If Price wrote:
"Thanks for the eloquent addition. Unlearning is probably much more
difficult than "learning", since it means changing ourselves, not just
adding to our accumulation of "knowledge". Chris Argyris's work comes to
mind as a testimony to the challenge you have laid before us."
" How do we create individual and organisational
'Unlearning'?. How do we even approach personal 'unlearning'?. Takers?"
I'm not at all sure that I find the use of the term 'unlearning' useful. It
seems to me that it confuses the debate by using a word to mean the opposite of
what it seeks to describe.
My working definition of learning is that it concerns the processing of
information about the environment or context to produce useful knowledge which
assists us to be more effecively instrumental in the environment in order to
satisfy needs. For learning to occur the first requirement is that there be a
needs state - that is a perception or understanding that our current mode of
working within the context is sub-optimal.
Given a needs state the quality of the subsequent learning depends on:
(a) the completeness of the information about the context which is relevant to
the need;
(b) the extent to which inaccurate information is being acted on;
(c) the extent to which we are capable of processing the information available
to us.
What If Price describes as 'unlearning' seems to me nothing more than the
difference between domain learning and learning at the boundary. By domain
learning I mean learning how to better act on a basically known and stable
environment in which we recognise repeating patterns (skills based or rule
based learning). By boundary learning I mean learning how to act in a
substantially transformed context in which previously unfamiliar patterns occur
(knowledge based learning). Both types of learning involve change, but the
latter involves both higher order change and higher order information
processing capabilities.
I always thought that the organisational learning project was entirely about
the shift in emphasis from domain to boundary learning which is required in
conditions of uncertainty and context instability. My belief - based on
involvement in 23 major and countless minor research based projects and
interventions in organisations - is that the ability of individuals to exhibit
higher order learning is a function less of biological determinants, but more
of how the organisation operates as a social system, and of the quality of the
information available to be acted on.
One highly significant contributor to the quality of boundary learning is the
capacity to draw on the collective experience and learnings of the organisation
and the individuals within it, and to recast and recommit that history. When we
use the term 'unlearning' - or, even worse, 'organisational forgetting' - we
seem to imply that we should discard old learnings. It is not the ability to
discard historical knowledge which is the key to knowledge based learning, but
the ability to retain in, draw on it, and recast it to aid our understanding of
transformed contexts.
Phillip Capper
Centre for Research on Work, Education and Business
Wellington
New Zealand
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>