Learning Disabilities

Various challenges are involved in organizational learning. These learning disabilities must be carefully understood and addressed:

a) Biased Information: Blind spots, filtering, lack of information. People fail to observe or notice the significance of some information or filter it out. They also fail to spread it across the organization.
b) Flawed Interpretation: Information interpretation is often flawed because it involves judgment and guesswork that are not completely guided by logic and reason. Stereotypes, wrong correlations and wrong attributions are examples.
c) Little Action: Routines are often difficult to change. People tend to persist with what happened in the past. They also tend to be risk averse and may not be willing to experiment.

Source: David Garvin, “Learning in Action,” Harvard Business School Press, 2000.