Why Organizations Never Learn? - Classification Essay

Introduction

Continued research has shown significant reasons from which organizations never learn over an extended duration of time. Among the major reasons are biased, which have 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. Some of the various biases which have led to organizations not being able to learn over the past decades include bias towards success, bias towards action, bias towards fitting in, and bias towards experts.

If this sample essay on"Why Organizations Never Learn? - Classification Essay" doesn’t help,
our writers will!

Trust an expert

What Is a Bias Towards Success?

The first bias towards success is related to some challenges one of them being fear of failure. Fear of failure is known to produce a series of painful emotions that involve hurt, anger, shame, or depression which makes most of us try and evade mistakes. 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. The two mindsets are fixed and growth, where individuals with a fixed mindset believe that intelligence and talent entirely depend on their genetic formation of a person while the growth mindset people tend to assume that it’s related to challenges and educative opportunities in that you can better through continued effort and practice. The third problem attached to bias towards success is the 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.

The fourth challenge is the attribution of bias where people place their achievements on hard work, intelligence, and skills as compared to luck and end up blaming their failures on bad fortune. 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 by acquiring a growth mindset and focusing 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 improved people’s performance and also by putting potential into consideration during the hiring and promoting. Lastly, in solving this problem, the leaders of the organizations should use data-driven approaches to identify what led to the success or failure because data can be used as a critical measure to determine the true cause of successful performance.

What Does Bias Toward Action Mean?

The second bias towards action is related to how people react when faced with various challenges within an organization where some tend to take different kinds of measures like putting more extra hard work into their assignment and working for extended hours hence placing more pressure on you. 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 make sure that workers take enough time to rejuvenate and meditate within their workdays 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 workday went. Encouragement by organization leaders can help the workers to have a better understanding of the actions they are about to consider. All organizations should work towards deploying various reflection ways into their regular activities.

What is Bias Towards Fitting In?

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. However, this bias has two major challenges. The first problem is believing people need to conform. This relates to people believing intangible benefits that are gained by submitting to social and organizational norms, and rules that lead to a major effort in learning and submitting both the written and unwritten codes of behavior at work. 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 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 good behavior to the organization’s 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.

What Does Bias Towards Experts Mean?

The fourth bias is towards experts which involve organizations placing their whole focus on experts where they believe that the experts are the best source of ideas for organization advancement. This bias is affected by two major challenges. The first challenge is an overly narrow view of expertise where the organizations always assume that expert title, high academic levels, and many years of experience are what will help to solve the organization’s 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 organizational problems.

Conclusion

Leaders should always ensure that the employees fix problems that they are responsible for. 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 should also focus on seeking to find out and to remove hindering issues that block the personnel from using their expertise fully. Employees should also solve the client’s problems in innovative measures and through ways that supplement value-adding and not navigating organizational issues.

References

KC, D., Staats, B. R., & Gino, F. (2013). Learning from My Success and from Others' Failure: Evidence from Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery. Management Science, 59, 11, 2435-2449