Learning, Unlearning, Relearning
Forgetting, Hibernating, Restoring (Reawakening)
It is always fascinating to read stuff written by Bill Starbuck. One interesting topic he has championed, along with colleagues Paul Nystrom and Bo Hedberg, is the so-called organizational unlearning.
While tons of works have been created that touch on the phenomenon of organizational learning, we are not sure whether what organizations have learned, or organizational knowledge to be exact, is indeed authentic or resembling the truth.
What if organizational learning or individual learning included, for the sake of argument, produces fake knowledge, mistaken causal relationships, and wrong conclusions?
We are not sure whether organizations improve their performance because of what they have learned and how they consequently act based on such learning.
Or do organizations simply like to believe that it is precisely their certain type of organizational learning (other than factors such as serendipity) that actually improves their performance?
How does an organization confirm or refute the learning-performance relationship through a higher order of learning?
How do they learn the truth of the relationship between their knowledge and performance, between their learning and performance, and between the exercise of their learning (through a certain type of action) and performance?
If they detect the wrongfulness, obsoleteness, or irrelevance of their current knowledge base, action routine, and capability repertoire, how do they engage in the "unlearning" or "forgetting" process?
Does unlearning simply mean the elimination or deletion of a certain type of knowledge, putting such knowledge in dormant forms, or replacing it with new knowledge?
Unlearning seems especially warranted in situations where the concerned knowledge is obsolete.
Yet, in a natural or neutral sense, unlearning could also happen in situations where concerned knowledge is truthful and useful.
Either obsolete or useful, knowledge could be "forgotten" because of various internal and external shocks, e.g., M&A, market entry or exit, change of CEOs, upheavals during and after power struggles, and retirement of key personnel, etc.
Unlearning or forgetting at the organizational level could also happen through the shrinkage or hiding of knowledge.
The repositories of knowledge, key personnel in particular, could simply choose to hide or withdraw the service of their beholden knowledge, causing temporary suspension or hibernation of organizational memories.
A resilient organization could somehow restore its suspended knowledge through reawakening. Or it can reacquire such knowledge if it remembers how to relearn it.
Consider the following case.
B is a subunit housed in C where C is a non-profit institution and B is a for-profit operation.
C has its legitimacy as a well-reputed non-profit yet possesses an outsized ambition to expand in many domains.
B is a money machine for C but does not have the necessary legitimacy and mainstreamness even within C.
Whenever the chief of C changes, the chief as well as the entire top brass of C has to relearn the indispensable role of B for C's survival.
During the chief's relearning process, B unlearns parts of its extant knowledge in the for-profit domain and regains more knowledge and inertia in the non-profit domain.
In the process of iteration, some hiding and hibernating of unique for-profit knowledge happens and the reawakening process becomes especially important during the chief's relearning process when financial resources are particularly short-supplied considering the ever-expanding scales and ever-escalating ambitions.
Things that are worth remembering are often forgotten. Organizations go through costly relearning and only barely break even, knowledge-wise.
Is learning really useful?
Do we ever learn?
