The Third Lens

This collection offers new analytical frameworks for organizational strategy, aimed at helping leaders respond to threats and opportunities that do not map neatly onto one another. Its authors combine participatory research techniques with strategies drawn from several sectors, encouraging readers to view decision-making through the lenses of disorder, complexity and chaos.

A central question runs through the chapters: should the nature of a project, meaning its underlying reality, its labor and its strategic setting, shape how we decide what counts as knowledge and how we go about studying it? The contributors test this idea, which they call the 'third lens', against the two other lenses of epistemology and methodology that shape how we understand the world.

The book also gives sustained attention to time. It examines spatio-temporal relations as anchoring points for interpreting situations and making strategic choices, both within their immediate context and as tools for handling several overlapping timelines and realities at once. It is written for strategists working in the twenty-first century and for organizations that must manage several coexisting ontological, epistemological and methodological viewpoints.