Myopia of Learning
Sokol Mana ’11 MGT2240.02 Principles of Management Winter 2008 I Week 9 Chapt. 16 Article analysis
THE MYOPIA OF LEARNING
Learning processes are powerful aids to intelligence but sometime they fail in coping with confusing experience and complicated problems because they do not take in consideration distant times, distant place and failures. The first step in overcoming these limitations is recognizing them and trying to avoid so they would not effect negatively in our performance. “Experience is often a poor teacher”. Drawing conclusion from experiences is common in the business world but we tend to forget that these conclusions are merely just point of views of went wrong or not with a decision. Learning from experiences can make you fall in repetition if you see that this way of doing things did actually brought the desired outputs. By doing so we tend to forget that not every issue has the same circumstances and qualities so the same thing that worked in another issue may not work in this task. Details and causality are two main factors that sometimes can guide you in a performance that can be successful or a failure. Experiences from the history of the organization are narrowed also by the memory, conflict, turnover, and decentralization that make it difficult to be a reliable source of experience. That is why sometime experiences give a misleading route in coping with problems.
Learning is a process and people can perform differently. There are people that acquire knowledge at different paces; some are what we call fast learner and slow ones. If we put these two persons in the same start, the fast learner would learn quickly and perform the activity faster than the other one. This means that the other person would never have the chance to do something and this will narrow its possibilities to progress and learn. In an
THE MYOPIA OF LEARNING
Learning processes are powerful aids to intelligence but sometime they fail in coping with confusing experience and complicated problems because they do not take in consideration distant times, distant place and failures. The first step in overcoming these limitations is recognizing them and trying to avoid so they would not effect negatively in our performance. “Experience is often a poor teacher”. Drawing conclusion from experiences is common in the business world but we tend to forget that these conclusions are merely just point of views of went wrong or not with a decision. Learning from experiences can make you fall in repetition if you see that this way of doing things did actually brought the desired outputs. By doing so we tend to forget that not every issue has the same circumstances and qualities so the same thing that worked in another issue may not work in this task. Details and causality are two main factors that sometimes can guide you in a performance that can be successful or a failure. Experiences from the history of the organization are narrowed also by the memory, conflict, turnover, and decentralization that make it difficult to be a reliable source of experience. That is why sometime experiences give a misleading route in coping with problems.
Learning is a process and people can perform differently. There are people that acquire knowledge at different paces; some are what we call fast learner and slow ones. If we put these two persons in the same start, the fast learner would learn quickly and perform the activity faster than the other one. This means that the other person would never have the chance to do something and this will narrow its possibilities to progress and learn. In an
Cited: Levinthal,Daniel & March, James. The myopia of learning. Strategic Management Journal (1986-1988); Winter 1993; 14, Special issue; ABI/IFORM Global