Valuable innovations out of nonsense? Expansive organizational learning and transformative agency in the Mann Gulch disaster and in the Finnish homelessness strategy

Abstract

The study explores the role nonsense may play when innovations are conceived and how innovations out of nonsense possibly inform processes of organizational learning. It argues that an expansive learning and transformative agency framework offers an alternative to primarily retrospective views of organizational sensemaking. The argument in favour of a forward-oriented and materially grounded dialectical perspective builds on two examples of innovations initially conceived as nonsensical and which nevertheless proved to be meaningful and generative: the Mann Gulch disaster and the Finnish national strategy for the eradication of homelessness.

Keywords

• Innovation. Organizational learning. Transformative agency.