Knowledge

Management
From
Harvard Business
Review

Harihur Dsilva
MIS Graduate Student
Towards a learning
organization
 Theme 1 - Managing creative and
learning group processes.

 Theme 2 - “Five disciplines”: mental

models and systems thinking, shared
vision, personal mastery, and team
learning
Teaching Smart People How
To Learn

 Article by –Chris Argyris

 Professor Emeritus
 Harvard Business School
 Published –May:June-1991
Two Mistakes
 Learning Dilemma:Competitive Success
depends on learning but most people don’t
know how to learn
 Effective Learning = The way people reason
about their behavior
 First: Define Learning as mere “Problem
Solving”
 Single Loop and Double Loop Learning.
 Second: Thinking that getting people to learn
is a matter of motivation
How Professionals Avoid
Learning
 “Professionals embody the learning
dilemma…”
 Defensive Reasoning can block Learning
 Teaching people how to reason about their
behavior
 Continuous Improvement did not click with
the consultants
 Defensiveness had become a reflexive routine
 Dynamics of Defensive Learning
Defensive Reasoning and The
Doom Loop
 “The very success of professionals at
education helps explain the problems they
have with learning”
 It is impossible to reason anew in every
situation.
 Theory of Action- Set of Rules that
individuals use to design and implement
their own behavior.
 Paradox of human behavior
 Theory in use
Governing Rules for in-use
Theories
 Four basic values
 To remain in unilateral control
 Maximize winning and minimize losing
 Suppress negative feelings
 Be rational
 Defensive reasoning encourages individuals to
keep private premises, inferences and
conclusions and not test them.
Doom loop or Doom Zoom
 Attributions are not tested so defensive
reasoning is closed loop
 Not experienced embarrassment or sense of
threat that comes with failure
 “Performance evaluation is tailor-made to
push professionals into the doom loop”
 Productive loner
 Features of fair performance evaluation
Learning How To Reason
Productively
 “Until senior managers become aware of the
ways they reason defensively, any change
activity is likely to be just a fad.”
 People can be taught how to recognize the
reasoning they use.
 Connect the teaching program to real
problems
 “Learning to reason productively can be
emotional-even painful. But the payoff is
great”
Grab The Opportunity
 “To question someone else’s reasoning
is not a sign of mistrust but a valuable
opportunity for learning”
 Reflecting undefensively about his own
role in a problem makes it possible for
professional to talk without whinning
 The insights they gain will allow them
to act more effectively in the future
Putting Your Company’s
Whole Brain To Work

Dorothy Leonard

Susaan Straus

Published in July:August 1997

Innovation and Thinking
 Innovation takes place when different
ideas, perceptions, and ways of
processing and judging information
collide.

 Comfortable Clone Syndrome

Thinking Styles
Analytical Intuitive

Conceptual Experiential

Social Independent

Logical Values driven

How We Think
 Creative Abrasion
 Cognitive Differences
 Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
 Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument
(HBDI)
MBTI
HBDI
How We Act
 Understand Yourself
 Style can stifle creativity
 Hire , Work With and Promote People who
make you uncomfortable.
Forget The Golden Rule
 “In a cognitively diverse environment, a
message sent is not necessarily a
message received”
 Create Whole-Brained Teams-
innovative problem solving is enhanced
by totally different perspectives.
Look For The Ugly Duckling
 “Successful managers spend time getting
members of diverse groups to acknowledge
their differences”
Process of Creative Abrasion
 Making sure that everyone is at the front of
the bus and talking.
 Clarify why you are working together

 Make Operating guidelines explicit

 Set up an Agenda
Depersonalize Conflict
 Caveat Emptor
 Energy released by the intersection of
different thought processes will propel
innovation.
How To Make Experience Your
Company’s Best Teacher
Art Kleiner

George Roth

Published – September:October 1997

Approach to Institutional
Learning
 Learning History is a written narrative of a
company’s recent set of critical episodes.
 Right Hand Column- Relevant events
described by people who took part in them
 Left Hand Column-Analysis and
Commentaries by Learning Historians.
 Learning history Is as much as a process as it
is a product
Advantages of Learning
History
 Build Trust
 Opinions Counted
 Visibility for People
 Collective Reflections
 Removes inhibition to raising issues
 Transfer Knowledge from one part of the
company to another
 Builds a body of knowledge about
management
Opinion
 Article 1-Defensive Reasoning
1. People with high levels of education have
learned to play the learning game.
2. They can't or won't admit they don't know
something because in essence they would
have to admit failure.
3. They become defensive in the face of failure
and rationalize the blame for failure rather
then looking for the root cause and
examining their own involvement in the
failure.
Opinion
 Article 2-Whole Brain
 A majority of the work in the corporate world all
over the world gets done in teams.Knowledge
workers from diverse backgrounds need to
synergize to achieve team goals.

 Article 3- Learning History

 The technology available now facilitates capture of
learning history viz. Blogs, Microsoft SharePoint
Portal.This will help the concept to flourish.
 Critique
Consequences Limitations

Application of Continuous Two decades later, in the

Improvement to Learning current dynamic business
of Professionals context, teaching smart
people to learn is even
more difficult
Seminal Work which Metrics for measurement
helped create the field of of success of the
knowledge management methodology are
inadequate.
New Thinking
 Article 1- Smart Learning
 Learning involves the detection and
correction of error.

Governing Action
Consequences
Variable Strategy
Single Loop Learning

Double Loop Learning

Application of Whole Brain
How Unisys combines
Six Sigma KM
Learning History Process
Reference
 Smart Learning to Learn
 Smith, M. K. (2001) 'Chris Argyris: theories of
action, double-loop learning and organizational
learning', the encyclopedia of informal education,
www.infed.org/thinkers/argyris.htm
 Using The Whole Brain
 Inside Knowledge- Volume 10, Issue 3-November
2006
 Learning History Process
 http://www.solonline.org/res/wp/18001.html#8