Why Organizations Don't Learn

Bias is the main reason from which organizations never learn from over an extended duration of time. It has made many people put their whole focus and attention on success, make vast actions while at the same time trying effortlessly to fit in and applying a huge dependency on experts. Bias towards success, bias towards action, bias towards fitting in, and bias towards experts are one of the various biases which have led to organizations not being able to learn over the past decades include;

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Fear of failure is first Bias towards success. Fear of failure is known to produce a series of agonizing feelings which involve hurt, anger, disgrace or despair which makes many of us to try and evade mistakes (Gino, and Staats. 2015, p. 112) When these emotions happen people try pushing them underneath, and this is mostly used in companies where leaders have a habit of unknowingly applying the fear of failure. Secondly is the fixed mindset which relates to two fundamental mindsets that people use to approach their lives. There are two mindsets that are involved in the fear of failure. The fixed mindset is whereby the individual's mind believes that intelligence and talent are dependent on the genetic formation of a human. The growth mindset on the other hand is whereby the individuals assume that growth is related to challenges and educative opportunities that are applied through practice. Bias towards success is the third problem. It's based on overreliance on past performance where during the recruiting an organization puts all concentration on the performance in contrast to the ability of an individual to learn (Gino, and Staats. 2015, p. 112).

The fourth challenge is the attribution of bias where people place their achievements about hard work, intelligence and skills as compared to luck and end blaming their failures on bad fortune (Gino, and Staats. 2015, p. 113) Not unless people learn to know that their failures are brought about as a result of their actions and also not learning from their mistakes. This can be avoided by leaders through acquiring a growth mindset and focus their attention on determining a person's potential. Similarly, this challenge can also be overcome by leaders continually emphasizing that mistakes are educative opportunities contrary to being a reason for embarrassment. The leaders also greatly ought to challenge their mentality about an improved people's performance and also by putting potential into consideration during hiring and promoting. In solving this problem, the leaders of the organizations should use data-driven approaches to ascertain what led to the achievement or failure because data can be used as a critical measure to determine the true cause of successful performance.

The second bias towards action is in relation to how people react when faced with various challenges within an organization where some tend to take a different kind of measures like putting more extra hard work to their assignment and working for extended hours hence placing more pressure on you (Gino, and Staats. 2015, p. 114). There are two major challenges that revolve around this bias. The first one is the exhaustion challenge where work people are too worn out to learn new things or implement their known skills. The Second challenge is the lack of reflection where full-time workers are not given time to reflect on the well-done works and also where they may have gone wrong.

Organization leaders may help to curb these challenges by building breaks into the work schedules where the leaders ensure that workers get enough time to refresh and meditate within their work days and between work shifts too. Organization leaders should also provide their employees with time to think similarly to how someone blocks out time on a calendar to make a plan. This should be applied so that the workers can take a few minutes to plan on their agendas or have a reflection on how their work day went. Encouragement by organization leaders can help the workers to have a better understanding of the actions they about to consider. All organizations should work towards deploying various reflection ways into their regular activities.

The third bias towards fitting in is related to, individuals' desire to have a belonging feeling and also to feel in place within an organization (Gino, and Staats. 2015, p. 116). However, this bias has two major challenges. The first problem is in believing people who need to conform. This relates to people believing to tangible benefits that are gained by submitting to social as well as organization standards, and guidelines that lead to a major effort in learning and submitting both the printed and unprinted laws of conduct at the workplace. The second challenge is the failure to use a person's strengths which relate to organization employees conforming to what they think the organization expects. This results in individuals losing the opportunity of pulling out their unique strengths. The organization leaders should empower and encourage their workers to apply on their strengths and live to implement the same procedure as a normal part of their jobs.

The leaders should also increase awareness and engage their employees in their day-to-day work activities which should also be followed by modeling a good behavior to the organization employees. The organization should highly motivate and support their workers and give them the opportunities to spend various portions of their time doing duties of their own choice. The organization leaders should help the workers advance on their behavior so as to improve the employee values. The fourth bias is towards experts that involve organizations placing their whole focus on experts where they believe that the leaders are a more reliable source of values for organization advancement. This bias is affected by two major challenges. The first challenge is swhere the companies always assume that expert title, high academic levels and many years of experience are what will help to solve the organization problems.

The second challenge is inadequate frontline involvement from which the organization believes that the frontline workers are the best to solve and detect organizational problems. The organization leaders should work towards giving employees various kinds of experience, empower and encourage employees to own issues that affect them directly and also finally encourage workers to use their experience in solving organization problems. Organizational Leaders should always ensure that the employees fix problems that they are responsible about. This helps to prevent the employees from depending a lot on the experts and also guides them not to make the same job mistake twice. Organizations focus on seeking to find out, and to remove hindering issues that block the personnel's from using their expertise fully. Employees should also solve the client's problems in innovative measures and through ways that supplement on value adding and not navigating organizational issues.

References

Gino, F., & Staats, B. (2015). Why Organizations Don't Learn. Harvard Business Review, Vol. 93(11), 110-118.

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