Strategy School 6: The Learning School

6. The Learning School (Strategy formation as an emergent process)
This post is continuation of my series of posts on strategy, based on Mintzberg's book Strategy Safari.

According to this school, strategies emerge as people, sometimes acting individualy but more often collectively, come to learn about a situation as well as their organization's capability of dealing with it.

Principles of the learning organization: (Joseph Lampel)

• Organizations can learn as much, if not more, from failure as from success
• A learning organization rejects the adage "if it ain't broken, don't fix it".
• Learning organizations assume that the managers and workers closest to the design, manufacturing, distribution and sale of the product often know more about these activities than their superiors.
• A learning organization actively seeks to move knowledge from one part of the organization to another, to ensure that relevant knowledge finds its way to the organizational unit that needs it most.
• Learning organizations spend a lot of energy looking outside their own boundaries for knowledge

Premises of the learning school:

• The complex and unpredictable nature of the organization's environment, often coupled with the diffusion of knowledge bases necessary for strategy, precludes deliberate control; strategy making must above all take the form of a process of learning over time, in which, at the limit, formulation and implementation become indistinguishable.
• While the leader must learn too, and sometimes can be the main learner, more commonly it is the collective system that learns: there are many potential strategists in most organizations.
• This learning proceeds in emergent fashion, through behavior that stimulates thinking retrospectively, so that sense can be made of action.

Critique of the learning school:

• There is always a danger of going to the opposite extreme - no strategy, lost strategy or wrong strategy.

Thank you very much,

RamP!