Using Technology to Enhance Creative Actions in Decision Making Frances Hauge Fabian A.B. Freeman School, Tulane University ffabian@tulane.edu dt ogilvie Graduate School of Management Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey dt.ogilvie@Newark.Rutgers.Edu Abstract Strategic decision makers are working in dynamic environments that are increasingly difficult to address using rational analysis. Specifically, the onslaught of great amounts of information that is increasingly sophisticated, conflicting, or even distracting for making plans about the future has led to the promotion of a more creative and action-based model of decision making. While technology has played a part in building this confusing information environment, it also offers tremendous advantages for boosting creative action-based decision making because of its unique capabilities at 1) randomizing and generating output; 2) iterating input "millions" of times;3) accessing "millions" of inputs instantly; and 4) recreating exact conditions in a simulated environment. This paper offers four propositions about how technology can uniquely improve creative action-based decision making. 1. Introduction Although decision makers have long faced varying degrees of uncertainty, complexity, and change, scholars agree the rate of change in today’s environment is unprecedented. Strategic decision making literature, though, has continued to promote various forms of the rationalistic model [14], which is designed to work with finite, unambiguous, and purposeful information. This kind of information might be usefully generated in markets of slow, predictable, and incremental change, with identifiable players employ similar norms, technologies, and standards amenable to analysis. Current environments, though, are often filled with infinite, ambiguous, and unexpected data. Managers often face markets undergoing sudden, chaotic and Schumpterian change, with hard to predict players entering the system and eschewing industry norms, technologies, and standards. Still, strategic decision making continues to be taught as it has since its inception, although technological and global changes in doing business clearly demand new skills in dealing with the explosion of information, analyses and alternatives facing the modern decision maker. In this article, we discuss some ways that this same technology that has caused so much distress to the traditional logic models can simultaneously spur creative approaches to deal with the new environment. Our overall model assumes that some situations require an alternative decision making model called the "creative action-based" model [23]. This model draws from the insights in the creativity literature [1] and action literature [2]; [27], but also on the premise that together, "creative action" can form workable environments as described in theories such as enactment [36] and the social construction of reality [4]. While the model’s underpinnings are rather philosophically demanding, the ensuing conclusions are fairly accessible: managers need to be able to draw on creativity (i.e., “the ability to produce or bring into existence something that was not there before, something new, an extension of our base of knowledge” [8] and they need to be able to understand how action (i.e., undertaking interactions that uncover the existing “logic of actions” [27] can help generate conditions for increasing knowledge. Because this model draws on a different view of knowledge, it suggests that the analysis based on textbook models (e.g., "define problem, generate alternatives, select optimal outcome") is incapable of addressing some of the needs of the decision maker. Specifically, the creative action- Proceedings of the 35th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2002 0-7695-1435-9/02 $17.00 (c) 2002 IEEE 1