Stephen Billing’s Blog

Saras Sarasvathy from the University of Washington uses the analogy of creating a menu for a dinner party, where you decide in advance what dishes to have and then go shopping for the ingredients (in an article published in the Academy of Management Review (available by subscription). She contrasts this with cooking a meal by looking in the cupboards to decide what to cook that evening. At our place, we use both methods, depending on the circumstances.

Sarasvathy points out that you can have dinner by either method. You can plan a menu in advance, then go shopping to make sure you have all the ingredients. This method she calls causation, because it’s a process of determining in advance what the meal will be, and then causing it to happen by shopping or acquiring the ingredients which cause the predetermined dish to materialise.

You can also have a meal based on what is in the cupboards, fridge and freezer – looking for the ingredients you have on hand and then deciding what to make with those ingredients. For example, we have a copy of Digby Law’s Vegetable Cookbook which is arranged in order of vegetable used. Inserted in this book are many recipes using particular vegetables so that if we are looking for what to do with cauliflower, for example, we have Digby’s ideas already published in the book plus a number of clippings for cauliflower recipes that have been stuffed in the relevant section like book marks. It’s primitive, but it works for us when we are trying to put together a dinner from what’s in the fridge. We also use Cuisine magazine’s amazing Meal Maker function for this – you can enter your ingredients and the software searches Cuisine’s recipes using those ingredients to give you some ideas for what to make with, say broccoli. Brilliant.

Planning a menu in advance, or causation, is similar to what happens in organisations when senior managers (i.e. chefs) determine in advance what results are wanted and then cause it to happen, through their actions. Let’s assume for the purposes of the post that managers can decide what result they want and then bring it about. This idea is problematic but is not the subject of this post, so I’ll leave it there for now.

Making a meal from available ingredients is what Sarasvathy calls effectuation, and she likens it to the entrepreneur’s task of working out what to do with the limited resources available. In other words, the entrepreneur does not have the resources available to go shopping to buy expensive ingredients like caviar and crayfish, but instead must work out how best to utilise the available resources such as contacts, technology and finances to create something that potential customers will be interested in. 

More information on Sarasvathy’s ideas on effectuation can be found at www.effectuation.org.