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Before a company can become a learning organization, it must first resolve a learning dilemma: competitive success increasingly depends on learning, but most people don't know how to learn. What's more, those members of the organization whom many assume to be the best at learning - professionals who occupy key leadership positions - are, in fact, not very good at it. In this article, Harvard Business School professor Chris Argyris looks at human behavior patterns that block learning in organizations, explains why well-educated professionals are prone to these patterns, and tells how companies can improve the ability of their managers and employees to learn. Effective learning is not a matter of the right attitudes or motivation. Rather, it is the product of the way people reason about their own behavior. When asked to examine their own role in an organizations problems, most people become defensive. They put the "blame" on someone else. This defensive reasoning keeps people from examining critically the way they contribute to the very problems they are committed to solving. The solution: companies need to make the ways managers and employees reason about their behavior a key focus of organizational learning and continuous improvement programs. Teaching people how to reason about their behavior in new and more effective ways breaks down the defenses that block organizational learning.
Skilled incompetence
By Argyris, Chris, Harvard Business Review, Sep/Oct86, Vol. 64 Issue 5, p74-79
.bq Most managers see civility as an asset. Many top executives pride themselves on their skill in avoiding conflict. The rationale is it's best not to upset others. So with the best of intentions, managers try not to hurt the feelings of others. What happens, though, is that this civilized asset turns into a real liability. When managers neither speak candidly nor put important facts on the table-including suspicions about others' motivations-they don't make effective decisions. If suspicions fester, if candor is lost, communication suffers, and so does the company. Skilled incompetence is a condition in which people are very good at doing things that have unhappy consequences, even though they seem like the right thing to do. "Skilled" because, like riding a bicycle or playing tennis, people do it without thinking. "Incompetence" because it creates results that aren't intended, like falling off a bike. To avoid the disastrous organizational consequences that this special kind of incompetence produces, it helps to understand and recognize how deeply ingrained one's incompetences can be and how to unlearn them. Argyris recommends a special application of the case method as a first step in recognizing and unlearning what's wrong.
Double loop learning in organizations
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