Leading Organizational Learning

The emotions experienced by people participating in these two
different approaches to knowledge sharing and learning manage-
ment are likely to be quite different. Action learning projects may
be (and perhaps should be) stressful for the participants, but usually
participants finish the projects feeling a sense of accomplishment
and pride. They feel good about their learning, and they feel good
about the people who have facilitated their learning. In addition to
building knowledge, action learning helps build social capital. In
contrast, postmortems surface more negative emotions. The learn-
ing experience and the people involved in it are associated with
feelings of failure and embarrassment. Because the focus is on the
past instead of the future, people attach less value to whatever
learning does occur. Besides creating little new knowledge, such
sessions may have the unintended consequence of destroying the
social capital needed for further learning and knowledge sharing.
Fortunately, challenges like these can be fixed. Often the cure is as
easy as restructuring exercises in hindsight to activities aimed at
achieving challenging and meaningful new goals.

Myth 2 Versus Reality 2

Myth 2:For knowledge work, electronic communication is just as

effective as meeting face to face.

Reality 2:In a knowledge-based economy, personal relationships

and face-to-face interactions are more essential than ever to under-

standing new knowledge and using it effectively.

For decades, science fiction writers have painted a future in
which computers are as “intelligent” as humans. However, as sci-
entists working in the field of artificial intelligence now know, the
task of creating a computer that matches the abilities of humans—
to learn, to see simple patterns embedded in a complex array of
visual cues, to synthesize information and give it new meaning—
has yet to be accomplished. Without question, computers are more

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