1. Chapter 5 ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING
WELCOME!
Chapter 5
ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING

2. LEARNING OBJECTIVES
To explain common theories on how we learn as individuals
To describe the difference between discussion and dialogue in team learning
To distinguish between processes of knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation and organisational memory
To assess the role of politics in organisational learning

3. Chapter plan How individuals learn? How groups learn?
Role of success and failure in learning
Notion of organizational learning
“Unlearning” in organizations
Organizational routines as a form of learning
Dynamic-capabilities

4. Individual learning
In small organizations, organizational learning could be considered synonymous with individual learning
Current learning theories come from
Behaviorism
Cognitive theory

5. Behaviorism
Behaviorists assume that the behavior is a function of its consequences
i.e. positive reinforcement is likely to result in the desired behavioral outcome.
Much competence-based training is based on this approach.
Competence approaches are useful for repetitive tasks but can be rigid and mechanical and lack higher order learning!

6. Cognitive psychology
Learning is a change in states of knowledge rather than a change in the probability of response (behaviorists).
This information processing perspective laid an emphasis on problem solving.
Further research also investigated the role of memory, memory structures…etc.

7. Constructivist perspective
Constructivists sees learning as a process where individuals develop new ideas based on their current and past knowledge and experiences.
Learning occurs when individuals engage in social activity and conversations around shared tasks and problems.

8. BUZZ GROUP How do you learn best as an individual?
Have you ever explored your learning style?
If so, how would you describe your optimal learning?

9. KOLB’S (1984) LEARNING CYCLE
Individual learning is defined as:
“Increasing one’s capacity to take effective action.”
Figure 5.1 The Lewinian experiential learning model (Kolb 1984)

10. Lewinian experiential learning model
Main criticism:
It ignores the learner’s motivation to learn.
How do we ignite this fire in organizations?
Also it emphasizes feedback and reflection!
But in many organizations there might be a tendency towards an action-fixated, non-learning cycle.

11. BUZZ GROUP HOW DO WE LEARN IN ORGANISATIONS?
‘There is something paradoxical here. Organizations are not merely collections of individuals, yet there are no organizations without such collections. Similarly, organizational learning is not merely individual learning, yet organizations learn through the experience and actions of individuals.
What then, are we to make of organizational learning? What is an organization that it may learn?’

12. Team learning
The capacity of the group to engage appropriately in dialogue and discussions, three characteristics of effective team learning:
Ability to think insightfully about complex issues and bring together the collective intelligence of the team
Ability to provide innovative and coordinated action (alignment of mind, music jamming!)
Ability to share practices and skills between teams in organizations

13. Dialogue
Dialogue is the free and creative exploration of complex issues involving active listening and suspending one’s own view.
The purpose is to go beyond one’s own understanding and become an observer of one’s own thinking!
Dialogue is essential in team learning!

14. Discussion It is complementary to dialogue
Best employed in situations of convergent thinking and decision making
It should be the best argument that wins the discussion and gets implemented!
Sometimes it is the best arguer

15. Defensive routines Can block effective team learning
Usually its individuals who don’t want to confront their own thinking to save themselves from threat or embarrassment.

17. ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING SINGLE- AND DOUBLE-LOOP LEARNING
Behavioural learning – ‘single-loop learning’ involves maintaining an organisation’s ‘theory-in-use’
Cognitive learning – ‘double-loop learning’ involves questioning assumptions and values

18. Single loop and double loop
For example; the problem of diminishing sales
Single loop thinking: placing the blame on the poor sales force and introduce measures to make them work harder or face redundancy.
Double loop: researching the problem to find out: maybe customers find the products outdated or unappealing!

19. Single loop and double loop
The solution then might be to decide to innovate its product or service by engaging the collective talents of its marketing, design and operations teams.
This shows the difference between exploration and exploitation in OL.

20. Exploration VS. Exploitation
Exploration behaviors (double loop) are when organizations engage in risk taking, play with ideas, experiment, discover and innovate.
Exploitation behaviors (single loop) are concerned with the refinement of existing processes and emphasize efficiency goals.

21. Drivers of organizational learning
DO we learn more from failure or success?!
Blame culture can be harmful to learning.
Forms of “error harvesting”: quality circles, action learning groups!
Success can be problematic!

22. Success VS. Failure
Success can lead to little motivation to change our ways as existing behaviors are reinforced!
But given the nature of dynamic environments, success can only give reliable performance in the short term.

23. SUCCESS & FAILURE: WHAT DRIVES OL?
Figure 5.3 Success and failure in organisations

24. SENSEMAKING
Making sense of ambiguous situations of high complexity and uncertainty e.g. nuclear attack
Involves process of ‘situational awareness’ to understand linkages between people, places and events
Allows inferences to be made of future scenarios
Lack of situational awareness is primary factor affecting human error

25. SENSEMAKING (CONTINUED)
Use mental models from previous experiences
‘Cognitive gap’ between mental models and new observations or circumstances
World is different from expectations
Meaning arises from labelling and characterisation – socially defined
Not about truth or accuracy but updating plausible stories through dialogue
Identity shapes our mental models and actions

26. Sensemaking in organizations
Identity (who think we are) shapes our mental models and actions.
External parties stabilize or destabilize identity by their images of the organization.

27. SENSEMAKING (CONTINUED)
Figure 5.4 Sensemaking and situational awareness

28. Organizational learning frameworks
Crossan (1999) proposed a framework that considers organizational learning at three levels:
Individual
Group and
Organizational
And four learning processes that flow naturally from one to another.

29. Level
Process
Inputs/outcomes
individual
Intuiting
Experiences
Images
Metaphors
Interpreting
Language
Cognitive map
Conversation/dialogue
Group
Integrating
Shared understanding
Mutual adjustment
Interactive systems
Organization
Institutionalizing
Routines
Diagnostic systems
Rules and procedures

30. OL Framework
Intuiting: subconscious process that often requires some form of pattern recognition.
It supports exploration
Metaphors and imagery can help provide that language to communicate one’s insight to someone else.

31. OL Framework
Interpreting: process of explaining through words and/or actions an insight or an idea to one’s self or to another person!
Cognitive maps play a major role in interpretation and conflicting interpretations.

32. OL Framework
Integrating: this learning process is about developing shared understanding and taking coordinated action through mutual adjustment.
Group dialogue and storytelling are major tools.

33. OL Framework
Institutionalizing: learning process to ensure routinized actions occur.
Such routines have an effect on systems, structures, and strategies.
Endurance of the behavior over a period of time is what characterize institutionalization.

34. Huber 1991 framework Defines organizational learning as:
“an entity learns if, through its processing of information, the range of its potential behaviors is changes”
He adopts a behavioral rather than a cognitive perspective.

35. ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING Huber (1991)
Organizational learning
Knowledge acquisition
Information distribution
Information interpretation
Organizational memory

36. KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION
Congenital learning
Experiential learning (experiments, self-appraisal, unintentional, learning curve)
Vicarious learning
Grafting
Searching and noticing (scanning, focused search, performance monitoring)

37. Congenital learning
Learning influenced by the founding fathers of the organizations
Inherited knowledge can affect the way an organization acts and interprets new knowledge.

38. Experiential learning
Organizational experiments
Move from behavioral learning to cognitive (questioning key assumptions).
Greater emphasis on exploration rather than exploitation.
Unintentional learning through the lives of the employees.
Learning curves (learning by doing)

39. Vicarious learning
“borrow” competitor strategies, practices, and technologies.
Using corporate intelligence to gain other organization’s know how!

40. Grafting
New knowledge can be acquired by employing new members with the knowledge and skills lacking within the organization.
It might be preferable than developing knowledge in-house.

41. Searching and noticing
Scanning: monitoring behavior of organizations, done by top management
Focused research linked to a particular organizational problem
Performance monitoring of internal targets.

42. ORGANISATIONAL LEARNING Huber (1991)
Organizational learning
Knowledge acquisition
Information distribution
Information interpretation
Organizational memory

43. INFORMATION DISTRIBUTION
Links with organisational communication.
Internal political environments may hinder good communication
Probability that A will rout information to B (member or unit)
Probability of delay in routing information by A to B
Probability and extent of information distortion by A when communicating to B

44. INFORMATION INTERPRETATION
Cognitive maps and framing (uniformity)
Position in hierarchy
Past experience
Working team
Media richness – variety of cues medium can convey and rapidity of feedback ( vs. meeting)
Information overload – detracts from effective interpretation
Unlearning – discarding obsolete and misleading knowledge

45. ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
Personnel turnover results in loss of organisational memory
Non-anticipation of future needs means that memory may not be stored
Who has the information I want?
Storing and retrieving information
Computer-based organisational memory

46. ORGANIZATIONAL MEMORY
Semantic (general) and episodic (context-specific) memory
Semantic comes from shared interpretations
Handbooks, procedural manuals
Episodic personally experienced events
Hard forms of organizational memory relate to
Storing and retrieving information
Computer-based organizational memory

47. UNLEARNING (Hedberg, 1981)
‘Unlearning is a process through which learners discard knowledge. Unlearning makes way for new responses and mental maps’
Unlearning modes of operation:
Challenge and negate (disconfirmation) processes for selecting and identifying stimuli (to unlearn world views)
Challenge and negate (disconfirmation) connections between stimuli and responses; people don’t know what responses to make to a particular stimuli
Challenge and negate (disconfirmation) connections between responses; people no longer know how to assemble responses to new situations.

48. UNLEARNING (Hedberg, 1981)
Unlearning can be triggered by three triggers:
Problems
Opportunities
People

49. Organizational routines
Are an important aspect of organizational learning
Help to understand the interplay between the structure, processes and organizational actions
Routines are operating procedures, and included in the norms, conventions, and rules.

50. Organizational routines
Routines can be communicated through a number of channels:
Socialization
Education
Imitation
Personalization processes
They become part of the collective memory.

51. Organizational routines
Routines can be defined as recurring patterns of behavior of multiple organizational members involved in performing organizational tasks.

52. Procedural memory Procedural memory VS. declarative memory
Procedural memory (know how): stores the cognitive and motor skills
Declarative memory (know what): is the repository of facts, propositions and events.
Routines can be changed by certain triggers
Encountering novel events, failure, reaching milestone, interventions, coping with change.

53. Routines and connections
Routines can also be defined as: form of coordination used in organizations.
Routines make connections
Connections are interactions between people that enables them to transfer information
Connections enable shared understandings to occur.

54. ORGANISATIONAL ROUTINES (CONTINUED)
Figure Organisational routines (adapted from Cohen and Bacdayan 1994; Feldman and Rafaeli 2002)

55. DYNAMIC CAPABILITY (Zollo & Winter, 2002)
‘…is a learned and stable pattern of collective activity through which the organisation systematically generates and modifies its routines in pursuit of improved effectiveness’
Double-loop learning?
Learning mechanisms (experience, knowledge articulation and codification) lead to dynamic capabilities which, in turn, lead to evolution of operating routines

56. Dynamic capabilities
Dynamic capabilities = systematic learning + organizational routines
Systematic learning = experience accumulation + knowledge articulation + knowledge codification

58. SOCIAL PERSPECTIVE OF OL (Gherardi & Nicolini, 2001)
Learning takes place through interactions between people shaped by cultural norms
Social and political processes impact on organisation’s ability to absorb new knowledge and practices
Similarities with social capital?

59. ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY
Ability of organisations to absorb and apply new knowledge
Capacity to learn and solve problems
Knowledge capacity driven by high previous experience, diversity and commonality
Knowledge capability driven by problem solving and knowledge transfer abilities
Gatekeepers important to transfer knowledge across boundaries

60. ABSORPTIVE CAPACITY (CONTINUED)
Figure Absorptive capacity processes

61. BUZZ GROUPS
Why are cooperative and competitive cultures both unlikely to lead to the most effective forms of organisational learning?

62. POLITICS & OL 2000; Jashapara 2003; Vince 2001)
Figure Politics and organisational learning (adapted from Coopey and Burgoyne
2000; Jashapara 2003; Vince 2001)

63. BUZZ GROUP
How does technology impact on the processes of organizational learning – trust forming or electronic fences?
What are the advantages and pitfalls of vicarious learning and grafting?
How can information overload be effectively managed?