Considering unlearning as a distinctive part of the learning process has sometimes been deemed artificial (Nicolini and Meznar, 1995). Learning and unlearning, when their distinction is meaningful, often flow concomitantly and not sequentially. Furthermore, this perspective leads to considering knowledge as a stock that can be mobilized or retrieved upon urgent needs, discarded at one’s will. As Starbuck and Laudon (1996) pointed out, people in organizations preserve knowledge by applying it, and renew knowledge the very same way.
Thus, applying is both of source of preservation and elimination. How then can people know that they are learning a new trick or discarding an old one?
While unlearning theories are appealing because they trigger a natural desire to question one’s own knowledge, they become impractical when faced with reality.
Moreover, unlearning isn’t always necessary (Klein, 1989; Kuwada, 1998).
This means that old and new knowledge may coexist in organizational action and memory. Knowledge such as myths, theories of action, values, beliefs, and methods, represents for the organization what cognitive structures represent for the individual. It filters the environmental information and models organizational behavior (Hedberg, 1981; Sproull, 1981; Lorsch, 1986;
Pfeffer, 1981; Starbuck, 2000). While they might be obsolete, these chunks of knowledge contribute to the consistency of action, even if detrimental to its performance. Hence, if such “old knowledge” shall be discarded, then most organizations would lose their consistency, maybe able to learn more, but incapable to act. Organizations would either be paralyzed, or would suffer schizophrenia.
Holding that knowledge determines behavior and that old and new organizational knowledge may coexist sounds paradoxical. However, this paradox can be solved if we bring into discussion the phenomena of knowledge activation and knowledge validity. It will be subsequently argued that old and new knowledge can coexist in organizational memory. However, it is only the one that is both activated and has perceived validity that will eventually influence organizational behavior.
3.1 Knowledge Validity
The first two meanings given by American English dictionaries to the word
“valid” are: (1) sound; just; well-founded, and (2) producing the desired result;
effective: a valid remedy. In the first place, the validity of a piece of knowledge
is related to its ontological value: is it true or false? From this point of view, validity is normally established by the objective conditions an organization’s environment may provide. For instance, the laws of demand in competitive markets state that the decrease of the price of goods will surely augment the amount of consumers’ demand for them. This law is generally accepted because economists see it to be true and people may notice and experience it in everyday life.
Unfortunately, things are not always so easily accessible or visible. This usually leads organizational actors away from the realm of objective validity toward perceived validity. This dichotomy is necessary. As Baumard and Starbuck (2005) point out, cognition does not afford a dependable basis for learning. Most managers have very erroneous perceptions of both their firms and their business environments (Mezias and Starbuck, 2003). Top managers, for instance, are often rather out of touch with current customers, suppliers, or technologies.
The same discordance between objective and perceived validity may turn the other way around. Management fads, for instance, usually spread this way. The Singer Company embarked on a certain product diversification strategy from 1967 to 1974. Managers noticed that this strategy was successful for other companies (Miller and Friesen 1980). Heavy losses determined by its continuous pursuit didn’t manage to shatter the perceived validity of this causal association. Hedberg (1981) called this phenomenon superstitious learning: organizational actors attribute (perceived) validity to a piece of knowledge that is objectively invalid. Such learning usually occurs under conditions of ambiguity, or when the complex interactions between organizations and their environments exceed people’s cognitive capacities for mapping, so that faulty inferences are drawn. The clear-cut distinction between perceived and objective validity is very important since it is perceived valid knowledge that shapes and affects organizational behavior outcomes, while objectively valid knowledge, as well as perceived invalid knowledge, may stay unheeded by organizational actors.
All organizational actors try to establish the perceived validity of knowledge against objective data (Daft and Weick, 1984). A part of the organizational knowledge could be validated this way. Unfortunately, however, because a large part of organizational knowledge is socially constructed, the yardstick of objective validity doesn’t always exist (Baumard, 1996). In such cases, validity will be defined by its second meaning, that of producing effective outcomes.
3.2 Validation, Invalidation, and Strategies for Unlearning
The various strategies for organizational unlearning proposed by previous research are suffused with assumptions concerning the ontology of knowledge.
They fall mainly in two categories. The first group (a) focuses on procedures, practices, exchange protocols with the task-environment of the firm, as well
with certain behavior-outcome associations, rules, norms, and structures. The second group (b) focuses on goal-setting, cultural beliefs and obsolete causal patterns carried over by the overall organization.
Most of these theories see “first-order knowledge” as a main source of learning inertia, whether this inertia comes from frozen behavioral routines or organization-wide obsolete belief structures. However, Klein (1989) argued that first-order knowledge mustn’t necessarily be unlearned. Its validity can be easily checked because its outcomes are immediate and can be interpreted readily. Once it is proved that first-order knowledge is no longer appropriate, it will be ‘bracketed’ or marked by invalidity. Therefore, obsolete knowledge may last in the organizational memory without being deleted and without being subsequently enacted.
Second order knowledge can be understood according to notions such as frames of reference (McCall, 1977), myths and perceptual filters (Hedberg, 1981), theories of action (Argyris and Sch¨on, 1976), and basic assumptions (Kuwada, 1998). This knowledge plays a major part in organizational life.
First, it allows the interpretation of complex environmental and internal configurations due to meta-rules of perception and event expectancies. Thus, it frames the organizational actors’ input information, usually without their awareness (Lorsch, 1986). Second, these logics of action will shape decisions and strategies, often in an unconscious manner. The reverse of these is the high complexity of such knowledge (Starbuck, 1983). In addition, the extremely loose coupling between this knowledge and organizational outcomes makes the mechanisms for its validation practically nonexistent. Consequently, second- order knowledge will seldom change, except under extreme circumstances. For instance, myths will change only by conquest or by ideological contamination (Hedberg, 1981).
Kuwada (1998) studied the process of strategic learning at the corporate level, namely the dynamics of basic assumptions. Basic assumptions serve as devices for sense-making, they determine modes of interpretation, and they underlie interpretation routines. They also condition and shape the design process of corporate-level strategic behavior. Strategic learning could not follow a trial-error process. Basic assumptions are a tacit form of second- order knowledge, usually entangling strongly held, emotionally loaded beliefs.
They describe complex realities that can be hardly invalidated. When new assumptions come into competition with old ones, strategic behaviors will be determined alternatively by the old and new assumptions. Thus, they will concomitantly be held in organizational memory, and will be alternatively used until, in the end, the one will be fully validated and the other will eventually fade from organizational memory.
The two preceding examples show that erasing obsolete knowledge is not the only way that allows new organizational knowledge and behavior to develop. Old knowledge may coexist with new knowledge without interference as long as the former is considered invalid. They seldom can both be considered valid, however—a temporary situation which is always accompanied by political conflicts in the organization (Hedberg, 1981). Unlearning and relearning can then hardly be disentangled in such a case.
Table 1.Objects of organizational unlearning in several studies Unlearning
Studies
Source of Knowledge Inertia
Unlearning Process
Outcomes
Hedberg, 1981 (b) Values, frames of reference, theories of action, myths
Undoing the full myth cycle Undoing superstitious learning with new myths
Antithetical organizational myths renewal
Nystrom and Starbuck, 1984 (b)
Organizational ideologies and beliefs
Organizational crisis, laying off top managers, symbolic actions
New
ideologies and symbols will need further abrupt discarding Schein, 1993 (b) Behavioral
rituals, practices, cultural
assumptions
Cultural
“green room”:
challenging culture and rituals
Developing a continuous behavioral learning culture McGill and Slocum,
1993 (a)
Old managerial practices, ideas and beliefs
Type II-Learning
Continuous learning through routine revision Mark´oczy, 1994 (b) Operational
routines (related to production and exchanges with the organization’s task-environment)
Undoing cultural and paradigmatic routines
(accepted and institutionalized classifications, interpretations and rules)
Sustainable institutional mechanism:
renewed insti- tutionalization
Starbuck, 1996 (b) Overconfidence in obsolete technologies
Encouraging skepticism Indirect actions
Developing a skeptic culture that questions over-rated trust in old knowledge Argote, 1996 (a) Technology,
structure, documents and procedures
Individual and organizational forgetting
Discarding routines
Carmona and Gr¨onlund, 1998 (a)
Successful routines and practices acting like a frame of reference that maintains stability and status quo
Cross- Functionality Cross-Cultural Confrontation New combinations of old knowledge
Formalization of unlearned routines
Kuwada, 1998 (a) Silos from multi-divisional organization Corporate cognitive prejudices
Ecological model: new breeds of managers bring new seeds for unlearning
Top
management team continuous renewal
3.3 Matters of Knowledge Activation
Up to this point, it was implicitly assumed that the perceived validity of knowledge would also guarantee its translation into action. It has been shown that individuals, however, do not obey such a law. Argyris’ work (1993) suggests that human beings have in their heads more that one design about how to act effectively. Faced with difficult, threatening, or embarrassing issues, individuals’ behavior suggests an underlying pattern of cognitions that are labeled “theories-in-use.” Nevertheless, when questioned about their reasons, the same individuals would describe rationales that are inconsistent with their former actions. These beliefs, of undoubted sincerity, are labeled
“espoused theories” (Argyris, 1993). Two conclusions are in order. First, though individuals are unaware of their influence, theories-in-use are valid because they are enacted, according to the second meaning of validity. Second, espoused theories also enjoy a perceived validity since people sincerely believe they represent the truth. The two theories are both valid and they deal with the same issues. Yet, only one of them is effectively put into practice.
A similar phenomenon was noticed in organizations. Though firms accumulate important amounts of intellectual capital, a big part of it is never translated into action (Want, 1993). Noticing this knowing-doing gap, Lew Platt, CEO of Hewlett Packard, has justifiably exclaimed: “I wish we knew what we know at HP!” (Pfeffer and Sutton, 1999).
Pfeffer and Sutton (1999) advanced an explanation that seems reasonable for both individual and organizational cases. The existence of valid knowledge that is not put into practice is explained by the carelessness of firms and individuals concerning tacit knowledge. Organizational knowledge should, in these authors’ opinion, be primarily configured in this uncoded, applied form through a process of internalization before it becomes ready to use or active.
We will broaden their argument by suggesting that valid knowledge is only activated inside special knowledge repertoires. Only there can it be in a position to influence the organization’s strategic behavior.
The existence of such registers flows naturally from the polymorphism of organizational knowledge (Girod, 1995). For instance, Nonaka (1994) highlights the difference between explicit and tacit knowledge. Baumard (1996) differentiates knowledge as individual and collective knowledge according to the number of individuals that share it. The intersection of the two dimensions determines four types of knowledge registers: explicit individual, tacit individual, explicit collective and tacit collective. All the four types of knowledge are present in any organization. Baumard also demonstrated that, faced with ambiguity, organizations react by transferring knowledge from one register to another. In this way, organizations obtain a better mapping of their dynamic environment. They also fan out such knowledge that is fitted to determine appropriate actions for the succeeding phases of ambiguous situations. Kuwada (1998) defines organizational knowledge along another dimension, somewhat similar to the hierarchical
position of the loci of knowledge. He thus identifies business-level knowledge, mainly present at the business-unit level and characteristic of middle- management. A more important type of knowledge is that of corporate-level knowledge, that infuses all the organization and activities performed. Kuwada also specifies that it is not until knowledge evolves from business-level to the corporate-level register that it will influence the design process of strategic behavior.
This research allows two important conclusions. First, an organization’s knowledge base is heterogeneous. It is made up of different registers where knowledge has particular properties and roles. For instance, tacit knowledge is uncoded but readily usable, while business-level knowledge is grounded, related to very specific business contingencies, but couldn’t govern the corporate policies. Second, knowledge flows from one register to another. A piece of knowledge is active only inside the specific register that governs the corresponding organizational behavior (Kim, 1998). Therefore, the transfer of knowledge from one register to another has either an activating or a deactivating character.