How Organizations Learn and Unlearn - Bo Hedberg (1981)

Do organizations only learn and remember through current members? Organizations have cognitive systems and memories, develop world views and ideaologies. For me this means, just as it is important to place the right people in the right positions, I need to consider the organization's identity story stems from all those who have gone before. Removing a person from a position that doesn't fit will not remove the organization's idenity story that person influenced. Organizations retain the sediments of past learning after the original learners have left.

unlearning (discarding obsolete thoughts and information) is as important as learning new knowledge

Organizational learning is the defensive process of adjusting to reality and the offensive process of fitting the
organization to the environmnet.

Cognitive limitations can distort organization's interpretation and block learning cycle

How researchers understand learning:
- learning that cumulates, maintains and restructures knowledge
- learning that enslaves and learning that liberates. Which do I prefer giving?
- learning that changes environemnts-the purpose of learning is to improve performance AND TO MASTER
THE ENVIRONMENT!
-learning as the result of adaptive and manipulative elationship between a system and environemnt (too
much stability or turbulence hinders learning)

Incompletedness in learning cycles:
role-consreined learning - individual beliefs and actions are blocked
audience learning - couplings of individuals' and organization's actions are weak
superstitious learning - individuals' actions affect organization's actions but couplings between organizational
actions and environmental repsonses are ambiguous.
incomplete learning cycles where couplings between environemntal responses and individual's beliefs are
problematic

Environmental benevolence or hostility affects organizational learning

Organizations can to some ectent control their external environment

Learning can be triggered by opportunity or by people

How one conceptualizes organizational development is also a matter of attitude

Unlearning cycles can also be blocked and incomplete.

Organizational unlearning is typically problem -triggered

development ends when one of these is missing: learning, unlearning, relearning