Generating Theory by Abduction

Uh alph and i to sharing this discussion on learning by abduction you know uh theory building is very important to all of us as young scholars as old scholars but also as practitioners we need theory in order to make sense of the world we need theory in order to be able to learn and pass on what we know we need theory in order to Understand buzzing blooming confusing subjects in a reasonable way and so we need to think about theory building as really consisting of three steps first is the conception of a hunch an idea

a half-baked idea by abduction second once you have a selected a hunch Then it's a matter of constructing the theory by deduction using good philosophy of logic and then once that is designed to move on to justify a theory and test it by argumentation and induction these three steps of course are highly interrelated and oftentimes happen simultaneously and not necessarily in this direction But what is important to recognize though is that this first idea of conceiving a theory by abduction is often confused with induction and so let's clarify what we mean by deduction induction and

abduction by deduction we mean basically moving from general theoretical principles to specific instances it's descending the ladder of abstraction Using logistic reasoning where if the major and the minor premises both are true then the conclusion must be true that is logic validity as a criterion induction works in the reverse it is ascending the latter abstraction if you will moving from specific instances to general principles it uses quantitative or qualitative data as the specific instances to find probabilistic Generalities empirical truth is the criteria often used and of course truth in a philosophical sense is quite different

from validity logic focuses on validity empiricism focuses on truth but abduction is quite different It's moving from some unexplained anomaly a surprise some funny thing happened toward a plausible explanation it's a generative process of creating and evaluating explanations that would render the anomaly understandable and plausibility is the criterion because you see abduction occurs right up front when the initial Surprise isn't achieved so with this as an introduction are there comments about clarifying what we mean when we talk about the words abduction induction and deduction for we fully understand there's many other different ways of thinking

about this any comments or elf you want to add anything uh no i think this this covers it that's um I'm a little surprised if there's no questions but uh that's okay we can we can move on we'll even take snide remarks if you have them but um very nice i posted a question ah here we go uh let's see do i hear her yeah here would you like to ask a question yes I posted a question in the chat what about methodological implications for the three i know it's a big question but you mentioned

quantitative and qualitative in induction so i thought a quick comment on that would be fantastic well methodologically these are three different modes of reasoning it's the way you think about things the methodology it's open to many different Methodologies but deduction is a logical descending a ladder abstraction from general principles or theoretically abstract concepts down to particular observables that's the methodology induction i'm sorry yeah for for deduction i'm assuming most of you if not all of you are familiar with the a classic example of of a major premise all men are mortal Uh minor premise socrates

is a man therefore uh you know it's syllogistic reasoning but it's it's major premise minor premise and and if both are valid both are true then the conclusion must be valid um [Music] very good induction works in reverse where you go from particular observables Count the different numbers and go toward probabilities and statistical averages of a population and abduction of course is a what we're going to be discussing here uh one that is the process of creation creating a new idea okay anything else hi professor can i ask a question please please It's a pleasure

to be here i'm a huge fan of your work i use your book as a methodology methodology professor in brazil and and i remember that to use the example of the apple falling from the tree as an abduction and sometimes we learn before your book i used to think about this as an induction process so i'd like you to comment on that a little bit what is the difference between induction uh And abduction i understand that is the surprise but sometimes when i when we are in the process of research we might confuse those two

elements so i'd like love to hear your comment on that a little bit and thank you very much well thank you very much can i skip ahead to address this point suppose i am looking at a lake and i find 10 swans swimming in this lake And i notice that one of them is black huh that's a surprise wait a minute i thought all swans were white so by induction if this is a valid sample of the population i will have to conclude that by induction ninety percent of swans are white ten percent are black

induction By deduction i would therefore conclude that i have to reject my hypothesis that all swans are white but by abduction now i notice this anomaly and i ask myself what's going on here what i thought oh i'll bet you there are some hunches here that explain why this one is black It could be a migration problem i know that swans black swans live in in uh australia but surely they wouldn't get up to the uk would they but it's a possibility another one might be it's a mutation maybe this is a swan that it

represents the starting of a new species biological genetic or i could say no That's one is black because it was in polluted water and yes indeed i checked the lake and i found there was polluted water there so i have three creative germs a hunch conjectures half baked ideas and now i'm gonna evaluate those three so i select the most plausible one so does that address your question paulo yes that's a great example thank you Very much yes the one thing you can also notice is that even deduction plays a small part in this and

that is that once you've observed the black swan you can deductively conclude that not all you can you know not all swans are white that's that must be true it's it's so that's deduction So the all these processes of deduction induction and abduction as we started with are highly interrelated so notice what what we start off with when you think of abductive reasoning you begin to see that our minds are full of expectations in other words we do not enter the world with a clean slate as they say instead we enter the world with a

full Split of experiences um education of disciplines of that leads us to look at the world and to most of all most of the time explain it it's a good normal everything everyday occurrence but We also are going to notice exceptions especially when we have a prepared mind exceptions are not just anomalies that happen to occur they are hunches that need to be verified and so the creative process of generating new ideas to solve an anomaly Used to be thought of in a as a eureka moment some spontaneous bright creative person came up in a

flash of inspiration to come up with a new hunch new idea new theory and we argue against that and indeed if you look at the literature on this subject you find that It goes far more deeply and there is a more systematic way of looking through the moves that we make as we develop and create theory for example in what led to the discovery of penicillin alexander fleming reported in 1928 that he was cleaning a pile of petri dishes growing um bacteria that was piled in the sink some mold was growing on one of the

Dishes but that was not unusual but all around the mold the staph bacteria had been killed huh that's funny very surprising another example in 1922 1992 i'm sorry scientists at pfizer were testing a pill to fight angina unfortunately for the afflicted it had a little success against the disease Though it didn't work the men taking part in the study refused to give up their medicine that's funny what's going on well this led to viagra you see the process of abduction you notice an anomaly you analyze it you create a hunch and you select the hunch

for further subsequent deductive theory construction and inductive Theory testing example mary's elmer bruin my colleague at uh was doing it field studies and observed that teams were learning more when they were interrupted several instances of losing team members changing tools organizational restructuring was this happening what explains this she asked might the interruptions get teams out of Their ruts hunch interpret interruptions provide opportunities to learn ways to do work better aha another example amy edmondson studying medical errors in hospitals she discovered that high performing teams make more errors than low-performing teams huh that's a surprise That's

funny did high performing teams really make more mistakes what explains this well the good teams edmondson reasoned do not make more mistakes they report more hunch one potential mechanism that would explain the anomaly is a shared belief that making a mistake will not be held against them aha And on went this work toward safety my own personal experience as a doctoral student was that i worked with and i went with dr andre dalbeck to attend neighborhood block meetings in order to identify the needs of low-income people in the housing area and after dane county community

action With the officials asked what difficulties do you have living in this neighborhood nobody talked that's funny huh what do you mean nobody talks when you're starting a meeting well we andre del beck sent me off to the library and he said go find out what's wrong what leads people Not to talk in a meeting and of course you know all of the factors racial minority uh all the other factors that lead individuals to not speak up but there was a study by taylor and osborne that found that individuals working alone generate more ideas than

when they work together aha andre suggested let's start the meeting by not letting people talk How about that that's a creative germ and so we'll start the meeting with silent writing of ideas on a question and that of course then led to some round-robin procedure for getting people to share their ideas on a flip chart which in turn led to a preliminary vote to determine what to talk about and then of discussion of all of those ideas ending with the final vote But it was that silent idea let me stop at this point and ask

questions about your examples or our examples about abduction because you see we do it all the time but we need to know the moves we are making and that's the point of our paper these four steps observe the anomaly confirm the anomaly Generate hunches and evaluate hunches and we point out notice it goes on not only at the individual level but the group collective level yeah andy before we get into this should we take a couple of questions absolutely shall we i see rinda and forgive me if i mispronounce her name have her hand up

Oh good yes hi uh my question is uh if i look at the phenomenon of women entrepreneurs and that's my field of study is you know women entrepreneurs have navigated some of them have navigated the space of covet 19 pretty well now Is that a process of abduction or is it something which which they were expected to do using technology so how do i position that problem is what i'm asking i'm not sure how to respond because i i guess i don't understand the context well enough or alf do you have some thoughts or please

no it's it depends on is this Is this an anomaly you're seeing or is this some some novel phenomenon or something you can't explain for example uh literature tells me that women should not have performed well but they are and some of them have for example remote working should have taken women out of the workforce for example so i don't know how to position that and That's exactly what i'm asking because that that's a phenomenon that i see but i don't know how to how to frame that question that therefore i'm leaving question out in

the open well it it sounds to me like depending on your methodology and your data if you have a if you have data To show that then that's interesting in itself because you have data that um provides evidence that what's going on um contradicts the literature and i'm not that familiar with that with that body of literature to do well indeed you could find and many of us do as scholars as we're reading the literature we come up and we read about findings that are surprising to us That are funny that don't fit our expectations

in other words we get our uh anomalies from the literature just as much as we do from real world observations point one and then as step one he suggests notice only certain people are going to be attentive to those anomalies only if you know the literature are you going to know about this surprise If you didn't know the literature you just pass it by go ahead sure thank you so much yeah andy and uh i'll stand we have five more hands raised in fact six now would you like to take those questions now no go

ahead yeah lisa would you like to go next sure um so as i was listening to this i was struck by this sounds a lot like what i do in a discussion section of a quantitative paper for instance i Hypothesize something about women are more likely to remain in their organizations when there are women in leadership i find that's not true so in the discussion i tried to generate some ideas about why this might be is that is that abduction it certainly is isn't it that sounds like it yeah and that's the neat thing but

notice when you make when you go through abductive reasoning You're thinking in a very different way than when you're going through a deductive or an inductive process abduction is creativity coming up with a new hunch a half-baked idea as opposed to a logical conclusion or as opposed to a statistical aggregation and that's the point of our Four steps here is to point out notice the process of thinking in an abductive procedure so that we can follow our own and those of others as we develop and improve our theory creation okay other questions ravi good to

see you by the way likewise um so as i was kind of looking at some of these examples a lot of times Especially in qualitative research they're presented as part of an inductive template people don't typically use the word here's abduction happening um and there is this sort of for better or worse this grounded theory baggage of well you come into the field with no expectations you're not listening to prior theory um and so without coming in with these expectations of prior theory abduction Doesn't really make sense because that's oftentimes the source of the mystery

so i was curious if you could kind of talk a little bit about um how we sort of manage that tension between how we portray our findings versus kind of how we actually come up with them because it seems like there's probably a heck of a lot more abduction going on that actually appears in the journals so if you could kind of talk About that that tension and whether you see there being um in your sort of template here a way to sort of justify the abductive move because it is a little mysterious and it

isn't as clear as inductive coding so any sort of insights on that would be very appreciated although some methodologists using case study or qualitative methods assume that researchers can Have a clean slate and have no theory and have no preconceptions until they observe phenomena the answer is that's not possible we are human beings we have social um biases those include all of our past experiences all the knowledge that we in the cultural situations in which we've lived And knowledge of the literature and disciplines that we've learned and we don't know many of the others as

pogi said what you see is also what you not see so that in turn then leads to the first statement like charles first said the american pragmatist that abduction is the form in which creative ideas emerge By recognizing it is the surprises the anomalies that lead one to think what's going on here and that that in turn then is precisely the spark the opportunity for creativity it's the uncertainties the quest for trying to understand something that we need to examine i don't know if i addressed your question um Is there anything further or else i

don't want to take too much time because i know there are many people with hands raised but just you know aside from amd just the tension between yes that's maybe how we come up with our ideas is there are these puzzles and then we iterate back and try to resolve them especially in qualitative field work but then the the gap between that is our actual process versus the ways that we have to present it in terms of Accepted templates in terms of you know coding schemes where you can't really just say oh i was sitting

there and all of a sudden this idea this hunch came to me people want like oh what's your coding process let me see the quotes let me see so it just seems to be this this kind of vague nebulous thing and i was curious maybe if some of what you're presenting today could maybe systematic like make it more systematic justify it better make it More acceptable make it more publishable that sort of thing notice what the reviewers are doing is asking about step two of this abductive process whereas you number one observe an anomaly and

you can describe it but the reviewer's gonna say check it out show me it's a matter of your method That came up with this anomaly it doesn't really exist it's that kind of step two need to confirm the anomaly grounding the anomaly up close and from afar diagnosing its characteristics and its context and then also not by yourself but with others converging on an agreement that yes indeed there is an anomaly out there yeah there's detention Isn't it okay um lee i see you what question do you have yeah you you guys are kind of

touched upon it and ravi put it really nicely actually then with how he was putting across i my question was to do with the um events that i care before step one um because with my research at the minute And working with emancipatory entrepreneurialism with um ex-offenders and their time inside prison i approach the research with this idea about emancipatory processes that may or may not be happening but i thought with a fairly kind of open mind and and so i would describe it as an inductive process but then through gathering the data and just

to see what People would find interviews just to see what people would would talk about their experiences and what came to mind that then generated a hunch around oh there seems to be something happening here with identity transitions which then move the research into an occupational identity route so i suppose that the question is around and apologies if you guys are going to want to talk about this but those steps That come before step one or is that just muddy in the waters of kind of saying well there's induction and then there's abduction and they

can kind of move back and forth well you know these steps can occur so quickly that they seem to be simultaneous but as i listen to you lee in terms of this framework you're jumping from step one to step three and four which takes you back to one and so forth Because you were generating some anomaly for which you had some hunches and you're exploring alternative hunches in order to know what procedure to take next so from the point of view of this framework you're going through these steps because i did not hear you going

through a process of deduction nor induction instead you are looking more at Problem solution pairs that is to say you see a problem that immediately is connected with a solution and that solution in turn may may vary with a further hunch yeah katrina did you have a question yes i have one question just a short one uh first of all thank you um professor and when i'm really very much appreciating your work and reading uh about the process um studies um And recently we have been also discussing with the qualitative research matters course i kind

of made a debate about objective processes theorizing inductive and dead active but my question relates um like for example if you are in the process of analyzing the data and of course you enter the field is not really an empty mind but then you are stuck in the decision making induction or abduction so what to do at this point is how to convince Yourself and others for example your supervisors your reviewers of going with the right approach so um what what what comes to your mind of argumentation to this thank you very much well you

are you say you are analyzing data yes probably you're doing that for a reason right you got a question in mind or something so in a sense what you are Doing is inductively examining data but you still have a mind of your own so you're going through the methodologies and the steps to evaluate whether or not your purpose your question is being addressed but in the process you come up with some hunches some surprises i'm sorry i didn't think the data would turn out to be this way Oh you asked the abductive question what's going

on right that's fun right health no that that's what i'm going to add you can sit there and do you know qualitative can range from case studies to various kinds of coding and you sit there and work with the data and then something shows up that violates your expectations and expectations are based on literature theory what you came into the field with And it's when you find this thing that surprises you what we call an anomaly which is a novel phenomenon that is heretofore unexplained by existing theories then the abductor process starts what in its

because people are natural um generators of explanations we We need to understand our environment so when we see something that doesn't fit we naturally start inventing explanations so that it would make sense to us and so it's this process that you can take advantage of through the uh abductive uh reasoning process that we propose um alicia you had a question alicia are there you are muted Or subhan john is that me ebm oh sorry yes okay all right thank you very much sir yes should i go ahead please do okay thank you i was going

to ask about the relationship between phenomenology and abduction because for phenomenology the expectation is that you're looking at a phenomenon from a participant's first Personal experience first person point of view the reason why i'm asking is that i'm looking at authentic leadership right and i've commenced my pilot study where some of my participants have already shared some insights that i didn't find in literature so my first question is this can you do phenomenology using an abductive line of reasoning and secondly based on these hunches that i've developed from from my pilot Interview am i supposed

to now start offering alternatives wouldn't that be biased wouldn't that be my personal explanations or i'm just supposed to continue interviewing to get more anomalies thank you very much well thank you for your question it's a loaded question um phenomenology yes is if i'm correct an attempt to understand phenomena right And it does so in a social construction manner that is a perceived manner and it does not necessarily rely on rational logical thinking but it could be very experiential or emotional or uh based on faith well having said all of that the Complexity now is

where does abduction fit into all of that phenomenology um i guess it does when you get surprised when your logic or your emotion or your beliefs get questioned and that in turn then triggers you To confirm the anomaly and proceed ahead to generate possible explanations hunches that then with others you can evaluate step four to select the explanation or the hunch that seems to be the most plausible what do you think else no that sounds about right to me um i i thought i heard a slightly different description of phenomenology but the sound was breaking

up so okay But now i think we have alicia back with us oh good hi there thank you for me do you hear me yes okay with the problem um i'm just having a question about how do you know i mean there's always something missing and surprising or sometimes because You want to try or to find something new but then or if someone else found it so i don't know if it's a dumb question or not but i'm just wondering that no it's not a dumb question in fact we get exposed to so many surprises

we can't possibly deal with them all isn't that right and that's what makes this a world a buzzing blooming confusing place so you and i and everybody else can only Handle and deal with so many anomalies in this world and so because i'm a social scientist and more or less a sociologist i tend to focus more on issues phenomena in my discipline or in the areas where i'm an expert or that is to say where i know the literature and i can spot things but i'm not an ornithologist let's say and so i do have

this very nice bird Feeder but to be honest i don't know when i see a new bird or an old bird because i don't know they look pretty but they i don't know enough my mind is not prepared enough to know when i have detected an anomalous bird species so it i just let those pass by I don't pay attention to those anomalies i don't even recognize them as anomalies and that's the thing with most of us we all sort of go along in this world being incredibly adaptive without recognizing that we are simply fitting

uh what could be anomalous situations into and within our existing stock of knowledge So that that that means that most of us go through the world most of the time fitting our experiences um into our existing theories that is in essence adapting our experiences to our existing theories instead of holding our theories loosely on our anomalies firmly and and trying to adapt our theories to our experiences so we're basically we're routinely missing opportunities for abductive thinking yeah Okay someone else uh yes uh professor shubhanjan decide from delhi okay yes thank you very much it has

been amazing to listen to this and i have a very elementary question um is it that induction is associated with hair regeneration Deduction with theory testing and adduction with theory elaboration and how do we differentiate and where does animal fit thank you alf do you want to uh answer that well my initial reaction is that deduction is about theory elaboration or fleshing out a theory once you have derived a pure hypothesis you can flesh it out through the deduction into a full-fledged theory consisting of a Set of hypotheses and then [Music] induction is i think

that's what you said the testing of the theory and abduction is what we talked about here is is the generation of novel theory good num rata oh could you you are muted here yes yes sorry sorry uh i do have to you know i Got kicked out my something happened with my internet so please ignore me if you've kind of dealt with this question already i'll hear it on the recording uh so can we say that you know where does a surprise come from i think when i got kicked out somebody was asking that question

um can the surprise i mean we often in the course of doing our inductive qualitative analysis We see something totally surprising that doesn't completely fit with the existing theory and so i think and that's amazing you know that you don't try and that's the opportunity to build your own theory so then where is that there seems to be a fine line there uh between is abduction that different it is the finest line in that what tends to happen if we are in a deductive or an inductive Mode is that we throw out the outlier and

dismiss it as opposed to saying ah here's an opportunity for another paper yeah okay thank you yes and silky you have a question are you you are also muted silky i hope i'm sorry sorry i just uh clicked on my camera many many things this is very insight for your presentation and Also the dialogue and just to confirm my thoughts the black swan it can ha it could be that it always has been there but the anomaly has been ignored am i correct or does it have to be a novel phenomenon no it can it

could have been there uh for years okay and if i but but if we haven't observed it it's an Until now it's a novel phenomenon okay i think i'm i have something in mind which probably has been observed but has been ignored in research i think that it happens for indeed in the physical sciences that's what we're looking for all the time isn't it yeah characteristics of the world that have not been explained or observed before And now we're trying to understand black holes right et cetera okay then and just because we haven't seen them

before doesn't mean they haven't been there all along yesterday yeah okay okay so that's also the interpretation of novel then okay and if uh if i have a hunch for a different explanation maybe a different theory that can explain this Anomaly better and then i look um inductively how i can you know test that that new explanation and this can still be qualitatively or indeed in other words after you've gone through the steps you then move on to deductive fleshing out and inductive testing of a hunch The ones that you chose and that can be

done qualitatively quantitatively using whatever methodology um and data sources um address the research question okay many thanks for that many things um sarah and frank Is that right so sarah you have a question you are also on mute sorry i just have a quick question um what is the difference would you say between reproduction and abduction because to me it's like yeah the same yeah they're the twelve first they are the Same charles first would say and called it retroduction okay then before he called it abduction so he changed the terminology of the but they're

the same because in all the like critical realist um literature like uh by um bashkar and all that i mean it's it's mostly spoken of reproduction so so i'm always confused um yeah reading the two so i was Wondering very good uh uh frank you have a question thank you um what's your view on the the distinction or or similarity between abduction and the hacking you know we are you know sometimes research you know reviewers say you your your your theorizing sounds like you know Hacking but uh yeah hypothesizing after the results are known harking

yeah and uh that is not being honest if you are following the logical deductive or pardon me inductive mode of uh research but hypothesizing after results are known Especially when they are surprises in our hunches that is abduction except you're doing it in a legal way well i think also you can do harking in a legal way i think what we both andy and i object to is what we call sharking which is secretly hypothesizing after the results are now i don't know now if you because you can't Get articulate all hypotheses and test them

a priori um you can you can heart but then you do you do it transparently which is farking the challenge is with getting um journals to publish that but but that's a legitimate way to do it yes and um lita you have a question and then we want to move on for the other discussion please yes yes thank you thank you for The dialogue my ques i just want to confirm my understanding um so so i think what happens very frequently is that we identify or normally it's something we cannot explain um oftentimes it's because

uh the literature or or or we as a whole the researchers haven't explained this phenomenon using An appropriate theoretical perspective or the theory so is that correct before we try to generate a new theory we really want to search make sure um it's it's not that the theory exists but we haven't used this theory to explain this phenomenon um but it's really um we we haven't got right theory so so my question i think my question is before we generate um a new theory To explain this phenomenon we need to make sure that um really

we don't have the theory a proper theory to explain this you know this abnormally is is this um what you are is this aligned with with your idea well yes in the in the following sense um the In step one you observe an anomaly and because of your cognitive attention or flexibility and your own depth of knowledge in the literature and so you say ah there's an anomaly here but it's good to check it out it's good to find out is this an anomaly in two regards number one talk to others that is to say

collectively Get others to observe this phenomenon to find out if is this the way i think it is is this the anomaly that i think it exists that's point one but the other one is has well someone else might tell you yeah that is the way you think it is but here's the theory that's been used to explain it and it works perfectly well so here's a case where you may think you have an anomaly But others that you talk with in a collective sense may say oh we don't know that already by this theory

it's explained right right um and that's that's why that's the the example of um that we um the fleming example is you know the prepared mind yeah you're the you're an expert in the field and it's also why You do step two um and it's also what and i guess this is a nice lead-in to to talking through this slide it's also when you move into the collective level of it because you check with others are you are you seeing this also is this do you understand this do you know a theory that uh that

explains this and then if there is then it's not anomaly because it's an it's an um phenomenon that is already explained by Some other body of literature yeah yeah oftentimes we see publications like the newly published papers that start the paper with something like uh we have been we have we have been explaining this phenomena using this to the theoretical perspective but there is something we cannot explain now i'm going to bring this uh another another theoretical perspective to explain this phenomena so this is this is the moment when We don't need to create a

new theory but we just need to explain this phenomenon using a different theoretical perspective so this is not the time to do right right right well having finding an existing theory that explains the phenomenon not only makes it not an anomaly but it's also akin to a court of law in a court of law frivolous cases Are thrown out in a court of law you see in social science we tend if we have theories that explain phenomena adequately then it becomes a frivolous case to say that this is an anomaly it becomes a relevant case

to say we need to replicate or this further in different contexts but maybe the existing theory is already Well known in certain locations or contexts okay thank you thank you so much yes so notice as you go from step one to step two to step three to step four the relationship between individual behavior and the collective group behavior grows from divergence to convergence to divergence to convergence And the process goes from individual to step one primarily but becomes more and more collective as you go to step two three and four when you start looking at

the creative process of doing research we find increasingly that co-authors collaborators who work together serve as checks and balances on one another So that i may observe a divergent cons anomaly and my co-author when asked to do so would agree or disagree and if he disagreed then i'd have to start to develop an argument for saying no i really do think there is an anomaly here whereas the other may say well drop it but even if i do see an anomaly in step Two i want to confirm that that anomaly exists up close and from

afar up close is to provide particular instances observable from afar is to know that well this is not a unique instance this is quite pervasive it's a problem a phenomenon an anomaly that seems to justify undertaking significant study And by diagnosing the characteristics in the context we then begin to obtain literature from others and findings and observations from colleagues who in turn then provide the basis for confirming your anomaly once you confirm the anomaly with others then The steps move toward generating hunches here we need diverse experiences a wide variety of different hunches and for

that we need a lot wide variety of different co-authors and collaborators who in turn generate diverse hunches but then come back in step four to help us converge to synthesize the hunches into those that are plausible here are the moves So the process of generating and evaluating ideas is pretty much generating ideas the point here is the greater the number of different hunches that you develop the better don't ever settle for one and use strong different classifications for developing these hunches don't fall into a rut thinking the same way about the phenomenon Then when it

comes to evaluating your ideas or your hunches the greater the number of different criteria that you use consistently to select hunches the better so don't evaluate one hunch because it tastes good and a second one because it's cheap and the third one because it's what something else instead evaluate your three hunches on The same criteria but notice here you can't prove anything because that's down the road when you're developing the theory deductively all you have is plausibility and carl white made a very nice argument on the need for plausibility as a substitute for validity in

selecting hunches so if these are the steps then you've got these levels going on at the individual level It's pretty much like carl white was suggesting it's an individual and evolutionary process of variation selection and retention of anomalies and hunches where you can generate many diverse hunches as many as you can and evaluate the hunches with the same criteria but our generation and our evaluations tend to be limited Limited to partial insights that can be overcome with the involvement of collective dialectical processes where with a partner trusting partners there can be sparring there can be

debate there can be a thesis antithesis and synthesis where once partial hunches are complemented by others and they fuse into collective ideas so evaluation criticism goes deeper And uh with a group of creative hunches and vergante wrote this nice book and go ahead alf one one thing that's worth noticing is that the process changes fundamentally as you move from individual level to the collective level it goes from being an evolutionary process to becoming a dialectical process yeah so so those are fundamentally different So as you move from me out to a pair radical circle interpreters

a big conference we are moving from inside out and where we're going through these different processes whereas for me i might be under undergoing an evolutionary process when we get into the sparring clashing infusing and questioning areas that's a dialectical process and social science really is Fundamentally a dialectical process collectively where there's always questioning and where there's never proof if you will of anything but there are more plausible more convergent schools of thought so collective abduction for example tversky and kahneman is nicely summarized here When one of us would say something it was off the

off the wall the others would search for virtue in it we would finish each other's sentences and frequently did but we also kept surprising each other it still gives me goosebumps that's dan kahneman speaking about diversity they wrote together sitting right next to each other at the typewriter recalls michigan psychologist Richard nisbet the way danny put it it was we were sharing a mind they both find it pointless to allocate credit as their thoughts felt like some a chemical byproduct of their interaction so as we move from individual to collective we also move from Individual

to collective memories and at some stage in this game we lose sight of whose ideas was which and after all the best of scholarship according to diversity and economy is a development of the shared mind where it's the idea not the person that matters so i can if you will conclude with some prescriptions for abductive theory creation And then we can have a further discussion about them all right so if you think of abduction as a four-step process of thinking four steps of behavior where step one is to observe and cherish anomalies chance favors the

prepared mind so the individuals likely to be prepared will be those who have Studied in depth and in breath and are flexible and open to surprises they seek divergent views of the anomaly with others because maybe it's just a figment of my imagination that leads me to say there's an anomaly here check it out second confirm the anomaly grounding the anomaly up close And from afar and that's to avoid the type three error it's also to avoid frivolous cases that are thrown out in courts of law and this requires diagnosing and converging on anomalies with

others not just by yourself notice we're talking about theory building and theory creation as a collective achievement more than an individual achievement step 3 generating hunches seeking many Alternatives avoid jumping to any one solution by diverging and getting divergent hunches from other people collaborators colleagues and then finally evaluating hunches selecting the plausible ones where plausibility is to substitute for validity and where we want to converge in the selection criteria With others alf you want to add anything else um no i think this about covers it i think there there are i want to call them

errors but the mistakes that you can commit in each step and we've talked about each of them so i just want to draw your attention to them again this and that's it's in step one it is sort of letting the world uh sail By uh or the error of uh insensitivity there's often little we can do about the strength of the signal of things that happen at the periphery of our area of our experience but what we can do something about is the sensitivity of the observer to pay more attention pay more careful attention to

things um and then we do step two in order to Avoid type three errors which andy talked about um and we do step three in order to avoid jumping to solutions because the first conjecture that comes to mind which we tend to fall in love with um because it was our idea is often not the best so you need to work with others to try and generate a wide Range of um hunches based on the divert diverse set of perspectives so here the inclusion of diverse perspectives becomes very important and in step four of course

it's the usual selection biases and errors that you can make in in selecting the best hunches that you're trying to avoid so that's just um a little uh repetition on those things And that's why you have this process and in our rather complex world the collective level becomes incredibly important comments or questions andy do you have more more slides i have more slides you have more slides so this is just posing for questions yes all right okay alisa would you like to go first yeah are you sure i'm just wondering because you said it Is

better to have different answers on the same criteria at the beginning but what do you mean by the same criteria if it is in step one step one you want to get others to see if the anomaly that you observe is verified does someone else see the anomaly like i see it or is this just a figment of my Imagination is that your that's your question isn't it yes but you say different and chase and then you have you said we need to have different hunches i i'm trying to understand did you say uh hunches

it's better to have different uh the seeds of the new theory yes And so the idea is don't ever settle for your first hunch always generate more hunches that you will then select from among from among and i also in in my courses on engaged scholarship i emphasize don't ever just test one proposition or theory compare alternative theories that is to say when you are proposing A proposition let's say you are a human resource manager or scholar and you propose investing in resource human resources increases organization performance fine but notice that's not a very important

well it's important but it would have much more impact if i added a disjunctive proposition to this Namely investing in human resources more strongly influences organization performance than investing in capital ah now you are juxtaposing the theory of capital investment with the theory of human resource investment and then you're going to have some important conclusion oh really is that correct How i say it yes thank you uh you are you are now uh muted asked to unmute aria hello so i have a little bit of i have a small question the way i understood the

uh uh abduction reasoning is that you focus on the outlier so i'm just wondering that if one go to the field and maybe you have a you collect a bunch of interviews or maybe You observe a phenomenon and then you you notice that there's anomaly and this may be an outlier but then you only have a small set of data on what seems to be the funny thing here what do you do if that data is not enough to like actually create or write a paper so i'm just really wondering in terms of evidence in

terms of like how do you how do you build a theory if you only have a small portion of Observation if it makes sense it i think the way i think about responding to your question which is a good question is that i don't need inductive generalizations of a population all i need is to see one black swan in a lake of ten birds i to start developing a hunch that huh I thought all swans were white and that leads me then to begin my abductive quest what's going on here why this black swan and

to come up with hunches that may then lead to subsequent theory construction does that address your point okay yeah so it's you're looking at the thing that you're Calling an outlier what you're basically addressing what the heck makes that so different and it's that it abduction is much more tenuous uh and tentative than than induction is oh yeah it's it's speculative you're generating explanations for what makes that so different you jonathan you had a question yes um thank you so uh Dr van deven in the paper in your 1995 paper with dr poole um you

mentioned or you you discuss the notion of um the idea evolving rather than create creating out of nothing and i was wondering through the discussion we've had today does the evolution idea of theory and essentially evolving from existing theory existing ideas limit the abilities to create new ideas Well it does but if you take donald campbell's statement about blind variations as opposed to random variations that basically says that i you may very intentionally come up with a very interesting idea because of your unique circumstance that i may not know about So you're seemingly creative insight

is blind to me because i can't see it and the distinction that donald campbell says is be careful ideas don't come out of blind alleys or faceless nameless ideas nor are they serendipitous events most of the time ideas the creation of new ideas are Blind to us but they're certainly not to the developers yeah that makes sense i appreciate the clarification there yep very nice thank you katrina yes i have one more question uh actually referring to the step one uh where you state that we should observe and cherish abnormalities um So basically my question

is what kind of uh observation techniques would you recommend at this stage so for example like narrative reflections together with your research group or analyzing collectively the data and i think that it's also not only at the first step it's kind of a evolving process and you can observe and cherish these annualities also maybe through the whole uh process of Analyzing data it's not just as the first um step when you code the data as first order code so i think it's more kind of developing process is it right that is that is exactly correct

uh it is certainly not a sequential process like our picture shows nor is it um a uh a rational necessary process because there's a lot of discontinuities in between all of these steps But what is important i think in these steps is that it provides us some guidance in theory in creating a theory there's a lot of people who actually do think that that like my second slide showed Eureka moments just flashes of bright insight when you look more carefully at how they develop we me mere uh mortals are very capable of creating insightful theories

if we think through the steps that we are following and to be honest for me I know when i'm doing this abduction because when i'm going through this process i feel very uptight i feel very uncertain i feel emotionally charged i feel tension precisely because there is this buzzing blooming confusing thing i saw out there and i don't know what to make of it and I try different things different hunches back and forth and i never feel satisfied not for two weeks or a month or a year even but this is a good state to

be in is what i tell myself because when you are in this state you are in a creative state don't jump out of create the creative state in order to simply satisfy your Quest for relieving attention in your mind or frustration i don't know others do you experience this tension i know i do yes as we are all researchers but would you recommend maybe some kind of techniques also um maybe observation of these animalities like using some narrative approach Do you use personal disease in your practice when you analyze the data or not oh i

certainly do once i see an anomaly i and when i when i develop some um uh hunches i conduct if you will not only with my co-author but with uh um collegial team i i conduct the nominal group meeting uh nominal group brainstorming Techniques where i present a question here is my hunch or here is what i think is an anomaly what do you think and asking them to respond by reflecting on the question and then we generate ideas that then are amazingly helpful to me for seeing new dots that are connected to that may

be connected to the overall phenomenon Great thank you very much yes good morning and good morning i am thrilled to be here i am also a fan of your work and i also use your book by the way well thank you thank you um well uh i am very happy to know that this paper is ready to be published in amr and i would like to know my first question is to know your view regarding This work as a function of the paper published by alba son 2011 in amr entitled creating mystery or something like

that i see this piece talking to that piece from different paradigmatic perspectives i don't know if my reading is correct please go ahead and tell us because i don't recall Uh the paper that you mentioned in 2011 unless uh alf you do and tell us how you see them informing one another or diverging from one another right well yeah unfortunately i don't i don't remember exactly the the past that albertson creates in in leading to mystery on how they resolve the mystery but I see abduction as a mystery as a surprise an unknown and then

you go ahead and you solve that mystery cognitively and behaviorally and the way i see it is that you are coming more from it and please accept my my bad reading if if if it is about of what i am listening which is much more positivistic in a way compared to albesan that comes from A social construction you talk about collective understanding which that brings social construction so i guess my question is more to continue this conversation i'll i'll i'll probably email you with with more fine-tuned thoughts about this thank you i would like that

very much ah But then i i just want to comment i certainly you are correct that matt ellison is much more of a um um what would you say uh humanist or or uh Relativist he's like he's a critical theorist this uh what he is yep whereas i see and and uh and the obvious on cameraman article it's been quite the number of years since i read it but it it's excellent asis most of the stuff that alvason does it's he's uh a tremendous guy but um like i said we Have different uh ontological perspectives

in terms of of that because neither andean nor i are critical theorists i'd say ours is more of a realist perspective which says that right we believe there's a real world out there but uh that is to say it's there is a real world outside of our mental capability but Epistemologically our capability of appreciating and seeing that world is highly subjective and fraught with measurement or other errors so the world is socially constructed from the point of view of any observer even though it may be real out there so that's the kind of a realist

perspective that i think i know i take and i think uh um Alf does too great go ahead thank you i i haven't i have a second question if i can if i may otherwise i can skip it sure uh what the question i have is um he brought what is our time because i do have a couple of closing points to make but it How much time do we have for continued questioning i think we have about another 35 minutes until we finish okay and we have four more hands raised at the moment very

nice okay please continue on fernando so my question has to do with emotions and you you mentioned that in this in this surprise of of looking at Something that is unexpected and there is this tension and and i agree with you this is a good state right um uh now my question is does your theory it involves emotions uh i didn't see it in your presentation well i can only say that i feel emotional i May not be writing about it because i'm trying to be coherent in communicating some ideas um alf you have any

comments on that because i don't know we didn't we didn't explicitly talk about uh uh emotion but what insights do you have to to offer on on that with regards to abduction that's the question to me yes Yeah um because i see a line of theory in organizational research particularly i have in mind a paper on organizational learning that talks about wonder and curiosity and i see a strong connection between the abducted process of being surprised and feeling this wonder and then go ahead and explore which is The curiosity aspect so i see like two

different dimensions on the one hand this cognitive behavioral way that you have of explaining abduction and then on a different dimension these emotions and states of wonder and curiosity yeah yeah right very good in stage one we do talk about um cognitive flexibility uh which is which i think uh at least in in my mind um deals with some of the same things That you that you could talk about as curiosity it's this ability to [Music] to jump sets so to speak par ultra you have a question um yes uh thank you professors extremely interesting

i'm really intrigued by this notion of kind of making explicit for yourself the reasoning process behind theory building I think that's very powerful but i'd like to hear your thoughts on something that i'm thinking a bit about myself which is um is it necessary and or indeed possible possible to share that kind of um with reviewers and readers when you write things up or how do you write things up do you um yeah do you actually go through the same Process of writing it up in those steps or do you just give readers the final

result well actually you often give readers the final result but it does give you some ideas on how to communicate that result you can certainly include in your methodology how you came up with an idea by beginning the paper by describing the Anomaly up close for example joe blow lost his job can't find work is suffering from all kinds of physical and mental problems inject pervasive next in general joe blows not alone so many hundreds of thousands of people are without work and they cannot find That anything good reachers researchers can't find anything good that's

happening to these people and so from afar and up close we can see an anomaly and the problem is what do we do with the job laws of this world who can't find work then we can go through hunches job training programs or is it um other kinds of issues And beginning but when you see what you're doing though is paragraph one of the paper joe blow paragraph two from afar paragraph three what's the research question what do we do about the joe blows of this world paragraph four hunch i think it is this not

the status quo that answers this question this paper now proceeds ahead It could be a study that compares your proposal versus the status quo in addressing the problem of joe blow notice how i have basically gone through the four steps in the way i have framed the first four paragraphs or five paragraphs of the paper okay great thank you yeah ananya is that correct yeah nania is correct Thank you thank you professors has been very insightful my question is kind of building up on a few others previously ash and just immediately before this one is

the step two part of it which is the confirmation of the anomaly and i feel that it's critical as a step um yes would you please expand upon this and how to do this well uh essentially i'm trying to ask is Uh how much confirmation is good enough from a publication angle and are we trying to confirm whether this is an anomaly or are we trying to say that this has not been previously explained by other theories the way the um literature has treated that subject is often this has not been adequately treated by existing

theories in other words this Problem this anomaly this puzzle this question has not been addressed or has been addressed in this way in the literature but this way in the literature which is the status quo does not do the job is insufficient needs to be revised needs to be improved needs to be substituted with my proposal your proposal is your hunch or hunches sure Any further comment okay marwa you have a question yeah many thanks auntie for this very very interesting and informative talk um i appreciate it um i'm from the school of the critical

management studies and um i have some reflection about uh your talk today um so you have um you have explained the process of that we go from individual to collective reasoning process and how Innovative or intuitive ideas come throughout this process and you explained the detail the process about it and my question relates to um led me to think about or question what the dynamics or the mechanism that helped researcher to Come up with innovative and intuitive or ideas novel ideas in in their field so i'm thinking about how you can theorize the ways that

you reach to individual and collective steps of objective reasoning and i could see you like you have talked this through your experience and your emotional experience about how you connected with developing ideas or developing theories So what do you think about this point or what do you think about the mechanism or the dynamics is that underpin this process of individual and collective steps of abductive reasoning and do you think that we need a theory to theorize this well i i'm not sure if we develop a theory but we develop a proposal for addressing this and

i think the example that i'm thinking about To address your question is this set of quotations from tversky and kahneman yeah is that what you read or can you well i i'm not sure i quite graphed the question i i apologize for that but i thought from the question was how do you go from individual experiences of your emotions to a collective group Mindset much like developing that shared mind that um was observed here in this quote and how your partner your colleague your collaborator your co-author uh continues to surprise you and yet continues to

provide insights that are worth listening to right Right and it gets to a point in the process where you have uh um well in particular if you're looking at the end product and i think that was the case with with us in for this paper it's hard to tell where um i end and it begins and where i begin and then the ends when you look At the paper because it is it's co-produced it's not like this bit is mine and this bit is andy's that's that's impossible to say after the fact yeah that's absolutely

right which reflects there is dynamics or mechanisms that is going on during this process yes and so if you go to if you go to slide um hang on The the vergante figure i think that's uh oh yes there we go go ahead right if you're working on a paper and this process sort of describes it and let's say that as an as an archive you're two authors and so but the process doesn't start with to do because our radical circle might be akin to the people we Think in our footnote for uh commenting on

earlier versions of the paper that's our radical circle and as you expand it through seminar series which this would have been a part of if it was before it was accepted um at your department other people you talk to then you know that process continues yeah Yeah okay um sunday i'm just being conscious that we have about 20 minutes left um and you said you have a couple of more slides you want to cover before maybe and then we can resume questions again yeah i have this slide which i want to share because it also

deals with the tug between deduction induction and Abduction now dave wetton is a good colleague along with many other colleagues in the field of organization and management and he wrote this 1989 article in the academy management review emphasizing that the the good contributions are those that are contributions to theory emphasizing that kind of a rational Deductive theory driven refinement and testing approach to theory building that's what good theorizing is all about the other hand we got a pushback from donald hambrick among many others who talk about the contributions of practice the contributions of theory to

practice namely taking a more empiricist approach an inductive approach as he calls it where it's phenomenon driven And you're trying to describe and diagnose phenomena and in response i see elf and i trying to make a contribution of and to theory i see this as a theory creation process where we're creating knowledge by abductive thinking and we are grounding our theory building in the phenomena but with hunches for addressing those Phenomena so i see it as a third alternative if you will to theory creation making contributions of and do theory when the earlier much more

positivist approach in the 1960s 1970s was focusing with david wetton's point making contributions to theory And where the pushback from don hamburg is the contributions of theory to understanding phenomenon and we're doing both any comments about that or alpha maybe you want to add something because i know you haven't looked at this one no this is great i'm seeing it for the first time with the rest of you so in my class of theory building I do this i ask my doctoral students to do this exercise it's an exercise in creating hunches where i ask

them to write down the anomaly the puzzle or surprise that you are studying and then i ask them okay given that research question problem or puzzle develop four different hunches for answering that problem First deal with it as it is done today in other words tell me what is the status quo baseline answer to this anomaly how has the literature addressed that question thus far second create a hunch by shifting between micro and macro levels go from if the problem exists at the Individual level look at it from a macro organizational level vice versa if

you're talking about an organizational problem look at it from the individuals within it these are different categories for thinking about the problem third alternate time periods you think this puzzle exists today what's it to look like tomorrow or what did it look like yesterday Does it unfold in cycles it comes and goes through some kind of an entrainment process but clearly no puzzle no surprise no problem is static it changes with time think about that and finally introduce a new concept The puzzle is gone between action individual action and organization structure if you follow gideon's

new concept of structuration huh so it dissolves the puzzle because what you thought was a puzzle is in fact a spurious issue so this is what i suggest and what students come out with that experience is wow I thought i only had a a surprise and what answer now you've given me four ways four hunches to address my question and that's the point using four very different categories and these four categories happen to be four different strategies for dealing with paradox as scott poole and i mentioned back in 1989 And once you've developed your hunch

such as dealing with as you do today shifting levels alternating time periods introducing and others now i'll start applying some criteria interestingness plausibility pragmatical or others but do so consistently across all of your hunches so that then your evaluation criteria are going to be improved so in conclusion hunches and conjectures I don't believe there would be any science at all without intuition and that's what we're talking about in terms of coming up with hunches to deal with surprises anomalous thinking elf no this is uh i i have little to add to that but i think

we should probably spend the last few minutes answering questions Because i see four hands that are right okay let's do so okay andrew and yes sir can i ask you a question um on the time aspect and the hunches around time because people doing perceptual research particularly those are doing it prospectively presumably they're being exposed to new developments in the Phenomena which is evolving and changing so how does this idea of abductive reasoning come into play here considering you know that things themselves are changing over time yes indeed well andrew abbott at the university of

chicago well many years or 10 years ago wrote a paper about process Thinking and he says you know most process studies focus on three questions the first question what's the pattern the process pattern is it a a b b b c c in other words a stage-wise progression is it a cyclical abc abc abc repetitive cycle or some other variation of the pattern That's the central question in a process study over time how do things unfold then the second and the third question focuses on well once you've identified a pattern what caused it is the

first second question and then the third question is what are its consequences so if you will the second and the third questions are variance theory questions of a process of alternative process Uh progressions so time is critical in any process study you cannot do a process study without looking at time because process looks at the sequence of events or patterns or activities that unfold in the emergence of development growth termination death of things okay thank you Thank you yes professor uh thank you very much uh this has been very enlightening for early career researchers like

us okay i saw a comment in the chat box and i have a very similar question how is this anomalous thinking uh different from problematization and we come across both these things in in research that's my one question another question maybe a more elementary question Is is this anomaly at the level of context and the hunch at the level of theory did i get that right two questions thank you in the answer to the second yes i would say and answer to the first problematizing certainly does include anomalizing if you will that is the anomaly

is The problem it's the way you construct the problem this is the formulation of the problem and you formulate the problem up closely from afar in order to identify what is going on here so in that sense i think problemization is very much the process of identifying anomalies and then um the other one is uh certainly Um like i said yes i do see that the issue of uh formulating the problem and developing the hunch alpha you want to add to that any comment uh no i think that covers it very nicely uh-huh thank you

i would just be [Music] okay key cow Here uh it's good but the wrong pronunciation does not bothers me thanks uh thank you so uh we do not have much time so i try to be short so first like can you talk a little bit about the paper development process itself you know how how long does it take to complete the draft no what what was like a review process at amr how much time secondly like i read the paper in march i have completed a Proposal for uh mr dialogue in case it is rejected

is it okay i'll send you law i email you like i can have a conversation etc thanks yes indeed uh alf when did we start this paper try to remember well i i i it started um and i'm hard pressed aside when we started working on it together because we had worked separately on abduction before that but yeah we probably started To started talking about it over dinners in maybe around 15 maybe 14 but 15 maybe as late as no i think 14 or 15 and then we started drafting things by 16. i think that's

right yep yeah and i i had a chapter on as you know in the engage scholarship book the chapter on theory building is heavily the first part of theory Creation is all anomalies uh or hunches or abductions uh so the answer key is a long time but there's another point which is uh the i would say the average is five seven years to go from drafting a paper to the time of getting it published and You're doing that first of all and the most important recommendation is draft a paper and share it with a sparring

partner many times before you submit it to the judge and jury of a uh edit of a journal the editor and reviewers in march when this came out and see when Did i start doing this and i found notes uh in my drafts as old as 2004 so we we bought we both had been thinking about and tinkering with abduction at least on my part um and they had been writing about it for many years and then which is also how we connected over it uh over dinner um and how that process started started so

it it's Uh it's kind of fussy when we start to start it because um it depends on what your account is starting starting and then the process in amr i i think is fairly uneventful it's the classical you get it back and the normal time frame is three months you get it back and then you have four months to respond um And then you go through that cycle a few times and so i think we submitted in august of 19 which was the deadline for the special topic forum uh and it came out in pre-print

in march march 4th 2021 so that's about a year and a half okay okay maybe one last question so um how basically to craft your argumentation For using abductive reasoning if you are writing a paper based on a single case study um why i'm asking this because some schoolers um kind of consider that if you write a paper based on a single case study and try to do process theorizing say consider your paper kind of anecdotal that what kind of process you're rising are you trying to do based on a single case study but how

to craft your Argumentation if you really have collected uh rich data and you see some patterns in the theory but both some discoveries in your data so how would your professor craft your arguments then to the reviewers my slide answers your question it is the slide proposed by stephen tulman the british logician who developed the basic structure of Debate that is used in debate teams throughout america and europe he proposed the following template for developing your argument there's a background there's a problem there's a question there's a context in which it exists here is the

anomaly as it exists the background which then provides the claim which is your proposition But it could be several propositions is it this or that or i propose this rather than the status quo this is my claim of the argument it is the theory which then gets explained by reasons your major premise the logic underlying the the claim supported with evidence the minor premise the warrants Now all reasons and evidence can be refuted on several grounds the logic of the reasons may not be valid the empirical refutation is that these data are not true there's

the cogency argument which is the persuasiveness argument pathos and ethos in the rhetorical triangle which then in turn leads you to qualify your claim By suggesting that my proposition or hypothesis hold under certain conditions assumptions and contingencies i i interpreted or heard your question as a inductive question about case studies and there's a discussion in case studies about how many cases you do need and i know that kathy eisenhart has been sort Of advocating that minimum minimum of four but um her student or former student i should say melissa grebner thinks that uh i think

one can be enough and and i think i suspected this is right if you look in the classical uh cases of of case studies um you can look at white's study of which is i guess the most famous case study of all uh white study of street corner society it's Based on a single case so yeah you can do inductive or case studies based on based on one case but i don't see it as necessarily an abductive process unless you enter some anomaly you need to explain then abduction i have another version here of how

you might present your paper your Study again beginning with an opening scene attracts attention pathos then going to the anomaly it's the problem it's the issue that is this is abduction because you got the problem up close and from afar which leads you to diagnose what we know and don't know This is where you are evaluating various hunches to come up with your question here is the status quo answer the current answer to the theory in practice and theory to which you're going to find some gap here's another anomaly anomalies that exist the limitations the

problems with the current status quo which leads you to your proposal i think this And here's my argument for why i think this and i conclude by arguing that my answer is better than the status quo because end of paper great thank you very much this tree diagram provides a nice way of putting together the whole thing so i have students go through exercises where they submit And present their research proposals using this tree diagram and putting it all on one paper on one slide no more and then presenting it that way and as you

can see i can talk through the entire project on one page okay adina you had a question You have your hand up and you're muted medina dabu sorry yes i was muted yes i i i was just uh curious uh about a better you know a little bit the backstage of your paper um how did it go through the review process what did you learn in the review process about abduction while writing this paper And submitting it with mr if you want to share anything about this backstage thank you what is what it what struck

you because i recall initially we were thinking not just about theory creation in uh writing a paper for theory creation for the special issue the academy management review on theory creation instead we were thinking more generally In terms of creativity in theory and practice uh invention well originally we started out with innovation as uh our baseline because that's an interest we both uh share um but the review process well what struck me and you have to um comment on this because your experience with amr is much broader than mine but i I was surprised at

the level of engagement from the reviewers and in particular the the associate editor yes they were uh deeply engaged in the paper and uh and i'm not and i'm not saying that in the way they were going easy far from it uh they were very critical but they were um there's no doubt about it they were Deeply engaged in it and that was um both very pleasing and terrifying at the same time but did they add much to your initial ideas the ideas elaborated they they were expanded yeah by suggesting further readings by questioning oh

well this is just induction and so time to we have one reviewer who Even to today would still view what we've written as induction rather than abduction and so there are some strongly held views that some reviewers have some are more close-minded others are more open-minded and that in turn is more frustrating but it is to say the reviewer is never wrong in the sense that the reviewer is to be Somehow a representative of the readership and certainly we have to and time and again i think we probably worked more on that issue i'll finally

putting the rest to say here is our definitions of induction deduction and abduction and others have different points of view but we'll leave it at that because we want to talk about the steps The sequence of abduction the other thing that i learned is initially we had the basic steps but we didn't have the uh the further advice within each step as you formulate the anomaly do so up close and from afar as you look at hunches never Settled for one look for many right as you are going from individual to group you're going from

evolution to dialectical inquiry those are important moves that emerged as we were developing at the revisions what do you think alex no it's they've forced us to To sharpen and defend our arguments and clarify things that we thought were clear but that obviously were not and one thing specific thing that comes to mind is this notion that we were talking about the prepared mind and the importance of deep expertise and all this and one of the reviewers pointed out that well that contradicts with cognitive flexibility because when you become deeply expert in something You're less

called less likely to be cognitive flexible and can jump so we had to resolve that issue thank you so much thank you um i think we're living in a world that is full of surprises and uh anomalies i i would like to hear your view on how to assess the importance of anomaly um so when you identify Something that you cannot explain um in a way this also relates to our earlier question i think or really ask if this is just um if this surprise it's just or or this phenomenon a strange phenomenon it occurs

only among it's just outliers among a few Um a smaller portion of the population why does it matter i mean that that's my question right i think we should not be conf not confused the um the importance of the anomaly with the importance of the explanation think back to the example because andy if you want to go back to the uh amy slide slide eight Uh if you if you think about what she discovered was that some medical teams um the most successful medical teams reported more errors in the grand scheme of things at some

hospital i don't know where it was but since amy is in boston let's say it's a hospital in boston in the grand scheme of things that's not an important thing that's going to change the world but her explanation of The phenomenon did make a huge impact psychological safety is has been tremendously impactful the anomaly in itself not so much but it was important in the grand scheme of things anyway okay i see thank you thank you so much and then i'll stand i'm being conscious of time It's been two hours now perhaps this could be

a good time to close the conversation as well what do you think i think so huh so the concluding conclusion i have is these concluding prescriptions for abductive theory creation and i think our hypothesis is the more you take explicit account of these steps And think about the the bullets below these steps the more creative your theory will be that's the hypothesis i'd love to test that now that we have developed this hunch well actually we've gone a bit further because through the review process i guess we're no longer at the abductive stage we are

At the theory construction stage as a result of the sparring and the criticisms of the reviewers that lead you down the path of forcing you to develop a theory for your hunch that theory creation is not just a flash of inspiration instead it consists of a systematic set of moves that is not only individual but Collective elf your com concluding common no i just want to thank everyone for their um great questions um this made me think about some things um in a new way and things about things that i haven't and for that i

am um grateful i would also appreciate it if someone could save and send us the questions in the chat because they rolled by far too quick for oh you need To see them all but i see there's stuff here that i'd like to read afterwards