Andy Van de Ven’s Wonderfully Full Life

Andy Van de Ven, a mentor and a friend to the three of us as well as many, many others, and an inspiration to all, passed away on April 30, 2022 following a courageous battle with leukemia. Andy was a long-time contributor to and editorial board member of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and Professor Emeritus and former Vernon H. Heath Professor of Organizational Innovation and Change at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.

Andy went the distance. He was active until the very end. From his hospital bed he was teaching a theory building doctoral seminar before he passed, in addition to writing a four-page letter nominating Alan Meyer for the career distinguished service award given by the Academy of Management and recording a welcome speech for a workshop on engaged scholarship that he was scheduled to inaugurate. He accomplished these tasks and more with grace and dignity.

One of Andy's first publications co-authored with his mentor, Andre Delbecq, that appeared in JABS in 1971 introduced the nominal group technique. The technique is a group process method that democratizes the decision-making process, one that continues informing theory and practice on planned change around the world. ¹ Just last year, Andy argued in JABS that planned-episodic change and unplanned-continuous change must be considered jointly rather than in opposition (Van de Ven, 2021).

We could write a book extoling Andy's accomplishments, as his intellectual and professional contributions were extensive. Instead, the three of us—who have never before co-authored but who were drawn together by Andy—want to focus on just a few ways he impacted us and the fields of innovation, organization, and management. We will also comment briefly on Andy's life beyond his professional contributions and some of his impact on us personally.

To begin our reflection, we invoke Frank Capra's film classic “It's a Wonderful Life” starring Jimmy Stewart. The movie's plot revolves around the life of George Bailey, the responsible, generous, and ethical owner of a local building and loan company in his hometown of Bedford Falls, who contemplates suicide because his business is about to be foreclosed due to others” misdeeds. George's guardian angel, Clarence, imparts a revelation in the form of a vision foreshadowing the grim dystopia that Bedford Falls would have become without him. This inspires George Bailey to turn away from taking his own life, because he sees how much he has contributed. He rushes home to see that the townspeople have come together to donate funds that more than avert foreclosure, and all celebrate his generosity.

Drawing inspiration from Capra's assertion that the absence of a single exemplary individual (such as George Bailey in Bedford Falls, or Andy Van de Ven in the Academy of Management) can open gaping holes in the social fabric of his community, we ask, “How did Andy contribute to the Academy and the many academic journals he touched, including JABS? What would the Academy, writ large, have been like without him? We believe that there would have been many holes in both the intellectual and practice fabric of our invisible college had it not been for Andy's contributions. Here is just a sample of his legacy.

Some Intellectual Contributions

An author of over 100 referred articles and editor or author of 14 books with many collaborators, Andy shaped our thinking on topics as far ranging as organizational change (Poole & Van de Ven, 2004, 2021), engaged scholarship (Van de Ven, 2007), abduction (Saetre & Van de Ven, 2021), process theorization (Langley et al., 2013), and innovation (Van de Ven et al., 1999), to name just a few. Andy won the George R. Terry book award for his 2007 book Engaged Scholarship, a treatise that has focused attention upon the reciprocal benefits of collaboration between academics and practitioners. His book, The Innovation Journey, which theorizes innovation as a non-linear process, was a finalist for the Terry Award.

In addition to his contributions to JABS, Andy had the inspiring vision giving rise to the Academy of Management Discoveries, a journal that publishes phenomenon-driven empirical research that theories of management and organizations neither adequately predict nor explain. He also played a pivotal role in the founding of Organization Science. Further, Andy served on the Steering Committee of the Academy of Management (AOM) Fellows” annual award for Responsible Research in Management, and co-chaired the selection of macro articles nominated for the award. In all these efforts, Andy was an unwavering champion of the concurrent need for rigor and relevance.

Practicing What he Theorized About

Consistent with his advocacy of a processual perspective, Andy practiced what he preached; that is, he spearheaded change consistent with his scholarly work. Andy led the charge on many initiatives within the Academy that amalgamated theory and practice. He was a leader in mentoring budding scholars, he fostered a shift from variance to process theorization by coediting a special issue of the Academy of Management Journal on the topic in 2013, and he led the Minnesota studies that created an appreciation of innovation as a process (Van de Ven et al., 1989). Andy served as the exemplar of engaged scholarship, and went on to instruct students across the world in its principles. He also fostered abduction as a legitimate form of inquiry (Saetre & Van de Ven, 2021).

As one example of creating change, Andy pioneered in the evolution of online submissions and preparing the conference program digitally while serving as Program Chair for the annual AOM meeting in 1999. He was the first program chair to enable authors to submit their work online, a process that he and his collaborators essentially invented in practice. He was assisted by Gove Allen, who was then a doctoral student in Information and Decision Sciences at Minnesota. As Gove recently recounted (personal communication):

I’ve thought back on the experience of working with Andy on that project many times. The Internet was finally getting the level of adoption that would allow us to just assume that everyone had access. Building systems to allow users to manipulate data was still cutting-edge stuff. I’m still amazed that we thought we could undertake to build a system to manage the program from scratch—and that we succeeded. Andy had confidence in the project from the start. That confidence helped me to believe that we could find a way over the obstacles—and there were plenty of obstacles. He was a great mentor.

Andy not only created a new way of constructing the program for the 1999 meeting, he also made several innovations in its content. For instance, he persuaded practicing executives to attend the AOM conference to engage with scholars, and he secured NSF funding for research on the program theme of “Change and Development in a Pluralistic World.”

To bring about even one change of this sort is difficult. But for a single person to leave his fingerprints on each of these initiatives in award-winning ways is extraordinary.

Andy's Farming Life

Andy went through life with his high beams on. He bubbled over with enthusiasm, with passion, with joy, and it was contagious. You couldn't spend much time around Andy without catching some light. And the light grew even brighter when he “retired” from his formal position at the Carlson School of Management. One of us happened to ask him what he planned to do after he retired. He said in his effusive way, “Now, I will have more time to write and explore,” adding: “but please note, I am not a one-trick pony.”

Indeed, he wasn't. Besides his main residence in Minneapolis, Andy maintained a farm in Montana where he was the euphoric owner of a tractor that was a Christmas gift from his family (pictured in Figure 1). Andy proudly shared his prized possession with us, noting in a holiday greeting that “In addition to my great family, (this letter) features my new big-boy toy I received this past year. Actually, you can learn some useful things from a tractor, like plow ahead, pull your weight, cultivate lasting friendships, work hard, don't blow a gasket, be outstanding in your field, and get your rear in gear!” Clearly, good advice to all.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Andy Van de Ven's christmas present.

The tractor was emblematic of Andy as a farmer. The farmer in him reminds us of Tim Ingold's (2019) insight:

What keeps the farm going as a habitable and productive environment is not the heritability of its assets but the continuity of the agricultural labour process. In its passage down the generations, this process is in the nature of a relay, wherein tasks once performed by older generations are gradually taken over by younger hands who have learned on the job. As the former slacken, the latter come up to speed. The life of the farm carries on. As this example shows, what is modelled as a mechanism of inheritance is not really that at all, but a process, namely the carrying on through time, and over generations, of an environment that is ever in the making.

Indeed, Andy was an intellectual farmer, laying the grounds for new ideas and new scholars to grow and flourish. Andy's legacy will live on in what he created for so many scholars, executives and other practitioners as we attempt to till and fertilize the intellectual soil “over generations, of an environment that is ever in the making.” We are grateful for what Andy left us all as an inheritance and we are also grateful for what he left us personally. We want to conclude this article with our own personal recollections.

Personal Recollections

Jean M. Bartunek

Because I followed Andy as program chair for the Academy of Management meeting and then as President of the AOM, I learned a great deal from him and also imagined with him and others what it was like to administer the a professional association that seemed a bit incentiveless and learningless, but still seemed to work (Bartunek et al., 2003). I was also fortunate enough to coauthor a chapter for his handbook published in 2021 (Bartunek et al., 2021). But I want to remember one moment in October, 2021. Andy's and my birthdays were only a few days apart, and somewhat out of the blue he and his wife Martha “zoomed” me on the eve of my birthday so we could talk and to celebrate each other. I had already learned how ill Andy was, but, on this occasion, he was full of energy and enthusiasm for what Martha and he were doing to celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary—getting ice cream on fifty successive days from different ice cream shops. This very personal connection celebrating our birthdays meant and continues to mean a great deal to me. I will toast him on his birthday (with ice cream, of course) from now on.

Raghu Garud

Our paths crossed in 1984 when I joined the University of Minnesota's Ph.D. program, mainly because there was an opportunity to work with Andy who was then pursuing his ambitious project today known as the Minnesota Innovation Research Program (MIRP). It was my good fortune that Andy agreed to work with me, especially given the differences in our approaches to investigating phenomena. I was trained as an engineer to look for root causes, while Andy was pursuing process thinking that eschews the search for efficient causes, and instead seeks to gain an understanding of the developmental patterns underlying phenomena in-the-making. Had it not been for him, I would not have pursued process research. Much before he was diagnosed with his fatal illness, Andy invited me to contribute a chapter to the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation. Marja Turunen and I (Garud & Turunen, 2021) undertook this task based on the generous feedback that Andy offered. In the chapter, we reflected on the notion of “perdurance” Ingold had offered. Melding Ingold's insights with those offered by Usher's ideas on cumulative synthesis, we concluded that ideas live on to the extent they are carried forward by those who follow lines of inquiry. As Ingold noted, perdurance “lies not in the transmission, across generations, of an already constructed world but in the continual bringing forth, or production, of a world that—from generation to generation—is ever in formation.” Indeed, I see myself continuing to translate the ideas that Andy and I discussed over the many years, such as organizational change, engaged scholarship, abduction, process theorization, and innovation. The seeds of the ideas that Andy planted have now grown to become robust areas of engaged scholarship.

Alan Meyer

Andy became my mentor when I was 72 years old. Although we’d been cordial acquaintances for years, we never actually collaborated until 2018 when Andy phoned and invited me to join him in writing a paper about “indigenous theorizing.” Then in 2019 he called again and persuaded me to write a chapter for his updated edition of the Oxford Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation (Gaba & Meyer, 2021). And in 2020 Andy accepted my invitation to co-chair the Responsible Research in Management award's macro subcommittee. Thus, collaborating with Andy has been a dominant theme during the emeritus chapter of my career. Throughout, he injected guidance, support, praise, and fun into our collaborative work. Without Andy, there would have been a yawning hole in this chapter of my life. Becoming his protégée at age 72 was a wholly unexpected and magnificent experience. Learning that Andy wrote a letter nominating me for an award from his hospital bed shortly before he died meant far more than actually receiving the award. Imagining Andy sitting in his hospital bed, tapping out this letter on his laptop, constitutes a synecdoche which symbolizes the warmth, generosity, and love that pervaded his wonderful life.

What would the “Academy”—and all of us—have been without Andy? Robbed of his enthusiasm, passion, innovative spirit, engaged scholarship, rigorous and relevant thinking and farming and so much more.

Postscript

Andy's memorial service was a “True Celebration of Life” (https://www.startribune.com/obituaries/detail/0000424557/) followed, appropriately, by an ice cream reception at his church. Alan and Raghu hosted a standing-room-only celebration of Andy at the 2022 Academy of Management meeting as well.

Rest in peace, dear friend.