As as an Aid to Management Decision-Making

There are so many ways in which Enquire Within can help managers make decisions that it is difficult to single out just a few. For example, it will help you:

• review the factors contributing to success or failure in the organisation’s history: issues such as restructuring, product launches, projects, etc
• explore what your customers want of you, understand the differences between crises which got worse and crises which were circumvented, etc;
• compare the frameworks of different parties with complementary or conflicting views on the same situation
• download the cognitive map of an expert, perhaps as part of the design of an expert system
• play ‘what if’ games as part of a scenario planning exercise
• analyse your customer or product portfolio and many, may more. Enquire Within is a tool for mapping the decisions people have made in the past - decisions which, consciously or unconsciously, will affect their perceptions and judgements in the future.

Enquire Within makes these processes explicit, presses for further clarification, allows them to be challenged and shared. It’s statistical rigour means that you can achieve the level of specificity appropriate to your purpose. It’s lack of any preconceived framework of analysis means that you explore your decisions on your own terms, without having to force them into an external model which may or may not be a good fit. Enquire Within reduces the size of your blind spot, showing you the things you didn’t know you didn’t know

Four Related Resources

• Using Repertory Grid to Identify Intangibles in Business Plans - Enrique Daz De Le and Paul Guild - Venture Capital, Volume 5, Issue 2 April 2003, pages 135 - 160. The assessment of intangibles in business plans by investors is an important factor of recent interest, particularly in the evaluation of early-stage technology-based ventures. On one hand, investors are challenged to properly assess new opportunities. At the same time, entrepreneurs or innovators face the formidable task of communicating what is, sometimes, nothing more than just an 'extraordinary' idea. In such situations, the decision to continue with the due diligence process, and finally to invest, is based frequently on those aspects that are intangible. In an attempt to reveal some of the intangibles assessed by investors and communicated by entrepreneurs, an investigation was conducted using repertory grid, a technique based on personal construct psychology. Five venture capitalists and five entrepreneurs were interviewed. Evidence was found for the importance of intangibles during the investment-decision process of early stage technology-based ventures. For these ventures, the consideration of only tangible criteria is not a guaranteed predictor of success. The repertory grid technique makes a significant contribution to the identification of intangibles assessed by investors and communicated by entrepreneurs.
• Eliciting Cognitions of Strategizing Using Advanced Repertory Grids in a World Constructed and Reconstructed - Robert P. Wright - Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Organizational Research Methods, Vol. 11, No. 4, 753-769 (2008) DOI: 10.1177/1094428107303353
• Repertory Grid in Change Management
• Organisation Culture Measurement

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• Accounting Software Directory - Management Software