The problem for all methods in business analysis is that it is difficult to strike a balance among a) enough generality to cope with the wide range of situations out there, b) enough specificity that at the end you’ve usefully narrowed down the problems/solutions, and c) enough simplicity that you can use the method under reasonable constraints of time, attention, and data availability. I try to make advances in these areas in my own research, and it isn’t easy.

Bad methods with sprouting boxes and arrows holding ill-defined and equivocal concepts are a curse in management. A cheap diagnostic when confronted with one of these is to see if the same problem element belongs under multiple headings withing the same schema. This approach can often reveal the essential vacuity of something like SWOT analysis (which is far from the worst thing in wide use).

Incidentally, if one of these things is quantifiable, you’re way ahead of the game. It becomes relatively easy to see what it’s claiming and what it’s missing. You have *units* to work with, and you can think about whether they are appropriate to the task at hand.

Non-quantifiable methods are much harder to debug. Another cheap diagnostic when faced with purely qualitative methods is to check whether some attribute cued by the method is even ordered over the set to which it is supposed to apply, e.g. “centralization” over the set of organizations.

It turns out that for many, many realistic situations if you look at two organizations you can’t say which one is more centralized than the other (the set is only partially ordered becaause there are lots of dimensions of organization where centralization can come in). Yet people constantly act as though this is a simple ordering. I bet a lot of the boxes and arrows in Danny’s method contain similarly non-ordered measures masquerading as unproblematic measures. Think about something like “authenticity” or “convenience” in a marketing context.

In the end,though, even divergent thinkers like Grant use methods to weed out bad ideas. These may be implicit or tacit, but they amount to some kind of theory-in-use. Heck, I seem to recall a very useful post (and even a book) on methods for interviewing people properly. If someone comes up with a “grounded” idea based on crappy interview techniques or focus groups, I expect Grant to use his method to reject it.

In some ways I can empathize with Danny. I meet many people who mentally check out when confronted with the rich ideas, but can accept a method. They want help, and I want to help them. Perhaps I can, starting with a method, then gradually introducing ideas, similar to martial arts in which one begins by repetitively practicing simple exercises, later combining them using sophisticated improvisation.

And btw, I never trusted anyone who referred to a PowerPoint presentation as a “deck.” Except for you, Grant.

So, for instance, if you approach consciousness as an object, it follows that the method of choice would be the scientific method (the preeminent method for studying objects). Consequently, the content (data) that emerge from using the scientific method are those amenable to quantification. So, psychology decided that the only things it could study scientifically were things that were quantifiably measurable. Unfortunately, that omits everything interesting about human life, putting all those things outside psychology’s purview. Want to study love? Sorry, can’t be measured. But you can study the galvanic skin responses of people viewing images of people they say they love.

What fun!

What the phenomenologists did (the folks we oddballs at Duquesne based our work on) was to say, well then, we better get ourselves another method, one more in keeping with the kinds of data we’re interested in, which is, human experience *as lived by real people*, not lab rats.

Seems to me your friend’s problem wasn’t so much that he had *a method* but that he had a method not well-suited to the domain he was interested in studying.

Or, to put it more simply, I mean, after all, if all you’ve got is a hammer…