What is Adaptive Decision-Making

Organizations are changing places where learning and knowledge creation is under perpetual construction. In order to keep pace with these changes, applied business research courses for graduate business students need to go beyond the ideology that business decision making is a tidy and rational process. To portray business decision making as a strictly goal-oriented and rational process overlooks the reality of the complexity of contemporary organizations, and this perspective may result in rigid thinking and single-loop learning. The purpose of this chapter is to present a complex responsive approach to applied business research that encourages flexible thinking and double-loop learning. The most comprehensive applied research studies in the future will be those where researchers become immersed in the research process and engage with participants in the process of learning and knowledge creation. Through this process, researchers help unleash the creative potential of the organization and gain a valuable learning experience.