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To do so, we borrow theories and techniques developed by the ... The dérive began with the Surrealist and Dadaist movements, but only really took shape at the.
Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 HOW TO TEACH EFFECTUATION: THE SITUATIONIST DERIVE AS A SOLUTION?

Sylvain Bureau (ESCP Europe, Paris, France) & Marios Koufaris (CUNY, NYC, USA)

ABSTRACT Entrepreneurship education is certainly expanding but many pedagogical issues related to this field remain open. In this paper, we discuss some shortcomings of teaching methods currently used in business schools. We question their effectiveness in addressing entrepreneurial challenges and propose an exercise that can address some of the issues. To do so, we borrow theories and techniques developed by the Situationist International movement in the 1950s and demonstrate the relationship between them and certain challenges encountered in entrepreneurship education and in entrepreneurship as a life experience. To illustrate this approach, we have conducted an experiment in which we used the Situationist dérive, or drift, to teach effectuation. At the end of this paper we discuss how students can benefit from this experiment to learn entrepreneurship. Key words: entrepreneurship education, effectuation, Situationist International, dérive, drift

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 INTRODUCTION

What is entrepreneurship? Definitions include the “pursuit of opportunity beyond available resources” (Stevenson, 1983), a “way of thinking and acting, that is opportunity obsessed (…) with the purpose of value creation” (Timmons, 1999), and “a subversive activity (that) upsets the status quo, disrupts accepted ways of doing things, and alters traditional patterns of behavior” (Smilor, 1997).

How can entrepreneurship, defined in such a varied way, be learned or, for that matter, taught? Recently, educational programs devoted to entrepreneurship have proliferated at business schools, from a handful in the 1980s to over 1600 in 2005 (Kuratko, 2005). Today they are almost all built around a core module that seeks to simulate some type of venture creation: student teams are put together and, following a number of courses, are instructed to identify a market opportunity, develop a corresponding business model, build a community of stakeholders around their nascent project, write up a business plan and eventually pitch before a jury, usually made up of entrepreneurs, investors and lecturers. But does such an exercise really prepare one to become an entrepreneur? Research has demonstrated the value of going beyond the business plan-based course, to perspectives with situated learning, exposure to emotions (Pittaway & Cope, 2007), crises (Cope, 2005), and to extreme time pressure (Smilor, 1997). According to these perspectives, students should step outside their ‘reality as students’ (Pittaway & Cope, 2007) and actively engage in becoming ‘insiders’ (Brown & Duguid, 1991). But how can all this be taught?

In this paper, we address certain aforementioned challenges posed by entrepreneurship education by concentrating on a specific issue: how to teach effectuation. The effectual process 2

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 (Sarasvathy, 2001) implies envisioning several possible ends through known means. This reasoning is opposed to the traditional causal reasoning used in MBA courses where one begins with a specific goal and a given set of means to reach it (Sarasvathy, 2008). This theory, important in the entrepreneurship literature (Corner & Ho, 2010), provides an interesting framework to describe the environment, process and decision model of expert entrepreneurs (Ucbasaran, 2008) but it still remains very hard for students to act and think in the effectual way. There is a major difference between understanding the formal theory and experiencing it in an entrepreneurial situation. Would it be possible to create new situations of learning where students could develop and experiment with effectual reasoning?

We try to answer this question with an innovative teaching exercise grounded on the dérive. The dérive began with the Surrealist and Dadaist movements, but only really took shape at the start of the 50s via Isou’s lettrist movement before being resurrected and amended by the Situationist International (SI) movement (Debord, 1956). The dérive, a “…technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences” (Knabb, 2006:62), stands for an experimental, playfulconstructive behavior, linked to the conditions in urban society and the Situationists’ wish to rethink cities and urban planning. Guy Debord, principal icon of this avant-garde artistic movement, will be used as a point of reference in this experiment.

One might question the value in “borrowing” from a movement blending revolutionary anarchism and avant-garde artistic positions, which is known for its rejection of consumer society, for its extreme anti-capitalist standpoint, and for its uncompromising slogans, such as “Never work!” The case may in fact seem lost in advance. Yet this method of taking old thinking to create new thinking is common throughout history. Subverting the subversion, we will try to co-opt Situationist techniques. In fact, we are not the first to do so, for Situationist 3

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 theories are currently undergoing a kind of resurgence. They are used as major references in art history, political science, literature, philosophy, architecture, and cinematographic studies (Wark, 2008: 8). In order to justify (or at least forgive) such an appropriation, the best recourse is to quote the words of the movement’s founder, Guy Ernest Debord directly: “All the material published by the SI is, in principle, usable by everyone, even without acknowledgment, with no concerns as to literary property… You can make all the détournements that appear useful to you.” (Debord, in Wark, 2008:7).

This paper begins with a presentation of the effectuation and dérive frameworks. In the second part of the paper, we describe the experiment and the methodology that we used. Following that, we describe the main results: we show how on the one hand the dérive can help students understand and experience effectual reasoning and on the other hand how it may be used to assess the entrepreneurial potential of a team.

THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS

Effectuation: From Theory to Practice The effectual process (Sarasvathy, 2001) implies envisioning several possible ends through known means. Effectual reasoning occurs in situations where uncertainty prevails in the sense of Knight (1921), where it is not possible to know what information is essential to take action, and where decision-makers’ preferences are uncertain (Sarasvathy, 2008). This effectual model is opposed to the causal model classically used in most business school courses where case study problems lead students to make decisions in a way that can be predicted, where goals are quite clear, and where the environment is independent of actions taken (Sarasvathy, 2008, p. 73). 4

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 To illustrate the difference between these two approaches, let us imagine that in the case of causal reasoning a chef cooks a meal using well-defined recipes taken from a cookbook and that he has the necessary ingredients and utensils. In the case of effectual logic, on the other hand, the chef simply finds various ingredients in his refrigerator and has to create a meal based on what he or she finds. In the first case, the meal will be better or worse depending on the chef who cooks it, but the dishes served at dinner will always be identical, whereas in the second case, not only will the quality of the meal prepared depend on the chef, but there will also necessarily be a wide variation of dishes (Sarasvathy, 2008). Effectuation is a logic of entrepreneurial expertise that both novice and experienced entrepreneurs can use in the highly unpredictable start-up phase of a venture to reduce failure costs for the entrepreneur (ibid.).

In the table below we detail the principles of effectuation (Kraaijenbrink, 2008; Read, Song, & Smit, 2009; Sarasvathy, 2001). -----------------------------------Insert Table 1 about here -----------------------------------Having said that, how can you teach something where the goals are not well-defined, where you have to start with your existing means, set affordable loss, leverage contingencies and form partnerships? We do not believe that the business plan approach is appropriate to do so. In addition, while there are a lot of case studies currently used to teach effectuation1, they do not help students experience effectuation in practice.

Quite a few authors agree on the fact that new teaching techniques have to be developed to prepare students to the specific context all entrepreneurs have to face. Several innovative

1

http://effectuation.org

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 teaching approaches have enabled instructors to go beyond traditional business planning and the case study methodology. One such approach is named Contingency-Based Business Planning and it aims to break up linear training sessions and encourage the emergence of random situations (Honig, 2004). In such a curriculum, students are asked to work on projects, and depending on their needs and unresolved issues, they can select the course which will allow them to solve the problem (op. cit.). Such a system circumvents the pre-determined organization of courses and places pedagogy at the heart of the project itself (op. cit.). Another approach aims to promote the discovery/development of new opportunities via a 4-phase methodology – securing, expanding, exposing and challenging. In the first phase of this technique, for example, students are asked to note down all the ideas that come to mind during a whole day in order to foster exploration and become well aware of serendipity (DeTienne & Chandler, 2004). More generally, several programs have based their curricula on action-based learning, where students have a “hands-on experience” and benefit from experiential learning through their involvement, for instance, in concrete projects in companies (Honig, 2004, p. 264 et 265). Our study follows the same research tradition and describes a new action-learning exercise for experiencing effectual reasoning, which uses the Situationist method called the dérive.

The Theory of the Situationist Dérive in Practice

Dériver: French word meaning “to drift” or “to diverge, to deviate.” From the Latin derivare, meaning “to leave the river.” Dictionary of the Académie Française

Introducing the Situationist movement in only a few lines is a challenge because it was neither unified nor did it have one single homogenous and structured philosophy. In fact, Situationists 6

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 were against the very idea of being boiled down to a single –ism philosophy: “Situationism: a term bereft of meaning, abusively forged through the deviation of the previous term” (Situationnistes, 1958). In the context of this paper, we will not be following these instructions. There were two phases of Situationist activity: from 1957 to 1962, the pursuit of superiority of art was the primary objective, and from 1962 to 1972, it became a more radical, more holistic revolutionary project (Hussey, 2000), concerned with a radical societal change. Whether in the context of art or in politics, “the Situationists appropriated the dialectic that emerges from the juxtaposition of Rimbaud’s “change life” and Marx’s “transform the world” (Genty, 1998, p. 5). They developed a radical critical outlook that aimed to both destroy and create: “SI explores the dialectic of achievement and elimination in one single movement” (Genty, 1998, p. 23). To construct life differently, one must destroy the framework in which we normally live. In this perspective, the members of SI, called Situs, developed a number of techniques, whimsical creations, or “games of a new essence” (Debord, 1957) that could “affect human behavior” (Comisso, 2000, p. 12). One of their core ideas was to rethink life by rethinking modern cities. For this to be possible, new situations had to be constructed: everyone had to be permitted to create new situations in order to create a new reality and thus change life (Barnard, 2004). Urban planning was the core activity of this huge project. Thus, in “urban ambiences” envisaged by the Situationists, “residents would be invited to create their own environment” (Chollet, 2004):36). According to them, there was a need to rethink the approach to cities at the time to open up new cultural and political perspectives. This vision employed numerous theoretical and operational tools, including the dérive.

Theoretically, the dérive entered psychogeographical thinking in the mid-50s, enabling a better study of the “precise effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously arranged or not, which act directly on how individuals behave” (Violeau, 2006):36-37). The technique of 7

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 “rapid passage through varied ambiences” (op. cit.), linked to conditions in urban society, was designed to rethink the constraints of the city and to reinvent it. Long strolls would allow observation of different phenomena caused by the environment. It was not so much a matter of “constraining the course of things, but of entering them to enjoy them in accordance with one’s desires” (Danesi, 2008):203). It was an unplanned way of evolving in a completely new city, following no pre-set plan or rational logic. Neither was it a purely random route, but rather a form of “controlled risk” where the fact of pacing the streets for hours at a time with no destination and usually drunk was a way of stimulating contact with the unknown. Dérive makes it possible to discover important things we might otherwise have overlooked, or, in other words, applies the principle of serendipity.

This behavior, coined “playful-constructive” by Guy Debord (1956), must comply with a certain number of rules. First, one can dérive alone, but according to the Situationists “…the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people, who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups’ impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions” (Knabb, 2006:63). The dérive is of no interest if conducted in the open countryside because the impact of chance is too low. It is therefore fundamentally urban. The average duration is a day, as in the time between two periods of sleep. The spatial field can be defined if you wish to analyze a precise zone or, conversely, can be vague. It is, for example, possible to take a taxi to “move twenty minutes to the west”. To meet up with your dérive companions, common meeting places are avoided, and a “possible/random” meeting point is proposed: a place you may or may not know, so as to encourage observation of the surroundings and engage in conversation with passers-by that might or might not be fellow strollers. In this way “the use of time will take an unforeseen

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 turn” (Knabb, 2006:65). In practice, the dérive includes regular stops at various bars and cafés and everyone usually ending up in a state of advanced inebriation.

The dérive must also result in an account explaining the process followed and the survey of the psychogeographical articulations of the city. Commented maps express the effects of the environment beyond an analysis of the purely physical constraints, and display unities of ambience, their main components and spatial localization, principal axes of passage, exits and defenses. One thus develops hypotheses on the existence of psychogeographical pivotal points. While the dérive may appear trivial and inconsequential, it was, according to members of the SI, extremely powerful, and the source of a myriad of new ideas.

We do not know of any famous entrepreneur who has formally exploited the idea of dérive but many artists, architects, and urban planners use this technique to stimulate their creative process. Conceptually, there are many links between the idea of dérive and entrepreneurship. Indeed, entrepreneurship is anything but linear. It has trajectories where contingencies and surprises reign. And yet entrepreneurship is not a simple consequence of random events. There is construction, a vision, a considered path, and, not least of all, initiative and intentionality. The tension between a deliberate project and the key role of contingencies is central to the field. The objectives of an entrepreneurial project are rarely perfectly defined in advance, especially in the case of breakthrough innovation. This perspective is very similar to the effectual reasoning conceptualized by Sarasvathy (2008).

Adapting Situationism: The Entrepreneurial Dérive We believe that the Situationist dérive is an interesting method to address certain entrepreneurship education shortcomings. To test this assumption, we present here a new 9

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 pedagogical experiential method conducted within an entrepreneurship major for students enrolled in a Master’s program. The pedagogical innovation consists in adapting the Situationist dérive to teach a central theory in entrepreneurship education: effectuation (Sarasvathy, 2008). As we demonstrate in Table 2, the dérive and its principles can be mapped to the principles of effectuation in entrepreneurship. It is this mapping that enabled us to develop and conduct the experiment reported in this study and which we describe in the following section. -----------------------------------Insert Table 2 about here -----------------------------------The dérive as a pedagogical exercise: three main propositions Based on this conceptual framework, we have conducted a pedagogical experiment to test three major propositions: (1) The dérive as a way to approximate the environment faced by entrepreneurs. This experiment creates a context of action that approximates the environment faced by entrepreneurs with information overload, a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty. (2) The dérive as a way to experience effectual reasoning. Given (1), the best way to achieve a dérive is not through causal reasoning but through effectual reasoning. Students should apply the effectual principles to achieve a dérive: start with their own means, leverage contingencies, set affordable loss, develop partnerships, etc. The dérive experiment could be used to test the students’ ability to experience and understand effectual reasoning. (3) The dérive as a way to assess entrepreneurial potential. 10

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Given (1) and (2), the dérive experiment could be a way to assess the entrepreneurial potential of a team as it approximates some of the parameters of an entrepreneurial situation.

RESEARCH DESIGN We conducted our pedagogical experiment in the fall of 2011 within the entrepreneurship major of a Master’s degree program at a western European University. Forty students (20 male and 20 female) with various backgrounds participated. About two thirds were business students, while the rest came from different fields such as engineering, law, design, and philosophy. They were grouped into ten teams that, as part of the program, would complete five separate and distinct projects. For one of those projects, during which we conducted our experiment, each team was asked to develop a business idea that would potentially be funded and developed after the program’s end. The program consists of three months of training and follow-up with a tutor for each team.

Experiment description As part of this experiment, the students were given an exercise that was designed by the program director - the co-author of this paper - and an artist. After having explained what the effectuation theory is (through a broad conceptual presentation and various case studies), we gave them two CD-ROMs designed by the artist. These CDs had a key role in the experiment for, at this stage, the students were introduced to the dérive exercise. They were given a day to achieve the dérives. Following this, they had to answer an on-line questionnaire in class, in which they were asked individually about what they did during their dérives. Then each team had to present their work (both the process and the results). At the end of the session the professor explained what the point of the exercise was and finished with an open discussion. 11

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 The experiment was carried out as described in Figure 1. -----------------------------------Insert Figure 1 about here -----------------------------------Key parameters of the experiment Providing information overload via CD1 CD1, entitled “Thoughts on the dérive”, presents different types of files: texts, pictures, and videos. All of these are related in one way or another to the dérive. They include the text of G.E. Debord on the Theory of the dérive, two maps, a picture representing a collage designed by the Situationists, an extract of the film In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni issued in 1978 and directed by G.E. Debord, as well as a list of Internet links on the topic (which illustrate the general meaning of the dérive and direct students towards various websites that all refer to concepts on the city, movement, and the critical aspect of this approach). Reading all these documents requires many hours. This CD1 was deliberately designed to create information overload, making it too long to take into account all the data contained in the files.

Conveying ambiguity and uncertainty via CD2 and the experiment agenda The object of the exercise is given on the cover of the second CD (CD2). The students are asked to record the content of their dérive on CD2, which is blank. The exercise is presented as follows: - name of the project - date - dérivez (drift) through the city as a group (+/- 3 hours) - to do so apply the principles of effectuation - you are free to use all the tools/media you believe are relevant during your dérive 12

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 - record the content (text, pictures, sound, videos) of your dérive on CD2.

With this second CD, the students do not have any instructions with regards to the goal that they have to reach. Directions are deliberately phrased in an ambiguous way and, as a result, many questions can be raised by students: Do we have to work on our entrepreneurial project? Is it a market survey? What are the connections between an anarchist movement like the Situationists and my studies? Is it a joke, is it serious? As a matter of fact, the exercise is so open that it doesn’t make any sense to predict what can be done. Each team has to create the meaning of their own dérive. To do so, they cannot really plan the whole process; quite the contrary, they have to transform the future to control it. As mentioned in Figure 1, to keep this situation fuzzy, we only make the pedagogical objectives of the dérive explicit at the very end of the process.

DATA ANALYSIS The dérive projects created by the students were analyzed using all available data: material returned by the participants after the dérive (CD and other media), data collected from a questionnaire given to each student before the presentation of the dérive in the classroom, verbal presentations/exchanges within the classroom, and informal discussions between the professors and the students after the exercise. We double-coded this material, seeking to highlight at each stage of the dérive apparent links with both the Situationist movement and effectual reasoning. To do so, we operationalized the five principles of effectuation following the guidelines of previous research with similar operationalizations (Chandler, DeTienne, McKelvie, & Mumford, 2009; Read et al., 2009). For each of the five principles of effectuation, we created four specific items with equal weight, presented in Table 4. We then went through all the available data for each dérive project and assigned a score of 1 if an item 13

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 was true for a project or 0 if it was not. The sum of all the scores for each project gave us a quantitative measure of the success of each group in applying effectuation principles in their project. -----------------------------------Insert Table 3 about here -----------------------------------RESULTS In this section, we detail the results regarding the three propositions presented above: the dérive as a way to approximate the environment faced by entrepreneurs (1), to experience effectual reasoning (2); to assess an entrepreneurial potential (3).

The Dérive: A Way to Approximate the Environment faced by Entrepreneurs? The students were very skeptical and completely lost when they discovered the CDROMs: “what is that?”, “what are we supposed to do with it?”, “we were confused”, “from my perspective it is not clear what we should do”, “we didn't understand anything”, and so on. After this initial reaction, which was very similar among most of the students, the teams’ reactions evolved quite differently. Some tried to find a clue in CD1 by working on the files while others decided to accept right away the fuzziness of the exercise and didn’t take the time to open all the documents. Faced with such a situation of information overload, ambiguity and uncertainty, the teams proceeded to create and experience different and varied dérives. We were able to distinguish three different types of reaction in the development of individual dérives: the marketing dérives, the Situationists dérives, and the entrepreneurial dérives.

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 The marketing dérive (2 out of 10 teams): The students do not really want to play the game of the Situationists. They tend to apply the rules of traditional business school exercises. For instance, they try to develop a market survey or marketing ethnography in the streets to obtain new data to test their entrepreneurial project. By doing so, the students reject the context of action proposed by the dérive exercise (information overload, ambiguity, uncertainty) and create an environment which is closer to the situations they usually face in a business school.

The Situationist dérive (3 out of 10 teams): The students tend to play the game of the Situationists. They try to apply the rules and spirit of the dérive. They do things that are really different from what they are used to doing in their business school. Their dérive has no connection whatsoever with an entrepreneurial project and is more connected to ways of rethinking and exploring the city (which is the original intention of the Situationist dérive). By doing so they accept the ambiguity and uncertainty involved in the exercise but they don’t make any connection with their current project and challenges.

The Entrepreneurial dérive (5 out of 10 teams): The students fully accept the constraints of the exercise (information overload, ambiguity, uncertainty). They play the game of the Situationists and tend to apply the rules of the dérive, but they do so by hybridizing it with an entrepreneurial project. They go beyond the Situationist’s folklore and goals. They appropriate the technique of the dérive to make it meaningful for them.

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 For illustrative purposes, we will describe three dérives among the ten achieved by the students. These 3 dérives are the most representative of the three types described above: the marketing dérive, the Situationist dérive, and the entrepreneurial dérive.

-----------------------------------Insert Table 4 about here -----------------------------------The Dérive: A Way to Experience Effectuation? “The most important part of this exercise is to experiment a practical application of effectual reasoning”. “I didn’t really understand effectual reasoning before the dérive. Now I think that I have experienced it”.

These two quotes are an illustration of some of the students’ perceptions of the dérive benefits. However, this understanding was not shared by all the students and, more importantly, the application of effectual reasoning during the dérive was heterogeneous among the ten teams. Based on the data collected, it clearly appears that the dérive projects were very different from one team to another, not only regarding their processes but also their outcomes. In order to illustrate the differences, we analyzed the different activities performed during the dérives by juxtaposing them with the principles of effectuation theory. We coded each dérive to assess how each of the activities carried out follows one of the five principles of effectual reasoning. Appendix C details the results for each team. In Table 5, we present some quotations collected in the questionnaires, which illustrate how the dérive helped make explicit what it really means to act through effectual reasoning. -----------------------------------Insert Table 5 about here -----------------------------------We detail below the average grade per principle (4 being the highest grade and 0 the lowest) and discuss briefly what the difficulties appeared to be for the students. 16

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 -----------------------------------Insert Table 6 about here ------------------------------------

The Dérive: A Way to Assess the Entrepreneurial Potential? It is very difficult to measure the impact of this experiment on the performance of the business projects as such, for the success of these projects will only be assessable in one or two years. As we explained, the dérive is an approximation of the environment faced by entrepreneurs. It creates a situation which is uncomfortable and which can generate misunderstanding and potential conflicts. Traditional roles of the teammates can be blurred and the leadership of the team might be questioned. In this uneasy situation, teams who find their way appear to have some resilience and entrepreneurial capacities. While we cannot definitively prove that at this stage, we can note that on average, the teams who followed the effectual principles the most during their dérives were also those that had the best assessments of their final entrepreneurial projects by an independent jury two months later. This jury consisted of fifty people (entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, professors, etc.) who voted for each project, after watching presentations by the student teams. -----------------------------------Insert Chart 1 about here ------------------------------------

CONCLUSION Training in entrepreneurship has reached a critical stage in its development (Fayolle, 2008). Although some rejoice in the fact that progress has been made (Commission, 2008; Fueglistaller, Klandt, & Halter, 2006), a lot remains to be done. The adaption of Situationism 17

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 described in this paper was meant to address some of the shortcomings still encountered in entrepreneurship education. One of the remaining challenges is that these programs mostly resort to causal reasoning and take place in very well-defined contexts. By following such a model, they do not allow for the development of a whole range of competencies that are however essential for entrepreneurial action. Causal reasoning requires a clear objective and a specific portfolio of means, and it allows one, on this basis, to select the optimal alternative (the most effective, the fastest, etc.) to attain the chosen objective. At best, this approach is causal on a creative level (Sarasvathy, 2008), that is to say it includes the creation of additional alternatives to attain the objective. However, in entrepreneurship, other types of reasoning can apply – and must therefore be included in entrepreneurial pedagogy – such as effectual reasoning (in addition to causal reasoning). This reasoning allows the emergence of objectives stemming from contingent aspirations and means, the entrepreneur’s imagination, and his or her interactions with diverse and various stakeholders (Chia, 1996).

In this study, using an experimental pedagogical approach, we demonstrate that creativity and imagination are inherent to the effectual approach. We also show how through the dérive – a technique developed by the Situationists – encouraging results can be obtained with students. While some of the students expressed doubts and skepticism about the value of the exercise, carrying out the dérive led a number of students to question themselves on their habits and relation to others. Doing this, they experienced a deep sense of discomfort, followed by a kind of satisfaction once they had done it. For a student used to working on formal exercises like case studies, business plans, and other projects through very well defined processes, having to do something without knowing the goal of what was expected was sometimes difficult to accept. Some of the participants had a hard time actually starting something and a small minority of them never really managed to get into the dérive. Whatever they chose to do, the 18

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 discussions in class after the dérive allowed each participant to become aware of the frame they adopted and to question it. Everyone saw what they did or did not do, and questioned their attitudes and decisions during this very particular exercise.

Several questions are left unanswered for now. How should we ‘prescribe’ a dérive, within a scholarly context? How formal should we be regarding what can be expected, concretely, as a productive outcome of the proposed techniques? Should production be guided, and if so, how far, or on the contrary, should it be left alone? Is failure a possible result and could such failure be a success? This is work in progress. We are continuing these experiments in various forms and formats, as we recognize the need to dérive, the need to ‘experiment with the experiment’ in order to better understand it.

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 APPENDIX Appendix A: Presentation of the CD-ROMs

Appendix B: Example of the contents of the blue CD-Rom (CD-ROM 1)

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Appendix C: How Effectual were the Dérives? Operationalization of the principles of effectuation to measure how effectual is a dérive Effectual reasoning does not begin with a specific goal. 1. There was no specified goal at the beginning of the dérive. 2. Students explain how they found a way to make sense of their dérive along the way. 3. A group goal emerges at the end. 4. There is an output which illustrates this goal. Bird in Hand Principle 1. All the team members are involved in the dérive. 2. The project is connected to the emerging goal and is explicitly used to create the final output. 3. The city is fully used (people, streets, buildings, trees…). 4. Students leverage new resources to achieve their dérive. Affordable Loss Principle 1. After discovering the CD-Rom, the participants engage in something which has no clear output (they don't try to optimize their time through a traditional exercise like a market survey). 2. Participants acknowledge not knowing the goal of the exercise but are willing to lose a few hours in the worst case scenario. 3. During the dérive, participants are ready to experiment and they take the opportunity to try things that they wouldn't have done otherwise. 4. These activities don't have to be carried out by the whole team. They can be launched, achieved, or ignored based on the affordable loss principle. Each participant can decide to engage differently in these activities. Lemonade Principle 1. Some contingencies are used to organize the path of the dérive. 2. The contingencies are themselves created by the way students make the dérive through arbitrary rules. 3. Situations created that way are really unusual for the students. 4. The creation and leveraging of contingencies and surprises tends to converge on an emergent goal. Crazy-Quilt Principle 1. There are some discussions with unknown people. 2. People agree to be filmed and appear in a video. 3. People agree to do things for the team beyond a simple interview. 4. People agree to stay in contact and do things beyond the dérive exercise. Total

P1

P2

P3

P4

P5

P6

P7

P8

P9

P10

4,0

4,0

4,0

3,0

2,0

4,0

3,0

3,0

4,0

1,0

3,0

4,0

4,0

2,5

2,0

4,0

2,0

2,0

3,0

2,0

4,0

4,0

4,0

3,5

3,0

4,0

2,0

3,0

3,0

1,0

3,0

4,0

4,0

3,0

2,0

4,0

2,0

3,0

3,0

1,0

1,0

3,0

2,0

2,0

1,0

1,0

1,0

2,0

1,0

1,0

15,0

19,0

18,0

14,0

10,0

17,0

10,0

13,0

14,0

21

6,0

Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Appendix D: On-line questionnaire sent to the students after their dérive. NAME: NAME OF YOUR PROJECT: EDUCATION (engineering, business, designer, law…):

QUESTIONS:

1. If you didn’t participate in the dérive, please explain why. If you did participate, please answer the following three questions. 2. Please describe what your team did with the CD-ROM which introduced the dérive exercise. 3. In your own words, please tell us what your team did during the dérive exercise. List and briefly describe any activities your team participated in or initiated, any encounters you may have had, any conflicts that may have taken place, or anything else that may have occurred during the dérive. 4. Briefly, please tell us what was the most significant part of the dérive exercise for you and why.

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Table 1: Effectual versus causal principles Dimensions Generic description

Starting point Logic

Assumptions on future

Causation Model The focus is on achieving a desired goal through a specific set of given means. Causation invokes search and select tactics and underlies most good management theories. Ends are given. Find the best opportunity beyond the resources you currently control. Planning is the best way to control the future.

Predispositions towards risks

Maximize the expected return.

Attitude toward outside-firms

Focus on competition.

Effectuation Model The focus is on using a set of evolving means to achieve new and different goals. Effectuation evokes creative and transformative tactics. Effectual logic is the name given to heuristics used by entrepreneurs in new venture creation. Means are given. Start with what you have (yourself, your knowledge, your network) and try to transform things around you. Leverage contingencies along the way and act according to the circumstances: to the extent that we can control the future, we don’t need to predict it. Set affordable loss: calculate downside potential and risk no more than you can afford to lose. Generate cooperation through partnerships: build your market together with customers, suppliers…

Table 2: Effectuation and the Situationist Dérive The principles of effectuation in entrepreneurship. Effectual reasoning does not begin with a specific goal. Goals emerge contingently over time from the varied imagination and diverse aspirations of the founders and the people they interact with. Bird in Hand Principle – Start with your means. Don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: who you are, what you know, and who you know. Affordable Loss Principle – Set affordable loss. Evaluate opportunities based on whether the downside is acceptable, rather than on the attractiveness of the predicted upside (i.e., not for profit maximization). Lemonade Principle – Leverage contingencies. Embrace surprises that arise from uncertain situations, remaining flexible rather than tethered to existing goals. Crazy-Quilt Principle – Form partnerships. Form partnerships with people and organizations willing to make a real commitment to jointly creating the future— product, firm, market—with you.

Applicability of the principles of effectuation in the dérive. The dérive has no pre-determined goal. Goals emerge over time: “The dérive did not really have finality: it was not part of a causal plan with a goal and the means to reach it. From this perspective, which puts aside any destination, the dérive brought together chance and foreseeability. It consisted of a happy search for the random to which it adapted rather than submitted.” (Danesi, 2008:203-204). A dérive will be different depending on the participants (who they are, what they know, and who they know), the city and the encounters which occur along the way.

The dérive will take place without an optimized goal. The participants will only evaluate opportunities based on affordable loss (of time, money, energy, etc.).

The dérive is by definition designed to produce surprises and contingencies which are supposed to be leveraged to explore further. A dérive assumes encounters with people with very diverse backgrounds. These encounters could lead to various forms of interaction and potential partnerships to engage in short activities in different locations (e.g. on the street, in a shop, in a bar).

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Figure 1: Agenda of the experiment

Day N+1 New course related to effectuation to be sure that everybody understood the key concepts.

Day N Strategy course with focus on exploration processes and effectuation

Day N+3 Deadline to hand in the dérive account (CD2 and all other materials)

Day N+2 CDs 1&2 are given to the teams with no other explanation

T

Day N+4 Each student answers the on-line questionnaire individually and in class. Each team explains what they wish to share of their dérive, then the professor explains the purpose of the project and organizes a debate on the exercise (3h in all).

Table 3: Operationalization of the effectual principles Operationalization of the principles of effectuation to measure how effectual is a dérive Effectual reasoning does not begin with a specific goal (goals emerge contingently over time from the varied imagination and diverse aspirations of the founders and the people they interact with). 1. There was no specified goal at the beginning of the dérive. 2. Students explain how they found a way to make sense of their dérive along the way. 3. A group goal emerges at the end. 4. There is an output which illustrates this goal (film...). Bird in Hand Principle – Start with your means (don’t wait for the perfect opportunity. Start taking action, based on what you have readily available: who you are, what you know, and who you know). 1. All the team members are involved in the dérive. 2. The project is connected to the emerging goal and is explicitly used to create the final output. 3. The city is fully used (people, streets, buildings, trees…). 4. Students leverage new resources to achieve their dérive (find a video camera to make a film…). Affordable Loss Principle – Set affordable loss (evaluate opportunities based on whether the downside is acceptable, rather than on the attractiveness of the predicted upside). 1. After discovering the CD-Rom, the participants engage in something which has no clear output (they don't try to optimize their time through a traditional exercise like a market survey). 2. Participants acknowledge not knowing the goal of the exercise but are willing to lose a few hours in the worst case scenario. 3. During the dérive, participants are ready to experiment and they take the opportunity to try things that they wouldn't have done otherwise (talk with strangers, shout in the street...). 4. These activities don't have to be carried out by the whole team. They can be launched, achieved, or ignored based on the affordable loss principle. Each participant can decide to engage differently in these activities (amount of time, energy or money spent can vary for each team member...). Lemonade Principle – Leverage contingencies (embrace surprises that arise from uncertain situations, remaining flexible rather than tethered to existing goals). 1. Some contingencies are used to organize the path of the dérive. 2. The contingencies are themselves created by the way students make the dérive through arbitrary rules (e.g. follow people with a red sweater). 3. Situations created that way are really unusual for the students (weird locations, discussions with homeless people or scavengers for instance). 4. The creation and leveraging of contingencies and surprises tends to converge on an emergent goal. Crazy-Quilt Principle – Form partnerships (form partnerships with people and organizations willing to make a real commitment to jointly creating the future—product, firm, market—with you). 1. There are some discussions with unknown people. 2. People agree to be filmed and appear in a video. 3. People agree to do things for the team beyond a simple interview. 4. People agree to stay in contact and do things beyond the dérive exercise.

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Table 4: Three main types of dérives. THE MARKETING DÉRIVE: DÉRIVE OF PROJECT 10 Reactions prior to the dérive: Perplexity of the group: “we didn’t understand the CD” (X4), “From my perspective it is not clear what to do and you can do anything you want” (X3). Prior construction of the problem: “the only rule is to go out and interact with people. During this interaction you will learn about yourself, your product and get feedback for free” (X3). Possible meeting point: “we were looking for an original and unique place to start our journey. One team member came up with the great idea to go to Rue de l'Entrepreneur” (X3). Examples of activities during the dérive: - They pitch their project and ask questions to a lot of people that they see in the streets while walking to the “Rue des Entrepreneurs”: “We ended up walking through the city and interacting with people. Pitching them our idea to see if they understand it and if they liked or disliked it” (X3). - They take pictures to find symbols and data that could be useful for their project. - They have discussions about their project. Post-dérive account: Standard format: PowerPoint presentation that details the route that they took and the people they met as well as the results that they got from the interviews. Some pictures were added to the slideshow to illustrate their walk. Perception: They conclude that it is amazing how people agree to talk in the streets about their project. They discover several market needs that they had not anticipated: “For me it was great to go into the unknown and talk to strangers to get an understanding of what they thought about our service” (X3). “People will tell you what they think about your product/service, what they understand, what they like and what they don't like. It makes you understand customer needs and gives you a great opportunity to field test your ideas” (X2). They enjoyed the walk and the discussions with strangers: “We were so excited that things went really well”. Examples of pictures taken by the teams:

THE SITUATIONIST DÉRIVES: DÉRIVE OF PROJECT 7 Reactions prior to the dérive: From how to find the goal to let’s play the dérive: “We wanted to discover what the key to the exercise was. But then we understood that the goal was to start without a precise goal” (X1). Emergent construction of the problem: “after several encounters and wandering around without a precise goal, we happened to be in a cemetery so we decided to question the concept of death in our society” (X2). Possible meeting point: “we chose to start from the school as we were there when we looked at the CD” (X3). Examples of activities during the dérive: - Discovery of a lot of unusual places and people. - Focus on the representation of death in society and the city: “We discussed in the largest cemetery in Paris about death and how it is in France compared to other cultures” (X3); “we entered a funeral services store and realized how ugly the objects surrounding death were (…) there is a need to reinterpret them!” (X2); “the business of death is quite cynical (…) hey look at the Adams family tomb! – Cool!” (X3) Post-dérive account: Format: Creation of a 5:02 min video to describe their encounters and route. The video mainly zooms onto the feet of the students who are walking in the streets and some pictures that represent symbols related to the discussions. Perception of the participants: Pleasant team-building exercise:

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 “that was a nice way to bond with my classmates (and to discover a part of their personalities)” (X2) Interesting creative techniques: “I understood how all these years studying made me think in a certain way: I always try to find a very precise goal and follow a linear path” (X1). “to think out-of-the-box, it helps to be in unusual locations and meet unusual people” (X1) Examples of pictures taken by the teams:

THE ENTREPRENEURIAL DÉRIVE: DÉRIVE OF PROJECT 2 Reactions prior to the dérive: Skeptical at first but quickly becoming very enthusiastic: “We took a quick look at the material but then we went straight into the project because it was too enticing to wait any longer” (X1). Emergent construction of the problem: “We first wanted to go from one bar to another but eventually we had this idea of random networking” (X3). “We found the goal thanks to interactions with the environment; we had no precise idea at the beginning” (X4). Possible meeting point: the apartment of one the teammates who had a video camera. Examples of activities during the dérive: - After some wandering around and discussions they decide to create a video to illustrate the importance of networking. To do so, they thought that if networking is key, it has to start right from the beginning, meaning when you are born: “we started by buying a little doll. Then we stopped people in the street, asking them to hold the baby and to throw it. We repeated this with a dozen of people in the street. Some of them did not want to do it because they did not have the time; they were "tired", or did not understand why we were doing this. But most of the people we met were happy to participate in this short movie” (X2). - “We wandered without precise direction (…) we were just looking for posh locations and luxurious environments because we thought that it would be more fun for the video” (X3). Post-dérive account: Very creative format: 1:20 minute video with an original scenario, where to illustrate the importance of networking from an early age, you can see people throwing a baby doll to one another in unlikely locations: in front of the Opera, the Ritz hotel, a luxurious car, etc. Perception: the team enjoyed the exercise a lot as they had fun and understood the potential of effectual reasoning: “First of all I think this has been one of the most enjoyable activities I have ever done at school” (X1). “It was really interesting to adopt the effectual reasoning which is essential to the dérive” (X3). “I didn’t really know X1 and it was nice to discuss with him in another context than business planning exercises” (X4). Excerpts of the video clip:

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Table 5: How Effectual were the Dérives? Effectual principles Goals emerge contingently over time

Examples of participants who followed the effectuation principles Seven teams did not have a pre-determined goal but a goal emerged over time: - “We looked for main threads as we went.” - “We started off aimlessly but at the end we had a target.”

Bird in Hand Principle – Start with your means.

Only three teams were able to fully use all the means made available to them. The participants of these teams analyzed and used the CDROM, completed the dérive in a city in two to three hours, and its contents were related to the entrepreneurial project. - “For shooting the video we decided to use only the things we already had so we did not go for anything fancy as our means were limited.”

Affordable Loss Principle

Eight teams decided to fully play the “game” of the dérive with the idea that in the worst case scenario they would lose 2 to 3 hours.

Lemonade Principle – Leverage contingencies

Seven teams leveraged contingencies to decide where to go and what to do: - “We took a lot of pictures of graffiti which were some sort of steps during our dérive”. - “We were using a lot of signs related to children as it was a major aspect of our project to organize our dérive”

Crazy-Quilt Principle – Form partnerships

Only one team tried to develop a real partnership during the dérive: - “We asked people to play a role in our short movie where they had to throw a baby doll to us”

Examples of participants who did not follow the effectuation principles Two teams set precise goals: - “We decided to test our concept in the street.” - “We decided to gather the maximum of signs related to our project” One team didn’t have any goal at all: - “We just wandered in the streets and went wherever it seemed interesting.” Four teams did not understand the CDROM and decided to ignore it. - “What should we make of this?” Three teams did not have the full participation of some of their teammates: - “I had no real interest in the exercise so I just followed the team, but that was it.” Four teams did the dérive without any link to their entrepreneurial project and simply tried to apply the Situationists’ principles to develop ideas for new entrepreneurial projects which were not related to their own project. Two teams didn’t really play the dérive because they mainly wanted to optimize their time and make the most of it thanks to well-known activities like market surveys. One team set too many dimensions in advance (location, goals, people to meet…) to really face any major contingencies. Two teams had no real goal and as a matter of fact couldn’t really make sense of contingencies: “We walked around the city to find elements to photograph and film that were a bit weird, interesting, beautiful…” Five teams had some discussions with strangers in the streets, but it did not go beyond that. Among them one team interacted with people to complete a market survey in the streets. Three teams found a way to film people while they were interviewed but it did not lead to partnerships of any sort.

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 Table 6: Grades for each Effectual Principle? Effectual principles Goals emerge contingently over time

Bird in Hand Principle – Start with your means Affordable Loss Principle Lemonade Principle – Leverage contingencies

Crazy-Quilt Principle – Form partnerships

Grade 3,2/4

2,85/4

3,15/4

2,9/4

1,5/4

Comments The dérive happens to be a powerful exercise to show how one can create meaning from situations that can appear completely fuzzy. It helps also to show that the hardest part is to avoid either a pre-determined fixed goal or no goal at all. It was very hard for some teams to know what their means were (do we have to use the project, the files of the CD-ROMs, etc.). Moreover, some teams had some difficulty in including all their members in the activity and finding a way to “get the most” from each participant for this exercise. Through the dérive, students were able to experience this principle and understand how their affordable loss was different from one person to another (some of the participants where more or less ready to act in unusual ways). This principle was really at the core of the debriefing. The issue was not only whether to leverage contingencies or not but to know how to create situations where contingencies could emerge and to know which ones to take into account and how to leverage them. Some teams didn’t really find a way to make these contingencies valuable at all. This principle was the hardest one for students. They had difficulty finding ways to create collaboration. Some teams barely talked to anyone and some were just involved in open-discussions to test their concepts but not in the creation of collaboration. Having said that, all the teams experienced a lot of pleasure in having discussions with people and understood that it was easier than they thought to create relationships with people they didn’t know. It seems that some social barriers could be dissolved through the dérive.

Chart 1: Comparison between the dérives (end of October 2011) and the final pitches (mid-December 2011)

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Academy of Management, Boston, USA, 2012, n°15819 REFERENCES

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