Organizational Learning: Control Systems and Routines

Abstract

As cognitive control systems, organizations carry out a cognitive activity involved in giving “meaning” to environmental stimuli, translating these into information and structuring these as knowledge, thereby developing a pro-active behavior for the long-term reproduction of the economic processes, anticipating environmental changes. Improving this approach, I argued that organizational attention to an issue raises and develops when an organization prioritizes that issue. Any organization develops a “pattern of organizational attention”, focusing on particular issues, given a particular configuration of skills, plans and procedures, and determining which levers of control to activate in order to reach a defined policy of goals. Organizational moves are the result of an attentional decision-making process and become part of the organization’s environment of decision and influence, in a feedback perspective. Then, I showed how and why attention, linked to control systems, is the driving force of organizational knowledge creation and development, to demonstrate how the development of knowledge and individual attention could be the premise for a more complete organizational learning. The faster the organizational learns how to develop attention and thinking, the more ready the entire organization is capable to deal with external dynamics. Lastly, I went further and considered recent literature about knowledge creation and routines, as a development of organizational theories, demonstrating that there is strong evidence asking for progress in cognition, attention, learning and intelligence; intelligence occurs when organizational knowledge creation never ends and it is, then, seen as a circular process not confined to the organization but includes many interfaces with the environment. Organizations are, then, “ideal repositories” for “tacit knowledge accumulation”, much of which is expressed by routines.