Guides and Rules of the Road 137Types of Organizational Learning
Organizations can engage in simple learning, generative
learning and, of course, no learning.
No Learning
Organizations, like people, can keep on doing the same in-
effective actions – flogging a dead horse. When you discover
you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
All too often organizations appoint a committee to study the
horse, try to improve their riding ability or deny it is dead
and say it is only resting.
Simple Learning
Simple learning serves stability and usually means setting up
a procedure so that the same process can be duplicated
faster, cheaper and more efficiently. This will be good in the
short term. In the long term you may end up with a good,
fast, cheap procedure for an out-of-date process.
Simple learning asks the question:
How can we make a procedure that will solve this problem?
Generative Learning
Here organizations question their assumptions about the
market. An example was Microsoft’s embracing the Internet.
Before 1995, Microsoft was operating on the assumption that
the Internet would not be important in computing and
therefore it expended its energies on doing what it had al-
ways done very well – making operating systems for PCs. The
company could have continued to build operating systems,
but as the Internet became more important Microsoft com-
pletely re-evaluated its work and operating systems.
Generative learning in organizations only comes from the
generative learning of the people within them.
The question for generative learning:
What are we assuming about this situation and is it
accurate?