We argue there is a fundamental flaw with mainstream management research: Its core approach is incompatible with our object of study, resulting in findings that are either invalid or valid but trivial—neither having meaningful practitioner value. The dominant research approach seeks to identify generalizable causal mechanisms that are important and interesting, an approach that has permeated every major metatheoretical research paradigm and become the prevailing aim of mainstream management research. Yet our object of study—people—possesses agency that enables them to defy causal mechanisms, making claims of causality invalid. Furthermore, reporting tendencies as an alternative to strict causality inevitably produces findings that are trivial. Having lived a lifetime as the object of study ourselves, any truly important and interesting tendencies would not have gone unnoticed prior to scientific investigation, meaning such findings merely confirm what we already know to be true. This dual challenge of agency and known tendencies points toward an alternative research approach that could resolve these problems of validity and triviality while delivering greater practitioner value. Since agency implies the future is made to happen rather than determined, research should be oriented at exploring what outcomes can be realized by leveraging known tendencies to better direct the agency of actors. This reorientation can be aimed at producing more desirable futures and solving important social problems rather than identifying unreliable, trivial patterns.
