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Complicating the Organization: A New Prescription for the Learning Organization?Stockholm University, Sweden, mih{at}fek.su.se As a result of their learning techniques, organizations tend to generate dominant behavior of either exploitation or exploration making a balanced attention to them hard to achieve. But how can the process through which this undesirable phenomenon develops be made more complicated? Largely this problem remains a neglected one in organizational learning theory. It is important to better understand how organizations can take measures to reduce the pathological effects that learning breeds. In this article I explore the idea of `complicating the organization' in order to constrain organizations from becoming swiftly locked in learning behavior of excessive exploitation or exploration. I suggest that contemporary organizations should complicate their learning through various interorganizational collaborations. In interorganizational learning activities, organizations have the potential to learn slowly because of being poorly focused in their attention to their experiences. Hence, they may remain open to reflect upon their current operations. They will be learning, but not in a too simpleminded and myopic way by reducing the speed through which competency traps of exploitation and exploration develop.
Key Words: exploitation • exploration • organizational learning
Management Learning, Vol. 40, No. 3,
275-287 (2009) |
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