Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

The process of learning, and the previous insights were taken up in managementstudies. The metaphor of the organization as an organism and as a learning brain provedfruitful correctives for the prevalent view of the organization as a machine, which haddominated management theory up till the 1960s. Both metaphors were based on opensystems theory 167 . This spawned two related schools of thought in management literature:the Cognitive School of strategic management and the Learning School, both of which canin turn be considered part of the Organic School of management theory. The idea thatorganizations are more like organisms guided the attention toward the more general issues ofsurvival, organization-environment relations and organizational effectiveness, and away fromgoals, structures and efficiency, which were key themes in the machine metaphor. It alsoinduced a focus on information flows. In the process, organization theory became a kind ofbiology in which the distinctions and relations among molecules, cells, complex organisms,species, and ecology are paralleled in those between individuals, groups, organizations,populations (species) of organizations and their social ecology.The organic school of management emphasizes the environment in which theorganizations exist. Morgan asserts that the open systems view suggests that we shouldalways organize with the environment in mind. This has important implications fororganizational practice, stressing the importance of being able to scan and sense changes intask and contextual environments, of being able to bridge and manage critical boundariesand areas of interdependence, and of being able to develop appropriate strategic responses.The dynamic of organizational learning resembles the process described by Boyd. Even inthe simplified form as depicted in the introduction, the OODA loop is obviously a very closecopy of graphic renderings of organizational learning processes shown above. Included inBoyd’s notion of Orientation is the idea of institutional memory in the form of doctrine,practices, values, and shared experiences, that guide action and that inform newcomers in theorganization. Other traits too betray the ‘organizational learning’ character of the OODAloop. The OODA loop model includes double feedback loops that allow an individual ororganization to monitor the continued relevance of its goals, its repertoire of responses andthe adequacy of the lens of its institutional memory. The following overview gives animpression of definitions of organizational learning in which both the cybernetic as well asthe evolution-theoretical elements are evident 168 .Organizational learning means the process of improving actions through better knowledge andunderstanding;Organizational learning is defined as increasing an organization’s capacity to take effective action;An entity learns if, through its processing of information, the range of potential behaviors is increasedOrganizational learning is a process of detecting and correcting error;Organizational learning is defined as the process by which knowledge about action-outcomerelationships between the organization and the environment is developed;Organizations are seen as learning by encoding inferences from history into routines that guidebehavior;Organizational learning occurs through shared insights, knowledge, and mental models [and] builds onpast knowledge and experience – that is, on memory.World History (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000), p.27. See also J.W. Burton, Systems, States,Diplomacy and Rules (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968) for one of the earliest applications,in particular chapter 1.167 See Morgan (1986), p.44. Chapters 3, 4 and 8 are based on evolution theory, systems theory andcomplexity theory and provide an early synthesis of these developments and apply the to organizationtheory.168 This is adopted David A. Garwin, Learning in Action (Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Ma.,2000), p.10. Garwin quotes seven different studies.114