The Pursuit of Organizational Intelligence. . - Other Reviews - book review

Administrative Science Quarterly, March, 2002 by Anne S. Miner

"Organizational Learning" (with Barbara Levitt) opens the book's most central and extensive section, "Learning in Organizations." As normative learning models continue to grow in popularity, this touchstone article remains vitally important. It depicts learning as a potential source of value but also a source of detours and dangers. It describes a variety of learning processes and obstacles. "Exploration and Exploitation," perhaps one of the most popular conceptual pieces in organizational learning research, is also included here and worth rereading. It is especially worth paying attention to the later sections that explore simulation-model implications. Results imply, for example, that fast learning by employees may not always be beneficial to an organization. In a section with special value to strategy researchers, they also explicate how the structure of competition determines which learning strategies offer the greatest competitive advantage. They consider how different learning strategies pay off in comp etitions based on "winner take all," "avoid being worst case," or "reliability counts most." In winner-takes-all environments that reward only the top competitor, for example, learning strategies that increase only reliability may pose dangers even if the organization is not the worst competitor.

In general, this section offers relatively new organizational learning researchers a fast track that will help them avoid automatic assumptions about learning and generate more fruitful theories. For other learning researchers, probing these papers as a group may provide a chance not only to appreciate March's ideas again but also to extend them in new ways. The field may be ready, for example, to pay closer attention to the constructs of exploitation and exploration and their use in empirical research. Although the broad modes are conceptually attractive, they are sometimes treated too casually in empirical learning research. For example, sub-processes within them may (or may not) be mutually exclusive in all cases. Re-reading the original work should help us tease out more careful versions of these constructs that can support systematic empirical research.

"Risk Taking in Organizations" presents work that the general reader is less likely to have run into but has substantial potential implications, especially taken as a set. It includes three exemplary chapters that explore aspects of variable risk preferences in rich detail. The first develops a model in which the adaptation of targets to experience can generate behavior that arises from a dynamic process of adaptive aspirations. This contrasts with the widely accepted assumption that people have an inborn fixed trait of risk aversion. The second chapter develops models that embrace both attention to key reference points (an adaptive aspiration level and a survival point) and the relation between resources and a focal point. The paper explores long-term patterns that might emerge in a population of such risk takers. For example, March argues that the model implies that there may be "broad survival advantages to variable risk taking oriented to an adaptive aspiration level" (p. 275). In the third chapter, March examines risk-taking biases arising from several trial-and-error learning models and expands on his themes involving the value and dangers of fast and precise learning. Although dense and somewhat speculative, these three chapters placed in one book together, and in proximity to the rest of the book, offer an important perspective on action that deserves broader attention in the learning and adaptation communities. Beyond its substantive contributions, this cluster of pieces also demonstrates an exemplary series of ongoing modeling efforts that produce non-obvious, consequential, and often testable claims about crucial organizational issues.