Retention of Learning 1
Topic 1: Organizational Memory
What is organizational memory?
Organizational memory is the collective recollection of experience, meanings appilied to experience, and inferences of meaning. It is:
* based on routines
* history dependent
* oriented to targets
Where is it located?
It is located in the rules, procedures, technologies, beliefs, and cultures that are conserved through socialization and control. Memories are rarely complete or accurate descriptions or interpretations of history.
Can it be observed?
Through the actions and records of the organization .
What is the connection to the memories of individuals in an organization?
Individual memories adapt to the collective organizational memory while the organizational memory adapts to the individual memories.
To the files?
Organizational memories are reflected in the organizational routines, procedures, and culture. There is a cost associated with storing and maintaining memories.
How does it change?
Organizational memory changes by adapting to individual memories or groups of memories. Often deviant memories are incorporporated into the organzational memory when the dominant group loses favor.
It also changes with new experiences, increased exploration, etc.
What is the effect of a change on subsequent changes?
Depends on the nature of the change. Changes in organizational memory that increase efficiency may increase sampling of the same experiences and ultimately reduce learning.
Changes that increase variety of interpretation may cause short-term confusion and chaos but increase the likelihood of increasing learning and knowledge in the long-term. Thus changes in memory can block future changes.
What does it mean to describe organizational memory as "procedural memory"?
It is memory about things that are automatic and inarticulate. It is associated with habit. Often they are emergent. It is distinquised from declarative memory of facts. Procedural memories decay more slowly than declarative memories.
Topic 2: Making and recording inferences of experience?
How does an organization come to understand its experience?
Organizations learn by doing or learn by watching others. They construct multiple individual interpretations of experience that are converged into a collective sense of knowledge. Some of this knowledge is incorporated into procedures, customs, etc and transferred to people who didn't experience the original events.
They understand experiences by recording, analyzing, and interpreting it.
To what extent and in what ways would a theory of organizational inference be different from a theory of individual inference making?
Individual inference making is often simpler and confined to fewer aspects of experience. Organizational inference involves consensus building, and deals with various deviant interpretations of meaning. Success and failure difficult to measure.
What are common errors of inference?
1. Overestimate recent events, underestimate unexperienced, unlikely events.
2. Insensitive to sample size
3. Overattribute actions to individual intention.
4. Use simple linear causal rules.
5. Assume big effects have big causes.
How are those inferences recorded in memory?
They are recorded in the procedures, rules, customs, expectations, stories, cultures, etc.
Recording is rarely complete or accurate and have inherant costs.
Topic 3: Retrieval and Transfer
How does an organization retrieve the lessons of experience?
Some of is built into tacit knowledge (procedural memory) that may be quickly retrieved. Other lessons are stored in rules, procedures, files, memos, sop books, etc., with various degrees of accessibility and recording accuracy.
With multitudes of memory traces, what determines what is retrieved at a particular moment and place?
It's a function of:
* frequency of use
* recency of use
* proximity of memory
* cost of retrieval
How is memory sustained?
Either in tacit form or in written rules, procedures, etc. Higher level memories are most often used by managers than lower-level people.
What is lost?
It's hard to maintain contradictions, ambiquities, and consistency of inferences drawn sequentially from a changing experience.
Memory is also lost with turnover and incomplete transfer of experience to new members. Routines are lost because of limits of time or legitimacy of socializing agents.
Old, unused knowledge is lost. Information may make retrieval more reliable but possible less accurate.
Second Part
What are the basic assumptions of the model described on pages 74-81 in March (1991)?
1. External reality is independent of beliefs
2. Beliefs of individuals don't affect other individuals.
3. Individuals learn from the organizational code
4. Organizational code learns from group of individuals whose overall knowledge score is higher than the code's. It changes its position based on a probability calculated by the relative position of the dominant "superior" group.
What are the main results (i.e., explain each of the figures)?
Figure 1: Effects of learning rates
Slower socialization leads to greater knowledge at equilibrium than faster socialization. But faster code adaptability leads to greater knowledge when socialization is low and less knowledge when socialization is high. The highest knowledge equilibrium occurs when the code learns rapidly from individuals whose socialization to the code is slow.
Figure 2: Effects of learning rate heterogeneity
Having both fast and slow socialization learners improves the overall knowledge equilibrium
Figure 3: % of Fast vs Slower Learners
Knowledge gains are disproportionally due to slow learners, but the are disproportionally realized by the fast learners. It seems that the fraction of slow learners is a significant factor in organizational learning. Since individuals are at a disadvantage to be "slow", it may be hard to maintain an optimal number of slow learners.
Figure 4: Effect of Turnover
Slow learners stay deviant long enough for the code to learn from them. If socialization rate is low, knowledge declines with increasing turnover (inadequate exploitation). If socialization rate is high, then moderate amounts of turnover are beneficial. Introducing more new people increases exploration and improves aggregate knowledge. The gains don't come from the superior knowledge of the new recruit but from their diversity. Old-timers have more knowledge but it is more redundant with the code.
Figure 5: Environmental Turbulence
If reality changes from 1 to -1 with probability p4, environmental changes make adaptation essential but learning difficult. As individuals and beliefs converge, change becomes more difficult in the face of exogenous changes. The equilibrium value becomes a random walk of knowledge. However, with turnover higher levels of knowledge is maintainted.
What is the organizational learning dilemma highlighted by the results?
To what extent are the results a consequence of the specific assumptions?
To what extent are they more general?
What are the implications?