovation processes require organizations to transcend current boundaries. These include not only technological as well as social limitations but-above all-the way we address the future. We are used to face the future with our existing knowledge and experiences from the past. This strategy, however, can hardly lead to knowledge off the beaten path...

Hidden needs are defined as requirements that customers or users have but which they have not yet directly recognized. As these requirements rest on a subconscious level, users are unable to articulate them (Goffin & Lemke, 2004). The identification of hidden needs and the externalization of knowledge about needs are very important and highly valua...

Hidden needs are defined as requirements that customers or users have but which they have not yet directly recognized. As these requirements rest on a subconscious level, users are unable to articulate them (Goffin & Lemke, 2004). The identification of hidden needs and the externalization of knowledge about needs are very important and highly valua...