As stated in the first paragraph of the chapter, its the ‘job of the cognitive school to get at what this process means in the sphere of human cognition, drawing especially on the field of cognitive psychology.” And that is what the authors spend the chapter discussing. They start out by giving a brief history about this particular school and talking about it’s founders, and there are many. Some of them are Reger, Huff, Bogner, Thomas, and Schwenk. The leading proponent though is Lyle, who did extensive research on strategic management in 1990.
The basic model of this chapter, and entire school, is centered on the idea that the more information a person has about something, the more informed their decision will be, and therefore they will make the best decision. There are also four premises of the model, which are:
1) Strategy formation is a cognitive process that takes place in the mind of the strategist
2) Strategies thus emerge as perspectives that shape how people deal with the inputs from the environment
3) These inputs flow through all sorts of distorting filters before they are decoded by the cognitive maps.
4) As concepts, strategies are difficult to attain in the first place, considerably less than optimal when actually attained, and subsequently difficult to change when no longer viable.
The authors themselves say at the end of this chapter that ‘the school is characterized more by potential than by its contribution.’ That quote stands for itself to say that there are lots of critiques to go along with this school. Interestingly enough, this is the first of the five schools we’ve read about that realized that there is an ever-changing environment out there that can’t be predicted by anyone, no matter their cognitive ability.
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